We creep along the wall, exploring the shadowy nooks behind the rides, the spaces where Renfield must hide when the park is open. I try to keep my distance from him. Everything’s built of wood here, everything’s a weapon he could use against me. Though he doesn’t seem eager to do that. He doesn’t seem eager for anything.

“There’s laughter here during the day,” he says, gazing up at the rafters, “but I never come out when I hear it. Because then the laughter would stop.”

This makes my chest ache, the way Dracula’s turned him into something to fear, his body like a curse.

We cross under another disembodied clown face, and Renfield peers at me. “Do you hate me, Miss Lucy?”

I hesitate. “No,” I say finally. “I feel sorry for you.”

He nods. “I’m sorry for you too.”

We reach another hallway, this one darker than the others, and I seize up, not wanting to go any farther. “What is it you need to tell me, Renfield?”

He breathes deep, trying to conjure it in his mind. “That he doesn’t have much time.”

“Why not?”

“Because he needs the rest of him,” he says. “The last urn. Until then, he’s so hungry. So terribly hungry he can hardly bear it.”

That’s the reason he’s gone through all of Rochester’s followers already. It’s why those three girls died in a day when it took me a week. He won’t stop. He’s trying to fill up the empty spaces within him.

I stand next to the bottom of a long slide. This place is painfully quaint, so silly in its nostalgia and kitsch. Everything’s colorful and inviting, the soft, buttery scent of popcorn hanging in the air, and I think how I could hide here too. I could vanish in plain sight.

Renfield must read it on my face, because he’s suddenly scowling at me. “You can’t stay,” he says flatly.

I exhale a thin laugh. “Why not? Because you’ve already claimed the fun house for your own?”

“No,” he says, “because you’ve got somewhere else you should be.”

My eyebrows twitch up. “And where’s that?”

“With your friends,” he says, and this twists in my heart.

I won’t look at him now. “They’re safer without me.”

“Not so long as he’s after them, they’re not.”

My head snaps toward him. “Is he?” I can barely speak. “Renfield, is he after them?”

“Of course he is.” Renfield scrunches up his dust-soaked face, annoyed I haven’t figured it out already. “Why do you think he tossed you off the bridge? It was to get you out of the way.”