by JL Bryan
“Leave me alone,” Artie whispered.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Perhaps I should come closer.” The man walked up the side of the bed until he reached the small bedside table. His blank eyes looked down into Artie’s. His presence chilled the air.
“Go away,” Artie managed to say, a little louder. “Please.”
“Is that how you greet your visitors? You receive so few, I thought you’d be happy to see me.” He sat down in the orange plastic chair by Artie’s bed, his posture perfectly straight. “Perhaps my appearance discomforts you. Would you prefer if I sprouted red horns and a goatee? Or perhaps a vaudeville mustache curled and waxed at the tips? Would you be more comfortable if my eyes looked like this?” The man’s pupils narrowed and elongated until they were vertical reptilian slits like those Artie had painted on Inferno Mountain’s devil face.
Artie didn’t say anything. The man’s inhuman eyes stared at him.
“Your soul is special to me,” the man said. “I take a particular delight in your torment. Look at your life now, no mate, no children, all your work crumbling to dust behind you.”
“What do you want from me?” Artie whispered.
“I want to watch you suffer. Your work disgusts me, you must know that by now. I loathe all manner of frivolity, laughter, lightness of heart and spirit. I like to watch souls grow dark and heavy, ripening with fear, hate, guilt, and greed until they fall toward me like rotten fruit. You seek to interfere, but your efforts are useless. Only a fool casts seeds on stony soil, and you have cast yours on the stoniest soil of all, the human heart.”
The man leaned closer, his voice falling to an intimate whisper. “So sour and barren is the heart, Artie, that we must at times resort to trickery to make things grow there. Isn’t that sad, Artie?”
Artie thought of the small brown medicine bottle made of thick glass. He had paid three dollars for it, a princely sum for a traveling carnival worker in 1950.
She will love you as much as she can, the man had whispered when he’d sold it to Artie. Artie had been nervous and horny as hell, his adolescent dreams and fantasies fueled by Tatiana’s short, skimpy costume that clung to her swaying hips while the boa constrictor curled around and between her breasts, as thick as Artie’s arm...
Artie had been young and out of his mind with desire. This man, dressed in a crisp brown suit and fedora, had stood next to the homemade wooden box-top on the back of his red Chevrolet Thriftmaster truck, from which he sold patent medicines and packets of ground roots and herbs.
Artie was now old and infirm, but this man looked as though he hadn’t aged one second since 1950.
“But you gave me an additional, special reason to hate you, haven’t you, Artie?” he asked. “You must know what I mean.”
Artie thought it over. “Inferno Mountain?”
“Inferno Mountain!” He snarled slightly, and the power of his voice rattled Artie’s frail bones in their sockets. “Plastering a cartoonish attempt at my face on a carnival ride for the amusement of a teeming, filthy mass of human beings. Making me into a figure of fun for public consumption. Stamping me on their little shirts and keychains so they could take home little mementos of how they laughed in my face. Mocking me on a grand scale. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
“I didn’t think you were real.”
“I am more than real. I am eternal,” he said. “I dwell in the dark places inside each of you. I wait, and I whisper in your ear, helping your soul on its inevitable journey downward toward me. You create fragile painted clouds, Artie, empty illusions of happiness to lure and fool your fellow man, but I dwell far below, on the final bedrock of the universe where all things must eventually fall.
“I have saved your grandest creation for the final destruction, the final insult to your existence,” the man continued. “I have transformed your great lighthouse of shallow happiness into a blackened pit of despair and suffering. As you once lured souls in search of delights, so I lure them now, and they give themselves to me. Your Starland will be known as a den of unspeakable horrors, a place where many were tormented and many died. That shall be your only legacy.”
“How many have you killed in the park?” Artie whispered, feeling horror and dread creeping all through his body.
“What matters is how many souls I will take. That will number in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, before I lose interest in this little project. For now, I find it refreshing and pleasant. There is so much one can do with an amusement park infused with the powers of Hell, so many experiments I’d like to try. I can assure you it will be quite profitable to me.”
Artie was quiet for a minute, and the man stood.
“Have you nothing else to say, Artie? You don’t need to speak. I feel the pain inside you. I relish your sense of loss and emptiness.” He walked toward the curtain, then turned back. “There is one additional matter. You recently spoke with two young visitors. You must know that I would have preferred you to turn them away, but instead you loosened your tongue and told them all you knew, didn’t you, Artie? Not that you know much, but surely you didn’t think it would go unpunished.”
The man stalked up the side of his bed again. Artie pressed the emergency call button for a nurse.
“I have already taken your hands as penalty for your grotesque creations,” the man said. “Now I must remove your power of speech as well, for that has offended me.”
The man reached his long, thin fingers toward Artie’s face. Artie turned his head, but didn’t have the strength to do much more.
The ice-cold fingertips pressed against Artie’s left temple. Artie grimaced as they pressed harder and harder, and finally seemed to break through his skin and slide through his skull as though it were a soft, permeable membrane.
He felt a crunching pain, like a sudden intense headache, and then the right half of his body went limp and numb.
Artie had slipped the potion in the mug of warm wine Tatiana drank after each performance. She had fallen for him and shared his bed for a few months, before a large cottonmouth had killed her. The venomous snake wasn’t part of her act. It had bitten her while she bathed one evening in a creek in rural Georgia. Artie had lost his first love, and had resisted the urge to fall in love since then.
Now Artie trembled while the man, the devil, removed his fingers from Artie’s head. There was no blood, nor any feeling of pain or injury where the man’s finger had penetrated his temple, but Artie could feel that he’d done serious damage in some other way.
“Say your name, Artie,” the devil instructed.
Artie felt his lips and jaw move uselessly, as if the signals from his brain weren’t reaching his mouth correctly.
“Say my name, Artie,” the devil said, with a gentle smile on his lips.
Artie tried to speak, but his mouth made nothing but useless wet sounds.
“Now you’re all fixed, Artie. Your hands cannot create, your mouth cannot speak. You can only lie here, useless, and think. Think of all the bright young souls drawn down into your park to meet their damnation. Think of how perfectly I’ve reversed your intentions and ruined all that you made.”
Artie again struggled to speak, but could not form a single word. A feeling of panic rose in his chest.
“Enjoy what remains of your miserable existence, Artie. I will be waiting for you on the other side.”
The devil vanished just before the nurse entered the room.
Chapter Thirty-One
Carter asked Victoria to drop him at home for a while so he could square away some schoolwork and prepare for their third visit to the park. He could tell she wasn’t thrilled to separate from him when they had such a dangerous night ahead, but there was something he felt he needed to do alone.
He borrowed his dad’s truck and drove out to the Memorial Gardens cemetery on the western edge of town, across the Gulf Coast Highway from an empty strip mall and a Burger King.
Carter walked up the grid of gravel paths among the
dead. It was a nondenominational, no-frills graveyard, with little brick-sized markers next to small flower holders. A few statues of angels and a woman in robes stood here and there as decorations, scattered across acres of glossy green grass. A small marble mausoleum/chapel at the center of the green expanse held the town’s wealthier corpses, but he wasn’t going there.
She lay in a back corner of the cemetery under the crooked, sprawling arms of a live oak tree. Her grave marker seemed isolated and lonely, since no other family members were buried nearby. Her ancestors had not lived in Conch City, and her parents and siblings had moved away. He was the only one left in town to keep her memory alive.
He knelt in front of the little marker, wishing he’d brought a few flowers to stick into the empty holder beside it. The inscription was so small he could have covered it with his hand:
BEATRICE GLORIA CALHOUN
“Love knows no death.”
“Hi, Tricia,” he whispered. “Sorry I haven’t visited you more. I miss you. I think about you a lot.”
The cemetery lay quiet except for a few whistling warblers and an occasional car on the highway far behind him. Evening approached, and the shadows of the trees around him had grown long and deep.
“We’re going back tonight,” he said. “I know you’re trapped in there. I want to help you. But I need your help, too. If there’s anything you can do from...from your side of things, please do it tonight. None of us really understand what we’re up against, or what we’re supposed to do, but we need to do something before he takes anyone else. If you can help at all...” He traced his fingertips over the inscribed letters of her name.
He heard a small, soft noise in the grass. At first he took it for a small animal, possibly a scrounging squirrel or bird under one of the trees, but as it approached him, it began to sound more and more like human footsteps.
Carter was scared to turn his head and look. He knew he would see her small, pale feet, one toe adorned with the plastic spider ring, and then he would look up to see her bloodstained white dress fluttering in the wind, the dark and gory stump where her head was supposed to be.
A shadow fell across him. The footsteps ceased. When he finally worked up the courage to turn his head slightly to the left, he didn’t see small girl feet standing beside him. They were large, clad in black leather shoes. The pants were white with thin red pinstripes.
Carter took a sharp breath as he looked up at the man from the park, who gazed down at him with no expression, his eyes almost transparently pale under his candy-striped carnival barker hat.
“Praying to a dead child,” the man finally said. “Aren’t you pathetic? What did you expect, a voice from the heavens? Did you think she would reach down and bless you, or intercede on your behalf with some deity?”
Carter shivered, afraid to stand up, run away, or make any sudden moves at all, so he remained where he was, kneeling before the devil.
“She is mine, Carter. No different from any of the others.” The man looked away across the rows of graves, and Carter drew back from a kneeling position into a squatting one, from which it would be easier to fight or run.
“Why are you doing this?” Carter whispered.
“Visiting you? Speaking to you?” The man looked almost amused.
“Killing people in the park.”
“Claiming souls is my trade, Carter. The souls of the innocent are difficult to corrupt after death, but that’s the challenge, isn’t it? That is what makes it fun. There’s a little devil in the soul of every child. It simply needs cultivation and encouragement. Don’t weep for them, Carter. When they aren’t busy working for me, they play and play—it’s an endless night at the amusement park for them, all the rides they want, all the cotton candy they can eat. It may not be paradise, but it’s certainly a lighter shade of purgatory.”
“And when they’ve killed enough people, you get to keep their souls.” Carter swallowed. “You take them down to Hell.”
“That’s the final profit for me, but it’s less about the destination than the journey. Don’t you agree?”
“Let her go,” Carter said.
“Who?”
“You know who I mean. Beatrice.” He touched her grave marker.
“Are you offering your soul in exchange for hers?” The man squatted down to look Carter in the eyes. The air around Carter turned cold, as though black clouds had rolled across the sun. “But her soul is a greater prize. So much lighter, so much sweeter...or it was when I first put my hands on her. I find you dull in comparison, neither very bright nor very dark.”
“Then how can I set her free?”
“You’re asking me how to steal my property, Carter? You cannot have her. In fact...” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s quite happy where she is. All the young ones enjoy the park so much. Why do you imagine she wants to leave?”
Carter didn’t know how to answer. He gaped at the man, trying to process that this was the devil of mythology and old-time religion.
When he was very young, maybe four or five, his mother had taken him to visit his grandfather, a tall, angry preacher in Mississippi. Carter had sat on the hard pew in the small pine-log church, stewing like a pig in the stagnant July heat, while his grandfather ranted about eternal fire and the devil, the devil, the devil. The same death-and-brimstone ramblings had driven Carter’s mom to run away from home at the age of sixteen, first to New Orleans, then to the sugary Florida beaches. His mother had a talent for running away.
Carter now wondered if watching his grandfather’s sermon, listening to the stories of souls burning in eternal anguish while he roasted like a pig inside the dim, hot country church had led to his childhood fear of Inferno Mountain. Maybe that was why he found the giant, grinning red devil face terrifying, while everyone else seemed to find it funny or campy.
The man in front of him was nothing like the evil monster of his grandfather’s sermons. This man looked so forgettable and ordinary that he could have vanished into any crowd, if not for his loud clothes. He could have been anyone.
“You are not welcome to return to the park,” the man said. “You’ve been an irritant. If you return, I will not hesitate to kill you. Victoria will die, too, as will any friends you bring along. I’ll be watching for you.”
“Why me?”
“I simply don’t like you, Carter.”
Carter didn’t believe him, but he didn’t want to press the issue too hard.
“I will make you a final offer,” the man continued. “I can give you anything you want, Carter, if you simply keep out. For example, this business of becoming a doctor—you and I both know you’re not capable of it. You’ll end up among the countless washouts littering the side of that particular path. Honestly, you probably won’t even make it through your high school classes this semester. I can change all of that. I can make you a rich, famous, brilliant doctor if you let me help. Perhaps you’ll cure, let’s say, Parkinson’s? That sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Or perhaps a major venereal disease? That will make you popular at parties.”
“I don’t care about being rich and famous.”
“Then I’ll make you a poor, obscure, mediocre doctor, if that’s your pleasure. College and medical school will be a breeze for you. Simply accept my offer.” He held out a bloodless, cold, carefully manicured hand.
“No,” Carter said.
The man scowled a little.
“I can grant any one wish,” he said. “What about Victoria? We both know she’s too good for you—in fact, all three of us know it, don’t we? She knew it the moment she met you. But I can make her all yours, Carter. For life, if you like, or just for a single ecstatic night, if you prefer. Consider what you truly desire. You could have any dream come true, no matter how impossible it seems.”
“And all I have to do is stay out of the park?” Carter asked. “No signing anything in blood? No giving you my soul?”
“You understand perfectly. One wish, no strings.”
�
��Why do you want me to stay out, when you want everyone else to come in?”
“Why must you press my patience? Make your wish and be free. Leave the ugly past behind, as you’ve always wished to do, Carter. Move on from this miserable, dying little town into your real life, into your future. It’s time. This chance will not come again.” He stood up, slightly adjusting the lapels of his jacket, never taking his eyes off Carter. “I could even move you forward in time, Carter. You want nothing more than to escape this town, isn’t that true? You could awaken tomorrow on your first day of college, leave all of this behind you. That’s all you really want, isn’t it, Carter?”
Carter stood with him, his knees shaking as if they would collapse under him at any moment. He knew there was only one way to answer, but the idea of speaking that single syllable terrified him, because there was no telling what might follow. If the man was who Schopfer said he was—and Carter was finding less and less reason to doubt Schopfer’s words—then he might strike Carter dead at any moment and stroll away whistling.
“Answer,” the man said. “Simply tell me which wish you wish to wish. Speak your heart’s desire.”
“No.”
“No?” The man’s eyebrows lifted slightly, and his lips parted. His slight smile disappeared. For his usually blank and expressionless face, it was an enormous outburst of emotion. “You have another wish to tell me?”
“I’m not making a wish.”
“Then you must want...” The man’s brow furrowed just a little, giving rise to a single shallow wrinkle in his forehead. “You are rejecting my offer?”
“Yes.” Carter felt sick with fear, as if he would vomit all over his shoes, if the man didn’t kill him first.
The man snarled, and there was nothing subtle about it. His canine teeth grew longer and sharper, and his pupils narrowed until they were vertical and reptilian. Now he did remind Carter of the devil on Inferno Mountain, just a little bit.
