Fifty
The midway crowd was bigger than a crowd, a throng, bigger than a throng, a multitude, the ceaseless press and crush of human flesh. People of all kinds and ages. Senior citizens with canes and hearing aids and bifocals. Teenagers in groups, dressed and accessorized in rebellion and yet dressed alike, some intent on texting or playing games on their phones even with the riotous carnival clamoring for their attention and their dollars all around them. Children eating cotton candy and ice cream and popcorn, children who should have been home in bed but were here with their parents, children with painted faces, none of them painted like Death, yet each of them a dead child walking if the cult succeeded. Short men with tall women. Fat women with skinny men. The gay, the straight, and the confused. Democrats and Republicans and those who, if asked, would shout Neither! The rich and the poor. All races, all creeds, all targets for those who did not believe that life was precious.
By the time I reached the fun house, I still had not seen Chief Porter or the two men he was tailing. In the giant face of the ogre, the eyes were not rolling as before, but were fixed straight ahead. The sculpted beast no longer issued threatening roars accompanied by great blasts of breath. The eerie music had been silenced. The lights that previously pulsed and flashed were dark now. A sign, hanging from a cord strung between two stanchions on the entrance ramp simply declared CLOSED.
I didn’t think it wise to enter the attraction by way of the ramp, in plain view of everyone on the concourse. Some people might recognize me, and a few of them might be cult members.
In truth, I assumed that it wouldn’t be wise to enter the fun house by any means whatsoever. But I was exhausted and bleeding and terrified. It wasn’t possible for me to buy an ice cream and go to the carousel instead and ride around on one of the swan benches provided among the horses for those who were in no condition to climb into a saddle and hold on to a brass pole.
Acting as if I was a person of authority in the Sombra Brothers operation, with my bleeding left hand thrust under my sport coat as if soothing an acidic stomach or doing a Napoleon imitation, I left the concourse. I walked between the fun house and the Wall of Death, which featured performances by a motorcycle daredevil riding at high speed, parallel to the ground, around the wall of a circular arena about fifteen feet deep, doing tricks, while the patrons on tiered bleachers looked down at him, waiting for something to go wrong that would turn him into Jell-O in a costume. They were between shows, but gasoline fumes lingered from the previous one.
Most of the carnival’s attractions were in tents, but the fun house had board walls with a canvas roof. They had probably put it up and torn it down a thousand times without incident, but I doubted that there was a structural engineer in the world who, upon a close inspection of the place, wouldn’t have the vapors. Images of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves covered the side wall, but they were no more scary than Mickey Mouse.
At the back of the structure, a loosely fitted wooden door was labeled KEEP OUT / EMPLOYEES ONLY. Although few marks ever ventured behind the attractions, the former owner, Solly Nickles, evidently believed in consistency of presentation; the words on the door looked as if they had been written by the finger of a skeleton using blood for paint.
I thought the door would be locked but it wasn’t. I couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing.
When I stepped inside, I found myself in a small vestibule with a ten-foot ladder nailed to the wall in front of me. Four steps to my left. Four to my right. Each set of steps led to a door.
I tried the door on the left. It opened awkwardly outward, because above it on the inner side hung a lighted EMERGENCY EXIT sign. Beyond lay a narrow corridor in which the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted flat black. This fun house was a walkthrough rather than a ride-through palace of thrills and chills, a black maze in which monsters popped from walls or dropped from ceilings, triggered by motion detectors. Ordinarily, the maze would be all but pitch-black, but at the moment a string of work lights revealed the way. Hanging overhead were rubber spiders the size of poodles, vaguely luminescent.
I could hear the noises of the carnival and the boisterous crowd, but no sound that seemed to come from within the fun house.
I tried the door on the right and found the same situation, although instead of spiders, there were shrunken heads.
Chief Porter had said that he’d assigned Taylor Pipes and Nick Korker to keep watch at the two attractions. I knew them both. Nice guys.
I almost called out, but then decided to keep silent.
In my mind’s eye, I summoned Taylor’s and Nick’s faces. I concentrated on their names, and psychic magnetism drew me to the ladder. I needed both hands, and the pain in my left made an ordeal of ascension. I left a slick of blood on the rungs, which worried me, not because I might be losing a critical amount of it, which I wasn’t, but because I was trying to be quiet and was pretty much succeeding—though the blood left a trail that could be noticed and followed.
Ten feet above the floor of the vestibule, the ladder brought me to an opening about four feet wide and a little over six high. Rungs in the walls provided grips to swing safely off the ladder and onto my feet. The walls were painted light gray there, and a string of small work lights ran end to end. No rubber spiders or shrunken heads or other claptrap cluttered the space. I assumed that the maze lay under me and that this passageway allowed an employee to travel from one end of the fun house to the other without encountering customers.
I stood listening but, as far as I could tell, still heard no sound that originated within those walls. All the noise filtering in from the carnival, however, would surely mask the scrapes and clicks and creaks of anyone who might be moving as cautiously through the structure as I was.
The gray corridor ended in another ladder that led down a four-foot-square shaft. Although my left hand wasn’t growing numb and the pain remained as bad as ever, it became stiffer by the minute and less useful to me. As much as possible, I tried to grip with just my fingers, rather than wrap the skewered palm around the rungs, but the descent became a sweat-inducing heart-knocking gruesome little journey.
At the bottom waited another door. When I opened it, I found Taylor Pipes’s body.