You can find ghosts anywhere, even amusement parks. (Yes, there really is an Oaks Amusement Park near Portland, Oregon.) Of course, ghosts are often much closer than you might want to think . . .
OAKS PARK
M.K. HOBSON
You are thirty-nine years old and you are a woman and a mother, and you’ve just avoided saying something to your husband that would cause a fight. Summer is almost over, though the days are still long and the evening still warm and heavy with the sound of insects, and this makes you feel desperate, but you don’t know why. You have a daughter who you already don’t understand even though she is only twelve. Even your own life is puzzling to you, you move in a fog of mild discontent, whatever ability you ever had to make a decision or form an opinion lost to the endless consensus of family, the compromises of marriage, every day covering you like a sheet with holes cut out.
Your daughter has friends all over the neighborhood, tanned scuffed elastic creatures, each as wild and improbable as she. They are like another species. They come from nowhere, they come up from behind you and you never hear them coming. They all look alike. They lounge on couches inside dark cool houses hiding from daylight’s glare, watching Nick for Teens and sipping Capri Suns, crushing packages of ramen and eating the crumbled noodles raw. They leave a trail of wrappers and crumbs. One day your daughter is prompted by her best girlfriend, a girl who looks exactly like your daughter, to ask “Can you take us to Oaks Park?” and you say “If you clean your room,” knowing that she will never clean her room so you will never have to take her to Oaks Park.
Later, you hear your daughter talking to two more of her friends, a boy and a girl who look exactly like her, scraped knees and dark tanned skin and cornsilk hair and T-shirts that assert their unswerving allegiance to an anime show. They are all sitting in the shade of the porch, eating popsicles, dripping bright colored sugarwater on the worn treads.
“Oaks Park is haunted,” one of them says. “Someone died there and the ghost wanders around.”
You listen closely. You haven’t heard this story before. You want to ask, Who died there? Is there really a ghost? What does it look like? But none of the kids on the porch have these questions, so they are not asked and not answered. The kids run into the streets and seize their bikes, leaving behind wrappers and sticks and puddles of sugary sweetness for ants to swarm over.
You turn to the Internet.
Oaks Park is a modest amusement park located 3.5 miles (6 km) south of downtown Portland, Oregon in the United States.
The park was built by the Oregon Water Power and Railway Company and opened in 1905, when trolley parks were often constructed along streetcar lines.
The large wooden roller skating rink is open year-round. The centerpiece is the largest remaining pipe organ installed in a skating rink in the world.
As of December 2005, Keith Fortune is at the organ’s console providing music for skaters on Thursdays and Sundays.
It’s all ragtimey, bandstands and box lunches, women in gored skirts and men in straw boater hats. You find bits of information about the flyscreened dance-hall and how the floor of the roller skating rink is on floating pontoons so it can stay above water when the Willamette River floods. There is nothing about a dead child or a ghost. The absence of such information makes you feel better. The vague anxiety you have been feeling eases. Your husband comes home, and you avoid talking about something that would upset you both, and you make dinner and eat it in front of the television, closing the curtains against the summer sunlight that blazes long into the night.
The next day, you receive an email from a young man named Chuck. He works at Oaks Park. You’ve already forgotten that you emailed him—Internet time works like that. But when the message pops into your email box you suddenly remember filling out a web form marked “history questions. Your message was brief.
Is there a ghost that haunts Oaks Park?
Chuck’s emailed reply is just as brief.
Some people have reported seeing the ghost of a girl, about 12 years old. She’s dressed in seventies-era clothing. She steals cotton candy from the snack bar and rides the rides. The Octopus is her favorite.
Your fingers type a furious question in response:
Is she happy?
But you don’t hit “send,” because you know that Chuck won’t know the answer and you already do.
The last time you went to Oaks Park you were twelve and it was 1977.
You remember riding in the back seat of the Dodge Dart, American steel bullying across the narrow Sellwood Bridge, sweltering heat pouring in through all four open windows.
Your hands are sticky and you are wearing Haggar shorts and a Garanimals T-shirt from the Sears Surplus over by Lloyd Center. Your hair is cornsilk blond and your skin is brown and scratched, scabs everywhere like a map of stars.
Your parents are brittle, recovering from a night-long fight. This is your reward, your battle pay, your assurance that everything in the world is perfect.
Your dad’s profile is sleek and handsome and brutal. Your mom’s face is soft and young beneath a smooth Dorothy Hamill cut, her eyes watchful behind huge amber sunglasses. Your legs stick to the vinyl. “Hotel California” plays on the radio.
Your parents park the car under knobby, diseased trees. The small parking lot seems like it’s in the wrong place; you get to it by driving past a caretaker’s shack and a shop with old ride parts jumbled before it. You approach the park from behind, like you’re sneaking up on it, stepping carefully over cracked mounds where tree roots have broken the asphalt. You leave your parents behind to mutter between themselves. That’s the only time they talk, these days—when they think you can’t hear.
To get to the new rides you have to pass the old midway, abandoned attractions that have been shut down for years. The old buildings are regal in their decay, silvered wood and peeling paint, bulb-broken light fixtures clotted with nests and twigs, cottonwood fluff piled in unswept corners.
One tilting building has a gigantic round doorway, like a giant storm drain, all boarded up. You run up to it, peek through the boards, peer into the darkness. The cool air coming from inside smells of mold. Your parents call you away, to where the new rides are—the steel-spiderweb Ferris wheel, the carousel with its cracked menagerie of dragons and rabbits, the Erector Set roller-coaster of rusted bolts and oil-smeared wood. A vast go-kart track sprawls to the north, belching gas fumes and the smell of baking rubber; beyond it, a fetid river lowland, a swamp filled with abandoned cars and frayed tires. There’s a neon sign for a ride called the Fly-O but the ride that’s actually there is the Octopus, spinning arms swinging bulbous black seats like fists.
While you are standing in line to ride the Octopus, you see a boy and girl in the shade of the snack bar. She is wearing a halter-top and baby-blue shorts, and she has long smooth hair that gleams down her back. She has one thumb hooked in the top of her shorts, and a velour prize monkey under her arm. The boy has tight curly hair, and he is leaning against her, his thumbs stroking the sides of her ribs. You are eating popcorn. You don’t understand them and you know, suddenly, that you don’t want to understand them. You never want to understand them. Your father has gone off somewhere, and you are alone with your mother. You watch her watch them. She understands them. There is betrayal and regret on her face.
The sun is still beating down but you feel cold. The line is moving, and it is almost your turn to get on the Octopus, but you know that there are clouds coming in, and you know that it will rain, and it will get cold. Your parents will fight again and again and again. And school will start and you will have a new teacher in a room with waxed floors, and you will wear new clothes and then it will be Christmas and then spring and then summer again, and then high school and then college and then you will be far far away from here, far from where old wise buildings keep the order of time. You will be the girl with the straight shiny hair or you will be the curly haired boy in cutoffs, betrayed. You will be y
our parents. You will be thirty-nine years old, and a woman, and a mother, and nothing will make any sense but it will all hurt. You see it all in one shambling terrifying moment, you see that everything will go on and on, spinning.
You ride the Octopus with your mother. Then you run away.
You find a deserted place, trash-strewn nook behind the bumper cars near the old line of bathrooms. You hide there, legs drawn up to your chest. You rest your forehead on your knees, and you close your eyes.
You imagine a ghost, a shell, a hollow creature that can be buffeted and molded, pliant as your mother when your father’s bulbous fists swing around and around, yielding as the girl with long smooth hair, the curly-haired boy looming over her like a cloud over the sun. You pretend someone else out into the world. You send her in your place.
You can’t ever come back, you whisper to her. You tell yourself it’s like a game. A game of hide and seek. You will hide from time and fear and betrayal and regret.
Someone else goes home in the car with your parents, someone new and formless, someone who feels no fear because she feels nothing. As insubstantial as mist, as air under a sheet. You will stay at Oaks Park. You will sleep during the hottest part of the day and at night, when the lights come on, the buildings will whisper their secrets to you and they will keep you safe forever.
You are thirty-nine years old and you are a woman and a mother.
You wake up after a night of unsettling dreams, whirling spinning dreams full of screaming and blurred lights and the smell of burnt sugar, and you have a fight with your husband. You tell him he’s the worst decision you ever made. You tell him you wish you’d never married him. You tell him you never loved him. You tell him you hate him, and when you tell him this, you feel the sickening truth of it. You scream at each other for hours, and you’re both late for work, and your daughter is late for school.
You drive her, and she cowers in the back seat and you feel, rather than see, the anxiety on her face. You understand it completely. You remember it, the fear of everything falling apart. The memory is strange and alien. It is a fear that is supposed to belong to someone else, someone like you.
You don’t go in to work. You come home and sit on the couch in your front room, heat beating against the walls of the house. You draw curtains against it, you move the air with fans, but it’s so terribly hot. You drowse, but every time you nod off you dream of boarded up buildings and peeling paint. The buildings are empty. You thought they held secrets, you thought they were wise. But they contain nothing. They are as empty as you are. You wake screaming.
Late in the afternoon, you drive to Oaks Park.
The air is still and sunny. You make the turn off the Sellwood Bridge at sunset, the dazzling light making your eyes tear. You drive along the road that leads to the park, fluff from the cottonwood trees glistening in the golden air. A stiff breeze from the Willamette makes faded nylon pennants ripple. The lights have been turned on, but you can’t see them, not yet.
Everything has changed. The big flat expanse of cracked blacktop where the go-karts used to be is now acres of smoothly paved parking. The swamp is now wetland and there are multi-use trails and urban hiking areas threaded throughout it. Everything is smaller. Most of the rides you remember are gone, even the Tilt-o-Whirl with its evil clown faces—you never liked it, it gave you a headache and made you feel sick and it smelled like diesel. The Erector Set roller-coaster has been replaced by something plastic and candy-colored that has a loop-de-loop. You pass what used to be the Haunted Mine, and remember that it used to scare you, but now it is called The Lewis and Clark Adventure and beavers jump out at you instead of skeletons. It’s all bad hand-me-down Funtastic carnival rides with cheap graphics of secondhand superheroes. Alternative rock spews from the speakers.
All the old boarded up rides are gone, razed. Where they once stood, picnic space has been cleared for corporate picnics and soccer team parties.
You buy popcorn from the snack bar. Made in China, it comes in a foil bag and is very stale. You sit on one of the old green wooden benches and wait for it to get dark.
You see her before she sees you. She’s wearing Haggar shorts and a Garanimals shirt from Sears Surplus. She has a chunk of cotton candy in her hand. She’s all eyes, wandering through the crowd in the watchful way of lost children, her brow creased with anxiety. You watch her until she sees you, watch her face light with perfect joy and relief. Feelings wrap around you like a winter coat. Anger. Resentment. Bitterness. Regret.
She runs to you, clutching grubby hands at your clothing. She buries a dirty face in your stomach and breaks, brave wary watchfulness dissolving into sobs. She wails and moans, a lost child found, and you pet her back and say soft soothing things to her. She clings to you, and people are watching, making sympathetic clucking sounds. You savor this moment. You hold onto it for as long as you can. You think of your daughter and you remember a million looks on her face that you couldn’t interpret. You understand them all now. You remember a hundred times you hated your husband, your life, your job . . . even your own child.
I want to go home, she sobs into your stomach, against your shirt. I want to go home.
You want to take her home. You want to put her in the back seat of your car, and let her fall asleep, exhausted by her ordeal. You would drive home, and when you got there, she would be gone, melted into the car, melted back into you. You would be whole again. Oaks Park would have one less ghost, and you would have one more.
And there would be another fight and another and another, and you would see the infinity of days stretch before you again, and you would see the looks your daughter gives you, and understand them for what they are—disgust, pity, shame. And maybe you would hurt her, hurt her so much that she would make her own ghost, and this whole terrible wheel would turn again, this carnival wheel, this gut-wrenching loop-de-loop.
You can’t take her home.
Dread of what you will have to do makes all the small muscles in your body ache. You can’t think about it. You will have to just do it. Your hands will have to rescue you.
You take her hand and walk. She is content to be pulled along, compliant and humbled, nose running. You are walking in the direction of the old parking lot at the back of the park. But you are really walking to the place behind the bumpercars, behind the bathrooms. It is the same as it was twenty-seven years ago, trash-strewn with the same trash, the same cottonwoodfluff.
You pull her down beside you and you take her in your arms and hold her tight, cradling her for a few minutes more, telling her how brave she’s been. She talks fast, sentences like broken sticks: she didn’t mean to, it was just a game, she didn’t mean to get lost, she was scared, she was looking for you.
You murmur shh, shh in her ear as your fingers find the kitchen knife you have brought from home.
You pull the knife across her smooth brown throat. She gushes, but it is not blood. She bleeds time, a million golden sunsets and white illuminated nights, and she bleeds fear, the shambling shadow of the eternal, dark and molasses-like. She bleeds regret. She thrashes in your arms, making betrayed noises, animal noises. She deflates. She melts. Then she is nothing but a pile of dirty old clothes from Sears Surplus. You hide these beneath the trash.
Walking back to your car, you are trembling, but it is only a physical thing. Your mind is calm, and everything feels vague and unknowable again. Your accustomed numbness returns, and you know that everything will be all right.
She will stay at Oaks Park. She will ride the rides and steal cotton candy. But she will be someone else, someone new and formless, someone who feels all the terror that you should share. As insubstantial as mist, as air under a sheet. She will sleep during the hottest part of the day and at night, when the lights come on, she search watchfully through crowds for the mother she didn’t mean to lose and a life she didn’t mean to surrender.
You leave her to her haunts.
You return to yours.
Inspired by t
he ballet Swan Lake, the author revisits the character of Odile, the Black Swan, while keeping in mind that not every girl wants a prince or even a crown . . .
THIMBLERIGGERY AND FLEDGLINGS
STEVE BERMAN
The Sorcerer
The Sorcerer Bernhard von Rothbart scratched at a sore on his chin with a snow-white feather, then hurled it as a dart at the chart hanging above the bookshelves. The quill’s sharp end stabbed through the buried feet of the dunghill cock, Gallus gallus faecis, drawn with a scarab clutched in its beak.
“A noble bird,” von Rothbart muttered as he bit clean his fingernails, “begins base and eats noble things.”
He expected his daughter to look up from a book and answer “Yes, Papa,” but there was only silence. Above him, in the massive wrought iron cage, the wappentier shifted its dark wings. One beak yawned while the other preened. A musky odor drifted down.
Why wasn’t Odile studying the remarkable lineage of doves?
Von Rothbart climbed down the stairs. Peered into room after room of the tower. A sullen chanticleer pecked near the coat rack. Von Rothbart paused a moment to recall whether the red-combed bird had been the gardener who had abandoned his sprouts or the glazier who’d installed murky glass.
He hoped to find her in the kitchen and guilty of only brushing crumbs from the pages of his priceless books. But he saw only the new cook, who shied away. Von Rothbart reached above a simmering cauldron to run his fingers along the hot stones until they came back charred black.
Out the main doors, the sorcerer looked out at the wide and tranquil moat encircling his home, and at the swans drifting over its surface. He knew them to be the most indolent birds. So much so they barely left the water.
He brushed his fingers together. Ash fell to the earth and the feathers of one gliding swan turned soot-dark and its beak shone like blood.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 48
