World's Scariest Places: Volume Two

by Bates, Jeremy

  The tunnel. The white light. The thing in the light.

  I shuddered—and berated myself. I didn’t believe in out-of-body experiences. I mean, I think something weird happened to me in the ER. I had a top-down view of my body while on the operating table after all. But I didn’t think this was my spirit stepping outside my body, preparing to travel to the other side. It was more along the lines of neurons in my brain dying, doing whatever weird shit they do when they die. Maybe even some sort of astral projection.

  The day, I noticed, had become overcast, tinged with the scent of ozone. The clouds were unusually low and dark. I picked up the beer bottle before me but found it empty.

  “Welcome back,” Elizaveta said to me, cocking her head waggishly. Velcome beck. She still sat next to me, though everyone else had moved to the gondola’s stern, where it appeared Jesus and Pepper were discussing something of importance with the boatman.

  “Why’d we stop?” I asked, looking down the table for an unopened beer.

  “The boatman thinks there will be tropical storm,” she said. “He doesn’t want to leave us on island, because maybe he cannot come back, get us.”

  It was Mexico’s rainy season, which meant almost daily afternoon showers. They were brief but intense, capable of filling streets with rainwater in a matter of seconds. Tropical storms were a different matter altogether, reaping destruction and often lasting days.

  “Didn’t anyone check the forecast before we came?” I reached for the metal bucket and tilted it to see inside. Two sodas and one orange juice floated in water that had once been ice.

  “Did you, Jack? But do not worry. Probably he only wants more money. Jesus will fix everything.”

  “Perform one of his miracles?”

  “You know, Jack, he hates—he hates—when you compare him to that Jesus.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “There should only be that Jesus. Nobody calls themselves Buddha.”

  “He didn’t choose this name. So you should stop making jokes. Besides, Jack,” she added, “you should know what it’s like having unfortunate name.”

  Giving up on finding a beer, I pushed the bill of my cap a little higher and prodded the bandage on my forehead with my fingers. The headache had receded, but it was still there, hiding, ready to pounce if I moved too quickly. “How long was I out for?” I asked.

  “A long time,” she said. “And you snore.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I heard you.” She made exaggerated snoring noises.

  “I don’t snore,” I insisted.

  “How would you know if you were sleeping?”

  “I just know.”

  “Don’t be ashamed. Everybody snores.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  Just then Jesus dug his wallet out of his pocket and withdrew several bills from the sleeve. He handed these to the boatman, who took them with reluctance.

  “See,” Elizaveta said happily. “I told you Jesus would fix it.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  She gave me a severe look. I pretended not to notice and said, “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when we get there.”

  “When we get there?” Elizaveta seemed amused. “Look behind you, Jack. We are already here.”

  8

  I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. My brain didn’t register the dolls. There were too many; the sheer number overwhelmed me. But then I was seeing them, registering them, because there they were, everywhere, an entire midget army clinging to trees and dangling from branches. There must have been hundreds of them—and these were only the ones lining the bank. “Holy shit,” I said.

  “I know,” Elizaveta said.

  The gondola started moving, the boatman pushing us forward with that long pole of his through the overgrown wetland flora. Pita retook her seat and began talking with Elizaveta. I kept my attention fixed on the island.

  The dolls were every shape and size and color. They were clothed, naked, broken, weatherworn, grungy. And opposed to the beatific dolls that had lined every shelf in my sister’s bedroom up until she was eight or so, the decrepit state of these made them appear to be demonic. Like they’d been to hell and back and couldn’t wait to return.

  I was still trying to get my head around the uncanny spectacle when the gondola bumped against a short pier with a jolt. Then everyone was getting to their feet, gathering their stuff, preparing to disembark.

  1952

  1

  María woke to her mother shouting at her from the kitchen: “María, get up! You don’t want to be late for your first day of school.”

  María buried her face in her pillow.

  “María! Get up now!”

  Reluctantly she poked her head out of the covers. The blinds were open. It wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t light either.

  “María!”

  María forced herself out of bed. She took off her pajamas and dumped them in the laundry basket. Then she pulled on the clothes her mother had laid out for her: a beige dress, white underwear, and white socks. She scooped up Angela, who had been sleeping with her, and went down the hall to the bathroom. She peed, then brushed her teeth. She’d had a bath the night before in her mother’s bathwater, so she didn’t have to have another one this morning.

  “I don’t want to go to school,” María confided in Angela, speaking around the toothbrush in her mouth. She listened to Angela’s reply, then said, “I don’t want to leave my mom. And I don’t want to meet my teacher.” She listened again. “Of course you can come. You’re my best friend.” She spit, rinsed, then went to the kitchen.

  Her mother stood at the sink, washing dishes. She was starting a new job as a seamstress today, and she was wearing her uniform. She glanced over her shoulder. “Eat up, sweetheart. We have to leave soon.”

  María sat down at the table, but she only ate a few of the beans before her. She didn’t touch the sweet roll or piece of tamarind.

  Then, out of the blue, she began to cry.

  “Oh, baby,” her mother said, drying her hands on a dish towel and crouching before her. “What’s wrong? Are you worried about your first day of school?”

  She nodded.

  “Just remember, it’s everyone’s first day. Everyone feels just the same as you.”

  “What if nobody likes me?”

  “Don’t think that. You’ll meet plenty of friends.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Cross my heart. Now go put on your shoes.”

  María went to the door, took her book bag from the hook on the wall, and she slid her feet into her Mary Janes.

  Her mother frowned at her. “Angela has to stay home today, sweetheart.”

  María clutched the doll tighter. “I want her to come with me.”

  “You’re five years old now, María. You’re a big girl. And big girls don’t take their dolls to school.”

  “I want her to come!”

  “No one else will have a doll.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Some of your classmates might tease you.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “María, please…”

  “I want her to come! I want her to come! I want—”

  “Okay! Okay!” Her mother shook her head. “If you want to take her, take her. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  2

  The school was a huge two-story yellow-brick building with a playground on one side and a farm on the other side. The sight of it made María’s heart beat faster. She wanted to turn around and go home, but she knew her mother wouldn’t allow this, so she followed her through the iron gate, up a set of steps, and to the office where a gramophone was playing music.

  Her mother spoke to the woman there, signed some papers, then led María through a maze of hallways that smelled of floor wax and wood polish and chalk. Some of the classroom doors they passed were open. The students were seated at wooden desks, and they all seemed to be older and bigger t
han her.

  María hugged Angela more tightly.

  They climbed a set of stairs and stopped in front of a classroom. Her mother knocked on the door, even though it was open. “Good morning, Mrs. González,” she said. “I’m Patricia Diaz, María’s mother. I’m sorry we’re late. This is María.”

  The teacher consulted the clipboard in her hand and said, “That’s all right. Come in, María.”

  María stared up at her mother, begging her with her eyes not to leave her.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” she said, bending over and stroking the top of her head. “Go on and meet everyone. I’ll be back at two-thirty to pick you up at the front doors.” She turned and walked away.

  “María?” Mrs. González said. “Come inside now, please.”

  María shuffled hesitantly into the classroom, taking in the new sights: the paintings of animals on the walls, the large blackboard, the bookcase filled with books, the globe mounted on a metal meridian.

  Her classmates were all looking at her. They weren’t seated at desks like the bigger kids but at small tables in groups of four.

  “You can sit right here, María.” The teacher indicated an empty seat at a table near the front of the room.

  María went to it, wishing everyone would stop staring at her.

  Before she could sit down and become invisible, Mrs. González said, “Please remain standing, María. We’re introducing ourselves. Can you introduce yourself to the class, María?”

  She shook her head.

  “You can tell us your name, can’t you?”

  “María,” she said quietly.

  “I can’t hear her!” a student said.

  “Please speak more loudly,” the teacher said.

  “María,” she said.

  “I still can’t hear her.”

  “That okay, Raúl.” Then, to María: “What else can you tell us?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Surely you can tell us something?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about we ask you some questions then. All you have to do is answer them. Does anyone have a question for María?”

  A boy stuck up his hand. “Why are you so small?”

  Everyone laughed.

  Mrs. González cracked her meterstick against a desk. “Quiet, children. Everybody grows at their own pace. María may end up being taller than all of you in a few years.”

  A girl raised her hand. “Why do you have a doll?”

  “She’s my friend,” María said.

  “I still can’t hear her!”

  Another hand. “What does your dad do?”

  “He’s a construction worker.”

  “What does he build?”

  “He puts up street lights.”

  Another hand. It belonged to a funny looking boy with large teeth and eyeglasses. “Do you want to be my friend?”

  “Okay.”

  Someone shouted: “He loves you!”

  “Do not!”

  “He wants to marry you.”

  “Do not!”

  The class began making eewwing noises.

  Mrs. González cracked her meterstick again. “That’s quite enough, children. Quite enough. María, you can sit down now.”

  Thankfully, she sat.

  3

  After everyone introduced themselves, Mrs. González explained the rules of the classroom the students were to follow for the duration of the schoolyear, then she read a story from a picture book. At lunchtime María ate the lunch her mother had packed her and drank the milk that was delivered to the class in small bottles. Most of the kids spent the break playing games and making friends. María was too nervous to join them and remained quietly in her seat. When two girls asked her why she was sitting by herself, she told them because she wanted to. Then Mrs. González rang a brass bell with a wooden handle, and everyone returned to their chairs. She set a large piece of paper displaying the outline of a house on each table. She also distributed packs of crayons and explained what sharing meant. Finally she instructed each group to color their house. There were two rules. The first was to color inside the lines. The second was to only use up and down strokes.

  María chose a green crayon and began coloring the grass out front the house. The girl sitting beside her—María couldn’t remember her name—started yelling at her, saying she was doing it wrong. Mrs. González came over and asked what the problem was.

  “She’s doing it wrong,” the girl said, pointing at María’s green scribbles.

  “Did you understand my instructions, María?” Mrs. González asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Color the house.”

  “Yes, but what were the rules I mentioned?”

  She couldn’t remember.

  “You must color only inside the lines, and your strokes must be vertical. That means up and down.” She demonstrated with her finger. “Do you understand now?”

  María nodded and went back to coloring, now using up and down strokes. When a boy at her table finished with the brown crayon, she snatched it up and began coloring the front of the house.

  “Teacher!” the girl beside her said, sticking her hand in the air. “She’s doing it wrong again!”

  Mrs. González returned and said, “What did I tell you, María?” She sounded angrier this time.

  “Color the house.”

  “Yes, but what were the rules?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve explained this twice now”

  Tears warmed her eyes, then spilled down her cheeks.

  The girl beside her said, “She’s crying!”

  Another student: “She’s a baby!”

  “She’s stupid!”

  “She’s a stupid baby!”

  Bawling, María threw her crayon down and raced out of the room.

  Jack

  1

  Pita stepped onto the island first, followed by Jesus, then Nitro, then Pepper, then Elizaveta, and finally me. Almost immediately the boatman pushed away from the pier. He didn’t look back.

  “Why doesn’t he just wait around for us?” I asked.

  “Because he is afraid of island,” Elizaveta told me.

  “Of course,” I said sardonically. “The ghost.”

  “This is so weird,” Pita said in awe. “I mean, look at all the dolls. They’re everywhere.”

  I was looking. And they were everywhere, literally. They adorned not only the trees but fence posts, railings, clotheslines, even the collection of ramshackle huts—especially the huts. They were almost buried beneath the dolls.

  “They’re like…dead babies or something,” she added.

  “Hey, I like that one with no shirt,” Nitro said. “She got curves just the way I like them.” He made a slithering motion with his hands.

  I said, “Can’t get any living, breathing women, Muscles?”

  “Shut up, Jack Goff.”

  “Ugh,” Jesus said, pointing to a doll nailed to one of the pier’s timber piles. “Are those maggots?”

  We shuffled closer for a better view.

  “They’re ladybugs,” I said.

  “They’re not ladybugs, Jack,” Jesus grumbled.

  They weren’t, I realized. But they definitely weren’t maggots. They were black, beetle-like, with red diamonds on their backs. However, I could see why Jesus might have thought they were maggots from a distance. They were a squiggling mass that covered much of the doll’s torso and half its face. They were clumped together particularly thickly over the doll’s right eye. In fact, I think the eye might have been missing, and they were spilling out of the empty cavity in the head.

  Pepper produced from his bag an SLR camera with a big lens and told us to give him some room so he could take a picture.

  We started down the dirt path. After a brief congress in Spanish, Jesus, Nitro, Pita, and Elizaveta turned right over a crude bridge. I continued straight ahead, glad to be on my o
wn.

  Birds chirped and squawked all around me from hidden roosts, while cicadas put up a wall of cryptic noise. The heat had left the afternoon, and now I found myself almost cold. The forest was still and dark. I walked slowly, swatting absently at flies and turning my head this way and that, as if it were on a swivel. Dolls decorated nearly every tree. Most appeared to be secured to the trunks with nails or wire, though some were tied to branches by their hair.

  I shivered. I couldn’t help it. Dolls in general were inherently creepy. Their inexpressive eyes and knowing smiles, their lifeless limbs and outstretched hands that seemed to be beckoning to you. Yet these rejects took the cake. Even in the gloomy light of day they were menacing. The sun had bubbled and scabbed their “skin,” while the rain had eroded much of their paint, leaving behind waxy skull-like faces the color of bone meal. Pita’s description had been quite apt: they really did look like dead babies—horribly mutilated dead babies with black-rimmed eyes and tufts of wasting hair. And aside from their state of dissolution, many were decapitated or missing arms and legs, while others were nothing more than butchered torsos, or disembodied heads impaled on broken boughs.

  As I progressed through their ranks, I found it rather unnerving to have so many sets of soulless eyes trained on me. They might be nothing more than glass orbs, unseeing, lacking consciousness or menace, yet I couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched, of the dolls twisting their heads and limbs unnaturally to follow me after I’d passed them by.

  I stopped beside a sagging timber hut with a corrugated iron roof. The majority of the dolls attached to the warped wood were the porcelain-faced variety—these had dominated the island thus far—but among them I was surprised to see a Cabbage Patch Kid, a troll doll, and several nude Barbie dolls.

  Footsteps sounded behind me. I turned just in time for Pepper to snap a picture of me.

  “That better not be for your documentary,” I said.

  “It’s only a photograph, Jack. It’s for my private collection.”