Copyright © 2016 by Jeremy Bates

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN 978-0-9937646-3-9

For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of the critically acclaimed novella Black Canyon, WINNER of Crime Writers of Canada The Lou Allin Memorial Award.

CONTENTS

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The novels in the World’s Scariest Places series are set in real locations.

2001

The bullfrog sat on a big green lily pad in the middle of the rotten-smelling pond. Its throat expanded like a balloon as it made a rusty croaking sound.

Eight-year-old Rosa Sánchez took another careful step toward it, then another, doing her best not to disturb the scummy water. She had taken off her sandals, and the mud on the bottom of the pond squished between her toes, feeling both good and gross at the same time.

The frog shifted its fat body on the lily pad so it seemed to stare right at her, its bulging eyes glistening.

Rosa froze, one foot in the air, stork-like.

The bullfrog croaked.

“Look away, frog,” Rosa mumbled in Spanish. “Look away.”

It didn’t, and Rosa, thinking she might topple over, get her clothes wet and stinky, set her lead foot down. Something sharp—a rock or a pokey bit of branch—jabbed the underside of her heel. She ignored the pain, keeping her eyes on the bullfrog.

It continued to stare back at her, its eyes unblinking. The air left the sack in its throat, and the bullfrog shrunk nearly in half. Still, it was a big sucker. And it was so close…

Rosa took another step and thought she might be able to grab it now if she was quick enough. She stuck her hands out before her and tilted forward slowly.

The bullfrog sprang. Rosa’s hands clutched its slimy flanks. But she was too slow. It plopped into the water and disappeared from sight.

Rosa’s momentum, however, kept her moving forward. One uncoordinated step, two, then she dunked facefirst into the water. She closed her eyes but forgot to close her mouth and got a big gulp of what tasted like sewage. Her hands sank into the muddy bottom of the pond, then her knees, yet she managed to arc her back and keep her head from going completely under.

She made a noise like she was crying, though she wasn’t crying, she was eight years old, a big girl, and big girls didn’t cry when they fell in water. Still, she wanted to. She was soaked, a foul taste was in her mouth, and she couldn’t get back to her feet. The mud sucking at her hands and knees was too slippery—

Now her head did go under. Water gushed into her ears, her nose, but at least she’d kept her mouth closed this time. When she burst back through the surface, she crawled, moaning, toward the bank, grabbing at tall grasses, roots, anything she could reach, until she was up on dry ground.

Rosa flopped onto her stomach, her eyes burning with tears. Then she sat up. Her clothes clung uncomfortably to her thin frame. And she stank like a toilet. Worse than a toilet. It reminded her of the smell when her big brother Miguel found the dead rat in the wall of their house, and told Rosa to take it out to the street.

Miguel. He was going to murder her. He was already mad at her for walking too slow when they got to the island and went looking for a spot to make camp. Then he got even madder because he wanted to kiss his girlfriend, but he couldn’t do that with Rosa around. That’s why he told Rosa to go do something. Rosa didn’t want to at first. The island scared her with all of the dolls hanging from the trees or sitting on the ground, just staring at her with their painted faces and glass eyes. However, you didn’t say “no” to Miguel, not unless you wanted to get a slap across your head, and so Rosa went, not planning to go far…and then she saw the pond. At first she wanted to muck around in the water a bit. She didn’t know there would be bullfrogs. But there sure were; they were everywhere. She spotted three right away. Yet she wasn’t careful then, and they all hopped off their lily pads and vanished beneath the water before she got close enough to catch one. It took her another fifteen minutes before she found the big fatty.

And now it was gone too, and she was dripping wet, and Miguel was going to call her names and slap her across the head—

A scream shattered the quiet.

Rosa jerked her head about.

That had been her brother’s girlfriend, Lucinda.

Did Miguel jump out from somewhere and scare her, as he always liked to do to Rosa? Or did one of the dolls hanging from the trees come to life and attack her? That’s what Miguel kept telling Rosa: the dolls were alive but they were just sleeping, and when you weren’t looking they would—

Another scream.

Not Lucinda. Deeper, male.

Miguel?

Rosa didn’t know, because she’d never heard her brother scream before, or at least not for years. Miguel wasn’t afraid of anything.

Rosa got to her feet, her soaked clothes forgotten.

Her eyes scanned the trees ahead of her, searching for movement, for Miguel to be sneaking from bush to bush—and that’s what this all was, wasn’t it? A joke, not on Lucinda, but on Rosa. Miguel got Lucinda to scream, then Miguel screamed too. As soon as Rosa went to investigate, they would jump out and scare her.

Rosa waited. The forest was silent. No wind. No crickets. Nothing.

“Miguel?” she said.

No reply.

Rosa picked up her sandals and began to walk back the way she came, toward the source of the screams. She knew Miguel was going to ambush her, but that was okay, because it would only be scary for a second, then everyone would be laughing. And that was better than how Rosa felt right now. Like she was sick, like she wanted to throw up.

Rosa left the glade with the pond. Trees closed tightly around her. She had to duck branches and watch where she stepped. The late afternoon seemed suddenly dark. She didn’t remember it being this dark earlier. Was that because the branches were blocking out the sun and sky? Or had a cloud passed before the sun?

“Miguel?” she said, though not very loud this time.

Because what if something else heard her?

Like what?

The dolls?

They couldn’t do anything to her. They were only dolls. Even if they came to life, she was a lot bigger than them.

But they got Miguel and Lucinda.

No they didn’t! Rosa told herself severely. Miguel was joking around. He was going to jump out any second now.

He didn’t jump out.

The forest remained silent and dark.

Maybe she should return to the pond and wait there for Miguel to grow bored of his game and come and get her? Then again, what if Miguel or Lucinda really were hurt? What if they needed her help?

Rosa continued forward, pushing through the thick foliage. She began to move quickly, heedless of the scratching branches and the sharp rocks and other deadfall beneath her bare feet. Then she was running. All she could hear was a thumping in her head and her loud breathing. Every tree looked the same, and she wondered if she was heading in the right direction. But she didn’t stop. If she turned back, she would probably only get more lost. Besides, she was pretty sure the camp was right ahead. It couldn’t be much farther.

She ducked around a tree—and ran into several dolls hanging from a low branch. She cried out and fell on her butt. Looking up, she recognized them from earlier: grimy, peeling, sinister.

That meant the camp was not very far away.

“Miguel!” she shouted. She could no longer suppress her fright.

“Rosa!” His voice came back, strangled, weak, filled with terror. “Go! Run!”

Rosa got to her feet. A sob caught in her throat, tight, painful.

“Miguel!”

“Run—” He was cut off abruptly.

Rosa hesitated a moment longer, then she turned and ran.

Jack

1

I woke up covered in my own blood. It had congealed between the right side of my head and the pillow, and I had to peel the damn pillow away, as if it were a crusty bandage. I held the pillow in front of me, staring in disgust at the brown splatter on the white slip. All the while I was trying to remember what had happened the night before.

I’d been having dinner with my fiancée, and her brother and his girlfriend. What a ball that had been. Listening to Jesus talk about himself all evening. That was Pita’s brother’s name, Jesus. Ironic how the one guy I’d ever met named after a god had an ego of a god to match. His girlfriend, Elizaveta, was far too good for him. Smart, down-to-earth, attractive. I didn’t know how he landed her. Actually I did: money. Pita’s and Jesus’s father, Marco, turned a mom-and-pop restaurant and pub into a multi-million-dollar brewery, and after Marco died of a brain aneurysm the year before, twenty-nine-year-old Jesus stepped up to the top position.

Setting the stained pillow aside, I touched the cut on my head, igniting a sharp pain that until then had been dormant. The cut ran from the outside of my eyebrow straight to my hairline. Dried blood crumbed beneath my fingertips and fell to the bed like red dandruff.

Recalling what happened, I cringed in embarrassment.

We’d been sitting on the back deck, the four of us. Dinner was finished. Jesus had been smoking one of his expensive cigars and going on about a skiing trip to Chile he and Elizaveta had gone on the previous winter. I was only half listening until he launched into some ridiculous story that had him backcountry skiing outside the ski resort’s boundaries, which he reached by helicopter. I chuckled loudly. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. Pita once told me she and Jesus had gone on skiing trips every year when they were younger. So I assumed he was a decent enough skier. It was the bragging. Making sure to mention the chartered helicopter, the difficulty of the off-piste terrain, his entourage, which included a famous Mexican singer.

I wasn’t nitpicking or being overly critical of Jesus. Everything the guy said and did was orchestrated to make him look good, to make people want to admire him, to see him as the apotheosis of success. Yet at the same time it was all layered in humility, like he was just one of the guys. His efforts were so transparent he became a caricature, a joke. You couldn’t help not laughing at him sometimes.

Jesus asked me what was funny. I told him nothing, please continue. The back and forth escalated, the insults becoming sharper, Pita and Elizaveta telling us to stop. Then the asshole took a cheap shot, bringing up the accident that ended my racecar driving career, saying I didn’t have the guts anymore to break the speed limit.

I could have taken a swing at him. I should have. Instead I went inside to take a leak. I didn’t return to the deck. I went to the second floor, to the balcony that overlooked the deck and the adjacent swimming pool. I climbed atop the railing so I stood precariously on the headrail, yelling that I was going to jump into the pool below, challenging Jesus, the fearless alpine skier, to do the same.

It was probably a good thing I slipped. Roughly ten feet separated the balcony and pool, and had I jumped, I might not have reached the water. But that’s what happened, I slipped—or lost my balance, it was all a blur—falling backward and cracking my head on something. I have no idea what. All I remember was the exploding pain—loud was how it felt—then the gushing blood, then everyone gathered around me. They wanted to call an ambulance, but for some reason I didn’t want them to. I guess I didn’t want to spend the night in the hospital. Then I was in the shower. I seem to recall standing there for a very long time, watching pink water swirl down the drain.

Grimacing, I pushed myself off the bed now, to my feet. I felt momentarily lightheaded, likely due to a loss of blood. I was in the guest bedroom. Not surprising. Pita wouldn’t have let me sleep in our bed bleeding like I’d been, even if it was my house. And what had she been thinking letting me go to sleep with a serious head wound? I know I said I didn’t want her to call an ambulance, but she should have done so regardless. I might not have woken up at all.

Light streamed through the window, all too bright, almost audible, like a horn. I wondered what time it was. I stepped into the pine-paneled hallway and went to the bathroom because I heard running water.

I knocked on the door lightly, then opened it. Steam fogged the mirror. Pita stood beneath the shower spray, her mocha-colored back and butt to me, her hands massaging either shampoo or conditioner into her dark hair.

“Hey,” I said, the word coming out brittle. My throat was as dry as if I’d eaten a handful of saltine crackers.

When we first began dating some five years before, Pita would have turned all the way around, showing off her body. Now she only turned her head slightly so she could see me sidelong. She lowered an arm across her breasts.

“You’re alive,” she said in her Spanish-accented English.

“Barely,” I said.

“So does that mean you’re not coming anymore?”

“Coming?”

“Don’t you remember anything from last night?”

That irked me, but I said, “Where are we going?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I did.”

“Maybe if you didn’t drink so much—”

“Forget it, Pita.”

I was about to close the door when she said, “Isla de las Muñecas,” and went back to washing her hair.

2

Man, I really had been black-out drunk. But a light switched on inside my head, the darkness shrouding my memories cleared, and the rest of the evening came back in snippets. Isla de las Muñecas. Island of the Dolls. That was the reason Jesus and Elizaveta had come by. We’d spent most of dinner discussing the details of the excursion. We’d agreed to leave at 10 a.m. Jesus and Elizaveta would pick up Pepper, then come by my house. Pita and I would follow them in my car to Xochimilco, where we would embark on a two-hour boat ride to the island.

Pepper was a host for a Mexican copycat of The Travel Channel, a basic cable show that featured documentaries and how-to programs related to travel and leisure around the country. He caught a break at the beginning of his career when he got a regular gig as a presenter on episodes featuring animal safaris, tours of grand hotels and resorts, lifestyle stuff—and in the process became a bit of a mini celebrity. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until last year that things took off for him due to a documentary he hosted on El Museo De Las Momias, or The Mummies’ Museum. The story went that after a cholera outbreak in the nineteenth century the city cemetery in Guanajuato was filling up so quickly that a local tax was imposed demanding relatives to pay a fee to keep the bodies interred. Most relatives couldn’t pay or didn’t care, the bodies were disinterred, and the best preserved were stored in a building. In the 1900s, entrepreneurial cemetery workers began charging tourists a few pesos to check out the bones and mummies—and the place has since become a museum displaying more than a hundred dried human cadavers, including murder victims, a Spanish Inquisition victim in an iron maiden, criminals buried alive, and children laid to rest dressed up as saints. Most were so well preserved that their hair, eyebrows, and fingernails were still intact, and nearly all of their mouths were frozen in eternal screams, a result of the tongue hardening and the jaw muscles slackening following death.

The documentary proved to be a huge hit, so Pepper pitched The Travel Channel an ongoing series titled Mexico’s Scariest Places. They liked the idea, and Pepper’s next project took him to La Zona del Silencio, or The Dead Zone, a patch of desert in Durango that got its moniker after a test missile launched from a US military base in Utah malfunctioned and crashed in Mexico’s Mapimi Desert region. The missile was carrying two containers of a radioactive element. A big US Air Force recovery operation lasted weeks—and made the region a pseudo Area 51 ripe with myths and urban legends regarding mutations of flora and fauna, lights in the sky at night, aliens, magnetic anomalies that prevented radio transmissions, the whole works.

Pepper has since done several other episodes in the series—most of which focused on haunted mansions and shuttered asylums and the like—but the Island of the Dolls had always been his golden egg so to speak. Problem was, the island was private property. The owner had recently died, and his nephew was now in charge—and he repeatedly refused to allow Pepper and his film crew access to the island. The Travel Channel, for their part, gave Pepper the unofficial go-ahead for the documentary, telling him if he got footage, great; if he got busted doing so, they didn’t know anything about it.

That was where Pita and I came in. Pepper didn’t want to go to the island alone, and we didn’t have any affiliation with the television network. I had been looking forward to the trip until Jesus got wind of it a few days ago and, in his blusterous fashion, insisted he and Elizaveta come as well.

Pita was rinsing her hair now. Milky white soap streamed down her back. I asked her, “We still leaving at ten?”

“Yes,” she said without looking at me.

“What time is it now?”

“You have half an hour to get ready.”

I groaned, wondering if I could pull myself together in time.

“You don’t have to come,” she told me, turning enough I could see the side of her left breast.

“I already told Pepper I would.”

“I’m sure he would understand—your head and everything.”

“Would you mind?” I asked cautiously, wondering whether I was walking into one of her traps. I would agree with her, only for her to pounce, accuse me of never wanting to do anything with her, of disliking her brother, something along those lines. Her machinations would have been amusing had they not always been directed at me.

“I think you should rest, Jack,” she said. “That’s what I think. But it’s up to you.”

3

Jesus and crew arrived forty minutes later in Jesus’s brand new Jaguar X-Type. The vehicle suited him: all show, little substance. Because under the prancing cat hood ornament, and leather and wood interior, it was nothing but an all-wheel-drive Ford Mondeo. Jesus likely didn’t know that. He would have purchased it because it was the type of car a young, affluent guy should be driving.

While Pita went out to greet everyone—wearing a chambray shirt with roll-tab sleeves and cutoff jean shorts that showed off the bottom curve of her ass—I went to the garage and loaded our daypacks into my three-year-old Porsche 911. It was parked next to a junked ’79 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. I used to own the same make and model as a kid in Vegas. I’d worked in an auto-repair shop for three years to save enough money to buy it. When I turned eighteen and got my racing license, I began racing four nights a week at the local tracks. I consistently finished middle to back of the pack, but I nevertheless became a fan favorite because of my name. The race track announcers thought Jack Goff sounded like a joke and took every opportunity to mention it over the PA system to the delight of the crowd. Soon nobody was calling me Jack anymore. It was always Jack Goff. Announcers, interviewers, fans, whoever. It had that two syllable cadence—and of course innuendo—that made you want to say the whole thing.

I never won a checkered flag with the Monte Carlo, but it was my first race car, and I had some of my fondest memories in it. That’s why I bought the junker to restore a few months ago. It was a pet project, a way for me to fill in the days now that I was finished racing.

I got behind the wheel of the Porsche and rolled down the driveway until I came nose to nose with the Jaguar. Elizaveta, in shotgun, her face hidden behind a large sunhat and sunglasses, flashed me a smile and a wave, which I reciprocated. Jesus had his window open, his elbow poking out, as he spoke with his sister. His hair as always was impeccably neat, the sides short, the top parted to the left and slicked back. He wore Aviator sunglasses and a day’s stubble he no doubt considered fashionable. The glare of the sun on the windshield prevented me from seeing Pepper in the backseat, and I was wondering if I should get out to say hi when Jesus and Pita finished their chat.

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