by L. J. Smith
"We all have to stay calm," Dee said, with another glance at Michael and Audrey. "And we need some
weapons. I lost my knife, and if there are any more of those things around .. ."
Jenny realized suddenly that she'd never even thought of getting Tom's Swiss Army knife out of her fanny pack. She wasn't used to fighting. She quickly unzipped the pack and reached in to make sure the knife was safe.
"I've got this," she said, holding it out to Dee.
"Okay, but it's too small. We need something big to fight those suckers."
Audrey spoke up in a small, controlled voice. "There were picks and things in the mine ride today.
I saw them this afternoon."
"She's right!" Michael said, excited. "They had all those scenes with miners-with axes and shovels and all sorts of stuff. Let's go."
Jenny got up slowly. "I need to get cleaned up first. There's got to be a bathroom around here somewhere." Her jeans were wet from the channel water, but even worse was the stinking ooze on her wind-breaker and hands.
There was a bathroom beside the restaurant, and it was open. Jenny washed her jeans as best she could. The windbreaker she threw in the trash, along with her damp sweater. She washed her hands and face over and over and then stood under the blower trying to dry her shirt and jeans.
She and Dee guarded the rest room entrance while Michael and Audrey took their turn washing, and Jenny noticed a squashed cigarette butt on the ground. She stared at it for several minutes, the night breeze cool on her damp jeans. Every detail, she thought. Julian must have re-created everything in the real park, making it realistic down to the tiniest detail.
Which didn't mean there weren't nasty, unrealistic surprises around any given corner. They'd only been here half an hour, and already one of them had nearly died. On his own ground Julian's illusions were real-or real enough that no amount of disbelief would shake them. In the Shadow World he was the master. Jenny had the feeling that all her worst amusement park nightmares were about to come true.
And we haven't even seen Julian yet, she thought. He's got to be here, somewhere, laughing himself sick at us.
As they set off for the mine ride, Audrey said, "I hear music."
CHAPTER 5
The music seemed to be coming from a distant corner of the park-somewhere in back, maybe near the arcade. For an instant Jenny saw lights glimmering through the trees. But the rides they passed were dark and still. The bumper cars were motionless humps like frozen cattle, and Jenny got a whiff of the graphite that kept the metal floor slippery.
What is it about amusement parks? she wondered as the bulk of a roller coaster blotted out the stars. What makes them give people nightmares?
It's because there's something mystical about them, she thought. About some of them, anyway-not the really new, totally sanitized, Hallmark-Pepsi-Colgate kind, but some of the older ones, or the ones that had older sections. In some of those there was something mystical, ancient-significant. Something more than met the eye.
The lights twinkled like will-o'-the-wisps up ahead, but Jenny and the others never seemed to get any closer to them. The music was so faint that she couldn't make out the tune.
Then she heard a new sound, a slap-pad, slap-pad like quick bare footsteps. Dee whirled instantly to face it. Jenny clutched Tom's knife. An hour ago she would have been afraid to walk around with it open-it was sharp-and now she was afraid to close it.
Four flashlights swept the manicured shrubbery, illuminating nothing more sinister than a clock made of flowers. Then Michael shouted, "There!"
Something was scampering across a path on the other side of the shrubbery. The flashlights picked out a slate-colored figure. It was moving too fast for Jenny to get a good look at it, but her impression was of something very small and impossibly deformed. Something like a withered gray fetus.
It disappeared behind-or into-the Whip.
"Should we go after it?" Dee asked.
Dee was asking? She must be half dead, Jenny thought. She said, "No. It's not bothering us, and we're not armed yet." It gave her a vaguely military and important feeling to say armed. "Let's get to the mine ride first."
"But what was it?" Audrey said.
"It looked like a monkey," said Michael.
"It was little," Jenny said-and then she thought of something. Her dream. The little man in the elevator, the man with the mask.
Can we take you? We can carry you.
The Shadow Men might ask something like that- but that wizened thing couldn't have been a Shadow Man. The Shadow Men were beautiful, frighteningly and heartbreakingly beautiful.
"Whatever it was, we'd better watch our backs," Dee said. "There might be more of them."
The mine ride was as dark as everything else. Jenny shined her flashlight on the freestanding control box with its little lights and switches.
"We don't have to use that, do we?" Michael said.
"No, I don't think so," said Jenny. She glanced behind her at the miniature train that stood waiting by the loading platform, then turned her flashlight on the track. "I think the train runs on its own power- see how the track looks just like a regular train track?-but it doesn't matter. I think we should walk."
Audrey opened her mouth as if to protest, then shut it again. All four flashlights converged on the mouth of the "cave" where the track disappeared. In the ordinary park this cave was a dark and fanciful gold mine full of ghostly miners, flooded shafts, skeletons, bats, and dynamite. In the Shadow Park, it might hold anything.
"Let's do it," Jenny said.
Going into the cave was like being swallowed. As they walked slowly along the track, Jenny glanced back and saw a circle of lighter black behind them- the outside world, getting smaller and smaller.
At about this point in the ordinary ride there had been colored lights and mist around the train, probably meant to show you were going back in time to gold mining days. Tonight, there was just a musty damp smell.
There were no lights to illuminate the scenes in the cave, either, and it gave Jenny a jolt when her flashlight caught a figure in the shadows. It was a mustached miner with rolled-up sleeves, loading dynamite into a hole in the rock while two other miners watched.
"That one's holding a sledgehammer," Dee said.
"Yeah, but it's way too heavy. None of us could even pick it up," Jenny said. "We'd better see what's farther down. I do remember pickaxes and things."
"We can't get lost as long as we follow the track," Michael added. Jenny noticed he seemed almost cheerful now.
Dee shrugged and they went on. The next scene showed what happened after the dynamite went off-a cave-in that left the three miners trapped beneath a wall of boulders. In the ordinary ride there had been screams and moans of "Let me out!" and "Help me!" It was almost scarier without the sound effects, Jenny thought. The figures in the boulders were scary as waxworks, while the flashlights made shadows leap on the cave wall behind them. Jenny found herself staring at one clawed hand reaching above the tumbled rocks.
"Are they moving?"
"It's your hand shaking," Audrey said in an edged voice.
"It's all just papier-mache," Michael said and thumped the cave wall. It sounded like hitting a surfboard. "Ow. I lied. It's fiberglass."
There were more scenes: a flooded shaft with real water, a hanging, even a wilderness saloon with skeletons as patrons. They climbed up to examine the saloon.
"These bottles might work," Dee said, taking one from a bony hand. Strange, Jenny realized-the bottle didn't look like modern glass. It was thick and milky with age and it said crown distilleries co. on the front.
All the bottles looked old. They were brown, dark blue, green, even pink, and they bore imprints like
AVEN HOBOKEN & CO. and PEARSON'S SODA WORKS.
"Very authentic," she said. "I didn't think Joyland took so much trouble."
The others exchanged glances, but said nothing.
"We'd better keep looking," Jenny added.
They passed another trapped miner, this one with thousands of small black ants crawling over his face. Jenny was liking the figures less and less-the feeling that they might start moving at any minute was almost unbearable. They passed strange waterfalls where purple water flowed like glass down broad steps of rock into a colored pool.
"There!" Dee said as they rounded a corner. "Picks!"
Miners were standing around a stream, leaning on shovels or holding pickaxes. Several had Bowie knives or pistols thrust through their belts.
Dee was already boosting herself up into the scene. "Look at this, it's great!" It was a tool with a wooden handle as long as a yardstick and an iron head. Neither side of the head was very sharp.
One ended in a sort of blunt spike as long as Jenny's little finger; the other was flat and triangular.
For scooping? Jenny wondered.
Dee was moving the tool up and down, trying to get it out of the miner's loose grasp. The miner, hat brim drooping wearily, stood impassive.
"Here's one I like," Audrey said grimly. She'd found a pick that was sharp on both sides.
Dee shook her head. "Too flimsy. See how the head's just tied on to the handle with rawhide? It might not hold." She succeeded in prying the tall pick loose and held it up triumphantly. "Now this is a weapon."
Michael was holding up an iron forklike thing with six heavy, curved tines. "Nightmare on Elm Street," he said.
Jenny put the Swiss Army knife in her pocket, gripped her flashlight in her teeth, and wrestled free a tool of her own. It had a short wooden handle and an iron head with a five-inch-long projection. She couldn't tell if it was a hammer or a pick, but it felt good in her hand, and she swung it once or twice for practice.
That was why she wasn't sure if the ground really moved a moment later, or if she was just off balance. She stopped swinging.
"Did anybody feel that?"
Dee was looking at the platform they were all standing on. "I don't think this thing is too stable."
"I didn't feel anything," Michael said.
Jenny felt a flicker of apprehension. Maybe it was just the platform-or maybe she was just dizzy-but she thought it was time to get out of there.
"Let's go back."
"You got it, Sunshine," Dee said, swinging the pick onto her shoulder. They all scrambled down, knocking ornamental gravel onto the track with a sound like popcorn in a pan.
"Follow the yellow brick road," Michael said, waving his flashlight beam along the track.
And we can't get lost, Jenny completed the thought in her mind. We can't. We'll be fine.
So why did she have a cold knot in her stomach?
Michael, at the front, was now humming "I've been working on the railroad." Suddenly his flashlight stopped swinging.
"Hey. What the-hey!"
Jenny sucked in her breath, feeling her chest tighten even as she pushed her way past Audrey.
Michael was sputtering indignantly, staring down at his feet. Jenny saw the problem immediately.
The railroad tracks split.
"Did they do this before?" Jenny swept her flashlight beam first one way, then the other. Both sides were the same: metal rails laid over thick wooden boards. But they went in different directions.
"No. They never split. I would have noticed," Dee said positively.
Audrey let her pick down with a solid thump. "But it wouldn't have looked like a split from our direction. It would have been two tracks joining."
"Splitting, joining, it doesn't matter. I'd have noticed."
"But it would have been behind us. In the dark-"
"I would have noticed!"
"Hey, guys, guys-" Michael began, making the time-out sign with his fork and flashlight. It was completely ineffectual. "Guys-"
"I am not a guy," Audrey snapped and turned
back on Dee. It didn't matter what the argument was about anymore, it was turning into another Dee-Audrey jihad.
"Oh, fine, yell at me, too-" Michael began.
"Shut the hell up-all of you!" Jenny shouted.
Startled, everyone shut up.
"Are you people crazy? We don't have time to argue. We don't have time for anything. Maybe the track split before and maybe it didn't, but we came up by that wall." She pointed to her right.
"We'll go that way and it should take us out."
Except, she thought, that nothing is what it should be when Julian's involved. And that tremor she'd felt before-maybe the ground really had moved.
The others, looking as if a summer thunderstorm had come and gone in their midst, meekly set out in the direction she'd indicated. But Dee said quietly, "If we are going the right way, we should see that miner with the ants all over him pretty soon."
They didn't.
The knot in Jenny's stomach pulled tighter and tighter. The right-hand wall was blank-and it seemed to be closing in. This place was looking less like a tunnel for a train ride and more like a real mine shaft all the time.
It was almost a relief to finally run into the proof. She rounded a slight curve and saw an ore car sitting squarely on the track in front of her.
A real ore car-at least as far as Jenny could tell. It was four or five feet long with rounded corners and solid wheels set close together under its center. It smelled like rusty iron-like a witch's cauldron, Jenny thought-and echoed slightly when she spoke while bending over it.
"This isn't part of the ride," she said.
"It would be stupid of a park to leave it here," Dee said and tried to pull it by the hitch in front. It clanged, but didn't move far.
Jenny had a wild impulse to jump into it and stay there.
She looked up slowly at the others.
Michael's flashlight lit up Audrey's hair from behind, giving her a copper halo. Dee was just a slim black shadow at Jenny's side. Jenny didn't need to see their faces to know what they were feeling.
"Okay, so we're in trouble," she said. "We should have known, really. So whose nightmare is this?"
The slim black shadow showed a glimmer of white teeth. "Mine, I guess. I'm not in love with enclosed spaces."
Jenny was surprised. The last time they'd been down in a cavern, she hadn't noticed Dee having any problems-but then, the last time her attention had been focused pretty exclusively on Audrey.
"I'm just a little claustrophobic. I mean, I don't remember having any dreams about this kind of thing. But"-Dee let out a breath-"I guess if you asked me what's the worst way to die, I'd have to say a cave-in would rank right up there."
"God, do we have to worry about that? Horrible ways to die?" Michael exploded. "I could fill a book."
"What am I most afraid of, I wonder?" Audrey said, rather emotionlessly. "Pain? A lot of pain?"
Jenny didn't want to think about it. "We've got to go back and follow the tracks the other way. It's our only chance."
They were headed deeper into the mine now. The hammer bounced bruisingly on Jenny's shoulder.
Since they were retracing their steps, the shaft should have opened up again. But it didn't. The walls closed in until Jenny could have touched irregular outcrops with her fingertips. The ceiling got lower and lower until it brushed Jenny's hair.
She gathered the flashlight and hammer in one hand so she could touch the cavern wall with the other. "Definitely not fiberglass," she murmured.
Not fiberglass but rock-and surprisingly beautiful rock. She could see veins of milky white and orange, the orange ranging from palest apricot to a rusty burnt sienna. It all sparkled with millions of infinitesimal pinpricks of quartz.
"Ore," Michael said. "You know, the kind gold comes in."
"This park was built on a coal mine," Jenny said, "They mined coal everywhere around here-but that was back in the eighteen hundreds."
"Different kind of mine," Michael said. "This is a real gold mine we're in."
Rock was everywhere-very rough, maybe carved but looking natural because it was so irregular. It was like being in a castle, Je
nny decided.
And it was cold. She wished she hadn't thrown her sweater away.
Dee, a step ahead, was walking with her shoulders drawn in. Jenny could sympathize. She was beginning to feel the pressure of the rock around her-the solidity of it. They were in an endless buried shaft of orange and brown and black.
When the first junction came, everyone stopped.
"The tracks go straight," Jenny said. She knew perfectly well that that didn't mean anything. This wasn't the split in the tracks they'd seen before. A long corridor simply stretched out into the darkness on one side.
They followed the tracks straight ahead.
The stripes of white on the walls got bigger and bigger the farther they went. It was damp, now, and the walls felt icy and dirty. When Jenny touched them, her fingers came away black.
They came to a place where the roof opened into a sudden cavern-a horizontal shaft maybe thirty feet up. Jenny could see a vein of rust-colored rock at the top, and below that gray slate ridged and grooved as if water had flowed down it.
"That shaft or cavern or whatever goes back a way," Dee said. "We could maybe climb it. ..."
"Or maybe not," Jenny said. She understood why Dee wanted to get out of the lower tunnel, but she didn't like the look of that black hole up there. "We'd break our necks, and there could be anything-or anybody-up there."
Audrey said, "Well, it's obvious that things are changing around us. I was wrong about the track, Dee."
Dee gave her a startled look. She wasn't used to apologies from Audrey.
Something cold struck Jenny's cheek. She touched
it and felt wetness-and then another drop on her hair.
"Listen," Michael said.
At first Jenny didn't hear anything. Then it came, the loneliest sound in the world. Water dripping musically onto rock-slow drops that seemed to echo through the deserted shafts. It sounded far away.
"Oh, God," Jenny whispered illogically, "we really are lost." The lonely dripping brought it all home. They were trapped under tons of rock, in the dark, far from any help, and with no idea of where to go.
Dee said, "Uh-oh," and then stopped.
"What? What?"