The Funhouse

minute later, as Liz felt the creature spreading her legs and entering her, she also felt its claws piercing her sides. As a cold, maroon darkness swept over her, she knew that sex was indeed the answer, as always, but this time it was the final answer.
        
        * * *
        
        Amy thought she heard Liz scream. It was a distant sound, a short, sharp cry of terror and pain. Then nothing but the usual funhouse noises.
        For a moment Amy continued to listen, but when she couldn't hear anything except the eerie music and the laughing clown, she turned to Joey again. He was standing to the left of the barker's corpse, trying not to look at it. Amy had untied the boy. Although tears were streaming down his face, and although his lower lip was quivering, he was trying to be brave for her. She knew that her opinion mattered more to him than did that of anyone else, and she saw that even now, even under these circumstances, he was concerned that she think well of him. He wasn't sobbing. He wasn't panicked. He wasn't going to break down entirely. He even made an effort to be nonchalant, he spat on his rope-burned wrists and gently smeared the saliva over the angry red marks, soothing the chafed skin.
        “Joey?” He looked up at her.
        “Come on, honey. We're going to get out of here.”
        “Okay,” he said, his voice cracking between the syllables. “How? Where's the door?”
        “I don't know,” Amy said. “But we'll find it.”
        The feeling of being watched over and protected was still with Amy, and it buoyed her.
        Joey took hold of her left hand.
        Holding the barker's pistol in her right hand, Amy led the boy through the shadowy funhouse, past mechanical monsters from Mars and wax zombies and wooden lions and rubber sea beasts. Eventually she saw a shaft of light coming up from the floor, back in the darkness to the left of the track, where the glow from the work lights didn't reach. Hoping the light represented a way out, she led Joey behind a pile of papier-mâché boulders, where she found a trapdoor in the floor.
        “Is this the way out?” Joey asked.
        “Maybe,” Amy said.
        She got down on her knees, leaned forward, and looked into the dimly lighted basement of the funhouse. The place was filled with humming motors, with rumbling machines, with giant pulley wheels and gears, with banks of levers, with enormous drive belts and drive chains-and with shadows. She hesitated. But then that reassuring, inner voice urged her not to retreat, and she knew she was meant to descend into the lower chamber; there was nowhere else for her to go.
        She sent Joey down the ladder ahead of her, covering him with the gun. When he was at the bottom, she followed quickly. Very quickly-because suddenly she wasn't sure Joey was protected by the unseen power, as she felt herself to be. Perhaps Joey was vulnerable.
        “This is the cellar,” Joey said.
        “Yes,” Amy said. “But we're not underground. The cellar is really the first floor, so there's almost sure to be a door to the outside.”
        She held his hand again, and they eased down the aisle between two rows of machinery, turned a corner into another aisle-and saw Liz. The girl was on the floor, on her back, head twisted and bent unnaturally to one side, eyes wide and sightless, stomach torn open, dressed only in blood.
        “Don't look,” Amy said to Joey, trying to shield him from the awful sight, even as her own stomach flip-flopped.
        “I saw,” he said miserably. “I saw.”
        Amy heard a deep-throated growl. She looked up from Joey's tear-stained face.
        The hideous freak had entered the aisle behind them. It was crouched to avoid hitting its enormous, gnarled head on the low ceiling. Green fire flickered in its eyes. Drool coated its lips and matted the wiry fur around its mouth.
        Amy wasn't surprised to see the thing. In her heart she had known this confrontation was unavoidable. She was walking through these events as if she had rehearsed them a thousand times.
        The creature said, “Bitch. Pretty bitch.” His voice was thick. It came out of cracked, black lips.
        As if drifting through a slow-motion dream, Amy pushed Joey behind her.
        The freak sniffed. “Woman heat. Smell nice.”
        Amy didn't back away from it. Holding the pistol at her side and slightly behind her, hoping the freak would not