Inferno Park (18 page)

Down in the water below, the ghostly shapes of the cypress roots were visible just beneath the surface like the gnarled fingers of dead giants. The moon was directly above them, and Carter realized it had to be sometime around midnight.

“Why are we still out here?” he asked. Nobody answered, so he repeated it: “Why are we still here? Shouldn’t we be home by now?”

Nobody stirred. Carter heard something thunk against the underside of the boat, then another thunk, and another. He looked over the side and saw the boat was driving over one after another of the thick, pale roots, spaced under the boat at regular intervals, like the cross-ties of a railroad. The thumping continued, and he had the odd idea that the boat was actually rolling along an underwater track, like on an amusement park ride. He wondered who would have built such tracks in the lake.

A splash sounded in the water beside him, followed by another. Two large shapes had floated up from under the water and now drifted alongside the boat. When the moon emerged from behind a cloud, he saw them clearly: Kevin and Reeves, the two missing boys, their bodies bloated, pale, and smeared with mud. Their waterlogged eyes stared up at him.

Carter wanted to yell, but he couldn’t make his mouth work at all. He tried to stand, but he was locked into his seat by a steel safety bar across his lap, which he was fairly certain had not been there when he’d sat down in the boat hours earlier.

The dead boys floated along with the slow-moving boat as it thumped its way along the underwater track.

“Hey!” Carter finally managed to yell, unable to put what he was seeing into coherent words. “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

“Sh,”
a voice whispered.

Tricia stood on a thick, black ruin of an ancient cypress trunk jutting out at a steep angle above the water, pale and glowing in the moonlight. He saw her feet first, slimy with mud, barefoot except for the plastic spider toe ring. Then her dirty, scarred shins, the hem of her white dress that became wet and bloody around her hips, turning to dark gore around her shoulders.

As in his dreams, he could hear her voice clearly when she spoke, though her head was still missing.

“We’re still here,”
she whispered.
“We’re all still here.”

The water churned and boiled around him. Dozens of bodies floated up from the depths, all pale and bloated, most of them children.

Carter screamed. He looked back at Tricia as the boat passed her by. Tricia raised one bloodless index finger to the area where her lips would have been, in the empty space above her neck.

“Sh,”
she whispered again.

A bright light turned on Carter, momentarily blinding him. The deputy up front had turned the searchlight onto him. Carter held up a hand to blot it out.

As his squinting eyes adjusted to the glare, Carter finally saw Ned Willoughby, owner and captain of the small fishing boat, in clear light. The man’s eyes bulged open under the floppy brim of his fishing hat, staring at nothing. He tongue was swollen and purple between his lips. A fishing line was coiled around his neck like a garrote, cinching the fat and muscles of his throat inward. More fishing line lashed his hands to the wheel. The dead man didn’t have to steer, because the boat was thumping comfortably along on its sunken track.

The other two retired men had been killed in the same fashion, strangled and tied to their seats with what looked like entire bales of fishing line.

Only the deputy seemed to be left alive. The man approached him, barely visible against the intense searchlight shining behind him. It occurred to Carter that this meant the deputy had killed the others, and Carter was trapped in his own seat, at the deputy’s mercy.

Then Carter saw it wasn’t the deputy at all. The broad-brimmed hat wasn’t blue or black but candy-striped, red and white, and so was the man’s suit. The man wore a red tie and sported a red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He looked like some kind of old-fashioned carnival barker.

“It’s you,” the man said, looking Carter over. Carter didn’t recognize his face. It looked bland, of no particular age, forgettable except for the searching, colorless eyes.

Carter gripped the locked safety rail, his heart beating as fast as a hummingbird’s. The man bent over him, studying his face.

“You must be so excited to know the old park is opening again,” the man finally said. “Imagine the good times you’ll have. The thrills. The chills. The ecstasy and the horror. All for less than twenty dollars.”

“Who are you?” Carter managed to ask.

“I am the new proprietor of Starland. And I intend to make it a place no one will ever forget.” His smile was thin and sharp, his eyes cold. “Tell your friends, Carter. The rides are dazzling, the games addictive, the refreshments top of the line. They can indulge themselves all they wish, day or night. Tell your friends, Carter—above all, tell your friends.”

The man seized Carter by the shoulder and gave him a hard shake.

“Hey, kid, tell your friends!” he said. “Hey, kid! Wake up!”

Carter blinked. It was daylight again, though the sun smoldered low and orange on the horizon. The man shaking his shoulder was no longer the carnival barker, but Ned Willoughby, their fearless captain.

“I gotta pull the boat on up the ramp now,” Ned said. “We’re done for the day.”

Carter looked around, feeling the same disorientation that came with stepping out of a dark movie theater into a bright afternoon. They’d returned to the boat ramp where they’d started. The deputy and the two other men were already out of the boat.

“You’re alive,” Carter said.

“Uh, yeah,” Ned said. “They ought to make a t-shirt. ‘I lived through Dead Lake!’ Damned place has more snarls than a hooker’s cooch. Come on, get moving, kid.”

“Did I sleep through the whole search?” Carter asked.

“You looked like you needed it,” Ned told him. “We weren’t gonna find nothing out here, anyway.”

“Stupid waste of my time,” the young deputy complained, kicking at the dock where he stood.

Soon after, one of the old men dropped Carter back home. Carter went to his room, unzipped his bag, sat down to confront a few hours’ worth of homework that was sure to be too hard for him.

He started with calculus, which already seemed like an alien language to him, though he’d always done fine in past math classes. His exhausted brain wasn’t much help in attacking this bizarre new species of math problem.

I’m too stupid
, he told himself.
I can’t do this. I’m going to fail everything.

After about twenty minutes of struggling, getting nowhere, and wondering why he’d set himself up for certain failure in life, he was startled by the notification chime from his phone. His nerves were badly frayed, and his hand shook as he checked his message.

It was a text from Victoria:
Did you get my voicemail earlier?

He hadn’t. Carter checked and found he’d missed her call while he was out on the lake, out of cell phone range. He played her voice message.

“Carter, I’m at the town library, and I have good news,” she said. He felt his heart sink. Good news for her might be bad news for him—it meant she’d found some reason to keep up her investigation of the park, when he was starting to wish they’d left it alone.

“They have every issue of the old town paper on microfilm,” her voice mail continued. “I’ve been spinning through this stuff for hours, and I think I’ve found something we can use. Call me the second you get this!”

She’d left the message more than two hours earlier.

He texted her back:
Can we talk later? I’m dead now.

What??
she replied.

Dead tired
, he texted back, realizing he’d forgotten a word. His brain was definitely not functioning.
Glad there’s good news
, he added, which wasn’t exactly true.

Found articles about the park’s creation
, she told him.
Talk at lunch tomorrow?

Can’t wait
, he replied. That wasn’t exactly true, either. He could wait and wait—he wasn’t sure he was ready to learn more about Starland, and probably wouldn’t mind if he never had to talk about it again. He shuddered as he thought of his dream, Tricia’s headless body facing him from the tilted cypress stump, raising a finger to her nonexistent mouth to shush him.

He lowered his head and focused on his homework—he hadn’t even scratched the surface of chemistry or biology yet, and he still needed to read the second half of
Walden
for English class. Homework and studying were the keys to escaping this town and his past, but the past wouldn’t stop haunting him.

Chapter Eleven

Carter trudged to the concrete courtyard for lunch break on Thursday, feeling a bit like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. He was drowning in school work, and he’d even quit soccer this year to focus on studying. He didn’t need the horrific distraction of the amusement park derailing him now.

Victoria waved and smiled from the door nook as he approached, practically bobbing with excitement. As reluctant as he felt, the smile on her face made him want to learn what she’d discovered. Though Starland was a major part of his own personal history—the shaping influence of his life, really, between the trauma of seeing his first love die in such a brutal manner and the eventual closing of the Eight-Track, which had dealt a fatal blow to his parents’ marriage—he didn’t know much about the park’s history. It had simply always been there, as far as he was concerned, like all the bright, gaudy, loud attractions that had crowded the Starwalk. Until, of course, the day all the magic died.

“You look happy,” he said as he sank down beside her.

“How was your search party?” she asked.

“Hot and full of mosquitoes, like any good party.” He decided not to mention the nightmare he’d had after nodding off in the boat. “I knew we wouldn’t find anything. Everybody else seemed to know it, too.”

“That sucks. But I
did
find something at the library. Want to see?” She unzipped a side pocket of her backpack without waiting for him to answer, and she brought out a single folded piece of printer paper. “It’s a start, anyway.”

Carter unfolded the page. It showed a portion of a Conch City Chronicle newspaper page dated July 8, 1978. Somewhere in the process of transferring from newsprint to microfilm to laser printer, the text had grown blurry and the accompanying picture had become grainy and fuzzy.

The headline was clear, however: INFERNO MOUNTAIN AWARDED TOP TEN RANKING.

“Can you read it?” Victoria asked.

“Barely.” Carter squinted his eyes, trying to focus on the blurry text.

Inferno Mountain, the newest attraction at Starland Amusement Park, is one of the top ten “dark rides” in the country, according to
Amusements and Attractions
magazine, an industry trade journal for amusements, carnivals, and circuses.

“Combining the excitement of a roller coaster with the allure and mystery of a spooky funhouse, Inferno Mountain creates a thrilling experience unmatched anywhere else in the Florida panhandle,” stated the journal’s July edition, which ranked the ride number four among the best “dark” (or enclosed) rides in the United States.

“We’re all very excited by this news, of course,” said Theodore Hanover, the park’s owner. “We always strive to provide a fun and unique family experience, and we invite everyone in the community to come visit us here at Starland. To celebrate this award, we’re giving everyone a dollar off admission all week.”

Also happy with the news was Arthur “Artie” Schopfer, the designer of Inferno Mountain and other eye-catching attractions around the park.

“It’s good to know people are enjoying what we built,” Schopfer said. “Each creation is unique, but I think we all felt something special when we put that big devil together. If you’ll pardon the expression, we think it’s one hell of a ride.”

Schopfer is currently building a miniature golf course near Starland, which he says will be populated by “life-size dinosaurs.”

Starland Amusement Park opened in 1968 and attracts more than eight hundred thousand visitors annually. It is located at 1066 Beachview Drive. Open 6 PM to 11 PM weekdays, noon to midnight on Saturdays, noon to ten on Sundays.

The grainy photograph accompanying the article showed the devil’s two-story face perched on the front of the smoldering volcano, its jaw stretched wide around the steep black roller coaster track as though laughing while it looked down at a very 1970’s crowd: the men with big mustaches, the women with feathered hair, the remarkably skinny teenagers in tiny shorts and high tube socks.

“Okay,” Carter said. “Now we know the name of the guy who built it. Sounds like he did Dinosaur Mini-Golf, too.”

“And the guy who owned the park,” Victoria said.

“I could’ve told you that. Everybody in town knows who the Hanovers are. They used to own a lot of stuff, when there was stuff worth owning.”

“Oh. Anyway, the library didn’t have
Amusements and Attractions
magazines, but I went online and found where somebody had uploaded a bunch of PDF’s of old issues. There’s like a whole Internet subculture devoted to old amusement parks and carnivals.”

“There’s probably a whole Internet subculture devoted to any weird thing,” he said.

“And I’m so glad there is. I found the article.” Victoria brought out two more sheets of paper folded together. One page showed grainy black and white pictures, while the other was mostly text. The headline read:

#4: Inferno Mountain, Florida. “One Hell of a Ride”

One picture was a shot of the ride’s front, the devil’s face framed by the clear sky, a trainload of riders on its way up to his open mouth. Another showed the ride under construction, when the mountain was just a skeletal framework of steel rods and wooden scaffolding. Two men stood in front of it. The caption identified the smiling rotund man in the white summer suit and matching fedora as
Theodore Hanover, Park Owner
. The other man, in horn-rimmed glasses, a dirty plaid work shirt, and scuffed jeans and boots, was identified as
Artie Schopfer, Ride Designer
.