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Authors: Walter Greatshell

BOOK: Mad Skills
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“It’s a disguise, don’t you get it? That’s what you have to do to ditch the paparazzi—the trick is to do it before they even know you’re gone. Leave right before the end of the show and slip out a side exit. Put on a wig and an overcoat and sneak away while everybody’s still screaming for an encore. Stars
have
to do stuff like that, or the press will eat them up—look at what happened to Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. It’s definitely her—come on!”
“Then how come nobody else seems to recognize her?”
“Cuz they’re dumb! Come
on
!” Maddy grabbed his hand and pulled. “She’s going into the fun house.”
“This is
ridiculous
.”
 
 
THE fun house was a portable plywood cave, painted black and red, with jigsawed flames and a fiberglass gargoyle suspended above the entrance doors. Tiny, two-seater cars rattled out of sight down the dark track, ferrying pairs of riders along its squeal-inducing itinerary before emerging a moment later and banging to a stop. The passengers were released, shaken but unharmed.
Maddy and Ben got in line behind the hooded girl, close enough to touch. For several minutes, they silently bickered over how best to get her to turn around, but before they could come to a decision, the object of their attention boarded a rickety black car and started off down the track. Following close behind, they got into the next car and belted themselves in. As the car jolted forward, Ben said, “I told you, it’s not her.”
“Is too. Shut up.”
The cars passed over a fast-spinning roller and were catapulted through the swinging entrance doors, which read DANGER! KEEP OUT. Coasting along to the plunks of a banjo, they were carried up a steep incline and entered a cobwebby tunnel held up by timbers—an old mine shaft. Gleams of gold shone among the rocks, and an eerie voice chortled,
“We struck gold, pure gold. It’s the mother lode, hee, hee, hee! You want some? Come on in
…
come take all you want
…
”
The cars slowed. Flickering lanterns revealed several mangled bodies beside the track, then, bouncing up like a jack-in-the-box, their killer: a crazed miner holding a bloody pickax. A deep voice bellowed, “IT’S MY GOLD, ALL MINE!”
Maddy grabbed Ben’s arm. Just in time, the car shot forward, clearing the ax but hurtling toward a dead end. A sign across the tracks read, BEWARE! MINE COLLAPSE. Just beyond was a pile of rubble, with arms and legs sticking out. At the last second, the car lurched sharply right.
Then they were in a greenish-lit tunnel, passing a dead canary in a cage. Sickly-faced corpses lay in postures of agony, clutching their throats. Voices gasped,
“Air
…
need air
…
”
As the car approached a patch of darkness, lights strobed to reveal a host of hideous ghouls blocking the way. Stiffly closing in, the zombies all held bloody picks and shovels, having already massacred the passengers of an earlier car, whose bodies lay half-eaten on the floor. Maddy shrieked, huddling tight with Ben.
Again, the car shot free around a blind curve.
Their faces were so close together that it would have required only the slightest effort to kiss. Suddenly, before Maddy knew it, Ben’s lips were touching hers. She felt the warmth of his body in the dark, his arms around her, and she responded, heart hammering with fear and yearning. Fear that what they were doing was wrong, but even more that she might screw up her first real kiss—she wanted to do it right.
He sat back. “Oh my God,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Maddy said. “I mean, we’re not really related or anything.”
“I know, but still …”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I must be insane.”
“Why? Because I’m not pretty enough for you? Like
Stephanie
?”
“No, because you’re gonna be my
stepsister
.”
“So what? That doesn’t make you a pervert.”
“Oh no?”
“No—we just kissed, that’s all.”
“Oh, that’s all, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He mulled it over. “I don’t know, man. That was a pretty intense kiss.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought so, too.”
Around them, all was red and rumbling. Lava glimmered in the crevices, and blackened skeletons littered the floor. Screams echoed as if from a deep pit. Something about the room made Maddy’s head hurt; suddenly, she didn’t feel so well. She hoped the ride was almost over.
Entering the final straightaway, they saw the other car again. It was not far ahead.
“There she is,” Maddy said.
“Watch this,” Ben said, unbuckling his seat belt.
“Ben! Don’t!”
“No, it’ll be funny, watch.”
As he jumped off the slow-moving car, the lights suddenly winked out. Everything went silent, and both cars shuddered to a total stop.
“Ben?”
There was no sound, nothing.
“Ben, this isn’t funny. Get back … get back here buh … before you get …”
That was weird—Maddy could barely say the words. Her head felt all woozy, and her stomach began to whirl. She could feel the blood throbbing in her temples like a kettledrum.
Seasick,
she thought. Nearly retching, she knew something was seriously wrong, but she was tired, so tired. Feeling her head start to droop, she roused herself to stand, hanging on to the car for dear life. The floor rocked like the deck of a ship.
I have to get out of here.
Steadying herself, she let go and tried to walk.
“Help … help us …”
Outside. If she could just reach the outdoors.
Follow the tracks—the tracks lead outside.
Barely coherent, Maddy clung to this basic fact like a lifeline. Feeling her way along, swaying through the dark, she saw something looming up in her path. Someone or something …
“Ben?”
Not Ben. The other car, with its lone passenger still seated, as though primly waiting for the ride to resume. The car sat on the brink of a gaping devil’s mouth, a leering Day-Glo-colored face with twining black horns and demonic tattoos.
Trying to speak, to say,
Marina … please
…
need help
, Maddy reached for the hooded figure.
When it turned, she screamed.
TWO
 
NEWS CYCLE
 
FUN-HOUSE TRAGEDY
 
Special to
The Examiner
Every year, millions of teenagers attend traveling carnivals, lured away from their PlayStations and TiVos by the lights, the sights, the sounds, and the smells of an earlier generation’s notion of interactivity. Like their parents and grandparents before them, they go seeking old-time fun and thrills, and perhaps the slight aura of danger: the time-honored sleaze of the traveling show.
Sometimes they get more than they bargained for.
Sunday night at the Denton Fairgrounds, teenagers Benjamin Blevin and Madeline Grant climbed into car four of the fun-house ride at Ridley’s Laff-O-Rama. As they clattered along the dark track, ducking plaster zombies and rubber skeletons, they could hardly have imagined that the corny fake horror was about to turn very real.
Just as the teens jerked around the ride’s final curve, less than twenty feet from the swinging exit doors, the car stopped. They probably thought it was part of the ride. But as they waited in pitch-blackness for whatever final thrill was in store, they might have noticed a strange sensation of nausea or dizziness … or perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps they merely went to sleep, unaware that leaking fumes from a faulty generator had turned their Tunnel of Love into a Tunnel of Death—literally a gas chamber. Dozens of other cars had passed through safely, their occupants complaining of nothing worse than a sudden headache. It was the terrible coincidence of a snag in the ride’s chain drive that doomed Ben and Maddy to their fates.
As the teens quietly succumbed to lethal fumes, the ride operator, Cecil Bluth, 27, noticed that his control lever had gone dead. The cars wouldn’t budge.
“I thought it was kids messing around,” Bluth says. “Happens all the time. They’ll jump off the cars while the ride’s still in motion and fool around, then jump back on. Or they’ll just throw trash at the exhibits. I’m always picking off spit wads, gum, you name it. If anything blocks the track, it sets off an alarm—there’s an automatic shutdown. Usually happens at least once a night. I send Bernie to do a walk-through and verify ain’t no safety hazard, which there almost never is. This time it was different.”
Bernie is Bernard Wornovski, 36, the carnival’s veteran mechanic, who entered the plywood archway as he had a thousand times before but never would again.
Cecil Bluth says, “Just before he went in, Bernie mentioned it was weird that nobody was yelling for help. He called out to let them know not to panic, but there was no answer. Most folks freak out pretty quick when you leave them in the dark, so we thought that was a little strange. Then when I didn’t hear back from Bernie right away, the hair really pricked up on my neck. That’s when I called 911.”
 
(See
Tragedy
, p. A8)
 
THREE
 
DREAM THERAPY
 
PEPL r gud I lik thm dr. stevnz iz nis she iz mi fren soz ners claybrn and dr. wali nrs clabrn taks me swimn evre morning aftr brekfs mi favrit aktvt iz swimn i lik it
 
 
“MADDY, are you awake?”
“Mmmm …”
“Maddy, wake up. Time for school.”
“Mmmm-
nuh
!”
 
 
I yuz tu b norml i yuz 2b lik yu i had mad skilz thats wat pepl sa enywa i don no i don rely rmembr bfor tha aksidnt i wish i cud but I cant thas ok i cn stil dans
 
 
“WAKE up, sleepyhead.”
The voice was inescapable, persistent as an usher with a flashlight. Maddy’s mind retreated like a toad under a rock, but the more she withdrew into comforting darkness, the more that voice followed her down the hole. At the same time, some part of her knew she was being unreasonable, that it was high time she woke up, but she couldn’t help it—she was
soooo tired
.
It had felt like the longest night of her life, an endless, restless sleep, densely cluttered with crazy dreams. Not ordinary nightmares of falling or fleeing, but an exhausting monotony of being stuck with needles, wired to machines, shackled to treadmills. Being walked and talked to death by infinitely patient doctors with big shiny clipboards and bigger, shinier grins. And the games—so many tedious games and puzzles, like some kind of waiting room in Hell. Then the questions! She couldn’t even understand half the stuff they asked, but they would keep after her, pestering and cajoling until she came out with something they liked.
Showing her a picture, they might ask, “Do you know who this is?”
“Nuh …”
“That’s you, silly! That’s Maddy Grant. Now you try saying it.”
“Muh-Maddee …”
“Good, good—don’t give up.”
“Gaaant. Gant.”
“Try rolling your tongue: Grrant, Grrraaant.”
“Gwaaant. Maddee Gwaaant.”
“That’s good! Excellent! And who’s this?”
“Nuh …”
“That’s your mommy! Bethany Grant. Can you say mommy?”
Then they might reward her, let her watch TV, play on the computer.
Oh, they tried to make it fun, to pretend it was all a big sleepaway camp, but it wasn’t. Therapy, they called it. To Maddy, it was more like school … only a million times more boring than any school she remembered. Not that she remembered much—only that she used to like school and didn’t care at all for this dream therapy.
 
 
I dont lik tu rit its boren I hat ritn this jrnel but its tharpee jus lik tokkin is tharpee bla bla bla evrethnz tharpee tharpee suks eksep swimn yr not supos2 pee in tha pool but i sed 2 ners clabrn no thas tharpee yestrda mi parnts cam tu vizit an we wen on a ltl feeltrp to see sum anamlz I luv anamlz
 
 
HER last dream: a van ride through the country, the picnic by the river—chicken salad sandwiches, potato chips, pickles. Tepid peach tea. Danish butter cookies from a tin. Her parents, smiling and praising her … and Dr. Stevens.
 
 
AFTER lunch, they wheeled her back in the van and drove the rest of the way, arriving at a sleek, mirrored building. A chrome cube with rounded edges, sitting on a grassy hill surrounded by pines. Maddy could see herself in the glass doors as they pushed her up the walk. She knew it was her because of her braces; otherwise, she wouldn’t have recognized the drooling, slack-faced creature in the wheelchair. Not her face. So pale and puffy, with a childish pink bow in her hair. The sight was frightening—she jerked her eyes away, wishing she could wake up. Maddy hated mirrors.

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