Scared Stiff

  Connie’s arm had been hurt, but it obviously wasn’t broken, because he was using it. He dove for a buggy, too—he had a yellow one and mine was orange—and we slammed down on the pedals and headed straight for our enemy.

  Zimmer was threading his way between stalled buggies all over the place, starting to grin, before he realized what we were going to do.

  The grin slid off his face just before Connie’s buggy slammed into him.

  It had rubber bumpers, but they were hard enough to hurt when they hit. Zimmer was thrown off balance, and then my buggy knocked him sideways. We quickly reversed and hit him again before he could get up. Then we abandoned the buggies and ran.

  Zimmer was hurt, though not seriously enough to matter. He was cursing and fighting his way free of the bumper buggies before we had any chance to get out of his sight.

  “The Splasher,” Connie gasped as we pelted away, and I didn’t waste breath responding.

  It was only when we reached the top of the ramp where we were to board the cars for the Splasher that it dawned on me.

  “We can’t push both buttons at once and get into a car before it starts!” I cried, looking back to see Zimmer gaining on us.

  Connie was already sticking the key in the lock beside the first control button. He was puffing from the exertion. “Jump in, and I’ll follow you if I have time to get the next car. Anyway, after we hit the water, we’ll split up. I’ll go left, you go right, okay?”

  There wasn’t time for more. I fell into the first car poised at the top of the slope over the pond, bumping an elbow painfully, then looked back.

  Connie had punched the second button, and the line of cars started to move. He dove toward the track and made it into the fourth car back.

  Far off across the park, by the hole in the fence, I saw Packard and Kenny, who was so limp I was afraid Packard had knocked him out.

  We were picking up speed when I looked back for the last time and saw Zimmer barely make it into the rear car.

  And then the front one went over the edge, plunging down toward the pond below. I hadn’t had time to fasten the bar in front of me, and I hung onto one side of the car to keep from being pitched out before we got that far.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When we hit the water it rose in a heavy spray all around our cars.

  I almost fell in the pond in my hurry to get out of the car before it had quite reached the unloading dock.

  I didn’t look back this time, but headed right, as Connie had instructed. Within seconds I heard his feet pounding on the dock behind me, and I ran for all I was worth.

  I knew who Zimmer would follow. It was me he wanted, not Connie, though no doubt they planned to catch him too, after I was in their grasp. At the very least, they’d keep him trapped inside Wonderland so he couldn’t go to the police until they’d used Kenny and me to force Ma to do what they wanted.

  Of course Zimmer didn’t know about the drainpipe. Even if he noticed it, he’d see only a grille that would presumably keep anybody out of it, and it wouldn’t mean anything to him.

  On the way down the Splasher, waiting for the water to soak me when I hit, I’d tried to plan. That isn’t easy when your mind is racing around in circles and you’re scared stiff. I tried not to think about how Kenny must be feeling.

  My best bet, I decided, was the Pirate’s Cave, after all. Zimmer could keep me cornered in there by simply standing on the loading and unloading platform, but if Packard stayed over by the hole in the fence, he couldn’t help get me out. If Zimmer left to get help, he’d have to leave the exit to the cave unguarded, and he wouldn’t be able to see which way I went.

  Even if he ran to get Packard, I figured I could get out the drainpipe before he knew where I’d gone.

  I didn’t have a key to anything at the cave, but the gondolas just went through by themselves anyway, because the water kept circulating, round and round. I jumped in the first one and pushed off.

  I didn’t relish going into the dark, with no flashlight and by myself, but I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t tell if Zimmer was hot on my heels, seeing where I went, but I didn’t have any other choices anyway.

  Just as the little boat reached the entrance to the tunnel I heard breaking glass.

  Instinctively, I put out a hand to the edge of the opening and held my position.

  Where had it come from? I couldn’t tell. Being down in the water, below the top edge of the fake rocks that formed the cave, distorted the sounds.

  More glass smashed, somebody yelled. Zimmer or Packard? Not Connie, I was sure.

  And suddenly, overhead, colored lights came on.

  If Zimmer was just about to bound up the steps, and then down to the loading dock, it was risky to stick my head up. But maybe he’d been diverted by the sounds and it might give me more options than trapping myself in a pitch-black cave.

  I hesitated. I didn’t hear running feet on the boards, nor any more shouting. Did I dare creep back up to the top of the loading platform, above the dock, and sneak a look?

  I did. I kept low and moved slowly, so as to attract as little attention as possible. Maybe Connie had managed to do something that would lead Zimmer on a wild-goose chase long enough for a miracle to happen. Like somebody calling the cops, and the cops actually taking them seriously and showing up, sirens screaming.

  I reached the top of the platform, where the walkway climbed over the rock wall before going back down to the boats. And right at that very moment, I heard the music.

  A calliope, I thought, incredulous. Somebody had started the merry-go-round!

  I saw Zimmer, then, only a few yards away from me, but he was looking back over his shoulder. I saw him yell, but couldn’t make out his words.

  If I couldn’t hear him from this close, Packard wouldn’t be able to, either.

  As I crouched there, only my head above the floor of the platform, lights began to come on in the approaching dusk.

  All over Wonderland, bright white lights and colored lights and neon signs advertising food and souvenirs and rides blinked on.

  Not all at once, but a cluster at a time, spreading out from the area around the carousel the way ripples spread on the water when you drop in a stone.

  No, not quite the same way. It was more like a wave going in one direction, sweeping over first one area, then the next.

  Somebody was moving from one attraction to another, as fast as he could reach them, turning on lights and music. A window crashed as it broke, and moments later there was dance-hall music from the Wild West Village Saloon.

  Connie and his keys, I thought, excitement almost suffocating me. Only he couldn’t be doing it all alone. He couldn’t reach both control buttons at the same time.

  Julie? I thought suddenly. Could Julie be helping him? But we’d left Julie behind, outside in the RV park.

  I saw Zimmer start to turn in my direction, and I jerked back. I wasn’t fast enough. I bumped my chin on the top step and bit through my tongue so I tasted blood, and then I heard him running up the wooden steps toward me. I gave up trying to be careful.

  I half fell down the steps and leaped into a gondola, and pushed off with my hands.

  This time I didn’t hesitate about entering the cave. Even a spooky dark pit was better than dealing with Zimmer, who didn’t care if he broke both a guy’s arms.

  I only let the boat drift a little way on the circulating stream before I stopped it with a hand on the wall and listened.

  Now Zimmer was closer, down inside the artificial rock mountain, standing on the loading dock.

  “Come out, kid, and you won’t get hurt,” he said. I heard that quite clearly.

  I didn’t answer. Maybe I couldn’t have, because it was hard enough just to breathe. Fat chance, I thought.

  “If I have to come in after you,” Zimmer said, “you’ll be sorry.”

  I swallowed, steadying myself against the wall. The current wanted to carry my gondola along, and I searched for a b
igger projection on the fake rock and held on harder.

  Far in the distance, the calliope music came to an end. Only the whisper of the water beneath me broke the silence, except that the dance-hall music, a long way off, kept playing for another few minutes while I waited.

  “You want to see your ma again, don’t you?”

  His voice sent shivers down my back.

  “We got your ma and your little brother,” Zimmer reminded me. He could speak more quietly now, and somehow that made his words more deadly. “Even without you, we’re in control. You be nice and come out, and we’ll take you to your mama. How’s that?”

  I jerked in alarm when I heard the other voice, sounding almost as nearby as Zimmer’s. Packard had come to join him.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think we’d better pack up and get out of here. Those confounded kids have managed to turn everything on, and it covers all the sounds they make. The people in the trailer park will hear the music and investigate—or get the cops to do it—before long. Where’s the other boy?”

  “In here. Went in in a little boat. And now that you’re here to make sure he doesn’t escape, I’m going in after him,” Zimmer said in a way that made my goose bumps bigger.

  I eased up my grip on the wall and let the gondola float onward, keeping track of where I was by feel as I went around the corner. What if, I thought, when the wall receded and I knew I’d come to the first of the scenes set up to scare paying customers, I were to get out of my boat? Crawl up onto the ledge where the scene was laid out? If only I could think of a way to get the boat out of the way, so he wouldn’t know I’d stopped, without having it come out the far end where Packard would see it and realize what I’d done.

  There was no way to do that. The tunnel was only wide enough for one gondola at a time. When the one Zimmer was in got to me, it would bump into mine, whether I was in it or not.

  Connie knew I’d gone for the cave, I thought. It was where he’d suggested I go, right from the start. Would he be able to think of anything to do to help me? Now that Packard was no longer guarding the hole through the fence, either Connie or Julie could slip back through it for help.

  I’d started to slide away from the left-hand wall, and I leaned over, grabbing whatever I touched, throwing me off balance. I got a better hold and gave a small sigh of relief that I hadn’t been pitched into the inky water.

  The water. What about the water? How deep was it now? It wasn’t the sluggish puddle we’d first found, not even up to Connie’s knees, but a flowing stream that might be deep enough to conceal this flat-bottomed gondola if I could sink it.

  It would have to be fast. Packard was giving Zimmer last-minute instructions, and he’d be showing up any minute.

  Hoping I was guessing right about the depth of the water, and hanging on to an invisible figure on the ledge in front of me, I began to walk up the side of the gondola, forcing it to tip sideways.

  The water, surprisingly cold, came over my foot, and then up my leg as I kept pushing the edge of the gondola downward. It only took seconds for it to fill with water; I scrambled up onto the ledge just before it sank.

  I had been hanging on to a pirate’s leg. I groped around, orienting myself in the darkness, and figured out where I was: with the pirate who held a lantern in the hook that replaced a missing hand, the one with a parrot on his shoulder.

  I crawled around behind the pirate, crouched against the back of the ledge, and waited.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Zimmer didn’t have any kind of light. Though I couldn’t see him coming, I heard him. He wasn’t making any effort to be quiet; in fact, he spoke to me as soon as he rounded the first turn in the tunnel and was in the dark, too.

  “You better give up and come out, kid, if you know what’s good for you.”

  I’d gotten pretty wet at the bottom of the Splasher, and it was always cooler inside the cave than outside because the sun never reached this far. So besides having goose bumps because I was scared, I was actually cold.

  My teeth were starting to chatter, and I bit them together so Zimmer wouldn’t hear me.

  When he spoke right alongside me the hair lifted off my scalp.

  For a minute I thought he’d seen me when he said, “Come on now, don’t be an idiot. If you don’t give up, we’re going to have to be mean to your little brother. You hear him screaming, it’ll be too late to save him.”

  There was the sound of his gondola bumping the wall right in front of me, and I froze. What if the water wasn’t deep enough? What if his boat hung up on the one I’d sunk?

  And then he was past, and he was still talking to me, making threats. He hadn’t seen me, and his gondola had gone right over the top of the first one.

  I just waited, shivering.

  I could faintly hear the carousel again, the calliope music. And maybe—was it my imagination?—voices shouting. I waited until I wanted to scream; surely Zimmer had had time to go all the way out the other end.

  Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I edged forward and slid off my ledge into the water, praying it wasn’t so deep I’d have to swim. I had a nightmare once about swimming in black water, in the dark.

  It was cold, and it came to a little above my waist. I stepped onto the sunken gondola, nearly tripped getting out of it, and headed toward the entrance, hoping they wouldn’t be expecting me to go back the way I’d come.

  Dusk had deepened, though it wasn’t really dark yet, and there were lights on all over inside the park. I sucked in a breath when I realized Packard was standing on the platform above the loading dock, and he was holding Kenny by the back of the shirt.

  Though I couldn’t see Kenny’s face, he seemed to be all right. For now, but for how long?

  I guess Packard thought too much time had passed, too. He was looking toward the opposite opening, and he yelled. “Zimmer! What are you doing? Haven’t you found him yet?”

  “He ain’t in here,” Zimmer called back, and a moment later his gondola drifted out into the open. “I went all the way through, and the kid’s not there.”

  “That’s crazy, he’s got to be in there! He took one of those boats and he went in the other end, didn’t he? You must have missed him.”

  “How could I miss him?” Zimmer was in a worse humor than before, and he didn’t like Packard yelling at him. As soon as I saw him, I’d jerked back inside the opening, but stayed close enough so I could hear. “It’s just a tunnel that winds around and comes back out; there’s no place else to go.”

  “Well, go through again. You must have missed him somehow,” Packard insisted. “Check the walls on both sides, make sure there isn’t a side tunnel or something.”

  “You go through,” Zimmer said sullenly. “This isn’t turning out the way you said. A quarter of the value of that load ain’t enough to make it worth my while to go chasing around in a dark hole looking for a bratty kid. Let’s take the other one back to Sophie and go to work on ’em.”

  I was frozen, inside and out. What should I do now? I wondered desperately.

  Packard called his partner a name, and then he said, “All right, you watch this one. I’ll go find the other one myself. He has to be in there somewhere.”

  I heard them moving around on the dock, and I started backing away, then turned and made my way deep inside again, afraid and not knowing what else to do.

  I hadn’t thought about the fact that I’d climbed onto the first of the rocky shelves from the edge of the sunken gondola, not from the floor of the artificial stream. It was too high up, and I panicked for a minute until I located the sunken boat again. Even then, it was hard work dragging myself out of the water, and I was afraid Packard would get there before I did.

  Packard talked to me, too, in a deadly voice that convinced me he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt me—and Kenny and Ma too—if he didn’t get what he wanted.

  He was coming alongside me, now, and I shivered against the back wall of the ledge, wondering if he’
d go on past, too, or if he’d notice that the ledge was there. Once he realized there were a series of ledges, he’d investigate and find me for sure.

  What did I do then?

  He was talking, and he stopped in the middle of a sentence. He’d realized the upper wall had changed. I forgot to breathe.

  And then, expecting to feel his hand on my ankle any minute, I was suddenly blinded when the light came on.

  It wasn’t a bright light, but the one intended to make this scene look spooky, and it was more of a surprise to Packard than it was to me.

  I don’t know where I got the nerve to throw all my weight behind the pirate and shove him forward, with the hooked hand and its lantern plunging right into Packard’s face.

  A second later the lights went out and it was dark again. I knew where I was, and I stayed there, but Packard was cursing and thrashing around. From the sounds he made, I guessed he’d fallen into the bottom of the boat, maybe cracking his head.

  By the time he’d recovered, the gondola had drifted past me. Zimmer started yelling from outside.

  “What’s going on? Packard? What happened?”

  The tunnel curved, so when the lights came on at the next scene I could barely tell it except that Packard started swearing again. I don’t suppose he was scared, once he realized what was happening, but he’d been startled enough the first time to allow himself to be swept on past me.

  Although the tunnel was fairly long, it curved back on itself in a tight pattern; it was easy to hear what was happening beyond the spot where I was because the walls weren’t real rock and nothing was very far away.

  When the crazy laughter began, it echoed through the cavern. After it finally died away, Zimmer demanded, “What’s going on? What was that?” He sounded quite unnerved.

  “It’s a fool tourist-trap fun house,” Packard yelled, startlingly near. “I’ll be out in a minute. This can’t last much longer.”

  “You find the kid?”

  “Not yet. But I will.”

  I was stunned. Hadn’t he seen me when the light exposed the pirate I’d shoved at him? Maybe not. He’d been taken off guard, and the light had only been on for a matter of seconds. Had he gotten such a poor look at me that he’d taken me for part of the pirate scene?