Gateway to Hell (at the carnival)

an excerpt from my published novel

(this is an excerpt from my published ghost story novel, in paperback - BY THE LIGHT OF THE CARNIVAL)

Joe shook his head. “No. No. It’s the glass house. She went in and it messed her up, and good. It made her tell crazy stories.”

Ken regarded it. “Ooooh.” He quickly turned to look at the bumper cars.

Joe asked, “What?”

Ken made a sour face. “I saw bullet holes for a moment in the reflection. But it must have been a reflection from something else.” He looked up at it. “There’s no bullets. Was there any lightning? What was that flash I saw?” He looked at the night sky.

Joe slapped Ken’s back. “Gotta go.” He ran to Pinda who was standing behind the Duck Pond. She looked bored out of her mind so he told her everything.

She simply replied, “That makes no sense.”

“There’s something more to that place than it just being haunted by a few lost souls.”

“A gateway to Hell?” She laughed like in a cheesy horror movie. “Everybody throw popcorn!”

Joe made a sour face. “I can’t imagine a gateway to Hell being movable.”

Pinda shrugged like a brat. “I can’t imagine Hell needing a gate.”

“A lot of places have gates.”

“It doesn’t exist.”

“It does too. I should know. I’m a Baptist.”

“The afterlife is not Heaven or Hell. It’s a merry-go-round.”

Joe shook his head to show he completely disagreed. “No, no. Everything is a straight arrow of time. That’s how God made it.”

Pinda twirled her finger. “Everything is a wheel. A wheel of fortune, idiot.”

“Maybe you don’t know everything. Maybe it’s a gate to Hell, and Hell has a gate… and it can move!”

“Suit yourself, if that’s how Baptists like to think. If that’s true, then are you going to tell me that only two people have gone to Hell since World War II, and they got stuck in the lobby or the foyer? And what did that poor woman do to deserve to go to Hell? The sick mob of Nazis should have been in there, just sucked right in, and not her.”

Joe said, “You’re right. Nothing adds up. Does it? So how would a Hindu explain what’s going on?”

“I’d like to set it on fire and give the whole damn thing a proper funeral. Then dump it into the Sacred River. But I don’t set expensive attractions on fire and I don’t have the Sacred River anywhere near me.”

“Our river here isn’t sacred. Is it? It’s nothing more than a really wet highway. So we can’t burn it and push it into our river here. Can we?”

Pinda spat at the glass house. “No.”

“Well you can’t let people go in there. They might get hurt and killed.”

Pinda reminded him, “Nobody has ever been hurt or killed on our rides, not this year yet. Not there. Not hurt too bad… we can’t talk about the bee swarm, that wasn’t our fault anyway.”

“I went in there and I felt like I would die.”

“Then don’t go in there if you’re afraid. So what if you are. I’m afraid of the double Ferris wheel and so I don’t go on that. I don’t even go on the single Ferris wheel. I just don’t like those things. I’m scared to death. But it don’t mean I’d really die.”

Joe asked, “What if somebody dies in there someday because the ghost gets them good?”

“Maybe someday the ghost will move on. No haunted place is haunted forever. I don’t think so.”

“Maybe the attraction will fall apart and be condemned by then.”

Pinda squinted. “Then that’s what’ll be the end of all this nonsense once and for all.”