The wind was strong and the clouds were swishing across the sky giving glimpses of the almost full moon, taking turns to throw fistfuls of rain down on Plymouth before they were hurried out over the sea and away. The gutters were running with water and even the usual Friday clubbing crowd were largely absent, or hiding under bus shelters having decided to call it a night. Along the dark street two figures moved purposefully, both clad in long raincoats and with lumpy, heavy-looking packs on their backs. They stepped over gutterstreams, dodged the drips off trees and made their way steadily towards the seaward end of the street. Their target was a great, looming structure that creaked and swayed in the gusting wind – a large Ferris wheel standing in an open space in the shadow of a decrepit office block with frayed concrete corners and rust-tinted window frames. In the way of such buildings the block funnelled the gusts of wind and created howling sounds to accentuate the unpleasant nature of the evening.
The duo reached the base of the wheel and stopped. As one their heads tilted back and they looked up, precisely as a gap opened in the clouds for a moment so that ragged moonlight shone through the spokes and flickered off the swaying seats, giving the impression of people swinging their legs as they waited for the silent wheel to turn. Then the lunar light was snuffed again and replaced by dim orange from beneath. One figure turned to the other and cleared his throat.
‘Well, it certainly looks out of action, doesn't it?’
His colleague contemplated his surroundings and wiped rainwater off his glasses. ’No generators to power it.’ He waved a hand vaguely towards the endpoint of a trailing cable looking like a damp deceased snake. ‘But there's been at least ten reports now of it turning’.
‘Well’, said Alan, the figure lacking vision impairment due to rainy spectacles, ‘Better start at the beginning and eliminate the mundane’.
Brian peered at the spotty world. ‘Not much to eliminate really, is there. No power, so pretty much all it could be is the wind. It must have brakes – let's see if we can find them.’
The twosome trudged around the ride, surveying it from all angles in a slightly desultory fashion. Both were of the opinion that if the brake had been left off, in these conditions the wheel should be positively whirring around. Brian shrugged off his pack and fished out a torch, then pointed the anaemic beam up at the hub.
‘There they are, bang in the middle there. Look...’
Alan's torch was of the one-million-candlepower variety and made it far clearer that yes, the brakes were in the middle there and yes, they were clearly clamped firmly into position. And to be honest would probably be seizing due to damp pretty soon if they hadn't already.
They looked at each other and nodded. Despite the weather that had cheered them considerably. It was always a bit of a let-down when an investigation threw up a Scully-solution. No fun being Plymouth's premier paranormal detectives when you got to point out that the strange noise was coming from a clock stuffed under the bed or that the figure in white was a drunken clubber in a bedsheet. They moved over into the slight shelter afforded by the lee of the office block and began to unpack the proper stuff. Camcorders, IR filters, thermometers (though as Alan did point out, any spirit that managed to lower the temperature much tonight was deserving of a round of applause), EMF meter. Before they’d done more than open the first pack, a pair of girls clearly insulated far more by alcohol than garmentry staggered past and seemingly decided that they needed to know what was going on. Oblivious to the weather, they stood about five feet away, swaying gently.
‘Whatchadoing?’ asked Miss Hypothermia 2012.
Alan buried his nose into a backpack and made it clear that he had no intention of answering, so Brian reluctantly stood up.
‘We're investigating the wheel’, he mumbled.
Two saturated peroxide heads turned to one another in clear confusion.
‘Why?’ asked the taller of the two, which was about the only distinction Brian was able to draw through rainspots.
‘In thisweathr?’ said the other.
Finding himself hard pressed for a sensible answer to the latter question, Brian settled for answering the first.
‘It's supposed to be shut down – the company went bust. But there's been quite a few people who've said they've seen it turning’.
‘S'yur engineers?’
‘Ah, no’. Brian busily cleaned his glasses in embarrassment. ‘Actually we're paranormal investigators’
‘Ghost hunters!’
‘Cool!’
The thought of being considered cool was enough to pull Alan up from the equipment to join the conversation.
‘I'm Alan – this is my partner Brian. So have you seen this wheel turning recently?’
‘You have, haventcha?’ the taller girl asked her friend. ‘Oh, I'm S'vannah – she's Demi-Leigh’.
Eyes turned to Demi-Leigh who, Alan realised, was actually shorter only because she was carrying her shoes.
‘Yeah. Las' Friday. I was tryin' to get a cab an' I heard it. She di'n't – she was still inside. But it creak'd 'n' stuff and started goin' round. An' lights came on too.’
The partners' morale rose. An actual witness. They usually had trouble getting witness accounts and those gathered by shouting through letterboxes were largely regarded with a certain degree of scorn by other investigators.
‘Whatcha gonna do then?’
‘C'n we help?’
Well, thought Brian, whoever would have thought there would be an upside to those dreadful ghost-hunting programs on the satellite channels.
‘Of course – do you want to help set up our equipment? And can you tell us any more about what you saw?’
Alan returned to his unpacking in something of a fluster, assisted in an enthusiastic but uncoordinated fashion by Savannah. The close proximity of much exposed (if somewhat blue) female flesh did little to help his own manual dexterity and between the two of them most of the contents of the first rucksack were soon extracted, precisely into a large puddle. Brian mentally thanked his lucky stars that he'd chosen the more expensive waterproof models and turned back to his witness.
‘So miss, were there any people around the wheel when you saw it move?’
The wind whipped his enquiry away the first time, and the second, so he resorted to the less-professional sounding but more effective strategy of bawling almost directly into Demi-Leigh's ear.
‘No, jus' me. Didn't see anybody in the seats up there, but all the lights came on.’
Though clearly still possessed of an alcohol level sufficient to explode a breathalyser, weather conditions were starting have a sobering effect on her.
‘They weren't all the usual colours though, they were all bluey whitey stuff. An' there was no motor sound or anything, just the creaking’.
‘And the wheel was definitely going round?’
‘Oh yeah. Not fast, same sorta speed it usually does’.
Brian jotted this all down in what had started the evening as a notebook, but was rapidly becoming a block of papier-m’ché.
‘Oi!’ Savannah wanted their attention. ‘What're we gonna do now then?’
All four of them clustered together next to the two neat, soggy piles of gadgetry.
‘Now we start taking readings’, said Alan, who was clearly well into his role of educating Savannah in the ways of investigations. ‘Not just the wheel, all around so we can see if the wheel is different from the surrounding area. We'll start with temperature and the EMF meter, you two get the recordings going’.
Demi-Leigh sighed slightly as master and pupil grabbed boxes and started pointing them at various objects, accompanied by squeaky giggles.
‘A few jagerbombs and it doesn't matter who it is’.
Brian busily cleaned his glasses to avoid getting involved.
‘So whaddya reckon it might be then, Brian?’
‘Well...’ Alan did have a point – it was very nice to have an audience. ‘It could be the wheel itself for some reason or other. Might be that something happened in its manufacture. Maybe poltergeist-type activity – though rather bigger than the usual sort of object that gets moved. There's nobody died in any manner associated with the wheel while it's been here and there's no record of any hauntings around this patch of land....’ His voice trailed off as a small cold hand grabbed hold of his own.
‘Look’ said Demi-Leigh in hushed tones, clinging really quite hard to Brian's hand. He followed the direction her other hand was pointing, up at the wheel. It towered over them, all sixty metres of it, but it was apparent that they shouldn't have been looking at the parts of it. For, stretching far above it and away to the left, in phosphorescent blue that the scudding clouds could be seen through, was not just the wheel, but the whole of the bicycle.