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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 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 СКАЧАТЬ