We saw clowns and acrobats and a few caged animals, but so far nothing too dangerous
but as we got a closer look, I saw something not right and it was all around us..
"Alex, come look at this" I said.
Alex met my gaze and came running from a few dozen feet away, where he'd been examining the ropes and pegs that supported the Big-top tent in the center of the fairgrounds. When he arrived, he was slightly out of breath and his eyes darted around, searching for something out of the ordinary. When he found nothing strange, he looked back at me with a quizzical expression.
"What am I supposed to be seeing here, Mike?"
We stood in front of a carnival game called "The Claw." Set up a bit like a popcorn machine, with a large, glass-enclosed chamber, the object of the game was to win prizes sitting at the bottom of the machine by manipulating a mechanical arm. This arm, however, wasn't the normal, 3-pronged metal winch. It looked more like the arm of a mannequin, or like a prosthetic arm. It was very lifelike, though obviously hard plastic plating over a metal skeleton. I pointed at the "hand" and Alex looked closely at it.
"See that hand?" I asked.
"Yeah, looks like a toy robot arm.." Alex trailed off.
"But look on the fingers. The hand has a couple rings on it. Why would it be wearing jewelry?"
"Well, they probably want to make you think there are valuable prizes to win. What's the difference?" He said.
At the top of the machine, in keeping with the design, was a mannequin head. It had lifelike blond hair and a beautiful feminine features. It's eyes were shut.
"Watch what happens when I put in a quarter." I fished in my pocket through various coins and retrieved a quarter. I popped it into the slot, and we both watched the mannequin's eyes flutter to life, and look back and forth between us. It's eyes seemed to meet mine and a tinny voice cam from a speaker mounted by the coin-slot.
::Hee Hee, Good luck, Bigboy::
One of the eyes winked at me as I took the joystick and hit the button to make the arm drop into the prize pile. It sifted around and rose mechanically. The hand was empty.
::Oopsie, hee hee, better luck next time::
The arm returned to it's original position and the eyes blinked once, twice, and slowly shut. The machine was lifeless once again. Alex and I looked at each other and he shrugged.
"Ok," he said, "creepy, but what does it prove?"
"Well, I'm not sure, but it's certainly not ordinary. With all these missing kids, they had to go somewhere, right? Do you think, maybe, she used to be alive?"
"That's nuts, man! I think you've been at this too long. It's much more likely that your brother, my sister and all the other kids were sold into slavery overseas. I don't like thinking about it, but we don't need to jump to weird conclusions like yours. Now come on, I want to search around the trailers in the back. If Dr. Morpho and his crew are capturing kids, they must be keeping here somewhere. If we get hard evidence, we'll bring the hammer down on these scumbags!"
Alex had a point. But I had a really bad feeling that something supernatural was going on behind the scenes. I mean, everybody is a little freaked out by clowns and stuff, but this carnival was giving me a seriously bad vibe. Alex walked quickly toward a low metal fence, beyond which sat the performer's trailers. I looked over my shoulder to see the head on the top of "The Claw" was looking at me again. It slowly winked at me before turning away and appearing, again, to sleep.