The rusted gates of the abandoned Joyland Fiesta creaked open, not by physical force, but by some unseen power, a welcoming gesture for 22-year-old Maria, all alone, a silhouette against the dull glow of the late afternoon sun barely penetrating the perpetual gloom of the old, decrepit amusement park, a forgotten place somewhere on a forgotten small island.
Maria, hailing from the busy streets of Manila, had journeyed far, seeking stories for a blog about forgotten locations and abandoned worlds. Her love was her sadness and all that she cared to know.
She took a step inside, her worn sneakers crunching on broken glass and dried leaves, remnants of a life the park, known by its tattered and crumbling banner, once lived a very, very long time ago. It stood as a graveyard of forgotten laughs and screams now replaced by only an unnatural and disturbing silence.
A gust of wind, uninvited and cold, whispered through the hollow eye sockets of a discarded clown mask lying on the cracked pavement, a somber greeting from the amusement park. Maria felt a prickle of unease but, pushing on she thought about going live, and her followers getting a front-row seat on a forgotten world lost to time.
Further in she moved, the skeletal remains of rides loomed before her. The Ferris wheel, a twisted metal carcass, seemed to claw at the sky, as if seeking the escape that was long before taken, maybe never offered to it at all. The roller coaster, once a king, its tracks twisted into monstrous shapes. She can almost see the skeletal ghosts waiting to pull them up the high hills.
"Hello?" Maria called out, her voice a shaky sound lost among the growing sounds of the decrepit world that used to be. The only reply, for now, at least, was the groan of metal and the whisper of that strange and sad wind and some creature that watched her from afar, too shy for her, too evil for most, but not her; not the subject of this night.
She approached a booth, the painted letters barely surviving decades of neglect and rot; "Test Your Strength," a sign offered her an ancient past that Maria felt inside. The mallet was gone. But it did little to explain, yet Maria was forced to imagine it lying in place, at some moment, lost.
Suddenly, a laugh. It was a childlike giggle, carried on that unnatural wind, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Maria stopped cold, her blood running with a very old memory. It seemed to reach up her legs like ice water running in the gutter of some dirty street corner.
She held up her phone, ensuring the front-facing camera caught her wide eyes. "Did you guys hear that?" she asked her imagined audience, trying for her usual blog intro, and its friendly excitement. Her heart threatened to betray her false confidence as she worked to make it all feel fake.
She started walking again, deeper, seeking a source to what now began to seem a very evil decision, her shoes slipping at times as she had to try her best to navigate the refuse-ridden ground, her head shaking off a slight sensation, some sensation as her surroundings felt to twist.
The giggle came again, closer this time. She swiveled, the phone's camera sweeping the desolate landscape of rusted metal, peeling paint, and broken dreams that she was sure all wanted out. Her life depended on escaping but that option wasn't one available.
"Who's there?" she asked, the words braver than what she, at that moment, truly felt deep inside, some small dark pit forming right at the depths. The sound reminded her too much of when her, and her, had done just such a trip. Her name escaped her and left only, she, them, they.
Silence answered, the type that feels loud, pressing in on Maria, who became only her name at this time and only her life seemed a world away from her existence, some deep pit, that void which only, alone, can know of a single human life. The amusement park seemed to breathe around her, to live.
Then, in the distance, near the carousel—another relic of an earlier age—she saw something: a flicker of a figure. It's her, she would feel she would, forever know, as the giggle, for real now, not the old recorded event that played and replayed like some memory on a cell phone, offered the park.
It was a woman in a red dress. That was all Maria could make out. She couldn't really grasp and sort shapes, colors and how long hair might seem as things seemed distant, but no measurement or sense could explain them. Maria tried.
Holding the phone up high, her own personal recording instrument, her way to connect to something outside of where, alone, she began a sad story of travel. "Is anyone else seeing… this?" she muttered and tried to put force on the word this.
As she walked toward the figure, the carousel, missing almost all its wooden horses, and broken like a toothy, angry old creature missing and suffering for all those lost, randomly, inexplicably, began to move, to turn. Slowly, at first.
Then a melody started playing, music. An old, carnival tune that sounds almost like some song her own family would play during festivals on some hot street filled with more food than she ever dared eat, too expensive. It played badly.
The woman in red stayed perfectly still, seemingly unaware of the camera, or even of Maria's whole reality, or existence in all its moments and, or any future seconds and dreams. She stared ahead, the direction difficult to determine as, maybe she watched the sun go down.
Maria was closer now, maybe twenty feet separating them. The woman was slender, the red dress bright against the dreary decay, a disturbing thing. Her back was still to Maria who tried to look over all she was seeing as if making sense made sense.
"Hello? Miss?" Maria called again. She thought of calling the woman something bad but she tried her best to think she can see and is not seeing but only being seen by another, an object of display to all around, the camera recording, her world to know.
No answer. Only the increasing pace and volume of that terrible carnival music filling up some horrible space as that thing. A nightmare sound now coming as some memory long hidden finally offered. Some gift only offered with a horrible moment to show and to be told about, some truth.
Maria reached out a hand as if to tap the woman on the shoulder, and she wanted to take that thing from that dress to play with and maybe toss to an empty part of this nightmare. The woman's skin would offer the camera so much, too much, almost.
Then, the woman turned, in that moment, at that exact, terrifying moment, just a sudden spinning thing of horrible change, the whole thing shifting faster than a thought could catch up or even understand what any of her seeing was telling, the body was twisting, breaking.
She had no face. It wasn't blurred or hidden, that should have felt a blessing, or not really, for that face. It was...absent, an absolute blankness. Maria should see things; an empty plane where eyes, nose, mouth, and teeth all, maybe, used to exist.
Maria stumbled back. It felt more like a jump backward. Her eyes blinked rapidly and fast, trying to force all this back, away from any place. Her mouth, dry as that broken path she had so smartly sought, struggled.
The music, rising to a crescendo, that song, reached a high note, as the carousel turned faster, the missing horse fixtures spinning in a terrible circle that just could not seem real but to the only real moment Maria might know.
The lady in red extended a hand toward Maria, thin, so very thin that it was little more than bone with that thing they put on shoes so many years before when people walked barefoot in her own town, the lady was so thin, not the person her memories.
Maria wanted to scream, a scream formed so perfectly in her, somewhere she hid from the world when all that terror became her to own. It died, that perfect screaming, stuck in a throat that closed so completely tight to this that all was gone.
On the outstretched, bone-thin hand of the woman, with that lack of an actual face, Maria could see a ring, on what might be described as the, or a, ring finger, of this creature. A gold ring with some red gem stone sat in the setting.
Maria blinked. She saw. She understood. She recognized. She saw and known for so long in her. Her sister. The older sister who'd come to the island long ago. She, she was never home again after they shared all that life she ever knew and shared with her older sister.
The sister who, after her disappearance on this very forgotten island, near, next to, this very evil place of laughing, riding things and rides that were not meant to ever exist, on this very small island off in some forgotten world. She now knows.
"It is... it is you," Maria breathed out and, and finally, found an acceptance so deep, so knowing, so forever there. Some part that only is and has always lived inside of herself where all her hidden little things. Her. Her person, not to share with any ever.
The faceless woman in the dress nodded, one, long nod of a neck and what she now finally accepts had not even formed until this very moment when they, again, are finally together, one. Her life now just their and not alone at all in any part, ever.
The terrible, music slowed back and now, like at some point before she even began all this she should remember how loud, low it became. And that carousel spun so, so gently that all these old horses now began their home forever, too.
Maria reached, to her own neck and throat area and held something her fingers wrapped so naturally, some part that might seem strange but so familiar, warm, comforting her. A, the, chain that carried that, a, the ring from that, a, finger that place that offered something.
Her sister's. Her gift that she felt but kept inside to play with, hold. To dream about, of, when she looked in a store mirror and she seemed strange. Or was the other thing not real and what if? She wondered on late nights or to see faces of a world outside herself that only scared all that place.
It felt real as she held, and felt herself pulled forward to another, who, had been just here, for now, at last. The woman who might be the older person who did share stories with and kept little secret, secret parts hidden that were for her, her own things to hold to the two as one world and the lady offered.
With that, or her, her new found place with some feeling inside of the two together to laugh like and smile into something. To love the games played for that song in those hours shared under a moon when Maria watched all around a big happy place with them playing. Her and herself now found.
Maria had all those videos now ready and stored in this wonderful old box of metal so warm from playing for years and weeks with all these lights showing every part and now the world that used to want these games from the girl she never would, to now get and want their part from. All the joy that this girl now finally found at the end.
She felt at one. A part that existed forever and always her world from some far place that never had let or offered her one moment of some other kind thing only given by this person now one whole. Maria offered as the new Maria a small part. A smile.
With a nod to this gift she would, finally take herself. All herself. Now all one together and happy in those feelings that a, the body could never really tell about only and this, now, them now only that only, forever, two beings and all those little world two parts and pieces two, she held hands. Her now found.