The Funhouse
Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival. She married a man she grew to hate—and gave birth to a child she could never love. A child so monstrous that she killed it with her own hands . . . Twenty-five years later, Ellen Harper has a new life, a new husband, and two normal children—Joey loves monster movies, and Amy is about to graduate from high school. But their mother drowns her secret guilt in alcohol and prayer. The time has come for Amy and Joey to pay for her sins . . .
Because Amy is pregnant.
And the carnival is coming to town.
THE FUNHOUSE
The acclaimed bestsellers
THE FUNHOUSE
“Koontz is a terrific what-if storyteller.”
—
People
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
“Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer!”
—The Associated Press
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
“A master storyteller . . . always riveting.”
—
The San Diego Union-Tribune
MR. MURDER
“A truly harrowing tale . . . superb work by a master at the top of his form.”
—
The Washington Post Book World
DRAGON TEARS
“A razor-sharp, nonstop, suspenseful story . . . a first-rate literary experience.”
—
The San Diego Union-Tribune
SHADOWFIRES
“His prose mesmerizes . . . Koontz consistently hits the bull’seye.”
—
Arkansas Democrat
HIDEAWAY
“Not just a thriller but a meditation on the nature of good and evil.”
—
Lexington Herald-Leader
COLD FIRE
“An extraordinary piece of fiction . . . It will be a classic.”
—UPI
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
“Koontz is brilliant.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
“A fearsome tour of an adolescent’s psyche. Terrifying, knee-knocking suspense.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
THE BAD PLACE
“A new experience in breathless terror.”
—UPI
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
“A great storyteller.”
—
New York Daily News
MIDNIGHT
“A triumph.”
—
The New York Times
LIGHTNING
“Brilliant . . . a spine-tingling tale . . . both challenging and entertaining.”
—The Associated Press
THE MASK
“Koontz hones his fearful yarns to a gleaming edge.”
—
People
WATCHERS
“A breakthrough for Koontz . . . his best ever.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
TWILIGHT EYES
“A spine-chilling adventure . . . will keep you turning pages to the very end.”
—
Rave Reviews
STRANGERS
“A unique spellbinder that captures the reader on the first page. Exciting, enjoyable, and an intensely satisfying read.”
—Mary Higgins Clark
DEMON SEED
“One of our finest and most versatile suspense writers.”
—
The Macon Telegraph & News
PHANTOMS
“First-rate suspense, scary and stylish.”
—
Los Angeles Times
WHISPERS
“Pulls out all the stops . . . an incredible, terrifying tale.”
—
Publishers Weekly
NIGHT CHILLS
“Will send chills down your back.”
—
The New York Times
DARKFALL
“A fast-paced tale . . . one of the scariest chase scenes ever.”
—
The Houston Post
SHATTERED
“A chilling tale . . . sleek as a bullet.”
—
Publishers Weekly
THE VISION
“Spine-tingling—it gives you an almost lethal shock.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
THE FACE OF FEAR
“Real suspense . . . tension upon tension.”
—
The New York Times
Berkley titles by Dean Koontz
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
THE FUNHOUSE
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
DARKFALL
SHATTERED
THE VISION
THE FACE OF FEAR
DEAN KOONTZ
The Funhouse
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.
THE FUNHOUSE
A Novel by Dean Koontz
Based on a screenplay by Larry Block
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a division of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc.
Copyright © 2001 by Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a division of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc.
Additional material copyright © 1994 by Dean Koontz. “Afterword” by Dean Koontz copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY
®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-0-425-25064-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63473-8
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Jove mass-market edition / November 1980
Berkley mass-market edition / June 1994
Berkley premium edition / March 2013
Cover photograph © by Philip Scalia/Alamy.
Cover design by Marc Cohen.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is dedicated to Marion Bush and Frank Scafati—
two people who are warmer than the California sunshine.
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every
experience in which you really stop to look fear in the
face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through
this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
—
A
NNA
R
OOSEVELT
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—
L
EO
T
OLSTOY
Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.
—
S
ATCHEL
P
AIGE
PROLOGUE
Ellen Straker sat
at the small kitchen table in the Airstream travel trailer, listening to the night wind, trying not to hear the strange scratching that came from the baby’s bassinet.
Tall oaks, maples, and birches swayed in the dark grove where the trailer was parked. Leaves rustled like the starched, black skirts of witches. The wind swept down from the cloud-plated Pennsylvania sky, pushing the August darkness through the trees, gently rocking the trailer, groaning, murmuring, sighing, heavy with the scent of oncoming rain. It picked up the hurlyburly sounds of the nearby carnival, tore them apart as if they were fragments of a flimsy fabric, and drove the tattered threads of noise through the screen that covered the open window above the kitchen table.
In spite of the wind’s incessant voice, Ellen could still hear the faint, unnerving noises that issued from the bassinet at the far end of the twenty-foot trailer. Scraping and scratching. Dry rasping. Brittle crackling. A papery whisper. The harder she strained to block out those sounds, the more clearly she could hear them.
She felt slightly dizzy. That was probably the booze doing its job. She was not much of a drinker, but in the past hour she had tossed down four shots of bourbon. Maybe six shots. She couldn’t quite remember whether she had made three or only two trips to the bottle.
She looked at her trembling hands and wondered if she was drunk enough to do something about the baby.
Distant lightning flashed beyond the window. Thunder rumbled from the edge of the dark horizon.
Ellen turned her eyes slowly to the bassinet, which stood in shadows at the foot of the bed, and gradually her fear was supplanted by anger. She was angry with Conrad, her husband, and she was angry with herself for having gotten into this. But most of all, she was angry with the baby because the baby was the hideous, undeniable evidence of her sin. She wanted to kill it—kill it and bury it and forget that it had ever existed—but she knew she would have to be drunk in order to choke the life out of the child.
She thought she was just about ready.
Gingerly, she got up and went to the kitchen sink. She poured the half-melted ice cubes out of her glass, turned on the water, and rinsed the tumbler.
Although the cascading water roared when it struck the metal sink, Ellen could still hear the baby. Hissing. Dragging its small fingers down the inner surfaces of the bassinet. Trying to get out.
No. Surely that was her imagination. She couldn’t possibly hear those thin sounds over the drumming water.
She turned off the tap.
For a moment the world seemed to be filled with absolutely perfect, tomblike silence. Then she heard the soughing wind once more; it carried with it the distorted music of a calliope that was piping energetically out on the midway.
And from within the bassinet: scratching, scrabbling.
Suddenly the child cried out. It was a harsh, grating screech, a single, fierce bleat of frustration and anger. Then quiet. For a few seconds the baby was still, utterly motionless, but then it began its relentless movement again.
With shaking hands, Ellen put fresh ice in her glass and poured more bourbon. She hadn’t intended to drink any more, but the child’s scream had been like an intense blast of heat that had burned away the alcohol haze through which she had been moving. She was sober again, and fear followed swiftly in the wake of sobriety.
Although the night was hot and humid, she shivered.
She was no longer capable of murdering the child. She was no longer even brave enough to approach the bassinet.
But I’ve got to do it! she thought.
She returned to the booth that encircled the kitchen table, sat down, and sipped her whiskey, trying to regain the courage that came with intoxication, the only sort of courage she seemed able to summon.
I’m too young to carry this burden, she thought. I don’t have the strength to handle it. I admit that. God help me, I just don’t have the strength.
At twenty Ellen Straker was not only much too young to be trapped in the bleak future that now seemed to lie ahead of her; she was also too pretty and vibrant to be condemned to a life of unremitting heartache and crushing responsibility. She was a slender, shapely girl-woman, a butterfly that had never really had a chance to try out its wings. Her hair was dark brown, almost black; so were her large eyes; and there was a natural, rosy tint to her cheeks that perfectly complemented her olive-tone skin. Before marrying Conrad Straker, she had been Ellen Teresa Marie Giavenetto, the daughter of a handsome, Italian-American father and a Madonna-faced, Italian-American mother. Ellen’s Mediterranean beauty was not the only quality about her that revealed her heritage; she had a talent for finding joy in small things, an expansive personality, a quick smile, and a warmth that were all quite Italian in nature. She was a woman meant for good times, for parties and dances and gaiety. But in her first twenty years of life, there had not been very much laughter.
Her childhood was grim.
Her adolescence was an ordeal.
Although Joseph Giavenetto, her father, had been a warm, good-hearted man, he had also been meek. He had not been the master of his own home, and he hadn’t had a great deal to say about how his daughter ought to be raised. Ellen had not been soothed by her father’s gentle humor and quiet love nearly so often as she had been subjected to her mother’s fiery, religious zealotry.
Gina was the power in the Giavenetto house, and it was to her that Ellen had to answer for the slightest impropriety, real or imagined. There were rules, an endless list of them, which were meant to govern Ellen’s behavior, and Gina was determined that every rule would be rigidly enforced and strictly obeyed. She intended to see that her daughter grew up to be a very moral, prim, God-fearing woman.
Gina always had been religious, but after the death of her only son, she became fanatically devout. Anthony, Ellen’s brother, died of cancer when he was only seven years old. Ellen was just four at the time, too young to understand what was happening to her brother, but old enough to be aware of his frighteningly swift deterioration. To Gina, that tragedy had been a divine judgment leveled against her. She felt that she had somehow failed to please God, and that He had taken her little boy to punish her. She began going to Mass every morning instead of just on Sundays, and she dragged her little girl with her. She lit a candle for Anthony’s soul every day of the week, without fail. At home she read the Bible from cover to cover, over and over again. Often, she forced Ellen to sit and listen to Scripture for hours at a time, even before the girl was old enough to understand what she was hearing. Gina was full of horrible stories about Hell: what it was like; what grisly tortures awaited a sinner down there; how easy it was for a wicked child to end up in that sulphurous place. At night young Ellen’s sleep was disturbed by hideous, bloody nightmares based on her mother’s gruesome tales of fire and damnation. And as Gina became increasingly religious, she added more rules to the list by which Ellen was expected to live; the tiniest infraction was, according to Gina, one more step taken on the road to Hell.
Joseph, having yielded all authority to his wife early in their marriage, was not able to exert much control over her even in ordinary times; and when she retreated into her strange world of religious fanaticism, she was so far beyond his reach that he no longer even attempted to influence her decisions. Bewildered by the changes in Gina, unable to cope with the new woman she had become, Joseph spent less and less time at home. He owned a tailor shop—not an extremely prosperous business but a reliably steady one—and he began to work unusually long hours. When he wasn’t working he passed more time with his friends than he did with his family, and as a result Ellen was not exposed either to his love or to his fine sense of humor often enough to compensate for the countless, dreary hours during which she existed stoically under her mother’s stern, somber, suffocating domination.
For years Ellen dreamed of the day she would leave home; she looked forward to that escape with every bit as much eagerness as a convict anticipating release from a real prison cell. But now that she was on her own, now that she had been out from under her mother’s iron hand for more than a year, her future looked, incredibly, worse than it ever had looked before. Much worse.
Something tapped on the window screen behind the booth.
Ellen twisted around, looked up, startled. For a moment she couldn’t see anything. Just darkness out there.
Tap-tap-tap.
“Who’s there?” she asked, her voice as thin as tissue, her heart suddenly beating fast.
Then lightning spread across the sky, a tracery of fiery veins and arteries. In the flickering pulse of light, there were large white moths fluttering against the screen.
“Jesus,” she said softly. “Only moths.”
She shuddered, turned away from the frantic insects, and sipped her bourbon.
She couldn’t live with this kind of tension. Not for long. She couldn’t live in constant fear. She had to do something soon.
Kill the baby.
In the bassinet the baby cried out again: a short, sharp noise almost like a dog’s bark.
A distant crack of thunder seemed to answer the child; the celestial rumbling briefly blotted out the unceasing voice of the wind, and it reverberated in the trailer’s metal walls.
The moths went
tap-tap-tap
.
Ellen quickly drank her remaining bourbon and poured two more ounces into her glass.
She found it difficult to believe that she had wound up in this shabby place, in such anguish and misery; it seemed like a fever dream. Only fourteen months ago she had begun a new life with great expectations, with what had proved to be hopelessly naive optimism. Her world had collapsed into ruin so suddenly and so completely that she was still stunned.
Six weeks before her nineteenth birthday, she left home. She slipped away in the middle of the night, not bothering to announce her departure, unable to face down her mother. She left a short, bitter note for Gina, and then she was off with the man she loved.
Virtually any inexperienced, small-town girl, longing to escape boredom or oppressive parents, would have fallen for a man like Conrad Straker. He was undeniably handsome. His straight, coal-black hair was thick and glossy. His features were rather aristocratic: high cheekbones, a patrician nose, a strong chin. He had startlingly blue eyes, a gas-flame blue. He was tall, lean, and he moved with the grace of a dancer.
But it wasn’t even Conrad’s looks that had most appealed to Ellen. She had been won by his style, his charm. He was a good talker, clever, with a gift for making the most extravagant flattery sound understated and sincere.
Running away with a handsome carnival barker had seemed wildly romantic. They would travel all over the country, and she would see more of the world in one year than she had expected to see in her entire life. There would be no boredom. Each day would be filled with excitement, color, music, and lights. And the world of the carny, so different from that of her small town in Illinois farm country, was not governed by a long, complex, frustrating set of rules.
She and Conrad were married in the best carnival tradition. The ceremony consisted of an after-hours ride on the merry-go-round, with other carnies standing as witnesses. In the eyes of all true carnival people, their marriage was as binding and sacred as if it had been performed in a church, by a minister, with a proper license in hand.
After she became Mrs. Conrad Straker, Ellen was certain that only good times lay ahead. She was wrong.
She had known Conrad for only two weeks before she had run off with him. Too late, she discovered that she had seen just the best side of him. Since the wedding, she had learned that he was moody, difficult to live with, and capable of violence. At times he was sweet, every bit as charming as when he had been courting her. But he could turn vicious with the unexpected, inexplicable suddenness of a wild animal. During the past year his dark moods had seized him with increasing frequency. He was sarcastic, petty, nasty, grim, and quick to strike Ellen when she displeased him. He enjoyed slapping, shoving, and pinching her. Early in the marriage, before she was pregnant, he had hit her in the stomach with his fist on two occasions. While she’d been carrying their child, Conrad had restricted his attacks, contenting himself with less brutal but nonetheless frightening abuse.
By the time she was two months pregnant, Ellen was almost desperate enough to go home to her parents. Almost. But when she thought of the humiliation she would have to endure, when she pictured herself begging Gina for another chance, when she thought of the smug self-righteousness with which her mother would greet her, she wasn’t able to leave Straker.
She had nowhere else to go.
As she grew heavy with the child, she convinced herself that a baby would settle Conrad. He genuinely liked children; that was obvious because of the way he treated the offspring of other carnies. He appeared to be enchanted by the prospect of fatherhood. Ellen told herself that the presence of the baby would soften Conrad, mellow him, sweeten his temper.
Then, six weeks ago, that fragile hope was shattered when the baby arrived. Ellen hadn’t gone to the hospital. That wasn’t the true carny way. She had the baby at home, in the trailer, with a carnival midwife in attendance. The delivery had been relatively easy. She was never in any physical danger. There were no complications. Except . . .
The baby.
She shivered with revulsion when she thought of the baby, and she picked up her bourbon once more.
As if it sensed that she was thinking about it, the child squalled again.
“Shut up!” she screamed, putting her hands over her ears. “Shut up, shut up!”
It would not be quiet.
The bassinet shook, rocked, creaked, as the infant kicked and writhed in anger.
Ellen tossed down the last of the bourbon in her glass and licked her lips nervously and finally felt the whiskey-power surging into her again. She slid out of the booth. She stood in the tiny kitchen, swaying.