yelled. “No!”
The web swayed and bounced under the weight of the rushing black beast.
Its eyes were yellow. Its mouth looked like a huge open sore. Its fangs dripped.
The bloated black thing danced over the web.
And onto Tanya.
Her shriek ripped his ears.
The spider’s mouth muffled her scream. Jeremy saw its fangs sink into her face.
Her tangled body flinched rigid, jerked with spasms.
Jeremy twisted sideways, freeing his right arm from the trapped sleeve of his jacket. He reached to his shirt pocket. For the razor blade he’d put there after giving the handkerchief to Tanya.
A quick slash across the throat.
Maybe he could die before the spider came for him.
The pocket of his shirt was empty.
He’d lost the razor blade. Maybe while going down the slide.
When didn’t matter.
It was gone.
Jeremy heard gunfire as the legs of the spider wrapped around Tanya, squeezing her like a monstrous lover.
Robin heard the faint hard claps of gunshots. She looked over her shoulder. Saw nothing except the deserted moonlit boardwalk. The muffled tone of the shots made her wonder if they came from under the boardwalk, or maybe from inside one of Funland’s buildings.
After a few seconds they stopped. The only sounds she heard were her heartbeat, the rushing wind, the wash of a comber hurling itself at the beach, and the troll whimpering quietly behind her.
She turned her head forward again.
The troll was still four or five feet away, hugging the steel beam.
He’d frozen there.
He’d come this close, and lost his nerve.
Obviously the height had suddenly gotten to him.
Robin remembered her own experiences with climbing. Shinnying up trees when she was a kid, once in a while working her way up bluffs and mountainsides during her travels. You could go along just fine for a while. Then, sometimes, it just hit you. Stark, paralyzing fear. You knew you were going to die. All you could do was hang on, waiting to fall.
Until something broke the spell.
Killed the curse.
And you were suddenly able to function.
This guy, she thought, will either fall or come to his senses.
If he comes to his senses, I’ll be fair game again.
But she didn’t want him to fall.
The troll raised his head when Robin began to sing.
I climbed a mountain peak last night
To see what I could see,
To take a peek at the moon so bright
And the stars in the midnight sea.
He sat up and stared at her.
On his way through the broken mirrors, Dave saw enough of those in the hallway ahead to know they were the remnants of Jasper Dunn’s freak show.
He’d heard stories about them, seen their photographs a number of times in the Gallery of the Weird.
Supposedly they had scattered and left town after the show was shut down.
Six years ago. Shortly before he arrived from Los Angeles.
All that time, they’d been living here in the Funhouse?
Those who hadn’t been hit by his bullets were standing in the hallway only a few yards beyond the last shattered mirror. Standing motionless, watching.
Dave didn’t want Joan to be first out of the maze.
First to face this crowd of deformities.
He hurried past her.
Without Joan’s back blocking the way, he had a clear view.
On the floor, her throat torn open by a slug, lay Donna the Dog Woman. Sprawled beside her, writhing in pain, was a shirtless man with a withered brown arm in the middle of his chest. Julian, the Three-Armed Man. His little brown hand was clutching the bullet wound near his left shoulder. Wonderful Wilma lay near him, naked except for leopardskin bikini pants. One hand was clamped to her bleeding thigh. Her other arm pressed in modesty across her two normal breasts, the third mound uncovered, pale and sweaty below her wrist.
Only Donna was dead, Dave thought. Could’ve been worse.
But, God, he wished he hadn’t hit any of them.
Stepping through the last shattered mirror, he aimed his pistol at Snake-Tongue Antonio. “Drop the ax,” he said.
The man’s tongue slid out of his mouth. As he glared at Dave, the pink slab of his tongue slithered from one side of his face to the other, licking tears from under his eyes.
“I don’t want to shoot you,” Dave said.
“Drop it,” Joan snapped, coming up beside him, also taking aim at Antonio.
The two-headed woman, who had a name for each head, but which Dave couldn’t recall, turned both faces toward the man. She reached out a hand and patted his shoulder. He glanced at her, retracted his tongue, and made grunting sounds.
One head nodded at him. The other’s face smiled gently.
He dropped