sooner or later.
Besides, you never knew for sure how clean and wholesome carnival food
was.
Maybe she had gotten a bad hot dog or had unwittingly eaten some piece
of filth along with her chiliburger.
Considering that possibility, he began to feel queasy himself. He
stared at his half-eaten candy apple and finally dropped it into a
trash barrel.
He wanted to find her and satisfy himself that she was all right, but
he didn’t think she would be too happy to see him while her breath
still stank of vomit. If she had just been sick in the ladies’ room,
she would want time to freshen up, patch her makeup, and put herself
back together.
After twenty-five minutes he threw Chrissy’s candy apple in the trash
with his own.
After half an hour, bored by the endlessly galloping horses and by the
rhythmically flashing brass poles, increasingly concerned about
Chrissy, he went searching for her. Earlier, he had watched her walk
away from the refreshment stand, admiring her round bottom and her
shapely calves, and then she had vanished in the crowd. A minute or
two later, he thought he had seen her golden head as she left the
midway near the funhouse, and now he decided to look in that area
first.
Between the funhouse and the freak show, a five-foot-wide path led back
to an open space behind the amusements, the outer ring of the
fairgrounds, where the restrooms were located. Toward the end of the
passageway, the shadows were so dark and thick that they seemed
tangible, like black drapes, and the night was surprisingly lonely
here, considering that the busy midway was only fifty or sixty feet
behind him.
Peering uneasily into the shadows, Bob wondered if Chrissy had
encountered more-serious trouble than just an upset stomach. She was a
very pretty girl, and these days, when so many people seemed to have
lost all respect for the law, there were more than a few men prowling
around who thought nothing of taking what they wanted from a pretty
girl, regardless of whether or not she wanted them to have it. Bob
supposed that there were even more men of that stripe in the carnival
than there were in the real world.
With growing trepidation he reached the end of the path and stepped
into the open area behind the funhouse. He looked right, then left,
and saw the comfort station. It was sixty yards away, rectangular,
gray, made of cement blocks, perched in the center of a tightly
circumscribed pool of bright yellowish light. He couldn’t see the
entire structure, only a third of it, because there was a row of ten or
twelve big carnival trucks parked in the intervening hundred and eighty
feet. Here the darkness was even deeper, the trucks were only hulking
outlines, and they made him think of slumbering, primeval beasts.
He took only two steps toward the distant comfort station before
putting his foot down on something that nearly sent him sprawling.
When he regained his balance, he reached down and picked up the
treacherous object.
It was Chrissy’s red clutch purse.
Bob Drew’s heart began to sink into a bottomless well.
At the far end of the funhouse, at the front of it, out on the midway,
the giant clown’s face sprayed the night with a brittle, shrapnel
laugh.
Bob’s mouth was dry. He swallowed hard, tried to squeeze out some
saliva.
“Chrissy?”
She didn’t answer.
“Chrissy, for God’s sake, are you there?”
A door squealed on unoiled hinges. Behind him.
The music and screaming inside the funhouse got louder as the door
opened.
Bob turned toward the noise, feeling something he had not felt in many
years, not since he had been a small boy alone in his dark bedroom with
the terrifying conviction that some hideous creature was hiding in the
closet.
He saw a forest of shadows, all but one of them perfectly still, but
that one was moving fast. It came straight at him. He was seized by
powerful, shadow hands.
“No.”
Bob was thrown against the rear of the funhouse with such incredible
force that the wind was knocked out of him, and his head snapped back,