THE FERRIS WHEEL

The young couple walking along the seedier end of the seafront in a south coast town in the earlier hours of a late Summer morning were slightly surprised to find themselves walking past a shiny, brand-new Ferris Wheel, or Big Wheel as most folk call them in these parts.

Boy turned to Girl and said :

'How long's that been there?'

She just shrugged, and they walked on, their curiosity quite outweighed by their need to get to their bed and sleep off the large quantities of cheap alcohol recently consumed.

Amidst the stale odour of last nights' fish and chips, a young-to-middle-aged man of unremarkable appearance was working round the Big Wheel, which was a smaller version of the London Eye. He was polishing the pods, checking the mechanism and making sure the correct signage was in place. The sort of person in fact that you see all the time preparing his pitch in a fairground.

By the time it was light, the man was sitting in the pay-booth, eating his breakfast-in-a-bun, and drinking his second large mug of tea. The suns' rays sparkled on the waves gently lapping the shingle shore and reflected brightly on the discreet black glass of the shiny white pods, two of which were marked 'VIP' - you got a bottle of champagne and a commentary if you paid extra for one of those.

Business was slow throughout the morning; this part of the town only started to come alive towards the end of the working day, as pleasure-seekers populated the pubs and clubs, and men in cars with blacked-out windows sat in the seafront parking bays selling goods of dubious origin and use.

In fact it was about 5 p.m. before anyone's curious stares turned into a desire to try out the new attraction. A young couple handed over their eighteen pounds and settled into a non-VIP pod. After their three statutory slow revolutions, they were duly released, looking a bit spaced-out and complaining that an unusually thick sea-mist had obscured their hoped-for view of the Channel. However, their slightly dishevelled appearance hinted at other interesting occupations they had been able to find during their trip in the darkened pod.

Business picked up around 9 p.m., when the now more evident coloured lights adorning each pod made the ride a more alluring prospect for youngsters already pink-cheeked after their first few drinks of the evening.

A more careful observer would have noticed that, as each couple came out of their compartment, two of the surrounding lights changed from red to green, one at each end of the light strip.

It was almost 2 a.m. when the last customers alighted from the ride, and the last two red lights turned green.

The attendant wearily did his last checks, and put up a 'CLOSED' sign. The only people now around to witness this were either too drunk or too tired to care anyway.

Before the hazy morning sun rose, with the blackened skeleton of the old burnt-out pier rising eerily from the water like an ailing sea-monster against the grey sky, the man began to dismantle the Ferris Wheel. First he turned his attention to the pods, carefully removing the string of lights from each one in rotation, and placing them carefully into a large metal chest. There was no-one interested enough to wonder why the lights still glowed green, although unattached to any power source; nor why, when the box was securely locked, the man passed his mobile phone over it several times, then seemed to send a text message before replacing it in his pocket.

There was then a brief - and largely unnoticed - power failure throughout the area, causing the lamp posts to darken then re-light almost immediately.

If anyone did actually register the fact that the Ferris Wheel had disappeared, they probably put it down to over-indulgence in various substances the night before; but if they had bothered to look skywards, they would have seen a shiny white object hovering in the air above, and they might even have detected the screams and moans from a hundred voices coming from the chest now stowed deep inside the vessel's hold.

Before the sun was full in the sky, as the changelings were settling into their new bodies and lives in Brighton, a non-descript young-to-middle-aged man was polishing a bright new Ferris Wheel in a run-down section of the Blackpool seafront, where the stale odour of last nights' fish and chips still lingered on the air..