What the Hell Did I Just Read

3. JOY PARK

Ted’s ringtone was “Flight of the Valkyries.” He answered and immediately his expression made it clear who was on the other end. Not “Mister Nymph,” but his little girl.

He squeezed his eyes shut and said, “Oh thank god. Shh … listen. Baby, where are you?” A pause. “What? Hey, tell me where you are…”

John muttered, “Put it on speaker.” Ted tapped his phone and I heard the tinny voice of a little girl, in midsentence.

“We saw Prince Blacktail and we took a picture of him and Betty the Bear and I ate a chocolate pickle on a stick.”

Ted said, “Maggie, where are you? Who are you with?”

“Do you want to talk to Daddy?”

“I’m here, this is me. We’re at home. Where are you?”

“I can’t hear, the people are really loud. It’s really crowded. We’re in line for the Night Wheel.”

Ted looked at us. None of us had any idea what that meant.

John said, “Hi, I’m a friend of your dad’s. Are you at a park? Like an amusement park? Tell us where you are and we’ll come join you.”

“We’re at Joy Park! It was a surprise for my fly box!”

It was word salad. Ted closed his eyes, I imagined the rage and frustration turning his brain into a sputtering pot of chili. “Honey, can you hear me? Do you know what town you’re in? Or, do you remember how long you drove to get there?”

“Do you want to talk to Daddy? Hold on.”

“No, honey, I … are you still there?”

There was a pause, some faint voices on the other end. Finally, a male voice came on the line. It said, “This is Ted. Who’s this?”

Ted, the one sitting in the room with us, looked at his phone, then looked up at us. We had no suggestions.

“Who are you, you son of a bitch? Bring back my daughter!”

From the phone, a man with a very similar voice said, “What? I ain’t got your daughter, dude.” A faint female voice could be heard asking a question, and the man on the phone replied to her, “No idea, somebody she dialed on accident.”

The call disconnected.

Ted stood bolt upright off the sofa, looked at me, and said, “What the fuck was that?”

Another good question.

John said, “Try to call her back.”

He did, and shook his head. “They turned it off.”

John was quickly scrolling through something on his phone. He said, “I tried doing a search for Joy Park. I don’t find a place by that name. Not within driving distance. Lots of, uh, people.”

I said, “Maybe we heard her wrong?”

“Even so, what place like that would be open before dawn?”

Ted said, “That sounded like me. On the phone. And in the background, that was Loretta. What is this?”

John said to Ted, “Keep in mind, again, that call was placed for a reason. What you heard, what you were allowed to hear, somebody did that to get you to react in a certain way. Regardless of who or what is behind this, never lose sight of what we said a minute ago—what’s happening here is a game.”

Ted’s phone dinged—an incoming text. He showed it to us—a photo. A large, run-down building with a rounded, redbrick rooftop.

John said, “That’s the ice factory.”

I said, “The fact that he—or it—wants us to go there tells me that going there is a terrible idea.”

“What’s our alternative?”

I thought, move to a different town? but said nothing.

Ted said, “Let me get a weapon.”

“A thing like this,” I said, “probably cannot be killed with a gun.”

“He’s right,” said John. “It will take several guns, at least. Can you dual wield?”

Ted nodded and jogged down the hall, a little too enthusiastically. I glared at John. “Any bystanders get shot, it’s on you.”

* * *

We were all in John’s black Jeep Grand Cherokee, the hood of which was entirely covered by an airbrushed mural of Satan holding an ax, chopping the head off of a naked woman above the words EZEKIEL 23:20. The paint job wasn’t John’s work—the Jeep had come from the cops’ impound lot and they wouldn’t tell us anything about the previous owner, only that he was “Never, ever coming back.” They had given it to John as under-the-table payment for some work we did for them, which I think was a good deal for the cops as I estimated the blue book value at about negative two hundred dollars. John and I were in front, Ted was in back. We rolled through the downpour, a sunrise having drowned somewhere behind it.

Ted had brought three guns with him and at the moment was loading bullets into a pistol magazine. He said, “All right, tell me exactly what I’m walkin’ into here. In terms of their capabilities, strengths, vulnerabilities, anything you know.”

I said, “You know how the earth is mostly run by assholes, who got their jobs either by accident, or by being the kids of other assholes, or via some other backroom assholery? Well, it turns out if you keep going up the ladder, past humans and into spirits and demigods and such, it’s just more assholes for several more levels.”

John said, “Most of the time you can’t perceive them, the same as you can’t detect bacteria in your taco meat until you’re puking your guts out three hours later. But Dave and I are special. We were able to look behind the veil, thanks to some drugs we took, to see the debauchery these unholy bastards get up to behind the scenes, see how their fluids splatter into our reality. We’ve been face-to-face with beings that would give your nightmares nightmares. The first time, Dave didn’t even flinch, he’s like, ‘You wanna see the real monster, it’s standing right in front of you, bitch.’”

I said, “Also, don’t believe anything John tells you. He tends to … embellish.”

Ted, realizing that spiel had contained no useful tactical information said, “But these things, they can be killed, right?”

I said, “Sort of?”

John said, “You got a Facebook profile, right? You ever get like an annoying ex-girlfriend or something on there, and eventually you just block her? Well, killing the body of one of these things is usually like that. It gets them out of your hair but they’re not really gone. Whether you see them again really depends on how persistent they are. Usually still worth it to try.”

Ted nodded. No fear, no confusion—he was a soldier evaluating the situation and storing the data as it came, without judgment. He said, “Or, like when insurgents would shoot down one of our drones.”

I said, “Yeah, that’s actually a way better analogy.”

We turned into the mostly abandoned industrial park and soon came upon an arched brick rooftop that appeared to be sitting in the middle of a lake—in reality, an old parking lot that was currently under about three inches of water, boiling with raindrops. Of all the creepy and abandoned places in Undisclosed, this one is probably the creepiest and most abandonedest. This is the infamous ice factory, a spot that many around here believe is a portal to Hell.

I guess that requires some explanation.

See, as recently as the 1940s, refrigerators were something only rich jerks owned. Everybody else had iceboxes—literal wooden boxes you had to cool with a big block of ice you bought. Those blocks were made in factories like the dilapidated one we were rolling up to right now. The place had been closed since the early 1960s, a brick building in the shape of a Quonset hut, with faint shadows above each window where flames had scorched the exterior.

Oh, yeah, that’s the “portal to Hell” part. The factory was closed after a horrific fire in 1961, which no one ever isolated a cause for. The blaze supposedly burned so hot that it melted the bricks inside. I know that sounds like bullshit, but according to Munch (who worked as a volunteer firefighter and knows stuff like this), if you can get the temperature up to about four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the clay in the bricks just liquefies like wax. They say the fire department didn’t even throw water at it, they just kept their distance and watched it roar like a blast furnace, the sheer heat wilting trees for a hundred yards in every direction. And then, just minutes after the firefighters arrived, it went dark, like somebody just flipped a switch. Once it cooled down, city officials glanced inside, nodded, then boarded up the doors and agreed to never speak of it again. Nobody had ever bought the factory or the land, presumably because they were afraid the supposed portal would open again and that their insurance wouldn’t cover the loss (and who wants to go to court over the issue of whether or not Hell itself counts as an “act of God”?).

The whole story was ridiculous, of course—even if a portal to Hell opened up, it isn’t a physical, fiery place. The ancient Hebrew word for Hell is “Gehenna,” which was an actual location outside Jerusalem back in Bible days, a valley where people tossed their garbage to burn it. They used to roll the corpses of sinners down into that putrid burning trash pit as a final posthumous insult, and New Testament writers just took that idea and ran with it. The real “Hell,” as far as John and I can surmise, is simply having to spend eternity with millions and millions of other terrible people with no laws, walls, or even physical bodies to separate them from you. An eternity spent swirling in a stew of ravenous, perverse appetites free of all restraints. Their torture is that they forever consume but are never satisfied, your torture is that you are forever consumed. Also, by the 1960s, consumer-grade refrigerators were common so the whole thing would have been a bad investment anyway.

The tires left twin overlapping wakes behind us as we rolled across the shallow pool of the parking lot. There were no visible vehicles or other signs of activity.

Ted said, “Do a slow lap around the exterior. See what we can see.”

“Now,” I said to Ted, “when we go in, I want you to keep one thing fixed in your mind. Whatever Nymph is, I can tell you what he almost certainly isn’t, and that’s a greasy pedophile in a suit with a smoking habit. What you saw in your driveway that day, that was just how this particular thing chose to present itself to you. It may look completely different now. Do you understand?”

“What, like a disguise?”

“Once,” I said, “we had a dainty young woman come in asking us to investigate a haunting in her parents’ house. We walk in, the door slams behind us, and the woman falls apart. All that’s left is a pile of snakes where the girl had been standing, patches of their scales colored like the dress she’d been wearing.”

Ted tried to picture it. “The whole time you talked to her, you didn’t notice she was snakes?”

John said, “They have, uh, techniques, for that.”

I said, “And then John started dating a girl named Nicky who I assumed was made out of snakes but it turned out that’s just the way she is.”

“She has been nothing but nice to you, Dave.”

Ted said, “My voice, on the phone … you think these things took Maggie by pretending to be me? Is that what I’m gonna find in there, somethin’ that looks and sounds just like I do?”

I shrugged. “Past experience has only taught us not to rely on past experience.”

We completed our circuit and rolled to a stop, about thirty feet from the front door. John parked with the Jeep facing away from the building and left the engine running—in this line of work, you always assume that you’re thirty seconds from needing to fly off into the horizon in a mad panic.

“Well,” Ted said as he pulled the slide on his pistol and stuffed it down the back of his pants, “let’s just assume ambush here.” He nodded toward the building. “Only two doors. Those are choke points. I’ve got line and hooks. I say we get up on the roof, rappel down to the windows, come crashing in on the fuckers.”

I said, “I’d break both of my ankles the moment I landed, before breaking my neck a half-second later. This is going to have to be a traditional ‘walk in the front door’ entry. At least for me and John.”

Ted seemed pretty disappointed by that, but didn’t argue. We circled around to the rear of the Jeep to retrieve our weapons. Ted brought out an M4 assault rifle (which I recognized from having used one in a video game recently) and a pump shotgun that he slung over his shoulder as a backup. John pulled out a gun with a six-inch-wide barrel, connected to a compressed-air tank he strapped to his back—one of those cannons they use to fire T-shirts at the crowd at basketball games. I would be carrying a small, faded wooden cross—supposedly carved from the very beams upon which the actual crucifixion was performed on Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ. Taped to it was a pair of small Bose speakers, a battery pack, and an iPod shuffle loaded with 80s power ballads.

I explained our gear to Ted, who gave the weapons a skeptical look.

I said, “Trust me.”

“What’s the range?”

“For the music? Uh, I guess wherever it’s audible.”

“But it’s not fatal to them? It’s more of an area effect deterrent?”

“Yeah, they hate it a lot.”

“How long do targets stay incapacitated?”

“I don’t—”

“And the cross, do they have to see it to be affected, or is it enough to just be in proximity?”

“Uh, the second one I think—”

“All right, so what’s the range?”

John said, “This is not an exact science, Ted.”

Ted didn’t reply, but his body language said it all. I’m on my own here. Again.

We sloshed through the standing water—I had never bought rain boots because I knew that it would immediately stop raining the moment I did—and arrived at the main entrance, an arched brick doorway partially boarded up by what looked like the original planks the crew had hastily nailed into place in 1961. Standing guard beside the door was a concrete snowman—about six feet tall, arms made of rusted rebar, the top half absolutely covered in bird shit. The eyes and mouth were three misshapen, eroded holes in the concrete, as if the thing was wailing in terror and dread. Rainwater puddled and splattered out of its ragged eye holes like flowing tears. The words MR FROSTEE were etched into his chest, like the epitaph on a particularly eccentric tombstone. The old ice factory mascot had seen better days.

A gap had been pried loose in the boarded-up doorway large enough for a person to slide through, but it looked like it had been that way since before I was born—there were still no obvious signs anyone had been here recently. John nodded to me and I hit the iPod, which started playing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Ted clicked on a flashlight attached to the barrel of his rifle and aimed the light through the gap, sweeping it slowly across the interior. He slid inside, quickly whipping his head back and forth to check for anyone waiting to waylay us inside the door. John went next. I brought up the rear and clicked on my own flashlight.

The interior smelled like wet rust and a recently snuffed candle. A row of huge, charred machines loomed above us like the aftermath of a robot battle. There were tanks and pipes and gears and fifteen-foot-tall iron objects shaped like wagon wheels connected to chutes designed to deliver coffin-sized blocks of ice to ground level. All of it was warped and misshapen, metal parts caught in the process of drooping, dripping, or dissolving entirely according to their various melting points. I shined the light overhead. The brick had in fact liquefied and then cooled into thousands of tiny spikes that made the whole vast space look like a torture chamber. I imagined the curved ceiling snapping shut the moment some hooded inquisitor threw a switch.

We crept steadily forward, the music echoing around the dead space. A light flared up to my left—John lighting a cigarette. He said into the darkness, “All right, we’re here, fartsong. What’s your deal?”

No answer from inside the building, or at least none that could be heard over Mr. Bon Jovi insisting we have to hold on to what we’ve got and that it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not. We advanced, Ted swinging his gun lamp around in both directions to light up nooks in between scorched machinery in which enemies could be lying in wait. We passed through an open doorway into an emptier room that had probably been a loading area, a truck-sized door at the opposite end the only other exit. How numb would your fingers get, loading ice all day?

John said, “Come out where we can see you, you son of a bitch! I have to be in court at eight. So whatever you’ve got in mind, we need to wrap it up.”

I said, “Yeah, and I have to pick Amy up from work soon, otherwise she has to get a ride home with this dudebro she works with and I think he’s trying to get in her pants. It’s a long story but the point is we don’t have time to dick around.”

Ted’s phone rang.

Hey, that worked.

He motioned for me to cut the music, then put the call on speaker.

The little girl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Baby, we’re here! Do you see us? I’m shining a flashlight.”

“The Night Wheel was scary! I screamed when it started spinning and everybody’s faces went away. We’re going to watch the flying goats. They let me lick the luck lizard and we’ve been eating hot dogs that squirm in the bun.”

“Maggie! Listen! I want you to yell for me. Yell anything, cry out real loud, so I can hear you.”

She’d hung up. Ted cursed, tried to dial back again, and once again it rang, and rang …

John held up a hand and said, “Shh.”

We all heard it.

A faint musical ringtone that I recognized as the theme song from a recent Disney movie. It was about a princess who has to learn to be independent or something.

The sound was coming from right below our feet.

Three flashlight beams swung down to illuminate the floor in front of us. There was a gap where the floorboards had been ripped aside. Below it was a patch of loose dirt, like a freshly dug shallow grave.

Ted dropped to his knees. He started digging away with his hands, flinging dirt behind him like a dog, crying out for his daughter.

But how would she have made the call from—

About a foot down, he found a phone.

Still on, smeared with mud. Ted tossed it aside and kept digging.

Something was moving in the dirt, in the shadows. Ripples in the clumps of muck, things squirming around his hands …

And then they were gone, as if having burrowed into the earth, hiding from the light. Or maybe it had been nothing.

Ted kept digging but there was no little girl down there, alive or dead. He sat back, chest heaving with the effort. He grabbed the muddy phone. He looked it over—it displayed only its lock screen.

He screamed, “Hey! Where is she? Nymph! You here, you son of a bitch?”

I shook my head. “She’s not here, and neither is Nymph. It’s a wild-goose ch—”

I had turned to walk away and immediately bumped into an inhuman figure that had been standing right behind me. I screamed and tumbled backward.

Ted jumped to his feet, whipped the shotgun off his back, and yelled for me to stay down. He fired and pumped and fired again, but John was yelling for him to stop.

“Hey! Hey! Cool it! It’s just the snowman.”

I looked up and the figure was of course just that stupid snowman mascot, now scarred across its chest from where the shotgun pellets had gouged the concrete and ricocheted away. Ted had succeeded in blowing one of its rebar arms off. In the panic and tension, we had forgotten that of course the MR FROSTEE mascot was there inside the factory, in the center of the storage room, where it had probably stood for eighty years. Where else would it be? I could now remember approaching it as we entered the room thirty seconds ago, plain as day.

Feeling ridiculous, I stood up and brushed myself off. I cursed when I saw that I had landed right on top of my iPod, smashing it. John was blinking at the snowman as if confused by it, then went to help Ted. He was sweeping his flashlight around each corner, determined to search every inch of the place before admitting defeat.

An hour of the three of us looking in and around the factory turned up no sign of either Nymph or Maggie. We rode back through town in silence, listening to the wipers squeak their complaints from the other side of the windshield.

Ted said, “What now?”

I said, “There are two threads to follow up on here. Who is Nymph, and where is Maggie? I’m guessing one will answer the other…”

John said to me, “You go to the library and see if you can find any reference to Joy Park, I’ll take Nymph, see if I can find anybody else around town who’s encountered him. If I track him down, I’ll give you a call after I’ve killed him.”

Ted said, “No. You get a bead on him, you call me. Not the cops, neither. I want to be the one to do it. I’m putting the word out for manhunt volunteers, get as many people lookin’ as we can. Got a friend I served with, he can be in town by this afternoon.”

“And I’m clearly not going to the library, John. I can search the Internet from my phone, from some place with free wifi, and pancakes. Speaking of which…” I was holding the muddy phone we’d found buried at the ice factory, turning it over in my hands. I turned it on, again just got the lock screen. “Anybody know how to hack a phone?”

“Amy probably does.”

“Yeah, I’ll ask. Wait, does that mean she can get into my phone any time she wants?”

“Only way to find out, put a bunch of pics of naked dudes on there and see if you can detect a change in mood afterward.”

As we pulled up to the Knoll home, Ted said, “If what you’re sayin’ about imposters and such is true, we should have a system. In case that thing tries to imitate one of us.”

I was taken aback. “Man, that’s a good idea. You should do this for a living.”

“You make a lot of money doin’ this? The password is ‘bushmaster.’ Don’t forget it, we encounter each other, we ask the password. Got it?”

John said, “Got it. Now, I figure we got forty hours before this goes from rescue to revenge, so there’s no time to lose. I’ll get on it right after I go to court on this public nudity thing.”