More came into view as he walked with Shiner through the gate. He saw the elevated platform. The lowest gondola was there, where it had been stopped at the end of the last ride of the night to let its passengers out. Dim shapes stood near it. He saw Samson leading the troll up the few stairs, Liz hurrying after them.
“Ooo, this is gonna be good,” Heather said. Instead of latching on to Jeremy again, she hurried past him and bounded to the top of the stairs.
Shiner stayed at Jeremy’s side while they climbed the platform.
“Everybody here?” Tanya asked.
“Anyone who’s not here,” Randy said, “speak up.”
“You’re as funny as crotch rot,” Liz told him.
“Okay,” Tanya said. “Let’s air this bastard out.”
Samson, standing in front of the troll, kept him on tiptoes by dragging upward on his mustache. Liz, Karen, Heather, and Shiner began to undress him. He danced and whimpered a little as they did it, but offered no real resistance. Tanya watched like a foreman, arms folded across her chest, nodding with approval.
Soon they had the troll down to his long johns.
Jeremy was surprised. He’d thought nobody wore long johns—just actors in cowboy movies. But this old fart wore them, all right.
Heather and Liz peeled them off him.
Jeremy couldn’t believe it. He felt shocked, and his skin burned with his embarrassment.
The guy was as hairy as an ape. The mound of his sagging belly was in the way, so Jeremy couldn’t see his privates and was glad to be spared the sight. But Liz and Heather were on their knees, having drawn the long johns down his legs, and they stayed there, inspecting him, whispering to each other, giggling. The guy obviously wanted to cover himself, but Karen and Shiner had his arms. So he just whimpered.
Heather reached up.
The troll’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.
“What’re you, desperate?” Liz muttered.
“I just wanta see if—”
“That’s enough,” Nate snapped.
“Let’s get on with it,” Tanya said. “We didn’t post a guard, so we’d better finish up and get out of here.” She reached out toward Randy. He dug into a pocket, took out something that clicked and rattled, and gave it to her.
Jeremy saw that it was a pair of handcuffs.
“I’ll get the thing going,” Nate said, and ducked away.
The troll was guided to the Ferris wheel and forced down. The gondola started to swing backward when his rump hit the footrest, but the platform stopped it.
As if he suddenly realized that the pain of the beating and the humiliation of being stripped were mere preliminaries to the main event, the troll shrieked and went wild. He kicked, squirmed, flung his arms at the kids trying to hold him down.
Tanya kicked him in the belly. His breath blasted out and he slumped against the front edge of the gondola’s seat, whinnying as he struggled for air.
She swung the metal safety bar down and clamped it.
A motor rumbled to life. Jeremy felt the platform begin to vibrate under his shoes.
Astonished, he muttered, “It’ll go?”
“Nate’s folks own the thing,” Liz said.
Tanya finished with the troll and stepped aside. He was still sitting on the footrest, sprawled backward against the seat, fat hairy legs sticking out.
His hands hung beneath the safety bar, suspended there by the chain of the cuffs.
“Watch it,” Tanya warned. Jeremy and the others stepped out of the way. “Okay, Nate,” she said.
Nate, over at the side, worked a lever forward.
The Ferris wheel lurched, and slowly started to turn. As the gondola moved backward, rising, it rocked away beneath the weight of the troll. He slipped off the footrest and cried out as the bracelets tugged at his wrists.
“No!” he yelled. “Please!”
A second later, he was hanging straight down—all his weight borne by the handcuffs, by the connecting links, by the safety bar.
The Ferris wheel lifted him higher, then squeaked and stopped with a slight jerk that made him yelp. He swayed up there, six or eight feet above the ground.
“Take him higher,” Tanya said.
“That’s high enough,” Nate told her. “He’s an awfully big guy. Something could give out.”
“Let me down. Please? I’ll get out of town. I’ll do anything. Please!”
“Give him one spin over the top,” Tanya said.
“Christ, yeah!” Heather blurted.
“Make him ride it!” Liz said.
“I don’t think we—”
“Shit!” Tanya snapped. “Give it to him! He’s a fucking troll!”
Nate shook his head.
He kept shaking it as Tanya strode toward him. “I’ll do it, then—shit.”
“Tanya…” he said. But he didn’t try to stop her.
She rammed the long lever forward. With a quick lurch that dragged a shriek out of the troll, the wheel started turning.
The naked, kicking troll flew upward as if being sucked into the fog. He screamed all the way up. He kept on screaming after Jeremy couldn’t see him anymore.
Tanya tugged the lever backward.
The Ferris wheel stopped.
The screams of the troll came down through the fog.
“God,” Shiner muttered, “he must be right near the top.”
“A good place for him to spend the night,” Tanya said.
“Let’s bring him down,” Nate told her. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Fine,” Tanya said. “In the morning. Go ahead and shut it off.”
“We can’t…”
The troll had never stopped screaming, but the pitch suddenly jagged high. It made Jeremy’s teeth ache. Goose bumps prickled his skin.
He heard a thump.
The screaming stopped.
Another thump.
“Oh, Jesus,” Nate murmured.
And down through the fog came the troll, striking spokes and braces, bouncing off them, cartwheeling, flipping, tumbling like a mad acrobat.
Twenty
The platform shook when he crashed against it.
Nobody said a word. There was silence except for the rumble of the Ferris wheel’s motor.
Jeremy stared at the body. It lay only a couple of yards from him, faceup on the floor between two of the gondolas. The shadows weren’t dark enough to shroud it. The face looked black with what was surely blood. The nose was mashed flat. One leg stuck out sideways, as if it had been wrenched from its socket. The other stood straight up from the knee. The hands, still cuffed, rested on the hill of the troll’s belly. A spike of bone protruded from the left forearm.
Jeremy turned his eyes away from the corpse and looked around the group. Everyone else was motionless, gazing at it.
Liz raised a hand to her mouth. He wondered if she was about to vomit. He felt a little like throwing up. But she began to make strange muffled noises, and he realized she was giggling. A moment later she said, “Woops.”
Shiner said, “Oh, God. Now we’ve done it.”
“He fall down go boom,” Heather said.
Nate broke away from the group and shut down the motor.
“Everybody stay cool,” Tanya said.
“What happened?” Randy muttered.
“Obviously,” Tanya said, “the safety bar wasn’t strong enough to support him.”
“We killed him,” Randy said.
“Brilliant deduction, dickhead.” From Liz.
“Look,” Tanya said, “the main thing now is not to panic. We’ve got to get rid of him and clean up. Nobody ever has to know this happened. Liz, Karen, Heather, I want you to clean up the blood. Go get a bucket and mop. Jeremy, get the guy’s stuff together and throw it under the boardwalk. Shiner, help him. Samson, you give me a hand with the body. Nate, go get your surfboard. We’ll float him out and dump him.”
“What about me?” Randy asked.
“Do us
a favor and stick your head up your ass,” Liz said.
“You can stay with me,” Tanya told him. She pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up her forearms, ducked beneath the outer rim of the Ferris wheel, and crouched by the body. Samson followed.
Nobody else moved.
Tanya lifted the sideways leg by its ankle and swung it inward. As she lowered the other leg—the one bent upward from the knee—Randy spun around, gagging. He threw himself against the platform’s railing and vomited.
“Good going,” Liz said. “I’m not cleaning that up.”
Somebody squeezed Jeremy’s arm. He looked, and saw that it was Shiner. “Let’s take care of his junk,” she said.
He turned away from the grisly sight of Tanya and Samson struggling with the body, and started to pick up the troll’s clothes.
Nate brushed past him and hurried down the stairs. Then Liz, Karen, and Heather left.
“I’ll help you guys,” Randy said. He still had the cane in one hand, the derby hanging on its top. The derby fell off when he bent down to pick up the long johns. It rolled under the Ferris wheel, and he scrambled to retrieve it.
Jeremy saw that Tanya and Samson had the body out from under the wheel. Tanya was holding the legs up while Samson dragged the body by its arms. They were moving it toward the rear of the platform.
“I never thought something like this would happen,” Shiner whispered.
“It’s pretty gross,” Jeremy told her.
“God.”
He picked up the shoes and socks. And looked up in time to see Samson and Tanya lift the troll over the railing behind the Ferris wheel. They dropped him toward the beach.
On the way back, Samson grabbed the duffel bag. He lifted it and followed Tanya down the stairs.
“I guess we’ve got it all,” Shiner said.
With Randy in the lead—but no longer holding the derby high on the staff like a trophy—they climbed down from the platform. They walked through the open gate. Tanya and Samson were off to the left, climbing over the boardwalk’s railing. Samson must’ve already tossed the duffel bag down. He and Tanya jumped, and vanished from sight.
When Jeremy reached the railing, he saw them striding across the beach. They took only a few steps before the fog devoured them.
The duffel bag lay in the sand straight below him. He emptied his arms over the railing. The troll’s shoes dropped fast, but the socks and pants fluttered down. So did the shirt released by Shiner. It sailed down, billowing, sleeves out. The wadded leather jacket plummeted, and hit the sand before the shirt. Randy hurled the cane. It stabbed the sand and stood upright like a spear. He kept the derby in his hand while he ducked between the bars of the railing.
Standing there, he hesitated. With the stiff brim of the derby, he nudged his glasses more firmly against his face.
“You don’t have to jump,” Shiner told him.
“I’m not afraid.”
“Liz isn’t here to razz you.”
“Tanya jumped, I can jump.” And he did. His feet hit the sand, his knees folded, and he seemed to dive forward. After getting up, he watched Shiner and Jeremy climb over the railing.
Hanging on to the outside of the bars, Jeremy could see why the smaller kid had been reluctant to leap from such a height. But the others had done it. He didn’t want to look like a chicken by turning around and trying to lower himself off the boardwalk so the drop wouldn’t be as great.
Shiner leapt.
As she fell, Jeremy stepped into space. He didn’t want to think about the troll, but suddenly he imagined himself as the old man plummeting from the top of the Ferris wheel, knowing he was as good as dead. For just an instant, terror seized him.
Then his feet struck the sand. The impact collapsed his knees. His rump was pounded, and a knee clipped him on the chin, jarring his teeth together. He flopped onto his back. As he sat up, Shiner reached down to give him a hand. He took hold of it. She pulled, helping him to rise.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Nodding, he ran his tongue across the edges of his teeth. He half-expected to find some chipped, but they seemed all right.
“You should’ve rolled,” she told him.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“If you two don’t require my assistance,” Randy said, “I’ll catch up with Tanya.”
“Sure,” Shiner said.
The boy rushed off into the fog.
Jeremy and Shiner wandered around, bending over and gathering the troll’s scattered clothes.
“I kind of feel sorry for Randy,” she said. “He’s a pretty sensitive kid. This was rough tonight.”
“That’s for sure.”
“He’s not…into this like some of us. He’s only here because he’s got some kind of crush on Tanya.”
“Really?”
Shiner stepped up close to a piling and tossed the troll’s jacket and pants into the darkness.
“Shouldn’t we take the stuff in under there? Maybe like scatter it around some?”
“No. Just throw it. There’s probably trolls.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. We’d better not hang around too long.”
Jeremy hurled the shoes, socks, and shirt, then backed away. “You think anybody saw what happened?”
“You mean trolls? Some might’ve. They’re always hidden around. I bet they know everything that goes on.” She picked up the long johns, pulled the cane out of the sand, and retrieved the feathered derby.
Jeremy lifted the duffel bag. It was awfully heavy. “Will they tell?” he asked.
“Not a chance.”
They stopped just under the edge of the boardwalk, and Shiner threw the troll’s things into the darkness.
“I’d better carry this in a little ways,” Jeremy said.
“No, don’t. Just toss it under. It’ll be picked clean by morning anyway.”
Holding the canvas bag by its strap, he swung it forward and let go. It vanished. A second later, it landed with a soft thump and a clinking of glass, as if bottles were knocking together.
“Some trolls’ll be glad to find that,” he said.
“Tha’s a fack.” The dry, withered voice came out of the blackness in front of him.
He flinched rigid. Shiner grabbed his arm. He wanted to spin around and run, but she held on to him and walked slowly backward. He heard her breathing hard.
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t go under there?” she asked after several strides.
“God.”
“I have all kinds of nightmares about getting caught by them. That’s about the worst thing I can imagine, you know?”
She let go of his arm and turned around.
Jeremy turned around too. Then he looked back over his shoulder. The black space beneath the boardwalk was a vague blur through the fog. He tried to spot the Ferris wheel, but it was out of sight.
“I bet you never thought you’d get into anything like this,” Shiner said.
“That guy biting it.” He shook his head.
“Bad. Real bad. Makes me feel kind of sick, you know? I mean, he was a troll, but still…” She leaned against his side, and Jeremy put an arm across her back. “It was pretty terrible, anyway.”
“Yeah.”
They kept walking. He could see nothing in front of him except sand and the fog.
“I hope he doesn’t wash in sometime,” Shiner said. “That’d be awful if people are on the beach and he comes in, you know?”
From the sound of the surf, Jeremy guessed they must be getting close to the shore. But he still couldn’t see the water, or Tanya and the others.
“Nate’s going to take him out on a surfboard?” he asked.
“I guess so.”
“Does he have to go all the way home to get it?”
“No. Shouldn’t take him very long. He keeps it in a storeroom in the arcade. He surfs in the morning sometimes before the place opens.”
“He’s Tanya’s boyfriend, huh?”
; “Yeah.”
Jeremy noticed that his feet no longer pushed into the sand. The beach felt solid. It slanted downward slightly. Here and there, it was littered with dark clumps of kelp that looked less like seaweed than like strange tentacled creatures dead on the shore.
A ragged fringe of white foam spread toward him. Shiner stopped walking. A couple of yards before reaching their feet, the foam settled and faded away. Jeremy heard the water receding, a fresh wave washing in.
“The others must be over there,” he said, nodding to the left.
Shiner turned her head that way. Then she looked forward again. Her hand tightened against his side, so Jeremy pressed her a little bit closer.
“I guess we should go over there,” she said.
“Yeah.”
But she didn’t move, so neither did Jeremy. He realized his heart was beating more rapidly than before.
This is fine, just standing here, he told himself.
He wondered what she was thinking about.
“You’d think we could hear them,” Shiner said.
“Should we try to find them?”
“Do you want to?” she asked.
He shrugged. He wanted to stay right here. And that was weird too. Tanya was the one he was crazy about, not Shiner. He could be with Tanya right now—looking at her, hearing her voice.
But I wouldn’t be holding her like this, he thought. She’s Nate’s girl. I don’t stand a chance with her.
“I think I might quit trolling,” Shiner said.
“Really?”
“I don’t know. Killing a guy like that. I hate the trolls, but killing them…”
“If you quit, when’ll I see you?” The words were out before he had a chance to think about them and back off.
She turned her face toward Jeremy.
“Why don’t you give me your number?” she said.
His heart felt like a drumming fist.
“I…we just got our phone. I don’t know the number. If you give me yours…”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’d like to, but I’m not allowed to get calls from boys.”
“Huh?”
“My mother, she’s…a little peculiar. She thinks I’m too young to have a boyfriend.”
Funland Page 17