turned the blood cold. It also chilled the long raw wounds on her back, but those didn’t seem to be bleeding now.
The hands get numb enough, she thought, or you lose enough blood to pass out, and it’s all over.
She knew that her nose and lips had bled, but that had stopped. So there was just her wrists and hands, and a single dribble of blood working its way down her left breast from the damn pin hole.
Like to pull the pin out and stick it in Tanya’s fucking eye!
Robin tucked her head down, thinking it might be possible to pluck out the pin with her teeth. But she couldn’t quite reach it. Her chin was in the way.
Worried about a pin.
Gonna fall to my death any second, and I’m worried about a goddamn pin.
Her chin brushed a corner of the card. She winced as its slight movement jostled the pin under her skin.
Then she saw, far below her, three dim figures shambling over the boardwalk. They came from three different directions, as if each, on its own, had spied the morsel suspended from the Ferris wheel.
One halted directly below her. His bald pate gleamed in the moonlight. When he looked up, Robin saw that one eye was covered by a patch. His mouth drooped open.
Gooseflesh rushed up her skin. She pressed her legs together.
While the one-eyed troll gazed at her, another shuffled through the gate. The third followed him into the fenced area beneath the wheel.
Robin heard a quiet whimper escape from her throat. She heard the rush of the surf. And she heard the far-off blast of a whistle.
“What was that?” Dave asked.
“Sounded like a police whistle,” Joan said.
“Did it come from the boardwalk?”
Joan shook her head. “I don’t know. It seemed to come from that direction.”
“Maybe whoever belongs to that car…”
She frowned at him. “Somebody might be in trouble,” she said, and started to run.
Dave broke into a sprint and caught up with her.
They raced up the sidewalk alongside the Funland parking lot.
If someone is in trouble, he thought, it might be over before we get there.
He suddenly regretted that their cars had been disabled, and wished he hadn’t taken such delight in their brief reprieve.
Jeremy stepped onto a landing. We must be at the ground floor, he thought. A door was there. Tanya tried to turn its knob, shook her head, and started up the next flight of stairs. Samson climbed them at her side. Karen went next, followed by Cowboy and Liz.
“I don’t like this,” Heather whispered. She was behind Jeremy, holding on to the bottom of his jacket.
“I think we were supposed to come in after that guy,” Shiner said.
Jeremy’s grimace made the wounds on his face stretch and sting. He wished Shiner hadn’t said that. It was bad enough, being inside the Funhouse, without having to worry about the possibility that they’d been lured into it. He thought about how gloomy the boarded old place looked from the boardwalk. And it was right beside Jasper’s Oddities. His mind lingered on what he’d seen in there—the Gallery of the Weird and those monstrous displays. Jasper’s Oddities was part of the same damned building. It might even open into here.
At the next landing, the stairway ended. Those ahead of Jeremy halted. He climbed the final step. Looking past them, he saw a dark hallway.
“Wish we had some flashlights,” Samson whispered.
Tanya stepped to the wall and lifted the single candle out of its wrought-iron holder. She started slowly forward, and the others followed. Shiner, clutching Jeremy’s left arm, pressed herself against his side and matched his small strides.
Tanya gasped, “Jesus!” and lurched away from the wall as a hand darted out at her.
“Two bits, ducky?”
From the other wall, a hand snatched the hat off Cowboy’s head. Blurting “Shit!” he grabbed it back and stumbled against Liz.
“Oh, jeez!” Liz cried out. “Jeez!”
Jeremy felt his guts shrivel. In front of him, trolls were inside the walls, faces pressed to barred openings, arms stretched out, hands grabbing for the kids as they hurried along. The trolls laughed, jeered, squealed with delight, and yelled.
“Two bits! Gimme two bits!”
“Suck me, sweets!”
“How’s about a buck!”
“Fun ’n games, fun ’n games!”
“Ours now!”
“Whee, yes!”
“Fuck me, fuck me!”
“Dead meat! You’re all dead meat!”
Heather shrieked. Jeremy whirled around. A toothless crone, both arms outside the bars, had Heather by the sleeve of her jumpsuit. Jeremy slashed one of the hands. The old woman yelped and let go. Heather, still screaming, stumbled away and ran for the