by Paul Finch
When Sharon suddenly heard a shrill clarion call, she almost jumped out of her skin. Swearing, she retrieved the phone from her pocket. The return text said:
Here. Where R U?
“For Christ’s sake,” she murmured, keying in a quick response:
Where is here?
Need a location
While she waited, she walked. She’d last been in here as a young teenager, and possessed no real knowledge of the park’s layout, so she ambled in a vague northerly direction, trying always to keep the open sky over the sea on her left, though as she had to turn a few corners to do this, it soon became confusing.
She eased the volume down on her radio. She hadn’t heard anything on it for quite a while, most likely because of the mountains; if not for that, she was certain the incident on South Shore would have kept the airwaves busy. But even so, she didn’t like the idea that a sudden burst of static might announce her presence. This was a habit she’d fallen into while making night-time property checks; it was far better to catch the felons in the act than alert them you were coming. Of course, at this moment she wasn’t trying to stop anyone doing something they shouldn’t – it was the other way around, she thought guiltily.
She passed the Flying Teacups on her right and the Surf Rider on her left. They were grim relics of their former selves: jibs hanging, cables trailing. From what Sharon could see, any attempt to regenerate the park in the future looked doomed to fail. Everything she saw here was broken, begrimed, gutted. Where the Dodgems had once collided in time to a coordinated dirge of all the latest pop songs, silent emptiness yawned under a rotted iron pagoda. The billboard on top of it had once advertised the latest shows at the Fun Land Emporium; now it hung charred and soggy. In fact, arson looked to have been the sole reason anyone had visited Fun Land in the last few years. Though the lower section of the Downhill Racer was caged off, its main tower had been reduced to blackened bones, while a flame-damaged effigy of Bubbles wearing a scarf and bob-cap and holding a pair of skis, which had once stood on top of this, lay on the footway.
A short distance on, she accessed a timber boardwalk, which thudded loudly as she strode along it. This was partly due to the empty space underneath. It was one of the unusual features of Fun Land that, to facilitate drainage of the autumn rains or spring melt-water from the heights of Diffwys and Cadair Idris, numerous channels had been tunnelled underneath the park, leading eventually to the sea. Back in 1920, during construction, the park’s original designers had made a special feature out of this: the Fun Land Marina had been built. This was a deep, octagonal harbour, about sixty yards in diameter, into which numerous of the drainage channels discharged, their vents carved into dolphin heads or the mouths of tritons and sea gods, but more importantly, from which motorised mock-Venetian gondolas would take paying guests out along the so-called Royal Canal for a ride around the bay, calling eventually at the Jubilee Pier, where they would ascend via a special stairway decked in a red carpet, then walk about for a bit and presumably buy a different brand of candyfloss from that on sale in the park.
Sharon crossed over the Marina via an arching metal footbridge. Rather to her surprise, the tide lapped against the aged pilings below. If nothing else, she’d expected the Royal Canal to have bogged itself up by now, but apparently not. There were even a few boats on view, though most looked like hulks banked in silt. As she reached the far side, a second clarion call announced that she’d received another text from Slater.
Haunted Palace
“What?” she groaned. “What the bloody …”
A voice she didn’t recognise replied to her.
Sharon turned, surprised. The bridge arched away through moonlight. No-one else was standing on it.
“No-one,” she said.
The voice replied again, apparently mimicking her.
It was a long half-second before she realised she was hearing an echo, probably from underneath the bridge. Even so, for the first time her thoughts strayed away from what she wanted to do here onto whether or not this was a good idea.
Despite the moonlight, everything was so black and still. On all sides, the jumbled silhouettes of gantries, domes, wheels and monorails blocked out the horizon, reminding her how deep inside the park she was. She wouldn’t easily be able to find her way back, and in addition she was now expected to locate the Haunted Palace. Enough was enough. Rarely in this relationship had she and Slater spoken to each other on their own mobiles; they didn’t have a particular rule about this – it was just that texting was simpler. But now she called him and waited impatiently while the number rang out – until it switched to voicemail.
She rang him again, and again. On both these occasions it switched to voicemail.
So it was the Haunted Palace. Bloody great! Snatches of childhood memory recollected dark tunnels, staccato lights, booming laughter. Not the most salubrious venue for romance.
Not that she felt like giving him any.
She pivoted around, finally spying what looked like a set of battlements protruding above the Pancake House, and sidled towards them, glancing over her shoulder as she did – again she thought she’d heard something, though it was probably another echo. She zigzagged through a labyrinthine section, which had once been nicknamed the Shambles because it was basically a market filled with novelty stands, ice cream vendors and the like. It also contained the Gobstopper, an attraction that had freaked her out a little even as a teen. It comprised a row of clown heads and torsos – minus limbs – mounted on metal poles, each with a gaping mouth to serve as a target. Contestants stood behind a counter and pelted them with hard wooden balls, the idea being to get as many as you could through the open mouth of your particular clown and down into its belly. With each clean hit, the eyes would light up to the accompaniment of bells, whistles and hysterical ‘Daffy Duck’ giggles. Sharon had thought it an odd-looking thing even back then; she’d never been able to shake off an impression that the dummy clowns were screaming – and even now as she walked past the row of de-limbed figures, still sitting motionless under their canvas awning, she fancied their ink-black eyes were following her.
When she emerged in front of the Haunted Palace, it was initially no more than a gothic outline in the gloom, yet in that strange way of long-ago familiarity, it all seemed so recognisable. It was easy to recall the wild screams as one car after another shunted its way up the access ramp and vanished through a pair of huge, nail-studded doors. The Palace itself was mock-medieval, sponge rubber and fibreglass doubling as heavy stonework, but when she shone her torch at it, she saw that it had decayed badly. Its griffins and gargoyles had dropped off, and fissures had snaked across it, exposing the framework underneath.
Of course there was no sign of Slater.
Sharon stood by the barrier and phoned him again. Still it went to voicemail. “Geoff!” she said under her breath. And then, because frankly she couldn’t take much more of this: “Geoff, where the hell are you?”
A voice replied. At first she thought it was another echo, though on this occasion it sounded as if it had come from inside the Haunted Palace. She ducked under the barrier and stood at the foot of the access ramp, on which only eroded metal stubs remained of the rail-car system. The door at the top stood ajar.
Finally, she ascended. It had definitely sounded as if the voice had called her by name. So it was Geoff. But if so, why didn’t he come out? She approached the door, the glare of her torch penetrating the gaunt passage beyond but revealing very little. When she entered, it stank of mildew. The ghostly murals that once adorned the fake brick walls had mouldered to the point where they were unrecognisable. She ventured on, turning a sharp corner – no doubt one of those hairpin bends where, for their own entertainment, everyone inside the car would be thrown violently to one side – and stopped in her tracks.
A tall figure stood in the dimness, just beyond the reach of her torchlight.
“Geoff?” she said, in the sort of querulous tone the general pu
blic would never associate with a police officer on duty.
The figure remained motionless; made no reply.
“Geoff?”
Still no reply; no movement. She advanced a couple more steps, the light spearing ahead of her. And then a couple more, and finally, relieved, she strode forward boldly.
It was a department store mannequin, albeit in a hideous state: burned, mutilated, covered with spray-paint. Up close, its face had been scarred and slashed frenziedly; for some reason, she imagined a pair of scissors. When she tried to shove it aside, it swung back and forth. Glancing up, she saw that it was hanging by a wire noose, which, even given everything else that had been done to it, seemed a little OTT.
Another thought now strayed unavoidably into Sharon’s mind, one that perhaps had been lurking on the periphery of her consciousness for the last few minutes.
Blair McKellan, the ‘Night Caller’; a maniac who, for twelve terrible months in the north of England, had broken into homes during the early hours and, using whatever household utensils he’d found, had slaughtered the families sleeping there.
But it was impossible. McKellan had stolen a security van from the asylum, which meant he’d be far to the south by now. There was no possibility he could have driven north from Lowerhall; he’d have had to come through the town itself, which would have been too much of a risk.
Vandals were responsible for the mannequin. Some bunch of stupid kids who had nothing better to do. But of course that didn’t explain the voice she’d thought she’d heard, or why Geoff Slater wasn’t here. Sharon made an effort to steady her nerve. More than likely those two mysteries were tied together. When she’d been a probationer, Slater had been one of several old sweats to play elaborate tricks on her – setting her up with a hospital visit for ‘a prisoner with a crippling foot injury’ who’d actually been an off-duty CID man under orders to dash off at the first opportunity, running her all over the hospital grounds. All the newbies were treated that way, but of course Sharon had been singled out for special attention because she was good-looking. Even now Geoff adopted the air of a guy who never took life too seriously, but surely he was past this kind of nonsense? Especially when she’d intimated that they had important stuff to talk about?
Suddenly irritated as hell, she stalked back to the front of the decayed building, kicking her way outside into the fresh air. She stabbed in another text message:
Stupid game
Not impressed
Heading back
It was more gung-ho than she felt, mainly because she wasn’t sure it would be as simple as ‘heading back’ – she didn’t know in which direction from here the gap in the fence actually lay – but also because she’d really wanted to sort something out tonight. All day she’d been psyching herself up to having this conversation; when she’d seen his Toyota and realised that he’d got here ahead of her, she’d felt certain they were about to resolve the problem. And now he was acting the goat.
That was when she saw him.
Or someone.
It was no more than a speck of movement in the corner of her vision. She squinted, and saw that she hadn’t been mistaken. A couple of hundred metres away across the park, a diminutive figure was plodding along one of the high humpback gantries of the Crazy Train. Sharon was astonished. She wondered if she was seeing things. But there was no doubt – someone was up there, a tiny shape picking its way along the track. A wino or drug-addict? Possibly. They came here from time to time and dossed down, but would they climb to the top of an edifice like that? Could they climb?
Of course not. It had to be Slater.
But again that question: what the heck was he playing at?
She tried calling him again. As before, it went to voicemail. This time she left him a message: “Am I actually watching you on top of the roller coaster? If it isn’t you, there’s someone else here, and that can’t be good, can it? Call me back ASAP. And please, please … stop fucking around. This is serious.”
She glanced again to the distant gantry. The figure was no longer visible.
As baffled as she was unnerved, she walked over in that direction. Again, she had to sidle down passages between empty shacks that had once been stalls, and along tunnels piercing the guts of vast skeletal structures, which were all that remained of world-famous white-knuckle rides. At the foot of the Flying Teacups there was a deafening shriek, and a seagull with a wingspan of nearly three feet burst out through the long-smashed window of the booth and swerved around her, beating the air hard, before lofting upward and vanishing.
Sharon was still shaken from that experience when she arrived at the Crazy Train. Its waiting area lay beyond a wire-mesh fence, and was only accessible via a turnstile, which she now had to climb over. Beyond this, the temporary crash-fencing, which she remembered being arranged in rows so that riders could queue in orderly fashion, had been flattened. She stepped over it as she approached the loading platform. The moment she got up there, a figure was awaiting her with a grinning sickle of tight-locked teeth, but it only made her start for a second. In fact it was two figures, one standing in front of the other, and thankfully both were made from hardboard.
The taller one at the back was Bubbles, hence the toothy smile. The smaller one was a teeny boy in a stripy t-shirt. A notice above them read:
Unless you’re at least as tall as Johnny here,
sorry … you can’t ride!
When she passed into the loading area proper, it was like a small railway station, the track-bed lying between two separate platforms where riders would either climb aboard or disembark. In either direction, only a matter of yards from the overhead canopy, the track, which was largely still intact, its rails gleaming with moonlight, rose up out of sight, though when she looked down from the platform’s edge, she saw large gaps where the various cogs and gears comprising the brake-run had long ago been removed. An ugly black emptiness lay underneath those.
She moved first to the north end of the platform, and gazed up the shockingly steep incline. Its uppermost rim, perhaps a hundred feet overhead, was framed against the moonlit sky, but no figure was silhouetted there.
“Ridiculous,” she said under her breath. “What the hell am I even doing here?”
She strolled the other way to the south end. From this direction, the track rose in a more gradual ascent, before levelling out at about fifty feet and twisting away. But this time she had to blink – she couldn’t be sure, but fleetingly she’d fancied there’d been movement; a tiny blot slipping out of sight.
This was nonsensical. Whoever it was, he couldn’t have seen her down here … could he? If he had seen her and had ducked away, might that be because he was trespassing and she was a cop? Okay, perhaps it wasn’t Geoff Slater – maybe yet another stupid teenager. Perhaps one of the firebugs who’d visited so often in the past?
Either way, it was time to assert herself.
She climbed down onto the track-bed. From here, she had to take extreme care as she advanced, balancing on the rails and sleepers, avoiding the black emptiness occasionally lying between. When she reached the foot of the incline, it was hemmed in on either side by steel-mesh netting, but at least she had a clear view up to the top. And if nothing else, all this gave her a good story.
“That’s right, sarge. I was driving past Fun Land – no reason really, just routine – and I saw a figure on the Crazy Train gantry. I tried calling for support, but got no response on my radio. Black spot, isn’t it?”
“Hello!” she called, waving her torch from side to side. “This is the police. You’ve got one minute to get down here, or I’m coming up after you.”
There was no response.
“I’ve got more officers on the way. We’re going to clean you lot out of this place.”
She expected nothing this time either, least of all the echoing metallic clack that half made her jump. Sharon strained her eyes as she peered up the timber gradient, its two rails again glinting. That had sounded suspicio
usly like some kind of gear being thrown. Even as she watched, another dark blot materialised against the skyline, but this wasn’t a figure – it was square and bulky, and it quickly vanished again, drawing numerous other squarish shapes behind it.
A slow panic went through her as she realised what this was.
Through fleeting patches of moonlight, she glimpsed a line of jostling carriages rushing downhill – right towards her. She stumbled helplessly backwards. But the platforms were several dozen yards behind her, while steel mesh hemmed the narrow track in, so she couldn’t even jump to the side. Sharon screamed as the speeding locomotive filled her ears with its ear-splitting clatter – and then dropped.
The train rattled by overhead as she plummeted through moon-stippled darkness for what seemed an eternity, and yet when she landed and the breath whooshed out of her, it was relatively easily – on a mound of wet sand.
Sharon lay groggy for a moment or two, vaguely aware of a series of explosive impacts overhead. Only long after this uproar had ceased did her surroundings swim into focus: a vast, empty space forested with pillars and supports, moonlight glimmering through it in crisscrossing shafts. Slowly, still dazed, she sat up. Similar dunes to the one she’d landed on stretched out around her, streams of water meandering between them. When she glanced overhead, she saw that she’d fallen about twelve feet, so it was fortunate indeed that she’d landed on sand. But no sooner had her scrambled thoughts reordered themselves than a particularly chilling one came to the fore.
The Crazy Train had rolled downhill because it had been pushed.
That was the only explanation. In the initial frenzy of her thoughts, she’d assumed that some kind of vibration might be responsible; that she’d triggered the coaster’s descent by trespassing on the aged, flimsy structure. But on reflection that was quite ludicrous. It had to have been done manually. And would a bunch of vandals really do that when they knew a copper was waiting at the other end? Would they stoop to murder?