The Funhouse (3 page)

“No!” she shouted.

A thought snapped through her mind:
I’ve got to wake up!

But she knew she was already awake.

The thing continued to hold her right arm, its nails hooked in her flesh, but it let go of her left arm. In the blackness she sensed the hooked claw reaching for her throat, her vulnerable jugular vein. She turned her head aside. The small yet incredibly long-fingered, deadly hand brushed past her throat, barely missing her.

She rolled, and then the child-thing was on the bottom. Whimpering, teetering on the wire of hysteria, she tore her right arm loose of the creature’s steely grip, at the expense of new pain, and she felt for its arms in the darkness, found its wrists, held its hands away from her face.

The thing kicked at her stomach again, but she avoided its short, powerful legs. She managed to put one of her knees on its chest, pinning it. She bore down on it with all of her weight; the creature’s ribs and breastbone gave way beneath her. She heard something crack inside the thing. It wailed like a banshee. Ellen knew, at last, that she had a chance to survive. There was a sickening crunch, a wet sound, a horrible mashing, squashing, and all the fight went out of her adversary. Its arms went slack and stopped trying to resist her. The creature abruptly fell silent, limp.

Ellen was afraid to take her knee off its chest. She was certain that it was faking death. If she shifted her weight, if she gave it the slightest opening, the thing would move as fast as a snake, strike at her throat, and then disembowel her with its spiky feet.

Seconds passed.

Then minutes.

In the darkness she began an urgent, whispered prayer: “Jesus, help me. Saint Elena, my patron saint, plead for me. Mary, Mother of God, hear me, help me. Please, please, please. Mary, help me, Mary, please . . .”

The electric power was restored, and Ellen cried out at the unexpected light.

Under her, on its back, blood still running from its nostrils and its mouth, the child-thing stared up at her with glistening, bulging, bloodshot eyes. But it couldn’t see her. It was looking into another world, into Hell, to which she had dispatched its soul—if it had a soul.

There was a lot of blood. Most of it wasn’t Ellen’s.

She released the child-thing.

It didn’t return magically to life, as she had half expected it would. It didn’t attack.

It looked like a huge, squashed bug.

She crawled away from the corpse, keeping one eye on it as she went, not entirely convinced that it was dead. She did not have sufficient strength to stand up just yet. She crept to the nearest wall and sat with her back against it.

The night air was heavy with the coppery odor of blood, the stench of her own sweat, and the clean ozone of the thunderstorm.

Gradually, Ellen’s stentorian breathing subsided to a soft, rhythmic lullaby of inhalation, exhalation, inhalation . . .

As her fear dwindled along with the steady deceleration of her heartbeat, she became increasingly aware of her pains; there was a multitude of them. She ached in every joint and every muscle from the strain of wrestling with the child. Her left thumb was bleeding where the nail had been ripped off; the exposed flesh stung as if it were being eaten away by acid. Her scratched, scraped fingers burned, and the gouged palm of her right hand throbbed. Both of her forearms had been scored repeatedly by the thing’s sharp fingernails. Each upper arm was marked by five, ugly, oozing punctures.

She wept. Not just because of the physical pain. Because of the anguish, the stress, the fear. With tears she was able to wash away much of her tension and at least a small measure of her heavy burden of guilt.

—
I’m a murderer.

—
No. It was just an animal.

—
It was my child.

—
Not a child. A thing. A curse.

She was still arguing with herself, still trying to find a comfortable set of rationalizations that would allow her to live with what she had done, when the trailer door flew open and Conrad came inside, backlighted by a strobe-flutter of lightning. He was wearing a plastic raincoat, streaming water; his thick black hair was soaked, and strands of it were plastered across his broad forehead. Wind rushed in at his heels and, like a big dog, circled the room, sniffing inquisitively at everything.

Raw, throat-tightening fear gripped Ellen again.

Conrad pulled the door shut. Turning, he saw her sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, her blouse torn, her arms and hands bleeding.

She tried to explain why she had killed the child. But she couldn’t speak. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out of it except a dry, frightening rasping.

Conrad’s intensely blue eyes looked puzzled for a moment. Then his gaze traveled from Ellen to the bloody, crumpled child that was on the floor a few feet from her.

His powerful hands curled into large, hard fists. “No,” he said softly, disbelievingly. “No . . . no . . . no . . .”

He moved slowly toward the small corpse.

Ellen looked up at him with growing trepidation.

Stunned, Conrad knelt beside the dead creature and stared at it for what seemed like an eternity. Then tears began to track down his cheeks. Ellen had never seen him cry before. Finally he lifted the limp body and held it close. The child-thing’s bright blood dripped onto the plastic raincoat.

“My baby, my little baby, my sweet little boy,” Conrad crooned. “My boy . . . my son . . . what’s happened to you? What did she do to you? What did she do?”

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 one 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.