by JL Bryan
“Who are you?” Emily asked.
“You already know the answer. Ask a more interesting question.” His gaze shifted to the laboratory area, and Emily looked along with him.
She pointed to a device that looked like an archaic phonograph amplifier, coiled in exposed wires, connected by tubing to a wooden cube of a box painted with runes and sealed with brass locks on every side.
“What is that, then?” she asked.
“That device was designed and constructed by a Spiritualist splinter group in New York in 1887. They called it a spirit box.”
“And what does it do?” Emily moved closer, looking into the brass amplifier cone. She felt the warning signal again, somewhere at the back of her mind, but was much too curious to be cautious. For some reason, she felt completely safe.
“Its purpose is to capture spirits,” the man told her. “Malevolent and troublesome spirits, specifically, though I suppose it could capture any kind.”
“Does it work?”
“If you wish to see how it functions, you may activate it.”
The wires ran into a wooden box, ornately carved with strange, twisted trees and odd geometrical shapes. A single lever jutted out of the top of the box, next to a tiny, unlit light bulb. The cluster of filaments inside the bulb looked like something from the Edison era.
Emily hesitated, knowing that something was wrong but not sure what it was. It felt like someone had washed out her brain with cold water. All she could think of was how curious she was to throw the switch.
She took the lever in her hand and prepared to push it.
Then she hesitated.
Everything in the room—with the dusty old volumes on ghost lore and the Victorian-era gear for talking to spirits—seemed handpicked to fascinate Emily.
It’s a trap made just for you, whispered the tiny, weak voice at the back of her mind. Emily knew it was right.
She forced herself to take a step backward.
“Where are you going?” the man asked, crossing his arms.
Emily didn’t answer. She dodged around him, heading for the coffin-shaped door through which she’d entered. Her heart was pounding and her skin felt suddenly clammy, as though she’d been having a pleasant dream and only just now noticed that it was a nightmare. She couldn’t move her sneakers fast enough.
“Stop!” the man shouted.
A creaking, cracking sound boomed above.
A box made of old boards wrapped in barbed wire crashed down around Emily. Its roof was low and lined with rusty nails, and she barely managed to drop to her knees and avoid getting stabbed in the scalp.
The interior of the box was lined with sharp-toothed gears and rusty pulleys with chains threaded through them. These gears shrieked as they turned all around her. They drove a dozen heavy steel bolts into the floorboards, locking the box into place around her like a cage.
When the pulleys and gears stopped turning, Emily looked closely at a cluster of them, trying to decipher the elaborate mechanism of rusty wheels.
One of them spun as she studied it, and a thin metallic wire swept towards her eyes. She ducked under it, dropping to the floor again.
The wire tugged open a small, hinged panel built into one side of the box, no larger than her hand. It was near the top. The man leaned close, studying her with cold gray eyes.
“That was stupid,” he said. “And ungrateful. I’ve put all this together for you, Emily, and your only response is to run away?”
“Let me go.” Emily wanted to be demanding, but she could barely whisper. She was terrified of what the strange box full of gears and wheels might do to her.
“You should choose to work with me, Emily. Think of the knowledge I could impart, the mysteries and secrets I could reveal to you. Think of all you could learn.”
Emily’s lip trembled. She barely managed to say the word “no.”
The man’s face twisted into a hideous snarl. Apparently he only had two modes—bland and cold, or furious. He barely looked human as his lips peeled back from his teeth and his face reddened with anger.
Then he looked away quickly, as though he’d heard a loud noise elsewhere in the park.
“I have more important matters to consider than a fat little worm like you, Emily,” he said. “I’ll return in a moment...and then we shall discuss how long you’re willing to stay in that box before you finally give in to me. Do yourself a favor and avoid touching the mechanisms before you, or may you find yourself losing your hands, if not your head.”
He vanished in flash of raw fire, with a sound like a thunderclap. He left a cloud of acrid black smoke in his wake.
Emily peered at the wheels, gears, chains, and wires lining the inside of the box around her, trying to figure out how to escape before he came back.
* * *
After the wall came down and trapped him in the dining room, Wes turned on his flashlight. He pounded on the wall and yelled for Carter and Victoria, but if they answered him, he couldn’t hear it. The new wall was apparently thick enough to be soundproof.
He turned his attention to the door latches, since turning one of them had brought the wall down in the first place. Both doors were now locked tight, and the handles wouldn’t budge.
“Let me out!” Wes shouted, just in case anybody happened to hear him and felt like helping. The night was turning into a frightening disaster.
He’d intended to give the park a quick look just to see if anything strange was really happening. His brother had been missing for a week, and his brother’s friend Jared insisted they’d all disappeared in the park, and that was all the information Wes really had. Having a look for himself seemed the right thing to do, even if they had to break the law to get here—why care about the law when the police weren’t accomplishing anything, anyway? Twelve kids were still missing. Fourteen if he counted Sameer and Emily. Fifteen, if he counted himself.
Wes had already seen enough tonight to know there might be no true logical explanation at all. The rapid restoration of the park, and especially the ghostly kids fading in and out of view, their faces turning to horror masks if you looked at them too long...
He kicked at the walls, remembering how Jared had said that the new, inexplicably larger Dark Mansion was now riddled with hidden doors and passageways. He pushed at a small sidebar with a tarnished silver tea set, but it didn’t move or seem to hold any clues. He swept the tea kettle and its china cups onto the floor, shattering the cups but accomplishing nothing.
“Let me out!” he shouted again. “Is anybody there? What do you want from me?”
He studied one of the full suits of armor flanking the double doors, searching with his fingers for any hidden buttons or levers. When he explored the helmet, he felt it turn slightly to one side, much more easily than he would have expected. He pushed it further, until the helmet had turned sideways to look at the wall.
The floor rumbled, and then one narrow slice of the wall rolled backwards on a pair of tracks, leaving an opening through which Wes would just barely fit if he turned sideways and sucked in his stomach.
Wes stepped close and cautiously peered through the new gap in the wall. Behind it, a dark green corridor with dirty, warped floorboards ran in both directions, lit by widely spaced sconces casting small pools of light. He stepped inside and walked toward the direction in which he’d last seen Carter and Victoria.
“Hey, guys?” he asked. “Can y’all hear me?”
His voice echoed back to him, sounding lower and flatter, and he shuddered. Maybe he didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself.
He walked up the hall, searching for any door or panel through which he could rejoin the others. It turned sharply to the left, and then he emerged in a larger chamber with low lights and an acidic smell. It looked like the back room of a taxidermist’s shop, with skinned animals heaped on one table, crawling with flies—he thought he saw squirrels, some kind of hog, and a canine creature that might have been a coyote, but it was hard
to tell because the creatures were just raw meat and veins. The room reeked of decay.
On the next table, a jumble of skins waited to be stuffed, reptiles and birds as well as mammals. Glass eyeballs stared up at him from a large jar.
Wes remembered there had been something like this room in the original Dark Mansion, a creepy taxidermy exhibit, but it hadn’t been nearly so large.
He continued on, seeing strange, deformed creatures mounted behind glass, and then floating in jars of formaldehyde. The jars grew larger as he walked, until they were as tall as him and held bizarre, human-sized creatures with fins, gills, or tails. He hurried past them, worried one of the odd monstrosities would spring out of its jar.
He searched the room until he found the exit, a hidden panel at the back of a cabinet full of animal skulls. He had to remove the damp, sticky skulls and the shelves before he could walk through it.
Wes entered a gallery with brighter light than the previous rooms, crystal chandeliers glowing along a gallery of paintings and sculptures. The first painting depicted Captain James Dark, the fictional original builder of the house, posing at the prow of his black ship while slicing at the wind with a gleaming cutlass.
He stopped and stared at the next painting. His brother Finn, along with Jared and some of his other scummy friends, were on the amusement park’s midway stuffing themselves with food and beer. They ate and drank like greedy animals, their faces and clothes splattered with foam, grease, and ketchup.
“What the hell?” Wes whispered.
The next painting was done in an Old West style, like the cover of a dime novel, depicting Finn and his stupid friend Derek walking up the dusty streets of Fool’s Gold. For some reason, they were dressed like 19th-century gold prospectors. Derek even carried a pickaxe over his shoulder.
In the next, Finn approached a two-story wooden building that was clearly a brothel, with women in low-cut calico dresses on the front porch leaning forward to greet him.
“Typical Finn,” Wes murmured.
In the next, Finn’s shirt was stripped off, and he screamed with a look of helpless terror in his eyes as the women sunk their sharp teeth and long nails into him, drawing blood.
The final painting in the galley showed Finn hanging from the ceiling of the Beat the Devil booth, alongside the stuffed goats and lambs offered as prizes. In the foreground, Wes himself played the booth’s stripped-down version of chess against an unseen opponent. Clearly, he was somehow playing to win his brother back.
“Okay,” Wes said. “Just show me the way.”
The painting creaked and toppled forward from the wall. Wes jumped aside as the top of the painting’s thick, heavy frame struck the floor where he’d been standing.
Three steep wooden stairs were built into the back of the frame, leading up into a dark cavity behind the wall where the painting had hung.
Wes climbed inside and found himself stooped in a crawlspace between the walls. He was on a landing of a hidden staircase, which coiled up out of sight in one direction and down into darkness on the other.
Wes hurried downstairs.
He emerged through an EMPLOYEES ONLY door into the Haunted Souvenir Shop. The lights were on, and the store seemed fully stocked, offering everything from candy to Inferno Mountain t-shirts to ghostly salt and pepper shakers. The old novelty song “Monster Mash” played over the store’s speakers
The glass door to Haunted Alley stood open, and Wes walked out into a warm breeze tinged with sulfur.
The Beat the Devil game was alive, its red and yellow lights flashing. Its hellish painted backdrop of people falling into a cavernous lake of fire glowed under a black light. The hooks along the ceiling were stocked with plush goats and lambs, but there was no sign of Finn.
As Wes approached the booth, he noticed the Devil Dogs stand next to it, offering foot-long wieners heaped with jalapenos and onions next to a row of icy, bubbling sodas in clear plastic cups. They were his favorite flavors, grape and orange. Wes had always been a Fanta fanatic.
He realized his throat felt hot and dry, and he was thirsty from all the walking and screaming he’d already done. One quick sip would cool him off and clear his mind.
As he reached for a cup of orange soda, he remembered Emily’s warning about eating and drinking. He forced himself to stop.
“Help yourself,” a voice said. A man in a striped hat, like the carnival barker the others had described, now stood in the Beat the Devil booth, watching him across the chessboard. “Refreshments are free tonight. Special promotion.”
“I try to avoid amusement-park food,” Wes said, making himself turn away from the tempting drinks and approach the booth. “Where’s my brother?”
“He’s here,” the man said. “Most likely at the Fool’s Gold bordello. He does love that place, and he should. It sprang from his own desires.”
Wes turned to walk away, up Haunted Alley and over to the Old West town.
“However, should you find him there, he won’t be in the form you desire,” the man added. “If you wish him fully restored, body and soul, you must best me in a game.”
Wes stopped and looked back. “Are you really the devil?” he asked.
“An interesting word, isn’t it? The devil. More of a title than a name. One can even capitalize it. The Devil.”
“Like...Satan?” Wes turned to face him. “Lucifer?”
“So many names, where does one begin?” the man asked.
“What are you really?”
“I am whatever you require me to be. Just now, Wesley, you need me to be someone who will restore your brother to you, should you win a game of strategy and skill. So that is who I am.”
Wes felt cold and afraid as he made himself walk toward the game booth.
“If I win, you return Finn, alive and well and healthy, right?” Wes asked. “No tricks?”
“I adhere perfectly to the letter of all my agreements,” the man told him. “I’ve even been known to grant wishes, on occasion. If you win, your brother will be returned alive and well and healthy, as you say.”
“And what if I lose?” Wes asked.
“If you know who I am, then you know my usual price.”
My soul, Wes thought. He nodded. “Okay. I’m ready to play.”
“The bargain is accepted.” The man leaned over the chess board, the brim of his candy-striped hat casting a dark shadow over his dead eyes.
Wes looked down at the game board.
Beat the Devil looked like an oversized chessboard with a reduced number of squares. Each player began with three pieces: a king, a knight, and a rook. Each piece was mounted on a mechanical stem. The pieces had to be moved like gear sticks through grooves carved into the board. The number of possible moves was extremely limited by the few available groove paths for each piece.
The game operator had never appeared to control the board directly—the “devil’s” black pieces had always seemed to move on their own, as if the player faced an invisible opponent. As a kid, Wes had thought the game was remotely operated, or perhaps there was someone hidden beneath the game table moving the controls. Now he considered that, with so few possible moves available anyway, the game table might have been entirely automatic, running on some kind of simple clockwork-and-weights programming.
The pieces began in opposing corners of the board rather than on opposing sides. Wes, as the customer, had the white pieces—a spindly, shriveled-looking horse as his knight, a crumbling white castle tower with significant chunks of its wall and upper curtain missing, as though it had endured heavy mortar fire, and a sagging hunchbacked king.
He looked across at the black pieces. The black castle looked sturdier and taller than his, and the black horse snarled around bared fangs, the interior of its nostrils and mouth red as though it breathed fire. The king was tall, dressed in black armor and a helmet with a closed visor and large ram horns mounted on its sides, sword and shield raised.
A fourth character stood among them, dres
sed in black robes and a cowl that obscured its face.
“Is that a bishop?” Wes asked. “I don’t have a bishop.”
“We play the game as it lies,” the man said.
“That’s not fair!” Wes studied the gearshift paths carved into the board, panicking. He had to reshuffle in his brain all the possible moves available, given the limited number of squares and the even more limited number of paths between them. How would he defend against the extra piece? He’d been thrown off balance.
“The game board has not changed since you arrived, Wes. Perhaps you should have inspected it and voiced your protests before entering our agreement.”
“This is cheating,” Wes said. “There was never a bishop here before.”
“Do you want your brother restored?” the man asked. “White moves first.”
Wes glared at the man, then looked down at the game board again, wondering how he was going to survive and take his opponent’s king.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Theodore Hanover Junior drove his black Mercedes sedan down the Gulf Coast Highway, his headlights piercing the gloom ahead. He drank from a bottle of Bowmore single-malt Scotch, clutching it between his thighs when he needed both hands for the wheel. ZZ Top blasted over the stereo system: “Got Me Under Pressure.”
Teddy had visited the site of Hanover Construction and unlocked a shed at the back of the paved lot. The family’s construction company had once done brisk business around town, particularly in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when everybody in town wanted an oversized pirate or a giant walrus to advertise their business. Artie Schopfer and Teddy’s own father had done much of the work involved in turning the beach strip into the gaudy eyesore it was today.
Hanover Construction had built more mundane creations, too, like strip malls and fast-food restaurants, but even those had gone into a clear decline by the 1990’s. The breaking of more recent real estate bubbles had finally put the struggling little company out of its misery.
