The Funhouse Read online

  Ellen's burgeoning fear gave her new strength, though not much. Bracing herself against the wall with one hand, she got to her feet. Her legs were shaky, her knees felt as if they would buckle if she dared take even one step.

  Conrad heard her move. He looked back at her.

  “I . . . I had to do it,” she said shakily.

  His blue eyes were cold.

  “It attacked me,” she said.

  Conrad put down the body. Gently. Tenderly.

  He isn't going to be that tender with me, Ellen thought.

  “Please, Conrad. Please understand.”

  He stood and approached her.

  She wanted to run. She couldn't.

  “You killed Victor,” Conrad said thickly.

  He had given the child-thing a name—Victor Martin Straker—which seemed ludicrous to Ellen. More than ludicrous. Dangerous. If you started calling it by name, you started thinking of it as a human baby. And it wasn't human. It wasn't, damn it. It was evil. You couldn't let your guard down for a moment when you were around it, sentiment made you vulnerable. She refused to call it Victor. And she even refused to admit that it had a sexual identity. It wasn't a little boy. It was a little beast.

  “Why? Why did you kill my Victor?”

  “It attacked me,” she said again.

  “Liar.”

  “It did.”

  “Lying bitch.”

  “Look at me!” She held up her bleeding hands and arms. “Look what it did to me.”

  The grief on Conrad's face had given way to an expression of blackest hatred. “You tried to kill him, and he fought back in self-defense.”

  “No. It was awful. Horrible. It clawed me. It tried to tear out my throat. It tried to—”

  “Shut up,” he said between clenched teeth.

  “Conrad, you know it was violent. It scratched you sometimes. If you'll just face the truth, if you'll just look into your heart, you'll have to admit I'm right. We didn't create a child. We created a thing. And it was bad. It was evil, Conrad. It—”

  “I told you to shut your filthy mouth, you rotten bitch.”

  He was shaking with rage. Flecks of foamy spittle dotted his lips.

  Ellen cringed. “Are you going to call the police?”

  “You know a carny never runs to the cops. Carnies handle their own problems. I know exactly how to deal with disgusting filth like you.”

  He was going to kill her. She was sure of it.

  “Wait, listen, give me a chance to explain. What kind of life could it have had anyway?” she argued desperately.

  Conrad glared at her. His eyes were filled with cold fury but also with madness. His wintry gaze pierced her, and she felt almost as if slivers of ice were being driven through her by some slow, silent, barely perceptible but nonetheless devastating explosion. Those were not the eyes of a sane man.

  She shivered. “It would have been miserable all its life. It would have been a freak, ridiculed, rejected, despised. It wouldn't have been able to enjoy even the most ordinary pleasures. I didn't do anything wrong. I only put the poor thing out of its misery. That's all I did. I saved it from years and years of loneliness, from—”

  Conrad slapped her face. Hard.

  She looked frantically left and right, unable to see even the slightest opportunity for escape.

  His sharp, clean features no longer looked aristocratic, his face was frightening, stark, carved by shadows into a ferocious, wolflike visage.

  He moved in even closer, slapped her again. Then he used his fists—once, twice, three times, striking her in the stomach and the ribs.

  She was too weak, too exhausted to resist him. She slid inexorably toward the floor and, she supposed, toward death.

  Mary, Mother of God!

  Conrad grabbed her, held her up with one hand, and continued to slap her, cursing her with each blow. Ellen lost count of the number of times he struck her, and she lost the ability to distinguish each new pain from the myriad old pains with which she was afflicted, and the last thing she lost was consciousness.

  After an indeterminable period of time, she drifted back from a dark place where guttural voices were threatening her in strange languages. She opened her eyes, and for a moment she didn't know where she was.

  Then she saw the small, ghastly corpse on the floor, only a few feet away. The gnarled face, frozen for all time in a vicious snarl, was turned toward her.

  Rain drummed hollowly on the rounded roof of the trailer.

  Ellen was sprawled on the floor. She sat up. She felt terrible, all busted up inside.

  Conrad was standing by the bed. Her two suitcases were open, and he was throwing clothes into them.

  He hadn't killed her. Why not? He had intended to beat her to death, she was certain of that. Why had he changed his mind?

  Groaning, she got to her knees. She tasted blood, a couple of her teeth were loose. With tremendous effort, she stood.

  Conrad shut the suitcases, carried them past her, pushed open the trailer door, and threw the luggage outside. Her purse was on the kitchen counter, and he threw that out after the bags. He wheeled on her. “Now you. Get the hell out and don't ever come back.”

  She couldn't believe that he was going to let her live. It had to be a trick.

  He raised his voice. “Get out of here, slut! Move. Now!”

  Wobbly as a colt taking its first steps, Ellen walked past Conrad. She was tense, expecting another attack, but he did not raise a hand against her.

  When she reached the door, where windblown rain lashed across the threshold, Conrad said, “One more thing.”

  She turned to him, raising one arm to ward off the blow she knew had to come sooner or later.

  But he wasn't going to hit her. He was still furious, but now he was in control of himself. “Some day you'll marry someone in the straight world. You'll have another child. Maybe two, three.”

  His ominous voice contained a threat, but she was too dazed to perceive what he was implying. She waited for him to say more.

  His thin, bloodless lips slowly peeled back in an arctic smile. “When you have children again, when you have kids you love and cherish, I'll come and take them away from you. No matter where you go, no matter how far away, no matter what your new name may be. I'll find you. I swear I will. I'll find you, and I'll take your children just like you took my little boy. I'll kill them.”

  “You're crazy,” she said.

  His smile became a wide, humorless, death's-head grin. “You won't find a place to hide. There won't be one safe corner anywhere in the world. Not one. You'll have to keep looking over your shoulder as long as you live. Now get out of here, bitch. Get out before I decide to kick your damned head in after all.”

  He moved toward her.

  Ellen quickly left the trailer, descended the two metal steps into the darkness. The trailer was parked in a small clearing, with trees bracketing it, but there was nothing directly overhead to break the falling rain, in seconds Ellen was soaked to the skin.

  For a moment Conrad was outlined in the amber light that filled the open doorway. He glowered at her. Then he slammed the door.

  On all sides of her, trees shook in the wind. The leaves made a sound like hope being crumpled and discarded.

  At last Ellen picked up her purse and her muddy suitcases. She walked through the motorized carny town, passing other trailers, trucks, cars, and under the insistent fingers of the rain, every vehicle contributed its tinny notes to the music of the storm.

  She had friends in some of those trailers. She liked many of the carnival people she'd met, and she knew a lot of them liked her. As she plodded through the mud, she looked longingly at some of the lighted windows, but she did not stop. She wasn't sure how her carny friends would react to the news that she had killed Victor Martin Straker. Most carnies were outcasts, people who didn't fit in anywhere else, therefore, they were fiercely protective of their own, and they regarded everyone else as a mark to be tapped or fleeced in on
e way or another. Their strong sense of community might even extend to the horrid child-thing. Furthermore, they were more likely to side with Conrad than with her, for Conrad had been born of carny parents and had been a carny since birth, while she had been converted to the roadshow life only fourteen months ago.

  She walked.

  She left the grove and entered the midway. Unobstructed, the storm pummeled her more forcefully than it had done in the grove, it pounded the earth, the gravel footpaths, and the patches of sawdust that spread out from some of the sideshows.

  The carnival was shut down tight. Only a few lights burned, they swung on wind-whipped wires, creating amorphous, dancing shadows. The marks had all gone home, banished by the foul weather. The fairgrounds were deserted. Ellen saw no one other than two dwarves in yellow rain slickers, they scurried between the silent carousel and the Tilt-a-Whirl, past the gaudily illustrated kootch show, glancing at Ellen, their eyes moon-bright and inquisitive in the darkness under their rain hoods.

  She headed toward the front gate. She looked back several times, afraid that Conrad would change his mind and come after her.

  Tent walls rippled and thrummed and snapped in the wind, pulling at anchor pegs.

  In the sheeting rain that was now laced with tendrils of fog, the dark Ferris wheel thrust up like a prehistoric skeleton, weird, mysterious, its familiar lines obscured and distorted and made fantastic by the night and the mist.

  She passed the funhouse, too. That was Conrad's concession. He owned it, and he worked there every day. A giant, leering clown's face peered down at her from atop the funhouse, as a joke, the artist had modeled it after Conrad's face. Ellen could see the resemblance even in the gloom. She had the disconcerting feeling that the clown's huge, painted eyes were watching her. She looked away from it and hurried on.

  When she reached the main gate of the county fairgrounds, she stopped, abruptly aware that she had no destination in mind. There was no place for her to go. She had no one to whom she could turn.

  The hooting wind seemed to be mocking her.

  * * *

  Later that night, after the storm front passed, when only a thin, gray drizzle was falling, Conrad climbed onto the dark carousel in the center of the deserted midway. He sat on one of the gaily painted, elaborately carved benches, not on a horse.

  Cory Baker, the man who operated the merry-go-round, stood at the controls behind the ticket booth. He switched on the carousel's lights. He started the big motor, pushed a lever, and the platform began to turn backwards. Calliope music piped loudly, but it wasn't able to dispel the dreary atmosphere that surrounded this ceremony.

  The brass poles pumped up and down, up and down, gleaming.

  The wooden stallions and mares galloped backwards, tail-first, around, around.

  Conrad, the sole passenger, stared straight ahead, tight-lipped, grim.

  Such a ride on a carousel was the traditional carnival way to dissolve a marriage. The bride and groom rode in the usual direction, forward, when they wanted to wed, either of them could obtain a divorce by riding backwards, alone. Those ceremonies seemed absurd to outsiders, but to carnies, their traditions were less ridiculous than the straight world's religious and legal rituals.

  Five carnies, witnesses to the divorce, watched the merry-go-round.

  Cory Baker and his wife. Zena Penetsky, one of the girls from the kootch show. Two freaks: the fat lady, who was also the bearded lady, and the alligator man, whose skin was very thick and scaly. They huddled in the rain, watching silently as Conrad swept around through the cool air, through the hollow music and the fog.

  After the carousel had made half a dozen revolutions at normal speed, Cory shut down the machine. The platform gradually slowed.

  As he waited for the carousel to drift to a stop, Conrad thought about the children Ellen would have one day. He raised his hands and stared at them, trying to envision his fingers all red with the blood of Ellen's offspring. In a couple of years she would remarry, she was too lovely to remain unattached for long. Ten years from now she could have at least one child. In ten years Conrad would start looking for her. He would hire private investigators, he would spare no expense. He knew that, by morning, Ellen would not take his threat seriously, but he did. And when he found her years from now, when she felt safe and secure, he would steal from her that which she valued most.

  Now, more than at any other time in his mostly unhappy life, Conrad Straker had something to live for. Vengeance.

  * * *

  Ellen spent the night in a motel near the county fairgrounds.

  She didn't sleep well. Although she had bandaged her wounds, they still burned, and she couldn't find a comfortable position. Worse than that, every time she dozed off for a few minutes, she was plagued by bloody nightmares.

  Awake, staring at the ceiling, she worried about the future. Where would she go? What would she do? She didn't have much money.

  Once, at the deepest point of her depression, she considered suicide. But she quickly dismissed that thought. She might not be condemned to Hell for having killed the child-thing, but she surely would be damned for taking her own life. To a Catholic, suicide was a mortal sin.

  Having forsaken the Church in reaction to her mother's zealous support of it, having been without faith for a few years, Ellen discovered that she now believed. She was a Catholic again, and she longed for the cleansing of confession, for the spiritual uplift of the Mass. The birth of that grotesque, malevolent child, and especially her recent struggle with it, had convinced her that there were such things as abstract evil and abstract good, forces of God and forces of Satan at work in the world.

  In the motel bed, with the covers drawn up to her chin, she prayed often that night.

  Toward dawn she finally managed to get a couple of hours of uninterrupted, dreamless sleep, and when she woke up she did not feel depressed. A shaft of golden sunlight pierced the high window and came to rest upon her, and as she luxuriated in the warmth and brightness, she began to feel that there was hope for the future. Conrad was behind her. Forever. The monstrous child was gone. Forever. The world was filled with interesting possibilities. After all the sadness and pain and fear that she had endured, she was long overdue for her share of happiness.

  Already, she had put Conrad's threat out of her mind.

  It was Tuesday, August 16, 1955.

  PART ONE

  Amy Harper

  1

  ON THE night of the senior prom, Jerry Galloway wanted to make love to Amy. His desire didn't surprise her. He always wanted to make love. He was always pawing at her. He couldn't get enough of her.

  But Amy was beginning to think she'd had enough of Jerry. Too much of him, in fact. She was pregnant.

  Whenever she thought about being pregnant, she got a hollow, cold sensation in her chest. Afraid of what she would have to face in the days ahead—the humiliation, her father's disappointment, her mother's fury—she shivered.

  Several times during the evening, Jerry saw her shivering, and he thought she was just bothered by a draft from the gymnasium's air conditioning. She was wearing a lacy, green, off-the shoulder gown, and he kept suggesting that she put her shawl over her shoulders.

  They danced only a few of the fast songs, but they didn't miss a single slow number. Jerry liked slow dancing. He liked to hold Amy close, pressing her tight against him, as they glided somewhat clumsily around the floor. He whispered in her ear while they danced, he told her that she looked terrific, that she was the sexiest thing he had ever seen, that all of the guys were surreptitiously staring at her cleavage, that she made him hot, real hot. He pressed so tightly against her that she could feel his erection. He wanted her to feel it because he wanted her to know that she turned him on. To Jerry's way of thinking, his erection was the greatest compliment he could pay her.

  Jerry was an ass.

  As Amy allowed him to maneuver her around the crowded room, as she permitted him to rub his body against her under
the pretense of dancing, she wondered why she had let him touch her in the first place. He was such a creep, really.

  He was handsome, of course. He was one of the handsomest boys in the senior class. A lot of girls thought Amy had made a wonderful catch when she'd latched onto Jerry Galloway.

  But you don't give your body to a guy just because he's good-looking, she told herself. My God, you've got to have higher standards than that!

  Jerry was handsome, but he wasn't nearly as intelligent as he was good-looking. He wasn't witty, clever, kind, or more than minimally considerate. He thought he was cool, and he was good at playing Joe College, but there was no substance to him.

  Amy looked around at the other girls in their silks and satins and laces and chiffons, in their low-cut bodices, in their Empire-waist dresses, in their backless gowns and long skirts and pumps, in their elaborate hairdos and carefully applied makeup and borrowed jewelry. All those girls were laughing and pretending to be ultra-sophisticated, glamorous, even world-weary. Amy envied them. They were having so much fun.

  And she was pregnant.

  She was afraid she was going to cry. She bit her tongue and held back the tears.

  The prom was scheduled to last until one o'clock in the morning. Afterwards, from one-thirty until three o'clock, there was an extravagant breakfast buffet in one of the town's nicest restaurants.

  Amy had been allowed to come to the prom, but she hadn't been given permission to attend the breakfast. It was all right with her father, but, as usual, her mother objected. Her father said she could stay out until three because this was a special night, but her mother wanted her home by ten, three whole hours before the prom ended. Amy always had to be home by ten on weekends, nine o'clock on school nights. Tonight, however, her father interceded on her behalf, and her mother grudgingly compromised, Amy didn't have to be home until one o'clock. Her mother didn't like making that concession, and later, in a hundred small telling ways, she would make Amy pay for it.