Spittoon

I know why the oldest ride at Porpoise Sand Amusement Park is haunted.

The Spittoon has its own ghosts. Everybody knows it. Since the park got going in the seventies there have been rumors of people hearing screams even when there’s nobody in any of the cars. Figures loitering under parts of the ride that are fenced off, accessible only to staff and the repairmen we send in now and then to make sure the old girl’s running right. Blood dripping down the guardrails, though the riders coming down off the coaster don’t have a scratch on them.

We workers have all seen it, same as the visitors, only we know it goes deeper than The Spittoon or any of the ghosts stories. We know enough that we could petition to have the place shut down, if we thought it’d get us anywhere. As it stands, all the serious incidents are spaced out enough that the big boss pays off any victims and the press until the story fades away, and people buy up those entry tickets, just as eager as they were before.

Money’s kept a lot of things quiet in the park, but there’s something else, too, keeping it up and running. Porpoise Sand looks out for itself, and those of us still working here know it all too well.

See, we’re a small town, and the park is small, too. Still, come what may it carries on.

Here’s an example for you. There was a fire in 1992, some kids fucking around with lighters and gasoline. Snuck in by night and went hog-wild setting coasters and snack stands up in flame. The park should have been done for, after that, but somehow there was enough cash to get it built back up and reopened in just a couple of months. Hell, it seemed to grow back, almost, the rides pulling themselves up out of the ashes faster than the workers could put them back together.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it was true. Things move around in Porpoise Sand. Just last week there was an issue where the Tide Pool kept switching places with the Big Heron, which is way off over on the opposite side overlooking the ocean, and so tall that folks use it like a North Star to find their way from one end of the park to the other.

Sometimes customers will say they enter tunnels in the aquarium and come out at the bottom of the Coastal Coaster, feeling wind through their hair and up their t-shirts from riders booming overhead, kicking their legs in their seats.

The park likes to play with people that way. Even us workers get caught up in its tricks, only we’ve learned to ignore them and go back to where we’re meant to be without a word.

We don’t talk about the park’s ways while we’re on the grounds. When you do things just get worse, like a kid being told ‘no’ when it’s doing something bad. Get any of the workers talking outside of Porpoise Sand, though, and you’ll get more tales than you cared to know.

Even before I ended up working there I’d heard how it was. My uncle did a stint at the park in his twenties, and when he got going sometimes he’d get strangers sitting down to listen.

Most of his stories were the usual stuff about The Spittoon: how he’d seen torn-off limbs scattered on the track from a kid that had died there in the 90s, still showing up like he’d been killed yesterday, or how a guest swore to him a girl had poked her head out from under a moving car like she was holding on underneath.

But Uncle Jonny’s best story was about one of the mascots, Henry the Hammerhead Shark.

Porpoise Sand has about ten different characters that wander round the place at various points in the day. Some of them are blatant rip-offs from kids’ movies, changed up just enough that the park doesn’t catch a lawsuit.

Henry was one of the true originals, though. Even these days the face on the mascot suit looks a little crazy, the eyes kind of crossed, the open mouth just a tad too dark on the inside, but back when Uncle Johnny was working the park Henry looked downright scary.

Still, kids seemed to like him, so there was a rotation of staff members they’d dress up and send off around Porpoise Sand for regular photo opportunities. It wasn’t unusual for one of the workers resting in the break room to end up sharing the space with someone suiting up or getting out of one.

That was why when Uncle Johnny was interrupted on a coffee break by Henry bending down to get the long head of the suit through the door he just laughed and said, “Is that you in there, Bobby? They’re working your ass off lately. Can’t wait to get that thing off, I’ll bet.”

‘Bobby’ only looked at him and sat down in one of the plastic chairs set up around the room, the black eyes of the suit staring off at nothing—this was before they put whites around the pupils to make him a little friendlier looking in the modern redesigns.

When Uncle Johnny started talking he couldn’t tell if the guy in the suit just couldn’t hear him or if he was ignoring him for some kind of comedy bit; Bobby was always joking around, so Johnny wouldn’t have put it past him to pull something like that.

But the suit just sat still for so long that it was starting to get to Johnny. Nobody wore their costumes off-duty for long if they could help it, even for a prank. The risk of heatstroke was just too high, and though it was tough to get fired from the park nobody working there was financially stable enough to take that chance.

Uncle Johnny started thinking it wasn’t Bobby in that suit, after all. He wasn’t sure it was any of the other staff he knew, and something stopped him from asking.

“You alright?” he said eventually, and the Henry suit turned its head to him, but didn’t speak.

Maybe the guy inside was sick, Johnny reasoned, but he knew the second that thought was in his head that it was something else. That the park itself was screwing with him, or maybe both of them; he just didn’t know how yet.

“Need some water?” Johnny asked, getting up to go to the fridge. “I’ll get you some.”

He walked behind the Hammerhead suit and inspected the zipper on the back of its neck. Then as quickly and quietly as he could he pulled it down, wanting to see who it was inside if only from behind. To know that they were just another human being, probably hot and weary and confused.

But all my Uncle Johnny saw inside that suit was a bunch of candy in brightly-colored wrappings, spilling out through the open zipper onto the break room floor. Every bit of that mascot was stuffed with it like a jumbo Piñata, and still the head of the costume turned to stare at Johnny as though there really was somebody inside.

“What did you do?” I remember asking the first time my uncle told me that story.

Johnny shrugged.

“I just zipped him back up, made some excuse and got out of there. Never did see something like that again. At least not so bad.”

“Didn’t you keep working there after that?”

Uncle Johnny grinned and crushed his empty beer can against his knee.

“Sure I did. About a year or so I stayed on there. Had to. Somebody totalled my car pulling out of the staff parking lot. I had to keep on working there till I could afford a new one. The park has a way of keeping people around just as long as it wants to, I’ll tell you that much.”

Now, you’d think hearing a story like that I’d stay as far away as I could get, but jobs are few in this town, and by the time I was twenty and hard up for work I’d started to convince myself that Pauper’s Sand couldn’t be as bad as people made out. Maybe everybody was in on some kind of joke, making up stories so they could all be a part of the local myth.

That’s how most people end up there: either they don’t believe the tales, or they tell themselves they don’t.

I was only a month into life at Pauper’s Sand when I started seeing little pieces of its behaviour.

It began with guests telling me things they’d seen or heard there, and expecting me to do something about it. A lady told me she’d heard a baby crying in the Hall of Mirrors, seen it crawling around and couldn’t get to it—I had to tell her we didn’t have a feature like that anywhere in the park, not since it got built over in ’82.

Then there was a kid that said there was a dead woman’s head floating in one of the tanks in the aquarium. Or an old fella who’d come running over, choking on his asthma pump to let me know that there’d been a teenage girl run over crossing the tracks of the Tiger Shark Train, that she was still walking around with bones sticking out of her.

Of course I’d go and look—the customer’s always right, and so on and so forth—but by the time I’d turn up there would be nothing there to see.

“Must be the heat,” I’d say to the stuttering customers, and I’d give them a bottle of water on the house and send them on their way.

Maybe I seem a little cold, telling it back, but it’s not that. The thing was, I’d seen most of the things they talked about and more.

The girl that old man found on the tracks had died at the park six years back: I’d spotted her face in the newspaper, beaming in her Homecoming dress, the fabric as blue and shiny as one of the park’s porpoise balloons. The woman in the aquarium had climbed into the shark tank the previous summer, thinking somehow she had a connection with the animals, and that they wouldn’t hurt her.

The whole area was shut down for months, coyly reopening after some other tragedy in the local news came up and made people forget.

What I believe, based on talk with other park workers and my own observations, is this: when Porpoise Sand gets bored it makes things happen. Maybe a coaster will stop working right, and there’ll be a crash or collapse of equipment that’ll badly injure or even kill someone, just for something to do. But on top of that the park puts ideas into people’s heads, ideas they wouldn’t have otherwise come to. Stupid ones like sticking their hands where all the signs us staff nail up tell you not to, or climbing down into the fenced off areas of the park where it’s easy to get hit by a moving carriage, or where something will swing down and crack your head open.

Onlookers to these incidents always say that the folks that wind up dead here get a funny look on their faces before it happens. Sometimes it’s like they’re sleep walking, like nothing’s home behind the eyes anymore. With others it’s like they’ve realised something awful, and they know the second that thought gets started that there’s nothing they can do about it, no one they can tell.

Then either they get caught up in some accident or they put themselves in the path of one, or IT does. The park, that is.

When people say that there are ghosts here I think they’re only half right. Porpoise Sand has its eye on who it takes from the second they get through the door. Watches them, toys with them. Lets them have their fun for a time before it takes them.

See, what I think it’s doing is making them a part of it—maybe not their souls, as in any conscious part left of who they were, but their likenesses, even parts of their personality so it can play at being them the way the workers do in their mascot suits.

That’s why even the people that survive this place end up here as its ghosts, the hand of the park up inside them like a puppeteer, making them do whatever it wants.

Whenever it decides to put on a real show, however, you can count on The Spittoon being the main stage every time. That’s the ride people really come to visit, not only for the highs and lows of the track, which certainly there are plenty of, but out of the morbid hope of seeing one of the dead or maimed people that appear along the way.

The ride is built around a vast set piece, starting inside a huge model whale and spinning out of its mouth in elaborate loops until you come to land in an open clam shell, where the guests woozily disembark.

The whale has the same goofy, unsettling eyes as the old mascot suits; though the paint gets a touch-up now and then they never did change the design, which is so iconic by now that there would be an uproar if it was ever updated.

Sometimes the eyes move, or the tail of that big old fish changes position. Once, while I was collecting lost property to take to its official desk, the mouth of that model shut over me with a bang so loud that I felt the ground quiver underneath me, and I had to go down a trapdoor into the workings beneath the coaster to get out.

Once I was up top again I noticed there were no hinges on the whale’s mouth for it to have moved from its original position, or without severing the tracks, but I’d heard them come down alright, stood in the darkness of that model, even thought I smelled the reek of dead fish and ozone before I found the exit.

Shit like that happens to staff working on The Spittoon all the time. You learn to keep people with you, hang in groups of at least two whenever you can.

Back in the day my cousin and I usually ended up on the same shift. We were both around twenty, twenty-one, and still closer to being kids than grown-ups.

“I still can’t believe your dad lets you work here, man,” I said to Lyle towards the end of that summer.

Lyle smirked, looking just like his old man.

“Guess he sees it as like a right of passage thing,” he said. “Plus when people quit working here they kind of stop believing in everything, after a while.”

I thought of the first time I’d seen the head in the tank and let out a snort.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nah,” said Lyle. “The park does something to people after it lets them go. Makes it stop feeling real anymore.”

“Okay, but what about all the dead people? And the people who got all fucked up?”

I watched Lyle hang up t-shirts in the merchandise store, shaking out the wrinkles.

“I mean, sure, there’s a ton of them,” he said, “but they’re spread out. The numbers are about equal to any of the bigger parks.”

“But that’s my point,” I said. “Porpoise Sand isn’t that fucking big.”

Lyle’s eyebrows went up so high they just about jumped off his forehead.

“Isn’t it?”

I looked away when he said it. Even now I can’t seem to figure out if there really is more space in the park past the front gates or if, like a lot of things in Pauper’s Sand, it’s all an illusion. The fucked up kid doing magic tricks again.

“You haven’t seen the craziest part,” said Lyle. “I figure you’ve been here long enough now that I can show you.”

He went to the door of the store and stuck his head out, watching the last straggling customers wander off across the park.

“Show me what?” I asked, and when Lyle pulled his head back in he was grinning.

“What’s under the ride.”

I’d known that there was a space beneath The Spittoon itself, having been down there myself a few times. There hadn’t been much in those tunnels then but hidden machinery and the beams holding the ride in place.

But when Lyle took me down there I knew that it’d all be different. It was a feeling you got when the park was playing with you, like somebody’s standing right behind you, only no-one’s there.

There were flickering lights on in the entrance tunnel, but no sign of the bulbs overhead or the mechanics that made the whole ride function. The underground system appeared to have been dressed up to look more like a haunted house experience, or what you’d see on either side of a ghost train.

There were skeletons in pirate hats clutching splintered chests, the bloated remains of dead fish that stank like they’d been pulled up from the bottom of the sea a little too long ago. It all looked real, or at least as real as anything the park let you see ever was.

“It’s doing the shipwreck theme again,” said Lyle. “Usually does when this place is here.”

He said it casually, but I could hear the fragile edge in his voice. Even he knew not to let his guard down. Stuff had happened to the workers, too, now and then. The ones that couldn’t keep their cool. That the park decided had to go.

“How did you know, dude?” I asked as we picked our way cautiously over sandy floorboards, shrugging off dubious water droplets from overhead. “How the fuck did you know this would all be down here?”

Lyle gave a small, cocky shrug.

“I heard it, earlier.”

“Heard what?”

But I already knew. As we’d been walking I’d been able to hear music floating in and out, some weird, ambient type stuff that was probably a disused track made for a park attraction and never used. Over the top of it was a thick, sporadic thud separated by gaps of silence, like a massive pipe expanding.

“What’s that knocking?” I asked.

Lyle gave me a sheepish look.

“I’ve never hung around long enough to find out. Let’s see if I do this time.”

Now and then there were quick motions on either side or up ahead of us, like people running or reaching out from the walls. I tried not to look. That’s what you did when the park was trying to spook you; if you made out you weren’t paying attention whatever it was doing would go away, mostly.

Still, I kept thinking that maybe the people the park kept with it might be more than just ghosts, that it had taken the material of what they were and had made them into something horrible. Something real.

Lyle and I stumbled over the decaying acrylic models of grinning dolphins and angler fish, cursing as the lights on our phones showed gooey lumps of meat or molten candy in the holes that had been broken through the casing. There was an old-school diving suit leaning against a barrel I looked at a little too long; the head turned, and as Lyle and I shot past it the body toppled forward, its head coming off to show a writhing fist of seaweed underneath.

“Fuck,” I said. “Let’s go back, man. We screwed with the park and now it’s screwing us right back. I don’t want to end up down here for good.”

“Just stop looking at it,” said Lyle. “The sound’s getting louder. I think whatever it is, it’s right up ahead.”

Sure enough, there was a brass door in the opposite wall that made me think of early submarine models. I knew that we were both idiots to have gone down this far, suicidal to even think about heading any further in.

But we both wanted to know what it was down there, why the park seemed to like The Spittoon the most. Everybody wanted to; we were just the first workers with enough balls and idiocy to answer our own questions.

I don’t remember if it was Lyle or me that opened the door, or if it was both of us, shoving at it together to get it back against the wall.

What I do remember is that I was the one to go through it first into the space beyond.

I didn’t go far.

The room was like a scene half remembered from an old movie—something about the off, tilted angle of the floor, the weird bluish light filtered through a porthole into a sea that wasn’t there.

Chains had been strung from the dripping ceiling, and it was the pulling and loosening of them by some invisible mechanical function that had created the thudding Lyle and I had heard on our approach. Or, rather, it was caused by what was on the end of those chains.

The metal links were hooked through the bodies of a hundred dead men, women, and little kids, some through their faces, others through their guts or gashes in their chests, tearing off strips of meat each time they drew taut. Barnacled crabs and scrawny sea birds picked at the fallen meat in the dark, or else sat back, chattering in wait for more as the bodies were yanked up and down, up and down

Each time they fell the cadavers splayed heavily on the floorboards like dolls. Then up they’d go again on the chains, their limbs flapping, useless in death. Sometimes the fall would happen slowly, then it came faster and faster as though there were angry, impatient hands on the other end of the iron lines.

The sound of it was like a colossal heartbeat, I thought in a sick kind of amazement. Lyle and I stood watching, struggling against the same horrified lack of words.

“Lyle,” I whispered.

He opened his mouth to say something back, but then through that room there was a rush of stagnant air that turned rapidly into a roar.

Without caring to investigate what it was my cousin and I both turned and bolted back to the outer park again.

The ride, Porpoise Sand—it let us go.

‘Boo’, I imagined it saying. It really got us, that time.

“Why hasn’t anybody torched the place?” I asked Lyle once we were back out in the open air, collapsed on two benches a good mile away across the park.

Lyle pulled his cap down over his eyes. I was impressed that he had kept it on all the time we ran.

“Remember those kids years back?” he said. “The kids with the gasoline?”

“Sure,” I said.

“They threw a canister down there under The Spittoon. It was fucked up afterwards. What was left was like a burned up arm sticking out of the ground. One of the old timers showed me the pictures. Next day half of it had come back, good as new. They hadn’t even hired the workers to start fixing it yet. You want to try setting that thing on fire again, go right ahead. It won’t do a fucking thing.”

*

Having listened to me this far you’ll be wondering why I’m still at the park, after that, working just as hard as I always have, and keeping my head down way further than I did when I was still green and eager.

Well, I tried to quit, first right after Lyle and I went under The Spittoon, and several times later on. Every time money troubles hit me where it hurt, then, when I kept trying to get out, something worse.

After two years of fighting to quit my mother got sick. Early-onset dementia, the doctor told us, the same thing that had killed my grandmother when I was a little kid, and now was starting on the woman that had raised and loved me all alone.

I couldn’t seem to get a job outside Porpoise Sand, nothing that would pay enough to cover my mother’s medical bills and hire staff so that she could still live with me at home. Pay had always been absurdly high at that park, and by then I could understand why.

I’ll keep on working here till my mother dies, or till the park gets hold of another shiny toy and lets me go. But I’ve seen the place deep down under The Spittoon. Was coughed up out of it like a human plegmn, just because it could.

Maybe it’ll swallow me again, someday, keep a piece of me there still, after I’m gone.