by Brian Harmon
They’d been together ever since.
She no longer worried about her weight. She redirected her energy and cultivated her skills in the kitchen. Instead of starving herself, she began making much healthier choices in her cooking and was much happier with herself in spite of gaining back some of that much-hated weight. And he couldn’t possibly love her more. As far as he was concerned, she was perfectly flawless.
(And for the record, he’d have picked her over her stuck-up, fake older sister any day.)
These days, Karen didn’t live under Joyce’s shadow or her parents’ scrutiny. But those relationships remained strained, especially when it came to her mother. She still felt compelled to prove herself. So when Blanche Dashton called her daughter to ask if she’d plan and cater a birthday party for her friend’s grandchild, Karen took it as a challenge.
And that was how Eric ended up here.
He crossed the floor, pausing only to let three hyper boys run across his path, shouting at each other that the zombies were right behind them. (What was everybody’s deal with zombies, anyway?) Once the boys had run off again in search of a safe place to ride out the apocalypse, he continued on into the arcade.
From here, the screaming from the playland was a little more muffled, but now he was surrounded by loud, overlapping music and muffled, recorded voices from the dozens of brightly lit arcade machines that were all continuously competing for everyone’s attention. It was difficult to decide which was worse.
His cell phone rang again. Who the hell kept calling him? Nobody ever called him. He reached into his pocket to look at the number, but before he could pull it out, he was distracted by the sound of someone calling his name.
He turned and looked around. There were a couple kids playing with the machines. Not playing the machines, but playing with them. They didn’t seem to have any money to actually play a game, so they were just sitting behind the steering wheels of a racing game, pretending to play. They weren’t paying any attention to him. And there was no one else there.
On the far side of the room, he could see a very bored-looking college-age kid standing behind the prize counter, playing with his cell phone and wearing one of those stupid clown noses. (He had no idea how they could stand wearing those all day. It’d drive him nuts.)
It must’ve been his imagination. A random recording from one of the machines that he misheard.
Maybe there was a character named Eric in one of the games.
He continued on, but quickly stopped again and turned to stare at a game screen next to him. It was some kind of zombie shooter. (Them again?) It was playing a demo of a scene in a dark hallway. But for a second there, in the corner of his eye as he walked by, it’d looked all wrong somehow. It wasn’t a crisp, colorful image like the one he was seeing now. It was grainy, distorted, more like a weak video feed.
It was probably just a part of the game. Maybe a creepy title screen of some sort. But for that one, brief moment it had struck him as incredibly unsettling. As crazy as it sounded, it seemed like something was staring out at him from that screen…
His imagination. It was probably those stupid clowns. They made everything a million times creepier.
He continued on through the arcade, past the doors on the far side and into the restaurant. There were windows here, on the far side of the room, but the blinds were all closed. The lights were out. The dining area was dark and uninviting.
And yet the atmosphere here was considerably nicer than in the rest of the building. It still maintained the circus theme, but in a classier, more nostalgic way. There were vintage circus posters hung on the walls, along with all manner of antique carnival memorabilia and countless photographs of acrobats and elephant trainers, circus tents and Ferris wheels, midways and clowns. There was also a miniature circus train that traveled around the entire dining area on an overhead track and a decorative carousel behind the hostess station by the main entrance.
Overall, a far less obnoxious take on the theme, in his opinion.
He could see the bar in the back corner, by the restroom sign, but there didn’t appear to be anyone over there. Now what was he supposed to do?
His cell phone rang again. He started to reach for it, but was again distracted by a voice. This time, it wasn’t his imagination.
“What’re you doing?”
He turned to find a young boy standing in the doorway he’d just entered. He looked to be about seven, with shaggy, blond hair and big, blue eyes. “What?”
“What’re you doing?” the boy asked again.
“I’m looking for someone to open the bar,” he replied.
The boy squinted at him. “Isn’t it a little early to be drinking?”
Eric frowned. “Aren’t you a little young to be the booze police?”
He shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Eric chuckled. “Right. Well, I’m supposed to ask somebody about the soda for the party,” he explained. “I was told there’d be someone at the bar.”
“Oh.”
He turned and looked around, but there was no one in sight.
“Maybe you should check the kitchen.”
Eric looked back at the boy. “Kitchen?”
He pointed toward the corner of the room, to Eric’s far left.
The layout of the room made it impossible to see that corner from where he stood, so he walked farther out into the restaurant. Sure enough, there was a door back there. A light was shining through the window. That was where they’d be making the pizzas soon, if they hadn’t already started. “Ah,” he said. “Thanks.”
“You’ll need the key to find her.”
He stopped and looked back at the boy, confused. “What?”
“Not a regular key. It’s something else. I don’t know what, but you won’t be able to find her without it.”
Eric stared at him. Find who? The bartender?
“And if you don’t find her, you can’t save them.”
This conversation was getting stranger by the second. “Save who?”
“The children.”
The kitchen door opened and a young, dark-haired woman stepped out into the dining room She was nicely dressed and wearing a bright-red clown nose. As soon as she saw him standing there, she stopped, startled. “Can I help you with something?”
He looked over at her, still puzzled. “Uh… Yeah. Sorry. I was sent to ask if they can put the soda out now.”
“Oh.” Over her initial (and perfectly understandable) surprise at finding a grown man lurking in a dark, unopen restaurant, she relaxed and offered him a polite and professional smile. “Of course. I’ll get it right out.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re very welcome.” She turned and vanished back into the kitchen again.
He turned back to the boy, but he was gone. He must’ve run back out into the arcade while the woman was talking.
There was no one else in the room.
The cell phone rang again. This time he removed it from his pocket and saw that it was Isabelle.
“Oh my god!” she yelled as soon as he lifted it to his ear. “Answer your phone!”
Eric cringed at the volume of her voice. “Okay. It’s answered. What do you want?”
“It’s not your imagination. Something is seriously wrong with that place!”
Chapter Two
“I felt it as soon as you walked in the door.”
Eric rubbed at the back of his neck. “What did you feel?”
Isabelle was a thirteen-year-old girl going on fifty-two. The two of them had shared a one-way psychic link since the day they met in an insane, sentient mansion that had trapped her and held her prisoner in a timeless rift between dimensions for more than three and a half decades. As a result, she was always inside his head, able to read his thoughts at any given moment, from anywhere in the world. As long as she wasn’t intentionally tuning him out, he could communicate instantly with her, but in order for her to speak to him, he needed a phone.
<
br /> Which he admittedly should’ve checked a lot sooner…
“That place is loaded with spiritual energy,” she explained.
“You mean like at Hedge Lake?”
“Not as intense as that, no, but it’s up there. I’m sure it’s not happening naturally.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“And there’s something else there, too. It’s hard to detect, but it’s there. And it’s really dark.”
A familiar dread was already creeping into his gut, like a hot lump of something slimy and foul deep in his belly. He didn’t ask her if she was sure. She wouldn’t have bothered him if she wasn’t. And besides that, it was hardly a surprise after his bizarre conversation with that boy a moment ago. Another person might dismiss something like that as nothing more than a child’s overactive imagination and odd sense of humor, but not him. He was well acquainted with the weird.
“Psychic energy?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. It feels like something different.”
“Different as in new?”
“Maybe. Hard to tell from where you are. You’ll have to get closer to it.”
“Oh good. I’m sure that’ll be fun for me.”
In general, Isabelle could sense three kinds of otherworldly energies: spiritual energy, psychic energy and magical energy. But there were other, much older and rarer energies out there that she still hadn’t identified.
“That boy said you had to save the children,” she recalled. “What children? Do you think there’s someone in that building somewhere who needs help?”
“I sure hope not…” His vivid imagination had always been something of a blessing and a curse. It had helped him to nurture a love of reading and literature that led him to pursue a career as an English teacher, but it also had a way of scaring the hell out him by dredging up ways that any bad situation could be far, far worse. Right now, it offered him a terrifying mental image of sobbing children tied up and locked in a dark, dank room somewhere, just waiting for some monster to come back and do terrible things to them. He forced the image out of his mind. “He said something about having to find ‘her’ before I could save them.”
“And needing some kind of key to find her,” remembered Isabelle. “That place feels like a nightmare. I don’t think you meeting that boy was a coincidence.”
He walked over to the open doorway and looked out at the brightly lit arcade. He must’ve ran out there while he was talking to the woman from the kitchen, but he was nowhere to be seen now. In a place this size, he could be anywhere.
“You’ve got to find him. If he knew enough to tell you to find a key, then it stands to reason that he must know more about what’s going on.”
“I know.” He wanted desperately to believe that she was wrong, that this was not “the weird” dragging him back into another episode of his own personal Twilight Zone. But even if he could dismiss the things that boy said as random nonsense from an overactive imagination, he couldn’t ignore the high levels of spiritual energy. The weird seemed to be intrinsically tied to those damn energies. They simply didn’t occur in such alarming quantities by themselves.
What he didn’t understand was why it always had to be him. He wasn’t young, fit or particularly talented. There had to be millions of people who were better suited for this sort of thing than him. And yet he just kept getting dragged into these messes.
Just a couple months ago, not long after that business with the letters from 1962 and Isabelle’s emotional ordeal in Tokyo, the two of them had sat down one evening and talked about things. Particularly, they talked about Why. Why did these things happen to them? Why did they travel these strange roads they traveled? Why did the universe keep asking so much of them? Her conclusion seemed to be that their fates were tied together somehow and that he must be some kind of “chosen one”, that he was simply born to do these things. That it was his destiny.
He thought “bad luck” was a better description.
But it did seem like something was steering him. Maybe it was God. Or maybe it was some other great force. But these things always just sort of fell into his lap, leaving him no choice but to play along. And at the last possible moment, too. This wasn’t any different. Save the children? How could you say no to something like that?
“Find that kid,” said Isabelle. Then the line went dead.
Find the kid. Right. That should be a breeze. He’d seen the guest list. There were more than fifty kids invited to this thing. It was going to be like a needle in a haystack, except the entire haystack was running around in a crazed sugar high, screaming its head off.
He walked out into the arcade and looked around. The kids who were pretending to play the racing game were now pretending to play the zombie shooter game. There was an older kid with actual money playing Guitar Hero nearby. And off to his right, a little girl was wandering wide-eyed through the dozens of machines as her mother trailed after her while texting on her phone.
This was only the first floor. There was another level of the arcade above him on the second floor, plus the mirror maze and the enormous playland. That was lots of places for one little boy to hide.
And what if the kid had nothing to do with the spiritual energy Isabelle felt? What if that business about keys and “her” and saving children was nothing more than the plot of some cartoon he’d watched this morning? Then what? He was going to look like a major weirdo chasing a little boy around a family entertainment center, trying to ask him crazy questions.
You couldn’t just do something like that. There was even a name for it: Stranger danger.
He set off through the arcade again, back toward the playland. If he hung around there for a little while, maybe he’d catch a glimpse of the kid as he ran in or out. Maybe he’d get lucky.
But he stopped again at the sound of someone calling his name.
He turned all the way around, scanning his surroundings.
There was no one trying to catch his attention. It almost had to have come from one of the machines. And yet, it didn’t sound like a machine. It sounded like a child’s voice. But it also didn’t sound like some kid calling out for his or her brother. It had an odd, echoing sound…as if it were coming from some deep, dark hole somewhere…if that made any sense. Which it of course didn’t.
Was he simply mishearing it?
He looked down at his phone. As always, Isabelle’s texts went straight to the screen. LIKE I’VE TOLD YOU BEFORE, I ONLY HEAR WHAT YOU HEAR, THE WAY YOU THINK YOU HEAR IT
He nodded. That was what he thought she was going to say.
A strange feeling came over him then. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up.
Someone…or something…was watching him. He was sure of it.
He turned and looked behind him.
There was an arcade machine standing there. One of those golf games, where you spin the ball to swing. The screen was running its demo, showing off some of the beautiful holes the game had to offer, but he had a strange feeling that it was showing something very different a moment ago.
FIND HIM, urged Isabelle.
Eric returned the phone to his pocket and headed for the party room, this time walking a little quicker than before.
Something wasn’t right here. He could feel it. It was like a dreadful presence looming over him. And yet as he stepped out of the arcade and looked around, it was clear that no one else felt it. Children were playing, mothers were socializing, and the clown-nosed staff were going about their business. He could see Holly finishing up the decorations while Karen still stood where he left her, listening to her mother and sister prattle on and on. Even from here, he could see that she was struggling to compose herself. She stood rigid and tight-lipped, tense, as if it were taking every ounce of her will not to start screaming at them (and knowing the three of them, it probably was).
Other than that, nobody looked in any way concerned.
Maybe he was starting to pick up on whatever it was that
allowed Isabelle to sense things about his environment. Or maybe it was simply a matter of experience. After all, how many times did one have to be surprised by the weird before he finally began to recognize it when he stepped in it?
There were more people here now. Before long, this place was going to be packed with screaming kids. It was only going to get harder to find a single boy in the crowd. It was going to be a lot harder to do anything.
He turned and looked out into the playland. It was a monstrous contraption of plastic, padded steel posts, black mesh, PVC pipe, nylon netting and brightly colored mats. The main entrance was a large, plastic archway that was molded to resemble the entrance of a large circus tent held open by two grinning, cartoon clowns. Through this entrance, he could see a wall of smeared and scratched plexiglass panels, behind which was a large ball pit already writhing with screaming children. There didn’t appear to be a way into the ball pit from this level. You had to go around it, climb up to the second level and make your way back down via one of three slides or a set of colorful, padded stairs. The point seemed to be to keep the balls in the pit instead of scattered all over the building, but in spite of this there were dozens of brightly colored balls scattered around the floor of the party room.
He didn’t want anything to do with this entire area. It was noisy, chaotic and probably coated in a horrific assortment of germs.
Sometimes people asked him why he chose to teach high schoolers. Why not little kids? But the truth was that he really didn’t like dealing with kids. He was much more comfortable with teenagers, as odd as he knew that sounded. Sure, they were moody, hormonal, disrespectful and thought they knew everything, but at least they could blow their own noses and almost never wet themselves.
There were just some things he wasn’t very good at handling.
