and his skull cracked hard into the wooden wall. Trying to placate his
burning lungs, he sucked desperately on the night air, it was cold
against his teeth.
The shadow swooped down on him again.
It didn’t move like a man.
Bob saw green, glowing eyes.
He brought up one arm to protect his face, but his assailant struck
lower than that, Bob took a sledgehammer punch in the stomach. At
least, for one hopelessly optimistic moment, he thought he had been
punched. But the shadow-thing hadn’t struck him with its fist.
Nothing as clean as that. It had slashed him. He was badly cut. A
wet, sickening, sliding, dissolving sensation filled him. Stunned, he
reached down, put one trembling hand on his belly, and gagged with
revulsion and horror when he felt the size of the wound.
My God, I’ve been disemboweled!
The shadow stepped back, crouching, watching, snorting and sniffing
like a dog, although it was much too big to be a dog.
Gibbering hysterically, Bob Drew tried to hold his bulging intestines
inside his body. If they slipped out of him, there was no chance that
he could be sewn up and restored to health.
The shadow-thing hissed at him.
Bob was too deep in shock to feel more than the thinnest edge of the
pain, but a red veil descended over his vision. His legs turned to
water and then began to evaporate from under him. He leaned against
the wall of the funhouse, aware that he had little chance of survival
even if he stayed on his feet, but also aware that he had no chance at
all if he fell. His only hope was to hold himself together. Get to a
doctor. Maybe they could sew him up.
Maybe they could put everything back in place and prevent
peritonitis.
It was a long shot. Very long. But maybe . . . if he just didn’t
fall . . . He couldn’t allow himself to fall. He must not fall. He
wouldn’t fall.
He fell.
The carnies called it “slough night” and looked forward to it with true
Gypsy spirit. The last night of the engagement. The night they tore
down. The night they packed up and got ready to move on to the next
stand. The carnival shed itself of the town in much the same way that
a snake sloughed off its dead, dirty, unwanted skin.
To Conrad Straker, slough night was always the best night of the week,
for he continued to hope, against all reason, that the next stop would
be the one at which he would find Ellen and her children.
By one-thirty in the morning, the last of the marks was gone from the
Coal County, Pennsylvania, fairgrounds. Even before then, some pieces
of the show began to come down, although most of the job still lay
ahead.
Conrad, who owned two small concessions in addition to the enormous
funhouse, had already overseen the breaking down of those
enterprises.
One was a pitch-and-dunk, which he had shuttered and folded around one
o’clock. The other was a grab joint, so named because it was a
fastfood place with no chairs for the marks to sit down, they had to
grab their food and eat on the fly. He had closed the grab joint
earlier, around midnight.
Now, in the cool, mid-May night, he worked on the funhouse with
Gunther, Ghost, his other fulltime employees, a couple of local
laborers looking to make forty bucks each, and a pair of free-lance
roughies who traveled with the show. They broke the joint apart and
loaded it into two large trucks that would carry it to the next
stand.
Because Conrad’s funhouse could legitimately boast of being the largest
in the world, because it offered the marks solid thrills for their
money, and because the ride was long and dark enough to allow teenage
boys to cop a few feels from their dates, it was a popular and
profitable concession. He had spent many years and a lot of money
adding to the attraction, letting it grow organically into the finest
amusement of its kind on earth. He was proud of his creation.
Nevertheless, each time the funhouse had to be erected or torn down,