Inferno Park (46 page)

“Jared.” The girl’s voice whispered softly up to them on a draft of air as cold as winter air blown across hard ice. “Jared, help me.”

“I’m coming!” Jared shouted back to her.

The ladder brought them into a dim, cavelike space, illuminated by a small fire near the far wall. They stood in a cellar below the haunted house, though if the original building actually had a cellar beneath it, Carter had never heard of it.

The dark room resembled the mock torture chamber that had once occupied the attic, but it was larger, with strange contraptions, like a blood-stained wooden wheel large enough to tie a human to its face. Sharp, rusty points jutted out at every inch around its circumference. There was a rack for stretching people and a dark cage suspended by a chain from the ceiling. Atop the wood-burning fireplace was a long metal stovetop with iron cuffs at the corners, the inner curves of the cuffs lined with little spikes. Flails, whips, tongs, blades, and hooks hung on the walls.

“Jared...help...” Becca’s voice echoed softly.

“Where are you?” Jared ran to look into one of three cage doors built along one wall. “Becca?”

“Here...”

Carter and Victoria advanced cautiously into the room. They reached the bed of nails, which had been outfitted, somewhat perversely, with a sculpted oak headboard like a piece of luxury furniture.

As they stepped around the headboard, they saw the girl lashed to the bed of nails, lying on her back and covered from head to toe in dark, dried blood. She did not move at all.

“That’s her,” Carter whispered.

“What?” Jared turned from peering into the second cage door.

“She’s over here, Jared,” Carter said quietly.

“Becca?” Jared dashed over, then stopped and stared at her body. “Becca?” He reached out to touch one cuffed arm, then immediately drew his hand back. “She’s cold. And stiff.”

“Yeah,” Carter said. “It looks like...she’s been dead a while. I’m sorry.” Carter touched Jared’s arm, but Jared shook him off, looking angry.

“It can’t be her. I just heard her voice.” Jared touched her stiff, bloody face, then recoiled. “How could we hear her if she’s dead?”

“She took a long time to die.” A flat, monotone voice spoke behind them. They turned to see the man in the striped hat, now standing behind one of the cage doors in the wall, as though he were a prisoner. “We milked every drop of her anger to rebuild this attraction. She was filled with hidden pockets of wrath. You see the results. Dark Mansion is now larger than it ever was during its natural lifetime.”

“You asshole!” Jared ran to the cage door and tried to wrench it open, but it was locked. He smacked the bars in front of the man’s face. “You killed her!”

“I merely stripped her of her form,” the man said. “She’s thriving in her new existence. We let her torture all she likes.”

“What are you talking about?” Jared asked.

“Jared...” Becca’s voice echoed from another cage door. He ran to it.

“Careful, Jared,” Victoria said, approaching him. “It’s probably a trick.”

“It is no trick,” Becca’s voice whispered. The girl appeared behind the cage door, only inches from Jared. Her skin was pale as a shroud, her eyes colorless, her long black hair tangled. Her lips parted in a sharp little smile. “I’m right here, Jared.”

“Becca?” Jared reached a hand through the bars toward her, then hesitated, his fingers reaching just beyond the bars.

“This life is sooo much better,” she whispered. “You should join me.”

“Join you?” Jared looked confused.

“Don’t listen to her,” Victoria told him.

“I want you with me, Jared. I need you with me. I’m reaching out to you from beyond the grave—that’s how special you are.” Becca touched her pale hand to Jared’s, and he shivered, but he didn’t draw back from her. “You’re everything to me, Jared.”

“I don’t understand,” Jared whispered. He looked cowed, and somehow entranced by the Becca ghost.

“I want you, Jared.” The cage door gave a rusty squeal, then opened just slightly. “I want you forever. There’s nobody else like you in the world. You’re the one. You’re everything.”

“Becca...” Jared pulled open the cage door. A cold rush of air spilled out of the cell.

“Don’t do it!” Carter grabbed Jared’s arm, but Jared snarled and punched him in the face with stunning force. Carter stumbled back a step, feeling blood leak from his left nostril and over his lips.

Becca retreated back into the darkness of the cell, out of sight. Jared hurried after her, though Carter and Victoria yelled for him to stop.

Jared was out of sight for only a couple of seconds before he screamed like a terrified child. Carter ran into the cage after him.

“Carter, wait!” Victoria shouted, but he didn’t stop.

He shined his cell phone upward like a flashlight. Jared hung there, in the center of a web of wires and chains strung through his body. The chains and wires were anchored in the walls around him. It looked as though someone had cut him at least a hundred times with a small blade. His blood drizzled out into a widening puddle on the floor beneath, his lifeless eyes bulging and staring at nothing, his legs still twitching.

“Too eager, Becca,” the man’s monotone voice spoke from the next cell.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Becca’s voice whispered. She became visible to Carter again, her pale face and arms splattered with fresh red blood. “I’ll kill the next one more slowly. Promise!”

She smiled at Carter and licked her bloody lips.

Behind him, the cage door gave a rusty squeal as it swung itself closed.

“No!” Victoria seized the bars of the door with her hands, pulling it back and stopping it less than an inch away from the latch that would have trapped Carter inside.

Carter ran to the door and pushed against it. Something sharp jabbed deep into his back, cutting him open, and Becca giggled, her frosty breath on his ear. She kept slashing at him while he pushed against the cage door.

Together, Carter and Victoria managed to pull the door open enough for Carter to slither out, his back greased by his own blood. The moment they released it, the door slammed shut and locked itself.

“Come back!” Becca shrieked. She became transparent, passed through the cage door, then grew solid again on the other side, holding a short, curved blade in one hand and a coil of razor wire in the other.

Victoria ran back to the ladder—it might not have been the quickest way out of the room, but they didn’t have time to search for another. While they climbed, Becca appeared at the foot of his ladder, hissing and slashing at Carter’s legs, trying to drag him back down.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sameer sat by Emily’s unconscious form, gently prodding her with his fingertips. The fall had knocked them both out, and he was the first to recover.

“Emily?” he whispered. “Emily, wake up.”

She groaned but didn’t open her eyes.

They’d landed, after a long fall, on a dusty concrete slab in a room full of cardboard boxes and wooden crates.

“Emily,” he said louder, poking her arm harder. “You have to get up.”

“Huh?” Emily’s eyes opened, and she let off a few sneezes as loud as gunshots. “My throat hurts.”

“It’s the dust. Here.” Sameer helped her sit up and handed her a bottle of Dasani water. She sipped it gratefully.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We took a bad fall. Does anything feel broken? Like your legs?”

“Just my skull. Where are we?”

“It looks like a storage room under Dark Mansion. Your phone’s broken, I think.” Sameer handed her the cell phone that had fallen loose from her belt. The screen was cracked and had gone dark.

“So we’re still...” Emily looked at the bottled water in her hand. “Where did this come from?”

“The vending machine.” Sameer pointed to an open doorway, from which a thin light glowed. “There’s some kind of break room in there. There’s a little booth table with an ashtray, there’s a drink machine, a snack machine...”

“Sameer!” Emily snapped, her eyes growing wide. She stared at the water bottle as if it had turned into a dead rat in her hand. “I said we shouldn’t eat or drink anything from the park. I thought you’d brought this in yourself or something.”

“It’s not really
from
the park, it’s from a vending machine,” he said. “It’s not like we drank something served by a food booth out there. This doesn’t count, does it?”

“I don’t know! It’s not worth risking, is it?” She quickly screwed the cap back on. “Don’t drink any more of that.”

“Okay, okay, chill...”

“How do we get out of here?” Emily pushed herself to her feet.

“I looked, but I can’t find anything.”

Emily took Sameer’s flashlight and swept it around the room. She stopped when the beam landed on an EXIT sign, currently switched off so it radiated no light.

“That wasn’t there before,” Sameer said. “I looked.”

“Maybe you missed it.” Emily rubbed her head and began pushing heavy cardboard boxes aside to clear the way to the exit. “Help me. We need to get back to the others.”

Sameer began pushing more of the boxes aside, grunting at their weight.

After a few minutes, they’d cleared a path to a steel fire door located just below the sign.

“Who goes first?” Sameer asked.

“I’m not standing around arguing over it,” Emily replied. She pressed the wide metal bar, and they both sighed in relief when the door swung open to the night outside, filled with neon, music, and fresh, salty air. They faced a steep flight of concrete steps leading up to ground level in Haunted Alley.

Down the alley, the lights were on at the Haunted Souvenir Shop at the back corner of Dark Mansion. In the Ghostly Gallery, a row of ghosts made from helium balloons draped in pastel sheets flowed endlessly past, suspended from a moving clothesline. A row of chili dogs piled with onions and jalapenos waited on the Devil Dogs serving counter. Red and gold lights flashed all around the Beat the Devil game, reflecting off the arrangement of oversized white and black chess pieces facing each other across the mechanical board. The overhead racks of Beat the Devil were crammed with prizes, mostly plush goats and lambs.

Before coming to the park, Sameer had dismissed the idea that it was really haunted. He’d only come to help Wes search for his missing brother. He had sort of believed something strange was happening in the park—maybe even a psycho killer or some kind of gang or cult hiding out there, dangerous but not truly supernatural.

Now he knew differently, and he just wanted to escape. The idea of challenging some demonic entity to a game of Beat the Devil had seemed absurd before, but now it seemed like an obvious way to get killed. He watched a group of ghostly kids flicker in and out of visibility as they chased each other up the midway, squealing and screaming with every step. His heart beat faster inside his chest. Those kids freaked him out.

“We should go around front and wait for the others,” Emily whispered.

Sameer nodded and followed her out to the park’s central plaza. All the games and rides were still going strong. A security clown rode past on an oversized, motorized red tricycle, his dirty orange curls spilling out beneath his blue peaked cap, swinging a bright pink and yellow truncheon in one hand. He slowed as he glanced toward Sameer, who shivered as the clown’s cold, colorless eyes examined him. Then the clown picked up speed and zipped on down the midway.

The buildings of the central plaza seemed much taller than he remembered, four or five stories instead of just one or two, adorned with masses of flashing lights and cartoony paintings of circus animals and ice cream cones. Even the wishing well had grown into a multi-tiered brick fountain.

One tall structure in particular caught his eye. He didn’t think it had been here when they’d walked into the plaza, because he wouldn’t have missed it.

The attraction, or at least its facade, was four stories high, painted to look like reddish stone. The front appeared to be crowded with sculptures of people in medieval Indian dress, and the spaces between them were embellished with geometrical shapes, keeping his eyes busy wherever he looked. Two smaller stone towers of similar design flanked the main building.

Sameer told himself that it had to be fake, because there was no way anybody could move that much stone in the short time he’d been inside the haunted house. He approached the front steps, which also looked like red stone and led up between a pair of columns into a dark, narrow cave of an entrance.

The giant sign above the entrance, written in English but in an ornate font reminiscent of Sanskrit, read THE GREAT LIBRARY OF NALANDA.

Sameer approached it slowly, with a feeling of awe. He’d long been fascinated by the lost university of Nalanda, a great center of learning in India for centuries before Turkish invaders destroyed it in the twelfth century. The small rectangular doorway seemed to call to him, tempting him with the mysteries of lost knowledge.

He approached the front steps. Emily said something behind him, but Sameer barely heard her. He was stunned to see any version of the Nalanda library here, even if it was just some kind of amusement park attraction.

Sameer ascended the steps, his heart beating rapidly in anticipation, all his fear momentarily forgotten. Some part of his mind, way at the back, was screaming for him to stop, to turn back and run away, but it was a weak little voice, easy to ignore. Sameer was completely entranced by the sight of the ancient library. He
had
to look inside.

He passed through the doorway into an open, cool, shadowy space, with different floor levels and platforms connected by stairs and ladders. Circular oil lamps with five wicks each filled the space with the smell of burning butter and cast their dancing light on shelves heaped with thousands of palm-leaf manuscripts.

He heard footsteps approach, but he was too in awe to feel afraid, even when the man in the candy-striped hat emerged around a shelf of manuscripts and looked down at him from one of the narrow flights of stairs.

“Impressive, is it not?” the man asked. “An archive of the ages. In its day, scholars could study all of human knowledge here. There were nine stories of leaves and scrolls in Sanskrit, Mandarin, Greek, Latin...”