by JL Bryan
“I have to. You should stay out of it, though. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You’re not going in there without me,” Victoria said. “Remember why you came with me the first time? You were worried I’d get hurt if I went in alone.”
“I don’t plan to go alone. I’m going to get a group of people.”
“That didn’t turn out well last time.”
“This time, I’ll get smart people. Like Emily Dorsnel. And the other science club kids if I can. Wes might help if I can convince him his brother’s in there. If he agrees, then Sameer will go along with it. Maybe even David Huang.”
“Do I count as a smart person?” Victoria asked.
“Sure, but I don’t want to put you in more danger—”
“I’ve been reading up on the devil. That’s what I did most of the night, because I couldn’t sleep. Some sources say that the devil’s power over the physical world is absolute, that he completely controls the world of the living.”
“So we can’t win. Good to know.”
“Others, though, say he his only real powers are deception and trickery. He can tempt people, he can inspire them to do evil, but he can’t control anything. People must make the choices he wants them to make, or he doesn’t get his way.”
“That sounds a little better.”
“More modern sources say that the devil isn’t real at all, that he’s just an idea, and he stands for the evil inside each of us. He’s a symbol.”
“Whatever we’re dealing with is more than a symbol,” Carter said. “Did you find anything about how to stop him?”
“Religions usually teach that only another powerful being like an angel can defeat him. In folklore, though, there are stories of people beating the devil through games and skill. Chess masters like Jose Capablanca were said to have beaten the devil—Capablanca supposedly challenged the devil to turn his king into gold to prove he was the devil, but when the devil touched the chess piece, he was obligated by the rules of chess to move it, and lost.”
“Don’t forget the guy who won the fiddling competition against the devil. And a fiddle made of gold, too,” Carter said.
“Are you any good at fiddling?” she asked with half a smile.
“No. I suck at chess, too.”
“I thought you were in the Chess Club.”
“That’s why I know how much I suck. We need Wes and Sameer, they’re the best players.”
“Do you think we can get them to help?” Victoria asked.
“We can try. Maybe we should bring Jared, too. He’s survived the park before.”
“Is he reliable? Remember what happened last time.”
“I don’t know. Let’s call him.” Carter brought out his phone and dialed.
“Carter,” Jared answered. “You gotta help me. I’ve been trying to go back into the park every day—”
“You shouldn’t go in there alone,” Carter said. “There’s something powerful and evil in there.”
“No shit, man,” Jared replied. His words were slurred, and he sounded more than a little drunk. “There’s a cop there all the time, parked right out front. Sometimes out-of-towners show up so they can, I don’t know, look at the park or take pictures and crap, and the cop runs them off. I can’t get inside.”
“Victoria and I are working on an idea. Don’t try to go in by yourself, okay?”
“Oh, yeah, the great and wonderful Victoria. Becca’s still in there, Carter. Who’s going to help her if I don’t?”
“Let’s talk this out when you’re not drunk—”
“Who’s drunk?” Jared asked. “I don’t need your help, man. I’m going to get everybody I can together to go search the place, and do it right. We’ll go at night, when the park’s actually alive. I think that’s what the cops did wrong. They searched it during the day.”
“Jared, don’t do that. If you bring a bunch of people into the park, they could get taken or killed like last time. We have to be prepared. The guy who built the park told us we’re dealing with the devil.”
Jared laughed.
“I’m serious,” Carter said.
“I really wouldn’t be surprised,” Jared said.
“Just promise me you won’t go in there until we’re ready. You can come with us.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” Jared snapped. “It’s your fault we went there in the first place. It’s your fault Becca’s missing...I don’t need your help. I can handle it myself. I have a lot of people who want to come with me already. Just leave me alone.” Jared hung up on him.
“Sounds like that went well,” Victoria said.
“Yeah, right. All those kids who sit around him at lunch and want to hear about the park...he’s going to lead them all in there.”
“They could all die.” Victoria’s eyes went wide. “He can’t do that!”
“I tried to tell him. I’ll try again when he hasn’t been drinking, but it sounds like he’s already been talking about it to other people. Whatever we’re going to do, we have to do it fast, before Jared can lead his expedition. The only thing stopping him is the police—he says they’re watching the park all the time now.”
“At least something is stopping him. That’s good...until we want to go inside ourselves, and then it’ll be a problem,” Victoria said.
Carter nodded. “We’ll have to get around them.”
“Do you have Emily Dorsnel’s number?”
“No, but I can message her on Facebook.”
“Let’s do that,” she said. “Like right away. When is Jared planning to go back?”
“He didn’t say, and I don’t think he’s really decided—but it’s obviously soon. I would think this week, maybe by the weekend.”
“Then we have to hurry,” Victoria said.
Carter got in touch with Emily, and the three of them talked on the phone. Carter and Victoria took turns catching her up on what they’d discovered, putting Emily on speaker.
“I’ll help you if I can,” Emily said. “I’m not sure about going into the park myself, though. I’ll have to think about it.”
“If we don’t stop it, he’s going to keep luring people inside and keeping them,” Carter said. “We might even free the souls he’d already captured. And the cops are never going to accept that something supernatural is really inside the park.”
“I know,” Emily said. “That’s why I’m thinking about it instead of just saying ‘no’ and telling you you’re crazy to go back in there.”
“Okay, thanks,” Carter said.
“I’ll also consider appropriate preparations,” Emily added, “Just in case I decide to join you on this expedition. I will see that my EMF gear is charged and stocked with fresh batteries, just in case.”
“I appreciate it,” Carter said. “Do you think the others will help us?”
“I would think not, except that Wes’s brother Finn is among the missing, so they might help because of that. We can only ask.”
“Thanks, Emily.”
“If we are to move, we should move quickly,” Emily said. “The more souls captured, the more powerful the trap becomes, just as a young planet’s gravitational pull grows as its mass increases.”
“We should talk to them tomorrow,” Carter said. “I’ll get Jared there, too, as another witness for what’s happening in the park. They don’t even believe in the supernatural—I mean neither did I, a few weeks ago—so we should do this in person.”
“Agreed,” Emily said, and Victoria nodded.
Later, as the sun sank down and the fireworks shot up, painting the sky above the apartment complex with explosions and crackling flames, Carter felt more and more afraid. It was good to be taking some action, but he was drowning in things far beyond his understanding, and he was dragging everyone else down into it with him. First Jared and his friends, now the science club kids, and worst of all Victoria, who’d just arrived in town only to be pulled deep into its darkness.
He reached across to her cha
ir and took her hand. She let him hold it. Her fingers were cold and trembling, and the contact didn’t seem to bring much warmth and reassurance to either of them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
With help from Emily, Carter convinced Wes McKinley, Sameer Upadhyay, and David Huang to meet with them after school on Tuesday, without giving them too much information about why. Carter wanted to talk in a deserted place where nobody would overhear them, so they met at the beach.
Wes, Sameer, and David listened to Carter, Victoria, and Jared tell their story, with Emily adding background lore about hauntings and dark places. The seven of them sat on the rickety stairs from the boardwalk down to the empty beach, where the wind blew restlessly, casting waves of sand left and right.
The three boys listened with few interruptions, probably because they were outnumbered and weren’t allowed much chance to interrupt, but they cast looks of obvious disbelief among themselves, particularly when Carter described seeing the host of dark spirits in Haunted Alley, and when he recounted Schopfer’s claims about the devil.
“This is all crazy,” Wes said, when he finally had a chance to speak. He looked at Jared. “I know my brother was probably with you the night he disappeared, but I can’t believe the rest of it.”
“Then go inside the park and prove me wrong,” Jared said.
“Are you sure you didn’t see my brother again? At all?” Wes asked.
“I didn’t see any of them again,” Jared said. “The park was deserted when I finally escaped Dark Mansion. I thought everyone had gone home, but I found out nobody else ever came back.”
“So what are you proposing we do?” Wes asked.
“We go back into the park as a group, at night,” Carter said. “We try to chase him out of there, free anyone who’s still alive...maybe free the souls of the dead,” Carter added.
Sameer snorted and shook his head.
“Why do you expect us to help with that nonsense?” David Huang asked.
“For one, Wes’s brother was last seen in the park,” Carter said. “Second, we need chess players.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sameer said, elbowing Wes, who didn’t return his eye-rolling grin.
“Why chess players?” Wes asked.
“In the stories I’ve found, chess is the game people play against him,” Victoria said. “Smart people can beat him, or trick him.”
“There’s a game in Haunted Alley called Beat the Devil,” Carter said. “It’s chess-themed. I’ve never played it, but—”
“I have,” Wes said. “I dominated that game when I was six years old. I still have the giant stuffed devil goat to prove it.”
“So we go into the park and challenge him to a game,” Carter said. “And if he loses, he has to free the people he’s taken and leave the park forever.”
“And what if he wins?” Wes asked.
Everyone was quiet for a moment.
“If he wins, he gets your soul,” Sameer said. “Everyone knows that.”
“This entire conversation is ridiculous and pointless,” David said. “The police will never allow us to go inside the park, so there’s no point talking about it.”
“Who said we’re getting their permission?” Jared asked.
“I’m not going to jail just to investigate your weird ghost stories.” David stood up and kicked sand from his shoes. “You people are crazy. Right?” He looked to Wes and Sameer.
“Yeah, you’re not going for this, are you, Wes?” Sameer asked.
“Sameer, I am not an ignorant thirteenth-century peasant, therefore I don’t believe in devils and ghosts,” Wes said. “But this is my brother. He’s been missing for more than a week, and the police don’t have any ideas. If going into the park offers any chance of finding some clue about my brother...He may be a useless jack rag with only a handful of functioning neurons, but I have to find him if I can.”
Sameer nodded. “Yeah. I’d probably say that if it was my brother or sister. If you want to go, I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t expect to find anything but ruins, but what the hell?” Wes shrugged.
“You’ve all lost your minds.” David stalked away across the rickety bridge, back toward the parking lot.
“Don’t go narc us out to anybody!” Jared called after him. “Or I’ll kick your ass.”
David gave him the finger before walking out of sight.
“Thank you, Wes,” Victoria said.
“Yeah, that’s great.” Carter felt a very small portion of the heavy weight lift from his shoulders. “We really need you guys. Emily’s putting together her ghost-hunting gear—”
“Actually, I’ve decided against that,” Emily said. “From what you’ve described, we’ll hardly be looking for trace signs of abnormal energy, or even a simple apparition. We should instead focus on defending ourselves against this entity. I have my doubts as to the existence of the actual ‘Satan’ of Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, but clearly we have a dark and powerful personality energy. One that weaves webs to collect and eat souls.”
“So what do you recommend?” Victoria asked.
“We should each bring religious or spiritual symbols with strong personal significance.”
“So you’ll just hope that at least one of several random ancient books of myth and folklore just happen to be true?” Wes asked.
“I personally believe their subjective importance to us would be the important factor,” Emily said. “But that is merely my viewpoint.”
“Whatever,” Wes said. “Do what you want on the hocus-pocus end. I’m just looking for signs of my brother.”
“All you two really need to do is prepare to play chess,” Carter told Wes and Sameer.
“It’s not real chess, it’s a simplified carnival-game version,” Wes said. “But consider us prepared.”
“Jared, you need to call off these other people who are planning to go into the park with you,” Carter said. “Tell them the party’s canceled.”
“I’ll try, but there are tons of people planning to go,” Jared said. “I might not be able to stop it at this point.”
“Define ‘tons’ of people,” Wes said.
“I don’t know, lots of freshman and sophomores. It could be forty people or a hundred. We were talking about going on Friday night.”
“The police will stop them, anyway,” Sameer said. “They have a cop out there all the time now.”
“I don’t know,” Victoria said. “I think he wants all those younger kids to come to the park. That might be why he let any of us out in the first place, to tell other people about it. And if he wants them to come, he’ll probably find a way to get them inside.”
“Because he’s ‘the devil,’” Wes snorted, rolling his eyes.
“So we should go Thursday night, before all those people go on Friday,” Carter said.
“What about the police?” Wes asked. “We still have to get around the cop, too.”
“Then we need to distract the police,” Victoria said.
“How? Start a fire?” Sameer asked.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Carter told him.
“You’re insane.” Sameer shook his head.
“This town is full of empty buildings that will probably collapse before anyone ever uses them again,” Carter said. “A fire would keep the police busy...”
“So who gets stuck committing the arson?” Wes asked.
“I’ll do it,” Jared said. “I’m good at setting shit on fire.”
“It would be smarter if none of us were there,” Wes said. “We could set up a timer or a remote detonator.”
“This is getting too wild for me,” Sameer said.
“You don’t have to be involved with that part,” Carter told him. “But we all agree we’ll go to the park together Thursday?”
“Why wait for Thursday?” Jared asked. “If Becca or Finn or anybody is still alive in there, they need our help now.”
“Exactly,” Wes said. “We should go right aw
ay.”
“We’re not prepared,” Emily said. “I insist that we take our time and take careful precautions.”
“And we’d have to set up a distraction for the police,” Carter said.
“I’ll do it,” Jared said. “I’ll set anyplace in town on fire, just name it.”
“I could make the detonator,” Wes said. “We should wait until after sunset to break into our abandoned building and set things up.”
“Then let’s meet back here an hour after sunset,” Carter said. “Nine o’clock. Will that give everybody enough time?”
They looked at each other, and nobody disagreed.
Chapter Thirty
The man came to visit Artie Schopfer at five in the morning, when the world lay dark and silent.
Artie heard the footsteps first, not in the hallway but behind the curtain dividing his room in half. It certainly wasn’t Ezekiel Reynolds, his wheelchair-bound roommate. Artie hadn’t seen a nurse enter the room, and he’d been lying awake for at least five minutes.
As the footfalls approached the curtain, Artie began to feel afraid. It was him, coming back to haunt and terrorize him again. Artie had told the kids everything he knew. The man must have found out somehow.
The man wasn’t really a man, of course, but Artie didn’t want to think too much about that, or he would drive himself into a fear-drenched panic.
The curtain waved slightly, as though someone had taken hold of it from the other side, preparing to pull it open.
“Who’s there?” Artie whispered. “Ezekiel? Is that you?”
Pale white fingers—definitely not Ezekiel’s—reached around the edge of the stiff green curtain. They eased the curtain aside, making no noise at all.
Artie couldn’t bring himself to speak again. He watched the man step out, dressed in a candy-striped fedora and a crisp matching suit with a red tie, as if he’d raided Theodore Hanover’s personal wardrobe.
He didn’t have Hanover’s ruddy, jolly features, though. His eyes showed little color or emotion, and his face seemed plain and forgettable.
Artie had last seen him years earlier, on the day of the sinkhole.
“How are you feeling, Artie?” the man asked, standing at the foot of his bed and folding his arms. “Bitter and powerless?”
