WHEN THE fun house suddenly took off, Caliato was so startled he stepped involuntarily backward and bruised his elbow on a gate post. The pain brought him back to himself, and he looked at all that coruscating light and found himself smiling with real pleasure.
He hadn’t expected the quarry to be so unorthodox. The guy should either have given up quietly to O’Hara and Dunstan, or he should have cowered in a corner somewhere, hunched over his suitcase of money, until Caliato and his people found him. But to counterattack like this, right at the very beginning, was something Caliato hadn’t expected.
The two cops were running this way, both of them all shook up. Caliato saw them coming, and that finished the job of getting him his own equilibrium back. Before either of them had reached him he’d turned to the others and started barking out his orders. “Abadandi and Pulsone, stay on the gate here. Chaka, get around to the back of that fun house, see if there’s any other way in there. Benny, come with me.”
Dunstan was there, breathless and blowing as though he’d just run a mile. While the others were saying right and moving to their posts, Caliato said to Dunstan, “Get hold of yourself. We’ll want to go in after him.”
O’Hara had showed up. “He — he — “
“It’s just a fun house,” Caliato told him. “It isn’t an atom bomb.”
O’Hara took a deep breath, and Caliato saw him getting hold of himself. “I know what it is,” he finally said. “But what the hell’s he doing it for? If there’s anybody around the neighborhood at all — “
“He knows what’s up, that’s why,” Caliato said. “He saw us when we saw him, and he’s figured out what’s the story. But the point is, he had to be in that fun house to turn it on. Come on.”
He led the way, trotting along the snowy backtop, feeling the unfamiliar weight of a gun in his overcoat pocket. The old man’s .44. He dragged it out of the pocket as he ran.
The fun house was still going wild. Caliato said, “Be careful going in. He’ll be watching these doors.”
“Why not wait for him to come out?” O’Hara said.
“We’ve got to turn this racket off, that’s why.”
They went in cautiously, through the main entrance, Benniggio in the lead, Caliato next, the two cops following. They all had guns and flashlights in their hands, though they didn’t need the flashlights yet.
They were all inside, and nothing had happened. They were in a crazy room, with walls and floors tilted funny ways, odd-shaped furniture, all things to make you think you were leaning one way when you were leaning another, so if you weren’t careful you’d lean too far the wrong way and fall on your face.
There were several doors leading out. Caliato said, “Split up. The first thing we do is find the main switch. But everybody take it easy, he’s got to be inside here someplace.”
They each went through a different door, moving with cautious haste, looking all around, all of them distracted by the booming laughter and the calliope music and the whirling lights.
Caliato found himself in a semi-dark narrow passageway. The floor seemed to roll and squirm uncomfortably under his feet, as though mice were moving back and forth under the rubber mat. The walls were of different substances, all of which had a distasteful feel to them, some slimy, some sticky, some an uncomfortable furry feel. When Caliato looked at his fingertips, he was surprised to see them still clean.
Spiders and bats and other things hung from the ceiling on thin black wires, some of them dipping and rising in regular motion, others just hanging in one place, turning lazily. Caliato, a neat man, almost finicky, found this passage almost nauseating, and when one of the bat figures brushed his forehead with its furry wings, he recoiled as though from an electric shock.
The end of the passage was a black curtain, vaguely repellent to the touch, as though made of snake bellies. Caution was replaced in Caliato with disgust, the need to get away from here, out of this rotten place. He pushed through into another room, and suddenly saw himself a dozen times. He saw the long-barreled .44 in his right hand, the unlit flashlight in his left. Over and over, a dozen times.
The strange thing was, he had a white circle on his chest every time.
His senses were being battered from too many directions, the noise and the lights and the crazy room with its tiled floors and then the place with the bats and spiders and now himself in endless repetition in dozens of doorways. He wasn’t rattled completely, the way O’Hara and Dunstan had been outside, but he was just rattled enough to take a second and look down at his chest, as though expecting to see a white circle there. There was none, and when he looked up, there were a dozen other men in the room with the dozens of himself. Those other men had guns too, just as all his own selves had guns.
He knew it was all up, he knew he was going to die in here, and his thought was What a waste. The future he had, the potential he had, all gone. What a waste. Who would have thought his story would end like this?
He raised his gun, even though he knew it was useless. Still, he was the first to fire, shooting at one of the men in front of him at random — they were all identical — and that one suddenly disappeared in a cascade of crashing glass.
PART THREE
One
PARKER SHOT the chest without the white circle on it. All the overcoated men in all the mirrors staggered back, their guns and flashlights falling. They fell against a mirror, and leaned there for a long second, and then toppled forward, only to bounce their heads against other mirrors and wind up crumpled over and over again on the floor.
Parker moved cautiously forward, not wanting to get caught in the maze of mirrors, but at the same time wanting to get the dead man’s gun.
Except he wasn’t going to get it. People were shouting at each other, not far away. Getting closer. Parker retraced his steps, moving slowly, knowing it was no good to hurry through the mirrored labyrinth.
Two men burst through the entrance at the far end, a cop and another one in an overcoat. The one in the overcoat dropped to his knees beside the dead man, shouting, “Call” but the cop held his pistol out at arm’s length and began methodically shooting mirrors.
