stepped around the bloody remains and hurried toward the end of the
Hall of the Giant Spiders. Just before he reached the next turn in the
tracks, he climbed out of the gondola channel and stepped into a
tableau featuring t vo animated figures: a man and a man-sized spider
locked in mortal combat, unmoving now that there were no marks to
witness their struggle. The battling man and tarantula were posed in
front of a jumbled pile of papier-mache boulders. Conrad went around
behind the false rocks and knelt down.
The glow from the string of work lights above the tracks did not reach
back here. He put a hand out in the darkness in front of him and felt
the rough board floor. After a few seconds he located the ringbolt for
which he had been searching. He pulled on the ring, lifting a
trapdoor, one of six that were scattered around the funhouse for
maintenance purposes.
He slid on his belly, backwards through the trap, feeling with his feet
for the rungs of a slanted ladder that he knew was there. He found the
ladder and descended into pitch blackness. Just after his head was
below the funhouse floor, his feet touched the plank flooring of the
bottom level, and he pushed away from the ladder and stood up
straight.
He reached into the darkness on his right side, passed his hand through
the air, found the light chain, and pulled it. Two dozen bulbs came on
all over the basement, but the place was still shadowy. He was in a
low-ceilinged room full of machinery, cogwheels, cables, belts,
pulleys, chain-driven mechanisms of odd design, these were the
mechanical guts of the funhouse.
l Turning away from the ladder, Conrad sidled between two machines and
stepped into a narrow aisle between banks of long, notched cables that
stretched across a series of large metal wheels. He hurried to the
northwest corner of the chamber, where there was a workbench, a tool
cabinet, a metal rack full of spare parts, a pile of tarps, and a
couple of suits of coveralls.
Conrad quickly pulled off his barker’s jacket, stepped out of his
trousers, and wriggled into a pair of coveralls. He didn’t want to
explain bloodstained clothes to Ghost.
He picked up one of the tarps and rushed back to the ladder.
Upstairs in the funhouse again, he returned to the dead woman on the
tracks.
He glanced at his wristwatch. Today’s show call was for four-thirty,
and that was precisely the time his watch showed him. At this very
moment the fairground gates were swinging open, and the marks were
pouring through.
Within ten minutes the first of them would be buying tickets for the
funhouse.
Ghost wouldn’t start the system until he’d gotten a final report on the
condition of the track. He must be wondering what was taking Conrad so
long.
In two or three minutes, he would come looking.
Conrad spread the tarp out in the gondola channel. He picked up the
still-warm body and dropped it in the middle of the sheet of canvas.
He grabbed the long, trailing hair and lifted the woman’s severed
head–its mouth open, its eyes wide–and put that on the tarp as
well.
He added her shredded, bloody clothes to the pile, then a flashlight, a
small notebook, and a hard hat. What sort of woman wore a hard hat?
What had she been doing in the funhouse? He looked for a purse. A
woman ought to be carrying a purse, but he couldn’t find one. At last,
panting from the exertion, he pulled the ends of the tarp together,
lifted it, and hefted it out of the gondola channel, onto the ledge
where the man and the spider were temporarily frozen in combat.
As he scrambled onto the ledge after the tarp, he heard someone call
his name.
“Conrad?”
With a sinking heart, Conrad looked back along the tracks, down the
gloomy gondola tunnel.
It was Ghost. The albino was standing fifty feet away, at the far end
of the straightaway, just inside the entrance to the Hall of the Giant
Spiders. He was only a pale silhouette, Conrad wasn’t able to see the