The Funhouse (8 page)

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 straight 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 full-time employees, a couple of local laborers looking to make forty bucks each, and a pair of freelance 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-a-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 freelance 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 next 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.

For nearly a minute Conrad stood just inside the doorway, staring apprehensively at the shower stall. The curtain was drawn. He knew he had to whisk it aside and see if anything waited behind it, but he dreaded making that move.

He closed his eyes and leaned against the doorjamb, weary, pausing until he could regain sufficient strength to do what must be done.

Twice before, he had found something waiting for him in the shower stall. Something that had been ripped and crushed, broken and chewed on. Something that had once been a living human being but wasn’t anymore.

He heard the shower curtain rattling back on its metal rod:
snickety-snickety-snick
.

His eyes snapped open.

The curtain was still closed, hanging limply, unstirred. He had only imagined the sound.

He let out his breath in a
whoosh!

Get on with it, he told himself angrily.

He licked his lips nervously, pushed away from the jamb, and went to the shower stall. He gripped the curtain with one hand and quickly jerked it aside.

The stall was empty.

At least this time the body had been disposed of. That was something to be thankful for. Handling the disgusting remains was a chore that Conrad hated.

Of course he would have to learn what had been done with the latest corpse. If it hadn’t been taken far enough away from the fairgrounds to deflect police suspicion from the carnival, he would have to go out soon and move it.

He turned away from the shower stall and began to clean up the bloody bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, badly in need of a drink, he fetched a glass, a tray of ice cubes, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker from the kitchen. He carried those items into the master bedroom compartment, sat on the bed, and poured two or three ounces of Scotch for himself. He sat back, propped up by three pillows, and sipped the whiskey, trying to attain a state of calm that would at least permit him to hold his glass without constantly rattling the ice in it.

A mimeographed copy of Big American Midway’s season schedule was on the nightstand. It was tattered from much handling. Conrad picked it up.

From early November until the middle of April, BAM, like other carnivals, shuttered for the off-season. Most of the carnies, people from every roadshow there was, wintered in Gibsonton, Florida—known as “Gibtown” to show-folk—where they had created a year-round community of their own kind, a carny Shangri-La, a retreat, a place where the bearded lady and the man with three eyes could get together for a drink at the neighborhood bar without anyone staring at them. But from April through October, Big American traveled incessantly, settling into a new town every week, pulling up its fragile roots six days later.