‘WELCOME TO CRICK’S HOLLOW. Your nightmare awaits. If you have a heart condition, please inform us now so we can be ready to devour your shell-shocked corpse when it hits the floor.’

A light ripple of laughter. It always got one.

This group was young, vapid, and not as immune to lame humour as their ingrained Gen Z scepticism would like to envisage. It was a more optimistic laugh than the joke might receive from their Millennial peers, whose deep wells of pessimism and faith in their own misfortune would inspire a snort-like grunt: a ‘yeah, we can believe that’ snigger of disparagement.

Over the years, I’d become rather proficient at guessing the age of my audience based on the flavour of their reaction to my welcome.

The crowd in front of me today was the youngest I’d greeted in a while. They owned bodies with supple skin and pliant muscles, with joints that could flex without the invisible grinding of cartilage, without the crackling of pain in every tired sinew. I considered their wealth of energy with interest.

My theme park used to attract, almost exclusively, an older class of patron. People who had been in the world long enough to learn the name of Crick’s Hollow—to glean whispered details from a friend of a friend’s acquaintance and mark a hazy location amid a patch of wild woodland on the edge of the North York Moors. We liked it when our guests put in the effort to find us.

I understood the internet had changed the nature of the game. There were still dark corners where our name was whispered—on niche websites and cryptic forum posts—but increasingly we were being drawn into the light. I felt this more than ever while watching my young audience prepare for their Crick’s Hollow experience.

They twisted around each other for selfies: a blonde girl in baggy jeans and over-sized jumper bent backwards around the Crick’s Hollow sign; one boy lifted another onto his shoulders with a drunken cheer; they all grinned in open-mouthed madness into their phones.

‘Let’s get in there!’ whooped a guy gesticulating wildly in front of the entrance gate. His friend held the camera steady for him. ‘I’m so scared right now, guys. This place is unreal. Let’s do it! Like for part two!’

His smile froze, then dropped away. ‘Did we get it? Was that good?’

‘Bet. Smashed it.’

‘Did you get the weird lady saying her thing?’

The phone camera swung in my direction. ‘Yup, got the close-up. Why’s she not even in costume, though?’ He frowned at my navy boiler suit, then frowned even more deeply while watching the playback of his video. ‘Ah, fuck. It’s all out of focus on her. Blurry and shit.’

His partner, the whooper, groaned. ‘Do you think we can ask her to say it again?’

I stepped between the pair and smoothly interjected. ‘It is time to enter. Your frightful experience awaits.’

They looked at each other and shrugged.

‘Let’s go. Don’t shake the camera too much when we’re running away from stuff, yeah?’

‘Don’t worry, I’m on it. Three, two…’

I watched the pair lope away into the park. Their schtick was ridiculous, but potentially good for business.

‘Excuse me, can we get a photo?’

Ah, the blonde baggy jeans girl. I smiled as her phone clicked. It clicked again, then again.

A flash of rainbow appeared at her side—evidently a friend, wearing a motley of patchwork colours, who then peered over the blonde’s shoulder. ‘You’ve got a weird filter on or something.’

‘No I haven’t,’ Baggy Jeans protested.

‘Then hold it still!’

‘Ladies, I have work to do.’ I moved away and gestured for them to enter the park. ‘I promise I don’t photograph well, anyway.’

Pouting a little, Baggy Jeans and Patchwork sauntered through the Crick’s Hollow gates.

They were tailed, I noticed, by a man who had been hanging at the back. He stuck out for being older, but he had the kind of unweathered, too-perfect skin that made his actual age hard to place. Sunglasses and a baseball cap masked his face. The rest of him seemed designed to draw as little attention as possible. Bland green t-shirt, beige trousers, scuffed trainers: not a pattern or brand in sight.

He’d kept his head bowed through my initial welcome, looked up only as the crowd began to split, and now the sunglasses gazed unerringly at Baggy Jeans and Patchwork as they giggled over their phones and squealed exclamations at each other about which ride to try first.

I watched him follow them onto the Ghost Train.

I pulled up my radio. ‘Hamish. It’s Sal. I’m going on break. Tell Larry it’s his turn on the gate. I’ll feed the ghouls on the way.’

‘You need to say ‘Over’ at the end. Over.’

‘…Over, Hamish.’

I swung by the staff shack to pick up the bucket of chicken livers. There’s much to be said for efficiency. Why make two trips when one would do?

The back door to the Ghost Train was hanging off its hinges—much of the park was desperately in need of repair—and I slipped inside quietly. The empty cars clanked along their track in the dark beside me.

Too many empty cars. Despite the advent of the world wide web, our humble park still wasn’t flashy enough to lure in a large audience. We were desperately in need of updates. Most of this stuff was built in the 1950s and hadn’t changed since.

I stood idly for a while in the tin tunnel, enjoying the cool atmosphere and gently flickering shadows. A duet of screams pierced the silence and I smiled. The girls had likely encountered the first curtain of dismembered limbs.

‘Ready for lunch, lads?’ I rattled my bucket. The girls’ car was approaching. We’d give them a special treat.

A rushing wind filled the little tunnel. I pulled up a slimy handful of livers—admired how they glistened in the dim green emergency lighting—and threw them into the air just as the car rumbled into view.

Lanky arms snatched down from the ceiling. Pallid bodies unfurled from their roosts, stretching towards the trundling car. Baggy Trousers and Patchwork shrieked as eyes burning with hellish embers turned upon them and the gnashing, hungry maws opened…

I rattled the bucket again. The ghouls turned swiftly, lunged for another moist confetti-throw of liver, and then the car was past and the girls disappeared further into the darkness. The echoes of their hysterics were matched by the slick munching sounds of the ghouls, and I knew that noise would be following them for the rest of the ride.

I left the ghouls to their meal. Now the other matter to attend to.

The man in the hat had entered the Ghost Train through the exit.

I jogged to catch up to the girls. I made a note of maintenance jobs on my way. Must order more fake cobwebs. The skeleton wants re-nailing to the wall—he had a habit of going walkabout if left unfettered. That light bulb should be replaced before the next health and safety inspection.

I was unsurprised to see the car stopped up ahead. A wooden coffin had been thrown onto the track and our rickety machinery was no match for such a feeble obstacle. The girls hugged each other in their seat, quietly whispering. Was this part of the ride? It wasn’t supposed to be this scary, was it?

I lingered in the back, absent-mindedly wiping chicken blood from my fingers onto my overalls.

His approach was hardly stealthy. He thought himself a monster, moving through the murky shadows like a devil, stalking prey like a tiger. But also not anything like a tiger, because a tiger would take more care not to spook its quarry.

He was all about spooking them. Clearly delighted by how his heavy footfalls made the girls jump and shiver, and when his voice cut through the buzzing of our neon lights there was a distinct grin edging his words.

‘Hello, darlings. Are you lost?’

‘Fuck off!’ Baggy Trousers shouted. Patchwork fumbled with her phone. Sensible.

He didn’t like it. The grin twisted to a sneer. ‘You have a dirty mouth, bitch.’

If they’d had any doubts about the danger they were in, it was obvious now. ‘Shit. Shit. I can’t move the bar, Jess!’

Ah yes. We should look at getting that fixed. It’s supposedly a safety bar to hang onto, though in reality it serves to keep people in their seats. You don’t want anyone moving off the path with the ghouls around. They work better with routine. If a customer disrupts their routine, well… it gets messy.

The man in the hat closed in, merely a silhouette in the pale green glow. Something sharp and metal glinted in his hand.

‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he rasped. ‘We’re going to take things nice and slow.’

A talker, I observed. Stupid. Already a faint dial tone indicated Patchwork had managed to get through to 999.

He swiped for the phone, ramming an elbow into the girl’s throat in the process. Her friend screamed—a real scream, and I took a moment to savour it. The scent of true fear. The delicate undercurrent of epiphany, of recognising one’s own mortality.

Genuine terror was so hard to replicate. Adolescent shrieks of adrenaline from shitty theme park rides were a poor substitute for the real thing.

But her scream had spooked the hat-man, and now he was re-thinking his plan. His knife blade came up and the scream got louder—

I sighed. A murder investigation really would be too much trouble.

—the knife clattered to the ground, surrounded by empty air.

‘Where’d he go?’ Patchwork shouted. ‘Seriously where the fuck did he go? If you’re there you better stay the fuck away you fucking freak!’

She screeched her threats until she was out of breath, to no response.

Baggy Trousers, violently shaking, said, ‘I want to leave now.’

The car jolted—to another set of shrill screams—and rattled on its way.

‘What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?’

‘M-maybe it was part of the ride?’

‘No fucking way.’

‘Where’d he go? It was like he was there and then this— Did you see this… thing? Like it grabbed him…’

I waited until they were out of earshot, then slowly unwound my tendrils from the now lifeless corpse of the man with the hat. It was a long time since I’d had the pleasure of sucking the life juices out of a body like that. I subsisted almost purely on low-grade fear, these days.

I buzzed my radio.

‘What’s up, Sal?’

‘I need clean-up on the Ghost Train. Scramble the crew, please.’

‘Another corpse? Fuck. Did the ghouls get loose again?’

‘No. This one was self-inflicted.’

A short silence underscored Hamish’s disapproval. ‘Fuck me, Sal. Two in one day? You gotta keep that temper in check.’

‘It wasn’t like this morning. Marty brought it on himself too, mind. Anyway, that one wasn’t permanent.’

‘I hear werewolves find it mighty inconvenient when you crucify them though, Sal.’

‘He’ll get over it. Besides, I was feeling symbolic.’

I dropped the fresh corpse to the side of the track and pulled some musty cobwebs over it. That’d do for now. Just one more prop until the cleaning crew arrived.

‘Hamish, I need you to tweak the announcement outside the ride as well. As the next two customers get off, have it say something like, “Can you endure our most murderous ride yet?” You know, something tacky but intense.’

‘I’m not your personal PA system—’

‘You’re a possessed radio. Get over it. Or I’ll exorcise your ass. Over.’

A crackle of radio static let me know he was sulking, but as I slipped away from the ride I heard our new announcement playing over the speaker.

Good. A few more hints here and there, and the girls would believe they’d just had the most intense Crick’s Hollow experience ever.

I wondered vaguely if I could get the video boys from earlier to interview them. But talking to people has never been my strong point.

I glanced down at my overalls, now substantially more blood-splattered than before. Excellent. It would add some extra ambience to my attire.

As I scanned the meagre crowds in the park, I spotted the two girls walking unsteadily towards our Cruel-Tea Café. I prompted Hamish to pass on a message to our server there to gossip about the Ghost Train’s ‘newest addition’. Perfect.

I took a deep breath in: stale candyfloss mixed with sweat and hot dogs and a wavering nuance of fear. Nothing quite as pure as the distilled terror I’d just tasted, but it’d do.

I stretched my neck, ensured my leech-fanged tendrils were neatly folded away, and got back to work.

---

Thanks for reading! This short story is an excerpt from my latest release, Welcome To The Fang-mily. WTTF is the first book in my new horror-comedy series of novellas, Crick’s Hollow, revolving around a nightmare theme park and its ghoulish residents.

If you enjoyed this mix of weird, dark and funny, check out the full book here.

💀