by Bryan Camp
The three of them got out of the car, and Leon walked around the back to pop open the trunk. He reached inside and pulled out a half-sized baseball bat, like something a toddler would use, and a thick black duffel bag. He handed both to Regal, who slung the bag’s strap over one shoulder and gave the bat a couple of loose-wristed whirls.
Renai saw that arcane symbols and runes had been carved deep into the wood of the bat. Before she could ask about it, Leon reached back into the trunk and took out a battered instrument case and the jacket that matched the rest of his suit. When he spun it around to slide his arms into the sleeves, the coat billowed up enough for Renai to see that symbols had been sewn into the lining, similar to the ones on Regal’s bat. The two of them—this Magician and Voice duo—moved like they’d done this a hundred times before, handing things to one another without needing to ask, without getting in each other’s way. Like an old married couple, Renai thought, not bothering to hide her smile.
Regal glanced over at her and did a double take. “Holy Sex Pistols, Sparkles!” she yelled, and Renai felt her face flush. If she was sure the ghost word would work, she’d have used it right then to disappear. “Check her out, Sweets. She looks like a punk rock faerie princess!”
The heat in Renai’s face shifted to a different emotion. “Don’t play,” she said. “If you think I’m about to stand here and get laughed at—”
Regal smiled. “No, seriously, I mean it. That jacket is the tits. What’s it do?”
“It’s a jacket. Keeps the rain off and the cold out.”
Regal’s smile faded. “Now who’s laughing at who? I can practically taste the magic coming off of that thing.”
Leon slammed the trunk shut and picked up his case. He cleared his throat and said, “I strike either one’a you as a man who aims to idle here in the sun and sweat through this suit?”
Man had a point. End of October it might be, but the first cold front of fall was a week away at least. With no clouds in the sky and humidity so high they might as well be swimming, Renai could already feel the heat draining her. For a moment, she considered the merits of watching Ramses’ journey into Jazzland through the seeing stone while they waited in the car with the AC on full blast. She was going to feel pretty foolish if all he did was creep in, take a selfie to prove he’d been there, and then hurry out again.
But no, she knew what she’d seen through the stone. She hadn’t seen a group of boys egging each other on to commit some mischief. Nor had she seen a pair of young lovers sneaking into a place where they were assured privacy. Ramses had been alone, and he’d been focused, and he hadn’t looked back. Whatever brought him here, Ramses had come to Jazzland with a purpose.
Renai pointed across the street, at the concrete barriers blocking what used to be the entrance to the theme park, the chain-link fence and the massive overgrowth of brambles and weeds, the sign that, via the seeing stone, she’d seen Ramses walk past without glancing up. “There,” she said, “that’s the way he went in.”
Walking down the service road that led to the huge empty parking lot felt like something out of a post-apocalyptic novel, the inexorable weight of nature breaking the asphalt into jagged chunks, a long, slow trudge down a span that—in a more civilized time—would have taken mere moments in air-conditioned comfort. Renai wondered why the soft breeze tickling through the treetops did nothing to ease the oppressive heat, only to realize that what she heard was actually the constant rush of traffic on the nearby interstate. Occasionally, a bird let out a harsh, grating call off in the distance, but otherwise they traveled in silence.
Renai checked Ramses’ progress a couple of times as they walked, the sped-up nature of the stone’s observation meaning that he was already in the ruins of the park when she saw him—once throwing rocks at the remnants of windowpanes, once pissing into the weeds behind a twisted metal shape whose original function she couldn’t even guess at—and each time she peeked through the stone, his day swooped closer to evening.
She couldn’t be entirely sure which day of Ramses’ life she was spying on—she might have missed the moment when he escaped his death, for all she knew—but given the fact that he was still wearing his school uniform, she had a feeling this day was his last. She tried to walk with one eye on her surroundings and one eye on Ramses, but every time she went more than three steps with the stone pressed up to her face, she stumbled on a loose stone or a well-anchored tangle of vines. So she and Leon and Regal crept along in the present while Ramses leaped toward his future. A creeping anxiety settled in to the back of her head, the certainty that when the vital clue revealed itself in the stone, she wouldn’t be watching to see it.
When they reached the three guard shacks that had once barred or granted entry into the parking lot, Renai paused and looked through the stone again. She saw Ramses staring down at his phone, and then he held it up, its camera facing back at him. Renai felt a brief stab of panic, instinct screaming at her to flinch away before he caught her even though she knew logically that whatever demon animated the stone would be invisible to Ramses, and also that what she was seeing had already happened. Sure enough, even though it felt like he aimed the phone right at her, all she saw on his screen was him, pulling a goofy face at the doodle of a unicorn someone had spray-painted onto a wall.
Renai slid the stone back into her jacket pocket. The sight of Ramses taking selfies made her wonder where her own devices had gone, a thought quickly swept away by the realization that Ramses definitely wouldn’t have posted that picture to any site that his mom had access to, which meant that aside from all the other shit he was into, Mr. St. Cyr was good at hiding his tracks online, too. She wondered if Jack Elderflower had been as thorough as he’d claimed. She’d ask, but with her phone lost to whatever abyss it had vanished into, she’d have to see him in person again to find out for sure, which was an option that was even less appealing than wandering around an abandoned theme park.
“Which way?” Leon asked. Way down the parking lot was the main entrance, with a boarded-up ticket counter and multiple turnstiles beneath a massive awning, while just off to their left a gap in the trees showed a paved strip just wide enough for a single car, the remnants of a fence long since collapsed and dragged away. Renai nodded toward the smaller, closer entrance, trying to project a certainty that she didn’t possess.
She was starting to worry that the sense of purpose she’d seen in Ramses had just been wishful thinking. As for taking the smaller entrance, that was just an educated guess. She hadn’t actually seen Ramses enter the park, but it stood to reason that the main gates would have some kind of barricades set up, and besides, when she was a teenager, she’d have relished the chance to use an entrance that wasn’t meant for her.
The moment they passed the threshold, leaving behind an abandoned stretch of parking lot and entering the ruins of the amusement park, a prickling, creeping sense of dread ran across Renai’s skin. That ominous lizard-brain feeling that you were being watched. The random birdcalls, the buzz of insects in the trees, all of it fell silent, eerily still. Debris marked a few places where nature and time and gravity had torn some structure down, a maintenance shed, maybe, or a decorative facade. Most of the sturdier buildings were more or less intact, though they were filthy and graffiti-covered and dilapidated. The rides towered over everything, skeletal and huge, like the bones of some metal leviathan that had died long ago. A faint stench hung in the air, stagnant water and rot, stale cigarettes and mold and rust. The stink of decay, of entropy.
Regal visibly shuddered. “You guys feel that? Like there’s eyes everywhere?”
Renai nodded, and Leon said, “Like somebody done walked over my grave.”
“Scopaesthesia,” Renai said, and then grinned sheepishly when the other two exchanged a look. “What, I like knowing big words.” What she didn’t say was that it wasn’t coincidence that she knew the term, that she’d searched for it often enough to remember it, that the sensation was one she was intimat
ely familiar with.
That the atmosphere in Jazzland reminded her of the deep, unpleasant parts of the Underworld.
They walked along the empty path of what, based on the signs, must have been a delivery access road until it came to an end at an intersection with the wider, more worn concrete of the walkway open to park guests. To their left, what looked like a target painted on the concrete—a blue circle ringed by white ringed by red—where the exposed piping of what had once been a fountain jutted up from the ground, and beyond it a miniature clock tower standing in front of a collapsed facade of some mansion. To their right, a couple of columns whose writing had long since worn away, a boxy, aluminum warehouse, and the looping, metallic spire of scaffolding that had once been one of the smaller roller coasters. “I think I know where we are,” Renai said, pointing at the warehouse. “They used to have haunted houses in there.”
“This whole damn place a haunted house,” Leon said, locking eyes with her. “Sooner we out of here the better.” Renai caught his meaning and dug in her jacket pocket for the seeing stone.
When she put it up to her eye, she saw Ramses sitting on the raised tracks of a roller coaster—not the huge wooden one that was visible from the interstate, but one of the smaller steel constructions that was still higher up than most of the surrounding pine trees—watching the sun set. The sight of him that high up, on a structure that had been deemed unsafe a decade ago, made Renai’s stomach clench. Even though she might very well have to end his life once she found him, she dreaded finding his broken body in this desolate place. And then she realized that it wasn’t the orange burn of sunset that had grabbed his attention, but a golden glow coming from inside the park. This is it, Renai thought, whatever he stole from Mason, he found it here.
“At some point,” Regal said, intruding on Renai’s concentration as she watched Ramses make his way down the tracks, “you’re gonna have to tell me how you magicked up an honest-to-goddess seer stone. Just out of professional curiosity, you understand. Last guy I saw tried some shit like that, his whole face melted off like a fuckin’ Nazi at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“I didn’t do it,” Renai said, only half paying attention to the other woman, “you’ll have to ask Jack.”
“Wait,” Regal said, grabbing Renai’s wrist and pulling the stone away from her eye. “Jack who?” Leon sucked in a breath like something had pained him.
Renai tried to pull her arm away, but the other woman’s hold was too strong. “He said his name was Elderflower, but I don’t think that’s the name his momma gave him, y’know?” She tugged again, thinking Regal had just gotten overzealous, but no, she wouldn’t let go. Renai felt Leon move behind her. The storm rose up, unbidden but welcome. “You want to take your hands off me,” Renai said.
“You never said you were working with that shit-breathed bastard,” Regal said.
“You never asked.” She saw Regal’s other hand, the one holding the bat, tighten its grip. “But just so you know: I’m not.”
Regal’s cynicism came out in an ugly, snorting laugh. “Sure. You expect us to believe a pap smear like Elderflower just gave you a talisman with this kinda juice”—she forced Renai’s arm up, and gave the hand holding the stone a little shake—“out of the goodness of a heart that he doesn’t fucking have?”
“Believe whatever you want,” Renai said, “you obviously made up your mind already.” It was getting hard to hold back the tempest, that crackling energy that had shown itself for the first time in Celeste’s dining room. Mostly because part of her wanted to hit Regal with it. Wanted to put her down hard. With the spirit’s strength filling her, Renai managed to yank her arm free of Regal’s grasp and took a long step back. She half expected Leon to grab her, but he shifted out of her way, moving to stand between her and Regal.
“Okay,” he said, “how ’bout we quit this foolishness? This ain’t the time, and it damn sure ain’t the place.”
Renai clenched her molars together and tried to summon a sense of calm. Leon was right. Regal had filled herself with as much of her own magic as Renai had. She could practically taste it in the air. And if she sensed it, then so could whatever lost, broken things that called these ruins home. A breeze kicked up years of dust off the concrete around them, swirling and cold, blowing strong enough to make the nearby Ferris wheel creak and groan. Renai reached out for the wind, to pull it back inside of her. It was only when it slipped away from her that she realized that the wind hadn’t come from her at all.
And that it carried with it the faint sound of children laughing.
Based on their sudden disinterest in Renai, the others heard it, too. “Well, shit-balls,” Regal said, turning in a slow circle and scanning the debris for threats, then she glanced at Leon. “Guess this is the part where you say you told us so?” Leon spit between his teeth, dropping to one knee to unclasp his instrument case and pull out his trumpet. Regal started spinning her bat, like she was limbering up her wrist, faster and faster, a shadowy presence uncoiling from the wood grain, the weapon letting out a harrowing buzz. Renai didn’t know exactly what magic Regal was calling up, but it felt nasty. Renai swallowed, her control over the storm’s power leaching away from her in the face of her fear. She considered trying the ghost word but decided to save that as a last resort. Instead, she reached into her nowhere place for the glass knife.
Renai felt the threat coming before she saw it. She was a psychopomp, after all. Spirits were her job. “Over there,” she said, pointing at the shape coming down the wide sidewalk, half-hidden by the gloom cast by the warehouse Renai had recognized.
She thought at first that it was just a large person—either exhausted or injured or drunk—staggering toward them. But the perspective was all wrong. As were the number of limbs. And then it stepped into the light and she saw it for the marionette cobbled together from the ruins that it was.
The walking ruin had steel girders for legs and lengths of coaster tracks and plumbing for arms—one still had a sink attached—of which there were at least four, if not more. Renai couldn’t tell exactly how many, because the body of the lurching puppet was most of an attraction that had once held riders in chairs as it whirled around and around, which it still managed to do, tilting and spinning as it staggered closer. Its face was one of the cartoon characters that the park had licensed, a scowling-mad cowboy with a bushy, flame-red mustache; its voice a chorus of screaming children, a cacophony of shrieks and squeals that might have been exhilaration and might have been terror.
She couldn’t see the individual spirits that animated it, but she could feel them, a whine in the ears like an old computer monitor, a vibration to the air like a hive of bees. “Play,” the ruin howled, its bumper-car foot pounding the ground so hard that Renai felt it shake beneath her feet. “Play!”
“Nope,” Regal said, “just no, nope, and no fucking thank you.” She aimed her bat at the walking ruin and muttered some other word, a word that tickled unpleasantly in Renai’s mind, a word of magic. She’d heard that word before, but she couldn’t—or didn’t want to—remember when. A shadow surged along the length of the bat—the tatters of Essence that the sorceress had used to animate and fuel her magic, Renai realized—and a spurt of molten fire dribbled out of the bat’s tip, squirting out less than a foot away, and oozing into a burning puddle on the concrete. Regal steadied her feet, gripped her weapon with both hands, and shouted the word so loud that her voice cracked.
Liquid flame burst from Regal’s cudgel like a firehose, a fountain that arced across the hundred feet or so that separated them from the ruin, striking it first in its whirligig chest, and then tracing a clinging, scorching line down to one of its legs. The ruin kept moving forward, one step, then another, but Regal’s stream burned white hot, so intense that it melted through the steel and sent the thing toppling to the ground.
Regal hissed out another word that made the fire cease and punched the air with a triumphant shout. “How you like that?” she y
elled toward Renai, and then she turned back to the ruin, sliding the bat into a hand held at her waist like she was sheathing a sword. “It was a pleasure to burn, motherfucker!”
The whirligig spun, its multiple arms scraping against concrete and gouging up chunks of earth until it righted itself, its spindly arms now crablike, insectile legs, its cartoon face now dangling from its belly, its two legs—one of them half the length of the other—pounding together like a battering arm.
Renai and Leon and Regal exchanged a few glances, and they all saw the same conclusion in each other’s eyes. They did the only sensible thing they could: they ran. The ruin followed, its skittering legs and swinging arms and shrieking voices, but its bulk made it slow. “You can’t kill it,” Renai said, once they rounded a corner and put a little distance between them and the ruin, “it’s not real.”
“There!” Leon shouted, pointing to a squat cinder-block building that seemed more sturdy than the ones surrounding it. Renai ran toward it, her youth and her runner’s stamina letting her pull ahead of the other two easily. The entrance wasn’t a door but an alcove that bent around a sharp corner into a dark, windowless room. She was already inside before she realized that Leon had steered them toward what had once been the public bathrooms.
Regal and Leon came running in behind her, crowding into the corner together instead of going all the way into the darkness inside. They stood for a minute, catching their breath, needing the oxygen but trying not to suck in too much of the hot, thick air. The smell wasn’t as bad as Renai expected, just more of the same funk of decay and dust and rot, only more concentrated in the enclosed stagnant space. In fact, what little she could see of their sanctuary in the darkness—tile floor and faux-marble sinks and a row of toilet stalls in the back—seemed improbably clean. Outside, the ruin crashed into something with a metal-on-metal screech.