Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

  Ben nodded, exhaling sharply through his nose. "I'm tired too," he said. He looked at his watch. "We can wait. Let's say half an hour. If help doesn't show up before then, promise you won't fight me on this."

  She made to reply but another blur streaked across the glass, catching her eye. This time it was green. "Oh my God," she said. The chair spun as she stood abruptly. "It's orbs!"

  "Huh?"

  "Orbs, Ben. They're inside the prison!"

  He looked out the window. "I don't see anything."

  "I just saw two of them float past the win—" She stopped, realizing what she'd implied. If orbs had gotten inside, it couldn't be as safe as Demont had promised. It might not even be safe at all. And she'd just proved Ben right.

  So much for that break, she thought.

  He stood and peered out the window. "Lil, if there are orbs in here—"

  "I know, I know!"

  Scowling, Ben moved to the closest security camera and pressed the power button. The screen remained dark. It didn't even make that high-pitched whine old TVs did when you flicked them on. "It's not working."

  "Maybe it's not plugged in."

  He moved to the next one and pressed the button. "There's no power up here. Didn't Demont say he was watching us on the security cameras?"

  Lilian frowned. "I don't remember. Why does that matter?"

  "Because if he—"

  The door opened before Ben could finish, and he closed his mouth abruptly.

  "Okay, at a guess that gas should hold us for at least a few hours," Demont said. He frowned and looked back and forth between the two of them. "Did I walk in on something private?"

  "Nope," Lilian said too quickly, feeling suddenly anxious.

  Because she thought she understood what Ben had been trying to say. If the security cameras weren't running Demont couldn't have been watching them. So how had he known to warn them about the door just as Ben had reached out to touch it? How had he guided them every step of the way? It wasn't possible to see through the entryway from up here without the monitors working. Beyond the inner door all she'd been able to see was about three feet of green linoleum.

  Demont narrowed his eyes. "So… what have you guys decided? Do we stay or do we go?"

  She had to think fast. If Demont knew about the orbs, then he knew the prison wasn't as safe as he'd made it out to be. Which meant he'd lured them with false promises. But why? His intent had never been to stay here. Almost as soon as they'd gotten here, he'd started in with talk about the hatch under Garrote House. Whatever the reason, she couldn't help but feel like they had been led into a trap.

  A cold trickle of sweat dripped from her underarm within the keeper suit. As she started to unzip it, feeling suddenly smothered and much too hot, she remembered how Demont had shied away from her when she'd picked it up, looking at it the way an arachnophobe viewed a spider.

  Is it possible? she wondered. She couldn't risk removing her glasses, not without alerting him to her hunch. She'd just have to figure out how to get close to Demont without him noticing. She wouldn't feel safe until she was sure she could trust him.

  Ben had asked Demont about the monitors.

  "That's odd," Demont said, going to his side. "They were working a few minutes ago."

  "You had power up here?"

  "Must have been on the backup generator. Maybe it's on a timer or something, routing power through the exhibits."

  Ben frowned, seemingly skeptical. Demont's back was turned and Lilian cautiously began her approach. He glanced back and she stopped in her tracks. He saw her and took a single step back, without expression.

  It's not gonna work, she thought. She had to distract him. But how?

  "I saw an orb," she said, thinking fast. "Two of them, actually."

  "They must've gotten in somehow," Ben said, standing on his toes to look out the window again.

  "That's not possible."

  Ben pointed. "Look, there's one!"

  "Ben." Demont glowered at him without even bothering to glance out the window, and sat back down in the chair. "They couldn't have gotten through the barrier. It's one-hundred percent ghost-proof."

  "What about the ceiling?" Lilian asked. "It's glass."

  "Right, the glass ceiling," he said, rolling his eyes. "Even if you did see an orb, they're harmless."

  "We saw one possess a chocolate bar wrapper," Ben said. "It floated for like three feet."

  "Ooh, the Case of the Haunted Snickers. That'll sure stump Scooby and the Gang." Demont looked at him over his tented fingers resting against his nose. "Ben, I don't know a ton about the science behind this stuff, but in my experience, orbs don't act like poltergeists. They're the butterflies of the ghost world. All they do is float around and look pretty."

  Lilian said, "I don't know if they're harmless but there's at least two of them inside here and we've seen those things swarm. Haven't we, Ben?"

  "Swarm?" Demont chuckled derisively. "Lilian, I would have seen something—"

  She jabbed a finger toward the glass. "Just look out the goddamn window!"

  Ben flinched, her voice surprisingly loud in the small domed room. Sighing, Demont rose from the chair and crossed to the window.

  Ben gave her a curious look as she crept up behind Demont while Demont peered out for half a second. "I don't see any—"

  He was already beginning to turn when she touched his arm with the silver glove.

  The reaction was instantaneous. Her fingertips began to crackle with electricity as the flesh of Demont's elbow peeled back like singed paper. His eyes went wide and he let out an agonized howl. She half-expected him to shove her away, which would make his pain much, much worse. But he was smarter than that. He kicked the chair closest to him directly into her knees. She felt the scabs split open beneath the fabric of her jeans and staggered back in pain.

  But the damage was done, Demont's secret revealed. He was dead. All this time, they'd been interacting with his ghost. Which meant they had never been safe here from the beginning.

  "Stay back," Ben said, aiming the stun gun as Demont scrambled back onto the counter and shrank against the glass.

  "Wait!" He held up his hands. "I can explain!"

  "You'd better!" Lilian said, holding out her hands within the shiny silver suit like a wizard.

  "Just please," Demont gasped, "don't hit me with that… thing." He nodded toward the stun gun. "Okay?"

  "Then don't move," Ben countered.

  The ghost groaned, grasping his elbow. Already the skin was recreating itself, knitting together until his elbow appeared solid again. "Guys, it was just an accident. I swear to God. I was setting up the perimeter, I'd just gotten the last wire in place and turned on the juice and bam, fifteen-thousand volts shot right through me. One second, I was on the ground in the worst pain of my life and the next, I was floating above myself. Like an out of body experience. Only when I tried going back my body wasn't having me." He shrugged, as if the idea that he'd just died meant nothing. "So I just dragged it out of sight," he said. "By then, you guys were already on your way here. It wasn't like I could call you back and tell you not to bother."

  "You need us to help you escape," Ben said, giving Lilian a fearful look. "Don't you? You can't open the hatch yourself. The electricity would fry you, like the keeper suit just did."

  The ghost nodded solemnly. "Because Garrote is coming. We can feel it. As soon as that generator runs out of gas, him and his minions will get inside and I won't be Demont Hudson anymore. I'll just be part of his army. His hivemind. Just another ghost for his collection."

  "But you're safe here, why would you want to—?"

  "Because there's more of us, Ben," Demont interrupted. "We've been hiding here since it all went down." He directed their attention toward the window. "Just look."

  Demont shied away again as Lilian sidled past him to the window. He put two fingers between his lips and whistled, and within moments the area below filled with ghosts, materializing out of th
in air. There had to be dozens of them, all looking up at the control tower windows.

  "Holy shit!" Ben said.

  Lilian thought it was an understatement.

  "Don't worry," Demont told them. "They won't hurt you."

  "How did they get in here?" Ben asked.

  "They were here the whole time, hiding from him. I just hadn't seen them. I was too busy running around, trying to play the hero. But my plan worked. You can see that. Nothing is getting in here so long as that generator keeps running. We just can't get out."

  Ben looked down at the ghosts crowding the Circle of Death. All eyes were focused on the three of them in the tower, although he wondered if they were able to see through the tinted glass. Still, his heart thumped heavily, fear pumping adrenaline through his veins. His medication had worn off. If things got worse—if the ghosts rushed the tower or the generator ran out of gas and Garrote and his army broke in—he'd need to take another pill. He'd never taken more than the recommended dose before and wasn't sure what the side effects might be.

  Breathe, Ben, he told himself. Just breathe. In and out. Don't hyperventilate.

  "So why do you need us?" Lilian asked.

  "Like Ben said, as spirits we can't interact with anything electrical without experiencing… technical difficulties, let's say. My guess is that it's part of the coding, so the electrostatic precipitators will function as barriers. It certainly doesn't work like that out in the real world. The only barriers out there are of our own making. Psychological barriers, binding souls to objects and places until we're able to move beyond those barriers, beyond the physical plane."

  "But you're not like the rest of them." Lilian nodded toward the window. "You weren't part of the Ghostland program. So why should the electrostatic effect you?"

  The ghost shrugged. "The program is still running, still detecting dead energy. That's how it works, I guess. The second my soul—spirit, dead energy, whatever you want to call it—the moment I left my body a new algorithm must have been added to the code. That's all I can figure. I can do just about anything I could before and then some. Like move things without touching them. And I can walk through walls." He smiled briefly. "Being dead does have its advantages."

  Ben wasn't convinced. Something didn't quite gel with Demont's story and what Sara Jane had said about the Ghostland program. He just couldn't put his finger on it. "If we help you escape," he said, "what's to stop your friends from killing us the second we get you out of here?"

  Demont let out a sharp laugh. "Them? They're harmless. We just want to leave this place and never come back. Move on to whatever comes next. You know I never fully understood the implications of what that evil woman created here until I met these people. Ghostland is a modern-day plantation. Think about it. These poor souls are all prisoners here. They perform tasks for zero compensation. They're tortured—"

  Lilian frowned. "How do you mean, tortured?"

  Demont gave her a hard look and spat out his reply. "That 'Recurrence Field' forced them to relive their deaths over and over, for entertainment. If that's not torture, I don't know what is. Everything that woman did to us—to them—that's the definition of slavery."

  Us, Ben thought. Demont was already acting as if he was one of them. He'd sure changed his opinion about Ghostland since their ride from Guest Services to the control room. Maybe death had made his thoughts erratic. Ben could certainly sympathize. Death—even the near-death he'd experienced himself—changed everything. It could awaken things in people they never could have comprehended or even dreamed of before.

  Lilian seemed to have arrived at the same decision, giving him a slightly troubled nod.

  "Okay," he said, turning to Demont. "Let's get out of here."

  Lilian had made Demont promise he would keep the other ghosts a safe distance from them before they set foot outside of the guard tower, but she still felt a tremor of fear as they headed down to the Circle of Death. The eyes looking up at them seemed so haunted. She saw sorrow, pain, confusion. But unless she was reading it wrong, she also saw a glimmer of hope.

  Lilian counted heads. There were twenty-three in all, including Demont. She spotted a circus clown with much of his flesh burned off, alongside two Victorian street urchins. Behind them stood ghosts she hadn't seen before, or at least didn't remember. There was a pirate whose skin had gone grey and bloated, draped in lengths of seaweed that moved like snakes over his dripping garments, and a Civil War soldier who kept absently slopping the bloody loops of his intestines back into his abdomen. Beside them was a Chinese man wearing a newsie cap and suspenders to hold up his loose denim pants. His body had been flattened at the shins and chest as if by a vehicle, stretching him taller than the rest by at least a foot. To their left, a football player held his head in a helmet under his right arm. To their right, a ballerina stood en pointe. Her heart had been carved roughly out of her chest, leaving an open cavity, and blood stained the ruffles of her pink tutu. At her feet a golden retriever with bare patches of mange in its fur panted and foamed at the mouth.

  There were others, many others, and Demont smiled and spread his arms wide to this diverse group as he reached the floor. "My people!" he said. "We are getting out of here!"

  The ghosts broke into applause, cheers and whistles. The dog wagged his tail happily. Despite her fear, Lilian smiled. These restless spirits would finally find freedom. It was an exhilarating moment to be part of, ghosts or not.

  "Step back, please, step back," Demont said, parting the crowd. They were already backing away from Lilian as Demont led them through, eyeing her with a mix of fear and fascination, obviously aware of what the keeper suit could do if they got too close. She supposed some of them might have suffered at the hands of a keeper before the fall of Ghostland, and she was struck with a twinge of guilt even though it hadn't been her decision to wear it, and it had only been for her protection. At her side, Ben was acting like a reluctant celebrity, greeting and nodding at ghosts as he passed, not afraid in the least.

  "One of you will have to shut off the generator," Demont said as they approached it. "Much as the idea of that troubles me. Once it's off, the two of you run like the wind down that wing there for the back exit." He pointed to a barred archway. There were signs on either side of the tunnel but Lilian couldn't read them from the distance. "We'll protect you as best we can if Garrote and the others get in before we get out," he said.

  Nods among the crowd greeted this.

  Ben raised a hand. "I'll turn it off."

  "We have ourselves a volunteer." Demont ushered him toward the rumbling machine. Lilian followed until Ben stopped suddenly and turned to face the ghost.

  "Wait a minute, you didn't get shocked by the generator, did you?"

  "What?" Demont squinted, then shook his head. "No. It was the bars. It was an accident, like I said."

  The dog barked behind Lilian. She almost jumped out of her skin.

  "Be quiet, Freddie," Demont said.

  "But why did you touch the bars after—"

  "Ben. Do you wanna argue all day or are we gonna get out of this goddamn place?"

  Ben shrugged. He approached the generator.

  "You see that key?" Demont asked. "All you have to do is turn it counterclockwise."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it."

  Ben reached for it. "Here goes nothing," he said. He looked back over his shoulder at Lilian, who nodded for him to proceed.

  Then he turned the key.

  PRISON BREAK

  THE ASSAULT BEGAN as soon as the generator stopped rumbling and the hum of electricity faded to nothing. The glass dome shattered and dozens of orbs led an army of soul-suckers down through the opening. The ghosts below scattered in the rain of glass, some vanishing, others floating away. Unable to do either, Ben dashed for the barred archway Demont had pointed out. It wasn't until he got halfway there that he could read the signs on either side: EAST BLOCK CONDEMNED ROW II.

  Under normal circumstances it
would be a place to run away from, not toward, and seeing this was where Demont had directed them didn't exactly inspire confidence. But with their sanctuary compromised, there was little choice. He ran ahead, glancing back to see that Lilian was following him. The dog dashed past him and headed right through the bars, barking down the darkened tunnel until he vanished. The ballerina leaped and leaped from toe to toe, her form so perfect Ben was surprised she didn't twirl.

  Lilian cried, "Watch out!"

  Something shot toward him out of a darkened cell. He ducked, and the rusted metal panel whipped over his head. His backpack jerked roughly into the air, tugging on his shoulders hard enough to pull his feet off the ground.

  He hurled the backpack off his shoulder as it began to unzip itself, the flap falling open like a tongue and its orb-possessed contents floating out: a crumpled granola bar wrapper, carefully folded tissues that bloomed and shaped themselves into origami, the water bottle, his pills, his Rex Garrote paperback, the pages flapping like an angry bird—

  The lighter fluid!

  A soul-sucker landed on the dirty Victorian boy to the right of him. The boy struggled as the creature's black tendrils looped around his slender wrists, screaming soundlessly as it sucked his soot-streaked face into its darkness, like matter drawn into a black hole.

  Ben wanted to help but he knew he'd lose his backpack if he let go of it now. He thrust a hand in up to his elbow and unzipped the secret pocket, while the cover flapped against his arm like a chewing mouth and its contents battered his arms and torso. He managed to snatch the can and matches and tucked them swiftly into his pocket, hoping they hadn't already been possessed—but as he did, he saw his pills had floated out of his reach.