“Let me carry my little Jesus he said, “my sweet little lamb,It will be
my privilege to carry you.” There was no warmth in his voice in spite of
the way he was talking. Only hatred and scorn. She knew that tone, had
heard it before. No matter how hard you tried to fit in and be
everybody’s friend, some kids hated you if you were too different, and
in their voices you heard this same thing, and shrank from it.
He carried her through the open, broken, rotting doors into a darkness
that made her feel so small.
Lindsey didn’t even bother getting out of the car to see if the gate
could be opened. When Hatch pointed the way, she jammed the accelerator
to the floor. The car bucked, shot forward. They crashed onto the
grounds of the park, demolishing the gate and sustaining more damage to
their already battered car, including one shattered headlight.
At Hatch’s direction, she followed a service loop around half the park.
On the left was a high fence covered with the gnarled and bristling
remnants of a vine that once might have concealed the chainlink entirely
but had died when the irrigation system had been shut off. On the right
were the backs of rides that had been too permanently constructed to be
dismantled easily. There were also buildings fronted by fantastic
facades held up by angled supports that could be seen from behind.
Leaving the service road, they drove between two structures and onto
what had once been a winding promenade along which crowds had moved
throughout the park. The largest Ferris wheel she had ever seen,
savaged by wind and sun and years of neglect, rose in the night like the
bones of a leviathan picked clean by unknown carrion-eaters.
a car was parked beside what appeared to be a drained pool in front of
an emmense structure.
“The funhouse,” Hatch said, for he had seen it before through other
eyes.
It had a roof with multiple peaks like a three-ring circus tent, and
disintegrating stucco walls. She could view only one narrow aspect of
the structure at a time, as the headlights swept across it, but she did
not like any part of what she saw. She was not by nature a
superstitious person although she was fast becoming one in response to
recent experience-but she sensed an aura of death around the funhouse as
surely as she could have felt cold air rising off a block of ice.
She parked behind the other car. A Honda. Its occupants had departed
in such a hurry that both front doors were open, and the interior lights
were on.
Snatching up her Browning and a flashlight, she got out of the
Mitsubishi and ran to the Honda, looked inside. No sign of Regina.
She had discovered there was a point at which fear could grow no
greater. Every nerve was raw. The brain could not process more input,
so it merely sustained the peak of terror once achieved. Each new
shock, each new terrible thought did not add to the burden of fear
because the brain just dumped old data to make way for the new. She
could hardly remember anything of what had happened at the house, or the
surreal drive to the park; most of it was gone for now, only a few
scraps of memory remaining, leaving her focused on the immediate moment.
On the ground at her feet, visible in the spill of light from the open
car door and then in her flashlight beam, was a four-foot length of
sturdy cord. She picked it up and saw that it had once been tied in a
loop and later cut at the knot.
Hatch took the cord out of her hand. “It was around Regina’s ankles.
He wanted her to walk.”
“Where are they now?”
He pointed with his flashlight across the drained lagoon, past the three
large gray canted gondolas with prodigious mastheads, to a pair of
wooden doors in the base of the funhouse. One sagged on broken hinges,
and the other was open wide. The flashlight was a four-battery model,
just strong enough to cast some dim light on those far doors but not to