Dark Ride (30 page)

Chapter 112

Rung by rung, Jack ascends the ladder with the others below him. He encounters a small wooden door that easily flips upward and reveals a new tunnel. Jack lifts himself up onto a wooden floor and glances around at the new path. To his right is a clay wall, and to his left is a long tunnel lit by several torches evenly spaced along the hall. It is an intimidating sight. Shadows flicker along the walls, which cause the room to feel alive and foreboding. He realizes they will have to walk down that path.

“Come on up,” Jack calls to the others.

Instantly, Amy's head pops up.

“The others are right behind.”

As Scotty enters the tunnel, he remarks, “This is the vault?”

Mason is the last up the ladder.

Jack asserts, “I'm going to assume that the vault is at the end of this path. I can't really see that far, but I'm guessing there will be a set of doors down there.”

“Good, then we can get a hold of that treasure,” Mason adds.

“More importantly, we can get out,” Amy responds.

“But we still don't have the keys,” Scotty notes.

Jack says, “We will cross that bridge when we get there. For now, let's just get down there and see what's ahead.”

Jack takes the first step forward. There is no need for the flashlight with the torches lighting up the tunnel. It's a slow walk. Occasionally, a harmless bat flies from the dark ceiling and zooms down the hall. Due to all they've experienced so far, these bats, which at one time would have inspired a feeling of mutual panic, especially in Amy, do not even cause a shudder amongst the four hardened teens.

Soon, the group is able to make out a large door at the end of the hall. It's solid with no handle, and Jack can see writing etched into the wall just above the frame.

He says, “Look at that,” and points this out to the others.

All four look at the writing, and Scotty begins to read the obviously ancient script:

“Four will enter the wood one day
With one chance to free all along their way.
All those trapped in their place can be freed,
A thief, wanderer, apprentice and tailor indeed.
The four must overcome on their own,
For this path they cannot be shown.
During their journey they will collect the keys,
Only the four, to enter as they please.”

Scotty pauses then declares, “I think Jack is right.”Defensively, Mason answers, “About what? It sounds like another bunch of the narrator's gobbledigook to me.”

“We are the four,” Scotty affirms. “The thief, the wanderer, the apprentice, and the tailor.”

“Oh great, now you're going to go all narrator-crazy on me, too?” Mason whines.

“No, I am just saying that maybe there is some merit in these rhymes after all,” Scotty carefully answers.

Jack grins in justification, but his enjoyment is cut short because Amy questions, “So who is who? Who's the thief?” giving another disapproving glare at Mason.

Jack's heart sinks, and he tells himself,
Oh man, I'm in trouble.
He decides to change the line of discussion and asks, “But what about the keys?”

“It said we would have them,” Scotty confidently declares.

Jack looks at Amy, who is still surveying everyone else, trying to determine the identities of the four.

“What if the keys are like a mental thing? It never said what kind of keys they are,” Scotty thinks aloud.

“Well if the treasure is behind the door and we have the keys, then let's just shove the thing open,” Mason states.

He marches up to the door and pushes on it, but the door does not budge. However, at that very moment, the sound of stone grinding against stone rumbles to the right of the door, and a small chevron-shaped opening appears at the place in the wall where the sound was coming from.

“What is that?” Mason asks.

All four approach the indentation to observe it more closely. The opening is small.

“Mason!” Scotty hollers.

“Geez, Carnahan, I am right beside you!”

“Oh, sorry, Mason. Listen, you are the one who pushed on the door.”

“So?”

“Look at the shape, it's like a chevron.”

“A what?” Mason asks.

“A chevron is like, never mind. It's the shape of something you have, just look.”

“The badge!” Mason yells, matching the previous volume of his friend.

Hurriedly, he pulls out the badge and places it into the groove. It's a perfect fit, but nothing changes.

“Now what,” Mason, who's a little dejected, asks.

“I don't know,” Scotty says. “I just assumed something would happen.” He pushes his sliding glasses back up his nose.

They take a few seconds to consider the question before them. Then Jack breaks the silence by saying, “Keys—get it! Keys plural—not key. Amy, touch the door.”

She gives Jack a quizzical look, but shrugs and walks over to the door. As soon as her hands touch it, the same stone lurching sound begins but to the left of the door this time. Then a long narrow indention appears in the rock.

“The stick, Amy, it's the stick! We do have the keys!” Scotty exclaims.

Amy places her stick into the space. It's another perfect fit.

Jack says, “It's just like the Douglas Finch thing said.”

At this point, a sudden thought disturbs him and keeps him from saying another word. He has just vindicated Mason. Jack wonders if he had put his faith in the wrong thing after all.This realization disturbs him. In his mind, he remembers the statement“Keys will cry out to you” and realizes that each of them had instinctively grabbed something from the ride. Jack thinks,
Perhaps the narrator was wrong.

“More proof, guys. The Finch stuff is legit,” Mason crows.

“Okay, my turn,” a confident Scotty declares. He touches the door, and another shape appears in the wall, this time just to the left of the badge. The shape is clearly the formation of a pair of scissors.

“Just as I suspected,” says Scotty. “After all, I am the tailor's apprentice. Your turn, Jack.”

Jack knows what his key is and knows that he must reveal it, but he's concerned that doing so will disappoint Amy. He touches the wall slowly while looking warily at the girl, praying that she will not figure out that he's the thief. He gulps, and a gap appears in the wall.

Jack reaches slowly into his backpack, and then he hesitates and says, “Uh, Amy, why don't you and Mason look for a…uh….”

Amy's face shows that she will not take the bait for what Jack is obviously intending to be a distraction.

“Oh, never mind,” says Jack.

He searches his pockets for something else, hoping against hope that perhaps something else could be the key besides the goose. Then he has another idea:
What if I place my entire backpack into the hole?
He shapes the pack around its articles and places it into the crevice, but nothing happens.
Who am I kidding?
Jack thinks.

He resigns himself to the fact that the gig is up and opens the backpack. Slowly, he removes the goose for all to see. Immediately he looks at Amy, who is staring at him in disapproval.

Chapter 113

Amy is stunned. She thinks,
Of all the people who might've stolen that goose…. How could it be Jack? But it is. When could he have taken it, though?

Her mind is racing, and she asks, “Jack? You'e the thief?” Her surprise is obvious to all.

“But, Amy, we all took something from the ride. Mason took the badge, Scotty took the scissors, and you took the stick. This is what we were supposed to do,” Jack tries to reason.

“I took the stick because I was alone and scared. Are you saying you took the goose ‘cause you were scared, Jack?”

“No.”

“I would expect this from Mason, but I thought you were better than that.”

The whole night begins to clear up in front of her eyes.

She says, “Wait a minute. You left me in the train so you could steal the goose, didn't you?”

Jack doesn't answer, but his body language says all she needs to know.

“So all this time, I thought it was Mason's fault that you abandoned me, but it wasn't. It was yours.”

“Lighten up, Amy. It's clear that—”

“Mason, stop talking, or I'm gonna retrieve my stick and swing for the fences, you get it?”

Mason returns to his more recent sheepish self and only nods.

Now the venom is filling Amy, and she turns all her wrath, all her anger, and all her frustration that have been building up throughout the night at Jack.

She says, “Listen here, Jack, you had me fooled. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. You tried to pass yourself off as some knight in shining armor,
but I see through that now. You're really just a thief. A thief who has risked all of our lives just to steal some dime store goose. Jack, we've nearly been killed time and time again all because of that, that thing.”

Amy pauses a second catching her breath and then with misty eyes, she delivers the final blow. “And there I was thinking that something was happening between us. Was that all a game, too?”

Furious and unrelenting, Amy reaches out and snatches the goose from the startled hands of Jack.

Jack is speechless and motionless as Amy shoves the goose into the opening.

At once a clicking sound emits from the door, and the large barrier creaks open.

For their part, Scotty and Mason are dumbfounded at the outburst. Neither of them grasps the full weight of what is happening between Amy and Jack.

A few more silent seconds pass before Mason shakes off his bewilderment. He rubs his hands together and heads for the newly opened door, saying, “Golden treasure, here we come.”

The four keys fall to the floor, and Mason greedily retrieves his badge while Scotty snags the scissors. Amy watches Jack to see if he will actually pick up the goose again. She wonders if he could possibly be that selfish.

Jack looks at Amy, and their eyes meet. It is as if he is trying to apologize for what he is about to do. Calmly, he turns his gaze away, takes a short step, bends down, and picks up the goose.

The thief can't let his treasure go
, thinks Jack.

Amy sighs and picks up the stick.

Mason moves through the door first, and Scotty follows close behind.

Amy looks at Jack and tries to penetrate his heart with a deadeye glare. Jack shrugs, and she turns to face the door. The vault, the destination they have been seeking, is before them.

Chapter 114

Things with Amy have taken a horrible turn for the worse for Jack. His brain is quivering with the realization that he has just blown his chance. Up to this point, all he wanted was to be near her. He had focused so much on the “thing” that was going on between them that the hardships they had mutually faced had been regarded by Jack as simply a shared
experience, the most bizarre first date of all time. But now, the wanderlust for the prop, and the revelation of his theft, have left things broken. In Jack's mind, after seeing the morbid face of Amy, things feel irreparable.

He thinks,
Why is she so mad?
He wants to blame her, to explain it all away, thinking,
She's the one who's taking this way out of context.
But the fact is that Amy had put it together that he had actually been the reason they were all in this mess. Jack considers that this new revelation would almost certainly trump all the hand-holding and flirting of the past few hours. Even though the door to the vault hangs open, it does little to make Jack feel one bit better. In spite of the victory of reaching their goal, he can take no joy in it. He thinks,
It's my fault we are here. She is right.

Amy walks past him without giving him the slightest acknowledgement. Then Jack puts the goose back into his backpack and drearily follows the others into the next room. After taking three steps through the door, Jack halts quickly. The others are standing with their backs to him, simply gazing around the room.

“Would you look at this place,” Scotty admires.

“I don't see any treasure,” Mason remarks. “Looks like nerd heaven.”

What Mason is referring to is evident to Jack immediately. The room is circular, and rows and rows of shelves circle the room from the floor to the very high ceiling, roughly some 30 feet above their heads. Each of the shelves is stacked with books. He surmises that there must be hundreds of thousands of books.

“Some vault this turned out to be,” a dejected Mason broods. “What are we supposed to get here? Aren't we supposed to get some treasure outta here and take it to the gingerbread house?”

“That's what we guessed, Mason,” Amy adds. “I think we guessed wrong.”

Just hearing Amy's voice makes Jack rub his temple in memory of how their relationship had gone bad so quickly. He wonders,
What can I say? What do I do?
He contemplates initiating an attempt at recompense with the girl, but before he has time to do so, he's interrupted by the sound of a man clearing his throat.

A voice utters, “And so they came to see the man, who tried reveal to them a plan.”

Spinning quickly away from the shelf-covered walls and toward the center of the room where the voice came from, Jack spots a desk he did not notice before. He thinks,
That voice…it's so familiar.
The man at the desk is sitting in a large black chair with his back toward them. Then, slowly, the chair turns to face them.

All four have the same jaw-dropping reaction. There seated before them, living and breathing, is the narrator.

Chapter 115

Jack is hit by a mixture of confusion and, at the same time, comfort. He realizes that this is not a robot or a mannequin, or else, Jack thinks, if it is, itw's the coolest one ever. But, Jack has to believe this really is a man—
the
man, there before them all.

He can only manage to squeak out the words, “What? How?”

“Greetings, travelers.”

Just like his plastic counterparts, the man's head is covered in a white tussle of hair, white facial hair adorns his chin and carpets his upper lip, and a wrinkled white suit clings to his barrel-like chest. Jack thinks these characteristics make him look like Mark Twain.

The man says, “So I see the time has come after all these years.”

Mason is the first to put together a sensible question and asks, “Who are you?” with a hint of confrontation in his voice.

“Me? Well, I guess you can call me Sam. Some of the employees here in the ride have taken to calling me that. They think I look like this Samuel fellow.”

Jack waits for the man to continue, to tell them something else and ease the confusion each of them is experiencing, but the man does not continue. He simply fiddles with a pencil on his desk and stares flippantly at the teens.

“Uh, Mr. Narrator, uh, Sam,” Jack asks sheepishly, “Could you tell us where we are?”

“Lost, a little lost.”

“Yes, we know that. How do we get out? That's all we want,” Jack explains.

“Yes, my young friend, that is what they all want.”

“Who do you mean by ‘they'?” Scotty asks.

“Why everyone—everyone here at least.”

“So, do you know how to get out?” Mason inquires, his voice now tinged with frustration.

“The manner of your leaving, my dear tailor, is up to you. You determine the outcome of this story.”

The man winks at them and continues to fiddle with his pencil.

Jack has heard this before. Just like in the rhymes throughout the ride, this narrator, this Mr. Sam, is telling them to finish the story.

Jack asks the man, “So we're supposed to finish the story, just like you said, I mean those models of you said?”

“Exactly.”

Jack feels a sense of vindication and continues, “So you've been trying to tell us what to do, right? Giving us hints along the way?”

“You could say that.”

Mason quickly asks, “So I am the tailor, right? And Jack, here, is the thief?”

Jack winces at the proclamation.

“Amy is the wanderer, and Scotty is the apprentice?” Mason adds.

“That is correct,” The man affirms.

“So, what does that mean?” Mason asks.

“These are simply the roles you are playing,” Sam answers.

Amy says, “Look, I don't care who is playing who. I just want to get out of this place and go home. Can you help us or not?”

Jack is a little startled by the tone of her voice.

“My dear girl, like I said, it is all up to you.”

At this point even Jack is growing weary of the cryptic responses. He attempts to change course and asks, “So, Mr. Sam, what are the books for?”

“To record stories, of course. I am the keeper of stories. I protect them here in my library—a vast treasure.”

“Whose stories, exactly?” Amy asks.

“Like I said, everyone here,” the narrator replies.

Scotty nods and says, “I get it; this is The Vault.”

Jack begins to connect some dots in his own head and asks, “By ‘everyone,'you mean these books are the stories of everyone who has entered the ride?”

“Anyone who enters the woods has their story written here,” Sam states.

It is becoming clearer, at least to Jack, and he rushes another question, “So you're saying my story is written here?”

“Your story is in a book,” Sam affirms.

Jack feels like he is on a roll but now decides to ask the question that has bothered him for much of the night.

He says, “Okay, I understand. So you were talking to us through those books, trying to help us get somewhere.” Jack gives a confident look to Mason and continues, “But we got to a point, and then there were these missing pages?”

“Yes, well, the answer is simple. Your story is not yet complete,” Sam says and grins.

Before Jack can ask another question, Mason bursts out, “Look, we are tired of the riddles and the games, the unfinished story garbage. Where is the gold? We need to get the gold.”

The man rises to his feet, still smiling. He sets the pencil down on the desk and walks by them. Stopping beside the door, he remarks, “Ah, so you seek the gold. Well, I cannot help you. It is for you to choose the path you take. Thus far, you have chosen to ignore my words. Jack, I have told you all along you must finish the story, you must make things right. That is all I can say.”

With that, the mysterious Sam leaves.

Jack is angry at Mason's impetuousness and wonders,
Did he drive the narrator away?
He has so many questions, and he calls out, “Wait! Sam! What do you mean make things right?”

Instead of answering, though, the man walks into the tunnel and disappears into the dark.

Jack rushes to follow him; however, it seems to him that the man has vanished into thin air.

“Mason, you made him leave!” Jack cries back at the others. “He was here in the flesh. He could have helped us.”

Mason leads the others into the hall and responds, “He was not telling us anything. He was just giving us more riddles. We want to know how to get out, not play games. All he told us was what we already knew. What did he tell us that will help one bit?”

Jack looks to Scotty for support, but he shrugs in agreement with Mason. Then he looks to Amy. However, she does not look his way.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, Mason adds, “Yeah, listen to your narrator. Some help.”

Jack is crushed.