Nevertheless, what made this week really great was the fact Roy’s sister, Peggy, had come along as well. She was a year older than Danny and Roy, and Danny thought she was the prettiest girl in school. Originally she was supposed to attend summer camp for ballerinas, but then her friend backed out, so she did too.
Because Roy didn’t want to sit beside her during the car trip, Danny got to, and he was fine with that arrangement. In fact, he had been thrilled every time his knee touched Peggy’s, or his shoulder brushed hers.
Ten minutes ago they had pulled into a picnic spot in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Roy’s mother had packed a cooler full of egg-salad sandwiches. Roy had wolfed his down, along with a cold can of Pepsi, then told his parents he and Danny were going to go ahead to check out Brandywine Falls. Danny had wanted to stay behind, so he would be close to Peggy, but he couldn’t say this, of course, and he obediently jogged after Roy, still finishing off his sandwich as he went.
Halfway to the falls, however, Roy left the trail and began making his way through the forest.
Danny hesitated. “Where are you going?”
“Come on!”
Danny followed.
When Roy found a glade suitable to his liking, he plopped down on his butt and took a sad, bent cigarette from the pocket of his shorts, along with a book of matches.
Danny’s eyes widened. “Where’d you get that?”
“My dad. Don’t worry. He doesn’t know.”
Roy stuck the cigarette expertly between his lips.
“You smoked before?” Danny said, impressed.
“A few times,” Roy said proudly.
He lit the cigarette with a matchstick and sucked hard. His face turned gray, then he bent forward and began coughing up a lung.
Danny bust a gut laughing. Roy must have kept coughing for a full thirty seconds. He was holding the cigarette toward Danny, telling him to try it.
“No way,” Danny said.
“Don’t be a chicken!”
“Look what happened to you.”
“Chicken!”
“I don’t want it.”
“You’re such a wimp.”
“You’re a wimp.”
“At least I tried it.”
“Try it again.”
Roy contemplated the cigarette, then tossed it away.
“Seriously, Danny,” he said, “you’re such a wimp.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Oh jeez.” Roy rolled his eyes, then jumped to his feet. “I gotta take a dump.”
“Right here?”
“No, not right here, you perv. What, you wanna watch?”
“Then where?”
“In the trees.”
“I think there were toilets back at the picnic area.”
“Those things are disgusting. You can get diseases from the seats.”
“You don’t even have toilet paper.”
“You can lick my ass.”
“You’re so gross.”
“I’ll be back.”
Danny watched Roy forge a path through the trees until he was out of sight. Then Danny lay down to get comfortable, folding his hands behind his head and staring up at the sky. Much of it was blocked by the canopy of branches overhead, but he could see bits and pieces, all bright blue, not a cloud anywhere.
He closed his eyes and wondered where he would be sleeping tonight. Would he have his own bedroom? Or would he share a room with Roy? That would be fun. They could stay up late, talking or reading comic books, like they did when they had sleepovers. Roy’s parents were pretty cool with curfews and stuff like that. They let Roy do a lot of things Danny’s own parents would never let him do. And besides, it was summer break. It wasn’t like they had school the next day.
And what about Peggy? he wondered. She was a girl, so she would have her own room, obviously. Danny wondered if he should try to kiss her at some point. He was a year younger after all. He was only going into grade six. She probably still thought of him as a little kid. Then again, she’d laughed at some of his jokes in the car. Didn’t that mean she liked him? Maybe if he could keep making her laugh, she would kiss him. Maybe they would even get married one day. That would be pretty neat. Then Roy would be his brother, or half-brother…
As Danny unwittingly drifted into a light sleep, his thoughts turned to what Roy’s dad had told them about Helltown during the car ride. The place was right around here somewhere. Supposedly there had been a bunch of devil worshippers a few years back who lived in the woods and kidnapped people. But then some army guy, Special Forces or something like that, tracked them all down and burned them alive in some church. Roy’s dad stopped there because Roy’s mom told him he was going to give “the kids” nightmares. Roy and Danny protested, they wanted to hear more, but Roy’s dad changed the topic. Sometimes it seemed to Danny that Roy’s mom ruled Roy’s family. It was true she was stricter than Roy’s dad (which was still pretty lenient by Danny’s parents’ standards), and she could be scary sometimes when she got angry, but for the most part Danny liked her. He just better make sure he stayed out of her bad books for the next week…
The twenty-six-foot-long green anaconda slithered silently through the deadfall toward the sleeping boy, forked tongue flicking in and out of its lipless grimace, collecting the sleeping boy’s scent particles from the air and the ground. It had devoured a similar creature years before, on the night it had escaped the House in the Woods, and like all the raccoons and deer and foxes and rodents it had subsisted on since, it knew the creature to be easy prey.
When the snake came to within striking distance, it opened its mouth one hundred eighty degrees and sunk its rear-facing teeth into the boy’s shoulder. The boy awoke, jerking then thrashing, trying to flee, but the snake was already coiling its body around its prey, constricting and wrapping, around and around and around, until the boy went still.
Then it ate.
BOOK TWO:
ISLAND OF THE DOLLS
ISLAND OF THE DOLLS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The novels in the World’s Scariest Places series are set in real locations. The following is a Wikipedia “Island of the Dolls” excerpt:
A two-hour canal ride from Mexico City lies Isla de las Munecas, or the Island of the Dolls. It is the best-known chinampa, or floating garden, in Xochimilco. It belonged to a man named Julián Santana Barrera, a native of the La Asunción neighborhood. Santana Barrera was a loner, who was rarely seen in most of Xochimilco. According to the legend, Barrera discovered a little girl drowned in mysterious circumstances in the canals. He also found a doll floating nearby and, assuming it belonged to the deceased girl, hung it from a tree as a sign of respect. After this, he began to hear whispers, footsteps, and anguished wails in the darkness even though his hut—hidden deep inside the woods of Xochimilco—was miles away from civilization. Driven by fear, he spent the next fifty years hanging more and more dolls, some missing body parts, all over the island in an attempt to appease what he believed to be the drowned girl’s spirit.
After Barrera’s death in 2001—his body reportedly found in the exact spot where he found the girl’s body fifty years before—the area became a popular tourist attraction where visitors bring more dolls. The locals describe it as “charmed”—not haunted—even though travelers claim the dolls whisper to them. Professional photographer Cindy Vasko visited the nightmarish island and described it as the “creepiest place she has ever visited.” The excursion began through maze-like canals, surrounded by lush greenery and beautiful singing birds, but soon her boat was slowed down by a swarm of lily pads and the canal fell ominously silent. She told MailOnline: “At the end of the journey, the trajinera turned along a bend in the waterway and I was struck by a surreal vision of hundreds, maybe thousands, of dolls hanging from trees on the tiny island.” The dolls are still on the island, accessible by boat.
2001
The bullfrog sat on a big green lily pad in the middle of the rotten-s
melling pond. Its throat expanded like a balloon as it made a rusty croaking sound.
Eight-year-old Rosa Sánchez took another careful step toward it, then another, doing her best not to disturb the scummy water. She had taken off her sandals, and the mud on the bottom of the pond squished between her toes, feeling both good and gross at the same time.
The frog shifted its fat body on the lily pad so it seemed to stare right at her, bulging eyes glistening.
Rosa froze, one foot in the air, stork-like.
The bullfrog croaked.
“Look away, frog,” Rosa mumbled in Spanish. “Look away.”
It didn’t, and Rosa, thinking she might topple over, get her clothes wet and stinky, set her lead foot down. Something sharp—a rock or a pokey bit of branch—jabbed the underside of her heel. She ignored the pain, keeping her eyes on the bullfrog.
It continued to stare back at her, its eyes unblinking. The air left the sack in its throat, and the bullfrog shrunk nearly in half. Still, it was a big sucker. And it was so close…
Rosa took another step and thought she might be able to grab it now if she was quick enough. She stuck her hands out before her and tilted forward slowly.
The bullfrog sprang. Rosa’s hands clutched its slimy flanks. But she was too slow. It plopped into the water and disappeared from sight.
Rosa’s momentum, however, kept her moving forward. One uncoordinated step, two, then she dunked facefirst into the water. She closed her eyes but forgot to close her mouth and got a big gulp of what tasted like sewage. Her hands sank into the muddy bottom of the pond, then her knees, yet she managed to arc her back and keep her head from going completely under.
She made a noise like she was crying, though she wasn’t crying, she was eight years old, a big girl, and big girls didn’t cry when they fell in water. Still, she wanted to. She was soaked, a foul taste was in her mouth, and she couldn’t get back to her feet. The mud sucking at her hands and knees was too slippery—
Now her head did go under. Water gushed into her ears, her nose, but at least she’d kept her mouth closed this time. When she burst back through the surface, she crawled, moaning, toward the bank, grabbing at tall grasses, roots, anything she could reach, until she was up on dry ground.
Rosa flopped onto her stomach, her eyes burning with tears. Then she sat up. Her clothes clung uncomfortably to her thin frame. And she stank like a toilet. Worse than a toilet. It reminded her of the smell when her big brother Miguel found the dead rat in the wall of their house, and told Rosa to take it out to the street.
Miguel. He was going to murder her. He was already mad at her for walking too slow when they got to the island and went looking for a spot to make camp. Then he got even madder because he wanted to kiss his girlfriend, but he couldn’t do that with Rosa around. That’s why he told Rosa to go do something. Rosa didn’t want to at first. The island scared her with all of the dolls hanging from the trees or sitting on the ground, just staring at her with their painted faces and glass eyes. However, you didn’t say “no” to Miguel, not unless you wanted to get a slap across your head, and so Rosa went, not planning to go far…and then she saw the pond. At first she wanted to muck around in the water a bit. She didn’t know there would be bullfrogs. But there sure were; they were everywhere. She spotted three right away. Yet she wasn’t careful then, and they all hopped off their lily pads and vanished beneath the water before she got close enough to catch one. It took her another fifteen minutes before she found the big fatty.
And now it was gone too, and she was dripping wet, and Miguel was going to call her names and slap her across the head—
A scream shattered the quiet.
Rosa jerked her head about.
That had been her brother’s girlfriend, Lucinda.
Did Miguel jump out from somewhere and scare her, as he always liked to do to Rosa? Or did one of the dolls hanging from the trees come to life and attack her? That’s what Miguel kept telling Rosa: the dolls were alive but they were just sleeping, and when you weren’t looking they would—
Another scream.
Not Lucinda. Deeper, male.
Miguel?
Rosa didn’t know, because she’d never heard her brother scream before, or at least not for years. Miguel wasn’t afraid of anything.
Rosa got to her feet, her soaked clothes forgotten.
Her eyes scanned the trees ahead of her, searching for movement, for Miguel to be sneaking from bush to bush—and that’s what this all was, wasn’t it? A joke, not on Lucinda, but on Rosa. Miguel got Lucinda to scream, then Miguel screamed too. As soon as Rosa went to investigate, they would jump out and scare her.
Rosa waited. The forest was silent. No wind. No crickets. Nothing.
“Miguel?” she said.
No reply.
Rosa picked up her sandals and began to walk back the way she came, toward the source of the screams. She knew Miguel was going to ambush her, but that was okay, because it would only be scary for a second, then everyone would be laughing. And that was better than how Rosa felt right now. Like she was sick, like she wanted to throw up.
Rosa left the glade with the pond. Trees closed tightly around her. She had to duck branches and watch where she stepped. The late afternoon seemed suddenly dark. She didn’t remember it being this dark earlier. Was that because the branches were blocking out the sun and sky? Or had a cloud passed before the sun?
“Miguel?” she said, though not very loud this time.
Because what if something else heard her?
Like what?
The dolls?
They couldn’t do anything to her. They were only dolls. Even if they came to life, she was a lot bigger than them.
But they got Miguel and Lucinda.
No they didn’t! Rosa told herself severely. Miguel was joking around. He was going to jump out any second now.
He didn’t jump out.
The forest remained silent and dark.
Maybe she should return to the pond and wait there for Miguel to grow bored of his game and come and get her? Then again, what if Miguel or Lucinda really were hurt? What if they needed her help?
Rosa continued forward, pushing through the thick foliage. She began to move quickly, heedless of the scratching branches and the sharp rocks and other deadfall beneath her bare feet. Then she was running. All she could hear was a thumping in her head and her loud breathing. Every tree looked the same, and she wondered if she was heading in the right direction. But she didn’t stop. If she turned back, she would probably only get more lost. Besides, she was pretty sure the camp was right ahead. It couldn’t be much farther.
She ducked around a tree—and ran into several dolls hanging from a low branch. She cried out and fell on her butt. Looking up, she recognized them from earlier: grimy, peeling, sinister.
That meant the camp was not very far away.
“Miguel!” she shouted. She could no longer suppress her fright.
“Rosa!” His voice came back, strangled, weak, filled with terror. “Go! Run!”
Rosa got to her feet. A sob caught in her throat, tight, painful.
“Miguel!”
“Run—” He was cut off abruptly.
Rosa hesitated a moment longer, then she turned and ran.
Jack
1
I woke up covered in my own blood. It had congealed between the right side of my head and the pillow, and I had to peel the damn pillow away, as if it were a crusty bandage. I held the pillow in front of me, staring in disgust at the brown splatter on the white slip. All the while I was trying to remember what had happened the night before.
I’d been having dinner with my fiancée, and her brother and his girlfriend. What a ball that had been. Listening to Jesus talk about himself all evening. That was Pita’s brother’s name, Jesus. Ironic how the one guy I’d ever met named after a god had an ego of a god to match. His girlfriend, Elizaveta, was far too good for him. Smart, down-to-earth, attractive. I didn’t know ho
w he landed her. Actually I did: money. Pita’s and Jesus’s father, Marco, turned a mom-and-pop restaurant and pub into a multi-million-dollar brewery, and after Marco died of a brain aneurysm the year before, twenty-nine-year-old Jesus stepped up to the top position.
Setting the stained pillow aside, I touched the cut on my head, igniting a sharp pain that until then had been dormant. The cut ran from the outside of my eyebrow straight to my hairline. Dried blood crumbed beneath my fingertips and fell to the bed like red dandruff.
Recalling what happened, I cringed in embarrassment.
We’d been sitting on the back deck, the four of us. Dinner was finished. Jesus had been smoking one of his expensive cigars and going on about a skiing trip to Chile he and Elizaveta had gone on the previous winter. I was only half listening until he launched into some ridiculous story that had him backcountry skiing outside the ski resort’s boundaries, which he reached by helicopter. I chuckled loudly. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. Pita once told me she and Jesus had gone on skiing trips every year when they were younger. So I assumed he was a decent enough skier. It was the bragging. Making sure to mention the chartered helicopter, the difficulty of the off-piste terrain, his entourage, which included a famous Mexican singer.
I wasn’t nitpicking or being overly critical of Jesus. Everything the guy said and did was orchestrated to make him look good, to make people want to admire him, to see him as the apotheosis of success. Yet at the same time it was all layered in humility, like he was just one of the guys. His efforts were so transparent he became a caricature, a joke. You couldn’t help not laughing at him sometimes.
World's Scariest Places: Volume Two Page 25
