The Funhouse

mechanical ghouls, ghosts, and ax murderers that had terrorized thousands of marks, and they wrapped the animated figures in blankets and other padding. They unbolted wooden wall panels, disassembled beams and braces, took up slabs of plank flooring, skinned their knuckles, knocked down the ticket booth, guzzled soda, and packed generators and transformers and a mess of machinery into the waiting trucks, which were checked periodically by Max Freed or one of his assistants.
        Max, superintendent of transportation for Big American Midway Shows-BAM to its employees and fellow travelers-supervised the tearing down and loading of the huge midway. Next to the famous E. James Strates organization, BAM was the largest carnival in the world. It was no ragbag, gilly, or lousy little forty-miler, it was a first-rate show. BAM traveled in forty-four railroad cars and more than sixty enormous trucks. Although some of the equipment belonged to the independent concessionaires, not to BAM, every truckload had to pass Max Freed's inspection, for the carnival company would bear the brunt of any bad publicity if one of the vehicles proved to be less than roadworthy and was the cause of an accident.
        While Conrad and his men dismantled the funhouse, a couple of hundred other carnies were also at work on the midway-roughies, concessionaires, animal trainers, jointees, wheelmen, pitchmen, jam auctioneers, short-order cooks, strippers, midgets, dwarves, even the elephants. Except for the men, now sleeping soundly, who would drive the trucks off the lot a few hours from now, no one could call it a night until his part of the show was bundled and strapped down and ready to hit the road.
        The Ferris wheel came down. Partially dismantled, it looked like a pair of gigantic, jagged jaws biting at the sky.
        Other rides were quickly and efficiently torn apart. The Sky Diver. The Tip Top. The Tilt-Whirl. The carousel. Magical machineries of fun, all locked away in ordinary-looking, dusty, greasy vans.
        One minute the tents rippled like sheets of dark rain. The next minute they lay in still, black puddles.
        The grotesque images on the freak show banners-all painted by the renowned carnival artist David “Snap” Wyatt-fluttered and billowed between their moorings. Some of the large canvases portrayed the twisted, mutant faces of a few of the human oddities who made their living in Freak-o-rama, and these appeared to leer and wink and snarl and sneer at the carnies who labored below, a trick of the wind as it played with the canvas. Then the ropes were loosened, the pulley wheels squeaked, and the banners slid down their mooring poles to the pitchman's platform, where they were rolled up and put away-nightmares in large cardboard tubes.
        At five-thirty in the morning, exhausted, Conrad surveyed the site where the funhouse had stood, and he decided he could finally go to bed. Everything had been broken down. A small pile of gear remained to be loaded, but that would take only half an hour and could be left to Ghost, Gunther, and one or two of the others. Conrad paid the local laborers and the free-lance roughies. He instructed Ghost to supervise the completion of the job and to obtain final approval from Max Freed, he told Gunther to do exactly what Ghost wanted him to do. He paid an advance against salary to the two fresh-eyed roughies who, having just gotten up from a good sleep, were prepared to drive the trucks to Clearfield, Pennsylvania, which was the next stand, Conrad would follow later in the day in his thirty-four-foot Travelmaster. At last, aching in every muscle, he trudged back to his motor home- which was parked among more than two hundred similar vehicles, trailers, and mobile homes-in the back lot, at the west end of the fairgrounds.
        The nearer he drew to the Travelmaster, the slower he moved. He dawdled. He took time to appreciate the night. It was quiet, serene. The breezes had blown away to another part of the county, and the air was preternaturally still. Dawn was near, although no light yet touched the eastern horizon. Earlier, there had been a moon, it had set behind the mountains not long ago. Now there were only scudding, slightly phosphorescent clouds, silver-black against the darker, blue-black sky. He stood at the door of his motor home and took several deep breaths of the crisp, refreshing air, not eager to go inside, afraid of what he might find in