Inferno Park (43 page)

Carter walked up the grid of gravel paths among the dead. It was a nondenominational, no-frills graveyard, with little brick-sized markers next to small flower holders. A few statues of angels and a woman in robes stood here and there as decorations, scattered across acres of glossy green grass. A small marble mausoleum/chapel at the center of the green expanse held the town’s wealthier corpses, but he wasn’t going there.

She lay in a back corner of the cemetery under the crooked, sprawling arms of a live oak tree. Her grave marker seemed isolated and lonely, since no other family members were buried nearby. Her ancestors had not lived in Conch City, and her parents and siblings had moved away. He was the only one left in town to keep her memory alive.

He knelt in front of the little marker, wishing he’d brought a few flowers to stick into the empty holder beside it. The inscription was so small he could have covered it with his hand:

BEATRICE GLORIA CALHOUN

“Love knows no death.”

“Hi, Tricia,” he whispered. “Sorry I haven’t visited you more. I miss you. I think about you a lot.”

The cemetery lay quiet except for a few whistling warblers and an occasional car on the highway far behind him. Evening approached, and the shadows of the trees around him had grown long and deep.

“We’re going back tonight,” he said. “I know you’re trapped in there. I want to help you. But I need your help, too. If there’s anything you can do from...from your side of things, please do it tonight. None of us really understand what we’re up against, or what we’re supposed to do, but we need to do
something
before he takes anyone else. If you can help at all...” He traced his fingertips over the inscribed letters of her name.

He heard a small, soft noise in the grass. At first he took it for a small animal, possibly a scrounging squirrel or bird under one of the trees, but as it approached him, it began to sound more and more like human footsteps.

Carter was scared to turn his head and look. He knew he would see her small, pale feet, one toe adorned with the plastic spider ring, and then he would look up to see her bloodstained white dress fluttering in the wind, the dark and gory stump where her head was supposed to be.

A shadow fell across him. The footsteps ceased. When he finally worked up the courage to turn his head slightly to the left, he didn’t see small girl feet standing beside him. They were large, clad in black leather shoes. The pants were white with thin red pinstripes.

Carter took a sharp breath as he looked up at the man from the park, who gazed down at him with no expression, his eyes almost transparently pale under his candy-striped carnival barker hat.

“Praying to a dead child,” the man finally said. “Aren’t you pathetic? What did you expect, a voice from the heavens? Did you think she would reach down and bless you, or intercede on your behalf with some deity?”

Carter shivered, afraid to stand up, run away, or make any sudden moves at all, so he remained where he was, kneeling before the devil.

“She is
mine
, Carter. No different from any of the others.” The man looked away across the rows of graves, and Carter drew back from a kneeling position into a squatting one, from which it would be easier to fight or run.

“Why are you doing this?” Carter whispered.

“Visiting you? Speaking to you?” The man looked almost amused.

“Killing people in the park.”

“Claiming souls is my trade, Carter. The souls of the innocent are difficult to corrupt after death, but that’s the challenge, isn’t it? That is what makes it fun. There’s a little devil in the soul of every child. It simply needs cultivation and encouragement. Don’t weep for them, Carter. When they aren’t busy working for me, they play and play—it’s an endless night at the amusement park for them, all the rides they want, all the cotton candy they can eat. It may not be paradise, but it’s certainly a lighter shade of purgatory.”

“And when they’ve killed enough people, you get to keep their souls.” Carter swallowed. “You take them down to Hell.”

“That’s the final profit for me, but it’s less about the destination than the journey. Don’t you agree?”

“Let her go,” Carter said.

“Who?”

“You know who I mean. Beatrice.” He touched her grave marker.

“Are you offering your soul in exchange for hers?” The man squatted down to look Carter in the eyes. The air around Carter turned cold, as though black clouds had rolled across the sun. “But
her
soul is a greater prize. So much lighter, so much sweeter...or it was when I first put my hands on her. I find you dull in comparison, neither very bright nor very dark.”

“Then how can I set her free?”

“You’re asking me how to steal
my
property, Carter? You cannot have her. In fact...” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s quite happy where she is. All the young ones enjoy the park so much. Why do you imagine she wants to leave?”

Carter didn’t know how to answer. He gaped at the man, trying to process that
this
was the devil of mythology and old-time religion.

When he was very young, maybe four or five, his mother had taken him to visit his grandfather, a tall, angry preacher in Mississippi. Carter had sat on the hard pew in the small pine-log church, stewing like a pig in the stagnant July heat, while his grandfather ranted about eternal fire and the devil, the devil, the devil. The same death-and-brimstone ramblings had driven Carter’s mom to run away from home at the age of sixteen, first to New Orleans, then to the sugary Florida beaches. His mother had a talent for running away.

Carter now wondered if watching his grandfather’s sermon, listening to the stories of souls burning in eternal anguish while he roasted like a pig inside the dim, hot country church had led to his childhood fear of Inferno Mountain. Maybe that was why he found the giant, grinning red devil face terrifying, while everyone else seemed to find it funny or campy.

The man in front of him was nothing like the evil monster of his grandfather’s sermons. This man looked so forgettable and ordinary that he could have vanished into any crowd, if not for his loud clothes. He could have been anyone.

“You are not welcome to return to the park,” the man said. “You’ve been an irritant. If you return, I will not hesitate to kill you. Victoria will die, too, as will any friends you bring along. I’ll be watching for you.”

“Why me?”

“I simply don’t
like
you, Carter.”

Carter didn’t believe him, but he didn’t want to press the issue too hard.

“I will make you a final offer,” the man continued. “I can give you anything you want, Carter, if you simply keep out. For example, this business of becoming a doctor—you and I both know you’re not capable of it. You’ll end up among the countless washouts littering the side of that particular path. Honestly, you probably won’t even make it through your high school classes this semester. I can change all of that. I can make you a rich, famous, brilliant doctor if you let me help. Perhaps you’ll cure, let’s say, Parkinson’s? That sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Or perhaps a major venereal disease? That will make you popular at parties.”

“I don’t care about being rich and famous.”

“Then I’ll make you a poor, obscure, mediocre doctor, if that’s your pleasure. College and medical school will be a breeze for you. Simply accept my offer.” He held out a bloodless, cold, carefully manicured hand.

“No,” Carter said.

The man scowled a little.

“I can grant any one wish,” he said. “What about Victoria? We both know she’s too good for you—in fact, all three of us know it, don’t we? She knew it the moment she met you. But I can make her all yours, Carter. For life, if you like, or just for a single ecstatic night, if you prefer. Consider what you truly desire. You could have any dream come true, no matter how impossible it seems.”

“And all I have to do is stay out of the park?” Carter asked. “No signing anything in blood? No giving you my soul?”

“You understand perfectly. One wish, no strings.”

“Why do you want me to stay out, when you want everyone else to come in?”

“Why must you press my patience? Make your wish and be free. Leave the ugly past behind, as you’ve always wished to do, Carter. Move on from this miserable, dying little town into your real life, into your future. It’s time. This chance will not come again.” He stood up, slightly adjusting the lapels of his jacket, never taking his eyes off Carter. “I could even move you forward in time, Carter. You want nothing more than to escape this town, isn’t that true? You could awaken tomorrow on your first day of college, leave all of this behind you. That’s all you really want, isn’t it, Carter?”

Carter stood with him, his knees shaking as if they would collapse under him at any moment. He knew there was only one way to answer, but the idea of speaking that single syllable terrified him, because there was no telling what might follow. If the man was who Schopfer said he was—and Carter was finding less and less reason to doubt Schopfer’s words—then he might strike Carter dead at any moment and stroll away whistling.

“Answer,” the man said. “Simply tell me which wish you wish to wish. Speak your heart’s desire.”

“No.”

“No?” The man’s eyebrows lifted slightly, and his lips parted. His slight smile disappeared. For his usually blank and expressionless face, it was an enormous outburst of emotion. “You have another wish to tell me?”

“I’m not making a wish.”

“Then you must want...” The man’s brow furrowed just a little, giving rise to a single shallow wrinkle in his forehead. “You are rejecting my offer?”

“Yes.” Carter felt sick with fear, as if he would vomit all over his shoes, if the man didn’t kill him first.

The man snarled, and there was nothing subtle about it. His canine teeth grew longer and sharper, and his pupils narrowed until they were vertical and reptilian. Now he did remind Carter of the devil on Inferno Mountain, just a little bit.

“Do you not understand?” the man growled. “If you defy me, I will capture your spirit and torture you until the end of time. It will not be an eternal night at the amusement park for you. It will be suffering and misery until you beg for death, but you will already be dead. You will die in ten thousand slow and horrific ways, and then ten thousand more. Your punishment will never end.”

Carter wasn’t sure what to say, but he realized he didn’t have to say anything at all. He’d already given his answer.

The man observed Carter’s silence for a full minute, his face growing angrier and turning a dark shade of crimson. Finally he stomped one foot on the ground. A wide circle of grass around his black loafer instantly turned brown and dead. The ripple of death spread outward, shriveling and killing the lawn in every direction, sweeping out across acres of grass. The lush green oaks and magnolias turned the dark colors of late fall and shed a wave of dead leaves onto the ground. Even the bouquets of cut flowers on the individual grave markers shriveled and crumpled.

“My offer is withdrawn,” the devil hissed. His voice sounded like the rustling of the dead leaves raining down around them. “Come to the park and die. I will relish your eternity of torment.”

He turned his back on Carter and stalked away. A heavy wind rose across the cemetery, blowing another thick rain of leaves from the trees. By the time it passed, the man had vanished.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“Are you ready for this?” Victoria asked when she picked Carter up from his apartment’s parking lot. She looked shaken and afraid, and he felt the same way. He hugged her.

“Thanks for helping,” he told her as she drove. “It’s really not your problem.”

“Someone has to do something about it. We’re the only ones available.”

“Do you think we should have tried to get some kind of, I don’t know, legitimate religious leader to help us? A priest or something?” Carter asked.

“A legitimate religious leader willing to break the law and sneak into a condemned old amusement park because some teenagers say the devil is there?”

“When you put it that way...”

“I did bring this.” Victoria opened the second button of her black, high-collared shirt and brought out a small golden cross with trefoil ends, reminiscent of the clubs from a deck of playing cards. “It was my grandmother’s baptismal cross.”

“Do you think it’ll protect us?”

“I have no idea. What did you bring?”

“I couldn’t think of anything.” Carter shrugged.

They reached the parking lot of the public beach, where Sameer and Emily were already waiting, and parked in the shade of the palm trees to make Victoria’s car less noticeable from the road. The sun had set and the beach was dark and deserted.

Wes and Jared arrived a minute later, reeking of gasoline. The six of them stood in the parking lot for a moment, looking at each other.

“We’re all set on the fire,” Wes said. “It’s on a timer. We have about five minutes before ignition.”

“What did you decide to burn down?” Carter asked them.

“Just the Beach Ball and Sand Castle Museum,” Jared said. “Wish we could watch it, it’s going to be sweet when it goes up.”

“A museum?” Victoria asked.

“It’s that building on the highway that looks like a crumbling old sand castle.” Carter said. “It closed down a year before the sinkhole even opened. It was a stupid museum, anyway. Just an excuse to sell overpriced beach gear.”

“The parking lot surrounds the building, so that should contain the fire. Nothing important will burn,” Wes said. “All we need to do is wait. I have to say, we did a pretty brilliant job all around.” He and Jared nodded at each other with such a serious look that it was almost comical.

“There’s something I should tell you guys before we go,” Carter said. He recounted his conversation with the devil in the cemetery.

Victoria, Emily, and Jared listened intently, looking increasingly pale as he described what had happened. Wes and Sameer made of point of rolling their eyes and making derisive snorts, refusing to believe him.