Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

“What’s that hulking great hamburger doing at the end of the line?” he said, when he came to inspect the cafeteria. “You can’t have a threatening hamburger. It’ll put the kiddies off their food.”

I thought it was the end for me. If you fail as a hamburger there’s not a lot of hope left. But the artistic director, thank heaven, had a little imagination. “See if she can get into K. K.,” he said.

I could. “Terrific,” the artistic director said. “Dynamite. Put her by the gate for the opening. She’s a natural.”

We opened very successfully, with me and the Creature from the Black Lagoon welcoming the crowds. The kiddies screamed and giggled as I lolloped around growling. They wanted to stroke my fur and have their pictures taken with me.

I can’t tell you how lovely this is for someone like me. Without a monster costume no one wants to take my picture at all, and the kiddies cross the road rather than come face to face with me on the pavement. I love kiddies, but I’ve got to be realistic. It’s unlikely I’ll ever have any of my own. Children are frightened by disfigurement and it’s one of life’s little ironies that they have only come to love me now that it’s my job to frighten them. I’m a wonderful monster, if I do say it myself. Who would have thought that someone like me could succeed in show business?

But it isn’t like that for everyone. My friend Cherry, for instance, used to get very depressed. “I’m a dancer,” she used to tell me. “A good dancer. Well, quite a good dancer. Not a bloody hot dog. It’s an insult, even if I am over thirty.”

She’s over forty, actually, but she’s right: she’s still very pretty in spite of being a little on the plump side. It’s a shame to hide her in a hot dog.

“I’ll give that agent of mine a piece of my mind,” she used to say, “you see if I don’t.” Well, maybe she did or maybe she didn’t. The only thing I know is that two years later she’s still a hot dog, and a good one at that. She says the tips are getting better all the time. She doesn’t positively enjoy the job the way I did, but she doesn’t complain much anymore.

Performers at Fantasyland divide up quite neatly into Freaks and Food, and I think it’s fair to say that of the two, the Freaks are happier in their work. They are the entertainers and the extroverts.

But they are quite territorially minded, too. I had a jungle, about half an acre of mixed conifers and rhododendron bushes with a climbing frame artfully disguised as creeping vines. You wouldn’t catch Godzilla in my domain. He roams the area around the gift shop, while the boating pool belongs to the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Of course, some of the Freaks work in teams. The Tingle-Trail is a miniature railway ride which begins in the Black Forest with the Werewolves in their various stages of transformation and ends in a graveyard with a stunning display by the Zombies, the Undead, and a pair of Bodysnatchers. There are twenty-three employed on the Tingle-Trail alone, and they have to work to a strict timetable.

The others give improvised performances. We all perfected the art of lurking and popping up unexpectedly. It is a delicate balance: shrieks of shock and surprise are the signs of a job well done, but you don’t want to scare anyone into a heart attack. There have been accidents, and we learned to watch out, especially for grandparents. The kiddies are pretty resilient; they want to be terrified. But the grandparents can be rather more fragile.

Although we rarely witnessed each other’s performances, there was a lot of respect around for the way each of us coped with our working conditions. I’d say, for instance, that the Mummy had the most difficult job. The Egyptian Tomb is a maze and a maze is claustrophobic. The Mummy was one of those men who could make something out of nothing. He stayed very still, and when he moved it was almost imperceptible. It was as if he was playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with his audience. He terrified his visitors slowly and subtly and I must say that of all of us, he was the one I admired most.

Mummy used to sing with the Scottish Opera until asthma ruined his career. He was an enormous man, but unlike me he did not work out with weights. He didn’t have to: physical strength was not part of his act. Timing was his forte. I wish I had seen him on stage — with that size and presence, coupled with his sense of timing, he must have been quite electric. Mummy was an artist and an outstandingly gentle person, so we all felt his humiliation personally.

It happened late one June evening. The ticket office had been closed for an hour and the last visitors were trickling away. I had come down from my climbing frame and was beginning to make my way over to the dressing room when a pack of teenage boys burst out of the Egyptian Tomb and chased each other to the exit. I noticed with alarm that one of them was waving a piece of burning cloth.