Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

  People are dying to get in.

  The exhibits will kill to get out.

  Be first in line for the most haunted theme park in the park in the world - GHOSTLAND! Discover and explore hundreds of haunted buildings and cursed objects! Witness spectral beings of all kinds with our patented Augmented Reality glasses! Experience all the terror and thrills the afterlife has to offer, safely protected by our Recurrence Field technology! Visit Ghostland today - it's the hauntedest place on earth!

  After a near-death experience caused by the park's star haunted attraction, Ben has come to Ghostland seeking to reconnect with his former best friend Lilian, whose post-traumatic stress won't let her live life to the fullest. She's come at the behest of her therapist, Dr. Allison Wexler, who tags along out of professional curiosity, eager to study the new tech's psychological effect on the user.

  But when a computer virus sets the ghosts free and the park goes into lockdown, the trio find themselves trapped in an endless nightmare.

  With time running short and the dead quickly outnumbering the living, the survivors must tap into their knowledge of horror and video games to escape… or become Ghostland's newest exhibits.

  Featuring an interactive "Know Your Ghosts" guide and much more, Ghostland is over 400 pages of thrills and terror!

  GHOSTLAND

  a novel

  DUNCAN RALSTON

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SHADOW WORK PUBLISHING

  Copyright © 2019 by Duncan Ralston

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1988819181

  Cover art by Dean Samed (TBA)

  Interior art by Mike Tenebrae (TBA)

  Sanitarium BB font by Blambot,

  used by permission.

  Also by Duncan Ralston

  Gristle & Bone (collection)

  Salvage (novel)

  Wildfire (novella)

  Woom (novella)

  Where the Monsters Live (novella)

  The Method (novel)

  Video Nasties (collection)

  Ebenezer (novella)

  _________________________________________

  Get this FREE book and more when you join

  the VIP list at www.duncanralston.com!

  Follow Duncan Ralston on Bookbub:

  A NOTE ABOUT GHOSTLAND

  This book contains the interactive index, Know Your Ghosts[i]: A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Ghostland. You will notice as you are reading that there are footnotes within the text, like the one above. If you want to skip them altogether or save them until the end, you can do that as well—the full index can be found at the end of the book.

  The entries (and the index itself) are not necessary to appreciate the story, however if you are like me and want to dig deeper into the types of ghosts and exhibits you are reading about—as well as some which may not feature in this particular tale but could reappear in future stories told within the Ghostland universe—clicking on these footnotes will take you to their entries in the Know Your Ghosts index. Clicking on their numbers in the index will take you safely back to where you started.

  Please keep your head and hands inside the ride and enjoy your time at Ghostland, the most terrifying theme park on earth!

  Want to dive deeper into the world

  of GHOSTLAND? Visit

  www.ghostlandpark.com.

  _________________________________________

  "Tell me… what are you afraid of?"

  — Rex Garrote, Ghost World television series (1993–1994)

  PROLOGUE:

  THE FLOATING HOUSE

  THE FIRST TIME Lilian Roth saw the haunted house it was floating down Main Street, and if she'd known the trouble it would cause them, she never would have pointed it out to her best friend.

  She and Ben Laramie were winding their way through Infinite Zombie's abandoned hospital level for the hundredth time when her living room suddenly went dark and the temperature dropped, causing goosebumps to spring up on her arms. As a shadow passed over the TV screen, she stood abruptly, spilling her can of cream soda all over the carpet. Paying it no mind—her mother would be upset, Dad would bail her out—Lil hurried to the window to look.

  The Roths lived on Main Street, above the bulk food store and across from one of two antique shops in Duck Falls. She squinted through the fly-specked window screen, expecting to see the crumbling façade and flat tar roof of Green's Antiques. Instead she found herself staring at a brick wall crawling with flat green leaves, so close she could almost reach out and touch it if she hung precariously out the window. She smelled its cool, rotting brick and the crisp scent of the leaves, confirming it wasn't a hallucination. Two deep-set windows moved by, and through their warped glass she saw more antique furniture than Mr. and Mrs. Green might sell in a year from their shop: a large wooden desk and shelves full of books, a massive globe, an armchair under a drop cloth, a lion's head mounted on the far wall near a stone fireplace and an open doorway.

  Why would they move it with all the furniture still inside? she thought. For some reason, this question troubled her most of all.

  "Holy crap, Ben! Do you see that?"

  "I saw that zombie totally rip your head off," Ben said over the headset from his own house. "I was just about to blow its brains out, why'd you pause the game?"

  "Go to your window."

  "Let's just finish this level," he whined. "I've only got an hour 'til Mom's home and I still gotta mow the back lawn."

  "Go to the window," she said again.

  Through the doorway inside the moving house, an enormous shadow swept across the wall. For a moment it appeared to have several arms, like a human octopus. Either that or it belonged to more than one person, a group of—creatures—people huddled together in the hall, like stowaways. Before she could decide which it was, the shadow was gone, disappearing into the patterned wallpaper. Whether it had been a trick of the light or a brief hallucination caused by the shock of watching a house literally float past her window, her heart thrummed unpleasantly fast.

  As the black door inside the house began to creak shut, she lowered the blinds and backed away, struck with a sudden certainty she'd just made a terrible mistake, like stepping in fresh-laid concrete or calling someone she loved an unforgivable name.

  Inside the moving house, the black door clicked shut.

  Frantic, Lil opened her mouth to prevent Ben from picking up his binoculars. But her words caught in her throat. She stood there gawping like a dying fish, watching the darkness pass her apartment through the blinds.

  Ben let out an annoyed huff and got up from the floor, knowing if he didn't at least humor her he'd be "in the doghouse," as his dad sometimes said regarding his mother. His legs and butt numb from sitting cross-legged on the rug while the two of them played their favorite survival horror game, Ben hobbled to his bedroom window to look. "Where am I looking?"

  Lil didn't answer for a moment. "Never mind," she said finally. "It's nothing."

  Ben grabbed the small pair of folding binoculars off his desk. "You sounded pretty tweaked out for 'nothing.'"

  He peered through the eyepieces, knowing he'd be able to see whatever Lil had, despite the distance. From his bedroom window, way up on the hill old folks still called the "Duck Bill," he could see almost the entire town with the binoculars he'd gotten a few Christmases back. He and Lil had tested them, with Ben warm inside his house and Lil braving the cold, standing in the middle of the street out front of her apartment, waving madly and shivering. When he pulled the focus now, he wasn't prepared for what he would see, and he wasn't sure he could be
lieve his eyes. He blinked hard and peered through them again only to be visited by the same impossible sight.

  A house hovered down Main Street like an apparition, like something out of a nightmare. The skin on his neck and cheeks prickled electric with disbelief and—despite his self-professed desensitivity to All Things Horror—even fear. He lowered the binoculars a moment, his palms slick with sweat. The hair on his arms stood on end. In the novels he enjoyed, the writers often called this phenomenon "horripilation." He'd always liked the ring of the word but had never experienced it quite as he was now.

  When he zoomed out, he was relieved to discover the house wasn't floating down the street on its own. Dozens of large wheels rolled beneath it, but the cab or tractor or whatever carried the house was hidden from view behind its covered porch.

  He remembered workers had been doing something with the power and telephone lines downtown on his way home from dinner at Grandma Laramie's house the other night, and now he knew the reason. They'd been making space to move the house through town.

  "That can't be real," he muttered into the headset, pulled taut from the console. He'd spoken it aloud but not to Lil, only to convince himself.

  "It's real," she said. "There was furniture inside and…"

  The sun had brightened her living room again, warming her goosebumped arms. Now that it was gone, she felt a surge of bravery. She drew up the blinds, pulled the bent screen off its frame, and stuck her head out the window. Several kids she recognized chased the house on their bikes, cheering and whistling and popping wheelies. Adults and children had stopped on both sides as if to watch a parade, shading their eyes to get a better look.

  "And what?" Ben asked.

  "It was nothing," she said, more to assuage her own fears than to answer Ben. She shook her head in amusement, chuckling at her initial fear. It was just a big old ugly house, nothing all that scary about it. If it hadn't rolled by her living room windows, if she'd seen it at the end of a cul-de-sac or at the top of the Duck Bill, she could imagine an old lady in a sunhat picking weeds from flowerbeds out front, or a middle-aged guy with his gut hanging over his jeans drinking a beer and pushing a mower across its lawn.

  Ben tailed the house with the binoculars. It looked straight out of the old horror movies he loved: three stories high with gabled rooftops like jagged teeth, veins of dark green ivy crawling over crumbled bricks the color of dried blood, shutters on the windows. He thought it even looked kind of familiar, but in his excitement, he couldn't quite place it. Maybe it had been used in a horror movie.

  A haunted house, he thought. A real haunted house rolling up Main Street. Wow!

  "It's gone," Lil said half the town away, relief in her voice.

  With the house out of sight behind the Post Office, the people in the street resumed their business, returning to stores and carrying on about their day as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened—though Lil suspected none of them had seen anything so interesting in their lives, especially not right here in the boring old town of Duck Falls, Maryland.

  Nothing to be afraid of, she thought. Just a house—a big, ugly old house.

  She thought of the shadow she'd seen in the hall, but she quickly pushed the image away. What good would playing that game do, besides creeping herself out for no reason?

  "Well, why don't you go outside?" Ben suggested. To look at the house, he meant.

  "Headset," she said. "Duh." But it was really just an excuse. She didn't want to be anywhere near that house, haunted or not. And she hoped wherever it was going was very far away from here.

  From high on the Duck Bill, Ben could still see the vaguely familiar old house continue through town. He thought it might be heading toward the old fairgrounds, but he supposed it could be headed for Burt Bucklebee's farm. The real estate company Ben's mom worked for had brokered the deal between Bucklebee and some billion-dollar conglomerate called the Hedgewood Foundation. But that land had been rezoned a few years ago for a theme park, so Ben didn't think it would be going there.

  Lil said, "Where do you think it came from?"

  "No idea." All he knew for sure was that it wasn't from anywhere around Duck Falls. Having been dragged along on several house tours with his mom, he recognized the style as Victorian, which meant it was at least a hundred years old, possibly more. Older than the Laramie's house by at least fifty years. Even their hometown—often called "Duck Farts" by local wiseasses like the two of them—wasn't as old as the house now rolling away from the main drag. Duck Falls had been founded in 1919.

  "What d'you think they're gonna do with it?" Lil asked after some time.

  "Looks like they're moving it somewhere."

  "Well no shit, Sherlock."

  Slightly aggravated, Ben said, "Somebody probably bought it, now they're moving it to their property. My mom says they do that sometimes when the government or some company owns the land the house is on."

  "Huh," Lil said. "Well, I guess she oughta know."

  "Yup. It's called expropriation. I heard they flooded this one town in Canada for a dam, but you can still see the church steeple over the top of the lake, which I thought was pretty cool. Anyways, a lot of the houses got moved up the hill to make this new town…"

  He trailed off, only talking to fill in the silence. As the house vanished behind First Methodist, leaving only its peaks visible above the steeple, he'd grown acutely aware of being alone in his own home. Even though it hadn't scared him for many years, the thought troubled him now. And when the house reemerged from behind the church, movement in a second-floor window caught his eye. The focus shifted, blurring what he thought he'd seen before his mind could thoroughly process it.

  The hairs on his forearms were stiff as bristles. Horripilation, he thought.

  He twisted the focus wheel, desperate to keep the retreating house in sight, assuring himself there was nothing to be afraid of: it was a strange lamp, a misplaced coat rack, a storefront mannequin—anything other than what he thought he'd seen.

  Because what he thought was impossible.

  Once he'd managed to get the binoculars focused again, the man he'd seen in the window was no longer there. The dirty lace curtains fluttered, but the motion of the house or a light breeze blowing in the opened windows could have easily caused it.

  As he thought this, the man stepped back into the window, menacing dark eyes staring directly at him with telescopic accuracy. It was impossible for the man to see him with the distance between them, Ben knew that. But the thought of it startled him enough to drop the binoculars. While he fumbled with them, hung from the strap around his neck, he heard Lil planning their route through Infinite Zombie's abandoned hospital level, as if she'd already forgotten about the actual haunted house that had just rolled past her apartment.

  He settled the binoculars against the bridge of his nose, and found the man still in the window, still staring at him. Dressed in a button-down gray cardigan, he had wild dark hair, a thin mustache above red lips, and heavy bags under his piercing brown eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept in decades.

  Ben knew it couldn't be him. It wasn't possible.

  But he had to be sure.

  Reluctantly, he set the binoculars down and grabbed the book he'd been reading off his bedside table. In that glossy red horror font particular to late-'70s and early '80s horror novels was the title, THE HOUSE FEEDS. Beneath was a haunted house very similar to the one in the street, although this had been painted in the classic '80s "horror boom" style with exaggerated features. Under the author's name was the tagline: A novel of skin-prickling terror, soon to be a major motion picture!

  Heart drumming disconcertingly fast, Ben flipped the book over.

  The man from the window stared out from the back cover in stark black and white. It was Rex Garrote—impossible and yet undoubtable—the writer People magazine had once called "the Most Terrifying Man in the World." The author of multiple best-selling horror novels, and creator and host of the short-lived TV
series, Rex Garrote's Ghost World. Ben owned every single one of Garrote's books, all the comics, even a handful of screenplays.

  But it couldn't possibly be Rex Garrote because for almost two decades Rex Garrote had been—

  "Dead," Ben croaked.

  "What?"

  "I think…" He trailed off again. Forming the words had become difficult, and his tongue felt fat in his mouth, his speech slurring. "I think I saw…"

  "What, Ben?"

  He shook his head to clear the fog from his brain. Blood pounded thickly in his ears and his chest felt tight, as if a heavy weight were pressing on his ribs. His reflection on the television screen wavered and his bedroom grew dim. It seemed as though night had fallen outside but it was only three in the afternoon.

  "What?" Lil asked. Her voice was far away, coming to him from the end of a long, dark tunnel, flashing warning red to the rapid beat of his heart. "Saw what, Ben?"

  He staggered back, blindly reaching for his desk, for a chair to collapse in, for something to potentially break his fall and maintain his fragile hold on reality as a single unbearable thought seared through his mind:

  Ghosts are real.

  The headset slipped off his ears and dropped to the carpet. His clutching fingers missed the desk and he fell against the chair, toppling it.

  Lil called out his name as he sprawled on the rug beside his fallen headset. Her voice sounded small and tinny in his thudding ears. His vision had shrunk to pinpricks. He thought, I'm dying, I'm dying and I never got to tell her—

  In the Roths's apartment, the words SECOND PLAYER HAS DISCONNECTED dripped blood-red down the screen. By the time the zombies had torn her character to shreds, Ben Laramie's heart had disconnected too.

  PART 1

  TOURISTS OF THE DEAD

  Ghostland features hundreds of exhibits and objects haunted by many types of spectral beings (see Index). Each ghost is made visible using a combination of state-of-the-art Augmented Reality and breakthrough Recurrence Field™ technology. Entire buildings have been disassembled and reconstructed here, alongside the most haunted house in America: Garrote House.