by JL Bryan
“They’ve wanted to ride it for years,” the man in the striped hat said, glaring at him through the fence. “I don’t think it would be fair to deny them.”
“I just want to watch him die,” whispered Kylie, the ghost-girl in pink barrettes, as she slithered into the seat directly behind Carter. “I hope he gets his head cut off.”
Carter kept his head turned halfway around, watching the ten new arrivals from the side of his eye as they took their seats. They didn’t bother with seatbelts, and the safety bars didn’t drop for them, either. They would be free to crawl up and attack him at any moment during the ride.
Victoria cast him a worried look as the train lurched and began to trundle forward on the track, toward the steep hill into the devil’s waiting mouth.
As the train rolled past the fence, the man in the striped hat spoke a final time.
“I’ll give you one last chance, Carter,” he said. “If the ride grows too dangerous, simply press the red button in front of you. The train will stop, the lights will come up, and you’ll be free to walk away.”
Carter glanced at the dashboard area in front of him. He was almost certain that nothing had been there before, but there was now a large red button with the word STOP.
The train curved away from the fence and began to clack its way up the steep incline.
Tricia gripped his hand in hers. Her fingers were cold as ice and stiff as steel.
“Can you say anything, Tricia?” Carter whispered. He didn’t get a response, inside his mind or otherwise.
As the train climbed the hill, he could see the park spreading out below him, but there wasn’t much to see. It had reverted to old ruins, all the lights out except for the glowing red devil face above him.
The crumbling old tracks creaked under the weight of the train. A strong wind kicked up, and the tracks began to sway and crack, as though the entire support structure beneath the train would break apart at any moment.
The eight-story climb was painfully slow. His guts knotted up inside him. He clasped Tricia’s hand tighter, but her cold, dead skin was no comfort. His heart beat so fast he thought it would erupt from his chest.
I’m going to die, Carter thought, while the tracks swayed beneath him. I’m going to die in there. Why did I do this?
The train reached the peak of the hill, then dipped forward as it entered the devil’s open, laughing jaws.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Victoria felt her knees shaking as she watched the black train carry Carter and the trainload of dead children up the steep, swaying hill into Inferno Mountain. Her knees tended to bob uncontrollably when she was nervous, and she hated it.
As Carter climbed up and away, the lights of the amusement park snuffed out like ten thousand candles. The game booths of Haunted Alley fell dark, as did the eerie blue lights of Dark Mansion. She risked stepping close to the pitchfork fence and looking out, but she saw no neon, not even from the high rides of Space City. The only light was the radiant red of the devil’s face against the sky.
She watched the train disappear into the flashing red lights of the devil’s mouth. High-pitched screams, angry growling, and rusty, thudding machinery sounded from inside the mountain. It was impossible to tell what was real and what was just an old recording.
A bright pair of lights appeared at the weed-choked base of Inferno Mountain, at the far side of the pitchfork fence. She watched as someone got out, unlocked a gate, and returned to the car.
A black Mercedes pulled in through the open gate, stopping at one side of the tracks. The driver left his headlights on as he climbed out of the car, swaying on his feet, and set a liquor bottle on his hood. He lit a cigar and looked up at the glowing devil face.
Victoria recognized him now—Theodore Hanover Junior, the owner of the park, the same man who had met with them and then failed to put them in touch with Artie Schopfer. She would recognize that curly toupee anywhere.
She had no idea why he would be here, and she was reluctant to make her presence known. She and Carter were both trespassing on his land, and she preferred to avoid the cops getting involved, so she decided to watch and wait.
Theodore heaved an old wooden crate from his back seat and dropped it to the ground next to his car. He leaned over and took something out of it. Victoria couldn’t see it very well, but it had a round cylindrical shape.
A gun, she thought. He brought a gun. Then another thought, based on nothing but the manic, lost look on Hanover’s face: He came here to kill himself.
“You’re going down tonight!” he shouted up at the devil’s face. “You’re going right back to Hell.”
He raised his bottle as though toasting, then drank.
When he put his bottle aside, he took the cigar from his mouth and touched the glowing red tip to the cylindrical object in his hand. When he held it up, Victoria saw the burning fuse at the end and felt panic welling up within her. It was either fireworks or some kind of serious explosive, and somehow she didn’t think he’d driven out here in the night just to set off a few bottle rockets.
“Wait!” she screamed. “Hey, wait! My friend’s in there!”
Either Theodore didn’t hear her, which she doubted, or he was too caught up in his own madness to care. He held up the explosive—it looked very much like a stick of dynamite, she thought, though she’d never seen dynamite outside of cartoons.
“Stop!” Victoria screamed, but he was aiming it at the devil’s face, lining it up and pulsing it forward a few times in preparation for actually throwing it.
Victoria banged on the fence, but didn’t get his attention. She ran away from the tracks, zigzagged back through the waiting area, and hesitated at the gate.
The pitchfork fence seemed to provide some protection against the man in the striped hat and his minions. Maybe Carter was right, and his dead friend Tricia was somehow resisting the devil—if the man really was the devil—and so the devil had less power around Inferno Mountain.
If so, then stepping through the gate could be unwise, and even get her killed. The skeleton key was in Carter’s pocket. The gate might lock behind her, trapping her out of the only area in the park that seemed a little bit safe.
On the other hand, Carter’s life might be in serious danger if she did nothing to stop Hanover.
Victoria cringed as she pushed open the gate, but no dead children showed up to attack her. She jogged as fast as she could over the broken, uneven asphalt, out of Haunted Alley, around the ruins of Dark Mansion, and up a narrow paved path between Dark Mansion and the Martian Arcade. Hanover’s car must have barely fit through.
“Stop!” Victoria shouted, her heart racing as she ran to the open gate in the pitchfork fence. “You have to stop!”
She was too late—Hanover had thrown the dynamite. She watched the tiny glowing fuse tumble through the air as the stick of dynamite spun toward the devil’s face, eight stories above.
The stick didn’t even make it halfway up before it stopped, then began falling downward again. It banged into the outer wall of Inferno Mountain and clattered its way down through the concrete boulders, right back toward the spot where Hanover stood.
“Oh, shit!” Hanover yelled, ducking behind his car.
The dynamite exploded near the base of the mountain. Its boom was deafening, like a shotgun blast. Smoke plumed out in every direction, followed by a wave of shattered concrete chips that flew out from the mountain.
Victoria dropped and covered her head before the concrete splinters rained down on her. They bit into her arms, scalp, and back, and she winced in pain.
Chunks of concrete struck Hanover’s car, denting his hood, cracking up his windshield, and smashing one headlight.
“Goddamn it!” Hanover stood up among the billowing dust and walked to the front of his car. He picked up the broken neck of his whiskey bottle, which he’d left on the hood, and tossed it away. “God damn it, my Scotch!”
Then he reached into the crate for another stick of dy
namite.
“Wait!” Victoria shouted.
He finally seemed to notice she was there.
“Did you see that?” He gave her a drunken grin as tried to line up the cigar in one hand and the dynamite in the other. The dynamite stick looked old and corroded, with strange little lumps all over the outside. “I just gotta hold it longer after I light it...let the fuse burn just a teensy-eensy little bit longer...”
“Don’t!” She grabbed his wrist to keep the cigar away from the fuse. “My friend’s inside the mountain. You could hurt him.”
“Shouldn’t be anybody in there,” Hanover grumbled. “Park’s closed.”
“But he is in there. Can’t you hear the roller coaster rumbling around?”
“Lemme go.” Hanover jerked his arm away from her, which sent him tumbling off-balance. He landed hard on his hip, dropping both the cigar and the dynamite. The objects rolled in opposite directions—the cigar under the running car, the dynamite toward Victoria’s foot.
Victoria snatched up the stick of dynamite. Its surface was rough with nitroglycerine crystals. She saw four more sticks in the old wooden crate, so she grabbed up the crate in her other hand and ran past the car. She now had all the dynamite, unless there was more in Hanover’s car.
“Hey! Hey, you stupid bitch, come back here!” Hanover shouted. “Drop that box!”
She didn’t look back, but ran as fast as she dared toward the open gate in the pitchfork fence. The old sticks of dynamite rolled and clicked against each other inside the crate. She was terrified the corroded sticks would detonate and blow her to pieces. Then she could worry about the drunken fat man.
An explosion sounded behind her, and she dropped to her knees and looked back. Hanover held up a revolver in his swaying hand. He had fired one warning shot into the air, and now he scowled at her.
Victoria made up her mind in about half a second. Staying close to the drunk and dangerous man would almost surely get her shot or blown apart by dynamite, so she regained her feet and ran out through the fence. He fired the gun again, but no bullet struck her, so she kept moving.
She ran up the narrow service drive between Dark Mansion and the Mad Martian Arcade, both of them small, dark, and overgrown with weeds—whatever magic or illusion had made the park look new and full of life was now vanished. She emerged into the dim ruins of the park’s central plaza. Hanover shouted somewhere behind her, his feet thudding on the broken asphalt as he pursued her.
Victoria immediately saw which way to go. If she crossed through the wreckage of Wishing Well Plaza, she could toss the dynamite over the old sawhorses and into the enormous sinkhole. She couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of the explosives before Hanover could take them back from her. He was clearly out of his mind and seemed determined to blow up Inferno Mountain, even after she’d told him Carter was inside the ride.
She crossed the plaza, trying to will her hands not to shake while the corroded dynamite bounced and rolled inside the crate. Another gunshot boomed behind her, and the hot sting of a bullet tore into her back.
* * *
Carter passed through the devil’s jaws and into darkness as the tracks curved away inside the peak of the mountain. Smoldering blasts of hot compressed air hit him from both sides, blowing his hair into a tangle and billowing his shirt. Despite the heat, Tricia’s dead hand still felt like solid ice. Her fingertips stabbed into his palm.
Terrified screams sounded in the darkness ahead—probably recorded, he reminded himself.
The roller coaster twisted sideways and plunged downward. Red lights strobed all around him, creating flicker-flash images of a tunnel of writhing bodies surrounding the tracks, all of them squirming and screaming together, arms and legs and torsos wriggling in a frenzy of howling torment.
These weren’t mannequins or animated displays. Carter could smell their flesh and their sweat in the thick, steamy air. The air reeked of fear. They shrieked and cried as the train raced past them.
Another flash of red strobe lights revealed a snarling three-headed dog that appeared to stand right in the middle of the tracks ahead, blocking the way. Its heads bobbed mechanically up and down, its jaws snarled and drooled as though rabid, its six eyes glowed blank and white.
Carter took a sharp breath at the sight of the oversized, slavering beast ahead. Then the train dipped steeply, ducking underneath the three-headed dog and racing down a long, steep hill into darkness punctuated by strobe-flashes of pale blue light. A cold, foul rain sprinkled over him.
As he swooped downhill through filthy, dripping water, he passed obese human beings who must have weighed several hundred pounds each, their bodies half-buried in the filthy muck walls alongside the steep track. Rivulets of dark water flowed over and between the folds of their pale, slug-shaped bodies. Their eyes were stitched closed, their mouths wide open and chomping at empty air like drowning fishes or starving baby birds. Their massive, meaty arms groped toward the plummeting roller coaster as though searching for a snack.
Behind Carter, the dead children screamed in delight. He looked at Tricia, but she wasn’t moving at all. It was hard to tell whether her hand was gripping his tightly or had simply reverted to the rigidity of death.
Hell, he thought. This really could be Hell.
The train began to climb uphill again, clanking slowly upward through a dark, cavernous space.
A steep rocky incline followed alongside the track, crowded with people trying to push their way past each other up the slimey slope. Each one dragged heavy weights and rocks chained to their arms, legs, and necks. They fought for every inch, trying desperately to climb over each other. They reminded him of the ghost of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, weighed down with chains and locks for all eternity.
As the train chugged toward the crest of the next hill, Carter looked over at the lead group of struggling, climbing souls, the ones who’d ascended the highest by climbing over the whole mob below.
Abruptly, their chains, weights, and boulders tangled around each other, and the whole group went sliding, tumbling, and screaming back down the steep slope, dragging everyone else down with them, presumably forcing everyone to start all over again at the bottom of the steep hill.
Then Carter saw the goal toward which all the struggling souls had been climbing and clawing: a treasure chamber heaped with gold, sparkling at the very top of the slope. Open chests overflowed with glittering gold coins and polished gems—unlike the pirate treasure they’d passed on the way out of Dark Mansion, these jewels and coins looked real. Golden animal statues bowed toward an unoccupied, gem-encrusted golden throne, waiting for an aspiring soul to claim it.
He glanced back to see little Kylie and her undead friends staring at him with sharp little smiles, probably just waiting for a fun moment to kill him.
The coaster train turned sideways as it twisted through a pitch-dark passage, then emerged into a wider, fire-lit space occupied by a shaggy, goat-horned demon that must have been a hundred feet tall, though he could actually only see its head and one arm.
The train shot directly toward the beast. Its furry, clawed hand, as large as a wrecking ball, lunged at the approaching coaster train.
The tracks dropped away into a steep hill, and the train ducked underneath the demon’s lunging claw. At that moment, a sudden loud blast rocked the building. The wall beside him exploded in a cloud of dust, pelting him with sharp chunks of concrete.
Carter ducked low, pulling Tricia’s cold body with him.
The enormous demon head and arm toppled forward with a sound of wrenching metal. The claw bashed across the top of their car, scraping across his shoulders, then fell alongside the track, trailing sparks, patches of its fur on fire. If Carter hadn’t ducked, the falling machinery could have taken off his head.
The train plunged down the steep hill toward a sunken valley, which held a vast stone city far below, sprawling for miles and coiling inward on itself in a lopsided spiral. Fire poured from the iron-gra
te windows and doors of squat, asymmetrical rock towers.
The roller coaster was clearly no longer contained inside the Inferno Mountain facade. The burning city below him was larger than the entire amusement park, larger than the town of Conch City, even larger than the cities of Tallahassee or Mobile.
As the track neared the burning stone city, he felt the intense heat and smelled sulfur, burning hair, roasting meat. Screams echoed through the narrow spiral coil of the streets. He saw blackened, skeletal hands banging against the underside of the sewer grates as if desperate to escape. Smoke and flame rose from the sewer grates—there was no sign of water anywhere.
The train curved around the city rather than plummeting directly into it. Decayed bodies hung along the city’s outer wall like grisly ornaments, many of them missing limbs, most of them with gaping holes carved into their torsos. Colonies of flies and worms crawled inside their open cavities.
One man with his jaw missing and a thick mat of maggots covering him from face to his empty, gutted abdomen raised an arm and moaned as Carter rode past. The bodies hanging on the outer wall weren’t exactly dead, Carter realized. Suffering souls were still trapped inside them.
As the rotten-but-not-dead man reached toward them from the wall, both of Tricia’s hands clenched tight on Carter’s arm. She screamed.
Tricia was alive.
At least, she looked more alive than before. Her head was restored to her body, her pale blond hair blowing out behind her, her lips pink with strawberry smacker. All the blood had vanished from her dress.
“Tricia!” Carter said, but the wind swallowed his words as the train shot through the city, spiraling downward toward the dark city center.
They raced past small stone temples, houses, and short towers—all made of unpolished, ill-fitting rocks, through which long tongues of red and orange flame leaked out. Red-hot wrought-iron grates sealed every window and doorway. Screaming, charred faces and hands banged against the grates, desperate to escape the fire-filled stone buildings.
