The Fairground Slasher

A Short Story

1989

It was the dead of summer on the day my friends died.

I had just turned fourteen the month before and had not seen my friends since school got out.

My mom and I were knee-deep in bills we couldn't afford. I was still a year too young to get a summer job of my own. So I was doomed to spend my summer vacation before my first year of high school, stuck at home, watching bad daytime TV in the relief of the air conditioner unit, waiting for my mom to return from work.

I wasn't expecting my mom to be home for another four hours at least when the doorbell rang, I assumed my mom must have gotten off work early for some reason and maybe lost her house keys or something, though I didn't know my mom to be that forgetful.

But when I opened the front door, the porch was vacant of any living being, including my mom.

I let out a curse under my breath before taking a nervous glance over my shoulder as if there were any adults around to hear. It must have been one of those brats from down the street ding dong ditching our house. They must have been just as bored as I was.

Just as I was about to shut the door behind me and return to my depressing afternoon of daytime TV and the limp frozen pizza that was waiting for me in the freezer.

Then I saw it. The slightly yellowed piece of copy paper folded into squares and tucked into the wireframe of the front door. I very nearly missed it entirely.

I considered leaving the slip of paper where it was stuck in the door. The stories from the news of the dangerous street drugs left in suspicious packages on the porches of unsuspecting youths ran through my head. But something told me that this piece of paper was not something that should be left ignored.

Just as I plucked the slip of paper from the door, I heard the landline right from back inside the house,

I rushed to answer the phone, thinking it might be my mom calling from her work, but it was another voice I heard on the other end of the line entirely.

"Dude, where have you been?" My best friend, David, lamented over the phone. "I haven't seen you since school let out. It's like you disappeared off the face of the earth."

"David!" I exclaimed, "Sorry. My family is really short on money right now. We can't even really afford for me to leave the house right now."

"Shit, dude. That fucking sucks." Said David, who had just recently figured out that he had the ability to curse.

"David! Language!" I heard David's mother scold him in the background.

"Sorry, Mom," David called back.

"Hey, David?" I asked, holding the slip of paper from the front door between my fingers." You didn't leave a note of some kind on my front door, did you?"

"No, but it's funny you should mention that," David said. "I was about to ask you the same exact question."

I blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I got a weird slip of paper on my front door too," David continued. "Isn't that a funny coincidence? I just talked to Kenny and Mark a few hours ago. They also got the same slip of paper. "

"No way," I said. "Did you open it yet?"

"Nuh-uh. Do you want to open them together?"

"Yeah, let's go on three."

"OK..one..two, three.."

I tore open the note, flattening its creases on the corner of the kitchen counter.

In the very center of the yellow-stained page, there was a single phrase written in hasty chicken scratch.

Meet me at the county fair at three am tonight exactly.

For reasons I couldn't quite explain, reading this message caused a sharp shiver of fear to rush up my spine.

"What does yours say?" I asked David.

"'Meet me at the county fair at three am tonight exactly,'" David read back to me. "The same thing Mark's and Kenny's said."

"Huh," I said. "If all of them say the exact same thing, what do you think it means? Why us?"

"Maybe it's girls, man," David said. I could hear the eagerness dripping from his mouth like spit. "Maybe it's a group of smoking hot girls wanting to meet up with us. Maybe there's one for each of us."

I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Ever since the seventh grade, David has been obsessed with girls and snagging himself a girlfriend. It was quite frankly kind of unhealthy.

"No way, dude. That's a load of crap." I told him, "Be realistic, what girls would go out of their way to meet up with us? You know we're losers."

"Maybe, but there's only one way to find out." David said, "I'll talk to Mark and Kenny and we can ride our bikes and meet you at the gates of the fair tonight. What do you say?"

I sucked on my teeth. "I don't know, man. We have no idea who left those notes. I don't know if it's a good idea."

"Come on, Malcolm." David urged. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

It was at that moment that I could see my mom finally return home through the front door.

"I don't know. I'll have to think about it and get back to you." I said. "I have to go. My mom just got home."

Before David could say anything else. I hung up the phone.

My mom and I sat around the plastic folding table in our kitchen, eating the soft, greasy frozen pizza I had slipped into the oven early in awkward silence.

Ever since my dad had left us nearly two years ago, the relationship between my mom and me had felt clunky and awkward. It was as if we had nothing to talk about now that my dad was gone as if my dad was the only thing my mom and I ever had in common.

"So, um, how was work, Mom?" I asked her, breaking the thick silence.

"It was good." My mom said, just barely looking up at me from her salad. "How about you? How was your day?"

"It was good too. I just watched some TV." I said, conveniently leaving out the note I had found earlier that day.

An awkward silence once again fell between my mother before she abruptly got up from her spot at the table, leaving her salad behind.

"I'm going to bed early. I have a headache." She said. "Remember to clean up when you're done eating."

I finished the rest of the pizza, washed both my and my mom's dishes in the sink, and put my mom's leftover salad in the fridge.

Just as I was about to turn in for the night, I heard a harsh knocking on the kitchen window, making me jump. I pulled up the curtain to find David's moonlike face grinning at me from outside.

"What the hell, David?" I gasped, "You scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry, man," David said, still grinning. "But somebody had to do it."

"What are you doing here, David?" I asked, scowling. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Of course I do, dingus," David said. "That's why I'm here."

I gritted my teeth. "What the hell are you talking about, David?"

"Come outside, Malcom." David urged me. "Bring your bike. I have Mark and Kenny waiting down the street."

"What?" I said. "Who said I was going anywhere with you?"

"You did," David retorted. "On the phone earlier. Don't you remember?"

I clutched the bridge of my nose in my hand. "I said I would think about it, David. I never promised anything."

"Hey, David!" Kenny's voice called out from not far off down the street. " Did you get Malcolm out of his house yet? We're burning daylight here."

"It's nighttime, stupid." David shot back. "There is no daylight."

"I never said I'd go with you." I told David sternly, "I never committed to anything."

David's mouth formed a mock pout. "Please come with us, Malcolm, if nothing else, just to keep us all from getting into too much trouble. You've always been the responsible one."

I took a glance over my shoulder at my mom's darkened bedroom door, She showed no sign of stirring.

"Fine," I said finally. "But I need to be home by the time the sun comes up. And I mean that."

Before I knew it, I found myself riding on my bike down the street with my best friends, David and Mark, at my side, with the smaller and younger Kenny bringing up the rear.

Mark and Kenny were brothers, Mark being the older one. They both had the same shaggy chestnut brown hair and green-flecked hazel eyes. They looked so similar to each other that the only real thing that set them apart was their teeth. Mark had the most perfect, porcelain straight teeth, like those of a big TV newscaster.

Kenny, on the other hand, had disastrously crooked and yellow teeth that protruded from his mouth like hard candy. He had also recently chipped his two front teeth when he tripped face-first on the asphalt of the basketball court earlier in June. The two buck teeth that stuck haphazardly into his mouth like a child's art project now had a massive chunk taken out of the bone, causing a gap in his grin large enough for him to stick the tip of his tongue through.

The county fair we were told to meet at was still a mile and a half away. The further we moved away from the eclectic glow of the suburbs, the more the dark was beginning to form such a thick barrier around us and our bicycles that we could no longer see an inch in front of our faces without the use of a flashlight, so we decided to take a break at our usual hangout spot of the local basketball court.

I had been to this basketball court countless times during the daylight hours, but I had never seen it cloaked in the night before. The dark made it seem strangely unfamiliar in a creeping, unsettling kind of way.

"So what do you think we're going to find at the county fair?" Mark asked, leaning up against the chain link fence surrounding the court and sipping Pepsi from the water bottle he had brought with him. "The anticipation is killing me."

"David said there will be hot girls waiting for us there.' Kenny said, lisping through the broken gap in his teeth. "He said there will be one for each of us."

Mark scoffed. "As always, David is full of shit Kenny. You should know by now not to believe a word he said. He's been obsessed with getting a girlfriend since we were in middle school. It's all he has been able to think about. Never take someone like that seriously."

"Hey, you don't know that the note wasn't from hot girls!" David piped up indignantly. "None of us has any idea who left the note, My guess is just as good as any of yours."

"I have a better Idea," Mark said, popping a wad of bubble gum into his mouth. "What if it's Concrete Charlie? What if he's the one who left us the note to lure us to our ultimate doom?"

The very mention of Concrete Charlie caused a silence to fall over the group. None of us have heard that name since we were in elementary school.

"Who the hell is Concrete Charlie?" Kenny asked, breaking through the thickness of the silence.

"Of course, my little brother hasn't heard of Concrete Charlie," Mark said, a cruel smile growing across his face. 'His the baby of our group. He wasn't in the same classrooms as us growing up. He wouldn't have been around to hear the stories like the rest of us were,"

"Stop calling me a baby. I'm not a baby." Kenny protested. "And why are you all acting all smug and cryptic? Just tell me who the hell Concrete Charlie is and cut the bullshit."

Mark, David, and I exchanged looks, wordless negotiating on which one of us would be the one to tell him.

"Legend has it that Concrete Charlie was once a normal kid growing up in our town back in the 1960s," Mark said, lowering his gaze for dramatic effect. "Little Charlie was not a smart kid, believing anything anyone would tell him, and his classmates at school took advantage of this, playing cruel tricks on him like convincing him to wear embarrassing clothes to school and eating bugs. One night, four boys from his school convinced him to sneak out of his house in the middle of the night and meet them at an active construction site. They encouraged him to climb on top of one of the metal structures and pushed him off, causing him to fall flat on his face into a vat of wet concrete, encasing and disfiguring him. Now he's all grown up, he stalked the streets of our town with a meat hook in, searching for victims."

Kenny's face screwed up in something between disbelief and repulsion.

"That sounds like a crock of horse shit." He said. "You guys don't actually believe that, do you?"

Mark and David exchanged a mocking look.

"What's wrong, little brother?" Mark said, showing his teeth. "Did we scare you? Are you scared?'

"No!: Kenny squeaked, his voice high with indignation. "I just can't believe you guys actually believe that crap. I think you all are just stupid as fuck. That's all I'm saying."

I looked up at the sky. It was as if I could see each star in the sky move ever so slightly with each passing minute.

"Come on, guys. Let's get a move on." I urged my friends. "I told you guys I need to be back home by sunrise. I don't want to get in trouble with my mom because of you."

"Fine, fine," David said as we all gathered up our bikes and prepared to head back out into the dark of the night. "Stop getting your panties in a twist. You know I've never broken a promise to you before."

This wasn't true. Over the years that David and I had been friends, he had broken more of his promises to me than I could reasonably keep track of. But at this point in our late-night excursion, I felt I had no choice but to give him the benefit of the doubt in this particular instant.

After all, I knew from the moment that I left home that there was no turning back. Anything that happened from there was on me and on me alone.

The county fair was located on the very edge of town. It was surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence with urgent "no trespassing" signs pasted on every corner.

There was not a single other living soul to be seen. It was as if my friends and I were the only beings left on this dark stretch of the world.

"Do any of you have any idea what time it is?" I asked. "We're not late, are we?"

David rummaged around in his backpack and pulled out his father's antique pocket watch, which he had clearly pilfered before we headed out on this excursion.

He shined the beam of his flashlight down at the face of the pocket watch and squinted down at it to read its hands.

"One in the morning on the dot." He announced. "Your worries about being late are all for not. We have like two whole hours left to kill."

"Well, what do we do until then?" Kenny asked, "We're not going to just sit around and do nothing for a whole two hours, are we? I'm already bored out of my mind."

"Yeah, fuck that." Mark chimed in. "I don't want to just sit around here. I'm climbing the fence."

Before I could stop him, Mark had already begun to scale the fence.

"Yeah, I'm with Mark." David said, "I don't want to just sit around either."

"Wait, guys, no." I protested. "What if they have security guards or something walking around? I don't want to get in trouble."

"Suit yourself. If you want to sit here like a dumb bitch, none of us are going to stop you." David said. "But you have to know that you were already in trouble the moment you left your house like that. What does a little bit more trouble matter?"

I turned to Kenny as if he were the only member of the group who was still on my side, but he too betrayed me by beginning to scale the fence just like all the others.

At that point, I felt I had no other choice but to follow behind the others. I was still wrecked with nerves at the threat of roaming security guards and hidden security cameras, but I would be damned I was caught waiting alone in the dark.

In the dark, the county fair was unrecognizable The rickety kiddie rides and the corny game booths looked like towering Lovecraft-like monsters ready to swallow me whole.

I had to rush to keep up with the rest of the group. The sound of the soles of my sneakers on the blacktop of the fairgrounds ripped through the silence in a way that was almost shocking.

"So, who do you think is going to meet us here?" Mark said, popping a wad of chewing gum in his mouth, a nervous habit I had always known him to have. "Or what do you think is going to meet us here?"

"I'm telling you, man, but you guys just don't want to listen," David said, grinning with all of his teeth. "It's the girls, It's the four hot girls who will be waiting for us by the fence at three am on the dot. I swear to God I will be proven right on this, Mark my words."

"You're living in a fantasy land, my Dude," Mark scoffed. "No girl would want any of our ugly lame asses, hot or otherwise. Especially not you, David. We all know you were still wetting the bed until last year. Everyone at school knows that. It must be a real cock block."

"The only reason everyone knows about that is because you told everyone, you piece of shit." David shot back, I could see his cheeks burn red in the light of the flashlight beam. 'You're the cock block."

"Can you guys quit arguing like this, please?" Kenny groaned. "You're making me nervous."

Once again, a tense silence fell over the group, giving the dark the opportunity to fill the space.

"What about you, Malcolm?" Mark asked me, finally cutting through the ribbon of silence. "You've been awfully quiet since we got here. Who do you think left us those notes to meet them here?"

"I don't know, I guess I haven't thought about it all that hard," I said, honestly. "I just don't really see the on speculating on things I have no way of knowing for sure about, you know? And we know all will be relieved soon enough, so what's the point in wasting time speculating about it?"

Mark scoffed once again. "Man, you're so lame. Where's the fun in not speculating? Not asking any questions? That's such a killjoy move, man."

"What if it really is that guy you were talking about? That old urban legend?" Kenny piped up. "I think you said his name was Concrete Charlie? What if he's the one who left the note?"

"Don't be stupid, Kenny." Mark snapped at his little brother. "Concrete Charlie is just a stupid myth all these dumb kids used to scare each other on the playground. He's made up, phony."

Kenny grew uneasily quiet before speaking up again. "Then who was that man I saw lurking in the corner by the fence?"

We all stopped dead in our tracks, all of us suspending our disbelief to stop and listen. But even with our full attention, none of us saw anything of interest.

"You're seeing things, Kenny," Mark said. "The dark is playing tricks on your mind. I never should have brought you with us. You clearly are not mature enough to handle it."

This was enough to make Kenny go quiet for the rest of the time we spent porrolling the grounds of the county fair.

Time seemed to drag on much more slowly than normally, as if it was being stretched out thin by the night sky itself. But eventually, three am did come around like a stalking predator.

We rushed to make to back to the opening gates of the fence with little time to spare.

We waited around for something, anything at all, to happen for what had to be fifteen or twenty minutes. But there was nothing but us and the darkness.

"Man, this is so lame," David said, kicking at the gravel in frustration. "Is there really no one coming? Was this whole thing just some kind of stupid prank?"

Mark shook his head and gave a little sigh through gritted teeth.

"I don't know, man. I don't think any of us are ever going to know." He said. "But I for one am pretty fucking bummed."

Just as we were about to throw in the towel and turn around and leave the fairgrounds, I noticed what looked to be a piece of folded-up stock paper stuck in a loose section of the chainlink fence.

"Hey, guys, wait," I called out to the others. "What's that over there?"

The other guys stopped dead in their tracks, eyes drifting to where I was pointing, settling on the piece of stock paper swaying gently in the wind like a warning flag.

David was the only one of us who could gather up enough courage to walk up and retrieve the slip of paper from where it was stuck on the fence, bringing it back to the group so we could crane over his shoulder to read as he unfolded it.

"Very good, boys. You made it this far." David read out loud. "But you have just a bit further to go yet. Meet me at the fun house, and I will give you what you seek."

A wide, wicked smile grew over David's face as soon as he finished reading.

"I told you guys there were hot girls here waiting for us." He said. "It seems I was right all along."

"Dude, shut the hell up," Mark said, spitting out his wad of bubble gum onto the ground. "We told you a million times that there are no hot girls here. You're stupid if you still believe that."

David crossed his arms matter-of-factly, "You don't know that. You don't know anything. None of us do."

"Quit it, guys. Arguing will get us nowhere." I snapped at both of them. "We need to focus on forming a plan, on what we're going to do about this letter."

"I say follow it," Mark said. "We made it too far to not know what lies at the end of this."

Kenny shook his head frantically. "No way. I have such a bad feeling about this whole thing. I think we should go home now."

"If you want to do that, fine. Walk home by yourself in the dark. See if I care." Mark snapped at him. "I knew I shouldn't have brought you with us. I knew you weren't mature enough to handle something like this."

"Wow, dude. This was a bit of an overreaction." David said, "There's no need to be so harsh, That's your little brother you're talking to."

"I'm just so tired of his whining." David shot back. "You don't understand how hard it is to have your brother ruin literally everything fun in your life. It gets old really fast."

When I looked over at Kenny, his eyes watered as if he was about to burst into tears at any moment. I looked down at him and smiled at him kindly.

"It's okay if you don't want to come with us." I told him, "You can wait here and we'll be back for you as soon as we can. I promise. Is that alright?"

Kenny nodded, chewing on his bottom lip to keep from sobbing.

With that, we headed off to search for this fun house while Kenny's shadow watched from the background.