A few seconds later Vince heard him hit the ground.
“You bastard!” Andrew jumped from his seat and onto Vince, his arms tightening around his father’s throat.
“I’m sorry,” Vince said. Andrew pounded Vince’s face. Vince felt his nose break, felt a tooth come loose. He swallowed warm blood in large gulps. “For everything. And most of all this.”
Vince formed his right hand into a fist and punched Andrew in his jaw. His head fell limp into Vince’s chest and he held his son for a few moments before he stood up, propped the boy over his shoulder, and ran for the elevator.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Something fell from the sky.
Audra looked toward the castle and saw a shape high above, speeding downward. She told herself it was not Andrew or Vince but her mind said otherwise.
Did you really think your family was going to make it out of here in one piece?
More like several pieces.
She held Tim closer to her, trying but failing to cover his eyes, as she watched the object descend. She imagined the sound it would make, the way the blood would splatter. She saw Andrew’s last pleading look before he hit the pavement. She pictured Vince, begging her to have another child before his neck snapped. We should’ve done it again Honey, but now it’s a bit late, his dead body would say.
She wanted to close her eyes, to turn around and lead Tim away from the oncoming object, but instead she stood frozen and saw the body make its impact with a loud thud.
She did not see anything that reminded her of Andrew of Vince. In fact, she did not see anything remotely human, no skin to speak of. She saw a brown mass of blood, bone, and fur.
Sebastian, the face of Dream Woods. Now just a pile of innards. One of his eyes had burst as if stabbed. Fluid still dripped from the vacant cavern. The remaining eye remained open, its googly pupil looking nowhere in particular.
“That’s a shame,” Regina said, looking toward the balcony of Dream Castle. “I liked him. He was a good kid once. Of course that thing on the ground wasn’t him, not anymore.”
“Does that mean Dad and Andrew are okay?” Tim said.
Audra followed Regina’s line of sight, squinted toward the balcony. She thought she saw a shape up there but her eyes could have been playing tricks. “I think so, Honey. I think they’re on their way out now.” She wished she could believe herself but her words were hardly convincing.
“And I’m on my way in,” Regina said.
“Are you crazy?” Audra said. “Those things are in there and who knows what else. We ought to wait here.”
“No more waiting. I can get us out of here but it’s got to be quick. He knows I’m here. And he’s going to be angry.”
“Who knows you’re here?” Audra held Tim closer.
“I’m the only prisoner who ever escaped and now I’ve come back. He’s not going to take any chances this time around.” She did not look away from the balcony, did not blink once. She seemed hypnotized by something Audra couldn’t make out.
“Regina, you’re not making any sense.” As if anything makes any sense here.
Regina went on as if she wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. “I’m going to make sure we get back to our world and I’m going to tear his fucking eyes out in the process.”
“You’re not making any sense. You expect us to just wait for you out here?”
“I need you to do me a favor,” Regina said, ignoring the question, or perhaps she hadn’t heard it to begin with. “I’m planning on getting out of this place alive. Hell, I’ve done it once before. But twice might be pushing it. I need you to tell them what you saw here today, what you heard and smelled and felt, that all of it’s one hundred percent true. That I’m not just some hack who went off the deep end for her third book. They’re going to say it was fiction but I need you to say otherwise. Will you do that for me?”
“I don’t understand what you’re—”
Regina held up her hand. “Just promise me.”
Audra nodded slowly. “Sure. Of course.”
“And you too, mister.” Regina pointed at Tim. “I expect you to do the same and to make sure your mom doesn’t chicken out. Any woman that would voluntarily step foot back inside this place must have a damn good reason and I see now that she does.” She ruffled Tim’s hair.
“Can’t we just use your ticket?” Audra looked at the gate across the way, wondered if it could be so simple.
“I’m afraid not. It’s one-time use only. You can check into Dream Woods but it’s much harder to check out. There’s another way out of here but I’ve got to hurry. It won’t be long until he finds me.” Without saying anything else, without saying goodbye or telling them to hide, Regina began to jog toward the castle. Audra watched her climb the front steps and enter the darkness of the entrance without hesitation. She may have been the bravest person Audra had ever met.
“Mom?” Tim said.
“Yes, dear?”
“She seemed crazy.”
Audra nodded. “But she’s crazy in all the right ways and I think she just might get us out of here.”
“That, Mrs. Carter, is quite wishful thinking.”
Audra tensed. The voice had not come from Tim. It had come from another source behind her and she knew the source without looking at who—or what—stood there. The voice was enough make her mind threaten to come unraveled. After all she’d been through, after thinking for just a moment that escape could be possible. After thinking the woman with the fleshy mask she called a face had just vanished. After everything that happened, she was still doomed.
She turned around and saw Doris.
The woman—though that term was no longer applicable—still wore her hotel uniform but that was the only recognizable detail. She was not wearing shoes, though even if she had been, they would not have fit her clawed feet. Her hands were grey and scaly, just like the rest of the things that had killed everyone.
Her face still looked pale and wrinkled and looser than ever before. Audra saw now how right she’d been to fear the woman each time she passed through the hotel lobby. She’d also been right about the mask of flesh. It was a second skin, a reptile shedding its exterior like it was crawling out of a wet suit.
“You are resilient, Mrs. Carter. I will give you that much. But you are still stupid and selfish and I hope it hurts you deeply to know that you are going to see your son die in front of you.” She reached her clawed hand upward, grabbed onto the pale flesh of her chin, and ripped it away from her face and neck. It stretched and resisted before it finally tore apart. There was no blood, no veins or vasculature, only the dark grey face beneath, her true face. It was the face of nightmares, something that made you question everything you thought could exist. Made you question existence itself. Doris tossed her face to the ground. It landed so that the hollow eyes stared upward.
“Tim,” Audra said, stepping in front of him and letting go of his shoulders.
He stuttered, holding onto her leg for support. His hands shook badly. “Y…yes?”
She cleared her throat, took a step back. “Run.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
It had been nearly thirty years since Regina had stepped foot in Dream Castle but some part of her felt as though she’d just been taking a nap, that she’d never truly left its walls in the first place. She remembered every detail as she walked toward the elevator.
Two years. They had held her prisoner for two entire years. She was kept in a holding cell deep beneath the castle. At first she was the only captive save for two women across the hall that had cried so much Audra marveled their voices never grew hoarse. One night they’d been dragged away screaming and begging and she’d never heard from them again. It went on like that, random prisoners showing up every so often, though they never lasted long.
It was a miracle she hadn’t killed herself on one of the many nights where she stared at the wall of her cell and listened to things grunt from somewhere far off. She’d thoug
ht about it plenty but had never been able to follow through. There were plenty of ways, blankets to turn into nooses, springs to rip from her cot and turn into knives. But something always held her back. Not hope or love.
It was the thought that one day she could escape and burn the lovely land of Dream Woods to the ground. A fantasy worth the suffering.
A few months in, The Director visited her for the first time. He stood perfectly still outside of the bars of her cell, smiling and waiting. “Are you certain you wouldn’t like to reconsider your stance on Dream Woods?”
She shook her head and told him to go fuck himself.
“All you have to do is say ‘yes.’ Come back to work for us. We’ll raise your pay beyond your wildest dreams. We’ll triple your salary. You can have all the benefits you’d like. Money is no worry to us here.”
“It’s not about the money.” She scratched at her skin, which was covered in bug bites the size of marbles. At night, she felt things crawling all over her body but she could never find them with her own eyes.
“Of course it is. Money is power and power is everything. It fuels the world and everything else beyond. It makes men kill children and start wars and rape women and torture innocents. When you come down to it, power is what makes everything tick.”
“If I agree to come back, if I sign on the dotted line and show up as if nothing ever happened, what difference will it make?” One of the bites burst open, blood beading on her forearm. It would surely become infected.
“All the difference in the world. You will no longer sleep and urinate and defecate behind bars. All the humility will vanish. You will be free.”
She shook her head, gritted her teeth. Her nails dug too deeply into one of the bites. The red bump tore open just like the last one. She wondered if the wounds would ever heal. “No. It might seem like freedom but you’ll never let me leave again. I’m willing to bet that even if I had hit the road before your little minions showed up that day it wouldn’t have mattered how far away I got. Eventually you would’ve found me.”
He nodded. His eyes watched her without blinking. The longer she stared the more they changed into something entirely foreign, no longer remotely human. “The reach of Dream Woods stretches quite far. We would’ve found you, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, but we would have found you regardless.”
“Then I’m a prisoner either way.”
He sighed, though he didn’t seem worried in the least. His face only knew two emotions: happy and happier. “If we are being technical, yes, although you would lead a much easier life were you to return to work. Your life would belong to you but your soul would belong to us.”
“Fuck you.” She spat onto his face, took great pride in watching the saliva slowly drip down his cheek.
He smiled, opened his mouth, and licked the mess up with his own tongue. “I can taste your fear, Regina.” He swallowed, opened and closed his lips like he was sampling fine wine. “It is painfully human and it tells me you will give in eventually. Perhaps not soon but it will happen. We have ways of persuading you.”
In the distance something growled, like a lion or a tiger, though it sounded much larger. She did not wish to meet the owner of the sound, though she had a feeling such a meeting was imminent.
***
Gregory, the man with the drooping glasses, visited her often. He would plead with her each time to reconsider her position. She would never have her freedom, he would say. That part of her was gone now, whether she liked it or not. But she could lead a somewhat normal life.
“If I can pretend I’m not working for an evil corporation that is controlled by things I can’t even begin to understand,” she would say. “And that’s a big ‘if.’”
He would nod and smile, a sad look on his face, the glasses nearly falling off his face each time.
One particular night, two years into her stay at Dream Woods, Gregory showed up unannounced. He had already paid her a visit that afternoon, bringing with him chicken fingers and cotton candy from one of the snack vendors topside. She had grown sick of the theme park food but she would force down whatever he offered. It was better than unidentifiable mush they served her most nights. She was surprised she hadn’t gained any weight but she supposed fear cancelled out the extra calories.
She had just nodded off on her spring-ridden cot, dreaming of life before she’d ever heard of New England’s most popular attraction, when she heard a tapping outside her cell.
She woke, startled. She expected to see The Director. He was here to make her resubmit her application by any means necessary. Or perhaps it was one of the things she heard grunting throughout the night, things she had yet to see, though they sounded closer with each passing day.
But it was just Gregory, holding one of the torches that were placed along the hall.
She opened her mouth to speak.
He held an index finger to his mouth. “Don’t make any noise. We’re leaving.”
“Leaving?” she whispered. “How?”
He held up a key. In the dim glow of the torch she thought it sparkled on its own accord. She thought it looked like a talisman, something like a miracle. She pinched her right forearm just to make sure she wasn’t still sleeping.
He slid the key into the lock and turned it. Before he could open the door she pushed her foot against the metal and stopped the movement. “You can’t do this. If they find out they’re going to kill you.”
“I assure you it will be much worse than that but it’s a risk I’m willing to take because I don’t plan on staying here myself.”
“But you can’t run away. Not forever. They’ll find us. You said so yourself.”
“Not if we put them out of business for a while.”
“And how do you plan on doing that?”
Without answering he pushed the cell door in, looked both ways, and waved her on.
***
“What is it?” Regina asked, pointing to the red circular button in the middle of the control panel. Just when she’d thought you couldn’t get any deeper into Dream Castle, they’d taken the elevator even lower, only two more floors though it felt like hundreds.
The doors had opened up to a single hallway that ended at a metal door. Inside was a room the size of Regina’s cell or perhaps smaller. There was a panel of machinery with blinking lights and buttons that made her dizzy trying to process each component. There seemed to be no pattern to the equipment, a whirlwind of switches and levers that made her sweat thinking of all the possibilities behind each one.
“That,” Gregory said, pushing up his glasses with one hand and handing her the torch with the other, “is our ticket out of here.”
She grabbed the torch and held it toward the panel. They stood silent for a moment looking at a red button, the largest of all the others, in the center of the console. It was encased in a square plastic shielding that Gregory flipped upward. In the middle of the button was a single word, written in white letters, that made Regina nearly drop the flame.
Elsewhere.
“What does that mean? Elsewhere?” Speaking the word aloud made her wince, as if she’d accidentally summoned something out of a black magic book.
He took his glasses off and massaged the crown of his nose. Though it was dark, she could still make out the bags underneath his eyes. She saw countless hours spent at Dream Woods taking their toll each time he pretended to punch out for the day, never truly off the clock. She wondered if the park haunted his dreams as well. “This place, it doesn’t exist only here in our world. It also exists in another place, hence the button.” He nodded toward the red circle.
The word stared at her like an eye, ready to blink at any moment.
Elsewhere.
She rubbed her prickly arms, wincing whenever her fingers brushed the swollen bites. Wherever elsewhere is, I don’t think it could be any worse than this place.
But she did not wish to test that theory. “You’re not making much sense.”
“Did you
ever wonder who the real faces of Dream Woods are? Sure you’ve got the pushers, the guys who showed up at your house that day, and you’ve got the employees you can see in broad daylight, and not forgetting, of course, The Director himself, but did you ever wonder about the investors, the people behind the scenes?”
“I guess I hadn’t really thought about it too much. I heard them mentioned during the meetings but no one ever explained who they were or what they did.” It had been hard enough trying to make sense of the past two years.
“You’re probably better off not thinking about them. The investors—let’s just say they don’t accept money as revenue. They’d rather have something more…primal. Something like blood. And this button is a one-way ticket back to their office.”
“You’re talking about another world?” She wished it sounded crazier but she spoke as if they were discussing sports or weather.
He nodded. “That’s right, a place not unlike this one except it does not house humans.”
She swallowed. “Meaning?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have a chance to get out of here. The moment we press this button, an alarm will sound all across the park. We’ll have to be quick. There will be no room for error.”
“Why are you doing this? You seemed so keen on staying here until you retired.”
“That’s just it. There is no retirement here. You work until you die and that’s all. You know I could’ve had a family? I was engaged before I applied to this shithole. I could’ve had a wife and kids and a normal life where I didn’t have to hear about sacrificial offerings but instead I chose a career. I want out and I want you to come with me.”
She eyed the button and Gregory’s nervous face, though it couldn’t have looked more worried than her own. Then she nodded.
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