by JL Bryan
“I’m kind of avoiding amusement park rides right now.”
“Probably a good policy.”
They both let out a small breath when the bridge finally connected to a causeway, and relaxed more when they reached solid ground again. Then they looked at each other and laughed at how scared they’d been.
“What happens when we actually meet this guy?” Carter asked.
“I’m not sure. I’ve been studying that one picture of him we found, from the seventies. It’s pretty grainy, and he’s wearing these thick glasses, but I blew it up on my screen. I don’t think he’s the carnival barker guy.”
“I hope not! I didn’t even think of that.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a different person.”
“So, do we start by telling him about the ghosts?” Carter asked.
“Definitely not. We say we’re collecting images of all his work, like the amusement park, and we want to find more.”
“Do you really think he’ll talk to us?”
“I hope so. I just hope this doesn’t somehow get us killed,” she said.
“He’s in a nursing home. How dangerous can he be?” Carter asked. Victoria just frowned, looking worried.
“We don’t know what we’re involved with here,” she said. “Not at all.”
The highway peeled away from the coast, unfortunately, and turned into an endless straight line slicing through leafy state forests that blocked any view of the water. The scenery eventually turned to farms and cow pastures, then suburbs, before crawling through the busy streets of Ocala, where the man’s nursing home was located.
Victoria pulled into the shady parking lot of a nursing home on the east end of town, not far from Silver Springs State Park. They sat quietly, the engine running, and stared at the low, single-story brick building shadowed by rows of palm trees. A small brown sign by the road identified it as Silverview Assisted Living Home. The building looked like a shabby, outdated motel.
“Should we get lunch first?” Carter asked.
“I don’t think I can eat.”
“That’s true.” Carter’s own stomach felt clenched and nervous. He’d been hungry before they reached the nursing center, but now he just felt cold and afraid. The idea of lunch was just a delaying tactic.
“We should just go see what he has to say,” Victoria said. “Then we’ll be done.”
“Okay.”
She turned off her engine. Carter got out first, looking toward the sliding glass doors at the front of the building. They reflected the palm trees around them like black mirrors.
As they crossed the parking lot, she took his hand and held it tight, just as she’d done while they explored Starland. Carter was glad. He felt like he was in a dream that was right on the verge of becoming a nightmare.
The glass doors slid open with a hiss, and they stepped inside.
The lobby was tiled in dark green, the walls a similar avocado hue. The sunlight barely penetrated the heavy yellowed curtains, and half the overhead fluorescents were switched off, leaving the interior dim. A few worn plastic chairs sat along one wall.
A heavyset, middle-aged Hispanic nurse sat alone behind the front desk. She looked up at them from the thick stack of paperwork in the open file folder before her.
“Yes?”
“We’re here to visit Mr. Schopfer,” Victoria said.
“Room 139. Turn right, all the way at the end.” She gestured with a ballpoint pen, then looked down and resumed her work.
The dim green corridor smelled like urine and Pine-Sol. Doors opened onto dim rooms on either side. Carter happened to glance in at a thin old man in a wheelchair, wearing an oxygen mask. The man’s rheumy eyes looked back at him, and Carter quickly gave him a polite smile and looked away.
The hall widened as they passed a kind of activity room with more of the plastic-upholstered seats. A couple of old men stared at a TV, watching a Gunsmoke rerun. Three frail, elderly women sat in a circle, softly whispering and cooing to the lifelike plastic baby dolls in their arms.
The hallway narrowed again, and seemed even quieter than the rest of the facility.
“Isn’t it strange she didn’t even ask who we were?” Carter whispered. “Or call ahead to tell the guy we’re coming?”
“Not really.” Victoria whispered even lower, her lips close to his ear. “My dad says most nursing-care residents never get visitors. They’re usually eager to see anyone at all.”
They finally reached 139, near the end of the hall. The index cards mounted in plastic by the door had two names, written in pencil. One of them was SCHOPFER, A.
Carter and Victoria looked at each other, and he squeezed her hand.
They leaned into the room.
A curtain was drawn down the middle of the dark room, and they could only see the half closer to the door. One very thin old man with a few white remnants of hair lay in the bed, his eyes closed.
“Is he sleeping?” Carter asked.
“He’s wearing headphones.” Victoria knocked on the open door, but he didn’t move. “What do we do?”
“Try to get his attention.” Carter stepped into the room, waving an arm. “Hello?”
The guy didn’t open his eyes.
“Should I tap his shoulder or what?” Carter asked.
“Um...” Victoria looked along the wall, found the light switch, and turned on all the overhead lights. She quickly turned them off again.
Carter looked at the bed. The man’s eyes had opened, sunken and pale inside his sockets. He stared at Carter, then lifted one shaking, badly gnarled hand and lifted away one headphone.
“Hello? Who’s that?” he asked.
“Uh, hi,” Carter said. “We’re looking for Artie Schopfer.”
“He’s dead,” the old man said.
“Seriously?” Victoria asked.
“Died this morning. Wheeled him out before lunch. Strange thing, though. I keep hearing his voice just on the other side of that curtain. Whispering. Saying he’s cold, he’s lost...”
“Oh my God,” Victoria said.
“If you lean real close, you might hear it,” the old man said. “Come on. Have the girl try it.”
Carter and Victoria shared a look, then both stepped close to the curtain and leaned their ears against it.
“Help me,” a voice whispered on the other side. “I’m lost. I think I’m dead.”
“Oh, no, there he goes,” the old man said. “He’s haunting us, just like he said he would, ever since that night he got cheated at Bingo.”
Carter pulled back the edge of the curtain and looked around it.
An elderly black man sat in a wheelchair, reading a large-print illustrated copy of the Tao te Ching. He smiled at the sight of Carter.
“Young man,” he said, “Don’t you know better than to disturb the dead?”
The old man in the first bed cackled laughter.
“I believe you scared this one, Artie,” the black man said. “He expected to see a real ghost. I could see it all over his face.”
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Carter said. He let the curtain drop and turned back to the old man with the sunken pale eyes.
“So you are Mr. Schopfer?” Victoria asked the first man.
“I apologize,” the old man said. “Couldn’t resist the old nameless-horror-behind-the-curtain trick...Could you do me a favor, young lady? Come press the stop button on this player. I’m listening to a book, and my hands aren’t what they used to be.” Schopfer held up both his hands, which shook rapidly, the fingers gnarled like old tree roots.
“Okay.” Victoria eyed him cautiously as she stopped his MP3 player for him. He looked her over with a growing smile.
“That’s an audiobook. Raymond Chandler. Ever read him?” Schopfer asked.
“No, sorry,” Victoria said.
“You should. Classic.” He turned to Carter. “So why are you looking for Artie Schopfer? Tell me you’re planning a new haunted house or roller coaster and you ne
ed expert advice.”
“I wish we were!” Victoria said. She introduced herself and Carter, and told her story about collecting images of his work around Conch City.
“You want to see more of my work? Is that what I’m hearing?” he asked.
“That would be great,” Carter said.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Victoria added.
“I have a little time to pass before my 3 p.m. medication,” he told her. “After that, two more hours until dinner. Young lady, would you mind grabbing that scrapbook on my bookshelf? The big one there, yes.” While Victoria lifted his scrapbook, which was bound in cracked brown pleather and looked about six inches thick, overflowing with papers, he said, “You know why they call this place Silverview? Right up the road you’ll find what used to be the front gate to Silver Springs Park. You kids ever been to Silver Springs?”
“No, sir,” Carter said. Victoria lugged the enormous, unwieldy scrapbook to the man’s bedside. Schopfer made no move to accept it.
“Florida’s first big tourist attraction,” Schopfer said. “The granddaddy of them all. Used to be the most famous amusement park in the country. Had some of the world’s first glass-bottom boats. By the 1930s, you had Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute, you had Colonel Tooey’s Jungle Cruise boats on the river. They made the Tarzan movies out there, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, too.”
“Really?” Victoria asked. “That’s a seriously classic horror movie.”
“Not to mention the Deer Ranch, the Six-Gun Territory...” Schopfer coughed into one of his twisted fingers. “Used to be quite a place. Most of it’s gone now, and hardly anybody remembers it.”
“Did you make any of the attractions?” Victoria asked.
“The Haunted Steamboat.” He smiled, revealing scattered teeth. “Only ran during October, of course. Rest of the year, it was just a regular jungle boat ride. One year we even had the Creature from the Black Lagoon climb aboard out of the water, try to scare the tourists. Lots of fun. You’ll have to hold that photo album for me, miss. You two have a seat.”
The room only offered one chair, so Carter motioned for Victoria to take it.
“Anything specific you want to learn about?” he asked. “Or should we start from the top? The whole she-bang?”
“The whole she-bang,” Victoria said.
“Let’s see that first page.”
Victoria opened the big photo album. Black and white photographs grown yellow with age showed a very young Schopfer in front of a false front painted to look like a gray brick wall, with the words Haunted House painted in big, lurid letters on the front. Simple curtained archways served as the entrance and exit.
“Did you say this is for a magazine article?” Schopfer asked, pulling on a pair of bottle-thick glasses.
“It’s more like a school project,” Victoria told him.
“Hm. Dervish Brothers Carnival,” he said. “Kids used to talk about running away with the circus, but I went and did it back in 1949. Sixteen years old. I didn’t want to farm the rest of my life. Had ten brothers and sisters, so I don’t think my parents missed me.
“I built that first walk-through house from pure scrap, no money. Should have called it the ‘Haunted Shack’ because ‘house’ was a little generous—it had about three little closet-sized rooms. I learned how to scare people on a budget. The key is to put them in a small, dark place and give them just enough to start up their imagination. That’s where the fear lives, down inside you, not inside whatever it is that’s scaring you. Anyway, I built that little haunted house up over the years. Could you turn the page?”
Victoria turned it. The next page showed a more decorated version of the attraction, with a legitimately scary figure in a stitched mask peering out a window, which reminded Carter of “Old Sackhead” staring out from the second floor of Dark Mansion, waving his butcher knife. A few people in dusty overalls and farm dresses were lined up for the haunted house.
“Dervish Brothers was small, but it stayed alive for years,” Schopfer said. “The usual things. A few rides, a few games. Some odd attractions.” He pointed to other pictures—a small, simple Ferris wheel, a “Freak Museum,” and another tall attraction front painted with a larger-than-life girl in a short skirt with a giant cobra curled around her, its fangs bared and its forked tongue lashing her cheek. A real girl stood in front of it, also in a very short dress with a big snake wrapped around her waist and shoulders, though it was a boa constrictor instead of a giant cobra. “Tatiana the Snake Girl. I dated her a little. I was seventeen, she was twenty-three and Romanian. Exciting times.” He smiled wistfully and shook his head.
“How long were you with the carnival?” Victoria asked.
“A few years. I learned a lot. In the winter, we’d go down to Florida, and I’d look for side work. This fellow came to find me, said he’d heard my haunted house was popular. It was, too. I made decent scratch most nights. The key was to give them one really good scare inside so everyone passing by could hear them scream. Later in life, I’d play records and tapes of the girls screaming so I didn’t have to wait for a real one, but back then it was real or it was nothing.” He grew silent, staring at the pictures.
“Who came to find you?” Carter asked.
“Huh?” Schopfer looked up and blinked, as though he’d been lost in thought. “Oh, yes. It must have been back in ‘52 or ‘53. This man had bought up beachfront land along both sides of the Gulf Coast Highway, and he’d built some tourists cabins and a motel—just a little wooden thing with about a dozen rooms. He said he leased a few amusement rides during the summer, and was looking for some kind of attraction to make people slow down, maybe stop at his little resort.”
“Should I turn the page?” Victoria asked.
“Yes, next page. What’s that?” He leaned forward and pointed to a one-story motel with the words CONCH CITY RESORT painted on the side. A two-tone Plymouth with a rounded, curvy 1940s frame sat in the sand-dusted parking lot in front of it.
“Conch City?” Carter asked.
“It was just the name of the motel. There wasn’t a Conch City, as far as a real town goes, until 1961. He made up the name, then made the city later.” Schopfer laughed a little, then held a gnarled hand over his mouth while he coughed. “In those days, old Highway 98, the original Gulf Coast Highway, ran right along the beach. When Conch City sprang up into the panhandle’s biggest tourist trap, traffic got so thick they rerouted 98 north, leaving Beachview Drive to run wild down there along the Gulf. You can see it better here.”
He gestured to another, wider view of the motel and a couple of simple, single-story tourist cabins. The blacktop of the highway ran through the foreground while the ocean lapped against the sand in the background.
“I didn’t know all that,” Carter said. “I’ve lived in Conch City all my life. Who built the resort? Was it one of the Hanovers?”
“Teddy Hanover.” Schopfer tapped a picture of a balding, chubby man in his thirties wearing a tie and starched shirt, his pants rolled up to his calves. He stood in the surf, talking and making giant hand movements, while a twenty-year-old Artie Schopfer, already wearing thick glasses, stood beside him listening, his unkempt hair and tie blowing in the wind. Carter guessed that was from an age when everybody wore ties all the time, like in old movies where guys wore fedoras and suits everywhere, even if they were on Mars or the moon.
“That’s the father of the guy we met?” Victoria whispered. Carter nodded.
“He was an idea man, ahead of his time,” Schopfer said. “He bought all that empty land dirt-cheap. He knew he could catch tourists off the highway if he could just make them turn their heads—a born pitchman, really.”
Schopfer gestured, and Victoria turned the page. A smile spread wide across Schopfer’s face.
The faded black-and-white picture showed a black house with large white question marks painted on the front door and all the exterior walls. The roof was high and steep to serve as a billboard, w
ith the words MYSTERY HOUSE painted in ghostly white letters.
“That looks pretty cool,” Carter said.
“Exactly the idea, young man,” Schopfer said. “Hanover imagined carloads of families pulling over to investigate the ‘mystery.’ He also had more practical projects underway—a restaurant and a gas station. He wanted to give people every reason in the world to stop. Once you’ve got the cows inside the barn, then you can start to milk ‘em. Hanover saw that highway as a river of money just waiting to be fished.”
“Did it work?” Victoria asked.
“I believe so. By the next year...where’s the placemat? Next page?”
Victoria turned to a page filled with a folded yellow slice of paper, brown and curled at the edges, decorated with little drawings.
“You can take that out, but be gentle,” he said.
She lifted the plastic sheet that held the paper in place, then gingerly unfolded the paper place mat. Several panels tracked the adventures of a cartoon family, with two smiley kids and a happy mom and dad. The family built a sand castle, the parents ate dinner together, the kids rode in a biplane, the parents slept in a bed. Each panel was captioned with an attractive feature of the resort: BEAUTIFUL BEACHES! RESTAURANT! RIDES AND GAMES! SOFT CLEAN BEDS!
The final panel showed a cartoon of the black house with white question marks, with the simple caption MYSTERY HOUSE.
Underneath the cartoons, in huge letters, it read: CONCH CITY BEACH RESORT – CHEAP RATES! followed by a phone number and address.
“Hanover paid restaurants up and down the highway to use these mats,” Schopfer told her. “So many people flooded the place, he had to double the size of the motel. Next page, I think, there’s some good pictures of it.”
Victoria carefully replaced the old piece of paper. The next page held a brochure for Conch City Resort from 1954. The photographs showed a large motel, kids on small amusement rides, girls swimming at the beach, and the Mystery House again.
“I think he would imagine the advertising he wanted, then built a place to match the advertising,” Schopfer said.
“What was in the Mystery House?” Carter asked.
