Mammoth Book of Best New Horror by Stephen Jones

obstacle that waited in his path was a wide-eyed schoolgirl. As the yellowing leaves tumbled above his head, Billy felt the first chill decision of adulthood.

        The funfair ran its cycle through Labor Day, but only passed by Cooper Creek for a week. He felt sure that convincing Susannah to come with him would be easy, but before that evening he needed to find a way inside the ghost train. He had watched the canvas flats of hellfire and damnation being put together to form a righteous journey, devil snakes and playing cards lining the tunnel through which the cars would roll. Now he needed to befriend the woman who was helping her old man set up the ticket booth, the one the roustabouts called Molly. He knew how to use seventeen years of healthy boyhood on a thirty-five-year-old overweight woman. Girls flirt with attractive men, but boys flirt with anyone.

        When he approached her, she was bending over a broken step, and all he could see was the wide field of blue cornflowers that covered her dress. He stood politely until she rose, hands on hips, a vast acreage of sun-weathered cleavage smiling at him. Her small grey eyes no longer trusted anything they saw, but softened on his face.

        "Help you, boy?"

        "Ma'am, my name's Billy Fleet, and I'm raising money for my college education by trying to find summer work. I know how to fix electrics, and it seems to me you need someone to work the ghost train, 'cause you got some shorts sparking out in there, and I ain't seen no one go in to repair 'em."

        "What are you, town watchdog? Got nothing better to do than spy on folks trying to earn a decent living?" Molly's bead-eyes shrank further.

        "No Ma'am. I meant no disrespect, I just see you setting up from my bedroom window and know you're shy a man or two. This town's real particular about health and safety, and I figure I can save you a heap of trouble for a few bucks."

        The woman folded fat arms across her considerable bosom and rocked back to study him. "I don't take kindly to blackmail, Billy boy." Her eyes were as old as Cleopatra's, and studied him without judgment. "Fairs don't take on college kids. It don't pay to be too smart around here."

        "Maybe so, but in this town a fair is a place where a guy gets a rosette for keeping a pig. This is a real carnival. It's special."

        "Ain't no big secret to it. You take a little, give a little back, that's all." She saw the need in his eyes and was silent for a moment. "Hell, if the town is so dog-dead you got to watch us set up from your bedroom at nights maybe we can work something out. Let me go talk to- Papa Jack."

        That was how Billy got the job on the Twilight Express.

        The night the fair opened, white lights punched holes into the blue air, and the smell of sage and dust was replaced with the tang of rolling hotdogs. Susannah had planned to go with her girlfriends, to shriek and flirt on the opalescent Tilt-A-Whirl, holding down their skirts and tossing back their hair with arms straightened to the bar, bucking and spinning across the night. She agreed with just a nod when Billy insisted on taking her, and he wondered whether she would really be fussed if he just took off, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't bear the thought of people bad-mouthing him, even though he wouldn't be there to hear it. So he took Susannah to the fair.

        He couldn't bring himself to place his arm around her waist, because the baby might sense his presence and somehow make him change his mind. Babies did that; they turned tough men into dishrags, and he wasn't about to let that happen. She wore a red dress covered in yellow daisies like tiny bursts of sunlight, and laughed at everything. He couldn't see what was funny. She was happily robbing him of his life and didn't even notice, pointing to the fat lady and the stilt-walkers, feeding her glossy red mouth with pink floss as if she was eating sunset