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

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