Inferno Park (17 page)

“What’s your secret?” she whispered to the devil. “I want to know.”

The devil kept smiling.

Chapter Ten

Carter arrived at AP Biology the next morning completely exhausted from lack of sleep, though he’d made some ultra-strong coffee at home. Now that it was daylight, he felt certain he could finally sleep, but instead he was taking notes on genetic inheritance and natural selection.

When the bell rang, Mr. Pluminowski walked out to the hall for monitor duty, but most of the nine kids in AP Biology stayed where they were, waiting for AP Chemistry in the same room. Among them were Carter and Emily Dorsnel, who absently scratched her nose while glancing through the chemistry textbook, a bored look on her face.

Carter, feeling nervous, walked across two rows to hers.

“Hey, Emily?” he asked.

“Huh?” She looked up at him, startled.

“You were talking yesterday about parapsychology and looking for ghosts in the amusement park.”

“A more precise term would be ‘discarnate energy entities,’” she said, blinking her eyes rapidly. “But yes.”

“Oh, this again?” Wes McKinley spoke up from his desk in the front row, smirking at them.

“I think Mr. Plum shot that idea down fairly roundly,” David Huang added.

“I don’t remember inviting you guys into our conversation,” Carter said.

“You invited us the instant you hoisted the brown flag of stupidity,” Wes snorted, and Sameer laughed and shook his head.

“Forget them,” Carter said. “Do you really think it’s haunted?”

“I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t collected any raw data yet, nor has anyone else,” Emily said. “I
think
that the sudden tragedy in such an emotionally loaded environment would make paranormal activity very probable.”

“How would you collect data?”

“Audio and video recordings, ideally with both analog and digital equipment, thermal imaging, electromagnetic field meters—”

“Don’t forget crystal balls and Tarot cards,” Wes snickered.

“Do you actually have any of that stuff?” Carter asked.

“Just a video camera. And infrared binoculars. And an EMF meter. But that’s all.”

“You can’t go into the amusement park,” David Huang said. “You’ll get arrested.”

“Who said I was going there?” Carter asked. Mr. Pluminowski returned to the room, and Carter whispered to Emily, “Can we talk at lunch?”

“Sure!” She gave him a smile.

“The superstitious leading the clueless.” Wes rolled his eyes.

“What’s that?” Mr. Pluminowski asked as he stepped behind his desk.

“Nothing. Just Emily’s parapsychology nonsense,” Wes said.

“Perhaps the most intriguing of the pseudosciences,” Pluminowski said. “Now, however, we must discuss the far more fascinating world of stoichiometry, in which we study the proportions of reactants and products in particular reactions...You’ve all surely read chapter five by now, so that will be our jumping-off point...” He approached the whiteboard, marker in hand, and Carter struggled to keep his eyes open.

Carter survived all the way to lunch break. He stood in the cafeteria and waited for Emily Dorsnel to walk out of the lunch line, carrying a disposable tray with a rectangle of pizza, tater tots, and a small heap of creamed corn, or what the posters in the cafeteria called “A Healthy, Balanced Meal!”

“Hey, Emily,” he said, approaching her. “Do you want come sit with us?”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“Just me and Victoria. We need to talk to you.”

“Who’s Victoria?”

“She just moved here.”

Emily frowned but followed him to the nook by the band storage door. Carter let her have the shady spot and instead sat on the outer edge of the doorway, in the relentless sunlight. Victoria smiled and introduced herself as Emily sat down.

“Where’d you move from?” Emily asked.

“Michigan. Did you grow up here?”

“Yep. Unfortunately. I like your Fonzie box.”

“Thanks! Carter said you might know some ghost stories about the old amusement park. We want to hear anything you might have heard.”

“I don’t think there are any such stories,” Emily said. “It usually takes a lot longer for ghost lore to build up. Usually people who actually knew the dead don’t want to think of them as restless and spooky spirits.”

“Emily’s like the expert parapsychologist in town, though,” Carter said to Victoria.

“I don’t know if I’m an expert. It’s more of an avocation. In this town, however, I think I’m the only one, so by default, maybe...” Emily shrugged. She wore a baggy t-shirt depicting the Nintendo character Yoshi.

“So you know more than anybody else,” Victoria said.

“There isn’t much to know. The park would be a promising site for paranormal investigation, but unfortunately it’s closed to the public,” Emily said. “With the sinkhole there, that’s not likely to change.”

“Listen, you can’t tell anyone what I’m about to say, you promise?” Carter asked. Emily nodded. “We went inside, Victoria and me. We took pictures, and we saw a few strange things.”

“You snuck in?” Emily gaped. “What did you see? What did you hear? You have to tell me!”

“I’ll skip to the weird part.” Victoria brought out her camera and showed her the popcorn cart.

“I don’t see anything. Is that the Whack-A-Frog back there? Everything’s so destroyed now, it’s sad...” Emily mumbled.

“When we took that picture, the cart looked brand new, and it was full of fresh popcorn,” Carter said.

“We could smell it,” Victoria added.

“Smell it?” Emily frowned and scratched wax from her ear. Rolling it between her fingers, she said, “It could be a time slip. Sights and sounds from a location’s past, experienced as though they were in the present. Commonly reported in haunted commercial areas such as hotels and, yes, amusement parks.”

“That could explain it, but there’s something else,” Carter said. Victoria flipped forward to the crucified puppets and showed them to her.

“That’s...bizarre. I still don’t see anything paranormal here,” Emily said.

“When we saw them, when she took that picture, they weren’t Shoot-Em-Up Puppets,” Carter said. “They were
Reeves Mayweather and Kevin Gordy, those missing middle school kids.”

“They were dead,” Victoria said. “They were cold and stiff. They looked like they’d been dragged through mud. Then I tried to show the picture to the police, and...”

“And now the police think we’re insane,” Carter finished.

“I can see where they’re coming from,” Emily said, studying the picture. “It looks as if you simply broke into the park, mangled some stuffed animals, and took pictures.”

“We didn’t, though,” Victoria said.

“Are you telling me the truth?” Emily asked, looking between them. “Are you playing a joke on me or something?”

“I wish we were,” Carter said. “We didn’t know who else to ask for help.”

Emily sighed. “The most common type of haunting is like a recording that plays over and over again. The second most common type is a spirit obsessed with people and places they knew in life. In either case, the most evidence you can reasonably expect is a photograph of a strange orb or light, a recording of a voice or an odd sequence of sounds, or in rare cases an actual apparition. This doesn’t fit with either type of haunting.”

“Is there a third type?” Victoria asked.

“The third type is extremely rare, and frankly I hope you’re both screwing with me at this point,” Emily said. “What you’re describing isn’t typical evidence of paranormal activity. What you’re describing is deliberate and manipulative. It requires sentience and supernatural power. You’d be dealing with a serious energy entity, either discarnate or noncarnate.”

“What was that last part?” Carter asked.

“Either a very powerful evil ghost or a never-born energy entity, something we might call a ‘demon’ as a general term, for lack of any well-developed taxonomy of the nonphysical world.” Emily pushed up her glasses and bit into her rectangle of pizza.

“A ghost or a demon.” Victoria frowned and looked at Carter.

“I don’t like those choices,” he said. “What about a crazed hallucination?”

“You’d want to test the park for chemical and gas leaks, naturally,” Emily said. “I assume neither of you were on drugs, or you would have mentioned it, correct?”

“What was the third type of haunting?” Victoria said. “A demon haunting?”

“Again, we use ‘demonic’ for lack of a more precise term,” Emily told them through a mouthful of ketchup and mashed tater tots. “The third type of haunting is what is sometimes called a
dark place
. In this case, we aren’t looking at a psychic recording of intense emotion, or an obsessive ghost that refuses to accept its death and move on. In a dark place, spirits are trapped against their will, unable to move on. They grow frustrated, confused, angry, and malevolent. Most haunted places are not dark places, but
all
dark places are extremely haunted. They are like miniature hells, imprisoning spirits here on the earthly plane.”

“So you’re saying Starland is a dark place?” Carter asked. “A miniature hell?”

“Based on a picture of two puppets? No, I’m not saying that. Again, assuming you’re not jerking me around, which I think you are...If you were to find such a place, you would want to stay away.”

“You wouldn’t want to investigate it?” Victoria asked.

“If I did, I would start by learning the history of the park and try to determine how it became a dark place.”

“The sinkhole,” Carter said. “All those people who died...”

“A sinkhole would account for simple haunting,” Emily said. “If we’re talking about a true dark place, however, the sinkhole itself may only be a symptom of the underlying darkness. Sinkholes are very rare up here in the panhandle of Florida, so why would the largest sinkhole in the state be here? It may not be a natural geographic formation.”

The bell rang, and Emily stood. “I honestly hope you’re not telling the truth.”

“We are,” Carter said.

Emily shook her head. “Then you should stay away from the park. A dark place is not a training ground for amateur ghost hunters.”

“Thanks for your help, Emily,” Victoria said, and the girl nodded a little as she walked away. Victoria looked at Carter. “I think we need to go back.”

“After what she just said?” Carter headed for the heavy front doors of the school.

“We still don’t know if those kids are alive or not. They could still need our help.”

“I’m not going tonight,” he said. “I’m about to crash my way to sleep, I’m already behind on homework, and I have to volunteer for the stupid search party until nine-thirty tonight.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can find out about the history of the park. This town has a library, right?”

“A small one.”

“Is there a local newspaper?”

“An out-of-print one. The
Conch City Chronicle
. I used to read the comic strips when I was a kid.”

“Perfect.” She smiled as they parted ways down different halls.

Carter managed to stay awake for the rest of the school day. Later in the afternoon, he joined his volunteer search party group, headed by a short-tempered young deputy who was clearly annoyed to be there. The other three men in the group were past retirement age.

They drove to Dead Lakes state park, which was more than twenty miles inland. There was no specific reason to search for the boys there, so Carter figured the search parties were running out of ideas already. They chugged slowly around the big lake in a motorboat owned by one member of the party, intermittently calling for the missing boys with a bullhorn, all of which seemed incredibly pointless.

Thousands of skeletal cypress trunks occupied the lake, corpses left over from an earlier time when the lake had been a forest. Their small boat nosed through dense swampy areas close to the shore, sweeping a light back and forth through the dense clusters of cypress husks while they repeatedly called the missing boys’ names.

Carter tried to watch the shadowy woods, but found himself nodding off, his head drooping so that he instead watched the dark ripples on the surface of the lake. His eyelids were heavy, and he could feel himself slipping into the half-dream state on the borderlands of sleep, hearing snatches of a chemistry lecture, then bits of real and imagined conversations with Victoria.

“I like you more than you know,” a dream-image of her told him while they sat at school lunch together. “But I don’t want to lose my head.”

A thin trail of dark blood welled up across her throat and around her neck, as though some invisible wire or blade had just sliced through her. She smiled at him like nothing unusual was happening and he watched, unable to move, waiting for her head to slide forward and topple from her shoulders.

He opened his eyes and it was night, hundreds of thousands of stars glowing above as the boat slipped across the black water, past an island of tall, thick dead cypress stumps resembling the broken towers of an old castle fallen to ruin.

He tried to look normal, like he hadn’t just suffered a mini-nightmare in front of everyone. The old men didn’t seem to be watching him, anyway. They slumped in the little bucket-sized seats of the fishing boat, not moving much, possibly asleep. In the darkness, it was hard to tell. The deputy was awake, standing in the prow wearing a broad-brimmed highway patrol-style hat, watching the water ahead. From where Carter sat, the deputy was outlined in black silhouette by the searchlight on the nose of the boat.

Carter looked at the boat’s owner and captain, a retired gas station manager named Ned, sitting ahead of him in the driver’s chair. He wasn’t moving much, either, but the guy had to be awake because the boat wasn’t crashing and tangling in the dead tree trunks and underwater roots.