Kelson grinned at him. His breath was very bad. “Now, settle down, Mayor. Why don’t you just run along and enjoy yourself. I can promise you that it’s gonna get real interesting around here ’fore long.”
“Maybe I don’t want to run along, Kelson. Maybe I’d like to leave and go home. What then?”
“Why, sir, you and your friends can leave just any old time you like. Ain’t nobody gonna stop you. You wanna leave now?”
Martin stared at him until the chief dropped his gaze. He muttered something under his breath about a long walk home.
“What did you say, Kelson?”
One of the city patrolmen laughed.
Martin’s eyes followed the chief’s turned head. All four tires on his pickup were flat. He looked up the line to Dick’s pickup, the foreman’s eyes following. A kid was running away from the truck, a knife in his hand. All the tires on Dick’s truck had been cut.
“Bastard!” Dick muttered. He took Martin’s arm and led him away from the gate, away from the now openly laughing city cops and the grinning Kelson. Just as he was about to speak, his eyes caught movement in the top chair of the ferris wheel. He pointed.
“Oh, no!” Martin breathed, lifting his eyes to the uppermost gondola.
A young man was standing up in the swaying gondola, waving his arms and shouting. “Look at me! Look at me! I can fly! Watch me fly!”
A crowd had gathered by the ferris wheel. “Jump, jump, jump!” they chanted.
“I can fly!” the young man shouted.
“Look at Nabo,” Martin said, cutting his eyes.
The man in black stood apart from the crowd, his arms folded across his chest. He was staring up at the young man in the swaying car, high in the air. Nabo was smiling.
The young man began flapping his arms like a large fatherless bird. He began cawing like a crow. Then he stepped out of the gondola and dropped like a brick. He turned twice, slowly spinning downward in the warm festive air.
He landed on the concrete lip of a permanent fair building. His head exploded, showering blood and brains all over the people standing closeby. The crowd all began laughing and joking at the sight.
Alicia ran up to Martin, her face flushed nearly out of breath. “Isn’t that great, Martin? What a wonderful act. I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you?”
Martin stared at her for a moment. “Act? Alicia, that kid is dead!”
“Don’t be such a silly-willy!” she tossed her head. “It’s all staged by the carnival.”
“Oh, lord!” Dick said, horror and revulsion in the words.
Matt Horton was kneeling by the broken and bloody body of the young man. The butcher had a plastic spoon in one hand and was dipping out brains from the shattered skull, eating them.
Gary pushed through the laughing, shouting, joking crowd, all of them looking with evil glee in their eyes at the ruined body on the ground. He joined Martin and Dick.
“Isn’t that hysterical, Gary?” Alicia asked. “I wonder how they do that?”
She laughed and walked off.
“Get the kids,” Martin said. “We’re getting out of this place. I was wrong. We should never have come.”
Eddie had just walked up. “Guess again, buddy. Take a look over at the gate.”
Twenty-five or thirty men were blocking the gate, all of them armed with rifles or shotguns.
“We could take a few of them out,” Dick said. “But none of us would survive it.”
The kids had joined the group. “Now what, Dad?” Mark asked.
Several “I should have’s” entered Martin’s head. I should have taken Alicia and the kids and left town. I should have called in state police reinforcements. I should have paid closer attention to what was going on in this town.
He felt the weight of defeat try to settle on his shoulders. He shrugged it off. “We fill up on hamburgers and hot dogs and then get to the farthest part of the fairgrounds. As soon as it’s dark, we go over the fence. Is that agreeable with everybody?”
It was.
Nabo met them as they walked toward a large refreshment booth. “It won’t do you any good,” he informed Martin.
Martin knew exactly what the man was talking about. But he had to ask. “What won’t?”
“Bunkering yourselves in some isolated part of the grounds. There is a lot of resentment toward you and your friends—among a certain segment of the community. They’ll get you. It’s only a matter of time. And bear in mind, Mr. Mayor: In all fairness, I did warn you to stay away.”
“Why did you? Did you know I would ingore the warning?”
“No. Oh ... perhaps it’s because with you and your group, I sensed a bitter fight.”
“Tell me the point of this, Nabo. I cannot see it.”
The man smiled that strange curving of the lips. “It’s only a game, Mr. Mayor. A fun game.”
Nicole stared at the man. “A boy jumping off a ferris wheel is a game to you? Killing is a game to you?”
“Of course. And you people think Satan doesn’t have a sense of humor. Shame on you!”
No one knew how to reply to that. Dick Mason stood and stared at the carnival man, his mouth open. He had one thought: kill this bastard!
Then it finally sank in: But the guy is already dead!
“Why don’t you people go have a good time?” Nabo suggested brightly. “There will be isolated incidents during the afternoon, but nothing for any of you to really concern yourselves with. Nothing . . .” he smiled, “... drastic is going to happen to any of you until tonight. Go. Enjoy your last day on this earth.”
“You’re crazy!” Frenchy told him. “Go . . . enjoy ourselves?”
Nabo turned his head to stare a her. “I must take my leave now. I must prepare for what the night will bring. Yes, enjoy yourselves, people. That’s what a carnival is for.” He walked away, losing himself in the large milling crowd.
A scream of pain turned their heads. “My God!” Susan cried, pointing toward a concession. “Look!”
It was a dart-throwing concession. Bust three balloons and win a prize. But there were no balloons to break. A woman had been lashed to a makeshift backboard, and she had already been impaled by half a dozen of the sharp-pointed feathered missiles. Blood was running down her face and neck.
“Help me!” she screamed, her eyes on a laughing, jeering man standing in the crowd. “Jim, for God’s sake. Help me!”
Her husband laughed.
Her tortured eyes found a teenage boy and girl standing by the man called Jim. “Help me, son!”
The boy and the girl spat at their mother.
The crowd snickered. A ranchhand took aim and let his dart fly, striking the woman in the stomach. She screamed in pain.
Dick stepped up to the man just as he was picking up another dart. The foreman balled a big right hand into a fist and busted the cowboy in the mouth, dropping him to the ground like a rock. Martin and Eddie had moved behind the concession, working at the ropes that bound the woman. They could hear the crowd turning ugly, shouting hate at Dick and the others.
“It’s all just in fun, you bastards!” a man yelled. “You get away here and let us have some fun or we’ll kill you.”
The ropes came loose just as several men and women charged around the tent and attacked Martin and Eddie. Martin threw up his arm in time to block a wildly thrown punch. Crossing with his left, he hit the man on the jaw, knocking him back, then drew his arm back and drove his elbow into the mouth of another attacker.
Eddie gasped in shock as he pulled the woman out of the rear of the concession. Someone had thrown their final darts, one catching the woman in the eye, and the other directly in the temple. She was kicking in death spasms.
“Eddie!” Martin shouted, struggling with a large woman and finally doubling her over by driving his fist into her stomach. “Let her go. We’ve got to get back to the others.”
“Grab the girl!” a man yelled. “Let’s have some fun with the kid.”
“Kill him!” another man yelled. Audie stepped into the melee and smashed the man in the face with a tent stake he’d jerked from the ground.
Martin and Eddie jerked up stakes and tore the tent ropes from them, then waded into the crowd, the heavy stakes clogging off of heads and shoulders and backs.
Martin could see no sign of Linda or Joyce or Gary. And he thought that strange.
Suddenly, and with no warning, the crowd veered off and began moving in another direction, leaving Martin and his group standing alone by the tent, wondering what in the world happened.
Susan said as much, looking around her as one of the men who had been screaming and cursing at her a moment past, smiled and tipped his hat and spoke to her.
“Let’s get out of here,” Dick suggested.
The group left the midway, moving into the maze of cars, trucks, campers and trailers. There they stopped and looked behind them. They had not been followed.
Martin quickly counted heads. They were all together. He cut his eyes. Nabo was standing a few yards away, smiling at them.
“Oh, you’re in real trouble, now!” he called. “You should not have interfered.”
“What did you think we would do?” Frenchy asked. “Just stand by and watch the torture without acting?”
“You’re very attractive, Miss. It’s a real pity that you’re so dumb.”
Without hesitating, Martin reached inside his jacket and pulled out the Colt Commander. He jacked the hammer back and shot the carnival man in the chest.
Nabo smiled. “Finally got a reaction from you. I was wondering when that might occur.”
They could all see where the slug had struck the man in the center of his chest. They had all heard the bullet tear through him, rip out the back, and clang off the metal of a bob-truck.
Nabo smiled at them.
Susan picked up a rock and threw it at the man, striking him in the face. The rock did no damage. Nabo laughed at them.
“You’ll pay for that,” he said.
“Ghoul!” Gary Jr. yelled at him.
“And you as well,” Nabo looked at the boy.
Then he vanished.
“What the—” Dick muttered, blinking his eyes.
“Where are Susan and Gary?” Janet yelled, turning in a slow circle.
The group looked around.
Susan and Gary Jr. were missing.
* * *
They were in total darkness. Susan felt for her brother’s hand and found it. “Hold on to me, squirt. Let’s figure out where we are.”
“I gotta pee!”
“Don’t think about it. Grab onto my belt. That’s it. Now hold on tight and don’t let go.”
With both her hands free, Susan felt around her. Her hands found a smooth surface, on both sides of her. Glass. They were in a small corridor.
Gary felt with his free hand. Felt like glass. “We’re in a glass house, Susie!”
Something began pulling at the boy. He yelled in fright. “Something’s got me, Susie!”
“Hold on, Gary.”
He felt his small fingers slipping from the leather of her belt.
“Susie!”
Then he was gone.
“Gary!”
Darkness and silence.
The silence remained. The darkness slowly became pocked with soft light, the light reflecting off of mirrors. Many mirrors. Susan knew then where she was. The house of mirrors. She calmed herself, forcing her mind to slow down, to think rationally. If there was a way in, there had to be a way out. Problem was, finding it.
She deliberately did not allow herself to think about how they—she—had gotten to this place.
No, it was they. But where was her brother? She heard movement from behind the mirror.
Gary stood in a house of horrors. Monsters all around him. His heart was beating so fast he really thought it might explode. The monsters were all great grotesque-looking things.
He forced himself to calm down, close his eyes, and take several deep breaths. He opened his eyes. The monsters were still there, but they hadn’t moved or snarled or growled or anything. He poked one in the belly. It did nothing.
Gary felt better. “Fake,” he muttered. But he knew it wasn’t fake that he had been separated from his sister by some kind of magic.
Black magic. Or so he guessed, although he really wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.
Was he scared? You bet he was!
Then he heard a giggling. But it wasn’t a very nice giggling. Evil, the word came to him. More giggling. He knew that giggling. He’d heard it before. Alma Sessions. That little creep.
“You crummy jerk!” another voice penetrated the near-darkness. “Now you gonna get what’s comin’ to you.”
Gary knew that voice too. That dumb David that ran with Alma, Norm, Bette and Virginia. They were all really bad.
“I’ll kick your butt, David!” Gary called, his voice carrying through the semi-gloom of the house of horrors. All fake horrors. Gary had to keep believing that. Fake, nothing but fake.
Then Davy told him what they were going to do to him. Gary was petrified. He kept his mouth shut and quietly slipped to the wooden floor. On his belly, he looked under a horrible hairy beast-thing. That really wasn’t real. Thing was on a metal stand of some sort. Wires running to it. Big fake was all it was. He had to keep reminding himself of that. Sure looked scary.
Gary could see the tennis-shoe clad feet of Alma and her punky gang. They were standing in a small corridor that ran behind the lines and rows of fake monsters. Could he slip under the hairy things? He thought so. But first thing was to get Alma and her gang out of there.
Easing his small one-blade pocket knife out of his jeans, Gary opened the lock-back blade and silently slipped under the hairy beast and worked his way closer to the feet of Alma and her gang. Maybe, the thought came to him, he could jab her in the foot so she couldn’t walk—or something.
“Gary?” he heard Virginia call. She was as bad as Alma. Maybe worse. She liked to hurt animals. “Gary, you better answer me.”
Gary remained still and silent.
“Little brat is gone!” Alma said, anger in her voice. “He tricked us. Come on. Let’s get over to the monster side.”
When the feet were gone, Gary slipped all the way under the hairy beast on the stand and rolled to the canvas next to the corridor. He cut a slit into the canvas and peeked out. He could see some of the nutty-acting people on the midway. But another tent blocked most of his view. He tried to remember what was next to the horror house.
The house of mirrors! Sure. That’s where they’d been. That’s what he’d felt while he was standing behind his sister.
And that’s where Susan was right now, he’d bet. He had to get over there. He had a knife. He could help his sister get free.
“The little creep is gone!” Alma’s voice came to him. “But that ain’t possible. The front door is blocked.”
“Maybe they lied?” Norm asked.
Gary didn’t wait to hear the reply. He slipped through the slit in the canvas and dropped to the ground, running across the short strip of grass to the next tent. He climbed up on the wooden walk-ramp outside the tent and cut a long slit into the canvas, then slipped into a maze of reflecting gaze.
Gary stood for a moment, startled by the many reflections of himself, all distorted. He listened for any sound.
“Stop it!” his sister’s voice, low and muffled, came to him. “You’re hurting me!” That was followed by a moan and a slap. His sister cried out in pain.
But where was she?
All Gary could see was his own reflection, about ten zillion times.
He thought he heard footsteps behind him. He started to turn around just as a hard hand clamped over his mouth,
cutting off his yelp of fright as strong arms jerked the boy off his feet.
* * *
Frenchy stepped in and blocked Gary’s path. “It won’t do anybody any good for you to go off half-cocked, Doctor. Just calm down. We’ll find your kids.”
“All right,” Gary said agreeably. Too agreeably, it seemed to Frenchy. Had they been her kids she would have been climbing the walls and screaming.
She cut her eyes. Martin had noticed it as well.
He shrugged.
“Where did they go?” Janet’s voice was edged with hysteria. “They couldn’t have just disappeared. That isn’t possible.”
“Don’t bet on that, Janet,” Ned Alridge’s voice was calm. “It’s just now getting through to me that we’re really dealing with the supernatural. We’d all better acknowledge that and act accordingly, by accepting that anything is possible.”
Dick was looking at Gary as if he could see something that no one else could see. The man is taking the disappearance of his kids just too calmly, the foreman was thinking. He looked at Linda. She was seemingly unconcerned about the vanishing act of her best friend. Something is all wrong here. But what? And why did no one come to investigate the loud booming of Martin’s Colt Commander.
Something is very wrong within this group.
But he didn’t know what.
“What are we going to do!” Janet persisted.
“Relax, honey,” her husband told her, about as much emotion in his voice as telling a patient that a shot isn’t going to hurt.
“I’ll go look for them,” Rich volunteered.
“You stay put,” Martin told him. “Let’s just all calm down for a few minutes and try to think this thing out.”
* * *
The breath was hot and stinking and whiskey-smelling on Gary’s neck. But the little boy kept his wits about him after just a few seconds of panic. Like he’d seen done on the TV, he palmed his knife, hiding the blade from unfriendly eyes. His assailant cuffed him on the side of the head, bringing a yelp of pain from the boy.
But I still got my knife! Gary thought. You big drunk bully! You’ll see.
“You don’t open your mouth, you little brat! ” the man’s voice hissed. “You gonna get to see your sister git hers.”
The man pushed on a mirror and the glass opened, moving inward. Gary looked at his sister in the dim light, half naked on the floor, and moaning like she was in pain.
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