Inferno Park (31 page)

“Isn’t it great?” Becca asked, her eyes shining like a kid on Christmas morning as she looked over the torture devices.

“Having Dark Mansion all to ourselves?” Jared asked, slipping an arm around her waist and pulling her close.

“You know what we should do? Kidnap Mitzi Traynor and bring her here. We wear scary masks and torture her.” Becca crossed her arms. “She deserves it, after she spread that rumor about me last year.”

“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” Jared said. “I see no flaws in your plan at all.”

“But, seriously, would you help me do that, if I asked you?” Becca placed her hands behind his neck, looking up at him.

“Kidnap and torture Mitzi Traynor?”

“Yeah. Bring her here, tie her to the bed of nails. Smack her big, ugly ass with that whip. You would do that, wouldn’t you?” Becca pressed herself against him.

“You’ve got anger issues,” Jared said. “Kind of sexy anger issues, but still...”

“I know we won’t really do it,” she whispered. “Just say you would if I asked you.”

“Okay. I would help you kidnap and torture Mitzi if you wanted me to. Which you don’t.”

Becca kissed him, and her entire body felt feverish in his arms. She wore a thin mesh shirt over a black bra and amazingly skimpy shorts, and he could feel her skin beneath his hands. She kissed him aggressively, her tongue prying into his mouth.

This is it
, Jared thought.
Here’s where it happens.
He’d brought condoms in his pocket just in case.

“Wait.” Becca pulled back from him and turned to look into the torture room again. “I want to go in there.”

“You don’t go in there. You just look into it through these little windows.”

“These little windows don’t have any glass. I can fit through this one.” Becca traced the edges of the wall cutout with her fingertips.

“You can’t.”

“Are you saying I’m fat?” She gave him a mock scowl.

“No, but—”

“Then give me a boost.” She leaned forward against the window, wiggling her hips, and he couldn’t resist her. He took her by the hips and hoisted her up.

Becca wriggled through the window and dropped to the floor with a crash and a scream. Then it sounded like she was sobbing.

“What happened?” Jared leaned through the window. Becca lay on the floor, not crying but laughing.

“I fell,” she said, rubbing her head, still laughing. “I fell so hard.” She used the bed of nails to pull herself to her feet, then carefully touched the point of one nail. It bent like rubber, and she frowned. “It’s not real.”

“Of course it’s not real. This isn’t a museum.”

“I just thought, for a second...” She frowned more deeply and opened the iron maiden casket propped against the wall. The interior had a few rubber spikes and a leaking plastic blood pack, but nothing else. “I guess there’s no point bringing Mitzi here.”

“Nope. Are you coming back out?”

“I don’t know.” Becca walked toward him across the room, unbuttoning her shirt. “Want to have sex on a bed of nails?”

Then the floor opened beneath her and she dropped out of sight, screaming. She’d stepped onto the grate in the floor where all the blood drained, and it had swung open like a trap door. Jared instantly flashed back to the sinkhole opening up and swallowing the carousel full of kids.

“Becca!” he yelled, banging the wall beside the window. “Are you okay?”

“Help me!” she screamed. “It’s crazy down here!”

“Okay, wait.” Jared hoisted himself up into the window, but he had to hunch in his shoulders to try and wiggle through the small opening.

“Jared, hurry! Open the trap door!”

“I’m coming!” He finally shoved himself through, then fell to the musty wooden floor painted to look like stone tiles. He scrambled on his hands and knees to the floor grate and pressed down on it.

It wouldn’t move.

“Help me!” she screamed below, but he couldn’t see her. The grate wasn’t real, just painted onto the floor. He couldn’t find a handle or hinges, or even the edges of a trap door. He banged on it with his fists, but it didn’t move.

“Jared, I’m scared!”

“I’m right here.” He stood up and stomped on the grate with one foot, but he didn’t feel it give at all. “Look out!” he shouted to her.

“How can I look out when I can’t
see
anything?”

“I’m coming down.” He braced himself, then jumped onto the painted grate with both feet, ready to grab onto the edge of the trap door as he fell.

The floor boomed beneath his feet, but it didn’t moved. There was no trap door at all.

“That’s impossible,” Jared whispered.

“Help me! I’m trapped!” Becca screamed.

“I can’t get it open!” he shouted to her through the floor. “I’ll try to find another way down!”

Jared ran to the window and struggled to crawl back through, listening to her scream. It seemed to take forever before he wiggled through into the narrow attic corridor.

He regained his feet, raced back to the stairs, and ran down to the landing with the Captain Dark portrait and the two doors that were both locked and possibly fake, located midway between the first and second floors of the haunted house.

“I told you to stay out of my attic!” the scowling picture shouted at him, its eyes glowing solid green.

Jared began kicking the locked door beside the portrait. If it was real, it would lead directly toward Becca.

He felt it creaking and cracking, so he kicked it harder. The door splintered around the handle and toppled back into the darkness behind it.

Jared rushed into a narrow passage lined with plywood, narrow wooden studs, and exposed clusters of electrical wire. He’d broken through into some hidden passage of the mansion used only by the amusement park employees.

He ran toward a dim light ahead, which led him into a small raw-wood room that must have been located somewhere near the center of the mansion.

A rumpled sleeping bag and a few beer bottles thick with cigarette ashes lay in one corner. Across from it was a sort of altar on cinder blocks, with burning candle stubs arranged around some kind of animal skull, maybe a dog. Pentagrams, inverted crosses, and the word SATAN were painted in black all over the walls.

“Becca!” Jared shouted. “Becca, where are you?”

She didn’t answer. Jared shined his phone up at the wooden planks of the ceiling above him. Someone had drawn a square on the ceiling with a pencil and written the words TRAP DOOR in a hasty scrawl.

“What the hell?” Jared whispered. “Becca! Becca!”

There were three ways out of the room, all of them narrow hallways framed in raw plywood and particle board like the one through which he’d entered. The passageways were just gaps between the mansion’s walls, barely wide enough to pass. Each one would take him toward a different part of the mansion, but he didn’t know which way to go.

“Becca!” he shouted. “Can you hear me?”

He thought he heard a faint scream down one of the dark passageways, though he couldn’t tell if it was her or one of the many recorded screams playing on loops all over the house. He started running in that direction, barely fitting through the hidden passage between the walls.

He shouted her name again, his heart pounding. He heard the scream again, a little louder this time.

Jared chased the sound to a gap in one wall, where he faced a door made of fake bamboo. A scrap of paper was Scotch-taped to it with the words EVIL TIKI GODS scrawled in pencil. Chanting sounded beyond the door.

He pushed it open and stepped into a room he’d seen before, though only through the viewing windows cut into the front wall. Large, angry Tiki-style carvings were set all around him, on different platforms connected by steps and hung with fake jungle vines. Dull red bulbs glowed in their eye sockets. A row of shrunken heads hung from the ceiling.

Another loud scream interrupted the chanting. The scream was just another part of the recording, not Becca at all. Jared cursed to himself as the chanting resumed.

He went back through the hidden door from which he’d emerged, back into the inner passageways of the mansion, and he resumed running and calling her name. He thought he heard her voice down another passage and started running that way, in the direction of the funeral parlor and the haunted library.

Chapter Twenty-One

Carter and Victoria again parked in the shadows of the peeling pink Fancy Flamingo Lodge to hide her car from the road. They hurried across to the dark ruins of the amusement park, past the shrine at the front gates, and around the corner of the fence near Crashdown Falls.

They slowed as they approached the spot where they’d entered last time.

“What the hell is that?” Carter asked.

Victoria shined her flashlight over it. Instead of a loose, partially cut away piece of rusty fence, they looked at a full-size door made of chain link, held in place with a simple unlocked latch. It looked brand new and had none of the thick, thorny growth of the fence around it. An aluminum sign on the front read STAFF ONLY.

“It definitely wasn’t here before,” Victoria said. “I wish I hadn’t left my camera at home.”

“You feel like you’re in more of a photography mood now?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Let’s go in and rescue them, if they need it.” Carter lifted the latch and pushed the gate open.

Instead of dark, slippery mud, a concrete path now lay on the ground beneath their feet, leading from the new gate to the blue and green lights of Pirate Island ahead. They shared a troubled look—things already looked very different from last time, and they hadn’t even stepped inside the park.

They took each other’s hand as they walked up the path under Crashdown Falls, which no longer dripped sour water on them at every step. Carter couldn’t have said whose idea it was to hold hands, but they gripped each other tight as they emerged into the glowing central plaza of the Pirate Island section of the park.

Most of the rides and attractions were fully lit and looked open for business. The big Swingin’ Scalawag ship sat in its cradle, freshly polished and dripping with lights. The winking pirate sign out front looked freshly painted, as did the big pelicans lining the Log Drop. The Harpoon Lagoon and Gone Fishin’ game booths were lit and open, and the big red crab of Pinchy Pete’s Sandwich Stand looked freshly rebuilt with a new coat of paint, and Carter knew it had been a wreck last time they were here, just a few days earlier.

“This is messed up,” Carter whispered as they walked the path toward the midway.

“It’s a lot of work for just one crazed psycho,” Victoria whispered back.

The midway looked new—the pavement no longer cracked at all, most of the little booths open with their neon signs glowing. People had clearly been there recently—greasy paper plates with pizza crusts, corn dog sticks, and half-eaten funnel cakes crowded the serving counters of the booths, now crawling with ants, flies, and worms.

A big barrel-shaped booth called the Keg Stand had dozens of plastic cups on its counter, most of them overturned with just a little foam left at the bottom. Carter didn’t remember the Keg Stand from childhood, but he’d been twelve last time the park was open and probably would have ignored a place that sold boring adult stuff like beer.

“Looks like they helped themselves to everything,” Carter said, remembering how tempted Victoria had been by the shiny red popcorn cart and its golden-yellow offerings.

“It’s so quiet,” Victoria said. Though all the lights were on, none of the attractions played their customary music, and there were no voices, either from game and ride operators advertising their offerings or from Jared and his friends. The park was lit up like Las Vegas but silent as a graveyard. All the rides were in their stations, waiting for passengers.

Carter called Jared’s cell phone, but only reached the voice mail. He left a quick message and hung up.

“Jared!” Carter shouted. “Other people who came with Jared! Are you guys here?”

No answer came. They walked slowly down the midway, still hand in hand, calling for Jared and friends, but the park lay silent around them.

They continued on toward the central plaza, with the wishing well surrounded by benches and colorful arrow signs.

To the left, where there should have been a gaping sinkhole, the thousand bright lights of the carousel circled around and around, the horses and dragons bobbing on their poles. The Ferris wheel was no longer a rusting heap slouching on the lip of the sinkhole—it was brightly lit and turning, just like the swing ride beyond it. The high wooden track of the Starland Express glowed behind it, fully restored.

“This isn’t possible, is it?” Carter whispered. “Even the biggest construction company in the world couldn’t do it in a few days. Right?”

“It was dark before we came inside,” she said. “We didn’t see any of these lights from outside the park.”

“Jared!” Carter shouted, turning slowly. He faced Haunted Alley, where the Dark Mansion’s eerie green light glowed through a thin haze of dry-ice fog. The little attractions looked open—the Haunted Souvenir Shop on the back side of Dark Mansion, the Beat the Devil and Ghostly Gallery games, the Devil Dogs concession stand—but Inferno Mountain rose above it all, its lights still off, a dead volcano towering into the dark sky above. Only a hint of the devil’s face near the top was visible in the colorful lights from the park below. “Jared, where in God’s name—”

The door to the Haunted Souvenir Shop creaked open, giving a recorded ghostly “Wooooooooo-ooo!” instead of a chime or a bell. A very bland-looking man in a candy-striped hat and a matching striped suit, like some old-time carnival barker, emerged onto the rickety-looking wraparound porch in front of the store. Carter thought he recognized him, but he couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before.

“I’m sorry you missed the party,” the man said. His voice was a dead, flat monotone. “An extraordinary time was had by all, and you may take some comfort in that.”

The moment he heard the man’s voice, Carter remembered—he’d seen him in his dream on Dead Lake, just after the headless ghost of Tricia had shushed him from the bough of a skeletal cypress.