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

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 suspiciously 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?

      “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