Page 19 of Hell's Fear

“Dude?” Diesel inquired.

“I fuckin’ hate clowns; I have severe coulrophobia,” he admitted.

“Oh crap,” Nando replied. “There’s no doubt we’re going to run into clowns.”

I whimpered, and so did Booth.

Nando spun on him. “You too?” he asked.

Booth nodded.

“This is gonna be a shitstorm,” Nando muttered, and I couldn’t disagree.

“Okay, let’s make a start, or we could end up locked in a room with clowns!” Blaze said. I sent him a horrified look and began searching for a way out.

“There’s some tangram pieces here,” Alice called, looking at a table next to the popcorn stand.

“Do they have sensors on the back?” Tiny replied.

“Yeah,” Alice responded after checking.

“I’ve got four frames here with loads of sensor connections. Maybe they fit into these?” Tiny proposed.

Alice picked up a few and brought them over. Tiny glanced at them and nodded.

“Should we put them together on the table and then hook them up over here?” I murmured.

“Good idea. If Tiny and Alice fix them, we can search for other clues,” Nando suggested.

We had a good poke around, but the truth was we had no idea what we were searching for. It took Tiny and Alice fifteen minutes to fit the tangram puzzles together.

“Now we have to match them to the correct frame,” Alice announced, breaking off her left-hand bottom piece. She carefully checked each frame until she found the corresponding slot. The puzzle fragment lit up when the sensors connected.

Tiny began checking his, and Diesel and Blaze took the other two. Finally, when they’d all been completed, four images stood out.

“Balloons, lions, wands, and clowns,” Diesel mused as his eyes searched the room.

“I can’t see any of those lying around,” Booth replied.

“The popcorn machine?” Razor inquired.

Booth and Nando peered inside but shook their heads.

“I have four clowns on this poster, and I see balloons, wands, and a lion,” Blaze called out. We all wandered over to the posters.

“Add them all up?” Booth suggested.

“Think so, and then what?” I asked. “Maybe we have to push the tangram puzzles the number of times that we count?”

“I can’t spot anything else to enter the numbers into,” Diesel agreed.

“Call out how many balloons,” Tiny said. We added them up and counted fourteen. Tiny pressed fourteen times on the puzzle, and it turned green.

There were eight lions, three wands and nine clowns. As soon as the panels went dark, the popcorn machine switched on. A hand rose in the middle, holding a key.

“How do we get that?”

“No idea,” Blaze replied after examining the casing.

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