Ignoble Deeds--A Short Story of the Paranormal

  *

  Lila camped outside the gates for two nights to be sure of being among the first visitors. Wrapped in her blankets, with her supplies of food and water, she felt like a kid queuing for front row at a rock concert. Her dad had died here. There was something she needed to do.

  “Is there any particular reason you chose this location for the park?” That was the historian. Edward, his name was. Suitably old-fashioned for a historian. They’d chatted in the queue, and he’d been surprisingly good company. Him, and Urijah the ghost hunter, and the rest. They’d only allowed eight in. The others had been sent away with free tickets and a serious case of disappointment.

  Caleb Johnson, the park owner, laughed. The sound was brittle, rehearsed. On the basis of his ten minute presentation, Lila had already decided she didn’t like him, or his pinstriped suit, but she’d been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt up till the phony laugh.

  “Spook Zoo, they’re calling it. I suppose you’ve heard that? Spook Zoo.” He chuckled, shaking his head and wiping his mouth with an oversized cotton handkerchief. An affectation. Lila ground her teeth and hated on him even harder. His set-up wasn’t the only reason they called it that.

  “The land was available,” he said with what was clearly meant to be a nonchalant shrug. “After zoos were banned in the international accord of ’34, the sites were offered for redevelopment. But where the amount of landscaping required was a problem for most developers, it was an asset to us. We feel we’ve kept the original character of the zoo. The enclosures where monkeys and apes once swung have become our haunted forest. The savannahs where elephants and giraffes roamed have become stately homes and castles. And so on.”

  “What became of the animals when the old zoos were closed?” asked a woman in a jacket covered in migraine-inducing black and white zig-zags. She’d kept herself to herself in the queue. Lila didn’t even know her name.

  Johnson frowned. “Well, now, this isn’t my area of expertise. But I believe that DNA was taken from any surviving creatures.”

  “They were preserved?”

  “Indeed. And used in digizoos, so the holograms and 3D images you see there are accurate representations of actual animals.”

  Johnson spotted another raised hand, this time a very young girl in her mid- to late-teens. “Yes, the young lady over there.”

  “Why did it take so long to get up and running?”

  Feet shuffled. The problems Johnson and his team had encountered had been well documented. One could hardly log in to news feeds without hearing a report on another accident, how the consortium was in financial difficulty, how the safety inspectors were requiring two layers of fencing, each using separate circuitry and backup generators, to ensure the ghosts would be contained in the event of a power outage. Fears of the zombie apocalypse had been replaced by fears of a ghost invasion, at least in the park’s immediate area. Property prices had dropped like a stone, and residents demanded compensation.

  Lila could see Johnson trying to work out how to dodge the question, and failing.

  “The Paliakis fields were designed for a different purpose. It was only by chance that their effect on the, ah, lingering deceased was discovered. And you have to remember that nothing like this has been done before. We have broken new ground, technologically, legally and ethically. Each area has had its issues.”

  Off to one side, Lila could see one of the park’s PR people looking worried, and making a subtle ‘don’t go there’ movement with her finger.

  Johnson acknowledged it with a raise of his eyebrow. “And that’s all I’m able to say on the matter, I’m afraid. Shall we continue? There is so much I’d like to show you, and so little time.”