The Funhouse

optimistic moment, he thought he had been punched. But the shadow-thing hadn't struck him with its fist. Nothing as clean as that. It had slashed him. He was badly cut. A wet, sickening, sliding, dissolving sensation filled him. Stunned, he reached down, put one trembling hand on his belly, and gagged with revulsion and horror when he felt the size of the wound.
         My God, I've been disemboweled!
        The shadow stepped back, crouching, watching, snorting and sniffing like a dog, although it was much too big to be a dog.
        Gibbering hysterically, Bob Drew tried to hold his bulging intestines inside his body. If they slipped out of him, there was no chance that he could be sewn up and restored to health.
        The shadow-thing hissed at him.
        Bob was too deep in shock to feel more than the thinnest edge of the pain, but a red veil descended over his vision. His legs turned to water and then began to evaporate from under him. He leaned against the wall of the funhouse, aware that he had little chance of survival even if he stayed on his feet, but also aware that he had no chance at all if he fell. His only hope was to hold himself together. Get to a doctor. Maybe they could sew him up. Maybe they could put everything back in place and prevent peritonitis. It was a long shot. Very long. But maybe… if he just didn't fall… He couldn't allow himself to fall. He must not fall. He wouldn't fall.
        He fell.
        
        * * *
        
        The carnies called it “slough night” and looked forward to it with true Gypsy spirit. The last night of the engagement. The night they tore down. The night they packed up and got ready to move on to the next stand. The carnival shed itself of the town in much the same way that a snake sloughed off its dead, dirty, unwanted skin.
        To Conrad Straker, slough night was always the best night of the week, for he continued to hope, against all reason, that the next stop would be the one at which he would find Ellen and her children.
        By one-thirty in the morning, the last of the marks was gone from the Coal County, Pennsylvania, fairgrounds. Even before then, some pieces of the show began to come down, although most of the job still lay ahead.
        Conrad, who owned two small concessions in addition to the enormous funhouse, had already overseen the breaking down of those enterprises. One was a pitch-and-dunk, which he had shuttered and folded around one o'clock. The other was a grab joint, so named because it was a fast-food place with no chairs for the marks to sit down, they had to grab their food and eat on the fly. He had closed the grab joint earlier, around midnight.
        Now, in the cool, mid-May night, he worked on the funhouse with Gunther, Ghost, his other fulltime employees, a couple of local laborers looking to make forty bucks each, and a pair of free-lance roughies who traveled with the show. They broke the joint apart and loaded it into two large trucks that would carry it to the next stand.
        Because Conrad's funhouse could legitimately boast of being the largest in the world, because it offered the marks solid thrills for their money, and because the ride was long and dark enough to allow teenage boys to cop a few feels from their dates, it was a popular and profitable concession. He had spent many years and a lot of money adding to the attraction, letting it grow organically into the finest amusement of its kind on earth. He was proud of his creation.
        Nevertheless, each time the funhouse had to be erected or torn down, Conrad hated the thing with a passion that most men couldn't generate for any inanimate object except, perhaps, a larcenous vending machine or a bullheaded billing computer. Although the funhouse was cleverly designed-a genuine marvel of prefabricated construction and easy collapsibility-putting it up and then sloughing it seemed equal, at least in Conrad's mind, to the most spectacular and arduous feats of the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders.
        For more than four hours, Conrad and his twelve-man crew swarmed over the structure, illuminated by the big, generator-powered midway lights. They lowered and dismantled the giant clown's face, took down strings of colored lights, rolled up a couple thousand feet of heavy-duty extension cords. They pulled off the canvas roof and folded it. Grunting, sweating, they disconnected and stacked the gondola tracks. They removed the