A Night at the Fair

The night air was not biting at Raymond Cain’s neck as he stared at the abandoned fair from his perch on the hill. It was washing over it in gentle gusts of wind, warming it and rustling his brown hair. 1

July, he thought as he took a drag from his shrinking cigarette, really was the best month for nighttime escapades. He put the glowing tip of his last Newport near his watch, and whispered the time to himself.2

“Eleven forty-eight.”3

His voice sounded strange. He had been standing on the hill for nearly an hour, waiting for midnight, and all he had heard was the occasional slamming of a door, the clicking of his lighter, and the occasional sound of a truck passing on the far-off expressway.4

Time to pick up the red toolbox that rested against his denim-covered leg. Time to walk down the hill and towards the fair, smiling like a maniac. Time to do what he had come here to do and get back home, where he could sit in a red chair with a thermos of coffee and read some of the mysteries he loved so much.5

But first, he dropped the cigarette butt onto the grass and extinguished it with his boot heel.6

The slope of the hill forced him to run down, feeling like a child playing tag in the nighttime, laughing and waking the neighbors as his friends all rushed around and slapped the mosquitoes on their thighs. The difference was that Raymond had never been afraid of the dark, and his mission was more than to have just a little fun.7

Before his watch chimed for midnight, he slowed down, caught his breath, and approached a chain-link fence that surrounded the entire fairgrounds. It was designed to keep the high school students from making out in the funhouse, but Raymond was not concerned. He had entered areas with much higher security than the Michigan State Fair.8

Without setting it down, Raymond opened up the toolbox, withdrew a pair of wire cutters, and snapped the lid shut again. He cut out a section that was perhaps four feet wide out of the chain-link fence and hurried through, being careful not to catch his shirt on the sharp edges. Ordinarily he would worry about setting off an alarm when breaching a fence, but this one was portable and divided into twenty-feet long sections. It was very unlikely that a security system was in place.9

At six-feet, four inches tall, Raymond had no problem pulling himself up and over the fence. The atmosphere inside the park, he noticed as he landed with a soft thud on the dirt, was entirely different than that of the hill. It was much more…sinister.10

Every single ride, stall, and booth seemed to stare at him. The Pendulum, a ride that he had ridden frequently as a child was staring at him, the satanic face on the side seeming to scream at him to come closer, so it could swing from side to side and catch him between it’s gaping lips, frozen in a perpetual scream.11

Patience, my friend. Wait until the morning. I promise you, there will be blood.12

Though Raymond Cain was thirty-two, a toddler’s smile spread across his face as he ran light-heartedly to the Serpent Swing. Here, twenty-one swings sat motionless, connected by metal cords to a circular disc at the top of a quickly rotating tower. While the ride was in motion, it would bring the riders at least forty feet off the steel platform down below.13

Richard walked to the only blue swing, (for that was his favorite color), and unscrewed the bolts that attached the chair to it’s cords. They were still attached, and would remain like that throughout the morning test run. They would remain attached until someone of at least one hundred fifty pounds sat and endured three or four rotations of the pole. Then, well, there would be four metal cords dangling loosely in the wind.14

The Paratrooper had been a great ride when Raymond had come there with his girlfriend three years before. It flipped whatever brave souls chose to ride it completely upside down several times. By the time this happened, they were easily thirty feet above the solid cement ground below. He simply hammered a small metal wedge into the latch of the lap harness, which was all that kept riders in. It would open easily now, with almost no pressure. He repeated the process on another car, in case this one was not used.15

On the way to the House of Horrors, Raymond lit his ninth cigarette of the night and picked the lock of Leo’s Lemonade Stand with a pin. After treating himself to a bottle of water and a handful of nacho chips, he pulled out an eyedropper of a water-like iocane poison and put seven drops in three different cups—a small, a medium, and a large. It was more than enough to kill a grown bodybuilder, and would be nearly invisible when dried.16

On his way out, he emptied a bag full of powdered arsenic into the sugar and mixed it with his index finger. 17

The interior of the House of Horrors was pitch black. It would be easy to be creative, Raymond thought, and easier still to make it live up to it’s name. All manners of monsters and symbols of terror covered the otherwise black exterior. He turned on the penlight he carried in his pocket and shined it through the door. A flight of twenty or so steps extended before him, each one a different height. 18

Raymond trudged up to the top, smiling with the shock that came when his feet would sail down farther than expected, or stop quickly on a taller step. He took a small crowbar from the toolbox and took off the tops of the last four steps, dropping the half-painted plywood onto the ground below, knowing that something else would fall down there…19

The last thing he did that night was to use a can of spray paint to create a neon-orange swastika on several ticket booth windows. He hated Hitler and the Nazis, but there needed to be some obvious damage to explain the gaping hole in the fence, otherwise an investigation would be launched.20

With a huge smile on his lips, Raymond Cain left the state fair, walked a ways down the road, got into his car and drove home.21

Patrick Webster’s mother distrusted all amusement park workers, saying they were all at least half-stoned when they assembled the rides. For this reason, he was not allowed to attend any carnivals or fairs. He was easily two hundred fifty pounds, and very self-conscious about it, but neither of these things kept him from being in line to be one of the first riders of the Serpent Swing. He sat in the blue swing, for that was his favorite color, and waited for the ride to begin…22

Timothy Rapp had broken his leg in a car accident, and could not participate in any rides. To make his day a little better, his loving mother bought him a nice large glass of lemonade…23

Amanda Barnes was pressed against the door leading into the House of Horrors, being the only one of her friends that had enough courage to enter it.24

Finally, Tyler Barber sat beside his mother in the Paratrooper, trying to convince her that her fear of rides like this was completely unreasonable…25