Inferno Park

by JL Bryan

  “We did,” Carter said. “I don’t know how the picture changed. We didn’t see those puppets at all. We saw the kids.”

  The police chief looked between them, analyzing them with his hard blue eyes, his jaw flexing under his cheek. He raised his Styrofoam cup and spat more brown juice.

  “What drugs are you kids on?” he finally asked.

  “Nothing , sir,” Carter said. His heart was racing, and the room suddenly seemed much too small and hot.

  “You been drinking?”

  “No. We really did see those kids—”

  “Maybe you ought to step out for a second, Miss Samaris,” Kilborne said, his eyes on Carter.

  “It’s not his fault,” Victoria said. “I was the one who insisted we go there—”

  “You’d best leave,” Kilborne told her.

  “It’s okay, Victoria.” Carter nodded at her, trying not to look as scared as he felt. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s sure,” the chief told her.

  Victoria frowned and looked at Carter again, and he nodded.

  “I’ll be right outside,” she said as she left.

  The chief stared at him for a long time, saying nothing, which only made him more and more uneasy. He could hear the round institutional clock on the wall ticking off the seconds. He felt sweaty and hot.

  “You lose anybody at the park?” Kilborne finally asked, and Carter knew he meant the disaster five years earlier.

  “Friends from school.”

  “Is that right? Any family?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I lost my boy, Michael. Seven years old. But you probably knew that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When I catch some out-of-towners nosing around without permission, I fine ‘em for every penny I can get. When I catch local kids doing the same thing, I flay and quarter them. You probably knew that, too.”

  Carter nodded.

  “Speak up,” Kilborne said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m ready to do the same to you. Her, I just about understand—she just moved down from the North, from the big city, she’s bored and wants to poke around. You should know better, even if the pretty new girl in town says she wants to go and see it.” He spat more brown juice. “Problem is that girl out there. The pictures are on her camera. I can’t exactly nail your ass to the wall without doing the same to her, can I? And lucky for her, her daddy is heading up that big new nursing home out on Cypress, which is the first new business to come to town in years. I don’t care to pay him a big ‘welcome to town, here’s your daughter in handcuffs’ kind of visit. You understand that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m letting her go, and what you’re going to do is volunteer for the real search party.”

  “The real one?”

  “If you really gave a damn about those kids, you’d know we started up civilian search parties yesterday. You’re volunteering, Carter.”

  “I’ve got school—”

  “If you got time to poke around out on Death Row, then you got time to help out your town,” Kilborne said. “We need a few more warm bodies. You’d think we’d have more, all these unemployed people just sitting around.”

  “For how long?” Carter asked.

  “You’re going to help until those two little delinquents finally turn up. Otherwise, I arrest you for breaking and entering, criminal trespassing, vandalism, and whatever the hell else I feel like piling on top of all that. You want to agree to what I’m telling you to do right now.”

  “Yes, sir. Okay, I’ll do it.”

  “I’d better not smell a whiff of trouble from you again, or I’ll bring the boot down on your ass, boy. Nobody goes inside Starland without my permission. Ever.” He regarded Carter for a moment longer, then waved him away. “Bertie has the volunteer sign-up sheet out front.”

  “Yes, sir.” Carter eased up from his chair and walked out the door. Victoria sat on the front edge of a bench outside it, her knees bouncing nervously while she stared at the display screen on her camera. She looked up, and Carter gestured for her to follow him.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered, walking close beside him.

  “It’s not so bad. I have to volunteer for the search parties and help look for those kids.”

  “But we know where they are.”

  “Why would he believe us?” Carter stopped at the front desk and signed up to volunteer. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Outside, they climbed into Victoria’s car, but she made no move to slide her key into the ignition. She kept staring at the display on the back of her camera, swiping her fingers to shuffle through the images, her knees bouncing crazily inside her muddy black jeans.

  “We should probably go,” he said after a minute.

  “The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Look at this.” She showed him the pictures she’d snapped of the cheery red popcorn cart. All three images showed what appeared to be the same cart, except it was dark inside rather than glowing with an inviting buttery light. The brass wheels and frame were filthy and tarnished instead of gleaming, and the red paint on the body was water-stained and flaking. A spiderweb crack split the dirty display window. Instead of a mountain of golden popcorn, the interior contained only a thin black crust at the bottom.

  “That changed, too?” Carter watched her flip through them again. “You were going to eat that.”

  “I was not!” Victoria frowned, shaking her head. Her knees were bouncing so fast he was tempted to grab them and make them stop. “This isn’t possible, Carter. My camera was with me all the time. Nobody could have changed these pictures.”

  “Unless it was you,” Carter said. “Maybe you’re screwing with me.”

  “Why would I do that?” She scowled at him.

  “Maybe you’re crazy. Maybe you’re just bored.”

  “I didn’t, Carter.” She looked him in the eyes. She looked so lost and scared that it was hard not to believe her. “I mean it. I swear to God. I have no idea what’s happening here.”

  “If you didn’t change the pictures, then what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.” She stared at the damaged, weathered popcorn cart. “You don’t think...”

  “What?”

  “What if it’s something, like...unnatural?” she whispered. “What if that place is haunted?”

  Carter looked at her for a minute, then noticed the uniformed officer staring out at them through the plate-glass door.

  “We’d better get moving,” he said.

  Shivering, Victoria nodded and started up her car.

  Chapter Nine

  Victoria tried to sleep that night, but she still wasn’t comfortable in her new house, located only a couple of miles from the old amusement park where she’d just seen horrible and inexplicable things. She couldn’t even close her eyes without seeing the two dead kids bolted to the front of the rocket.

  She uploaded the amusement park pictures to her desktop and stayed up late going through them again and again. Most of the pictures were just as they should have been—the ruins of the water rides, the dilapidated midway with the collapsed buildings.

  She flipped among the popcorn cart pictures, bewildered at how she’d seen, smelled, and practically tasted the popcorn. How could it have been any kind of mirage or illusion? She studied the objects in the pictures carefully, but didn’t see any sign that the image had been altered. She’d been a serious photographer since she was eleven and tampered with enough pictures of her own to know the tricks.

  It wasn’t possible that anyone had messed with her camera, anyway. It had never been out of her sight.

  She went back to the truly scary picture, the one of a plush horse and pig crucified on the rocket car. No matter how long she stared at it, the picture refused to change to what it should have been, a pair of dead boys caked in mud. There hadn’t even been fresh blood where their
wrists were bolted to the front of the rocket. They might have been dead for days.

  She tried to imagine why anyone would have done all of this—killing the kids, mounting them up like that, playing their recorded voices over the outdoor speakers (which meant somehow bringing in electricity), and then, impossibly, altering the images on Victoria’s camera. She turned it around and around in her mind, but nothing added up. No rational explanation began to form.

  Uploading the pictures online, with the story of what had happened, might bring some useful comments from her photography forums and groups, but it didn’t feel right to do that yet. People would just call her crazy, anyway.

  She clicked back and forth on the popcorn-cart pictures, scrutinizing them on the twenty-four inch monitor she used for photo editing. It was hard to believe she’d seen the black moldy grit coating the bottom as something appealing and snackable.

  A new thought seized her, and her first reaction was to grab the phone and text Carter: Call me if you’re awake. It was one-thirty in the morning, but she doubted he was sleeping well after what they’d seen.

  He called a few seconds later.

  “Maybe they’re not dead,” Victoria said when she answered.

  “Who?” Carter didn’t sound sleepy at all.

  “You know. Kevin and Reeves.”

  “We saw them, Victoria. They looked dead to me.”

  “The popcorn looked real, too. Do you think it was? Or do you think my camera was right, and the cart is old and rotten?”

  “I would think...the cart is really old and broken down, like everything else.”

  “So our eyes were being fooled, but not my camera,” Victoria said. “If that’s true, then we didn’t really see the kids’ bodies, either. That would have been an illusion, too, right?”

  Carter was quiet for a minute while he thought it over. Victoria looked again at the two puppets on the rocket.

  “I see what you mean,” he said.

  “So if we were really looking at puppets and not dead kids, then—”

  “Maybe they’re not dead, like you said. Then where are they?”

  “They could be in the park somewhere. I don’t know,” Victoria said.

  “And what created the illusions in the first place?”

  “I definitely don’t know that. I’m just saying, what if they’re still alive? Maybe the psycho in the park has them captured or something.”

  “If there is a psycho in the park,” Carter said. “Maybe we were just hallucinating all of it...”

  “You don’t really believe we were both having the same hallucination at the same time for no reason, do you?”

  “Then what should I believe?” he asked.

  “Maybe it’s...” Victoria wasn’t sure how best to say what she was thinking. “Could it be something supernatural? Are there any ghost stories about the park?”

  She waited through another long pause, wondering how Carter would react. He finally let out a kind of sigh.

  “Not really,” he said. “But I know who to ask about it. We can find out tomorrow.”

  “Good. Carter...I’m sorry this insanity is happening.”

  “Me, too. How are you feeling?”

  Victoria smiled. Her first impression of the boy was continuing to hold—that he was a nice, honest, trustworthy kind of small-town kid. Reasonably cute, too, if things happened to go that way, but she had too much on her mind already.

  “I’m okay. What about you?” she asked.

  “Can’t sleep, but I already have a lot of homework, so that works out. These AP classes don’t waste time.”

  “I see those two kids nailed to that ride every time I close my eyes,” she whispered.

  “So do I. It will fade over time, though. Trust me.”

  “But we have to figure out what’s happening, right?” she asked.

  “Do we really have to?”

  “At least until we know about those kids...”

  “Those kids.” He blew out a long puff of air. “Yeah, at least until then.”

  “Thanks, Carter.”

  After their conversation, Victoria resumed flipping through the pictures of the old amusement park, the padlocked and faded game booths, the burned and collapsed wooden buildings of the midway, the bumper boats in their stagnant pond thick with cattails.

  The echoes of life were everywhere, in the faded colors and circus characters painted on the food stands, the immense rusting weight of the waterfall ride, the ruins of the roller coaster shaggy with thorny vines. It wasn’t hard to imagine the park when it was alive, crammed full of excited children and other tourists, eager to win a stuffed bear or ride a rocket into the sky.

  That same feeling, the invisible echoes of lost memories in a place where life had once thrived, permeated her pictures of Detroit—lavish mansions and soaring downtown architecture done in extravagant Deco and Beaux Arts styles, built in the feverish early twentieth century when the city was dizzy with its own wealth, all of it abandoned now and left to crumble and rot. She’d photographed everything from empty movie palaces to luxurious train stations that had been intended to rival Grand Central in New York City, towering more than ten stories high and fronted with Corinthian columns and elaborate sculptures, now standing hollow and empty like the temples of forgotten gods.

  The emptiness and decay had eaten into neighborhoods across the city. Victoria had won a Young Michigan Photographers Award for a black and white image of an everyday street in Corkdown, a long view of crumbling, empty shops sealed with plywood. Their faded signs indicated they had once included a pharmacy, a deli, and a newsstand. A stray cat had sat on an old bench in the foreground, watching her. Its left eye was missing, and that side of its face was scarred and twisted into a permanent sneer. The right side of its face had stared stoically at the camera.

  The old amusement park—Starland Amusement Park, she reminded herself, not Inferno Park as the news had reported at the time—was like Detroit on a small scale, but with high emotional energy packed into every square inch. She could feel the anticipation, excitement, fear, and joy of moments long faded, but still echoing.

  In Detroit, she’d developed her search for the lost magic, the fragments of the past that marked where great emotion had once been felt, where lives had once been lived. In the roadside amusement park in the nearly forgotten tourist-trap town, she might have stumbled into some kind of real magic, of a dark and dangerous kind.

  She looked at the devil on her screen, a look of mirth on its face as its grinning jaw stretched open around the black steel rails. It watched her over the sharp peaks of rotten dormers and a cracked turret on the Dark Mansion house in front of it. Though it was only a digital picture and not the life-size sculpture, its eyes seemed to follow her.

  “What’s your secret?” she whispered to the devil. “I want to know.”

  The devil kept smiling.

  Chapter Ten

  Carter arrived at AP Biology the next morning completely exhausted from lack of sleep, though he’d made some ultra-strong coffee at home. Now that it was daylight, he felt certain he could finally sleep, but instead he was taking notes on genetic inheritance and natural selection.

  When the bell rang, Mr. Pluminowski walked out to the hall for monitor duty, but most of the nine kids in AP Biology stayed where they were, waiting for AP Chemistry in the same room. Among them were Carter and Emily Dorsnel, who absently scratched her nose while glancing through the chemistry textbook, a bored look on her face.

  Carter, feeling nervous, walked across two rows to hers.

  “Hey, Emily?” he asked.

  “Huh?” She looked up at him, startled.

  “You were talking yesterday about parapsychology and looking for ghosts in the amusement park.”

  “A more precise term would be ‘discarnate energy entities,’” she said, blinking her eyes rapidly. “But yes.”

  “Oh, this again?” Wes McKinley spoke up from his desk in the front row, smirking at them
.

  “I think Mr. Plum shot that idea down fairly roundly,” David Huang added.

  “I don’t remember inviting you guys into our conversation,” Carter said.

  “You invited us the instant you hoisted the brown flag of stupidity,” Wes snorted, and Sameer laughed and shook his head.

  “Forget them,” Carter said. “Do you really think it’s haunted?”

  “I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t collected any raw data yet, nor has anyone else,” Emily said. “I think that the sudden tragedy in such an emotionally loaded environment would make paranormal activity very probable.”

  “How would you collect data?”

  “Audio and video recordings, ideally with both analog and digital equipment, thermal imaging, electromagnetic field meters—”

  “Don’t forget crystal balls and Tarot cards,” Wes snickered.

  “Do you actually have any of that stuff?” Carter asked.

  “Just a video camera. And infrared binoculars. And an EMF meter. But that’s all.”

  “You can’t go into the amusement park,” David Huang said. “You’ll get arrested.”

  “Who said I was going there?” Carter asked. Mr. Pluminowski returned to the room, and Carter whispered to Emily, “Can we talk at lunch?”

  “Sure!” She gave him a smile.

  “The superstitious leading the clueless.” Wes rolled his eyes.

  “What’s that?” Mr. Pluminowski asked as he stepped behind his desk.

  “Nothing. Just Emily’s parapsychology nonsense,” Wes said.

  “Perhaps the most intriguing of the pseudosciences,” Pluminowski said. “Now, however, we must discuss the far more fascinating world of stoichiometry, in which we study the proportions of reactants and products in particular reactions...You’ve all surely read chapter five by now, so that will be our jumping-off point...” He approached the whiteboard, marker in hand, and Carter struggled to keep his eyes open.

  Carter survived all the way to lunch break. He stood in the cafeteria and waited for Emily Dorsnel to walk out of the lunch line, carrying a disposable tray with a rectangle of pizza, tater tots, and a small heap of creamed corn, or what the posters in the cafeteria called “A Healthy, Balanced Meal!”