Bentley Little - The Burning

And all of his sightseeing side trips didn't help.

He toyed with the idea of stopping for a while in some picturesque town and taking a menial job. Janitor or newspaper deliveryman or box boy. In the abstract, the idea was romantic, exciting, and when imagining such scenarios before, he'd always ended up meeting some gorgeous woman or getting involved in some type of adventure. In real life, however, he knew that he would simply be performing manual labor with sullen teenagers in a dead-end community. He needed some way to get money, though. Maybe he'd just buy a lottery ticket. He sat back down on the bed and looked up. The dull yellowish glow of the lamp illuminated a water stain on the ceiling. He thought of his own room at home with its clean walls and modern furniture. It might be a long time before he had something that nice again. He sighed. Right now, even his job at the rental agency didn't seem so bad.

Still, he had that strange nagging sense that he was supposed to be doing this, that there was a reason for this trip. In his mind was an image from the dream that the train whistle had cut short: a walking mountain, a huge hulking creature that stood over a field filled with bloody corpses. The image frightened him but spoke to him, and was reminiscent of that triangular-headed behemoth he had dreamed of before, the one who had beckoned him down the road toward the wall of smoke.

Dennis sat there for a few moments, not sure he could fall asleep but not wanting to stay up. The rug under his bare feet felt grainy, dirty. He listened carefully for the sound of any more trains, heard nothing and, deciding to give sleep a shot, finally switched off the lamp, lay back down and closed his eyes. This time, he had no dreams. He felt better in the morning. For breakfast, he bought a paper cup of bitter coffee from the gas station where he filled up the car, and then he was on the road again, the dejection and discouragement of the night before little more than a memory. No matter how the day ended up, it always started well, and essential optimist that he was, he began each morning thinking that today things would be different.

This time he was right.

He was planning to drive straight through to evening. He still had half a bag of leftover Doritos that would suffice for lunch, and if he could make better time, perhaps he could buy himself a free day down the road. By noon, however, after four straight hours of nearly identical woods and rolling hills, with nothing but bad music and fire-and-brimstone sermonizers on the radio, he was ready for some sort of diversion, desperate for a distraction or amusement that would take him out of himself.

ENTER IF YOU DARE!!

The sign was impossible to miss. Bright yellow against the mellow green of the trees, its letters a shocking red, the sign was designed to attract the attention of passersby. It definitely attracted his, and Dennis looked at the cartoonish illustration of a haunted castle and the name below it: the keep. His mood brightened considerably, and was boosted even more when he saw the big red arrow up ahead pointing to a small paved parking lot and a series of old wooden buildings. A plank fence in front of the buildings was painted like a castle wall, with names of the exhibits within displayed on fake windows: The Haunted Skeleton, The Petrified Tree, The Noose of Justice, The Garden of Natural Wonders.

It was a tourist trap, one of those roadside attractions he'd heard about, read about and seen in bad horror movies but had never before encountered in real life. He pulled into the parking lot, swinging into a space next to the entrance. The only other vehicle in the lot was a beat-up red pickup truck in the corner. Dennis assumed it belonged to the proprietor. He got out of the car, stretched his tired limbs, breathed deeply. The air seemed heavier and more humid than it had when he'd been in the car and moving.

The entrance to The Keep was through a gate in the fence that was open and made to look like a drawbridge. Behind it was the largest building, and Dennis stepped inside a shabby gift shop filled with printed T-shirts, novelty knickknacks, polished-rock bookends and crappy children's toys. A tired-looking older woman with incongruous Jackie O. glasses sat on a high stool behind the cash register, working on a crossword puzzle book. He walked up to the counter. "I'd like to see The Keep," he said.

"One dollar," she told him without looking up. The price was definitely right. He withdrew his

wallet, took out a dollar bill and handed it to her. The woman's eyes met his for a brief second, and though he didn't think about it until later, the emotion he saw in them was fear. She pulled a purple ticket from a large roll, tore it in half and handed him the stub. "Right through there," she said, pointing. On the far wall was a painting of a castle, in the middle of it a real door.

"Thanks," he said. He walked over, pushed open the door and found himself in a darkened room. Fluorescent lights sputtered to life as the door closed behind him, and on the floor he could see several large pieces of drywall with what looked like Indian carvings on them. Two long tables on either side of the room were host to a variety of pots and grinding stones. But the focal point of the room was a built-in alcove covered by a clear sheet of glass. Behind the glass, propped up against the wall was a skeleton.

Dennis walked over to the alcove, peering in. He had no doubt that the skeleton was real. The bones weren't clean and bleached like the ones in movies or Halloween displays: rather the skull was cracked and yellowed, the ribs chipped and deteriorating, the legs and arms dirty and discolored. On the wall above and behind the figure were painted the words The Haunted Skeleton, and below that was a short description of how the man who had discovered this intact specimen in a river cave had died under mysterious circumstances, and how the succession of subsequent owners had all come to bad ends. The paragraph concluded, "Although it has been behind glass and has not been touched since entering The Keep in 1999, the proprietors will sometimes discover that the skeleton has moved on its own in the middle of the night, and more than one customer has returned to reveal that they have had nightmares about the skeleton and have seen its image in their own homes! Believe it or don't!"

Dennis smiled, kept walking.

He passed through a series of rooms in the connected buildings he'd seen from the parking lot, most of them filled with local Indian and pioneer artifacts. In the last chamber, which was larger than the others and had a much higher ceiling, there was a full-sized replica of a gallows. A worn thick-roped noose hung from the center beam, and text on a laminated board attached to the adjacent wall read, "The Noose of Justice. This was used to hang Niggers and Kikes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when those outsiders threatened to disrupt forever the idyllic life created by our forebears... ."

Dennis looked away from the words, glancing back up at the noose. He had a queasy, unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was shocked and offended by the blatantly racist description, and he felt more than a little uneasy when he considered how far out in the middle of nowhere he really was. He thought of that one lone pickup in the parking lot.

If he disappeared, no one would know where he was. His body might never be found.

Niggers and Kikes.

He'd left his cell phone in the car.

Dennis looked again at the description. There were a lot of militia groups in Missouri, weren't there? For all he knew, this little tourist attraction was a front for some white supremacist organization.

He suddenly felt the need to get as far away from here as possible. He considered doubling back the way he'd come, but those dark rooms filled with old artifacts and that skeleton in the alcove now seemed a lot more sinister than they had, and instead he pressed ahead and walked outside to the Garden of Natural Wonders. This property was much bigger than he'd originally thought. According to the small hand-painted signs that pointed toward three diverging paths, the Petrified Tree was off to his right, the Ancient Indian Burial Ground was straight ahead, and the Olde Faithful Geyser and exit were off to the left.