The Funhouse (16 page)

He reached into the darkness on his right side, passed his hand through the air, found the light chain, and pulled it. Two dozen bulbs came on all over the basement, but the place was still shadowy. He was in a low-ceilinged room full of machinery, cogwheels, cables, belts, pulleys, chain-driven mechanisms of odd design; these were the mechanical guts of the funhouse.

Turning away from the ladder, Conrad sidled between two machines and stepped into a narrow aisle between banks of long, notched cables that stretched across a series of large metal wheels. He hurried to the northwest corner of the chamber, where there was a workbench, a tool cabinet, a metal rack full of spare parts, a pile of tarps, and a couple of suits of coveralls.

Conrad quickly pulled off his barker’s jacket, stepped out of his trousers, and wriggled into a pair of coveralls. He didn’t want to explain bloodstained clothes to Ghost.

He picked up one of the tarps and rushed back to the ladder. Upstairs in the funhouse again, he returned to the dead woman on the tracks.

He glanced at his wristwatch. Today’s show call was for four-thirty, and that was precisely the time his watch showed him. At this very moment the fairground gates were swinging open, and the marks were pouring through. Within ten minutes the first of them would be buying tickets for the funhouse.

Ghost wouldn’t start the system until he’d gotten a final report on the condition of the track. He must be wondering what was taking Conrad so long. In two or three minutes, he would come looking.

Conrad spread the tarp out in the gondola channel. He picked up the still-warm body and dropped it in the middle of the sheet of canvas. He grabbed the long, trailing hair and lifted the woman’s severed head—its mouth open, its eyes wide—and put that on the tarp as well. He added her shredded, bloody clothes to the pile, then a flashlight, a small notebook, and a hard hat. What sort of woman wore a hard hat? What had she been doing in the funhouse? He looked for a purse. A woman ought to be carrying a purse; but he couldn’t find one. At last, panting from the exertion, he pulled the ends of the tarp together, lifted it, and hefted it out of the gondola channel, onto the ledge where the man and the spider were temporarily frozen in combat.

As he scrambled onto the ledge after the tarp, he heard someone call his name. “Conrad?”

With a sinking heart, Conrad looked back along the tracks, down the gloomy gondola tunnel.

It was Ghost. The albino was standing fifty feet away, at the far end of the straightaway, just inside the entrance to the Hall of the Giant Spiders. He was only a pale silhouette; Conrad wasn’t able to see the albino’s face.

And if I can’t see him clearly, he can’t see me any better, Conrad thought, relieved. He can’t see the tarp, and even if he
can
see it, he can’t possibly know what’s in it.

“Conrad?”

“Yeah. Here.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no. Nothing.”

“The gates are open. We’ll have marks swarming all over us in a couple of minutes.”

Conrad crouched beside the tarp, using his body to further block Ghost’s view of it. “There was some junk on the track. But it’s okay now. I’ve taken care of it.”

“You need some help?” Ghost asked, starting toward him.

“No! No, no. I’ve got everything under control. You better get out front, throw the switch, and start selling tickets. We’re ready to roll.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” Conrad snapped. “Get moving. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Ghost hesitated for just a second, then turned and walked back the way he had come.

As soon as the albino was out of sight, Conrad dragged the tarp behind the papier-mâché boulders. He had a bit of trouble squeezing the grisly bundle through the trapdoor. He leaned in after it, lowered it the length of his arms, then let it drop the rest of the way. It landed at the foot of the ladder. The tarp flopped open, and the ghastly, disembodied head looked up at him, mouth stretched in a silent scream.

Conrad went down the ladder again. He closed the trapdoor above him. He bent, gathered up the corners of the tarp, and dragged the corpse to the maintenance area in the northwest corner of the funhouse basement.

Overhead, the building was abruptly filled with eerie, tape-recorded music as Ghost started switching on the system.

Grimacing, Conrad picked up the dead woman’s gore-spattered clothes, one piece at a time. He checked the pockets of her jeans, jacket, and blouse, looking for some scrap of identification.

He found her car keys right away. Attached to the key ring was one of those miniature license plates that were sold by some veterans’ organizations. The number on it was the number on her real plates.

Even before he had finished his search of her clothes, he saw the Big American Midway VIP badge pinned to her blouse. That discovery rocked him. If she was someone with important carnival connections, Gunther’s secret could no longer be concealed.

Conrad found the sort of thing he was looking for in the last pocket he turned out. It was a laminated ID card that said she was Janet Leigh Middlemeir; she worked for the county Office of Public Safety; she was a safety engineer, whatever the hell that was, and she was accredited by the State of Maryland.

A government official. That was bad. But not as bad as he had feared. At least she wasn’t a sister or a cousin of one of the carnies. She didn’t have any friends or relatives on the lot, no one who would be looking out for her. Evidently she had been on the midway strictly in a professional capacity, making spot safety checks. No one would have realized that she had disappeared in the middle of one of those inspections because no one would have been paying special attention to her. There was a good chance that Conrad could move the body and plant it far away from the carnival, in such a way that the police would think she had been killed after she quit working.

But he couldn’t do anything more until it was dark; it would be a risky bit of business even then. Now he had to get out front, on the barker’s platform, before Ghost started wondering what had happened to him and came looking again.

Conrad took a coil of rope from one of the storage shelves and threaded it through the eyelets around the edges of the tarpaulin. Then he pulled the rope like a drawstring and made a bag out of the tarp, with the dead woman and her belongings inside. He put the bag in the corner. He stripped out of the bloody coveralls and put them with the bag. His hands were bloody, and he wiped them off as best he could on a couple of dirty rags that were on the workbench; then he put the rags with his coveralls. Finally he stacked the other tarps on top of all that incriminating evidence, until there was nothing to see but a mound of rumpled canvas. No one would stumble across the dead woman, at least not during the few hours she would be there.

Conrad put on his street clothes and left the funhouse by a rear door. Because the basement wasn’t underground, the door opened onto the warm, late-afternoon sunshine behind the building.

He walked to the nearest comfort station. Because the gates had opened only minutes ago, there weren’t yet any marks in the restrooms. Conrad scrubbed his hands until they were as clean as a surgeon’s.

He returned to the funhouse and walked around to the front of it. The giant clown’s face was laughing. Elton, one of Conrad’s employees, was selling tickets. Ghost was working at the boarding gate. Gunther was dressed like the Frankenstein monster and was growling enthusiastically at the marks; he saw Conrad, and they stared at each other for a moment, and although they were too far apart to see each other’s eyes, an understanding passed between them.

—
I did it again.

—
I know. I found her.

—
What now?

—
I’ll protect you.

* * *

Until night fell
over the fairgrounds, Conrad worked on the pitchman’s platform, ballying the marks, drawing them in with his polished spiel. As soon as darkness came, he complained of a migraine headache and told Ghost that he was going back to his motor home to lie down.

Instead, he went to the large parking area adjacent to the fairgrounds, and he searched for Janet Middlemeir’s car. He had the miniature license plate on her key ring to guide him, and even though there were a great many cars to check through, he located her Dodge Omni in just half an hour.

He drove the Omni onto the lot through a service gate, well aware that he was leaving an evidential trail in other people’s memories, but there was nothing else he could do. He parked in the shadows behind the funhouse. The service alley was deserted at the moment. He hoped no one would stroll past on the way to the comfort station.

He entered the funhouse basement through the rear door and carried out the tarp that contained the corpse, while the marks screamed at mechanical monsters in the dark tunnels overhead. He put the gruesome bundle in the Omni’s trunk, and then he drove away from the fairgrounds.

Although he had never been so bold before, he decided the best place to leave the dead woman was in her own home. If the police thought she had been murdered in her own house by an intruder, they wouldn’t be likely to link the killing with the carnival. It would look like just another random act of senseless violence, the sort of thing the cops saw all the time.

Two miles from the fairgrounds, in a supermarket parking lot, he looked through the car, trying to find some indication of where Janet Middlemeir lived. He discovered her purse under the front seat, where she had left it while making her inspection tour of the carnival. He went through the contents of the purse and found her address on her driver’s license.

With the help of a map that he picked up at an Exxon station, Conrad managed to find the pleasant apartment complex in which the woman lived. There were a number of long, two- and three-story, colonial-style buildings angled through and around the parklike grounds. Janet Middlemeir’s unit was on the ground floor, at the corner of one of the buildings, and there was an empty parking slot behind her place, not more than fifteen feet from her back door.

The apartment was dark, and Conrad hoped that she lived alone. He hadn’t found anything to indicate that she was married. There were no rings on her hands; nothing in her purse bore the word “Mrs.” Of course she might have a girlfriend rooming with her, or there might be a live-in boyfriend. That could mean trouble. Conrad was prepared to kill anyone who walked in on him while he was disposing of the body.

He got out of the car, leaving the dead woman in the Omni’s trunk, and he let himself into her apartment. A quick check of the closet in the single bedroom was sufficient to convince him that Janet Middlemeir lived by herself.

He stood at the kitchen window and watched as a car drove into the parking area. Two people got out of it and went into an apartment two doors away. At the same time a man left yet another apartment, got into a Volkswagen Rabbit, and drove off. When all was quiet again, Conrad went out to the Omni, took the tarp from the trunk, and carried it inside, hoping that no one was watching him from a window in one of the other apartments.

He took the tarp into the small bathroom and opened it there. Taking care to keep himself clean, he lifted the canvas and dumped the contents into the bathtub. There was still a great deal of blood trapped in the torn body cavity, and he spread some of the viscous stuff around, smearing it on the walls and the floor.

He took a macabre pride in the cleverness of his plan. If he had left the dead woman in the bedroom, the police pathologists would have realized at once that she hadn’t been killed there, for they wouldn’t have found enough blood on the carpet to support that theory. (Most of her blood had been spilled in the funhouse, on the gondola tracks, and had soaked into the boards there.) But when the cops found her here, in the bathroom, maybe they would think that the missing pints of blood had simply gone down the bathtub drain.

Conrad remembered the VIP badge on her blouse. He fished that out of the tub and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

He also retrieved her hard hat, flashlight, and notebook, which were spotted with blood. He cleaned those off at the sink, then took them out to the foyer closet and put them on the shelf above the coatrack. He didn’t know whether that was where she usually kept those items, but the police wouldn’t know, either, and it seemed a likely enough place.

He folded the empty tarp.

In the kitchen, in the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights, he inspected his hands carefully. He had washed them in the bathroom, when he had cleaned the articles that he’d taken to the foyer closet, but there was still some blood caked under his fingernails. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands once more, vigorously.

He found the drawer in which the dead woman had kept her dish towels. He wrapped one of the towels around his right hand and took another one to the kitchen door. He opened the door, which had three small, decorative windows arranged in the center of it. He looked out at the parking lot; under the stark light of the sodium-vapor lamps, there was no sound or motion. He put the folded dish towel against the exterior surface of one of the door’s little panes, and then he struck the interior surface with his wrapped right hand, trying to make as little noise as possible. The glass broke with only a dull crack, and he used the folded towel to push the fragments inward onto the kitchen floor, so that it would look as if the killer had smashed the pane from the outside in the process of forcing entry. Conrad quietly closed the door, shook the dish towels to be certain there were no slivers of glass clinging to the fabric, refolded them, and returned them to the drawer in which he had found them.

He suddenly realized that threads from the dish towels might be snagged on the shards of glass. He stared down at the bright fragments. He didn’t have time to examine each of them. Likewise, he didn’t have time to study the trunk of her car with a magnifying glass to see if there were spots of blood in it. There were probably other loose ends, too. He would just have to do the best he could and trust in the protection of the dark god who guided him.