Joyland

reproachfully. “Your dog, your responsibility. How many times have I told you?”
    “Sorry, Mom.” To Fred and Lane he said, “Only we hardly ever use it because Milo always comes.”
    “Except when we need him to.” Annie cupped her hands around her mouth. “Milo, come on ! Time to go home!” Then, in a much sweeter voice: “Biscuit, Milo! Come get a biscuit!”
    Her coaxing tone would have brought me on the run—probably with my tongue hanging out—but Milo didn’t budge.
    “Come on Dev,” Mike said. As if I were also in on the plan but had missed my cue, somehow. I grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and rolled Mike down Joyland Avenue toward the funhouse. Annie followed. Fred and Lane stayed where they were, Lane leaning on the chump board among the laid-out popguns on their chains. He had removed his derby and was spinning it on one finger.
    When we got to the dog, Annie regarded him crossly. “What’s wrong with you, Milo?”
    Milo thumped his tail at the sound of Annie’s voice, but didn’t look at her. Nor did he move. He was on guard and intended to stay that way unless he was hauled away.
    “Michael, please make your dog heel so we can go home. You need to get some r—”
    Two things happened before she could finish. I’m not exactly sure of the sequence. I’ve gone over it often in the years since then—most often on nights when I can’t sleep—and I’m still not sure. I think the rumble came first: the sound of a ride-car starting to roll along its track. But it might have been the padlock dropping. It’s even possible that both things happened at the same time.
    The big American Master fell off the double doors below the Horror House façade and lay on the boards, gleaming in the October sunshine. Fred Dean said later that the shackle must not have been pushed firmly into the locking mechanism, and the vibration of the moving car caused it to open all the way. This made perfect sense, because the shackle was indeed open when I checked it.
    Still bullshit, though.
    I put that padlock on myself, and remember the click as the shackle clicked into place. I even remember tugging on it to make sure it caught, the way you do with a padlock. And all that begs a question Fred didn’t even try to answer: with the Horror House breakers switched off, how could that car have gotten rolling in the first place? As for what happened next . . .
    Here’s how a trip through Horror House ended. On the far side of the Torture Chamber, just when you thought the ride was over and your guard was down, a screaming skeleton (nicknamed Hagar the Horrible by the greenies) came flying at you, seemingly on a collision course with your car. When it pulled away, you saw a stone wall dead ahead. Painted there in fluorescent green was a rotting zombie and a gravestone with END OF THE LINE printed on it. Of course the stone wall split open just in time, but that final double-punch was extremely effective. When the car emerged into the daylight, making a semicircle before going back in through another set of double doors and stopping, even grown men were often screaming their heads off. Those final shrieks (always accompanied by gales of oh-shit-you-got-me laughter) were Horror House’s best advertisement.
    There were no screams that day. Of course not, because when the double doors banged open, the car that emerged was empty. It rolled through the semicircle, bumped lightly against the next set of double doors, and stopped.
    “O -kay,” Mike said. It was a whisper so low that I barely heard it, and I’m sure Annie didn’t—all her attention had been drawn to the car. The kid was smiling.
    “What made it do that?” Annie asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Short-circuit, maybe. Or some kind of power surge.” Both of those explanations sounded good, as long as you didn’t know about the breakers being off.
    I stood on my tiptoes and peered into the stalled car. The first thing I noticed was that the safety bar was up. If Eddie Parks or one of his greenie minions forgot to lower it, the bar was supposed to snap down automatically once the ride was in motion. It was a state-mandated safety feature. The bar being up on this one made a goofy kind of sense, though, since the only rides in the park that had power that morning were the ones Lane and Fred had turned on for Mike.
    I spotted something beneath the semicircular seat, something as real as the roses Fred had given Annie, only not red.
    It was a