“Don’t you have a Watcher’s expense account?” Cordelia asked Giles.
“Hardly.” Giles looked affronted.
“Not even a dry-cleaning allowance?” she pushed. “Because I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. If I’m going to be running around with you people—well, there’s all this goo and dirt and stuff. I had no idea demons had green blood, and that it stained!”
“Well, we got in for free, so that’s not too bad,” Buffy said. She came to a decision. “I think we should split up. We can cover more ground that way.”
Xander held up a finger. “Maybe not so much, Buffy. That’s the Camp Crystal Lake approach, and that usually results in a machete to the forehead.”
“True,” Buffy said thoughtfully.
Giles adjusted his glasses. “I beg your pardon?”
“Camp Crystal Lake? Jason? Hockey mask?” Xander prompted. Giles continued to stare at him as if he were speaking Swahili. “Giles, how can you be so up on all things wiggy and not know about this stuff?”
Willow stepped up to the plate. “You see, in slasher movies, when people go off in different directions to search for the killer, that’s when they get the axe. Literally.” She tapped the crown of her head. She smiled pleasantly at Cordelia. “Brain comes out with Spray ’n Wash.”
“Oh my God,” Cordelia said, looking ill.
“However, playing devil’s advocate here,” Xander cut in. “If we observe the Scooby-Doo mystery-solving method, we note that all the creepiest things happen to the group when they’re together.”
“And you do call yourselves the Scoobies,” Cordelia put in, cocking her head. “And Xander is kind of like a big, weird, goofy dog.”
“All’s I’m saying is, either approach has its time-honored plusses and minuses,” Xander said. “Splitting up, or hanging together.”
“Yeah, because we could die either way,” Willow finished helpfully.
“Exactly my point,” Xander concluded. They smiled and nodded at each other.
“I still say we should split up,” Buffy said. “We can each do one thing and then meet back in, like, half an hour with a report.”
“Oh my God,” Cordelia blurted, staring at her. “You had a good idea.”
“Still,” Giles said. “It may be dangerous.”
“Good ideas often are,” Xander riffed. “They can lead to political upheaval and…” His gaze wandered to an extremely, uh, woman wiggling her hips past him. “…the invention of Spandex.”
He caught himself. “Buffy’s right. We should explore in ones and twos. Hey, we’re not the Slayer-ettes for the T-shirts.”
“There are T-shirts?” Willow asked, sounding sad.
“The T-shirts are a metaphor,” Cordelia informed her. She narrowed her eyes. “Right?”
“Right. You haven’t missed out, Cordelia. There is nothing to get that you don’t have,” Xander replied.
“That’s for sure,” she said.
“We’ll split up, then,” Giles said.
“With you there,” Xander bit off.
“Me, too,” Cordelia shot back. “Splitting up forever.”
“What are you going to investigate?” Giles asked Buffy.
“Maybe we should go back through the Tunnel of Love,” Angel said.
Buffy looked interested. Then she gave her head a little shake. “I’m thinking the Ferris wheel,” she said. “We’ll be able to see a lot from up there.”
“Good thinking.” Giles looked at Willow. “What about you?”
“I think I’ll go to the fortune-teller’s tent,” she said.
“I’ll go to the freak show,” Cordelia volunteered. “Since I’ve had a lot of experience hanging around freaks.”
“Very well.” Giles looked to Xander.
“Carousel,” he decided. “I’ll whirl around in lazy circles and take in my surroundings.”
“Gee, that’s just like your life,” Cordelia sniped.
“Then I’ll investigate the Chamber of Horrors,” Giles said, “since I’ve already had so much experience with that.”
“A watcher’s existence,” Willow murmured sympathetically.
“I was thinking of having to live here, in southern California,” Giles informed her.
“Good.” Buffy beamed at Angel. “We have a plan. Let’s go.”
“Gone,” Angel said. He laced his fingers through Buffy’s.
“Remember, we’ll regroup in thirty minutes,” Giles said.
“We will,” Buffy promised.
“Half an hour,” Giles said.
“Aye, aye, captain,” Xander replied.
They turned their backs and scooted off.
The carousel.
Xander found a cozy little bench on the carousel, behind a trio of angry-looking black stallions with red flames painted on their faces and hooves. His bench was decorated to look like a chariot, and not only could you sit down in it, but you could plop down lengthwise, rest your head, and prop your feet up like you were in a hammock.
Round and round and round I go, when I’ll get up, no one knows, Xander thought, settling in.
Feeling very relaxed, he watched the first load of riders trot to their creatures of choice, and climb on. Funky dolphin things, unicorns, weird metamorph-style combo creatures.
I might be more impressed if I hadn’t already seen a lot of this in real life.
The music started, and the drums banged and the cymbals clanged as everyone went up and down, up and down, like on slow-motion pogo sticks.
He wished he could tell Carl Palmer about his sister. Or at least stake the vamp that had chomped her and changed her into one of the living undead. That was pretty much Buffy’s job, but he wished he could do more than he did.
He kept a sharp lookout—with one eye open—all the while inhaling the multilayered, tantalizing scents of nacho cheese, chocolate, and hot dogs. All was laced with the sweet odor of hydrolyzed vegetable oil.
Churros, he thought, with the love he had always thought he would reserve for a woman. Ooh, I’ll bet they have kettle corn, too. Giles said we shouldn’t eat anything, but hey, other people are doing the munch thing, and they’re not keeling over and dying.
The little boy on the black stallion in front of Xander’s chariot was licking an ice-cream cone, and he was just fine.
Xander shifted his weight, watching the silvery moon-ball glow as the cymbals clanged and the drums crashed and thundered.
Around and around and around. Xander watched and listened, and yawned.
Nothing’s happening. This is boring. Also nice. I move around too much, as a rule. Except for all the TV watching. And dozing off in class. But there’s the walking, and the skateboarding, and the dancing…no wonder I’m so tired.
He opened his eyes, realizing that he had dozed off. The carousel had stopped, and the little ice-cream-cone boy was gone.
He looked up at the bright mirror-moon. The silver glanced and darted across his field of vision, and for a moment, he felt a little dizzy. Probably from hunger.
“You deserve something tasty and sweet. Something delicious to fill your stomach. It’s so empty. You’re aching with hunger, aren’t you?”
Xander’s stomach growled.
A little redheaded girl about Teletubbies age and her equally redheaded mother were visible. Mom and Mini-Mom were each snacking on an enormous chocolate chip cookie, the tantalizing disks so large that the little girl’s resembled a Frisbee in her grasp. The cookies were loaded with chocolate chips and…merciful Zeus, were those M&Ms as well? Chocolate chips and M&Ms? Did it get any better than that?
Xander’s mouth watered.
The mom handed her cookie to her daughter as she picked her up to set her on the fierce-looking ebony steed. Xander scrutinized the two cookies now in the little girl’s possession.
It did get better. There were chunks of white chocolate too. Three kinds of chocolate in one delectable cookie.
His stomach growled.
&n
bsp; As the little girl settled on her horsie’s wooden back, both cookies slipped from her grasp and tumbled to the wooden floor. They broke into large, crumbly chunks. The M&Ms poked out from the crumbs like jewels in buried treasure.
Xander thought briefly about reaching out and scooping up a handful.
“All gone, Mommy,” the little girl said mournfully.
“That’s okay, Boo-boo,” the woman soothed. “We’ll get some more.”
“Yeah, for five bucks each,” Xander said under his breath.
The woman heard him. She looked at him and said, “Oh, no, they’re free tonight.”
Xander blinked. “What?”
She pointed. “They’re right over there.”
Xander followed her line of vision.
And shuddered.
Sure enough, there were heaps and heaps of cookies on two red trays. The trays were labeled FREE!
Each tray held by two hands.
Each pair of hands belonging to a clown—a fully made-up, dressed-up, wicked-scary clown, grinning and bowing as people grabbed themselves a little bit of heaven.
Xander wasn’t at all sure that he could make himself walk up close enough to one of those guys to snag a cookie no matter how hungry he was. Those big weird grins, those blank eyes of doom…nope.
He stayed safely prone.
“They’re giving away little bags of toffee, too,” the woman added. “And kettle corn.”
Xander sat up. “And kettle corn?”
Chapter Six
The crush inside the Chamber of Horrors was so oppressive that Giles wondered why the tacky wax figures didn’t melt. He was hot, and hemmed in on all sides by noisy boys with terrible body odor. There were so many of them that Giles couldn’t have left if he wanted to.
And he very much did want to.
The Chamber of Horrors was a series of tableaux, each a ghastly display of the sort of things one expected to find in a Chamber of Horrors—a poor fellow being stretched on the rack by hooded priests of the Spanish Inquisition; a statue of Jack the Ripper and one of his prostitute victims. Everything very crudely done—badly proportioned bodies, amateurishly arranged displays of skulls and bats. Compared to Madame Tussauds, the legendary wax museum back in London, it was farcical. Had he paid a separate entrance fee, he would have demanded it back.
As it is, all I’ve lost is—he checked his watch—fifteen minutes of my life.
He sighed as he was pushed by the crowd along to the next dreary scene. Ah, the French Revolution, of course. A scaffold, and upon it, a guillotine. An unmoving body was posed kneeling in position, with its head thrust through the restraining wooden-stocks portion of the execution device.
From a speaker a voice crackled, “No! I’m innocent!” It was a terrible French accent.
“Guilty!” another voice shouted.
The blade slid down two guy wires, and lopped off the head. A wax stump of a neck was revealed. It was painted red. The head tumbled into a basket.
“Dude, this is so lame,” said the pale, foul-smelling boy closest to Giles.
His friend, a shorter, tanner, but no-less-foul-smelling boy, yawned and said, “We are totally wasting our time.”
Giles had to agree.
All twenty or so of the onlookers moved on. Giles exhaled and snaked his left hand up his side, to dab his forehead with the paper napkin he’d found in his pocket.
Ahead, something glittered, catching his eye. Giles wearily craned his neck over the heads of the two boys, wondering what less-than-stellar monument lay in store.
“Vampires, cool,” the pale boy announced.
It was a scene from Dracula. Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, was holding a mirror pointed at a fanged man who was shielding himself from a wooden cross, held by a man in a cowboy hat. Ah, in the original novel that would be Quincy Morris, the Texan.
From the chest of the Quincy Morris statue, a man’s voice twanged, “Stake him, professor!”
The vampire hissed. His reflection could not be seen in the mirror. It was probably not a mirror at all, but something sprayed with nonreflective silver paint.
“Lame,” another boy opined.
Or the angle of the mirror was deliberately off. The trick worked either way. The trick, because…Giles felt a wave of vertigo. Something flashed silver.
It’s so hot in here, he thought. I think I’m going to faint.
It was so hot that summer, that summer of black magicks and free love and chicks who wanted to be with powerful young sorcerers. Rupert Giles and Ethan Rayne cut such a swath! The black arts belonged to them.
“We’re going to rule the night,” Ethan told him.
It was midsummer, a powerful time in the lunar year. They were drunk on Guinness and potions and magicks. “We have done the impossible, Ripper-Rupert. That makes us mighty.”
“We are the champions,” Giles sang. But deep beneath his euphoria, he seethed. Double, double toil and trouble, his anger was rising to the top.
This is not my life, he thought through the haze. This is not for me.
I am a watcher.
His grandmother, also a watcher, had written him a terrible letter, a death sentence, and he received it in the post that morning:
Rupert,
I know this is so hard for you, but you must accept your destiny. The Watchers Council have asked me repeatedly what they are to do about you. I tell them to be patient. You’re young. But I fear you, my boy. I sense that you’re playing with fire. There may be a girl who will need you, and you cannot fail her. I’m old, Rupert, and I…I suppose that I must tell you, dear, that I don’t anticipate being here much longer. Before I depart this world, I need to know that you have joined the good fight. Come home.
Your devoted
Gran
God, how he hated her in that moment. Hated her and all she stood for: that damnable Watchers Council, relic of a bygone age, when the only person who could go up against the forces of evil was some young chit. He and Ethan had proven that wrong a hundred times. Called up viler evil than those old watchers could imagine, then shot it back down. Raised demons, and destroyed them. The world didn’t need a slayer. It needed more men like Ethan, and him.
I won’t do it. I won’t go back, he thought. Fury rose inside him like a Roman candle.
Shocked out of his reverie by a blast of cold water, Giles opened his eyes. He was seated on the floor of the Chamber of Horrors with his back against the wall. Two of the several boys were bent over him, and the freckle-faced one was pouring a sports bottle on his head.
“Stop that!” Giles cried.
“You okay, dude?” the boy asked Giles as he obeyed him. He cradled the water bottle against his chest. “Are you, like, having a heart attack or something?”
“Dude, he didn’t have a heart attack,” the older boy snapped. He looked anxiously at Giles. “Did you?”
Giles touched his forehead. “It must have been the heat. No, that’s all right. I’m fine.”
“Do you want us to get help?” the older boy said.
“No, thank you. That’s not necessary.” Calling attention to himself was the last thing he needed. Carefully, he got to his feet. His surroundings swirled.
“You look bad,” the freckle-faced boy informed him. “Maybe you should just wait a minute.”
Giles felt a sudden rush of anger. He said through his teeth, “Damn your eyes, I am leaving.”
Goggle-eyed, both boys took a step away from him. “Whoa. No problem,” the older boy assured him.
Giles was shocked. What the devil is wrong with me? He wanted to apologize to them both, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. Because he was very afraid he might give voice to the words that were flashing through his mind:
Dare to question me, will you? I ought to bash your heads in.
Silently, he inclined his head.
And hurried out of the Chamber of Horrors as fast as he could possibly go.
He stood in the rush and glitter, liste
ning to the chatter and the noise and the calliope. Looked up, and saw the Uncle Sam person on stilts.
Looked around…at the smiling faces.
And the clown, staring right at him from a little platform across the breezeway. It was holding a seltzer bottle, which it pantomimed spraying at him.
Yes, someone ought to cool me off a trifle more, he thought. I am out of sorts. I am…
The calliope played. The clown dipped a low bow and began to dance in a circle. Then it pulled three glass balls from its sleeves and began to juggle them with remarkable skill.
Giles watched, his practiced eye following the path of the third ball as the fellow went through the motions. The glass caught the colored lights of the fair—red, blue, pink, green—or perhaps the balls themselves were tinted. They seemed to retain their hues against the white of the clown’s gloves.
The clown looked at Giles with its silly, happy face. Giles found himself smiling back.
Then he glanced down at his watch and thought, Oh, damn! I’m late!
He was furious with himself.
The kissing was great. It was wonderful.
But they hadn’t ridden the Ferris wheel yet, and…
“Angel, we’re late!” Buffy said, glancing at the large illuminated clock face on a pedestal behind him. “We have to go!”
“But you’re so beautiful tonight,” he said, covering her face with kisses. It was beyond nice. It was the best.
But they were so late.
“Okay.” Angel kissed her again.
They stumbled out of their secret hideaway, Buffy walking backward as Angel bent down and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her. She smacked into something—one of those cutout figures you can stick your face in and then take a picture with.
This one was a clown. The back of her head filled the hole for the face.
“Buffy,” he murmured, “why can’t we just get out of here?”
Someone shouted. “Get a room!”
“We have to stop,” she said. She put her hands against his chest and pushed him gently away.
“God, I love it when you do that,” he moaned.
I think we’ve taken it to the next level, Buffy thought. It was not an unwelcome move. However.