A Fistful of Knuckles

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: GHOST TRAIN

Sam and Gene went blundering into the crowds milling around at the fair. Heaving and shoving, they fought their way between shooting ranges and candyfloss stalls and fun houses.

‘Where the hell is he?!’ hissed Sam, glaring about him.

‘Hey! Anyone seen a bastard?!’ Gene cried out.

‘Bald bastard?’ a kid in a woolly hat piped up, chomping on his toffee apple. ‘Looks like a monster?’

‘Aye, that’s him.’

‘Went that way, mate.’

Gene flicked him a fifty pence piece and launched off in the direction the lad was pointing. Sam shoved past him and took the lead.

They saw Annie. She was looking about anxiously. Then they saw Tracy, clinging tightly to Annie’s hand like a frightened child. They were standing together outside the ghost train; above them, a huge painted steam locomotive was tearing through a deserted station, ghosts and ghouls and living skeletons pouring from its funnel, scaring the crap out of the poor station master and sending him running for his life.

Sam called out to Annie, but she didn’t hear him. He roughly heaved a young family out of the way and struggled towards her.

Patsy’s bald and ink-stained head gleamed amid the crowd. With both arms he was cleaving his way through the punters at the fair, recklessly, making straight for the ghost train.

He’s after Tracy. And Annie too. He knows I set him up, that this whole thing was a sting — and all he can think of is revenge. He knows Tracy can testify against him, so he’ll rip her limb from limb. And when Annie tries to stop him, he’ll kill her too. He doesn’t care about consequences or repercussions. All he wants is to kill them. Kill them both!

Was it this that the Test Card Girl had been hinting at all along? Was this the moment she had forecast, the unhappy ending to the Sam and Annie story? Would the Devil in the Dark lay its murderous hands on her, and throttle her, before Sam got anywhere close enough to stop it? Was tonight about to become the worst, the most evil, the most tragic night of his life?

‘Gene!’ Sam cried. ‘Get to them! Get to Annie and Tracy before it does!’

He didn’t notice that he had referred to Patsy O’Riordan as it. In his exhaustion and pain and fear, he was thinking of that lumbering, painted monstrosity not as a man, but as the Devil in the Dark.

At that moment, there was a shriek and a commotion. Princess burst into the crowd, gnashing and snapping crazily left and right, froth flying from her wild muzzle. People screamed. The crowd rushed chaotically outwards in every direction, like waves radiating across violently disturbed water. Princess bounded about, insane in her fury, the chain clanking and clanging behind her, the stake she was tethered to gouging furrows in the mud.

A terrified surge of people threw Sam off balance and hurled him down into the mud. At the same time, it drove Gene backwards, slamming him against the wooden wall of an amusement arcade that bore the huge, lascivious face of an airbrushed babe in heart-shaped sunglasses. Sam struggled to right himself, but the panicking crowd buffeted and battered him.

And then, without warning, he glimpsed a flash of white between the running legs and flying mud. It was the glimmer of a patent leather stiletto. Above it swung a hem of fake fur, and a flash of leopard print.

Like a cheap and slaggy Angel of Mercy, Stella stood motionless and serene amid the confusion. Princess went raging past her, and as the beast bounded by, Stella crouched down and took hold of something. In the next moment, Sam saw Princess racing towards him, her jaws savaging the air, her eyes rolling insanely — and then, as if hit by a magic spell, the hound shot backwards, her paws lifted off the ground, and away she sailed into the night sky.

Stella smiled a slow, sly, lipsticked smile as she gazed up at her handiwork. She had wedged the post into one of the struts of the Ferris wheel. As the wheel went up, so did Princess, dangling from the chain around her neck that had suddenly tightened like a garrotte. Princess gave a wild, pitiful, strangled cry, twitched, then went limp. The C-90 cassette at her throat snapped under the pressure and the magnetic tape spooled away on the breeze, like the hound’s black soul leaving its body.

The crowd had formed a clearing, with Stella in the middle of it. She turned and observed Gene, her eyes glittering.

‘Set a bitch to catch a bitch,’ she observed.

‘Remind me to punch your lights out later for that, luv,’ said Gene, straightening his collar. ‘I owe you one.’

Stella’s cheeks flushed and her eyes glistened. She ran her tongue across her upper lip like she was licking off cream.

But Sam had no inclination — no inclination and no time — to witness this mating ritual. He was already racing towards the ghost train, hollering at Gene to move it, move it, move his arse.

Annie had pulled Tracy up the steps that led to the ghost train. The little carts were bumping and rolling along on the tracks, through the swing doors and into the ride. At the sight of Patsy, Annie yanked Tracy by the hand, dragging her between two of the carts and then through the swing doors. They vanished inside the ghost train.

Moments later, Patsy bounded up the steps, hurled two carts aside, and disappeared inside after them.

Now it was Sam and Gene’s turn. They raced up the steps, shoving the last few frightened punters aside, and made for the swing doors. The painted Mouth of Hell greeted them — and together, they barged through it into the pitch blackness beyond.

Sirens howled, klaxons blared. A flash of light revealed a mummy in ragged bandages. An axe swung. Spiders dangled from above. A coffin lid creaked open and, bathed in sickly green light, a rotting hand emerged.

‘Annie!’ Sam yelled.

‘Don’t be a prat, Tyler!’ Gene hissed in his ear. ‘She’s bloody hiding!’

In the eerie, ever changing lights of the ghost train, Sam saw him — saw it. Perhaps the pain from his mangled arm had clouded his brain; perhaps all this running and fighting and shouting had stressed him into a state of hallucination; perhaps he was mad … or perhaps he was seeing more clearly than he ever had before, seeing past the veils and illusions of daily life and glimpsing something deeper, something darker, some terrible vision of ultimate reality. Whatever the hell was happening, what he saw was not Patsy O’Riordan, but a man in a black Nehru suit.

At the sight of that familiar apparition, Sam’s heart froze. A sense of mindless panic threatened to overtake him and send him running crazily out of the ghost train and away through the fairground. The terror was irrational, instinctive, overpowering.

I will not run! I will be a man! I will NOT run!

Coloured light bulbs flashed and fizzed, revealing the Nehru man’s monstrous head in shifting hues of red and green and purple; for a moment, it seemed as if the man in the suit was even more covered in tattoos than Patsy — but then Sam saw hints of movement, the squirming of maggots nestled in the rotten flesh, and he realised what he was seeing was a mouldering cadaver.

That’s not part of the ride, he thought to himself with shocking clarity. I don’t know what that is … but it’s real. Whatever it is, it’s real!

The festering corpse turned slowly. It was aware of Sam. It wanted to see him, even though a flashing yellow bulb threw its sickly light into empty eye-sockets busy with earthworms.

In the next moment, the light shifted once more, and the scream of a siren split the air, and the corpse in the Nehru suit was Patsy O’Riordan, glowering furiously about, his narrow hands flexing as if he were about to smash the entire ghost train to splinters.

‘Patsy!’ Gene barked. If he too had seen that ghastly, mouldering horror, he certainly didn’t act like he had. ‘Pack it in! You’re nicked!’

Patsy grabbed one of the empty carts and wrenched it clear off the tracks. He hurled it at Sam and Gene, who threw themselves out of the way as it crashed past them.

The noise and violence brought out a scream of terror from Tracy, who suddenly broke cover from behind a skeleton in a gibbet and made a break for it. Annie popped up, reaching hopelessly for her, trying to drag her back.

Patsy wheeled round, glaring at Tracy.

‘Stop,’ he intoned, his voice shockingly calm and level.

At once, in spite of herself, Tracy stopped. Coloured light bulbs flickered and flashed about her.

‘Come ‘ere,’ said Patsy.

Tracy’s eyes were two round circles of terror.

‘Tracy, run!’ Annie cried.

‘I said come ‘ere,’ Patsy repeated.

Years of brutal conditioning took over. She could not resist. Tracy began shuffling towards Patsy.

‘Okay, babes,’ she muttered. ‘I’m coming, babes.’

Annie flung herself between the two of them: ‘Tracy, I said run!’

With terrible speed, Patsy lunged forward. Something snapped in Tracy, and she bolted, shrieking and howling. Patsy clamped his hands around Annie’s throat and lifted her clear off the floor.

Sam and Gene kicked into action together. They powered forward and flung themselves at Patsy, launching themselves against his back like two men trying to bring down a tree. Sam battered at the rough, hard back, hurling punches at the rock-like head. He felt an elbow slam into him and send him crashing into a row of skulls that clattered about him in chaos. Leaping to his feet, he saw Gene being flung back and falling amid a confusion of bloodied metal spikes. Patsy was still holding Annie by the neck, letting her feet kick wildly in the air. Her face was bright red — but then, as the coloured bulbs went through their cycles, her face became pink, then green, then yellow, then blue. Patsy shook her. Annie clawed desperately at his hands, then her arms began to go limp and her eyes rolled upwards behind the fluttering lids.

One of the skulls Sam was lying amongst turned towards him. In the sad, frail voice of the Test Card Girl, it said: ‘This isn’t a ghost train, Sam. It really is Hell.’

Sam kicked the skull away. With a barbaric, inhuman cry, he jumped to his feet. Something rushed past him in the darkness. He ignored it and lunged at Patsy — and instead found Annie lying sprawled across the little railway tracks, unmoving. Instinctively, he flung his arms about her, not thinking of Patsy or why he had dropped her, not thinking of the thing that had raced past him in the dark, not thinking of the Test Card Girl, or Gene, or the crazy crashing and bellowing that was suddenly going on only a few feet away from him, or anything except her, his Annie, his love.

A pulse! She’s got a pulse!

Placing his cheek to her mouth, he sensed a faint flicker of breath.

It was only then that he looked up. Patsy was lumbering and veering about madly, striking blows at a man who had leapt up and was clinging to him like a monkey. Sam glimpsed a spider tattoo on the man’s neck; it stood out with sudden lividness in the garish red glare of an electric light bulb. The sharp stink of paraffin reached Sam’s nostrils.

Spider hooked his legs around Patsy’s knees. It was enough to topple him, bringing him crashing down into a mass of coloured light bulbs which at once popped and shattered. Electricity crackled. Sparks flashed. The paraffin ignited. The two men, locked together in their death struggle, went up like torches.

The sudden flames illuminated the interior of the ghost train, revealed the wires, the pulleys, the shoddy props, the cut-price sceneries. It was all cardboard, plastic, and fake cobwebs.

It’s not Hell at all. It’s just a ride.

Gene fought his way out from a tangle of papier mache dungeon, took one look at Spider and Patsy burning together, then turned sharply to Sam. He reacted to Annie’s limp body in Sam’s arms.

‘Tell me she ain’t snuffed it!’ he barked.

Sam looked down. Annie’s eyes struggled open. She coughed feebly. It was enough. It was more than enough.

‘Let’s get her out of here!’ Sam cried, and Gene was right there, hoiking Annie up and, without grace or ceremony, throwing her over his shoulder. He loped between the little carts and burst back out through the Mouth of Hell, back into the open air, back into life.

Sam raced after him — then paused. He glanced back. Patsy was back up on his feet, burning. Spider was still clinging to him.

Spider knew what he was doing. He didn’t want make it through this … all he wanted was to take that bastard with him.

Ablaze, Patsy flailed about blindly, slowed, then sank to his knees and toppled over. Spider clung to him for several more seconds, then went limp, like a puppet suddenly losing its strings.