Chapter 1 15 Clicks The Sky Cruiser By Emily Rowan Pierce. Junior Editor, StoryShellOS. Listen to audio version Open Third Place Nomad playlist Serialized Fiction Audio available September 2026 The instructions said fifteen clicks. Not fourteen. Not sixteen. Fifteen. The old man had made that part unusually clear. “Count them out loud if you have to,” he said. I laughed because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. The machine sat beneath the loading platform of an amusement ride that looked like it had been built by men who assumed children were more durable than we later discovered. Painted wooden gondolas hung from a steel wheel perhaps forty feet across. The cars were red and yellow once, although years of salt air had softened both colors into something closer to rust and nicotine. Above them, a hand-painted sign announced: THE SKY CRUISER Underneath, in letters that had mostly surrendered to weather: SEE THE WHOLE WORLD FROM HERE You couldn’t. You could see the parking lot, an abandoned miniature golf course, two blocks of old beach cottages and, if the air was clear, a thin blue strip of Atlantic Ocean. That was apparently the whole world. The Sky Cruiser belonged to a place called Funland, although no one had bothered to remove the sign when Funland closed. That had been nineteen years earlier. Now the property belonged to somebody in New Jersey who was waiting for the town council to approve condominiums. I was there because a friend of a friend knew a guy who needed somebody to watch the place for three weeks. It paid cash. I had recently reached the stage of life where sentences beginning with a friend of a friend knew a guy had become strangely persuasive. I was fifty-four. I had quit one job, almost accepted another, started three businesses, abandoned two business plans, built several things nobody had asked for, written half a book, and spent an unreasonable percentage of the previous year sitting in my car thinking. So naturally I was qualified to operate an abandoned amusement park. The timing worked, too. I was in between things. Or, more accurately, I was in the middle of deciding whether I was in between things. There was a contract sitting in my inbox that could have made the decision for me. Good money. Good title. People I respected. Work I knew I could do. I had been staring at it for four days. Not because there was anything wrong with it. That was the problem. It was good enough that I could see the life attached to it. Monday morning coffee in a clean kitchen. A decent car in the driveway. Bills paid without thinking about them. Dinner at six. A vacation already on the calendar. People asking what I did and me having an answer that fit neatly into a sentence. My wife not having to wonder what strange thing I was building this week. Me not having to wonder either. Apple pie. A lawn that got cut on Saturday. Maybe a dog sleeping by the back door. Not exciting, exactly. But solid. Finished. A life with edges. And then there was the other version. No title. No guarantee. Some months good. Some months terrifying. Ideas scribbled in notebooks. Half-built things on folding tables. Coffee shops instead of conference rooms. Driving somewhere because an idea felt more important than whatever I was supposed to be doing. Maybe it became something. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I looked back ten years later and realized I had been brave. Maybe I looked back and realized I had been an idiot. That was what kept eating at me. I had somehow convinced myself that both lives already existed somewhere. One good. One bad. One waiting for me to choose correctly. I just needed to think long enough to figure out which was which. Watching an abandoned amusement park for three weeks seemed, at the time, like a perfectly reasonable place to do that thinking. Then I met Walter. Walter had worked at Funland since 1973. Technically, Walter had stopped working at Funland when Funland stopped existing. Walter did not appear to recognize this distinction. He wore navy work pants, a gray shirt with FUNLAND MAINTENANCE embroidered above the pocket, and a ring containing perhaps sixty keys. He showed me the bathrooms. The electrical panel. The breaker for the arcade. The water shutoff. The place where teenagers climbed the back fence. Then he took me beneath the Sky Cruiser. The room underneath smelled like grease, wet wood and something electrical. An iron wheel protruded from a gearbox near the floor. It was about the size of a dinner plate. Walter put his hand on it. “You turn this every morning.” “Why?” “Keeps tension on the drive.” “The ride works?” “No.” “So why keep tension on the drive?” Walter looked at me. It wasn’t an annoyed look. It was the look people give you when you have asked why a church has a steeple. “Because you do.” He turned the wheel. Click. Click. Click. A ratchet somewhere inside the gearbox answered each movement. Walter counted quietly. “Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.” He stopped. Then turned it once more. Click. “Fifteen.” He let go. “That’s it?” “That’s it.” “What happens if I do sixteen?” Walter took his hand off the wheel. “Don’t.” Chapter 2 The Eighth Morning The first week was uneventful. I arrived around six-thirty every morning with coffee and a laptop. The amusement park became my office. I worked from an old concession stand overlooking the midway. There was still a menu above the counter. HOT DOG $2.25 CHEESE FRIES $3.00 LARGE COKE $1.75 I found the prices comforting. Every morning I unlocked the gate. Checked the property. Walked beneath the Sky Cruiser. Fifteen clicks. Then coffee. Laptop. Work. I liked it there more than I expected. No notifications except the ones I allowed. No meetings unless I scheduled them. No television. No house. No obligations sitting in the next room disguised as furniture. Just gulls. Wind. An empty amusement park. And me. It was probably not psychologically healthy. Most useful things aren’t. On the eighth morning, I lost count. I had been thinking about the contract. That was the problem. People imagine accidents happen because somebody isn’t paying attention. Usually they’re paying attention to the wrong thing. Click. Click. Click. I was thinking about the salary. Click. The title. Click. Whether doing work I was good at was the same as doing work I wanted. Click. Whether certainty was really the same thing as safety. Click. I stopped. “Shit.” I had no idea what number I was on. I looked at the wheel. There was no indicator. No gauge. No helpful digital display saying: YOU HAVE TURNED THIS THING 12 TIMES, IDIOT. I closed my eyes. Tried to replay the clicks. Eleven. Maybe twelve. I turned the wheel. Click. Thirteen. Click. Fourteen. Click. Fifteen. I let go. Nothing happened. Naturally. I laughed at myself. Then I went upstairs. Chapter 3 Funland Was Full At 8:17, the carousel started playing music. Funland did not have electricity. Not really. A few circuits remained active for security lights and the maintenance building, but the rides had been disconnected years ago. I knew this because Walter had shown me. But somewhere across the midway, a calliope began playing. Not loudly. Faintly. Like music coming through a wall. I walked outside. The carousel stood beneath a round wooden pavilion about a hundred yards away. Its horses were covered with gray tarps. The music continued. I started toward it. Halfway across the midway, I noticed the cigarette machine. There hadn’t been a cigarette machine there before. I am certain of this. It stood outside what used to be the arcade. Red top. Chrome handle. MARLBORO WINSTON VICEROY I stopped walking. There are objects that tell you what year they belong to. A cigarette vending machine is one of them. Then somebody bumped into me. Hard. A cup hit the pavement. Ice went everywhere. “Oh God.” A girl. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Brown hair tied back. Shorts. A yellow shirt with something printed on the front that I couldn’t quite read. “I’m sorry.” “It’s okay.” “No, that was completely my fault.” She crouched and began collecting ice with her hands, which struck me as useless but polite. “You don’t have to save the ice.” She laughed. “I panicked.” She stood. Looked at me. Stopped laughing. There was something odd in her face. Not fear. Recognition, maybe. But recognition can look a lot like confusion. “What?” I asked. She tilted her head. “I know you.” “I don’t think so.” “No.” She kept staring. “No, I—” Her eyes moved past me. She pointed toward the entrance. “You’re on the—” A burst of music from the carousel swallowed the rest of the sentence. “The what?” She pointed again. There was a large wooden display near the gate. Old photographs. Funland opening day. Workers assembling rides. Families beside attractions that no longer existed. I walked toward it. The girl followed. “There.” She tapped one of the photographs. It was black and white. Or maybe badly faded color. A group of people stood in front of the Sky Cruiser. Four men. Two women. A child sitting on somebody’s shoulders. There was another person off to the side. His face had been caught in the glare. I leaned closer. The shape of the head. The shoulders. Something about the way he stood. For a second I knew exactly who it was. Then I didn’t. I moved closer. The face seemed to change. Not literally. Nothing moved. But one moment he looked young. The next old. Then familiar. Then completely unknown. I could almost make out the features if I looked slightly away from them. “See?” the girl said. I didn’t answer. “When was this taken?” She looked at the photograph. Then at me. “I don’t know.” There should have been a date beneath it. There was a brass plate. The surface had been rubbed smooth. “What year is it?” She laughed. “What?” The question had escaped before I could stop it. “What year is it?” “You’re serious?” “No.” “Yes, you are.” She smiled, but cautiously now. I pulled my phone from my pocket. Tuesday, September 22, 2026. No service. The time was 8:19. The girl looked at the screen. Her expression changed again. “What?” “Nothing.” She stepped backward. “What?” “Your phone.” I looked at it. “What about it?” She shook her head. “Nothing.” Someone called her name from across the midway. At least I think it was her name. She turned. Then looked back at me. “You really don’t remember?” “Remember what?” But she was already walking away. “Remember what?” She disappeared into a group of people. I looked back at the photograph. The person at the edge was gone. Not the photograph. The person. There were now six people standing in front of the ride. I counted twice. Then somebody pushed between me and the display. When they passed, the entire display was gone. A cigarette machine stood against the wall. I walked backward several steps. That was when I noticed the parking lot. It was full. Station wagons. An enormous brown sedan. A Volkswagen Beetle. Cars I remembered seeing when I was a kid. A boy ran past carrying cotton candy. Short gym shorts. Striped socks. A Star Wars shirt. I stared at him. The shirt looked new. Or old. I couldn’t decide which. Another child rolled past on sneakers with small wheels embedded in the soles. A woman behind him held something flat and black to her face for a second. Camera. Phone. I looked again. She wasn’t there. The midway seemed to flicker without actually changing. A man walked past smoking a cigarette. Behind him came somebody wearing wireless headphones. Then a woman pushing a stroller that looked forty years too modern. I turned slowly. Funland was full. But it wasn’t any year I understood. A ride operator wore a red striped uniform and a smartwatch. A teenage boy dropped a quarter into an arcade machine. A little girl ran by holding something that looked like a tablet. Then it was a stuffed animal. Then I wasn’t certain I’d seen anything at all. The smell hit me next. Popcorn. Hot grease. Cigarettes. Ocean. Creosote. Coppertone. My mother used to put it on us when I was a kid.