Inferno Park

by JL Bryan

  They searched the park, calling out for Emily and Sameer.

  Emily’s voice sounded faintly from inside one of the shapeless collapsing attractions on the midway. Carter and Victoria hurried inside and found her trapped inside a box made of scrap lumber and wrapped in old barbed wire.

  “Emily?” Victoria found a small hinged panel on one side and raised it up.

  “Thank God,” Emily whispered. She was huddled inside, looking frightened. “Where did he go? He said he was coming back for me.”

  “I think you’re okay. He’s gone,” Carter said.

  “You beat him?” Emily asked. “The chess game worked?”

  “No....” Carter didn’t want to talk about what had happened to Wes. He didn’t know how to explain how he’d beat the devil himself, either, except that it involved courage, focus, and refusing to back down even when he was terrified.

  They ripped the box apart and set Emily free.

  As they walked out through the park, Victoria explained in quiet whispers what had happened to the others. Emily just shook her head, looking miserable and distraught at the news.

  They found no sign of Sameer.

  In Pirate Island, the Crashdown Falls ride had ruptured open, spewing out years of accumulated slimey water. They ducked underneath the drizzling waterfall.

  They made their way to the place where they’d originally entered the first time. The side gate was gone, replaced by the original loose section of chain-link fence sliced open by Victoria’s wire cutters.

  While the big waterfall ride above swayed and creaked and dumped nasty water over them, they crawled through the mud under the fence. They stood up among the dense, thorny vines in the scrubby woods outside the old park.

  And then they were free.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Say ‘cheese.’”

  Carter looked up, and Victoria snapped a picture in which he was certain to look stupid and surprised, his mouth wide open.

  “What was that for?” he asked. He was at school, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while he sat in their usual lunchtime doorway, avoiding everyone else.

  “The yearbook. Maybe. If it makes the cut.” Victoria sat down beside him.

  “I thought that didn’t count as serious photography.”

  “Maybe my perspective has evolved.” She looked out over the groups of kids scattered through the courtyard. “You were the one who said I should do the school yearbook and stuff.”

  “So you decided to pad out your college application.”

  “I realized every moment of life is something to appreciate,” she said. “After everything we saw, all the death. Any moment when you can relax and smile, any moment when a supernatural entity isn’t hacking you to pieces on a bizarre torture device...that’s probably a moment worth enjoying. I’ve seen enough decay and destruction.”

  They sat quietly for a minute.

  It had taken a couple of weeks, but their lives were finally beginning to calm down. They’d gone to the hospital after leaving Starland, Carter broken and bloody, Victoria with her owns cuts and abrasions, and a shallow bullet wound across her side. The bullet wound had drawn the police, who had recovered an unconscious Theodore Hanover from the park.

  Carter and Victoria had decided to tell Chief Kilborne the truth rather than try to come up with any kind of story. The police chief didn’t believe them. He’d questioned each of them several times, and would probably do it again, but sticking to the truth was easy, even if it clearly angered the police chief. Carter had faced much scarier individuals.

  They’d also both declined to talk to the media at all. The newspapers and television stations had been attracted by the reports of more missing kids, plus a second search of the amusement park, this time involving the state police. No bodies had been found, but the small army of searchers had been surprised to discover that Florida’s largest sinkhole had inexplicably closed up and vanished.

  Despite the horrors he’d seen inside the park, Carter’s nightmares of the last five years had ended. He was restless and sometimes ill, feeling haunted by guilt about Emily, Wes, Sameer, Jared, and Jared’s friends, all the people who might never have gone into the park if not for him, but there were no more dreams of Tricia’s headless ghost insisting he return to the park.

  Victoria insisted that it wasn’t his fault, that it was all part of a plan by the ultimate devious trickster, but he felt responsible anyway.

  The only comfort was that final vision, the glorious constellation of escaped souls rising toward the sky, radiating light and gentle musical tones, whispering that there was something beyond death besides darkness.

  He and Victoria had spent much of their time together, trying to get away from everyone else, trying to talk about anything except what had happened inside the park.

  “Look at this,” Victoria said, taking her tablet out of her backpack. She opened up her photography blog, where she’d added a dozen new pictures of the Starland ruins. “Most of the pictures were too dark to see. I took pictures of the devil, and of the glowing souls, but nothing shows up except the wreckage. The videos I took were the same way.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “The traffic on my blog has spiked since I added them, though.”

  “A lot of people probably want to see inside the park,” Carter said.

  “There won’t be much left to see before long. Have you heard they’re going to demolish it?”

  “I’ve been hearing that every year since it closed. Maybe it’ll really happen this time.”

  “If they do, I want to be there, or as close as I can get. I want to see it happen.”

  Carter nodded. “I’ll go with you. Seeing them finally tear it all down would be...” Carter couldn’t find the words to express the mixture of hope, relief, and loss that he would feel at the park’s final destruction. “I would definitely want to see it happen.”

  He looked at her pictures—the deteriorated devil-faced mountain, now with a big hole gaping open in its crumbling side from Hanover’s dynamite. An image of the sinkhole under the moonlight, which was supposed to show a hundred glowing souls rising into the heavens, instead showed only a dark abyss with a few broken, overgrown wooden columns of the Starland Express roller coaster visible in the background.

  “He didn’t show up in any pictures,” Victoria said, pointing to one she’d taken from the loading platform of Inferno Mountain. Through the pitchfork fence, the camera had captured only trash, weeds, and broken asphalt. “This one should be full of ghosts, with him at the front.”

  “He was kind of an illusion,” Carter said. “His powers are just tricks. I saw what he really is...and he’s a prisoner.”

  “You really think he’s the devil?”

  “I can believe that the place I saw was Hell. Or some part of it. He was at the center, at the very bottom.” Carter shook his head. “It was insane down there. I can’t believe I survived.”

  “I’m glad you did.” She smiled a little and took his hand.

  Nothing would bring back the dead, Carter thought, but at least their souls were free, whatever that meant—they were no longer trapped and enslaved inside the overgrown walls of the park. The evil had been driven away, but it had left deep and permanent scars in its wake.

  He put an arm around Victoria and hugged her close, glad to be alive, and glad to have her near.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Artie Schopfer lay in his bed, waiting for the devil. He craved a cigarette, the ghost of an addiction he’d given up twenty years earlier but never fully escaped. He breathed as deeply as he could, taking in the bleach-and-piss smell of the nursing home.

  It wasn’t just fire and smoke in his lungs he longed for tonight. He wanted to smoke as a young man behind the wheel of his long-lost 1964 Plymouth Fury, the top down while he crossed the United States on the old highways, maybe hugging the beach on US 98, or cutting through swampland and sunlit pastures as he took US 80 west from
Georgia to Texas, or taking old Route 66, the more northerly passage across America.

  He would thread through small towns and past giant billboards advertising reptile farms, petting zoos, roadside candy stands, oversized dinosaurs advertising minor amusements or natural formations (“Visit Alabama’s Largest Water Tower!!”) that would all be forgotten in a generation. He would pass hundreds of barns across hundreds of miles painted with the simple phrase SEE ROCK CITY, directing travelers toward the mountaintop attraction built by the same man who invented miniature golf.

  Perhaps one of his occasional girlfriends would be with him—maybe Dottie Cotswold, the dark-haired girl who’d sold tickets at Tombstone Junction in Kentucky. They’d gone to New Orleans together one summer. He wondered what had ever become of her.

  Married a better man than me, I hope, Schopfer thought.

  The room-divider curtain was drawn open because he’d been moved to another floor for closer observation. For the moment, Artie had a private room. He could see a palm tree outside, outlined by a streetlight.

  He knew the devil would return because the boy and the girl had already visited him again. He wished he could remember their names. They’d returned the Starland skeleton key to Artie, along with a fascinating story of how it had helped them stand against the devil and even beat him back. The devil had lost most or all of the park’s captured souls. Feeling his own death drawing near, Artie found himself warmed by the girl’s description of beautiful lights rising away into the sky.

  The key lay once again in its envelope, tucked into the back of an old photo album.

  “You cost me a great deal by interfering,” the dead voice spoke. Artie turned to look at him.

  The man in the white suit and white hat sat in the thinly upholstered visitor chair, as though he’d slipped in from the hallway without making a sound. Artie understood that the man wasn’t really there at all. The real devil was chained and trapped somewhere far away, far below the world.

  Artie had loosely based the descending circles of Inferno Mountain on an old illustrated copy of Dante’s Inferno, creating layers of darkness, fire, and cold and filling it with screams. The flickering lights gave only quick hints of the monsters, ghosts, and skeletons hung by the side of the track, letting the rider fill in the horrors with his or her imagination. The scare was more effective that way—and cheaper, too.

  The ride had given the boy a glimpse of something far beyond what Artie had built, maybe even the true Hell that waited below, hungry for lost souls.

  “You didn’t mention the skeleton key,” the devil said, glaring at him. “That would have been useful of you, Artie.”

  Artie didn’t speak. On his last visit, the devil had plunged his fingers into Artie’s head, smirking as he took Artie’s power of speech.

  It was possible, Artie had begun to speculate, that he hadn’t lost his ability to speak at all, that he’d only been trapped in one of the devil’s illusions. Buying the love potion and giving it to Tatiana had put him in the devil’s power sixty years ago. Now he thought he could break free.

  Artie raised his shaking, gnarled hand from under his sheet. He clutched a small cassette player. A nurse had purchased it for him at his request. She’d bought him one with large, easy buttons.

  “What is that?” the devil asked.

  “Special dedication,” Artie croaked. “Me to you.” Artie thumbed down the big yellow button with the triangular “play” symbol. A roaring, cheering, whistling crowd played over the little speakers.

  The devil’s lip curled, and he stepped back in disgust. He hated any sound of joy, so Artie used the happy recorded concert crowd as his weapon.

  A guitar played into the cheers, then a fiddle joined in. Artie grinned like a loon, unable to contain his amusement when the Charlie Daniels Band launched into the old classic “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

  The actual devil’s lip curled in disgust, and he took another step back.

  “I loathe this song,” he said. His normally dead-placid features were actually twisted by anger and irritation. “You must have known or surmised as much. Turn it off!”

  Artie laughed out loud. While the recorded song, with its whistling and cheering audience, had clearly annoyed him, Artie’s barking laugh actually seemed to cause the devil some pain. He scowled, a red glow creeping into his eyes, his teeth looking just a little sharper than they’d been a moment earlier.

  “Get out,” Artie said. It took an immense effort, and his words came out coarse and rusty, but laughing at the devil had begun the process of breaking the illusion and restoring his voice. Artie raised his hands, and his knotted fingers began to untie themselves and straighten.

  Now the devil looked less annoyed and less angry. He frowned, his eyes widening, and Artie thought he caught a glimpse of fear.

  “You have nothing,” Artie said, his voice raw and grinding but wonderfully strong.

  . “You deceive, you lie, but you have no more...” Artie paused to cough and wheeze. “You have no more power than we give you.”

  The devil narrowed his eyes.

  “That’s not precisely true,” he said.

  “True enough,” Artie replied. His throat felt like raw, bloody meat...but he was speaking again, and his fingers straightened themselves a little more. “Go away. Go back to your prison of ice. You don’t fool us anymore. You’re nothing.”

  To prove how unafraid he was—though, in fact, he did feel quite a bit of fear—Artie closed his wrinkled eyelids and settled back on the pillow as though ready for a nap. He let the silly novelty song play on through his fingers.

  The devil let out something like a low scream—it reminded Artie of nothing so much as the hiss of air escaping from a balloon.

  Artie forced himself to count to ten before opening his eyes.

  The devil was gone.

  Artie held up his crooked fingers, stretching them out to their full length for the first time in five years. He felt a shadow had lifted away from him.

  He craved a Bristol pad and pencil. With his hands working again, he was eager to create. Creation, the act of making something from nothing, was a direct attack on the devil, whose only wish was to drag the whole world down until everyone joined him in the cold, lightless abyss.

  Artie found a pen and began to draw.

  From the author

  Thanks so much for taking the time to read Inferno Park! If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review at the retailer of your choice. Good reviews are possibly the most important factor in helping other readers discover a book.

  My new book Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper begins a new series about a private investigator based out of Savannah, Georgia, who specializes in removing ghosts from haunted houses. Chapter one of that book begins on the next page, so I hope you’ll give that a try!

  Sign up for my newsletter to hear about my new books as they come out: http://eepurl.com/mizJH. You’ll immediately get a free ebook of short stories just for signing up.

  If you’d like to get in touch me, here are my links:

  Website

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  Thanks for reading!

  -J. L. Bryan

  Ellie Jordan’s job is to catch and remove unwanted ghosts. Part detective, part paranormal exterminator, Ellie operates out of Savannah, Georgia, one of the oldest and most haunted cities in North America.

  When a family contacts her to deal with a disturbing presence in the old mansion they’ve recently purchased, Ellie first believes it to be a typical, by-the-book specter, a residual haunting by a restless spirit. Instead, she finds herself confronting an evil older and more powerful than she’d ever expected, rooted in the house’s long and sordid history of luxury, sin, and murder. The dangerous entity seems particularly interested in her clients’ ten-year-old daughter.

  Soon her own life is in danger, and Ellie must find a way to exorcise the darkness of the house befo
re it can kill her, her clients, or their frightened young child.

  Chapter One

  “Why do ghosts wear clothes?” Stacey asked as we drove toward the possibly-haunted house.

  Stacey was twenty-two, four years younger than me and much prettier, her blond hair cropped short and simple, carelessly styled, but her makeup was immaculate. She looked like what she was: a tomboy despite being raised by a former beauty-queen socialite in Montgomery, Alabama. She was a very recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design film school, but she'd been eager to join Eckhart Investigations and hunt ghosts rather than pursue a more sane and profitable career.

  I had to wonder how Alabama-socialite mom felt about that.

  “Well?” Stacey asked, raising an eyebrow. She rode shotgun as I drove our unmarked blue cargo van through the streets of Savannah. It was June, and rich sunlight fell through the thick, gnarled branches of ancient live oaks dripping with Spanish moss and crepe myrtles heavy with red blossoms. The stately old trees shaded columned mansions and gardens filled with summer blooms.

  “I don't know, Stacey,” I said, trying not to sigh. “You tell me why ghosts wear clothes.”

  “I'm asking you!”

  “I thought you were setting up a joke,” I said.

  “Nope, totally serious.”

  “I don't get the question,” I told Stacey. “Why wouldn't they?”

  “Well...think about it,” Stacey said. “The living wear them to keep warm or whatever. If you're a ghost, you don't have a body.”

  “Does that keep you warm?” I smirked at her low-cut tank top, which wasn’t quite appropriate for work. I’ve been scratched and bruised by enough angry spirits that I wear turtlenecks, leather, and denim even in hot weather. I’ve tried to warn Stacey about this, but she hasn’t listened so far.