Dark Winter Tales: a collection of horror short stories. Paul Finch

route back to town, she passed another local patrol easing its way along South Shore Drive. She flashed her headlights and the vehicles pulled up alongside each other. It was PC Mike Lewton and his young probationer, Rob Ellis. Lewton was burly and black-haired, with a thick moustache, pitted cheeks and a flattened nose. But he wasn’t the brute he looked and was usually good for a giggle. Ellis was younger, and even more fresh-faced than Sharon, but with a shaved head and jug-handle ears, there was something vaguely comical about him.

      “Don’t tell me,” Lewton said through his open window. “Pugh wants us to pick up the scrag ends?”

      “No work for us up there,” Sharon said. “That’s only for the big boys.”

      “Probably nothing to do anyway. Just come over the FR that McKellan’s lifted one of the asylum security vehicles. He’ll be halfway down the A470 by now.” Lewton pondered and shrugged. “Alright, no worries … see you later, Shaz.”

      As expected, on returning to town Sharon copped for three jobs straight away. Routine calls had been backing up while the emergency on South Shore had been occupying the airwaves. The first was a complaint about a bunch of yobbos playing football against someone’s front door, the second was criminal damage to a car, and the third a burglary. They each took her progressively deeper into what was known as the ‘Back End’ of town, where blocks of scabby flats and rows of run-down terraced houses alternated with boarded-up pubs, sex shops and tattoo parlours. This was the sort of seedy district that the holiday programmes rarely focused on. Not that St Derfyn Bay featured very regularly on holiday programmes these days. Who actually came to the seaside for a holiday in the twenty-first century? Perhaps there were one or two, but Sharon rarely saw them.

      When she was a little girl, the town’s seafront, which followed a slow, gentle curve of nine miles all the way from North Shore to South Shore, had seemed magical to her with its array of whitewashed, neatly-aligned hotels and guesthouses, its nautical-themed pubs and cafes, its theatres, casinos, pleasure palaces and amusement arcades, all done up in rainbow-hued neon. The neon was still there, loops of fairy lights suspended above the prom. The prom itself was a pleasant enough stroll on a nice sunny day, but there was more litter around now than Sharon remembered, while a lot of the hotels had closed or been given over for the use of the DHSS. Sharon was only twenty-four, so in truth things probably hadn’t been a lot better when she was a child – she certainly had no memories of the so-called golden age of the British seaside – while the close proximity of Lowerhall Psychiatric Hospital, a glowering edifice of black brick, originally constructed as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Napoleonic era, had always cast something of a shadow. But she never recalled St Derfyn being quite as down-at-heel as it seemed to be at present. The town’s former pride and joy, the Jubilee Pier, was still in use, but the pastel blue and pink colours with which it had originally been painted had long flaked away, leaving it a drab, skeletal grey, while the assortment of joke shops, puppet shows and postcard stands that had once made it such an attraction had long gone. Now there was only a tea-room at the end of it, and usually a bunch of desultory, middle-aged fishermen perched on the barriers, most of whom would be lucky if they caught anything other than a pair of dirty underpants or a used condom.

      In actual fact, neither the beach nor the sea were in a particularly grubbier state here than anywhere else along Britain’s west coast, but in poor weather, which seemed to be the rule rather than the exception these days, it made a bleak picture. It was difficult to imagine that Bubbles still lived off this coast. He was the mythical sea monster who’d supposedly been tamed by the original Derfyn back in the age of the Welsh saints, and had allegedly been sighted a few times since, on several occasions during the 1950s as a mass of bubbling turbulence several hundred yards offshore; investigating scientists had later explained this as harmless natural gases escaping from the seabed, but schoolchildren had preferred to think of it as their friendly local sea monster blowing bubbles. The name had stuck and he’d become a mascot for the town in its heyday, his smiley crocodile head omnipresent everywhere, from the hoardings of fish-and-chip shops to balloons being sold on the sands.

      Of course, Bubbles was a name from the past now. Much like the town itself.

      Once Sharon had dealt with the burglary, she emerged from the Back End and was dispatched to a drunken dispute on the prom itself. She attended this scene with some minor trepidation, but she didn’t expect the worst. It was midweek, and so was unlikely to be the usual story of a visiting stag party falling out with a posse of local cowboys. In fact, when she got there it turned out to be three retired men arguing about a disputed bowling score from earlier that afternoon. As soon as her white Opel Corsa complete with its Battenberg flashes pulled up, the anger drained out of them, and with all parties advised (and sent home with tails between legs), Sharon was at last able to concentrate on her real plans for this evening.

      When she checked her phone, she saw that Detective Sergeant Geoff Slater had beaten her to it, having texted her over half an hour ago. His message read:

       Circus on South Shore – North Shore seems a plan.

       Fun Land could be fun tonight.

      Fun Land, St Derfyn’s once-famous amusement park, was a good choice for three reasons. Firstly, as it had been closed since 2003, no-one went there anymore, apart from the odd tramp or drug addict, so privacy was nearly always assured. Secondly, thanks to the Diffwys and Cadair Idris massifs lowering over the north end of the bay, it was a radio black-spot; few messages were deliverable to or from North Shore without chronic interference, so if Comms called her or Sergeant Pugh wanted a meet, she’d have plenty reason not to immediately respond. The other reason of course, as Slater had said, was that with South Shore the current focus of attention, North Shore would be quieter than usual – and it was quiet at the best of times.

      There was no better personification of St Derfyn and all its problems than Fun Land. As Sharon drove up there, the quality of the buildings on the seafront declined, the faded guesthouses giving way to derelict shells. There were still kiosks and cafes on the sea wall, but they were more like rabbit hutches, sealed up with wire mesh and corrugated metal. A couple had even been torched, as had Captain Flint’s Tavern, the last pub on the last corner before the gates of Fun Land. As a child, Sharon remembered it teeming with customers – usually dads and granddads, whetting their whistles while mum and grandma took the nippers into the amusement park. Now its red-brick Georgian edifice was black and scabrous, its famous mullioned glass windows, what remained of them, hidden behind a fence of faceless wooden slabs.

      There was plenty of opportunity for Sharon to leave the car at the front. There were no parking restrictions because, as a rule, no-one wanted to park, but it seemed a risk – it would be just like Pugh to make a pointless drive-by and ‘catch her shirking’. Instead, she cruised down a side street towards the park’s rear, its south boundary delineated by an eighteen-foot wrought iron fence. Only darkness lay beyond this, the relics of rides and attractions visible as shadowy, shapeless outlines.

      Fun Land had once been a huge draw for tourists from South Wales and the Valleys, but mainly from the English Midlands. While Rhyl catered for Liverpudlians, Blackpool for Mancs and Morecambe for Scots, St Derfyn had found itself inundated each summer by Brummies, but the amusement park had eventually closed as part of the general downturn in fortunes suffered by the British seaside. By the 1990s fewer and fewer people were visiting it, and an increasingly rough crowd spoiling the atmosphere for families had led to the introduction of an entry fee, which had killed off even more custom. As a result there was under-spending and so dilapidation set in. A succession of miserably wet summers was the final straw, and even the ubiquitous Bubbles, who’d featured on billboards all over the park, and had walked around it every day in June, July and August, an actor enclosed in an ingenious rubber sea monster suit, complete with a bubble-blowing machine installed in his grinning, crocodilian snout (the bubbles emerging from his nostrils), hadn’t been able to reverse that. When Fun Land had finally padlocked its ornate scroll-iron gates for the last time, there’d been a promise that new investments would be found at some point, and a revival project put into motion – hence the lack of demolition work – but there was no sign of that yet. Rumours abounded that the site