Haunt: Volume 2

Curtis Jams on the Swans (a Curtis Story) (Part 2 of 2)

Weekend Two, Thursday Night, Continued

September 22, 2022

Curtis laughed. It wasn't a humorous laugh; it was the sort of laugh that one might develop in a padded cell. He shook from head to toe. The swan's right eye stared at him. Decrepit as it was, this boat was in better condition than the others. It angled itself as if inviting Curtis inside. He ignored the dozens of alarms ringing in his head and neared the vessel.

There was another Scrabble board on the seat. Possibly the same board, just in a different boat - why not? Its letters read:

And he obliged before he could think his way out of it. He stepped nimbly into the wobbly swan. Its weight shifted, but the boat turned and drifted downstream after Curtis settled on the seat next to the board game.

"Oh my god." He muttered to himself.

What was this emotion? He felt positively elated. Elation felt a great deal like terror. The twins of extreme emotion, hand in hand, led him. A swan boat and a Scrabble board was all this was, and for some reason, he felt like he challenged Lucifer to a fiddling contest.

The swan paddled on its own and took him around a creek. Only the occasional signs of industry dotted the woods. Some litter here and there. Curtis felt like he was on one of the park's water rides.

After a couple quiet minutes of drifting, the boat approached a series of wooden boards that barricaded and walled off the rest of the creek. When the swan approached, the boards parted open like an old saloon door. They shut again after they passed. The swan carried him onto an artificial lake. He saw canoes tied to a distant dock.

"Oh! We're in Barrier Reef Bay," said Curtis, realizing that he spoke to the swan itself now. With colorful slides and obstacle courses of the waterpark looming in the distance, he found himself in Seven Wonders Underwater.

He felt a bit perplexed - what was this magical demon swan boat doing? Underwater closed at the end of August and wouldn't reopen until May. Screamsters never had anything to do with it, though Curtis thought a haunted waterpark sounded awesome.

"Someone or something is going to murder me here," Curtis said. Logic told him this, but his emotions whispered something different.

Barrier Reef Bay was still full of water. He supposed it hadn't been closed long enough for the water to drain. He wasn't sure if they ever drained this place. Fall leaves gathered in bunches on the surface, bugs spinning lazily around them. The paddleboat drifted past Barrier Reef Bay and floated onto a lazy river that led to the Iguazu Falls waterslide pool. Curtis was dangerously close to relaxing. He wondered about the swan's destination. Technically, he was breaking into a closed theme park, but nobody was around to catch him.

At Iguazu Falls, the swan's bottom scraped along the shallow pool. His ride stopped gently at the foot of a staircase that led out of the water into a closed food court. Dozens of round picnic tables sat like gigantic pushpins with umbrellas folded and battened against approaching winter weather.

At the apex of his journey, he spotted her. Incongruously, a figure bright as birthday balloons danced in his direction.

Curtis stared. She can't be real.

But she looked and sounded real enough. He heard her boots on the concrete and metal scraping from her chains. He did a double-take. Had she escaped from a stockade or something? A set of thick wooden shackles circled her wrists, one on each, with clanking chains attached.

The clown-costumed woman skipped toward him excitedly, her energy a mixture of delight and mania. "Curtis!" she cried. "You came! You came!"

Curtis's mind did some scrambling around. The women's costume was great; clearly streak-freak-level design. Now that he looked more carefully, she was more harlequin than a circus clown.