cars ahead of them?” Conrad stepped up to the gondola channel by the
exit ramp and looked down at the tracks. Faking surprise, he said,
“The center drive chain isn’t moving.” “What’s that mean?” Joey asked,
stepping up beside him.
“It means the damned machinery has broken down again,” Conrad said.
“It happens every once in a while. Your sister and her friends are
stuck in there.
I’ll have to go inside and see what’s wrong with the equipment.” He
turned away and started around the side of the funhouse. Then he
stopped and looked back as if he had forgotten Joey for a moment.
“Come along, son.
I might need your help.”
The boy hesitated.
“Come on,” Conrad said. “Let’s not leave your sister sitting in the
dark.”
The boy followed him to the rear of the funhouse.
Conrad opened the door that led to the room beneath the main floor of
the structure. He went inside, felt for the light chain, pulled on
it.
Joey entered after him. “Wow!n the boy said. “I didn’t realize
there’d be so many machines!n Conrad closed and locked the door behind
them. When he turned to Joey, he grinned and said, You lying little
shit. Your mother’s name isn’t Leon”.”
, Amy, Liz, and Buzz were deep in the funhouse when a string of lights
came on above the track. They had turned several sharp bends, had
edged nervously down a couple of long, dark straightaways, and had just
started up a steep slope, past wax dummies of monsters from various
science fiction movies.
The lights didn’t completely dispel the darkness. Deep shadows lay
close by.
But any light at all was welcome, for Amy had only one match left.
“What’s happening?” Liz asked anxiously. She was frightened of any
change in their situation, even if that change meant light instead of
darkness.
“I don’t know,’ Amy said uneasily.
“It’s turned the lights on so it can look for us more easily,” Liz
said.
“That’s what’s happening, and you know it.” “Well, if that is the
case,” Amy said, “we’ll be a lot harder to find if we keep moving.”
aRight,” Buzz said. “Let’s don’t just stand here. Let’s find a way
out.”
“There isn’t one,” Liz said. But she moved uphill with them.
When they reached the top of the rise, they found a large display
featuring six man-sized, tentacled, bug-eyed monsters. The aliens were
disembarking from a flying saucer, absurd shapes frozen in the
frost-pale backwash from the lights above the tracks.
“That saucer’s pretty damned big,” Buzz said. Y’ll bet we could all
three hide in it.” “They’d be sure to look in there,” Amy said. aWe
can’t stand still, and we can’t hide. We have to get out.” Just as she
finished speaking, the drive chain in the center of the tracks started
to move.
They all jumped, startled.
In the distance an approaching gondola rattled noisily along the
rails-clatter-clunk-clatterclunk–a hard, sharp sound, audible above
the music and the recorded laughter, growing louder by the second.
“It’s coming for us,” Liz said. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, that freak is
coming to get us!”
The dull, rusty knife that Amy had taken off one of the monster models
now seemed like a laughable weapon.
Clatter-clunk -clatter-clunk . . .
“Quick,” Buzz said. “Get off the tracks.”
They clambered onto the wide ledge where the six aliens were coming out
of the flying saucer.
Clatter-clunk-clatter-clunk . . .
“You two go over by the spaceship,” Buzz said.
Make yourselves visible. Make sure his attention is on you.”
~ “What are you going to do?” Amy asked.
Buzz grinned. It was a strained, frightened, utterly humorless grin.
He was struggling to maintain his macho image. He pointed to a
papier-mache boulder and said, “I’m going to stand over there by that
rock. When the car comes up the hill . . . when the bastard in it
sees – the two of you, I’m going to chop him before he has a chance to
jump out onto the tracks.” “It might work,” Amy said.
Sure,” Buzz said. “I’ll split him wide open.”
Clatter-clunk-clatter-clunk . . .
The gondola turned the nearest corner and ~ started up the slope toward