Jacqueline returned to Wick's modified roadster with one dirty crystal dangling from a waxed cord around her neck but lacking a sacred bug that the god Anubis had tasked to bring her to his deathbed. It did not, on balance, seem like a fair trade. She could not believe that she had made the exchange. She only accepted that it was inherent to the act and the day and consciously allowed it. She saw no other choice presented to her.
Flying directly into the sky did not seem like the worst fate for a scarab. They navigated by the light of the Milky Way and had wings, so they deserved to be considered creatures of the sky. She could pretend that the beetle had not died and was only buzzing about in search of a juicy pile of dog shit on which it could retire. Instinctively, she knew this wasn't so, but it supplied her with some mental balm.
The scarab in Howe Caverns had sacrificed itself for her from what seemed to amount to a clutch of bad vibes that had flicked off lights. This action was threatening, but Jacqueline could not say it was a direct threat against her. In stories, a dragon mostly wants to be left alone. They don't conspire and plan against knights, only react, more animal than anything. Who could say how intelligent this nebulous persecutor had been?
So, she was left with two scarabs and two companions, all essential to the mission, none of whom chose to be straightforward. It was likely that this too was the nature of mystical quests initiated by gods -- or at the bare minimum, their purported children. She had never been on a mission before and hoped this would not be anything she needed to repeat soon, though she could not deny the novelty of what had otherwise been tourist traps and a diner. This was not the worst way to spend a Saturday outside the inevitable destination.
There had been no such caginess when it had come to her mother's death. The doctors had been forthright to the degree of bluntness. Their complete want of bedside manner had been a relief. It did not force on Jacqueline the agony of false hope. She and her mother had been able to plan for the death and make all arrangements well in advance. Her mother was pragmatic until the end of her time, suffering hospice in a house that now belonged to Jacqueline. Her mother wept then, begging for the burden of so cruel, so banal a death to be lifted from her near-skeletal shoulders for a little longer. Could Anubis have affected some miracle, a reprieve granted from his godly aegis in lieu of eighteen years of missed child support payments? Jacqueline would have accepted that even if it was only worth a few years (she did not know the equivalent exchange rate of dollars and life).
She banished the idea. Her father hadn't done this. He may not even have known that her mother had sickened and died, though Jacqueline would have kept tabs on the mother of her (only?) child. He was a death god, after all, the one who kept the scales and weighed the dead's heart against a feather. She didn't see how that would have permitted him to reverse the course of mortality.
Now, Anubis was dying, a notion stranger (and far more ridiculous) than her father dying, even though the two had always been one. How a god could die was beyond her, though it should not be by nightfall. She had too few hours until dusk and so the sure knowing.
Jacqueline held her Herkimer diamond necklace to her eye and watched the lines on the road rush by in their titanium brightness.
"Oh." A kaleidoscope. Now, what the hell did that mean?
Wick took her syllable as a reason to ask, "Do you know where next we should go? The location of your father?"
"Why don't we ask Mica? Or the scarabs?" Her tone was tart. Her direction brought them to two destinations, but it had only once been hers alone. She held a grudge toward Mica for consulting her book without asking them. She couldn't be upset at the scarabs because, well, they were bugs. Sacred or not, they weren't much of conversationalists. She thought Houdini was polite for having ignored her having dropped him into a toilet.
"Do you believe they know the next location?"
"No," Jacqueline said, almost in unison with the tagalong steward, though the latter was more emphatic.
Wick would drive until she answered, though it would not be in a necessarily helpful direction.
The diamond could be the fruition of the kaleidoscope, or she could be reaching for guidance. As a kaleidoscope, her necklace was poor. That seemed to fulfill something, but brought her nothing beyond more distance from Cairo -- though they could be back there in under two hours if they did not stop for pee breaks.
"I want," she began, daring the forces of fate to finish the sentence. Before her, she saw the sharp plummet of the hill, "a rollercoaster."
She did not know how they would accomplish this efficiently, but Wick flicked his turn signal at once.
Sylvan Beach Amusement Park was not much to look at. Jacqueline could not even say with confidence that there had been some heyday long ago where this was a vacation destination, where families from the Catskills mistook this for Coney Island. It might have passed for a decent carnival to stumble upon in an erstwhile empty field, but it could not pass muster as an anchor for the tourist trade. It occupied an enviable location on a finger of a peninsula into Oneida Lake, but it was dubious that it took in enough dollars to justify it. There were a few rides -- including the requisite rollercoaster -- and a game or two on the midway staffed by teenagers too busy trying to score baskets to notice them. Sylvan Beach could have been fun if she were a small child who had not seen better.
Still, it was an amusement park and so smelled of suntan lotion and cotton candy, the respective slicks of engine and deep fryer oils. Jacqueline had not been to an amusement park in over a decade. She had missed it enough that she wouldn't have been sorry if she went no further than this, no matter how humble she found it.
Standing before Sylvan Beach, the first pang of regret for how this day must end shot through her limbs. Her father had never brought her to something like this, never blew tens of dollars trying to win her a teddy bear, and never waited for her outside the teacups. She had no reason to associate him with this amusement park directly, but she imagined the memories they could have shared if he had given a solitary damn about her before his death. Would he try some sage words to ease his conscience? She might gag if he did.
Her mother had needed Jacqueline, who slowly increased the morphine until the world floated away, had needed Jacqueline to die well. Jacqueline had played off this overdose as a tragic accident, but it was not a lie if both knew it as such. It was a mercy that Jacqueline hoped never to need to exact twice.
Her father could die on his own, as well or poorly as he needed. She could not see how he could need her. Her aggrieved tears at hearing of his death years hence would not fill a thimble. He was a god and must have a subsidiary mythic figure, brother god, follower, or acolyte to twist the metaphorical (or perhaps literal) morphine knob. All Jacqueline had was half his genetic charge -- and possibly a connection with a dwindling number of insects (which was not the sort of gift she could lean against).
She granted her father only a share more compassion than she would a stranger on their last day. Let it be as painless as possible and not involve her more than it must.
"You're dour," said Mica, having no trouble reading Jacqueline's unmasked expression. "Let's focus on this, right in front of us. Rollercoaster first, or do we get fried dough or--?"
"We just ate," said Jacqueline, startled by Mica's sudden, almost childlike delight at being surrounded by not-entirely trustworthy rides and an arcade with claw machines.
"We ate nearly an hour ago, and absolutely none of that was fried dough, fried Oreos, fried Twinkies, fried Snickers, or anything else in the fried food group."
"Fries potatoes," reminded Wick.
"No one asked you," said the steward. "So, fine. We won't get french fries, you spoilsports. That doesn't begin to touch the sheer variety of unhealthy options I assume the law must require this place to offer."
Jacqueline studied the rollercoaster across the park, but not far. "Yeah, I wanted a rollercoaster. Let's go there first. Get this over with."
She turned back to Mica, who now had a corndog in one hand and a giant pink soda in the other.
"How?" Jacqueline demanded.
The steward nodded toward a yellow-painted stall with neon piping.
"Did you pay for that?"
Mica snorted. "You are tense about money. You know that it's imaginary, right? It's based on nothing but our good feelings. Once, yes, it could be directly traded for an amount of gold in a treasury. Even gold only has value because we decided it does. Otherwise, it is a soft, yellow metal that isn't good for much without adulteration."
"Aside from microprocessors and magic," added Wick.
"I thought that went without saying. So, given all that, how can it matter that I now have a corndog?" She slurped some soda through the straw as though as punctuation.
Jacqueline didn't care for this twisting of logic, especially its threads that were true, if only on a technicality. "The people you stole it from might care. It affects them."
"They drop or burn more than one corndog a day without it ending up hurting their bottom line. And the soda? It's fizzy water with a splash of unhealthy syrups and dyes. And half of its volume is ice. Their cost for it is, like, a penny. Not even."
"You can't steal."
Mica's eyes went wide at the accusation. "I didn't steal anything! I would never do such a thing. That nice boy gave it to me." She waved at the late adolescent behind the glass, who waved back after a confused moment.
Jacqueline doubted that they had time to parse this out further. "Can we just go to the rollercoaster?"
Mica finished the corndog in a few bites, washing it down with a hearty draught of the soda. She wiggled her nose at the fizziness and gave a burp far smaller than seemed to fit either situation or woman, tossing the rest of the cup into the trash.
The Galaxi Coaster was not the worst coaster Jacqueline had ever seen, but it had a level of ricketiness that was impossible to ignore from the ground. It was not the sort of structure that should belong to an established park, more like something assembled by carnies out of K'nex, blue struts and red chipped tracks. She would go on it because it was part of the quest and because she had watched a few circuits of other parkgoers, none of whom seemed irreparably damaged when they left their cars at the end of the ride. It was unlikely that it would stop in the middle of the ride, and, even if it did, the coaster didn't even have a loop. One took a wide corkscrew, tolerated a few hills less threatening than the ones they had taken to get here, and were returned to the depot in fewer than two minutes. If there was guidance to her father for her, she couldn't see it, but perhaps she wasn't meant to until the act was completed, or why bother doing it in the first place?
"You don't have to go on this," Jacqueline said to Wick, whose impassivity might have taken on the mildest green tinge of nausea.
"Damn right we will," said Mica, speaking only for herself.
She proffered her hoodie toward him. She could not trust that she would not accidentally squish her two remaining scarab beetles and trusted him to keep them present and intact for the duration of the ride.
Wick was not ungrateful for the excuse. "I prefer more solid ground."
Mica urged Jacqueline toward the front cars ("The view is much better when your brain gets scared you are about to kill it by dropping from height"). It did not seem a much more fatal position than the backmost seat, plus it had the added benefit that she would only see her doom for a moment before it happened. If one sat in the back, one had that fraction of a second of watching the rest of the ride plummet into the unforgiving ground.
Though the corkscrew felt milder even than it looked, Jacqueline's lunch still reminded her of its undigested mass. She closed her eyes tight. When she dared to open them again, the ride having reached the straight and narrow, the crystal necklace hovered in front of her face for only as long as it took to show itself to be an impossible contradiction of gravity. It twisted a little, fixing on the Ferris wheel before dropping back onto her shirt.
As signs went, she could appreciate a rock that lacked ambiguity about where to go next.
The Ferris wheel had eighteen gondolas, each painted a different shade, though it bothered Jacqueline that they had not been painted according to the color wheel. It would have been so simple that its lack seemed intentional. The day was still sunny, but the wheel's bulbs glowed so brightly it was as though they tried to contradict this natural light with their own.
"This was not here when last I visited," Wick said, peering up to the top.
Mica joined the angle of his face. "When was that?"
His eyes closed in concentration. "1991."
Jacqueline's gaze pinioned over him, doing the math and finding the product nonsensical. "How old are you?"
"Old enough," he answered simply, which was far from answer enough.
The three were directed into a gondola by a man lazily smoking by the controls. Once their door closed, he jerked a lever until the next came to be filled.
As they rose on their first circuit, Oneida Lake glittered. It could have passed for a sea, so far away was its western shore. As they descended once more, Sylvan Beach Amusement Park reintroduced itself, shabbier for the moment outside her direct view.
The Ferris wheel reached its apex for the third time before shuddering to a halt.
"Oh, are they already letting people--?" but Jacqueline could not let herself finish the question. The stop was too abrupt to have been the fault of the ride operator.
They were trapped hundreds of feet in the air, at the mercy of whatever had broken the machine. She knew that this "Whatever" had to be the same that had stalked them in the cavern. She did not know what it wanted beyond that it must want her.
Jacqueline peered over the side. The wheel was bolted to the pavement beneath, fortifications driven into the ground to stabilize it. The Whatever would not knock it over. This was an electrical issue only.
Jacqueline considered how athletic she felt. Junior gymnastics had not prepared her to treat the struts of this machine as parallel bars. She had no confidence that she could climb down without slipping. Why wouldn't the Whatever start the Ferris wheel soon after Jacqueline left the gondola, effectively dropping her to the ground? She did not know that the Whatever wanted this, but she could not assume the neutrality of something that had trapped them, to say nothing of benevolence.
To Jacqueline's frustration but not surprise, her companions were not bothered. Wick looked around as though wondering whether it might rain. Mica wore a smile that she barely managed to suppress when Jacqueline met her eyes.
"Suggestions? Some sort of spell that will get this thing started again."
"Seance," Mica answered without pause. "Figure out what it wants. Convince it that it wants to be less of a bastard. Negotiate on the ground, if possible."
"Don't we need--?"
Mica reached into her bag, candles and a lighter in her hand before Jacqueline could finish.
"You know how to hold a seance?"
"I spent some time in Cassadaga, sister camp to Lily Dale, down in Florida. Not enough that they would certify me as a medium -- that takes years and mentors who do not find you bothersome -- but I picked up enough from the genuine ones. I bet I can give a damn good spirit session right now."
"So, you've done seances often?" asked Wick.
"Oh, never before, but what better time?"
Mica slipped to the gondola floor, lighting the candles, dripping wax on the seat, and sticking them where she had been sitting. Jacqueline was not thrilled to add the possibility of this car catching fire, but it was unlikely that two candles no larger than her middle finger would ignite rigid plastic and metal seats.
The steward tugged the cuff of Jacqueline's pants, directing her to sit on the floor. Had she not spent an hour playing in the dirt, this might have seemed unsanitary. Not that she wouldn't still do it -- there were more significant issues afoot -- but she knew the ship of her being immaculate had sailed hours ago. Though, she thought, anyone who came out of a road trip spotless hadn't done it right.
Wick needed no tug to join them.
Mica held out her hands, Jacqueline and Wick taking them without request. That much of the protocol of a seance was obvious.
"Okay, good. Keep holding hands, close your eyes unless you need not to do that, think peaceful thoughts, do not ask the spirit silly questions, accept what they tell you."
Mica's rules were simple enough to be obeyed but too simple to have the illusion that this was something mystical and authentic. If this worked, then every sleepover session with a Ouija board did.
"They do," Mica assured Jacqueline. "Every time the girls believe it enough. Then Becky -- it was always a Becky with me -- would get lippy about her doubts, and the rest of us wouldn't want to be seen as suckers, so we would pretend we didn't think anything had happened. The whole thing would fall apart, having given some ghostie or elemental a set of spectral blue balls. But it worked for then and will work better for us."
Eight minutes of handholding passed with Mica only saying, "Spirit, are you there?"
Jacqueline's palms were sweaty. She doubted she could resist much longer the urge to break contact so she could wipe her hands on her pants.
Mica opened one eye. She heaved a breath, deciding something. "So, hey, I was at a bar the other day, and there was this guy there, McGregor."
"Is this relevant?" asked Wick.
"McGregor," repeated Mica, "pounding shots like a drowning fish."
"That simile doesn't make sense."
"It's a turn of phrase," said Mica. "Are you going to let me tell my -- I promise -- relevant story or keep interrupted? Because we probably shouldn't be wasting more time while we are prisoners."
Jacqueline motioned for her to continue, though with visible skepticism.
"So, McGregor pounds a shot and says, 'I built an orphanage, but do they call me McGregor, the Orphanage Builder? No!' Pounds another. 'And I saved the orphans from a fire, but do they call me McGregor, the Orphan Saver? No!' Another shot. 'And I taught some of those kids to read, but do they call me McGregor, the Orphan Teacher? No!' He sipped this shot, wincing the whole time, burning look in his eye, holding up a finger. 'But you fuck one sheep...'"
Their gondola was so silent that the creaks and groans of the metal, the nervous mumbling of passengers in other cars, drifted up to them in a chorus.
Wick held a blankly serious expression. Like cracks along a dam threatening collapse, obliterating the land below, a smile spread his lips, followed by so deep and sonorous a laugh that even the worried people below them quieted to hear it.
Jacqueline doubled over giggling. Not at the joke -- she had heard better, though never in weirder circumstances -- but how infectious Wick's laugh was. Even people who could not have listened to the punchline snickered without knowing why. Mica's own Devil's smirk bore bawdy satisfaction.
"Give me your hands again," she said. "Now."
Jacqueline wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand, Wick laugh quieted now, quick breaths, but not yet leaving him.
"Spirit, we call on you. Reveal your purpose."
The candles flared behind her, the air dropping ten degrees, the sun dimmer around them.
"Are you here because of Jacqueline? One knock for yes, two for no." The Ferris wheel groaned once as though the hot metal had dropped into liquid nitrogen, the gondolas swaying such that it reminded Jacqueline of her rollercoaster nausea. Mica had better make these questions count, or the wheel might lose its integrity.
Mica's eyes went wide, realizing this. "Thought it would just tap," she whispered as if only to herself, then to the Whatever, "Are you trying to harm Jacqueline or us?"
The knocks now were closer and, accordingly, harder but came twice, bringing some relief.
"Are you trying to stop her from getting to her father?" Mica tensed for the attack of an answer.
The single knock slammed into the gondola, which could not have swayed more had they been caught in a storm. The drop in air pressure underscored this, Jacqueline's ears popping.
"Well, you can't," answered the steward. "Don't be rude."
Jacqueline looked to Wick to judge how inappropriate it might be to call the entity holding them hostage rude. He had his eyes closed in concentration, unbothered by this remark.
The Whatever was more decisive. What could have been a storm was now a tornado, though Jacqueline noticed that Mica's candle's flames danced madly but would not extinguish.
"Will it hurt me to stop us?" Jacqueline demanded over the din.
"I don't know," Mica shouted back.
"Ask it!"
"Spirit," began Mica, anxious for the response no matter what it might be, "are you willing to hurt us to stop Jacqueline from getting to her father?"
Jacqueline braced, abandoning their joined hands to squeeze the metal bar in the center.
The wind stopped -- not merely died down. The gondola went still. The air remained chill and dry.
Its solitary knock on the pole beside Jacqueline's head used no more force than a toddler's fist but rang like a bell.
Wick squeezed Jacqueline to him. It was not a hug but pulling someone from a raging river.
"Hand Mica the necklace and a scarab."
Jacqueline yanked the former from her neck, breaking the waxed string. She did not pull a scarab out but allowed the one that was not Houdini to flap over to the steward.
"Hate this," said the steward, raising the Herkimer diamond. The nameless bug alighted on her shoulder. "If I had more time with my Codex, maybe I could come up with something suitable, but you just want me to do it and--" she cut herself off, her fingers twitching as though typing a crazed manifesto.
"What will she--?" but Jacqueline said no more, not wanting in her core to know the answer.
Jacqueline had not grasped the distinction between death and not existing.
Something -- Whatever -- surrounded the scarab. Then, in an otherwise inarticulable way, the scarab covered it, surrounded them, even the park. Without anything changing, without even a second, it then did not.
Jacqueline's eyes lost the moment of the scarab. Her mind felt slippery that there had been one.
"It was there," said Mica, knowing Jacqueline's mind. Her voice was somber, even, and unsettling for that.
Mica could say this, Jacqueline understood, because she had lost something to magic that had remained gone.
"Where is it now?"
Mica pursed her lips. "Elsewhere. Something" -- she exhaled through her nose -- "else. Not what it seemed, but what it was to start. It knew what it needed to do better than I could."
The sobriety of the moment passed to fear. "And the Whatever?"
Mica lifted the necklace. The small chamber of ancient water turned a dark opalescence, an aurora through a pitch thunderstorm.
"You trapped it?"
"No. Not me and not trapped," the steward said. "Without more time to prepare, it would have been close to impossible. Even if I had the time, I couldn't guarantee it. But still, contained for now."
She handed it over to Jacqueline, who wasted no time dangling it over the edge, a threat more than she had given to Houdini last night that felt like a year.
Wick snatched it from Jacqueline. "We ought to keep it contained."
"You are not going to let me throw this in the lake, are you?"
"It is safer with us. You are almost to your father. Have faith in yourself."
"I'm not sure why I should, but when in Rome," she said and felt a lurch corroborated by Houdini's buzzing in her pocket.
The Ferris wheel jerked back to life.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
