by Paul Finch
“Geoff …?” she mumbled, hardly able to give full voice to the notion. She glanced around again. Her eyes didn’t penetrate the further depths of these sandy, salt-smelling chasms. There was no sound, save water dripping from rotted woodwork or jagged, rust-eaten metal.
Geoff was her lover, and a great card in the office – but he was also a ruthless operator. He’d planted more than his fair share of screwdrivers to get villains sent down; several times he’d been investigated for alleged brutality. Murder wouldn’t be too much of a leap for him. But why? Just because he’d had enough of his mistress? Because she’d been going to ask him to ditch the mother of his children?
Sharon spotted an upright ladder about thirty yards to her left. She hobbled towards it, one hand planted on her hip, which she’d clearly bruised during the fall.
Had Geoff got sick of her? And was he so much a shit-heel that rather than break it off and risk having a woman scorned muddying the waters for him, he’d try to kill her?
On the face of it, it seemed preposterous. But Geoff had asked her here, and yet hadn’t responded coherently to any of her messages. She glanced over her shoulder as she reached the ladder, checking that she hadn’t dropped her baton or CS canister. She continued to glance back as she scrambled up the rickety iron rungs, this time to ensure no-one was encroaching from behind. And then another thought struck her, and this one was such a shock that, briefly, she almost lost her perch.
Had someone been sitting in the front carriage of the Crazy Train?
It seemed incredible, and yet she’d kept replaying the incident in her head, and in that last petrifying second, as the train flitted through that final patch of moonlight, she could have sworn there’d been someone riding in the front of it.
She hung there in the half-dark, thinking hard, gradually convincing herself that she hadn’t been mistaken. There was no doubt. Whoever had pushed the train downhill, they’d jumped on board to hitch a lift. Which, as the roller coaster track wasn’t functioning properly anymore and as there was no braking system left, meant they’d been dicing with suicide. So surely it could not have been Geoff Slater?
At the top of the ladder, she emerged through a square manhole into a dusty kitchen-like room, which astonishingly still smelled vaguely of hotdogs and onions. Through a broken window, she saw that she was just across the footway from the Crazy Train pay-booth. When she crossed towards it, she had baton in hand, snapped out to its full one and a half feet of flexible alloy. Warily, she re-ascended the ramp, and found the station area thick with dust and wood-splinters. She wafted her way through this, baton braced against her right shoulder.
“Geoff? You here?”
As the dust cleared, she saw that all twelve carriages had derailed on the other side of the station, plunging part way through its cage-work support structure. The train’s inverted wheels still turned as the bulk of it lay arched and twisted over the track.
There was no sign of a body or any kind of movement, from what she could see – and she was damned if she was getting any closer – but if someone had ridden the coaster down from that perilous height, it could not have been Slater? It had to be someone else, someone with an absolute death-wish.
She leaned to the radio on her collar, knowing that failure to call this in wouldn’t just be remiss of her, it would be an abrogation of duty. By instinct, she adjusted the volume control – and only now noticed that the device had been muted. On first entering the park, she’d turned it down low, but had not thought to turn it back up again later. She swore as she adjusted it, and immediately heard a crackle of static, and caught some cross-talk from elsewhere on the Division.
“That’s confirmed,” came the voice of Comms. “It was reported that McKellan had removed a vehicle from the Security Pound at Lowerhall. It wasn’t specified at the time that he’d removed one of the offshore patrol boats, over.”
There was further chit-chat, much of it incomprehensible, the messages broken, distorted. But Sharon was no longer listening.
A boat?
The Night Caller had removed one of the asylum’s boats?
She turned dazedly in the direction where she thought the Marina lay. It was a hideous thought, but in a speedboat he could have crossed St Derfyn Bay and moored amid the grimy ruins of Fun Land in next to no time. And yet – she glanced again at the piled-up wreckage of the Crazy Train. Deranged or not, Blair McKellan couldn’t have survived such a crash.
On the verge of panic, she slid her baton away and scampered down the access ramp onto the footway, trying to get a radio message out, but almost immediately losing her reception again. She swore aloud, but when a piercing clarion call sounded from her pocket, snatched at her phone.
What game?
She tried to ring Slater again. It went to voicemail. Turning the air blue, she tapped in a quick message.
Meet up now
McKellan in park
Maybe dead or injured
Call me!!!
But he didn’t call. And she very quickly began to wonder at the wisdom of her last message. That was a hell of a thing to have told a fellow copper. Suppose Slater spread the word, and the whole circus headed over here, allowing the real killer to get clean away? She had not seen a body, she reminded herself. She couldn’t even be sure that someone had been riding the coaster. Again she wondered if she might have tripped it herself. Or what about the bunch of kids she’d initially suspected? She’d had enough, she realised. This was going nowhere. She tried to call Slater again, but the call failed. She keyed in another text:
Heading back to car park
C U there
She’d no sooner sent it than something creaked behind her. She twirled around, and initially the breath caught in her throat – but then she realised what she was actually seeing.
Across the footway, in the recess between the Hotdog Kitchen and the Penguin Skittles, stood something like a children’s theatre: a small upright cubicle made of timber or fibreglass. A pair of shutters that once enclosed the tiny stage had swung open, presumably in the breeze, revealing that a life-size figure was standing behind them. But it was the usual thing – Bubbles, probably an animatronic version, looking more than a little mouldy and saggy, his scaly hide mottled, his eyes like ragged holes in rotted fabric, his crocodile snout deflated.
Sharon ignored it, glancing back to the topmost tier of the Crazy Train, straining her eyes one last time for trespassers. It didn’t feel like the done thing, heading away from this place when there may have been a fatal accident here, but regardless of the Geoff Slater fiasco, she needed to get the word out. There was no-one up there she could see, so she turned and walked away, passing the children’s theatre on her left – and noticing from the corner of her eye that it was empty.
She stopped in mid-stride and pivoted around to face it.
At first she thought the Bubbles dummy had maybe slipped down out of sight. But how come the side-door to the theatre now stood open?
And then she sensed a figure on her left.
She pivoted again.
In its present state of decay, the Bubbles costume was quite the most revolting thing she’d ever seen, hanging raddled and desiccated on the strangely emaciated form inside. His right hand was raised, causing Sharon to involuntarily giggle as she remembered the way Bubbles used to wave to the cameras with his right hand as he walked through Fun Land on hot summer days, hordes of gleeful kiddies trailing after him.
But this time he held something in it.
It looked like it was made of steel; it also looked heavy and very sharp.
Even when she blasted him in the face with her CS agent, he swung this massive implement down – this cleaver, or whatever it was – aiming squarely at the side of her neck. With barely suppressed shrieks, she ducked away, jetting the CS spray into his face a second time, and hitting him dead-on – though perhaps the costume headpiece was masking him, because he spun after her, slashing again with his razor steel, knocking off her
hat, her hair uncoiling every which way. She drew her baton again, snapping it open, trying to fend him off, but another arcing swipe caught it mid-stem, severing it in two. Blindly, she struck out with a different weapon – her torch, and this blow landed. The bulb audibly shattered on impact with her assailant’s head, but it also drew a grunt from him and he staggered.
Sharon used the opportunity to run – in no particular direction.
“PC requires,” she gibbered into her radio. “PC requires. Fun Land amusement park. Blair McKellan is here. I need back-up urgently … I repeat, urgently!”
As before, there was no response. She turned along a side-passage, and found herself amid metal struts and under tarpaulin roofs. She was back in the Shambles, she realised, which surely was somewhere she could lose the bastard? She took turns at random, hoping to throw him off, constantly glancing behind, seeing no-one in pursuit – only to find herself confronted by the Gobstopper, its broad front standing open on the darkened recess in which the mounted clown figures were just vaguely visible.
Her mind raced, thoughts tumbling over each other.
There’d be missile weapons in there, of a sort – those hard wooden balls. Okay, they didn’t signify deadly force, but they would pack a wallop. She clambered over the counter and into the space behind, where she crouched low and fumbled on the floor, eventually finding two of the missiles – though they seemed much smaller and lighter than she remembered. Once in possession of them, she waited and listened, struggling to stop her teeth chattering. For a few minutes, even the wind seemed to drop – the only sound was Sharon’s heart thundering in her chest as she scanned the surrounding maze of stands and stalls, through which moonlight spilled in various fantastical forms, making it difficult to maintain depth or perspective.
Nothing seemed to move.
Had she thrown him off? She hardly dared consider the possibility. No-one could second-guess a monster like Blair McKellan, the Night Caller; an out-and-out madman who left his victims like sides of butchered meat. But surely he wasn’t completely demented? He’d retained sufficient of his faculties to lie low between kills, to evade the law for almost a year. If he’d identified her as a police officer, as he surely must, he’d be expecting her to call this in? Assistance would be en route. He’d be better running.
A few dozen yards away, a figure emerged through the moonlit haze.
Sharon sucked in a breath so tight it almost squeaked. She sank lower, only her eyes visible over the counter-top. But no … now that she looked carefully, it wasn’t a figure, it was just an awning, patterned with mildew, rippling in the stiffening breeze.
She allowed herself to breathe again, filching the phone from her pocket. She would try Slater one more time. It seemed futile, pointless, but he was the closest to her, the only person who could provide immediate assistance. She prodded in his number – and immediately froze as she heard a tinny tune somewhere in her vicinity. It sounded like jazz; low, sleazy jazz played on a sax. And she recognised it.
Slowly, incredulously, she turned around, riveting her eyes on the dummy clown directly behind her … except that, now her vision had attuned, it didn’t even resemble a clown. Or a dummy. True, like the others it was only a torso; the legs and arms were missing, and the mouth yawned open to impossible width, and it sat upright on a metal pole, though possibly in this case that was because the pole had been jammed ten inches or so into the object’s anus.
A warm trickle soaked Sharon’s knickers and the crotch of her trousers.
What she’d first taken for clown make-up streaking the figure’s cheeks wasn’t anything like make-up; and those eye sockets, which now contained nothing at all, let alone electric bulbs, would never light up again. In the gaping mouth, where once there’d been a tongue, sat a small, flat device, juddering its jazzy tune – until it switched abruptly to voicemail.
Sharon had some vague thought that it was a good job she didn’t still have her torch. Because the last thing she wanted to see were the finer details of this atrocity. Even so it transfixed her. She could do nothing but sit there gawking – until she tasted something salty dripping down the front of her face and onto the tip of her tongue. Dazed, she craned her neck back to gaze overhead – and saw a massive rent in the canvas awning, into which a distorted figure was leaning, staring down at her. The fluid dripping from the end of his hanging snout was probably tears, or saliva, or nose mucus, or a combination of all three – a product of the spray she’d hit him with earlier.
There are times in every police officer’s career when all sense of authority and decorum is lost. When you cease to be a stern pillar of law enforcement, and revert to your natural state: a frightened, vulnerable animal whose main instinct is to run.
This Sharon now did.
With hysterical shrieks. Throwing herself over the counter and haring off along the footway, blathering incoherently into her radio – even though she expected no response.
Again, she ran in no particular direction, blindly, exhaustedly, threading between the stands and stalls, through moon and shadow, until she reached a broad thoroughfare, which, more by instinct than logic, she felt would lead her to the park’s entrance.
It did. Right up to those towering, scroll-iron gates.
They were closed of course. And locked.
The chains holding them were thick with corrosion, the padlock fused into a lump of impenetrable rust. Sharon yanked on it futilely, tearing her fingernails, before glancing back. A figure approached along the main drag; at first it looked distant – was only visible through the intermittent patches of moonlight – but very quickly it assumed those grotesque quasi-reptile proportions. Its faltering, lumbering gait was also unmistakable; as was the glint of steel in its clenched right hand.
With more breathless shrieks, Sharon ran back into the park, veering right when she spied an open doorway. She had no idea what to expect beyond it, but immediately found herself in a complex network of passages, smoothly glazed walls encompassing her from every side. Phantom Sharon Joneses leapt and cavorted, bodies elongated, heads expanded; illusions rendered even more demonic by the refracting moonlight. Not that twists and turns were a problem for her pursuer. Somewhere close behind, mirrors exploded one by one as he put his shoulder to them. Billions of fragments rained ahead of his wild, bullocking charge. Sharon attempted the same, arms wrapped around her head. Despite her stab-jacket and the thick tunic beneath, flecks of glass wormed their way under her collar and cuffs, cutting, stinging. When she blundered through one already-broken frame, a hanging shard of glass drew a burning stripe across the top of her head, though in truth she barely felt this. She snatched the shard down; it was twelve inches long and shaped like a dagger – its edges sliced into her fingers, and yet she clung onto it.
With hot blood dribbling into her eyes, she hobbled left, groping along a side-passage that seemed to lead to brighter moonlight, so desperate to reach this that even when another mirror disintegrated in front of her, and a brutal form blocked her path, she drove straight on.
Perhaps McKellan was more surprised than she was. He had a weapon, but now so did Sharon – and she was the one who struck first, plunging the shard into the top right side of his chest, puncturing the rumpled costume and the human tissue beneath – the glass grating on bone as she drove it deep, to half its length at least, before lodging it fast. Her foe made no sound but reeled backwards, allowing her to shove past him and head on to the light, which, as she’d hoped, turned out to be a window. She kicked it until it fell to jangling pieces, and clambered through.
After the hallucinogenics of the Mirror Maze, the moonlight outside brilliantly bathed another thoroughfare lying straight and open. She’d staggered fifty yards along it, mopping blood from her brow, before glancing back. McKellan had emerged behind her, but now was toppling sideways rather than following. Even as she watched, he fell heavily to the tarmac.
She turned to run on, and slammed into a massive, iron-hard body.
<
br /> Sharon screamed and lashed out with her fists, before strong, gloved hands caught hold of her wrists. Through fresh trickles of blood, she gazed up into the saturnine features of Sergeant Pugh.
“What the devil … PC Jones, what the …?”
“McKellan,” she whispered. “It was Blair McKellan … he killed DS Slater …”
“Slater … Blair McKellan?”
“But I killed him!”
“What …?” Pugh looked perplexed. “What are you talking … what happened?”
Aware that she was ranting unintelligibly, she tried to explain, not even attempting to conceal the nature of her relationship with the late detective. Halfway through, Pugh – looking very alarmed – checked the gash on her scalp, and after mumbling something unsympathetic about it only being a flesh wound, strode back along the thoroughfare, ordering her to stay close.
“No!” she yelped. “I’m not going back there!”
“Pull yourself together, girl! You’re supposed to be a police officer!”
She stammered out a few more semi-coherent objections, but the sight of Pugh, stern as ever, unimpressed by anything, seemed to restore a half-sense of normality. And in any case, McKellan was dead. He had to be.
“How many other units are attending?” she whimpered, following from a distance.
“None, as far as I’m aware.” Pugh’s features tautened as he spotted the shape lying on the tarmac ahead. “No-one even knows where you are. It’s pure good fortune I swung by North Shore and spotted your vehicle.” He hurried forward, speaking urgently into his radio. Though Sharon fancied she heard a fizzing of static, she didn’t hear anyone at Comms respond. He tried again as he knelt beside the casualty.
She halted a few yards away and held her breath.
Wasn’t there a lack of blood? She’d stabbed McKellan deeply, and yet there was no blood spattered across the footway. How much of what she’d penetrated was McKellan, and how much was monster suit?