Roderick ignored the amused stares he received as he wandered through the area where Adventureland and Frontierland met, and he was enchanted by the warmth which still suffused the park in the gathering dusk. So unlike home! he thought contentedly. He looked cheerfully around at the happy people and the otherworldly series of amusements which presented themselves. It was hard to say which of the rides and exhibits he had enjoyed the most during his week long stay at the MagicKingdom, but the Pirates of the Caribbean was certainly close to the top of the list. He found the Peter Pan ride quaint and amusing, and he was astonished by almost everything at EpcotCenter—except, of course, the area with the re-created European streets, which was nothing special to him. But the dinosaurs in the World of Energy fascinated him, and the three dimensional film he had seen was delightful.
What was the best? he mused as he walked beside the man-made river and watched the steamboat Robert E. Lee chug along happily. The African jungle ride? Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea? SpaceMountain? The ride through Epcot's Unisphere? So many choices, so many choices.
This evening, as every evening during the past week, he slowed his pace slightly as he drew close to the HauntedMansion. The ubiquitous lines were rather short this time of day, and he could probably get into the HauntedMansion in only five or ten minutes. He had never gone into the HauntedMansion, but every evening he had stopped in front of it.
He looked at the sign which stood beside the entrance way to the re-created Gothic structure. "Inside!" the sign proclaimed. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine ghosts!"
Roderick turned and began to walk back toward the pirate ride. He glanced over his shoulder at the gloomy building which stood high upon a hill beside the man-made river.
"Enough is enough," he muttered. He adjusted his Mickey Mouse ears, took another bite of cotton candy, and walked on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFFREY SACKETT was born in Brooklyn in 1949, and accounts himself fortunate to have made it home from the hospital unscathed. After studying briefly for the ministry, he chose to pursue an academic career, this being preferable at the time to his alternative, which was a year in the Mekong Delta as a guest of the government. He obtained graduate degrees in history from QueensCollege and New YorkUniversity, and also studied classical Greek, Latin, and several modern languages. Being thus possessed of a vast fund of fascinating and generally useless information, he became a teacher of history and English, which he has remained until this day. He explored other career alternatives at various times. He worked for a while as a bank guard (during which time the bank was robbed) and as a finder of missing persons (most of whom had disappeared by choice and threatened him with all manner of violent reprisals when he found them). He decided that on the whole, teaching was his safest bet.
Stolen Souls is his first published novel. His second novel, Candlemas Eve, will soon be published by Bantam Books. He is currently working on a third manuscript.
Sackett lives in a ridiculously overpriced house in Tanglewood Hills, New York, with his wife, Paulette, an artist; their daughter, Victoria Simonetta, an infant; their dog, Paddington, a cocker spaniel; and their lizard, Horatio, a seven-foot-long iguana. Theirs is the only house in the neighborhood with a sign saying "Beware of Reptile" on the fence.
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