Croaked

by Alex Bledsoe

  “Mrs. Tully, you--”

  “Doctor Tully,” she corrected sternly.

  “Dr. Tully, this is a multi-million dollar operation. We changed it as soon as the maintenance schedule permitted.”

  “Which was after Jere Rundle disappeared.”

  He nodded slowly.

  Tanna stepped closer, fists clenched, but she channeled all the fury into her voice. “There is indeed a Hell, Mr. Barlow. It’s for people who violate their own beliefs out of selfishness. It doesn’t matter if you’re Buddhist, or Hindi, or even atheist. If you ignore your own morality just for personal gain, that’s a mortal sin. And you go to Hell.” She paused. “And that’s where you sent that boy, that child. Because of money. You sent innocent people in and out of the gates of hell, and the spirits there eventually noticed. And decided to play.”

  “That’s...that’s insane,” Barlow said weakly. He sat on the edge of his desk, and the wood creaked under his weight. Or maybe it was just his rusty conscience.

  “Yes,” Tanna agreed. “But you and I know it’s true, and we have the only opinions that matter right now. I said I needed a favor. I want you to put the ride back like it was. Recreate Tatigliani’s Spiral. And I want to ride it.”

  “But--”

  “I’m going in after him,” Tanna said. “Believe me, I’m the only person you know who might be able to do it. And for the sake of your eternal soul, Mr. Barstow, you better do all you can to help me, and then pray to whoever you think is listening that I pull it off.”

  ***

  Midnight the next night; the witching hour, and believe me, I didn’t miss the irony. It had taken that long for Barstow to get the tracks returned to their original position. The adjustment had been a minor one, just a change in the angle of one turn, but as with anything involving heavy equipment, it had to be done carefully.

  Barstow himself stood at the controls to operate the Descent, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and his tie loosened. Everyone else had gone, and the park’s security guards knew only that the boss was entertaining guests.

  Tanna sat in the first car. She wore a black t-shirt and jeans, carried my biggest Case knife in her pocket, and wore a selection of small charms around her neck. The car’s safety devices had been disabled so that she could leave if needed. It also meant she could easily fall out on one of the ride’s sharp turns.

  “I’m not really in favor of this, you know,” I said.

  She smiled wryly. “Yeah, I’ve caught on to that.”

  “I think I should come with you.”

  “You’d follow me through the gates of hell?”

  “Why not? I’ve already spent the holidays with your parents, how much worse can it be?”

  “I can’t protect you,” she said seriously, “only myself, and hopefully Jere, if I find him. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I understand it intellectually, but my male ego is having a hard time with it.”

  She winked. “Your male ego has nothing to worry about.”

  We kissed, long and a bit desperate, and then I signaled Barstow that Tanna was ready. He pushed some buttons, and the four-car train moved toward the tunnel that led into the ride itself. The music began as well, the bass so loud I felt it in my chest. “Do we need that?” I shouted.

  “A little problem with the cut-off switch,” Barstow called back. Sorry!”

  Tanna flashed an “OK” sign, but I thought, Oh, great. What other “little problems” might strike?

  It normally took thirteen minutes for the car to return to the starting position. For the first ten or eleven, nothing seemed unusual. Then I felt a deep, regular tremor through the floor, different from the music’s beat. I looked over at Barstow.

  He checked the control panel. “Something’s holding up the car. The motors are straining.”

  “Where?”

  “Near the final turn.”

  My heart jumped up my throat. “Can we get there from here?”

  Barstow pointed toward a walkway that paralleled the track. Before he could say anything I jumped down onto the walkway and ran toward the black arch where the car should have emerged.

  This last section of tunnel brought passengers through a moment of pitch darkness before they emerged into the brightly-lit exit/entry area. I stumbled along, pummeled by techno, and finally emerged into the building’s great open dome.

  The ride was in full progress. Lights and lasers streaked through the dry ice mist, and the black-painted walls shimmered with tiny pinpoint bulbs. The track spiraled around the walls above me like some Salvador Dali catwalk, held in position by chains and thick supports. I heard the shriek of twisting metal, followed by a weird clacking sound.

  I looked up.

  Tanna’s train was stopped fifteen feet above me, in the last turn. I didn’t see her, but something as large as the car itself, composed of straight lines and sharp angles, seemed to be wrapped around the last car in line. I thought at first part of the support scaffold had collapsed, but as my eyes adjusted further I saw it more clearly. And wished I hadn’t.

  Clutching the rear of the car was a gigantic, blackened and deformed human skeleton.

  As I watched, the great eyeless skull turned and looked down straight at me. When it moved, its joints all loudly popped.

  I started climbing the service ladder toward the car, and yelled, “Tanna!” over the music.

  Her face appeared at the front of the car. “Ry!” she yelled. “Get out of here!”

  I ignored that, and continued climbing. This close, the skeleton looked as big as King Kong. Was it part of the ride that had malfunctioned like the music, I wondered? It certainly fit with the motif. Then one giant hand rose and formed a fist.

  Tanna pushed a limp human form out the front of the car onto the track. The fist plunged toward her just as she got him over the edge, and she had an instant to jump aside. The fist bent the metal as if it were aluminum foil. Then the hand groped past her, reaching for the one she’d saved.

  As Tanna stabbed the bony forearm with my knife, I rushed forward and grabbed the boy by one arm and his hair. He was slick with something, and naked. I pulled him toward me, just as the big skeleton fingers closed over the spot where he’d fallen.

  “Ry, look out!” Tanna screamed. Too late.

  The skeleton’s hand closed around my waist. Okay, it wasn’t as big as King Kong, but it was plenty big enough to lift me and damn near crush the life out of me. I let go of the boy, wished I had the breath to scream, and fought to stay conscious.

  I felt myself yanked backwards, then a blast of intense heat washed over me. The smell of sulphur filled my lungs. I couldn’t see, but I heard a roaring sound that, a moment later, resolved itself into millions of individual screaming voices. Over them I heard Tanna call my name, impossibly distant.

  A voice much closer spoke to me then, breathing the words in my ear like some lover’s whisper. I recognized it from nightmares of childhood that still troubled me as an adult. I knew who it was. And it knew me.

  Hello, son, my dad’s voice said. You got any vodka? I’d give my soul for a drink right now, I tell you what.

  I screamed. Then I saw spots.

  But not because I was being crushed. They were spots of light, yellowish-green, spots I immediately recognized. Fireflies.

  They surrounded me in a blanket of pulsing, comforting light. The horrible pressure around my torso vanished, and I fell, still screaming, gathering speed each moment. I had time to reflect that the impact was really going to hurt.

  It did.

  I lay across the tracks gasping and coughing. I opened my eyes and saw Tanna’s dirt-streaked face as she bent over me.

  I choked out, “I’ll never tell...anybody to...go to hell...again.”

  “Thank the Goddess,” she cried with relief, and kissed me. “You dumb redneck bastard, I told you I couldn’t protect you.”

  “I think I broke my arm,” I croaked.

  “Well, at lea
st you can walk, I can’t carry you both.”

  I held my injured arm to my stomach and got to my feet, while Tanna lifted Jere fireman-style. We were almost to the exit when I sniffed and said, “Hey, do you smell smoke? Normal smoke?”

  ***

  The Descent burned to the ground that night, with Titus Barstow inside it. Because of that, it was decided not to rebuild the thing, and a “meditation garden” in his honor was erected on the spot. Rumors that he’d kidnapped the boy we found and kept him as a sex slave made the rounds, but were never substantiated.

  And the boy was Jere Rundle...sort of. It was six months before he spoke a word, and another two years before he said anything coherent. By the time he reached eighteen, the specialists, including Tanna, succeeded in convincing him that his memories of demonic abuse and torture were just delusions, and he made tentative steps toward recovery.

  No one ever explained how or why he survived over a month inside the Descent building. Or why he’d gone in a fourteen-year-old boy, and come out looking for all the world like a thirty-year-old man.

  ~IV~

  SAME OLE SONG

  According to Mick Jagger, it’s the singer, not the song. Maybe. Or maybe not....

  ***

  A man I’d never seen before stood outside my wife’s office in the West Tennessee University Humanities building. He was tall, portly, and had a belligerent expression firmly set on his round face. His beard seemed stretched, like it would’ve been adequate for a normal face but wasn’t thick enough for the man’s jowly visage. He leaned against the wall, texting someone on his phone. The kids in the hall between classes gave him plenty of room.

  As I reached the Psychology Department door, he put a ham-sized hand on my chest. “Hold up there, hoss. Why don’t you come back some other time?”

  I looked down at the hand, then up at the man. “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “No admittance. Private conference going on.”

  “Really?” I looked down at his hand again. “I’d appreciate it if you’d take your hand off me.”

  He grinned. His teeth showed the evidence of a lifetime of tobacco chaw. “Don’t get tough with me, Tiny, I’ll bend you in half and shove your head up your own ass.”

  I was more perplexed than angry. “Who are you?”

  His grin widened. “The man blocking the door, smart-ass. Try to get past me. I dare you.”

  I stared for a moment, then shrugged and went back the way I came. I entered the English as a Second Language suite, nodded at the secretary and went down the short hall that connected it to the Psych Department.

  Two other men I’d never seen before, both too old to be students, sat on the couch. One flipped through a magazine, the other played Angry Birds on his smartphone. Both were big, in both height and girth, and were so totally focused on what they were doing that neither noticed me.

  The secretary, Jane, saw me and was about to speak, but I put my finger to my lips. I nodded at the ape outside in the hall, whose meaty elbow was visible through the open department door he so assiduously guarded. She shrugged, then indicated the closed door to my wife’s office.

  I knocked and said, “It’s me.”

  At the sound of my voice, the watcher in the hall looked around, saw me and shouted, “Hey!” I flipped him off with a smile and went inside.

  I should give a little background. Every fall semester the Student Government Association at West Tennessee University commits nearly the whole year’s activities budget to book an actual big-name star, usually a country music act, to appear in concert, and its success helps fund the smaller activities for the rest of the year.

  This year the star of choice was Lorenzo “Son” Emerson, Jr., scion of the late country music legend Lorenzo “Dad” Emerson. During the 1960s, Dad Emerson wrote and recorded some of the most haunting and emotionally honest songs in all of country music; he completed the legend by dying onstage, after his doctor insisted he cancel a sold-out show. This, of course, was one hell of a shadow for Emerson, Jr., to emerge out from under.

  “Son” Emerson had an undeniably powerful voice and a certain talent for writing Red State/redneck anthems, but his dominant trait was an ego that made Donald Trump look like Gandhi. A typical Son story: a few years earlier he’d been recruited by the Angel Heart Foundation, a group that grants wishes for terminally ill children, to meet a 10-year-old boy who idolized him. He didn’t show up for the meeting in his hotel room, although the boy’s mother saw him outside talking to girls at the pool.

  And here he sat, in my wife’s office.

  He looked at me through his trademark dark glasses. A cowboy hat the size of my first car rested on his lap.

  “Hi, hon,” I said. “You called me?”

  “Yes, come on in,” Tanna said easily. She stood to give me a quick kiss. “Mr. Emerson, this is my husband, Ry Tully.”

  Emerson stood. He was taller than me, big and barrel-chested, with a beer belly and a carefully-groomed beard. He wore brand new blue jeans and a flannel shirt unbuttoned halfway down. He extended a big, meaty hand and shook mine firmly. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Tully,” he said in his distinctive voice. “Your wife says you’re a reporter.”

  “Yes, I’m the editor of the local paper.”

  “Everything here is off the record,” Tanna said. “Right?”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  “Mr. Emerson has a rather interesting problem,” Tanna said. To Emerson, she said, “Ry generally helps me out on any unusual work. He’s a first-class observer of phenomena.”

  When he looked blank, I added, “I’m her seeing-eye husband.” I sat on the edge of her desk and tried to project the same level of cool as Paul Drake perched on Perry Mason’s. It would’ve helped, I suppose, if I’d been in black and white. “So what’s up?”

  The door opened, and the big man from the hall stood there, pretty much blocking all light from outside. “Sorry, Son, he snuck up past me. I’ll throw him out.” He reached for my arm.

  “You dumb raccoon turd, this is Doctor Tully’s husband,” Emerson said. “She done called him to come up here and talk to us.”

  “But he didn’t say--”

  “Just go on back out there and hold up the wall,” Emerson said. When the big man didn’t move, he snapped, “Go on, now, Duke! Don’t make me tell you again.”

  Duke shuffled his weight from one foot to the other, pointed a sausage-shaped finger at me and said, “This ain’t over, hoss.” Then he went back to his position.

  “Sorry about that,” Emerson said. With his sunglasses on, I couldn’t tell where he was looking. That was ironic: Tanna really couldn’t see, but gave no outward sign here in her office that she knew so well, while Emerson, who could see, wore sunglasses like a blind man. “I got a lot of fans who think they know me from my music and stuff. Lots of times he has to run them off for me.”

  “I’m sure he’s a decent man,” Tanna said. "I've been explaining the nature of parapsychology to Mr. Emerson here, and pointing out that Ghost Hunters doesn't really demonstrate what we actually do. Mr. Emerson, would you mind repeating what you told me about the nature of your problem?"

  Emerson shifted uncomfortably. “Well. Er. Uh...like I was telling Professor Tully here, I got her name off the internet, and since I was playing a show here tomorrow night, I looked her up. I think my daddy’s guitar is haunted.”

  Something quite serious can sound extremely funny when simply stated like that. I didn’t exactly laugh out loud, but the single sharp barking noise that escaped did enough damage.

  “Damn, I knew this ghostbuster stuff was ignorant,” Emerson muttered, and put on his hat. “Sorry for wasting your time and mine.”

  Tanna, as usual, said just the right thing to salvage the situation. “Mr. Emerson, you’ve got to admit it does sound kind of funny, but just because we recognize that, doesn’t mean we’re not taking it seriously.”

  Emerson removed his hat and mumbled something apologetic.


  Tanna continued, “Now. The story so far, Ry, is that after years of looking for it, Mr. Emerson finally found the guitar that his father wrote his most famous songs with. In a garage somewhere, I believe, right?”

  “Yeah,” Emerson said. “My daddy’s old driver had it.”

  “And that’s as far as we’d gotten when you walked in. Please go on.”

  “Well...I knew it was my daddy’s, ‘cause he’d carved a certain date in the wood on the back. It was the date of the first time he...uh...you know. Had relations.”

  We both nodded seriously.

  “Anyway, I was real tickled to have it, so I stayed up late playing around with it that first night, and I was celebrating having it, too, so I kind of...passed out. Anyway, I woke up needed to pi--er, I mean, go to the bathroom--real bad, and when I got up....” He stopped, embarrassed.

  “You saw the ghost of your father?” I prompted. It seemed a reasonable assumption.

  “Naw. It wasn’t that. It was the ghost of a naked girl.” He pronounced naked as nekkid.

  “Ghost of a naked girl?” I repeated, saying the word correctly.

  “Yeah, a butt-naked girl. A little girl, you understand, like nine or ten. She hadn’t gotten...you know,” he said, and cupped his hands in front of his chest. “She was milk white, and you could see right through her.”

  “Did she look familiar?” Tanna asked.

  “Naw,” he said. But he seemed to hold something back, and Tanna sensed it.

  “But?” she prompted.

  “Well...I kinda felt like I knew her, but I knew I didn’t, you know? And man, when she looked at me, she looked so sad.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Nothing. Soon as I woke up good, she just faded away. I thought I was dreaming or something, but every damn time I’m alone and start playing that guitar, don’t matter where I am, she shows up. She’ll kind of fade in, look real sad, and fade out.”

  “She fades out when you stop playing?” Tanna said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”