Rocket Slide (a short science fiction-horror story)
Photo courtesy of Nels Olsen by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/people/7776581@N04
INTRODUCTION
The Rocket Slide exists!
It’s a real thing and I stole it directly from a creepy, hidden-away playground in my old neighborhood. Whether it can be used by a vengeful ex-husband to kidnap his children … that’s another matter.
But yes, I had lived in the neighborhood for years without knowing that just down the street, behind a grassy verge that separated two of the more splendid homes from the others, lay a secret park with a secret playground filled with death-dealing rides that would never pass muster on a modern playground.
It was as if the rides had been designed by somebody who wanted children to be hurt. It had all the standard 1960s features – swings, a merry-go-round (which, when spun sufficiently fast, could fling a kid off into another dimension), and a couple of non-standard features.
For instance, there was an odd slide that consisted of a gigantic wedge-shaped piece of metal. It was mounted at a steep angle and to make correct use of it you had to start at the tapered in and, using the edge as a handgrip, drag yourself up to the top, then let go.
During the summer its metal hide would cook the flesh off your bones, and to successfully slide one had to reduce its adhesion – we used very fine sand flung up to the top of the slide. It was one broken arm or leg away from being a helluva lot of fun.
And then there was the Rocket Slide.
I remember it as an enclosed, twisty tunnel of a slide, but it may very well have been a straight slide. The words “Rocket Slide” were emblazoned on the side of the tube, written in flaming italic characters, as if the ride were not stationary but shooting through the atmosphere at the speed of sound. Children would climb a ladder to the top, sit down, and slide through the tunnel to emerge from the bottom, like a screaming, laughing chunk of Pez freshly clicked from the dispenser.
As I watched kids playing on the slide I wondered: What would happen if one of them went into the slide but didn’t come out? And what if an anxious mom looked up the metal throat of the slide and saw nothing but clear air. Just exactly how – and why – would something like that come to pass?
You ever wonder where writers get their ideas? THAT is where writers get their ideas – from everyday life, viewed from a slightly askew angle.
Stephen King made laundry machines evil.
Dennis Etchison made ambulance drivers evil.
And now I, Del Stone Jr., am making playground equipment evil.
I remember working on this story over and over, trying to give it significance larger than the basic idea of a playground slide that ate little kids. The anxious mother and vengeful father came along after I had finished the first version and sent it around to a few places. It finally found a home with Jeffery Thomas’ The End.
Since writing “Rocket Slide” I have never looked at playground equipment the same way.
I mean, seriously. Who knows what’s really inside the Rocket Slide? When was the last time you were inside the Rocket Slide?
Do you have a spouse working on a top-secret government who you recently split up with?
Do yourself a favor.
Keep your kids out of the Rocket Slide.
—
ROCKET SLIDE
The playground did not move, the way a living thing sometimes will not move.
Children dashed along its flanks, butterfly motes of motion flitting across its grassy expanse, from jungles of monkey bars and nodding teeter-totters to the giddy merry-go-round and best of all best, rising above the rain-washed landscape like a metal tower, the Rocket Slide. Children laughed and cried out, whirling and swinging in the delight that is exclusive to children, while mothers filled benches and watched, satisfied in their own ways.
All but one.
Jenny sat, tense, at the edge of the wooden seat, its whitewashed boards resembling teeth that might snap at her if she settled more comfortably into its jaw, and when a certain little girl wandered too close to the swings, Jenny would stand and call, “Amanda! Not behind the swings!” Or if the girl dared to explore the jungle gym and climbed too high, Jenny would shout, “Come down honey! You might fall!”
And for perhaps the third time that afternoon, after they had come out from beneath the bright gazebo when the rain had finished, the mother’s friend reached to her, touched her lightly on the shoulder, as if flesh would convey what words could not, and whispered, “Jen, let her play.” A pause. “You worry too much.”
Jenny thought, No … that’s not true. If you had a child … and an ex-husband … you’d understand. She turned to her friend and said, “I don’t know, Angie. There’s – there’s something – I don’t know. Something different. …” And then she sat, and her unease settled around her like a heavy shroud, locking in a chill.
Angela chuckled. Her voice was light as mist. Her arm slid around Jenny’s shoulder.
“Oh come on, Jen. It’s the playground. You’ve been here a hundred times. What could possibly be different?”
Jenny closed her eyes, opened them. “I don’t know. I’m just worried, I guess.”
What she could not describe was the feeling of being surrounded by hidden, prying eyes, everywhere, eyes that watched her thoughts, the way she perched at the edge of the bench, the nervous intake of breath and her darting gaze, flicking birdlike as she followed her daughter’s movement from one troublesome park peril to the next. She felt a wrongness here. Call it a mother’s intuition. She did not like this park anymore. She’d come her against her better judgment, giving into Angela’s unshakeable insistence that they spend the afternoon here so that Amanda might play and Angela could share the minutia she’d accumulated since they’d last spent an afternoon together. But Jenny didn’t like the park anymore. She didn’t like the swings – swings from which a child might be tossed to the ground – nor did she trust the creaking teeter-totters or the jungle gym or the narcotic whirl of the merry-go-round. Least of all did she trust the Rocket Slide, a tall metal tube wrapped around the steep incline of a slide. They cylinder was painted metallic red and was adorned with rocket fins; the characters R-O-C-K-E-T S-L-I-D-E were exhaust-fire yellow along its sides, around which stars and crescent moons and ringed planets capered. It was too high, Jenny decided, remembering how her heart would crawl into her throat when Amanda used to play on it. A child might take a spill from there and hurt herself. A young girl of five, for instance, who was precious beyond price to a mother who might be watching from too far away.
A young girl she’d fought to keep.
Rocket Slide. Jenny spoke the words to herself. Her lip curled imperceptibly at the dank taste of the syllables.
She watched a boy clamber up the ladder, apelike, to the waiting mouth of the slide, fit himself against the shiny metal tongue and push into its throat, swallowed by moons and stars and yellow rocket flare. She looked away before he could emerge.
“It’s Roger, I’ll bet. You and Roger used to come here every Saturday afternoon – at least until he started the project. A person could set his watch by you and Roger going to the playground. You’re afraid he might show up, aren’t you?” Angela was saying. Jenny didn’t turn, didn’t flinch, and wondered if the lack of reaction was incriminating. Finally, she murmured a simple, “No.” Not Roger. Please, not Roger. Not after what the lawyer told her the last time Roger came, attorneys in tow, ready to claim what he still insisted belonged to him.
No. Well … maybe. A little.
She shook her head and gazed across the park to make sure Amanda was nowhere near the Rocket Slide. She felt watched. An older girl, Amanda’s size, was making her way up the slide, moving with a quickness that suggested expertise in climbing ladders and touching feet-to-clouds from swings and all manner of playground skills.
“So you had the cops on him because he was harassing you. I think any woman in your position would have done the same thing. If it hadn’t been for that Pentagon bigshot running interference, Roger might be in jail now.”
“Yeah,” Jenny mused. Her memories of that sorry episode were bundled into a tidy package she found herself mentally tripping over a hundred times a day.
Roger Clemmons, Phd. The physicist – ”quantum theory of gravity physicist,” he’d correct her, as if he were amplifying a misdelivered introduction. She’d met him at the Caltech admission office. She’d worked there as a clerk, entering schedules and adjustments to the office’s mainframe. He’d dropped in one afternoon to clear up an error in his class time schedule and it had been immediate infatuation … at least on his part, she thought at the time. She considered him old and a bit eccentric, but after three months of effusive, often embarrassing pursuit, she’d given in. They had nothing in common and he’d seemed to like that. But after seven years of marriage, the novelty had worn off. Only Amanda still seemed able to captivate him.
A year after they were married the university had granted his sabbatical. Roger had wheedled and connived – persistence was his other distinctive quality, aside from a quickness to anger – and had gotten himself a grubstake from the dwindling pool of SDI money to pursue an applied research project he’d been kicking around for years, a mysterious project that he would reveal to nobody except, presumably, the agencies that were underwriting the costs.
She knew its name.
Bootleg.
And she knew a little bit more.
Roger would’ve been furious. She never told him about the envelope, the one she found in his coat pocket as she was checking it before sending it off to the cleaners. The envelope was scribbled with hieroglyphics of formulae and notations – maybe he’d been working up a presentation or a report, or maybe he’d had a brainstorm while eating lunch at that greasy spoon he and his grad students inhabited almost every afternoon.
The notes were cryptic: “Effect is localized. Can be g-rated from our end to coordin (garbled) silo, war room. 1 man job. Stable apertures; loss rates acceptable.”
She’d read the notes and then returned the envelope to his pocket, and that night, after Roger came home, she mentioned she was taking his suit to the cleaners.
The next morning, the envelope was gone.
Bootleg.
And when Bootleg was going badly, if something hadn’t worked – she always knew when something hadn’t worked – Roger would rage, his anger inevitably focusing on her attempts to console him, then on her. She could not reveal what she knew about Bootleg – a security breach, as he’d warned her the times she’d asked about his work, could cost him the project and maybe land him in the federal stockade to boot. So she could offer him no encouragement, no solace, nothing beyond the meaningless assurances that he’d eventually discover a way around the problem, whatever it was. But that seemed only to aggravate him, as if he knew he’d never solve the riddle of Bootleg and resented her blind confidence he would.
Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore. His stormy outbursts, his anger and browbeating. She filed for divorce. The project was going nowhere. Funding was dying on the vine. Roger was consumed by hate – for her, for Bootleg, for just everything.
“Jenny?” Angela asked.
Jenny shook her head. The girl mounted the Rocket Slide, and a silent claxon within Jenny began to gong, No! Don’t do that! Get down from there before – before –
The girl swooshed and disappeared.
“ – devil’s advocate, you know. You wouldn’t think that, would you?” Angela was saying, cautiously. She hesitated, the lines around her mouth tight with an effected frown, and stared deeply into Jenny’s eyes. “Earth to Jenny. Are you listening?”
Jenny blinked. She turned to Angela, blushing, and laughed nervously.
“No – I mean yes. Actually … no. I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat. “I guess I’m kind of out of it today. Something about the playground, something I can’t explain. It gives me the creeps, if you want to know the truth.” She held up an arm, turned it to the bright sun. “Look at me,” and she laughed again, a sound without humor. “I’ve got goosebumps.”
Angela sighed. “It’s just a park, Jen. What could be wrong with a park? It’s not as if there were muggers and perverts hiding in the bushes.”
Jenny smiled at the notion. “It’s nothing like that. I really couldn’t explain it, but I’ve got this feeling, you know, like something isn’t right.”
“I’d call it an overactive imagination.”
Jenny looked back at the slide. Another boy was slowly climbing the ladder. The slide loomed over the park, primeval in its hugeness, a symbol for some dimly remembered horror, making even the trees seem incidental. Light glittered forbiddingly from the firebolt lettering along its neck.
“I know one thing. I do not like that slide. I think it’s too tall; a child could break his neck if he fell off it.”
The boy hoisted himself onto the smooth metal.
Angela sniffed. “Oh come on, Jen. Amanda used to play on it all the time.”
“She could fall climbing – ”
Angela shook her head. “Roger used to help her up the slide. You know, you could do the same thing.”
“I don’t like it,” Jenny insisted. “I’ve been sitting here the past five minutes watching children throw themselves into that thing – like sacrifices to some – some god …” The idea had her trembling, as if her joints had quietly come unpinned. “I don’t like the damned thing – there’s something weird about it.”
“Oh Jenny!” Angela snorted. “You’re getting twitchy in your old age.”
“I mean it.”
The boy hesitated, acted as if he’d changed his mind. The slide sucked him down. Jenny watched, waiting, a sense of foreboding winding itself tightly along the cords in her neck. She closed her eyes and rubbed them, her thoughts again uncovering the stone of memory that was Roger. She shuddered as a familiar, sick fear slithered over her, shadowy and impossible to manage.
Roger. She hadn’t heard from him in a year. Then, something had happened. A breakthrough. Something. Not a word about it in the press, of course, but she knew something had happened. Roger was back, swaggering into her living room like an Errol Flynn gone to rot, all smugness and confidence, as if the secret half of his life had finally resolved itself and he could now devote all his energies to compensating her for the distraction of a divorce.
He wouldn’t hurt her, at least not physically. He was a Phd. There were ways to hurt a person – clever ways – that might suit a quantum theorist’s penchant for elegance.
He wanted Amanda.
After countless confrontations – one that required the intervention of police – they’d gone to court. And when the judge said no, she’d seen that smear of a smirk in Roger’s eyes, that malicious squint that said no damned piece of paper could change his mind, and maybe Jenny had better lock the doors at night and keep a sharp eye, oh, a very sharp eye on Amanda, because sometimes fathers took little girls away from their mothers, no matter what the judge said. Sometimes they did things like that.
She breathed deeply and tried to muster a facade of composure. The bastard. He’d better not try it.
She gazed back out over the park, imagined little eyes scuttling to hide, and whispered, “Maybe it is Roger. Maybe.”
Angela reached around her, pulled her close. She felt hot. “You see, that’s what’s got you so worked up, Jen. Roger.”
She turned Jenny’s face to hers. “And you’ve got to stop worrying about the little shit. There’s nothing he can do; nothing at all. Never again. That was all decided in court, remember? Roger is history. He’s under a permanent restraining order, OK? So forget about him.” She cocked her head, the set of her mouth softening into a smile.
Jenny managed a tepid smile herself and nodded – an almost imperceptible movement of her head – then with greater conviction. The little shit. Her fear began to evaporate, the space it had occupied filling with gratitude. Just a little shit.
She said, “You know what I’d like?”
“What?”
Jenny paused. “I think I’d like a cup of coffee. Or a drink.”
They burst into nervous titters and sank into the maw of the bench, at once comfortable again, the tension gone. Angela whewed and answered, “I think both can be arranged. You know, you really had me going there. All that talk about slide gods. I almost expected Rod Serling to jump out of the bushes at me.”
Jenny smiled sheepishly, started to thank her, stopped, the thought derailed and clicking – my God – the words were a glacier in her throat. A small figure was at the top of the Rocket Slide, its face slack with innocent wonder. My God? A Novocaine deadness settled into the square of Jenny’s back, then faded as she was overcome with dread.
Amanda –
A hammerstroke of horror, cold as lightning is hot, surged in stinging fingers along her nerves and set them to thrumming. At first, she could not move; then she was off the bench, running a cry strangled at the back of her throat. She ran automatically, her eyes locked to the figure atop the slide. And when the girl started to sit down, as if she too would give herself to that gleaming metal throat, Jenny did scream.
Amanda looked up, saw her mother and spoke words that were incomprehensible with the distance. Her face was a question mark, a Did-I-do-something-wrong? expression. Then she stared back down into the Rocket Slide.
Jenny’s heart lurched; she drew in a whistling breath and shouted, “NO! Amanda – NO! Get down from there now!”
She hurtled around the slide, the flaming letters R-O-C-K-E-T S-L arching above her, meteors snaking down from the metal ethers. She grabbed a handrail and put her foot on the first rung and the slide seemed to throb to life, as if secret engines had been fired and would launch it into outer space. Amanda looked down at her mother, looked back into the slide … her expression slowly melting into the immaculate terror that only a child can know.
She whispered huskily, “Mommee!”
Jenny scrambled for handholds, footholds, her foot slipping from the rungs and her body flattening against the unyielding steel. An agony of pain flared from her shin. She saw that Amanda had a death grip on the guardrails. Her face was pallid, as if the monsters in closets and beneath beds were suddenly alive and lurking within the slide. Her feet stretched toward its maw as if something were trying to pull her inside. Her eyes were locked in a fierce squint.
Jenny hauled herself up, up the ladder, shivering involuntarily as she climbed. For a splintered second she thought she heard voices. The metal began to tingle and burn – frozen the way it might freeze in the stratosphere.
“MOMMEE!”
The girl’s hand slipped from the guardrail and she flipped onto her side –
“MOMMEE! I CAN’T HOLD ONE!”
And the slide pulled at her, gulping swallows of gravity, friction and inertia unbound and gone wild. The girl tried to grab the rail with her free hand and a dark cloud of panic swelled within Jenny, obliterating all thought but ascent, everything with ascent as its motive –
“HELP ME – ”
– three rungs, she was three rungs away –
“MOMMEE! MOMMEEEEE!”
– two –
“HOLD ON, AMANDA! DON’T LET GO – ”
– it pulled –
– one rung –
– the girl’s fingers slipped, one, two, three four, from the rail –
– Jenny wailed and snatched –
And grabbed a small fist. She fought to pull her daughter to her against the capering insanity of the Rocket Slide, called strength from reservoirs she hadn’t known existed, pulling her daughter out of the tunnel. She wrapped an arm around the biting, sub-zero metal and grabbed the girl by her shoulder and pulled until the girl slammed against her and the Rocket Slide heaved like a thing denied breath. Only then did she dare to look, to see into its throat –
– and stared into the vast, star-painted belly of the universe. A spiral galaxy unwound, frozen alive in the slow progression of time; wizards’ eyes of stars dusted the tunnel, shining hard and unblinking as they might from space. A ringed planet, its equator tilted insanely against the plane, loomed to one side, and as Jenny watched, a small dot of light, at first inconspicuous among the other stars, began to dilate. White light burned through, in fierce contrast to the surrounding void. The dot enlarged until it eclipsed nearly everything else in the tunnel, and a face appeared within it, blurred and amorphous. Jenny thought she could see hands reaching from the light, and she heard words, distorted at first, but gaining in clarity, as the circle of light expanded.
She thought she heard, “Come to Daddy.” She thought she recognized the voice.
Her thoughts seized on a single word: Bootleg. And everything inside her stopped.
Then Angela’s had her by the shoulders and arms, pulling her back to the top of the ladder. She gave herself to Angela, limp, and slipped fitfully beneath the surface of consciousness.
She thought she heard Amanda sobbing.
—
At dusk: An ethereal light glittered from the Rocket Slide. A lone child sat at the top of the chute, staring into the light. “No,” she shook her head. “My name’s Susie. Not ‘Manda.” And no, she didn’t know where Amanda lived because she didn’t know any Amanda, and she wasn’t lying and No! she wouldn’t come closer so he could see her.
The girl clambered down the ladder. She ran home to tell her mother about the bad man. Somebody’s father.
In the slide.
And the playground, the Rocket Slide: They did not move.