Free Carousel by Brendan Ritchie Page B

loudly, above the rain.
    Taylor stared at me blankly. She couldn’t hear. Rather than try again I took her arm and pulled her over to the other side of the door. She looked at me like I was weird, then turned the handle.
    The door flung open and a wall of water exploded into the office.
    Straight away I realised we should have left the entrance open. The room was large, but if it filled with water we would be screwed.
    I left Taylor gaping at the river we had created and dashed across the office to the candy bar entrance. I think she must have thought I was getting the hell out of there because I half heard her yell, ‘What the hell, Nox!’
    The water had reached the door before me, which made it hard to pull it back against the flow. When I did Ihad to find something big and heavy to keep it propped. There wasn’t really anything close by so I pushed it back fully against the wall so that the water pressure would hold it open rather than closed. Then I dragged across a desk and propped it there just to be sure.
    Trudging back I noticed the pressure decreasing already.
    Taylor looked at me and nodded with a half smile.
    We waited by the door until the flow of water had subsided a little more, then moved carefully up the stairs inside.
    The walls and ceiling were wet all around us. Water had completely filled the staircase. It was pretty narrow and although another rush of water seemed unlikely, neither of us felt totally comfortable in the space. There was also a light source somewhere ahead. I’d noticed it as soon as the door had opened, and I’m sure Taylor had too. This didn’t necessarily mean anything. But it created an automatic anticipation.
    Taylor double-stepped the final section of stairs and disappeared around the corner. I shrugged off visions of her being thrown back by a wall of water or falling down some huge Carousel chasm, and followed.
    Inside was carnage.
    Reams of film were plastered all around the long,hall-like projection booth. Two of the big, clumsy looking projectors had been tipped over by rushes of water. All of the small square windows to the cinemas were burst through and dripping with water.
    A section of the roof had collapsed under the pressure of the torrential rainfall. Maybe something had blocked up the guttering during the summer. On a flat roof like Carousel’s this would create some serious pooling. The section had fallen away from us so that the opening faced the opposite end of the booth. From where we stood there was just a downward sloping ceiling that met the floor in a messy and jagged pile of soaking rubble. However, through pockets of this, and to one side, there filtered the unmistakable grey of daylight.
    Taylor looked at me with big, excited eyes.
    We stepped carefully forward to the edge of the collapsed roof. I was a little nervous. Water was still running freely beneath our feet and there was a shitload of electrical items in the room. Many of these were switched off, but probably not everything, and I could never remember how conductivity worked. We both had rubber-soled shoes. Did this mean we were safe?
    â€˜The gaps aren’t big enough,’ said Taylor, crouching.
    I followed her gaze and saw what she meant. Therewere only small pockets of space where the water and light were reaching us. It looked like there might have been something bigger when the roof first came down. But since then a growing pile of debris had banked up against it from the outside. None of the holes that remained were anywhere near large enough to climb through.
    It seemed like the hole in the roof was out of reach.
    â€˜Maybe from the other side,’ I said.
    Taylor nodded and moved back past me toward the exit. We ventured swiftly into the two adjacent projection booths to see if they had also been breached or somehow offered access to the hole.
    Both were intact.
    More deflating was the discovery that all booths seemed to share the exact same layout.