6. Damien
Damien
Iwas supposed to keep moving. The Ringmaster wasn’t meant to linger.
He drifted through the park, appearing without warning beneath broken signs and behind fogged windows.
He welcomed guests at the gates, redirected traffic when lines grew too long, checked in with actors, and made sure no one did anything stupid enough to require an ambulance.
He absolutely did not stand in the shadows beside a rotting game booth waiting for one woman in particular to finish riding the carousel.
And, yet there I was.
Half-hidden beneath the sagging canvas awning of the old Milk Bottle Toss, watching Luci rise and fall on a black wooden horse.
I folded my arms across my chest.
Objectively, this was creepy, slightly stalker-ish behavior. Good thing the whole premise of this park was being surrounded by creepy things.
The carousel carried her past again.
Her dark hair lifted in the wind, the orange streak catching beneath the amber lights. She was laughing at something one of her friends had said, one hand wrapped around the brass pole while the other pressed against her stomach.
Even from here, I could hear it. In the darkness of the park, it was a sound so bright it seemed out of place. It was beautifully unrestrained. The sound struck me somewhere beneath the ribs.
There were hundreds of other people in the park. I should probably acknowledge some of them.
A family stood near the entrance to the midway, the father trying to convince his son, if I had to guess, that the scarecrow propped beside the map wasn’t real.
But then the scarecrow twitched and the kid screamed so loudly that three people turned around.
When the actor sprang off the post, mimicking the kid’s scream, the boy shook his head and kept saying “nope, nope, fuck no” while his parents and siblings dissolved into laughter.
The scarecrow bowed deeply and wandered off through the fog, straw spilling from the tears in his burlap sleeves.
A few booths away, wooden pins clattered beneath the striped awning of the Devil’s Bowling Alley. Someone cheered. A bell rang. Then one of our midway barkers shouted, “A winner! Mark the date! We may never see another!”
Across the midway, a pair of contortionists crawled beneath the rusted tracks of the old kiddie coaster, their limbs bending at angles that made passing guests recoil.
The Widowed Bride wandered, shuffling, her dirt-stained veil dragging across the pavement. She carried a bouquet of dead roses in one hand and a severed groom’s head in the other.
Farther down, a trio of carnival freaks surrounded a group of kids.
I say, “kids,” but they had to be at least eighteen because it was Blackout Night.
If I had to guess, they were all right around there though.
The Tall Man leaned over them on stilts, his coat brushing the ground.
The Bearded Lady smiled with rows of pointed teeth.
Between them, the Human Pincushion dragged one long metal skewer across his cheek.
One of the teenagers tried to act unimpressed, but when the Bride approached them, shrieking for help, he shook his head furiously and stepped behind one of his buddies.
I smiled. This was my favorite part. Not the scares themselves, but the reactions.
The laughter that comes after the fear. The way strangers grabbed one another when something moved in the dark.
The way grown men cursed and then immediately looked around to make sure no one had seen them jump.
Every shriek that echoed through the park made the years of work feel a little more real.
For a while, this was just a pipe dream that I’d kept to myself. Til Cassie and I had been celebrating our twenty-fourth birthdays in the back room of a bar in Portsmouth. Technically, her birthday was a week before mine, but we’d always combined them. It was easier. One cake. Twice the alcohol.
Sometime after midnight, with Cassie barefoot and wearing a plastic crown she’d stolen from a bachelorette party, I’d started talking about the park. Not intentionally. The words had simply fallen out of me.
I told her it was bullshit that it had been sitting empty for so long. That our grandparents had spent their lives building something everyone in town remembered, only for their children to lock the gates and watch it collapse. That somebody should do something with it.
Cassie had taken a long drink and asked, “What would you do?”
I don’t know what came over me, but I told her.
A haunted carnival.
I wanted to keep the rides exactly as they were. Keep the rust. Keep the broken windows. Turn every inch of it into something people would pay to be afraid of.
By the time I stopped talking, Cassie was staring at me over the rim of her glass.
“What?” I’d asked.
“You’ve really given this some thought.”
I hadn’t answered, because I had. For a few years at that point.
I was bartending at a chain restaurant. It was good money, but I knew I wasn’t meant to be slinging Long Island Iced Teas for the rest of my life.
The problem was other than my dream of reopening the park, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and bartending paid the bills.
The next morning, Cassie called before nine. I answered with my face buried in a pillow and a headache that made death seem reasonable.
Her first words were, “Were you serious?”
I sat up. She didn’t need to explain. Three hours later, both of us in sunglasses, and a bag of greasy burgers and fries in hand, we were standing outside the rusted front gates.
Her father had given her the keys.
Uncle Michael had never hated the park. None of our parents did. They just didn’t have the dream themselves. To them, Graves Park was what stole their parents from them. They spent their childhoods watching their parents choose the business over everything else. Even them.
To us, it was possibility.
Cassie and I walked every inch that day. We climbed through buildings filled with raccoon nests and water damage. We stepped over broken bottles and ducked beneath collapsed ceiling panels. We made lists on the backs of old park maps.
What could stay.
What had to go.
What could be saved.
We gave ourselves one year.
Our goal was to open by Cassie’s twenty-fifth birthday. Friday the thirteenth. It was an invitation from the universe if there ever was one. We called a family dinner with my brothers and her sisters that night. It took zero convincing. Our siblings were all in from the get-go.
Our parents were harder to convince. They were willing to hear us out, but made no promises to let us follow through with the plans.
Until they saw the plans outlined in front of them.
Luca, who was great with numbers, projected a budget.
Cassie, who was a project manager at a construction company, made a complete timeline.
When they saw it was a serious business plan and not a thoughtless dream, they allowed us all to access the trusts our grandparents had left us early. It gave us enough money to do the work properly instead of covering rot with black paint and hoping nobody leaned too hard against a wall.
Five years later, the park was nearly sold out for the entire season. For the first time, the five of us could take actual salaries. Not much, but it was something.
We could pay Daniele, who also happened to be Cassie’s childhood best friend, instead of letting her insist the photography was good for her portfolio. We had actors on payroll, food vendors, employees who didn’t share our DNA or owe us favors. The park wasn’t just surviving. It was profitable.
My attention snapped back toward the carousal as it slowed to a stop.
Luci and her friends stepped through the exit gate, still laughing.
The one that had been taking Luci’s photo when I came onto the platform showed the others her phone, showing them something that made Luci cover her face.
Probably the picture of me scaring her. I hoped it was.
I hung back waiting to see which direction they went. When they turned toward the fun house, I pushed away from the booth and followed at a reasonable distance. A professional distance. A completely non-creepy distance.
The front of the fun house had once been painted with grinning suns and clouds. Years of rain had faded them into pale smears across the wood. Most of the upper glass panes had been shattered long before we took possession of the park.
Teenagers used to sneak in after dark. They broke windows, spray-painted the walls, left beer cans in every corner, and smashed mirrors simply because they could.
At first, the graffiti had pissed me off.
Some of it was mindless, but mixed among it were massive pieces of street art—twisted faces, skeletal animals, bright lettering curling around doors and climbing over old murals.
Once we cleaned up the broken glass and sealed the unsafe sections, the graffiti became part of the attraction. We couldn’t have recreated that kind of abandonment if we tried. The fun house looked violated and forgotten.
Luci stopped beneath the cracked sign and stared up at it.
Only three letters still lit.
F N H
She grinned. Then the five women disappeared inside.
I took the staff entrance around back. The passage was narrow and unlit, hidden between two false walls. I could navigate it blind.
I slipped through a black curtain near the mirror maze and listened. Laughter echoed from somewhere ahead, a scream bounced off the glass, someone cursed when they walked into their own reflection.
I moved between the mirrors, watching fractured pieces of the group appear and vanish. Then Luci stepped into view.
The floor ahead of her was built in two broad sections, balanced on hidden pivots beneath the boards. Each panel tipped with the weight of whoever crossed it, seesawing up and down as guests tried to keep their footing.
She placed one shoe on the first section. The floor dipped. She threw both arms out, trying to balance herself.
“Oh, this is evil.” She laughed.
“Keep it moving, Luce!” one of her friends called out in a teasing tone.
Luci took another careful step. As the board tilted beneath her, she adjusted and found her balance. Then stepped onto the second platform.
There was my window of opportunity.
I emerged from the shadows at the raised end of the board. She didn’t see me. Not until I planted one boot down hard. The platform dropped beneath my weight. Her side of the board shot upward. Luci gasped as the floor changed direction beneath her, throwing her backward. Straight into me.
My arm caught around her waist. Her back pressed against my chest, one hand grabbing my forearm while the floor rocked beneath us.
“Watch your step, Luci.”
She went still for half a second. Then tipped her head back to look at me. Green light reflected across the mirrors, catching in her eyes. She turned carefully within my hold. The floor shifted again, but neither of us moved away.
Her hand remained on my arm. She looked up at me through thick black lashes. Slowly, deliberately, she tipped her head to one side. Her lips pursed ever so slightly. Not enough to call it a pout, but enough that I noticed.
“I believe you have me at a disadvantage.”
I lifted an eyebrow.
“You know my name.” Her fingers slid from my forearm. “I don’t know yours.”
There it was. An opening. I could have broken character. I could have told her my name. I could have leaned into the way she was looking at me and admitted I’d been waiting beside the carousel just to see where she went next.
She was flirting. I was almost certain. She wanted me to give her something real. For one dangerous moment, I considered it. Then the floor shifted beneath us again. I stepped backward, letting the darkness gather between us.
“I am simply the Ringmaster…”
My reflection multiplied across the glass behind me. One crimson coat became three.
Her lips parted to say something, but I took a step back and slid behind the mirrors.
“Wait,” she called.
But, I kept moving. By the time she reached the place where I’d been standing, I was already behind the next wall. I paused there, listening to her friends catch up.
“Was that him again?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
A brief silence.
“Oh my God,” another one squealed. “You’re being stalked by the Ringmaster.”
My hand tightened around the head of my cane. This was becoming a problem.
A very pretty problem with dark hair, sugar-sweet lips, and a laugh I could somehow hear over every scream in the park.