“Excuse me,” I said, brushing by him.

“There’s no town drunk here, you meddling son of a bitch,” he said, never looking at me and never missing a beat as he clapped. “We all just take turns.”

It’s a dream after all, I thought. It’s a dream and that proves it.

But the smell of tobacco on his breath wasn’t a dream, the smell of the crowd wasn’t a dream, and the weight of the frightened child in my arms wasn’t a dream, either. My shirt was hot and wet where her face was pressed. She was crying.

“Hey, Irish!” Sara called from the stage, and her voice was so like Jo’s that I could have screamed. She wanted me to turn back—I could feel her will working on the sides of my face like fingers—but I wouldn’t do it.

I dodged around three farmers who were passing a ceramic bottle from hand to hand and then I was free of the crowd. The midway lay ahead, wide as Fifth Avenue, and at the end of it was the arch, the steps, The Street, the lake. Home. If I could get to The Street we’d be safe. I was sure of it. “Almost done, Irish!” Sara shrieked after me.

She sounded angry, but not too angry to laugh. “You gonna get what you want, sugar, all the comfort you need, but you want to let me finish my bi’ness. Do you hear me, boy? Just stand clear! Mind me, now!” I began to hurry back the way I had come, stroking Ki’s head, still holding her face against my shirt. Her straw hat fell off and when I grabbed for it, I got nothing but the ribbon, which pulled free of the brim. No matter.

We had to get out of here. On our left was the baseball pitch and some little boy shouting “Willy hit it over the fence, Ma! Willy hit it over the fence!” with monotonous, brain-croggling regularity. We passed the Bingo, where some woman howled that she had won the turkey, by glory, every number was covered with a button and she had won the turkey.

Overhead, the sun dove behind a cloud and the day went dull. Our shadows disappeared. The arch at the end of the midway drew closer with maddening slowness. “Are we home yet?” Ki almost moaned. “I want to go home, Mike, please take me home to my mommy.”

“I will,” I said.

“Everything’s going to be all right.” We were passing the Test Your Strength pole, where the young man with the red hair was putting his shirt back on. He looked at me with stolid dislike—the instinctive mistrust of a native for an interloper, per-haps—and I realized I knew him, too. He’d have a grandson named Dickie who would, toward the end of the century to which this fair had been dedicated, own the All-Purpose Garage on Route 68. A woman coming out of the quilting booth stopped and pointed at me. At the same moment her upper lip lifted in a dog’s snarl.

I knew that face, too. From where? Somewhere around town. It didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to know even if it did. “We never should have come here,” Ki moaned. “I know how you feel,” I said. “But I don’t think we had any choice, hon. We—”

They came out of Freak Alley, perhaps twenty yards ahead. I saw them and stopped. There were seven in all, long-striding men dressed in cutters’

clothes, but four didn’t matter—those four looked faded and white and ghostly. They were sick fellows, maybe dead fellows, and no more dangerous than daguerreotypes. The other three, though, were real. As real as the rest of this place, anyway. The leader was an old man wearing a faded blue Union Army cap. He looked at me with eyes I knew.

Eyes I had seen measuring me over the top of an oxygen mask. “Mike? Why we stoppin?”

“It’s all right, Ki. Just keep your head down. This is all a dream. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning in your own bed.”

“"Kay.” The jacks spread across the midway hand to hand and boot to boot, blocking our way back to the arch and The Street. Old Blue-Cap was in the middle.

The ones on either side of him were much younger, some by maybe as much as half a century. Two of the pale ones, the almost-not-there ones, were standing side-by-side to the old man’s right, and I wondered if I could burst through that part of their line. I thought they were no more flesh than the thing which had thumped the insulation of the cellar wall… but what if I was wrong? “Give her over, son,” the old man said. His voice was reedy and implacable. He held out his hands. It was Max Devore, he had come back, even in death he was seeking custody. Yet it wasn’t him. I knew it wasn’t. The planes of this man’s face were subtly different, the cheeks gaunter, the eyes a brighter blue. “Where am I?” I called to him, accenting the last word heavily, and in front of Angelina’s booth, the man in the turban (a Hindu who perhaps hailed from Sandusky, Ohio) put down his flute and simply watched. The snake-girls stopped dancing and watched, too, slipping their arms around each other and drawing together for comfort. “Where am/, Devore? If our great-grandfathers shit in the same pit, then where am I?”

“Ain’t here to answer your questions. Give her over.”

“I’ll take her, Jared,” one of the younger men-one of those who were really there—said. He looked at Devore with a kind of fawning eagerness that sickened me, mostly because I knew who he was: Bill Dean’s 1 bfhen KINL father. A man who had grown up to be one of the most respected elders in Castle County was all but licking Devore’s boots. Don’t think too badly of him, Jo whispered. Don’t think too badly of any of them. They were very young. “You don’t need to do nothing,” Devore said. His reedy voice was irritated; Fred Dean looked abashed. “He’s going to hand her over on his own. And if he don’t, we’ll take her together.” I looked at the man on the far left, the third of those that seemed totally real, totally there. Was this me? It didn’t look like me. There was something in the face that seemed familiar but-“Hand her over, Irish,” Devore said. “Last chance.”

Devore nodded as if this was exactly what he had expected. “Then we’ll take her. This has got to end. Come on, boys.” They started toward me and as they did I realized who the one on the end—the one in the caulked treewalker boots and flannel loggers’ pants—reminded me of:

Kenny Auster, whose wolfhound would eat cake ’til it busted. Kenny Auster, whose baby brother had been drowned under the pump by Kenny’s father. I looked behind me. The Red-Tops were still playing, Sara was still laughing, shaking her hips with her hands in the sky, and the crowd was still plugging the east end of the midway. That way was no good, anyway. if I went that way, I’d end up raising a little girl in the early years of the twentieth century, trying to make a living by writing penny dread-fuls and dime novels. That might not be so bad. .

but there was a lonely young woman miles and years from here who would miss her. Who might even miss us both. I turned back and saw the jackboys were almost on me. Some of them more here than others, more vital, but all of them dead. All of them damned. I looked at the towhead whose descendants would include Kenny Auster and asked him, “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you men do?” He held out his hands.

“Give her over, Irish. That’s allyou have to do. You and the woman can have more. All the more you want. She’s young, she’ll pop em out like watermelon seeds.”

I was hypnotized, and they would have taken us if not for Kyra. “What’s happening?” she screamed against my shirt. “Something smells! Something smells so bad./ Oh Mike, make it stop/” And I realized I could smell it, too. Spoiled meat and swampgas. Burst tissue and simmering guts. Devore was the most alive of all of them, generating the same crude but powerful magnetism I had felt around his great-grandson, but he was as dead as the rest of them, too: as he neared I could see the tiny bugs which were feeding in his nostrils and the pink corners of his eyes.

Everything down here is death, I thought. Didn’t my own wij9 tell me so?

They reached out their tenebrous hands, first to touch Ki and then to take her. I backed up a step, looked to my right, and saw more ghosts—some coming out of busted windows, some slipping from redbrick chimneys. Holding Kyra in my arms, I ran for the Ghost House. “Get him!”