Inferno Park (47 page)

“How is this possible?” Sameer whispered. “How is it here?”

“It is here because it is among your fondest wishes,” the man said. “Are you pleased, Sameer?”

“Can I read them?”

“Read anything you like.”

Sameer gently lifted a stacked bundle of rectangular palm-leaf pages held together by string. The manuscript felt dry and fragile in his fingers, ready to crumble into fragments if he was careless with it.

The leaves were written in a flowery Nagari script, an archaic form of the modern Devanagari his mother had taught him. He struggled to read the faded ink on the first page, which was illustrated by a compact drawing of the goddess Kali, portrayed as a four-armed woman wearing nothing but a necklace of human heads.

“I wish I could spend the rest of my life studying these manuscripts,” Sameer whispered.

“You may have your wish,” the man replied.

Sameer focused on the figures at the upper left of the leaf. The manuscript grew warm in his fingers, and then tiny flames rose from the text. Before he could react, the flames spread quickly, devouring the dry old leaf and scorching his fingers.

“Ouch!” Sameer threw the old manuscript aside and stuck his burned fingers in his mouth. The burning book landed on a shelf of similar old, dry manuscripts. Tongues of fire crawled up and down, igniting the shelves above and below it.

“Careful,” the man in the hat said. “You’re going to lose thousands of years’ worth of knowledge.”

“No!” Sameer beat at the spreading fire with his hands, wincing at the pain. The fire raced up and down, leaping to other shelves of old manuscripts. Cursing, Sameer took off his shirt and tried to smother the fire, but it was spreading and growing much too fast. A long row burst into flames, sending a runner of fire to the shelves on the next wall.

“There are few fragrances more satisfying than a burning library,” the man said, completely stoic as the fire whooshed from shelf to shelf. “You should have seen what Julius Caesar did to the Library of Alexandria. I wish I had a thousand ambitious souls like his to work with. Men of the modern age are nothing but weak clay.”

“Help me!” Sameer said. He slapped at the flames faster, but his shirt caught on fire and he had to drop it onto the wooden floorboards.

“I have helped you,” the man said. “Your wish has come true.”

As though someone had pumped an enormous unseen bellows, the flames erupted into flowing torrents, sweeping from wall to wall and floor to floor, climbing the narrow stairs and wooden ladders. Rows of dry, brittle manuscripts burst into crackling little fires.

The smoke rose thick and dark from all sides, stinging Sameer’s eyes and searing his lungs. He coughed and gasped for air, but the man in the striped hat did not seem to have trouble breathing. A shadow of a smile appeared at one corner of the man’s mouth.

Sameer gave up on saving the library and ran down the narrow red steps through which he’d entered. Blinded by smoke, he smacked directly into a solid rock wall at a full run, bloodying his nose. He leaned against the wall and coughed again.

He felt around with his hands, but the doorway was gone, replaced by a carving of Kali so large the human heads on her necklace were life-sized.

“Where’s the door?” Sameer hacked and coughed as he turned around. The smoke thinned enough for him to see the man in the hat standing on the stairs ahead of him, watching Sameer coolly.

“The only way out is through the flames,” the man said. “It will only sting for a moment.”

The thick fire billowed down the stairs, passing through the man as if he were a ghost, and crashed down onto Sameer like a tidal wave. Sameer howled in pain, breathing in raw flames, until he collapsed into a charred heap on the burning floor.

* * *

As they reached Wishing Well Plaza at the center of the park, Emily found herself staring at a dark new attraction that had appeared next to the haunted house. She knew it hadn’t been there before, or she would have drooled at the sight of it.

The facade resembled a black two-story house with thick red curtains blocking the windows. Three steps led up to a door that looked like a coffin stood on its end, and the sign above it read PSYCHICAL RESEARCH LABORATORY. A smaller sign suggested: EXPERIENCE THE MYSTERIES OF DEATH!

Emily drifted toward it, forgetting about Sameer and the supernatural danger they faced. She just wanted a quick peek inside. The words “psychical research” made her think of nineteenth-century parapsychologists like William James, the kind who would visit Spiritualists and mediums in search of hard evidence of the afterlife.

She ascended the three steps, and the coffin door opened as she approached.

The interior looked just as she’d imagined. To her right, it resembled a nineteenth-century laboratory with racks of glass bottles interspersed with strange handmade devices of wood and iron. To her left lay a long table strewn with Tarot cards, a crystal ball, a planchette with a pencil for spirit writing, a brass “spirit trumpet” that was supposed to amplify the voices of the dead during seances. Leatherbound books lined the back wall of the room, with such titles as
Notes on the Nature and Substance of Ghostly Ectoplasm
.

Emily approached the wooden table with the occult artifacts, barely noticing as the front door closed softly behind her. The long scroll of spirit-writing paper had coiled up against the planchette, and she unrolled it and smoothed it out. Words were written at every angle, like the scribbling of a schizophrenic, and a few particularly large ones jumped out at her: ALONE, COLD, and HELP ME.

“I knew you would feel at home here,” a voice said, and she jumped. A man dressed like a carnival barker approached her from the rack of laboratory glassware. She hadn’t seen him there before. His gray eyes regarded her without any hint of emotion. “I know your kind, Emily. For millennia I have watched you searching for hints and glimmers in tea leaves and pig entrails, and later with cameras and magnets.” He stopped in the middle of the room, staring at her.

Emily felt nervous, but she knew she ought to be terrified—this was clearly the man Carter and his friends kept talking about, the one they claimed was Satan or some kind of demon. He was the one behind all the strangeness at the park.

At this moment, and in this setting, she was less frightened than curious. It seemed like a place where the human and the supernatural could meet and discuss, and she was eager to know what such a being had to say for himself.

It was only the weakest, quietest part of her mind telling her to run away, that she was in a lot of danger. Emily didn’t want to hear that.

“Many fools have spent their lives staring into the inexplicable chasm between science and the soul,” the man said. “Most find nothing...but you, Emily, shining the particular brilliance of your mind into that dark, might actually manage to find something there, some evidence or artifact to present to the world. Of course, few will believe you, as most people cling to their beliefs with an unshakeable stubborn stupidity. They need their primitive tribal myths of an angry god-king hurling thunderbolts from the sky, or their myth of an indifferent and empty material universe—you are among the few, very few, who dare to seek the bridge between these extremes.”

“Who are you?” Emily asked.

“You already know the answer. Ask a more interesting question.” His gaze shifted to the laboratory area, and Emily looked along with him.

She pointed to a device that looked like an archaic phonograph amplifier, coiled in exposed wires, connected by tubing to a wooden cube of a box painted with runes and sealed with brass locks on every side.

“What is that, then?” she asked.

“That device was designed and constructed by a Spiritualist splinter group in New York in 1887. They called it a spirit box.”

“And what does it do?” Emily moved closer, looking into the brass amplifier cone. She felt the warning signal again, somewhere at the back of her mind, but was much too curious to be cautious. For some reason, she felt completely safe.

“Its purpose is to capture spirits,” the man told her. “Malevolent and troublesome spirits, specifically, though I suppose it could capture any kind.”

“Does it work?”

“If you wish to see how it functions, you may activate it.”

The wires ran into a wooden box, ornately carved with strange, twisted trees and odd geometrical shapes. A single lever jutted out of the top of the box, next to a tiny, unlit light bulb. The cluster of filaments inside the bulb looked like something from the Edison era.

Emily hesitated, knowing that something was wrong but not sure what it was. It felt like someone had washed out her brain with cold water. All she could think of was how curious she was to throw the switch.

She took the lever in her hand and prepared to push it.

Then she hesitated.

Everything in the room—with the dusty old volumes on ghost lore and the Victorian-era gear for talking to spirits—seemed handpicked to fascinate Emily.

It’s a trap made just for you
, whispered the tiny, weak voice at the back of her mind. Emily knew it was right.

She forced herself to take a step backward.

“Where are you going?” the man asked, crossing his arms.

Emily didn’t answer. She dodged around him, heading for the coffin-shaped door through which she’d entered. Her heart was pounding and her skin felt suddenly clammy, as though she’d been having a pleasant dream and only just now noticed that it was a nightmare. She couldn’t move her sneakers fast enough.

“Stop!” the man shouted.

A creaking, cracking sound boomed above.

A box made of old boards wrapped in barbed wire crashed down around Emily. Its roof was low and lined with rusty nails, and she barely managed to drop to her knees and avoid getting stabbed in the scalp.

The interior of the box was lined with sharp-toothed gears and rusty pulleys with chains threaded through them. These gears shrieked as they turned all around her. They drove a dozen heavy steel bolts into the floorboards, locking the box into place around her like a cage.

When the pulleys and gears stopped turning, Emily looked closely at a cluster of them, trying to decipher the elaborate mechanism of rusty wheels.

One of them spun as she studied it, and a thin metallic wire swept towards her eyes. She ducked under it, dropping to the floor again.

The wire tugged open a small, hinged panel built into one side of the box, no larger than her hand. It was near the top. The man leaned close, studying her with cold gray eyes.

“That was stupid,” he said. “And ungrateful. I’ve put all this together for you, Emily, and your only response is to run away?”

“Let me go.” Emily wanted to be demanding, but she could barely whisper. She was terrified of what the strange box full of gears and wheels might do to her.

“You should choose to work with me, Emily. Think of the knowledge I could impart, the mysteries and secrets I could reveal to you. Think of all you could learn.”

Emily’s lip trembled. She barely managed to say the word “no.”

The man’s face twisted into a hideous snarl. Apparently he only had two modes—bland and cold, or furious. He barely looked human as his lips peeled back from his teeth and his face reddened with anger.

Then he looked away quickly, as though he’d heard a loud noise elsewhere in the park.

“I have more important matters to consider than a fat little worm like you, Emily,” he said. “I’ll return in a moment...and then we shall discuss how long you’re willing to stay in that box before you finally give in to me. Do yourself a favor and avoid touching the mechanisms before you, or may you find yourself losing your hands, if not your head.”

He vanished in flash of raw fire, with a sound like a thunderclap. He left a cloud of acrid black smoke in his wake.

Emily peered at the wheels, gears, chains, and wires lining the inside of the box around her, trying to figure out how to escape before he came back.

* * *

After the wall came down and trapped him in the dining room, Wes turned on his flashlight. He pounded on the wall and yelled for Carter and Victoria, but if they answered him, he couldn’t hear it. The new wall was apparently thick enough to be soundproof.

He turned his attention to the door latches, since turning one of them had brought the wall down in the first place. Both doors were now locked tight, and the handles wouldn’t budge.

“Let me out!” Wes shouted, just in case anybody happened to hear him and felt like helping. The night was turning into a frightening disaster.

He’d intended to give the park a quick look just to see if anything strange was really happening. His brother had been missing for a week, and his brother’s friend Jared insisted they’d all disappeared in the park, and that was all the information Wes really had. Having a look for himself seemed the right thing to do, even if they had to break the law to get here—why care about the law when the police weren’t accomplishing anything, anyway? Twelve kids were still missing. Fourteen if he counted Sameer and Emily. Fifteen, if he counted himself.

Wes had already seen enough tonight to know there might be no true logical explanation at all. The rapid restoration of the park, and especially the ghostly kids fading in and out of view, their faces turning to horror masks if you looked at them too long...

He kicked at the walls, remembering how Jared had said that the new, inexplicably larger Dark Mansion was now riddled with hidden doors and passageways. He pushed at a small sidebar with a tarnished silver tea set, but it didn’t move or seem to hold any clues. He swept the tea kettle and its china cups onto the floor, shattering the cups but accomplishing nothing.

“Let me out!” he shouted again. “Is anybody there? What do you want from me?”

He studied one of the full suits of armor flanking the double doors, searching with his fingers for any hidden buttons or levers. When he explored the helmet, he felt it turn slightly to one side, much more easily than he would have expected. He pushed it further, until the helmet had turned sideways to look at the wall.