Authors: JL Bryan
The bamboo doors of the exit lay straight ahead. Beyond them glowed all of the lights outside. Kevin and Reeves broke down laughing, both of them feeling relieved.
“That wasn’t bad!” Reeves said as the boat carried them toward the light. “Kind of cheesy, but it had good parts.”
“It was awesome,” Kevin breathed.
“It’s still broken. I’m going to show him where it scratched the hell out of me.” Reeves touched the torn shoulder of his shirt.
The boat squealed to a halt, its prow three feet from the still-closed bamboo doors.
“You think it broke down?” Kevin whispered after a few seconds.
“Probably. This thing’s a piece of junk.” Reeves pushed against the safety bar on their laps. “Help me out here, Beefball.”
Kevin pushed the safety bar alongside Reeves, until he was grunting and sweating, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Hey!” Reeves cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, mister...dude! We’re stuck here!”
An ear-scraping sound like rusty metal gnashing on gears boomed from beneath their boat. The boat turned sideways while sinking lower in the water, as if changing from the main track to another one. It creaked forward down a short, dark tunnel with paint-primer walls. The water lapped against a gray door marked with the words MAINTENANCE and DO NOT ENTER in plain red stencil.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Reeves twisted to shout toward the still-closed exit gate.
The boat jerked and shuddered through the tunnel until its prow hit the gray maintenance door. The gray door swung open, and the boat plunged forward and down a steep ramp into darkness, riding a wave of putrid water.
The boat track flattened out abruptly, jarring and rattling Kevin’s spine. The boat drifted forward into a lightless, sour-smelling cinderblock tunnel, following some kind of underground track. Rivulets of slimy water drizzled down from the ceiling above.
In the initial gloom, Kevin could see an array of rusted tools hanging on the tunnel walls. There were hand saws, strange curved blades, long needles, and things resembling jagged-tooth scalpels. Chains hung from the ceiling, tipped with hooks gone red with rust.
“This must be where they worked on the boats,” Kevin whispered. “Right?”
Reeves didn’t say anything. He shivered as the boat rolled forward into darkness.
Kevin thought he saw new, softer shapes along the edges of the canal, but it was too dim to make out what they were.
The boat thudded to a halt, shuddering against some kind of underwater obstacle. As if by an automatic signal, the big gray maintenance door through which they’d entered gave a rusty squeal and slammed shut high above and behind them, blocking out all the light.
Kevin drew a big breath to yell for the guy to come get them, but then he heard something splash in the water near the boat. Then he heard another splash somewhere ahead of them.
“Do you hear that?” Kevin whispered.
“We have to get out of here,” Reeves whispered back. “Push on the safety bar again.”
They pushed, but it was locked tight, trapping them in the boat, which had come to a complete halt inside the pitch-black tunnel.
A third splash sounded, then another, and another.
“Fish couldn’t live in here, could they?” Kevin whispered.
“I can’t even unbuckle my seatbelt,” Reeves told him. “It’s stuck. I can’t see what’s wrong with it.”
“I can’t see
anything
.” Kevin tried his own seatbelt, but his clasp seemed stuck, too. The air in the tunnel grew icy cold, and Kevin trembled.
“Why would it get cold in here?” Reeves whispered in the dark. “Kevin? Why the hell would it get cold? Tell me!” Reeves was panicking, and Kevin felt the same way.
Kevin started to cry. He suddenly wished his mom was here to save him, but she was a couple miles away, and there were no security clowns to rescue him this time. There was nobody in the park except the psycho guy in the red-striped hat.
A little splash sounded right beside him, and then a small, wet, mud-dripping hand brushed the back of his neck. It was much too small to be Reeves.
Kevin screamed and kicked, and the boat sloshed a little, but there was nowhere to go. Reeves screamed and pounded the safety bar that trapped them.
“Something touched me!” Reeves screamed. “Kevin, something touched me!”
The cold hand lay on the back of Kevin’s neck again, and this time the ragged, sharp tips of its icy fingers dug into his flesh.
“We’re still down here,” a little girl’s voice whispered, almost too soft to hear. “We’re
all
still here.”
Kevin’s blood turned cold, and he wanted to scream but couldn’t.
The safety bar quietly lifted away from his lap.
A dozen little hands, all of them cold and muddy, seized his neck, his arm, and his leg and pulled him sideways over the edge of the boat. He heard Reeves scream, and then the hands dragged him down into the dark water. He felt small bodies, cold and stiff, swimming around him. As the thick, foul water filled his ears, nose, and lungs, he thought he could hear the echoes of the little girl’s voice giggling underwater.
Gifts from the host are presented at the end, just before departure
, the man in the pinstriped suit had said. Kevin could see the man’s bland face in his mind, the dull dead eyes looking out under the brim of the cheerful candy-striped hat.
The little hands covered Kevin’s face and dragged him to the bottom, holding him under the dirty water until he stopped struggling.
Chapter Four
I’m stalking you
, said Carter’s new Facebook message. It came with a friend request from VICTORIA SAMARIS, from GROSSE POINTE, MICHIGAN, with a picture of the dark-haired girl he’d met at Dr. Larson’s house a couple of days earlier.
Want to be ‘friends’?
she asked.
Sure
, Carter replied, and he accepted her friend request.
He got out of bed and stretched. It was almost ten in the morning, and he felt sore from a week of hard work, but it was Wednesday and he had the day off. He glanced out the window of his small bedroom at spindly palm trees lining the parking lot. He’d had another bad dream about the amusement park, and he was eager to get busy doing something, any activity to put the nightmarish memories out of his head.
His phone chimed, and he checked it.
I want to go here
, Victoria had typed. She’d linked a Google map set to an address he recognized, the AA Flea Market just north of town.
Come with me?
Now?
he asked.
I can pick you up in 20 mins. What’s your address?
she texted back.
Carter sent his address and apartment number, then hurried to take a shower. The apartment was cluttered, dirty, and embarrassing, especially compared to the tall, cheery gingerbread house where Victoria lived.
Carter’s dad was leaning against the kitchen sink, eating a bowl of generic Frosted Flakes and wearing a faded Journey t-shirt and boxer shorts. Carter decided to wait outside.
“Where you going?” his dad asked as Carter headed for the door.
“That girl Victoria wants to hang out.”
“Who?”
“Moved into the old Woodman house.”
“Have fun. Stay out of trouble.” His dad tilted up the cereal bowl and slurped the sugar-and-corn-flavored milk.
Carter sat on the concrete outdoor steps, feeling a little nervous. If the girl liked him, he wasn’t sure how he would handle it. Tricia’s death had traumatized him so much that he’d avoided relationships since then, and even lost what friendships he’d had. He told himself that he was focused on his future, but he knew he was also scared to get close to anyone.
She doesn’t like you
, he told himself.
She just doesn’t know anyone else in town yet.
A polished black Ford Fiesta pulled into the spot beside his dad’s elderly Toyota pick-up, which was marred by paint and scratches from the odd jobs his dad had taken for extra money over the years. The Fiesta wasn’t an expensive car, but it looked brand new. Victoria was behind the wheel, wearing oversized dark sunglasses that made him think of old-fashioned movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn.
Carter opened the passenger-side door.
“Ready?” she asked.
“I’m ready,” he said as he dropped into the seat beside her. “I don’t get why you want to go to the flea market, though. It’s depressing.”
“I don’t mind depressing.” She drove to the parking lot exit and double-checked her phone before pulling out onto the main road, which was virtually deserted. While most of the girls around town would be wearing shorts and tank tops this time of year, she wore black jeans and a matching blouse, as though indifferent to the summer climate. That made him think of Tricia, how she’d held her own identity against all the lame popular kids picking on her.
“Flea markets are the best spots to find super-cheap prices on old vinyl,” Victoria said. “That’s why we’re going.”
“Old vinyl?” Carter asked.
“Records?”
“Oh. Why would you want those?”
“Seriously? I have to explain the difference between full analog waves and chunky digital bits?”
“Not if you don’t want to,” Carter assured her.
“Anyway, I bet some other interesting stuff washes up at the flea market around here, with this town’s history.”
“There’s not really much history here.”
“Are you kidding? All the tourists that used to come, and then everything suddenly closing down...What does it look like in there?”
“Where?”
“The old amusement park.”
Carter stiffened, glancing out the window as they passed a closed building that still had a big smiley-face DVD sign out front, with the words
VIDEO PLANET: Movies and Games!
just barely visible.
“Did the sinkhole swallow everything?” Victoria asked.
Everything that mattered
, he thought.
“It’s all still there,” he told her. “The rides, the games...they said it was too dangerous to get the equipment in there and tear it down. I guess there’s nobody to pay for it, either.”
“So it’s all just sitting there condemned?” she asked.
“Condemned,” he agreed.
“That’s wild. You can’t see anything through that overgrown fence. Just...the devil, looking out at everyone driving by.”
“Hornsby,” he said. “People used to call him Hornsby.”
Victoria laughed.
“What are you listening to?” he asked, hoping to change the subject to something other than the worst possible thing to talk about. Her stereo blasted a girl’s voice singing over a sharp, jagged electric guitar.
“The Breeders,” she said. “Do you like them?”
“Oh, yeah.” He hadn’t heard of them before.
The gravel-drive entrance to the flea market was guarded by a tall black wooden bear holding a green fish in one paw and waving at visitors with the other. The bear’s paint was flaking, and it looked like the fish had been infested with termites, its belly rotten and perforated.
The market was mostly an outdoor jumble of old picnic tables shaded by slanted roofs on bare wooden columns. A long, low ramshackle shed near the back was the only indoor area.
After parking, they walked toward a table cluttered with cardboard boxes, random pieces of clockwork, and a couple of old birdhouses. A thin man with a long gray beard sat in a folding chair behind it, smoking a cigarette. He said nothing as Carter and Victoria approached, just watched them with small, suspicious eyes.
Victoria peered hopefully into the cardboard boxes, but she frowned at their contents. One box held dirty, dusty stuffed animals, including several of the purple and black plastic-winged bats that used to be offered as prizes at Starland Amusement Park’s Bat-Ball game, where customers would pitch a baseball at a row of stuffed bats hanging in front of a painted cave backdrop.
The other box held a chipped assortment of old Christmas-tree decorations and knockoff Hummel figurines. Carter reached inside it for a matching set of salt and pepper shakers, one shaped like a cartoony white ghost with black eyes, the other identical but with the opposite color scheme.
“These are pretty cool,” Carter said.
Victoria leaned closer to him, and he held them up for her inspection.
“That...is a pretty sweet find,” Victoria said.
“Dollar-fifty for the both of ‘em,” the thin, gray man said, possibly his first words of the day.
“Is that a good price?” Carter asked her.
“An excellent one.” She nodded with a calm, very serious look on her face.
“Probably came from the Dark Mansion’s Haunted Souvenir Shop,” Carter said as he paid for the ghost shakers. The old bearded man didn’t say anything. Carter had no intention of putting actual salt and pepper into the questionable receptacles, but they looked neat.