The Funhouse

all freaks, because they didn't have any knowledge of his uncontrollable need to rape, kill, and taste blood. He hadn't always been this violent. The carnies knew he was different, but they didn't realize how dangerously different he had become during the past three years, when he had belatedly acquired a sex drive. No one ever paid much attention to Gunther, he was almost a shadow in their midst, a marginally perceived presence. But if a carny woman was killed, someone would take a much closer look at Gunther than ever before, and there would be no way to hide the truth.
        After an initial rush of panic, Conrad saw that the dead woman was not from the carnival. He had never seen her face before. There was still a chance that he could save Gunther and himself.
        Aware that he didn't have much time to conceal the evidence, Conrad stepped around the bloody remains and hurried toward the end of the Hall of the Giant Spiders. Just before he reached the next turn in the tracks, he climbed out of the gondola channel and stepped into a tableau featuring two animated figures: a man and a man-sized spider locked in mortal combat, unmoving now that there were no marks to witness their struggle. The battling man and tarantula were posed in front of a jumbled pile of papier-mâché boulders. Conrad went around behind the false rocks and knelt down.
        The glow from the string of work lights above the tracks did not reach back here. He put a hand out in the darkness in front of him and felt the rough board floor. After a few seconds he located the ringbolt for which he had been searching. He pulled on the ring, lifting a trapdoor, one of six that were scattered around the funhouse for maintenance purposes.
        He slid on his belly, backwards through the trap, feeling with his feet for the rungs of a slanted ladder that he knew was there. He found the ladder and descended into pitch blackness. Just after his head was below the funhouse floor, his feet touched the plank flooring of the bottom level, and he pushed away from the ladder and stood up straight.
        He reached into the darkness on his right side, passed his hand through the air, found the light chain, and pulled it. Two dozen bulbs came on all over the basement, but the place was still shadowy. He was in a low-ceilinged room full of machinery, cogwheels, cables, belts, pulleys, chain-driven mechanisms of odd design, these were the mechanical guts of the funhouse.
        Turning away from the ladder, Conrad sidled between two machines and stepped into a narrow aisle between banks of long, notched cables that stretched across a series of large metal wheels. He hurried to the northwest corner of the chamber, where there was a workbench, a tool cabinet, a metal rack full of spare parts, a pile of tarps, and a couple of suits of coveralls.
        Conrad quickly pulled off his barker's jacket, stepped out of his trousers, and wriggled into a pair of coveralls. He didn't want to explain bloodstained clothes to Ghost.
        He picked up one of the tarps and rushed back to the ladder. Upstairs in the funhouse again, he returned to the dead woman on the tracks.
        He glanced at his wristwatch. Today's show call was for four-thirty, and that was precisely the time his watch showed him. At this very moment the fairground gates were swinging open, and the marks were pouring through. Within ten minutes the first of them would be buying tickets for the funhouse.
        Ghost wouldn't start the system until he'd gotten a final report on the condition of the track. He must be wondering what was taking Conrad so long. In two or three minutes, he would come looking.
        Conrad spread the tarp out in the gondola channel. He picked up the still-warm body and dropped it in the middle of the sheet of canvas. He grabbed the long, trailing hair and lifted the woman's severed head-its mouth open, its eyes wide-and put that on the tarp as well. He added her shredded, bloody clothes to the pile, then a flashlight, a small notebook, and a hard hat. What sort of woman wore a hard hat? What had she been doing in the funhouse? He looked for a purse. A woman ought to be carrying a purse, but he couldn't find one. At last, panting from the exertion, he pulled the ends of the tarp together, lifted it, and hefted it out of the gondola channel, onto the ledge where the man and the spider were temporarily frozen in combat.
        As he scrambled onto the