Inferno Park (55 page)

The lights were emerging from the sinkhole itself. As Carter and Victoria approached the sawhorses and debris at the edge of the giant hole, he heard a kind of music from the rising, glowing cloud, as if each of the hundred or so clusters of bright threads emitted a gentle tone of its own, and all of the tones flowed into each other like ripples on a pond, creating a melodic constellation of sound ringing among the floating lights.

The rising lights mesmerized him, leaving him unable to think, watching and listening in pure awe. He’d had a horrifying glimpse of Hell tonight, and now he was seeing something that felt just the opposite, a glimmering garden of living lights escaping from the sinkhole.

“What are they?” Victoria whispered.

“She told me I broke his trap.”

“So these are souls.” Victoria tilted her head back to watch them rise higher and higher. They reflected in her eyes like bright stars. “All the captured souls. Aren’t they?”

“Such a waste,” another voice said. It was low and flat.

Carter jumped, his sense of wonder broken by fear.

The man in the striped hat approached slowly, watching the lights rise out of reach as he ambled around the ragged, crumbling edge of the sinkhole.

Victoria tensed and grabbed Carter’s hand, but he remained where he was. He’d already beaten the devil, and he didn’t feel the need to run away now.

“This took an investment on my part, you know,” the man in the hat said. He finally turned to regard the two of them with his dead gray eyes. “And where is my profit? Just a few scattered souls, not much more. I’d hoped to leave the park with better prizes.”

As the cloud of lights ascended into the sky, the ground rumbled beneath them. The edges of the sinkhole crumbled, spilling loose soil and black pebbles of broken asphalt into the distant darkness below.

Carter and Victoria held onto each other, backing away as the earth shook.

Muffled, agonized groans rose in a strained chorus from the sinkhole. The ground around it trembled, shaking loose rivulets of dust, as if the sinkhole was about to swallow up another huge piece of the park.

A tower of flesh emerged from the deep darkness like a swaying tongue. It was made of pale, naked human beings stitched together into a long tube formation that pawed at the edges of the sinkhole like an elephant’s trunk. Their eyes and mouths were sewn shut, which kept their pained moans to a low rumble.

The huge trunk of human flesh made Carter think of how he’d sometimes imagined the sinkhole as a kind of giant dinosaur of a worm, hungry to swallow up the world above.

One large man extended out of the heap of stitched bodies and lay prone over the abyss below, bridging the gap from the tower of bodies to the edge of the sinkhole. Chains rattled through eyehooks embedded in his arms and legs, stretching him until his was firmly in place. His screams barely escaped the metal rings that stapled his lips together.

“Give my regards to Artie Schopfer,” the devil said. “Tell him I will kill him for giving you that key.”

He strolled across the blinded, chained man, using him as a bridge to the tower of bodies. The top layer of bodies arranged themselves into a wide throne, and he sat upon it, his polished shoes resting on a row of living heads. He looked out at the rotten husks of the amusement park’s attractions and gave a slight sigh, like someone who’d had a disappointing evening at the gambling table.

The bridge-man was retracted by a chain running through eyehooks along his spine. He let out a muffled cry of pain as he coiled back against the other groaning bodies.

The tower of bodies lowered back into the sinkhole, the devil riding down on top of them all. His blank face watched Carter and Victoria as he sank out of sight. For a moment, he scowled, his eyes glowing red, his teeth long and sharp, and then he was lost in the shadows.

The groaning voices of the damned echoed a little longer before falling silent.

The earth shifted beneath them again, knocking Carter and Victoria off their feet.

The broken asphalt flowed toward the sinkhole, carrying them along like a river of shattered rock. He thought they would be swept down inside, but the sinkhole itself grew smaller and smaller as the tide of earth and broken pavement swept him toward it. The overgrown sawhorses around it clattered into each other and collapsed into rotten pieces as the perimeter shrank.

The giant hole was closing, and the ground around it was knitting itself together.

At last the earth finally stopped moving. They regained their feet, leaning on each other for balance, both of them wounded, bloody, and exhausted.

Only a small depression of loose, sandy dirt remained to mark where the center of the sinkhole had been.

“Is it over?” Victoria whispered.

Heavy, rusty squeals sounded from the sagging ruins of attractions thrown off-balance by the closing sinkhole and shifting earth. An overgrown column of the Starland Express roller coaster toppled and crashed into the remains of Fool’s Gold. The rusty tower of American Rockets twisted and fell against the last standing supports of the old Moon Robot ride.

Carter and Victoria ran into the open plaza and waited while the rides fell apart. Hanover lay without moving near the old wishing well. They avoided him—if the man was crazed enough to shoot at Victoria, Carter didn’t see any reason to wake him up. They could call an ambulance once they were safely out of the park.

They checked the ruins of Dark Mansion and Haunted Alley, but did not find Sameer or Emily, nor any sign of Jared and Becca’s bodies. The park seemed to have absorbed them like all the others.

They searched the park, calling out for Emily and Sameer.

Emily’s voice sounded faintly from inside one of the shapeless collapsing attractions on the midway. Carter and Victoria hurried inside and found her trapped inside a box made of scrap lumber and wrapped in old barbed wire.

“Emily?” Victoria found a small hinged panel on one side and raised it up.

“Thank God,” Emily whispered. She was huddled inside, looking frightened. “Where did he go? He said he was coming back for me.”

“I think you’re okay. He’s gone,” Carter said.

“You beat him?” Emily asked. “The chess game worked?”

“No....” Carter didn’t want to talk about what had happened to Wes. He didn’t know how to explain how he’d beat the devil himself, either, except that it involved courage, focus, and refusing to back down even when he was terrified.

They ripped the box apart and set Emily free.

As they walked out through the park, Victoria explained in quiet whispers what had happened to the others. Emily just shook her head, looking miserable and distraught at the news.

They found no sign of Sameer.

In Pirate Island, the Crashdown Falls ride had ruptured open, spewing out years of accumulated slimey water. They ducked underneath the drizzling waterfall.

They made their way to the place where they’d originally entered the first time. The side gate was gone, replaced by the original loose section of chain-link fence sliced open by Victoria’s wire cutters.

While the big waterfall ride above swayed and creaked and dumped nasty water over them, they crawled through the mud under the fence. They stood up among the dense, thorny vines in the scrubby woods outside the old park.

And then they were free.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Say ‘cheese.’”

Carter looked up, and Victoria snapped a picture in which he was certain to look stupid and surprised, his mouth wide open.

“What was that for?” he asked. He was at school, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while he sat in their usual lunchtime doorway, avoiding everyone else.

“The yearbook. Maybe. If it makes the cut.” Victoria sat down beside him.

“I thought that didn’t count as serious photography.”

“Maybe my perspective has evolved.” She looked out over the groups of kids scattered through the courtyard. “You were the one who said I should do the school yearbook and stuff.”

“So you decided to pad out your college application.”

“I realized every moment of life is something to appreciate,” she said. “After everything we saw, all the death. Any moment when you can relax and smile, any moment when a supernatural entity isn’t hacking you to pieces on a bizarre torture device...that’s probably a moment worth enjoying. I’ve seen enough decay and destruction.”

They sat quietly for a minute.

It had taken a couple of weeks, but their lives were finally beginning to calm down. They’d gone to the hospital after leaving Starland, Carter broken and bloody, Victoria with her owns cuts and abrasions, and a shallow bullet wound across her side. The bullet wound had drawn the police, who had recovered an unconscious Theodore Hanover from the park.

Carter and Victoria had decided to tell Chief Kilborne the truth rather than try to come up with any kind of story. The police chief didn’t believe them. He’d questioned each of them several times, and would probably do it again, but sticking to the truth was easy, even if it clearly angered the police chief. Carter had faced much scarier individuals.

They’d also both declined to talk to the media at all. The newspapers and television stations had been attracted by the reports of more missing kids, plus a second search of the amusement park, this time involving the state police. No bodies had been found, but the small army of searchers had been surprised to discover that Florida’s largest sinkhole had inexplicably closed up and vanished.

Despite the horrors he’d seen inside the park, Carter’s nightmares of the last five years had ended. He was restless and sometimes ill, feeling haunted by guilt about Emily, Wes, Sameer, Jared, and Jared’s friends, all the people who might never have gone into the park if not for him, but there were no more dreams of Tricia’s headless ghost insisting he return to the park.

Victoria insisted that it wasn’t his fault, that it was all part of a plan by the ultimate devious trickster, but he felt responsible anyway.

The only comfort was that final vision, the glorious constellation of escaped souls rising toward the sky, radiating light and gentle musical tones, whispering that there was something beyond death besides darkness.

He and Victoria had spent much of their time together, trying to get away from everyone else, trying to talk about anything except what had happened inside the park.

“Look at this,” Victoria said, taking her tablet out of her backpack. She opened up her photography blog, where she’d added a dozen new pictures of the Starland ruins. “Most of the pictures were too dark to see. I took pictures of the devil, and of the glowing souls, but nothing shows up except the wreckage. The videos I took were the same way.”

“That’s too bad.”

“The traffic on my blog has spiked since I added them, though.”

“A lot of people probably want to see inside the park,” Carter said.

“There won’t be much left to see before long. Have you heard they’re going to demolish it?”

“I’ve been hearing that every year since it closed. Maybe it’ll really happen this time.”

“If they do, I want to be there, or as close as I can get. I want to see it happen.”

Carter nodded. “I’ll go with you. Seeing them finally tear it all down would be...” Carter couldn’t find the words to express the mixture of hope, relief, and loss that he would feel at the park’s final destruction. “I would definitely want to see it happen.”

He looked at her pictures—the deteriorated devil-faced mountain, now with a big hole gaping open in its crumbling side from Hanover’s dynamite. An image of the sinkhole under the moonlight, which was supposed to show a hundred glowing souls rising into the heavens, instead showed only a dark abyss with a few broken, overgrown wooden columns of the Starland Express roller coaster visible in the background.

“
He
didn’t show up in any pictures,” Victoria said, pointing to one she’d taken from the loading platform of Inferno Mountain. Through the pitchfork fence, the camera had captured only trash, weeds, and broken asphalt. “This one should be full of ghosts, with him at the front.”

“He was kind of an illusion,” Carter said. “His powers are just tricks. I saw what he really is...and he’s a prisoner.”

“You really think he’s
the
devil?”

“I can believe that the place I saw was Hell. Or some part of it. He was at the center, at the very bottom.” Carter shook his head. “It was insane down there. I can’t believe I survived.”

“I’m glad you did.” She smiled a little and took his hand.

Nothing would bring back the dead, Carter thought, but at least their souls were free, whatever that meant—they were no longer trapped and enslaved inside the overgrown walls of the park. The evil had been driven away, but it had left deep and permanent scars in its wake.

He put an arm around Victoria and hugged her close, glad to be alive, and glad to have her near.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Artie Schopfer lay in his bed, waiting for the devil. He craved a cigarette, the ghost of an addiction he’d given up twenty years earlier but never fully escaped. He breathed as deeply as he could, taking in the bleach-and-piss smell of the nursing home.

It wasn’t just fire and smoke in his lungs he longed for tonight. He wanted to smoke as a young man behind the wheel of his long-lost 1964 Plymouth Fury, the top down while he crossed the United States on the old highways, maybe hugging the beach on US 98, or cutting through swampland and sunlit pastures as he took US 80 west from Georgia to Texas, or taking old Route 66, the more northerly passage across America.

He would thread through small towns and past giant billboards advertising reptile farms, petting zoos, roadside candy stands, oversized dinosaurs advertising minor amusements or natural formations (“Visit Alabama’s Largest Water Tower!!”) that would all be forgotten in a generation. He would pass hundreds of barns across hundreds of miles painted with the simple phrase SEE ROCK CITY, directing travelers toward the mountaintop attraction built by the same man who invented miniature golf.