THE CLOSET SMELLS of mothballs, but it has no clothes, only a couple of cardboard boxes on the floor. I sit on a narrow bench along the back wall and keep my feet out of the way as Lavinia comes in and pulls the little, ratchety chain on an overhead light bulb. She rummages in a box until she comes up with a small black puck. After she sticks a cord into it, plugs it into a socket, and pushes a button, a light shoots up and expands outward in a cone, just like I saw once before in Berg’s office. Lavinia smiles grimly, sets the puck on a box, closes the door, and pulls the chain to turn off the overhead light.
“Move over,” she says, and sits beside me on the bench.
A keyboard of light shines onto Lavinia’s lap, and she types in a command. A colorful, 3-D map of an amusement park appears in the puck’s projection cone, and I can easily read the sign over the main entrance: Grisly Valley. It’s about the last thing I expected.
“Why do you have this?” I ask.
“I designed the original layout for the cameras at Forge when I was there. When I came west in forty-seven, I was head of the team that designed the camera security for Grisly Valley,” she says. “Heard of it?”
“No. Should I have?”
Her voice is close in the closet. “It was a famous horror theme park back in the forties. The challenge for my cameras was much like what I had at Forge, just with a bigger stage and thousands more players.”
“It wasn’t broadcast as a show, was it?”
“No,” she says. “The cameras were all internal, for security. But it was the same idea.”
“What’s this have to do with the vault of dreamers?” I ask.
“I’m getting to that. You’re not the most patient person, are you?”
“Sorry.”
In the 3-D map, intricate buildings, bridges, and waterways are portrayed with striking detail, filling out the lands of the theme park. Five different horror lands lie inside its borders, clockwise from the entrance: Vampyre Graveyard, Zombieville, Backwoods Forest, Bubbles’ Clown World, and Camp High. At the center is a massive stone tower with spired roofs and a moat.
“What’s this?” I ask, pointing to the tower. A dark green dragon is poised on one spire with its wings folded back.
“The Keep of Ages,” she says. “It was the centerpiece for all the parades and spectacles, like the dark twin of Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disney. Or was that Cinderella’s? I forget. See the dragon? It was a wonderfully lifelike combination of puppetry and projections. The special effects at the park were legendary. The effects team was given carte blanche, and I remember when they’d simulate earthquakes and fires all over the park. Floods, too. People were scared witless, which was just what they wanted, of course.”
My gaze is drawn to the signature rides that rise above the treetops, especially the Glue Factory roller coaster, the Fodder Mill wheel, and the End of Daze spiral. “I would have loved this place,” I say.
“You and millions of others. It’s a ruin now,” Lavinia says. “It lasted only nine months. The state condemned it when the meltdown happened at Olbaid. Every acre of Grisly is in the OEZ, the Olbaid Exclusion Zone.”
I’m stunned to think of all that work and creativity gone to waste after only nine months.
“When was that meltdown?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “In forty-eight. Nineteen years ago. Not exactly Chernobyl, but bad enough. The Olbaid Nuclear Power Plant was damaged in an earthquake and leaked high-level radiation for two weeks. Everyone was banned from the area for twenty miles around. Thousands of us had to be moved. Even now, the place is dangerous because it was too costly to clean it up properly.”
“You had to move, yourself?” I ask, turning to see her profile. Her glasses reflect the lights of the projection.
She nods, her gaze still toward the map. “That’s when I came here to this apartment. Me and my daughter’s family.”
She skims her hands over the keyboard on her lap, and the top surface of the map lifts up and hangs in midair. Beneath, the underground routes and service rooms are exposed to view, including a parking lot and a large assembly area. Smaller cells might have been offices or changing rooms. The cafeteria, the main office, the archives, and the tech rooms are all clearly marked. It looks like an entire underground city.
“What was this space for?” I ask, pointing to the biggest room.
“That’s where the parades assembled. It was big enough for full-sized floats. We called this level Negative One.” She points to another area. “This was the costume department. Here, the cafeteria. Special VIP routes for celebrities who visited the park are marked with the green dotted lines, so they could move easily between rides without getting gawked at on the surface. These big half circles here in blue? They’re the moat around the Keep of Ages. These red lines mark the doors up to the ground level. Stage level, we called it. Everything hidden from the public was backstage.”
“Like at Forge,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Same concept.”
The green lines for the VIPs go everywhere, like their own web, and I can easily see how the red lines of the stage level match up with the hidden ramps and stairways in the level below.
“And these—” Lavinia touches her keyboard and a galaxy of tiny blue lights comes on through the stage level of the park. “These are the cameras.”
“Wow,” I say. Each one is a tiny fan shape, showing the angle of its viewing direction, and they cover every inch of Grisly Valley, in some places, many times over.
Lavinia sets the 3-D image spinning slowly, and I stare, fascinated by the complexity of the system, the little buildings and rides. It looks so alive, so vibrant, that it’s hard to imagine the place dead and deserted.
“It looks so fun. Did you ever go?” I ask Lavinia.
“Many times before it opened. Once afterward,” she says. “It was truly delightful in a dark, twisted way, if you like bat wings and glow powder. The Grisly brothers who came up with it were very creative, obviously, but they also had a sense of humor.”
“Who were they? What happened to them?”
“Gone, all three,” she says. “Their assets were tied up in lawsuits for over a decade. One of them shot himself. The second died of cancer. The third went bankrupt and moved away to the Philippines. No one’s heard from him in years.”
“Who owns Grisly Valley now, then?” I ask, curious.
“The state,” Lavinia says. “It bought up most of the property in the contaminated zone. They even stored contaminated cadavers there for a while.”
As it occurs to me now why she’s showing me this, I stare at her dim profile. “You think the vault of dreamers is at Grisly Valley,” I say.
She nods. “It may be outlandish, but that’s what I think.”
“What makes you think so?”
She taps her keyboard so the upper layer settles back down on top of the lower one, and her glasses flicker again with colored reflections.
“The park is supposed to be shut down like all the rest of the OEZ,” she says. “Technically, nobody’s allowed in, but people are curious. They sneak in sometimes. I know because I used to see them. I left a few cameras behind, off the grid. Simple, solar-powered cameras to satisfy my curiosity. I used to see kids trespassing now and then. A few old hippies, too. Harmless picnickers, really. Then, one day, maybe seven or eight years ago, I noticed a truck pull in.”
She taps her keyboard again. The 3-D map recedes, and the projection of a flat screen comes forward into the same space. It shows a grainy, black-and-white film of a truck driving slowly around the potholes of an old road. It passes near the camera and Lavinia freezes the frame. “Forge Ice Cream” it says on the side of the truck in clear letters.
But that’s not possible, I think, dumbstruck.
“Seems a little odd that someone at an abandoned theme park is ordering ice cream, don’t you think?” she says.
My mind’s racing. “Linus and I had a theory,” I say. “We never knew for sure. But we thought human bodies were being delivered to Forge in the freezer compartments of those ice cream trucks.”
She doesn’t bat an eye. “Shortly after I saw that, all of my cameras went dead except for one,” she says. “This one here, out by the road. It’s practically useless.”
She shows me a view of a deserted, overgrown road. It could be anywhere.
“Did you tell anybody about the ice cream truck?” I ask.
“What would I say? That I kept illegal surveillance cameras going on Grisly Valley? That I was concerned about unorthodox deliveries?” She straightens back and folds her arms across her chest. “Since then, there’ve been rumors the park is haunted. People say the lights and the rides go on sometimes when nobody’s there.”
“Do you believe them?”
She shrugs. “I’d like to get some new cameras back on the property. That’s what you can do for me.” She runs her fingers over her computer, and some grainy footage of the road starts playing.
“If the vault of dreamers is at the park, down in one of those big rooms, someone has to be living there, taking care of them,” I say.
“That’s possible, as long as they’re doing it in secret,” she says. “It’s the perfect place, really. It’s officially off-limits, so anything could happen there.”
As it starts to sinks in, I get a prickle of anxious foreboding. This could be it. The vault of dreamers could be right there, a few miles away, at Grisly.
“You never went to look and be sure?” I ask.
“No. I didn’t want to,” she says. She pauses her footage on the view of the lonely road, then backs it up and starts it forward again, slow motion. “But now look at this. This was from this morning, just before dawn.”
A pair of headlights comes slowly into view. Details are hard to make out, but the vehicle has the shape of a delivery truck. Lavinia freezes on it.
A sick feeling turns in my gut. “My family could be in there,” I say.
Without replying, she fast-forwards through the footage, and half an hour later, the truck comes back out again and passes under the camera.
“That’s all I’ve got,” she says, her expression solemn.
The timing would work. It’s all adding up. If the vault of dreamers truly exists at Grisly Valley, my family could be hostage there. In fact, a huge number of dreamers could be waiting there, like in the picture I saw. It’s starting to feel real. Dangerous.
Lavinia opens the door of the closet so that air and light from outside can shift in. I blink as my eyes adjust. I expect her to lead me out of the closet, but she stays seated beside me, rubbing her thumb into her palm, as if her hand aches. A faint trace of lemon dust clings to her sleeve.
“I wish I knew why you were here,” Lavinia says quietly.
“What do you mean? Dubbs sent me.”
She shakes her head deliberately. “No. It feels like a giant hand has reached down to shuffle up the tidy furniture of my dollhouse life.” She turns the wedding band on her finger. “My daughter and my granddaughter both died of radiation poisoning after the incident at Olbaid.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Lavinia goes on as if she’s barely heard me. “The cemetery wouldn’t take them. They had a new policy based on ignorance. In any case, I should have buried them myself, back at our old place, but my son-in-law wouldn’t agree, so we sent their bodies to Grisly.” Her smile is both bitter and sad. “Ironic, isn’t it? The horror theme park became a burial ground.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t care to go into the logistics with you,” she says. “I’ll just ask you, once you’re there, to please have respect for the dead.”