Scared Stiff Read online

  The only people I could see were the two old men and the woman who had just come out to sweep her little scrap of sidewalk in front of a tiny trailer not much bigger than a car.

  “What’s in there?” Kenny asked, staring at the blank gray boards as if he had X-ray eyes. “Can we ride a merry-go-round? Or the Ferris wheel? Is there a roller coaster?”

  “There’s all of them,” Julie said, “only you can’t ride any of them. They’re shut down.” She saw his disappointment and added quickly, “But there’s a lot of stuff to look at and play on. I sit in the moon rocket and pretend I’m heading out into space. It’s neat.”

  If I hadn’t been so worried about Ma, I’d have been more excited. Still, I didn’t see what I could do except wait to hear from Pa. All my life I’d been told that if you get in trouble, you call the cops. Now we had, and they weren’t going to do anything. Uncle Henry said it was because they were used to dealing with irresponsible people, and there were plenty of them who did walk off and leave their families; the police dealt with so many like that, they assumed everyone was that way. They didn’t know Ma, or they’d be looking for her right this minute.

  I figured I might as well find something else to think about, if I could, and Wonderland was as good as anything. “When do we go in, then?” I asked.

  Julie grinned and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, looking down the road between the rows of trailers. “Well, if we’re lucky, Mrs. Bogen will go off shopping pretty soon. If she does, we can go right away, because she’s the only one who could see us, and she’d tell Grandma for sure. If she doesn’t shop today, though, we’ll have to wait until tonight,” she said. “As soon as it’s dark.”

  “In the dark?” Kenny asked, dismayed. “We have to go in the dark?” Kenny likes to sleep with a night-light on.

  “If we don’t want to get caught we have to go when nobody will notice us. Everybody who lives here is retired, and all they have to do is sit around and watch what everybody else is doing,” Julie explained. “They notice who visits who, and when they go away, and things like that.”

  I could tell by his face that Kenny hoped we wouldn’t wait until dark.

  “Where do we go in?” he asked. “There’s no doors or windows, and the big gate is fastened shut.”

  Julie looked mysterious. “It’s a secret way I found. I’ll show you. As soon as it’s dark. Or if Mrs. Bogen leaves to shop. She drives that little blue car, and it always takes her three or four hours because she stops to visit her sister on the way home. If you see her car leave, meet me as soon as you can over by the laundry room.”

  So we had to wait to visit Wonderland, too. It wasn’t as bad as waiting for Ma to come back, or Pa to show up; but as the day went on I could see Kenny was almost as nervous as he was looking forward to an adventure, and I sort of felt that way myself. When he said he hoped we wouldn’t have to wait until after dark, I had to agree.

  It was hot in the sun, and there were only a few spindly little shade trees, none of them near the purple bus, so we went inside.

  Kenny was hungry, and I looked to see what there was to eat. Uncle Henry sure had different ideas from Ma about food, I decided. There was nothing to make a salad, which was okay; I wouldn’t have made one anyway, but it seemed strange to find the vegetable bin full of kielbasa sausage and baloney and Mars bars. The bread wasn’t brown, like the kind we had at home, but when I made sandwiches out of the baloney and white bread, they weren’t too bad. There were a lot of Mars bars, so I hoped it was okay if we each had one of those, too. Ma almost never bought candy.

  Everything reminded me of Ma. Whether it was the same as she did things, or totally different, it all made me feel like crying.

  What if Ma never came back again? We couldn’t stay here in this old school bus with Uncle Henry, sleeping on a couch in his living room. We couldn’t go with Pa on the truck, with no sleeper space for three of us and having to eat in restaurants and nowhere to go to school or get our clothes washed. Would we have to be in a foster home, then? Or worse yet, go to live with Aunt Susan in Philadelphia?

  Most of my worry wasn’t for Kenny and me, though, but for Ma. I knew something bad had happened to her, no matter what the police thought. The more I considered the matter, the more convinced I was that she’d been afraid of the man in the car, that she’d deliberately sent Kenny and me away because of that. If one of us boys had been kidnapped, she’d be tearing the city apart trying to find us. She’d be yelling at the cops until they did something. We ought to be doing the same thing; but how could we, if they wouldn’t listen to us?

  Kenny was bored, and there was nothing to read that we could find except a stack of newspapers. We’d already read the comics in them, so I finally turned on the TV real low, so it wouldn’t wake Uncle Henry. Several times I looked out the window, but Mrs. Bogen’s little blue car was still sitting there.

  Everything that was on TV seemed stupid. The characters were all grown-ups, and they were very serious and talked about a lot of other people who weren’t there, and they hugged and kissed a lot. I don’t know what Kenny was getting out of it.

  Uncle Henry finally woke up and came out scratching his bare chest. “Time to think about supper,” he said.

  Ma wouldn’t have let us eat that way for very long, but it was good. We had chili out of a can, with cheese melted on top of it, and chopped onions and nacho chips. For dessert there was chocolate-ripple ice cream with chocolate sauce.

  “Tomorrow I’ll get some vegetables,” Uncle Henry said gruffly.

  “That’s all right,” Kenny said politely. “We don’t mind if there aren’t any vegetables.”

  Uncle Henry grunted. I don’t think he usually ate vegetables, but he knew kids were supposed to have them.

  Finally he went and got his blue uniform shirt with the Security Patrol patch on the sleeve and the pocket. He had a gun, too, in a holster. He saw Kenny looking at it, bug-eyed.

  “Don’t you ever touch this, young’un,” Uncle Henry said sternly. “I don’t leave it lying around, but no matter where it is, don’t you kids touch it.”

  “Is it loaded?” Kenny asked in awe.

  “Of course it’s loaded. What good would it be to me if I caught somebody trying to break into one of my buildings and my gun wasn’t loaded? This is what’s most important, though, right here.”

  He patted the cordless telephone he was attaching to his belt. “Call the cops if I need any help. Had to call them once, couple of months ago, when I caught two punks inside the warehouse. I didn’t even let on I saw them until they started to carry out boxes to put in their pickup; I called 911 and just waited until those fellers were ready to leave. Then I stepped out and told them to freeze and held them there until the police showed up. Sent both of them to jail,” he concluded with satisfaction.

  He picked up his uniform cap. “Well, I have to get going. I work a twelve-hour shift, except for Sundays and Mondays when Oliver takes over. I won’t be back till about the time you boys will be getting up, I reckon. Nothing to worry about here, Mrs. Biggers keeps a good eye on everything.” He snorted. “Far as that goes, so does everybody else. Most of them have nothing to do but look out their windows. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When he was gone, Kenny knelt on the couch to look out the window. “How will we know when it’s dark enough to meet Julie?”

  “It won’t be dark for a couple of hours,” I told him. In the next trailer over I saw a man and a woman eating their supper. They looked up and waved, smiling.

  I waved back. It seemed strange to be so close to your neighbors that you could tell they were eating pork chops and baked potatoes and spinach.

  And then, right while I was looking out the window, a lady in a yellow pantsuit came out of her trailer and got into the small blue car and drove away.

  By the time I had relayed that to Kenny, I saw Julie come out of Mrs. Biggers’s trailer carrying a cardboard box and head for the laundry room.

  �
��It’s time,” I said to Kenny. “It’s time to explore Wonderland. Come on, let’s go.”

  Chapter Six

  Julie had unloaded little packages of bleach and detergent from the box she carried and put them into a dispenser. There was a fat lady in a flowered dress waiting for her to finish so she could put coins in the machine, and Julie put a warning finger on her lips behind the woman’s back.

  “Are we going to—” Kenny began, and I clapped a hand over his mouth just in time.

  “We can go out this way, and I’ll get rid of this box,” Julie said when she’d finished, leading the way toward the back of the building.

  Several washing machines were running noisily, and two driers were spinning clothes around. We walked between them and out into the sunshine before I dared take my hand off Kenny’s mouth.

  “What’d you do that for?” he demanded indignantly.

  “So you’d shut up, naturally. If you’d mentioned Wonderland in front of that lady—”

  “Mrs. Giuliani,” Julie supplied.

  “—she’d have known what we were going to do and told Mrs. Biggers.”

  “Or called the cops,” Julie confirmed. “She did that last summer, when Lael was here and we jimmied open the Coke machine. We weren’t stealing, we had the money, only not the right change, and Grandma’s the one who collects it. She would have let us do it if she’d been home. Only she wasn’t here with the key, and we’d been skating and were real thirsty and hot. Mrs. Giuliani is half-blind and a little deaf, luckily, or she’d be reporting somebody for something every few minutes: parking in the wrong place, or a water connection leaking, or music too loud. Grandma groans when she sees her coming. Come on, this way. Don’t talk, so nobody will hear us, and move fast once I get it open.”

  We had gone out the back door of the laundry room into the late-summer afternoon heat. Somebody’s radio was playing opera—the kind Ma liked, I remembered with a lump in my throat—and we were almost up against that tall gray wooden fence, out of sight of anybody unless Mrs. Giuliani stepped to the rear door of the laundry room to see what we were doing out there.

  Julie cast a quick glance over her shoulder, then dug her fingernails into a crack between the boards of the wall. She shoved sideways and lifted outward at the same time.

  A section of the wall—about four boards’ worth—slid aside at the bottom part, leaving a tantalizing opening.

  “Quick!” Julie said, and pushed Kenny through the hole as he gave a bleat of protest at being first into the unknown place.

  She gestured for me to be next, and I followed Kenny. I was bigger; I had to scrunch down because the opening was narrower at the top and I sort of scraped going through. When I hesitated, because even though I was sideways it was a tight fit, Julie suddenly shoved me hard, all the way through. She slipped after me, letting the section of boards fall back into place with a rasping sound.

  Only then, when we heard nothing from behind us and I guessed Mrs. Giuliani hadn’t noticed where we’d gone, did I look around me.

  Wonderland.

  The place was huge. Far bigger than I’d thought from the outside. We were standing underneath a section of roller coaster track that dipped and soared away on both sides of us.

  Beyond, walkways went out in several directions, and even if the park was shut down, deserted, it made prickles of anticipation run through me.

  It had been standing empty for quite a long time, but the paint wasn’t too faded on most things, so there was lots of color. There were trees for shade, and benches under them where you could rest if you wanted to. And there were rides sticking up everywhere: towers, artificial mountains, water slides, and “mine” buildings built over underground tracks.

  The booths were closed, of course, but the signs were still there: Hobie’s Hamburgers, Wonderland Souvenirs, Westy’s T-Shirts and Caps, Jose’s Mexican Specialties, Suzee’s Ice Cream Parlor.

  We walked under the roller coaster, and when I looked back I saw that it was a really big one, and high.

  “Wow!” Kenny said, but he wasn’t looking at the roller coaster. “I wish we had some money!”

  “Nothing’s open,” Julie reminded him, leading the way. “They’ve taken the food and the souvenirs and stuff out. They put side covers from the roof over the cars on the Bumper Buggies, but you can crawl under the canvas.” She headed for what looked like a big tent with a yellow wooden roof and lifted the edge for us to see.

  “Maybe we could get the cover off,” I suggested, peeling back a section of the heavy canvas far enough to display a bright blue bumper car.

  “I never figured out a way to turn anything on,” Julie said. “The main power’s still on; the security lights come on about ten o’clock. But we can’t make anything run.”

  “We could push the cars,” Kenny said hopefully. And then, “What’s that?”

  Julie turned to follow his gaze. “The Splasher? It has cars that run down that steep hill and hit the water in the pool at the bottom. Only the pool’s dried up. Just rainwater in it, and it’s pretty scummy. Grandma says the heirs are idiots; they’re not taking care of the place properly, so it would probably take a lot of money to get it going again. Mr. Alvinhorst—he’s the one with the white beard who has the little trailer right across from us—says the rest of them won’t let the granddaughter who wants to reopen it do that, anyway. They just want to sell to the warehouse people and get cash, and they don’t care about the rides and stuff.”

  I put the canvas back over the Bumper Buggies, because there was too much to see to stop yet. “Where’s that thing you played on, going to the moon?”

  “The Moon Rocket. Over that way. Come on, I’ll give you a tour,” Julie offered.

  It was no wonder she came here, even if it was just to look. There was every kind of scary ride I ever heard of, almost as good as Six Flags. The merry-go-round was inside a pavilion; there were doors on all eight sides of it, but they were closed now, so we could only peek in the windows.

  “I wish we could get in,” Kenny said wistfully. “There’s a pink giraffe.”

  “I like that white horse the best,” Julie said, her hands shading her eyes as she pressed her face against the glass. “The one with the red and gold trappings.”

  “I always liked merry-go-round music,” I said softly, remembering how Ma had stood beside me the first time I ever rode on one of those horses.

  “Me too,” Julie agreed. “Come on, there’s a train station over that way. The track runs all the way around the park, and in one place it goes through a tunnel.”

  We walked past an area where there were bright yellow and green and red and blue and purple toadstools to sit on, and some that were big enough to serve as tables. I could almost smell the hot dogs from the Tinkerbell Kitchen next to it.

  “It’s like Fairyland,” I said. “Only the fairies are gone.”

  Julie nodded. “But it’s still magic. See, here’s the Moon Rocket. One of them’s down on the platform, and it isn’t locked. Two people can sit in it at once.”

  “Me,” Kenny said eagerly, so we stood aside while he buckled himself into the seat and began to manipulate the controls, a big grin on his face.

  It was so interesting that before I noticed, it was almost dark. There were deep shadows forming along the western side of the wall that surrounded the park and inside the closed buildings.

  “Maybe we’d better go,” I said reluctantly.

  “Not without going into the Pirate’s Cave,” Kenny protested. “We didn’t see that yet!”

  “It’s dark in there,” Julie pointed out, pausing at the entrance to that ride. There were little boats—gondolas, Julie called them—floating in more scummy water at the bottom of the canal that disappeared into a mountain of fake rock. “And there’s no moving water to carry a gondola through. We’d have to paddle, and there aren’t any paddles.”

  “We can use our hands,” Kenny begged.

  I looked down into the canal. There wa
s green stuff on the surface of the water. “I don’t think I want to stick my hands in that. Not in the dark. Maybe we can come back with something to paddle with, and a flashlight so we can see.”

  “An old broom would work,” Julie pointed out. “To push us along. And Grandma’s got a big flashlight.”

  Kenny didn’t pay any attention to what we were saying. He ran down the steps to the dock and stepped into one of the little boats, a yellow one at the head of the line. It rocked but didn’t tip over.

  He reached out a hand to the fake rock and pushed off before I could yell at him to stop. By the time Julie and I got down to the dock, he was already heading toward the opening to the tunnel.

  “I can see something in there,” Kenny called back in excitement. “A light!”

  “There can’t be a light,” Julie said, frowning. “The lights are turned off.”

  I stepped down into the red boat that was next in line, and Julie came after me. “Come back, Kenny. Don’t go any farther in there!” I commanded.

  “But there is a light!” he insisted. “Come see, Rick.”

  I didn’t want him to actually get into the mouth of the tunnel. If he did, and kept going, I’d have to go after my little brother. There was no way of knowing how long it would take to come out the other end—if we managed to get all the way through it just by pushing with our hands against slimy walls. Well, maybe they weren’t slimy, but I felt as if they would be.

  It only took a slight push to send our gondola close enough to the yellow one so I could grab hold of the back of it. “Come on, Kenny, cut it out. We’ll come back with a flashlight later.”

  “Look! There it is again, and it’s not very far inside! We can still see daylight behind us, Rick! And I can move just pushing against the wall, see?”

  With that he leaned out and shoved as hard as he could, and since I was hanging onto his boat it pulled both gondolas inside the tunnel.