The jackboys' attempt to take Kyra at the fair

The jackboys' attempt to take Kyra at the fair is a pursuit through the Ghost House that turns Mike's apparent rescue of a child into a passage between times. A line of dead lumbermen demands Kyra, invoking an old family crime; Mike refuses, and Kyra's alertness and growing confidence help them evade their pursuers. The escape ends not at another fairground exit but in the uncanny corridors connecting the fair to Mike's home, with Kyra's hat ribbon as evidence that the journey was more than a dream.

The jackboys block the way

After coming out of Freak Alley, Mike sees seven lumbermen ahead: four appear pale and insubstantial, while three seem fully present. Their leader wears a faded Union Army cap and has eyes Mike recognizes from Max Devore, yet the man is not Max. He is a dead forebear whose face differs subtly from Max's, and his identity makes the custody demand a return of family history rather than a simple encounter with a familiar adversary.

The old man orders Mike to give Kyra over. One of the younger men, Fred Dean, offers to take her himself, but the leader says Mike will surrender her willingly; if he does not, the group will take her together. When Mike refuses, the leader accepts the answer as expected and tells the men to move. Kenny Auster is among the approaching figures, connecting the threat to the family line associated with the drowning of his baby brother under their father's hand.

The men promise that Mike and the woman can have more children, treating Kyra as replaceable. Their demand and this attempted consolation expose the stakes: they intend to remove this particular child, not merely separate Mike from her temporarily. Mike sees no safe route back through the fairground crowd, so he turns away from Sara and the Red-Tops and runs toward the Ghost House instead.

Flight into the Ghost House

At first the pursuit nearly overwhelms Mike. Kyra cries that something smells wrong, and Mike realizes the attackers are dead despite the force of their presence. More ghosts emerge from windows and chimneys; as the jackboys reach for the child, he carries her up the Ghost House steps. The ticket seller objects that he has not paid, while the pursuers shout that he has stolen a child. No one stops him before he plunges into the attraction.

Inside, the Ghost House's ordinary fairground machinery becomes a sequence of obstacles. Mike and Kyra squeeze through a narrow passage, cross a rolling barrel, and pass a vent that releases a startling hiss and a burst of white. Kyra's response changes from alarm to laughter. Mike takes her hand, and she leads him onward, even stopping to enjoy the distorted reflections in a mirrored corridor. Behind them, the jackboys struggle with the barrel and curse; their apparent command over the scene begins to diminish.

The route keeps extending beyond what a fair attraction should contain. The calliope, the strength-test bell, and the music of Sara and the Red-Tops fade from hearing; Mike estimates that they have walked a quarter of a mile. A corridor offers three doors marked with a red tricycle, Mike's green IBM typewriter, and a child's sled he associates with the sled Max Devore stole from Scooter Larribee. The objects make the passage feel bound to separate lives and times, rather than to the simple geography of a funhouse.

Kyra passes through

Kyra calls the doors their toys and thanks Mike for taking her away from the scary men. Before he can answer, she opens the door bearing the tricycle and steps through. It shuts behind her, leaving the ribbon from her straw hat caught in the bib pocket of Mike's overalls. He cannot reopen the door: its knob will not turn, and the wood feels impossibly solid beneath his hand. When he listens back along the passage, there is only silence.

Mike recognizes the place as the between-time, a space where people seem to slip through the cracks. Jo's voice warns him that he must keep moving or risk being trapped there, perhaps forever. He binds the blue ribbon around his wrist and follows a winding corridor, using the faint sound of Bunter's bell to choose his way through successive doorways. As the bell grows louder, thunder joins it and the air turns hot; the clothes he wore at the fair give way to thermal underwear and itchy socks. A voice in the darkness recalls a line about the President's wife and blood on her stockings, another fragment of a world outside the fair.

Return and residue

The corridor eventually gives way to Mike's living room. At five past five, he makes his way through the dark house, drinks water, and goes to the bathroom before returning to bed. The sheets are rumpled, but not in the way they had been after his earlier dream involving Sara, Mattie, and Jo. The fair episode might be explained as an unusually vivid dream or sleepwalk, but the ribbon remains on his wrist, and the smell of pine and a smear of sap on his finger contradict that explanation.

The ribbon thus carries the escape's consequence into ordinary life: Kyra has crossed through the door, while Mike has returned alone with a physical trace of their passage. The Ghost House has served as both refuge from the jackboys and a threshold into the between-time, where historical violence and the present custody struggle converge. The scene turns a fairground chase into evidence that the boundaries between dream, memory, and material reality have become permeable.