by Guy Adams
‘No, no,’ he’d muttered, ‘that’s the only place you’ll be safe.’ Then he’d watched the video again, talking to himself as he watched the grainy footage. It must have been caught by a security camera, she guessed, or maybe someone had set their phone to upload automatically, the camera still filming even as its owner died. However it happened, all she knew of its contents was what she could pick up through Uncle Ray’s chatter.
‘Leviathan,’ he whispered, ‘bursting from the sky with its dark heart, gazing down on us with its eyes… so many eyes… judging us good… judging us ripe…’
When he’d finally died, his body just a few feet from the bars, she’d cried, then screamed, then slept, her brain switching off rather than having to deal with the situation.
She had no idea how long she slept for; she’d slipped in and out of consciousness, sometimes waking in darkness, sometimes in daylight. She’d started trying to shift the bars, then picking away at the wooden floor in the hope of crawling underneath the boards. The key was in her uncle’s pocket but, stretching as far as she could, she still couldn’t reach him.
She had watched his body bloat then deflate. The smell had made her wretch but eventually either she got used to it or it just went away.
The hunger was the worst. She had water in the cage, several big plastic bottles of it—Uncle Ray would often insist she washed and scrubbed herself with it several times a day to ’cleanse herself of sin’—so thirst wasn’t an immediate problem and she had the sense to eke it out as much as she could. Still, she would die in the cage unless she caught a break, she knew that.
That break came when she finally managed to loosen one of the floorboards. With bloody hands, she’d torn it free and peered underneath only to find there was only a few inches space below, nowhere near enough to move through. For a moment, her exhausted, panicked mind had thought that was the end. She finally accepted she would die soon.
Then she’d realised she could use the board for something else. She’d squatted by the bars, poking the board through and slowly, ever so slowly, managed to roll the dead body of her uncle close enough to reach.
Grimacing, she’d searched his pockets, trying not to think about the way his dead flesh gave beneath the cloth as her fingers dug around. Finally the key was in her hand. She unlocked the cage, ran outside and sobbed into the earth of the free world.
It had taken her a little longer to leave the cabin. She’d buried her uncle—his madness might nearly have killed her but she couldn’t leave the body—stocked up on provisions and walked out of there.
But at night, ever since, when she dreamed, she was back in the cage and part of her wondered if she’d ever really left it at all.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘GRACE,’ GOD ASKED, putting a hand on her shoulder, ‘are you alright?’
She tore her eyes away, pulled herself back from the memory of her own cage. This wasn’t it. She wasn’t in the cabin. She had escaped. She was sure of it.
‘Memories,’ was all she could say, turning away and looking around with the rest of them.
‘Where do you think they hid the drugs?’ asked Peeper. ‘There must be a cupboard or something.’
Demi-John pulled himself along the floor but found the going harder here than outside, the straw and dirt catching in his wheels. ‘I don’t know, keep looking, it must be here.’
‘If it works,’ said Lucy, ‘I mean, most of the things in the park are real, real enough to eat or drink anyway, but what if the tranquillisers aren’t like that? What if they don’t even exist anymore?’
‘Then we’ve wasted our time,’ Demi-John admitted, ‘but we might as well try.’
‘Has anyone else noticed the smell is getting worse?’ asked Fabrizzi. ‘It really stinks in here.’
Grace had. ‘This place is waking up too,’ she said.
A low growl emerged from the shadows of the cage Grace had been looking at.
‘The animals,’ said God, ‘we need to be careful.’
‘The animals didn’t come back,’ said Fabrizzi, ‘no idea why. We see ghosts of them sometimes. Even hear them occasionally. They’re safe though, they pass right through you. They’re not actual, solid, bitey animals. Maybe you had to be human for it to happen.’ He adopted a theatrical pose of thoughtfulness. ‘Or just breathtakingly gorgeous.’
The low growl became louder and then, from the shadows, a large shape burst into the air. It had been a lion once, perhaps it would soon be one again. For now it was a thing of memory, built from the impressions of those who had thrilled to it in years gone by. ‘Mama!’ the children had cried, ‘look at the size of its teeth!’ and those teeth were indeed big, bigger than any naturally born animal. ‘Look at the strength in its paws, could take your head off with a single blow!’ Oh yes, yes indeed it could. It was the wild animal of fantasy, a nightmare creature as powerful as every flinching spectator and awe-struck passer-by had made it.
It took Baron Fabrizzi’s head in its jaws, and left the rest of him behind.
‘Fabrizzi!’ Lucy screamed, scarcely able to believe what she had just seen. Fabrizzi’s stump of a neck spurted once, then twice, then his body—his pride and joy—toppled backwards into the dirt.
‘Found them!’ Peeper shouted, unaware of what had just happened. She stood at the far side of the room, Demi-John beside her. In her hands was a large glass bottle and some syringes.
When she saw the lion she almost dropped both. ‘Oh Lord…’
It paced between them, switching its attention from one side to the other. Would it go for Peeper and Demi-John on one side of the room or God, Grace and Lucy on the other?
‘Leave this to me,’ said God. ‘If I could save Daniel when he was cast into the lion’s den, I can certainly save you lot.’
‘Don’t!’ Grace shouted. ‘It’ll tear you to pieces.’
‘I’m God,’ he replied, calmly. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? God does not get torn to pieces by lions. In fact, God does not get torn to pieces by anything.’
He marched up to the lion, pointed at it and shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Shut your mouth you roaring asshole!’
It stared at him, its growl continuing to purr away in its throat like the idling motor of a motorbike.
God turned around and began to walk towards the main entrance. ‘We’re walking out of here,’ he told the lion, ‘and you’re simply going to go back in your corner and have a nice quiet sleep. I am a kindly and forgiving God so, even though you bit the head off a friend of ours, I will let you live.’
He opened the main door, letting the light flood in. The lion cowered from it slightly, as if scared of the outside world. God turned back to face it.
‘But mind me! I will not tolerate you threatening another of my children. They are precious to me and you will obey your creator.’
The lion growled again and then, with a ferocious snarl charged at him.
‘I’m telling you!’ God shouted, stumbling back into the daylight, ‘I won’t stand for disobedience.’
The lion leapt into the air, paws spread wide, talons bared.
There was a gunshot and it recoiled in the air, twisting slightly as it collided with God, the pair of them falling to the ground.
‘I was perfectly in control,’ God insisted, from his position beneath the dead lion.
‘Force of habit,’ said Colonel Gerry, reloading his rifle, ‘I should have saved myself a bullet and let it kill you.’
He pointed his gun at God as the others came running out of Bostock’s Arena. ‘Never could resist bagging a decent cat,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll hang its head on my wall once I’ve tidied this place up once and for all.’
‘Please don’t!’ Grace shouted, running over to God, who was struggling to free himself. ‘We’ll leave, there’s no need to do this.’
‘There’s every need,’ said Colonel Gerry, ‘look around you! Look at the chaos of this ungodly place!’
The whole park w
as close to wakefulness now, from within the buildings, rides were whooping and rattling along their tracks. The midway was filling with the ghosts of spectators gone by, ethereal figures pointing and laughing at its amusements. A herd of carousel horse, their wooden teeth gnashing even as calliope music burst from their throats, leaped onto the racetrack and began chasing one another.
As the Colonel stared, a baby scurried past his feet, chasing a reanimated roast chicken that squawked and flapped its golden, crispy wings.
‘It’s disgusting,’ he said, ‘and any moment now it’ll turn on the lot of us.’
From the lagoon there came the sound of rushing water as something massive began to rise from its depths.
‘It’s everything that was ever wrong with this damned country,’ he said, ‘it’s excess, gluttony, perversion and bad taste.’
On the dome of the Creation ride, the forty foot, marble statue of a naked woman that presided over the Surf Avenue entrance, was pulling herself along, the roof cracking beneath her weight. She opened her cold, empty mouth and roared with the sound of a hundred church organs.
‘Disgusting,’ Colonel Gerry sighed, ‘brazen, whorish, mad. The very worst kind of woman.’
He raised his rifle and curled his finger around the trigger. ‘It must all be made to go away. Everything in its right place.’
The flash of light that collided with him was unrecognisable to Grace and God; it was nothing more than a blur of movement that swept him up and whisked him along the midway towards the closest point of darkness: the entrance to the Hell Gate ride.
‘What are you doing?’ he screamed, the rifle falling from his hands.
He came to land in the shadows. Above the building, a mammoth, leather-winged representation of the devil chuckled and craned its neck to watch.
‘It’s for the best, my love,’ said Gloria, her flickering face adopting a look of pure sorrow. The heat from her as she held him close began to make his clothes singe.
‘You’re burning me!’ he cried.
‘I’m burning us both,’ she replied, ‘back to memory, back to dreams.’
There was a crackle of celluloid and the light burst from her, banishing every shadow in the mouth of the ride. The grotesque barges lined up to take their passengers into the subterranean passages beyond twisted and crackled in the heat. The flames caught and began to curl their way up the tar-painted grotto entrance.
The fire that had once claimed Dreamland, triggered in this very building, was once again blazing.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
ONE PANIC WAS now replaced with another.
Lucy, still in shock at the sight of Fabrizzi’s death realised more would soon follow unless she acted quickly.
‘We’ve got to get everyone out of here!’ she said. ‘Everyone in the village.’
‘And our lot,’ said Demi-John, ‘we need to run.’
‘The babies,’ said Grace, ‘we can’t let them all get burned.’
God, finally dragging himself free from beneath the carcass, pointed towards the far end of the midway where, even now, crowds were erupting from Midget City. ‘I don’t think that’ll be a problem.’
As the residents ran towards the exit, the babies emerged from their hiding places looking up at the flames of the Hell Gate ride and cooing with pleasure.
‘Fetch the bag,’ he said ‘we need to lure them out.’
Grace ran back inside Bostock’s, grabbing the sack of apples. She stood by the main exit, untying the knot in the sack just enough that she could snatch one of the apples out. It fluttered in her hand as she held it up in the air.
‘Come on,’ she shouted, ‘dinner time!’
She let the apple go and it hovered in the air for a moment, tiny heads watching it with hunger as it swooped towards the flames and then, with a jolt, retreated towards the exit.
The babies ran for it, bursting from doorways and windows, scampering along the midway, eyes on the apple.
‘Plenty to go round,’ Grace said, stepping outside the exit and upending the sack. the apples burst into the sky of Coney Island, dipping and swooping like bright red swallows as they explored this new world. Once again, Grace was bowled over as the babies pushed past her and made their own way out into the world beyond Dreamland.
God came running out of the incubation room, the baby he’d caught earlier in his arms.
By now the midway was crowded, everyone forcing their way out of the exit.
‘Come on!’ Demi-John shouted, ‘you’re being too slow!’
‘I’m moving as fast as I can,’ complained Jolly Irene as she dragged herself along behind him with the assistance of Toney the Alligator Boy and Jean Libbera, the latter supporting her with all four of his arms. ‘It’s hard to run when you’re as voluptuous as I am.’
God stepped outside to join Grace and, behind them, their absence was immediately felt. With its audience gone, the park suddenly floundered even as it burned. The racing carousel horses solidified mid-leap and fell lifeless to the ground; the marble woman atop the Creation ride reached towards the sky—perhaps to somewhere she thought of as home—and then toppled forwards, crashing through the roof and into six thousand years of questionable history; the lagoon settled once more, its calmer waters reflecting the flames that climbed higher and higher, reducing the park, once more to history.
Peeper stood at the exit gate, a long procession of dwarfs running past her.
‘Come on!’ Grace shouted, beckoning to her. ‘It’s safe, look! Everyone’s still here!’
The dwarfs hadn’t vanished on leaving the park; whatever the truth of their existence, life clung to them even once they were beyond its influence.
‘It’s not that,’ Peeper admitted, ‘well, not just that. It’s alright for you but… the way I look… at least in here I fitted in. Mostly… But out there. Where everyone’s normal…’
‘Normal?’ Grace laughed. ‘You have no idea.’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
‘SO,’ SAID THE Queen, shifting slightly on her throne, though through tiredness or wind it was hard to tell. ‘I sent you to feed the babies but, in the end, you thought it best to flood my Queendom with everyone that was living in the park and then burn the place to the ground?’
‘Cool stew,’ chuckled Corman.
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ said Grace, ‘things got a bit out of control.’
‘The fire didn’t,’ Corman assured his Queen. ‘The only thing that burned was the park itself, the flames wouldn’t spread beyond it.’
‘That’s something,’ the Queen admitted. ‘I’d have been real pissed if you’d set fire to us all.’
‘But she didn’t,’ said Corman. ‘In fact she solved your Dreamland problem once and for all.’
‘Will you stop sticking up for her damn it!’ the Queen shouted. The sudden loud noise made her head hurt even more than normal. ‘OK, whatever, you did a cool thing. I’m happy. See?’ She looked up at Grace and God who were rocking gently from side to side on the inflatable floor in her throne room, her face the perfect mask of misery. ‘I am the happiest woman alive. Take your damn boat and my permission to travel as far as Rikers.’
‘Thank you, Your Majesty,’ said Grace, bowing.
‘Yeah,’ said God, ‘thanks a bunch. Consider yourself blessed.’
‘I sure will, honey,’ the Queen replied, ‘just as soon as you weirdoes leave.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
THEIR BOAT WAS moored at Coney Island Creek. It was small but big enough for four with extra storage room for equipment, provisions and spare gas for the motor.
‘We need to call her something!’ said God as he admired it from the shore. Peeper was clambering unsteadily aboard, Demi-John being carried between her and Grace.
‘Have I told you how well I can swim?’ Demi-John asked. ‘The answer is “not very well”, you know, just in case I hadn’t actually mentioned it.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Peeper. ‘If we get
in trouble I’ll help you, haven’t I always?’
‘How about the Baron Fabrizzi?’ Lucy suggested, looking up at God, a sad smile on her face. ‘He was an arrogant pig, but not a bad man for all that. He’d have loved to have a boat named after him.’
God smiled and nodded. ‘The Baron Fabrizzi, that’s an excellent name for a boat.’ He sat down on the grass next to her. ‘You sure you don’t want to come with us, it’ll be fun!’
‘It’ll be terrifying,’ she replied with a laugh, ‘so no, I’d rather stick around here. The Queen’s set us up with rooms. Everyone’s being terribly nice.’
‘Good,’ God put his arm around her. ‘You have reached your promised land my child.’
‘I don’t know about that, but it’ll do for now. From what I hear it’s better than most of the city. Have you heard about Queens? Nobody will go anywhere near there.’
‘Yes,’ said God. ‘I have heard about Queens, it’s all anyone seems to go on about. I’m sure it can’t be that bad.’ He stood up. ‘Perhaps we’ll visit it on our travels.’
‘Maybe I should stay here too?’ said Demi-John as he pulled himself towards the prow of the boat. ‘I think you guys are going to be the death of me.’
‘We’ve already died once,’ said Peeper, sitting down next to him, ‘what’s once more?’
God clambered unsteadily aboard, dropping down on the bench at the stern with such force everyone had to hold on to something to stay upright.
‘What?’ he asked as everyone stared at him. ‘God does not normally do boats. He’ll get used to it.’
Grace untied the moor rope and started the motor, they waved goodbye to Lucy and the Baron Fabrizzi began its journey westward towards the Hudson.
‘Hey,’ announced God, ruffling in his robes, ‘has anyone seen my bottle?’
‘Bottle?’ Grace asked.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, pulling an infant’s feeding bottle from his sleeve, ‘I’ve got it.’
