There’s a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead, by Sarah Pinsker

JUNE 2023, SHORT STORY, 5500 WORDS

The far stall in the ladies room in the Land of the Dead was backed up again. The day had already started terribly, with an email that hit my phone as I walked the 387 steps from my staff cabin to the front desk, an email from Lana saying Vera, I wanted you to find out directly from me that I’ve started seeing somebody. Call if you want to talk.

I did not want to talk. I did not want to have feelings about my ex dating someone in a serious enough way to send that message, which read like it had been written by a damage control committee. I did not want to keep walking through the late January gray—it perfectly matched my mood—or flip the “Open” sign, or sell weekday tickets to a roadside attraction two hours from where I’d left my life behind, or deal with a backed-up toilet an hour into my shift. I would not even have said that last bit fell under my purview, but the weekly janitor had been in two nights before, which meant “other duties as assigned.” Which was why I ended up plunging the toilet in the Land of the Dead and pulling a fast food burger, still in its wrapper, out of the toilet in the Land of the Dead.

There were two main perks to working for the Land of the Dead. One was being able to tack “in the Land of the Dead” onto any sentence. The other was working with Adelaide, the oldest, coolest queer I’d ever met. Blue hair with a rattail that was either decades out of date or art school au courant, six feet tall even with her back starting to curve in at the shoulders, butch as the local sheriff, who she played poker with because she believed you had to “keep your friends close and your enemies poor,” her words. I had a huge crush on her, and also wanted to take pictures of her and follow her around recording everything she knew.

She was the one who pointed out the “in the Land of the Dead” thing. She’d brought takeout Chinese from the place by the gas station at the exit for the Land of the Dead to celebrate my one-month anniversary working there, and when we cracked our cookies open, she told me to add “in the Land of the Dead” to my fortune instead of “in bed.”

I ate my cookie before looking at the crinkled paper. “‘The greatest risk is not taking one’—in the Land of the Dead?”

She tossed her broken cookie aside and held her fortune up to read it like a proclamation. “‘You can make your own happiness’ in the Land of the Dead. See, Vera? I totally believe that. Look at me.”

I couldn’t argue: she did seem to make her own happiness in this place. She had been the tour guide in the Land of the Dead for thirty-six years, as long as I’d been alive. She wasn’t expected to clean clogged toilets, and the tourists came and went from her company in good spirits. She said she pocketed about a hundred bucks a day in tips on summer weekends, more in the weeks leading up to Halloween. The Land of the Dead opened Wednesday to Sunday year-round, except Christmas and New Year’s; it didn’t really seem worth it to me to be open on Wednesdays and Thursdays—even our boss didn’t come in on weekdays, since he had a garage in town that I suspected made him more money than this labor of love—but I wasn’t about to say anything since, unlike Adelaide, I did not get tips, so those hours counted for a lot, even if nobody showed.

On the quiet days, I restocked shelves in the gift shop of the Land of the Dead, dusted the museum exhibits, played games on my phone, designed paper cuts, and read whatever appeared in the Little Free Library in the parking lot, mostly culled books Adelaide brought from the library in Chattanooga on her monthly outing for drag queen bingo. (I’d gone with her once; she knew everybody in the bar.) The Land of the Dead was a good place to work on ending my addiction to social media, because it had no Wi-Fi and not much in the way of cell reception; I could reliably contact the outside world only on the path from my cabin to the shop.

If nobody sprung for Adelaide’s tours she hung out with me, but if even one person paid admission, she’d start her spiel for them. Not their fault nobody else had come, she said; they still deserved to be educated. That’s what she considered it, and I guess her part was educational, since her tour and the museum and the Path of the Dead got us state arts grants. The Path of the Dead was pretty cool, a boardwalk through the woods with interactive displays about various cultures’ death rituals, customs, myths, and beliefs, done far more tastefully than you might expect for a place like this. Adelaide said she’d had free rein to develop that section—she’d built the entire thing by hand—and she owed it to the different peoples represented to get it as close to right as possible.

Realistically, I think a lot of people only came for the amusements section: the arcade, with The House of the Dead and Ghosts and Goblins, The Twilight Zone and Addams Family and Nightmare on Elm Street pinball machines, and a claw machine full of cheerful rubber skeletons; glow-in-the-dark indoor mini golf, the walls painted with various facts that those who skipped the educational stuff might have missed.

And, outside: Dante’s Inferno and Persephone’s Wild Ride. The Inferno was a scrambler, Persephone a dark ride. Both designed for The Land of the Dead in the eighties at no small cost, during the park’s boom time, according to Adelaide. The amusements still had their own staff, a couple of twentysomething townie boys. Every night, they jumped in their truck and drove back down the mountain the second we closed; in the time I’d been there they’d never once stayed for a drink with us, though I’d heard Adelaide offer.

I think they didn’t really know what to say to me. Adelaide made sense; she was part of the landscape, George Lazaridis’s first and most lasting hire, the one who’d realized his vision and transformed it. I’d showed up eight months ago in a place that as far as those guys were concerned, nobody moved to on purpose.

I’d taken this job out of complete desperation.

“Quit before Mrs. Ferrera dies,” my friends had said for years. “She’s ninety years old.”

To which I responded that I couldn’t leave her in the lurch; I felt a certain responsibility as the only employee of Ferrera’s Art Supplies for the last fifteen years, and I’d liked being able to do my paper cut designs behind the counter during quiet stretches. Some part of me had hoped for one of those movie situations where I’d find out she’d left me the store, but it turned out she hadn’t ever gotten around to writing a will, so that dream died with her. If you could call it a dream; maybe it was just another thing that would have forestalled me actually figuring out what to do with my life. (Ironically, that was why Lana had broken up with me too, a few months before my job evaporated; she said watching me tread water was exhausting.)

Mrs. Ferrera had always bragged about having the last analog store in a digital world; I’d never considered the implications for me. Over ten months, I applied to seventy-six positions in every field I could even tangentially say I knew anything about, everything from art teacher to museum guard to copy store clerk, and nobody had bitten, most likely a combination of bad job market and a lack of terminal degree and my outdated computer skills and a lack of referrals. I had a working knowledge of ledger sheets, but no idea how Excel worked. I had never used a point-of-sale system, and nobody seemed interested in teaching me. Atlanta offered me nothing but chain-store greeter options, like I was ninety myself, and those wouldn’t have covered city rent after the split.

Lana was the one who suggested I expand my search to the whole state, which was how I ended up storing all my worldly belongings in her garage and relocating two hours northwest, to a cozy staff cabin in the Land of the Dead. She and I had stayed friendly, and maybe part of me had been hoping that if she saw me take her advice, if she had a chance to miss me a bit, we might eventually reconcile.

All of which is a very long way of explaining why, eight months into my employment, my friend Adelaide the tour guide leaned against the wall beside the hand dryer to watch and offer moral support as I reached down the toilet and pulled out a burger, still in its waxy wrapper.

“My money was on a diaper,” she said. “What does it say about fast food that that thing still coheres? At least now you can say you’ve unclogged a toilet in the Land of the Dead. That can go on the firsts board, right?”

The firsts board was a running list I kept on my refrigerator. She had suggested it after the fortune cookie dinner; said she’d done it for her first few years. She didn’t have many firsts these days, but she claimed she enjoyed watching me experience them.

“Second time this month, actually.” I wasn’t in the mood for enthusiasm.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I got an email this morning. My ex met somebody.”

She stepped aside to let me toss my wadded gloves and burger into the wastebasket under the sink. “Oh, hon. I guess that means you have to stop imagining you’re going to get back together? I’d hug you, but you need to wash your hands first.”

The front door chimed the chorus of “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and we both turned toward it.

“I’ll go tell them you’ll be out in a minute. You wash up.” She headed down the corridor, then turned back. “We’ll hang out tonight. I’ll give you a new first, in honor of your eight-month anniversary.” A declaration, not an invitation; she didn’t wait for a response.

A distraction from Lana, in any case. I spent the afternoon puzzling over what she was so sure would make my firsts list eight months in. We’d covered every cuisine within an hour, several varieties of edible, and every drink that didn’t require a blender, since most appliances tended to blow my cabin’s breakers. We’d made out once, for my six-month anniversary on the job, just so I could say I’d kissed someone in the Land of the Dead. It was a fun night.

This day brought thirteen customers in total, including the three teenagers who came from town once a week for the arcade, two death tourists, and two carsful of travelers made curious enough by the highway ads to take the exit on their way between Atlanta and Chattanooga, one of which I blamed for the toiletburger.

At five, the amusements guys funneled the stragglers toward the gift shop, where I gave them half an hour to part with their remaining dollars. Then half an hour of cleaning, for me. Adelaide was gone by then.

A barrage of text messages pinged my phone on the path to the cabins. Lana had said what she needed to say in the morning; I’d responded I’m happy for you! with a smiley face that I hoped conveyed no sarcasm. Sometime in the day, six mutual friends had checked on me, which I guessed meant they’d been waiting for her to tell me. I stopped walking and responded to each with a variation on I’m happy for her/I’m fine that I hoped also sounded sincere.

Adelaide’s lights were on in the far cabin, and I headed over as soon as I’d changed out of my toilet-diving clothes. Past the six empty cabins between hers and mine, more relics of the boom years, or at least years when the amusement staff weren’t townies.

“Come in,” she called before I raised my hand for a courtesy knock.

Her cabin had the same layout as mine—there’s only so much variation to be had in a single room with a postage-stamp bathroom— but hers felt lived in. She had actual framed art on the walls, by her friends, and curtains and lampshades and a rug and a love seat and a bedspread all in different patterns that somehow complemented each other’s color schemes. She’d made her own bookshelf, and the coffee table, and the hutch where she kept dishes. She’d fit a queen bed in, and still it felt cozy instead of cramped like mine.

The room smelled like microwaved ramen, which told me tonight’s surprise wasn’t culinary. She sat on the love seat with her bowl up to her chin. I grabbed the second bowl and settled on the floor rather than risk spilling on her bedspread.

She peered down at me as I dug in. “I’m glad you’re eating. That’s a good sign.”

“I’m okay, I think. Sad, but not depressed. She’s moving on, and I’m going nowhere.”

“You’re in luck,” she said. “We are most definitely going somewhere tonight.”

That surprised me. She generally maintained that nothing in the area was worth driving to on a work night. Not the restaurants, not the bars, not the one seedy dance club, which was in the parking lot of a truck stop and still had viewing booths in the rear even though it no longer provided live adult entertainment.

“Do I need to change?” I slurped noodles while she assessed my apparel.

“You’ve got hiking boots, right? We’ll go back to your place for those and a coat.”

“Are we going hiking? I don’t even know if I’ve ever been on a winter night hike. Is that the first?”

She shook her head like I should know better.

“You’d think I’d run out of firsts at some point. It’s been eight months.”

“Honey, I promise you, you’ve got a long way to go before you run out of firsts, if that’s really a thing you’re worried about. Groundhog Day in the Land of the Dead is just around the corner, for starters.”

“Ooh,” I said with exaggerated excitement. She laughed.

Sometimes I forgot that as isolated as I would have felt here without her for company, she’d been here for the better part of four decades without anyone else who had ever stuck around for long. How did she do it? I’d asked once, and she’d shrugged and said it was more interesting than I realized, which I took to mean giving tours was a more fulfilling gig than selling admissions and skull candy and plastic scythes.

After dinner, I washed her bowl and mine, and then we headed to my place. On her instruction, I put on my puffer jacket and hiking boots, and dug out a beanie and gloves, none of which I usually bothered with on the walk from cabin to work.

“It’s not cold,” I said.

“It’s colder in the woods, and always better to be prepared.”

“Were you a Girl Scout?”

“What do you think? Hon, there’s no ‘were.’ Scout for life. You?”

“My mother didn’t sign me up for anything that might involve her getting roped into volunteering. We bought the cookies, though?”

She snorted, which I interpreted to mean that cookies did not count.

I didn’t ask again where we were going, since she was clearly enjoying the surprise element. She led me from the residential area through the amusements yard and back toward the Path of the Dead, pitch-black beyond the entrance.

“I’ve been through here before,” I said. “You took me on both your tours my first week.”

“That was so you could talk knowledgeably to customers about what they each entail. Relax, we’re not doing the Path.”

As she said that, we entered the Path, her flashlight illuminating first the replica of a Cherokee burial mound, with plaques declaring that this was Cherokee land and explaining about the removal camps and the Trail of Tears. On both her indoor and outdoor tours, Adelaide made sure that was the first thing everyone heard, since in her words, if the tourists only took away one new fact from their weird death excursion, it should be that real lives and deaths happened here.

We passed the Egyptian Field of Rushes, and a tree with a large fiberglass chameleon facing off against a large fiberglass lizard, which had something to do with a Bantu myth. I was about to open my mouth to ask again if we were doing the Path, even though she’d said we weren’t, when we veered off the wooden boardwalk between the reptiles and the concrete banshee.

I hadn’t realized how much I appreciated the boardwalk until we left it. I’d never been a big hiker, and the question of what might be underfoot made me nervous. Ticks, snakes; I was pretty sure those went dormant in winter, though if you stepped on a sleeping snake it would probably take issue. And what lurked behind the thick trees? Black bears, coyotes, foxes, bobcats. Besides the animals, this area had canyons. Dropoffs. Rivers.

I followed as close as I could to Adelaide without stepping on her heels, trying to see what she saw in her flashlight beam, though nothing looked like a landmark to me. The halogens illuminating the amusements lot had already been swallowed by the trees. If she left me out here, I’d never find my way back.

I was about to tell her that getting me lost in the Land of the Dead was not a fun thing for my firsts board when her beam caught something different. It looked like two trees growing together, leaning into each other at about ten feet above the ground, like they were commiserating, or sharing a secret. Like they shared a brain; up close, they looked so entangled I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

“Did someone train those trees to grow like that?” I asked. “I’ve heard about artists who—”

“It’s not about the trees,” Adelaide said.

She grabbed my hand, pulling me forward between the steepled branches. Her flashlight’s beam winked out, and I stumbled and nearly fell before catching my balance. When I looked up, the sky was as dark and close as a closet. I could barely see my hands in front of my face. My feet shuffled forward, and it was dust like a dirt road they stirred, no longer the forest floor. A moment later, I collided with Adelaide’s back.

“Good,” she said. “I was worried you hadn’t followed.”

“Followed where?”

Adelaide raised her arms like a lesbian Willy Wonka. “Welcome to the Land of the Dead!”

I must have looked skeptical, because she added, “I know for a fact you’ve never been to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead before. This goes on the firsts board for sure. Look around!”

Was that meant ironically? There was nothing to see. The trees that had surrounded us a moment before had vanished. What phase was the moon in? The darkness held no moon, no stars, no satellites.

“Don’t turn back,” Adelaide said. “If you take a step backward, you’ll be back on the other side of the trees. Like, any step backward, no matter how far we walk now, and you’ll be instantly back. Trust me?”

I nodded, then vocalized, since it was dark and she was in front of me. “Okay. What about to the side?”

“To the side? Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know. This is a lot. I’m just trying to establish the ground rules.”

“Okay, well, I don’t know what happens if you step off the side. I’ve never thought to test it. This is a road. We walk forward on the road. Think of it like a dark ride; you can only move in one direction. Can’t you feel it?”

I tried, but I didn’t really feel anything. Not hot, not cold. Not scared, which was weird in itself, and definitely not any intuitive instructions she thought she felt. When she started walking again, it took only a moment for her to be swallowed by the blackness.

“Wait up,” I called.

I leapt forward and immediately plowed into her, after which I slowed to match her a step behind. I could have walked beside her, since it wasn’t like she was really leading anymore, but I liked having something to look at other than nothing.

Our feet made no sound as we walked. My puffer jacket’s arm didn’t swish against my body. I couldn’t stand the silence. “So which Land of the Dead is this?”

“Huh?”

“We just walked through two dozen of your own handmade displays about different cultures and death. Which one is this?”

She laughed, a welcome sound. “I guess you’re right. I guess what we work at should by rights be ‘The Lands of the Dead?’ Plural? But that’s all entertainment. This is the real thing. A real thing.”

“You still didn’t answer my question. Which one?”

She stopped and pointed some distance ahead at a brick-faced bar, lit by neon beer signs and a glow from inside. The first anything we’d seen since we started on the road–I couldn’t make any guess on the distance we’d traveled or how long we’d been walking.

“Mine.” She said it as if it was obvious.

“The land of the dead is a honky-tonk?”

“No. My land of the dead is not a honky-tonk. It’s the first gay bar I ever went to.”

Impossibly, we had closed the distance, though we’d taken only a few more steps. We were crossing the empty parking lot now. Dead winter grass and gravel crunched under our feet, the first sounds other than our own voices.

I let space open between us. “Have you been in before?”

“Sort of. For a long time it stayed far away no matter how much I walked. These days—I’ll show you.”

That should have made me nervous, probably, but somehow it didn’t. From inside, laughter, voices, music.

She gripped the brass door handle and swung it open without stepping in. I had to crane my neck around her to look inside. Two couples slow-danced in front of an old-school jukebox playing “Walkin’ After Midnight.” A dozen or so young men, Black and white and brown, stood near the bar chatting, and more in the booths. A few women, too, mostly Adelaide’s age and older.

A copper-haired trans woman in a black tank top and acid-white jeans washed glasses behind the bar, a towel over one shoulder. She was the first to notice us. Not us.

“Addie,” she said. “You’re too early.”

Everyone looked over, but not in a synchronized way, nothing creepy or ominous. Someone in the far booth waved at her. I’d had that moment before walking into a new bar, where all the locals size you up; none of these people spared a glance for me.

Adelaide. They all looked at Adelaide in surprise and delight. I waited for her to take another step, to cross the threshold, but she didn’t.

The song faded, and another began. Something faster, an eighties synthesizer riff driving it, something I didn’t recognize, but more people from the booths rose to dance.

“Karaoke isn’t until later, Addie,” the bartender said. “And you know you can’t bring friends. Come back later. We’ll be here, I promise. We love you.”

“I love you, too.” Adelaide didn’t move.

“Come on, Adelaide.” It seemed clear to me that the bartender was telling her to leave. If this was a dark ride, they were a diorama we were meant to see but not engage with; not yet for her, not ever for me. I touched her bicep, but she shrugged off my hand.

“One drink. We’ll stay for one drink. They can’t object to that.” She took a single step forward, but something had shifted. It looked like she was forcing her body through Lucite. She turned and reached for me, to pull me with her, I thought, and I stepped back, and my heel slipped on the mat of dead leaves that meant I was back in the woods. I landed gracelessly on my butt and hands.

Since I was already on the ground, I stayed sitting, staring deep between the twisted trees. Waiting, hoping Adelaide would step through, too. In the second before I’d backed out, as she’d reached for me, I’d thought she was trying to pull me forward, into a scene that was hers, or not hers, but definitely not mine. Now, picturing the look in her eyes, I wondered if that hadn’t been what she was asking of me at all. Maybe she needed an anchor.

I considered my options: wait here or try to find my way back to the Path and the yard and the known? No, the third option. I needed to find Adelaide, to offer her the help I’d failed to offer.

I scrambled to my feet and walked forward between the trees.

Into nothing.

Dark and dark and darkness, not even road beneath my feet, not even my hands in front of me, not even my own breath. I called out once to Adelaide, and no sound emerged from my mouth, if I still had one. And again, I should have been scared, but I wasn’t; this was a non-place that paradoxically felt like it would one day be known to me. I tried one step forward, but it felt like moving against a current. This ride is under construction. No, this ride is still in the planning stages, a space waiting to be used, a drafting board waiting for a concept, a sketch, a cutting away of negative space.

My non-foot stepped backward, and I found myself slipping again in the slick late-winter leaves of northern Georgia. A second later, Adelaide stepped through the doorway.

“There you are,” she said, like I was a kid who’d wandered away in the grocery store. She turned her flashlight back on, and I followed her wordlessly back to the boardwalk, then the lighted amusements yard, then to her cabin.

She flopped backwards onto her bed, boots and all. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I shouldn’t have pushed it when I knew that was the closest they’d let me get. I know it’s not time, but I can’t tell you what it’s like to see them and not go to them.”

“Who are they?” I dropped onto the love seat. She wouldn’t have brought me if she didn’t want me to ask.

“I moved to New York when I was seventeen. You don’t know what the energy felt like in the seventies; I thought I’d be there forever. That was before all my friends started dying. I took care of them, buried them when their families wouldn’t come. By the time there were none of them left, there was none of me either. I saw an ad where a guy needed help building a new roadside park about the dead in northwest Georgia, and I thought, ‘Who knows more about that than me? What do I deserve other than this?’ So I came here, and to my surprise I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the weird concept of the place, the land. I made new friends, found new lovers, buried some of them too. Built a weird little life here.” She waved a hand, indicating the cabin around her, or maybe the whole Land of the Dead.

“And built that doorway?”

“No. I found it. Maybe twenty years ago? I’d been here a while already. I would’ve sworn I’d explored that area before, but maybe not, or maybe I couldn’t see it until I needed to.”

“You’re telling me that the entrance to the real Land of the Dead is somehow coincidentally at the Land of the Dead?”

“I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think maybe George felt it too. Have you ever asked him why he picked this spot to build? It’s not exactly tourist central. I asked once and he said, ‘This was the right place.’ Who knows, maybe he goes through that doorway too.”

“To your gay bar?”

“No. You saw my gay bar because I went first and pulled you through. If you went on your own, you’d see something else. I’m guessing it’s not time for you to catch a glimpse yet, and you’d get lost and never even find those trees, or yours is different trees or something else altogether.”

“How do you know?” I didn’t tell her I’d tried it.

She propped herself on an elbow. “Honey, you know you’re not my first, right?”

I laughed. I understood, kind of. She’d been here a while.

“Anyway,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done all that research and built all those exhibits if I thought that what I see is what anyone else sees. I figure there are other entrances, other lands, other ways of being and not being. And even I would get sick of bar food after a while; I’m kinda hoping that’s the welcome center, and that one day I’ll step through the trees and straight into the bar. I guess I’ll find out someday.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then she told me to grab a couple of beers from the minifridge.

She hoisted her bottle. “A toast.”

“To my first time in a land of the dead in the Land of the Dead?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And your first time leaving a land of the dead in the Land of the Dead.”

Something about the way she said “leaving” made me realize she meant a bigger moving-on. Not immediately, but soon. I did like it here, sometimes, and I thought she was fantastic, but I had to go somewhere and do something, so that somebody greeted me someday the way the people in the bar had greeted Adelaide. I still needed to find my place, and my people.

How many folks like me had she given this tour to? How many mes had there been before me? More than a few, I guessed, from the look on her face. I offered one more toast. “To all the firsts. To beginnings.”

We clinked bottles and drank.

“Yours too?” She asked, as if it was my idea. “What are you going to do?”

I considered. “I want to try to sell my paper cuts. Like, at maker markets or online or something. I don’t know where.”

“I know some artists in Chattanooga if you want introductions.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I know some in Atlanta, too. I was always the person selling them supplies, so I never really introduced myself as an artist. Anyway, I didn’t leave Atlanta because there was nothing left for me there. It had gotten a little small, but maybe it won’t feel that way if I’m doing something new.”

“A place like this is good for resetting your sense of scale.” She waved at the close walls. “When do you think you’ll leave?”

I studied her face. She had seen a lot of people come and go; for the first time, it occurred to me she might even be the one who did the hiring. She brought people here when they needed it and then pushed them out before they got stuck, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it. “Not right this second, but soon.”

“Good. You need to make me a paper cut to frame on my wall, for starters. All my art is by friends, you know.”

“I’d be honored.” My brain immediately started in on the puzzle of what to make her: two trees entwined, maybe, surrounded by a forest boardwalk. It made me think of one other thing. “You know, I’ve been here for summer and fall and winter, but not—”

“Oh, you’ll love it when everything starts blooming. You won’t even recognize the trees when they get dressed up nice.”

“It doesn’t seem right to leave before I put that on my firsts board. I guess I can stick around a little longer.”

I sighed, faking resignation, knowing at the same time that it felt true. I was almost ready to go, but before I did, I wanted to be able to say I’d spent springtime in the Land of the Dead.

 

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