The Funhouse

or had unwittingly eaten some piece of filth along with her chiliburger.
        Considering that possibility, he began to feel queasy himself. He stared at his half-eaten candy apple and finally dropped it into a trash barrel.
        He wanted to find her and satisfy himself that she was all right, but he didn't think she would be too happy to see him while her breath still stank of vomit. If she had just been sick in the ladies' room, she would want time to freshen up, patch her makeup, and put herself back together.
        After twenty-five minutes he threw Chrissy's candy apple in the trash with his own.
        After half an hour, bored by the endlessly galloping horses and by the rhythmically flashing brass poles, increasingly concerned about Chrissy, he went searching for her. Earlier, he had watched her walk away from the refreshment stand, admiring her round bottom and her shapely calves, and then she had vanished in the crowd. A minute or two later, he thought he had seen her golden head as she left the midway near the funhouse, and now he decided to look in that area first.
        Between the funhouse and the freak show, a five-foot-wide path led back to an open space behind the amusements, the outer ring of the fairgrounds, where the restrooms were located. Toward the end of the passageway, the shadows were so dark and thick that they seemed tangible, like black drapes, and the night was surprisingly lonely here, considering that the busy midway was only fifty or sixty feet behind him.
        Peering uneasily into the shadows, Bob wondered if Chrissy had encountered more-serious trouble than just an upset stomach. She was a very pretty girl, and these days, when so many people seemed to have lost all respect for the law, there were more than a few men prowling around who thought nothing of taking what they wanted from a pretty girl, regardless of whether or not she wanted them to have it. Bob supposed that there were even more men of that stripe in the carnival than there were in the real world.
        With growing trepidation he reached the end of the path and stepped into the open area behind the funhouse. He looked right, then left, and saw the comfort station. It was sixty yards away, rectangular, gray, made of cement blocks, perched in the center of a tightly circumscribed pool of bright yellowish light. He couldn't see the entire structure, only a third of it, because there was a row of ten or twelve big carnival trucks parked in the intervening hundred and eighty feet. Here the darkness was even deeper, the trucks were only hulking outlines, and they made him think of slumbering, primeval beasts.
        He took only two steps toward the distant comfort station before putting his foot down on something that nearly sent him sprawling. When he regained his balance, he reached down and picked up the treacherous object.
        It was Chrissy's red clutch purse.
        Bob Drew's heart began to sink into a bottomless well.
        At the far end of the funhouse, at the front of it, out on the midway, the giant clown's face sprayed the night with a brittle, shrapnel laugh.
        Bob's mouth was dry. He swallowed hard, tried to squeeze out some saliva. “Chrissy?”
        She didn't answer.
        “Chrissy, for God's sake, are you there?”
        A door squealed on unoiled hinges. Behind him.
        The music and screaming inside the funhouse got louder as the door opened.
        Bob turned toward the noise, feeling something he had not felt in many years, not since he had been a small boy alone in his dark bedroom with the terrifying conviction that some hideous creature was hiding in the closet.
        He saw a forest of shadows, all but one of them perfectly still, but that one was moving fast. It came straight at him. He was seized by powerful, shadow hands.
        “No.”
        Bob was thrown against the rear of the funhouse with such incredible force that the wind was knocked out of him, and his head snapped back, and his skull cracked hard into the wooden wall. Trying to placate his burning lungs, he sucked desperately on the night air, it was cold against his teeth.
        The shadow swooped down on him again.
        It didn't move like a man.
        Bob saw green, glowing eyes.
        He brought up one arm to protect his face, but his assailant struck lower than that, Bob took a sledgehammer punch in the stomach. At least, for one hopelessly