ground climbing rail by rail on a ladder without rungs. One
hundred feet of sheer pole climbing with occasional crosspieces to
hang on to isn't much, and you begin to wonder, What if Dewey
slips and falls into me? What if I lose my grip and sail to the
bottom? How will I get down once I'm up there? Can drunk
Dragons fly? And then you look at the bottom, and all of your fears
are summed up in one phrase:
Don't look down.
Hand over hand, pull over pull, I made my way upward, trusting
that the pace of those above me wasn't too slow. I never really
looked up to where Brant and his friends were while I was
climbing. Even to this day I remember the blackness of the night
sky mixing well with my own blackout as I shut my eyes tightly to
the things around me. I was climbing to the top, and I just couldn't
stop. Hand over hand. That's when the screaming started, loud and
forceful, over and over, with an occasional splashing behind it as if
someone below were enjoying a late night swim and horseplay in
the murky pond. Ignoring my own rule, I shot a glance down.
God, how weird it looked. If you've ever been on a roller coaster
right as it goes down the steepest slope, you can understand the
feeling; the depth, the rails shooting together as they plummet
below right as you drop over the top. Imagine yourself frozen in
that position. Below, the rails meet and your stomach assumes a
new position in your throat. And standing on those gleaming rails,
still holding Eddie's flashlight and stained with the dark was Kirby,
gazing back up at me, a look of confusion, horror and what to do
next? written across his face. He scared the hell out of me the way
he just stood there, arms at his side, staring at me but saying
nothing.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" I shouted down with extra
force. No answer. "Kirby, what's wrong?" By then I knew damn
well what was wrong. The tracks had begun to drum under my
hands, and the frame of the SkyCoaster itself had begun to sway
rhythmically from side to side. Then the awful sound of the roar of
a coaster car spinning around some distant bend, fading out, then
coming back in, fading out again-and coming back with
thunderous racket that sent my stomach and my heart both jumping
on top of my tonsils.
Then Brant screamed. It was like the scream of a woman's that I
described earlier, but louder, blending in with the steady clack-
clack-clack of a chain-dragged coaster car on an electrified track. I
didn't ask any questions, but simply locked both hands together,
swung both feet together and slid down the rail to the bottom.
If you've ever been on a roller car as it plummets the final hill - the
Grandaddy drop - you'll probably know the feeling of fear that
builds up in you. There's always a chance that you may fly from
the car to the steel tracks below as the force presses your spine
against the back cover and shakes you with head-splitting strength
to the bottom. There was no car for me to ride in that night -no
seat, no belt, no safety bar to pull against my slumped torso. And
as I sailed to the bottom, my mind made a different rule that I was
forced to follow - Don't look.
The wind stopped suddenly in my hair, and I realized that I was
down on the bottom rails of the coaster, hanging dreadfully close
to the murky waters of Skybar Pond. And as I hung there
momentarily I could picture Randy Stayner waiting below, a
mossy green hand beginning to emerge to the surface, and as I
imagined this, I also visualized others like him in a sea of arms,
reaching for my dangling shirt tail as I hung there, all of them
coming up to the surface to get me, or desperately reaching out as
they were dragged down. A splurge of violent bubbling water
popped to the surface, jolting me back to Skybar and, getting to my
feet, I pulled myself to the shore and somehow managed to pull
Kirby with me. He was still standing in a daze, eyes fixed on the
tracks where the coaster car was falling toward us.
And as we ran through the depot station past the empty coaster
cars, I could hear the steady thud-thud-thud of the one car
advancing on us. I shot a glance over my shoulder as we both ran
on, my feet and eyes growing with every step.
Then I let go of Kirby. I can't clearly remember when, but I
remember all that ran through my mind was Run Like Hell! I flew
up the chain link fence behind Pop Dupree's, cutting my hands
severely on the barbed wire. After jumping to the safe ground on
the other side, I didn't stop running until I was almost a mile away
on Granges Point, where I could still hear the soft screaming
laughter of the seabreeze through the Funhouse clown, and could
see the vague form of the SkyCoaster winding through the trees.
Somewhere behind one of the tents - I can still swear it was the
freak tent - a light glowed softly. I sat there, staring at it,
wondering if it was Kirby trying to find his way out of the dark.
Then I heard the cracking grass of footsteps behind me and whirled
to find Kirby standing in front of me. My legs were shaking, and
my teeth began to chatter softly, and he walked up to me and put
his arm around me.
"It's okay. We made it. We're pretty brave, huh? Right up and right
down those rails. We're far away from it now, though. We're not
there now" I stared at him and wondered how the hell he got there.
I couldn't recall dragging him with me. I couldn't believe how calm
he stood there-how he acted like it was all a scary movie at
Starboard Cinema and we were walking home in the dark trying to
calm ourselves down. Then he turned me toward the park and
started to walk away.
"Coming?" "Kirb, you're headin' the wrong way."
I turned toward home and started to run again. After a while. Kirby
came running up to me, and we didn't stop until we were five miles
away from Skybar and on my front porch. I can still see the horror
in poor Kirby's eyes as he saw his best friends and the Dragons
drop to death before him. Even after seeing that smiling, rotting
freak clambering from behind the safety bar of the coaster car that
had rolled over Brant and the others, he stuck with me at the
bottom and didn't run. The only ones who acted as bravely as
Kirby were the drunk Dragons who jumped at the first sight of the
coaster car coming toward them. Maybe it was bravery, maybe it
was the liquor, but it doesn't matter because the 100 foot dive to
the pond was a mistake either way. Brant and the rest may have
tried to slide, but they never made it to safety and the authorities
still haven't pulled their bodies from the murky pond waters to this
day.
And still, in my dreams, I feel Kirby taking my hand and telling
me it was okay; we were safe, we were home free. And then I
heard the thud-thud-thud of a single SkyCoaster car rolling toward
us. I want to tell Kirby not to look -"Don't look, man!" I scream,
but the words won't come out. He does look. And as the car rolls
up to the deserted station, we see Randy Stayner lolling behind the
safety bar, his head driven almost into his chest. The fun-house
clown begins to scream laughter somewhere behind us, and Kirby
begins to scream with it. I try to run, but my feet tangle in each
other and I fall, sprawling. Behind me I can see Randy's corpse
pushing the safety bar back and he begins to stumble toward me,
his dead, shredded fingers hooked into seeking claws. I see these
things in my dreams, and in the moments before I wake,
screaming, in my wife's arms, I know what the grown-ups must