Stopping in a shadow beside a statue of the Grim Reaper, I take off my backpack and pull out her first camera. I climb up the pedestal of the statue, and I affix Lavinia’s camera and solar panel to a flat place near the hem of the reaper’s robe. I aim it toward the turnstiles and the road, as she requested, and turn it on.
Then I leave the floodlit area, heading around the tall iron fence, looking for a way into the park. In the darkness, I almost miss the place where a bar has been pried out, but then I manage to wriggle through the narrow gap, and I’m in the park proper. Another thrill runs up my nerves.
I’ve reached a narrow, curving lane with bathrooms to my right. As I tiptoe forward and peer around the first corner, I enter Camp High, the horror land based on summer camp and high school. The maze called The Showers is right in front of me. Based on the maps I studied, the giant Arts & Crafts slide should be ahead to my right, and the Main Drag should be to my left, only I can’t see either. Ruin and time have shifted things.
To avoid the lights, I have to take an indirect path, and I get badly lost once before I find the Main Drag. A few widely spaced, pragmatic security lights buzz faintly overhead and cast shadows from the quaint, original streetlamps that aren’t on. Across from me, a white statue of a unicorn has a plastic six-pack ring on its horn. The cobblestoned pavement is uneven underfoot, with missing and cockeyed stones. And yet, when I look up the length of the Main Drag toward the Keep of Ages, I can feel a certain aura of excitement, even now.
Grisly isn’t just a ruin. It’s has the feel of a legendary ghost town, an ironic tragedy. It’s a horror park that was closed by real catastrophe, almost as if it tempted fate, and I’m here all alone. I keep alert, walking slowly and staying to the shadows.
Since I promised to set up Lavinia’s second camera near the Keep of Ages before I go underground to search for the vault, I head west up the Main Drag, toward the center of the park. I pass a café, a souvenir shop, and a tattoo parlor, all empty. The faded storefronts seem too small for a real main street, skewing my sense of proportion. An armadillo squats in an empty flower tub, and a hubcap lies in the gutter. A kiosk has been burned to a blackened shell.
From somewhere to my right, a tinny snatch of carnival music drifts through the night. My pulse takes off. I step back into a doorway and slip my knife out of its sheath, but though I watch and wait, no one comes. A minute later, the music goes off, and all I can hear is my heart thudding.
Someone’s watching me. I can feel it.
I take a deep breath and start cautiously forward again. Three mannequins are draped in American flags and posed on a balcony as if waving to a passing parade. At the next corner, a dim alley is piled with baby strollers. I can tell some of the trespassers before me have been more interested in pranks than vandalism, but that only adds to the bizarreness of the place.
A light comes on in the store beside me, and I jump back. Gilt lettering on the window announces TOYS. I peek in. The toys are long gone. Only a rack remains, and an old price gun. I watch for movement, but no one’s there, and a minute later, the light goes off again.
“This is weird,” I whisper.
First the music and now the toy store lights make me think someone is following my progress through the park, but who? Why don’t they come out and talk to me? They can’t be ghosts.
I peer around and spot more camera lenses everywhere, large ones on poles and button cameras on doorframes and trim, exactly like at Forge. Just because Lavinia doesn’t have access to the feeds anymore doesn’t mean all the cameras are dead. Some of them could still be serving a security system.
But still no one comes. The Main Drag is as dim and motionless as before.
I don’t understand this place, but I’m not going to let a little spookiness stop me from looking for my parents. I still have to put up Lavinia’s other camera before I head underground. I note the VIP portal she mentioned, the one between a cookie shop and a gift shop, as I pass. Then, at the end of the Main Drag, I reach Scylla Square, the center hub of the park, where the Keep of Ages rises out of its base of thorny shadows.
The keep towers above me, twice as large as I expected, and blacker than the sky. Instinctively, I shiver. A dark, empty moat surrounds the massive foundation, and double bridges with rising stairs cross over the void to a big, arched door. One caged light bulb glows above the arched doorway like a modern afterthought, but otherwise, with a shimmer of moonlight on its pointed roof, the keep looks like it was born straight out of a nightmare.
Clinging to one of the topmost spires, a large black dragon peers over its shoulder with vivid red eyes. It’s no longer sleek and green as it was in Lavinia’s 3-D map. Instead, this dragon has weathered into a dark, motley beast with ragged scales and bony claws. I’m trying to understand how its eyes can glow so brightly, if they’re lit or coated with reflective red paint, when the dragon shifts its head.
My heart stops. I must be wrong. I peer upward, disbelieving. Slowly, with a creak, the dragon turns its heavy head as if to survey the park below, and then it blinks. Nothing more. It doesn’t hiss fire or open its wings, but it has the slight, hovering alertness of a beast that breathes, and it seems all the more lifelike and ominous because of its patience.
I’ve never seen special effects like this—if Lavinia hadn’t mentioned how remarkable the technology controlling the dragon originally was, I might have worried that I was hallucinating. As it is, I’m completely captivated.
Cautiously, keeping near to the buildings at my back, I circle Scylla Square and get closer to the moat and the bridge on the left. A small statue of a snaky, six-headed monster presides over a set of defunct water fountains, and I choose the monster’s platform for Lavinia’s second camera. I fit my knife back in its sheath, and then it takes me a second to secure the camera. I aim it across Scylla Square, toward the stairs of the keep, as she requested. When I try to call Lavinia to tell her it’s ready, I can’t get a signal, and now I know I’m on my own.
When I look back up at the dragon, its head has turned in my direction. It blinks again. I press back into a shadow, but its gaze never wavers. This is crazy, I think. It’s not real. But I can’t shake the feeling that the dragon’s eyes are staring right at me. On the double bridge of stairs that leads across the moat, dim blue lights turn on below the banisters. They shine out at knee height and catch in specks of white in the stone steps, giving them an eerie, black-light sort of glow. They almost seem like an invitation.
Above, a purple spotlight flicks on, beaming onto the keep’s roof, and the dragon lifts its shoulders in a great double-hunch, as if it’s stretching, or preparing for flight.