“Hey, sweet stuff,” the troll said.
“Babes babes babes,” said another.
“Tasty bits.”
“Where are the others?” Debbie yelled at the ceiling. “Where are my friends?”
Trolls laughed.
“Oh, they been by, they been by.”
“Bound fer hell.”
“Let’s go,” Joan said. She swept the walls with the flashlight, probed the darkness of the hallway to the left, and jogged in that direction.
“Bye-bye, sweets.”
“Say hi to Webster!”
Dave nudged Debbie’s back, and she started to run.
He hurried after her. He slipped his arms into the vest as he ran. Though he wanted Joan to wear it, he saw no point in wasting time on argument.
Joan and Debbie crouched at the edge of a barrel that filled the hallway. Dave stepped up behind them as Debbie muttered, “Oh, jeez, no.”
A dead kid was stretched out inside the barrel. All around him, the wooden staves bristled with spikes.
“One of your friends?” Joan asked.
“Samson.”
“Looks like they used him for a bridge,” Dave said.
“I guess we do too,” Joan said.
Debbie curled her left hand against the side of her mouth and shouted through the barrel, “Hello! Jeremy! Hey, you guys, it’s Shiner! Can you hear me?”
No answer came.
“Jeremy? Tanya? Cowboy? Liz? It’s Shiner. We’ve got guns! Wait up! Or come back! You’ll be all right! We’ve got guns!”
Still no answer.
“Dammit,” she muttered.
“I’ll go first,” Dave said. He stepped around them. He swept the edge of his shoe against one of the spikes. The barrel rocked from side to side. “Christ,” he said.
Joan and Debbie grabbed spikes near the rim of the barrel to hold it steady.
Dave knelt on the dead boy’s shins. They felt steady under him. Of course they do, he thought. They’re nailed down.
Leaning forward, he gripped the boy’s thighs and started to crawl.
Robin, kneeling on the seat and clutching its back, watched the troll climb onto the beam that led straight to her gondola.
The same route the other had used.
Well, she’d taken care of that one.
Two down, one to go.
This guy was bigger than the last troll. He had a round face, hardly any neck at all, and shoulders the size of hams. His eyes were small and close together. Pig eyes, Robin thought. A squat, upturned nose. A tiny slit of a mouth, lips tight.
He really looks like a pig, she thought.
But he also looked, somehow, like a little boy in a body that had bloated out of control.
He wore a ball cap with its bill turned up. The skin around its sides was hairless.
“Go back,” she said. “I don’t want to kill you.”
As she spoke those words, she saw herself in the steaming spa with Nate, holding him tightly, both of them weeping for the deaths they had caused.
She saw Nate sprawled on the sheet. His bloody head.
She felt her throat tighten.
Oh, God, Nate.
Had he deserved it? she wondered. Was all this some kind of rough justice at work?
“I really don’t want to kill you,” she pleaded, her voice sliding to a higher pitch. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
The troll straddled the beam and stared at her.
“Just go away,” she begged. “Please.”
The troll lowered his head. Looking down at the dead ones? He hunched himself over and hugged the beam.
He’s afraid, Robin thought. He doesn’t want to fall.
“If I knock you off here,” she said, “you’ll be broken to pieces.”
He began to make soft whimpery sounds.
Oh, no, Jeremy thought. We forgot the camera.
It was back there somewhere, hanging around Cowboy’s neck, the incriminating film still in it.
He decided not to tell Tanya.
She might insist they return for it. They’d come a long distance, winding their way through the total darkness, bumping into mirrors, often backtracking when they found themselves at dead ends. To go back now…
To be in the same place with those bodies again…
Jeremy shivered as he remembered falling onto Liz and Cowboy. Trying to get up, he’d pushed a hand into something sodden and mushy.
Besides, he told himself, the film doesn’t matter. Most of the kids in the pictures are already dead.
There’re just the two of us. And Heather. Lucky Heather. She’d fled down the stairs before it got bad.
We should’ve gone too.
If only I’d listened to Shiner.
I got Shiner killed.
It seemed like ages ago, and the pain and guilt of it were muffled by all that had happened since.
It was probably fifteen minutes ago, he thought.
The head of his ax bumped glass. He swung it slowly to the left, met no resistance, and turned in that direction. Tanya followed, her hand tight on his shoulder.
If we had a candle, he thought, we’d be out of this thing by now.
We could’ve smashed straight through with the ax, fuck the maze.
But doing that without light would’ve been disastrous. They’d discussed it, and both agreed that they’d be cut to pieces if they tried.
This was taking forever, but at least they might get through with their skin intact. If they didn’t get jumped by more trolls.
Jeremy turned, and turned again.
And saw a glimmer of light.
“All
right,”
Tanya whispered.
The faint glow ahead of them turned out to be a reflection. The ax thudded the mirror. Jeremy turned, and the light was stronger.
Instead of a mirror, there was suddenly a hallway to his left. Candles on the walls. He stumbled free of the maze and took a deep breath.
“Made it,” Tanya whispered. She hugged herself against his back, then stepped around beside him.
Along the left side of the hallway were barred windows like those they’d passed in the corridor above. Jeremy saw no trolls behind the bars.
“So where the hell’s our audience?” Tanya said.
“Maybe they all cleared out. Maybe the fire scared them off.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Midway down the hall, on the right, was a door. Another door waited at the end. “What’ll we do?” Jeremy asked.
Tanya said nothing. She looked from one door to the other and frowned.
“The one at the end,” Jeremy said, nodding toward the far door. “It might be the one at the stairway.”
“If it is, you can bet they’ve got a nasty surprise waiting for us.”
“Yeah. They aren’t gonna let us just walk away from this.”
“Fuck the doors,” Tanya said. “Let’s chop our way out.”
“Yeah!”
“No more playing by their rules. We’ve got the ax, we can play the game our own way.” She took a few strides forward, turned to the right, and tapped the wall with the point of her knife. “There’s probably some kind of a room through there. All we’ve gotta do is bust in, then we can knock a hole in the wall and maybe step right out onto the boardwalk.”
“Sure hope so.”
Tanya moved aside. Jeremy raised the ax overhead and swung with all his strength. Its heavy blade bit into the wall. As he tore it loose, a thick splinter of wood split away and dropped to the floor. He put his eye to the narrow gap.
Darkness on the other side.
Stepping back, he chopped again. The entire head of the ax broke through the wall.
“It’s going to work!” he blurted.
“Damn right!”
As he struggled to free the trapped ax head, a sudden sharp tug yanked the haft from his hands.
In the instant it took him to realize what was happening, the entire length of the handle vanished into the hole.
“Oh, Jesus,” he gasped.
“We’d better get…”
They both jumped as a chunk of the wall flew at them. Jeremy glimpsed an inch of the ax blade before it withdrew.
Now they’ve got it. And they’re coming for us.
Jeremy heard maniacal laughter.
It came from him.
Tanya tugged his arm, and they ran down the hallway.
Ran until the floor dropped out from under their feet.
Then, side by side, they dropped into the black chasm of the Funhouse basement.
Whirling away from the three corpses in the mirror maze, Debbie hunched over and vomited. Joan rubbed her back while she heaved.
The poor kid had been through hell. And it wasn’t over yet.
The worst is over, Joan told herself. The worst had to be in that closet upstairs, alone and fighting for her life. Debbie was damn lucky to have survived. With her mind in one piece, too. A lot of people might’ve flipped out, having to deal with something like that.
She was holding up pretty well.
Losing her dinner was probably a good sign. Showed she was still in touch with reality.
“This one must’ve come down a goddamn beanstalk,” Dave said. His trembling voice sounded astonished and disgusted.
Debbie finished. She straightened up, sobbing, and wiped her mouth with the front of her sweatshirt.
“Two of them are kids,” Dave said. “One’s a girl. The other’s the guy from the fight.”
“Our fight?” Joan asked.
“The one with the ear.”
“Oh, no.”
She’d saved his ear for this. So he could get his head split open in this mad perversion of a funhouse.
Debbie turned around. She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “That’s Cowboy,” she said. “And Liz. God!” She slapped a hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Is anybody left?” Joan asked her.
She nodded. “Jeremy,” she said through her hand. “And Tanya. Only them.” She took her hand away, pressed her face to Joan’s shoulder, and hugged her tightly. “Jeremy’s my friend, Joanie. I tried to stop him. I don’t want him to die.”
“Okay,” Dave said. “We’re going through this thing the fast way.” He drew his pistol. He shouted, “Anybody can hear me better hit the deck! Hit the floor! Bullets are coming!”
Standing at the feet of the giant dead troll, he clamped the flashlight between his legs, aimed at the mirror in front of him, and fired.
Debbie jumped as the shot blasted the silence. She stuck her fingers into her ears.
Joan covered her own ears.
Dave kept firing, the Beretta roaring, jerking in his hand, walls of mirror exploding in front of him as the 9mm slugs smashed through them. Disintegrating glass flashed in the beam of his flashlight. He swept the muzzle just a bit from side to side, blasting a corridor straight through the maze.
Some forty feet ahead, a glow of candlelight appeared. The size of the lighted area grew as Dave kept firing, knocking apart more mirrors.
After thirteen shots he dropped the magazine into his palm. He shoved a fresh one up the pistol’s handle and jacked a cartridge into the chamber.
Joan and Debbie stepped carefully around the bodies. They stopped beside Dave. Looking past him, Joan saw the dark rubble of shattered glass, then a lighted hallway.
And bodies sprawled on its floor.
Dave rubbed a trembling hand across his mouth. “God,” he muttered. “I warned ’em to duck.”
“Then they should’ve ducked,” Joan said.
“Maybe they couldn’t hear me.”
“Let’s go.” She pulled the flashlight from between Dave’s legs, ducked under jagged teeth of glass, and started walking through the litter of demolished mirrors. The glass crunched under her shoes. “Be careful back there,” she said.
She proceeded slowly.
Sometimes, before stepping through a panel, she knocked hanging shards out of the way with the barrel of her revolver. She heard Debbie and Dave close behind her, glass tinkling and popping under their shoes.
Ahead, some of the people in the hallway began to move.
Roll over, crawl, stand up.
At least three bodies stayed down.
Those Joan saw rising were not kids.
Nor did they look like trolls.
She felt a chill squirm through her. Her skin began to crawl.
She remembered that Jasper Dunn used to be the proprietor of a freak show. He’d been forced to close it down after some of his freaks got loose and attacked people in the Funhouse.
He’d closed the show.
Obviously, he’d kept his freaks.
Made a home for them in the Funhouse.
Behind Joan, Dave groaned.
A hand clawed at the back of her T-shirt, peeled the wet cloth away from her skin, tried to pull her backward. In a low, shaky voice, Debbie said, “I wanta go back. Please, Joanie. Can’t we just go back?”
As Jeremy dropped into darkness, he expected his descent to be stopped with a bone-jarring crash. Instead, he landed on something springy. A net? It sank under his back, then lifted him. The taut lines quivered as he tried to untangle his arms and legs from them.
They felt gluey.
They stuck to him.
He heard Tanya gasping. To his right, and not far away. Her struggles shook the netting.
“You okay?” he whispered.
“What
is
this shit?”
In front of Jeremy and off to his left, a door opened.
That’s the other door, Jeremy realized. The one at the foot of the stairway.
The way out is right there.
Someone entered, carrying a kerosene lantern. Jeremy squinted as the harsh glare from the lamp’s twin mantles stabbed his eyes.
He saw that the tall cadaverous man wore a top hat and tails. Jasper Dunn.
Trolls poured through the doorway behind Dunn, crowding the small balcony on which he stood. They were oddly silent.
As Jeremy’s eyes adjusted to the light, he saw more.
He saw too much.
He felt as if he were collapsing inside, shriveling into a black ruin.
The sticky cords that held him trapped were the strands of a web spread across the Funhouse basement. A spiderweb. Hanging in it, suspended several feet above the sand, were the crushed husks of people wrapped in transparent gray silk.
Tanya shrieked.
He twisted his head toward her.
Saw her writhing and bucking.
Saw the
spider
scurrying over the top of the web, rushing in from a corner of the basement.
A spider like the one he’d seen in Jasper’s Oddities.
But bigger. Much bigger.
Jasper’s Giganticus.
Jeremy heard Cowboy’s voice deep inside the abyss of his mind.
Discovered in the jungles of New Zealand.