Funland (21 page)

Somebody patted his rump. He looked back, and saw Heather behind him. “How you like it so far?” she asked.

He shrugged. He didn’t know what to say. He felt a little sick with guilt, but also very excited. His heart was pounding, his mouth was dry, and his throat felt tight. All he said was, “Neat.”

“A blast,” Heather said. “But it’s gonna get better.”

“What happens next?” he asked.

“It’s up to Tanya,” Shiner said.

Heather added, “You can bet it’ll be cool,” and put an arm around his back. He felt her big soft breast against his upper arm, and wanted to pull away.

Of all the girls here, why did
she
have to be the one snuggling up to him?

Tanya was too much to hope for, of course, but he liked Shiner and she didn’t seem to have a boyfriend here. Even though the darkness had made it impossible, so far, to get a good look at her face, she seemed pretty. She certainly wasn’t a fat slob with stinky breath.

Just what I need, he thought. This one hanging all over me.

Shiner, walking on the other side of Jeremy, quickened her pace and moved ahead, leaving him with Heather.

Who slid a hand into a rear pocket of his corduroys and rubbed his rump. “Good and warm,” she said.

“Too bad Cowboy’s missing out on the fun,” he told her.

“He’s an asshole.”

The word, coming from her, sounded especially gross.

“He’s my best friend,” Jeremy said.

He hoped she might back off, hearing that. Instead, she gave his butt a playful squeeze and kissed his ear.

Jeremy turned his head away.

And saw Jasper’s Oddities through the fog. An image filled his mind: Heather inside—an exhibit—her bloated, naked body suspended in a harness of leather straps. She looked as if she were made of white bread dough that hadn’t gone into the oven yet. The straps sank into her flab so far they were almost out of sight. Her tongue lolled out. Her dead eyes were rolled upward so he could see only their whites. The picture made him go hot with shame.

She’s just being nice to me, he told himself. She’s probably lonely. It’s not a crime.

The troll suddenly began to struggle. With his good hand he pounded Samson’s back.

Samson bent at the waist and hurled him down. The troll crashed against the boardwalk. Before he could move, he was surrounded.

Jeremy, free of Heather, sighed with relief and stepped on the man’s wrist.

“Don’t hurt him,” Tanya ordered. “Just bring him along.”

“I’ve got him,” Samson said. He grabbed one side of the troll’s thick handlebar mustache and started pulling.

With a lot of gasps and whimpers and groans, the old guy got to his feet.

Samson walked beside him, leading him by the mustache.

“Over here.” Tanya hurried on ahead, Randy rushing after her with the derby wobbling high above him. They both melted into the fog. Then Karen and Nate vanished too.

Jeremy heard the squeak of a gate swinging open.

“Where’d you go?” Samson called.

“The Ferris wheel,” Tanya answered.

“Oh wow.” That came from Heather. Close behind him.

Jeremy hurried forward and caught up with Shiner. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“We’re about to find out,” she said.

Samson and the troll, with Liz walking close behind the troll as if to grab him if he should somehow free himself, angled across the boardwalk toward one of the low fences that enclosed each of the rides. They passed through the open gate.

The Ferris wheel stood beyond the gate, mostly hidden by the fog. Jeremy could see only the front of it: a few of the gondolas, some distinct and others vague in the grayness; the curves of the wheels connecting them; spokes running inward toward the axle, but fading, and vanishing entirely before they reached it.

More came into view as he walked with Shiner through the gate. He saw the elevated platform. The lowest gondola was there, where it had been stopped at the end of the last ride of the night to let its passengers out. Dim shapes stood near it. He saw Samson leading the troll up the few stairs, Liz hurrying after them.

“Ooo, this is gonna be good,” Heather said. Instead of latching on to Jeremy again, she hurried past him and bounded to the top of the stairs.

Shiner stayed at Jeremy’s side while they climbed the platform.

“Everybody here?” Tanya asked.

“Anyone who’s not here,” Randy said, “speak up.”

“You’re as funny as crotch rot,” Liz told him.

“Okay,” Tanya said. “Let’s air this bastard out.”

Samson, standing in front of the troll, kept him on tiptoes by dragging upward on his mustache. Liz, Karen, Heather, and Shiner began to undress him. He danced and whimpered a little as they did it, but offered no real resistance. Tanya watched like a foreman, arms folded across her chest, nodding with approval.

Soon they had the troll down to his long johns.

Jeremy was surprised. He’d thought nobody wore long johns—just actors in cowboy movies. But this old fart wore them, all right.

Heather and Liz peeled them off him.

Jeremy couldn’t believe it. He felt shocked, and his skin burned with his embarrassment.

The guy was as hairy as an ape. The mound of his sagging belly was in the way, so Jeremy couldn’t see his privates and was glad to be spared the sight. But Liz and Heather were on their knees, having drawn the long johns down his legs, and they stayed there, inspecting him, whispering to each other, giggling. The guy obviously wanted to cover himself, but Karen and Shiner had his arms. So he just whimpered.

Heather reached up.

The troll’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

“What’re you, desperate?” Liz muttered.

“I just wanta see if—”

“That’s enough,” Nate snapped.

“Let’s get on with it,” Tanya said. “We didn’t post a guard, so we’d better finish up and get out of here.” She reached out toward Randy. He dug into a pocket, took out something that clicked and rattled, and gave it to her.

Jeremy saw that it was a pair of handcuffs.

“I’ll get the thing going,” Nate said, and ducked away.

The troll was guided to the Ferris wheel and forced down. The gondola started to swing backward when his rump hit the footrest, but the platform stopped it.

As if he suddenly realized that the pain of the beating and the humiliation of being stripped were mere preliminaries to the main event, the troll shrieked and went wild. He kicked, squirmed, flung his arms at the kids trying to hold him down.

Tanya kicked him in the belly. His breath blasted out and he slumped against the front edge of the gondola’s seat, whinnying as he struggled for air.

She swung the metal safety bar down and clamped it.

A motor rumbled to life. Jeremy felt the platform begin to vibrate under his shoes.

Astonished, he muttered, “It’ll
go?”

“Nate’s folks own the thing,” Liz said.

Tanya finished with the troll and stepped aside. He was still sitting on the footrest, sprawled backward against the seat, fat hairy legs sticking out.

His hands hung beneath the safety bar, suspended there by the chain of the cuffs.

“Watch it,” Tanya warned. Jeremy and the others stepped out of the way. “Okay, Nate,” she said.

Nate, over at the side, worked a lever forward.

The Ferris wheel lurched, and slowly started to turn. As the gondola moved backward, rising, it rocked away beneath the weight of the troll. He slipped off the footrest and cried out as the bracelets tugged at his wrists.

“No!” he yelled. “Please!”

A second later, he was hanging straight down—all his weight borne by the handcuffs, by the connecting links, by the safety bar.

The Ferris wheel lifted him higher, then squeaked and stopped with a slight jerk that made him yelp. He swayed up there, six or eight feet above the ground.

“Take him higher,” Tanya said.

“That’s high enough,” Nate told her. “He’s an awfully big guy. Something could give out.”

“Let me down. Please? I’ll get out of town. I’ll do anything.
Please!”

“Give him one spin over the top,” Tanya said.

“Christ, yeah!” Heather blurted.

“Make him
ride
it!” Liz said.

“I don’t think we—”

“Shit!” Tanya snapped. “Give it to him! He’s a fucking
troll!”

Nate shook his head.

He kept shaking it as Tanya strode toward him.
“I’ll
do it, then—shit.”

“Tanya…” he said. But he didn’t try to stop her.

She rammed the long lever forward. With a quick lurch that dragged a shriek out of the troll, the wheel started turning.

The naked, kicking troll flew upward as if being sucked into the fog. He screamed all the way up. He kept on screaming after Jeremy couldn’t see him anymore.

Tanya tugged the lever backward.

The Ferris wheel stopped.

The screams of the troll came down through the fog.

“God,” Shiner muttered, “he must be right near the top.”

“A good place for him to spend the night,” Tanya said.

“Let’s bring him down,” Nate told her. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Fine,” Tanya said. “In the morning. Go ahead and shut it off.”

“We can’t…”

The troll had never stopped screaming, but the pitch suddenly jagged high. It made Jeremy’s teeth ache. Goose bumps prickled his skin.

He heard a thump.

The screaming stopped.

Another thump.

“Oh, Jesus,” Nate murmured.

And down through the fog came the troll, striking spokes and braces, bouncing off them, cartwheeling, flipping, tumbling like a mad acrobat.

Twenty

The platform shook when he crashed against it.

Nobody said a word. There was silence except for the rumble of the Ferris wheel’s motor.

Jeremy stared at the body. It lay only a couple of yards from him, faceup on the floor between two of the gondolas. The shadows weren’t dark enough to shroud it. The face looked black with what was surely blood. The nose was mashed flat. One leg stuck out sideways, as if it had been wrenched from its socket. The other stood straight up from the knee. The hands, still cuffed, rested on the hill of the troll’s belly. A spike of bone protruded from the left forearm.

Jeremy turned his eyes away from the corpse and looked around the group. Everyone else was motionless, gazing at it.

Liz raised a hand to her mouth. He wondered if she was about to vomit.
He
felt a little like throwing up. But she began to make strange muffled noises, and he realized she was giggling. A moment later she said, “Woops.”

Shiner said, “Oh, God. Now we’ve done it.”

“He fall down go boom,” Heather said.

Nate broke away from the group and shut down the motor.

“Everybody stay cool,” Tanya said.

“What
happened?”
Randy muttered.

“Obviously,” Tanya said, “the safety bar wasn’t strong enough to support him.”

“We killed him,” Randy said.

“Brilliant deduction, dickhead.” From Liz.

“Look,” Tanya said, “the main thing now is not to panic. We’ve got to get rid of him and clean up. Nobody ever has to know this happened. Liz, Karen, Heather, I want you to clean up the blood. Go get a bucket and mop. Jeremy, get the guy’s stuff together and throw it under the boardwalk. Shiner, help him. Samson, you give me a hand with the body. Nate, go get your surfboard. We’ll float him out and dump him.”

“What about me?” Randy asked.

“Do us a favor and stick your head up your ass,” Liz said.

“You can stay with me,” Tanya told him. She pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up her forearms, ducked beneath the outer rim of the Ferris wheel, and crouched by the body. Samson followed.

Nobody else moved.

Tanya lifted the sideways leg by its ankle and swung it inward. As she lowered the other leg—the one bent upward from the knee—Randy spun around, gagging. He threw himself against the platform’s railing and vomited.

“Good going,” Liz said. “I’m not cleaning
that
up.”

Somebody squeezed Jeremy’s arm. He looked, and saw that it was Shiner. “Let’s take care of his junk,” she said.

He turned away from the grisly sight of Tanya and Samson struggling with the body, and started to pick up the troll’s clothes.

Nate brushed past him and hurried down the stairs. Then Liz, Karen, and Heather left.

“I’ll help you guys,” Randy said. He still had the cane in one hand, the derby hanging on its top. The derby fell off when he bent down to pick up the long johns. It rolled under the Ferris wheel, and he scrambled to retrieve it.

Jeremy saw that Tanya and Samson had the body out from under the wheel. Tanya was holding the legs up while Samson dragged the body by its arms. They were moving it toward the rear of the platform.

“I never thought something like this would happen,” Shiner whispered.

“It’s pretty gross,” Jeremy told her.

“God.”

He picked up the shoes and socks. And looked up in time to see Samson and Tanya lift the troll over the railing behind the Ferris wheel. They dropped him toward the beach.

On the way back, Samson grabbed the duffel bag. He lifted it and followed Tanya down the stairs.

“I guess we’ve got it all,” Shiner said.

With Randy in the lead—but no longer holding the derby high on the staff like a trophy—they climbed down from the platform. They walked through the open gate. Tanya and Samson were off to the left, climbing over the boardwalk’s railing. Samson must’ve already tossed the duffel bag down. He and Tanya jumped, and vanished from sight.

When Jeremy reached the railing, he saw them striding across the beach. They took only a few steps before the fog devoured them.

The duffel bag lay in the sand straight below him. He emptied his arms over the railing. The troll’s shoes dropped fast, but the socks and pants fluttered down. So did the shirt released by Shiner. It sailed down, billowing, sleeves out. The wadded leather jacket plummeted, and hit the sand before the shirt. Randy hurled the cane. It stabbed the sand and stood upright like a spear. He kept the derby in his hand while he ducked between the bars of the railing.