The Funhouse Read online

She was vaguely aware of being lifted and carried.

  She couldn't resist him; she had no strength at all.

  A door creaked noisily.

  She forced her eyes open and saw that she was being carried out of the dark night, into an even darker place.

  Her heart was beating so hard that it seemed to hammer the air out of her lungs each time she tried to draw a breath.

  He dropped her rudely onto a hard, wooden floor.

  Get up! Run! she told herself.

  She couldn't move. She seemed paralyzed.

  Hinges squealed as he pushed the door shut again.

  This can't be happening! she thought.

  A sliding bolt rasped into place, and the man grunted with what she took to be satisfaction. She was locked in with him.

  Dizzy, confused, weak as a baby, but no longer in danger of losing consciousness, she tried to figure out where she was. The room was perfectly black, as utterly lightless as the inside of the Devil's pocket. The wooden floor was crude, and it was filled with vibrations, the muffled sound of machinery.

  Someone screamed. Then someone else. The air was split by a maniacal laugh. Music swelled. The vibrations in the floor resolved into the clackety-clackety-clack of steel wheels on a metal track.

  She was in the funhouse. Probably in the service area. Behind the tracks on which the cars moved.

  A trickle of strength seeped into Chrissy's body again, but she was barely able to lift one hand to her bruised temple. She expected to find her skin and hair wet and sticky with blood, but they were dry. The flesh was tender but apparently unbroken.

  The stranger knelt on the floor beside her.

  She could hear him, sense him, but not see him, however, even in this pitch-black hole, she was aware of his great size, he loomed.

  He's going to rape me, she thought. God, no. Please. Oh, please don't let him do it.

  This stranger was breathing curiously. Sniffing. Snuffling. Like an animal. Like a dog trying to get her scent.

  “No,” she said.

  He grunted again.

  Bob will come looking for me, she told herself hopefully, frantically. Bob will come, he's got to come, he's got to come and save me, good old Bob, please, God, please.

  She was succumbing to a rapidly burgeoning panic as her head cleared and as the terrible danger became more and more evident to her.

  The stranger touched her hip.

  She tried to pull back.

  He held her.

  She was gasping, shaking. The temporary paralysis faded, the numbness in her limbs vanished. Abruptly she was awash in pain from the blow to the head that she had suffered a few minutes ago.

  The stranger moved his hand up her belly to her breasts and ripped open her blouse.

  She cried out.

  He slapped her, jarring her teeth.

  She realized that it was useless to call for help in a funhouse. Even if people heard her above all the music, above the recorded howling and wailing of the ghosts and monsters, they would think she was just another thrill-seeker startled by a pop-up pirate or a jack-in-the-box vampire.

  The man tore off her bra.

  She was no match for him physically, but enough of her strength had returned for her to offer some resistance, and she couldn't just lie there, waiting for him to take her. She reached for his hands, grabbed them, intending to push them away, but with a shock she discovered that they were not ordinary hands. They weren't a man's hands. Not exactly. They were . . . different.

  Oh, God.

  She became aware of two green ovals in the blackness. Two softly shining, green spots. Floating above her.

  Eyes.

  She was looking into the stranger's eyes.

  What sort of man has eyes that shine in the dark?

  * * *

  Bob Drew stood at the carousel with one candy apple in each hand, waiting for Chrissy. After five minutes he started to eat his own apple. After ten minutes he grew impatient and began to pace. After fifteen minutes he was angry with Chrissy, she was a gorgeous girl, fun to be with, but she was sometimes flighty and frequently inconsiderate.

  After twenty minutes his anger began to give way to mild concern, then he began to worry. Maybe she was sick. She had eaten an incredible amount and variety of junk. It would be amazing if she didn't upchuck sooner or later. Besides, you never knew for sure how clean and wholesome carnival food was. Maybe she had gotten a bad hot dog or had unwittingly eaten some piece of filth along with her chiliburger.

  Considering that possibility, he began to feel queasy himself. He stared at his half-eaten candy apple and finally dropped it into a trash barrel.

  He wanted to find her and satisfy himself that she was all right, but he didn't think she would be too happy to see him while her breath still stank of vomit. If she had just been sick in the ladies' room, she would want time to freshen up, patch her makeup, and put herself back together.

  After twenty-five minutes he threw Chrissy's candy apple in the trash with his own.

  After half an hour, bored by the endlessly galloping horses and by the rhythmically flashing brass poles, increasingly concerned about Chrissy, he went searching for her. Earlier, he had watched her walk away from the refreshment stand, admiring her round bottom and her shapely calves, and then she had vanished in the crowd. A minute or two later, he thought he had seen her golden head as she left the midway near the funhouse, and now he decided to look in that area first.

  Between the funhouse and the freak show, a five-foot-wide path led back to an open space behind the amusements, the outer ring of the fairgrounds, where the restrooms were located. Toward the end of the passageway, the shadows were so dark and thick that they seemed tangible, like black drapes, and the night was surprisingly lonely here, considering that the busy midway was only fifty or sixty feet behind him.

  Peering uneasily into the shadows, Bob wondered if Chrissy had encountered more-serious trouble than just an upset stomach. She was a very pretty girl, and these days, when so many people seemed to have lost all respect for the law, there were more than a few men prowling around who thought nothing of taking what they wanted from a pretty girl, regardless of whether or not she wanted them to have it. Bob supposed that there were even more men of that stripe in the carnival than there were in the real world.

  With growing trepidation he reached the end of the path and stepped into the open area behind the funhouse. He looked right, then left, and saw the comfort station. It was sixty yards away, rectangular, gray, made of cement blocks, perched in the center of a tightly circumscribed pool of bright yellowish light. He couldn't see the entire structure, only a third of it, because there was a row of ten or twelve big carnival trucks parked in the intervening hundred and eighty feet. Here the darkness was even deeper, the trucks were only hulking outlines, and they made him think of slumbering, primeval beasts.

  He took only two steps toward the distant comfort station before putting his foot down on something that nearly sent him sprawling. When he regained his balance, he reached down and picked up the treacherous object.

  It was Chrissy's red clutch purse.

  Bob Drew's heart began to sink into a bottomless well.

  At the far end of the funhouse, at the front of it, out on the midway, the giant clown's face sprayed the night with a brittle, shrapnel laugh.

  Bob's mouth was dry. He swallowed hard, tried to squeeze out some saliva. “Chrissy?”

  She didn't answer.

  “Chrissy, for God's sake, are you there?”

  A door squealed on unoiled hinges. Behind him.

  The music and screaming inside the funhouse got louder as the door opened.

  Bob turned toward the noise, feeling something he had not felt in many years, not since he had been a small boy alone in his dark bedroom with the terrifying conviction that some hideous creature was hiding in the closet.

  He saw a forest of shadows, all but one of them perfectly still, but that one was moving fast. It came stra
ight at him. He was seized by powerful, shadow hands.

  “No.”

  Bob was thrown against the rear of the funhouse with such incredible force that the wind was knocked out of him, and his head snapped back, and his skull cracked hard into the wooden wall. Trying to placate his burning lungs, he sucked desperately on the night air, it was cold against his teeth.

  The shadow swooped down on him again.

  It didn't move like a man.

  Bob saw green, glowing eyes.

  He brought up one arm to protect his face, but his assailant struck lower than that, Bob took a sledgehammer punch in the stomach. At least, for one hopelessly optimistic moment, he thought he had been punched. But the shadow-thing hadn't struck him with its fist. Nothing as clean as that. It had slashed him. He was badly cut. A wet, sickening, sliding, dissolving sensation filled him. Stunned, he reached down, put one trembling hand on his belly, and gagged with revulsion and horror when he felt the size of the wound.

  My God, I've been disemboweled!

  The shadow stepped back, crouching, watching, snorting and sniffing like a dog, although it was much too big to be a dog.

  Gibbering hysterically, Bob Drew tried to hold his bulging intestines inside his body. If they slipped out of him, there was no chance that he could be sewn up and restored to health.

  The shadow-thing hissed at him.

  Bob was too deep in shock to feel more than the thinnest edge of the pain, but a red veil descended over his vision. His legs turned to water and then began to evaporate from under him. He leaned against the wall of the funhouse, aware that he had little chance of survival even if he stayed on his feet, but also aware that he had no chance at all if he fell. His only hope was to hold himself together. Get to a doctor. Maybe they could sew him up. Maybe they could put everything back in place and prevent peritonitis. It was a long shot. Very long. But maybe . . . if he just didn't fall . . . He couldn't allow himself to fall. He must not fall. He wouldn't fall.

  He fell.

  * * *

  The carnies called it “slough night” and looked forward to it with true Gypsy spirit. The last night of the engagement. The night they tore down. The night they packed up and got ready to move on to the next stand. The carnival shed itself of the town in much the same way that a snake sloughed off its dead, dirty, unwanted skin.

  To Conrad Straker, slough night was always the best night of the week, for he continued to hope, against all reason, that the next stop would be the one at which he would find Ellen and her children.

  By one-thirty in the morning, the last of the marks was gone from the Coal County, Pennsylvania, fairgrounds. Even before then, some pieces of the show began to come down, although most of the job still lay ahead.

  Conrad, who owned two small concessions in addition to the enormous funhouse, had already overseen the breaking down of those enterprises. One was a pitch-and-dunk, which he had shuttered and folded around one o'clock. The other was a grab joint, so named because it was a fast-food place with no chairs for the marks to sit down, they had to grab their food and eat on the fly. He had closed the grab joint earlier, around midnight.

  Now, in the cool, mid-May night, he worked on the funhouse with Gunther, Ghost, his other fulltime employees, a couple of local laborers looking to make forty bucks each, and a pair of free-lance roughies who traveled with the show. They broke the joint apart and loaded it into two large trucks that would carry it to the next stand.

  Because Conrad's funhouse could legitimately boast of being the largest in the world, because it offered the marks solid thrills for their money, and because the ride was long and dark enough to allow teenage boys to cop a few feels from their dates, it was a popular and profitable concession. He had spent many years and a lot of money adding to the attraction, letting it grow organically into the finest amusement of its kind on earth. He was proud of his creation.

  Nevertheless, each time the funhouse had to be erected or torn down, Conrad hated the thing with a passion that most men couldn't generate for any inanimate object except, perhaps, a larcenous vending machine or a bullheaded billing computer. Although the funhouse was cleverly designed—a genuine marvel of prefabricated construction and easy collapsibility—putting it up and then sloughing it seemed equal, at least in Conrad's mind, to the most spectacular and arduous feats of the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders.

  For more than four hours, Conrad and his twelve-man crew swarmed over the structure, illuminated by the big, generator-powered midway lights. They lowered and dismantled the giant clown's face, took down strings of colored lights, rolled up a couple thousand feet of heavy-duty extension cords. They pulled off the canvas roof and folded it. Grunting, sweating, they disconnected and stacked the gondola tracks. They removed the mechanical ghouls, ghosts, and ax murderers that had terrorized thousands of marks, and they wrapped the animated figures in blankets and other padding. They unbolted wooden wall panels, disassembled beams and braces, took up slabs of plank flooring, skinned their knuckles, knocked down the ticket booth, guzzled soda, and packed generators and transformers and a mess of machinery into the waiting trucks, which were checked periodically by Max Freed or one of his assistants.

  Max, superintendent of transportation for Big American Midway Shows—BAM to its employees and fellow travelers—supervised the tearing down and loading of the huge midway. Next to the famous E. James Strates organization, BAM was the largest carnival in the world. It was no ragbag, gilly, or lousy little forty-miler, it was a first-rate show. BAM traveled in forty-four railroad cars and more than sixty enormous trucks. Although some of the equipment belonged to the independent concessionaires, not to BAM, every truckload had to pass Max Freed's inspection, for the carnival company would bear the brunt of any bad publicity if one of the vehicles proved to be less than roadworthy and was the cause of an accident.

  While Conrad and his men dismantled the funhouse, a couple of hundred other carnies were also at work on the midway—roughies, concessionaires, animal trainers, jointees, wheelmen, pitchmen, jam auctioneers, short-order cooks, strippers, midgets, dwarves, even the elephants. Except for the men, now sleeping soundly, who would drive the trucks off the lot a few hours from now, no one could call it a night until his part of the show was bundled and strapped down and ready to hit the road.

  The Ferris wheel came down. Partially dismantled, it looked like a pair of gigantic, jagged jaws biting at the sky.

  Other rides were quickly and efficiently torn apart. The Sky Diver. The Tip Top. The Tilt—Whirl. The carousel. Magical machineries of fun, all locked away in ordinary-looking, dusty, greasy vans.

  One minute the tents rippled like sheets of dark rain. The next minute they lay in still, black puddles.

  The grotesque images on the freak show banners—all painted by the renowned carnival artist David “Snap” Wyatt—fluttered and billowed between their moorings. Some of the large canvases portrayed the twisted, mutant faces of a few of the human oddities who made their living in Freak-o-rama, and these appeared to leer and wink and snarl and sneer at the carnies who labored below, a trick of the wind as it played with the canvas. Then the ropes were loosened, the pulley wheels squeaked, and the banners slid down their mooring poles to the pitchman's platform, where they were rolled up and put away-nightmares in large cardboard tubes.

  At five-thirty in the morning, exhausted, Conrad surveyed the site where the funhouse had stood, and he decided he could finally go to bed. Everything had been broken down. A small pile of gear remained to be loaded, but that would take only half an hour and could be left to Ghost, Gunther, and one or two of the others. Conrad paid the local laborers and the free-lance roughies. He instructed Ghost to supervise the completion of the job and to obtain final approval from Max Freed, he told Gunther to do exactly what Ghost wanted him to do. He paid an advance against salary to the two fresh-eyed roughies who, having just gotten up from a good sleep, were prepared to drive the trucks to Clearfield, Pennsylvania, which was the n
ext stand, Conrad would follow later in the day in his thirty-four-foot Travelmaster. At last, aching in every muscle, he trudged back to his motor home— which was parked among more than two hundred similar vehicles, trailers, and mobile homes—in the back lot, at the west end of the fairgrounds.

  The nearer he drew to the Travelmaster, the slower he moved. He dawdled. He took time to appreciate the night. It was quiet, serene. The breezes had blown away to another part of the county, and the air was preternaturally still. Dawn was near, although no light yet touched the eastern horizon. Earlier, there had been a moon, it had set behind the mountains not long ago. Now there were only scudding, slightly phosphorescent clouds, silver-black against the darker, blue-black sky. He stood at the door of his motor home and took several deep breaths of the crisp, refreshing air, not eager to go inside, afraid of what he might find in there.

  At last he could delay no longer. He steeled himself for the worst, opened the door, climbed into the Travelmaster, and switched on the lights.

  There wasn't anyone in the cockpit. The kitchen was deserted, and so was the forward sleeping area.

  Conrad walked to the rear of the main compartment and paused, trembling, then hesitantly slid open the door to the master bedroom. He snapped on the light.

  The bed was still neatly made, precisely as he'd left it yesterday morning. There wasn't a dead woman sprawled on the mattress, which was what he had expected to find.

  He sighed with relief.

  A week had passed since he had found the last woman. He would shortly find another. He was certain of that, grimly certain. The urge to rape and kill and mutilate came at weekly intervals now, far more frequently than had once been the case. But apparently it had not happened tonight. Feeling marginally better, he went into the small bathroom to take a quick, hot shower before going to bed—and the sink in there was streaked with blood. The towels were darkly stained, sodden, lying in a pile on the floor.

  It had happened.

  In the soap dish, a cake of Ivory sat in a slimy puddle, it was red-brown with blood.