Description: 1 Mary Alice Brannigan sat on the roof of the Dreamland carousel at twenty minutes to midnight and considered her work in the light from the lamp on her yellow miner's hat. It was good. FunFun, the redheaded clown sitting cross-legged next to her on the roof's peak, was fully restored again. Of all the clowns in the park, including the beautiful seven-foot ironclad Fun at the Dreamland entrance, this wooden one was her favorite: exuberantly happy, one yellow-gloved hand pulling back his striped blue-green coat to show off his orange-and-gold-checked waistcoat, the other flung above his head, reaching for the gold panpipes he'd lost long ago. "Don't worry, baby," she said to him, patting her work bag between them. "I got your pipes right here." He grinned crookedly down at her, or at least down toward the ground as a breeze picked up, biting with the chill of the Ohio October night. Mab pulled her canvas painting coat closer around her and looked out over the newly restored jewel box of an amusement park. It had taken her thirty-nine years, but now she was not only in Dreamland, she'd saved it. Once I finish the Fortune-Telling Machine, I will have put this place back the way it was at the very beginning. I will belong here. I rock. And the best part was that she was surveying it all at night with no- "You up there, Mab?" Glenda yelled. -people around to spoil the moment. "Stop what you're doing and come down here," Glenda called, the cheer in her voice sounding as platinum bright as her hair, and about as authentic. "We'll walk you back to the Dream Cream, see you get upstairs to bed. You need your sleep, honey." Mab gritted her teeth. This was what she got for taking a break to gloat over her work: people showed up and shouted at her. She pulled her bag closer and took out the pipes, careful not to scratch any of the five little golden cylinders. Then she fished a tube of fast-set glue out of the bag, stood up carefully, and reached to glue the pipes into the FunFun's empty fingers, tilting her head back so the light from her miner's cap shone on the hand. A small black raven swooped down and perched on the clown's head. "Beat it, Frankie," Mab whispered to the bird, trying to brush it away without dropping the pipes or falling to her death. Frankie flapped his wings and rose above the clown and then settled down on the upflung hand, cawing at her like a cheese-grater dragged across a fire escape. Cinderella got bluebirds doing her hair, Mab thought. I get ravens screwing with my work. From below, Mab heard the raspy voice of Glenda's friend Delpha, an echo of Frankie's: "She's up there, Glenda. Frankie knows." "I know, too," Glenda said, and then she raised her voice. "I'm not kidding, Mab, stop whatever you're doing up there right now." Mab leaned in, holding on to the glue with one hand and the pipes with the other, and looked Frankie right in the eye. "These pipes are going in that hand, bird," she told him, serious as death. "Do not get between me and my work." Frankie watched her for a moment, his eyes steady and bright with intelligence, and then he cawed again, the sound going down Mab's spine like a rasp, and flapped off. "Okay, then." Mab checked for the side of the pipes with the broken metal rod on it, reached up and squirted a generous shot of glue into the hole in the FunFun's palm, and slotted the broken rod into it. She held it for sixty seconds, ignoring demands to quit from down below, and then wiggled it a little to see if it had set. The pipes clicked, the sound sharp in the night, as if the metal rod had moved into place, engaged a gear or something. What the hell? "Okay, that's it," Glenda said, the brightness gone from her voice. "I'm coming up there." At fifty-nine, Glenda was probably in better shape than Mab was at thirty-nine, but it was dark, and Glenda liked a cocktail or three after six, and while she was often annoying, Mab didn't want her dead, so . . . "Hold on." Mab capped her glue and put it in her paint bag and eased down the turquoise-and-blue-striped carousel roof to peer over the edge, gripping the gold scalloped trim for insurance. Glenda stood on the flagstone below in the spotlight cast from the lamp on Mab's hat, one hand on her capri-clad hip, the other waving a cigarette, her spiky white hair glowing over her pink angora sweater. Beside her, ancient, black-eyed little Delpha looked up from under lowered brows, her improbably black hair slicked down on both sides of her sunken face like two strokes of black paint over a skull, the rest of her swathed in a dark blue shawl that blended into the night. Frankie flapped down to sit on Delpha's shoulder. Death's parrot, Mab thought. "Glenda, I'm almost done-" "Done?" Glenda smiled up at her, tense for some reason. "But, honey, you shouldn't be doing anything up there-" Somebody staggered out of the night and lurched into Glenda, who bumped into Delpha, who stumbled back and dislodged Frankie, who went for the staggerer, who screamed and batted at him. Frankie flew to sit on the edge of the carousel roof beside Mab, and the guy looked up. Mab saw brown hair, bleary eyes, and a dense five o'clock shadow over an orange Bengals shirt: Drunk Dave, one of the Beer Pavilion regulars who should have been out of the park when it had closed forty-five minutes before. He'd probably stumbled off to pee in the trees that rimmed the island and gotten lost. Again. "Whassat?" Drunk Dave squinted up at her, and Mab realized that to him, she was just a big light in the black sky. "This is God, Dave. Go home, sober up, get a job, and never get drunk again. Or you'll go to hell." Drunk Dave's mouth dropped open, making him look even more slack-jawed than usual. "Go home, Dave, the park's closed," Glenda said. "Okay," Dave said, and staggered on. "Come down, Mab, and we'll walk you back to the Dream Cream," Glenda said. "It's not safe for you to wander around alone." "I've been walking around this park alone for months, and now you tell me it's not safe?" "Well, there's Dave." "I can take care of Drunk Dave with one hand wrapped around FunFun." "And there's danger." Glenda waved her cigarette around vaguely. "It's . . . October." "Right. The dangerous month." Mab shook her head, which made the light from the lamp on her hat swing wildly, and then she crawled back up the striped metal roof. The park people were just odd; that was all there was to it. It probably came from living on the grounds. You lived full-time in Dreamland, you got strange. "Mab, get down here right now!" "I'm coming!" She fastened the flap on her work bag, made her way back to the ladder on the opposite side of the carousel, and climbed down to the flagstones that covered most of the park. Tomorrow she'd come out in the daylight and see the wood FunFun in all its finished glory, and then she'd move on to the Fortune-Telling Machine- Something hard ran into her, and she lost her hat as she went down and smacked her head on the stone. "Ouch!" she said, and grabbed her hat and put it back on so that the light on it would stun the moron who'd knocked her down. "Damn it, Dave-" Huge turquoise eyes gleamed down under iron-hard red-orange curls. A stiff turquoise striped coat loomed over her, metal protesting as it bent. Then the thing brought its red-orange lips together slowly and ground out "Mmmm" and then spread them apart with the sound of rending metal to say, "ab," its smile widening and its cheeks splitting as it jerkily held out its yellow iron-gloved hand to help her up. "FunFun?" Mab said faintly. The thing nodded, its head moving slowly up and down with a metallic squeaking sound. Mab screamed. Ethan John Wayne stared across the causeway at the locked iron gates that led to Dreamland as the sound of his taxi faded into the darkness. Something was missing on the other side of the gate, but it had been a long time since he'd been home, and he couldn't figure out what it was. Well, maybe they'd moved something. A lot of things changed in twenty years. He rubbed his chest, feeling the scar that covered the Taliban bullet pressing on his heart. Dreamland was as good a place to die as any, and he had family here, which counted for something. What, he wasn't quite sure. He dropped his rucksack to the ground, pulled out a leather flask, and took a good, long slug. Then he put the flask away and squared his shoulders to go back into the park. It wasn't much of a home, he thought, but at least it was peaceful, no people around to- A scream rent the night. Ethan threw his vest on, grabbed his .45-caliber pistol from the pack, and sprinted for the entrance. He leapt as he reached the ten-foot-high wrought-iron gate, free hand reaching for the crossbar just below the top, and fell right onto his butt. Cursing, he got to his feet and approached the gate, factoring in his inebriated sta

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