Ghost Flesh: The first chapter

(First chapter of Ghost Flesh, available now on Amazon)

I

Into the Mouth of The Monster

People do a lot of things for the sake of making friends, getting people to like them, finding their tribe. Maggie always thought she was better than that. Above peer pressure. So, it struck her how out of place she should have felt in front of the hole. 

It was a jagged cut in the chain link. The sharp edges screamed tetanus, clostridium tetani, lockjaw. She should never have snuck out. She should be home right now reading through her latest book haul, not about to enter an abandoned water park miles from home.

Maggie took a deep breath, savored all the smells of the night. Tried to calm the buzzing anxiety inside her stomach. Still, her mind went down a checklist of all the reasons the knots in her belly were justified. This was trespassing. And vandalism. If she got arrested, there would be no way her mother wouldn’t find out. That one alone would have kept Maggie safe in her room. It would have before she met Sam, anyway.

 Things had changed months ago when she had found Samantha crying in the bathroom before gym. Maggie had never been able to go if someone else was in there. It was a common problem; she’d read up on it. Shy bladder syndrome.  She was no stranger to sitting on the cold porcelain until the coast was clear.

She had been waiting for a full five minutes for a group of chatting freshmen to finally leave. When they left and the only sound was the hum of the fluorescent lights above, the tight clench in her let up. Maggie sighed in relief right before the door opened again and Samantha flung herself against one of the sinks. 

Maggie listened to the other girl sob and was struck by the pain of it. She’d never heard a person sound like that. It was as if something important and special had snapped, and the sound of that snap was Samantha’s awful cries. 

The two were opposites. Maggie enjoyed most of her coursework and took her grades seriously. Samantha was more concerned about making sure she could fit in as many weekend parties as possible. The two of them had known of each other, Scar Bay was not that big, but their circles couldn't have been farther apart. Girls like her didn't hang out with girls like Maggie. 

But it was Maggie she opened up to about being pregnant. Not her other glitzy friends. It was Maggie Sam found herself calling in the middle of the night. It had been her who drove Samantha to the clinic and picked up the pieces afterward. The two had a special secret that forged a friendship neither of them had expected. 

A friendship that had Maggie here, at the abandoned Shireland Water Park. The park used to be a hot spot for the town, well before any of them had been born. It had boasted the longest water slide in the world and had raked in money from tourists every summer. Now it sat like a dark ruin, luring in a very different kind of visitor. 

“Come on,” a nasally voice called out to her from the darkness of the hole. One of Dylan's slender hands extended out into the beam of her flashlight and waved to her. 

“Remind me again why we're doing this?” 

“How else am I going to add my art to history?” The bone-white arm made a flourish.

“And it's cool.” Sam's bell-like voice carried over the fence. “Like smoking.” 

“Oh, and recreational drug use.” Dylan added

“Almost as fun as underage drinking.” 

“You know I hear it is a gateway...” 

“Oh, God. Okay. I'm coming.” Maggie stooped low to avoid the jagged edges and stepped into the grounds of the abandoned park. Fun time attractions loomed out in the desert of overgrowth and broken stones. She could make out what had once been a cuttlefish splash pad to her left. A little further out from it was a rusty and broken penguin. It held two dull blue ice cream cones in each flipper. She figured that they must have come in on the kiddie side.

“Catch, Mags.” Sam tossed her a can of yellow spray paint. “In case you want to leave your mark too.” Maggie flashed her in the face with her light and took in Sam's features in the harsh glow. She had movie star lips and high cheekbones. Combine that with a pair of baby blue eyes and she was your stereotypical high school sweetheart. 

“Blind me already.” She swatted at Maggie's flashlight and pointed her own at Maggie's face.

“Rude.” Maggie backed away and shielded her eyes. She shook the can. The rattle sounded loud in the quiet all around them. “I can’t draw anyway. I can barely make a stick man.” 

“Well, it is yellow, so Pac-Man?” 

“That would be pretty sweet actually,” Dylan said from behind Samantha. He brushed her hair with his fingers and put his arm around her. Maggie's eyes focused on the hand that clutched Sam's left shoulder. At how possessive it looked, how his fingers pressed into her tan skin. Those fingers that had explored every part of Sam's body. Ran across the smoothness of her thighs, felt her breasts, pushed into her...

“Hello, come back to us, Mags.” He laughed and turned Sam around. “You’re so spacey.” Maggie narrowed her eyes at the back of Dylan's head. At first glance, she wouldn't have suspected that he was Sam's type at all. 

Dylan was thin with long red hair he kept tied in a bun. He was an artist and had been responsible for the mural at school. Not the obvious choice for a bottle blond cheerleader, but Maggie had come to find that when it came to Sam, nothing fit in the usual boxes.

When it came to Dylan, Maggie couldn’t stop her thoughts from going dark. Her mother did not allow television, or trips to the movies, and so Maggie spent her free time reading. One of her favorite reads was an old book she had found at a yard sale. Fatal Flora, a guidebook of poisonous plants. She would often daydream of spiking one of Dylan’s fancy coffees with Belladonna or White Hemlock. Maybe the devil’s bell, Datura, with its psychoactive toxin. Or something exotic like English Yew, the seeds of which could cause paralysis and heart failure.  

As they walked past dilapidated game stalls, Maggie entertained herself by wondering what picture the school would use in the yearbook for Dylan when they dedicated it in his memory. Every now and then she would train her light on Sam’s ass. It was a hot September night, as if the last little bit of summer were determined to give a grand finale. Sam had decided to wear the jean shorts Maggie had helped her pick out. 

They hugged her toned backside like a second skin. Maggie had traced Sam’s curves so many times before. Sideways glances and the little moments friends can get away with. Her mouth grew dry.

“Alright, it's just through here.” Dylan stopped in front of the entrance to one of the decaying rides. 

“Oh, hell no.” The giant, yellowed eyes of a squid stared down at them. The shadows created by their lights made it seem as if the tentacles were moving. On the suction cups, someone had drawn screaming faces. Underneath its menacing stare, in still vibrant orange letters, was the word KRAKEN. 

“Yeah! What the fuck, Dylan? You didn't tell me it was in there.” Sam pointed at the opening to the ride, which had been designed as the mouth of the monster.

“Come on, don't tell me you're scared.” Dylan held his flashlight under his chin.

“That's just wrong though.” Sam shuffled her feet and her voice dropped. “People died there.” 

“Whoa, what?” Maggie's voice hitched a little.

“You didn't know?” Sam gave her a look that was part suspicion and part surprise. 

“Yeah, seriously?” Dylan also sounded disbelieving. Maggie was used to being the one out of the loop. She'd never been very social and had missed out on a lot of what most teens would know as common knowledge. She hadn't even known that the town had a make out point until the bonfire last week, which Sam had invited her to.

“Wow, um...Where to start?” Sam bit her lip. Maggie imagined how soft it must be. “Okay. So, this place closed, what? Almost 20 years ago, yeah?” She looked at Dylan.

“Oh, more than that.”

“Well, it wasn't because the place was hurting for money. It was because a bunch of kids died on this ride.” 

“Oh, you tell it so bad.” Dylan groaned. 

“What? They closed the park because like five kids died.” 

“Yeah, but they didn't just die. They were murdered.” His voice turned serious. “And it wasn't five. It was eight. The Shireland Eight. Our own small-town horror story.” He jumped up onto the first step leading to the ride. The loud stomp of his shoes shook the still air. His flashlight became a microphone, the pale light caused his lips to have an unnatural shine to them. 

Sam moved next to Maggie and whispered in her ear, “Should never have let him join the drama club.”

“It was Rodney Crislip, a maintenance man who found the children. He had come in to clean out the filters. There they were, floating in the little pool at the very start of the ride. Seven mutilated bodies bobbed in the water.” 

“I thought it was eight.” He glared at Sam’s interruption. 

“I’m getting there.” Dylan shined his light on each of the faces painted on the suckers of the squid. Four on one side of the doorway, four on the other. “The pieces were later identified as missing kids from all over the state.”

“Police came in and did a sweep of the place. They found Curtis Beringer in a backroom of one of the service areas. He was naked and had his back to the door. He spun around and the police opened fire. They thought he’d had a knife in his hand you see, but it wasn't. It was a hairbrush.” 

“Why did he have a hairbrush?” Maggie felt goose flesh rise on her arms.

“He'd been brushing the hair of a girl's severed head, his eighth and final victim, when the police shot him.” Dylan paused his story, allowed the silence of the night to creep back in. “While some were happy the police put him in the ground, others felt they had acted unjustly. After all, all Curt wanted was a little head.” 

“Jesus, Dylan!” Sam walked up to where Dylan was cackling. She punched him in the arm over and over until he moved farther up the steps. 

“That was tragic.” Maggie kept her face deadpan.

“Oh, come on, that was great and the two of you know it.” Dylan looked from one girl to the other. He scowled and dropped his eyes. “Tough room.”

“Alright, can we get on with it?” Sam moved past him and into the mouth of the Kraken. “Come on, Picasso.”

Maggie's body is no longer her own. She feels the other inside her as it reworks her flesh and twists her form. Something in that darkness pulls at her, begs her to slip into it. To give in and give up. Can her friendships, her loves, pull her from that abyss?

Ghost Flesh deals with body horror and possession. It is soaked in forbidden passions and secret desires. At the heart of it is the darkness that threatens to swallow everything in its hunger, and the soul of a young woman beset by a want she's never dared to name. Can her only friend save her from that malignant dark?