by JL Bryan
“Hey, Emily,” he said, approaching her. “Do you want come sit with us?”
“Who’s ‘us’?”
“Just me and Victoria. We need to talk to you.”
“Who’s Victoria?”
“She just moved here.”
Emily frowned but followed him to the nook by the band storage door. Carter let her have the shady spot and instead sat on the outer edge of the doorway, in the relentless sunlight. Victoria smiled and introduced herself as Emily sat down.
“Where’d you move from?” Emily asked.
“Michigan. Did you grow up here?”
“Yep. Unfortunately. I like your Fonzie box.”
“Thanks! Carter said you might know some ghost stories about the old amusement park. We want to hear anything you might have heard.”
“I don’t think there are any such stories,” Emily said. “It usually takes a lot longer for ghost lore to build up. Usually people who actually knew the dead don’t want to think of them as restless and spooky spirits.”
“Emily’s like the expert parapsychologist in town, though,” Carter said to Victoria.
“I don’t know if I’m an expert. It’s more of an avocation. In this town, however, I think I’m the only one, so by default, maybe...” Emily shrugged. She wore a baggy t-shirt depicting the Nintendo character Yoshi.
“So you know more than anybody else,” Victoria said.
“There isn’t much to know. The park would be a promising site for paranormal investigation, but unfortunately it’s closed to the public,” Emily said. “With the sinkhole there, that’s not likely to change.”
“Listen, you can’t tell anyone what I’m about to say, you promise?” Carter asked. Emily nodded. “We went inside, Victoria and me. We took pictures, and we saw a few strange things.”
“You snuck in?” Emily gaped. “What did you see? What did you hear? You have to tell me!”
“I’ll skip to the weird part.” Victoria brought out her camera and showed her the popcorn cart.
“I don’t see anything. Is that the Whack-A-Frog back there? Everything’s so destroyed now, it’s sad...” Emily mumbled.
“When we took that picture, the cart looked brand new, and it was full of fresh popcorn,” Carter said.
“We could smell it,” Victoria added.
“Smell it?” Emily frowned and scratched wax from her ear. Rolling it between her fingers, she said, “It could be a time slip. Sights and sounds from a location’s past, experienced as though they were in the present. Commonly reported in haunted commercial areas such as hotels and, yes, amusement parks.”
“That could explain it, but there’s something else,” Carter said. Victoria flipped forward to the crucified puppets and showed them to her.
“That’s...bizarre. I still don’t see anything paranormal here,” Emily said.
“When we saw them, when she took that picture, they weren’t Shoot-Em-Up Puppets,” Carter said. “They were Reeves Mayweather and Kevin Gordy, those missing middle school kids.”
“They were dead,” Victoria said. “They were cold and stiff. They looked like they’d been dragged through mud. Then I tried to show the picture to the police, and...”
“And now the police think we’re insane,” Carter finished.
“I can see where they’re coming from,” Emily said, studying the picture. “It looks as if you simply broke into the park, mangled some stuffed animals, and took pictures.”
“We didn’t, though,” Victoria said.
“Are you telling me the truth?” Emily asked, looking between them. “Are you playing a joke on me or something?”
“I wish we were,” Carter said. “We didn’t know who else to ask for help.”
Emily sighed. “The most common type of haunting is like a recording that plays over and over again. The second most common type is a spirit obsessed with people and places they knew in life. In either case, the most evidence you can reasonably expect is a photograph of a strange orb or light, a recording of a voice or an odd sequence of sounds, or in rare cases an actual apparition. This doesn’t fit with either type of haunting.”
“Is there a third type?” Victoria asked.
“The third type is extremely rare, and frankly I hope you’re both screwing with me at this point,” Emily said. “What you’re describing isn’t typical evidence of paranormal activity. What you’re describing is deliberate and manipulative. It requires sentience and supernatural power. You’d be dealing with a serious energy entity, either discarnate or noncarnate.”
“What was that last part?” Carter asked.
“Either a very powerful evil ghost or a never-born energy entity, something we might call a ‘demon’ as a general term, for lack of any well-developed taxonomy of the nonphysical world.” Emily pushed up her glasses and bit into her rectangle of pizza.
“A ghost or a demon.” Victoria frowned and looked at Carter.
“I don’t like those choices,” he said. “What about a crazed hallucination?”
“You’d want to test the park for chemical and gas leaks, naturally,” Emily said. “I assume neither of you were on drugs, or you would have mentioned it, correct?”
“What was the third type of haunting?” Victoria said. “A demon haunting?”
“Again, we use ‘demonic’ for lack of a more precise term,” Emily told them through a mouthful of ketchup and mashed tater tots. “The third type of haunting is what is sometimes called a dark place. In this case, we aren’t looking at a psychic recording of intense emotion, or an obsessive ghost that refuses to accept its death and move on. In a dark place, spirits are trapped against their will, unable to move on. They grow frustrated, confused, angry, and malevolent. Most haunted places are not dark places, but all dark places are extremely haunted. They are like miniature hells, imprisoning spirits here on the earthly plane.”
“So you’re saying Starland is a dark place?” Carter asked. “A miniature hell?”
“Based on a picture of two puppets? No, I’m not saying that. Again, assuming you’re not jerking me around, which I think you are...If you were to find such a place, you would want to stay away.”
“You wouldn’t want to investigate it?” Victoria asked.
“If I did, I would start by learning the history of the park and try to determine how it became a dark place.”
“The sinkhole,” Carter said. “All those people who died...”
“A sinkhole would account for simple haunting,” Emily said. “If we’re talking about a true dark place, however, the sinkhole itself may only be a symptom of the underlying darkness. Sinkholes are very rare up here in the panhandle of Florida, so why would the largest sinkhole in the state be here? It may not be a natural geographic formation.”
The bell rang, and Emily stood. “I honestly hope you’re not telling the truth.”
“We are,” Carter said.
Emily shook her head. “Then you should stay away from the park. A dark place is not a training ground for amateur ghost hunters.”
“Thanks for your help, Emily,” Victoria said, and the girl nodded a little as she walked away. Victoria looked at Carter. “I think we need to go back.”
“After what she just said?” Carter headed for the heavy front doors of the school.
“We still don’t know if those kids are alive or not. They could still need our help.”
“I’m not going tonight,” he said. “I’m about to crash my way to sleep, I’m already behind on homework, and I have to volunteer for the stupid search party until nine-thirty tonight.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can find out about the history of the park. This town has a library, right?”
“A small one.”
“Is there a local newspaper?”
“An out-of-print one. The Conch City Chronicle. I used to read the comic strips when I was a kid.”
“Perfect.” She smiled as they parted ways down different halls.
Carter managed to st
ay awake for the rest of the school day. Later in the afternoon, he joined his volunteer search party group, headed by a short-tempered young deputy who was clearly annoyed to be there. The other three men in the group were past retirement age.
They drove to Dead Lakes state park, which was more than twenty miles inland. There was no specific reason to search for the boys there, so Carter figured the search parties were running out of ideas already. They chugged slowly around the big lake in a motorboat owned by one member of the party, intermittently calling for the missing boys with a bullhorn, all of which seemed incredibly pointless.
Thousands of skeletal cypress trunks occupied the lake, corpses left over from an earlier time when the lake had been a forest. Their small boat nosed through dense swampy areas close to the shore, sweeping a light back and forth through the dense clusters of cypress husks while they repeatedly called the missing boys’ names.
Carter tried to watch the shadowy woods, but found himself nodding off, his head drooping so that he instead watched the dark ripples on the surface of the lake. His eyelids were heavy, and he could feel himself slipping into the half-dream state on the borderlands of sleep, hearing snatches of a chemistry lecture, then bits of real and imagined conversations with Victoria.
“I like you more than you know,” a dream-image of her told him while they sat at school lunch together. “But I don’t want to lose my head.”
A thin trail of dark blood welled up across her throat and around her neck, as though some invisible wire or blade had just sliced through her. She smiled at him like nothing unusual was happening and he watched, unable to move, waiting for her head to slide forward and topple from her shoulders.
He opened his eyes and it was night, hundreds of thousands of stars glowing above as the boat slipped across the black water, past an island of tall, thick dead cypress stumps resembling the broken towers of an old castle fallen to ruin.
He tried to look normal, like he hadn’t just suffered a mini-nightmare in front of everyone. The old men didn’t seem to be watching him, anyway. They slumped in the little bucket-sized seats of the fishing boat, not moving much, possibly asleep. In the darkness, it was hard to tell. The deputy was awake, standing in the prow wearing a broad-brimmed highway patrol-style hat, watching the water ahead. From where Carter sat, the deputy was outlined in black silhouette by the searchlight on the nose of the boat.
Carter looked at the boat’s owner and captain, a retired gas station manager named Ned, sitting ahead of him in the driver’s chair. He wasn’t moving much, either, but the guy had to be awake because the boat wasn’t crashing and tangling in the dead tree trunks and underwater roots.
Down in the water below, the ghostly shapes of the cypress roots were visible just beneath the surface like the gnarled fingers of dead giants. The moon was directly above them, and Carter realized it had to be sometime around midnight.
“Why are we still out here?” he asked. Nobody answered, so he repeated it: “Why are we still here? Shouldn’t we be home by now?”
Nobody stirred. Carter heard something thunk against the underside of the boat, then another thunk, and another. He looked over the side and saw the boat was driving over one after another of the thick, pale roots, spaced under the boat at regular intervals, like the cross-ties of a railroad. The thumping continued, and he had the odd idea that the boat was actually rolling along an underwater track, like on an amusement park ride. He wondered who would have built such tracks in the lake.
A splash sounded in the water beside him, followed by another. Two large shapes had floated up from under the water and now drifted alongside the boat. When the moon emerged from behind a cloud, he saw them clearly: Kevin and Reeves, the two missing boys, their bodies bloated, pale, and smeared with mud. Their waterlogged eyes stared up at him.
Carter wanted to yell, but he couldn’t make his mouth work at all. He tried to stand, but he was locked into his seat by a steel safety bar across his lap, which he was fairly certain had not been there when he’d sat down in the boat hours earlier.
The dead boys floated along with the slow-moving boat as it thumped its way along the underwater track.
“Hey!” Carter finally managed to yell, unable to put what he was seeing into coherent words. “Hey! Hey! Hey!”
“Sh,” a voice whispered.
Tricia stood on a thick, black ruin of an ancient cypress trunk jutting out at a steep angle above the water, pale and glowing in the moonlight. He saw her feet first, slimy with mud, barefoot except for the plastic spider toe ring. Then her dirty, scarred shins, the hem of her white dress that became wet and bloody around her hips, turning to dark gore around her shoulders.
As in his dreams, he could hear her voice clearly when she spoke, though her head was still missing.
“We’re still here,” she whispered. “We’re all still here.”
The water churned and boiled around him. Dozens of bodies floated up from the depths, all pale and bloated, most of them children.
Carter screamed. He looked back at Tricia as the boat passed her by. Tricia raised one bloodless index finger to the area where her lips would have been, in the empty space above her neck.
“Sh,” she whispered again.
A bright light turned on Carter, momentarily blinding him. The deputy up front had turned the searchlight onto him. Carter held up a hand to blot it out.
As his squinting eyes adjusted to the glare, Carter finally saw Ned Willoughby, owner and captain of the small fishing boat, in clear light. The man’s eyes bulged open under the floppy brim of his fishing hat, staring at nothing. He tongue was swollen and purple between his lips. A fishing line was coiled around his neck like a garrote, cinching the fat and muscles of his throat inward. More fishing line lashed his hands to the wheel. The dead man didn’t have to steer, because the boat was thumping comfortably along on its sunken track.
The other two retired men had been killed in the same fashion, strangled and tied to their seats with what looked like entire bales of fishing line.
Only the deputy seemed to be left alive. The man approached him, barely visible against the intense searchlight shining behind him. It occurred to Carter that this meant the deputy had killed the others, and Carter was trapped in his own seat, at the deputy’s mercy.
Then Carter saw it wasn’t the deputy at all. The broad-brimmed hat wasn’t blue or black but candy-striped, red and white, and so was the man’s suit. The man wore a red tie and sported a red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He looked like some kind of old-fashioned carnival barker.
“It’s you,” the man said, looking Carter over. Carter didn’t recognize his face. It looked bland, of no particular age, forgettable except for the searching, colorless eyes.
Carter gripped the locked safety rail, his heart beating as fast as a hummingbird’s. The man bent over him, studying his face.
“You must be so excited to know the old park is opening again,” the man finally said. “Imagine the good times you’ll have. The thrills. The chills. The ecstasy and the horror. All for less than twenty dollars.”
“Who are you?” Carter managed to ask.
“I am the new proprietor of Starland. And I intend to make it a place no one will ever forget.” His smile was thin and sharp, his eyes cold. “Tell your friends, Carter. The rides are dazzling, the games addictive, the refreshments top of the line. They can indulge themselves all they wish, day or night. Tell your friends, Carter—above all, tell your friends.”
The man seized Carter by the shoulder and gave him a hard shake.
“Hey, kid, tell your friends!” he said. “Hey, kid! Wake up!”
Carter blinked. It was daylight again, though the sun smoldered low and orange on the horizon. The man shaking his shoulder was no longer the carnival barker, but Ned Willoughby, their fearless captain.
“I gotta pull the boat on up the ramp now,” Ned said. “We’re done for the day.”
Carter looked around, feeling the sa
me disorientation that came with stepping out of a dark movie theater into a bright afternoon. They’d returned to the boat ramp where they’d started. The deputy and the two other men were already out of the boat.
“You’re alive,” Carter said.
“Uh, yeah,” Ned said. “They ought to make a t-shirt. ‘I lived through Dead Lake!’ Damned place has more snarls than a hooker’s cooch. Come on, get moving, kid.”
“Did I sleep through the whole search?” Carter asked.
“You looked like you needed it,” Ned told him. “We weren’t gonna find nothing out here, anyway.”
“Stupid waste of my time,” the young deputy complained, kicking at the dock where he stood.
Soon after, one of the old men dropped Carter back home. Carter went to his room, unzipped his bag, sat down to confront a few hours’ worth of homework that was sure to be too hard for him.
He started with calculus, which already seemed like an alien language to him, though he’d always done fine in past math classes. His exhausted brain wasn’t much help in attacking this bizarre new species of math problem.
I’m too stupid, he told himself. I can’t do this. I’m going to fail everything.
After about twenty minutes of struggling, getting nowhere, and wondering why he’d set himself up for certain failure in life, he was startled by the notification chime from his phone. His nerves were badly frayed, and his hand shook as he checked his message.
It was a text from Victoria: Did you get my voicemail earlier?
He hadn’t. Carter checked and found he’d missed her call while he was out on the lake, out of cell phone range. He played her voice message.
“Carter, I’m at the town library, and I have good news,” she said. He felt his heart sink. Good news for her might be bad news for him—it meant she’d found some reason to keep up her investigation of the park, when he was starting to wish they’d left it alone.
“They have every issue of the old town paper on microfilm,” her voice mail continued. “I’ve been spinning through this stuff for hours, and I think I’ve found something we can use. Call me the second you get this!”