Page 174 of Serenity Falls

We watch as she pulls out and drives back up the street. She stops just past the ice-cream van on the opposite side of the road. The she revs the engine and with a screech of tyres, reverses hard into the driver’s side of the van. The crash of metal on metal is excruciatingly loud in the quiet street. The alarm on Stella’s car erupts in a high-pitched whine. The chimes of the ice-cream van stutter into a weird discordant drone.

Moments later, a stocky man in white overalls, hood down, staggers out, clutching his head.

‘I think there’s only one,’ Davey had said. ‘There’s more at night.’

The white-suit dude advances towards Stella. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Stella climbs out. ‘I’m so sorry, sir. My foot slipped.’

‘You need to get out of here—’ He breaks off, staring past her.

Davey emerges from the gate of Home and Spry, dressed in the Arnie suit. He dances as he goes, kicking his legs, shaking his furry behind. It’s surreal, comical yet also vaguely sinister. The face of the white-suit dude slackens. ‘What the—’

Davey reaches him, stops, waves … and then punches him in the face. The white-suit dude staggers but recovers and swings back at Davey, who ducks and punches him in the stomach.

I look around. The street is still silent in the hazy twilight. No one out on the pavements staring or asking what the flying fuck is going on. Conditioned inertia, or maybe they’re inside, frantically making phone calls. Either way …

‘Now!’ I say to Sadie. We burst out of the door and run across the road, praying there isn’t another person in the van. I fumble out my keys, let us into the house, and we run upstairs. Sadie grabs the box with Zelda in. We pound back down the stairs and burst outside, just as Davey delivers a final sucker punch and the white-suit dude collapses on to the tarmac.

‘Get him in the back,’ Stella instructs, popping the now dented trunk on her car.

I grab white-suit dude’s feet, Davey grabs his arms and we manoeuvre the inert body into the car. Stella slams the trunk closed. I turn and freeze. ‘Shit.’

A young boy stands about halfway down the street. He stares at us. A strange adult and a giant armadillo loading an ice-cream vendor into the coroner’s van.

‘It’s okay—’ I start to say.

His eyes widen; he turns and runs back up the road. ‘Mommy!’

Davey hauls his furry head off. ‘We need to get out of here.’

Stella nods. ‘I’ll take the Dairy Queen back to the morgue. Here.’ She chucks me a set of car keys, attached to a keyring shaped like a plastic ice-cream cone.

I look at it. ‘I guess we’re taking the van.’

52

We all cram into the front. Davey drives. I rest my head back against the seat, trying to wrap my sore brain around how quickly events have escalated. The ice-cream van’s chimes jangle gratingly. Davey can’t seem to turn them off. It only adds to the nightmarish quality of our predicament. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that I am fully on board with the need to get the fuck out of this place, right a-fucking-way.

‘Are you okay?’ Sadie asks.

‘I’m fine,’ I say, but I’m not. My head isn’t hurting, but it feels kind of numb, and my whole body aches.

‘I’m sorry about all of this,’ Davey says, turning. He has a bruise on his cheek where the vendor managed to get a punch in.

‘Yeah? Maybe you should have thought about that before you started dressing up as a dead kid in a furry armadillo suit to scare the shit out of us … and that is a sentence I wasn’t expecting to say.’

‘We just … I just wanted to find out the truth.’

‘About this place?’

‘Yeah, but mostly about my mom.’

‘You know, sometimes finding out the truth doesn’t make things any better.’

‘I just wanted to know why she left me, and where she is.’

I sigh. ‘Davey, if everything you’ve told me about this place is true … you know your mum is probably dead.’