“Seriously, your mom lets you come here?”
I’d never heard of this Carnaval Midway. You didn’t need to be some kinda social worker to see this was a place bad kids went. And the Foster twins? Add Manny driving us to Carnaval Midway with Mrs. Foster’s blessing as the latest entry to my list of things that were not adding up.
My shoulder still hurt from my near-death experience three nights ago. The always-nocturnal little troll, that being me, figured it would be easy to sneak into the unlocked garage at three in the morning. But I didn’t realize the door was set on kill. It trapped me, quite seriously coming within a few seconds of crushing me, before Ellis came bounding into the garage in his jammies to do a heroic Six Million Dollar Man rescue.
Did I mention the jammies? I was shaking with adrenaline. I mean, I was no weakling. Once upon a time, I was even one of those little girls who almost made the Olympic gymnastics team. Nearly killed by a heavy door! Did I say, Thank you, remarkably strong young man who stopped the door with one hand? Did I offer even a simple word of gratitude?
“What in God’s name are you wearing?”
His outfit was another product of Mrs. Foster’s demonic sewing machine. It came down to just below his elbows and knees. Stitched in brown flannel, and obviously something that had been made for him when he was much smaller, the boxy shirt top had these huge, soft fake buttons sewn onto it. He looked like a human Mickey Mouse who’d had a growth spurt in his sleep.
Funny thing was, after risking my life, the secret hideout garage was a letdown. Ellis had weights and shit like that. Ellen, clearly a science type, had a bunch of old TVs on a workbench. Her “lab,” Ellis said, but no further details. It didn’t matter. The mom was so insanely protective, she had them do their hobby-stuff in the privacy of a garage.She had some serious problems…but then she lets them come here?
Was it because Manny was going to protect us? Hell, no. He parked near the back of the lot and put his Los Angeles Racing Herald over his face for a nap. And the twins bounded out of the Durango like it was broad daylight at the beach.
It was pretty much dark but it didn’t take much light to figure out the Carnaval Midway crowd was, to be nice, a bit rough. Tank tops, worn jeans, greasy hair, tough guy attitudes – and they seemed to move in packs. The three of us were noticeably younger and, I thought, totally out of our element. The Carnaval Midway gate was well past its prime, lit up nicely, but just going through the motions. You could easily see the old name of the park, Merryland, directly underneath the sixty-watt light bulbs spelling out Carnaval Midway. And even a poor reader like me knew they didn’t bother to spell it right. There is no “I” in Carnaval.
Some of the guys (they outnumbered the gals) noticed us. I was really jittery about Ellen’s promise that we would get in for free. They had slipped the leash and were up to something.
“Guys, I have money. It’s just twenty bucks to get in.”
They ignored me. Ellis walked away from the entrance and toward…I knew not what. I followed Ellen’s example of staying close. We stopped for absolutely no reason I could see at one of those green cylinder-shaped buildings. It was about twice the size of a portapotty. Maintenance was its name, and it was our destination. No doubt in my mind: Ellis was going in.
“So,” I said. “You know they pay highly trained men good money to go in places like this.” No real response from them on that, and with a closer look I could see that the narrow wooden door leading inside hadn’t been opened in a long time.
“Here’s how we get in,” Ellis said in the totally adorable way he had of saying things that both didn’t make sense but were also obvious.
“So that’s a false door, right?” I asked.
“Nope,” Ellen said. “It leads to a two hundred foot drop.”
I ignored that, hoping it would somehow suggest I wasn’t totally afraid.
Ellis pulled a dime out of his pocket and pried loose a part of the green plastic on the other side of the Maintenance thing. He tugged, and most of the plastic popped off. Now we had a fairly private side door. If anyone glanced our way, it would look like we were just making a pit stop.
“Manny made it for us,” Ellis said. Well, of course he did. To hear him tell it, Manny had practically built Carnaval Midway.
Ellis held the plastic door open, and Ellen stepped into this dark little shed with her usual lack of care. After a beat, I followed her. I didn’t have much choice, and I needed more clues to figure out the Foster twin mystery.
My first week in California had been easy. A harmless meeting with a dotty special education director, who called me a nice young lady. As I expected, I would be placed in Basic classes, which was also Ellis’s level, except for History, and I’d get extra time for assignments and tests. All good. I got very lucky and got into the Theater Department. The director was so sorry it was too late for him to give me a part, but, oh, how lucky I was to live next door to the amazing Frank Foster. I would be working on stage crew, again exactly as I expected, but the director was just gushing about how much I could learn from Mr. Foster.
So school added up just fine. Ellen and Ellis, painfully awkward, doing all their after school stuff in their garage, would have been savaged back at New Trier High. But the kids left them alone. I just didn’t get it, and I didn’t get them, even with me eating every dinner there. Normally I get things almost instantly. But everything I picked up threatened to make sense…then didn’t. This was uncharted territory for me. The “nice young lady,” who could barely read but was gifted with social and situational awareness, was not used to mysteries.
I had hoped the drive to Anaheim with beloved Manny would shed some light. The twins had squabbled so much about who would sit next to me that they had to sit in the back themselves. I was fine with that because I knew Manny was a talker and, I hoped, he’d let something slip while Ellen and Ellis sat back there and sulked.
“This was way before I worked for the big studios, Miss Ronnie,” he said. Manny handed me his horse race paper. It was annotated in thick pencil. “See if you can spot any winners in there.”
“Will do, Manny.”
“Okay, so I worked for Mr. Barry. He owned this B-studio and a lot of land in Anaheim. Disney was after him to sell and Mr. Barry said, shit, I’ll build my own amusement park.”
“Carnaval Midway?” I asked. The twins were coming to life in the back seat.
“No,” Ellis said. “Merryland.”
“It was ‘Barryland’ first, dummy,” Ellen corrected.
“Come on, guys, I want to hear this,” I said.
“So, like I said, this was way before I was a grip at the big studios. I was pretty much the only guy Mr. Barry had, and he asked me for advice on things. I warned him that with Disneyland and Knotts there wasn’t a lot of room for another family park. He didn’t listen and in about a year it looked like he was gonna go broke. And he copied a lot of Disney’s ideas, and they were threatening to sue him.
“Mr. Barry wasn’t the kind of guy you threatened. He told dime he’d put his last dime into Merryland, and if he took one customer away from Disneyland it would be worth it. He meant it, too.”
“Tell her what happened!” Ellis said excitedly.
“Well, it was the late fifties, and I was telling Mr. Barry maybe there was a customer he could get if he made the park a little different. But he was getting older and the money problems were getting to him. B movies were dead. Then – they found oil under the studio parking lot. Mr. Barry was rich. Way beyond rich. He could do whatever he wanted.”
“Tell her what he had you do!” Ellen said.
“Hang on, Miss Ellen. One day the Disney lawyers showed up. They did that now and then, trying Mr. Barry to just roll over and sell Disney the land. Mr. Barry was ready for them. I’d never seen him in form like that, He cussed them out, cussed out their mothers and their aunts and told them he was going to make their boss miserable. What did he mean by that, they wanted to know. And Mr. Barry looked at me and he said, and these were his words: We are going to make a park Walt Disney will never forget. It will be his nightmare. So – kids, I’m getting to that – Mr. Barry told me he wanted to make Merryland into a Carnaval. Not just a Carnaval but a horror show, the kind of place that would bring the worst kids into town.”
“Wait,” I said. I was starting to get nervous again about what we were getting into. “Wasn’t Mr. Barry doing Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm a favor by drawing away all the kids they didn’t want?”
“Well, you’d think so, but Mr. Barry’s theory was that if he brought those kids to Anaheim, some of them would stop off at the other parks and make trouble there. I wasn’t so sure that he was right, or that it was a great idea, but he was the boss. He sent me out to find the best, or the worst, really, carnival rides and Midway games I could find.”
“Wow,” I said. It was kinda evil, in a way, and obviously it didn’t work. I’d never heard of Disneyland being overrun by tough kids.
“Anyway, Mr. Barry wasn’t satisfied with the stuff I found. Most of it was pretty tame, the people that ran the carnivals were worse than the exhibits. So…he sent me to Europe. I wanted me to find creepy stuff there. I did. And Mr. Barry bought all of it. I mean, all of it, and had it shipped here.”
The twins had gotten awfully quiet, so I turned around. Cats that ate a pet shop full of canaries.
“What are you two grinning about?” I demanded.
“You’ll see,” Ellen said.
“Now you two, don’t get me in trouble with your mom,” Manny said.
“We won’t,” they chimed together, like they did sometimes. Twins.
“So, Manny,” I said. “Did you have that adventure with Mr. Foster in Germany on one of your carnival-buying trips?”
“What? Oh, no. Mr. Barry had died years earlier. My retirement plan had been winning horse races, so I had to get work where I could. Frank and I had become friends and he got me the gig on the Mutiny movie.”
And that took me full circle, right back to young, pregnant with twins Claudia Schultz’s “escape” from East Germany. Manny fell silent and by the time we arrived, the twins were too excited to pout.
So…yeah, maybe I had some idea what was down there.
Ellis held the door as Ellen went in first. Ellis took my hand and led me in.
“Don’t move from that spot,” he said. Then he followed me in and secured the hidden entrance from behind.
“Jesus, is this worth saving sixty dollars?” I asked. “I mean it’s breaking and entering, isn’t it?”
“It’s worth it,” Ellen said. “You’ll see.”
She pulled out a penlight from the same pocket the dime came from. It lit the place up.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s no ordinary flashlight. Is it, Ellen?”
She sighed. “Just a little arc light I built.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thought so.” I was sure you couldn’t buy a light like that at the store.
“So, these are steam tunnels,” Ellis said.
“I figured. The kinds of places people get lost forever.”
“No,” he said. “The kind of place we get to where no one says ‘no.’”
That got my attention.
“We have a rule, no English once we go down,” Ellen said, indicating narrow concrete steps barely concealed by the green structure the three of us were stuffed into. “Um, do you know any French?”
“Nope,” I said in German. “I’ve got Hebrew if you need it.”
We descended down the stairs. The air was dry, dusty, and smelled like rust and things I couldn’t name. The concrete stairs were narrow, so we went down one at a time, with me in the middle. Now the troll brain was working. I definitely figured we’d find some of the stuff he’d bought for Mr. Barry. I figured it would be weird. I was totally prepared, then, for something that would really scare me.
Being prepared didn’t help. I followed them…and started screaming my head off.