Inferno Park (42 page)

Sameer nodded. “Yeah. I’d probably say that if it was my brother or sister. If you want to go, I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t expect to find anything but ruins, but what the hell?” Wes shrugged.

“You’ve all lost your minds.” David stalked away across the rickety bridge, back toward the parking lot.

“Don’t go narc us out to anybody!” Jared called after him. “Or I’ll kick your ass.”

David gave him the finger before walking out of sight.

“Thank you, Wes,” Victoria said.

“Yeah, that’s great.” Carter felt a very small portion of the heavy weight lift from his shoulders. “We really need you guys. Emily’s putting together her ghost-hunting gear—”

“Actually, I’ve decided against that,” Emily said. “From what you’ve described, we’ll hardly be looking for trace signs of abnormal energy, or even a simple apparition. We should instead focus on defending ourselves against this entity. I have my doubts as to the existence of the actual ‘Satan’ of Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, but clearly we have a dark and powerful personality energy. One that weaves webs to collect and eat souls.”

“So what do you recommend?” Victoria asked.

“We should each bring religious or spiritual symbols with strong personal significance.”

“So you’ll just hope that at least one of several random ancient books of myth and folklore just happen to be true?” Wes asked.

“I personally believe their subjective importance to us would be the important factor,” Emily said. “But that is merely my viewpoint.”

“Whatever,” Wes said. “Do what you want on the hocus-pocus end. I’m just looking for signs of my brother.”

“All you two really need to do is prepare to play chess,” Carter told Wes and Sameer.

“It’s not real chess, it’s a simplified carnival-game version,” Wes said. “But consider us prepared.”

“Jared, you need to call off these other people who are planning to go into the park with you,” Carter said. “Tell them the party’s canceled.”

“I’ll try, but there are tons of people planning to go,” Jared said. “I might not be able to stop it at this point.”

“Define ‘tons’ of people,” Wes said.

“I don’t know, lots of freshman and sophomores. It could be forty people or a hundred. We were talking about going on Friday night.”

“The police will stop them, anyway,” Sameer said. “They have a cop out there all the time now.”

“I don’t know,” Victoria said. “I think
he
wants all those younger kids to come to the park. That might be why he let any of us out in the first place, to tell other people about it. And if he wants them to come, he’ll probably find a way to get them inside.”

“Because he’s ‘the devil,’” Wes snorted, rolling his eyes.

“So we should go Thursday night, before all those people go on Friday,” Carter said.

“What about the police?” Wes asked. “We still have to get around the cop, too.”

“Then we need to distract the police,” Victoria said.

“How? Start a fire?” Sameer asked.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Carter told him.

“You’re insane.” Sameer shook his head.

“This town is full of empty buildings that will probably collapse before anyone ever uses them again,” Carter said. “A fire would keep the police busy...”

“So who gets stuck committing the arson?” Wes asked.

“I’ll do it,” Jared said. “I’m good at setting shit on fire.”

“It would be smarter if none of us were there,” Wes said. “We could set up a timer or a remote detonator.”

“This is getting too wild for me,” Sameer said.

“You don’t have to be involved with that part,” Carter told him. “But we all agree we’ll go to the park together Thursday?”

“Why wait for Thursday?” Jared asked. “If Becca or Finn or anybody is still alive in there, they need our help now.”

“Exactly,” Wes said. “We should go right away.”

“We’re not prepared,” Emily said. “I insist that we take our time and take careful precautions.”

“And we’d have to set up a distraction for the police,” Carter said.

“I’ll do it,” Jared said. “I’ll set anyplace in town on fire, just name it.”

“I could make the detonator,” Wes said. “We should wait until after sunset to break into our abandoned building and set things up.”

“Then let’s meet back here an hour after sunset,” Carter said. “Nine o’clock. Will that give everybody enough time?”

They looked at each other, and nobody disagreed.

Chapter Thirty

The man came to visit Artie Schopfer at five in the morning, when the world lay dark and silent.

Artie heard the footsteps first, not in the hallway but behind the curtain dividing his room in half. It certainly wasn’t Ezekiel Reynolds, his wheelchair-bound roommate. Artie hadn’t seen a nurse enter the room, and he’d been lying awake for at least five minutes.

As the footfalls approached the curtain, Artie began to feel afraid. It was
him
, coming back to haunt and terrorize him again. Artie had told the kids everything he knew. The man must have found out somehow.

The man wasn’t
really
a man, of course, but Artie didn’t want to think too much about that, or he would drive himself into a fear-drenched panic.

The curtain waved slightly, as though someone had taken hold of it from the other side, preparing to pull it open.

“Who’s there?” Artie whispered. “Ezekiel? Is that you?”

Pale white fingers—definitely not Ezekiel’s—reached around the edge of the stiff green curtain. They eased the curtain aside, making no noise at all.

Artie couldn’t bring himself to speak again. He watched the man step out, dressed in a candy-striped fedora and a crisp matching suit with a red tie, as if he’d raided Theodore Hanover’s personal wardrobe.

He didn’t have Hanover’s ruddy, jolly features, though. His eyes showed little color or emotion, and his face seemed plain and forgettable.

Artie had last seen him years earlier, on the day of the sinkhole.

“How are you feeling, Artie?” the man asked, standing at the foot of his bed and folding his arms. “Bitter and powerless?”

“Leave me alone,” Artie whispered.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Perhaps I should come closer.” The man walked up the side of the bed until he reached the small bedside table. His blank eyes looked down into Artie’s. His presence chilled the air.

“Go away,” Artie managed to say, a little louder. “Please.”

“Is that how you greet your visitors? You receive so few, I thought you’d be happy to see me.” He sat down in the orange plastic chair by Artie’s bed, his posture perfectly straight. “Perhaps my appearance discomforts you. Would you prefer if I sprouted red horns and a goatee? Or perhaps a vaudeville mustache curled and waxed at the tips? Would you be more comfortable if my eyes looked like this?” The man’s pupils narrowed and elongated until they were vertical reptilian slits like those Artie had painted on Inferno Mountain’s devil face.

Artie didn’t say anything. The man’s inhuman eyes stared at him.

“Your soul is special to me,” the man said. “I take a particular delight in your torment. Look at your life now, no mate, no children, all your work crumbling to dust behind you.”

“What do you want from me?” Artie whispered.

“I want to watch you suffer. Your work disgusts me, you must know that by now. I loathe all manner of frivolity, laughter, lightness of heart and spirit. I like to watch souls grow dark and heavy, ripening with fear, hate, guilt, and greed until they fall toward me like rotten fruit. You seek to interfere, but your efforts are useless. Only a fool casts seeds on stony soil, and you have cast yours on the stoniest soil of all, the human heart.”

The man leaned closer, his voice falling to an intimate whisper. “So sour and barren is the heart, Artie, that we must at times resort to trickery to make things grow there. Isn’t that sad, Artie?”

Artie thought of the small brown medicine bottle made of thick glass. He had paid three dollars for it, a princely sum for a traveling carnival worker in 1950.

She will love you as much as she can,
the man had whispered when he’d sold it to Artie. Artie had been nervous and horny as hell, his adolescent dreams and fantasies fueled by Tatiana’s short, skimpy costume that clung to her swaying hips while the boa constrictor curled around and between her breasts, as thick as Artie’s arm...

Artie had been young and out of his mind with desire. This man, dressed in a crisp brown suit and fedora, had stood next to the homemade wooden box-top on the back of his red Chevrolet Thriftmaster truck, from which he sold patent medicines and packets of ground roots and herbs.

Artie was now old and infirm, but this man looked as though he hadn’t aged one second since 1950.

“But you gave me an additional, special reason to hate you, haven’t you, Artie?” he asked. “You must know what I mean.”

Artie thought it over. “Inferno Mountain?”

“Inferno Mountain!” He snarled slightly, and the power of his voice rattled Artie’s frail bones in their sockets. “Plastering a cartoonish attempt at my face on a carnival ride for the amusement of a teeming, filthy mass of human beings. Making
me
into a figure of fun for public consumption. Stamping me on their little shirts and keychains so they could take home little mementos of how they laughed in my face. Mocking me on a grand scale. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

“I didn’t think you were real.”

“I am more than real. I am eternal,” he said. “I dwell in the dark places inside each of you. I wait, and I whisper in your ear, helping your soul on its inevitable journey downward toward me. You create fragile painted clouds, Artie, empty illusions of happiness to lure and fool your fellow man, but I dwell far below, on the final bedrock of the universe where all things must eventually fall.

“I have saved your grandest creation for the final destruction, the final insult to your existence,” the man continued. “I have transformed your great lighthouse of shallow happiness into a blackened pit of despair and suffering. As you once lured souls in search of delights, so I lure them now, and they give themselves to me. Your Starland will be known as a den of unspeakable horrors, a place where many were tormented and many died.
That
shall be your only legacy.”

“How many have you killed in the park?” Artie whispered, feeling horror and dread creeping all through his body.

“What matters is how many souls I will take. That will number in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, before I lose interest in this little project. For now, I find it refreshing and pleasant. There is so much one can do with an amusement park infused with the powers of Hell, so many experiments I’d like to try. I can assure you it will be quite profitable to me.”

Artie was quiet for a minute, and the man stood.

“Have you nothing else to say, Artie? You don’t need to speak. I feel the pain inside you. I relish your sense of loss and emptiness.” He walked toward the curtain, then turned back. “There is one additional matter. You recently spoke with two young visitors. You must know that I would have preferred you to turn them away, but instead you loosened your tongue and told them all you knew, didn’t you, Artie? Not that you know much, but surely you didn’t think it would go unpunished.”

The man stalked up the side of his bed again. Artie pressed the emergency call button for a nurse.

“I have already taken your hands as penalty for your grotesque creations,” the man said. “Now I must remove your power of speech as well, for that has offended me.”

The man reached his long, thin fingers toward Artie’s face. Artie turned his head, but didn’t have the strength to do much more.

The ice-cold fingertips pressed against Artie’s left temple. Artie grimaced as they pressed harder and harder, and finally seemed to break through his skin and slide through his skull as though it were a soft, permeable membrane.

He felt a crunching pain, like a sudden intense headache, and then the right half of his body went limp and numb.

Artie had slipped the potion in the mug of warm wine Tatiana drank after each performance. She had fallen for him and shared his bed for a few months, before a large cottonmouth had killed her. The venomous snake wasn’t part of her act. It had bitten her while she bathed one evening in a creek in rural Georgia. Artie had lost his first love, and had resisted the urge to fall in love since then.

Now Artie trembled while the man, the devil, removed his fingers from Artie’s head. There was no blood, nor any feeling of pain or injury where the man’s finger had penetrated his temple, but Artie could feel that he’d done serious damage in some other way.

“Say your name, Artie,” the devil instructed.

Artie felt his lips and jaw move uselessly, as if the signals from his brain weren’t reaching his mouth correctly.

“Say
my
name, Artie,” the devil said, with a gentle smile on his lips.

Artie tried to speak, but his mouth made nothing but useless wet sounds.

“Now you’re all fixed, Artie. Your hands cannot create, your mouth cannot speak. You can only lie here, useless, and think. Think of all the bright young souls drawn down into your park to meet their damnation. Think of how perfectly I’ve reversed your intentions and ruined all that you made.”

Artie again struggled to speak, but could not form a single word. A feeling of panic rose in his chest.

“Enjoy what remains of your miserable existence, Artie. I will be waiting for you on the other side.”

The devil vanished just before the nurse entered the room.

Chapter Thirty-One

Carter asked Victoria to drop him at home for a while so he could square away some schoolwork and prepare for their third visit to the park. He could tell she wasn’t thrilled to separate from him when they had such a dangerous night ahead, but there was something he felt he needed to do alone.

He borrowed his dad’s truck and drove out to the Memorial Gardens cemetery on the western edge of town, across the Gulf Coast Highway from an empty strip mall and a Burger King.