Nightmare Island (A Partial Draft)

Chapter 10

Ren's breath caught as he watched the girl suffer. The thing was that she was already dead and nothing could be done to save her. They'd all been standing there watching her, and suddenly, she disappeared, her image replaced by one of a high school-aged young man with glasses and braces. Something about this kid- even beyond the fact that he was of the geek variety... that he was bullied... it was heartbreaking. The kid went on the rollercoaster, and Ren watched in horror as something went wrong with the rollercoaster car's harness system, and the boy fell to his death.

The thing was, from what the kid was wearing, it seemed as if this had to have happened recently, but he'd never heard anything about it. Usually, in a community, when something like this- a death at the local theme park happened, there would at least be a mention of it and some local investigation which would get media coverage. But he hadn't ever remembered hearing anything about a teenager dying from falling off a rollercoaster...

The apparition got up off the ground, reverting back to an almost pre-accident appearance, and seemed to be making quite an effort to speak to them, but all they were able to get out of him, even with the spirit box and everything the ghost-hunting faction had brought with them, was his name. Jeff. That was it. They tried to communicate with him for well over ten minutes... but nothing. He still appeared to be trying to communicate, but he just wasn't able to. However, when Emily's spirit returned, she told them that this boy, Jeff was the last park guest to die, and the reason the park officially closed.

"But how come nobody heard about it?" Lexie asked, looking as ruffled and confused as he felt.

"Because Jeff's parents were dead and actually, the name everyone he went to the park with was familiar with was Bradley. His parents died under suspicious circumstances, and it's heavily speculated that it was mob related. They worked for the PR branch of this amusement park. But they also used to work for a local engineering firm... and when they were killed, his only other relatives moved Jeff away to California and changed his name... but he only lived there two years before his aunt and uncle were murdered in their own home while he was at soccer practice. His aunt and uncle generally worked from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like the day of the murder. He called the police from one of the only payphones left in the area, and snuck aboard a bus, and then eventually, a plane... somehow making it back to his hometown. He'd faked his own death back in L.A. and he somehow managed to get someone to take him in. Apparently, they never blabbed to anyone who Jeff was... and he'd managed to fly under the radar for about a year and a half... when this happened, the park is thought to have seen him with some friends a few times during the summer of 2012... and somehow, some park officials managed to tamper with just that one car's harness system. They knew he would ride it because Jeff always made time to ride it, no matter how long the wait was. Luckily, since this wasn't regular park season, but the Halloween festival, the place wasn't all that crowded."

"So, what is his significance to the rest of all that we've seen so far?" Ren questioned the girl.

"He's the most tortured of all of us. He endured bullying, his parents being brutally murdered, having to pack up his whole life... even having to be called a different name for a time- only to have his only other family brutally killed, and have to fake his own death, hitchhiking his way home because he didn't know what else to do... and then he died while having a fun day with his friends... something that shouldn't have turned bad or sinister. Another thing is the fact that he was murdered too... and that no one really cared. The public never even heard about it."

"So, just curious- if his death was an engineered 'accident' and no one cared, why did the park close?" Kyla asked.

Emily nodded. "Yeah... it seems odd. It is odd. The thing is that the feds knew about the parents and the aunt and uncle. They knew that the boy hitched a ride home... they knew his whereabouts... and they were trying to help him out. They just failed to protect him ultimately because they didn't know that the park had shifty people working there. They failed to account for the relationship between the parents working PR for the park before they were killed, and the kid dying from a tragic rollercoaster fall. See, the thing is that his folks had died a while ago, and most of the staff, including the CEO and the company president had both retired. The people who took their places weren't related... and if the other people were involved in shifty stuff, and these folks were new, were they also shifty? It'd hard to determine if you're looking too closely. But once the incident happened and Jeff died, they finally shut the place down. But because of how much pain Jeff carried around with him his entire life, and this park's spiritual pull, his spirit got trapped and is constantly tortured with the pain of falling off that rollercoaster and splatting on the ground."

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