Once the carnival ground began to sink, Zozo lived for some years in a topsy-turvy version of his old home: an underground maze of drainage tunnels that had been beneath the grounds of the amusement park. Many of the old booths and rides had washed down and settled in these damp, dark tunnels.
This vast underground world was a sad, haunted space. Zozo’s heart, which he’d grown so many years before when his fellow toys had believed in him, was now broken. When he lost the dancer, he was so filled with hurt that though he could, like all toys, move when no one was looking, he lay moldering for months in the wet, mildewing wreckage of his old booth, never so much as blinking, for his sorrow left him as blank and lifeless as a plank of wood.
But then his sorrow began to decay into something else, something worse. Anger simmered. Then hate—first a flicker—began to burn. He thought over and over of the last words the little girl had said to the dancer as she took her away: You will be my favorite. Those words charred deeper into his darkening soul. Then he thought of a way to avenge his hurt, and that is when Zozo finally stirred.
Slowly, over time, Zozo assembled a warped and mournful world of fun-house mirrors, snarls of roller coaster track, giant teacups and swan seats—all sheared from their rides, grounded forever. This place, located at the center of all the drainpipes, became a kind of laboratory where Zozo began to work his vengeance.
He had always been a keen observer. Through the years he had watched the inventor who had made him tinker with various machines and gadgets. Zozo had learned much in those years, and now he poured that knowledge into an increasingly elaborate plan. For after he’d completed his underground world, he began to create its inhabitants.
An army! He built an army of small creatures, cobbled together from the crumbling leftover toys of the Bonk-a-Zozo game, and bits of wire and metal and rags. Each was given a drop of the rust and oil, the foul liquid that corroded inside his mechanical workings that seeped from his chest. These creatures soon forgot their innocent toy beginnings and became things of ill will and mean spirit, a vast regiment of small but efficient mercenaries he christened “the Creeps,” who he meticulously trained and then sent out into the human world with very specific orders—to bring back what Zozo could not abide: favorite toys.