Full Tilt (10 page)

Carl put his hand on my shoulder. “Keep your wits about you, boy.”

“You can’t really be here, right? You’re just some figment of my imagination. Just a part of the ride, right?
Right?”

He just ignored me, looking out to sea for a sign of the whale. “I struck my first whale as a boy harpooner of eighteen. But this one here is the great prize, and beyond her there will be no other. Will you help me, boy?”

“No! I mean, yes! I mean, I don’t know!”

The bow crashed down again, and as we rose and crested the next swell I saw a reef off the starboard bow—jagged granite rocks that thrust up through the churning sea like teeth. I could see bits and pieces of other ships in the crevices of the stone monoliths.

“Follow her into the reef!” shouted mad Captain Carl. A sailor at the helm wildly spun the tiller, and the ship turned toward the rocks.

Up above me the riders still wailed with joy as they swung from the ratlines. One of those voices sounded familiar. It was a shrill whoop that I’d heard so many times, I could place it a mile away. I looked up. In a flash of lightning across the mottled yellow sky, I saw Quinn clinging to the highest of the ratlines, right beneath the crow’s nest. He screamed in defiance of the crashing waves, daring them to shake him loose.

Fighting the violent pitching of the ship, I climbed the ratlines toward him. I was almost thrown from the ropes, but I held on with what little strength my fingers had left, until I finally reached him high up where the ratlines met the mast.

“Toward thee I roll,” the mad captain shouted at the whale with my mother’s eyes. “To the last, I grapple with thee!”

“Quinn!” I could barely hear my own voice over the thunder and wind. I was right next to him now, and still he didn’t know I was there. He just kept whooping as the boat pitched up and down, the motion intensified by the height of the mast. He was oblivious to Carl, our mother the whale, or anything else outside the rush of the ride.

“Quinn!”

Finally he turned to me, blinking like he had just come out of a trance. His eyes were wide and wet from the cold wind.
“Blake?
When did
you
get here?”

There was a deafening blast, and a surge of electricity
made my arm hairs tingle. A kid on the foremast had been struck by lightning. His smoking body tumbled limply, missing the deck and plunging into the sea. Then I caught sight of one of the passing spires of rock. Part of the stone seemed to melt away, forming a face. In fact, all over the reef, I could swear I saw giant faces in the stone, the wailing mouths and hopeless eyes of those whose lives were given to the ride.

Lightning sparked in the sky again as I realized we were clinging to the highest point of the boat. Then I looked at Quinn’s moronically metallic face. Dangling chains and rings—all perfect electrical conductors.

“You’re a lightning rod! You’ve got to get down from here!”

“No way!” He returned his gaze forward. “I’m not letting you spoil this! It’s the best ride yet!”

With Quinn, action always speaks louder than words, so I tugged him from the rope net, and we both fell, rolling down the rough ratlines, bouncing painfully off the boom, and landing hard on the deck.

“This ship’s going down!” I told him, ignoring my aches from the fall.

“How do
you
know? You don’t know everything.”

“I know the story. One way or another, this ship is going down.” I looked around for something—anything that would give us an out. Then I caught sight of a strange, unearthly light escaping around the edges of a closed hatch. I knelt down and pulled at the hatch with all my strength. Finally it popped open.

The light within was too bright. My eyes fought to
adjust, and for an instant I got the briefest glimpse of bright chrome gears turning. They were pieces of some colossal gear-work that couldn’t possibly fit in the hold of a ship. This hatch was a doorway to another place entirely!

The Works,
I thought.
It must be The Works!

Beyond that hatch was the mechanism that ran every ride. But before I could get a better look, crazy Captain Carl slammed it shut with his foot.

“Nobody goes below!”

Just then the whale breached right beside the ship.

“Was that a whale?” Quinn asked, clueless as ever. “What’s up with
that?”

As the whale with my mother’s eyes came down, the force of its wake threw the ship against the rocks with a shattering of wood.

“Blast ye!” yelled that strange blending of Captain Ahab and my mother’s fiancé. He threw his fists to the sky. “The madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood, and the smoking brow!”

“That’s it, we’re outta here.” I pushed Quinn to the railing. “Jump. Now!”

“Are we gonna ride the whale? Is that part of the ride?”

“Just jump!” I practically hurled him over the side, and followed right behind. I hit the icy water. Then, for an instant, I felt something huge and rough brush right past me. I fought my way to the surface, breaking through into the noise of the storm.

Quinn sputtered beside me. He wasn’t as strong a
swimmer as I was, so I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t let me. He kicked me away and began swimming toward the rocks. I turned back to see the ship, twenty yards away now . . . and then a blue gray wall rose in front of me. The whale breached again, but this time it came down right on the ship. Riders were thrown from the ratlines. The ship cracked in half, and in a few moments both whale and ship were gone into the darkness of the churning sea.

A wave hurled me onto the rocks, where brand-new faces were appearing. I tried not to look directly at them; I was afraid I’d be too horrified to move if I did.

When I turned to look for Quinn, he was scrambling away over the rocks.

“No!” I grabbed him by his collar as we reached a wide plateau. I was so mad, I would have grabbed him by his nose ring if I could get my finger through it. “You’re not getting away from me again!”

“Why did you have to come?” he yelled. “You ruined everything! You made me miss the best part of the ride!”

“Best part? What, are you out of your mind? If you went down with that ship, you wouldn’t be coming back up.”

And then Quinn looked me dead in the eyes.
“Who says I wanted to?”

If my temper was a burning fuse, that pinched it right off. My head reeled from what he said. From what he
meant.

“Who says I want to do anything but finish the ride?”

I took a deep breath, and another, as I stared at him.
The sound of the ocean raged behind us, but right now I could hear only him. “What are you saying, Quinn?”

“You came here to save me from this place, didn’t you? But who said I want to be saved this time?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but all my words had been robbed from me. What could I say to him? What could I say to my brother, who came here not just for the thrills, but for something else? As much as I didn’t want to face it, I had to now. Somehow he knew where these rides would end. He knew that once he crossed through the gates, he wasn’t coming back. He knew, and still he had come.

“What’s out there for me, huh?” Quinn’s eyes flowed with tears, and those tears flowed with a dozen different emotions. “What’s ever been out there for me? When I’m at home, it’s like I’m . . . it’s like I’m empty on the inside. You don’t know what that’s like.”

They say that before someone takes their own life, there’s always a cry for help. Sometimes it’s loud, and you have to be seriously deaf not to hear it. Sometimes it’s just a word or a look, like the look Quinn was giving me right now. I might have been deaf to it before, but that look screamed louder than anything now. I had no skill in talking someone in from the edge, and that space between us was still a whole universe wide.

“Quinn . . .”

“It’s not your job to save me, so give it up, huh? Please . . . just give it up.”

“It’s not a job,” I told him. “It’s something I’ve got to do. Something that I
need
to do.”

“But why?” Quinn asked. “Is it because of what happened on the school bus?”

I looked away from him. “Mom shouldn’t have told you about that.”

“She didn’t. I just heard.” Quinn hesitated for a moment. I thought he might take a step closer. “Is it true that you’re the only one who survived?”

I took a deep breath. “Let’s go home, and we can talk about it there.”

Quinn thought about it and shrugged sadly. “Some people are survivors. Some aren’t.”

“And how do you know you’re not? Just because things stink now and you feel empty inside, it doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way next week, or next month, or next year!”

“That’s just words!” Quinn said, getting more frustrated. “Hell, I don’t have the patience to play a game of Scrabble, and I’m supposed to hang on your words for months and years?” He looked down. His shoulders dropped. I could see into
his
works now—the angry pistons, the overheated gears, and that pit inside of him. He kept it so well hidden back home with attitude, but here, it was bare and bottomless. A wave crashed behind me. I could feel it vibrating up my legs and into my joints.

“Sometimes I just want to disappear . . . y’know?” Quinn looked around at the tortured faces in the rocks around us. “Can you think of a better place to do it?”

“I’ll never let you disappear, Quinn.”

I locked on his teary eyes and imagined that I had tractor beams in mine, that my gaze would somehow
pull him in. “Come on,” I told him. “We’ll ride out of this place together.”

He took one step closer, then another. I reached my hand toward him, he reached out his—

And then the symbol on the back of his hand began to glow.

From deep in a cave behind him came the distant, hollow cries of other kids in the middle of one last thrill.

Quinn backed away from me. “I kinda got used to riding alone.” Then he turned toward the cave.

I was losing him again. I didn’t know what else to say that would get through to him, so I leveled the truth at him with both barrels.

“You’re lying in a coma in the hospital!” I shouted. “They carted you away in an ambulance, and that’s where you are!”

It was harsh, like waking a sleepwalker; but it stopped him in his tracks. “At least that’s what Mom thinks,” I said, trying to ease the blow.

Without even turning to look at me, he said, “Maybe it’s best she thinks that.” Then he leaped into the gaping mouth of the cave and the darkness swallowed him.

I sat on the rocks among the silent stone faces, with no desire to go on. I could have leaped into the darkness after Quinn, following him to his next ride, but what was the point? How do you help someone who refuses to be helped? Was I supposed to knock him unconscious and drag him out of here? He was already unconscious.

There was a flash of yellow light. Far off in the ocean
a new ship appeared out of nowhere, sailing closer. This time it was a Spanish galleon—somebody else’s nightmare. The swinging boat sailed again, filled with a whole new batch of riders headed toward some different adventure but the same fate.

“You’re not playing,” I heard Cassandra say. She sat on a rock just a few feet away, dressed in a bright yellow silk gown, a garland of flowers and shells woven into her hair. She looked like something from mythology: a beautiful siren, luring sailors to their death. “You made it through this ride. Now move to the next.” Although her voice was restrained, her words still sounded like an order.

“Why are you following
me?
You have a park full of riders, happy to hand their lives to you. Leave me alone! Like you said, I didn’t come for your rides.”

“No, you came for your brother. But he’ll be lost, just like everyone else.”

Her words echoed around inside my head a few times before catching on some receptive brain tissue. “What do you mean, ‘like everyone else’?”

She stood and came closer. “Seven rides, each one harder than the last. Think about it, Blake.”

“Are you saying that
no one’s
ever made it through all seven rides?”

She turned with only mild interest at the approaching galleon. “They’re lured by the thrill, and soon there’s nothing else. Even though there’s a way out of every single ride, they rarely find it, or even look for it. They let the thrill consume them. In the end either the
ride takes them or they get caught at dawn. Either way, they never leave.”

In the sea beside us the galleon careened along the reef until something huge, green, and reptilian rose from the depths to grab its masts, pulling it over on its side, flinging riders into the sea. If there was a way out of every ride, like she said, these riders had missed their chance. The creature pulled riders from the ratlines with its clawed hands, shoving them into its tooth-filled mouth. Rocks eroded into astonished faces.
Here be serpents,
the medieval maps all warned.

“How can you do this to people? Lure them here, only to destroy them?”

“It’s a matter of balance,” she said coolly.

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed at me. “You don’t think this park grows out of nowhere, do you? It has to be built, attraction by attraction, on the spirits of those who visit.”

A roar from the serpent, and the last of the galleon was taken under the waves. So if this park was a living thing, a creature existing in the rift between dreams and the real world, then the riders—
all
the riders—were merely prey; and I had been watching the creature feed.

Cassandra took another step forward. “You’re afraid! Tell me about your fear, Blake.”

“I won’t tell you anything!”

“Please. I want to know what it’s like. I want to know fear.”

As I forced myself to look at her I could see she wasn’t just toying with me. She wanted to know. She wanted to
feel
what I felt. She studied me. I could feel her pulling at my thoughts, trying to get ahold of my feelings, and failing. She didn’t know fear. How could she, when the danger was always someone else’s?