Scared Stiff (6 page)

I put the canvas back over the Bumper Buggies, because there was too much to see to stop yet. “Where's that thing you played on, going to the moon?”

“The Moon Rocket. Over that way. Come on, I'll give you a tour,” Julie offered.

It was no wonder she came here, even if it was just to look. There was every kind of scary ride I ever heard of, almost as good as Six Flags. The merry-go-round was inside a pavilion; there were doors on all eight sides of it, but they were closed now, so we could only peek in the windows.

“I wish we could get in,” Kenny said wistfully. “There's a pink giraffe.”

“I like that white horse the best,” Julie said, her hands shading her eyes as she pressed her face against the glass. “The one with the red and gold trappings.”

“I always liked merry-go-round music,” I said softly, remembering how Ma had stood beside me the first time I ever rode on one of those horses.

“Me too,” Julie agreed. “Come on, there's a train station over that way. The track runs all the way around the park, and in one place it goes through a tunnel.”

We walked past an area where there were bright yellow and green and red and blue and purple toadstools to sit on, and some that were big enough to serve as tables. I could almost smell the hot dogs from the Tinkerbell Kitchen next to it.

“It's like Fairyland,” I said. “Only the fairies are gone.”

Julie nodded. “But it's still magic. See, here's the Moon Rocket. One of them's down on the platform, and it isn't locked. Two people can sit in it at once.”

“Me,” Kenny said eagerly, so we stood aside
while he buckled himself into the seat and began to manipulate the controls, a big grin on his face.

It was so interesting that before I noticed, it was almost dark. There were deep shadows forming along the western side of the wall that surrounded the park and inside the closed buildings.

“Maybe we'd better go,” I said reluctantly.

“Not without going into the Pirate's Cave,” Kenny protested. “We didn't see that yet!”

“It's dark in there,” Julie pointed out, pausing at the entrance to that ride. There were little boats—gondolas, Julie called them—floating in more scummy water at the bottom of the canal that disappeared into a mountain of fake rock. “And there's no moving water to carry a gondola through. We'd have to paddle, and there aren't any paddles.”

“We can use our hands,” Kenny begged.

I looked down into the canal. There was green stuff on the surface of the water. “I don't think I want to stick my hands in that. Not in the dark. Maybe we can come back with something to paddle with, and a flashlight so we can see.”

“An old broom would work,” Julie pointed out. “To push us along. And Grandma's got a big flashlight.”

Kenny didn't pay any attention to what we were saying. He ran down the steps to the dock and stepped into one of the little boats, a yellow one at the head of the line. It rocked but didn't tip over.

He reached out a hand to the fake rock and pushed off before I could yell at him to stop. By the time Julie and I got down to the dock, he was already heading toward the opening to the tunnel.

“I can see something in there,” Kenny called back in excitement. “A light!”

“There can't be a light,” Julie said, frowning. “The lights are turned off.”

I stepped down into the red boat that was next in line, and Julie came after me. “Come back, Kenny. Don't go any farther in there!” I commanded.

“But there is a light!” he insisted. “Come see, Rick.”

I didn't want him to actually get into the mouth of the tunnel. If he did, and kept going,
I'd have to go after my little brother. There was no way of knowing how long it would take to come out the other end—if we managed to get all the way through it just by pushing with our hands against slimy walls. Well, maybe they weren't slimy, but I felt as if they would be.

It only took a slight push to send our gondola close enough to the yellow one so I could grab hold of the back of it. “Come on, Kenny, cut it out. We'll come back with a flashlight later.”

“Look! There it is again, and it's not very far inside! We can still see daylight behind us, Rick! And I can move just pushing against the wall, see?”

With that he leaned out and shoved as hard as he could, and since I was hanging onto his boat it pulled both gondolas inside the tunnel.

“Darn it, Kenny, I told you—” I began, and then my voice trailed away.

Because he was right about the light; I'd seen the flicker of it, too. Kenny pushed again, carrying us away from the oval of light behind us at the mouth of the tunnel. We bumped the
other wall, where Kenny pushed again, sending us around a curve so that the light behind us almost vanished.

It was pitch black ahead. I heard Julie suck in her breath, and then the hair stood right up on the back of my neck. A leering pirate with a parrot on his shoulder suddenly loomed up to our left, an evil grin on his face and a hooked hand carrying a lantern.

It wasn't the lantern that illuminated him, though, but a flashlight, I realized as my heart thudded in my chest.

It wasn't a real pirate, of course, nor a real parrot. But there was someone real in the tunnel with us; when I heard the maniacal laughter I stumbled backward and sat down without intending to.

I wanted to shout out and ask who was there, but for just a few seconds my voice wouldn't work, even when I heard Kenny whimper as he, too, sank onto the seat of his gondola.

And then the light went out and we were in darkness, while the wild laughter continued to echo off the walls around us.

I heard Kenny's wavering voice say “Rick?” and felt our boats bump, then drift apart. I'd let go of the one he was in when I sat down, and I felt a moment of panic that I'd lost contact with my little brother.

He hadn't really meant to come far enough inside the tunnel to get completely away from the light, and he'd never have done it if he hadn't thought I was right behind him. He didn't spook about the dark unless he was alone in it.

I could hear the blood thundering in my ears as the crazy laughter died away, and then Julie spoke behind me.

“Who's there?”

There was no response, only the faint sound of one of the boats rubbing against the tunnel
wall. I tried to calm down, because there wasn't anywhere Kenny's boat could go except on through the tunnel; there wasn't room to pass, and my boat was right behind his.

I wanted to say his name, to reassure him that I was close by, but my voice wouldn't work. Off to the side there were small scuffling sounds, and then a giggle.

Julie's words were sharp and didn't sound as afraid as I was. “Who is it? Who's there?”

The only answer was another smothered giggle.

“Is that you, Connie Morse?”

The flashlight came on, glancing off the fierce pirate with his parrot and his hooked hand, then settled on Julie's face so that she lifted a hand to shield her eyes.

“You don't have to blind me,” she said. “What are you doing in here?”

“I been following you for half an hour,” a perfectly normal boy's voice said. The beam of light swung over me, picked out Kenny crouched in the gondola ahead of us, then dropped so it didn't shine in anybody's eyes.

At first I couldn't see behind the light to
whoever was holding it, but at least if it was someone Julie knew maybe I didn't need to have a heart attack.

“Why have you been following us? And why are you in here?”

“You were heading this way. I figured there was a chance you'd check out the Pirate's Cave the way you were checking out everything else, so I ducked in here. Thought I'd give you a surprise. Didn't cost you anything, either.”

The boy laughed again, only this time he didn't sound crazy.

“It was stupid,” Julie said, but she wasn't angry. “Just like that stupid play you wrote for the sixth grade to put on at school. That's how I knew it was you. It was the same stupid laugh.”

The flashlight dropped a little, and I finally saw the face behind it and realized why it had been so difficult to make out. Connie Morse—what kind of name was that for a boy?—was black.

“The play wasn't stupid. It was a fantasy,” the boy called Connie stated. “I got an
A
for writing it, and another one for being the insane Dr. Murder.”

“What are you doing in Wonderland? Nobody's supposed to be in here.”

Including us, I thought. Kenny was staring at the other kid and didn't seem scared anymore.

“Same thing you are,” Connie Morse said. “I been watching you for weeks. I followed you in here a few times.”

“Spying on me?” Julie was mildly indignant, probably remembering how silly she might have appeared as she played she was going to the moon in the rocket ride.

“Well, you helped entertain me. Mostly, I really came in here to have a place to hide when my old man is drunk,” Connie said. “He starts fights with my mom and I can't take it; when I say anything, or sometimes if all I do is look like I might say something, he belts me. One time he did it and I took off, didn't have anywhere to go. I came into the RV park to use the Coke machine and saw where there were loose boards in the back fence. I worked 'em open farther and I been coming here ever since. Nobody else ever shows up except you. It's safe. I go home after I figure my old man has passed out.”

“Well, it's getting dark outside. Let's get out of here,” Julie said, and I muttered agreement.

“Who are these guys?” Connie wanted to know, swinging the beam of light across us again.

“Rick and Kenny Van Huler. They're staying with their uncle, Mr. Svoboda.”

“The old guy in the purple bus?”

Connie was crouched in a hollowed-out place where he was surrounded, I could now see dimly, by a tropical beach with a treasure chest spilling gold coins and jewels onto the sand. For a few minutes I'd forgotten this was a scary place for kids, and that it was supposed to be about pirates.

Connie suddenly slid off the shelf into the water, which must have been barely deep enough to float the gondolas. “Come on, I'll take you on the rest of the tour,” he offered. “I'm Conrad Morse, only everybody calls me Connie. I'll pull the front boat, you hang on from behind, okay?”

So we got the tour. The tunnel twisted and turned inside the artificial mountain, and around every corner was a new scene on one of the shelves of “rock” on each side.

“When the park's operating,” Connie told us as he waded forward through the shallow water, “there're electric eyes that trigger the lights so each scene pops up at you when you reach it. It's not as dramatic with a flashlight, but you can see what's here.”

He'd obviously been through here often, because he knew what came next each time. He'd shine the flashlight on the pirates as they buried their treasure, and on their ship as they made someone walk the plank, and then there was a pretty spooky scene where everything was supposed to be underwater—there were fish suspended around the hulk of a sunken ship, and another pirate treasure spilling out onto the bottom of the sea.

Our guide stopped at that one, playing the flashlight over sea urchins and starfish and a corroded anchor so we could see the details. “When the regular lights are on,” he said, “they have a greenish one here, so it looks more like it's underwater.”

“You were through here when this place was operating, then?” I asked.

“Sure. Lots of times. We live over the corner
grocery, six blocks down, two blocks over. Our whole family came to the grand reopening, when they redecorated everything and built the new roller coaster, when I was about seven. Then the summer before it closed, my old man bought a family ticket for the season. Course he was drunk when he did it, and he didn't remember afterwards and thought I stole the money while he was passed out. He tried to get a refund on the ticket, but they wouldn't give his money back, and if I hadn't run off to my grandma's and hid out for a couple days he'd probably have beat me senseless.”

Connie said these things offhandedly, the way I'd have talked about walking to the store for a loaf of bread, but it made me shiver. My folks had argued, but they never hit each other, or got passing-out drunk. It made me think of Ma being missing, and Pa going off without saying good-bye, and I forgot about the scene of the sunken pirate ship.

“Anyway,” Connie went on, “I already had the ticket. So I came over here almost every day, the whole summer. I felt bad when they shut it down when old Mr. Mixon died. Every
time the old man gets to drinking so it's not safe to be around him, I come over here. You want to see where I sleep sometimes?”

“Sure,” Kenny said immediately. Already he'd accepted Connie as a friend.

We went on the rest of the way through the tunnel of the pirates; when we came out into the open air, right where we'd started from, it was dark enough so we couldn't see very far, but since Connie had the flashlight, it didn't seem to matter so much.

“Why didn't you ever say anything, if you knew I was here, too?” Julie wanted to know as we trudged along past a huge tower that had an elevator to take you up high before you got dropped in parachutes. She sounded sort of resentful.

“I didn't want anybody to know I was coming here,” Connie said cheerfully. “And I figured you wanted privacy, too. Only tonight I couldn't resist the chance to spook you in the pirate's cave.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, but I wasn't really resentful. Not now, anyway. “Where do you sleep?”

“Got me a good place,” Connie said with satisfaction. “Not if it's too cold, but in the summer it's great.”

He swung the light up and illuminated one of those Mexican hats that stood maybe twenty feet high; it had seats around the brim and gave you a wild ride when they turned the machine on and made it tilt and dip while it was going up and down and around in circles all at the same time.