Joyland

HORROR HOUSE LIES BEYOND! BEWARE!

PREGNANT WOMEN AND THOSE WITH SMALL CHILDREN MAY EXIT LEFT.

We walked into an antechamber filled with echoing recorded cackles and screams. Pulsing red light illuminated a single steel track and a black tunnel entrance beyond. From deep within it came rumbles, flashing lights, and more screams. These were not recorded. From a distance, they didn't sound particularly happy, but probably they were. Some, at least.

Eddie Parks, proprietor of Horror House and boss of Team Doberman, walked over to us. He was wearing rawhide gloves and a dogtop so old it was faded to no color at all (although it turned blood red each time the lights pulsed). He gave us a dismissive sniff. "Must have been a damn boring day off."

"Just wanted to see how the other half lives," Tom said.

Erin gave Eddie her most radiant smile. It was not returned.

"Three to a car, I guess. That what you want?"

"Yes," I said.

"Fine with me. Just remember that the rules apply to you, same as anyone else. Keep your fuckin hands inside."

"Yessir," Tom said, and gave a little salute. Eddie looked at him the way a man might look at a new species of bug and walked back to his controls, which consisted of three shifter-knobs sticking out of a waist-high podium. There were also a few buttons illuminated by a Tensor lamp bent low to minimize its less-than-ghostly white light.

"Charming guy," Tom muttered.

Erin hooked an arm into Tom's right elbow and my left, drawing us close. "Does anyone like him?" she murmured.

"No," Tom said. "Not even his own team. He's already fired two of them."

The rest of our group started to catch up just as a train filled with laughing conies (plus a few crying kids whose parents probably should have heeded the warning and exited from the arcade) arrived. Erin asked one of the girls if it was scary.

"The scary part was trying to keep his hands where they belong," she said, then squealed happily as her boyfriend first kissed her neck and then pulled her toward the arcade.

We climbed aboard. Three of us in a car designed for two made for an extremely tight fit, and I was very aware of Erin's thigh pressing against mine, and the brush of her breast against my arm. I felt a sudden and far from unpleasant southward tingle. I would argue that-fantasies aside-the majority of men are monogamous from the chin up. Below the belt-buckle, however, there's a wahoo stampeder who just doesn't give a shit.

"Hands inside the caaa!" Eddie Parks was yelling in a bored-to-death monotone that was the complete antithesis of a cheerful Lane Hardy pitch. "Hands inside the caaa! You got a kid under three feet, put im in your lap or get out of the caaa! Hold still and watch for the baaa!"

The safety bars came down with a clank, and a few girls tuned up with preparatory screams. Clearing their vocal cords for dark-ride arias to come, you might say.

There was a jerk, and we rode into Horror House.

* * *

Nine minutes later we got out and exited through the arcade with the rest of the tip. Behind us, we could hear Eddie exhorting his next bunch to keep their hands inside the caaa and watch for the baaa. He never gave us a look.

"The dungeon part wasn't scary, because all the prisoners were Dobies," Erin said. "The one in the pirate outfit was Billy Ruggerio." Her color was high, her hair was mussed from the blowers, and I thought she had never looked so pretty. "But the Screaming Skull really got me, and the Torture Chamber… my God!"

"Pretty gross," I agreed. I'd seen a lot of horror movies during my high school years, and thought of myself as inured, but seeing an eye-bulging head come rolling down an inclined trough from the guillotine had jumped the shit out of me. I mean, the mouth was still moving.

Out on Joyland Avenue again, we spotted Cam Jorgensen from Team Foxhound selling lemonade. "Who wants one?"

Erin asked. She was still bubbling over. "''m buying!"

"Sure," I said.

"Tom?"

He shrugged his assent. Erin gave him a quizzical look, then ran to get the drinks. I glanced at Tom, but he was watching the Rocket go around and around. Or maybe looking through it.

Erin came back with three tall paper cups, half a lemon bobbing on top of each. We took them to the benches in Joyland Park, just down from the Wiggle-Waggle, and sat in the shade.

Erin was talking about the bats at the end of the ride, how she knew they were just wind-up toys on wires, but bats had always scared the hell out of her and-

There she broke off. "Tom, are you okay? You haven't said a 1 19 word. Not sick to your stomach from turning in the Barrel, are you?"

"My stomach's fine." He took a sip of his lemonade, as if to prove it. "What was she wearing, Dev? Do you know?"

"Huh?"

"The girl who got murdered. Laurie Gray."

"Linda Gray."

"Laurie, Larkin, Linda, whatever. What was she wearing?

Was it a full skirt-a long one, down to her shins-and a sleeveless blouse?"