(Stephen Gallagher’s career began as a researcher for Yorkshire Televisions’ documentary programmes and he started writing in 1977, initially selling a number of radio scripts. He subsequently scripted two Doctor Who stories, Warrior’s Gate and Terminus (1981 and 1984 respectively), and more recently also wrote Moving Targets (1988) for the BBC. Early novels include The Last Rose of Summer, Dying of Paradise, The Ice Belt and the novelisation of Saturn 3, while his popularity in the field of fantasy and terror has been reinforced by such acclaimed novels as Chimera, Valley of Lights,, Oktober and Down River. The first of that quartet will become a four-part TV movie, and the other three novels are all optioned for filming. Steve has produced numerous short stories, which have appeared in such anthologies and magazines as Ripper!, Shadows and Winter Chills. He has also written non-fiction studies on Stephen King, John Farris and Joseph Payne Brennan. This spring sees the publication of his latest novel in hardcover, Rain, and the paperback edition of Down River. Forthcoming are The Boat House and The Unforgiven. The novella that leads off this issue of FT is the first of Steve’s writing to appear in the magazine. We think you’ll agree it’s a powerful tale of psychological terror . . .)
Sometimes I still think about it.
I know it was a long time ago, but you don’t forget a night like that; not when it shaped you a little and changed you a lot and then took someone away. It was also the scariest thing that ever happened to me, and that’s how I’d like it to stay.
I’m damned sure I wouldn’t want to go through anything worse.
It began, I suppose, when I met up with Spike outside the gates of the city park just after dusk. There were supposed to be three of us, me, Spike, and Michael, but Michael was late as always and so we moved down to the corner away from the road to wait for him. We felt that somebody might get suspicious if they saw us hanging around. Two dirt-poor kids with no elbows in their sweaters and the backsides worn out of their trousers; latchkey children out after dark, what could they be wanting but trouble?
Spike showed me his hammer.
“I got it out of the shed,” he explained. “I’ll put it back later, and no-one’ll know. What about a torch?”
I showed him my father’s cycle lamp. “It’s nearly new,” I warned him. “If I lose this, I’m dead.”
That wasn’t all of it. Spike had scrounged up a bottle of Cream Soda and I’d made some paste sandwiches. They were a little grey from handling and I’d skipped on refinements like butter on the bread but please, you’ve got to make allowances, I was eleven years old at the time. As far as anybody at home knew I’d gone to the fair, which was midway though its once-yearly stopover on some rough ground at the far end of town.
Later on I was going to be wishing that we’d all done exactly that.
Michael arrived after about another ten minutes. We could see him standing by the gates, bewildered and looking around like some abandoned thing, but then Spike gave him a whistle and he came down out of the streetlighted area to join us. He’d brought a carrier bag that hung like a bowling ball in a sling and banged against his legs as he moved.
“I had to walk it,” he said morosely. “Bastard conductor wouldn’t let me on the bus.”
Of any of us, Michael lived the furthest out. His house was in a cramped terrace and beyond it was marshland with distant power lines and, arched like a silver bow in the far, far distance, the motorway bridge that ran on over into the next county. On foot, it would have taken him nearly an hour to get in from there. A while ago he’d hit upon the trick of boarding the bus with no money and sitting as far away from the conductor as he could get, so that by the time he was thrown off he’d already have covered a good part of the journey. Tonight he’d obviously been remembered, but he seemed to feel that he’d somehow been cheated of a right. That was Michael all over—just enough imagination to think up the scheme, but not enough to realise that it wasn’t going to work every time or forever.
We both ribbed him a little and he got hot and angry, and then we got down to business.
“First we check all the torches,” Spike said and he tested his own, which was an old rubber-coated thing that looked as if it had been around since wartime, and then I did the same with the cycle lamp, and then Michael reached down into his carrier bag and brought out the biggest, ugliest-looking flashlight that I’d ever seen. It was made out of tin that had been plated to look like silver and it had three sliding buttons on the handle. These operated filters that would change the colour of the beam. Everything about it screamed piece of junk, but Michael showed it like it was his grandfather’s watch or something.
Then he switched it on. The bulb gave off a weak, urine-coloured glow which faded to nothing in less than five seconds.
“Oh, great,” Spike said sarcastically and Michael, immediately on the defensive, said “It’s not my fault.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Spike said reasonably, and then he took the flashlight from Michael’s hands and lobbed it as high and as hard as he could over the park wall and into the darkness. It flew like one of those German grenades, tumbling end over end, and I heard it come down in bushes quite some way inside. Michael gawped at Spike in disbelief, and even I felt that he’d overstepped some invisible mark.
“You rotten sod!” Michael said.
And Spike said, “Shut up.”
“You can come back and find that, tomorrow!”
“You’ll be able to buy a hundred like it by then,” Spike told him. “And with decent batteries, as well.”
Everything went quiet.
Michael wasn’t exactly mollified, but stopped his protesting. I expect that the prospect of such riches was enough to distract and entrance him for a while. I have to admit, I found it pretty overwhelming myself. Spike looked at Michael, and then from Michael to me. In that moment we were as aligned in our thinking as compass needles. We were a team, we had a purpose.
In stealth, we scrambled over the low wall and entered the park.
I went back and took a look at the park again a couple of years ago. The gateway’s still there, a big triple archway of sandstone in the Victorian style, but these days it doesn’t seem quite so monumental as it did then. There’s a carved plaque above the middle entrance to commemorate the fact that the ornamental fountains were presented by the mayor of the borough in 1857. The gates lead through onto a broad central walkway of dull red tarmac, powdered along its edges by fallen debris from the overhanging tree branches. The walkway climbs gently into the heart of the parkland.
I should imagine there’s something like it in nearly every Northern industrial town; some long-ago civic gift from a factory owner or a mine boss, tamed and decorous and mostly deserted. I’d guess that this one had perhaps once been a streambed and valley that had been tidied up and transformed, the stream culverted and the contours of the land flattened out to accommodate a bowling green, a big old conservatory, an ugly playground, some red shale tennis courts, and enough rolling landscape to lose them all in. You could stand in the middle and believe you were in another country, anchored only by the sounds of traffic coming from the road as if from some near-distant amphitheatre.
Back when the park had first been laid out, it had been surrounded by a low wall topped by some elaborate cast-iron railings. But the railings had gone for the war effort leaving only faint, well-worn stumps in the stonework, and making a boundary that didn’t even slow us that night. I expect Michael snagged his pants. I don’t remember for sure, but it was the kind of thing that he was always doing.
And I think there was probably a moon. I remember that we were following the main walkway and that there was stuff in the asphalt that glittered like pantomime dust. Nobody was saying much at that stage. Spike was carrying his hammer and I had the cycle lamp at the ready, but I wasn’t using it. We didn’t need it yet, and we didn’t want to risk being seen so early in the expedition. Michael was grousing a little at the rear, but mostly under his breath.
A couple of hundred yards up the walkway, we came to the first of the ponds.
At a guess, these had been created as a system to deal with the original drainage from when the land had been open fields, or woodland, or whatever. The lower pond was the smaller of two, and it was a mess; stagnant greenish-brown water with a few branches sticking up out of it like the ribs of drowned ships. Low railings enclosed it, although there was nothing inside them to spoil. Until a short time before it had been fed by a steady trickle from a brick-lined shaft that ran under the path. Now nothing came through, and the level of the pond was dropping.
We went on by. We were heading for something bigger.
The upper pond was almost a lake, and had been the centre of some intense activity over the past few weeks. Now, as we approached it, I risked the light.
A new fence, probably the first new feature in the park for years, stood before us. It was six feet high, made of chainlink on white concrete posts. . .
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