G is for Ghosts

by Rhonda Parrish

  “Everybody’s gonna know where you’ve been, buddy, ha ha!”

  He locked eyes with her for one hot second before he stomped off, trying to brush the white glitter from his lapels and just making it worse.

  Another dollar emerged, and another, and another. She lost track of time, and somewhere within the catcalls, as the puff danced across her backside, she rolled to her side to change the view, and suddenly she saw bright orange.

  Shouts, and running. The crowd of admirers turned and stampeded out of the tent. Girls were crawling away as flames licked across the stage. She tried to get up on her heels, but a hand suddenly grabbed her leg and pulled her right back down.

  The wind knocked from her body, she managed to flip herself over and she found herself staring up at a sparkling white face.

  “Bitch! You’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  He jumped onstage and brought both feet down on her ankle. She could barely hear herself scream over the roar of the flames. The canvas was disappearing into a world of red and there was nobody here, and nobody coming—nobody at all to make sure she was safe. She looked around the stage and saw her puff sizzle and blacken.

  His foot came down and pinned her on her back. She looked into his eyes and recognized her enemy: the strip-club shadow with the knife, the hotel-room creep with the gun, the boogeyman of bad girls everywhere was here and now and ready to fill tomorrow’s newspaper with an inch or two of murdered coochie girl.

  Her next life, the new life out west, was melting. The pain in her bones was agonizing, and the blaze blinded her with smoke. Behind him, the canvas doorways rippled, his escape out into the night. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  One swift push of his foot sent her over the edge of the stage, down into the charred fairground grass, into the heart of the fire.

  The last of the iron stakes had been hammered into place. Through the haze of powdered sugar and game buzzers, the carnival came to life.

  The nighttime twinkle was still lit up by neon bulbs, but the rainbow glow of LED was slowly encroaching on the vintage lights. Rock’n’roll had rambled on long ago, goosed away by electronic dance music. Beside the spinning wheels, the prizes of glittery unicorn mirrors had given way to fake Coach bags. The classics remained, though: the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Scrambler and a creaky little Ferris wheel, stalwart machines that hadn’t yet had their leather-padded teeth ripped out and upcycled into seats for trendy bars.

  Sitting in the back of the fairgrounds, where the more mature pleasures lurked, was a haunted house.

  The Dark Castle had been slapped together out of pure schlock, the most amount of thrill for the least amount of budget. The butcher knife of a serial killer here, a guillotine from the French Revolution there—the hell with thematic consistency, whatever burnt, stabbed, crushed, sliced, or annihilated a life in the most violent and dramatic (and cheap) way possible, was good enough for the Castle.

  Intertwined with these instruments of death, women. Within the labyrinth of rubber terrors, the demented shriek of the pipe organ soundtrack, the rooms were full of girls about to get it. A dungeon featured a female mannequin in a black negligee, roped to a table, her belly trapped beneath the red-tipped tines of a buzzsaw. She’d come from a DVD store that had replaced her with a newer model, one with an enormous bustline. Behind her, another mannequin was cuffed to the back wall, clad in a white lace bikini. She’d come from the same adult novelties store and she still wore the same outfit they’d thrown her out in.

  Down the corridor, in the room before this one, a third girl was lashed to a post, witch-hunting flames painted on the walls around her. Red stains suggested seared knees, and her gauzy dress had been ripped down to reveal one smudged breast, the spice of implied nudity. She’d been plucked from the dumpster of a high-end boutique, her eye makeup too outdated for displaying the latest fine fashions. Nearby, a female torso hung from the ceiling, strung in chains.

  From the cars of the darkride, the customers saw only what the Dark Castle wanted them to see. Beams of light cut through the dusty gloom to a pair of rosy lips or a splash of blood, the murk disguising a multitude of b-movie glue-gun sins. The faces of the girls roasted beneath the lights, fair maidens so much more beautiful when frozen in the amber of imminent gore.

  Suddenly, the ride stopped. The electronics had been acting funny all day. Maybe it was the usual first-day kinks still working their way out of the system, maybe it was the temper of a recently exhumed spirit that had been crackling in the air, like flashes of lightning across a hot black sky.

  A loudspeaker broke into the organ music, commanding the riders to stay inside their cars while the problem was being fixed.

  “Fuck that, man.”

  Two pairs of grungy loafers stepped up into the dungeon’s plywood panorama. In long shorts and popped collars they came, hands callused from mashing fighter buttons, mouths soured with cheap beer.

  “No shit. Least now I’m gettin’ my eight bucks’ worth outta this dump,” said the one in gray, running his fingers through a buzzcut.

  “Tracy. Traceeeeeee,” said the other, all muscle and oversized stripes, heading right for the girl beneath the buzzsaw.

  “Yeah, she does look like Tracy, all that black hair. Whatever happened to her?” asked Gray.

  “I called her by another girl’s name.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Naw, I did it on purpose. ‘Taylor, oh yeah that’s right, Taylor,’ and she tried to get away but I wouldn’t let her go, she tried to fight me and I just kept going. It was fucking great.” Stripes came up to the table, ran a hand up the mannequin’s bare thigh.

  “That’s why I got all those bracelets in my room, all that goth shit with the rings and the leather,” said Gray. “So they can’t get away.”

  They snickered, and Stripes stared down at the girl about to be bisected. He rested his hand at the top of the blade as he brought his face down to hers.

  The Dark Castle had been slapped together out of pure schlock, and nobody had bothered to sand down the buzzsaw’s edges for safety.

  He nicked his fingers and quickly drew his hand back—but not before a drop of blood fell and struck the mannequin’s collarbone. The tension that had been simmering in the air all day finally burst.

  Slow, at first, just the quiet rise and fall of her first breath. Her painted eyes began to moisten. Long, thick hair coiled out of her scalp, knocking her cheap brunette wig to the ground. Plastic took on the sheen of cool flesh, and long, sharp nails slid forth from the tips of her slender fingers.

  Within her pretty head, the dungeon came into focus. Her vision resolved into a bloody blade hovering above her, right where her murderer’s foot had been. Her murderer. A face glowered down at her, a sneer etched into the curve of his mouth.

  He’s going to kill me—

  The fake ropes slipped easily from her arms as she knocked the sinister prop to the side, grabbed Stripes by the back of the head and sank her teeth into his left eye.

  Too shocked to scream, Gray fell backwards as the blood hit his face. He tried to climb over the stalled car but snapped something in his leg and kept going anyway, winced down onto the service path beside the track and limped into the room up ahead.

  The Buzzsaw Girl tore her teeth from Stripes’ face, a thread of crimson swinging from her jaws. She rose up from the table and threw him to the floor.

  You took my life away, as she rose to her full height, six terrifying feet, and stepped down from the dungeon. You took it all away, as she climbed across the stopped car and pursued her prey into the next chamber of horrors.

  Strobe lights diced the darkness, misted by a throat-thickening fog machine. The organ music vanished behind the deafening wail of a siren. There he was, smacking into the next stopped car, empty of other passengers. And he turned and suddenly faced her, a looming silhouette cutting through the veil of lights and fog. The funhouse siren summoned nothing but panic as she reach
ed for him.

  Those angry spikes gathered the front of his shirt and pulled hard, back down the service path, up over the car, over Stripes’ still-warm body, up to the torture table. The prop ropes turned real around his hands and feet as she knotted his limbs into a tight, painful X.

  The pipe organ swelled as she leaned over him. Raised her claws and brought her nails down, dragging them through his chest. His screams rang out through the dungeon as ten deep wounds became twenty, thirty, by sixty it was all shreds of meat. The blood, intoxicating. She raised her palms to her face, glorifying in her immense newfound strength. Two smears down her cheeks bestowed the balm of Bathory.

  Behind her, the mannequin in the bikini and cuffs started to hum and twitch. Buzzsaw Girl turned around and the twitching picked up. Buzzsaw Girl walked to the back of the room and lifted her dripping hand, and

  (a little girl in dirty satin sneakers, trying to shield her pigtailed head from the descent of a whiskey bottle—someone’s forgotten daughter, hauled out to the woods to keep adult secrets silent)

  realized the carnival fire was not the only time someone had gotten killed out here. Others were waking up.

  Soon Bondage Girl was breathing beside her, let down from her cuffs. Her first act upon consciousness was walking over to the table and burying her face in Gray’s glistening midsection.

  Buzzsaw Girl walked down the service path to the room before and

  (a young woman in a black bob and glittering eyelashes, trying to pry red-nailed hands from closing hard around her throat—a new girlfriend on her way to a date, attacked by an angry ex determined to snuff out the bitch who stole her man away)

  liberated Burning Girl from her heathen stake.

  The torso nearby shook in her chains as the blood drew close, so tantalizing. Her former life had been spent in a fashion school classroom, clothed in fanciful runway dreams. But with no head, no arms or legs, Buzzsaw Girl decided that denial was mercy.

  Sated, for now, the three circled together in the center of the dungeon, let their stories seep through each other. Short lives, all of them, cut down before they’d barely had a chance to live.

  The blood of the cruel was sweet on the Girls’ skins, getting to live again, even better stolen back from thieves. They flexed their hands, took deep breaths, so simple but so miraculous to sense the grit beneath their bare feet.

  Now, we ride. Buzzsaw Girl’s mouth lifted into a grin, and the others nodded with wet smiles as well.

  They squeezed their rail-thin bodies side-by-side into the car. Buzzsaw Girl’s hand whistled down and slapped the door, and the track charged back into life. They lurched forward into the click-clack of the fright factory, into the overload of fog and strobelights and whatever else decorated the rooms after theirs.

  Gray was left tied to the table, the buzzsaw moved back into place over his body, looking very much like the intense FX handiwork of a darkride with money.

  Stripes was strung up on Burning Girl’s stake, his ruined face resting in the path of a scalding spotlight, his shorts and boxers pulled down to his ankles.

  Whatever tragedy the torso had to share stayed locked inside. Left behind, she quivered in her chains, gradually trembling into stillness.

  Three Amazons descended from a giant fanged mouth, the Dark Castle’s photo-op exit. They paused to look out across the carnival, scope this unfamiliar terrain.

  A beer garden was jammed with people, and trash cans overflowed with plastic cups. A Flying Carpet thrill ride lifted a row of screamers into the air. Megaphoned insults squawked from the Dunk the Bozo tank, where a mark wound up a vicious pitch that smacked harmlessly against the canvas. Amplified laughter boomed from the tank as he walked off in a huff of profanities.

  Further away, half-hidden behind the trailers of hot pretzels and chocolate fudge, the carousel of the G-rated section was as glittering and distant as heaven.

  Buzzsaw Girl looked down at her hands, her thighs. Not plastic beneath the crimson splatters, but true human flesh, as real as any woman walking around the fairgrounds. Nobody knew who they were, or what they’d just done.

  She looked up, and vengeance melted beneath the sudden warm light of wonder as she gazed around. Scrolling lights within the windows of the food trailers spelled out ICE CREAM! CHURROS! FRIED OREOS! (Fried Oreos?!) Strange electronic music. People holding tiny, flat television sets. Everywhere.

  She’d somehow made it to the world of Ziggy Stardust! Shit, this was better than going west! This was—

  “Are you in a show? Are you all cosplaying?”

  A guy ran up and threw his arm around her. Sunglasses, bluejeans, all smiles.

  “Take my picture with her! And her! They’re from the Castle!” he said, grabbing Bondage Girl.

  His friend held up a television set that flashed. A few more people drifted over, held up similar devices which she guessed were capturing their cheap lingerie, the fake blood. The real blood.

  Television-cameras, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The future, all right, but the way this guy was hanging on, the way his friends were squeezing in to join him, some things never fucking change.

  “Dude, I don’t think the Castle has live actors. Lady, are you okay?” A guy with goggles pushed atop his head tried to step in, but got jostled aside quickly.

  “Man, she’s fine.”

  “Yeah, all of them are fiiiiiiiiiine.”

  Buzzsaw Girl tried to back away but two of them were forcing her towards a camera. Burning Girl was struggling with someone commanding her to smile. He ignored her elbows, laughing as Burning Girl tried to pull away and her long nails accidentally sliced the side of his face.

  “Hey! Hey, what the fuck!” Hand clapped to his cheek. “I can sue you for that! Bitch!”

  Hands descended, circled Buzzsaw Girl’s wrists. No. No. All she wanted was to wander in the lights, and some creep was trying to hold her down. Again.

  Buzzsaw Girl lashed out, easily breaking Sunglasses Guy’s grip. The men refused to back away, tried to duck their razor fingers and lost. Blood dampened the Girls’ fine-boned faces, energized their flesh with another incredible rush—wounding hands that had hurled bottles, mouths that had screamed slurs, jeering flesh torn open and gushing sublime malevolence. The battle was being recorded from at least three different cameras and that stopped once Bondage Girl smashed a television set to pieces. Three bodies lay crumpled on the ground, and that was when people started to run away.

  A security guard barked into a walkie-talkie and pointed in their direction. The Girls scattered as hysteria sparked a mass exodus towards the parking lot.

  Buzzsaw Girl vaulted over the railing of the Flying Carpet. The ride operator had run off, leaving a teenage couple trapped in their seats by the T-bars. They sat side by side, both wriggling to get out from behind the safety guards, and went still as she came near.

  The boy—the boy, musk and sweat and his father’s cologne. An old scent, familiar, thick in the tent when dollar bills rained down on her body. But the way he hung on to his girlfriend’s hand, laced so tight but shaking, holding the Girl’s gaze, he was determined not to let the fear slip out from behind his puppydog bravado.

  And her... an airbrushed heart on a pink hooded sweatshirt. Huge shining eyes. The Girl leaned down and inhaled an essence that went straight to her memories. Not the Eau de Love she sprayed on before a show, not the pot she smoked afterwards. This was the stream in the woods... the clean, soothing place a scratched-up coochie girl could have a few calm moments to herself before a hard night on the bally. She leaned closer, craved the bubbling brook of girl-thoughts that had never been soured by an ugly touch. How would it taste, a bite of that birthday-cake life, sweet and soft like an angel-food pillow—

  Behind her, another Girl screamed.

  Buzzsaw Girl whipped around and spotted a small cluster of angry townies brandishing guns. Weapons were never far away in towns like these, and they wer
e why the carnies in her crew had tended to stick to their trailers, rarely venturing into the places they visited.

  They’d surrounded Bondage Girl. The hunger for honor burned in their eyes.

  “We can take care of this before the cops get here,” said a girl in a camo bra.

  “No, you can’t,” scoffed the Bozo from his megaphone.

  Bondage Girl tried to push through the circle but was stopped by a wall of gym-toned biceps. Snarling, she flexed her fingertips and tried to slash through, sending her captors howling and falling, and broke away into a run. Three long strides until a bullet struck her shoulder.

  More bullets hit her, piercing her back, her thighs. A cloud formed around her body as it shattered, like the snap of a magician’s fingers before disappearing into a puff of white. Horrified, Buzzsaw Girl watched Bondage Girl crumble into the air and float away. Back into ash.

  “Dude... where’d she go?”

  “Dunno, but...” A shirtless guy with a foxtail clipped to his belt held up a scrap of her white lace bikini.

  Right behind Buzzsaw Girl, the girl in the pink sweatshirt screamed.

  “Here! Over here! Help us!”

  The guns swiveled towards the Flying Carpet and Buzzsaw Girl dove behind the operator booth. Bullets riddled the couple, and their bodies fell limp beneath the T-bars. Crimson streamed from the airbrushed heart.

  A few drops of the girl’s blood had landed on Buzzsaw Girl’s shoulder. The burst of sugar she’d been anticipating, didn’t feel like anything at all. There was nothing to savor... because these kids hadn’t stolen anything.

  Innocents.