Part 43 (1/2)

”The story people. I've been reading the message boards and blogs. It's where I get all my best tips.”

Perry shook his head. Everyone else was more on top of this stuff than him. He was going to have to spend less time hacking the ride and more time reading the interweb, clearly.

”It was all Lester's idea, anyway,” he said.

She looked down with an unreadable expression. He hazarded a guess as to what that was about.

”Things are getting tight between you two, huh?”

”Christ it doesn't show that much does it?”

”No,” he lied. ”I just know Lester is all.”

”He's something else,” she said.

Suzanne needed some sundries, so he directed her to a little bodega in the back room of one of the houses. He told her he'd meet her at the guesthouse and took a seat in the lobby. He was still beat from the cold and the jet-lag, the work and the sheer exhaustion.

On the road he'd had momentum dragging him from one thing to the next, flights to catch, speeches to make. Back at home, confronted with routine, it was like his inertia was disappearing.

Eva Kettlewell thundered down the stairs three at a time with a sound like a barely controlled fall, burst into the lobby and headed for the door, her back rigid, her arms swinging, her face a picture of rage.

She went out the door like a flash and then stood in the street for a moment before striking out, seemingly at random.

Uh-oh, Perry thought.

Sammy didn't dare go back to the ride for weeks after the debacle in Boston. He'd been spotted by the Chinese guy and the b.u.mmy-looking guy who said he'd designed the ride, that much was sure. They probably suspected him of having sabotaged the Boston ride.

But he couldn't stay away. Work was dismal. The other execs at Disney World were all amazingly petty, and always worse before the quarterly numbers came out. Management liked to chase any kind of bad numbers with a few ritual beheadings.

The new Fantasyland had been a feather in Sammy's cap that had kept him safe from politics for a long time, but not anymore. Now it was getting run down: cigarette burns, graffiti, and every now and again someone would find a couple having pervy eyeliner s.e.x in the bushes.

He'd loved to work openings in Fantasyland's heyday. He'd stand just past the castle-gate and watch the flocking crowds of black-clad, lightly sweating, white-faced goth kids pour through it, blinking in the unnatural light of the morning. A lot of them took drugs and partied all night and then capped it off with an early morning at Fantasyland -- Disney had done focus groups, and they'd started selling the chewy things that soothed the clenched jaws brought on by dance-drugs.

But now he hated the raven-garbed customers who sallied into his park like they owned the joint. A girl -- maybe 16 -- walked past on vinyl platform heels with two gigantic men in their thirties behind her, led on thin black leather leashes. A group of whippet-thin boys in grey dusters with impossibly high sprays of teased electric blue hair followed. Then a group of heavily pierced older women, their faces rattling.

Then it was a river of black, kids in chains and leather, leathery grownups who dressed like surly kids. They formed neat queues by their favorite rides -- the haunted houses, the graveyard walk-through, the coffin coaster, the river of blood -- and puffed cloves through smokeless hookahs. At least he hoped it was cloves.

The castmembers in Sammy's Fantasyland were no better than the guests. They were pierced, dyed, teased, and branded to within an inch of their lives, even gothier than the goths who made the long pilgrimages to ride his unwholesome rides.

The worst of it was that there weren't *enough* of them anymore. The goth scene, which had shown every sign of surging and re-surging every five years, seemed finally to be dying. Numbers were down. A couple of goth-themed parks in the area had shuttered, as had the marshy one in New Orleans (admittedly that might have been more to do with the cholera outbreak).

Last month, he'd shut down the goth toddler-clothing shop and put its wares on deep online discount. All his little nieces and nephews were getting bat-wing onesies, skull platform-booties and temporary hair-dye and tattoos for Christmas. Now he just had to get rid of the other ten million bucks' worth of merch.

”Morning, Death,” he said. The kid's real name was Darren Weinberger, but he insisted on being called Death Waits, which given his pudgy round cheeks and generally eager-to-please demeanor, was funny enough that it had taken Sammy a full year to learn to control his grin when he said it.

”Sammy! Good morning -- how're you doing?”

”The numbers stink,” Sammy said. ”You must have noticed.”