The Funhouse

wouldn't see it and that somehow she would get close enough to him to use the blade.
        “Say hello to your little brother,” the barker said. He was holding a rope in one hand. He pulled on it. Joey staggered out of the darkness, at the other end of the leash.
        “Oh, God,” Amy said. “God, help us.”
        “He can't help you,” the barker said. “God is weak. Satan is strong. God can't help you this time, bitch.”

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    16
        
        Liz stumbled into someone in the shadows. He was big. She cried out before she realized that it wasn't the freak. She had walked into another of the mechanical monsters, which were all motionless and silent now.
        Liz was sweating, shaking, disoriented. She kept colliding with things in the darkness, and each time her heart nearly stopped. She knew she should either sit down until she was calm again-or go back to the gondola channel, where there was some light, but she was too frightened to do what she ought to.
        She staggered forward, hands out in front of her, the knife in one hand, gagging when she thought of Richie with the ax buried in his head, resisting the urge to throw up, her head light from the effects of adrenaline and dope, just trying to save herself, gasping, whimpering, aware that all the noise she was making might be the death of her, but unable to be silent, just trying to save herself any way she could, hoping she would luck into an exit, counting on the fact that she'd always been a very lucky girl, wishing (crazily) that she had time to stop and smoke another joint, and that was when she tripped over something and fell, hard, onto the plank floor, and she reached back to free her foot, and she discovered a metal ring in the floor, a large ring in which she had caught the toe of her shoe, and she cursed the pain in her twisted ankle, but then she saw a thread of light coming up through the floor, light from a room below, and she realized that the ring was a handle on a trapdoor.
        A way out.
        Laughing excitedly, Liz scrambled off the trap, on which she had been sprawled. She knelt in front of the door and took hold of the ring. The door was warped, it didn't want to open. She grunted, put all her strength into one hard tug, and finally the trap swung up.
        Light filled the funhouse around her.
        The huge, hideous freak was standing on the ladder directly under the trapdoor. He reached up, fast as a striking snake, seized a handful of Liz's long blond hair, and dragged her, screaming, through the hole in the floor, into the funhouse basement.
        
        * * *
        
        “Let my brother go,” Amy said.
        “Not likely,” the barker said.
        Joey's hands were tied behind his back. Another rope was tightly knotted around his neck, the barker held the loose end of that leash. Joey's throat was rope-burned, and he was crying.
        Amy looked into the brilliantly blue but inhuman eyes of the barker, and for the first time in her life she knew beyond all doubt that she wasn't the evil person her mother had always insisted she was. This was evil. This man was evil. This maniac. And the murderous freak that had killed Richie. This was the quintessence of evil, and it was as utterly different from her as she was different from… Liz.
        Suddenly, incredibly, in spite of the fact that both she and Joey seemed close to death at that moment, Amy was filled with a bright, cascading river of self-confidence, with a great and good feeling about herself that she had never experienced before. That river washed away all the dark, confused, and bitter emotions with which she had been plagued for so long.
        Simultaneously, she had another flash of déjŕ vu. She had the uncanny feeling that this scene had been acted out before, perhaps not in every detail, but in essence. And she felt, too, that she was somehow connected to the barker far less casually than she appeared to be. A tremendous sense of destiny settled like a cloak upon her shoulders, a certainty that she had been born and had lived only to come to this place at this time. It was an eerie feeling, but now she welcomed it.
         Move, act, be brave , a voice said within her.
        Holding her rusty knife at her side, hoping that the barker hadn't seen it, she moved toward Joey. “Honey, are you all right? Did he hurt you? Don't cry. Don't be afraid.” She concentrated all of her attention on Joey, so