Croaked Read Online Free Page B

Two seconds after the door closed behind him, I was on the phone to our lawyer.
    ***
    “Do you have your notes from the kids you interviewed?” Alan Forbeck asked after I described the encounter. We were in his office, four doors down from my own.
    “I’ve got the audio file, yes. I mean, dang, this was just the opening of some new ride. I went for Tanna’s sake, she wanted to hit the Hangman rollercoaster.”
    “And why didn’t you ride the Descent?”
    “They didn’t give me a free pass, and I’ll be damned if I was going to stand in line for an hour just to take some five-minute haunted house ride.”
    Alan picked up the brochure and looked at it. “Is that what it is?”
    “That’s what the kids I talked to said it was. I don’t know what the hell Barstow thinks it is.”
    “Man, I haven’t been to the Redneck Riviera since I was a kid and my church youth group went. I’m surprised they haven’t turned it into a shopping mall.”
    “I guess it’ll stick around as long as there are church youth groups willing to make the drive to Nashville.”
    He unfolded the brochure. “According to this flyer, it’s ‘a ride through a futuristic nightmare’.”
    “Doesn’t that sound like a haunted house ride to you?”
    “Maybe. If they pursue it, though, they’ll just end up looking silly.”
    “Like that’s ever stopped anybody,” I said.
    ***
    Nothing came of Barstow’s threat, but something happened two weeks later that reminded me of the encounter.
    The wire service put out a story from its Nashville bureau. A fourteen year old boy named Jere Rundle disappeared somewhere inside the Descent. He went in with three friends, and when the car returned to the start, he was gone. The Descent building and the Redneck Riviera grounds were thoroughly searched. They found nothing.
    The Descent was closed while the safety measures were revamped. After all, if he’d been able to voluntarily leave the moving car, someone could just as easily fall out. The general consensus was that the boy had run away from home; nothing further was heard from him.
    Until the next full moon. And from the least likely source.
    ***
    That June, the full moon was on a night that threatened to be stormy, so Tanna’s coven, the Circle of Evening Light, met indoors at our house, specifically in her study. We had hardwood floors, and Tanna painted a permanent circle in the middle of the room. A small table served as the altar, and wax stained the floor at the four cardinal points from years of candles.
    Tanna’s coven was still small that year. She, as the high priestess, was picky about who she invited into her circle. There were three other women and a man, none of whom shared either Tanna’s third-degree rank or experience. In fact, most of them were new to the Craft, learning it under her tutelage.
    Most senior was Andrea Lewis, another professor at West Tennessee University. She taught, predictably enough, Woman’s Studies, and could be counted on to turn any conversation to feminism. Yet she also spent three weeks escorting young women into a clinic past screaming and ranting protestors, at a time when doctors who performed abortions were being shot and killed. That sort of bravery made the pedantry easier to take.
    Sara Brine was a graduate student in comparative religion, studying some eclectic mix of archaeology and parapsychology. She was gay, and tended to be quiet and observant, two qualities I also cultivated. She missed very little, and often had the most interesting comments.
    The youngest woman was Jo Slade. She was still in high school, but her parents, who had grown up on a commune, whole-heartedly supported her interest in Paganism and Wicca. She had the zeal of a convert and the beauty of a potential bikini model.
    The only male was Wade Stevens. He was one of those people you’d never expect to be Pagan: he attended West Tennessee University (called “WesTN” for short) on a tennis scholarship, and looked