I used to hear them talking when they thought I was asleep.
“Is it good for her, Gerald? Is it good for a little girl to spend so much time where everything is dark and creepy?”
“She's not a little girl anymore, and it's good for her chances of getting a paycheck someday. There are no jobs, Martha. If she gets work at that park, she'll stay in this town. Our town! You know, where we grew up and fell in love and got married, where we know all our neighbors, where we want to grow old and die?!”
“We're barely making ends meet! If you just went down to the community college, they say they'd give you that retraining for almost nothing. You could get certified to do something, and then you could get a job somewhere else. This place is dying. We could go somewhere there's life. You know, young couples in the neighborhood, people moving in instead of out. How many more years do you think your work'll last? Two? Five? One of our sons got into college, and the other one is a punk musician. My beautiful boy's hair is dyed green and turned into two foot spikes! Two foot spikes, Gerald! That's what living here has done.
“Your beautiful boy just got a record advance he could buy a car with, Martha. He's making a good living, and he loves to play. I've never understood it, but music means the world to him. He got out of here. He played clubs in Chicago, and then it was New York. Now it's an album. You really think our son, the big punk rock guy, is every coming back here except to visit us at Christmas? And his big brother called while you were at the store. He ain't coming back, either. Our boy's going to law school. Law school! He and his brother. They're both gonna be rich, important men. Maybe one'll be a rock star or do a big movie soundtrack. The other, maybe he'll be a great lawyer or a politician or a judge. Besides, that park suits her. Mary Isabelle took to it like Joey-, sorry, Aziziel, the lead singer of Razorwolf Dead, took to that electric guitar.”
“We bought him that, didn't we.”
“Yeah, Martha, that year for Christmas. We had to scrimp and save half the year for it, but he still plays that guitar every night. He's never forgotten it. His tool, his toy, his ticket out of here, that scary-looking thing he calls the Marshfire Rose.”
“That is an awful-looking thing, isn't it, but the smile on his face when he saw that monster-”
“Is a lot like the way Mary Isabelle looks on her way to the park.”
“Are you sure we aren't doing a disservice to her. Sometimes, I hear rumors-”
“Of course you do. It's a “haunted” fun park that's been around since 1889. The owner probably starts half of them to drum up buisnes.”
“Gerald, you moved to this town as a young man. I was here as a child, and, well, strange things happen there. There's an edge here, a borderline, two sides to a coin. Some of these murders lately-”
“A lot of it's the poverty and drinking. Crime's got nothing to do with that park.”
“An ax murderer and a cyanide killer within weeks of each other? Those things you sometimes see out of the corner of your eye? All the maulings?
“Bears.”
“The survivors say wolves, and then we don't see them around anymore. The attacks on the diner by things that look a whole hell of a lot like rotting corpses? Crazy things happen in this town, crazier things around that park.
“Even if they do, Mary's tougher than the boys ever were. Martha, she's a fighter. This is what she does. I doubt we could stop her. Besides,” I found myself drifting off, “he told us he intends for her-” I fell asleep.

“A hundred years! But-but that's impossible. Impossible, crazy, but the deeds don't lie. The house is mine. The house was his and his father's. And Delokgate! I grew up here in Delokgate This place is more home to me than Mom and Dad's house. It was here almost before they'd finished killing the Indians. It says here Von Braun bought the land in 1886 from a farmer, and on this page, in Van Helsing's handwriting, that he was most of the way through drinking himself to death. The man's family was slaughtered by things. And then his wife and daughters kept coming back! Vampires. They came back to him as vampires every night. Then the park opened in '89. I knew that, though.
He was there. He was there, watching the old roller coaster rise, breaking open the crates that held the horses on the carousel. Maybe he accepted the delivery of the first costumes. Maybe he hammered a nail here, kept the books there, sharpened swords. How old would he have been? In '97, he was twenty-two. Thirteen. He was thirteen. He did no worse to me than his own father did to him. Child labor-well, I guess things were different then. Childhood isn't something a man of that time would understand. Could it be true? He did appreciate black humor. Did he play some outlandish prank?
No, that's not like him. Not now. He was just too thoughtful. Seven years ago, when he finally woke up, his first thought was to comfort me even though he was three quarters dead himself. He hung on long enough to tell me to bury his brother. He wouldn't leave a mess, a trick. Besides, the lawyer says it all checks out. He did some quick mental math and turned white as a sheet! This paper has his writing on it, and it's old.
How many nights did he do this? How many times? How many of them did he kill during his long life? There's no way to know. How many years will I be here doing the same thing? A hundred? Two? And does it rub off on the people around me? You've been here a long time, Mrs. Tran, and you haven't visibly aged. Not the whole hundred years, right? But you've been here a while. You said this champagne was set aside for my twenty-first birthday. It looks expensive, but I guess money's not something I have to worry about anymore. Here, have a glass. We'll drink to long life. Here's to our health and to all dead ghost riders. Here's to death, as hard a worker as any that ever rode his-my train. Here's to a good man, finally at rest, and the hope that we'll see him again someday.

Mary didn't mind vampires stopping in for a cup of coffee around sunset or the suspiciously hairy-looking set that would stagger in the night after the full moon and take a couple of tables in the front. As long as everybody behaved and everyone paid, she didn't think their lifestyles were her problem. She never felt it was her place to judge others for their humanity or utter lack thereof. She didn't mind the walking dead. They had the money for good tips. It was the shambling, moaning kind that got to her. She loved her hometown and didn't want to move away, but she already ran her diner under fairly adverse conditions. She wondered if the zombies and revenants wouldn't finally kill her, or her overextended patience.
When the decaying shell of the abandoned factory on the hill had begun to glow green, she told the teenage busboy to leave early. When the smell of rotting flesh drifted down from the rise, she told Ivan that he could head out. He stayed, but he put his knives where he could reach them in a hurry. She called the night manager, a single mother of two, and gave her the night off. Mary called the waitress and short order cook who worked the graveyard shift and told them she was having one of those nights. No one was required to show up. Anyone who did would get time and a half.
She told Ivan to look around for oil, grease, cleaning solvents, anything that would blow up or burn. Ivan nodded his assent. The mouth on his broad face seemed like a vestigial organ. He isn't the kind of guy, Mary often thought, that you'd expect to hear much from. Ivan resembled a boulder, heavy, solid, and low to the ground. If she hadn't known him all her life, Mary would have though he was a big stone that one day got the urge to walk into a restaurant ask for a job. He barricaded the front window with tables. Mary tied up her long, brown waves of hair. The last of the staff arrived. She turned the sign to “closed” and locked the door. They came.
She told Ivan to look around for oil, grease, cleaning solvents, anything that would blow up or burn. Ivan nodded his asent. The mouth on his broad face seemed like a vestigial organ. He isn't the kind of guy, Mary often thought, that you'd expect to hear much from. Ivan resembled a boulder, heavy, solid, and low to the ground. If she hadn't known him all her life, Mary would have though he was a big stone that one day got the urge to walk into a restaurant ask for a job. He barricaded the front window with tables. Mary tied up her long, brown waves of hair. The last of the staff arived. She turned the sign to “closed” and locked the door. They came.

I'm the only techie left from the Majestic's early days. I was hired two weeks after the movie theatre shut down and the place opened up again to show live acts. We had all kinds of people here, back then, and I've got some great stories, especially about the magicians. It was one of those that wrecked the stage back in 68'. The Great Ezmanzeraldo, Magician and Illusionist, had one of the most popular shows. On average, I'd say he cut three pretty girls in half every night. I ran the light board for his acts and we went out for drinks after a good show sometimes. That's how I found out he'd been trying to avoid his wife Trudy for seventeen years.
Trudy was a perfect little hausfrau. She was one of those rare women who likes doing the laundry and having dinner on the table by the time hubby's home. Ezmanzeraldo, real name Joseph Smith, couldn't stand it. She was always badgering him about his tuxedo,ss whether there was something for her to let out or hem or drive to the dry cleaner's. She worried over him when he was sick with aspirin and chicken soup. She never left him alone, never let him be. She called herself Mrs. Joseph P. “Ezmanzeraldo” Smith. In public. He looked for comfort in the flask in his breast pocket and his assistants. She never once raised a fuss. After the house emptied, we would go to a bar. Over my Pabst and his Smirnoff, I would always ask him if he wanted a divorce. He said he couldn't hurt her like that. Besides, he wasn't sure if she could survive on her own.
Anyway, one night, she called him six times in half an hour. The last time, it was to tell him she was on her way to his dressing room with six dozen roses. There wasn't much that needed doing, so I went out to get a pizza for the boss. I got back to find that he had climbed into this steel cage he had, an antique piece he was really proud of, a giant bird cage. It had claws and gilding and filigree, the whole nine yards. That thing was nine hundred pounds before you put the anorexic assistant inside. Well, he hadn't set the lift up right, and because I wasn't there to help, he only used five hundred pound rope. I knew when I saw it I had a disaster on my hands. Lucky for his little woman, he'd made good money as a magician the last fifteen years or so and had one helluva life insurance policy. Trudy became a feminist and was just fine by herself. As the rope broke, he waved at me, smiled, and shouted his last words:
“Cage before Trudy!”

It was almost seven AM on the east coast, and the sun was not so much as kissing the sea as it was slobbering all over it, and the light lit upon die-hard joggers trotting along the shoreline, kicking up dust clouds and dripping perspiration off their noses; it would have been a peaceful scene, with its gleaming seashells and seagulls (who would have been pretty if only they weren't sea gulls) but for the atomic bomb that went off at 7:01 AM.
Major General Howard Cruntz was having a bad day. He was in charge of, among other things, storing leftover missiles from the cold war under a mountain in a remote corner of Colorado. Somehow, a particularly large and powerful piece of Uncle Sam's apocalypse delivery system was aimed at Rhode Island around three fifteen the previous afternoon, or so said the computers. A little before seven, it had somehow gotten fired at the aforementioned state, which was largely obliterated before its residents had any chance to wonder what had hit them. Someone had been horribly, unforgivably incompetent. Apart from any directly responsible parties, whom he assumed would be jailed if not executed or lynched, he knew that someone in the top brass would have to take the blame. Yes, someone's military or civil service career was ruined, and he desperately hoped it wasn't his. It wasn't, he thought as he stormed down a hallway trying to look busy, it wasn't as if I meant to shoot the thing. What has Rhode Island ever done to me? I'm not in charge of the computers. I haven't even looked at the launch codes in years.
He decided that one of the engineers or computer programmers, one of the scientists, had to be to responsible. It must have been one of those egg heads, he concluded and continued down the hall. Most of the computers got their original programing during the cold war, he remembered. Maybe those professors of computer engi-whatever can say someone who's been dead twenty years actually made this awful mistake. I guess people will be angry they didn't fix it, but at least they'll have some kind of excuse. He walked into his office, picked up a ream of blank paper, and stuffed it into files marked “classified” in large, orange letters. He walked back down the hallway, trying to seem like he was doing something to remedy this awful mess.

“Head on home, Cathy. You're mother told you not to say out past sundown until they catch this sicko.”
“We're neighbors, Clyde. I trust you. So does she. I'll go after I help with this firewood.” Clyde grinned.
“Are you sure I ain't what she was worried about?” He raised his ax.

Bobby read his paper in the diner.
“Another cyanide death, John. One of ours. He lived here thirty years, went to Our Lady, drank his usual cuppa Joe here, and collapsed right outside.”
“And yesterday ax murderer got the Greene girl. Crazy times, Bobby”
“Ain't they?”
“You like yours black, right?”

Sixty year ago, the world was turning dark, and, in the Lady's realm, madness spread like a plague and reigned like a king. The people were insane, insatiable, like rabid beasts. Soldiers deserted the Army, leaders forsook their people, and swindlers and thieves patrolled every alley with more regularity than any police or night watch. The world tree's roots were gnawed by an acidic chaos that crept up through cracks between the floorboards of the world. Everyone was drunk. Everyone was high. People, strangers, made a wild, desperate something that cannot be called love openly in city streets. A fragment of the multiverse was dying, as a thousand do every day, and no one but its denizens noticed or cared. Denizens they were, for it was a land of travelers, vagrants, wanderers, immigrants, and refugees, lost souls and ruined people from a million surrounding dimensions. Each searched for success, trying to cut from the fabric of the place a new and mighty self, a personage able to write off past failures as the work of a pitiable inferior and free from the curse of any prior misfortune. Now, they found their lots cast with a dying country.
Some felt cheated and spent their rage pummeling anyone smaller and weaker who happened to come along. Others became resigned to their fate, declared themselves perpetual losers, and finally lost even themselves in the abundance of alcohol that stayed cheap even as the price of food went through the roof because of obscure economic difficulties that only a few of the wizards of the great bankers could understand. The wizards, mathematician-mages, were slaughtered along with their financier bosses before they could do anything to rectify the colossal mess they had made. Some people cried, others quietly hung themselves or left for parts unknown. Many turned to hedonism, violence, and vice as branches of the old ash tree cracked and fell away, forever, into nothingness. The void's un-stomach growled as it laughed at their coming destruction.
Then the trustees, older than the Lady herself, convened and decided that there was no alternative to a cataclysm of biblical proportions which would wipe everything out. Their sorcery would rip the ash out of the ground and throw it into the emptiness of space. Then they would begin anew. These mortal deities had not visited the realm they handed off to a minor goddess in aeons. The roots of the ash tree proved stronger than anyone had anticipated. The trustees decided they would keep the same topography and find an almost entirely new population less depraved than the half-settled nomads, strangers, foreigners, and freaks who were told tho pack their bags and leave. No one particularly wanted to die, so as far as anyone knew, the eviction notice had one hundred percent compliance. Most of the people went quietly off to other places with nothing more than a few good stories to tell, stories their new acquaintances would likely never believe. A few, however, loved their homes. They left to save their lives, but they swore an oath of return.