The ride operator insisted on separating us so there were no more than two people on each bench seat before slamming the bar down and dropping the pin into place. He tested it to make sure it couldn’t spring open by accident; then, satisfied we were locked in place, moved on to the next carriage. That didn’t mean the safety bar couldn’t be undone by someone determined enough to do something stupid.
Spider was both stupid enough and determined enough to think circumventing it was a good idea.
Scotty and I were the last to clamber into our seats.
Spider and Ferret were a couple of swinging carriages ahead of us.
As the wheel turned they were behind us when the commotion began. We saw the people on the ground looking up; we heard them shouting and we felt an unnerving rocking sensation in the whole of the ride but we couldn’t see what the problem was. It took me a second to realize someone was yelling, “Get back into your seat!” and someone else was shouting for the carnies to turn the ride off, but no one was actually doing anything.
The wheel continued to turn slowly, our seat swaying as it cranked around another notch on the circle. I turned in the plank seat, trying to see what was going on behind us, but the bar across my lap was keeping me pinned in place. I heard the sudden siren whir, an alarm going off, and it sounded like it was right above my head, and suddenly the wheel came to a juddering stop. Our plank chair continued to sway.
The seat Spider and Ferret had been in was one person short. I could see Ferret clinging onto the support pole for dear life, and I could see the safety bar hung free.
I felt sick. I’d never been afraid of heights until that moment, but right there, right then, I couldn’t think of a single more terrifying thing—even the creature down under the Batters didn’t count because it was dead.
“Where’s Spider?” I shouted.
Ferret didn’t answer me.
He was completely and utterly gripped by the fear of falling. There was no way his voice could work through that mental block.
Scotty wasn’t looking; his gaze was firmly fixed on the view across the Batters. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Then I saw what he was staring at: scrambling through the network of metal that supported the wheel, Spider was being a prick and doing another stupid daredevil stunt but this one was more dangerous than any climbing he did in the spinney.
“Get back in your seat, you pilchard!” I yelled.
The carney was shouting pretty much the same, though his insult of choice was more profane.
Spider reached the next chair.
I saw two girls in it. They looked vaguely familiar, but fear had changed their faces. One was crying, and the other shouting at him to get off because he was making their seat rock wildly. Spider didn’t care. He leaned forward and kissed the shouter on the lips in triumph.
He looked across the gap between us, at me.
He grinned like the biggest bloody idiot on the planet.
He’d done it.
No one would forget this one.
He’d gone from a nobody to a somebody.
Everyone would be talking about it when we got back to school.
I can remember the sheer joy in his expression.
He was immortal in that moment.
And then he fell.
9
Present Day
“Well?” The detective was waiting; clearly patience wasn’t a virtue in his walk of life.
“Not that I recall.”
“Really? Let me get this straight, Simon Morrissey was one of your closest friends when you were growing up together, wasn’t he? Surely you can’t have that many friends who would pull a stunt like faking a fall from a fairground ride before they ran away from home. That strikes me as something you would talk about during your wander down memory lane.”
“It wasn’t a stunt,” I said.
“Then how come his body wasn’t found?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know. But you were there, weren’t you? You were on the ride when he disappeared. I’ve read the statement you gave the next day. You said you saw him fall. And yet there was no body at the bottom. And his parents never saw him again. So I repeat, you can’t have had that many friends who would have faked a fall from a fairground ride before they ran away from home, so how come you didn’t talk about Simon?”
“Yes, I was there.” I could feel a bead of sweat start to form on my forehead. I couldn’t wipe it away because I didn’t want them to see it. If the policemen saw I was tense, they’d push harder and harder until they got the answers they wanted to hear.
It didn’t matter that they weren’t the truth.
They were answers they could understand.
“Right. You were there, and so was your friend Scott. It’s hard to believe you get together after all this time to talk about the old days and yet you don’t talk about what must have been the most traumatic moment in either of your lives, so forgive me if I’m skeptical.”
I shrugged.
It wasn’t the most traumatic, but he didn’t know that.
The stuff that happened down in the tunnel under the Batters would always hold that particular scratch on my soul.
But that wasn’t something I wanted to talk about.
We’d made a pact. We didn’t want to talk about it then. Nothing had happened since that day to change my mind or make me want to break my word.
“We just wanted to forget what happened. Who wouldn’t? Like you said, it was traumatic. He was our friend.”
“What would you say if I told you we had found Spider’s body?”
I hadn’t expected that. “Where?” I said before I could stop myself. “I mean how?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand. What happened to him?”
The detective looked inordinately pleased with himself. He leaned back in his chair and took a moment, fishing inside his jacket pocket for a battered packet of Embassy Regal, and sparked up. He inhaled deeply, blowing out a corkscrew of smoke. He didn’t ask me if I wanted one. He tapped off the ash, and finally said, “That’s what we’re hoping you’ll be able to help us with.”
“Me?” I said. “Why should I know anything?”
The detective looked me in the eye, holding my gaze for a moment, like we were fourteen playing a game of Blink. I flinched first. He smiled. It wasn’t a warm smile. There was no friendliness in it. No camaraderie. No sense of “we’re in this together.” He moved in for the kill. “Because of where we found him.”
I couldn’t help myself. I had to know. “Where?”
“That’s the interesting thing. He was found in part of the old mine workings near the common. You know the place?”
“The Batters.”
“Right, the Batters. So, do you want to tell me how he got there?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“For some reason I’m finding that more and more difficult to believe. You have been down there, haven’t you? You and Scott. We know you have because of certain items that were recovered from the crime scene. There was an air rifle, stop me if you know where this is going, won’t you? The air rifle, it turns out, is a match for one that was lost by Nathan Nichols, Scott’s older brother. Now, would you like to tell me anything, Drew? I might be your only friend left in the world. The last person who can help you. But you have to talk to me.”
“Nothing.” The palms of my hands were sweaty. I tried to dry them on my jeans without being obvious. They didn’t know anything, they couldn’t know anything. And if I didn’t tell them, it would stay that way.
But how did Spider end up down there?
He didn’t disappear until after we’d been down there. After we’d killed the creature. After we’d thrown the key away.
There was no way someone could have found it so quickly. And even if they had, it would have taken them ages to work out what it opened.
The thing is, part of me had always thought Spider had to be alive.
If the fall had kil
led him, then his body would have been found.
So the policeman was right when he reasoned it had to have been a trick. That’s the same conclusion I’d come to. I just couldn’t work out why Spider would have run away from home and not told us.
“We found some other things down there too.” I didn’t have to hear him speak the words, I could remember only too well the things we had left down there in our panic to get out. “A broken flashlight, a piece of lead piping, a length of rope. The pipe was still covered in blood, even after all these years.”
“And Spider?”
“And Spider. Yes. There was not much of him left after being down there for so long with the rats to feed on him, but his body showed signs of a particular savage beating being administered premortem. He had been beaten to death.”
No, that couldn’t be right.
We didn’t kill Spider.
He wasn’t down there with us. It was only me and Scotty down there. We’d seen Spider afterward, clowning about on the Big Wheel.
But suddenly this nagging doubt was there: I didn’t see the creature that had burst through the doorway. I lashed out at it. I beat it to death. No. I knew it wasn’t Spider.
I knew it.
Because he’d been with us later when we had gone to the fair, when he had fallen from the Big Wheel, hadn’t he?
But then how could he have got down there?
“Are you sure it’s him?”
The detective nodded. “We’ve got a positive ID from a number of things recovered from the body, not least of which was his school bus pass in a wallet in his back pocket, or rather what remained of his back pocket. Or are you going to suggest he might have lost it?”
It was a trap. I knew it was.
He was trying to lure me into telling a lie; to make it look like I was clutching at any straw that might be within reach.
I shook my head.
He leaned forward over the desk. It was a calculated move, using the proximity to appear more menacing.
“The thing is,” he said, slowly. “You don’t seem particularly surprised.”
I looked at him. Held his gaze. And asked, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re driving at?”
“Well, let me make it simple for you: he was found with his school bus pass on him. He was wearing the same clothes he was last seen in at the funfair. So, that would suggest his body was put there straight after the fall, would it not?”
“Put there?”
“Well it didn’t walk there, now did it? The coroner’s report suggests the injuries are consistent with a fall, including impacts with the metal supports on the way down. Our thinking is that someone managed to get his body away from the fairground. Is that what happened?”
I didn’t understand. One minute he seemed to be saying I was involved in killing Spider—that I’d beaten him to death with the pipe, even—and the next that he had died as a result of the fall and I carried him to his final resting place, somehow getting him past all the eyes in the fair. But why would I have done that? Why would anyone?
I shook my head, even though I didn’t really know what I was denying. “What about all of those people who saw him on the Big Wheel? Who watched him fall to the ground? He couldn’t just become invisible. If he’d hit the ground, then they’d have all seen him lying there, wouldn’t they? If someone had spirited him away, they’d have seen it. If he’d walked away himself, they would have seen it. This doesn’t make sense, none of it does. It never did.”
I could still remember the screams.
10
1985
Spider seemed to fall in slow motion.
Maybe the world just slowed down.
Maybe it stopped, for just a moment.
The girl had instinctively tried to push him away to stop him from kissing her, and then realized where they were but by then it was too late. He was falling from the moment he kissed her.
He hit the seat below, then bounced off it, arms and legs pinwheeling almost comically even though there was nothing remotely funny about it. The girls in both seats screamed. They could have been competing against each other to see who could shatter every piece of glass in the fair first. The air was filled with noise.
But the rest of the fair was eerily normal.
Everyone else was just carrying on.
They were oblivious to one of my best friends dying.
The scratchy sound system on the waltzers was playing Bruce Willis’s cover of Under the Boardwalk in competition with the dodgems pumping out Howard Jones’s New Song and the traditional chimes of the carousel. It was noise everywhere, which only made Spider’s fall seem to take so much longer.
But finally the whole world stood still.
We were suspended in the air for hours. Stranded. Helpless. People below milled around. They looked like ants to us, but there was no sense of order. Where ants would have moved in patterns and lines, following the silent commands of the nest, these people just drifted around. Mr. Sagar had taught us about Brownium random motion in physics last term, and here we were watching it firsthand.
We waited up there.
The night grew colder.
No one showed any signs of trying to get us down.
Spider must have fallen somewhere bad. Maybe his body was blocking the mechanism or preventing them from getting to it so they couldn’t get us back to the ground. I didn’t want to think about it. He was my friend. There was no way he could have survived the fall. It was too far.
I hadn’t realized I was crying until a bubble of snot burst from my nose and I sucked in a huge ragged breath. Scotty just stared out over the Batters like he didn’t care. That was worse. The girls were more upset than he was, and he was supposed to be one of Spider’s best friends.
By the time I heard the sirens approaching, the blue flashing lights were already well over the hill. People weren’t screaming anymore. The screams had turned to sobs. Panic had turned to grief and fear for everyone else’s safety. The music was still playing. Freddie Mercury’s voice drowned out Haircut One Hundred.
Ferret had managed to lift the safety bar back into place so he didn’t have to cling onto the strut like his life depended on it. But he didn’t look any more relaxed.
We waited. People moved around beneath us. One of the carnies seemed to be showing the police officers the guts of the machine. There was lots of back-and-forth between them. Then the ambulance men came with a stretcher. I assumed it was to take Spider away, but they didn’t, or at least not that I could see. Before I could get a better look, the wheel juddered back into life and we started moving again, working our way around the circuit until we were lowered to the ground and two-by-two, clambered out of our chairs so the next pair could come down.
We were shepherded away from the ride the moment we were back on the ground, but no one was allowed to leave until the police had taken statements.
“Could I have your name and address, love?” the policewoman who’d taken me to one side asked. “And your date of birth?”
I gave it, though wondered why they needed to know when I was born. I mean, it was just a terrible accident. I hadn’t even been next to Spider when he had climbed out of the chair. I’d been too wrapped up in my own problems to even really think about what he was doing until it was too late to stop him, but that didn’t make it my fault.
“Great. Can you tell me who else you were here with tonight?”
I reeled off a list of names, then realized that saying Ferret and Spider wasn’t really going to help the police, and I had to think twice, trying hard to remember their real first names, because Ferret was always Ferret and always would be.
“Okay, Drew, I need to ask you this: Did you know Simon was going to climb out of his seat?” She looked up from her notebook to see my reaction to the question. She didn’t register any kind of disappointment when I shook my head, but I know it would have been easier for her if she’d thought we were all in on it.
“No. He had
n’t said anything about it to me.”
”What about the others?”
I spread my hands wide. How was I supposed to know that?
“Do you know if he had said anything to any of the other boys you came here with?” she repeated. Obviously a shrug wasn’t a good enough answer for her so I shook my head again.
“You’ll have to ask them,” I said. “But no one said anything to me.” I wanted to ask her something, but I didn’t want to hear the answer, because I know it had to be no. But still, I had to ask. “Is he all right?”
She looked at me a little strangely. Like I ought to know the answer to that already. “Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “I’ve got no idea because he’s not here.”
“I don’t follow?”
“He’s nowhere to be found.”
”But… How? How can he have gone missing? I saw him fall,” I said, remembering. “I saw him hit one of the other chairs on the way down. I saw his arm hit the central column. I saw his head…” I shook my head, trying to dislodge the memory. “He couldn’t have just got up and walked away after that.” It wasn’t a question. I knew he couldn’t. “Someone must have seen him when he hit the ground.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s all a bit confusing, to be honest, but if he’s hurt, we need to find him. He needs to be checked out. He could have internal injuries. So if you know where he is, you have to tell us, Drew. You’re not helping him by keeping quiet.”
“I don’t know where he is,” I repeated.
“Okay, I believe you. We’ve got someone going to his house to see if he’s gone back there, but can you think of anywhere else he might go? Anywhere you guys hang out?”
I told her about the hideout, and how to get there, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else.
He wasn’t there.
11
Present Day
When I left Scotty, he still looked absolutely terrified.
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