around the midway– and then he saw her. She was with Liz, Buzz, and
another boy. The carny who had given Joey the free passes was helping
them into a gondola at the funhouse boarding gate.
Joey hesitated, remembering how weird the carny had acted this
afternoon. But he was so eager to tell Amy about how he had fooled
Mama that he shrugged off his misgivings and headed toward the
funhouse.
.- .
‘1.
The gondola seated four: two forward, two behind. Liz and Richie took
the front seats, Amy and Buzz sat in back of them.
They started with a jolt that made Liz yelp and laugh. The phony
castle doors opened, swallowed them, and closed again.
At first the gondola moved rapidly into the pitch blackness, but then
it slowed. A light popped on to the left of the track and above it,
and a leering, grizzled pirate laughed and thrust a sword at them.
Liz squealed, and Buzz took the opportunity to put his arm around
Amy.
On their right, just past the pirate, a very realistic-looking werewolf
was crouched on a ledge, suddenly illuminated by a moon that lit up
behind him.
His eyes glowed red, there was blood on his huge teeth, and his claws,
which he raked at the gondola, gleamed like splinters of a mirror.
“Oh, protect me, Richie!n Liz shouted in make believe terror.
“Protect my virgin body from that horrid beast!n She laughed at her own
performance.
The car slowed even more, and they came to a display in which an
ax-murderer was standing over one of his victims. The ax was buried in
the dead man’s skull, cleaving his forehead in two.
The gondola came to a complete stop.
“What’s wrong?” Liz asked.
“Must have broken down again,” Richie said.
They were sitting in purple-brown shadows. The only light came from
the ax-murderer exhibit beside them, and that was an eerie, greenish
glow.
“Hey!” Liz shouted into the darkness and into the waves of creepy
music that crashed over them. “Hey, let’s get this show on the road!”
“Yeah!” Buzz shouted. “Hey, out there!”
For a minute or two they all called to the barker, who was on the
platform outside, beyond the closed doors of the attraction, no more
than thirty or forty feet away. No one responded to them, and at last
they gave up.
“Shit,” Liz said.
“What should we do?” Amy asked.
“Stay put,” Richie said. “It’ll start moving again eventually.”
“Maybe we should get out and walk back to the doors,” Buzz said.
“Absolutely not,” Richie said. “If we did, and then the ride started
up again, our gondola would go offwithout us. And if another car came
through the entrance doors, it would run us down.” “I hope we don’t
have to wait in here too long,” Amy said, remembering the way the
barker had looked at her. “It’s spooky.”
“What a pain in the ass,” Liz said.
aBe patient,” Richie said. “We’ll be rolling soon.”
“If we’ve got to just sit here,” Liz said, “I wish they’d shut off that
fuckin’ music. It’s way too loud.
. .
.
, i_ .
Something creaked loudly overhead.
1What was that?” Amy asked.
They all looked up in the darkness.
“Nothing,” Buzz said. “Just the wind outside.” “There isn’t any wind
tonight,” Amy said.
The creaking noise came again. This time there were other loud sounds
with it: a scraping, a thud, an animal-like grunting.
“I don’t think we–” Richie began.
Something flashed out of the darkness and seized him by the throat. An
arm thrust down from the low, unlighted ceiling over the gondola, an
arm that ended in a large, long-fingered, furcovered hand that was
tipped with murderously sharp claws. Though the arm moved fast, they
all saw it in the backwash of green light from the ax-murderer exhibit,
but they couldn’t see what was in the blackness above, at the other end
of the arm.
Whatever it was, its claws pierced Richie’s throat, hooked deep into
his flesh, and the thing hauled him up, off his seat. Richie kicked
frantically, his shoes drumming on the front of the gondola for a
second or two. Then he was out of the car, up, up, dragged through a