Inferno Park (45 page)

“Fuck all that, I have to find her.” Jared continued on toward the front steps, now made of black stone instead of worn, peeling wood.

“Wes, you should look at this...” Sameer pointed to one of the gravestones. Wes stood beside him and read it.

“What the hell?” Wes asked.

“What is it?” Carter joined them. They stared at a headstone that read FINNEGAN MCKINLEY.

“Why is my brother’s name in front of this house?” Wes asked.

“I don’t know...” Carter looked at the other headstones and pointed. “Look, there’s those first two kids who went missing, Reeves and Kevin. Some of your other friends are here, too, Jared—Elissa, Tamara, Derek...”

“Becca?” Jared asked. He already reached the top stair, under the arched entrance to the haunted house, and now he turned back to look at the gravestones.

“I don’t see her...” Carter looked among the headstones, which faded in and out of visibility as the cold fog crawled across them. He was also looking for Tricia, but didn’t see her name anywhere.

“I want to know why my brother’s name is there. Let’s look inside.” Wes started up the stairs, followed by Sameer.

“I think it’s unwise to grow distracted from our primary goal,” Emily said. “That would be the Beat the Devil game.”

“I don’t care about that stupid game,” Wes told them. “First, we look for my brother.”

“And Becca,” Jared added. He, Wes, and Sameer approached the heavy black door inscribed with bats and skeletons.

“It would also be unwise to split up the group,” Emily told Carter and Victoria.

“But that means whoever is loudest and pushiest will get their way,” Carter said.

“Welcome to democracy,” Victoria said.

“Wait!” Carter called up to the three boys on the stairs. He approached them, holding out his skeleton key. “If we’re going in there, maybe we shouldn’t use the front door. This key is the only thing we have that might protect us.”

“Sounds good to me.” Jared started down the stairs. “I don’t want to get stuck in there again.”

They circled around the house, looking for a side entrance. They went around the left side, following a narrow maintenance path between Dark Mansion and the red-rock exterior of the Mad Martian Arcade. Going around the other way would have meant walking into Haunted Alley, and Carter wasn’t in a hurry to go there after the crowd of ghosts they’d seen last time.

As they passed along the narrow, tall windows barred by wrought iron, Carter thought he glimpsed small white faces peering out at them, but they vanished when he turned to look.

At the back of the mansion, under the dark shadow of Inferno Mountain—the only ride that still appeared to be closed—they found a small, plain rectangle of a door with a DO NOT ENTER sign marked with a skull and crossbones.

Carter inserted the key. The lock turned reluctantly, with an angry squeal.

The door opened onto a workshop area with table saws and racks of sharp tools, lit by bare bulbs in the ceiling. Scarecrows, spiders, and dismembered mannequin limbs lay heaped on the shelves, and the air smelled of the old sawdust strewn across the floor.

“Looks like we found the backstage area,” Victoria said, poking at a stuffed rat on a dusty plank table.

“Let’s keep moving.” Wes hurried up a half-flight of wooden stairs to a short, plain wooden door in the far wall.

“Wait,” Emily told them. “Considering the story Jared related, perhaps we should take measures to avoid getting lost in the maze.” She looked among the tools, found a large ball of twine, and tied one end to the leg of a tool bench. “We’ll trail the string behind us so we can find our way.”

“Good idea. I’ll hold it.” Jared reached out his hand.

“I can handle it myself, thank you,” Emily replied.

“Come on!” Wes shoved open the door. Jared hurried to follow him. Victoria quietly took Carter’s hand as they went up the steps together. Sameer and Emily came up behind them, Emily unraveling the ball of twine as she walked.

They ducked through the low lintel of the doorway and emerged into a narrow room with a floor and walls that looked like rough stone tiles. Tall, bizarre statues crowded the walls, distorted human shapes with the bodies of bulls or the heads of lizards and birds. They had just stepped out of a raised dais occupied by the statue of a squatting, pot-bellied man with hollow eyes and curving ram horns on the sides of its head. Carter touched the dais, and it felt like real stone. Frescoes on the walls showed rows of humans with empty eye sockets, their bodies mangled and twisted. A small stone brazier full of real fire illuminated the room and cast dancing horned shadows on the walls.

“I don’t remember this room from when I was a kid,” Carter said. “Jared, did you see it when you were here?”

“No, nothing like this,” Jared said.

“The art looks Sumerian to me,” said Sameer, and Emily nodded.

“Looks like a good place to get sacrificed to strange gods,” Wes said. He pointed to one end of the room. “I think I see a way out.”

They had to walk single-file around the large statues in the narrow gallery. Carter and Victoria found themselves leading the group through a small archway and up a dim wooden stairway that twisted left and right. The house had few straight paths, Carter remembered. The corridors slanted and turned frequently, so you were always turning a dark corner into the unknown.

Distant screams, intermingled with soft piano music, sounded from deep within the house every few seconds as the group ascended the dark stairway. A cold, wet drop splashed onto Carter’s head from somewhere above, followed by another that splattered across the back of his hand.

“Something’s dripping on me,” Victoria whispered.

“Me, too.” Sameer pointed his flashlight upward.

The stairway, though narrow, had a high ceiling. Hanging from it, swaying slightly, were several human shapes draped in bedsheets, suspended by rope nooses around their cloth-covered heads. The sheets were damp and dripping red.

“Are those real?” Emily asked from the back of the line. “Or mannequins?”

“You want to pull one down and look?” Wes asked.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Carter said.

The stairs took them up to a spacious ballroom lit by a chandelier with just a few burning candles, which reflected in black windows framed by heavy red curtains along one wall. The ornate floor tiles, engraved with floral and geometrical shapes, were dirty and grimy beneath their feet. An antique player piano sat on the raised stage at one end, banging out-of-tune notes as a yellowed scroll of paper rolled over a drum above the piano keys. The dirty ivory keys rose and fell as though played by a ghost.

Jared checked a pair of double doors, one of several around the room.

“These are locked,” Jared told them. “Keep trying all the doors. Probably only one or two of them actually lead anywhere.”

A scream echoed through the room, carried by a stiff, cold wind that blew out candles one by one. A wave of darkness swept toward them from the piano.

“Let’s go!” Wes shouted, sounding frightened.

The group scattered to the different doors, trying each of them as the large room turned dark and cold. Carter and Victoria pressed against one locked set of doors, and Carter kicked it in frustration.

“Over here! Hurry!” Sameer announced as he pushed open a pair of black glass doors near one of the remaining candles. He stepped through the doorway and screamed.

Emily was closest to him. She reached out to grab his sleeve, but he fell forward and dragged her through the doorway with him. The floor tiles immediately in front of the open doorway had sunk to create a slippery ramp. When Emily and Sameer tumbled out of sight, both of them shouting, the sunken tiles rose again to blend in with the others.

“Sameer!” Wes shouted, running toward them.

“Watch your step!” Carter yelled. He stood to one side and pressed the hidden ramp down with one foot.

“Emily? Sameer?” Victoria called into the darkness as she cautiously approached the doorway.

The double doors had opened onto a lightless space the size of a large chimney. Wes’s flashlight illuminated irregular, dusty bricks thick with spiderwebs. There was no floor, just an empty brick shaft with Emily’s length of twine dangling down one side.

“Are you guys okay?” Carter shouted into the dark shaft. Nobody answered. Emily’s playlist of assorted religious music had fallen silent.

“I can’t see the bottom,” Victoria whispered, leaning over Carter’s shoulder. She reached her video camera into the empty chimney space and twisted her display screen, trying get a better view straight down the chimney.

“This is crazy,” Wes said, pushing the ramp area down with the toe of his shoe. “You open the door, and the floor slants and makes you fall inside.”

“I told y’all this house was evil,” Jared said.

“Sameer! Emily! Say something!” Wes called into the dark chimney shaft. “There’s no way to climb down to them.”

“We’ll have to find another way down,” Victoria said. “Let’s look for stairs.”

“That’s how the house traps you,” Jared told her.

“What choice do we have?” she asked.

They approached the other doors more carefully, but all of them seemed sealed, some of them simply false fronts that would never open. Jared finally found the other way out, not through a door but one of the black-painted windows. He raised the heavy iron-trimmed pane, looked through it, and announced there was another room beyond.

They had to duck their heads low and step high over the windowsill.

The next room was again dimly lit by dripping candles, most of them spaced along the massive dining table at the center of the room. Dried, shriveled corpses, like mummies excavated from the desert, sat in high-backed wooden chairs around the table, their open jaws and empty eye sockets facing platters offering decayed goat heads, rotten fish, and blackened fruit crawling with flies.

The foul stench of the place made Carter gag.

“This is awful,” Victoria whispered, holding her arm across her nose. “Just fucking awful.”

Wes shined his light around the walls, revealing graphic paintings of people carving and eating each other, a bizarre banquet of mutual cannibalism. He jogged toward the oversized double doors at one end of the room. They were closed tight, flanked by full suits of armor thick with cobwebs.

“The obvious door won’t work. My money’s on the fireplace.” Jared moved in the opposite direction, toward the immense stone hearth, which held a heap of crumbling, moldy wood. A marble wolf crouched beside the fireplace, its teeth bared in a snarl.

“We shouldn’t have come inside this house,” Victoria whispered.

A loud, rusty squeal sounded as Wes turned one of the door handles. The walls shuddered around them, and a rumble echoed from the ceiling.

Carter looked up in time to see a heavy wooden-lattice wall descend from the ceiling like a curtain. It slammed to the ground just beyond the end of the dining table, walling off Wes’s end of the long room.

“What the hell?” Wes shouted. He ran toward the wall and looked through the gaps between the thick slats. “Help me out here. These doors won’t open, by the way.”

A loud rattling sounded from the ceiling, and then a more solid, wood-paneled wall descended in front of the lattice, sealing him off.

“Hey! Hey! What the hell?” Wes shouted, while Carter and Victoria ran toward him. Carter reached out to slap the new wall as it dropped into place, but it was much thicker and heavier than he expected. He couldn’t stop its descent.

“Wes, can you try the same handle again?” Victoria shouted through the wall. “Or the handle on the other door?”

No answer came through the very solid new wall.

“Can you hear us, Wes?” Carter asked, but he didn’t get a response.

“What the hell happened?” Jared ran over and kicked the new wall, but it didn’t help.

The three of them spent a few minutes trying to talk to Wes through the wall while searching for some way of making it rise up again. They couldn’t find anything, though, and the rotten-meat smell of the dining room was overwhelming.

“Jared...” a voice whispered weakly. “Jared, where are you?”

“That’s Becca!” Jared ran to a heating grate with an intricate brass grill resembling flowering vines. “Becca, can you hear me?”

“Jared...it’s so dark down here...”

“Where are you?” Jared asked.

“Jared, help me...”

“We have to go down!” Jared ran back toward the fireplace. “I think I found the way out.”

“Wait!” Carter ran after him, but Jared didn’t slow down. Victoria followed close behind him. “The house is trying to split us up. We need to stay close together.”

“So stay close.” Jared laid his hands on the snarling marble wolf on the raised hearth. It rolled backwards on a pair of sunken tracks, and a portion of the rock wall at the back of the fireplace swung open.

“What about Wes?” Carter asked.

“That guy’s fine. Becca’s been trapped here for a
week
, Carter. We’re lucky she’s alive.” Jared stepped into the fireplace and peered through the new opening. Carter couldn’t help imagining the dead, blackened wood flaring to life, consuming Jared in a sudden bonfire.

“What’s in there?” Victoria asked, edging closer.

“A ladder,” Jared said. “We can climb down and look for Becca.”

“Maybe we should try to help Wes first—” Carter began, but Jared stepped over the decayed wood and slithered through the hidden door, down a wooden ladder and out of sight. “Jared, wait!”

“Should we go with him?” Victoria asked.

Carter sighed, then shouted Wes’s name again, but received no reply.

“We can’t get separated,” Carter said. “You go first, and I’ll be right on top of you. Wes! We found a way down! We’ll come back!” he shouted at the wall.

Victoria grimaced as she squatted in the ashes and reached one leg into the open hole. Carter helped her slide forward and onto the ladder, which was barely visible in the candlelight from the grotesque dining table.

He crawled down after her, through a space so small he could barely fit his shoulders inside. There was no light. It was like climbing down inside a dark, sour-smelling well.