Free Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz

anyone but another Stanfeuss. Nevertheless, humbled and self-reproachful, I was also grateful for the fat man’s good-humored charity.
    When I reached the door and opened it, he said, “Wait a minute.”
    I looked back and saw that he was staring at me in a different way than before. He had been sizing me up to determine my character, my abilities, and my sense of responsibility, but now he was looking at me the way a handicapper might examine a horse on which he intended to place a bet. “You’re a strong youngster,” he said. “Good biceps. Good shoulders. You move well too. You look like you could take care of yourself in a tight situation.”
    As some answer seemed required, I said, “Well . . . I have, yeah.”
    I wondered what he would say if I told him that I had killed four goblins so far—four pig-faced, dog-fanged, serpent-tongued things with murderous red eyes and claws like rapiers.
    He regarded me in silence for a moment, then at last said, “Listen, if you can get along with Rya, that’s who you’ll work for. But tomorrow I’d like you to do a special job for me . There probably won’t be any tough stuff, but the potential’s there. Worse comes to worst, you might have to duke it out with someone. But I suspect you’ll just have to stand around and look intimidating.”
    “Whatever you want,” I said.
    “You ain’t going to ask what the job is?”
    “You can explain it tomorrow.”
    “You don’t want a chance to turn it down?”
    “Nope.”
    “There’re some risks involved.”
    I held up the four dollars he had given me. “You’ve bought yourself a risk taker.”
    “You come cheap.”
    “It wasn’t the four bucks that bought me, Jelly. It was the kindness.”
    He was uncomfortable with the compliment. “Get the hell out of here, grab your lunch, and start earning your keep. We don’t like deadbeats on the lot.”
    Feeling better than I had felt in months, I went out to the front office, and Cash Dooley said I could leave my gear with him until they found trailer space for me, and then I went to Sam Trizer’s grab-joint for a bite of lunch. They call these places “grab-joints” or “grab-stands” because there’s no place to sit, so you just have to grab your food and eat on the fly. I had two perfect chili dogs, French fries, a vanilla shake, and then headed up the midway.
    As county fairs go, this was better than average, almost large, but not nearly as big as the important fairs in places like Milwaukee, St. Paul, Topeka, Pittsburgh, and Little Rock, where paid admissions could top a quarter of a million on a good day. Nonetheless, Thursday was getting close to the weekend. And it was summer when the kids were out of school, and a lot of people were on vacation. Besides, in rural Pennsylvania the fair was as much excitement as there ever was—people came from fifty or sixty miles around—so even though the gates had just opened, a thousand marks had come onto the midway already. All the hanky-panks and other games were ready for business, their operators beginning to pitch the passing tip, and many of the rides were running. The scent of popcorn was in the air, and diesel fuel, and cookhouse grease. The gaudy fantasy was just cranking up its engine, but in a few hours it would be running at full-tilt—a thousand exotic sounds, an all-encompassing blaze of color and motion that would eventually seem to expand until it had become the universe, until it was impossible to believe that anything existed beyond the carnival grounds.
    I passed the Dodgem Cars, half expecting to see police and a crowd of horrified onlookers, but the ticket booth was open, and the cars were in operation, and the marks were screaming but only at one another as they crashed their rubber-bumpered vehicles together. If anyone had noticed the fresh stains on the pavilion floor, he hadn’t realized they were blood.
    I wondered where my unknown helper had taken the corpse, wondered when he would