The concrete sluiceway, along which the gondolas had once moved, was
three feet deep and eight feet wide. A much narrower channel in the
sluiceway floor contained the rusted chain-drive mechanisms long series
of blunt, curved, six-inch-high hooks that had pulled the boats forward
by engaging the steel loops on the bottoms of their hulls.
When the ride had been in operation, those hooks had been concealed by
water, contributing to the illusion that the gondolas were actually
adrift. Now, dwindling into the dreary realm ahead, they looked like a
row of stubby spines on the back of an immense prehistoric reptile.
The world of the living, he thought, is always fraught with deception.
Beneath the placid surface, ugly mechanisms grind away at secret tasks.
He walked deeper into the building. The gradual downward slope of the
sluiceway was at first barely perceptible, but he was aware of it
because he had passed that way many times before.
Above him, to either side of the channel, were concrete service walks,
about four feet wide. Beyond them were the tunnel walls, which had been
painted black to serve as a non-reflective backdrop for the moments of
half-baked theater performed in front of them.
The walkways widened occasionally to form niches, in some places even
whole rooms. When the ride had been in operation, the niches had been
filled with tableaus meant to amuse or horrify or both: ghosts and
goblins, ghouls and monsters, ax-wielding madmen standing over the
prostrate bodies of their beheaded victims. In one of the room-sized
areas, there had been an elaborate graveyard filled with stalking
zombies; in another, a large and convincing flying saucer had disgorged
blood-thirsty aliens with a shark’s profusion of teeth in their huge
heads. The robotic figures had moved, grimaced, reared up, and
threatened all passersby with tape-recorded voices, eternally repeating
the same brief programmed dramas with the same menacing words and
snarls.
No, not eternally. They were gone now, carted away by the official
salvagers, by agents of the creditors, or by scavengers.
Nothing was eternal.
Except death.
A hundred feet beyond the entrance doors, he reached the end of the
first section of the chain-drive. The tunnel floor, which had been
sloping imperceptibly, now tilted down sharply, at about a
thirty-five-degree angle, falling away into flawless blackness. Here,
the gondolas had slipped free of the blunt hooks in the channel floor
and, with a stomach-wrenching lurch, sailed down a
hundred-and-fifty-foot incline, falling into the pool below with a
colossal splash that drenched the passengers up front, much to the
delight of those fortunate or smart enough to get a seat in the back.
Because he was not like ordinary men and possessed certain special
powers, he could see part of the way down the incline, even in that
utterly lightless environment, although his perception did not extend to
the very bottom. His catlike night vision was limited: within a radius
of ten or fifteen feet, he could see as clearly as if he stood in
daylight; thereafter, objects grew blurry, steadily less distinct,
shadowy, until darkness swallowed everything at a distance of perhaps
forty or fifty feet.
Leaning backward to retain his balance on the steep slope, he headed
down into the bowels of the abandoned funhouse. He was not afraid of
what might wait below. Nothing could frighten him any more. After all,
he was deadlier and more savage than anything with which this world
could threaten him.
Before he descended half the distance to the lower chamber, he detected
the odor of death. It rose to him on currents of cool dry air. The
stench excited him. No perfume, regardless of how exquisite, even if
applied to the tender throat of a lovely woman, could ever thrill him as
profoundly as the singular, sweet fragrance of corrupted flesh.
5
Under the halogen lamps, the stainless-steel and white-enameled surfaces
of the operating room were a little hard on the eyes, like the geometric
configurations of an arctic landscape polished by the glare of a winter
sun.
The room seemed to have gotten chillier, as if the heat flowing into the
dead man was pushing the cold out of him, thereby lowering the air