Inferno Park (56 page)

Perhaps one of his occasional girlfriends would be with him—maybe Dottie Cotswold, the dark-haired girl who’d sold tickets at Tombstone Junction in Kentucky. They’d gone to New Orleans together one summer. He wondered what had ever become of her.

Married a better man than me, I hope
, Schopfer thought.

The room-divider curtain was drawn open because he’d been moved to another floor for closer observation. For the moment, Artie had a private room. He could see a palm tree outside, outlined by a streetlight.

He knew the devil would return because the boy and the girl had already visited him again. He wished he could remember their names. They’d returned the Starland skeleton key to Artie, along with a fascinating story of how it had helped them stand against the devil and even beat him back. The devil had lost most or all of the park’s captured souls. Feeling his own death drawing near, Artie found himself warmed by the girl’s description of beautiful lights rising away into the sky.

The key lay once again in its envelope, tucked into the back of an old photo album.

“You cost me a great deal by interfering,” the dead voice spoke. Artie turned to look at him.

The man in the white suit and white hat sat in the thinly upholstered visitor chair, as though he’d slipped in from the hallway without making a sound. Artie understood that the man wasn’t really there at all. The real devil was chained and trapped somewhere far away, far below the world.

Artie had loosely based the descending circles of Inferno Mountain on an old illustrated copy of Dante’s
Inferno
, creating layers of darkness, fire, and cold and filling it with screams. The flickering lights gave only quick hints of the monsters, ghosts, and skeletons hung by the side of the track, letting the rider fill in the horrors with his or her imagination. The scare was more effective that way—and cheaper, too.

The ride had given the boy a glimpse of something far beyond what Artie had built, maybe even the true Hell that waited below, hungry for lost souls.

“You didn’t mention the skeleton key,” the devil said, glaring at him. “That would have been useful of you, Artie.”

Artie didn’t speak. On his last visit, the devil had plunged his fingers into Artie’s head, smirking as he took Artie’s power of speech.

It was possible, Artie had begun to speculate, that he hadn’t lost his ability to speak at all, that he’d only been trapped in one of the devil’s illusions. Buying the love potion and giving it to Tatiana had put him in the devil’s power sixty years ago. Now he thought he could break free.

Artie raised his shaking, gnarled hand from under his sheet. He clutched a small cassette player. A nurse had purchased it for him at his request. She’d bought him one with large, easy buttons.

“What is that?” the devil asked.

“Special dedication,” Artie croaked. “Me to you.” Artie thumbed down the big yellow button with the triangular “play” symbol. A roaring, cheering, whistling crowd played over the little speakers.

The devil’s lip curled, and he stepped back in disgust. He hated any sound of joy, so Artie used the happy recorded concert crowd as his weapon.

A guitar played into the cheers, then a fiddle joined in. Artie grinned like a loon, unable to contain his amusement when the Charlie Daniels Band launched into the old classic “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

The actual devil’s lip curled in disgust, and he took another step back.

“I loathe this song,” he said. His normally dead-placid features were actually twisted by anger and irritation. “You must have known or surmised as much. Turn it off!”

Artie laughed out loud. While the recorded song, with its whistling and cheering audience, had clearly annoyed him, Artie’s barking laugh actually seemed to cause the devil some pain. He scowled, a red glow creeping into his eyes, his teeth looking just a little sharper than they’d been a moment earlier.

“Get out,” Artie said. It took an immense effort, and his words came out coarse and rusty, but laughing at the devil had begun the process of breaking the illusion and restoring his voice. Artie raised his hands, and his knotted fingers began to untie themselves and straighten.

Now the devil looked less annoyed and less angry. He frowned, his eyes widening, and Artie thought he caught a glimpse of fear.

“You have nothing,” Artie said
, his voice raw and grinding but wonderfully strong.

. “You deceive, you lie, but you have no more...” Artie paused to cough and wheeze. “You have no more power than we give you.”

The devil narrowed his eyes.

“That’s not precisely true,” he said.

“True enough,” Artie replied. His throat felt like raw, bloody meat...but he was speaking again, and his fingers straightened themselves a little more. “Go away. Go back to your prison of ice. You don’t fool us anymore. You’re nothing.”

To prove how unafraid he was—though, in fact, he did feel quite a bit of fear—Artie closed his wrinkled eyelids and settled back on the pillow as though ready for a nap. He let the silly novelty song play on through his fingers.

The devil let out something like a low scream—it reminded Artie of nothing so much as the hiss of air escaping from a balloon.

Artie forced himself to count to ten before opening his eyes.

The devil was gone.

Artie held up his crooked fingers, stretching them out to their full length for the first time in five years. He felt a shadow had lifted away from him.

He craved a Bristol pad and pencil. With his hands working again, he was eager to create. Creation, the act of making something from nothing, was a direct attack on the devil, whose only wish was to drag the whole world down until everyone joined him in the cold, lightless abyss.

Artie found a pen and began to draw.

From the author

Thanks so much for taking the time to read
Inferno Park
! If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review at the retailer of your choice. Good reviews are possibly the most important factor in helping other readers discover a book.

My new book
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
begins a new series about a private investigator based out of Savannah, Georgia, who specializes in removing ghosts from haunted houses. Chapter one of that book begins on the next page, so I hope you’ll give that a try!

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Thanks for reading!

-J. L. Bryan

Ellie Jordan’s job is to catch and remove unwanted ghosts. Part detective, part paranormal exterminator, Ellie operates out of Savannah, Georgia, one of the oldest and most haunted cities in North America.
When a family contacts her to deal with a disturbing presence in the old mansion they’ve recently purchased, Ellie first believes it to be a typical, by-the-book specter, a residual haunting by a restless spirit. Instead, she finds herself confronting an evil older and more powerful than she’d ever expected, rooted in the house’s long and sordid history of luxury, sin, and murder. The dangerous entity seems particularly interested in her clients’ ten-year-old daughter.
Soon her own life is in danger, and Ellie must find a way to exorcise the darkness of the house before it can kill her, her clients, or their frightened young child.

Chapter One

“Why do ghosts wear clothes?” Stacey asked as we drove toward the possibly-haunted house.

Stacey was twenty-two, four years younger than me and much prettier, her blond hair cropped short and simple, carelessly styled, but her makeup was immaculate. She looked like what she was: a tomboy despite being raised by a former beauty-queen socialite in Montgomery, Alabama. She was a very recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design film school, but she'd been eager to join Eckhart Investigations and hunt ghosts rather than pursue a more sane and profitable career.

I had to wonder how Alabama-socialite mom felt about that.

“Well?” Stacey asked, raising an eyebrow. She rode shotgun as I drove our unmarked blue cargo van through the streets of Savannah. It was June, and rich sunlight fell through the thick, gnarled branches of ancient live oaks dripping with Spanish moss and crepe myrtles heavy with red blossoms. The stately old trees shaded columned mansions and gardens filled with summer blooms.

“I don't know, Stacey,” I said, trying not to sigh. “You tell me why ghosts wear clothes.”

“I'm asking you!”

“I thought you were setting up a joke,” I said.

“Nope, totally serious.”

“I don't get the question,” I told Stacey. “Why wouldn't they?”

“Well...think about it,” Stacey said. “The living wear them to keep warm or whatever. If you're a ghost, you don't have a body.”

“Does
that
keep you warm?” I smirked at her low-cut tank top, which wasn’t quite appropriate for work. I’ve been scratched and bruised by enough angry spirits that I wear turtlenecks, leather, and denim even in hot weather. I’ve tried to warn Stacey about this, but she hasn’t listened so far.

“Uh, no...” Stacey looked down at her shirt as if puzzled.

“So why do you wear it?”

“Because I don't want to be naked?”

“Question answered,” I said. “Next?”

“Why do ghosts wrap themselves in bedsheets?” Stacey asked.

“They don’t do that. Why would you even think--?”

“So they can rest in peace.” Stacey beamed, then her smile faltered a little. “
That’s
a joke.”

“No, jokes make you laugh.”

“That one killed at my second-grade Halloween party.”

“Only because your audience was high on sugar,” I said.

“Here’s another one: why do ghosts come out at night?”

“Because their electromagnetic fields are sensitive to dense concentrations of photons.”

“Joke-ruiner,” Stacey said.

We drove north and west, away from the city center. The Treadwell house was in an odd area of town, upriver, near empty brick warehouses and a few old factory shells dating back more than a hundred years. The nearest residential neighborhood was a row of decrepit bungalows on narrow, weedy lots, some of them clearly abandoned or foreclosed. They'd probably been inhabited by factory and dock workers at some point.

One old factory did show some signs of remodeling and gentrification, with a clothing boutique and one of those restaurants where you can buy a cruelty-free mushroom sandwich on sprouted-grain bread for just fifteen bucks. Maybe the area was on its way back.

I dropped the sun visor and opened the mirror to double-check myself before meeting the new clients. I always kept it pretty simple—minimal make-up, long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. I can't do much more than that with my crazy coarse hair, anyway. Back in high school, I'd let it grow too shaggy and thick, and it combined with my old armor-thick glasses to create a real Mad Scientist Girl look.

Unlike Stacey, I hadn't been trained in a thousand subtle varieties of cosmetics and hair products. After my parents died when I was fifteen, I didn't really care about normal adolescent stuff like parties, dances, or dating, anyway. I'd stay up late at night studying everything from William James and Spiritualism to Tarot cards and Aleister Crowley.

Even then, I was training myself to be a ghost trapper.

“I don't see any houses down this way...” Stacey said. We passed a low brick warehouse choked with vines, its windows boarded over and spraypainted with graffiti.

“Maybe there.” I pointed to an overgrown lot with a screen of massive old trees and a wilderness of overgrown shrubs. A narrow, cracked brick drive led from the street into the darkness behind the trees.

We had to slow down and squint to read the old letters rusting off the ivy-choked brick mailbox. It was the right address.

I turned and eased the van up the cracked driveway, nosing aside low-lying limbs.

“Doesn't look like anybody's lived here in a long time,” Stacey whispered. “Do you think it'll be a real ghost this time? I'm tired of duds.”

“Careful what you wish for,” I told her. More than half our calls come from people who are just plain ghost-happy. They think their place is haunted, and they haven't bothered to eliminate other options. Sometimes that eerie, moaning cold spot is just a clunky air conditioner; sometimes those strange footsteps in the attic are just squirrels. Our first job is to check for any non-paranormal causes for the alleged haunting.

Stacey hadn't seen much in the way of real ghosts in the three weeks since she'd been hired full-time. If she had seen the kinds of things I've seen, she would have been less eager to find a true haunting.

The house lay beyond a jungle of green that had once been a lawn and gardens. Here in coastal Georgia, with the hot sun and constant rain, the wilderness is always ready to sprout back at the first sign of neglect.