by Val Crowe
I felt panic at the edge of my consciousness, but I forced myself to try to stay calm.
Maybe Mads was fine. Maybe it was just interference. Something in this place that kept her from breaking through and communicating.
If I left the park, got beyond the fence, then maybe I could call to her again.
The prospect of going through the gate was daunting, though. It was such a long walk up the parking lot, and then I was going to have to unfasten the gate and then walk through, and then I’d have to walk all the way back after I was done. The walk seemed to stretch out in my mind to something incredibly long. It somehow seemed as if walking to the South Pole would be easier than going to that gate.
But this was Mads.
I went to the door of the Airstream. I hesitated. Maybe I should stay here. I was tired, right? I should sleep. And even if I couldn’t sleep, I wanted a beer. I should go to the fridge and find a beer and settle in for the night. Mads was probably fine.
No.
I had to be sure.
I pushed open the door.
Moving down the steps was tough.
Walking across the parking lot was even tougher. It felt like I was fighting my way through the air, as if I was being forced to move in slow motion.
It took an eternity to get to the fence, and when I did, I was exhausted.
I knew that I needed to open the gate, but I didn’t know if I had it in me. Instead, I clutched the chain link and pressed my face against it. “Mads?” I called out into the night.
She materialized, directly in front of me, on the other side of the fence.
“Mads!” I was overjoyed. “You’re all right.”
“You’re just coming to look for me now? It’s been days, Deacon.”
“You are okay, aren’t you?” Fear splintered through me. “Did something happen? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s not me you should be worried about. It’s yourself.”
“No, I’m fine.” I laughed a little, to show her she was being ridiculous. “I’m great. Nothing’s happening here. I haven’t even seen one ghost since we got here.” I paused. “Well, there was that kid in the maze. I don’t know what that was all about.”
“Deacon, listen closely to me. The power in that place, it’s formidable. And it is using you. It wants to keep you there. With you there to feed on, it can expand itself. It can grow to terrifying heights of power. You need to leave this place.”
“Leave?” I rested my head against the chain link. “I can’t. I need answers. It knows about Negus.”
“Whatever answers you need, get them and get out,” she said. “I can’t help you in there. I can’t get in. You’re on your own. And I’m telling you, you have to leave as soon as you can.”
I sighed. I stuck my fingers through the chain link, reaching for her. “Hey, I miss you.”
“Then get out of there. Do you hear me? Get out of there.”
I heard her, all right.
It was only that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t sure that I could leave.
* * *
It was much easier walking back from the gate than it had been walking to it. As I moved through the night air, away from Mads, I felt lighter and more content. I felt comfortable.
Back in the Airstream, I had a beer and then I climbed into bed. I slept well again, cocooned in comfort.
But I woke up agitated.
I’d been dreaming, but I couldn’t remember the dream. It was all fading in the morning light, and now all I had was a few vague pieces and a overall sensation of anger and urgency. I got up and quickly pulled on some clothes.
I went over to my mother’s trailer and banged on the door.
She opened the door. “Oh, Deacon, I think there’s some sausage in your fridge. Could you run and get it?”
“No,” I said. “You’re not going to make a big breakfast this morning and distract me. This is important. We’re going to the maze.”
She sighed. “There’s no reason to go anywhere on an empty stomach. Don’t be silly. Let’s have some breakfast. How do you want your eggs, hmm?”
I grabbed her by the arm, digging my fingers into her flesh. “We’re going.”
Fear flashed in her eyes and she tried to pull her arm away.
But I had too tight a hold on her. “Come on.” I tried to drag her out of the door of her motorhome.
She grabbed the side of the door and anchored herself in place. “What’s gotten into you?” The bottom had gone out of her voice.
“We will go,” I said. What was this rage inside me, and where was it coming from? The dream? Whatever the case, I wasn’t about to give up. I would drag her kicking and screaming if I had to. I would—
A strong hand pried at my fingers.
I looked up to see that Oscar was there. “Hey,” I said to him.
He got my mother free, and she backed into the motorhome, rubbing her arm.
I glared at Oscar. “What’s your problem?”
“You shouldn’t talk to your mother that way,” said Oscar. “You shouldn’t put your hands on her either.”
“This is none of your business, Oscar,” I sneered. “Why don’t you go back to your tent—”
“I mean it,” said Oscar. “Whatever she did, it doesn’t give you the right to hurt her. Now, why don’t we all try to calm down and—”
“Oscar, you leave my son alone!” My mother’s voice was shrill. “You just back off, now.”
Oscar looked up at her, confused.
“I mean it.” My mother hurled herself out of the motorhome, launching herself at Oscar. “Don’t you touch him.”
I backed up, confused. I was still angry. It was like a red haze on the edge of my vision, threatening to overtake everything.
Oscar eyed my mother and then cast a glance at me. He raised his hands, palms up. “I was just leaving.”
“That’s a good idea,” said my mother, face flushed.
Oscar did leave. He took off away from us, into the park.
My mother’s hands were cupping my face. “Did he hurt you, baby? Did he touch you?”
I pushed her off. “Stop that,” I gasped.
“I’m only trying—”
“Why couldn’t you have tried when it mattered? Why did you let it take you over?”
“Deacon—”
“Why don’t you remember? How can you possibly not know what you did?” And then the rage was bubbling over, and I couldn’t even be here anymore. I turned and took off, first at a jog, then a sprint.
“Deacon!” my mother called after me.
I ran faster.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I ran into the park, and I ran until I was out of breath and spent. I ended up somewhere in the interior of the place. The swings were looming in front of me. The rusty chains circled around the center, and the swings themselves were bloated and rotting wood.
I sat down on one of those swings anyway.
I needed to rest.
It gave under my weight, groaning, but it held.
I sighed.
What the hell was going on here? I was starting to feel like I might be losing my mind. This place…
It was sometimes so comfortable and enticing. Other times, it was repulsive and horrid. Sometimes I never wanted to leave. Other times, I was sure that I had to get out of there.
One thing remained the same.
I hadn’t left.
I dug out my cell phone, and I started to compose a text to Wade.
Hey, man, what you were saying about coming here? Do you think you could do that?
My finger hovered over the send button. Could I really ask Wade to drop everything and come to my rescue? It didn’t seem right. Furthermore, I’d probably only be putting him in danger.
I deleted the text.
What are you up to?
I deleted that too. Too generic.
This place is getting freaky.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I
hit the send button.
Immediately, I regretted it. Wade was going to feel as if he had to come here, and I was pretty sure it was a bad idea. But I’d just have to talk him out of it whenever he responded.
I stared at the phone’s screen.
Sending message, it said. A few dots were moving across the screen.
I waited.
Message failed, it said. No network.
Oh, wow, wait a minute. There were no bars. But I hadn’t had any problems with reception before, had I? This was probably just some weird pocket where the phone didn’t work. That happened all the time.
I got up off the swings, walking and glancing down at my phone screen every couple feet to see if the bars returned.
They didn’t.
And then I looked up, and I saw a kid there. I recognized him. He was the kid from the maze. He was running up the walkway as fast as he could, eyes wide, a look of terror on his face.
I moved to intercept him.
He saw me and came to a stop, gasping for breath. “Can you help me? I need to find my mom and dad.”
“Uh, yeah, maybe I can help,” I said, even though I knew he was already dead. I’d try to lead him out, but if I couldn’t, knowing his name might help me find information to help him move on. “What’s your name?”
“Theo Forrest Alexander,” he said promptly. He looked over his shoulder. “Please, I want to go home now. I’m really scared.”
“Okay, Theo. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Come with me.”
“I want to get out of here,” said Theo.
I beckoned and started to walk down the path. “Let’s go.”
“I try to go,” said Theo. “But he always finds me.”
“Who finds you?”
“The man in the maze,” he said.
Suddenly, a man rushed out from behind us. He spotted Theo. Then he looked around, as if checking to see if anyone would spot him. Seemingly satisfied, he rushed us.
I stepped into his path. “Hey!”
The man went right through me, dousing me in frigid air.
Theo screamed.
“Hey now,” said the man. “It’s okay. It’ll be fun. We’re just going to play a game. And I have ice cream.” He scooped Theo up into his arms, making a sound that was supposed to sound like an engine or something, but instead sounded demented.
“No!” screamed Theo.
“Hey!” I went after the man and Theo, but the man kept going and then faded out in a puff of black smoke.
I stopped running, bending over and panting.
What the hell?
CHAPTER NINE
Theo Forrest Alexander, I typed into my laptop. I had service now, enough to connect to the internet on my phone and tether my computer. My text to Wade had permanently failed, though, which was probably for the best. I didn’t need to get him mixed up in this.
Maybe everything was weird here because I needed to do something. Like figure out what was going on with these kids and find some way to free their spirits.
Maybe if I did that, then I’d be able to find out answers about Negus. It could be that the incarnation of the spirits of the kids was so traumatizing and so strong that it had some ability to block out the other spirits, the ones who could give me answers. Yeah, that had to be it. I’d figure this all out, save Theo, and then my reward would be to find out all about Negus.
I scrolled through the results.
First thing to come up was some guy’s Facebook profile, which was no good, because this Theo was obviously dead. He’d been killed as a little kid in this park, I guessed. I didn’t know what had happened to him, but it had something to do with that man I’d seen.
I kept scrolling, looking for some old obituary or article about a kid being missing or something.
I didn’t find it. I wondered if maybe it was too old to be on the internet. I mean, this park had closed down sometime in the mid 1980s, from what I understood. Which meant that news articles from before that time period would definitely not have been posted online.
Knowing his name was no help at all, I thought.
I scrolled back up to the top of the search results.
After the social media was a news article from a few years back. ‘We were molested,’ say survivors thirty years later, read the headline.
I clicked on it and began to read.
It was about a guy named Theo Alexander who had gotten together a group of kids, all of whom had visited Point Oakes before it closed. Thirty years later, they were testifying against a man named Jason Wick, who had allegedly molested all of them when they were minors. Jason Wick was on the staff of the park. He did maintenance work and sometimes manned several rides. Apparently, he would lure the kids with the promise of sweets or ice cream, which he would give the kid. It would be laced with something that would knock the kid out. Then Wick would do horrible things to the kids, usually while they were passed out, but sometimes the drugs didn’t last long enough, and the victims had woken up during.
Alexander himself was one such kid. He had fought Wick, gotten free, and gone running out of the maze to freedom, Wick on his heels. When Alexander found his parents, “I was just so glad to see them that I didn’t tell them what happened.” Alexander said he hoped he would forget it, like a bad dream. But the events had haunted his entire life, affecting his relationships and his ability to function. Finally, he had come forward and discovered that Wick was still free and currently working at a children’s daycare in Delaware.
Horrified, Alexander knew that Wick needed to be brought to justice. He had started looking for others who had been victimized by Wick. “More and more people started coming out of the woodwork,” he said in the article. “We all felt it was time for justice.”
The article went on to say that Wick had been arrested and that a court date was pending.
I searched for Jason Wick. I found out that he had been convicted for his crimes and was currently locked up. He wouldn’t ever get out.
So, now, I was even more confused. None of this made any sense. I had obviously come across “ghosts” of these events. The man I’d seen was Jason Wick. I’d seen Theo as well, and also another little boy in the maze. But Wick hadn’t killed anyone, at least as far as I could determine.
Some of the kids said that Wick had convinced them that what happened to them was their fault. He had said that if they were to speak up, they would get in bad trouble with the law and be sent to a jail for kids. He said that he wouldn’t tell if they wouldn’t.
The guy was a real creep. I was disgusted by him, and I was glad he was locked up for the rest of his life.
But I still couldn’t understand why there were ghosts.
And furthermore, if all this had come to light thirty years after the park had closed, why had the park closed in the first place?
I looked that up and found that the owners had simply gone bankrupt. They’d let the park start to get rundown and fall into disrepair before they finally closed their doors. By the time they tried to sell the place, it was in need of so much work, it wasn’t attractive to buyers.
So, there was no shocking, tragic event that had closed this place. It had simply started to fester, and then closed down, and then deteriorated to what it was now.
The molestation, that must be the trigger event that was causing this haunting. But it was strange, because it didn’t involve death.
Truth be told, the trauma of the molestation fit with the trauma of my childhood abuse. I’d seen ghosts of both myself and my mother. Neither of us were dead either.
* * *
“I’m just wondering if…” I blew out a huff of air. “Maybe what I see sometimes isn’t really a ghost in the way we think of it.”
It was lunch time, and my mother had gone crazy with food again, making sandwiches and several different cold salads—pasta salad, potato salad, cole slaw—and now we were all eating at the table outside of her motorhome. I was drinking coffee since I hadn’t had any
that morning. I’d also put away two sandwiches in addition to the various salads, because I was starving. I hadn’t eaten breakfast either.
“What do you mean?” said Lily, furrowing her brow.
I had told them all about Theo Alexander and Jason Wick and the stuff that I had found on the internet. I figured it was important for them to know about this stuff. And besides, I was also trying to work through it, and it helped to talk it through out loud. Lily and Patrick were there, but Oscar wasn’t. I guessed he was holding a grudge.
“Well, they’re not dead, but I saw their ghosts,” I said. “And this has actually happened to me before. So… I’m kind of wondering if maybe these ghost aren’t really ghosts. They’re something else. Spirits, yes, specters, phantoms, whatever you want to call them. But they’re not simply dead people huddled on the wrong side of the veil.”
“What?” said my mother, who was dipping potato salad onto her plate. “Of course they are. What are you saying?”
“Look,” I said, “you know that oil you gave me? The dandelion and wormwood?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “It’s a conduit for spirits.”
“Right,” I said, “and I can use it to summon powerful energy. If I get a bunch of ghosts hanging around me, and it starts bothering me, I use that oil.”
“Hold on, what do you mean?” said Patrick. “Ghosts hang around you?”
“Yeah, always have,” I said. “They’re attracted to me for whatever reason. I don’t know why that is. Sometimes they want things from me—”
“Like unfinished business,” said my mother.
“That’s true,” I said, tapping my fork thoughtfully against my plate. “I don’t know if that fits or not.”
“Fits with what?” said Lily. “You’re talking but you’re not saying anything.”
“Right,” I said, “well, if I get a bunch of ghosts that won’t leave me alone, I’ll go out somewhere private, and I’ll use that oil my mother gave me, and I’ll summon the energy to me. If it’s powerful enough, that energy absorbs the ghosts, and then they’re attached to it, and they leave me alone. Also, last month, I tried something that was sort of the same principle with some very nasty spirits. The spirits were attached, so we went to a place of spiritual power, and the spirits were absorbed into that power. They stayed there. We left.”