Haunted Legends (28 page)

I want to go home,
she sobs into your stomach, against your shirt.
I want to go home.

You want to take her home. You want to put her in the backseat of your car, and let her fall asleep, exhausted by her ordeal. You would drive home, and when you got there, she would be gone, melted into the car, melted back into you. You would be whole again. Oaks Park would have one less ghost, and you would have one more.

And there would be another fight and another and another, and you would see the infinity of days stretch before you again, and you would see the looks your daughter gives you, and understand them for what they are—disgust, pity, shame. And maybe you would hurt her, hurt her so much that she would make her own ghost, and this whole terrible wheel would turn again, this carnival wheel, this gut-wrenching loop-de-loop.

You can’t take her home.

Dread of what you will have to do makes all the small muscles in your body ache. You can’t think about it. You will have to just do it. Your hands will have to rescue you. You take her hand and walk. She is content to be pulled along, compliant and humbled, nose running. You are walking in the direction of the old parking lot at the back of the park. But you are really walking to the place behind the bumper cars, behind the bathrooms. It is the same as it was twenty-seven years ago, trash-strewn with the same trash, the same cottonwood fluff.

You pull her down beside you and you take her in your arms and hold her tight, cradling her for a few minutes more, telling her how brave she’s been. She talks fast, sentences like broken sticks: she didn’t mean to, it was just a game, she didn’t mean to get lost, she was scared, she was looking for you.

You murmur
shh, shh
in her ear as your fingers find the kitchen knife you have brought from home.

You pull the knife across her smooth brown throat. She gushes, but it is
not blood. She bleeds time, a million golden sunsets and white illuminated nights, and she bleeds fear, the shambling shadow of the eternal, dark and molasseslike. She bleeds regret. She thrashes in your arms, making betrayed noises, animal noises. She deflates. She melts. Then she is nothing but a pile of dirty old clothes from Sears Surplus. You hide these beneath the trash.

Walking back to your car, you are trembling, but it is only a physical thing. Your mind is calm, and everything feels vague and unknowable again. Your accustomed numbness returns, and you know that everything will be all right.

She will stay at Oaks Park. She will ride the rides and steal cotton candy. But she will be someone else, someone new and formless, someone who feels all the terror that you should share. As insubstantial as mist, as air under a sheet. She will sleep during the hottest part of the day and at night, when the lights come on, she will search watchfully through crowds for the mother she didn’t mean to lose and a life she didn’t mean to surrender.

You leave her to her haunts.

You return to yours.

Afterword

When I was looking for a ghost story to retell, I focused on my home state of Oregon. Oregon doesn’t want for great ghost stories (a lighthouse haunted by a murdered sea captain, a ghostly flushing toilet, a revenant cow that wrecks cars on old Highway 97), but I was captivated by a single tantalizing entry about Oaks Park:

“This amusement park, built in 1890, has been plagued with a ghostly apparition of a lone child in 1970s style clothing for over 20 years.”

I found that same surreal squib all over the Internet, obviously cut and pasted from the same source, never elaborated on. The opacity was oddly chilling, as was the fact that the story was so precisely contemporary to my own experience. I was often at Oaks Park in the 1970s, a lone child clutching a paper cone of cotton candy. Maybe I met the child who
became a ghost? Could I have spoken to her? Could I have
been
her? The story arose swiftly from that juxtaposition of the surreal and the personal. More than anything, I tried to capture a feeling of timeless disquiet, of discovering that ghosts might be closer than you think, in places you’d never imagine.

Stephen Dedman is the author of four novels
—The Art of Arrow Cutting, Shadows Bite, Foreign Bodies,
and
A Fistful of Data—
and more than one hundred twenty short stories published in an eclectic range of magazines and anthologies.

He teaches creative writing at the University of Western Australia and is co-owner of Fantastic Planet bookshop in Perth.

For more information, check out his website:
www.stephendedman.com
.

Workers at the Kayser Shipyards said the
George M. Shriver
was jinxed long before she sailed, or possessed, or infested with gremlins. But no one spoke of seeing a ghost until much later.

•  •  •

Dugan gritted his teeth as another tarantula crawled up his leg. The spiders ranged from the size of his thumbnail to larger than his palm, and he’d been promised that none of them were any more venomous than wasps and much less likely to bite, but that didn’t make it any easier to stand there without flinching. He’d also been told that if he killed any of the spiders, their cost would be taken out of the prize pool at the end of the show. His tattoos, and the hair on his legs and chest, hid most of his gooseflesh, but he couldn’t help but shudder as he felt something tickle him just below the hip, or just above where he thought his boxer shorts ended.

Instead of glancing down at the dozens of spiders inside his private hell—a coffin-sized Perspex booth—he stared into the chamber next to his. Langley stood there at attention, as erect and impassive as a cigar-store Indian or a grenadier guard outside Buckingham Palace. The ex-soldier didn’t seem to be afraid of anything . . . at least, anything that the producers had thrown at them. Dugan suspected that he had at least one crippling fear: a pathological terror of failure, of showing any sign of weakness.

It’s going to be you or me, in the end, thought Dugan, as a cave spider with a seven-inch leg span dropped onto his shoulder—the one marked with the one percent symbol and the Harley-Davidson logo with purple wings,
not the one he’d briefly considered having tattooed with a cobweb pattern while in maximum security. It’ll be down to us, he silently repeated as though it were a mantra. All of the others will break before we do.

He saw frantic movement in the corner of his field of view, and turned his head. One of the women was beating on the walls of her booth, obviously too panicked to remember the phrase that would get her out. Dugan smiled, though he was careful not to open his mouth. Once the first person quit, the timer started, and that meant there was only ninety minutes of this nightmare to go. He wondered what would be next.

•  •  •

Beck looked at the spreadsheet, and grimaced.
Worst Nightmare
seemed to be living up to its name, at least as far as he was concerned. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” he groaned. “I wouldn’t try to shoot a thirty-second ad on this sort of budget.”

“That,” said the accountant, “is because you’ve gone overbudget on almost every episode, to the tune of one million three thousand and seventeen dollars, while the ratings have been in the fucking toilet.” She handed over another printout. “We’ve had to drop the price of those thirty-second ads so low they’re barely paying the electricity bill. We’d be doing better with a rerun of
Gilligan’s Island.
The only reason you’re still on the fucking air is the Australian content rules.”

Beck couldn’t argue with that. Reality TV had been a godsend for the networks—making money from product placement and the telcos who were making money out of people texting their votes, and costing much less to produce than drama or even sitcoms because the payment for the performers averaged out to less than minimum wage . . . and so, when Beck had approached the network with the proposal for
Worst Nightmare
—a hybrid of
Survivor
and
Fear Factor,
with more than a hint of the old Japanese game show
Endurance
—they’d jumped at it. Unfortunately, they’d also given the greenlight to no less than six other reality shows, audiences had already begun to switch off, and the last episode of
Worst Nightmare
had suffered the ultimate indignity: losing in the ratings to all the other free-to-air stations, including the foreign-language service.

The problem, Beck suspected, was that not enough viewers liked the remaining contestants, and had realized that none of them were likely to die or even be badly injured: waivers and insurance could only cover so much.
And while they were frequently humiliated, the contenders who’d made it through the first two weeks were so stolid that the show was falling flat—about as scary, Beck thought gloomily, as the remake of
The Haunting,
but with much less eye candy. The budget restrictions meant that he couldn’t even afford to bring in even the most obscure celebrities as guest stars.

He looked at the spreadsheet again, then took out his smartphone and did some calculations. The only area where it seemed possible to make cuts was in travel and accommodation. Whittling down the number of contestants faster than expected might not save them in the ratings, but it would save them a little money. And he could change the schedule to reduce the number of flights . . . no, even that wouldn’t be enough. “I’ll think of something,” he said.

“You’d better,” she purred. “If the show gets axed . . .” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Beck nodded, and walked out.

•  •  •

A few of the workers cheered as the
George M. Shriver
slid down the slipway and into the sea; others waited to see whether it would sink or explode. After three minutes, it had done neither, and the foreman called out, “Coffee break. Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” and lit up a Lucky Strike.

Assembling the hull of a Liberty Ship typically took ten days; for the
George M. Shriver,
this had dragged out to six weeks because of equipment failure and accidents. Many of the accidents the foreman had put down to the workers hurrying to finish building the cursed thing and be rid of it—and absenteeism was making matters worse, with men finding excuses not to expose themselves to the jinx. It was whispered that the ship either exuded bad luck or attracted it like a gigantic magnet. Now that the cursed thing was gone, the foreman reflected, maybe things would return to normal.

Most of the absentees returned within the next week, except for the few who’d been injured while building the
Shriver,
and two who were never seen at the shipyard again.

•  •  •

Beck spent the evening looking through a catalog of horror movies in search of frightening situations he could inflict on
Worst Nightmare
’s contestants on his reduced budget. After a few minutes of going through the book in alphabetical order as far as
The Blair Witch Project,
he began opening it at random.
Phantasm.
Different versions of
Ghost Ship. The Premature Burial
—no, he’d
already done that in episode seven.
Freddy vs. Jason. The Seventh Victim. Halloween III.
He picked up his whiskey glass, found it empty, and walked over to the bar. Before he reached it, he had an idea that had him rushing back to his laptop to write it down. Then he reopened the spreadsheet, and began chuckling.

The prize for the winning contestant was one million dollars, and he was contracted for another eight episodes. If no one won the million, that would almost cover his cost overruns, without requiring him to trim over a hundred thousand from the budget of each episode. If he could do both, of course, then even better.

He looked at the contracts, and found that if any of the contestants defaulted on a particular task, he could reduce the prize pool and penalize all of them. And most of the endurance tests had a minimum time as well, and he could set the limits on those as high as he liked. Now to find something, preferably local, that would be cheap, scary, and could be made to stretch out over at least a week.