Inferno Park (38 page)

It was one of the first color photographs in the album, which made it clear that the businessman’s round-brimmed hat was white with red candy stripes. He also wore a white suit with matching red pinstripes, a red bow tie, and a red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket.

Carter and Victoria looked at each other, startled, and Carter felt a chill along the back of his neck.

“That’s Theodore Hanover, right?” Victoria pointed at the picture and looked at Schopfer for confirmation.

“That’s him. The first day he wore that silly get-up. That would have been the Fourth of July, 1970. He had fireworks at the park, a country singer from Nashville playing the Fool’s Gold stage—Townes Van Zandt, I think.”

“And Mr. Hanover kept dressing like that?” Victoria asked, looking at Carter.

“He wore the broad-brimmed hats long after they went out of fashion, probably because he was bald as an egg up there.”

“His son wears a toupee,” Carter said.

“Is that what the little snot’s calling that dead possum on his scalp?” Schopfer asked.

“I’m really interested in this outfit he’s wearing.” Victoria tapped the picture.

“He brought it out on special occasions—opening day in the spring, Memorial Day, the Fourth...He had a black and orange version for ‘Scareland’ in October, when we made all of Starland haunted for a a few weeks, just before closing down for the year. By that time, he’d lost interest in the real estate business and the motel business and considered himself a showman. He focused all his time and money on the park.”

“Did anyone else ever wear that outfit?” Carter asked.

“I don’t think anyone else ever dared to dress that way, no,” Schopfer said. “Possibly some of the game operators down on the midway.”

They flipped through pages of color pictures showing rides and attractions under construction—the Funtime Firehouse, the Storybook Maze, the big alien-brained scientist, the log ride.

“His philosophy was to add one or two big attractions every year,” Schopfer told them. “After Disney World opened in 1971, Hanover figured he could build something just as big. We went down and rode Space Mountain in 1975, and that’s when he started talking about building ‘the big one,’ a great big monster of a ride folks could never forget, one they’d just have to write home about.”

“Inferno Mountain?” Carter asked.

“That’s the one,” Schopfer said. “He wanted his own enclosed dark-ride coaster, which was about the most expensive thing he could have decided to build. He’d just sunk a bundle into Jungle Land and the bumper boats, but he was determined to catch up with Disney World. ‘If Disney’s taking them way up, then I’ll take ‘em way down,’ he said. He wanted to do an underground, journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth roller coaster, with mines and caves and lava. I don’t want to tell you what that would have cost, but it was out of his price range. He first settled for a roller-coaster-inside-a-volcano idea, but then he wanted more. He wanted the volcano to be the doorway to Hell itself.”

Victoria turned the page to see a picture of Hanover and Schopfer—both with heavy sideburns now—studying a scale model of the ride on a table. Half the volcano was sliced away to reveal a tangle of curving, twisting tracks inside. Both the men frowned as they looked it over.

“We had nothing but trouble with Inferno Mountain,” Schopfer said. “Design problems, engineering problems, and later some construction injuries. Unluckiest ride I’ve ever built. We broke ground the day after Halloween in 1975, the instant the park closed for the year, but it wasn’t ready when we opened in 1976. We kept hammering away at it all summer. One little thing after another went wrong, like we had a gremlin infestation. The ride still wasn’t ready for opening day in ‘77. The thing was a black hole of time and money, and about this time I felt I was no longer welcome in the Hanover household.”

“Why not?” Victoria asked.

“His wife thought I was bankrupting them,” Schopfer said. “His children—adults by then—they agreed with her. Lots of people got rich off tourism in Conch City in those days, but the Hanover family felt he was blowing all their money on the amusement park. They blamed me for encouraging him.

“About then they decided to re-route the Gulf Coast Highway away from the beach, because it was bumper-to-bumper traffic through Conch City from spring break to Labor Day. Hanover loved it—that was his fishing stream, stocked so heavily the fish could barely swim. They poured into the attractions and motels along the strip, and most of that was located on land he owned.

“So he panicked and bought up all the land between Starland and Northcross Road, which he figured would be expanded and turned into the new U.S. highway. The road along the beach would just become Beachview Drive, a horseshoe spur off the new highway route, and after that a million tourists would blow right pass Conch City beach every summer. If the tourists happened to turn their heads, they might notice the high rides of Starland, but that was about all. Now most of the fish were going to cruise right past his net without even tapping their brakes.

“It turns out, though, that the land values had shot way up since he first bought his land in the late forties, early fifties, and interest rates were high. He had to borrow against his existing beachfront parcels to buy hundreds of acres of scrub brush. I didn’t know all this at the time, but he took on a crushing load of debt, and his family blamed me for it.

“Anyway, we managed to open Inferno Mountain in October 1977, just in time for the ‘Scareland’ fun. We’d renovated and expanded the Dark Mansion, with a souvenir shop and ‘Haunted Alley’ games and food to help recoup some of the cost. It was a fantastic opening, and everybody seemed to love the ride. It won some awards, you know.”

“We read about that,” Victoria said. “Congratulations.”

“Long time ago now. We had big plans for that land. First idea was to expand Space City northward, with a shiny new high-speed steel coaster. We talked about all kinds of things, but then Teddy had his first heart attack early in 1979.

“After that, his family took over, and they opposed any new expansion, any new attractions. They were ready to sit back and let the money come in for once, and their focus was on getting rid of that new land and the debt that came with it.”

“That left me without a job, because we already had full-time maintenance people. My job was always design and development, and suddenly there was nothing to design and develop except the advertising. I suppose I stayed on until sometime in 1981, but the family pretty well pressured me out of town. And that was that. I never worked there again, and the park remained forever frozen in 1979 until the day it died.”

“I was there,” Carter said.

“Were you? It must have been awful.”

“It was. It ruined everything, too. The whole town.”

“I know.” Schopfer limped through the last few pages of his scrapbook, showing them a “Gorilla Golf” course in Biloxi, Mississippi and a glow-in-the-dark “Creature Feature” bowling alley in Guerneville, California, with each lane themed after Dracula, the Mummy, or another classic horror monster.

“Work slowed down by the nineties,” Schopfer said, frowning now, the wrinkles on his eighty-year-old face standing out in sharp relief. “People left the highways for the interstates, and they took the interstates straight to Orlando, walled in the whole way so they can’t even see what else lies along the road.”

The room grew quiet for a minute. Carter felt like he’d just gone on a ride through a very obscure nook of history.

“Does that answer your questions?” Schopfer asked. “I believe I may have rambled a bit.”

“When you were building Starland, did anything unusual happen?” Victoria asked. “You said Inferno Park was a cursed ride.”

“Cursed construction,” he said. “Never had one problem with it after opening day. The construction crew thought it was cursed, but later on, the maintenance crew thought it was eerie how little work it needed.”

“Did anything else strange ever happen at Inferno Mountain?” Victoria asked, which instantly stirred bad memories for Carter.

“What are you trying to ask me here, young lady?”

“Anything supernatural,” Carter said. “Did anything supernatural ever happen?”

Schopfer’s sunken, pale eyes looked at him for a long moment, then closed behind his wrinkled lids. He took a deep breath, his mouth trembling.

“You know,” he said, “When I would build these things, I could start to imagine all the people that would pass through them, all the visitors over the years—millions and millions of them, with the amusement park. Each one of them would be stepping out of their regular lives, out to have a little fun, and maybe each one brings a little bit of extra happiness back home with them. Multiply that by millions, and you’ve got waves of light flowing out from Starland into the world all season long. Like a big lighthouse, or a radio tower, broadcasting these waves of happy feelings.

“People visited these amusements with family and friends, so it’s a place for creating happy memories between people, a little connection between them. Up Route 319, north of Tallahassee, I built a giant catfish in front of a place called Uncle Fred’s Seafood Shack. It was twenty feet from whiskers to tail, and its eye rolled back and forth, and in the early days it waved a fin at oncoming traffic. You couldn’t miss it if you were heading into Tallahassee from the northeast.

“I sat out there one day and watched families pull off the highway for a quick picture with that big ridiculous fish. It must have been ten or fifteen families I saw do it in a single day. Just a goofy memory, a happy shared moment among them. That’s what I was creating, ultimately, whether it was a haunted house or a roller coaster. That moment.” His eyes opened, looking at Carter. “Is that supernatural enough for you?”

“I wish it was,” Carter said. He looked at Victoria with a question in his eyes, and she nodded.

Carter told the man about their experiences at the park—the dead boys the first time, the ghosts the second, the man in the striped hat, and the twelve kids still missing. Victoria hopped in several times to add details.

Schopfer listened without asking questions, but he rubbed his eyes and sighed frequently while they spoke.

“We’re trying to find out who he is and what he’s doing in the park,” Victoria said. “And how to stop him from taking more people.”

Schopfer gazed at the ceiling for a minute. The room, and the facility around it, seemed dim and silent.

“There’s something else out there,” he finally said, his voice thin and weak now. “I could feel it all those years, following me like a wolf in the night. It kept me restless. It followed behind me, destroying all I created. Everything I showed you in my scrapbook is gone. There’s nothing left of what I built, as far as I know. It’s all gone now.

“The man in the striped hat isn’t me, and it isn’t Teddy Hanover, even if he did copy the silly pinstriped outfit,” Schopfer said. “I know who he is. First time I saw him, he was a peddler selling medicines and potions out the back of his truck. That was nineteen...” Schopfer’s brow knitted as he concentrated. “Nineteen-fifty. Had to be. Just before I got involved with Tatiana the Snake Girl. Next time I saw him was that day of the sinkhole—was that three years ago?”

“Five years,” Carter said.

“Five years ago. And I tell you, he looked just the same, like he never aged. Same old dead gray eyes, sand-colored hair, exact same face. Like he was frozen in time. He came into my room, and he took my hands away from me.” Schopfer held up his twisted, shaking fingers. “He said I would never create again, and I would live to see the destruction of all I’d created. Then I heard about Starland, and the sinkhole, and all those deaths, and I knew it was him.”

“Who is he?” Victoria whispered.

“He doesn’t like what I just told you about. The lighthouse, the radio tower, the broadcasting of light, the forging of connections and bonds between people. He wants each one of us to feel isolated, hopeless, cold, and dead inside. Because that’s what
he
feels, all the time.”

“Who?” Carter asked. He also felt the need to whisper, as Victoria had.

“The devil,” Schopfer whispered. “He is the devil.”

The room was silent again while Carter and Victoria looked at each other.

“In what way?” Victoria asked.

Schopfer laughed until he coughed again. “In every way, young lady. The one true devil.”

“And...he has nothing better to do than hang around an old amusement park?” Carter asked, half-certain Schopfer was joking with them, just as when he’d pretended there was ghost behind the curtain and his roommate had played along.

“He takes an interest in each of us, but particularly the young—so much innocence to be corrupted, so much potential waiting to be wasted and lost. Those are the most precious souls to him, I think,” Schopfer said.

“Did he...
say
he was the devil?” Victoria asked.

“He didn’t have to say it. The moment I watched my hands shrivel up like dead flowers, I knew. When I heard about the sinkhole at Starland, and saw those pictures on the news, it only made me more sure of it.”

“Then what’s he doing with Starland now?” Carter asked.

“I can’t tell you what he’s doing or why,” Schopfer said. “I can only tell you who he is. He’s the devil, and he’s taken my best work and turned it into something monstrous.” The old man gave a very thin smile. “He can create nothing of his own, you know. That’s why he wears Teddy Hanover’s old suit. He can only infest and inhabit what others have made. I’ve had time to study and think.” His warped fingers touched the side of his head.

Carter and Victoria shared another quiet, uncertain look.

“Then what do we do?” Carter asked.

“The only safe thing is for you to stay out of the park,” Schopfer said. “Whatever he’s plotting, you don’t want to be in the middle of it.”

“It’s too late for that. We’re already involved,” Victoria said. “People keep disappearing into the park, and we’re the only ones who understand what’s happening.”

“Not that we really understand it yet,” Carter added. “We have to figure out how to stop him.”