Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  As Pete led them farther and farther, the water picked up eddies seeping out of the concrete until the floor was rippling glass that clapped under their shoes. Splat, splat, splat.

  The canal angled to the left and became deeper, with a dip in the middle, and a gaping black storm drain low in the wall continuously gurgled water into the trough, creating a fast-moving brook. They walked along the side of the ditch then, their ankles turned so they could traverse the incline like billy goats, and sometimes Amanda would steady herself with a hand on the concrete. Some part of Wayne expected one of them to slip and fall into the water, sliding away and out of sight, screaming and flailing, but it never happened.

  The buildings became shorter and shorter until the steel banisters along the top of the channel became a chain-link fence, and the crackerjack WHZZ, WHZZ of a power-wrench howled down to them from some mechanic’s garage overhead. PSST, PSSSSST, the pit-viper hiss of a paint-sprayer.

  Stands of hickory and ivy and something with broad green leaves sprouted up from the base of the wall, where drifts of sand and trash accumulated. When the children shouldered past them, tiny birds shifted in the foliage, chirping and rustling.

  Rumbling water became louder and louder until the children came to the end of the aqueduct and found the river, a wide band of darkness sparkling under the cold afternoon sun. The concrete sloped and the walls flared out like a spout, river-water licking and lapping up onto the stony floor and leaving smears of slimy brown algae.

  Pete turned right and clambered up a short grassy hill, pushing past the end of the chain-link fence.

  At the top of the rise, Wayne could finally see over the walls of the canal. They had walked east out of the main historical district and they could no longer see it, only the backs of various buildings and groves of hickory and oak.

  On the other side of the river, far to the west, an apartment building was half-obscured behind the tree line.

  “Where to now, Dora the Explorer?” asked Amanda.

  “Down the river to the pipe, and then you cross it to the other side.” Their leader set off across the riverbank, stumbling across the uneven grass. Wayne glanced at Amanda, who gave him a noncommittal whatever face, coughed into her hands, and fell into step behind Pete.

  The pipe turned out to be close enough they could see it as soon as they went over the hill. In the background to the east, after-work traffic shushed back and forth across a long concrete bridge.

  A pile of smashed bricks lay under a froth of dry brown brush. Johnny Juan picked up a piece, flinging it sideways into the river. K’ploonk. “I’m kinda getting tired, guys. My feet really hurt.”

  “You wanted to come,” said Wayne. “You don’t even live out here.”

  Johnny scratched his face and shrugged. “I know.”

  Taking off his glasses, Wayne stopped to buff them on his shirt and the world around him turned into a smear of colors. When he put them back on, Pete was already heading for the river.

  To Wayne’s relief, the pipe was two or three feet across, just big enough he wouldn’t have been able to get his arms around it. Pete and Amanda had no trouble with it at all—the big guy put out his arms and heel-toed across it like a tightrope walker, only stopping once halfway across to bend over at the waist, pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance.

  “Watch out!” shrilled Amanda.

  Pete sneered at her and straightened, throwing out his belly. “Man, I got this. See how a pro does it.”

  He flipped them all the finger, and wobbled the rest of the way across. When he got to the other side he threw himself on the grass and sat down to watch them make fools of themselves, using the bank as a windbreak.

  Amanda stormed down the hill, stepped onto the pipe, and gracefully strolled the entire length of it as easily as if she were on a sidewalk, her long legs scissoring right across.

  “Wow,” said Wayne.

  “Ballet,” explained Johnny Juan. “Her dad takes her every Saturday to the ballet studio over on my side of town, the one in the building that used to be a garage or a hangar or something.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Johnny waggled his eyebrows. “It’s right next door to my family’s restaurant, Puesta Del Sol.” Turning back to the river, he gave a deep, steeling sigh, and flexed his shoulders. “Guess I’ll go across next. See you on the flip side.”

  The boy stepped onto the big sky-blue pipe and started off across the narrow water. About one-third of the way across, he lost his balance and bent over at the waist, his ass in the air and one arm thrown out to the side. The other hand was pressed against the top of the pipe. Johnny quivered there, twitching back and forth trying to find his center of gravity, and then straightened up again and shuffled forward, hunkered down with his hands out like a man trying to catch a mouse. As soon as he reached the opposite side he threw himself onto the grass and clambered away from the water on all fours.

  “Your turn, Batman,” Amanda shouted through her hands as Wayne climbed down to the bottom of the riverbank.

  Up close, the pipe seemed a lot slimmer than it had from the berm, maybe only a foot and a half across, easily small enough to wrap his arms around and touch his fingers. Wayne put a foot on the plastic curve and something inside him quailed from the hollow thump.

  The others all sat on the far bank, watching him expectantly. Adapt and overcome. His reputation hung on this moment, he knew down deep. It wasn’t the first time Wayne had been forced to be brave in order to fit in.

  Be the Hulk, he thought, standing on the utilities pipe over the Cataloosa River as Blackfield slipped into evening.

  Pete, Amanda, and Johnny Juan sat on the grass watching him. Adapt and overcome. A band of rushing quicksilver streamed by underneath him, thirty or forty feet across, clear enough he could see shelves of greasy brown stone under the surface.

  “Hell are you doing?” said Pete. The water looked deep. Over his head, at least. “Snap out of it, fool!”

  Be bigger. Be badder.

  Man, peer pressure sucks.

  Wayne was halfway across, his arms straight out to either side, his hips swaying and twitching to maintain his balance. “I’m comin’, I gotta—” he started to say, and then he slipped. One leg slid into thin air and Wayne sat down hard, the storm pipe flexing underneath and bouncing him a few inches. Suddenly he was lying on his belly in terror, straddling it, holding on with both hands. The fall had happened so fast he couldn’t remember anything between standing-there and lying-there.

  “You okay?” someone called.

  Water cackled past the toes of his shoes. Now the burn came, the hot leaden bellyache of blunt force to the testicles.

  He sat up, hugging the pipe with his knees. “Yeah,” he shouted over the coursing water, wincing up at the sky. He’d hit his chin on the pipe too, banging his teeth together, and now a headache was germinating at the base of his skull. He slid forward, inching across on his butt. “Uuuggh! I smacked my nuts is all.”

  Pete gave a Nelson-laugh. “Ha-ha!”

  Once everybody was safely on the other side, Pete wallowed back to his feet and steamered off across a huge gravel clearing. Now that he’d had a moment to sit and rest for a minute, he seemed to have gotten a second wind, and he was really hustling.

  Dry grass, like brush you’d see at the edge of the desert, made a crunchy lacework in the chalky white gravel. Clouds had moved in while they were traversing the Broad Avenue canal, and the bright sun was now a smear behind shreds of white, sapping the children’s shadows of substance.

  “So what were you talkin’ about this morning?” Amanda asked, her face pinching up in a suspicious way, squinting. “When you said you had breakfast with a ghost.”

  “My mom died of cancer. This was hers.” Wayne took out the ring around his neck. “Dad and me, we always keep a place for her at the kitchen table. We carry her everywhere we go, Aunt Marcelina says, and Dad says she came down from Chicago with us.” He put the ring to his
eye and ogled Amanda through it.

  She smiled wistfully. “That’s sweet. I’m sorry about your mom.”

  “It’s okay. It’s been awhile. Sometimes I feel like I don’t remember as much about her as I did yesterday.” He tucked the ring back into his shirt. “I don’t like that. I don’t want to forget her.”

  “I don’t think you will.” The girl reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Wayne returned the smile and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

  Scraggly pine trees made a cathedral of the forest around them. The tree line was thick with undergrowth, but Pete picked out a bald spot in the vegetation where rust-colored needles were a carpet under the bushes. Strung across the path was a rusty old barbed-wire fence, presided over by a NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a tree and shot full of holes.

  Pete stepped on the bottom strand of wire and lifted the top, opening a passage for them. Wayne expected Amanda to say something about the sign, but she never did.

  As soon as they stepped into the woods, the day faded into a nether-light, streaming weakly through the pine boughs.

  The kids moved deeper until they’d left the constant rumble-and-hiss of the highway behind for the forest’s cloistered hush. They walked for what must have been half an hour, traipsing through leafy foliage and across patches of crumbly yellow gravel, climbing over fallen trees mulchy with termite-rot.

  At one point they passed a little valley with steep banks, trees standing precariously on the edge with their roots clawing at thin air. Deep and dark, the pit was full of garbage, old garbage in sun-rotten bags, spilling mush and flaky paper onto the ground. Two new-looking bicycles, their wheels bent and their tires flat. A nude, one-legged Barbie-doll. Beer bottles and cans by the legion, glistening brown and black and white in the straw.

  “See?” asked Pete. “Wasn’t this better than walking down the street where creepers can pick you up?”

  A peculiar feeling of placelessness had come over Wayne—without tall buildings to use as landmarks and reference points, he had lost his sense of direction amidst the endlessly identical trees. He enjoyed being out in nature, but he had developed a creeping sense of panic at not knowing where he was.

  “Not really.” Amanda’s gait had become slow and indolent, and she had crossed her arms, her shoulders scrunched against a creeping chill.

  Until then, Wayne hadn’t noticed the afternoon had gotten colder. It was also darker, though they still had plenty of light left. He peered up at the smudge of white sun through the trees and judged it was probably on the verge of nightfall.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Would have been faster and safer to ride home with our parents. Or heck, on the school bus, even.”

  Pete’s face fell, his expression going from tired, determined, and content down the other end of the spectrum to hurt and exhausted. “Well, I only wanted to show you guys something, you know? And I wanted to show the New Guy here around.”

  The corner of Wayne’s mouth tucked up in a smile. “I appreciate it. I never been hiking before. It’s nice.” He took a deep breath. “It smells nice. Pine smells nice. I like it out here.”

  Pete shrugged, as if to say, See?

  “Let’s just hurry up and get home before it gets dark, okay?” Amanda shouldered past them and walked down the trail in her stormy, gangly way, her glossy black braid swinging from the back of her head. “I think we’re close enough now it doesn’t matter.”

  The trail had widened and was now quite visible, a thinness meandering across the woods, occasionally meeting a side trail. Pine gave way to oak and naked dogwood, and little brooks zagged across their path, giving the kids something to jump over, stepping from stone to stone. Tiny silver fish darted through the brackish water.

  Wayne had lapsed into a daydream, staring at his feet, when Johnny Juan said, “Whoa. Creepy as hell.”

  “Oh my God,” breathed Amanda.

  Deep in the trees, approximately the size of a supermarket shopping cart, was a clown’s face.

  13

  Rust stains streaked down from the clown’s giant eyes and mouth as if it were bleeding from the inside. On closer inspection, Wayne saw it was a sort of cart, a roller-coaster car or part of a carousel.

  “Is this your surprise?” asked Amanda.

  “No,” said Pete, shaking his head and walking away. “That’s cool, but it’s not what I wanted to show you.”

  Pine needles and briars choked the passenger seat of the clown-face car. The mess was dark, tangled, ominous. Wayne wanted to get away from it, so he overtook Pete and jogged down the trail.

  “Wait up,” said Johnny.

  Wayne went down a short slope and found a break in the trees where the last dregs of sunlight slanted in from a clearing. He stepped over a half-buried train track and emerged into what might have been one of the coolest things he had ever seen.

  The stark umbrella-skeleton of a hulking Spider ride threw stripes of shadow over them, its suspended cars rusting quietly in the white sun. He had come out onto what appeared to be a go-kart track, a paved oval about ten feet wide and painted green. Grass and milkweed thrust up through cracks.

  “Ho-lee Moses.” The forest stood vigil over the ruins of an abandoned amusement park. A tree grew up through the middle of a small roller-coaster track, shadowing more rusted-out clown-cars and a broken scaffolding no taller than an adult man.

  His friends crunched up out of the woods and stood next to him.

  “Now that’s cool,” said Johnny.

  Amanda picked a careful path across the buckled road. “I had no idea this was out here. You found this last summer?”

  Pete forged ahead, leading them through an aluminum garage at one end of the track. The ground was oily and nothing grew, which made for easy walking. “Yeah. I came out here to, ahh … look for Bigfoot. My mom said this is the old fairgrounds. It’s supposed to be one of those travelin’ amusement park things—you know, how they go from city to city, settin’ up in mall parking lots and stuff. But she said this one, the people set it up, and then they disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Wayne’s neck prickled. A go-kart was overturned against the wall, its axle bent, its guts pulled out. Parts lay strewn around it.

  Leading them through the heart of the overgrown carnival, Pete lurched over the dead weeds, trampling briars, sticks cracking under his shoes. “Yeah. She said it happened back in the eighties. Before any of us were born.”

  Gradually the brush gave way to open gravel and dirt. “Mom said the city tried to open it anyway, and it ran for like a year, but they couldn’t make any money on it and it was too expensive to clear it out. So they left it here.”

  A long arcade leaned over a bushy promenade, its game booths frothing with hickory and blackberry bushes. HIT THE PINS! POP THE BALLOONS! THROW A DART! WIN A PRIZE!

  “Y’all don’t tell her we were out here. She said not to come back. It’s dangerous here.” Pete gazed up at a ten-foot board standing at the end of the concourse, with a round bell at the top. “Is this what I think it is?”

  Wayne came closer. “Hey, yeah. It’s one of those strong-man tester things. Where you hit the thing with the hammer and the slider hits the bell.” He grinned up at his big friend. “Man, I bet you could knock the crap out of this thing.”

  “Let’s find the hammer,” said Amanda.

  Wandering in separate directions, the children searched through the dry grass and weeds. Johnny and Amanda went to root around under the Spider, while Pete went behind the north side of the arcade. Wayne kept going west, and found himself in an intersection between a funhouse and a caved-in concession stand. The funhouse was sooty black, heavily damaged by fire and overgrown with creepy ivy, so he didn’t bother going in.

  The marquee over the concession stand read FUNNEL CAKES, SNO-CONES, CANDY APPLES. The sign underneath the sales counter told him he was in WEAVER’S WONDERLAND, and it was FUN FOR ALL AGES!

  Weaver. Must be the person who built an
d abandoned this place, he thought, cupping his face against the cloudy windows. The concession stand was empty except for a chest freezer with the lid open, nasty with black gunk. Wonder what happened to him. Wayne couldn’t imagine anybody willingly walking away from owning their very own amusement park.

  When he looked away, his eyes were caught by a giant contraption down the right-hand street.

  Like a flying saucer crashed to Earth, a huge purple Gravitron rested in a bed of brush, its door wide open to reveal a dark mouth. Strips of dead bulbs marched in rib-cage rows down its sides and down the frames supporting it from above. Wayne ventured up the textured steel ramp into the hollow machine. Curved black walls were lined with padded seats that, in the run-down darkness, could have been gurneys rather than seats meant for park patrons.

  A Formica coffee table stood near the back of the Gravitron chamber, the woodgrain skin rubbed away at the corners. Several half-melted red and white candles stood in brass candelabras around a white bowl.

  Wayne crept closer. The bowl was full of some black substance … or perhaps it was the shadows playing a trick on him, he couldn’t tell; the cavernous dark of the machine’s interior made it hard to see.

  Picking up the bowl, he tilted it toward the light. Whatever it was, the black stuff in the bowl smelled foul: pennies, cigarettes, burnt hair. The inside of the bowl was black but dry—burned out, the contents had been cooked. He turned it upside-down to look at the bottom (MADE IN CHINA, maybe?) and saw the jagged rim of a pair of nostrils, and the two guileless eye sockets of a human skull. The teeth had been sawed away under the nose.

  “Uhh!” he exclaimed, snatching his hands away.

  The hollow skull hit the carpeted floor with a thump.

  He felt like he ought to scream. Seemed like the logical thing to do, to draw a great big breath, open his mouth, and belt out the loudest shriek he could muster, but his lungs were too small and he couldn’t get purchase on the air, as if the Gravitron’s door had closed and Martians were sucking out all the oxygen.