by JL Bryan
“Records?”
“Oh. Why would you want those?”
“Seriously? I have to explain the difference between full analog waves and chunky digital bits?”
“Not if you don’t want to,” Carter assured her.
“Anyway, I bet some other interesting stuff washes up at the flea market around here, with this town’s history.”
“There’s not really much history here.”
“Are you kidding? All the tourists that used to come, and then everything suddenly closing down...What does it look like in there?”
“Where?”
“The old amusement park.”
Carter stiffened, glancing out the window as they passed a closed building that still had a big smiley-face DVD sign out front, with the words VIDEO PLANET: Movies and Games! just barely visible.
“Did the sinkhole swallow everything?” Victoria asked.
Everything that mattered, he thought.
“It’s all still there,” he told her. “The rides, the games...they said it was too dangerous to get the equipment in there and tear it down. I guess there’s nobody to pay for it, either.”
“So it’s all just sitting there condemned?” she asked.
“Condemned,” he agreed.
“That’s wild. You can’t see anything through that overgrown fence. Just...the devil, looking out at everyone driving by.”
“Hornsby,” he said. “People used to call him Hornsby.”
Victoria laughed.
“What are you listening to?” he asked, hoping to change the subject to something other than the worst possible thing to talk about. Her stereo blasted a girl’s voice singing over a sharp, jagged electric guitar.
“The Breeders,” she said. “Do you like them?”
“Oh, yeah.” He hadn’t heard of them before.
The gravel-drive entrance to the flea market was guarded by a tall black wooden bear holding a green fish in one paw and waving at visitors with the other. The bear’s paint was flaking, and it looked like the fish had been infested with termites, its belly rotten and perforated.
The market was mostly an outdoor jumble of old picnic tables shaded by slanted roofs on bare wooden columns. A long, low ramshackle shed near the back was the only indoor area.
After parking, they walked toward a table cluttered with cardboard boxes, random pieces of clockwork, and a couple of old birdhouses. A thin man with a long gray beard sat in a folding chair behind it, smoking a cigarette. He said nothing as Carter and Victoria approached, just watched them with small, suspicious eyes.
Victoria peered hopefully into the cardboard boxes, but she frowned at their contents. One box held dirty, dusty stuffed animals, including several of the purple and black plastic-winged bats that used to be offered as prizes at Starland Amusement Park’s Bat-Ball game, where customers would pitch a baseball at a row of stuffed bats hanging in front of a painted cave backdrop.
The other box held a chipped assortment of old Christmas-tree decorations and knockoff Hummel figurines. Carter reached inside it for a matching set of salt and pepper shakers, one shaped like a cartoony white ghost with black eyes, the other identical but with the opposite color scheme.
“These are pretty cool,” Carter said.
Victoria leaned closer to him, and he held them up for her inspection.
“That...is a pretty sweet find,” Victoria said.
“Dollar-fifty for the both of ‘em,” the thin, gray man said, possibly his first words of the day.
“Is that a good price?” Carter asked her.
“An excellent one.” She nodded with a calm, very serious look on her face.
“Probably came from the Dark Mansion’s Haunted Souvenir Shop,” Carter said as he paid for the ghost shakers. The old bearded man didn’t say anything. Carter had no intention of putting actual salt and pepper into the questionable receptacles, but they looked neat.
“Here we go, jackpot,” Victoria said as she drifted to the next table, operated by a large Mexican woman in her fifties or sixties, reading a Spanish-language romance novel that featured a shirtless man and a girl in a nightgown riding horseback on the cover.
Victoria approached the four cardboard liquor boxes on the table, all packed with battered and dusty record sleeves. She browsed them gently with her fingertips, treating them like delicate antique treasures.
“Records cost...” the lady began. She looked over Victoria’s outfit and shoes. “One dollar each. You buy more than ten, gets cheaper.” Her attention returned to the romance novel.
“Look at this,” Victoria whispered. “The Best of Bread. Infected by The The. Coven—they were the first rock band to use the devil horns at concerts.” Victoria held up her left hand with her index and pinkie fingers extended.
Victoria bought a few of the worn albums.
The next table was much less promising—two guys in their thirties, possibly brothers, definitely meth heads by their sunken, scabbed faces, offered a table full of random junk, including coils of copper wiring, a few cell phone chargers, a very used waffle iron, assorted lengths of PVC pipe, and a car stereo.
Carter stared at the backdrop of their booth—a city street scene, the emphasis on the traffic signs and traffic lights. He’d dabbed it with paint countless times, keeping it fresh against the effects of rain and go-kart exhaust. Now it was faded and dirty.
“What is it?” Victoria asked, looking from Carter’s face to the backdrop.
“Fifty dollars,” one of the guys said. His smile lacked several teeth.
“That’s from the Eight-Track,” Carter finally managed to say.
“Maybe could be.” One of the meth brothers scratched his scalp under his cap.
“The what?” Victoria asked him.
“It was a go-kart track, down on the Starwalk,” Carter said. “My parents owned it.”
“Hey, now, we got this from the landfill,” the other brother said. “Nobody owns anything once it goes to the landfill.”
“Give it you for forty,” the first one said.
“Let’s go.” Carter led the way down the tables, and Victoria followed closely. He kept his back to her, since he didn’t want her to see how upset he suddenly felt. He swallowed it back and tried to look normal.
“Twenty-five bucks, final offer!” one of the brothers called after him.
“That’s what you call that place with all the old attractions?” Victoria asked. “The Starwalk?”
“Or Death Row, depending on what year you’re living in.”
“That’s harsh.” Victoria slowed to look at some dusty, possibly antique picture frames on one table.
“The town got harsh. Used to be the best place you could live...now I just want to get out.”
“And go where?”
“College.”
“Which one?”
“Maybe Florida. Any one with a teaching hospital.”
“You’re going to be a doctor?” She raised her eyebrows.
“If I survive a hundred years of school, yeah.”
“Really?” Victoria looked at him with what seemed like new interest, smiling a little. “That’s great.”
“What about you?” Carter looked at a remote-controlled car, no battery plate on the bottom, no actual remote control in sight.
“Photography,” she said. “Any kind, but I really like getting pictures of remote or lost places, desolate places, forgotten places...”
“So you want to take lots of happy pictures.”
“That’s just what I like to document. I’m from Detroit...”
“Facebook says Grosse Pointe.”
She blushed. “Near Detroit. That’s what I started taking pictures of...boarded-up restaurants and stores, these giant old Art Deco buildings nobody uses anymore. It just seems...” She shrugged. “There’s a certain feeling. All this life that used to be there, and now you can see it all dying.”
“If you like dying towns, you’ll enjoy Conch City.”
> She bit her lip for a moment, then spoke rapidly. “I was hoping you might show me all those old places down by the beach. What did you call it? Death Row?”
“It’s not good for out-of-towners to call it that,” Carter said. “It’s different when a part of you died with it.”
“Oh, sorry.” Victoria glanced around, probably noticing how the flea market vendors and the sparse customers were glaring at them. She strode quickly toward the long enclosed shed building. “What’s in there?”
“Hot dog stand, nacho stand, boiled peanuts place,” Carter said. “Or it was a couple years ago. I doubt it’s changed much.”
“Huh.” When they were away from other people, she started talking low and fast again. “Will you show me around down there? I really want to take pictures.”
“We can’t go into the amusement park,” Carter said, and her hopeful smile faded noticeably. “The cops are serious about that. If you’re a teenager, it’s better to be caught drinking while driving a stolen car, with a dead body full of cocaine in the trunk. The police chief’s kid died in the sinkhole.”
“That’s sad.” Victoria said. “What about the other places?”
“There’s not much to see. It’s all ruins.”
“That’s what I want to see. Please, Carter?” She touched his arm, gazing up at him with eyes that were dark and lovely and openly begging. “It would mean a lot to me.”
“I guess we could,” Carter said, immediately wishing he hadn’t. “But we can’t go inside anywhere. You can take pictures from the outside.”
“You said your family owned a go-kart track? Can we can see that?”
“Only from the outside. It belongs to the bank now.”
“That sucks.” She squeezed his arm before letting go. “Stand right there.”
She raised her camera and snapped a picture of him standing in front of the flea-market barn, under a sign offering BOILED PEANUTS and HOT WINGS.
“Want to try the hot wings?” He grinned and pointed at the open door to the dim shed, fairly certain the idea of eating here would gross her out. “They’re good.” He had never actually eaten here, either. He just wanted to see her reaction.
“Not hungry,” she said., clearly trying not to look queasy. “Take me to the...what did you call it?”
“The Starwalk. It’s not what it used to be.”
“I’m interested in what it is now.”
They reached Beachview Drive about fifteen minutes later, and Victoria pointed to the first large, dilapidated structure, located on the west end of the old strip.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The Spotted Octopus.”
“We’ll start there.” She pulled into the weedy parking lot. The entrance had once been blocked off by orange cones and a boulder, but some earlier explorers or vandals had moved these aside. She parked in the shadow of the building and grabbed her camera.
She left the car and took snapshots of the building’s facade, where a purple octopus with blue spots loomed as a roof over the front entrance, some of its tentacles serving as its support columns. The building was shaped like a wooden two-story amphitheater, one wing of it already collapsed by the weather into an impenetrable mass of timbers and floorboards. The entryway doors had been kicked open, and broken, rusty chains hung from one door handle.
“What was this place?” Victoria asked.
“College kids would drink here, and they’d have wet t-shirt contests and stuff like that. You could hear it from the beach. It sounded pretty wild.”
“You never went inside?”
“I was like thirteen when it closed down, so no...”
She turned the camera on him and backed away, framing him up against the building. “Then you don’t have any personal memories here.”
“Nah.” He didn’t tell her about conversations at the middle-school lunch table, the young adolescent male fantasies of what happened inside the forbidden Spotted Octopus. “Nothing personal.”
They continued on foot through the old parking lot. Victoria took pictures of an almost unrecognizable snow-cone stand and the Fishbowl, a round building painted blue (badly peeling now) on the outside, with goldfish and aquarium-tank decorations. The serving window was nailed shut.
“Tell me about that place,” Victoria said. An amused smile played on her lips as she took pictures of it.
“The Fishbowl. Probably the worst place to eat on the whole beach. They were open later than anyone else, so the drunk college kids would go there when the bars closed. The next day, they’d get sick but blame it on the drinking. Pretty good racket.”
They eventually reached the Eight-Track, now just a ribbon of concrete and a small, boarded-up building locked inside chain-link fence. Carter drifted up to the fence, staring inside.
“This was your go-kart track?” Victoria asked.
“This was it.”
Victoria looked over the area, taking it in before she raised her camera.
As Carter looked along the bare asphalt track, he imagined he could hear, very distantly, the sound of a dozen roaring little engines, the air scented with their exhaust.
“My dad bought it from old Mr. Sheffield...possibly won it in a poker game. We all worked here together, keeping it all running. We took good care of it. My dad, my mom.” He had a glimpse of his childhood, a bright and sunny day with both his parents at the track, all three of them racing against each other while they were closed to the public. Laughing, his dad when he had his long hair, his mom when she had a real smile, not the waxy drunken corpse-smile of later years.
He heard a soft click as Victoria took a picture of him.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked softly.
“How it used to be.” My dad, my mom. “Let’s keep walking. There’s nothing left here.”
They passed the collapsed tiki shack of Big Billy’s Surf Shop and continued on into the parking lot of Dinosaur Mini-Golf, where Victoria stopped to admire the triceratops out front, its green paint faded down to bare concrete in some places, moss growing in every crevice of its plates and horns.
“Who made all this?” she asked.
“All what?”
“Everything. The big octopus, the triceratops, the devil face. All the crazy stuff along this road.”
“I don’t know.” Carter had never really thought of people making them. The oversized crabs, fish, cowboys, pirates, and leprechauns around town seemed to him as much a part of the local ecosystem as the beach and the palm trees. “This stuff’s always been here.”
“Always? Even a thousand years ago, there were big clown statues with neon bow-ties selling donuts?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.
She took pictures of the Dinosaur Mini-Golf course, which was an artificial hill full of plastic trees and assorted dinosaurs lurking among foam boulders, all locked behind a chain-link fence hung with NO TRESPASSING signs.
“Did you ever come here for a game of dinosaur golf?” she asked.
“Yeah. The best part of the course was the cave through the middle. You can’t see it from here.”
She took a few more pictures and kept walking. The remaining columns of the old Starland Express roller coaster jutted up above a chain-link fence so thick with thorny vegetation it looked like a solid, living wall.
“We should stop here,” Carter told her as they reached the weedy, sandy parking lot for Starland.
“Looks like it’s okay to go to the front gate.” Victoria walked toward the castle towers with their dead neon stars and the shrine of pictures, flowers, burned-down candle stumps, cards, and other offerings. She wore a look of dazed fascination, her eyes glancing up at the devil until she was too close to the fence to see it. Then she studied the disorganized shrine to the dead. “It’s crazy how these things spring up whenever there’s an accident or a tragedy. It’s like this nameless organic religious practice.”
“It makes sense, though,” Carter said. He was very u
ncomfortable to be standing in this place talking about it. He’d already made his visit for the year. “Especially when something really bad like this happens, and when a lot of the bodies are still here.”
“They are?” Victoria suddenly looked at the overgrown gates with horror instead of fascination. “Are you serious?”
“The sinkhole’s too deep, and the bottom’s like quicksand,” Carter said. “They couldn’t get down there to dig them up.”
“Oh, God.” She covered her mouth. “So this is really a graveyard, too. It didn’t mention that on Wikipedia.”
“You can see why the police take it so seriously. We should move on.”
Victoria backed up until she could see the devil peering over the fence. Its eyes still pulled the same old trick of seeming to follow you wherever you went. She snapped a picture of it, and the glint of fascination was back in her eyes.
“I want to go inside,” she said in a low voice.
“Definitely not,” Carter said. “It’s awful in there.”
“I want to see it.” Victoria was almost whispering.
“You said you wanted to see the empty motels across the street, too. Maybe we should go back and look at those.”
“Please, Carter.” Victoria lowered her eyes from the devil to look right at him, begging. “Please. Take me inside the park.”
Chapter Five
Carter looked up at the looming dark shape of the devil’s face, its horns still visible against the purple sky. The small red bulbs at the center of its vertical pupils seemed to flare for a moment, probably reflecting a passing headlight on the highway.
He couldn’t believe he’d let the girl bring him here.
They’d clearly lost track of time. The sun had sunk behind the wooden ghost town of Fool’s Gold while the devil watched in silent glee.
Victoria had slipped away from him, lost in her vision of capturing the sad ruins of other people’s memories. Or maybe it was Carter who’d gotten away, drawn by the horrific lure of this place, this ride in particular, where Tricia had been one of the final twelve riders, dying somewhere within the ride while the opening of the sinkhole shook the park.
He stood alone now, looking up at the dark mountain. The back-and-forth walls of the waiting area had been high fences topped with red pitchforks, creating a prison-like environment for park visitors waiting for their turn on the ride. These fence walls had collapsed together into a rat warren, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if actual rats or other animals nested inside it.