by L. J. Smith
Dee leaned a casual arm on her shoulder. "Don't tell me, you've had Leo the Lion nightmares."
Jenny hadn't, that she could remember. But the lion had looked sinister even this afternoon, and it looked doubly sinister now.
"I am not putting my hand in there," Michael said positively.
Dee flashed her most barbaric smile. "No, Audrey can do it; she's got nice long nails. How about it, Aud?"
"Don't tease her," Jenny said absently. "Now, what we need is something long-but a fishing pole wouldn't work because it wouldn't catch a coin. Maybe if we put something sticky on the end ..."
"Nothing's as good as a hand. Audrey could-"
"Dee, quit it!" Jenny cast a sharp look at the girl beside her. She didn't know why Dee and Audrey seemed to be having problems today-maybe it was a reaction to all the tension-but this was no time for Dee's skewed sense of humor. Audrey was standing a little apart from the others, head tilted back, chestnut eyes narrowed in disdain, cherry-colored lips pursed. She looked very cool and superior.
"Leo's always hungry. So feed me," the distorted, bestial voice said. Every time it spoke, Jenny's heart jumped. She was terrified that the caramel-colored muzzle might move, that she'd look up and Leo's head would swing toward her.
It can't. It's plastic, she thought. But she was afraid her heart would simply stop if it did. The quietness of the park around them, the darkness, made this one animated trash can even more eerie.
Dee sat back on her heels. "It looks like there's more to this than just finding the coins. We have to actually get them, which may be the hardest part. It's a quest game."
"Quest?" Jenny said.
"Yeah. Remember how I told you about the different kinds of games, once? Games fall into certain categories. The first one Julian played with us, where we had to get to the top of the house by dawn, that was a race game."
"Right, and the second one, where the animals were chasing us, was a hunting game. Like hide-and-seek," Jenny said.
"Yeah, well, there's another type of game, where you have to find things in order to win-like in a treasure hunt or a scavenger hunt. Or hot and cold. A quest game. It's as old as the other kinds of games."
"Naturally," Michael said. "Humans are terrific questers-they love to look for things. The Holy Grail, or the truth, or the treasures in Zork, or whatever."
"Surely you can find something to feed Leo the Paper-Eating Lion. I'm starving."
Jenny looked up, jerked out of the pleasant hypothetical discussion. Audrey was standing by the circus car, examining her nails. The usually perfect polish had been slightly chipped in the mine ride. She looked thoughtful.
"Go on, princess. I dare you," Dee said, her black eyes flashing in amusement.
"Don't be silly, Audrey," Jenny said automatically. The concept was so ridiculous, though, that she said it unhurriedly. Audrey never did anything reckless-not physically reckless, at least.
So Jenny didn't say the warning with urgency, and therefore she was, in some way, responsible for what happened next.
Audrey put her hand in.
Michael was the one who shouted. Jenny jumped up. But for a moment it looked as if it was going to be all right.
Audrey, her face set, was fishing around in the hole. Her hand was in it to the wrist.
"I feel something," she said.
Jenny's heart was thudding. "Oh, Audrey . .."
Audrey's lips curved in a triumphant smile that brought out her beauty mark. "It's cold-I've got it!"
Then everything happened very fast.
The caramel-colored plastic face was flowing, melting, like a very good morphing effect in a movie.
In a movie it would have been fascinating-but here it was real. It was real, and so awful that it froze Jenny to the spot.
The colors bled and changed, going olive green, then a dreadful grayish cemetery tone with steely streaks. The eyes sank, becoming hollow pits. The mouth seemed to snarl, lips pulling back to reveal long teeth that had grown to trap Audrey's wrist.
It happened so fast that even Dee didn't have time to move. Audrey started to gasp, and then screamed instead. Her entire body snapped forward.
The thing had sucked her arm in to the elbow.
"Audrey!" Michael shouted. He covered the distance to her in two steps. Dee was right behind him with her pick.
No good, Jenny thought dazedly. It's not flesh, like that thing-like Slug. It's stone or metal or something.
"Don't hit it, Dee. That won't help-that won't help. We have to pull her out!"
The thing-it wasn't a lion anymore, but some sort of hideous cyberbeast-was now the color of an old statue coated with moss.
Audrey screamed again, breathlessly, and her body jerked. The nylon jacket was skinned up to her shoulder now, bunched" like an inner tube as her arm was dragged farther in.
"It's taking my arm off!"
Jenny gasped, almost sobbing. Michael was yanking at Audrey.
"No, don't pull! Don't pull! It hurts!"
Vaseline, Jenny was thinking. Or soap-some-
thing to make it slippery. But they didn't have anything.
"Dee!" she said. "Use the pick-try to pry its teeth apart. Michael, wait until she gets it in-then pull."
Audrey was still screaming and Michael was crying. Vaguely, in shock, Jenny noticed that the stone beast was still changing, becoming more deformed. Dee wedged the tip of the heavy pick upside down between the gray, mossy teeth and pulled back on the handle. Jenny grabbed it to help her.
"Hard!"
Dee threw her weight down. Jenny prayed the wooden handle wouldn't break off from the iron head.
She felt something shift-the upper jaw lifting just a fraction, like a car lifting on a jack.
"Pull, Michael!"
Michael pulled. Audrey's arm came out.
She screamed on a new note-a shriek that pierced Jenny's chest. But her arm came out.
They all fell backward, the pick clattering down. With a common impulse they scrabbled back away from the circus car, still sitting, still holding on to one another.
It was only then that Jenny looked at Audrey's arm. , There were toothmarks. Or-some kind of marks, as if sharp rocks had been scraped over the skin.
Long, raw gouges, just starting to bleed.
"Audrey-oh, God, are you okay?" Michael asked A gurgling, maniacal voice said, "I bet I'll have a tummyache tomorrow."
Jenny looked. The cyber-beast had stopped changing, its features frozen in a long-toothed snarl.
Dee raised a clenched fist, tendons cording in her slender arm. Then she dropped it. "I don't think it can move toward us," she said in a curiously quenched voice. Jenny glanced at her, but Dee turned and Jenny found herself looking at the back of her close-cropped head, where velvety nubs of hair glistened like mica.
"Does anybody have aspirin?" Jenny said. "I lost mine."
Michael, who had taken off his sweatshirt and was trying to wrap Audrey's arm in his undershirt, thrust a hand in his pocket. "I've got some . . . here."
Audrey's left hand was trembling as she took them, washing them down with a gulp of water from the canteen Dee silently offered.
"Are you okay?" Jenny asked hesitantly.
Audrey took another drink of water. Her spiky lashes were dark against her cheek as she leaned back against Michael. She looked as white as porcelain, and as fragile. But she nodded.
"Really? You can move your arm and everything?" Michael's cotton undershirt was showing signs of pink, but it wasn't the cuts that worried Jenny. She was afraid Audrey's shoulder might be dislocated.
Audrey nodded again. A faint smile appeared on her lips. She lifted her right arm, the bandaged one, and turned it over. Then, slowly, she unclenched her fist.
Michael gave a shout of laughter.
"You got it! You wouldn't let go, you little-" He seized Audrey in a bear hug.
"You may kiss me," Audrey said. "Just don't squish my arm." She twisted her head toward Dee.
"Good thing your pick wasn't flimsy. No rawhide there!"
It was an extraordinarily generous gesture, but Dee seemed to take it as an insult. At least, when Jenny looked at Dee, she could only see the fine curve of a dark cheekbone.
"If everybody can move, we'd better go," Dee said. "We're right in the open here; anything could be sneaking up on us."
Jenny helped Audrey up as Michael put his sweatshirt back on. The lion-thing in the painted cage watched them like a gargoyle.
"What should we do with the coin?" Audrey said.
"I'll take it." Jenny put this one in the pocket of her pale blue denim shirt and buttoned the pocket. "If we can get to the merry-go-round, we can rest. There's an arbor thing beside it."
The merry-go-round had gone dark, but across the shimmering water of the lake Jenny could see the shining lighthouse. Tom was there-and Zach. Jenny had to get to them, no matter what happened on the way.
Audrey didn't want to rest long. "If I don't get up now, I never will. But where do we go?"
"That lion was lit-up-working," Michael said. "And it had a doubloon."
"So we just look for something else that's working?"
"I don't like the idea of being led," Dee said, but she said it without her usual confidence.
Jenny was worried about Dee. Of course she hadn't meant for anybody to get hurt. She'd just been trying to get a rise out of Audrey. But the way it had turned out-
"What are those lights way down there?" Michael said.
Beyond the merry-go-round, beyond a stretch of greenery, tiny white lights twinkled between dark trees.
"I think-I think it may be the arcade," Jenny said.
"Well, it's working," said Michael.
"Auons-y," Audrey said, settling things.
They passed the dark merry-go-round and a rocket ride with all the rockets landed, down. As they rounded a slight turn in the path, a building came into view.
Hundreds of tiny white lights flashed, running along the borders of a sign reading: penny arcade.
Jenny stopped in her tracks.
"But-it's different. It's not like it was this afternoon. It's like-" Suddenly she knew. "It's like it used to be. This is the way the arcade looked when I was a kid. I remember!"
"Well, it's open," Michael said.
The doors gaped invitingly. Jenny felt a qualm as they cautiously stepped over the threshold. She didn't know why Julian had made the arcade this way, but she couldn't imagine it meant anything good.
Still, it gave her a strange pang of pleasure to see what was inside the building. Not the gleaming, spotless, high-tech wonderland she'd seen in the real park that day. Now it was a dim, rather dingy room, crowded with old-fashioned wooden cabinets.
Automata, Jenny remembered. That's what her grandfather had called the machines with moving figures inside them. She remembered him taking her here, putting dimes in the slots, watching the mechanical action scenes.
Her grandfather had always seemed to have time for her. All she knew as a kid was that he was a professor of this, that, and the other, but he never seemed to go to work anywhere. He was always home when Jenny and Zach came to visit-unless he was traveling. He did a lot of traveling, and always brought back presents.
"What was that? There-at the back," Michael said.
Jenny looked, but only saw more cabinets.
"It's gone now. I thought it was one of those little critters-the scuttling ones." He spotted something. "Hey, you want some candy peanuts? I found lots of change in with the aspirin."
The machine dispensed black candy-coated peanuts, very stale, and square multicolored gum.
Jenny felt a little better while chewing it, comforted somehow.
And the machines were interesting, in the absurd, picturesque way of times gone by. There were peep shows and nickelodeons and all sorts of mechanized figures.
"The Ole Barn Dance," Jenny read on one cabinet. "See 'em Whoop It Up! Watch 'em Swing! Drop two bits in the box."
The little figures were made of blocks of wood, dangling from wires. Their wooden jaws hung open grotesquely.
"Do you think we should try the things?" Audrey said doubtfully. Jenny knew what she meant-after what had happened with Leo, she didn't relish the thought of activating anything mechanical.
"I guess we have to," she said slowly. "In case the coin's inside one of them. Just stay back from them-and if anything goes on by itself, run."
"And check the coin slots," Audrey said sensibly. "What better place to hide a doubloon?"
They moved carefully around the dim room, staying together, checking the tops and bottoms of cabinets for a gleam of gold.
Michael found a mutoscope and began cranking it, leaning gingerly to look in the goggle-type viewer and watch the flip-card film, see naughty marietta sun bathing, the sign on the brass-trimmed machine read, passed by my censors, oct. 1897.
"My arm hurts," he said afterward. "And it's just some lady wrapped in a sheet."
Audrey paused in front of an elaborately carved machine with gold paint that was much faded and rubbed off. Dee found a cabinet that looked like a grandfather clock, labeled: see horrible monster. terrifying-shocking-only 5 cents. Jenny knew that machine: You put your money in and saw a mirror.
Jenny ventured a little farther down the corridor.
Not that grip tester-she didn't want to touch it. She didn't want to step on the foot vitalizer, either.
There-a rather shabby wood box with dark glass. The sign read: ask the wizard, deposit it in slot and
THE WIZARD WILL PERFORM FOR YOU. Below Was a Strip of plastic tape: receive prediction here.
Jenny had always liked the kind of fortune-teller that gave you a card. She loved the outrageous predictions about whether you were going to get married and what your career would be. She picked out a dime.
The coin slot was shaped like a sphinx. Jenny hesitated an instant with the dime resting against cool metal. A flash of foreboding went through her, as if telling her to stop and think before she did anything rash.
But what was rash about turning on a mechanized wizard? And they had to search this place.
She slipped the dime in.
CHAPTER 9
As the coin clunked somewhere in the machine's innards, Jenny heard a faint buzzing, then a mechanical ticking. The glass brightened, and Jenny could see that two bare lightbulbs had gone on inside. They illuminated a wizard, maybe two feet high and wearing a surprisingly mournful and pained expression. As Jenny watched, it began to move jerkily, like clockwork.
Its eyes opened and shut, and its eyebrows lifted and fell. .Its lower lip seemed to be jointed and moved below a surprisingly fine and lifelike beard, as if it were mumbling to itself. Its face was ruddy plastic, with carmine lips and deep shadows under the eyes. Jenny could see layers of caked-up paint on the cheeks.
Poor thing, she thought. Absurd as it was, she felt sorry for the mechanical figure. It showed much finer workmanship than the barn dancers, but it was undeniably in a state of disrepair. Its paintbrush eyelashes were matted, its black velveteen robe dusted with red lint.
A strange feeling was coming over Jenny. A squeezing in her chest. It was ridiculous to feel this way about an automaton. But it looked so pathetic- so trapped there in that box, in front of a stapled-on backdrop of shabby red velveteen. . . .
And something about the figure ... something about its face . . .
The wizard held a chipped and peeling wand in one clenched fist. He raised the wand and struck it on the table in front of him-Jenny could see the indentation where he'd done it many times before.
His eyes opened and shut, rolled around, moving back and forth. They didn't look at the wand.
His lower lip moved, showing white painted teeth, but there was no sound. He seemed to be talking to himself.
Jenny was mesmerized by the wizard's jerky, almost violent movements-but she didn't know why, and she was getting more and more frightened. It's because he looks like one of
those homeless guys at the shelter, she told herself. That's why he's familiar.
No. It was more than that. Something about the plastic face, a face frozen in an expression of ineffable sadness.
The glass eyes rolled, staring straight out at Jenny. Dark as marbles, strangely tired, strangely kind.
She knew.
She really did know then, but it was such an impossible, intolerable concept that she pushed it away. Slam-dunked it back into her subconscious. Too insane to even think about.
She heard a click at the bottom of the machine and saw that a card had appeared. She reached for it reflexively-then stopped for just an instant, again feeling as if her mind was shouting a warning.
Her fingers closed on the card. She turned it over and stared at the writing on the other side.
Then she felt herself begin to faint.
The cramped lines of type were faded but perfectly readable. Not a prediction or a personality chart.
The entire card was covered with two words typed over and over.
HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP
ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME ...
The letters swam in front of Jenny's eyes, merging into a scintillating black-and-white pattern. She couldn't control her trembling or the shuddering in her stomach. She couldn't feel her legs. And she couldn't scream-even though there was a screaming inside her.
She felt the floor bang her palms and rump as her legs gave way.
"What happened? Did it do something to you?" The others were around her. Jenny could only look up at the glass, box, as her fingers tightened on it.
Those tired dark eyes, oh, yes, they were familiar. But they didn't belong with a shabby velveteen robe and a long angel-hair beard. They belonged with a slight, stooped body, a cardigan sweater, and thinning white hair. And a smell of peppermint, because that was what he always carried in his pockets.
"It's my grandfather," Jenny whispered. "Oh, Dee, it's my grandfather, it's my grandfather. ..."
Dee cut a glance at the box. When she looked back at Jenny, her face was composed. "Okay, now, you take it easy. Lets get you some water here.."
"No!" Jenny screamed. She was completely out of control. She hit Dee, beating at her feebly with her fists. "Don't humor me'. It's my grandfather in there -they've done it to him. Oh, God!" Tears were flying as she whipped her head. "It's a joke, don't you see? He was a sorcerer-now he's a wizard. I thought he was dead-but this is so much worse-"