The Staff Tunnels at Kingsley Fair Brought Me Up in the Wrong Year | Horror Story Animated

📖 Free book of Kettleby Archive files: https://louloubooks.com/horror/free?ref=podcast-staff-tunnels-kingsley-fair

The Staff Tunnels at Kingsley Fair Brought Me Up in the Wrong Year | Horror Story Animated · Kettleby Archive · Episode 24

How does a junction box disappear from a concrete wall and leave concrete that already looks old? I do closing duties at Kingsley Fair. Torch, radio, eleven fifteen start, the same four hatches every night. That night I had a cup of tea from my flask in my coat pocket, still warm enough to drink. I

Chapters:
0:00 The Wrong Corridor
1:49 The Figure at the Far End
2:55 📖 The free book (louloubooks.com/scary)
3:20 NOT YET
5:04 The Old Ticket Booth
6:33 Over the Fence
8:13 The Ledger Entry

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.

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How does a junction box disappear from a concrete wall and leave concrete that already looks old? I do closing duties at Kingsley Fair. Torch, radio, eleven fifteen start, the same four hatches every night. That night I had a cup of tea from my flask in my coat pocket, still warm enough to drink.

I never drank it. My hand swung out at the usual spot and hit smooth wall. Not a bolt hole, not a shadow, not a mark. The concrete looked ancient. Untouched. Like whatever had lived there had been painted over decades ago. What came out of the tunnel at the far end that night was not what went in.

I am still trying to work out which direction the swap happened. Four hatches, fifty metres apart. And if the box had always been gone, why could I still feel the ghost of the impact in my palm from every single previous night? How do you remember hitting something that was never there?

Back at the start of the season Bev walked me through the run. Hatch one. Then the costume alcove, five mascot heads on five hooks, Mr Chip in the middle with his brass buttons. Then the junction box, twenty six steps on. My halfway point. I counted it once and never again. Then, from further along the tunnel, a sound.

Metal on metal. One tap, like a button catching a ladder rung. My torch battery read eleven percent. I started walking. At hatch two I raised my torch to check the panel and that is when I saw it. At the very far end of the corridor, maybe fifty metres off, a figure in full Mr Chip costume stood completely still.

Head tilted a few degrees too far to the right. Not moving. Not breathing, as far as I could tell. I called out. Nothing. Then I noticed the brass buttons on its waistcoat were catching the light too brightly, like something newly polished. That was the last ordinary moment. I got on the radio to Bev and she said the costume had been signed back in at nine and nobody was cleared to be in the tunnels after closing, nobody.

Then she said the thing she always said, flat and firm: if the strip lights change colour down there, you come straight up, no exceptions, that is the rule. I said understood. Above me, without my noticing, the nearest strip light had already shifted from white to the faintest yellow. One thing before we carry on.

There's a story I've never told on the channel. A woman was paid four hundred pounds to be filmed while she slept, and on the seventh night the camera caught someone sitting on the edge of her bed. It's in a free book of Kettleby Archive files. Go to LouLouBooks.com slash scary. That's LouLouBooks.

com slash scary. The maintenance room was empty. One bare bulb, bare shelves, except for a laminated sign zip-tied to the bracket that read HATCH 2 INSPECTION CURRENT, the same sign I had checked in at the start of the season and never looked at since. Someone had crossed out CURRENT in marker pen and written NOT YET.

The bulb swung once. No draught. Then Bev's voice broke through the static, and behind it, just beneath the hiss, something else pressed its breath against the speaker. Bev came back on the radio. I asked her if someone was in the office with her. She said no. She was alone. Then she told me to finish the breaker run or the whole fair would lose power overnight and we would both miss the weekend bonus.

Sixty quid. That was it. I want to be honest about that. I had already decided something was wrong down here, and sixty quid was enough to make me keep walking toward it. I clipped the radio back on my belt, took a breath, and walked toward hatch three. I did hatch three without looking up.

I killed the last breakers at hatch four. When I turned back the corridor was different. Not dramatically, not impossibly, just wrong enough to stop my breath. The walls were cream, not the grey I knew. The strip light covers were an older style, longer tubes in metal cages. And when I put my hand on the ladder to climb out, it was shorter than it should be.

Two rungs missing at the top. The hatch was closer to the ground. I surfaced into the fair. Rain on the tarpaulins, rides dark, same as always. For about four seconds I nearly laughed with relief. Then I saw the Wheel. And beside the Wheel, standing solid and lit from inside, was the wooden ticket booth that had been demolished eighteen months ago.

A handwritten price board in the window read two shillings. A bare bulb glowed inside it. The rain fell straight through the light like it always had. The board said two shillings. A bare bulb. Rain falling straight through the light the way it always had at this fair. My radio was silent.

Then from below the boards, one tap of brass on metal. Then two. Getting closer. The hatch behind me lifted. A hand gripped the rim. I did not look. Then the voice. Slow, papery, right at my ear. Kit. Flat. Like someone reading from a register. I keyed the radio and said the one word Bev made us learn on the first day.

Help. That was all I got out. I turned and ran. Not for the gate. For the fence. Through the mud, in the dark, and behind me I could hear brass buttons dragging up the ladder rungs, one by one, steady as a clock. I hit the fence at a run and went straight up it. My left palm caught a wire staple on the way over and I felt it tear.

I landed hard on my right knee on the road outside, went down on both hands, and got back up without stopping. I ran until I reached the staff car park. Under the lights I stood there, soaked to the skin, hand bleeding into the rain, and tried to remember how to breathe. A family walked past on the pavement not three metres away.

Pushchair, balloon, dad with an umbrella. They did not look at me once. I was against a stranger's bonnet, hand bleeding through my fingers, soaking wet, shaking so hard my teeth knocked together. And then I noticed it, the fair music across the fence had changed. An older melody.

Something slower. Something I did not recognise from any speaker they had on-site. Two security officers went down hatch four. Twenty minutes. They came back up and said: grey walls, standard lights, ticket booth gone, nothing unusual. Then I played them my torch footage. My torch has a little camera clipped to it.

Twelve minutes of clean grey static. No shapes. No sound. One of them handed it back and would not meet my eye. Then his radio crackled. One short burst. Then a single tap, metal on metal. He went very still. Three days later I found a laminated sheet tucked under my wiper. A photocopy of a page from the fair's old ledger, fifty five years back.

Fuel. Bulbs. Cable. One line was circled in red. Groundsman, closing duties, tunnel run, did not return. No name. Just the sign off box. Except it wasn't empty. Someone had filled it in, in blue biro, and the ink was new. Two letters. K. W. My initials. In my handwriting. I still do the tunnel run.

I need the money. I radio the breaker count up and give the exact time I go down. Every single night. When I pass the alcove, I count the heads on the hooks. Five is normal. Some nights I count six. I never look long enough to see which one does not belong. And the tea is still in my coat pocket.

I never drank it. Every night it is still warm, as if it is still that night, as if part of me never came up. Last Tuesday I counted four heads. And when I got home, for the first time, the tea was cold.