SideTrack

The Beginning:

How do you begin a nightmare?  Well, I just as well begin at the beginning.

My name is Jay R. Rayburn.  I have been working for the Minotopa Springs Police Department for the past thirty years.  Minotopa Springs is a small little town of about fifteen thousand people.  A quiet community, my job mostly consisted of burglary and traffic accidents.  People in our little town don’t even lock their doors.  That was until the teens started to come up missing.

It happened in other towns at first.  It could never happen here, or so we thought.  We read the newspaper reports, and the television news stories were blasted all over the state.

First, it seemed to be a rash of teenagers running away from home.  Then, it seemed to move from one town to the other, like a cancer running free, leaving a trail of desperation and shattered dreams.  One, two, three, four, then twenty or more, teenagers just seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.  Closer and closer, it seemed to be coming to us.  We took notice when the five kids came up missing in Wellington, just fifty miles south of us.

I started reading the reports, and the one thing they all had in common is that all the kids were last seen entering a traveling carnival haunted house.

The traveling horror house was owned by two brothers, Charles and Chuck Wynters.  They were carnival freak show entertainers, and they called their den of evil on wheels SideTrack, The World’s Most Perfect Maze of Horror.  Funny, but they advertised that their maze of horror was so perfect, that once you go in, you may never come out the same again.  Seems the kids going in were not coming out again at all.

The police reported that there was nothing that could tie the disappearances to the two brothers or their perfect maze, and after questioning them, the brothers were let go.   They continue to move their traveling horror show from city to city, like a plague moving from one place to the other.  

I remember well the day I heard the carnival was coming to our town.  It was dark and raining, giving an ominous feel to the air.  A feeling of desperation seemed to take hold of me, but I could not understand where it was coming from. Maybe I had a premonition, and maybe I should have done something about it.  Maybe----!

I saw the group of trailers pulling into our town, and was immediately drawn to the big black one in the middle of the pack.  As the big rig drove by, I remember reading the huge sign posted on the side of the trailer;    Now Appearing; Today thru Sunday:   SideTrack, A Maze So Perfect and Horror So Real, We Dare You to Enter Inside.  The Weak at Heart Will Not Survive!

I saw the twisted little man looking at me from inside the truck.  He had a strange smile on his face, that seemed to be taunting me.  Slowly, he drove down our little city street, as he made his way to the big field they had rented.   I heard the brakes of the big truck make a screaming sound as they strained to stop the heavy load it carried, a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Its only for five days,” my brain called out to me.  “They will be gone in five days.”

The following story is about the impact of their stop in our little city.  Even as I write this a chill runs down my spine.  The fear and terror that was brought down on us, like a fire storm  from hell, will never be forgotten.