"Let's just blow this place and go back home," Brandy whispered.

"Wait," Bobby shot back. "I think I see the exit."

Brandy crossed her arms, which said everything. She was getting frustrated, she had long-since gotten cold, and she was starting to get scared. She had sacrificed a lot to die here. Hours before Bobby had turned up late in his busted Toyota with his crappy CDs, her girlfriends had called to invite her out. She had reminded them that Bobby had invited her on a date, and over the other line, she was met with snickers and whispers.

"Seriously, Brandy?" Kim had asked. "The dude in our seminar? I thought your were just being, like, sympathetic. I didn't think you'd actually go through with it."

Brandy hadn't thought she'd go through with it, either. Bobby was cute in the way a stranded seal was cute. Helpless things were endearing to her, but feeling helpless herself was irritating. He had offered her only a cryptic explanation of where they were going, and a choice between System of a Down and Creed to listen on the drive.

An hour out from the city. Bullshit. Now, he had used her patience to dig them both a shallow grave.

"I hear someone," she said, pointing down the dark hallway they had come down. "Bobby, I hear someone."

"No, you don't," Bobby snapped back. Sad boys like him always looked the least likely to be dismissive, to be hostile, to be curt... which made it all the more explosive when they were. Brandy looked away from him, dreaming about how unpleasant she was going to make the car ride back. Dreaming about how, when he called her up again, he'd hear her snickering and whispering to her girlfriends.

She shivered. The rust on the corrugated walls looked bloody under the light. She wanted to get home and make some coffee and ask her mom if she had ever gotten her teenage tetanus injection. She wanted to...

"Brandy, stop that," Bobby snapped.

"I'm doing doing anything," Brandy said. She spun around, only to see a figure behind him, pulling on his jacket. Wild black hair and long-dead eyes made the playful smile the spectre shot back at her all the more menacing.

Brandy started to shriek.

✘ ✘ ✘

As the two ran out into the night as kaleidoscopes of color danced on the asphalt, the banshee said that she needed a smoke.

Joshua grinned. Behind him, there was much to talk about. Nathan - as he insisted Joshua call him - had kept it all a surprise. Yes, it was an airfield, and signs of that were still contained in the frame of chainlink around the property. A terminal they had walked through to get in, six steel hangers far from the activity, and the activity itself, strategically sprawled out on the line where landing gear once grazed a runway. On the two occasions that evening had had referred to the area as Propellor Junction, he quickly tailed it with 'just a working title'. Perhaps because a junction was the last thing that came to mind when every structure unfolded in a straight line, and perhaps because he wasn't too attached to the land's skyward history.

This was just an interim. An amusement park, built on an old airfield. Before the noughties had come to pass, he'd want it to be a theme park and its origins just trivia.

Celebration Columbia. You could walk to the river from where they were standing. Don't, though, Nathan had said. It gets dark and you're likely to step on one of the many plots of unincorporated communities surrounding them.

The banshee pulled back her veil, signalling at someone at the front of the attraction that she was heading for a smoke break. The haunted house was an interesting one. A cartoonish, serpentine creature swooped and swept his way around big, weathered white letters. Colossal Claude's Cavern they said, announcing a ride that only existed in the way a skeleton was still a person.

"So there's this ship in the 1930s," she said, her gaze hole-like from the eyeshadow. "1934. This guy on it, either the captain or the first mate, I forget. No, it was the first mate. Yeah, he sees this 40-foot-long thing in the water at the mouth of the Columbia River. Colossal Claude, they call it. Our friend Claude gets spotted again in 1937, and I think right before the end of the decade, and then never again."

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She led him around the structure - the first one. It was bulky and rectangular and robust in comparison to what was behind it. A couple of temporary structures had been arranged in a maze, and Joshua suspected the closest one was where he had been perched to watch the banshee lay in wait.

"Like I said in there," she continued. "I take things seriously. Don't tolerate when the others ruin the fun by talking. Sorry if it was weird just, ya know, standing there, in the wings, so to speak."

"I liked seeing a master at work," Joshua joked.

She looked at him for a couple of seconds, and then turned the corner.

"You probably picked up on things," she continued. "Mr. Koenig wouldn't tell you the truth. The front part? That's from an old dark ride meant for kids. Stopped working and has been sitting waiting to become scrap since the 90s, but Mr. Koenig decided to repurpose it. Not enough, I think. Sure, we're just using it as a glorified queue, but the theming is off. False advertising. Inside it's a mental asylum, outside it's Creature from the Black Lagoon for toddlers. And by the time I hit my cue and start screaming in someone's face, I don't know if it's teens like the ones you saw, or a mom ready to fling her baby at me."

She darted to look behind her, which told Joshua enough about whether this was allowed. When she was confident Mr. Koenig wasn't around, she reached under her dress, only to groan.

"Forgot my lighter," she said.

Joshua smiled, and pulled out one he had bought the morning after meeting what might have been his new boss.

"Lifesaver," she said. "Move over to this side. Don't want the wind telling on me. And as far as Mr. Koenig is concerned, I did exactly what he told me to. Showed you what it was like inside, and then took you back to his office in..."

"A half-an-hour or so," Joshua said with a nod. "We still have ten minutes."

She smiled, and then lit the cigarette.

"Imogen, by the way," she said. "I promise I'm nicer-looking when I'm not on the clock."

"I promise I'm not always as quiet," Joshua said.

Imogen frowned hard enough that the white makeup on her cheek started to crack.

"Quiet is nice," Imogen said. "Half of the kids working here will be gone before the end of the season - and not by their own decision, but certainly by their own choices. Mr. Koenig pays better than most of us are used to. He gives second chances. A lot of kids decide to try their luck and get shown the gate."

"He said he's passionate," Joshua said.

"He's..." Imogen started, only to hesitate. "Sure, passionate works. Let's go with that."

Before Joshua could press, a group emerged behind them. He looked at Imogen, worried that they might spot her slacking on delivering scares, but she didn't seem too pressed. But before they closed in, Joshua saw a figure at the back turn on his heel.

"Fuck no," he said, pointing at Imogen. "I don't play with that stuff."

A girl turned around and accosted him for being both rude and chickenshit. Imogen put her hand up dismissively, saying it was fine - she was glad the costume was working. Then the girl groaned about having to find another spot to smoke, and as the group trailed off, Joshua felt a sense of second-hand embarrassment.

"Don't worry about it," Imogen said. "That's just the way Douglas is."

Joshua frowned.

"He was in my high school," Imogen said, leaning over to stab her cigarette into the ground. "And more importantly, my church. Pretty sure he locks himself away every Halloween. Scared of monsters and demons and things that go bump in the night."

"You're religious?" Joshua asked.

"You're not?" Imogen said as she stood up. "Could have bet you were Mormon or something. You've got that... doe-eyed way about you."

"Don't leave home very often," Joshua said.

Imogen gave a sharp nod, then shrugged.

"You asked me first," Imogen said. "Yes. Well, put it like this. If Colossal Claude really is slithering at the mouth of the Columbia, it's only because God wanted us to spot him there. Does that make sense?"

✘ ✘ ✘

He had never really thought much about God or banshees.

Imogen had gone back inside, and Nathan wasn't at the trailer he called the capital-o Office. A merry-go-ride started to kick up cheers as it spun, and across the asphalt, he could see the couple from the haunted house sitting at a bench. The girl looked like she had been crying; eyeshadow still weeping down her cheeks. Her partner - didn't she call him Bobby - he was hunched over and dejected.

Between the lights around them and the shadows they made dance, Bobby's lips moved.

The girl suddenly burst out laughing. And Bobby, the surprise clear in his big eyes, managed to smile.

Joshua smirked. He had told Nathan that he would come down to see what was what before making a decision. But he had made the decision the moment he had told his parents he was going away for a couple of months. The last words they exchanged were muffled behind the sound of a closing front door.

He had pulled his suitcase slowly to the sidewalk.

"Don't react," he whispered to himself. "Just walk calmly."

He did so, even as his fingers kept a death grip on the handle.

And the moment his sneakers touched the sidewalk, he ran like hell.