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

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 public 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