The Rhinebeck Amusement Park closed eighteen months after it opened, and that had been three years ago. Most of the rides were auctioned off to traveling amusement shows or placed in storage for use at the Dutchess County Fair each year. It was a huge story in the papers for an entire summer.
What remained was a ghost town.
It had been featured the previous fall in a photo spread for Vogue—models in Alexander McQueen and Gucci draped over rusting metal bumper-car pavilions and in doors of haunted houses. Patrick Demarchelier had done the photography and it had all been trés chic.
I drove the BMW under an unlit neon archway, which had once announced Amusement in bold pink and orange letters, but no one was laughing now. The parking lot was unkempt and sprawled long and dark in every direction. The pavement had begun to crack from disrepair, and grass cropped up through the crevices.
A ten-foot-tall chain-link fence wrapped around the entirety of the blackened park, and beyond it were the handful of reminders of what had been before. The husk of the Ferris wheel, which no longer had its passenger buckets, was an eerie iron wheel against the purple blue of the night sky.
The haunted house sat off the midway a few paces, recessed from the fun and looming with sinister promise. My money was on it for the nest’s home base. Vampires love clichés, and
nothing was more clichéd than a haunted house. It was a beautiful mockup of an old Victorian home, and it reminded me a great deal of the Addams family mansion. Which was probably intentional.
I parked the car next to an early nineties red Jeep Cherokee that had seen better days. This had to be Jameson’s car because there were no other signs of life in the parking lot. When I shut the engine off and killed the headlights, I took a moment to adjust to the quiet and let myself drink in the scenery.
Outside the car the silence felt heavier somehow.
I’d expected the sounds of screaming, or fighting, or any indication I’d come to the right place. There was only the sound of wind whistling through torn canopies and the constant smacking of a screen door beating against a wall. I took a sniff of the air and got back a big whiff of fear.
Fear, blood and vampires.
I was definitely in the right place.
The front gate was still chained and padlocked, so no one had gotten in that way. I tugged at the lock once to be sure, but it didn’t budge. I didn’t want to waste any time looking for a secondary entrance or checking for holes in the fence. Not when my path in was right in front of me. I hooked my fingers through the chain links and got a foot up on the locked chain, using it for leverage. I scrambled up the few necessary feet, then swung my legs over the top of the fence, getting snagged in the thigh by a loose bit of metal, which cut deep enough to make me bleed.
I dropped to the ground, landing in a crouch, then stood to investigate the wound. A thin beaded line of blood had sprung up, but it wasn’t serious. It would heal quickly, and in the meantime I had just announced myself to any hungry vampires who hadn’t heard me pull up.
Checking my gun, I flicked off the safety and chose to keep the weapon out and ready rather than tucked into my pants. The steel frame glinted merrily in the moonlight. Loaded with fifteen silver rounds, the gun was pretty pleased with itself. I hoped it knew something I didn’t, because I didn’t have any extra clips.
To my left the old bumper-car area was now reduced to a fenced-in concrete pad with broken glass on the ground from the bulbs that had once lit the overhead rafters. To the right was an aisle of abandoned concession carts promising popcorn, lemonade, hot dogs and cotton candy. The signs had begun to fade over years of dormancy, and the air lacked the cheerful smell of any carnival foods. Behind the bumper cars was the Ferris wheel, and beyond it all was my destination.
I crossed the midway cautiously. No one had come for me yet, and it made me wonder what they were waiting for. And if there was no noise, was I too late to save anyone? No, if there was fear in the air, then there must still be a little hope. I held the gun out but downward, ready to raise it at any moment. My heartbeat thumped along steadily, my pulse not yet above average.
The thumping of the screen door grew louder as I approached the path leading to the haunted house. On the front porch the old door swung open, then smacked closed, swung open and smacked closed, over and over in a steady rhythm. A little too steady, actually, considering the wind had all but died since I’d hopped the fence.
Yet there it was, smacking and squealing at me, doing its best to lend the night a more frightful atmosphere than necessary. In one of the upstairs windows a blue light flickered on for a fraction of a second, illuminating a figure. My finger tensed on the trigger as I took aim, but when the light flickered a second time it showed the figure to be nothing more than a dummy dressed up like a villainous hag.
I lowered my weapon and stood in awe of the house. Dense fog had begun to roll out from beneath the front door, but the smell of it was faintly chalky. Smoke-machine haze.
“Okaaaaay,” I whispered.
Either this place was haunted by one seriously unoriginal ghost, or the power had been restored to this building. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind when a deafening pop echoed through the air, the sound of a breaker being thrown, and the whole park came back to life.
Neon lights, most broken or faded, lit up as best they could, and to my right, in the distance, a carousel I hadn’t noticed before began to move in slow rotations. The still-life horses looked macabre with their open-mouthed whinnies and wild eyes. The air filled with the sounds of music and the irritating bells and whistles of midway din.
A chill cut through me and my heartbeat quickened a pace.
This was all wrong.
I took a step towards the house, where flashes of green-and-blue light were now intensifying and the fog had grown thick, spilling down the front steps. The soundtrack of the haunted house was playing full volume, filling the night with manufactured screams and the noises of moaning ghosts and ghouls.
If anyone called for help, I wouldn’t be able to tell. The suddenness of the lights and sounds had thrown my senses off balance. I couldn’t tell if the movement from the shadows was a trick of the light or if someone was actually there. I didn’t want to be outside and exposed anymore.
I reached the front of the house and was about to pull the door open when a hissing crackle over the park’s loudspeakers froze me on the spot, my hand still extended.
First it was just white noise, but that was replaced by the sound of someone singing the tune from a jack-in-the-box. The slow, creepy way the voice sang each note made me draw my hand back from the door and step away from the house so I could get a better look at the midway. In between notes the voice began to laugh. It started as hiccup-like bursts of giggling, interrupting the song and giving the tune a markedly demented quality.
Then it broke down into a maniacal cackle that had nothing to do with amusement and would have given a supervillain the willies.