The Funhouse

same hunger.
        Amy crossed her arms over her breasts, so he couldn't see her nipples through the pale green T-shirt she wore.
        
        * * *
        
        Joey had just about give up trying to find Amy in the crowd that surged around the midway- and then he saw her. She was with Liz, Buzz, and another boy. The carny who had given Joey the free passes was helping them into a gondola at the funhouse boarding gate.
        Joey hesitated, remembering how weird the carny had acted this afternoon. But he was so eager to tell Amy about how he had fooled Mama that he shrugged off his misgivings and headed toward the funhouse.
        
        * * *
        
        The gondola seated four: two forward, two behind. Liz and Richie took the front seats, Amy and Buzz sat in back of them.
        They started with a jolt that made Liz yelp and laugh. The phony castle doors opened, swallowed them, and closed again.
        At first the gondola moved rapidly into the pitch blackness, but then it slowed. A light popped on to the left of the track and above it, and a leering, grizzled pirate laughed and thrust a sword at them.
        Liz squealed, and Buzz took the opportunity to put his arm around Amy.
        On their right, just past the pirate, a very realistic-looking werewolf was crouched on a ledge, suddenly illuminated by a moon that lit up behind him. His eyes glowed red, there was blood on his huge teeth, and his claws, which he raked at the gondola, gleamed like splinters of a mirror.
        “Oh, protect me, Richie!” Liz shouted in make-believe terror. “Protect my virgin body from that horrid beast!” She laughed at her own performance.
        The car slowed even more, and they came to a display in which an ax-murderer was standing over one of his victims. The ax was buried in the dead man's skull, cleaving his forehead in two.
        The gondola came to a complete stop.
        “What's wrong?” Liz asked.
        “Must have broken down again,” Richie said.
        They were sitting in purple-brown shadows. The only light came from the ax-murderer exhibit beside them, and that was an eerie, greenish glow.
        “Hey!” Liz shouted into the darkness and into the waves of creepy music that crashed over them. “Hey, let's get this show on the road!”
        “Yeah!” Buzz shouted. “Hey, out there!”
        For a minute or two they all called to the barker, who was on the platform outside, beyond the closed doors of the attraction, no more than thirty or forty feet away. No one responded to them, and at last they gave up.
        “Shit,” Liz said.
        “What should we do?” Amy asked.
        “Stay put,” Richie said. “It'll start moving again eventually.”
        “Maybe we should get out and walk back to the doors,” Buzz said.
        “Absolutely not,” Richie said. “If we did, and then the ride started up again, our gondola would go off without us. And if another car came through the entrance doors, it would run us down.”
        “I hope we don't have to wait in here too long,” Amy said, remembering the way the barker had looked at her. “It's spooky.”
        “What a pain in the ass,” Liz said.
        “Be patient,” Richie said. “We'll be rolling soon.”
        “If we've got to just sit here,” Liz said, “I wish they'd shut off that fuckin' music. It's way too loud.
        Something creaked loudly overhead.
        What was that?” Amy asked.
        They all looked up in the darkness.
        “Nothing,” Buzz said. “Just the wind outside.”
        “There isn't any wind tonight,” Amy said.
        The creaking noise came again. This time there were other loud sounds with it: a scraping, a thud, an animal-like grunting.
        “I don't think we-” Richie began.
        Something flashed out of the darkness and seized him by the throat. An arm thrust down from the low, unlighted ceiling over the gondola, an arm that ended in a large, long-fingered, fur-covered hand that was tipped with murderously sharp claws. Though the arm moved fast, they all saw it in the backwash of green light from the ax-murderer exhibit, but they couldn't see what was in the blackness above, at the other end of the arm. Whatever it was, its claws pierced Richie's throat, hooked deep into his flesh, and the thing hauled him up, off his seat. Richie kicked frantically, his shoes drumming on the front of the gondola for a second or two. Then he was