Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror

GHOSTS OF HYPERIA Jessica McHugh

It smells like seawater and Aqua Velva in the underground prop room where Victoria Fell stands over her father’s coffin.

She wipes dripping blood from her chin and grits her teeth. This can’t be real. Not Harlan’s cologne, maybe not even the coffin. Certainly not the fingernails scratching the underside of the lid. But then the casket shudders, the lid lifts, and shriveled brown fingers curl over the edge.

Vic stumbles backward into a rack of moldy gowns and quickly snaps up an algae-slicked stiletto as a weapon, but the things in the dark don’t care.

It laughs. It wheezes. And it sounds exactly like Harlan Fell, especially after the hurricane. The breathing alone makes her feel like a child again, before acid reflux and Celiac Disease took hold, and fear was the only thing that swamped her gut with pain. It was the same hushed desperation she heard late at night, when her adoptive father stood outside her room, soundless yet somehow screeching for Victoria to talk to him again.

But she could barely look at him after the storm. She wasn’t even certain the man outside the door was Harlan Fell. Even after she left for Cornell at sixteen, part of her believed the creature in the house overlooking Fell’s Fairy Funland was an impostor.

Until Harlan Fell hung himself two years ago in her childhood bedroom. Until he was embalmed, painted up and displayed in a near-empty mortuary. It was him all along, and he died knowing his only child didn’t think he was human.

“I’d never hurt you the way you hurt me,” he says. “I love you, Vic. You’re why I did all this.” The voice is changed now. It slips around pockets of familiarity but loses all trace of her father’s melodic drawl. Even when Harlan was at his worst and sounded like Vic’s most depraved imaginings of the boogeyman, there’s no mistaking this thing for Harlan Fell. It is a hundred wet whispers, a wave of angry ghosts echoing in the utility tunnels underneath the once-legendary theme park.

She covers her ears and pain shoots through her skull. She doesn’t know the severity of her injuries, but she must be battered to hell. Such a hurricane struck Calvert Cliffs once before, but this time she left the watchtower at the onset, directing as many employees as she could to the house on the hill. But the wind was like a serpent, purposeful as it whipped and crashed through the crowd of fleeing actors. It tossed the sea as carelessly as the people dressed as fairies and forest animals, and once the bay surmounted the wall, Vic had no choice but to flee herself.

But that was before she realized the utility tunnels were still accessible. Harlan was supposed to have filled them in, out of respect for the people who died there years ago, out of respect for the teenager who almost did.

The scratching in the coffin increases so exponentially that Harlan would need at least eight arms to execute such cacophony. When the lid explodes off the coffin, Vic buries herself deeper in the dresses, grabs another stiletto and brandishes them like hatchets as the corpse’s pitted face rises above the edge. Harlan Fell’s eyes are pale gray, his skin like bleached driftwood, but there’s life in his lips. They’re theatrically red, and his teeth glimmer Borax white in the musty room.

“You can end this now, Victoria. One wish, and this can all be over.”

She shakes her head so much it nauseates her. She says, “no” until it’s just a nonsensical moan.

The corpse chuckles like a brush fire.

“Very well. More fun for us.”

With a howl, the cadaver lunges at Vic in the costume rack, but she narrowly avoids his skeletal grasp and whips around with the shoe in her fist. The stiletto heel pierces her father’s temple and the twisted things inside, and all at once, Harlan’s corpse pops like a balloon spraying hundreds of tiny opalescent crustaceans around the chamber. Vic crushes as many as she can, but the majority avoid the hammering and join like water droplets forming pearly pools in the corners of the costume room.

“Remember this,” they hiss from all angles, “we gave you the chance to save them.”

Their bodies shimmer with mimetic camouflage and they disappear into the walls and ceiling like white twinkle lights dying all around her.

“I hear her!” someone shouts. “She’s down here!”

Vic is still holding the shoes when Tiffany Law jogs into the chamber.

“Are you okay, Ms. Fell? Did you get lost?”

She shakes her head and tosses the heels aside. “I’m fine.”

The ice-blond actress screws a bloody tissue into her nostril and sniffs. “You’ve been down here for ten minutes. Is it safe or not?”

With a huff, she says, “Not,” and shoves Tiffany from the prop room. She doesn’t get far pushing her down the main corridor, however, before they collide with Rina Bestler, a former competitive figure skater, and Raymond Burke, a beefy but jittery first-time security guard who swings his flashlight beam over the scabby walls. They ask her what’s happening, what the plan is, but Vic keeps her mouth clamped shut as they pass the faded maps of the tunnel’s chambers and entrances. The drawings seemed so much bigger when she was a kid. The ladder too, stretching up into the massive watchtower at the center of the theme park built along Calvert Cliffs; it seems like a flimsy plaything now, not a gateway to the horrifying storm that struck Fell’s Fairy Funland out of the blue just one hour ago.

Planting her feet, Rina latches onto a rusted warm-up barre and forces Vic to stop. “I need you to tell me exactly where we’re going, Ms. Fell. And who the hell were you talking to down there?” She tilts her head as if the correct angle will spill her boss’ secrets, but despite the insistence in her rigid stance, her left pinkie finger twitches like a worm on a hook.

It’s the first time since they met that Rina Bestler has shown a chink in the lofty and impenetrable air she boasted as a competitive figure skater. She’s too young to have experienced Fell’s Fairy Funland in its heyday and its revival in the mid-90s, but the cast of the new and improved park often discussed the legendary storm that struck in the winter of 1991. They called it the “Ghost Hurricane” because it appeared out of nowhere, with not a single indicator that a storm would break across a clear blue sky, raise the Chesapeake Bay over the cliffs, and decimate fifty acres of Calvert Cliffs State Park. The Ghost flooded and thrashed the attractions that day, killing nearly a dozen off-season employees.

Rina only heard about it in passing, however. She didn’t get along with most of the other actors, partly because of the local celebrity’s spectacular fall from grace in an underage drunk driving accident the previous year, but also because spending most of her life in pursuit of Olympic gold left her frightfully inept in most social situations. Add in the fact that many actors would’ve preferred it if Tiffany Law were cast as Fairy Funland’s lead character, Princess Papillon, and Rina tended to keep to herself.

Vic fielded all sorts of complaints about the former figure skater’s icy attitude, but when it came down to it, Rina’s scandal was exactly the kind of publicity she needed for the grand reopening of her father’s once-revered theme park.

“I’ll explain everything once we’re safe,” she says. “But we need to get to the bridge. The water didn’t reach the house last time. It’s our only chance.”

Tiffany wails so theatrically the tissue shoots from her nose. “That’s what we came to tell you! The bridge is gone!”

She hopes Tiffany’s just being dramatic again. The girl whose mother originated the role of Princess Papillon in 1975 was certain she’d get the part for the grand reopening and was vehemently vocal about her displeasure that the focus of a scandal had stolen her legacy. Whenever Rina winced after a landing or stretched her calves longer than usual, Tiffany offered herself as an understudy, usually with a braggadocious twirl.

But Raymond’s expression confirms Tiffany reply. It’s not just drama. It’s the end of the line… again.

The security guard’s voice catches in his throat. Clearing it, he says, “There’s no path to the house anymore. The police are on their way, but we lost contact when HQ got submerged, so there’s no telling when they’ll be able to get to us, especially if we’re down here.” He takes off his glasses and wipes off dirt with his soaked shirt, which makes matters worse. “If the watchtower goes, we’ll be trapped in these tunnels for God only knows how long.” He wipes the glasses again and sets them on his nose as he squints at Ms. Fell. “Except you know, don’t you? You’ve been stuck down here before.”

“Why are we even discussing this?” Tiffany squeals. “There’s no way I’m going back out there. You saw what happened to Chelsea. To Mrs. Popper and her kid. It picked them up; it dangled them in the air—” Her voice disappears into a whimper, and she throws herself against Raymond’s chest, which seems to disturb him as much as the omnipresent thunder vibrating the tunnels.

Vic hadn’t seen Chelsea, nor Maria and Elias Popper — she’d hoped they were still out there, actually — but she knows precisely what Tiffany means. She was in the watchtower when the Ghost struck in ‘91. Though she often had birthday parties there as a child, Harlan opened up during the off-season and paid the actors double to let her have the run of the park on Adoption Day.

“To preside over the entire fairy realm,” he said, because there was no proving the former orphan wasn’t part fairy herself.

Vic despised the reason but enjoyed the solitude. Until the storm began.

She was standing at the eastern window that day, the pane propped open and music entrancing her so completely that her ice cream started melting down her wrist. She was licking it off, her eyes fixed on the Ferris wheel, when the first bouts of lightning struck. She didn’t recognize it as lightning at the time, though. The sky brightened temporarily, but it seemed more like clouds clearing than the warning it should’ve been. The thunder came soon after, disturbingly persistent with jags of non-stop rolling and rumbling that shook the earth. And as the azure sky twinkled above, harsh and violent winds troubled the Chesapeake beyond the cliffside barrier.

Vic watched it rise. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the churning mass climbed the rocks and broke the border trees. Even when the massive waves crashed through Fairy Funland, it didn’t seem real, especially from so high, so far, and so alone in the cloudless sky. She had sounded an alarm and closed the watchtower window, but she could still hear the screams of people tossed from the top of the Ferris wheel and impaled on twisted roller coaster rails. The waves blasted families apart, hurling them like sputtering ragdolls through the air. Some landed on rooftops, dying instantly, while some hit the rising tide and were sucked slowly underwater.

But some stopped in mid-air. As if suspended by invisible nooses, they hung in the sky, bleeding out, pissing themselves over the swamped park. As Vic beheld the catastrophic melee spread out in frothy waves before her, a security guard was snatched up by the wind and dangled just outside the watchtower window. Harlan’s voice had charged out of the speakers and ordered everyone underground, but Vic couldn’t move. The hanging man was alive. He was praying, reaching out, trying to touch the glass.

Then the wind had taken him. It snapped him out of the sky like a child plucking a wilted blade of grass.

Vic grits her teeth. She smells briny cologne again and tries not to dry heave in Tiffany’s face, but the stench is stronger when the actress steps up to Vic, like she’s brewing Aqua Velva kombucha in her gut.

“Why didn’t you tell us these tunnels were here?” Tiffany demands.

“I didn’t know.”

“Bullshit. You must’ve surveyed the land before you overhauled the old park.”

“I thought they were filled in,” she says. “Harlan said he filled them in.”

“But you didn’t check?” Raymond asks.

Vic exhales heavily. “Not personally.”

Rina’s staring at her, looking like she bit into a bad apple. “You said you upgraded the security systems too.”

“We did.”

“And we’re just supposed to believe you?” Tiffany throws her head back with a laugh that echoes through the corridor. “You say you believed your dad when he claimed to fill in the tunnels, but you don’t actually think your dad was your dad after the first hurricane, do you?”

Rina’s face screws up in confusion, so Tiffany looks to Raymond for support, which he hesitantly gives.

“I do remember reading something about that, Ms. Fell. You told the cops your dad was an alien or something.”

Vic grunts in frustration. She’s a grown ass woman. A Cornell graduate who’s worked as lead project manager with Fortune 500 companies. She’s run two successful small businesses, not including managing Fairy Funland’s massive overhaul. And a twenty-five-year-old actress with bleached eyebrows and scaredy-cat rent-a-cop are making her feel like she’s fifteen again: paralyzed with fear and certain she’s going to die under this goddamn park.

“You know something?” Tiffany continues, now calling Rina into the circle of scorn. “I don’t think this is about protecting us at all. I think this is about you being down here during that storm when you were a kid. I think you’re scared, and we’re gonna die for it. Well, pardon my French, but fuck that, Ms. Fell.”

Tiffany isn’t wrong. Vic is scared; more than she was an hour ago when she thought the damn tunnels were full of cement. But parts of her still scream out in the voices of the investigators and doctors who convinced her she was crazy. What she witnessed from the watchtower broke something in her, they said, disassociating her mind so far from itself that she invented trauma to suffer underground as well as above. Every harrowing second beneath her father’s theme park — the things she saw Harlan do, the demons he worshiped — she’d hallucinated them all, partly to mask her pain and partly to punish the father who failed to protect her.

“This is crazy,” Rina blurts at Ms. Fell. “Why aren’t you denying any of this shit?”

“Because there’s nothing to deny,” Vic replies softly. “Whatever you’ve heard about me, it’s probably true… and worse. And you’ll see that for yourselves if we stay down here.”

With a stifled whimper, Tiffany collapses against a faded cartoon of a pixie beside the watchtower ladder. “Rina’s right. This is insane.”

“I’m doing the best I can, and frankly I don’t care what you think about me right now. Any of you.” Peering at the group, Vic lifts her chin. “But I do value your safety, and I’m telling you these tunnels aren’t safe. As hospitable as they may seem, there are demons in the woodwork.”

Tiffany snorts. “It’s stone, honey.” Despite her bloody nose and injured thigh, as she rushes to the ladder to call down the rest of the survivors, she looks like the cat that got the cream. They hurry down like starving kittens, thanking God and Tiffany for discovering salvation in the still-accessible tunnels.

The smell rises again, and Vic knows the hyperia are watching her. Though her knees soften at the terror of her earlier decision, she braces herself on the map of the underground chambers and calls for attention from the clammy crowd.

It doesn’t come easy. Half of the actors portraying Fairy Funland characters look to Tiffany and a few others look to Raymond as the only remaining security guard. But their gazes eventually sweep to their boss when she says, “I’m the only one who’s spent any time down here.”

She traces her finger across the faded map and draws several circles in the dust. “There are three access points to the grounds, as well as several chambers that were used for costuming, rehearsal, and breaks, but I’m not sure what condition they’re in. As far as I know, they haven’t been used since 1991.” She glares at Tiffany, who’s conveniently tossing her gaze around the corridor. “Raymond and I will investigate the areas ahead to make sure there aren’t any leaks or weak spots,” she continues.

The security guard flinches but salutes, causing the older man portraying The Sleeping King to raise his tattooed arm.

“I’ll come with you,” the king says.

“Thank you, Tom. Anyone else?”

Ben, still dressed in his skin-tight time-traveling knight costume, points to the largest chamber on the underground map. “With your permission, Ms. Fell, I’d like to lead everyone here. If it’s not filled in either, it stands to reason there might still be supplies.”

“Be careful, all of you. Stay together. And should you reach the northern exit,” she says, circling what looks like a waffle embedded in a cliff, “turn around immediately.”

“Where does it go?” Rina asks.

Tiffany whistles, walks her fingers to the edge of an imaginary cliff, and plummets them into the abyss.

“We’re going to check it out, so there’s no reason for any of you to take the risk,” Vic says. “But for god’s sake, speak up if you see something strange.”

“Like what? Little alien crabs?” Tiffany snickers and elbows a teenage boy who portrayed a dancing flower.

He doesn’t respond. He stares at the floor and continues crying.

As the trio set off to inspect the entryways and the others prepare for the march to the break room situated under the northern quadrant of the park, Vic looks back on the shivering clusters. Nearly three dozen employees stood in the atrium for the mock run that morning. And of the twenty yawning performers and makeup artists, a handful of security guards dressed in padded suits of armor, and a dozen actors playing park guests who lined up with the rising sun at their backs and not nearly enough caffeine in their bloodstreams, only nine remain.

And not one checks to make sure Rina Bestler is following them.

Rina sinks to the floor, alone. Her stomach swells with anxiety as the group heads down the hall. Her fairy princess costume is too tight and she can’t catch a breath. With a desperate grunt, she widens a hole in her shredded sleeve and tears along the seam until she can fill her lungs. She isn’t supposed to be here. She’s supposed to be four hours into her rink time. She’s supposed to be bruising the hell out of her ass trying to add another rotation to her double axle. Never mind she was thinking the same thing during morning line-up. And on the drive to the house overlooking the park. And every single goddamn minute since the accident.

Whenever Rina thinks about medals and trophies in dank basement boxes, or how magical it would’ve been in South Korea under fresh snowfall, a new bloom of self-hatred opens inside her. It’s nearly a garden now, reeking and tangled as she fantasizes about Olympic glory while her peers bob facedown in the water.

Her knee is skinned to shiny meat, but she rests her forehead on it, savoring the sticky sting all the way through her body. It might be the last thing she feels, so why not indulge in it?

Covering Rina’s toes with her wet slippers, Tiffany extends her hand, and Rina recoils so hard she knocks her head on the wall.

The actress, who said barely a word to her over the last month, drops to a squat and curls her hand around Rina’s head. “You okay? I know this can’t be easy for you.”

Rina didn’t let the best skaters in the world touch her when she couldn’t remove a warped blade guard, so she shrinks away from Tiffany’s touch. Rocking to her feet, she thanks her and starts away, eyes to the floor.

“Would this help?”

When Rina swivels around, the local actress slides a mini bottle of Southern Comfort from her pocket and dangles it in her face. “I found it in the kitchen right there. Plenty more like it too. Must’ve been Harlan’s secret stash.”

Rina desperately wants a drink. She had sips of champagne here and there growing up, but in contrast to the rumors flying around the park, she never had more than that before the night of the accident. She never craved it, never thought it was an easy way out. It was all a mistake, exacerbated by the fight she’d had with her parents that night. She told them she wanted to go to college, but they wouldn’t even discuss it. Her life was skating and competition. Her life was gold. Her life was theirs.

Sensing her hesitation, Tiffany laughs. “I don’t think you’re gonna crash any cars down here, honey.” She apologizes but doesn’t look like she means it. “I’m just saying.”

“I wish you hadn’t.” Rina pushes past Tiffany to the kitchen, but the actress follows close behind.

When Rina opens a random cabinet, Tiffany giggles.

“You really got a nose for it, huh? That’s where I found it,” she says, twisting off the cap. “Hand me some more, would ya?”

Reaching past a stack of paper towels, Rina discovers an incomplete pyramid of mini liquor bottles.

“We’re going to be stuck here a while. Come on. Help me make the best of it.”

Rina passes the SoCos to Tiffany and shakes her head. “No thanks. Being drunk off my ass when we’re rescued probably isn’t what I need right now.”

Tiffany laughs. “You say that like you actually think we’re getting out.” Spinning on her toe, she dances to a moldering sofa that spews squelchy debris when she flops down. “Don’t you know? We’re all gonna die down here.”

“What makes you think that?”

Tiffany laughs as she twists off another cap and lobs it like a basketball into the scummy sink. “Well,” she says after a guzzle, “if this was the first time, I’d say sure, Ms. Fell needs as many of us to survive as possible. She would still be able to salvage her reputation. But there’s no coming back from this. She failed on Wall Street, she failed at the family business, and now—” She drinks the rest and hurls the bottle at the sink, narrowly missing. “Dang!” She opens a tiny gin and sniffs cautiously. “Anyway, she doesn’t plan on surviving, so why should we?”

“That’s a bleak outlook.”

Tiffany lifts her eyebrows. “Did you see the same shit I did? All those people? All those dead people? And that storm… it… ” She drinks the gin and shudders as she swallows. “It was alive. It was… fuck, I don’t know, some kind of monster.” When Rina stares blankly, Tiffany rolls her eyes. “Anyway, don’t tell me that you, a disgraced Olympian, want me to look on the sunny side. That ain’t happening, sister.”

Rina wipes sweat from her brow and it stings; she must’ve cut her scalp. With a wince, she sits beside Tiffany on the crusty couch. “I thought you didn’t believe in monsters.”

“I said I don’t believe Vic.” Swinging her gaze to Rina, she says, “I absolutely believe in monsters.”

“Okay. So what do you think she saw when she was a kid?”

Tiffany shakes her head. “If we’re getting into this, you can’t make me drink alone.”

Rina sighs as she opens her palm and Tiffany slaps on a mini whiskey. Twisting off the cap, she says, “Bottoms up,” and takes a sip. She gags and coughs, and Tiffany smacks her on the back.

Leaning back, the actress huffs. “Look, I have no problem admitting I wanted to work here, but it was just because of my mom. I wanted to play the part that made her career. The part that… ” She rolls her focus to the ceiling and shakes her head. “I wanted it, okay? But I almost didn’t audition at all because of the rumors about Ms. Fell. She went crazy after the Ghost, started telling people her father was an impostor.”

Swallowing another mouthful of whiskey, Rina flinches. “Why would she do that?”

“He fell out the northern exit,” she says, having too much fun as she jumps her fingers off the imaginary cliff again. “Right into the bay. I guess she thought he was dead or swept out to sea, cuz they didn’t find him after. Not until a few days later when some hikers found him on the beach.”

“You’d think she’d be happy he was alive. Why would she say he was an impostor?”

Tiffany grabs Rina’s shoulders, howling as she shakes her, “Because she’s crazy! Why else would she reopen this hellhole?” She shoves Rina a little too hard and the girl tumbles off the lumpy couch with a shriek.

Someone shouts from the main corridor and footfalls echo in crescendo. Ben jogs into the break room, his face flushed with fear when he asks Tiffany, “Everyone okay?” But the fear vanishes, sours to a twitchy pit, when he sees Rina.

She hides the mini bottle behind her back, nodding as she stands and dusts off her gown.

“She’s fine,” Tiffany says, joining her side. “Though she’s much more of a lightweight than I would’ve thought, especially for someone who carries around little baby boozes.” She kicks an empty bottle and winks at Ben.

“Me? You’re the one who found them!”

“Well, yeah, after you told me you held onto a bunch during the storm. That was pretty impressive. All those people getting killed and you held onto your booze.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Look! She’s trying to hide one right now!” Tiffany tugs on Rina’s arm, exposing the half-consumed bottle, and the skater’s face burns in humiliation.

Ben forces an amiable smile. “It’s not a big deal. I was coming to check on you anyway and wanted to make sure no one was hurt. And the break room down the way is in pretty good condition if you want to join us, Tiff. Better digs than this. Bunkbeds, cots, the whole nine yards. There’s even some bottled water from the 90s.”

“Thanks, but I’m gonna stay with Rina a little longer. She needs all the support she can get right now.”

Rina’s brain boils with baffling rage, but she keeps her head down, her hands clenched, until Ben’s footsteps disappear.

“Not that this comes as a surprise to you,” Tiffany says as if replying to a conversation taking place in her mind. “She’s doing stupid crazy things all the time.”

Jumping to her feet, Rina shoves herself in Tiffany’s face and backs her against the sink. “What the hell was that about? Why did you lie about me?”

She bats her large blue eyes. “Lie?”

“The bottles! Why did you tell him they were mine?”

Tiffany cocks her head and furrows her brow in puzzlement. “Tell who, honey?”

The cut on Rina’s scalp aches when her nostrils flare. She backs away, suddenly overcome by nausea. For a moment she thinks she’s still in the car after the accident, her swollen head bobbing on her shoulders and dust rising from the busted airbag. Tiffany’s image doubles before her, and she stumbles to the side, bracing herself on a wall decorated with a massive cartoon of a smiling sun.

“Help!” Tiffany screams. “We need help!”

Someone shouts from the main corridor, and footfalls echo in crescendo. Ben jogs into the break room, his face flushed with fear when he asks Tiffany, “Everyone okay?” But the fear vanishes again, souring to a twitchy pit just as it did the first time.

“We were just talking and it looked like she was going to pass out,” Tiffany says.

Ben helps Rina to the couch, where she flops forward on her lap and hangs her head between her knees. “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not drunk. I swear I’m not drunk.”

“Of course you’re not,” Ben says, patting her back. “Where the heck would you find booze around here?”

When Rina lifts her head, Tiffany is crouched in front of her with concern etched into her expression. The bottles and caps she’s been tossing haphazardly around the room are mysteriously absent, along with the one Rina was working on.

Rina grips her head and whispers. “What’s happening to me? I feel like I’m losing it.”

“Hey,” Ben says, catching her focus, “we’ve all been through a lot. You’re hurt, you’re probably dehydrated. Why don’t you join us in the break room, Tiff, and let Rina take some time for herself?”

“Thanks, but I’m gonna stay a little longer. She needs all the support she can get right now.”

Ben shrugs and leaves the room, his squelchy footsteps again fading into the distance.

When Tiffany sits beside her, Rina buries her face in her hands. “I don’t understand what’s going on. Was there never any alcohol?”

“When? During your accident?”

“No! Today! Right now, goddammit!”

“Okay! I’m sorry! Jesus Christ, Rina, I don’t know what’s going on with you.” She grunts. “I hate suggesting this, but maybe we should get you to Ms. Fell.”

“I thought you said she was trying to kill us.”

“What? No!” Tiffany laughs and throws her arm around Rina’s shoulders. “No, no. I just think she’s not going to save us — if it comes to it, I mean. But I’d completely understand if you do want to go to her. Hell, maybe I even understand why she chose you over me for the part. You’ve both been publicly disgraced. You’ve lost everything.” She hums as she stands and looks down on Rina. “Now that I think about it, you probably don’t want out of here any more than Vic does. I mean, what do you have to go back to? I know your parents kicked you out.”

Rina doesn’t answer. She can’t. Her gut whirls with such incendiary acid, she feels like it might spurt out in a skull-dissolving geyser if she doesn’t lock her jaw.

Tiffany closes their distance with a smirk. “And I know what you want. More than anything in the world, I know you wish you could go back to the way things were — back to the ice, back to the team.” She crinkles her nose. “I can help with that, you know.”

Rina scoffs, her rage shrinking into laughter. “How? Your mom? The first Princess Papillon? If she couldn’t get you the part you wanted, what makes you think she has the sway to help me?”

“My mom’s dead.”

Rina drops her gaze and mutters an apology.

“She died down here, actually. In the first Ghost. The first Ghost anyone here remembers anyway.” She giggles and shrugs when Rina meets her eyes. “At any rate, it’s not about sway. People get that wrong all the time. It’s not even about who you know. It’s about sacrifice, Rina. Are you willing to give whatever it takes to restore order and joy to your life?”

Tiffany’s voice is deeper now, silkier, and her lips move with such deft subtlety, she could have a side hustle as a ventriloquist. The voice seems to come from all sides, echoing, dizzying Rina as she whispers, “Make a wish. Anything. Something big, something small. Make a wish.”

Holding her swirling stomach, she grunts. “Fine. Get us out of here then.”

Tiffany lifts her eyebrows and beckons Rina into the main tunnel. When she places her hand upon the wall, the structure changes, softens, and pores open in the concrete, amalgamating and forming a large dark portal.

Rina approaches the hole cautiously, hand outstretched, and a salty breeze sucks on her fingertips. She pulls back, panting. “Jesus. What is that? Where does it go?”

“You only said ‘out.’ You should really be specific next time.”

“But how—”

Tiffany’s smile drops suddenly, and sorrow creases her brow. “How isn’t important. Rather, why. Why would you want to leave, Rina? This, like many paths out of here, leads only to a life of loneliness and regret. The path before you will continue to crumble and rot, just as it has since the accident. There’s nothing out there for you. No one waiting. No one missing you. You’re a brat. You’re a drunk.”

“That’s not true.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Labeling you is easier than letting you explain, and your gigantic fuck-up makes people like me feel better about my failures. That’s how America sees you, how they’ll always see you.”

Rina’s heart thumps madly in her breast. Tiffany Law is annoying. She’s bitter and sardonic. She can even be vicious if she’s backed into a corner, but she’s never been so cruel.

“You’re not Tiffany.”

She snorts. “You sure about that? You don’t actually know me very well. Or anyone, really. You don’t have any friends, Rina. Or family. Or prospects. This was all you had, wasn’t it?”

Rina’s hands are cold and trembling, and the apprehensive knot she used to able to ignore on the ice feels like a fist twisting up her guts.

“I can give you what you had and more, Rina Bestler. I can help you find your way back into the spotlight. Whatever you want, it’s yours. If you’re willing to pay the price.”

“What the hell are you?

Tiffany sighs as she saunters into the kitchen. “Harlan called us ‘hyperia;’ it was better than a lot of the names we’ve gotten over the centuries. He didn’t want to make sacrifices at first either, but he realized soon enough it was in his best interest. In everyone’s best interest. But he wasn’t strong enough to handle it in the end. It’s a balance: sacrifice and success.” With a nose-scrunching grin, Tiffany spins to face her. “But you know all about that, don’t you? It’s why you don’t have anyone. You understand what it takes to be great. It takes loss. It takes independence. And the hyperia enjoy rewarding that.”

“I don’t understand. What did you do to Tiffany?”

“Tiffany couldn’t handle the price,” she says. “She wanted to be Princess Papillon just like Mommy, and we would’ve given it to her if she’d been able to deliver.”

“Deliver what?”

She hisses through a chuckle. “You, of course. The prized part in exchange for bringing you to us. We made the deal on the day of her audition, while she was walking the beach, just like Harlan did all those years ago.” She looks up fondly, lips pursed. “But she obviously didn’t have the guts for it. So we let you keep the role and took a different payment.” She opens her hands, and thunder shakes the tunnels, dropping debris on Rina’s head. “But we still demand a real sacrifice. A human to appease us. Blood in the bay. Do that, and all your wishes will come true.”

Rina hardly believes it when the words, “Which human?” leak out her lips.

A grin consumes Tiffany’s milky face and she wheezes in amusement. “Oh, I think you know who won’t be missed.”

Hatred blooms for new reasons now. From the rotten garden in Rina Bestler’s soul, weeds spread like cancer, coiling around her heart until only one unblemished spot remains. It’s the part of her that put on skates because she wanted to, the part that pored through college catalogs and dreamed of an entirely different life, the part that was overjoyed beyond belief when Victoria Fell took a chance on her. It’s small, but the fact that it’s there after all the mandatory rehearsals, competitions, and collisions means it’s the strongest part of all.

She says, “No,” and Tiffany’s face falls dead. It doesn’t even twitch before her hand flies to Rina’s throat and closes tight. She pushes Rina through the kitchen, but the skater wraps her fingers around a cabinet handle at the last second and rips the door off its rusty hinges. The force jostles both women, and Rina reels around with the door in hand. When she smacks Tiffany in the face, the ice-blonde stumbles backward, babbling, and covers her cheek. There’s no blood, though. No bruising. But when Rina drops her hand, the nest of white crustaceans in her skull writhes in screeching fury.

Rina screams, tripping over her feet as she retreats backward, and crashes to the floor. The wounded hyperia drop like sloppy pearls from Tiffany’s malformed head, but other areas of her body lose integrity too. Her shoulder slopes, then dissolves into scores of tiny arthropods that skitter down her legs as she clumsily advances. More and more hyperia fall with each step until there’s nothing left of Tiffany but her voice. Like mimetic shrimp, they’re copying her still as they cluster in corners, flood over cabinets, and from all directions chant, “Make a wish, Rina. Make a wish.”

Trying to track them dizzies her so much she has to lie down. Covering her ears, she yells to drown out Tiffany’s voice, but it’s on the inside now, and it has friends: steel slicing ice… the soft smack of rose petals hitting her boots… a crowd cheering her name… and then silence. Even when she uncovers her ears, she can’t hear anything. She screams but can’t hear her own voice. She smacks the floor and can’t feel it. She’s numb. She’s broken.

When someone suddenly touches Rina’s shoulder, she jerks as if out of a deep sleep. She gasps for air and stares wide-eyed at Vic and Raymond standing over her.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Raymond asks.

Rina shakes her head, her voice a frantic whisper, and Vic crouches in front of her with a mostly empty bottle of stale water, which she downs in one gulp. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s going on.”

It feels like a brood of cannibalistic moths are doing battle in Vic Fell’s chest, preventing her from speaking in a steady voice, but she’s able to muster something comforting enough to coax Rina into lifting her head.

“We’re here now,” she says, “and we’re not going to let anything happen to you.” It comes so naturally off Vic’s tongue she wonders if one of the rescue crew said it to her the day after the Ghost. “As best you can, tell us what you saw.”

“Tiffany—” The misshapen teeming skull flashes into Rina’s mind and she shudders. “There were things inside her. Or she was made up of them. They started pouring out of her and then… then she was just gone.”

“What sort of things?” Raymond asks.

“I’ve never seen anything like them. Crabby-spidery things with crazy camouflage. Hyper-something.”

“Hyperia,” Vic says flatly.

“Wait.” Raymond lifts his hands. “What are you saying? These are the same monsters you saw when you were a kid?”

“The word ‘monsters’ doesn’t really do them justice,” Vic replies. “Hyperia can imitate anything, and they can give you anything, and they use those powers to convince you to kill people for them. I don’t know why. It seems like they’re pretty good at it all by themselves. They made me and the rest of the world think I was crazy, but they killed all those people. Everyone in the tunnels, everyone in the park.” Vic rolls her gleaming eyes to the ceiling, her chin dimpled in sorrow.

“You mean these hyperia things caused the Ghosts?”

She shakes her head and whispers, “They are the Ghosts. I don’t know how, but what you saw, Rina, aren’t even half of what the hyperia are. There’s something in the Chesapeake, something big along the cliffs, and it’s been there forever, waiting for desperate people like my father.”

Rina’s lungs empty in grief. “Like Tiffany. And me.” She pushes herself up and glares at Vic Fell. “And you opened a theme park on top of it. You knew they were here, and you had us dancing around like fairies and forest animals!”

“I didn’t know they were real!” she screams. “I spent more than half my life believing that I hallucinated everything I saw down here. And even then, believing I invented everything, I couldn’t trust that Harlan wasn’t those things in disguise. You saw how they mimic people. You can’t know. So I left. I put it behind me. I got better. I remade my life.”

“But you still came back here. Back to them!”

Raymond steps between and eases them apart. “How about we just calm down and get back to the others. We can talk this out together and find a reasonable solution.”

Thunder rolls, ferocious, and shakes the earth, knocking the trio to the ground and raising an ear-splitting alarm from the group in the lounge. They scramble down the corridors, twisting and turning toward the lounge, but despite the persistent howling, there’s no one in the passage before the break room. In the break room, either. But blood drips thick from railings and the bunk beds are festooned with sinew, from which glistening hyperia hang like Christmas baubles.

Vic spins out of the room and claps her hand over her mouth, but the vomit comes anyway, spurting between her fingers as she crumples to her knees.

“It’s happening again,” she mutters as Raymond wipes off her face with a scrap of sleeve. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They can take us down whenever they want. Just like that.”

“Yes,” the voices cry. “Just like that. Just like the two dozen people you watched die thirty-five years ago, Victoria. You had the power to stop it then, and you had the power to stop it this time. But you were selfish, always selfish.”

Rina whispers, “Vic—” and the woman peeks around the corner to see lumps of meat and bone sprouting legs and crawling across the floor. They join, grow, and they shift into malformed but seamless amalgamations of her employees. The disproportionate, patchwork bodies shamble toward them, hissing and chanting, “Make a wish! Blood in the Bay!”

Rina scrambles from the room, grabbing Vic by the arm and following Raymond as he races down the main corridor. There are suddenly thousands of hyperia on the walls beside them, a swarm that is sometimes invisible and sometimes a frothy wave, complete with shadows of fish caught up in the tide. The longer the walls resemble the churning bay, the slower Raymond runs. His flesh turns green and he starts wobbling to one side. His knees eventually weaken entirely, and he collapses to the floor in a nauseated daze. When hyperia swarm over his body, Rina and Vic kick and smack them away, but there are too many. They each grab a leg as the creatures begin towing and then rushing his catatonic body to the rusted grate that once opened in the face of Calvert Cliffs. Vic falls when Raymond’s shoe pops off in her hands, and Rina hangs on only a few seconds longer, dragged several feet and scraping up her chest.

Jumping to her feet, Vic screams, “Wait!” and the convoy stops inches before smashing Raymond’s skull into the grate. “Just don’t hurt anyone else and I’ll—”

“You’ll what, sweetheart?”

The tunnel stinks of cologne again, and Rina scrambles away as the source approaches Vic from behind. The corpse of Harlan Fell hobbles to her side and lays a warm hand atop hers, then lifts it to his moldering lips for a kiss.

She grits her teeth as she finally gazes into his pale eyes. “Why are you doing this to us?”

His brow creases and he caresses her cheek with a chapped hand. “Because there is nothing else. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. We can’t wish ourselves away, or we would’ve done it by now, and our powers can only be directed outward. So we do our best to remain… entertained… until our rescue arrives. Your family’s been quite helpful, thank you.” Harlan grabs her chin and pulls her closer with a hiss. “Now, what are you going to do for us?”

Vic pushes away and sucks on her top lip. Looking to Rina, she sighs. “You have to be the one. You have to make the wish. I’ll be the sacrifice.”

“I can’t—”

“I’m okay with it, I promise. It won’t be bad. It’s just falling.”

Raymond stirs when the hyperia begin towing him back to the women, but they aren’t returning him — they’re getting ready to use him as a battering ram. He shrieks and thrashes, and Vic screams for Rina to make a wish.

“I can’t kill someone!”

“They’re going to kill us all if you don’t!”

Rina shrinks against the wall, her mind a whirlpool of life’s biggest and smallest wishes. Which one would make it easier to murder a human being? Would a clean slate or a gold medal really absolve her guilt over killing someone who took a chance on her when no one else would? Even if she wished herself into the perfect life, how could she sleep at night with such an atrocious experience infesting her brain?

Vic grabs Rina’s hands and says shakily, “I forgive you, okay? It needs to end. Raymond will back you up about what happened, and you’ll go on with your life in a way I never could. Okay? Please, Rina. Make a wish.”

The chanting begins again, and the hyperia carrying Raymond begin thrusting him toward the grate. As a ferocious clap of thunder judders the people in the tunnel off their feet, Rina Bestler makes a wish.

“HEY, ARE YOU with us?”

“Pull her away from the edge, will you?”

“No, don’t touch her. Look, she’s waking up.”

Rina moans as she sits up, shivering and aching from head to toe, with a bevy of people in helmets and orange vests staring at her. Once she realizes they’ve come to rescue her, she gasps and throws herself into an older man’s arms.

“Careful, girlie. You’re real close to the edge.”

It’s an understatement. One sneeze in Rina’s sleep might’ve sent her right over, out the hatch in the cliff face and into the Chesapeake. It’s calm now, and the wind has died to a cologne-scented kiss. But the beach is littered with bodies.

Not Vic’s though. As Rina stands at the edge, she doesn’t see her boss’ body, nor does she remember sacrificing Vic Fell to the hyperia — which means her wish came true. Terrified of the guilt, Rina wished to skip forward in time to her rescue, which is precisely where she wakes up. But she also doesn’t remember what happened to Raymond until she spots his corpse broken on the shore, his arm hooked inside the grate.

“What happened here, miss?” one of the EMTs asks.

Her heart races. Raymond can’t vouch for her story now. They’ll think she’s just as crazy as the people who found Vic alone after the slaughter in ‘91.

“Wait, are you Rina Bestler?”

“Holy shit, it is Rina Bestler! The ex-figure skater!”

She wilts to the floor as her rescuers close around her, shouting in her face and raving about the discovery. The noise nauseates her, and her head pounds like a bass drum. Rina Bestler, the former Olympian. Rina Bestler, the sole survivor of the second Ghost Hurricane. Rina Bestler, alone and crazy as hell.

She made the wrong wish. She wasted it, threw it away on fear.

But then the crowd parts, and a familiar face appears between the invasive strangers. Pushing through, Victoria Fell extends her hand to Rina and pulls her free.

“Ms. Fell, you’re alive!” one of the rescuers exclaims. “The police need to speak to you immediately.”

“Of course,” she says. “But first, let me get Rina out of here.”

“They need to speak to her, too.”

“Later.”

“No. Now, Ms. Fell.”

Vic bats her eyes in shock and wraps her arm around Rina’s shoulders. “Well, how about we let the girl decide for herself? What do you say, Rina? Do you wish to be left alone?”

The garden is overrun now, and the strongest part of her withers to dust. Scanning the group of rescuers, she doesn’t see salvation anymore. She sees a gold medal. A college degree. And when she turns to behold the source of the hyperia at the bottom of the Chesapeake, a flashing mass larger than the Fairy Funland grounds itself, she sees the beginning of her first friendship.