“Damn, it’s a kid.” The girl in the sailor cap looked past Pin, to where a group of young men shelled out dimes to Rubbery Moe. “Say, Mister, how’s about fixing us with a couple of those fellas instead of this kid?”

Without waiting for an answer, the two girls extricated themselves from the boat and hurried to join the young men. Moe glared at Pin, now alone in the boat. “You’re losing me money,” he said, and pushed her off.

Pin quickly hopped to the front seat, grabbing the sides of the vessel as it coasted along the canal’s spiraling path. The rank water appeared as thick and black as machine oil. Her boat followed the canal’s circular route, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the spiral tightened and the little vessel approached the central chute. In the boat behind hers, the two girls were already canoodling with the boys they’d just met. In front of her loomed the tunnel, its entrance an enormous mouth surmounted by a pair of huge eyes, red and angry looking. Flame-colored streamers billowed around it, blown by hidden electrical fans. From inside, recorded shrieks and moans drowned out the voices of couples in the other boats.

Streamers whipped Pin’s face as the prow of her boat slid forward and, for a second, hung over empty air. It dropped in a sickening rush, and she was thrust backward, barely catching herself as she frantically clutched the plank seat. Spray spattered her cheeks as the boat splashed down, hard, at the bottom of the chute. After bobbing precariously and bumping against the wall, her boat righted itself and began to glide through the tunnel.

The din momentarily deafened her. Screaming girls and women, whooping men. Sounds of hollow laughter and clanking chains boomed from phonographs tucked into plywood grottoes. Flashing red and blue lights illuminated wax dummies, skeletons, disembodied skulls, bedsheet ghosts dipped in luminous paint so they glowed like toadstools. An electrical motor turned the waterwheels so the canal flowed past all of them. Devils stabbed a wax policeman with pitchforks. Two turnip-headed goblins tugged at the skirt of a papier-mâché woman, exposing broomstick legs and a bare electrical bulb. Pin gasped as a skeleton dropped from the ceiling, its fingers scraping her scalp before it was yanked back up to await the next boat.

Even worse was a stretch where there were no lights, and hundreds of threads hung down to graze her face like cobwebs. She had ridden through Hell Gate several times this summer: she knew it was all chicken wire and plaster and colored gelatin lights.