by JL Bryan
“Becca?” Jared reached a hand through the bars toward her, then hesitated, his fingers reaching just beyond the bars.
“This life is sooo much better,” she whispered. “You should join me.”
“Join you?” Jared looked confused.
“Don’t listen to her,” Victoria told him.
“I want you with me, Jared. I need you with me. I’m reaching out to you from beyond the grave—that’s how special you are.” Becca touched her pale hand to Jared’s, and he shivered, but he didn’t draw back from her. “You’re everything to me, Jared.”
“I don’t understand,” Jared whispered. He looked cowed, and somehow entranced by the Becca ghost.
“I want you, Jared.” The cage door gave a rusty squeal, then opened just slightly. “I want you forever. There’s nobody else like you in the world. You’re the one. You’re everything.”
“Becca...” Jared pulled open the cage door. A cold rush of air spilled out of the cell.
“Don’t do it!” Carter grabbed Jared’s arm, but Jared snarled and punched him in the face with stunning force. Carter stumbled back a step, feeling blood leak from his left nostril and over his lips.
Becca retreated back into the darkness of the cell, out of sight. Jared hurried after her, though Carter and Victoria yelled for him to stop.
Jared was out of sight for only a couple of seconds before he screamed like a terrified child. Carter ran into the cage after him.
“Carter, wait!” Victoria shouted, but he didn’t stop.
He shined his cell phone upward like a flashlight. Jared hung there, in the center of a web of wires and chains strung through his body. The chains and wires were anchored in the walls around him. It looked as though someone had cut him at least a hundred times with a small blade. His blood drizzled out into a widening puddle on the floor beneath, his lifeless eyes bulging and staring at nothing, his legs still twitching.
“Too eager, Becca,” the man’s monotone voice spoke from the next cell.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Becca’s voice whispered. She became visible to Carter again, her pale face and arms splattered with fresh red blood. “I’ll kill the next one more slowly. Promise!”
She smiled at Carter and licked her bloody lips.
Behind him, the cage door gave a rusty squeal as it swung itself closed.
“No!” Victoria seized the bars of the door with her hands, pulling it back and stopping it less than an inch away from the latch that would have trapped Carter inside.
Carter ran to the door and pushed against it. Something sharp jabbed deep into his back, cutting him open, and Becca giggled, her frosty breath on his ear. She kept slashing at him while he pushed against the cage door.
Together, Carter and Victoria managed to pull the door open enough for Carter to slither out, his back greased by his own blood. The moment they released it, the door slammed shut and locked itself.
“Come back!” Becca shrieked. She became transparent, passed through the cage door, then grew solid again on the other side, holding a short, curved blade in one hand and a coil of razor wire in the other.
Victoria ran back to the ladder—it might not have been the quickest way out of the room, but they didn’t have time to search for another. While they climbed, Becca appeared at the foot of his ladder, hissing and slashing at Carter’s legs, trying to drag him back down.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sameer sat by Emily’s unconscious form, gently prodding her with his fingertips. The fall had knocked them both out, and he was the first to recover.
“Emily?” he whispered. “Emily, wake up.”
She groaned but didn’t open her eyes.
They’d landed, after a long fall, on a dusty concrete slab in a room full of cardboard boxes and wooden crates.
“Emily,” he said louder, poking her arm harder. “You have to get up.”
“Huh?” Emily’s eyes opened, and she let off a few sneezes as loud as gunshots. “My throat hurts.”
“It’s the dust. Here.” Sameer helped her sit up and handed her a bottle of Dasani water. She sipped it gratefully.
“What happened?” she asked.
“We took a bad fall. Does anything feel broken? Like your legs?”
“Just my skull. Where are we?”
“It looks like a storage room under Dark Mansion. Your phone’s broken, I think.” Sameer handed her the cell phone that had fallen loose from her belt. The screen was cracked and had gone dark.
“So we’re still...” Emily looked at the bottled water in her hand. “Where did this come from?”
“The vending machine.” Sameer pointed to an open doorway, from which a thin light glowed. “There’s some kind of break room in there. There’s a little booth table with an ashtray, there’s a drink machine, a snack machine...”
“Sameer!” Emily snapped, her eyes growing wide. She stared at the water bottle as if it had turned into a dead rat in her hand. “I said we shouldn’t eat or drink anything from the park. I thought you’d brought this in yourself or something.”
“It’s not really from the park, it’s from a vending machine,” he said. “It’s not like we drank something served by a food booth out there. This doesn’t count, does it?”
“I don’t know! It’s not worth risking, is it?” She quickly screwed the cap back on. “Don’t drink any more of that.”
“Okay, okay, chill...”
“How do we get out of here?” Emily pushed herself to her feet.
“I looked, but I can’t find anything.”
Emily took Sameer’s flashlight and swept it around the room. She stopped when the beam landed on an EXIT sign, currently switched off so it radiated no light.
“That wasn’t there before,” Sameer said. “I looked.”
“Maybe you missed it.” Emily rubbed her head and began pushing heavy cardboard boxes aside to clear the way to the exit. “Help me. We need to get back to the others.”
Sameer began pushing more of the boxes aside, grunting at their weight.
After a few minutes, they’d cleared a path to a steel fire door located just below the sign.
“Who goes first?” Sameer asked.
“I’m not standing around arguing over it,” Emily replied. She pressed the wide metal bar, and they both sighed in relief when the door swung open to the night outside, filled with neon, music, and fresh, salty air. They faced a steep flight of concrete steps leading up to ground level in Haunted Alley.
Down the alley, the lights were on at the Haunted Souvenir Shop at the back corner of Dark Mansion. In the Ghostly Gallery, a row of ghosts made from helium balloons draped in pastel sheets flowed endlessly past, suspended from a moving clothesline. A row of chili dogs piled with onions and jalapenos waited on the Devil Dogs serving counter. Red and gold lights flashed all around the Beat the Devil game, reflecting off the arrangement of oversized white and black chess pieces facing each other across the mechanical board. The overhead racks of Beat the Devil were crammed with prizes, mostly plush goats and lambs.
Before coming to the park, Sameer had dismissed the idea that it was really haunted. He’d only come to help Wes search for his missing brother. He had sort of believed something strange was happening in the park—maybe even a psycho killer or some kind of gang or cult hiding out there, dangerous but not truly supernatural.
Now he knew differently, and he just wanted to escape. The idea of challenging some demonic entity to a game of Beat the Devil had seemed absurd before, but now it seemed like an obvious way to get killed. He watched a group of ghostly kids flicker in and out of visibility as they chased each other up the midway, squealing and screaming with every step. His heart beat faster inside his chest. Those kids freaked him out.
“We should go around front and wait for the others,” Emily whispered.
Sameer nodded and followed her out to the park’s central plaza. All the games and rides were still going strong. A security clown rode past on an oversized,
motorized red tricycle, his dirty orange curls spilling out beneath his blue peaked cap, swinging a bright pink and yellow truncheon in one hand. He slowed as he glanced toward Sameer, who shivered as the clown’s cold, colorless eyes examined him. Then the clown picked up speed and zipped on down the midway.
The buildings of the central plaza seemed much taller than he remembered, four or five stories instead of just one or two, adorned with masses of flashing lights and cartoony paintings of circus animals and ice cream cones. Even the wishing well had grown into a multi-tiered brick fountain.
One tall structure in particular caught his eye. He didn’t think it had been here when they’d walked into the plaza, because he wouldn’t have missed it.
The attraction, or at least its facade, was four stories high, painted to look like reddish stone. The front appeared to be crowded with sculptures of people in medieval Indian dress, and the spaces between them were embellished with geometrical shapes, keeping his eyes busy wherever he looked. Two smaller stone towers of similar design flanked the main building.
Sameer told himself that it had to be fake, because there was no way anybody could move that much stone in the short time he’d been inside the haunted house. He approached the front steps, which also looked like red stone and led up between a pair of columns into a dark, narrow cave of an entrance.
The giant sign above the entrance, written in English but in an ornate font reminiscent of Sanskrit, read THE GREAT LIBRARY OF NALANDA.
Sameer approached it slowly, with a feeling of awe. He’d long been fascinated by the lost university of Nalanda, a great center of learning in India for centuries before Turkish invaders destroyed it in the twelfth century. The small rectangular doorway seemed to call to him, tempting him with the mysteries of lost knowledge.
He approached the front steps. Emily said something behind him, but Sameer barely heard her. He was stunned to see any version of the Nalanda library here, even if it was just some kind of amusement park attraction.
Sameer ascended the steps, his heart beating rapidly in anticipation, all his fear momentarily forgotten. Some part of his mind, way at the back, was screaming for him to stop, to turn back and run away, but it was a weak little voice, easy to ignore. Sameer was completely entranced by the sight of the ancient library. He had to look inside.
He passed through the doorway into an open, cool, shadowy space, with different floor levels and platforms connected by stairs and ladders. Circular oil lamps with five wicks each filled the space with the smell of burning butter and cast their dancing light on shelves heaped with thousands of palm-leaf manuscripts.
He heard footsteps approach, but he was too in awe to feel afraid, even when the man in the candy-striped hat emerged around a shelf of manuscripts and looked down at him from one of the narrow flights of stairs.
“Impressive, is it not?” the man asked. “An archive of the ages. In its day, scholars could study all of human knowledge here. There were nine stories of leaves and scrolls in Sanskrit, Mandarin, Greek, Latin...”
“How is this possible?” Sameer whispered. “How is it here?”
“It is here because it is among your fondest wishes,” the man said. “Are you pleased, Sameer?”
“Can I read them?”
“Read anything you like.”
Sameer gently lifted a stacked bundle of rectangular palm-leaf pages held together by string. The manuscript felt dry and fragile in his fingers, ready to crumble into fragments if he was careless with it.
The leaves were written in a flowery Nagari script, an archaic form of the modern Devanagari his mother had taught him. He struggled to read the faded ink on the first page, which was illustrated by a compact drawing of the goddess Kali, portrayed as a four-armed woman wearing nothing but a necklace of human heads.
“I wish I could spend the rest of my life studying these manuscripts,” Sameer whispered.
“You may have your wish,” the man replied.
Sameer focused on the figures at the upper left of the leaf. The manuscript grew warm in his fingers, and then tiny flames rose from the text. Before he could react, the flames spread quickly, devouring the dry old leaf and scorching his fingers.
“Ouch!” Sameer threw the old manuscript aside and stuck his burned fingers in his mouth. The burning book landed on a shelf of similar old, dry manuscripts. Tongues of fire crawled up and down, igniting the shelves above and below it.
“Careful,” the man in the hat said. “You’re going to lose thousands of years’ worth of knowledge.”
“No!” Sameer beat at the spreading fire with his hands, wincing at the pain. The fire raced up and down, leaping to other shelves of old manuscripts. Cursing, Sameer took off his shirt and tried to smother the fire, but it was spreading and growing much too fast. A long row burst into flames, sending a runner of fire to the shelves on the next wall.
“There are few fragrances more satisfying than a burning library,” the man said, completely stoic as the fire whooshed from shelf to shelf. “You should have seen what Julius Caesar did to the Library of Alexandria. I wish I had a thousand ambitious souls like his to work with. Men of the modern age are nothing but weak clay.”
“Help me!” Sameer said. He slapped at the flames faster, but his shirt caught on fire and he had to drop it onto the wooden floorboards.
“I have helped you,” the man said. “Your wish has come true.”
As though someone had pumped an enormous unseen bellows, the flames erupted into flowing torrents, sweeping from wall to wall and floor to floor, climbing the narrow stairs and wooden ladders. Rows of dry, brittle manuscripts burst into crackling little fires.
The smoke rose thick and dark from all sides, stinging Sameer’s eyes and searing his lungs. He coughed and gasped for air, but the man in the striped hat did not seem to have trouble breathing. A shadow of a smile appeared at one corner of the man’s mouth.
Sameer gave up on saving the library and ran down the narrow red steps through which he’d entered. Blinded by smoke, he smacked directly into a solid rock wall at a full run, bloodying his nose. He leaned against the wall and coughed again.
He felt around with his hands, but the doorway was gone, replaced by a carving of Kali so large the human heads on her necklace were life-sized.
“Where’s the door?” Sameer hacked and coughed as he turned around. The smoke thinned enough for him to see the man in the hat standing on the stairs ahead of him, watching Sameer coolly.
“The only way out is through the flames,” the man said. “It will only sting for a moment.”
The thick fire billowed down the stairs, passing through the man as if he were a ghost, and crashed down onto Sameer like a tidal wave. Sameer howled in pain, breathing in raw flames, until he collapsed into a charred heap on the burning floor.
* * *
As they reached Wishing Well Plaza at the center of the park, Emily found herself staring at a dark new attraction that had appeared next to the haunted house. She knew it hadn’t been there before, or she would have drooled at the sight of it.
The facade resembled a black two-story house with thick red curtains blocking the windows. Three steps led up to a door that looked like a coffin stood on its end, and the sign above it read PSYCHICAL RESEARCH LABORATORY. A smaller sign suggested: EXPERIENCE THE MYSTERIES OF DEATH!
Emily drifted toward it, forgetting about Sameer and the supernatural danger they faced. She just wanted a quick peek inside. The words “psychical research” made her think of nineteenth-century parapsychologists like William James, the kind who would visit Spiritualists and mediums in search of hard evidence of the afterlife.
She ascended the three steps, and the coffin door opened as she approached.
The interior looked just as she’d imagined. To her right, it resembled a nineteenth-century laboratory with racks of glass bottles interspersed with strange handmade devices of wood and iron. To her left lay a long table strewn with Tarot cards, a crystal ball, a planch
ette with a pencil for spirit writing, a brass “spirit trumpet” that was supposed to amplify the voices of the dead during seances. Leatherbound books lined the back wall of the room, with such titles as Notes on the Nature and Substance of Ghostly Ectoplasm.
Emily approached the wooden table with the occult artifacts, barely noticing as the front door closed softly behind her. The long scroll of spirit-writing paper had coiled up against the planchette, and she unrolled it and smoothed it out. Words were written at every angle, like the scribbling of a schizophrenic, and a few particularly large ones jumped out at her: ALONE, COLD, and HELP ME.
“I knew you would feel at home here,” a voice said, and she jumped. A man dressed like a carnival barker approached her from the rack of laboratory glassware. She hadn’t seen him there before. His gray eyes regarded her without any hint of emotion. “I know your kind, Emily. For millennia I have watched you searching for hints and glimmers in tea leaves and pig entrails, and later with cameras and magnets.” He stopped in the middle of the room, staring at her.
Emily felt nervous, but she knew she ought to be terrified—this was clearly the man Carter and his friends kept talking about, the one they claimed was Satan or some kind of demon. He was the one behind all the strangeness at the park.
At this moment, and in this setting, she was less frightened than curious. It seemed like a place where the human and the supernatural could meet and discuss, and she was eager to know what such a being had to say for himself.
It was only the weakest, quietest part of her mind telling her to run away, that she was in a lot of danger. Emily didn’t want to hear that.
“Many fools have spent their lives staring into the inexplicable chasm between science and the soul,” the man said. “Most find nothing...but you, Emily, shining the particular brilliance of your mind into that dark, might actually manage to find something there, some evidence or artifact to present to the world. Of course, few will believe you, as most people cling to their beliefs with an unshakeable stubborn stupidity. They need their primitive tribal myths of an angry god-king hurling thunderbolts from the sky, or their myth of an indifferent and empty material universe—you are among the few, very few, who dare to seek the bridge between these extremes.”
