Chris's Place

When night fell at sea, it was more total. Denny’s motorboat bobbed in the middle of a sphere of velvety darkness. It had clouded over, there were no stars to show where the sea ended. Only off to the south-west was a little galaxy of lights. Ylva guessed it was Västervik.

She stood, lower arms resting on the chilly railing, in night air that made the little hairs on your arms stand on end. Some might have wanted a cigarette in this pose, even if they’d never smoked. Here in the dark, the sea – even if it was just the Baltic, hedged about with landmasses – was a science-fiction world, a dream of journeying further. It was separate from the reality of sharing a two-room boat with two others, the arguments about who would do the cooking, the awareness of the septic tank whenever you had to use the toilet in the closet where your knees wedged the door open.

A sole pressed against the deck, and a moment later Justin was next to her, a potato chip in his hand. Another one crunched between his teeth. The smells travelled far in the almost scentless air over the water: sour cream and onion.

“A bit chilly to be standing here without a coat,” he said.

Every time he cared for her, or not even that, was polite, she wanted to think that it meant something more. So fucking idiotic, Ylva. She fought for the hope as much as against it, she burned energy on not saying anything.

It was a couple of years since she’d told him she was into him, while they were in university. After that she’d forced it down, for friendship’s sake. It meant that she had to continue pressing it down, every day they spent together.

“Not just yet,” she said. “I might have to put my coat on soon.”

Her clumsy voice left a gap in the conversation. He stood in the light of the deck-house. If she turned her head, she would see his golden profile, and she wouldn’t be able not to stare.

If she’d turned her head, she might have spotted something.

“Denny is getting married,” he said. “To Irja.”

He said it as if he was only now realising it. Something in his voice was scraped raw.

“Starting to feel the mid-life crisis, Justin?”

It sounded stupid and crude. Above the mainland something blinked, a star or a plane.

She looked at his hand as it went into his pocket. A moment later she heard his jaws grind something else, thicker, maybe a Dime bar.

“I wish I’d talked to him,” he managed.

That was the point where little pieces fell into place: the way he’d fallen silent when Denny talked, the way he wouldn’t look at Denny, the same way she wouldn’t look at him.

What she felt was closest to freedom. Justin was gay, she didn’t have any possibility to win him. Love had no more power over her.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

She’d been about to say “talk to him now,” but what would that achieve? Irja was on the mainland. She hadn’t been able to take time from her doctoral thesis to go with them. She hadn’t deserved this, and Denny wasn’t going to leave her, not when they’d come this far.

She shook her head. A long strand of hair tickled on her neck.

“Talk to him. You’ve been friends since first grade. Be honest, it’s better than hiding things.”

She could have put her arm around his shoulders, now that it was allowed. It was still only a couple of minutes away. (If she had, what would have happened?)

Justin made a noise. It made her look up. He was glossy-eyed and so flushed, it made his profile almost spongy, impure. If she touched his skin, it would sizzle. Drunk, that explained his behaviour. He must have topped up his glass after she went on deck.

He didn’t say anything more, but vanished down the hatch.

Ylva stayed. There were no sounds here, no night birds at sea, and they were too far from any other boats. The blackness might have been a nocturnal forest around them. When she got home, she might look up how long she’d have to save to buy a boat. It wasn’t so bad, being able to raise anchor and set out, even on an inland sea, even with piss and shit building up in the tank. She was going to miss these days. A selfish thought, when it had ended like this.

She heard a sound, a fleshy slap. It made her lean over the railing, looking down to where the hull met the water. She switched on the light of her phone, sweeping it downward. The sound returned. The wind had fallen with night, the black waves were one hand tall. She couldn’t see anything other than the reflections of the beam. There was nothing in the depths below, nothing slapping against the hull. It didn’t sound wet. The only thing that would sound like that would be if there were a lump of dense thumping flesh down there.

She headed for the light in the hatch. If Justin and Denny had been talking, she would have heard them. Instead, she heard the thump again. It was no longer possible to ignore.

She climbed down into the short wood-panelled hallway, warmly lit. The galley and control room were ahead, and the bunks to the right, where it was dark.

“Denny?” she said.

She barely recognized her voice.

The sound came from the doorway on the right. She glanced inside. Justin and Denny were on the floor, Justin’s head above Denny’s, the shadows over them blending them into a single body. She ought to have backed away, and yet she stayed.

Justin raised his head a couple of degrees, fixing his gaze on her. His face was just the whites of his eyes and a light-lined cheekbone. He was trying to say something – it sounded like he was trying to say something, but it came out thick, just a retch, a sob. He thrust his hips into Denny again, and Denny’s head whipped and bashed face-first into the footlocker beneath the bunk.

“For fuck’s sake!” she yelled, thought she yelled, grabbing Justin’s shoulders and trying to wrest him off.

Justin shook himself free, bending his face towards Denny’s back. She drew her fist back and punched him. The angle was too bad to do any damage. Justin’s head snapped to the side, but he kept going as if he hadn’t noticed. His face was above a tear in Denny’s shirt where the pallor of skin showed. He had a strip of something pale between his teeth.

She just wanted to put an end to this. She wasn’t wearing anything on her feet. She would have kicked otherwise. There was a floor lamp out in the dining room, a fluted tube with a heavy floor plate. If she turned her back to them, and went out into the yellow light of the deserted dining room, and still he hadn’t reacted, her sock-clad feet padding on the lino, making light little noises when the sweat made them stick.

The plug thudded on the floor when she pulled it out. She moved back towards the bunk room.

Justin raised his eyes from the thing under him and in the next moment he’d leapt towards her, on all fours, not like a human. She only had time to see it. The lamplight blackened above her, and that body slammed into her, driving her back. The back of her head smacked into the bathroom door with a dry-wood noise. She didn’t feel any pain, she didn’t feel anything, but she was on her back, only her head and shoulders wedged upright against the door. Her hand couldn’t feel the lamp-stand now.

Justin stood over her, his fly open, nothing visible, with a look that didn’t belong in his face. It was illuminated, beatific. He hadn’t done anything yet. He seemed to totter, or was it the surface of her eyeballs that couldn’t keep its integrity?

“Justin, do you hear me?”

That alone made her winded. She was trying to reason with it, as if it were Justin.

It glanced between her and Denny, silent on the floor.

Ylva twisted around, planting her palm in the lino. The lamp was to the left, the hatch to the right. She chose the hatch. Justin, the form, flung itself after her. She felt its fingers through her T-shirt. For a moment she could feel the body on her back while its momentum carried them in the same direction. Then she slammed into the ladder in front of it, feeling her ribs buckle.

The air had gone out of her between the varnished rungs and its weight. She didn’t know whether she would be able to inhale. She tasted blood, without knowing what she’d bashed. That being was pressed against her back, she couldn’t breathe anything except its smell, she tasted it in her saliva. It hadn’t started yet. Its fingers felt her shoulder-blades. They were clumsy, like something that had frozen and not thawed to the right shape.

She started hauling herself up the ladder, as if she could pull herself free in that direction.

Something jabbed into her, into the long fleshy muscle that stretched down across her back. It stained the fabric of her shirt, and she didn’t know how deep it had gone or whether it could still be fixed.

Now she screamed, still more a yell of anger. It didn’t help, it didn’t drive it back an inch. She pushed back from the ladder with one foot. The pressure of flesh against flesh gave a little, without letting up. It was hard to get space, she didn’t have more than a few inches between him and the wall. She felt the hard surface of a kneecap under her heel. Another kick, and it gave a hissing gasp and fell away.

She climbed like you do in dreams, with just a little slot of clarity between fields of shining haze above and below, with hands that seemed to slip as often as they caught. It was just below her, enough inches away that she couldn’t kick at it without having to stop, but it was okay. She wasn’t trying to outrun it.

She stumbled out on deck beneath the black sky. They lay immobile, the sea in all directions around them. It went for her ankle as she got out of the hatch, and she felt its nails slipping, but it didn’t catch hold.

Her feet pounded on the deck boards, louder than any other sound here. The railing lay before her, then blackness. She didn’t have a weapon. The deep outside the railing would have to be her weapon.

She danced around – and if it wasn’t coming, would she have to lure it to her? – but it was emerging from the hatch. She didn’t have to look straight at it, it was enough to glimpse its – Justin’s – yellow hair and red-striped shirt, two irritating infections on her retinas. She was one step away from the railing, or two. If she kept backing away, would it catch on? (How much did it understand?)

It took two leaps across the deck, three, she could see its toes splay against the dim boards with every bound, and then it was on her. The force of its leap shoved her against the railing, but her lower back was pressed against it and she kept her footing.

This was where she’d wanted it, but it was heavier and taller than she. It wasn’t trying to pull her away from the railing: it was happy having her here. It sniffed her with its wet muzzle, like some drugged shadow-memory of being nuzzled by a friendly animal at a farm. She stared past its chest, towards the hatch and the yellow lantern and the blackness on the other side. She wasn’t getting enough air, her ribcage wasn’t expanding properly. It bent its head over her, drooling. Its saliva had a smell. It dripped on her shirt and cooled in her hair. The longer she waited, if she waited to the very last moment of safe return, the less prepared it would be. (But she was making the assumption that it thought like a human.)

She felt rows of teeth close around her ear, around the upper cartilage-slick part. It tore downward with two kinds of pain, the bloody one and the shrieking one in the middle ear.

To the left. She twisted and tore free and got it between herself and the railing. She locked arms around its waist, as low as possible, get its centre of gravity off the ground. If it had kicked now, it might have hit her chest or her stomach and knocked her onto the deck, but its legs barely moved. She took a step forward, almost placing it on the railing, and pushed upward with her arms, manoeuvring it over the edge.

Both hands hooked in her shirt. It ought to have torn. She ought to have thought to throw her arms up, and maybe the shirt would have slipped off her. Now the deck was dropping away under her soles, her breasts and waist were pulled over the railing’s thick profiled edge. She put her hand out, unseeing, and felt the edge, but she was moving too fast, the edge only hurt her fingers without slowing her. Now she fell in the dark, head first.

The surface shattered around her. It was blackness, as if this were something other than water. She sank and didn’t know which way the air was, if there was still air.

But it was still only August, the sea water was chilly rather than cold. She surfaced with only a bit of a sting in her throat. All her clothes sopped up water, the tee became large and entangling around her. The water was warmer over her right shoulder where the blood from her ear pumped out. The hull of the boat was one body-length away. She paddled towards it, and now she heard it speak, halfway under water, halfway just bubbles:

“Ylla Yvla wet down in wet soft tummy I and and Ylla...”

She couldn’t outswim it; it would follow her as long as it needed to. Out here there were no weapons, everything was soft except fingernails and teeth. She cast around and pressed her hands down over its head, fingers under its wet tangled locks, and crawled over it to press its head down with her own bodyweight. Its nails slid into soft areas of her abdomen, she felt the sea water in the wounds. It wouldn’t get better if she let go now, so she panted with every jab and lay still. The only things that were left were the warm pounding in the side of her head and Justin’s locks that had been twisted into wire around her fingers.

The body jolted. For a moment it fought with doubled strength, then it heaved in a cough, the movements slowing and stopping. Ylva remained lying across it in the blackness. She could count: two minutes below surface, then it would have to be dead. That would have killed her. It was filling up with water, it was starting to slip underneath. She twisted and kicked and got off it, and her splashing was the only sound over the sea. On her way to the boat, her hand glided through a cloud of something finger-warm and stinking, something other than the blood. She felt as if she was about to throw up herself. She couldn’t remember how long it was since she’d eaten; her body felt bitter and scraped clean on the inside.

The long sweeping hull was in front of her. It was darkness in the darkness, she was only aware of it from how the little waves sounded different up ahead. She groped with a wet hand across the slick surface, and she wouldn’t have been able to climb it even if she and the wood had been dry – enough sweat in her palms to give a good grip, rubber-soled shoes that caught on the wood –, even if the water had been a surface to stand on.

She swam around the boat for a ladder or a rope, and there hadn’t been any, and still she had to. It was too dark to see. She swam another lap, and this time she trod water after each stroke and reached up in the air. It was enough to drug her brain for a while longer. (She didn’t know whether she’d gone clockwise or counter-clockwise. She’d become the protagonist in an Edgar Allan Poe story whose brain no longer had a grip on directions.) Her nerves convinced her that she could feel the swaying draft of a rope-end, just an inch in front or behind.

Denny’s boat, warm firm boards under your feet, yellow light and blankets in the bunks, the control room, all was on the other side of the moon or the galaxy.

She located the pearl-string of lights to the west and started swimming. After having swum – a few body-lengths – she stopped and yelled, wordlessly. There were no lanterns in sight, but the whole hemisphere of air lay open around her, so she yelled until she was lightheaded.

She set out again. The water grew colder around her, the waves drove her off course. She couldn’t feel her fingertips any more, and the side of her head was cold and numb. Her arms were going to grow tired, then lose sensation, then she would go under the surface and vomit and inhale water. But there were swimmers who had swum more than ten kilometres, who had swum across the English Channel. A salty wave washed up above her nose. You could bleed out from having your ear cut off. Maybe she would pass out from it and not have to feel when the surface went over her.

The wounds in her back muscles and the remnants of her ear had started throbbing. In her mind, she saw them as fluorescent stripes of red and yellow, as if new tissues had become visible beneath the skin. They would glimmer through the water. Maybe it was starting to give her a bit of strength.

When the bus slowed towards the stop out in Kolboda, the adrenaline had started pooling in Sasha’s stomach. She made her way through the lit aisle with hurried tripping steps, as if something was chasing her, glancing behind her one more time to make sure no-one was following her as she set off down the roadside. The orange lampposts were far between above the spruce canopy. It was past nine, but it was summer, it wasn’t going to get darker than this. The sky was just a smudgy haze of light between the black branches.

She turned in on a side road, a broad dirt timber track. The scent of new-mown grass grew denser in the dusk and became overpowering. She pulled her phone out of the deep pocket of her capris and switched it on, in case she’d had a text: the others calling it off at the last moment, mum who’d called someone and found out she wasn’t at the dance. Nothing was there. She couldn’t back out: she was the one who’d suggested it to Ricky and Kari.

Up ahead, the forest ended in a crescent-shaped wall of trees, then a band of pale grass up to a chain-link fence around low stalls, black now. Two forms detached from the shadows. The beam of a phone moved across the grass, towards her.

“‘Blessed be the fruit’,” said Kari’s voice.

“What the hell… ‘is there no help for the widow’s son?’” Sasha said. ”I didn’t realise we were going with passwords. Can I go back home and start over?”

“I dunno, I thought it was funny.”

“Is this some sort of woman thing?” Ricky said, taking a step closer.

Sasha got her phone back out, letting the beam flit between them. Ricky had crew-cut, almost white hair, and had been a head shorter than her back when they became friends, before puberty hit them. Sometimes he still was, in her mental images: a sinewy little guy with squirrel-quick eyes. Kari was shorter than she, pudgy, with a round tan face and shiny black hair in an ascetic cut. Both she and Ricky were wearing black, fuzzy clothes, clothes that would be hard to see at night. Sasha looked down at her khaki pants and light sweatshirt. Her mouth was dry.

“I’ve been here checking, two nights running,” Ricky said. “There aren’t any guards. No cameras, near as I can see. They’re expecting the fence to keep people out.”

Sasha nodded. A couple of tight black curls tickled against her forehead. Ricky’s silhouette had turned towards the carnival fence, then she saw the shapeless dark form of his jacket detach and land across the barbed wire, angled outwards, strung along the upper edge.

He grabbed the chain-link, clambering up, without giving either of them a chance.

“Show-off,” Kari muttered.

She took a step back, letting Sasha go next. The fence was a black cut-out against the sky, invisible against the outlines of the sideshows and the rides behind them; only the others’ phones provided a couple of points of light. The chain-link was easy to grip with your fingers and provided holds for the toes of your trainers, not too different from being a ten-year-old in the school-yard, back when a fence had been just a ladder. The strings of barbed wire were the only thing giving her trouble. She felt the prickles on her calf through her trouser leg, but then she was over the top and able to haul herself down onto the close-mown grass.

It took longer for Kari to climb over, to the point where she started wondering what they were going to do if the girl couldn’t manage; they’d hardly be able to unlock the gates from the inside without a keycard. It was just a moment, then Kari’s outline changed shape as she moved her centre of weight across, and scrambled down on the inside almost in a single jump.

“Whatever, come on,” she muttered, trudging ahead of them.

They moved between the stalls along worn footpaths. Ricky’s phone was lit, a trail of faint light ahead of them. It felt as though a guard would see the glint straight away, but it might have been impossible to make your way otherwise: you’d smash your face into the board walls. She tilted her head back and saw a wireframe pole – but no visible surveillance camera, just a loudspeaker, black and dead. The endorphins had taken over.

“What do you say, ladies?” Ricky said. “Candyfloss or Skeeball?”

The dark altered his voice a bit, so that she might not have recognised it.

“I think we should go to the entrance,” she said. “To get an… overview…”

She could feel their glinting eyes on her. If she’d come there alone, that was what she would have done. You had to start from screen one in a game.

“Sure, if you like,” Ricky said after a second.

They walked in the solid shadow where you couldn’t see the ground at all, it was just a resistance beneath your soles. If not for that sensation, she might have believed that this was just another fantasy about what was going to happen tonight. The buildings were interchangeable boxes. If Ricky raised the beam, she’d see the padlocked hatches.

The buildings thinned and they stood in the pale light of the sky. To the right was the chain-link gate and a dark ticket booth. If there were CCTV cameras, it would have to be here, on the gate posts – but even if they were discovered, she couldn’t imagine it would be worse than getting thrown out, it wasn’t as if they were here to steal or vandalise.

She turned her gaze away from the gate. In the other direction, the sky was open, the tree canopy was far away, and the black track of a roller coaster was outlined against the pallor, like an infinity symbol with more loops behind. Perhaps there was another one. It was no big carnival, out here on the coast, but she hadn’t checked ahead what attractions there were.

“Okay, here we are now,” Kari said, shrugging so that her arms swung a bit. “Where d’you want us to go now?”

“That’s not for me to decide, is it?”

Her voice sounded rougher, as if it was something the dark had done to it.

“The rides,” Ricky said. She heard his grin. “They’re the only things to look at. Not as if the game show things are open.”

They set off along the wider central aisle. It was natural: that was the one leading to the rides, the motor of the carnival. If the cameras were on, they’d already been seen, and it didn’t matter whether they sneaked or not.

“This is some Stephen King shit,” Kari said on the other side of Ricky.

Sasha chuckled, with more energy than necessary, as a peace offering more than anything.

“Hope I won’t be the first to die, then.”

She set her trainer down in a hole in the lawn, nearly stumbling. The shock stabbed with a chill that hurt as much as if she’d really fallen, but the others might not have noticed anything.

“Why…” Ricky began, cutting himself off. “Oh… I get it.” He giggled. “Are monsters allowed to get the black guys first nowadays?”

“They might get the Asian first,” Kari said. “We’ve got three different skin colours here. Real diversity… taste the rainbow.”

The jokes died off again.

She’d pictured the carnival as small, like the plane of asphalt between the terraced flats back home. Of course it wasn’t: it was a long way to the rides, many opportunities to let visitors pay to eat something or compete for something.

(Distances always got longer in the dark.)

She looked up. The aisle was wide here, there was more natural light, and she didn’t need to focus on the ground any more. The roller coaster was still far off, with rises and loops that overlapped differently from their new angle.

Their muscles stiffened when they heard the noise.

It wasn’t a human voice; it was a long, distant shriek of steel. It had to have been a coaster; she’d caught the little clonk of the chain as it started up.

Next to her, Kari stiffened, as if she was about to stumble.

“That must be the roller coaster,” Sasha managed. “It must have started… maybe they’re doing test runs…”

She hadn’t needed to say anything. The sound died away after a while, to a tremor through her soles.

“Okay!” Ricky said. “First one there…”

The bastard started to run, as if he didn’t need to see the ground. Before Sasha set off after him, she glanced towards the sky. If the carts on the coaster had moved, they were nowhere she could see them: she saw light sky through the grid of cross-ties. Standing with her head tilted back made her feel nauseous, dizzy, as if she was about to wake up from a dream.

She started running, so she wouldn’t lose them, and the sound came again. It had to be coming from the direction of the coaster. It was fainter this time, or was that because it didn’t come as a surprise?

They emerged in a field, not the one with the coaster: to the left was the black silhouette of a classic carousel, a glimpse of a gentle white horse with a Barbie-curly mane, but there was only emptiness ahead. The air was spicy with metallic grease and a lingering smell of some carnival snack, sugared popcorn.

Ricky’s head twitched right and left as he looked around. Sasha stepped to the side, stepping on something soft – rustling, a striped paper bag. Maybe the popcorn had been in there.

“It’s not here…” he said. His voice sounded hesitant.

“Of course,” Sasha said. “It’s over on the other side…”

Distances got longer.

She was about to say “is it a good idea, going there?”, but that depended on whether there was a person there, didn’t it? They were just doing test runs, maybe they didn’t need a human supervisor.

It had to be the roller coaster. What else could it be – a cargo ship off the coast, a crane starting to sag?

As they kept walking, she looked up again, but it was impossible. The coaster had a new shape, one of the two loops was pointed away from them, or towards them, so that the dark cross-ties and the gaps formed an almost unbroken surface.

She ended up standing while the others went on. The ground was firm, she could feel the dewy-cold grass around her trainers, and she kept her balance. She wasn’t crazy, or was it possible to have a psychosis or something and start seeing things that couldn’t exist, while all your senses felt like they still obeyed you? She felt sick now, but she didn’t know whether it was from the fear or something her body was producing. The smell of grease and metal was everywhere around her, as if she was standing in a workshop.

She could have stayed there. (She couldn’t have left without them.) She went on, because she wanted to see if anything changed or corrected itself on its own. The sound, that slow roar, came again, maybe further off. The others had heard it, did that mean that what she was seeing was real, too?

“Guys, do you hear me…”

She came out behind them in an open field, a larger one. There were concrete bases, as wide as Porta-Potties, concrete so pale you could see it without a light, and after a few seconds she found the wooden deck where the carts had braked to let new passengers get in. Her first ride, when dad had lied that she was six years old. Dad had had to take his clogs off, and the grown-ups around her had had to hand over their handbags and glasses in a basket. Perhaps it was the smell summoning up the memory. It was thick like something that had permeated the lair of a big animal, but the coaster wasn’t there. She thought she could feel the metal particles on her teeth.

“What the fuck?” Ricky said.

It was so long since she’d heard their voices, she jolted. He went on:

“The bloody thing’s not here.”

His voice seemed to get a bit more force from the swearwords. He started turning around, but froze. She couldn’t see his face.

“Okay, what is this…” Kari began.

She half-ran over to the platform without a track. Sasha made out her silhouette against the sky, crouching into something that didn’t need to be human, then rounded one of the lower pillars. Maybe she was looking for a way to climb up.

The sky lay open above them, that light-haze that took shades of orange and magenta from the town on the other side of the forest, and something long moved across it.

It moved in high loops, like a snake, if a snake had been able to grow to be thicker than a tree, longer than the tallest tree in the world. It was the roller coaster – the sky was visible through the ribs of the cross-ties –, but it moved visibly, several yards while she looked, like something with a mind and senses. The noise moved with it, the deep shriek of metal, preceded and followed by a rattling. She could still believe that it was something possible – a robot, some kind of promotional event, maybe controlled by five employees with remotes. There was no rationality in it, but you had to believe it.

Kari was up on the concrete pillar, between them and it. She was investigating something, maybe the oxidated remains of a support that had been stuck into the concrete, she hadn’t seen it yet, and the frontmost bend twisted towards her with that creaking wail that came out of the stratosphere, upright like a cobra. But a remote controlled animatronic would also be able to run people over or crush them.

“Kari, look out!” she might have yelled.

Maybe it had only been Ricky.

Kari spun around and saw it. If she screamed, it wasn’t audible. Her black form became just a sign of horror against the sky. She reacted in time. She jumped, dived, for the platform and flung herself flat on it.

And that track turned in the air, with a supple cartoon movement, and dived onto her. This time, her scream rose above the roar before it cut off.

Sasha had curled up on the cold grass, arms pressed over her head. If it’d been after her, she would have been dead; it had just been an animal’s defence against the noise. The coaster rose towards the sky again, from the platform that was a halo of shattered wood. Ricky got up opposite her, on the other side. She took a step, then she felt the impact in the ground. It was strong enough to shake her joints. Her heart stopped for a second.

Maybe that was when she pissed herself.

Kari lay on the edge of the ruin of the platform. For an unreasonably long time, Sasha thought she’d found a depression in the soil and squeezed herself into it and got an inch of air between herself and it. Part of her lay lower than the rest. Part of her was flat, only her right arm and a bit of her right side retained its shape. Even then, there could have been some hope. If enough internal organs had survived, the tangle of crushed bones would have time to knit back together. Her dark-haired head lay face down, they didn’t have to see what her face looked like after this. Her black clothes absorbed everything, but she could smell it. They were not the smells of a whole body. Ricky had started howling, not a normal scream, just a single note like an old steam whistle.

It hadn’t left them. That shriek returned, more creaking, cracking up, maybe as it turned around. This was a moment where you collapsed, catatonic, or burst into a run, and her body was smarter. She ran, arms and legs flailing, through the abysses of shadow, and it was some psycho chasing them with the coaster, she could convince herself that she’d seen their silhouette on some roof, triumphant with their remote. Perhaps it was that image that let her keep sprinting through the aisle.

It was just behind her, it was above her. That screech, and the rattle – noises that had become part of her body, like harmful metal organs – and then the impact that threw her running steps into a skip. (But the impact must have been ten yards behind her, a different coil.)

The chain-link was in the air in front of her, the forest and maybe the road with its grassy middle were visible behind it. Her mouth was full of the oily iron taste of blood, and she had the notion that her eardrums had burst and run down her throat, but she’d just bitten something in her mouth. Ricky wasn’t next to her. If she looked around, he might be behind her, he’d come rushing like a shooting star at the last moment, or else he was faster than she, he’d already flung himself over the fence somewhere else, maybe he’d be a glint of light if she turned her head further in some direction, or he was dead and she hadn’t been able to do anything and she couldn’t do anything now.

She wasn’t going to make it over. She had iron-rusty oil in her mouth, it mingled with the taste of blood until she didn’t know what was biological and what was an imitation. The loops were above and around her, they were architecture, too huge to be afraid of.

(Maybe she’d have been able to feint towards a section of the fence and let it flatten the net. It would have slammed into her and made her into meat. She wouldn’t have managed, anyway, not to offer herself as bait to something that paralysed the brain.)

The gate. She started running again, pressed so tight against the fence that her clothes snagged on protruding metal bits for a few moments at a time, and she wasn’t going to make it, locked gates, steel boxes with clamped instruments, she was going to be cornered there instead, her legs shivered with exhaustion under her, and was the only thing she could hope for now to pass out so that she wouldn’t feel anything?

She turned, shoulders hunched, air wheezing in and out of her lungs with a pain she didn’t feel. It’s real, the insanity is real, run towards the brushfire and through it. The coils were around her, in the darkness on ground level they melted into the background of the stalls. She burst into a run, into the cage of serpents, towards its base. Perhaps it had a heart, something she could smash up and ruin for Ricky and Kari. (She didn’t have a weapon – wooden splinters from the platform, at most, but they would tear open her palms before they scratched the iron.) Something like this existed – it might as well obey video game logic.

The blackness in the sky beat down on her and drove her into the earth.

The noise came back, the roar stretched into a wail. That was how she realised that she was alive. She had a sharp-angled pain in her back, soil and dew-wet grass driven into her face. Something had scraped along her left arm in its full length, scratching open the fabric, but her body had followed some instinct and fallen sideways. Her arm heated, then came the pain. The heat rolled from it in heavy drops. The strip of cloth lashed from it, black in the gloom.

Somehow, it got a bit easier after that. Part of her was ruined. She didn’t need to care about what it did to her any more. The impacting end was next to her, like the head of a railway bridge stabbing into the lawn. As it took off again, she grabbed a cross-tie and the track vibrated as if a cart was passing over it and the ground fell away beneath her soles.

It yanked her upwards and the air shot out of her lungs, a scream or a gasp. Her left arm wasn’t usable, but she kicked her way up, hugging her upper body to the cross-tie with her cramp-strong right arm. The tie was robust, with sharp edges on the back as if it had been a shell around a core, and this was real. For a few moments, she dangled above the fence, and if she’d let go, she might have fallen on the outside, but she was already so high, she would have broken bones in her in the dark, and soon it had yanked her even higher, and it was still going upwards.

She hung turned backwards so that she had an overview of the major part of its body, not a body, something skeletal and sparse that covered a vast surface. It had no weak spots, it had nothing a weapon could have pierced. A fully decentralised nervous system, she’d read in a sci-fi book once, but it had no nervous system, unless it was nothing but nerves.

She twisted herself forward, as far as she could without risking weakening her grip. She looked out across a huge flat of land, the carnival stretching to the horizon, like a metropolis. Gigantic skeletal forms coiled over the sky, separate, lit from underneath by red and blue floodlights. She didn’t hear any more, she was in a cage of noise that drove into her from every direction like pistons. She didn’t know whether they trumpeted or were silent.

She was heading towards them.

The coil where she hung whistled downwards again, and she clung upside down, swaying. Her hearing and balance were smashed up, she hung in a void of savage circus lights and didn’t know whether she might have several hours left.

The black surface of the earth grew above her, and she could no longer see them.