'I'll be all right.'
'I doubt that. Once a young man sees a nude woman gyrating on stage a few feet from his face, he's never quite the same again. Well, go ahead if your hormones are in such a galloping fit. I'll just finish putting the kiddies to bed.'
Billy left the tent, walking into the humid August night. Around him the air glowed with lights. Some of the sideshows were closing down, but most of the rides still jerked and swung their passengers through the night, their engines growling like wild beasts. The carousel, topped with white and blue bulbs, was spinning merrily as recorded calliope music rang out. The Ferris wheel was a jeweled pendant set against the darkness.
Billy had received a letter from home today. The letters sometimes caught up with him late, though he tried to let his Mother know in advance where the carnival would be stopping. There was a message in his father's scrawl:
He'd found out that Dr. Mirakle's real name was Reginald Merkle, and that he had a real affinity to J.W. Dant bourbon. Several times the man had gone through his Ghost Show routine barely able to stand. Dr. Mirakle had started out to be a dentist, he'd told Billy, until he realized he couldn't stomach the idea of peering into people's mouths all day long. Billy at one point had inquired about Mirakle's family, but the man quickly said he had no family except for the little figures of ghosts and skeletons. He had names for all of them, and he treated them like children. Billy was puzzled about the picture of the young man Dr. Mirakle carried in his wallet, but it was obvious Dr. Mirakle didn't want to discuss his personal life.
Billy saw the blinking red neon sign ahead: jungle love . . . jungle love. He could hear the faint booming of bass drums.
Another new sideshow had been added to the midway as well. It stood between the Ghost Show and the Tiltawhirl on the other side of the midway, its white clapboard structure festooned with garish paintings of snakes with venom-dripping fangs. The entrance was through the open mouth of a huge snake, and above the entrance the sign read alive! see killer snakes of the world! alive!
It was a strange thing, Billy thought, but after four days he still hadn't seen the man who ran the snake show. The only sign of life over there, besides the paying customers, was that the entrance was open at three in the afternoon and closed at eleven. Right now he saw that the door was slightly ajar. The huge red-painted snake eyes seemed to watch Billy as he hurried past.
'Stop it!' he heard someone wail.
'Please . . . going too fast . . . !'
Between Billy and the Jungle Love sideshow loomed another new ride that was shaped like the skeleton of a huge umbrella. Pour gondolas—yellow, red, purple, and one still wrapped up in a Protective green tarpaulin—whirled on the end of thick metal spokes connected to a central piston mechanism. Hydraulics hissed, and the gondolas wildly pitched up and down. Screams erupted as the ride went faster and faster, the gondolas dipping to within three feet of the ground and then quickly pitching upward to almost thirty feet. The entire mechanism groaned, swinging in a fierce circle. Two people were riding in each of the three gondolas, which had safety canopies of wire mesh that closed down over their heads. At the control lever, his foot poised above a metal brake pad, was a thin man with lank, shoulder-length brown hair. A sign with mostly burnt-out bulbs said octopus.
'... please stop it!' a voice wailed from one of the gondolas.
Billy saw the man give it more speed. The Octopus was vibrating, the noise of pounding pistons was almost shaking the ground. The man was grinning, but Billy saw that his eyes were dead. The machine seemed barely in control.
Billy stepped closer to him and touched his shoulder. 'Mister—'
The man's head whipped around. For an instant Billy saw a red gleam in his eyes, and he started, remembering the way the beast had grinned at him out on that highway in the dead of night. Then the man blinked. 'Shitfire!' he shouted, and stomped down on the brake as he disengaged the gears. With a high metallic shriek, the Octopus began to slow. 'Damn it, boy!' the man said. 'Don't you sneak up on people like that!' A jagged scar ran through the man's right eyebrow, and in a breath of wind from the Octopus his hair lifted to show he was missing an ear. One hand had only three fingers.
The Octopus was slowing. The whine of brakes had faded. But in the absence of noise Billy imagined he heard another sound: a high-pitched, eerie screaming—like a dozen voices at once. The sound faded in and out, and Billy felt his flesh crawl.
The man went to each gondola and unlocked the mesh canopies, letting out angry and tearful kids. 'So sue me!' he shouted at one of them.
Billy stared at the Octopus. He saw scaly, rust-eaten metal behind a hanging flap of tarpaulin. The faint screaming went on and on, drifting in and out. 'Why's that gondola covered up?' he asked the man.
'Needs work. Gonna repaint it. Don't you have nothin' better to do?' He glared up at a couple of approaching teenagers and snapped, 'We're closed!'
Abruptly, the eerie voices stopped, as if they'd been silenced by a stronger force. Billy felt himself stepping closer to the hidden gondola. He had the sudden urge to climb into it, to close the canopy over his head, to let the Octopus whirl him high into the air. It would be the best ride in the world, he thought. The most thrilling ever.
He stopped in his tracks, and he knew.
There was something deadly in that scabrous gondola.
'What're you lookin' at?' the man said uneasily. When Billy turned toward him, he saw a heavy set woman with a sad face and coarse blond hair coming out of the shadows.
'Buck?' she said tentatively. 'Buck, it's time to close down now.'
'Don't bother me, woman!' he shouted, and then he paused, frowning. 'I'm sorry, hon,' he said wearily, and then he looked again at the Octopus. Billy saw a strange combination of fear and love on his face. 'You're right. It's time to shut it down for tonight.' Buck started walking to the generator that powered the ride.
The woman came toward Billy. 'Get away from that machine, boy. Get away from it right now!' she warned him. And then the Octopus sign went out.
'What's wrong with it?' he asked her, quietly so the man wouldn't hear.
She shook her head, obviously afraid to say any more.
'Go on about your business!' Buck shouted at him. 'This is a good ride, boy!' Something was about to break behind the man's eyes. 'I was in control all the time!'
Billy saw the torment in both their faces, and he hurried away. Lights were flickering off all over the midway. He saw the Jungle Love sign go out, and knew he'd missed the last show.
The Octopus had just gone up this morning. He remembered that one of the roustabouts had split his hand open on a bolt, but then he'd thought nothing of it because accidents were common. The roustabout had bled a great deal. He decided to stay away from that machine, because he remembered his mother telling him that evil could grow in the most unexpected places—like an oak tree.
Or a machine.
The screams were silenced, Billy thought, as if the machine had offered them up to whet his curiosity. When he looked over his shoulder, the man and woman were gone. The midway was clearing out.
Billy glanced over at the Jungle Love sideshow. There was a figure standing near the entrance, where the sexy photographs were tacked to a display board. He decided to walk over, to find out if the man worked with the sideshow. But before Billy could reach him, the man stepped into the darkness between the Jungle Love trailer and the Mad Mouse maze.
When Billy reached the display board, he saw that the photograph of the blond girl—the one who troubled his dreams so much—had been ripped away.
'You'd better slow down,' Helen Betts said. 'Wayne won't like it.'
At the wheel of his fire-engine-red Camaro, Terry Dozier was watching the speedometer climb to sixty-five.
