Free Carousel by Brendan Ritchie Page A

awful at the same time. Like a lot of stuff in Carousel.
    We continued on to an amenities area adjacent to the cinemas. There were a couple of corridors with various doors similar to the one we had broken through near Just Jeans. Taylor stopped out the front of these and unpacked her tools. I stood by her side and looked up at the ceiling to listen to the rain. It really was intense.
    Taylor handed me a mallet and we started on one of the corridors. She had established a pretty comprehensive system by this stage. First she would check the locks and handles to see if they could be jimmied with a series of small screwdrivers. Failing this, she located the position of the hinges to see whether the door could be knocked free. Then there was the crowbar approach which had magically worked for Rocky. When none of these freed the door, there were other, more forceful options.
    It had been ages since I’d seen Taylor really flip out on a door. Occasionally you would come across onethat she had taken to during our first week, with axe marks near the hinges and large mallet indentations surrounding the handle. But most of them seemed to be tested thoroughly then left alone. I don’t think any of us, including Taylor, really thought we could bust a hole in a door or smash a window to break out of the centre anymore. Somehow it was more complicated than that.
    We tried the first door, and the second, with no luck. At the third a giant crashing noise stopped us dead.
    Taylor and I stood looking at the cinema. Something had fallen somewhere inside. The sound had reached us above the rain.
    It must have been big.
    We glanced at each other. There were a lot of weird noises in an abandoned shopping centre, but this one had been different. Something had changed. Neither of us needed to say anything. We put down our tools and headed to the cinema.
    Just because we weren’t talking about our discovery of the Fiesta didn’t mean we weren’t thinking about it. That day had caused a slight but permanent shift in our lives. We looked at things differently. Kept together at night. Talked more on the radio. Walking into the foyer, the dull blue hatchback was forefront in my mind.
    We had pretty much left the cinema alone asidefrom a half-baked attempt to run a movie on one of the complicated projectors. It was a maze of darkened, soundproof rooms. Not the type of place you want to frequent in our situation.
    But the noise we heard had definitely come from somewhere inside. We paused at the candy bar and considered our options. We were reluctant to search each cinema, one by one. There were nearly twenty of them and tons of corridors, toilets and projection booths in between.
    Taylor sighed and headed off in the direction of the first cinema. I grabbed her arm. She turned and looked at me, confused. I tapped my ear, signalling for her to listen. Amid the chorus of falling water there was something else. A kind of swirling noise. Dense, like an indoor pool. It was coming from behind the candy bar.
    We slid over the counter and walked around the corner to a door labelled
Office
. Taylor tried the handle. It turned. She held the door open and I reached inside for a light switch. There was a bunch of them by the door.
    A long room was illuminated under a series of fluoros. There were some desks. A large stack of movie standees and posters. A kitchenette with a sink, fridge and water dispenser. And a series of doors leading up to projection booths.
    The noise was definitely louder in there.
    We moved through the room, listening cautiously. It was above us, in one of the projection booths. We scanned the doors, trying to decide which one to investigate first. A small pool of water had gathered at the base of the door to Projection Booth Four. We looked at it carefully as if to confirm it was real. The noise was a constant hum from behind the door. Taylor glanced at me and took the handle of the door.
    â€˜Stand on this side,’ I said