He satisfied his sea-air appetite with cod and chips, large, from the fish bar at the pier’s end. He licked slippery and steaming white flakes from his fingers, just as good as ever, and once more caught the elusive spoor of Welmouth as it should have been. Tracked up the strand in sightings of hand-lettered signs and bleached pavilions, this led only to the shock of the abandoned roller rink, its smooth expanse cracked now by thrusting fists of dandelion, the tannoy tower rusted and silent.

  Welmouth spins about him, gold and blue, and in a crackling tin throat, ‘All You Need Is Love’ passes some brink where music is no longer separable from movement. Under whirling sky, in this Newtonian ricochet of children, there’s no more to him than lyric glide. Mum stands at the perimeter, smile blurring by at intervals, a number on his clock face. As the song begins to fade, collapsing into other tunes, even back then he’s made nostalgic by ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’.

  Caught in a drift of roller skates, ex-missus and drowned strangers, Pleasureland was on him before he expected it. The turrets at its entrance stated flatly that his jet age was now medieval, while beyond them, painted-horse accompaniments and voices swirled in an acoustic maelstrom. Candyfloss and frying hot dog onions snagged olfactory fish hooks in his nostrils. He recalled his youthful sense of the amusement park as a colossal, single animal, and wondered if it would remember him.

  Although he can’t articulate the thought, he knows the seaside isn’t real. The yearning winter daydream is the only Welmouth, the imaginary jailbreak from work, school, behaviour, and all but unbearable existence. The resort is only there as a suspension of the world and all its laws of what’s allowed to happen. From the waxworks to the blondes on postcards, Welmouth’s built from nothing else but inland fantasies. There rests its irresistible allure, and also its faint scent of hungry menace.

  Past the gates, he was engulfed in stretched sound, sequenced light and families that floated by in straggly genetic clumps. Unchanged above, the giant wheel turned like time or fortune, and a rollercoaster alternated between ratcheted suspense and plunging terror, but there were omissions: no more mirror maze with people lost amongst themselves, no House where Fun was an upskirted wife. The ghost train had likewise been exorcised, though in truth Welmouth was all ghost train now.

  He panics in the hallway of reflections and headbutts a self who’s running in the opposite direction. The trick floor beneath him slides both ways, like memory, making forward progress difficult, and on the scary train his eyes are shut for the whole ride. Pleasureland’s personality, he thinks, is jocular and spiteful with a cruel heart under its striped blazer. The big prize is unattainable, the children vomit excess motion, and in crystal cases leprous sailors can’t stop laughing.

  Shuffling in amongst the stalls, he didn’t know why he had gone there or what he was meant to do. Bent-barrel rifle ranges had been done away with, and there were no longer ducks to hook. Paused at the top of the Big Wheel, he noticed a procession of Down’s syndrome youngsters with their carer, trudging gravely on the beach below, their shadows lengthening behind them. It was later than he’d thought, and back on solid ground he was just heading for the exit when he found the snails.

  Him and his mum and dad enact this slow tour every year, for want of any other family traditions. Pastel gastropods with lines that might be smiles on their vestigial faces, front half of each shell gone to allow for seating, they roll mounted on a track through grotto tunnels, out into the open air and the indifference of the public, unspectacular and yet dependable. The stiff antennae look like radio aerials, and he supposes that the metal rails they travel on are their silver calligraphies of slime.

  Unable to resist, he bought his ticket from a very old man with a strawberry blemish under his left eye, who showed him to his steed and clunked the safety bar over his lap. Leaning across to do so, the attendant shared a carious, overfamiliar grin and said, ‘Hhaaah, oy remember you, boy,’ but before he could respond or ask the ticket-seller what he’d meant, the snail car was already moving off, into pink-lighted artificial catacombs with glistening mucous walls and oil-flavoured air.

  They take the same ride every holiday, their crawling pilgrimage, until inside the twinkling passages he can no longer tell which year it is, or even if these annual excursions aren’t all just the one year, happening again. Although there are still dates and days, the whole two weeks in Welmouth go on somewhere outside time, and have no consequences. Trundling with his parents in the ancient life form through synthetic caves, their offspring is pressed breathless between past and future.

  Halfway down a mock-stone throat, it came to him that all of this had been a really bad idea, a spasm of bereavement and divorce. His almost faceless chariot took him, at its own excruciating pace, down corridors of his decrepit yesterday, on predetermined lines into the blind of an upcoming bend. He never should have come here, should have left it as an overexposed memory, but now it was too late. Points in the track ahead diverted him into a side shaft that he wasn’t sure if he remembered.

  In the photograph he’s laughing on the snail, showing his overbite, but he’s alone. And yes, of course he is, because his mum and dad must be outside to take the picture when the car emerges into daylight, but how can that be when he knows that they all three share the ride, each year the same? He feels for them beside him in the rattling pink gloom, but they’re both gone. He’s on his own, inching through twilight mines of recollection that are only his, and, other than himself, are empty.

  There was something wrong, and his discomfort mounted with each yard of his advance into the glimmering sinus. He was almost certain that this unexpected branch line hadn’t been there on his previous visits, but then lots of things that he felt sure of turned out not to be as he’d construed them. Up ahead, it looked like there were lighted alcoves set beside the track that he had definitely never seen before. Or had he? He began to feel extremely nervous, shifting in his seat, and tense.

  In the first recess is a little girl, at first mistaken for those child-shaped Spastics’ boxes once so commonplace, but this is different. There is still an iron brace imprisoning one leg, but this girl’s older, twelve or thirteen, and is not soliciting donations. Standing in fine sand against a cloth of poorly rendered dunes and sky, she lifts her hem with one stiff hand to show the dusty, painted knickers. Flaking plaster lips curled to a knowing smirk, blind eyes smug with unmentionable secrets.

  Stomach plummeting, he doesn’t understand. Something has changed, here in the juddering shadows, and his situation seems now more uncomfortably immediate and real, thudding against his breast. He knows that things will only become more unbearable from here on, but he’s trapped. He can’t do anything to stop the ride and can’t dismount; there isn’t room. With its expression made inscrutable by the eroding years, his carriage drags him inexorably towards a second inset cavity.

  Here, on floor papered to resemble paving slabs, its backdrop mimicking the seafront’s night lights, sits the model of an infant suffering from something previously known as water on the brain, strapped in a reconstructed pushchair. The boy’s skull is swollen to a thin skin bulb, the size of which exceeds that of the face below. Paused always at his trompe l’oeil kerb, the little figurine’s expression holds a look of managed disappointment that shades into an appalling and unanswerable wisdom.

  Deep inside, a part of him that fathoms more than he does starts a muffled screaming, hammering against the glass of his fixed stare. He hardly knows what’s happening, only that it can’t be, and there’s nothing he can think or do that makes this less than shattering, even if he’s not sure what’s being broken. He reluctantly concedes that it can’t be the snail that he hears whimpering, as they progress through subterranean pretence in the direction of what looks to be a last exhibit.

  Face down in sand bright with blotted brine, the dead man’s shape is soft and saturated, slumped so that a minnow-nibbled head points to the breakers airbrushed in its background. One shoe and accompanying sock are gone, and the revealed white foot is frightful, with black bits of grit embedded in the sodden, corrugating flesh. Around the corpse, inverted sepia saucers lazily rotate the pallid feelers ringing their perimeters, wilfully burying themselves like landmines.

  He wants this to be a bad dream, an hallucination brought about by stress, because what else? Uneven walls crawl past in a rose glow, and he resembles one of the chewed-paper damned in their penny-a-go scenarios, creaking to bitter ends through clockwork purgatories. If he pretends that none of this has happened, he can go back to his caravan tonight and then tomorrow he’ll go home, leaving his scare and the transistor radio behind. The car bumps through its exit, out into already fallen night.

  How can he have been on the ride so long? As the snail stops, he looks for the old chap who’d so disquieted him on his way in, but the late afternoon shift’s evidently over and a skinny young man with a quiff now helps him from the slithering vehicle. Spotting a blotch beneath the new attendant’s eye, he reasons this must be the other fellow’s son, ignoring his sure knowledge that birthmarks aren’t generational. He hurries to the way out, through an altered fairground that he’s trying not to register.

  As he leaves Pleasureland, he gazes fixedly ahead, for his peripheral vision’s crowded with things that aren’t there. Bright duck-armadas barricade constricted straits, and on blurred balconies eye-corner underskirts blossom to squealing tulips in the updraft. Along skeleton-draped platforms, half-glimpsed passengers await commutes to nightmare, while in glass halls endlessly repeated apparitions meet in silent confrontation. Since he notices no LEDs, even the dark is the wrong sort.

  Out between phony castle gates he blunders, heart still thumping and the night draft stippling bumps on his bare arms. He isn’t so much thinking as colliding dodgems of incomprehension, and he startles at the overwhelming blackness of the seafront, sparse illuminations burning lonely on the sagging vine. A ginger-haired lad overtakes him, carrying a presumably just won stuffed toy, a lion-headed figure in a football outfit that he only narrowly contrives to keep himself from recognising.

  Painfully protracted, at a snail’s pace, it occurs to him that this is what he’d wanted. This is Welmouth as it was. Avoiding an ice-blue Ford Anglia, he finds himself on the arcade side of the avenue, across the road from the seawall and blacked-out beach. Moving against the frock-and-jacket current of an ambling crowd, he gapes in awful wonder at the puddled light around a cockle stand; at the huge billboard head of long-dead Jimmy Clitheroe, now playing at Welmouth Palladium.

  The town was never flirting with him, didn’t need to; it reeled him in using the hook and chain it had through his intestines. All the years he’s thought it irrecoverable, it’s been waiting here, a penny-plated crocodile. Spectra of coloured bulbs adorn his hairless crown, and from an isolate portable radio, a young Mick Jagger comments on the drag of getting old, as if it were a lifestyle choice. Coins sour the breath of the amusement parlours and his ears are ringing, distant fire alarms.

  He sees them only yards ahead – the man, the woman and their little boy – stepping away into a dimly lit pub garden overshadowed by the Hippodrome. There’s something in the couple’s gait that stops him dead, the husband breezy with hands in his pockets, the wife lapping side to side like water. In their hard-to-place familiarity is something unaccountably alarming, then the twelve-year-old trailing behind them turns around to look at him, and he is speared by catastrophic understanding.

  Shaking his head like a rear-window dog, he backs away before he’s pointed out to the child’s parents and makes all this worse. Breathing in sobs, he reels across the busy street between the Minis and the Vespas, hurdling from seawall to sand, unnoticed in the screaming need to get away from this fond horror, all these lights. Footfalls crunch damp beneath him in the panting black amongst the dunes, although ahead the running’s smooth down to a crashing, drumbeat ocean.

  When he wasn’t there at work the Monday after and his phone was switched off, concerned colleagues calling at his flat reported no one home. His wife and kids were contacted, but had no clue as to his whereabouts. Eventually, police recovered some belongings, mostly clothes and an antique transistor radio, that the Ocean Vista people had retrieved from his deserted caravan. Though there were all the obvious speculations, his remains were never found, or, anyway, not subsequently.

  WHAT WE CAN KNOW ABOUT THUNDERMAN

  FOR KEVIN O’NEILL

  1. (August, 2015)

  Through the front window of Carl’s Diner, Tuesday afternoon was bleeding out. Under a pimple-incubating light, amidst yellow Formica dulled by thirty years’ ennui, the Supper Club of Infinite Earths squeezed into a family booth and put the many worlds to rights.

  All four were writers, obviously – Jerry Binkle, Dan Wheems, Brandon Chuff and Milton Finefinger – since writers had much more invested in the finer points of comics continuity than, say, artists or colourists. Artists and colourists, as universally revered publisher’s son-in-law ‘Satanic’ Samuel Blatz had oft expectorated, only had to draw the stuff you told them to and not go over any lines. They didn’t need to know that it was just the 1940s Moon Queen who could turn herself to moonlight, or that energy-directing teenager Bronze Bolt was Thunderman’s son from another timeline: didn’t need to know, and, in the Supper Club’s opinion, didn’t truly care.

  ‘It’s like they don’t see why the continuity’s important. They’re all, “So who gives a fuck if Mr Ocean’s mom and dad came from Atlantis or Lemuria?”, and I’m all, like, “Hello? The kid who you once were, pal, that’s who gives a fuck. The kid who worshipped Mr Ocean, and who wanted to know everything about him, just so some asshole like you could come along in twenty years and change it all.” All these revisions, what they’re doing is they’re making that fan knowledge that we worked so hard to learn into, almost, I guess, kind of a pointless waste of time.’

  Dan Wheems and Milton Finefinger, feigning engrossment in their food, briefly locked eyes over the centrally positioned condiments. It was well known that ‘Merry’ Jerry Binkle, founder of this weekly gathering, was way too into Mr Ocean. Binkle had resigned from a high-paid position at American when they cancelled his Ocean’s Depths miniseries after issue three, and was now back with Massive doing Beetle Boy and a whole bunch of contraindicated medicines.

  His mouth still numb with novocaine from the dental appointment earlier, Wheems risked a lateral glance at famously impassive Brandon Chuff, seated beside him. Binkle was the oldest of the four men, but as editor-in-chief across town at American, Chuff was the Supper Club of Infinite Earths’ senior member. As he sat and listened now to Jerry Binkle’s remonstrations, Chuff was staring at the jaundiced tabletop with a quiet smile that meant, ‘Well, I know better, but I’m too disinterested in what you’re saying to correct you.’ Wheems assumed that he was thinking back to the Unending Brawl crossover at American the summer before last, where, marking his own homework as the reboot’s writer/editor, Chuff had revealed both Mr Ocean’s jellyfish friend Fufu and his sidekick Ocean Kid to be false memories implanted by the Didn’t Happener. Outside the diner, a profound blue gradient was established with, beyond the light pollution, a conjectured star or two.

  Wearing the perma-smirk inflicted by Bell’s palsy that made every utterance seem needlessly sardonic, Milton Finefinger, still stinging over the delays to his book Union caused by the Arvo Cake disaster, ventured here an interjection into Merry Jerry’s enervating monologue. ‘I heard how Sherman Glad came up with Mr Ocean when he visited a seafood restaurant called that once, in Boston. Of course, how Glad told it’ – Milton’s laugh was four snorts detonating somewhere near his sinuses, hnohh-hnohh-hnohh-hnohh, like that – ‘he had this boyhood dream where he was drowning and got rescued by a strangely well-groomed merman. Now, that doesn’t sound like what you’d call a dry dream, you know what I’m saying? Hnohh-hnohh-hnohh-hnohh.’

  Jerry tucked his chin into his neck and crumpled an increasingly high forehead.

  ‘Milton, you and I have had this conversation. As you know, in 1962, I interviewed Glad for my seminal fan publication, Hooded Vigilante. Visited his house, met his wife Gail and everything, when I was, like, this fifteen-year-old boy. It was when I asked how he’d come up with the Streak, Gold Eagle, Mr Ocean and the rest, that he made the since legendary statement that they’d come to him in dreams. He claimed the dreams had been transmitted from some other place, a parallel world or Ideal Platonic realm or something, where the things in Sherman’s stories were all really happening. OK, that’s maybe just a thing a writer tells a teenage fan, like “Santa’s a real person” or whatever, but I thought he seemed sincere. And as for being gay, you wouldn’t think that if you’d met Gail Glad when you were an impressionable youth. She was quite … memorable, if you know what I mean.’

  Nobody did, exactly, but a reference to the since dead matron’s boobs was their default assumption. With a sneer he couldn’t help, Finefinger took another forkful of his Slippy Joe, which was an ordinary Sloppy Joe that had a quarter pound of butter melted over it. Dan Wheems attempted to pick up the conversation with an anecdote about either a character called S-Man, or, possibly, something about eczema: Dan’s mouth wasn’t working for some reason, so nobody understood a word that he was saying but kept on smiling and nodding as they waited for him to run out of steam.

  Finefinger took a peek at Brandon Chuff, seated across from Binkle, wondering what was going through the mind of the ursine fan favourite as he gazed into the table’s primrose sheen. From the ironic smile that played around Chuff’s pursed lips, Milton speculated that he was most probably considering the fate of Sherman Glad. A pulp science fiction writer moonlighting in comics, Sherman had created many of American’s best known and most enduring characters, but then in 1965 had tried, with other scriptwriters, to form a union. Needless to say, Glad and those other old guys were immediately fired, replaced as writers by an eager swarm of youthful comic fans who, grateful to be living out their boyhood dreams, seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were putting previously lionised creators out of work. Out went the grizzled 1950s hipsters like James Flaver, Edward Hannigan, and Sherman Glad, who’d made ends meet by grinding out genre-specific paperback pornography following his defenestration at American. In came the teenage/twenty-something King Bee and United Supermen enthusiasts like Jerry Binkle, Ralph Roth, David Moskowitz and Brandon Chuff. All said, Milton concluded, Chuff had no shortage of things to smile about.