The first time someone died at Fantasy Fair, no one thought to check near Old Cassie. She was little more than an embellished archway, after all: something people idly passed through without much pause.
Cassie was never meant to be beautiful; she was meant to lure frugal families away from fabulous, brand-name getaways. She’d been built hurriedly out of leftover materials and slathered in an uneven coat of garish greens and vulgar violets. Unimpressed visitors walked under her arch with full lungs, saving their breathless awe for twisting metal behemoths such as Viper Vortex and Astro-Racer.
By 1992, Cassie still wasn’t much to look at: her painted facade was chipping; her plywood towers were warped; and her plaster had begun to crack.
After the boy went missing, no one noticed the soft patch of grass abutting Cassie’s east wing. They didn’t ask questions of the twitchy groundskeeper, didn’t spot the strange stains on his shovel. By the summer of 1993, investigators had given up. The boy’s friends swore up and down that he’d bravely undertaken their dare, that he had climbed over the park’s gates after hours, and that he must be inside. But as time passed, even they wondered if he just ran away, like disgruntled adolescents often do.
The forgotten boy rotted in the dirt while Cassie rotted above it.
After a while, that angered her.
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By the new millennium, Fantasy Fair had been bought by a national corporation that gave failing rides fresh coats of paint and B-list superhero theming. But despite her new blue paint and silver trim, Old Cassie remained unadmired, an impressive feat for a castle. If anything, visitors were even more eager to pass her threshold, now that the coasters paid homage to various cheaply licensed intellectual properties.
Even the off-season received a facelift, promising visitors a Winter-Wonderland lights show. A young, handsome electrician had been hired to transform Cassie into a glittering spectacle. He spent hours carefully hanging string lights along her turrets and walls; he caressed her golden spires with gentle, meticulous fingers.
It felt good, to be touched and stroked and embraced—even to be pierced with nails and wrapped in wire. So Cassie kept the man as long as she could. She whispered to the mice to chew through cables; she persuaded bulbs to flicker and burn out. Each malfunction required a visit from her new friend.
Eventually—when Cassie could conjure no further malfunctions—she summoned a storm wind so strong that the electrician’s ladder toppled with it.
She thought she’d be able to keep him, like they let her keep the boy that was now bones. But they took the electrician’s body from her and buried him far, far away.
The week-long snowstorm that followed ruined the park’s plans. Tickets were refunded; lights were ripped down. Veins of ice settled deep within Cassie’s cracks, and her walls began to bow; her foundation began to sink. Termites ate holes into one of her spires.
By spring, she was lopsided, worn, and more hideous than ever. The park opened a south entrance near the water rides, and that became the new preferred entry.
Deep within her plaster, Cassie boiled.
#
Halloween was going to be the park’s big comeback, or so everyone said. They brought in metal trailers full of fake bats and spiderwebs, bought terrifying costumes for the employees, and set up fog machines along the paths.
Cassie had enough spiderwebs to begin with, so someone lined her with Jack-o-Lanterns and bales of hay and then called it a day. It was Cassie’s least favorite dressing, and no one seemed to care that the pumpkins were spoiling far too quickly.
A few employees wondered if something else had been done to the castle: Cassie’s fake, painted-on windows seemed to bend inward like angry eyes. But the guests didn’t notice. There were candy apples for sale near the south entrance, and few even came near Cassie, except for the scare actors, whose make-up trailer was parked nearby.
Even Cassie wasn’t sure how she did it: how she poisoned that one actor’s mind, how she filled his head with nightmarish notions and malevolent musings. But one Friday, he brought a replacement chain to work and installed it onto the chainless saw he’d been using as a prop.
Screaming followed revving. Blood pooled in the grout of the brick walkway running through Cassie’s arch.
Cassie gorged on police, press, and yellow tape. She savored the attention until it came to a sudden halt.
The park closed its gates for the last time, and then no one came at all. Striped awnings flapped in the wind. Metal tracks rusted. Plastic rolled through the park like tumbleweeds.
Cassie screamed, but only the birds and the bugs could hear her. Sick animals curled up under her to die. Hornets built palaces of their own in every crevice. Weeds blanketed the path, vines strangled her turrets, and she grew smaller and smaller.
Wilderness snaked through Fantasy Fair’s veins like a disease, until the park became a strange, twisted part of the forest itself, until Cassie believed herself a cluster of trees perched on a mossy mound and forgot all she was.
#
Years passed, and then they came, with their hiking boots and little black boxes.
They took pictures and whispered about “Top Ten” lists and blogs. Words like creepy and haunted and abandoned buzzed in the air and woke Cassie from her slumber.
The park itself had become so overgrown that few dared—or even could—enter. In fact, most people arrived, took pictures of Cassie, admired her “creepiness,” and then left.
Behind her, the carousel cried; the water slides whimpered. But nobody ever heard. Few, if any, went to see what had become of the lazy river, the bumper cars, the teacups. And Cassie kept those who did.
Because after all this time, finally, she was what they came to see.