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The Fun House [067-011-5.0]

By: Dean R. Koontz

Synopsis:

Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival.
She married a man she hated and begat a child she could never love.
Now Ellen has a new life, a new husband and two normal children.
Memory is drowned in alcohol and prayers--neither of which will save
her kids when the carnival comes back to town. A premiere release by
the bestselling author of Dragon Tears.

Berkley Pub Group;

ISBN: 0425142485

Copyright 1994

"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."

--ANNA ROOSEVELT "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way."

--LEO TOLSTOY "Don't look back.            Something may be gaining on you."

--SATCHEL PAIGE.

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.



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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.



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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


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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.



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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, coalblack 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


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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.

The dissonant music of the oncoming storm crashed louder than ever,
directly over the fairgrounds now, building rapidly to a furious
crescendo.

She weaved through the trailer and stopped at the foot of the
bassinet.

She switched on a lamp that produced a soft amber glow, and the shadows
crawled away to huddle in the corners.



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The child stopped struggling with its covers.                 It looked up at her, its
eyes shining with hatred.

She felt sick.

Kill it, she told herself.

But the baby's malevolent glare was hypnotic. Ellen could not tear her
eyes from its medusan gaze, she could not move, she felt as if she had
been turned to stone.

Lightning pressed its bright face to the window again, and the first
fat drops of rain came with the subsequent growl of thunder.

She stared at her child in horror, and beads of cold sweat popped out
along her hairline. The baby wasn't normal, it wasn't even close to
normal, but there was no medical term for its deformity. In fact you
couldn't rightly call it a child. It was not a baby. It was a
thing.

It didn't seem deformed so much as it seemed to belong to a species
ent*ely different from mankind.

It was hideous.

"Oh, God," Ellen said, her voice quavering.                 "God, why me?       What have I
done to deserve this?"

The large, green, inhuman eyes of her offspring regarded her
venomously.

Ellen wanted to turn away from it. She wanted to run out of the
trailer, into the crackling storm, into the vast darkness, out of this
nightmare and into a new dawn.

The creature's twisted, flared nostrils quivered like those of a wolf
or a dog, and she could hear it sniffing eagerly as it sorted out her
scent from the other odors in the trailer.

Kill it!

The Bible said, Thou shalt not kill. Murder was a sin. If she
strangled the baby, she would rot in Hell. A series of cruel images
flickered through her mind, visions of a Hell that her mother had
painted for her during thousands of lectures about the terrible
consequences of sin: grinning demons tearing ragged gobbets of flesh
from living, screaming women, their leathery black lips slick with
human blood, white-hot fire searing the bodies of sinners, pale worms
feeding off still-conscious dead men, agonized people writhing
painfully in mounds of indescribably horrible filth. Ellen was not a
practicing Catholic, but that did not mean that she was no longer a
Catholic in her heart. Years of daily Mass and nightly prayer,
nineteen interminable years of Gina's mad sermons and stern admonitions
could not be sloughed off and forgotten easily. Ellen still believed
wholeheartedly in God, Heaven, and Hell. The Bible's warnings
continued to hold value and meaning for her. Thou shalt not kill.

But surely, she argued with herself, that commandment did not apply to
animals. You were permitted to kill animals, that was not a mortal
sin. And this thing in the bassinet was just an animal, a beast, a
monster. It was not a human being. Therefore, if she destroyed it,
that act of destruction would not seal the fate of her immortal soul.


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On the other hand, how could she be certain that it wasn't human?

It had been born of man and woman. There couldn't be any more
fundamental criterion for humanity than that one. The child was a
mutant, but it was a human mutant.

Her dilemma seemed insoluble.

In the bassinet, the small, swarthy creature raised one hand, reaching
toward Ellen. It wasn't a hand, really. It was a claw. The long,
bony fingers were much too large to be those of a sixweek-old infant,
even though this baby was big for its age, like an animal's paws, the
hands of this little beast were out of proportion to the rest of it. A
sparse, black fur covered the backs of its hands and bristled more
densely around its knuckles. Amber light glinted off the sharp edges
of the pointed fingernails. The child raked the air, but it was unable
to reach Ellen.

She couldn't understand how such a thing could have come from her. How
could it possibly exist? She knew there were such things as freaks.

Some of them worked in a sideshow in this very carnival.

Bizarre-looking people. But not like this. None of them was half as
weird as this thing that she had nurtured in her womb. Why had this
happened? Why?

Killing the child would be an act of mercy. After all, it would never
be able to enjoy a normal life. It would always be a freak, an object
of shame, ridicule, and derision. Its days would be unrelievedly
stark, bitter, lonely.

Even the tamest and most ordinary pleasures would be denied it, and it
would have no chance of attaining happiness.

Furthermore, if she were forced to spend her life tending to this
creature, she wouldn't find any happiness of her own. The prospect of
raising this grotesque child filled her with despair. Murdering it
would be an act of mercy benefitting both herself and the pitiful yet
frightening mutant now glaring at her from the bassinet.

But the   Roman Catholic Church did not condone mercy killing. Even the
highest   motives would not save her from Hell. And she knew that her
motives   were not pure, ridding herself of this burden was, in part, a
selfish   act.

The creature continued to stare at her, and she had the unsettling
feeling that its strange eyes were not merely looking at her but
through her, into her mind and soul, past all pretension. It knew what
she was contemplating, and it hated her for that.

Its pale, speckled tongue slowly licked its dark, dark lips.

It hissed defiantly at her.

Whether or not this thing was human, whether or not killing it would be
a sin, she knew that it was evil. It was not simply a deformed baby.

It was something else. Something worse.                 It was dangerous, both less
and more than human. Evil.

She felt the truth of that in her heart and bones.



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Or am I crazy? she wondered. No. She couldn't allow doubt to creep
in. She was not out of her mind. Grief-stricken, deeply depressed,
frightened, horrified, confused--she was all of those things. But she
was not crazy. She perceived that the child was evil, and in that
regard her perception was not askew.

Kill it.

The infant screamed.        Its gravelly, strident voice grated on Ellen's
nerves.

She winced.

Wind-driven sheets of rain drummed noisily against the trailer.

Thunder picked up the night and vigorously rattled it again.

The child squirmed, thrashed, and managed to push aside the thin
blanket that had been draped across it. Hooking its bony hands on the
edges of the bassinet, gripping with its wicked claws, it strained
forward and sat up.

Ellen gasped.      It was too young to sit up on its own with such
assurance.

It hissed at her.

The thing was growing at a frightening rate, it was always hungry, and
she fed it more than twice as much as she would have fed an ordinary
child, week by week she could see the amazing changes in it. With
surprising, disquieting swiftness it was learning how to use its
body.

Before long it would be able to crawl, then walk.

And then what? How big and how mobile would it have to get before she
would no longer have any control over it?

Her mouth was dry and sour.           She tried to work up some saliva, but
there was none.

A trickle of cold sweat broke from her hairline and wriggled down her
forehead, into the corner of one eye. She blinked away the salty
fluid.

If she could place the child in an institution, where it belonged, she
would not have to murder it. But Conrad would never agree to giving up
his baby. He was not the least bit revolted by it. He was not
frightened of it, either. He actually seemed to cherish it more than
he might have done a healthy child. He took considerable pride in
having fathered the creature, and to Ellen his pride was a sign of
madness.

Even if she could commit the thing to an institution, that solution
would not be final. The evil would still exist. She knew the child
was evil, knew it beyond the slightest doubt, and she felt responsible
for bringing such a creature into the world. She could not simply turn
her back and walk away and let someone else deal with it.

What if, grown larger, it killed someone?                Wouldn't the responsibility
for that death rest on her shoulders?

The air coming through the open windows was much cooler than it had


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been before the rain had begun to fall.               A chilly draft brushed the
back of Ellen's neck.

The child began trying to get out of the bassinet.

Finally summoning all of her bourbon-inspired courage, her teeth
chattering, her hands trembling as if she were afflicted by palsy, she
took hold of the baby. No. The thing. She must not think of it as a
baby. She could not allow herself the luxury of sentiment. She must
act. She must be cold, unmoved, implacable, iron-willed.

She intended to lift the loathesome creature, retrieve the
satin-encased pillow that was under its head, and then smother it with
the same pillow. She didn't want to leave any obvious marks of
violence on the body.

The death must appear to be natural. Even healthy babies sometimes
died in their cribs without apparent cause, no one would be surprised
or suspicious if this pitiful deformity passed away quietly in its
sleep.

But as she lifted the thing off the pillow, it responded with such
shocking fury that her plan instantly became unworkable. The creature
squealed. It clawed her.

She cried out in pain as its sharp nails gouged and sliced her
forearms.

Blood.    Slender ribbons of blood.

The infant squirmed and kicked, and Ellen had great difficulty holding
onto it.

The thing pursed its twisted mouth and spat at her. A viscous,
foul-smelling glob of yellowish spittle struck her nose.

She shuddered and gagged.

The child-thing peeled its dark lips back from its mottled gums and
hissed at her.

Thunder smashed the porcelain night, and the lights in the trailer
blinked once, blinked twice, and lightning coruscated through the brief
spell of blackness before the lamps came on again.

Please, God, she thought desperately, don't leave me in the dark with
this thing.

Its bulging, green eyes seemed to radiate a peculiar light, a
phosphorescent glow that appeared, impossibly, to come from within
them.

The thing screeched and writhed.

It urinated.

Ellen's heart jackhammered.

The thing tore at her hands, scratching, drawing blood. It gouged the
soft flesh of her palms, and it ripped off one of her thumbnails.

She heard an eerie, high-pitched ululation quite unlike anything she
had heard before, and she didn't realize for several seconds that she
was listening to her own shrill, panicked screaming.


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If she could have thrown the creature down, if she could have turned
away from it and run, she would have done just that, but suddenly she
found that she was unable to release it. The thing had a fierce grip
on her arms, and it wouldn't let go.

She struggled with the inhumanly ferocious child, and the bassinet
almost tipped over. Her shadow swayed wildly across the nearby bed and
up the wall, bobbing against the rounded ceiling. Cursing, straining,
trying to keep the creature at arm's length, she managed to shift her
left hand to its throat, and then her right hand, and she squeezed
hard, bearing down, gritting her teeth, repelled by the savagery she
felt rising within herself, frightened by her own newly discovered
capacity for violence, but determined to choke the life out of the
thing.

It wasn't going to die easily. Ellen was surprised by the rigid,
resistant muscles in its neck. It crabbed its claws higher on her arms
and dug its nails into her again, making ten fresh puncture wounds in
her skin, and the pain prevented Ellen from putting all of her strength
into the frantic attempt to strangle the thing.

It rolled its eyes, then refocused on her with even more evident hatred
than before.

A silvery stream of thick drool oozed out of one corner of its mouth
and down its pebbled chin.

The twisted mouth opened wide, the dark, leathery lips writhed.                     A
snaky, pale, pointed tongue curled and uncurled obscenely.

The child pulled Ellen toward it with improbable strength. She could
not keep it safely at arm's length as she wanted. It drew her
relentlessly down toward the bassinet, and at the same time it pulled
itself up.

Die, damn you!      Die!

She was bent over the bassinet now. Leaning into                  it. Her grip on the
child's throat was weakened by her new position.                  Her face was only
eight or ten inches from the creature's repugnant                 countenance. Its
rank breath washed over her. It spat in her face                  again.

Something brushed her belly.

She gasped, jerked.

Fabric ripped.      Her blouse.

The child was kicking out with its long-toed, clawed feet. It was
trying to gouge her breasts and stomach. She attempted to draw back,
but the thing held her close, held her with demonic power and
perseverance.

Ellen felt dizzy, fuzzy, whiskey-sick, terror-sick, and her vision
blurred, and her ears were filled with the roaring suction of her own
breath, but she couldn't seem to breathe fast enough, she was
light-headed. Sweat flew off her brow and spattered the child as she
wrestled with it.

The thing grinned as if it sensed triumph.

I'm losing, she thought desperately.              How can that be?         My God, it's


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going to kill me.

Thunder pounded the sky, and lightning burst from the broken night.                      A
mallet of wind struck the trailer broadside.

The lights went out.

And stayed out.

The child fought with renewed fury.

It was not weak like a human infant. It had weighed almost eleven
pounds at birth, and it had gained, phenomenally, more than twelve
pounds in the past six weeks. Almost twenty-three pounds now. And no
fat. Just muscle. A hard, sinewy, gristly infant, like a young
gorilla. It was as strong and energetic as the six-month-old
chimpanzee that performed in one of the carnival's more popular
sideshows.

The bassinet toppled with a crash, and Ellen stumbled over it.

She fell. With the child. It was close against her now. No longer
safely at arm's reach. It was on top of her. Gurgling. Snarling.

Its taloned feet found purchase on her hips, and it tried to tear
through the heavy denim jeans she was wearing.

"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.


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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.



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--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 childthing'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.


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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.

"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.

aWait, 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
sl*ers 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


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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.


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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'shead 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


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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.

She headed toward the front gate. She looked back several times,
afraid that Conrad would change his mind and come after her.

Tent walls rippled and thrummed and snapped in the wind, pulling at
anchor pegs.

In the sheeting rain that was now laced with tendrils of fog, the dark
Ferris wheel thrust up like a prehistoric skeleton, weird, mysterious,
its familiar lines obscured and distorted and made fantastic by the
night and the mist.

She passed the funhouse, too. That was Conrad's concession. He owned
it, and he worked there every day. A giant, leering clown's face
peered down at her from atop the funhouse, as a joke, the artist had
modeled it after Conrad's face. Ellen could see the resemblance even
in the gloom. She had the disconcerting feeling that the clown's huge,
painted eyes were watching her.

She looked away from it and hurried on.

When she reached the main gate of the county fairgrounds, she stopped,
abruptly aware that she had no destination in mind. There was no place
for her to go. She had no one to whom she could turn.

The hooting wind seemed to be mocking her.

Later that night, after the storm front passed, when only a thin, gray
drizzle was falling, Conrad climbed onto the dark carousel in the
center of the deserted midway. He sat on one of the gaily painted,
elaborately carved benches, not on a horse.

Cory Baker, the man who operated the merrygo-round, stood at the
controls behind the ticket booth. He switched on the carousel's
lights. He started the big motor, pushed a lever, and the platform
began to turn backwards. Calliope music piped loudly, but it wasn't
able to dispel the dreary atmosphere that surrounded this ceremony.

The brass poles pumped up and down, up and down, gleaming.

The wooden stallions and mares galloped backwards, tail-first, around,
around.

Conrad, the sole passenger, stared straight ahead, tight-lipped,
grim.



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Such a ride on a carousel was the traditional carnival way to dissolve
a marriage. The bride and groom rode in the usual direction, forward,
when they wanted to wed, either of them could obtain a divorce by
riding backwards, alone. Those ceremonies seemed absurd to outsiders,
but to carnies, their traditions were less ridiculous than the straight
world's religious and legal rituals.

Five carnies, witnesses to the divorce, watched the merry-go-round.

Cory Baker and his wife. Zena Penetsky, one of the girls from the
kootch show. Two freaks: the fat lady, who was also the bearded lady,
and the alligator man, whose skin was very thick and scaly. They
huddled in the rain, watching silently as Conrad swept around through
the cool air, through the hollow music and the fog.

After the carousel had made half a dozen revolutions at normal speed,
Cory shut down the machine. The platform gradually slowed.

As he waited for the carousel to drift to a stop, Conrad thought about
the children Ellen would have one day. He raised his hands and stared
at them, trying to envision his fingers all red with the blood of
Ellen's offspring. In a couple of years she would remarry, she was too
lovely to remain unattached for long. Ten years from now she could
have at least one child. In ten years Conrad would start looking for
her. He would hire private investigators, he would spare no expense.

He knew that, by morning, Ellen would not take his threat seriously,
but he did. And when he found her years from now, when she felt safe
and secure, he would steal from her that which she valued most.

Now, more than at any other time in his mostly unhappy life, Conrad
Straker had something to live for. Vengeance.

Ellen spent the night in a motel near the county fairgrounds.

She didn't sleep well. Although she had bandaged her wounds, they
still burned, and she couldn't find a comfortable position. Worse than
that, every time she dozed off for a few minutes, she was plagued by
bloody nightmares.

Awake, staring at the ceiling, she worried about the future.

Where would she go?        What would she do?         She didn't have much money.

Once, at the deepest point of her depression, she considered suicide.

But she quickly dismissed that thought. She might not be condemned to
Hell for having killed the child-thing, but she surely would be damned
for taking her own life. To a Catholic, suicide was a mortal sin.

Having forsaken the Church in reaction to her mother's zealous support
of it, having been without faith for a few years, Ellen discovered that
she now belieued. She was a Catholic again, and she longed for the
cleansing of confession, for the spiritual uplift of the Mass. The
birth of that grotesque, malevolent child, and especially her recent
struggle with it, had convinced her that there were such things as
abstract evil and abstract good, forces of God and forces of Satan at
work in the world.

In the motel bed, with the covers drawn up to her chin, she prayed
often that night.

Toward dawn she finally managed to get a couple of hours of


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uninterrupted, dreamless sleep, and when she woke up she did not feel
depressed.

A shaft of golden sunlight pierced the high window and came to rest
upon her, and as she luxuriated in the warmth and brightness, she began
to feel that there was hope for the future. Conrad was behind her.

Forever.    The monstrous child was gone.

Forever.    The world was filled with interesting possibilities.

After all the sadness and pain and fear that she had endured, she was
long overdue for her share of happiness.

Already, she had put Conrad's threat out of her mind.

It was Tuesday, August 16, 1955.

O N E AMY HARPER

ON THE NIGHT of the senior prom, Jerry Galloway wanted to make love to
Amy.

His desire didn't surprise her. He always wanted to make love.                      He was
always pawing at her. He couldn't get enough of her.

But Amy was beginning to think she'd had enough of Jerry.                      Too much of
him, in fact. She was pregnant.

Whenever she thought about being pregnant, she got a hollow, cold
sensation in her chest. Afraid of what she would have to face in the
days ahead-- the humiliation, her father's disappointment, her mother's
fury--she shivered.

Several times during the evening, Jerry saw her shivering, and he
thought she was just bothered by a draft from the gymnasium's air
conditioning. She was wearing a lacy, green, off-the shoulder gown,
and he kept suggesting that she put her shawl over her shoulders.

They danced only a few of the fast songs, but they didn't miss a single
slow number. Jerry liked slow dancing. He liked to hold Amy close,
pressing her tight against him, as they glided somewhat clumsily around
the floor. He whispered in her ear while they danced, he told her that
she looked terrific, that she was the sexiest thing he had ever seen,
that all of the guys were surreptitiously staring at her cleavage, that
she made him hot, real hot. He pressed so tightly against her that she
could feel his erection.

He wanted her to feel it because he wanted her to know that she turned
him on.

To Jerry's way of thinking, his erection was the greatest compliment he
could pay her.

Jerry was an ass.

As Amy allowed him to maneuver her around the crowded room, as she
permitted him to rub his body against her under the pretense of
dancing, she wondered why she had let him touch her in the first
place.

He was such a creep, really.

He was handsome, of course.           He was one of the handsomest boys in the


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senior class. A lot of girls thought Amy had made a wonderful catch
when she'd latched onto Jerry Galloway.

But you don't give your body to a guy just because he's good-looking,
she told herself. My God, you've got to have higher standards than
that!

Jerry was handsome, but he wasn't nearly as intelligent as he was
good-looking. He wasn't witty, clever, kind, or more than minimally
considerate. He thought he was cool, and he was good at playing Joe
College, but there was no substance to him.

Amy looked around at the other girls in their silks and satins and
laces and chiffons, in their low-cut bodices, in their Empire-waist
dresses, in their backless gowns and long skirts and pumps, in their
elaborate hairdos and carefully applied makeup and borrowed jewelry.

All those girls were laughing and pretending to be ultra-sophisticated,
glamorous, even world-weary. Amy envied them. They were having so
much fun.

And she was pregnant.

She was afraid she was going to cry.              She bit her tongue and held back
the tears.

The prom was scheduled to last until one o'clock in the morning.

Afterwards, from one-thirty until three o'clock, there was an
extravagant breakfast buffet in one of the town's nicest restaurants.

Amy had been allowed to come to the prom, but she hadn't been given
permission to attend the breakfast. It was all right with her father,
but, as usual, her mother objected. Her father said she could stay out
until three because this was a special night, but her mother wanted her
home by ten, three whole hours before the prom ended. Amy always had
to be home by ten on weekends, nine o'clock on school nights. Tonight,
however, her father interceded on her behalf, and her mother grudgingly
compromised, Amy didn't have to be home until one o'clock. Her mother
didn't like making that concession, and later, in a hundred small
telling ways, she would make Amy pay for it.

If Mother could have her way, Amy thought, if Daddy didn't stick up for
me now and then, I wouldn't be permitted to date at all. I wouldn't be
permitted to do anything except go to church.

"You're dynamite," Jerry Galloway whispered as he took her in his arms
for another dance. "You make me so hot, baby."

Dear, dear Mother, Amy thought bitterly, just look at how well all your
rules and regulations have worked. All your prayers, all those years
you dragged me to Mass three or four or five times a week, all those
nightly recitations of the rosary that I had to take part in before I
could go to sleep.

You see, Mother?       See how well all of that has worked?                I'm pregnant.

Knocked up. What would Jesus think about that? And what will you
think about that when you find out? What will you think about having a
bastard grandchild, Mother?

"You're shivering again," Jerry said.



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"Just a chill."

A few minutes after ten o'clock, while the orchestra was playing
aScarborough Fair," and while Jerry was pushing Amy around the dance
floor, he suggested they cut out and spend the rest of the night
together, in their own way, just the two of them, just (as he so
transparently put it) proving their love to each other. This was
supposed to be a special night for a girl, a time to store up good
memories, not just another cheap opportunity to screw around in the
backseat of her boyfriend's car. Besides, they had arrived at the
dance only two and a half hours ago.

Jerry's eagerness was unseemly and more than a little selfish.

But after all, she reminded herself, he was just a horny teenager, not
a real man, and certainly not a romantic. Besides, she couldn't really
enjoy herself anyway, not with everything she had to worry about. She
agreed to leave with him, although what she had in mind for the
remainder of the evening was much different from the steamy makeout
session he was contemplating.

As they left the gymnasium, which the decorating committee had tried
desperately to transform into a ballroom, Amy glanced back wistfully,
taking one last look at the crepe paper and the tinsel and the
carnations made out of Kleenex tissues. The lights were low. A
revolving, mirrored globe hung above the dance floor, turning slowly,
casting down splinters of color from its thousand facets. The room
should have looked exotic, magical. But it only made Amy sad.

Jerry owned a meticulously restored, fussily maintained,
twenty-year-old Chevrolet. He drove out of town, along narrow, winding
Black Hollow Road.

Eventually he pulled off on a single-lane, dirt track near the river
and squeezed the car in among the high brush and the scattered trees.

He switched off the headlights, then the engine, and he rolled down his
window a couple of inches to let in a warm current of fresh night
air.

This was their usual parking spot.             It was here that Amy had gotten
pregnant.

Jerry slid out from behind the wheel. He smiled at her, and his teeth
looked phosphorescent in the calcimined moonlight that streamed through
the trees and the windshield. He took Amy's right hand and put it
firmly on his crotch. "Feel that, baby? See how you get to me?"
"Jerry--" "No girl has ever gotten to me like you do."

He slipped one hand in her bodice, feeling her breasts.

"Jerry, wait a minute."

He leaned toward her, kissed her neck.               He smelled of Old Spice.

She took her hand off his crotch and resisted him.

He didn't take the hint. He removed his hand from her bodice only long
enough to reach behind her for the zipper to her dress.

"Jerry, damn it!"       She shoved him away.

He blinked stupidly.        "Huh?     What's wrong?"


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"You're panting like a dog."

"You turn me on."       "A knothole would turn you on."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I want to talk," she said.

"Talk?"

"People do, you know.         They talk before they screw."

He stared at her for a moment, then sighed and said, "All right.

What do you want to talk about?" "It's not what I want to talk about,"
she said. "It's what we haue to talk about."

"You aren't making sense, baby. What is this-- a riddle or something"
She took a deep breath and blurted out the bad news: "I'm pregnant."

For a few seconds the night was so perfectly still that she could hear
the soft gurgling of the river washing along the shore twenty feet
away. A frog croaked.

Ys this a joke?"       Jerry asked at last.

"You're really pregnant?"          ayes.

"Oh, shit." "Ah," she said sarcastically, "what an eloquent summary of
the situation." "Did you miss your period or what?" "I missed it last
month. And I'm overdue this month again." "You been to a doctor?"
"Maybe you aren't." "I am." "You aren't getting big." "It's too
early to show."

He was silent for a while, staring out at the trees and the black, oily
river beyond. Then: "How could you do this to me?"

His question stunned her. She gaped at him, and when she saw he was
serious, she laughed bitterly. "Maybe I wasn't paying much attention
in biology class, but the way I understand it, you did it to me, not
the other way around. And don't try to blame it on parthenogenesis
either." aPartho-what?" "Parthenogenesis. That's when the female
gets pregnant without having to find a male to fertilize her egg."

With a note of hope in his voice, he said, "Hey, is that possible?"

God, he was a dolt. Why had she ever given herself to him? They had
nothing in common. She was artistically inclined, she played the
flute, and she liked to draw. Jerry had no interest whatsoever in the
arts. He liked cars and sports, and Amy had little tolerance for
conversation about either of those things.

She liked to read, he thought books were for girls and sissies.

Except for sex, cars, and football, no subject could engage him for
more than ten minutes, he had a child's attention span. So why had she
given herself to him?

Why?

"Oh, sure," she said in answer to his question. "Sure, parthenogenesis
might be possible--if I was an insect. Or a certain kind of plant."
"You're sure it can't happen to people?" he asked.


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"God, Jerry, you can't really be that dumb. You're putting me on,
aren't you?" "Hell, I never listened to old Amoeba Face Peterson in
biology," Jerry said defensively. "That stuff always bored my ass
off." He was silent for a minute, and she waited, and finally he said,
so what are you going to do?" "I'll get an abortion," she said.

He brightened up immediately.            "Yeah.     Yeah, that's the best thing.

It really is. That's smart. That's the best thing for both of us. I
mean, you know, we're too young to be tied down with a kid." aWe'll
cut school on Monday," she said. aWe'll find a doctor and set up an
appointment to have it done." "You mean you want me to go with you?"
"of course." Why?

"For Christ's sake, Jerry, I don't want to go by myself. I don't want
to face it alone." "There's nothing to be scared of," he said. "You
can handle it. I know you can."

She glared at him. "You're coming with me. You've got to. For one
thing, you'll have to approve the doctor's fee. Maybe we'll have to
shop around for the best price." She shuddered. "That's up to you."
"You mean . . . you want me to pay for the abortion?" "I think that's
fair." "How much?" "I don't know. Probably a few hundred." "I
can't," he said.

"What?" "I can't pay for it, Amy." "You've had a real good job the
past two summers. And you work weekends most of the year." "Stocking
shelves in a grocery store doesn't pay a whole hell of a lot, you
know." "Union wages." Yeah, but-"You bought this car and fixed it
up.

You have a pretty good savings account.

You've bragged about that often enough."

He squirmed. "I can't touch my savings." "Why not?" "I need every
dollar for California." "I don't understand." "Two weeks from now,
after graduation, I'm going to blow this stupid town.

There ain't any future here for me.               Royal City.     What a laugh.

There's nothing royal about this dump. And it sure ain't a city. It's
just fifteen thousand people living in a dump in the middle of Ohio,
which is just another, bigger dump." "I like it." "I don't." aBut
what do you expect to find in California?" "Are you kidding There's a
million opportunities out there for a guy with a lot on the ball."
aBut what do you expect to find there for you?" she asked.

He didn't understand what she meant, he didn't feel her slip the needle
in. "I just told you, baby. In California, there's more opportunities
than anywhere else in the world. Los Angeles. That's the place for
me. Hell, yes. A guy like me can go real far in a city like L.A."
"Doing what?" "Anything." "Such as?" "Absolutely anything." "How
long have you been planning to go to L.A.?"

Sheepishly, he said, "For about a year now." "You never told me." "I
didn't want to upset you." "You were just going to quietly disappear."
 "Hey, no. No, I was going to keep in touch, baby. I even figured
maybe you'd come along with me." aLike hell you did. Jerry, you have
to pay for the abortion." "Why can't you pay for it?" He was
whining.



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"You had a job last summer. You've been working weekends just like
me." aMy mother controls my savings account. There's no way I can
withdraw that much cash without telling her why I need it. No way."
"sO tell her." "God, I can't. She'd kill me." "She'd scream a lot,
and you'd probably be grounded for a while.

But she'll get over it." "She won't. She'll kill me."                      "Don't be
pid. She won't kill you." "You don't know my mother.                       She's very
strict. And she's . . .

mean sometimes.

Besides, we're a Catholic family.             My mother is very devout.             Very,
very devout.

And to a devout Catholic, abortion is a terrible sin. It's murder.                          My
father even does some free legal work for the Right-to-Life League.

He's not so fanatical about religion as my mother is. He's a pretty
straight guy, but I don't think he'd ever approve an abortion. And I
know my mother wouldn't. Not in a million years. She'd make me have
the baby. I know she would. And I can't. I just can't. Oh, God, I
can't."

She started to cry.

"Hey, baby, it's not the end of the world."                 He put an arm around
her.

"You'll come through this okay.            It's not as bad as you think.             Life
goes on, you know."

She didn't want to lean on him for either emotional or physical
support. Not on him, of all people. But she couldn't help it. She
put her head on his shoulder, despising herself for this weakness.

"Easy," he said.       "Take it easy.        Everything's going to be just
fine."

When the tears finally stopped flowing, she said, "Jerry, you've got to
help me. You've got to, that's all." "Well . . ."

Jerry, please.

"You know I would if I could."

She sat up straight, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief.

"Jerry, part of the responsibility is yours.                 Part of--" "I can't," he
said firmly, taking his arm away from her.

"Just lend me the money. I'll pay you back." "You can't pay me back
in just two weeks. And I'll need every dollar I've got when I go to
California the first of June." "Just a loan," she said, not wanting to
beg but having no choice.

"I can't, can't, can't!"          He shouted like a child throwing a tantrum.

His voice was high, screechy. "Forget it! Just forget it, Amy! I
need every penny I've got for when I get out of this stinking town."

Oh God, I hate him!

And she hated herself, too, for what she'd let him do.


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"If you don't at least lend me the money, I'll call your parents.

I'll tell them I'm carrying your child.               I'll put the heat on you,
derry."

She didn't think she really had the nerve to do something like that,
but she hoped the threat of it would make him be reasonable. "God help
me, I'll even make you marry me if that's the last resort, but I won't
go down alone."

"What do you want from me, for Christ's sake?"                  "Just a little help.

Decency.

That's all." "You can't make me marry you." "Maybe not," she
admitted. aBut I can cause you a lot of trouble, and maybe I can force
you to contribute to the support of the baby." "You can't force me to
do anything if I'm in another state. You can't make me pay up from
California." "Well see about that," she said, although she thought he
was probably right.

"Anyway, you can't prove I'm the father."

Who else?"     "How should I know?"          "You're the only one I've been doing
it with."

"I sure wasn't the first," he said.

"You bastard." "Eddie Talbot was the first." "I haven't done anything
with anyone else since I started going with you six months ago." "How
do I know that's true?" "You know," Amy said, loathing him. She
wanted to kick him and hit him and scratch his face until it was a
bloody mess, but she restrained herself, hoping she might yet gain some
concession from him. "It is your baby, Jerry. There's no doubt about
that." "I never came inside you," he argued.

"A couple of times you did.           Once is all it takes."

Yf you tried to nail me in court or something like that, I'd get five
or six friends to swear they'd been in your pants during the past
couple of months." aIn my whole life there's never been anyone but
Eddie and then you!" aIn court it'd be your word against theirs."
"They'd be committing perjury."

"I've got good buddies who'd do anything to protect me."                     "Even destroy
my reputation?" "What reputation?" he asked, sneering.

Amy felt sick.

It was hopeless.       There was no way she could force him to do the right
thing.

She was alone.

"Take me home," she said.

"Gladly," he said.

The drive back to town took half an hour.                During that time neither of
them said a word.

The Harper house was on Maple Lane, a solidly middle-class neighborhood
of wellmanicured lawns and shrubs, fresh paint, and two-car garages.


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The Harpers lived in a two-story, neo-colonial house, white with green
shutters flanking the windows. Lights were on downstairs, in the
living room.

As Jerry pulled the Chevy to the curb and braked in front of the house,
Amy said, aWe'll probably be passing each other in the halls during
final exam week. And we'll see each other at graduation two weeks from
now. But I guess this is the last time we'll be talking." aBet on
it," he said coldly.

"sO I wouldn't want to miss this opportunity to tell you what a rotten
son of a bitch you are," she said as evenly as she could.

He stared at her but said nothing.

"You're an immature little boy, Jerry.               You're not a man, and you'll
probably never be a man."

He didn't respond. They were parked beneath a street light, and she
could see his face clearly, he was impassive.

She was angered by his refusal to react to her. She wanted to leave
with the knowledge that she had hurt him as badly as he had hurt her
with his comment about her reputation. But she was not very good at
vituperation.

She didn't have a talent for quarreling. Ordinarily she preferred to
live and let live, but in this case the injustice she had suffered at
Jerry's hands was so great that she felt an uncharacteristic urge to
retaliate. She steeled herself to make one last attempt to sting
him.

"One other thing I want to tell you as sort of a favor to your next
girlfriend," Amy said. "There's another way you're like a little boy,
Jerry.

You make love like a little boy. You're immature in that department,
too. I kept hoping you'd get better at it, but you never did. You
know how many times you managed to make me come? Three times. Out of
all those nights we made love, I climaxed only three times.

You're clumsy, rough, and quick on the trigger.                  A regular minuteman.

Do your next girlfriend a favor and at least read a couple of books
about sex. Eddie Talbot wasn't all that great, but compared to him
you're really a lousy fuck."

She saw his face darken and tighten as she spoke, and she knew she had
finally gotten to him. Feeling a sick sort of triumph, she opened her
door and started to get out.

He grabbed her wrist and held her in the car.                 "You know what you
are?

You're a pig, that's what." "Let go of me," she said sharply, trying
to pry herself loose of him.

"If you don't let go, I just might tell you how that pathetic little
thing between your legs measures up to Eddie Talbot, and I'm sure you
don't want to hear that."

She heard herself, and she didn't like how hard and sluttish she



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sounded, however, at the same time, she took a fierce, primitive
delight in the shock that was visible in his face.

Several times over the past six months, she had sensed his sexual
insecurity, and now it was quite evident indeed. He was furious. He
did not merely let go of her wrist, he flung it away from him, as if he
suddenly realized he was holding onto a snake.

As she got out of the car, he said, "You bitch!                  I hope your old lady
does make you keep the kid. And you know what?                   I hope the damned
thing's not right.

Yeah. I hope it's not right. I hope it's not normal. You're such a
smart-mouthed bitch, I hope you're stuck with some drooling little
creep who's not normal. Your smart mouth wouldn't get you out of that
one."

She looked in at him and said, "You're disgusting."                   Before he could
respond, she slammed the door.

He threw the Chevy in gear, stomped on the accelerator, and drove away
with a protracted squeal of tires.

In the ensuing silence, a night bird shrieked.

Amy moved through a cloud of acrid blue smoke that smelled of burning
rubber, and she started up the walk toward the house. After a couple
of steps, she began to tremble violently.

When her father had approved of her staying out later than usual, he
had said, The senior prom is a special night in a girl's life. It's an
euent. Like a sixteenth birthday or a twenty-first. There's really
not another night quite like the night of a girl's senior prom.

As it turned out, there was a perverse sort of truth in what he had
said. Amy had never lived through a night quite like this one. And
she hoped she'd never know another one like it, either.

Prom night.     Saturday, May 17, 1980.

That date would be burned in her memory forever.

When she reached the front door, she paused, her hand resting on the
knob. She dreaded going into the house. She didn't want to face her
mother tonight.

Amy didn't intend to reveal the fact that she was pregnant. Not just
yet. In a few days, perhaps. In a week or two. And only if she were
left with no other choice. In the meantime she would search diligently
for other exits from her predicament, even though she didn't have much
hope of finding another way out.

She didn't want to talk to her parents now because she was so nervous,
so upset over Jerry's treatment of her that she didn't trust herself to
keep the secret. She might let something slip by accident or out of a
subconscious need for punishment and pity.

Her hand, damp with sweat, was still on the doorknob.

She considered just walking away, leaving town, starting a new life.

But she had nowhere to go.           She had no money.

The load of responsibility she had shouldered was almost too much for


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her. And when Jerry had lashed out in a childish attempt to hurt her,
when he had wished a deformed baby on her, he had added another weight
to the burden she bore. She didn't believe that Jerry's curse had any
real power, of course. But it was possible that her mother would force
her to have the baby, and it was possible that the baby would be
deformed and forever dependent upon her. The chance of that happening
was small, but not so small that she could put it out of her mind,
misfortune of that nature befell people all the time. Crippled
children were born every day. Legless and armless babies.

Misshapen babies.

Brain-damaged children. The list of possible birth defects was very
long--and very frightening.

Again, a night bird cried.           It was a mournful sound that matched her
mood.

Finally she opened the door and went into the house.

THIN, TALCUM-WHITE, with streaming hair the color and texture of spider
webs, dressed all in white, Ghost hurried along the busy carnival
midway. He moved like a pale column of smoke, slipping effortlessly
through the narrowest gaps in the crowd, he appeared to flow with the
currents of the night breeze.

From the funhouse barker's platform, four feet above the midway, Conrad
Straker watched the albino. Straker had stopped in the middle of his
come-on spiel the instant he had seen Ghost approaching. Behind
Straker, the raucous funhouse music blared continuously. Every thirty
seconds the giant clown's face--a much larger, more sophisticated, and
more animated version of the face that had topped his first funhouse,
twenty-seven years ago--winked down at the passersby and let out a
recorded, four-bark laugh: aHaa,haa,haa,haaaaa."

As he waited for the albino, Straker lit a cigarette.                    His hand shook,
the match bobbled.

At last Ghost reached the funhouse and pulled himself up onto the
barker's platform. "It's done," he said. "I gave her the free
ticket." He had a cool, feathery voice that nevertheless carried
clearly above the carnival din.

"She wasn't suspicious?"          "Of course not.        She was thrilled to have her
fortune told for free.

She acted like she really believed that Madame Zena could see into the
future." "I wouldn't want her to think she'd been singled out,"
Straker said worriedly.

"Relax," Ghost said. "I gave her the usual dumb story, and she bought
it. I said my job was to wander up and down the midway, giving out
free tickets for this and that, just to stir up interest. Public
relations."

Frowning, Straker said, "You're positive you approached the right
girl?" "The one you pointed out."

Above them, the enormous clown's face broadcast another tinny burst of
laughter.

Taking small, quick, nervous drags on his cigarette, Straker said, "She
was sixteen or seventeen. Very dark hair, almost black. Dark eyes.


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About five foot five."

"Sure," Ghost said. aLike the others, last season."                     "This one was
wearing a blue and gray sweater.

She was with a blond boy about her age." "That's the one," Ghost said,
combing his lank hair with his long, slender, milky-white fingers.

"Are you sure she used the ticket?"              aYes.    I walked her straight to
Zena's tent."

"Maybe this time . . ." "What does Zena do with these kids you steer
to her?" aWhile she tells their fortunes, she finds out as much about
them as she can-their names, their parents' names, a lot of things like
that." "Why?" "Because I want to know." aBut why do you want to
know?" "That's none of your business."

Behind them, inside the enormous funhouse, several young girls screamed
at something that popped out at them from the darkness. There was a
phony quality to their squeals of terror, like thousands of teenage
girls before them, they were pretending to be frightened witless, so
that they would have an excuse to cuddle closer to the young men beside
them.

Ignoring the screams behind him, Ghost stared intently at Straker, the
albino's almost colorless, semitransparent eyes were disconcerting.

"Something I have to know. Have you ever . . . well .                       . . have you
ever touched one of these kids I've sent to Zena?"

Straker glared at him. "If you're asking me whether I've sexually
molested any of the young girls and boys in whom I've shown an
interest, the answer is no.

That's ridiculous." "I sure wouldn't want to be a part of something
like that," Ghost said.

"You've got an ugly, dirty little mind," Straker said, disgusted.

"I'm not looking for fresh meat, for God's sake. I'm searching for one
child in particular, someone special." "Who?" "That's none of your
business." Excited, as always, by the prospect of finally,
successfully concluding his long search, Conrad said, "I've got to get
over to Zena's tent. She's probably just about finished with the
girl.

This could be the one.         This could be the one I've been looking for."

In the funhouse, their voices muffled by the walls, the girls screamed
again.

As Straker turned toward the platform steps, anxious to hear what Zena
had discovered, the albino put a hand on his arm, detaining him.

"Last season, in almost every town we hit, there was a kid who caught
your eye.

Sometimes two or three kids.           How long have you been looking?"
"Fifteen years."

Ghost blinked. For a moment a pair of thin, translucent lids covered
but did not fully conceal his strange eyes. "Fifteen years? That
doesn't make sense." "To me, it makes perfect sense," Straker said


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coldly.

"Look, last year was my first season working for you, and I didn't want
to complain about anything until I understood your routines better.

But that business with the kids really bugged me.                   There's something
creepy about it.

And now it's starting all over again this year. I just don't like
being a part of it." "Then quit," Straker said sharply. "Go to work
for someone else." aBut, except for this one thing, I like the job.

It's good work and good pay." "Then do what you're told, take your
paycheck, and shut up," Straker said. "Or get the hell out. It's your
choice."

Straker tried to pull away from the albino, but Ghost would not
relinquish his hold on the larger man's arm. His bony, clammy,
death-white hand had a surprisingly strong grip. "Tell me one thing.

Just to set my mind at ease."            "What is it?"       Straker asked
impatiently.

"If you ever find who you're looking for, do you intend to hurt him .

. . or her?" "Of course not," Straker lied. "Why would I hurt him?"
"Well, I don't understand why you're so obsessed with this search,
unless--" "Look," Straker said, "there's a woman to whom I'm deeply
indebted. I've lost track of her over the years. I know she has
children by now, and every time I see a kid who resembles her, I check
it out. I figure I might be lucky enough to stumble across her
daughter or son, find her, and repay the debt."

Ghost frowned. "You're going to an awful lot of trouble just to--"
"It's an awfully big debt," Straker said, interrupting him. "It's on
my conscience. I won't rest easy until I repay it." aBut the chance
that she'd have a kid that looks like her, the chance that her kid will
come wandering past your funhouse some day . . . Do you realize what a
long shot that is?" "I know it's unlikely," Straker said. aBut it
doesn't cost me anything to keep an eye out for kids who resemble
her.

And crazier things happen."

The albino looked into Straker's eyes, searching for signs of deception
or truth.

Straker was not able to read anything in Ghost's eyes, for they were
too strange to be interpreted. Because they were without color, they
were also without character. White and faded pink. Watery.

Bottomless eyes.

The albino's gaze was piercing but cold, emotionless.

At last Ghost said, "All right. I guess if you're just trying to find
someone to repay an old debt . . . there's nothing wrong with me
helping you." "Good. It's settled. Now I've got to talk to Gunther
for a minute, and then I'm going over to Zena's. You take over the
pitchman's roost for me," Straker said, finally managing to pull free
of the albino's moist hand.

Inside the funhouse a new chorus of girlish voices wailed in a shrill


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imitation of horror.

As the huge clown's face spat out another mechanical laugh, Straker
hurried across the barker's platform, beneath a banner that proclaimed
THE BIGGEST FUNHOUSE IN THE WORLD! He descended the wooden steps, went
past the red-and-black ticket booth, and paused for a moment near the
boarding gate where sever al ticket holders were stepping down into the
brightly painted gondolas that would carry them through the funhouse.

Conrad looked up at Gunther, who was standing on a six-foot-square
platform to the left of the boarding gate and four feet above it.

Gunther was waving his long arms and growling at the marks below him,
pretending to threaten them. He was an impressive figure, better than
six and a half feet tall, more than two hundred and fifty pounds of
bone and muscle. His shoulders were enormous. He was dressed all in
black, and his entire head was covered by a Hollywood-quality,
Frankenstein monster mask that disappeared under his collar. He was
also wearing monster gloves--big, green rubber hands streaked with fake
blood--that extended beneath the cuffs of his jacket.

Suddenly Gunther noticed Conrad looking up at him, and he turned,
favoring him with an especially fierce growl.

Straker grinned. He made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his
right hand, giving Gunther a sign of approval.

Gunther capered around the platform in a clumsy monster dance of
delight.

The people waiting to board the gondolas laughed and applauded the
monster's performance.

With a fine sense of theater, Gunther abruptly turned vicious once more
and roared at his audience. A couple of girls screamed.

Gunther bellowed and shook his head and snarled and stamped his foot
and hissed and waved his arms. He enjoyed his work.

Smiling, Straker turned away from the funhouse and walked into the
river of people that flowed along the midway. But as he drew nearer to
Zena's tent, his smile faded. He thought of the dark-haired, dark-eyed
girl he'd seen from the barker's platform a short while ago. Maybe
this was the one.

Maybe this was Ellen's child. After all these years, the thought of
what she'd done to his little boy still filled him with a fiery rage,
and the possibility of revenge still made his heart beat faster, still
caused his blood to race with excitement. Long before he reached
Zena's tent, his smile had metamorphosed into a scowl.

Dressed in red and black and gold, wearing a spangled scarf and a lot
of rings and too much mascara, Zena sat alone in the dimly lighted
tent, waiting for Conrad. Four candles burned steadily inside four
separate glass chimneys, casting an orange glow that did not reach into
the corners. The only other light was from the illuminated crystal
ball that stood in the center of the table.

Music, excited voices, the spiels of pitchmen, and the clatter of the
thrill rides filtered through the canvas walls from the midway.

To the left of the table, a raven stood in a large cage, head cocked,
one shiny black eye focused on the crystal ball.


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Zena, who called herself Madame Zena and pretended to be a Gypsy with
psychic powers, had not a drop of Romany blood in her and actually
couldn't see anything in the future other than the fact that tomorrow
the sun would rise and subsequently set. She was of Polish
extraction.

Her full name was Zena Anna Penetsky.

She had been a carny for twenty-eight years, since she was just
fifteen, and she had never longed for another life. She liked the
travel, the freedom, and the carnival people.

Once in a while, however, she grew weary of telling fortunes, and she
was disturbed by the endless gullibility of the marks. She knew a
thousand ways to con a mark, a thousand ways to convince him (after he
had already paid for a palm reading) to shell out a few more dollars
for a purportedly more complete look into his future. The ease with
which she manipulated people embarrassed her. She told herself that
what she did was all right because they were only marks, not carnies,
and therefore not real people. That was the traditional carny
attitude, but Zena could not be that hard all the time. Now and then
she was troubled by guilt.

Occasionally she considered giving up fortunetelling. She could take a
partner, someone who had done the palm-reading scam before. It meant
sharing the profits, but that didn't worry Zena. She also owned a
bottle-pitch joint and a very profitable grab joint, and after overhead
she netted more each year than any half-dozen marks earned at their
boring jobs in the straight world.

But she continued to play Gypsy fortune-teller because she had to do
somethirlg, she wasn't the kind of person who could just sit back and
take it easy.

By the age of fifteen, she had been a welldeveloped woman, and she had
begun her carnival career as a kootch dancer. These days, as she
became increasingly dissatisfied with her role as Madame Zena, she
frequently considered opening a girl show of her own. She even toyed
with the idea of performing again. It might be a kick.

She was forty-three, but she knew she could still excite a tentful of
horny marks. She looked ten years younger than she was. Her hair was
chestnut-brown and thick, untouched by gray, it framed a strong,
pleasing, unlined face. Her eyes were a rare shade of violet--warm,
kind eyes. Years ago, when she'd first worked as a kootch dancer,
she'd been voluptuous. She still was.

Through diet and exercise, she had maintained her splendid figure, and
nature had even cooperated by miraculously sparing her large breasts
from the downward drag of gravity.

But even as she fantasized about returning to the stage, she knew the
hootchie-kootchie was not in her future. The kootch was just another
way of manipulating the marks, no different from fortune-telling, in
essence it was the very thing that she needed to get away from for a
while. She would have to think of something else she could do.

The raven stirred on its perch and flapped its wings, interrupting her
thoughts.

An instant later Conrad Straker entered the tent. He sat in the chair
where the marks always sat, across the table from Zena. He leaned


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forward, anxious, tense.          "Well?"

No luck," Zena said.

He leaned even closer.         "Are you positive we're talking about the same
girl?"

"Yes."

"She was wearing a blue and gray sweater."

"Yes, yes," Zena said impatiently.             "She had the ticket that Ghost had
given her."

"What was her name?        Did you find out her name?"

"Of course.     Laura Alwine."

"Her mother's name?"

"Sandra. Not Ellen. Sandra. And Sandra is a natural blonde, not a
brunette like Ellen was. Laura gets her dark hair and eyes from her
father, she says.

I'm sorry, Conrad. I pumped the girl for a lot of information while I
was telling her fortune, but none of it matches what you're looking
for. Not a single detail of it." "I was sure she was the one."

"You're always sure."

He stared at her, and gradually his face grew red. He looked down at
the tabletop, and he became rapidly, visibly angrier, as if he saw
something in the grain of the wood that outraged him. He slammed his
fist into the table.

Slammed it down once, twice. Hard. Half a dozen times. Then again
and again and again. The tent was filled with the loud, measured
drumbeat of his fury.

He was shaking, panting, sweating. His eyes were glazed. He began to
curse, and he sprayed spittle across the table. He made strange,
harsh, animal noises in the back of his throat, and he continued to
pound the table as if it were a living creature that had wronged him.

Zena wasn't startled by his outburst. She was accustomed to his
maniacal rages. She had once been married to him for two years.

On a stormy night in August, 1955, she had stood in the rain, watching
him ride backwards on the carousel. He had looked so very handsome
then, so romantic, so vulnerable and brokenhearted that he had appealed
to both her carnal and maternal instincts, and she had been drawn to
him in a way she never had been drawn to another man. In February of
the following year, they rode the carousel forward, together.

Just two weeks after the wedding, Conrad flew into a rage over
something Zena did, and he struck hen-repeatedly. She was too stunned
to defend herself.

Afterward he was contrite, embarrassed, appalled by what he had done.

He wept and begged forgiveness. She was certain that his fit of
violence was an aberration, not ordinary behavior. Three weeks later,
however, he attacked her again, leaving her badly bruised and
battered.


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Two weeks after that, when he was seized by another fit, he tried to
hit her, but she struck first. She rammed a knee into his crotch and
clawed his face with such frenzy that he backed off. Thereafter,
forewarned, always watching for the first sign of one of his oncoming
rages, she was able, after a fashion, to protect herself.

Zena worked hard at the marriage, trying to make it last in spite of
her husband's explosive temper. There were two Conrad Strakers, she
hated and feared one of them, but she loved the other. The first
Conrad was a brooding, pessimistic, violence-prone man, as
unpredictable as an animal, with a shocking talent and taste for
sadism. The second Conrad was kind, thoughtful, even charming, a good
lover, intelligent, creative. For a while Zena believed that a lot of
love and patience and understanding would change him. She was
convinced that the frightening Mr. Hyde personality would fade
completely away, and that in time Conrad would settle down and be just
the good Dr. Jekyll. Instead, the more love and understanding she
gave him, the more frequently he became violent and abusive, as if he
were determined to prove that he was not worthy of her love.

She knew that he despised himself. His inability to like himself and
be at peace in his own mind, the frustration generated by his incurable
selfhatred-that was the root of his periodic, maniacal rages.

Something monstrous had happened to him a long, long time ago, in his
formative years, some unspeakable childhood tragedy that had scarred
him so deeply that nothing, not even Zena's love, could heal him. Some
horror in his distant past, some terrible disaster for which he felt
responsible, gave him bad dreams every night of his life. He was
consumed by an unquenchable guilt that burned in him year after year
with undiminished brightness, turning his heart, piece by piece, into
bitter ashes. Many times Zena had tried to learn the secret that
gnawed at Conrad, but he had been afraid to tell her, afraid that the
truth would repel her and turn her against him forever. She had
assured him that nothing he told her would make her loathe him. It
would have been good for him to unburden himself at last. But he could
not do it.

Zena could learn only one thing: the event that haunted him had
transpired on Christmas Eve, when he was only twelve years old. From
that night forward, he had been a changed person, day by day, he had
become ever more sour, increasingly violent. For a brief spell, after
Ellen gave him his much-wanted child, even though it was a hideously
deformed baby, Conrad had begun to feel better about himself. But when
Ellen killed the child, Conrad sank even deeper into despair and
self-hatred, and it wasn't likely that anyone would ever be able to
draw him out of the psychological pit into which he had cast himself.

After struggling for two years to make their marriage work, after
living in fear of Conrad's rage all that time, Zena had finally faced
the fact that divorce was inevitable. She left him, but they didn't
cease to be friendly.

They shared certain bonds that couldn't be broken, but it was clear to
both of them that they couldn't live together happily. She rode the
carousel backwards.

Now, as Zena watched Conrad venting his rage on the table, she realized
that most, if not all, of her love for him had been transformed into
pity. She felt no passion any more--just an abiding sorrow for him.



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Conrad cursed, sputtered through bloodless lips, snarled, pounded the
table.

The raven flapped its shiny, black wings and cried shrilly in its
cage.

Zena waited patiently.

In time Conrad grew tired and stopped thumping the table. He leaned
back in his chair, blinking dully, as if he were not quite sure where
he was.

After he was silent for a minute, the raven became silent, too, and
Zena said, "Conrad, you aren't going to find Ellen's child. Why don't
you just give up?"

"Never," he said, slightly hoarse.

"For ten years you had a bunch of private detectives on it. One after
the other. Several at the same time. You spent a small fortune on
them. And they didn't find anything. Not a clue." "They were all
incompetent," he said sullenly.

"For years you've been looking on your own without any luck."                       "I'll
find what I'm after."

"You were wrong again tonight. Did you really think you'd stumble
across her kids here? At the Coal County, Pennsylvania, Spring Fair?

Not a very likely place, if you ask me."

"As likely as any other." "Maybe Ellen didn't even live long enough to
start a family with another man.

Have you thought of that?          Maybe she's long dead."           "She's alive."
"You can't be sure."

Y'm positive." "Even if she's alive, she might not have children."
"She does. They're out there--somewhere." "Damn it, you have no
reason to be so sure of that!" "I've been sent signs. Portents."

Zena looked into his cold, crystalline blue eyes, and she shivered.

Signs?

Portents? Was Conrad still only half-mad--or had he gone all the way
over the edge?

The raven tapped its beak against the metal bars of its cage.

Zena said, "If by some miracle you do find one of Ellen's kids, what
then?" "I've told you before." "Tell me again," she said, watching
him closely.

"I want to tell her kids what she did," Conrad said. "I want them to
know she's a baby killer. I want to turn them against her. I want to
use all of my power as a pitchman to convince them that their mother is
a vicious, despicable human being, the worst kind of criminal. A baby
killer. I'll make them hate her as much as I hate her. In effect,
I'll be taking her kids away from her, though not as brutally as she
took my little boy."

As always, when he talked about exposing Ellen's past to her family,
Conrad spoke with conviction.


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As always, it sounded like a hollow fantasy.

And as always, Zena felt that he was lying. She was sure that he had
something else in mind, an act of revenge even more brutal than what
Ellen had done to that strange, disturbing, mutated baby twenty-five
years ago.

If Conrad intended to kill Ellen's children when (and if) he found
them, Zena wanted no part of that. She didn't want to be an accomplice
to murder.

Yet she continued to assist him in his search. She helped him only
because she didn't believe he would ever find what he was looking
for.

Helping him seemed harmless, she was merely humoring him. That was
all. Nothing more than humoring him. His quest was hopeless. He
would never find Ellen's kids, even if they did exist.

Conrad looked away from her, turned his gaze on the raven.

The bird fixed him with one of its oily black eyes, and as their gazes
locked, the raven froze.

Outside, on the midway, there was calliope music. The hundred thousand
sounds of the closing-night crowd blended into a rhythmic susurration
like the breathing of an enormous beast.

In the distance the giant, mechanical funhouse clown laughed and
laughed.

WHEN AMY STEPPED into the house at a quarter till twelve, she heard
muffled voices in the kitchen. She thought her father was still awake,
though he usually went to bed early Saturday night in order to get up
in time for the first Mass on Sunday, thus freeing the rest of the day
for his hobby--building miniature sets for model train layouts. When
Amy got to the kitchen, she found only her mother. The voices were on
the radio, it was tuned to a telephone talk show on a Chicago station,
and the volume was turned low.

The room smelled vaguely of garlic, onions, and tomato paste.

There wasn't much light. A bulb burned above the sink, and the hood
light was on over the stove. The radio dial cast a soft green glow.

Ellen Harper was sitting at the kitchen table. Actually, she was
slumped over it, arms folded on the tabletop, head resting on her arms,
her face turned away from the doorway where Amy stopped. A tall glass,
half-full of yellow liquid, was within Ellen's reach. Amy didn't have
to sample the drink to know what it was, her mother always drank the
same thing--vodka and orange juice-and too much of it.

She's asleep, Amy thought, relieved.

She turned away from her mother, intending to sneak out of the room and
upstairs to bed, but Ellen said, "You."

Amy sighed and looked back at her.

Ellen's eyes were blurry, bloodshot, the lids drooped. She blinked in
surprise. "What're you doing home?" she asked groggily. "You're more
than an hour early." "Jerry got sick," Amy lied. "He had to go home."



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 aBut you're more than an hour early," her mother said again, looking
up at her in puzzlement, still blinking stupidly, struggling to
penetrate the alcohol haze that softened the outlines of her
thoughts.

"Jerry got sick, Mama.         Something he ate at the prom."              "It was a
dance, wasn't it?"

"Sure. But they had food. Hors d'oeuvres, cookies, cakes, punch, all
kinds of stuff. Something he ate didn't agree with him." "Who?"
"Jerry," Amy said patiently.

Her mother frowned.        "You're sure that's all that happened?"                  "What do
you mean?"

"Seems . . . funny to me," Ellen said thickly, reaching for her
unfinished drink. "Suspicious." "What could possibly be suspicious
about Jerry getting sick?" Amy asked.

Ellen sipped the vodka and orange juice. She studied Amy over the rim
of the glass, and her stare was sharper than it had been a minute
ago.

Exasperated, Amy spoke before her mother had a chance to make any
accusations.

"Mama, I didn't come home late. I came home early.                    I don't think I
deserve to be subjected to the usual third degree."                   "Don't you get
smart with me," her mother said.

Amy looked down at the floor, shifted nervously from one foot to the
other.

"Don't you remember what Our Lord said?" Ellen asked. a Honor thy
father and thy mother." That's what He said. After all these years of
church services and Bible readings, hasn't anything sunk into your
head?"

Amy didn't respond. From experience she knew that respectful silence
was the best way to deal with her mother at times like this.

Ellen finished her drink and got up. Her chair barked against the tile
floor as she scooted it backwards. She came around the table, weaving
slightly, and stopped in front of Amy. Her breath was sour. "I've
tried hard, so very hard, to make a good girl out of you. I've made
you go to church. I've forced you to read the Bible and pray every
day. I've preached at you until I'm blue in the face. I've taught you
all the right ways. I've done my best to keep you from going wrong.

I've always been aware that you could go either way. Either way. Good
or bad." She swayed, put a hand on Amy's shoulder to steady herself.

"I've seen the potential in you, girl. I've seen that you have the
potential for evil. I pray my heart out to Our Lady every day to look
over you and guard you.

There's a darkness deep inside you, and it must never be allowed to
come to the surface."

Ellen leaned very close, put a hand under Amy's chin, lifted the girl's
head, and met her eyes.

Amy felt as if ice-cold snakes were uncoiling inside her.


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Ellen stared at her with a peculiar, drunken intensity, with the
burning gaze of a fever victim. She seemed to be looking into her
daughter's soul, and there was a mixture of fear and anger and
hard-edged determination in her expression.

aYes," Ellen said, whispering now.             "There's a darkness in you.

You could slip so easily.          It's in you.       The weakness.        The
difference.

Something bad is in you, and you have to fight it every minute.                     You
have to be careful, always careful." "Please, Mama. . .

"Did you let that boy touch you tonight?"                "No, Mama."

"Unless you're married, it's a dirty, filthy thing. If you slip, the
Devil will have you. The thing inside you will come to the surface for
everyone to see. And no one must ever see it. No one must know what
you've got inside you.

You've got to wrestle with that evil, keep it caged." "Yes, Mama."
aLettin the boy touch you--that's an awful "Don't lie to me." aWe went
to the prom," Amy said shakily, "and he got sick, and he brought me
home. That's all, Mama." "Did he touch your breasts?" "No," Amy
said, unsettled, embarrassed.

"Did you let him put his hands on your legs?"                 Amy shook her head.

Ellen's hand tightened on the girl's shoulder, the talonlike fingers
digging painfully deep. "You touched him." she said, her words
slurring just a bit and the flesh of her face sagged on her bones.

When she was sober she was a pretty woman, but when she was drunk she
looked haggard, much older than she looked otherwise. She let go of
Amy, turned away, tottered back to the table.

She picked up her empty glass, carried it to the refrigerator, dropped
a couple of ice cubes into it. She added a little orange juice and a
lot of vodka.

"Mama, can I go to bed now?"           "Don't forget to say your prayers."

Y won't forget."

"Say the rosary, too.         It wouldn't hurt you."          aYes, Mama."

Her long dress rustling noisily, Amy hurried upstairs. In her bedroom
she switched on a lamp and stood by the bed, shuddering.

If she failed to raise the abortion money, if she had to tell her
mother, she couldn't expect her father to intercede. Not this time.

He would be angry and would agree to any punishment her mother
proposed.

Paul Harper was a moderately successful attorney, a man who was in
control in the legal arena, but at home he relinquished nearly all
authority to his wife.

Ellen made the domestic decisions, large and small, and for the most
part, Paul was happy to be relieved of the responsibility. If Ellen
insisted Amy carry the baby to term, Paul Harper would support that
decision.


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And Mama will insist on it, Amy thought miserably.

She looked at the Catholic icons her mother had placed around the
room.

A crucifix hung at the head of the bed, and a smaller one hung above
the door. A statuette of the Virgin Mary was on the nightstand. Two
more painted religious statuettes stood on the dresser. There was also
a painting of Jesus, He was pointing to his Sacred Heart, which was
exposed and bleeding.

In her mind Amy heard her mother's voice: Don't forget to say your
prayers.

"Fuck it," Amy said aloud, defiantly.

What could she ask God to do for her?               Give her money for an
abortion?

There wasn't much chance of that prayer being answered.

She stripped off her clothes. For a couple of minutes she stood in
front of a full-length mirror, studying her nude body. She couldn't
see any sure signs of pregnancy. Her belly was flat.

Gradually the medical nature of her self-inspection changed to a more
intimate, stimulating appraisal. She drew her hands slowly up her
body, cupped her full breasts, teased her nipples.

She glanced at the religious statuettes on the dresser.

Her nipples were erect.

She slid her hands down her sides, reached behind, squeezed her firm
buttocks.

She looked at the painting of Jesus.

Somehow, by flaunting her body at the image of Christ, she felt she was
hurting her mother, deeply wounding her. Amy didn't understand why she
felt that way. It didn't make sense. The painting was only a
painting, Jesus wasn't really here, in the room, watching her. Yet she
continued to pose lasciviously in front of the mirror, caressing
herself, touching herself obscenely.

After a minute or two she caught sight of her own eyes in the mirror,
and that brief glimpse into her own soul startled and disconcerted
her.

She quickly put on her flannel nightgown.

What's wrong with me?         she wondered.       Am I really bad inside, like Mama
says? Am I evil?

Confused, she finally knelt at the side of her bed and said her prayers
after all.

A quarter of an hour later, when she pulled back the covers, there was
a tarantula on her pillow. She gasped, jumped--and then realized that
the hideous thing was only a painted-rubber novelty item. She sighed
wearily, put the phony spider in the drawer of her nightstand, and got
into bed.



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Her ten-year-old brother, Joey, never missed a chance to play a
practical joke on her. Ordinarily, when she encountered one of his
tricks, she went looking for him, pretending to be furious, threatening
him with grave bodily harm. Of course she wasn't capable of hurting
the boy. She loved him very much. But her mock anger was the part of
the game that Joey enjoyed most.

Usually, in retaliation for his pranks, Amy did nothing more than hold
him down and tickle him until he promised to be good.

Right now he was in bed, probably awake in spite of the late hour,
waiting for her to storm into his room. But tonight she would have to
disappoint him. She wasn't in the mood for their usual routine, and
she didn't have the energy for it, either.

She got into bed and switched off the light.

She couldn't sleep.

She thought about Jerry Galloway. She had told him the truth when she
had ridiculed his skills as a lover. She had seldom had an orgasm. He
was a clumsy, ignorant, thoughtless bedmate. Yet she had let him touch
her night after night. She got little or no pleasure out of the
affair, but she allowed him to use her as he wished. Why? Why?

She wasn't a bad girl.         She wasn't wild or loose, not deep down in her
heart.

Even while she let Jerry use her, she hated herself for being so
easy.

Whenever she made out with a boy in a parked car, she felt awkward,
embarrassed, out of place, as if she were trying to be someone else and
not herself.

She wasn't a lazy girl, either. She had ambition. She planned to go
to Royal City Junior College, then to Ohio State, majoring in art. She
would get a job as a commercial artist, and she would labor at fine
arts in her spare time, nights and weekends, and if she found that she
had enough talent to make a good living as a painter, she would quit
the nine-to-five job and create wonderfully beautiful pictures for sale
in galleries. She was determined to build a successful, interesting
life.

But now she was pregnant.          Her dreams were ashes.

Maybe she didn't deserve happiness.              Maybe she was bad, just deep-down
rotten.

Did a good girl spread her legs in the backseat of a boy's car nearly
every night of the week? Did a good girl get knocked up while she was
still in high school?

The dark minutes of the night unwound like black thread from a spinning
spool, and Amy's thoughts unwound, too--tangled and confusing
thoughts.

She couldn't make up her mind about herself, she couldn't decide
whether she was basically a good person or a bad one.

In her mind Amy could hear her mother's voice again: There's a darkness
in you. Something bad is in you, and you have to fight it every
minute.


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Suddenly, Amy wondered if her sluttish behavior was just an attempt to
spite her mother. That was an unsettling thought.

Speaking softly to the blackness around her, she said, "Did I let Jerry
knock me up just because I knew the news would shatter Mama? Am I
destroying my own future just to hurt that bitch?"

She was the only one who knew the answer to her own question, she would
have to look for it within herself.

She lay very still beneath the covers, thinking.

Outside, the wind stirred the nearby maple trees.

In the distance a train whistle sounded.

The door scraped open, and floorboards creaked beneath the carpet as
someone walked into the room.

The noise woke Joey Harper. He opened his eyes and looked at the alarm
clock, which was visible in the pale glow of the night-light. 12:36.

He had been asleep an hour and a half, but he wasn't groggy. He was
instantly awake and alert, for he was anticipating Amy's reaction to
the tarantula in her bed. He had set his alarm for one o'clock because
that was when she was supposed to come home, apparently she had
returned early.

Footsteps.     Soft.    Sneaky.      Coming closer.

Joey tensed under the sheets, but he continued to feign sleep.

The footsteps stopped at the side of his bed.

Joey felt a giggle building in him.              He bit his tongue and struggled to
hold back his laughter.

He sensed her leaning toward him.             She was inches away.

He was going to wait a few seconds longer, and then, when she was on
the verge of tickling him, he was going to yell in her face and scare
the dickens out of her.

He kept his eyes closed, breathed shallowly and evenly, and counted off
the seconds: One . . . two . . . three . . .

He was just about to shout in her face when he realized that the person
bending over him wasn't Amy. He smelled sour, alcohol-tainted breath,
and his heart began to pound.

Unaware that Joey was awake, his mother said, "Sweet, sweet, little
Joey.

ittle baby-boy angel. Sweet, precious little angel face." Her voice
was eerie. She spoke in an odd, half-whispered, halfcrooned, throaty,
silky stream of slurred words.

He wished desperately that she would go away.

She was   very drunk, worse than usual. She had come into his room
several   other nights when she'd been in this condition. She had talked
to him,   thinking he was asleep. Maybe she came in a lot more nights
than he   knew, maybe some nights he was asleep. Anyway, he knew what


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was coming.     He knew what she was going to say and do, and he dreaded
it.

"Little angel. You look like a little snoozing angel, a baby angel,
lying there so innocent, so tender, sweet." She leaned even closer,
bathing his face with her pungent breath. "But what're you like
inside, little angel? Are you sweet and good and pure all the way
through?"

Stop it, stop it, stop it! Joey thought. Please, don't do this again,
Mama. Go away. Get out of here. Please.

But he didn't speak to her, and he didn't move. He didn't let her know
he was awake because when she was like this he was afraid of her.

"You look so pure," she said, her alcoholthickened voice growing even
softer, even more blurry. aBut maybe that angel face is just the
surface . . . the mask. Maybe you're just putting on an act for me.

Huh?   Are you?

Maybe...

underneath . . . maybe you're just like the other one.                      Are you,
little angel?

Under that sweet face, are you like the other one, the monster, the
thing he called Victor?"

Joey never had been able to figure out what she was talking about when
she sneaked in here at night and mumbled drunkenly at him. Who was
Victor?

"If I produced one like you, why not another?" she asked herself
aloud, and Joey thought she sounded a little bit afraid now. "This
time...

maybe it's a monster inside.           In the mind.       A monster inside .         ..

hiding in a normal body .

. . behind such a nice face . . . waiting. Waiting to come out when
no one's looking. Just waiting patiently. Both you and Amy. Huh?

Wolves in sheep's clothing.           Could be.      Sure.    Could be that way.           What
if it is? Huh?

When will it happen?        When will the thing come out of you for everyone
to see?

Can I turn my back on you, little angel?                Can I ever be safe?          Oh,
God.

Oh, Jesus, Jesus, help me. Mary, help me.                 I should never have had
children. Not after the first one.

I can never be sure of what I've created.                Never.     What if .       . ."

Increasingly numbed by the liquor she had drunk, her tongue and lips
became less and less able to form the words she wanted to say, and she
lowered her voice so far that Joey could barely hear her, even though
she was less than a foot from him. "What if . . . someday . . . what
if I have to kill you, little angel?" Softer, softer, word by terrible
word, softer. "What if .


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. . I have .

. . to kill .      . . you .      . . like I had to kill .           . . the other one
.

. . ?"

She began to weep quietly.

Joey was suddenly chilled to the bone, and he was worried that his
shivering would disturb the sheets and draw her attention. He was
afraid she would discover that he had heard every word.

Eventually her stifled weeping subsided.

Joey was sure she could hear his pounding heart.

He felt strange.       He was afraid of her, but he was also sorry for
her.

He wanted to hug her and tell her everything would be all right--but he
didn't dare.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but was surely only a minute or
two, she left the bedroom, gently pulling the door shut after her.

Under the covers Joey curled into a tight, fetal ball.

What did it all mean? What had she been talking about?                      Was she just
drunk? Or was she crazy?

Although he was scared, he was also a little bit ashamed of himself for
thinking such things about his own mother.

Nevertheless, he was glad he had the wan, milky glow of the weak
night-light.

He sure didn't want to be alone in the dark right now.

In the nightmare Amy had given birth to a bizarrely deformed baby--a
disgusting, vicious thing that looked more like a crab than like a
human being. She was in a small, poorly lighted room with it, and it
was coming after her, snapping at her with its bony pincers and
arachnoid mandibles. The walls held narrow windows, and each time she
passed one of them she saw her mother and Jerry Galloway on the far
side of the glass, they were looking in at her and laughing. Then the
baby scuttled along the floor, closed in fast, and seized her ankle in
one of its spiny pincers.

She woke up, sat up in bed, a scream caught in the back of her
throat.

She choked it down.

Just a dream, she told herself.            Just a bad dream courtesy of Jerry
Galloway.

Damn him!

In the gloom to her right, something moved.

She snapped on the bedside lamp.




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Curtains. Her window was open a couple of inches to provide
ventilation, and a mild breeze stirred the curtains.

Outside, a block or two away, a dog howled mournfully.

Amy looked at the clock.          Three in the morning.

She sat there for a while, until she had calmed down, but when she
switched off the light she couldn't get back to sleep. The darkness
was oppressive and threatening in a way it hadn't been since she was a
small child.

She had the curious, disturbing feeling that, outside, in the night,
something terrible was bearing down on the Harper house. Like a
tornado.

But not a tornado. Something else. Something weird, worse than a mere
storm. She had a premonition-- not quite the right word, but the only
word that came close to describing what she was feeling--an icy
premonition that some relentlessly destructive force was closing in on
her and the entire family.

She tried to imagine what it could be, but no explanation occurred to
her. The impression of danger remained formless, nameless, but
powerful.

The sensation was, in fact, so electrifying, so unshakable, that she
finally had to get up and go to the window, even though she felt
foolish for doing so.

Maple Lane was dozing peacefully, wrapped in unthreatening shadows.

And beyond their street, the suburban south side of Royal City rose on
a series of gentle, low hills, at this hour there was only a sprinkling
of lights.

Farther south, at the edge of the town and above it, lay the county
fairgrounds. The fairgrounds were dark now, deserted, but in July,
when the carnival arrived, Amy would be able to stand at her window and
see the blaze of colored lights, the far-off, magical blur of the
steadily turning Ferris wheel.

The night was filled only with the familiar.                 There was nothing new in
it, nothing dangerous.

The feeling that she was standing in the path of a fiercely
destructive, oncoming storm faded, and exhaustion replaced it.                      She
returned to bed.

Only one threat loomed over the Harper household, and that was her
pregnancy, the inescapable consequences of her sin.

Amy put her hands on her belly, and she thought about what her mother
would say, and she wondered if she would always be as alone and
helpless as she was now, and she wondered what was coming.

AT THE REFRESHMENT stand near the carousel, there were five people in
line ahead of Chrissy Lampton and Bob Drew.

"I hate to waste time waiting like this," Chrissy said, abut I really
want that candy apple."

"It won't take long," Bob said.



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"There's so much more I want to do."

"Relax. It's only eleven-thirty.              The carnival won't shut down until
at least one o'clock."

"But it's the last night," Chrissy said. She took a deep breath,
savoring the blend of aromas that permeated the night: popcorn, cotton
candy, garlic-flavored french fries, hot roasted peanuts, and more.

"Ahhhh! My mouth is watering. I've been stuffing myself all night,
and I'm still famished. I can't believe I've eaten so much!"

"It's partly the excitement," Bob said.               "Excitement burns up
calories.

And all those thrill rides. You were scared half to death on most of
those rides, and fear burns up calories even faster than strenuous
exercise." He was seriously trying to analyze her unusual appetite.

Bob was an accountant.

"Listen," Chrissy said, "why don't you wait in line and get the candy
apples while I find the ladies' room. I'll meet you over there by the
merry-go-round in a few minutes. That way we'll kill two birds at the
same time." with one stone," Bob said.

"Huh?"

"The expression is, We'll kill two birds with one stone."

" "Oh.    Sure."    aBut I don't think it applies here exactly," Bob
said.

"Not quite.

Anyway, you go ahead to the ladies'.              We'll meet at the carousel like
you said."

Sheesh!    Chrissy thought.        Are all accountants like this?

She walked away from the refreshment stand, through the damp wood
shavings that covered the ground, through the calliope-blast from the
merry-go-round, past a high-striker where a muscular young man slammed
a sledgehammer into a scale and rang a bell overhead to impress his
date, past a dozen pitchmen who were spieling a mile a minute, trying
to get people to play all sorts of games where you could win a teddy
bear or a kewpie doll or some other piece of junk.

A hundred attractions played a hundred different songs, but somehow the
various strains of music didn't sound the least bit discordant when
they . came together, everything fused into a single, strange, but
appealing melody.

The carnival was a river of noise, and Chrissy waded through it,
grinning happily.

Chrissy Lampton loved the Coal County Spring Fair. It was always one
of the high spots of the year. The fair, Christmas, New Year's Eve,
Thanksgiving, the Halloween dance at the Elks' Club, the Las Vegas
Nights at St. Thomas's Church (one in April, one in August)--those
were the only days of excitement in the entire year, the only events
worth looking forward to in all of Coal County.



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She remembered part of a funny and rather dirty little song that had
made the rounds when she'd been in high school: Eueryone who lives here
has the zits, Good old Coal County sure is the pits.

Anybody with a brain has got to split Cause this is where God squats
when he gets the shits.

In high school she used to laugh at that song. But now, at the
still-tender age of twenty-one, grimly aware of how limited her future
was in this place, she didn't find those lyrics very humorous.

Someday she would move to New York or Los Angeles, to a place with
opportunities. She intended to split as soon as she had six months'
worth of living expenses in her savings account. She already had
enough for five months.

Soaking up the color and glamour of the carnival as she walked, Chrissy
headed toward the amusements that stood at the fringe of the midway,
behind which she expected to find a comfort station within a couple of
hundred feet. The public restrooms were in cinder-block buildings
scattered around the perimeter of the fairgrounds.

AB she made her way through the crowd, a pitchman at a duck-shoot game
gave her a loud wolf-whistle.

She grinned and waved in reply.

She felt terrific. Even though she was temporarily stuck in Coal
County, she had a wonderful, sparkling future. She knew she was
good-looking.

She had a lot of smarts, too. With those qualities she could carve out
a niche for herself in the big city in record time, easily within six
months.

Currently she was a typist, but that was strictly short-term.

Another pitchman, this one working a wheel of fortune, heard the first
barker's whistle, and he whistled at her, too. Then a third carny
joined the fun, whistled, called to her teasingly.

She felt as if she would live forever.

Ahead of her the big clown's face atop the funhouse laughed shrilly.

The funhouse, which stood next to Freak-o-rama, was at the eastern edge
of the midway, and Chrissy figured there would be a comfort station
somewhere behind it. She turned in beside the big, rambling structure,
with the freak show on her right, and she walked through the narrow
alley between the two attractions, away from the crowds and the lights
and the music.

The air was no longer redolent with cooking food. It smelled of wet
wood shavings, grease, and gasoline from the large, thrumming
generators.

Inside the funhouse, chains clanked, banshees howled, ghosts laughed
spookily, ghouls cackled, the wheels of the cars clattered incessantly
along the winding track, and haunting music swelled and faded, swelled
and faded. A girl screamed. Then another. Then three or four at
once.

They're acting like little kids, Chrissy thought scornfully.


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They're so pathetically eager to be thrilled, so willing to accept the
shabby illusions in there, anything to be briefly transported from the
drab reality of life in Coal County, Pennsylvania.

An hour or two ago, when she had ridden through the funhouse with Bob
Drew, she had screamed, too. Now, remembering her own hysteria, she
was a little bit ashamed of herself.

AB she stepped over cables and ropes, cautiously picking her way toward
the rear of the funhouse, she realized that, a few years from now,
after she had had a chance to experience classier thrills, after she
had grown accustomed to more sophisticated excitements, she would find
the carnival tawdry and juvenile instead of exotic and glamorous.

She was almost at the end of the long, narrow passageway.                      It was
darker here than she had expected.

She stumbled over a fat electric cable.               - "Damn!"

She regained her balance, squinted at the ground ahead.

There was just enough light to create impenetrable, purple-black
shadows on all sides.

She thought of turning back, but she really had to pee, and she was
sure there was a bathroom nearby.

At last she reached the end of the alley and turned the corner into the
darkness behind the funhouse, looking for one of the brightly lighted
comfort stations.

She almost walked into the man.

He was standing against the rear wall of the funhouse, in an
exceedingly deep pool of velvety shadows.

Chrissy yelped in surprise.

She couldn't see his face, but she could see that he was big.

Very big.     Huge.

An instant after she registered his presence, even as she gasped in
shock, even as she saw how large he was, she realized that he was
waiting for her.

She started to scream.

He struck her on the side of the head with such brutal force that it
was a miracle her neck didn't snap.

The scream died in her throat. She dropped to her knees, then toppled
onto her side in the dirt, stunned, numbed, unable to move, struggling
desperately to remain conscious. Her mind was a dully glinting blade
skating on a crescent of silvery ice, with mile-deep, black water on
both sides.

She was vaguely aware of being lifted and carried.

She coultln't rcict him- chf h:l no strenœth 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.


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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
clacketyclackety-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.


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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.



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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,


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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


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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
fastfood 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


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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-aWhirl. 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


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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 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.

I 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


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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.

0f 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 Johnny 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


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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 offseason. 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.

As he sipped his Scotch, Conrad Straker read through the Big American
schedule, letting his eyes linger on each line of it, savoring the
names of the towns, trying to get a psychic fix on one of them, trying
to figure out in which burg he would (at long last) come across Ellen's
children.

He hoped she had at least one daughter. He had plans for her son if
she had a son, but he had special plans for her daughter.

Gradually, after he poured a few more ounces, he felt the Scotch having
its desired effect. But as always, the names of the towns on the
season schedule settled his nerves more effectively than whiskey ever
could.

At last he put the list aside and looked up at the crucifix that was
fastened to the wall above the foot of the bed. It was hanging upside
down. And Christ's suffering face had been carefully painted black.

A votive candle in a clear glass container stood on the nightstand.

Conrad kept it lighted around the clock. The candle was black, the
burning wax produced a strange, dark flame.

Conrad Straker was a devout man.             Without fail he said his prayers
every night.

But he didn't pray to Jesus.

He had converted to a satanic religion twenty-two years ago, not long
after Zena had divorced him. He contemplated death with great
pleasure, eagerly anticipating the descent into Hell. He knew that was
his destiny.

Hell. His rightful home. He was not afraid of it. He would be at
peace there. Satan's favored acolyte. He belonged in Hell. It was
his rightful home.

After all, since that tragic, fiery Christmas Eve when he was twelve
years old, he had lived in one sort of hell or another, day and night,
night and day, without relief.

The outside door opened at the front end of the Travelmaster, and the
trailer rocked as it took in its other lodger, and the door closed with
a bang.

Y'm back here!"       Conrad called, not bothering to get up from the bed.

There was no answer, but he knew who was there.

"You left the bathroom a mess when you cleaned up," Conrad shouted.


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Heavy footsteps headed toward him.

The following Sunday, a man named David Clippert and a dog named Moose
were hiking in the spring-fresh Coal County hills, two miles from the
fairgrounds.

Shortly before four o'clock, as they were crossing a grassy hill,
Moose, gamboling ahead of his master, came across something in a small
patch of brush that he found unusually interesting. He raced around in
a circle, staying in the grass, not entering the brush, but fascinated
by whatever he had spotted in there. He barked several times, stopped
to sniffsomething, then dashed in a circle again and loudly announced
his discovery.

From twenty yards behind the dog, David couldn't see what all the fuss
was about. He had a pretty good idea, though. Most likely it was a
flurry of butterflies flitting back and forth through the weeds. Or
perhaps a tiny lizard that had frozen on a leaf but had failed to evade
Moose's sharp eyes.

At most it was a field mouse. Moose wouldn't stay close to anything
larger than that. He was a big, silken-coated Irish setter, strong and
friendly and good of heart, but he was a coward. If he had come upon a
snake, a fox, or even a rabbit, he would have vamoosed with his tail
between his legs.

AB David drew nearer the waist-high brush-- mostly milkweed and
brambles-Moose slunk off, whining softly.

"What is it, boy?"

The dog took up a position fifteen feet away from his find, looked
beseechingly at his master, and whimpered.

Strange behavior, David thought, frowning.

It wasn't like Moose to be frightened off by a butterfly or a lizard.

Once the big mutt zeroed in on prey like that, he was a formidable
adversary, absolutely ferocious, indomitable.

A few seconds later, when David reached the brush and saw what had
drawn the dog's attention, he stopped as if he had walked into a brick
wall.

"Oh, Jesus."

A great river of arctic air must have changed course in the sky, for
the warm May afternoon was suddenly cold, blood-freezing cold.

. Two dead bodies, a man and a woman, were sprawled in the brush,
supported in a partially upright position by the interweaving
blackberry vines. Both corpses were facing up, arms spread wide,
almost as if they had been crucified on those thorny branches. The man
had been disemboweled.

David shuddered, but he didn't turn away from that gruesome sight. In
the late 1960s he had served two tours of duty as a battlefield medic
in Vietnam before he was wounded and sent home: he had seen gut wounds
of all kinds, bellies ripped open by bullets, by bayonets, and by the
shrapnel from antipersonnel mines. He was not queamish.




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But when he took a closer look at the woman, when he saw what had been
done to her, he cried out involuntarily, quickly turned away from her,
stumbled a few steps into the grass, dropped to his knees, and was
violently, wrackingly sick.

n q :' THE DIvE WAS the teenage hangout in Royal City. It was on Main
Street, four blocks from the high school. There wasn't anything
special about it, so far as Amy could see. A soda fountain. A
shortorder grill. Ten tables with oilcloth draped over them. Eight
shiny, red leatherette booths. Half a dozen pinball machines in an
alcove in the back. A jukebox. That was it.

Nothing fancy. Amy figured there had to be a million places just like
it spread all over the country. She knew of four others right here in
little old Royal City. But for some mysterious reason, perhaps herd
instinct, perhaps because the name of the establishment sounded like
the kind of sleazy dump their parents would disapprove of, Royal City's
teenagers congregated at The Dive in greater numbers than they did
anywhere else in town.

Amy had been a waitress at The Dive for the past two summers, and she
was going to work there full-time again starting the first of June,
until the junior college opened in September. She also pulled a few
hours of hash-slinging during the school year, around the holidays and
on most weekends. She took a small allowance out of her earnings,
hardly enough for pocket money, and the rest went into her savings
account for college.

On Sunday, the day following the senior prom, Amy worked from noon
until six.

The Dive was exceptionally busy. By four o'clock she was worn out. By
five o'clock she was amazed that she could still stand. As the
shift-change neared, she caught herself glancing at the clock every few
minutes, willing the hands to move faster, faster.

She wondered if her uncharacteristic lack of energy could be explained
by her pregnancy. Probably. Some of her strength was being diverted
to the baby. Even this early on, it was bound to have its effect on
her. Wasn't it?

Dwelling on her pregnancy depressed her.                Depressed, she found the time
crawling by even slower than before.

A few minutes before six, Liz Duncan came into The Dive.                     She looked
smashing.

She was wearing skin-tight French jeans and a mauve and blue sweater
that appeared as if it had been knitted on her. She was a pretty
blonde with an extremely cute figure. Amy saw boys looking up from all
over the room as Liz walked through the door.

Liz was alone, currently between boyfriends.

She was always between boyfriends but never for long, she went through
guys the way Amy went through a box of Kleenex. Yesterday evening Liz
had gone to the prom with a one-night stand. It seemed to Amy that
every relationship Liz had with a boy was a one-night stand, even if it
went on for as long as a month or two, Liz never desired anything
lasting. Unlike other high school girls, she was repelled by the
thought of exchanging rings and going steady with just one guy. She
liked variety, and she seemed to thrive on impermanence. She was the



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Bad Girl of the senior class, and some of her exploits were legendary
among her peers. She didn't give a damn what anyone thought of her.

Amy was drawing two frosted mugs of root beer from the soda fountain
when Liz breezed up to the counter and said, Hey, kid, how's it going?"
 "I'm frazzled," Amy said.

"You get off soon?"

"Five minutes."

"Doing anything after?"

"No.   I'm glad you came in.          I have to talk to you."

"Sounds mysterious."

"It's important," Amy said.

"Think the house will treat us to cherry Cokes?"

"Sure. There's an empty booth over there. You stake a claim to it,
and I'll join you as soon as I get off work."

A few minutes later Amy brought the Cokes to the booth and sat down
opposite Liz.

"What's up?"      Liz asked.

Amy stirred her Coke with a straw.             "Well .      . . I need to .         .."
Yeah?"

I need to .     . . borrow some money."

"Sure.    I can let you have ten anyway.             Will that help?"

Liz, I've got to raise at least three or four hundred bucks.

Probably more."

"You serious?"

"Yes."

Jesus, Amy, you know me.          When it comes to money, my hands have grease
on them.

The stuff just slips away. My folks give it to me pretty much whenever
I ask, and then, next thing I know--zip! It's a fuckin' miracle that
I've got ten bucks I can let you have. But three or four hundred!"

Amy sighed and nodded.         "I was afraid you'd say that."

"Listen, if I had it I'd give it to you."

"I know you would."

Whatever other faults Liz might have--and she had her
share--miserliness was not one of them.

"What about your savings?"           she asked Amy.

Amy shook her head.        "I can't touch my bank account without Mama's
approval.



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And I'm hoping she won't find out about this."

"About what?      What do you need big bucks for?"

Amy started to speak, but her voice caught in her throat. She was
reluctant to reveal her awful secret, even to Liz. She sipped her
Coke, buying time to reconsider the wisdom of sharing her misery with
her friend.

"Amy?"

The Dive bristled with noise: clicking, beeping, ringing pinball
machines, hard-driving rock and roll on the jukebox, a babble of
voices, bursts of laughter.

"Amy, what's wrong?"

Blushing, Amy said, "I guess I'm being ridiculous, but I .                      ..

I'm just .     ..

too embarrassed to tell you." "That is ridiculous.                    You can tell me
anything. I'm your best friend, aren't I?" aYes."

That was true, Liz Duncan was her best friend. In fact Liz was just
about her only friend. She didn't spend much time with any of the
other girls her age.

She hung out almost exclusively with Liz, and that was odd when you
thought about it. She and Liz were so different from each other in so
many ways. Amy studied hard and did well in school, Liz couldn't care
less about her grades.

Amy wanted to go to college, Liz abhorred the idea. Amy was
introverted, downright shy on occasion, Liz was outgoing, bold, even
brassy at times. Amy liked books, Liz preferred movies and Hollywood
fan magazines. In spite of the fact that Amy was in rebellion against
her mother's excessive religious fervor, she still believed in God, but
Liz said that the whole concept of God and life after death was a
crock. Amy didn't care much for booze or pot and used them only when
she wanted to please Liz, but Liz said that if there was a God--which
she assured Amy there was not--he would be worth worshipping just
because he had created liquor and marijuana. Even though the two girls
differed in countless ways, their friendship flourished. The main
reason it flourished was that Amy worked very hard to make a success of
it.

She did pretty much what Liz wanted to do, said what she figured Liz
wanted to hear.

She never criticized Liz, always humored her, always laughed at her
jokes, and nearly always agreed with her opinions. Amy had put an
enormous amount of time and energy into making the relationship last,
but she had never stopped to ask herself why she cared so much about
being Liz Duncan's best friend.

Last night, in bed, Amy had wondered if she'd subconsciously wanted
Jerry Galloway to knock her up just to spite her mother. That had been
a startling thought. Now she wondered if she was maintaining a
friendship with Liz Duncan for the same misguided reason. Liz had (and
relished) the worst reputation in school, she was foul-mouthed and
irreverent and promiscuous.



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Hanging out with her might be, for Amy, just one more act of rebellion
against Mama's traditional values and morals.

As before, Amy was unsettled by the thought that she might be screwing
up her future just to cause her mother pain. If that was true, then
the resentment and anger she felt toward her mother was much deeper,
much darker than she had realized. It also meant that she wasn't in
control of her life, it meant she was motivated by a black hatred and a
corrupting bitterness she couldn't control. She was so unnerved by
those ideas that she refused to consider them, she quickly pushed them
out of her mind.

"So?"   Liz said.      "Are you going to tell me what's happening?"

Amy blinked.      "Uh .    . . well .      . . I broke off with Jerry."

"When?"    "Last night."       "After you left the prom?            Why?"

"He's a stupid, mean son of a bitch."

"He's always been," Liz said.            "But that didn't bother you before.

Why all of a sudden?        And what's this got to do with needing three or
four hundred bucks?"

Amy glanced around, afraid that someone might overhear what she was
about to say. They were in the last booth, so there was no one behind
her.

On the other side, behind Liz, four football jocks were arm-wrestling
boisterously. At the nearest table two couples, self-styled
intellectuals, were intently discussing current movies, they called
them "films" and spoke of aauteurs" as if they'd all worked in
Hollywood for years and knew what it was about. No one was
eavesdropping.

Amy looked at Liz.        "Recently I've been getting sick in the morning."

Liz understood immediately.           "Oh, no.      What about your period?"

"Missed it."      "Holy shit."

"So you see why I need the money."

IaAn abortion," Liz said softly.             "Did you tell Jerry?" "That's why we
broke up. He says it isn't his.              He won't help." "He's a rotten
little shit."

I don't know what I'm going to do."

,: "Damn!" Liz said.          "I wish you'd gone to the doctor I
recommended.

I wish you'd gotten that - prescription for the pill."

- "I was scared of the pill. You hear all these stories about cancer
and blood clots . . ." "As soon as I turn twenty-one," Liz said, "I'm
going to get the Band-Aid operation. But the pill's essential in the
meantime. What's worse--the risk : of blood clot or getting knocked
up?" "You're right," Amy said miserably. "I don't know why I didn't
do what you told me to do."

Except maybe I wanted to get pregnant and didn't even know it.



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Liz leaned toward her.         "Jesus, kid, I'm sorry.           I'm sorry as hell.

I feel sick.

I really do. I just feel sick that you're in this bind."                       "Imagine how
I feel." "Jesus, what a bad break."

"I don't know what I'm going to do," Amy said again.

"I'll tell you what you're going to do," Liz said.                   "You're going to go
home and tell your old man and your old lady."

"Oh, no. I couldn't. It'd be awful." "Look, I know it won't be
pretty. There'll be all sorts of screaming and hollering and
namecalling. They'll dump a hell of a load of guilt on you. It'll be
an ordeal, for sure. But they aren't going to beat you up or kill
you." aMy mother might." "Don't be silly. The old bitch will rant
and rave and make you feel miserable for a while. But let's not lose
track of what's important here.

The important thing is getting your ass into a clinic and getting that
baby scraped out of you as soon as possible."

Amy winced at the other girl's choice of words.

"All you have to do, " Liz said, "is grit your teeth and sit through
all the shouting, and then they pay for the abortion."

"No. You're forgetting that my family is Catholic. They think
abortion is a sin." "They might think it's a sin, but they won't force
a young girl like you to ruin her whole life. Catholics get abortions
all the time, no matter what they say." "I'm sure you're right," Amy
said. "But my mother is too devout.

She won't ever agree to it."

"You really think she'd be willing to live with the shame of an
illegitimate grandchild right there in her own house?"

"To hurt me .      . . and mainly to teach me a lesson .                . . yes."

"You're sure?"      "Positive."

They sat in glum silence for a while.

On the jukebox, Donna Summer was singing about the price she had to pay
for love.

Suddenly Liz snapped her fingers.             "I've got it!"        "What?"

"Even Catholics approve of abortion if the mother's life is in danger,
don't they?" "Not all Catholics. Just the most liberal ones approve
of it even under those circumstances."

"And your old lady isn't liberal." "Hardly." aBut your father's
better, isn't he? At least about the religious stuff" "He's not so
fanatical as Mama. He might agree to let me have an abortion if he
truly thought the baby would destroy my health." "All right. So you
make him think it's destroying your mental health.

Dig it?

You get suicidal.       You threaten to kill yourself if you can't have an
abortion.


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Act like you're half crazy. Be hysterical. Be irrational. Scream,
cry, then laugh without having any reason to laugh, then cry again,
break things . . .

If all of that doesn't convince them, then you can make a phony attempt
to slash your wrists, just a big enough cut to smear some blood
around.

They won't be sure whether you botched it on purpose or by accident,
and they won't want to take any chances."

Amy slowly shook her head.           "It wouldn't work."

"Why not?"     "I'm not a good actress."

Y'll bet you'd fool them."

"Carrying on like that, pretending .              . . Well, I'd feel stupid."

"Would you rather feel pregnant?"             "There must be another way."          aLike
what?"

"I don't know."       "Face it, kid.       This is your best shot."            "I don't
know."

Y do know."

Amy sipped her Coke.        After a couple of minutes of thought, she said,
"Maybe you're right.        Maybe I'll try the suicide bit." "It'll work.

Just as smooth as glass. You'll see. When will you tell them?"
"Well, I had been thinking about breaking the news right after
graduation if I couldn't find another way out by then." "That's two
weeks! Listen, kid, the sooner the better."

"Two weeks won't hurt anything. Maybe in that time I'll find some way
to come up with the money myself." "You won't." "Maybe."

"You won't," Liz said sharply.            "Anyway, you're only seventeen.

You probably couldn't get an abortion without your parents' consent,
not even if you had the money to pay for it. I'll bet you have to be
at least eighteen before they let you have one on your own say-so."

Amy hadn't considered that possibility. She simply didn't think of
herself as a minor, she felt a hundred and ten years old.

"Get your head on straight, kid," Liz said. "You wouldn't take my
advice about the pill. Now get your shit together this time, will
you?

Please, please, for Christ's sake, listen to me.                  The sooner the
better."

Amy realized that Liz was right. She leaned back in the booth, away
from the table, and a wave of resignation swept through her. She
sagged as if she were a marionette whose strings had been cut.

"Okay.

The sooner the better. I'll tell them tonight or tomorrow."
"Tonight." "I don't think I have the strength for it tonight. If I'm
going to put on a big suicide act, I'll need to have my wits about


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me.

I'll have to be rested." "Tomorrow, then," Liz said. "No later than
tomorrow. Get it over with. Listen, we have a great summer coming
up.

If I go west at the end of the year, like I'm hoping to, this'll
probably be the last summer you and I will have together. So we've got
to do it up right.

We've got to make a lot of memories to last us a long while. Lots of
sun, some good dope to smoke, a couple of new guys . . . It'll be a
blast. Except it won't be so terrific if you're walking around all
bloated and preggy."

For Joey Harper, Sunday turned out to be a fine day.

The morning started with Mass and Sunday school, of course, which was
as boring as usual, but then the day improved rapidly. When his father
stopped at Royal City News for the Sunday papers, Joey found a batch of
new comic books on the rack and had enough coins in his pockets to buy
the two best issues.

Then his mother made chicken and waffles for lunch, which was one of
his favorite things in the whole wide world.

After lunch his father gave him money to go to the Rialto.                      That was a
theater, a revival house that played only old movies.

It was six blocks from their house, and he was allowed to ride his
bicycle that far, but no farther. The Rialto was showing two monster
flicks for the Sunday matinee--The Thing and It Came from Outer
Space.

Both pictures were super.

Joey liked scary stories.          He wasn't exactly sure why he did.

Sometimes, sitting in a dark theater, watching some slimy thing creep
up on the hero, Joey almost peed in his pants. But he loved every
minute of it.

After the movies he went home for dinner, and his mother made
cheeseburgers and baked beans, which was even better than chicken and
waffles, better than just about anything he could think of. He ate
until he thought he'd bust.

Amy came home from The Dive at eight o'clock, an hour and a half before
Joey's bedtime, so that he was still awake when she found the rubber
snake hanging in her closet. She stormed down the hall, calling his
name, and she chased him around his room until she caught him. After
she had tickled him and had made him promise never to frighten her that
way again (a promise they both knew he wouldn't keep), he persuaded her
to play a sixty-minute time-limit game of Monopoly, and that was a
whole lot of fun. He beat her, as usual, for an almost grown-up
person, she sure didn't know much about financial wheeling and
dealing.

He loved Amy more than anybody. Maybe that was wrong of him. You were
supposed to love your mother and father most of all. Well, after
God.

God came first.


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Then your mother and father. But Mama was hard to love. She was all
the time praying with you or praying for you or giving you a lecture on
the proper way to behave, and she told you over and over again that she
cared that you grew up the right way, but she somehow never showed you
that she cared. It was all talk. Daddy was easier to love, but he
wasn't around that much.

He was busy doing law stuff, probably saving innocent men from the
electric chair and things like that, and when he was home he spent a
lot of time alone, working on the miniature layouts he built for model
trains, he didn't like you messing around in his workshop.

Which left Amy. She was there a lot. And she was always there when
you needed her. She was the nicest person Joey knew, the nicest he
ever expected to know, and he was glad that he had her for a sister
instead of that crabby, nasty Veronica Culp, who his best friend, Tommy
Culp, had to share a house with.

Later, after the Monopoly game, when he was in his pajamas, teeth
brushed, and ready for bed, he said his prayers with Amy, which was
much better than saying them with Mama. Amy said them faster than Mama
did, and she sometimes changed a word here and there to make the
prayers a little bit funny.

Like, instead of saying, "Mary, Mother of God, hear my plea," she might
say, "Mary, Mother of God, hear my flea." She always made Joey giggle,
but he had to be careful not to laugh too loud because Mama would
wonder what was so funny about prayers, and then everyone would be in
trouble.

Amy tucked him in and kissed him and finally left him alone in the
moonglow of his night-light. He snuggled down in the covers and fell
asleep almost instantly.

Sunday had been a fine day indeed.

But Monday began badly.

Not long after midnight, in the first few minutes of the new day, Joey
was awakened by the spooky, mush-mouthed sound of his mother's
whispered conversation. As on other occasions, he kept his eyes closed
and pretended to be sleeping.

"My little angel .        . . maybe not an angel at all .             . . inside .     .

."

She was really sloshed, pickled. According to Tommy Culp, when
somebody was falling-down drunk, you said they were "pissed." Mama was
sure pissed tonight.

She rambled on about how she couldn't decide whether he was good or
bad, pure or evil, about how there might be something ugly hidden
inside of him and waiting to break out, about how she didn't want to
bring devils into the world, about how it was God's work to rid the
world of such evil any way you could, and she talked about how she harl
killed somebody named Victor and hoped she would never have to do the
same thing to her precious angel.

Joey started to shiver and was deathly afraid that she would discover
he was awake. He didn't know what she might do if she knew he had
heard her weird mumblings.


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When he felt on the brink of telling her to shut up and go away, Joey
tried desperately to tune her out. He forced himself to think of
something else. He concentrated on putting together a detailed mental
picture of the big, vicious alien creature in The Thing, which he had
seen just that afternoon at the Rialto. The thing in the picture was
like a man, only much bigger. With gigantic hands that could tear you
to pieces in a minute. And sunken eyes full of fire. And yet it was a
plant. An alien plant that was almost indestructible and lived on
blood. He could vividly recall the scene in which the scientists were
looking for the alien behind a series of doors, they didn't find it,
and they finally gave up, and then the very next door they opened, when
they weren't expecting anything, the monster jumped out at them,
growling and spitting and eager to eat somebody. Remembering the
unexpected fury of the monster's attack, Joey felt his blood turn to
ice as it had in the theater.

That scene was so spine-chilling, so tingly-icky-awful that it made his
mother's drunken rambling seem harmless by comparison. The things that
happen to people in horror movies were so terrible that they made the
scary things in life seem tame. Suddenly Joey wondered if that was why
he liked those spooky stories so much.

MAMA WAS ALWAYS the first up in the morning. She went to Mass every
day of the week, even when she was sick, even when she had a really bad
hangover. During the summer, when school was out, she would expect Amy
and Joey to attend services and take Holy Communion nearly as often as
she did.

On this Monday morning in May, however, Amy still lay in bed, listening
to her mother move through the house and then into the garage, which
was directly under Amy's bedroom. The Toyota started on the second
try, and the automatic garage door rumbled up, coming to rest with a
solid thud that rattled Amy's windows.

After her mother had gone, Amy got out of bed, showered, dressed for
school, and went downstairs to the kitchen. Her father and Joey were
finishing a breakfast of toasted English muffins and orange juice.

"You're running late this morning," her father said.                    aBetter grab a
bite quick. We're leaving in five minutes."

It's such a beautiful morning," Amy said. "I think I'll walk to school
today." "Are you sure you have enough time?" "Oh, yes. Plenty of
time." "Me too," Joey said. "I want to walk with Amy." "The
elementary school is three times as far as the high school," Paul
Harper said. "Your legs would be worn down to your knees by the time
you got there." aNah," Joey said. "I can make it. I'm rough and
ready." "One mean hombre," his father agreed. aBut just the same,
you'll ride with me." "Aw, shoot!" Joey said.

"Bang," Amy said, pointing a finger at him.

Joey grinned.

"Come on, hombre," his father said.              "Let's get moving."

Amy stood at one of the living room windows, watching the man and the
boy drive away in the family's Pontiac.

She had lied to her father.           She wasn't going to walk to school.

In fact she didn't even intend to go to school at all today.


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She returned to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, poured a steaming
mug of it for herself. Then she sat down at the kitchen table to wait
for her mother to get back from Mass.

Last night, tossing restlessly in bed, plotting how best to make her
confession, she had decided that she should tell her mother first. If
Amy sat them down and told them both at the same time, Mama's reaction
to the news would be calculated to impress not only her daughter but
her husband, she would be even tougher on Amy than she might be if Amy
told her in private. And Amy also knew that if she told her father
first, it would look as if she were sneaking around behind her mother's
back, trying to drive a wedge between her parents, trying to make an
ally of her father. If Mama thought that was the case, she would be
twice as difficult as she otherwise might have been. By telling Mama
first, by according her at least that much special respect, Amy hoped
to improve her chances of getting the abortion she wanted.

She finished the mug of coffee.            She poured herself another, finished
that one, too.

The ticking of the kitchen clock seemed to grow louder and louder,
until it was a drumbeat to which her nerves jumped in sympathy.

When Mama finally came home from Mass, entering the kitchen through the
connecting door to the garage, Amy had never been more tense. The back
and underarms of her blouse were damp with perspiration. In spite of
the hot coffee, there seemed to be a lump of ice in her stomach.

"Morning, Mama."

Her mother stopped in surprise, still holding the door open, the
shadowy interior of the garage I visible behind her. "What are you
doing here?" "I want to--" "You should be in school."

I stayed home so I could--" Ysn't this final exam week?" "No. That's
next week. This week we just review material for the tests." "That's
important, too."

- aYes, but I don't think I'll be going to school today."

As Mama closed and locked the door of the garage, she said, "What's
wrong? Are you sick?" "Not exactly. I--" "What do you mean--not
exactly?" she asked, putting her purse on the counter by the sink.

"You're either sick or you're not. And if you aren't, you should be in
school." "I have to talk to you," Amy said.

Her mother came to the table and stared down at her.                    "Talk?      About
what?"

Amy couldn't meet the woman's eyes. She looked away, turned her gaze
to the muddy residue of cold coffee in the bottom of her mug.

"Well?"    Mama asked.

Although Amy had drunk a lot of coffee, her mouth was so dry that her
tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed, licked her
parched lips, cleared her throat, and at last said, "I have to withdraw
some money from my savings account." "What are you talking about?" "I
need . . . four hundred dollars." "That's ridiculous." "No. I
really need it, Mama."



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"For what?"

"I'd rather not say."

Her mother was astonished.           "You'd rather not say?"          "That's right."

The astonishment turned to consternation. "You want to withdraw four
hundred dollars that's meant for your college tuition, and you don't
want to say what you're going to do with it?"

"Mama, please.      After all, I earned it."

The consternation turned to anger. "Now you listen to me and listen
good, young lady. Your father does well enough at his law practice,
but he doesn't do all that well. He's not F. Lee Bailey. You want to
go to college, and college is expensive these days. You're going to
have to help pay for it. In fact you're going to have to pay for most
of it. We'll let you live here, of course, and we'll pay for your
food, your clothes, your medical bills, while you're going to the
junior college, but you'll have to meet the tuition out of your
savings. When you go away to the university in a couple of years,
we'll send you some money for living expenses, but you'll have to pay
for that tuition, too. We just can't do more than that. We'll be
sacrificing as it is."

If you didn't spend so much money trying to impress Father O'Hara with
your devotion to St. Mary's Church, if you and Daddy didn't contribute
a tithe and a half to show what good people you are, maybe you'd be
able to do more for your own children, Amy thought. Charity starts at
home, Mama.

Isn't that what the Bible tells us? Besides, if you hadn't made me
tithe to St. Mary's, I'd have that extra four hundred bucks now that I
need it.

Amy wished she could say all of that, but she didn't dare. She didn't
want to completely alienate her mother before she even had a chance to
mention the pregnancy. Anyway, no matter how she tried to express what
she was thinking, no matter what words she chose, she would sound petty
and selfish.

But she wasn't selfish, damn it.

She knew it was a good        thing to give money to the Church, but there had
to be limits. And you         had to give for the right reasons. Otherwise it
didn't mean anything.         Sometimes Amy suspected that her mother hoped to
buy a place in Heaven,        and that was definitely the wrong reason to give
to the Church.

Amy forced herself to look up at her mother and smile. "Mama, I've
already got that small scholarship for next year. If I work real hard
I'll probably get scholarships every year, even if they're all just
small ones. And I'll be working at The Dive summers and weekends.

With what I'll be earning, plus what I've got in the bank already, I'll
have more than enough to pay for my own way. By the time I get to Ohio
State, I won't need to ask you and Daddy for help, not even for living
expenses. I can spare that four hundred dollars right now, Mama. I
can spare it easy." "No," Mama said. "And don't think you can sneak
behind my back and get the money on your own hook. My name's on that
account along with yours. You're still a minor, don't forget. As long
as I can, I'm going to protect you from yourself. I'm not letting you
throw your college money away on trendy new clothes you don't need or


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on some other silly bauble you've just seen in a store window."

"It isn't new clothes I want, Mama." "Whatever.                   I won't let you--"
"It's not a silly bauble I want, either."

"I don't care what sort of foolishness--" "An abortion," Amy said.

Her mother gaped at her.          "What?"

Touched off by a fuse of fear, the words exploded from Amy: "I've had
some morning sickness, I missed my period, I'm really pregnant, I know
I am, Jerry Galloway got me pregnant, I didn't mean for it to happen,
I'm so sorry it happened, so very sorry, I hate myself, I really do, I
really hate myself, but I have to get an abortion, I've just got to
have one, please, please, I've just got to."

Mama's face suddenly turned white, chalkwhite.                  Even her lips were
pale.

"Mama? Do you understand that I can't possibly have this baby?                         I just
can't go ahead and have it, Mama."

Mama closed her eyes.         She swayed, and for a moment she looked as if
she would faint.

"I know what I did was wrong, Mama," Amy said, beginning to cry.

"I feel dirty.      I don't know if I'll ever feel clean again.                     I hate
myself.

And I know that an abortion is even a worse sin than what I did. I
know that, and I'm afraid for my soul. But I'm even more afraid of
going ahead and having the baby. I've got my life to live, Mama.

Yvegot mylife!"

Mama's eyes opened. She stared down at Amy, and she tried to speak,
but she was too shocked to be able to get any words out. Her mouth
moved without producing a sound.

"Mama?"

With such speed that Amy hardly saw it coming, her mother raised a hand
and slapped her face. Once. Twice. Hard.

Amy cried out in pain and surprise, and she raised one arm to protect
herself.

Mama grabbed her by the blouse and dragged her to her feet in a
disconcerting display of strength.

The chair fell over with a crash.

Her mother shook her as if she were a bundle of rags.

Crying, frightened, Amy said, "Mama, please don't hurt me.

Forgive me, Mama.

Please."    "You filthy, rotten, ungrateful little bitch!"

"Mama--" "You're stupid, stupid, so damned stupid!" her mother
screamed, spraying her with spittle as hot and stinging as venom.



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"You're an ignorant child, just a stupid little slut! You don't know
what could happen. You don't have the slightest idea. You're
ignorant. You don't know what you might give birth to.

You don't know!"

Amy was unwilling and unable to defend herself. Mama pushed her,
pulled her, jerked her from side to side, this way and that, shook her,
shook her, shook her ferociously, until her teeth rattled and her
blouse tore.

"You don't know what sort of thing might come out of you," Mama
screeched maniacally. "God knows what it might be!"

What is she talking about? Amy wondered desperately. She sounds as if
she's heard Jerry's curse and believes it'll come true. What's going
on here? What's wrong with her?

Second by second her mother was becoming increasingly violent.

Amy   hadn't really believed that Mama would kill her. That's what she
had   told Liz, but she had been exaggerating. At least she had thought
she   was exaggerating. But now, as her mother continued to curse her
and   shake her, Amy began to worry that Mama would seriously hurt her,
and   she tried to squirm away.

Mama refused to let go.

The two women tottered sideways and bumped solidly against the table.

The nearly empty mug fell over, spun around twice, dropped off the
table, scattering droplets of cold coffee, and smashed into a dozen
pieces when it hit the floor.

Mama stopped shaking Amy, but her eyes were still demented and wildly
lighted.

"Pray," she said urgently.           "We've got to pray that there's no baby
inside you.

We've got to pray that it's a mistake, that you're wrong."

She pulled Amy down roughly onto the floor, onto her knees, and they
knelt side by side on the cool tiles, and Mama began to pray loudly,
and she held Amy by one arm, held her so tightly that Mama's fingers
seemed to pierce Amy's flesh and touch the bare bone, and Amy wept and
pleaded to be released, and Mama slapped her again and told her to
pray, demanded that she pray, and Mama asked the Holy Virgin to be
merciful, but Mama wasn't merciful when she saw that Amy's head wasn't
bowed far enough, for she grabbed her daughter by the back of the neck
and forced her face toward the floor, forced it down and down until
Amy's forehead was touching the tiles, until her nose was pressed into
a wet splotch of spilled coffee, and Amy kept saying, "Mama, please,"
over and over again, "Mama, please," but Mama wasn't listening to her,
because Mama was busy praying to everyone, to Mary and Jesus and Joseph
and God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and she prayed to various
saints as well, and when Amy gasped for breath a couple of drops of
coffee slipped up her nose from the small puddle into which she was
pressed, and she spluttered and gagged, but Mama held her down, held
her even harder than before, squeezing the back of her neck, and Mama
wailed and whined and shouted and beat the floor with her free hand and
thrashed about and shuddered with religious passion, begged and
wheedled and whimpered for mercy, mercy for herself and for her wayward


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daughter, howled and wept and pleaded in a fashion which Catholics
usually disdained, in a devout frenzy that was more suited to the
fundamental Christianity for the Church of the Nazarene, flailed and
babbled fervently, until she was finally all prayed out, hoarse,
exhausted, limp.

The ensuing silence was more dramatic than a thunderclap would have
been.

Mama let go of Amy's neck.

At first Amy remained as her mother had left her, face against the
floor, but after a few seconds she lifted her head and rocked back on
her knees.

Mama's hand had cramped from maintaining such an iron grip on Amy's
neck. She stared down at the clawlike fingers, massaging them with her
good hand. She was breathing hard.

Amy raised her hands to her face, wiped away the coffee and the
tears.

She couldn't stop shaking.

Outside, clouds passed over the sun, and the morning light streaming
through the kitchen windows rippled like bright water, then grew
dimmer.

The clock ticked hollowly.

To Amy, the silence was frightening, like the endless instant between a
skipped heartbeat and the next sound of your pulse, when you could not
help but wonder if perhaps that vital muscle in your chest would never
again expand or contract.

When Mama spoke at last, Amy jerked involuntarily.

"Get up," Mama said coldly.           aGo upstairs and wash your face.              Comb
your hair." aYes, Mama."

They both stood.

Amy's legs were weak. Her skirt was rumpled, she pressed it down with
her quivering hands, smoothed the wrinkled material.

"Change into fresh clothes," Mama said, her voice flat and
emotionless.

aYes, Mama."

"I'll call Dr. Spangler and see if he has an opening in his
appointment book this morning. We'll go in right away if he can take
us." "Dr. Spangler?" Amy asked, confused.

"You'll have to take a pregnancy test, of course. There are other
reasons why you might have missed your period. We can't really be sure
until we get test results." "I know I am, Mama," Amy said shakily,
softly. "I know I'm going to have a baby." "If the test is positive,"
her mother said, "then we'll make arrangements to take care of things
as soon as possible."

Amy couldn't believe the implications of that statement.                     She said,
"Take care of things?"



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"You'll get the abortion you want," Mama said, glaring at her with eyes
that contained no forgiveness.

"You don't really mean it." aYes.             You must have an abortion.            It's the
only way."

Amy almost cried out with relief. But at the same time she was afraid,
for she figured that her mother would extract a terrible price for this
amazing concession.

aBut . . . abortion . . . isn't it a sin?"                   Amy asked, struggling to
comprehend her mother's reasoning.

aWe can't tell your father," Mama said.               "It's got to be kept a secret
from him. He wouldn't approve."

"But . . . I didn't think you would approve either," Amy said,
bewildered.

"I don't approve," Mama said sharply, a trace of emotion returning to
her voice. "Abortion is murder. It's a mortal sin. I don't approve
at all. But as long as you've got to live in this house, I won't have
such a thing as this hanging over my head. I simply won't have it. I
won't live in fear of what might come. I won't go through that terror
again." "Mama, I don't understand. You talk as if you know for a fact
that the baby will be deformed or something."

They stared at each other for a moment, and Amy saw more than anger and
reproach in her mother's dark eyes. There was fear in those eyes, too,
a stark and powerful fear that transmitted itself to Amy, chilling
her.

"Someday," Mama said, "when the time was right, I was going to tell
you." "Tell me what?" "Someday, when you were ready to be married,
when you were properly engaged, I was going to tell you why you must
never have a child. But you couldn't wait for the proper time, could
you? Oh, no. Not you.

You had to give yourself away.            You had to pull up your skirts the
first chance you got.

Still little more than a child yourself, and you had to throw yourself
at some high school boy. You had to rush out and fornicate in the
backseat of a car like a worthless little slut, like the worst kind of
pig. And now maybe it's inside of you, growing." "What are you
talking about?" Amy asked, wondering if her mother was completely
mad.

"It wouldn't do any good for me to tell you," Mama said.                     "You wouldn't
listen.

You'd probably even welcome such a child.                You'd embrace it just like
he did.

I've always said there was something evil in you. I've always told you
that you had to keep it in check. But now you've loosened the reins,
and that dark thing is running free, that evil part of you. You've
loosed the evil in you, and sooner or later, one way or the other,
you'll have a child, you'll bring one of them into the world, no matter
what I say to you, no matter how I plead with you. But you won't do it
in this house. It won't happen here. I'll see to that. We'll go to
Dr. Spangler, and he'll abort it for you. And if there's any sin in
that, if there's mortal sin for someone to bear the burden of, it will


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rest entirely on your shoulders, not mine.                You understand?"

Amy nodded.

"It won't matter to you, will it?" her mother asked meanly. "One more
sin won't matter to you, will it? Because you're already destined for
Hell anyway, aren't you?" "No. No, Mama, don't--" "Yes, you are.

You're destined to be one of the Devil's own women, one of his
handmaidens, aren't you? I see that now. I see it. All my efforts
have been in vain. You can't be saved.

So what's one more sin to you?            Nothing.

It's nothing to you. You'll just laugh it off." "Mama, don't talk to
me like that." "I'm talking to you like you deserve to be talked to.

A girl who behaves the way you've behavedhow can she expect to be
talked to any differently?" "Please . . ." "Get a move on," Mama
said. "Clean yourself up. I'll call the doctor."

Confused by the several twists that events had taken, baffled by her
mother's certainty that the baby would be deformed, wondering about
Mama's sanity, Amy went upstairs. In the bathroom she washed her
face.

Her eyes were bloodshot from crying.

In her bedroom she took another skirt and a clean blouse from the
closet. She stripped off her sweat-streaked, wrinkled clothes. For a
moment she stood in bra and panties before the full-length mirror,
staring at her belly.

Why is Mama so certain that my baby will be deformed? Amy asked
herself worriedly. How can she know such a thing for sure? Is it
because she thinks I'm evil and that I deserve this sort of thing--a
deformed baby, a sign to the world that I'm the Devil's handmaiden?

That's sick.      That's twisted thinking.

It's ridiculous and crazy and unfair. I'm not a bad person. I've made
some mistakes. I'll admit that. I've made a lot of mistakes for
someone my age, but I'm not evil, damn it. I'm not evil.

Am I?

She stared into the reflection of her own eyes.

Am I?

Shivering, she dressed for the visit to the doctor's office.

ON SUNDAY THE carnival moved to Clearfield, Pennsylvania, by highway
and rail, and on Monday the sprawling midway was erected again with
military efficiency.

Big American Midway Shows gave its own people and its concessionaires a
four o'clock show call for Monday afternoon, which meant that every
attraction-from the least imposing grab joint to the most elaborate
thrill ride--was expected to be operational by that hour.

Conrad Straker's three enterprises, including the funhouse, were in
place and ready to receive the marks by three o'clock Monday
afternoon.


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It was a cloudless, warm day. The evening would be balmy. "Money
weather," the carnies called it. Although Fridays and Saturdays were
always the best for business, the marks would flood in on a mild,
breezy night even if it was at the beginning of the week.

With an hour of free time before the fairground gates were opened to
the public, Conrad did what he always did on the first afternoon of a
new engagement. He left the funhouse and walked next door to Yang
Barnet's ten-in-one Freak-o-rama, a name which some carnies found
offensive, but which drew the marks with greater efficacy than honey
ever drew flies.

A luridly illustrated banner stretched across the front of Yang's tent:
HUMAN ODDITIES OF THE WORLD.

Yang had as much respect for show calls as Conrad did, and except for
the fact that the human oddities would not arrive from their trailers
until four o'clock, the joint was ready for business well ahead of
schedule.

That was especially commendable when you knew that Yang Barnet and a
few of his freaks always played poker Sunday night, into the wee hours
of Monday morning, accompanying the game with a considerable amount of
ice-cold beer and Seagram's, which were combined into murderously
potent boilermakers.

Yang's place was a large tent, divided into four long rooms, with a
roped-off walkway that serpentined through all four chambers. In each
room there were either two or three stalls, and in each stall there was
a platform, and on each platform there was a chair. Behind each chair,
running the length of the stall, a big sign, colorfully illustrated,
explained about the wondrous and incredible thing at which the mark was
gawking. With one exception, those wondrous and incredible things were
all living, breathing, human freaks, normal F minds and spirits trapped
in twisted bodies: the world's fattest woman, the three-eyed alligator
,r man, the man with three arms and three legs, the bearded lady, and
(as the barker said twenty or thirty times every hour) more, much more
than , the human mind could encompass.

- Only one of the oddities was not a living person.

- It was to be found in the center of the tent, half ' 0?" way along
the snaking path, in the narrowest of all the stalls. The thing was in
a very large, specially blown, clear glass jar, suspended in a
formaldehyde solution, the jar stood on the platform, without benefit
of a chair, dramatically lighted from above and behind.

It was to this exhibit that Conrad Straker came . that Monday
afternoon in Clearfield. He stood at e restraining rope where he had
stood hundreds of times before, and he stared regretfully at his
long-dead son.

As in the other stalls, there was a sign behind the exhibit.                        The
letters were big, easy to read.

VICTOR "THE UCLY ANGEL" THIS CHILD, NAMED VICTOR BY HIS FATHER, WAS
BORN IN 1955, OF NORMAL PARENTS.

VICTOR S MENTAL CAPACnY WAS NORMAL. HE HAD A SWEET, CHARMING
DlSPOSmON. HE WAS A LAUGHING BABY, AN ANGEL.

ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 15, 1955, VICTOR S MOTHER, ELLEN, MURDERED


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HIM.

SHE WAS REPELLED BY THE CHILD'S PHYSICAL DEFORMITIES AND WAS CONVINCED
HE WAS AN EVIL MONSTER. SHE WAS NOT ABLE TO SEE THE SPIRITUAL Bravery
within HIM.

WHO WAS REALLY THE EVIL ONE? THE HELPLESS BABY?                   --ORTHE MOTHER HE
TRUSTED, THE WOMAN WHO MURDERED HIM?

WHO WAS THE REAL MONSTER? THIS POOR, AFFLICTED CHILD?                      --OR THE MOTHER
WHO REFUSED TO LOVE HIM? JUDGE FOR YOURSELF.

Conrad had written the text of that sign twenty-five years ago, and it
had expressed his feelings perfectly at that time. He had wanted to
tell the world that Ellen was a baby killer, a ruthless beast, he had
wanted them to see what she had done and to revile her for her
cruelty.

During the off-season the child in the jar remained with Conrad in his
Gibsonton, Florida, home. During the rest of the year, it traveled
with Yang Barnet's show, a public testament to Ellen's perfidy.

At each new stand, when the midway had been erected again and the gates
were about to be opened to the marks, Conrad came to this tent to see
if the jar had been transported safely. He spent a few minutes in the
company of his dead boy, silently reaffirming his oath of revenge.

Victor stared back at his father with wide, sightless eyes. Once the
green of those eyes had been bright, glowing. Once they had been
quick, inquisitive eyes, filled with bold challenge and self-confidence
beyond their years. But now they were flat, dull. The green was not
half so vibrant as it had been in life, years of formaldehyde bleaching
and the relentless processes of death had made the irises milky.

. At last, with a renewed hunger for retribution, , Conrad walked out
of the tent and returned to the funhouse.

Gunther was already standing up on the platform by the boarding gate,
dressed in his Frankenstein monster mask and gloves. He saw Conrad and
immediately went into his snarling-pawingdancing act, the one he put on
for the marks.

Ghost was at the ticket booth, breaking rolls of quarters and dimes and
nickels into the change drawer, his colorless eyes were filled with the
flickering, silvery images of tumbling coins.

"They're going to open the gate half an hour early," Ghost said.

"Everyone's set up and eager for business, and they say there's already
a crowd of marks waiting outside."

"It's going to be a good week," Conrad said.

"Yeah," Ghost said, pushing one slender hand through his spider-web
hair. "I have the same feeling. Maybe you'll even get a chance to
repay that debt." what?"

"That woman you owe a debt to," Ghost said. "The one whose children
you're always looking for. Maybe you'll be lucky and find her here."

"Yes," Conrad said softly.           "Maybe I will."

At eight-thirty Monday night, Ellen Harper was sitting in the living



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room of the house on Maple Lane, trying to read an article in the
latest issue of Redbook. She couldn't concentrate. Each time she
reached the bottom of a paragraph, she couldn't remember what had been
in it, and she had to go back and read it again. Eventually she gave
up and just leafed through the magazine, looking at the pictures, while
she sipped steadily from a glass of vodka and orange juice.

Although it was not late, she was already under the spell of the
booze.

She didn't feel good . Not by a long shot.                  Not bad, either.        Just
numb. But not yet numb enough.

She was alone in the room. Paul was in his workshop, out in the
garage. He would come in at eleven o'clock, as usual, to watch the
late news on television, and then he would go to bed. Joey was in his
room, working on a model of his own-- a plastic representation of Lon
Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera. Amy was upstairs, too, lying
low.

Except for a brief, fidgety appearance at the dinner table, the girl
had been holed up in her room ever since returning from Dr. Spangler's
office this afternoon.

The girl.     The damned, defiant, wanton girl!              Pregnant!

They didn't have the test results yet, of course.                   That would take a
couple of days. But she knew.

. Amy was pregnant.

e' The magazine rustled in Ellen's tremulous hands. She put Redbook
aside and went out to ú the kitchen to mix another drink.

She wasn't able to stop worrying about the bind she was in. She
couldn't allow Amy to have the baby. But if Paul found out that she
had gone behind his back to arrange an abortion, he would not be
pleased. For the most part he was a meek man at home, gentle,
easygoing, willing to let her run the house and, generally, their lives
as well. But he was capable of anger if pushed far enough, and on
those rare occasions when he lost his temper, he could be tough.

If Paul learned of the abortion after the fact, he would want to know
why she hadn't told him, and he would demnd to know why she had
approved of such a thing. She would have to be able to provide a
cogent explanation, a passionate self-defense. Right now, however, she
didn't know what in God's name she would say to him if he ever found
out about the abortion.

Twenty years ago, when she had married Paul, she should have told him
about her year with the carnival. She should have confessed about
Conrad and about the repulsive thing to which she had given birth. But
she hadn't done what she should have done. She had been weak. She hid
the truth from him.

She was afraid he would loathe her and turn away from her if he knew
about her mistakes. But if she had told him back then, at the very
beginning of their relationship, she wouldn't be in such serious
trouble now.

Several times during the course of their marriage, she had almost
revealed her secrets to him. When he had talked about having a large
family, there were a hundred times when she almost said, "No, Paul. I


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can't have children. I've already had one, you see, and it was no
good. No good at all. It was a horror.

It wasn't even human. It wanted to kill me, and I had to kill it
first. Maybe that hideous child was solely a product of my first
husband's damaged genes.

Maybe my own genetic contribution wasn't to blame.                   But I can't take a
chance."

Although she had been on the brink of making that confession countless
times, she had never given voice to it, she had held her tongue,
naively certain that love would conquer all--somehow.

Later, when she was pregnant with Amy, she almost went out of her mind
with worry and fear. But the baby had been normal. For a short while,
a few blessed weeks at most, she had been relieved, all doubts about
her genetic fitness banished by the sight of that pink, giggly,
supremely ordinary infant.

But before long it occurred to her that all freaks were not necessarily
physically deformed. The flaw, the twisted thing, the horrible
difference from normal people--that could be entirely in the mind. The
baby she'd borne for Conrad was not merely deformed. It was wicked, it
radiated wickedness, it reeked of malevolent intent, a monster in every
sense of the word. But wasn't it r. conceivable that her new
girl-child was just as . wicked as Victor, except that there were no
outward signs of it? Perhaps a worm of evil nestled deep within the
child's mind, out of sight, - festering, waiting for the proper time
and place to emerge.

, Such a disturbing possibility was like an acid. It ate away at
Ellen's happiness, it corroded and then destroyed her optimism. She
soon ceased to take any pleasure in the baby's gurgling and cooing.

She watched the child speculatively, wondering what nasty surprises it
would spring on her in the future. Perhaps, one night, when the child
was grown tall and strong, it would creep into its parents' bedroom and
murder them in their sleep.

Or perhaps she was crazy, perhaps the child was as ordinary as it
appeared to be, and the problem was in her own mind. That thought did
occur to her rather frequently. But each time she began to question
her sanity, she remembered the nightmarish battle with Conrad's
vicious, bloodthirsty offspring, and that grisly, vivid memory never
failed to convince her that she had good reason to be wary and
afraid.

Didn't she?

For seven years she resisted Paul's desire to have another child, but
she got pregnant in spite of her precautions. Again, she went through
nine months of hell, wondering what sort of strange creature she was
carrying in her womb.

Joey, of course, turned out to be a normal little boy.

On the outside.

But inside?

She wondered.      She watched, waited, feared the worst.



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After all these years, Ellen still wasn't sure what to think of her
children.

It was a hell of a way to live.

Sometimes she was filled with a fierce pride and love for them.

She wanted to take them in her arms and kiss them, hug them. Sometimes
she wanted to give them all the affection that she never had been able
to give them in the past, but after so many years of guarded feelings
and continuous suspicion, she found it virtually impossible to open her
arms to them and to accept such a dangerous emotional commitment with
equanimity. There were times when she burned with love for Joey and
Amy, times when she ached with a surfeit of unexpressed love, times
when she wept at night, silently, without waking Paul, soaking her
pillow, grieving for her own cold, dead heart.

At other times, however, she still thought she saw something
supernaturally wicked in her progeny. There were terrible days when
she was convinced they were clever, calculating, infinitely evil beings
engaged in an elaborate masquerade.

Seesaw.

Seesaw.

The worst of it was her loneliness. She could not share her fears with
Paul, for then she would have to tell him about Conrad, and he would be
devastated to learn that she had been hiding a checkered past from him
for twenty years.

She knew him well enough now to understand that what she'd done in her
youth would not upset him a tenth as much as the fact that she'd
deceived him about it and had kept on deceiving him for so very long.

So she had to deal with her fear by herself.

It was a hell of a way to live.

Even if she could make herself believe, once ,L' and for all, that they
were just two kids like any other two kids, even then her worries
wouldn't be :- at an end. There was still the possibility that one of
Amy's or Joey's children would be a monster like Victor. This curse
might strike only one out of every two generations--the mother but not
the child, the grandchild but not the great-grandchild. It might skip
around at random, raising its ugly head when you least expected to see
it. Modern medicine had identified a number of genetically transmitted
diseases and inherited deficiencies that skipped some generations in a
family and struck others, leapfrogging down the decades.

If she could only be sure that her first, monstrous baby had been the
product of Conrad's rotten, degenerate spermatozoa, if she could just
be certain that her own chromosomes were not corrupted, she would be
able to lay her fear to rest forever. But of course there was no way
she could determine the truth of the matter.

Sometimes she thought that life was too difficult and much too cruel to
be worth the effort of living it.

That was why, now, standing in the kitchen on the night of the day that
she had learned of Amy's pregnancy, Ellen tossed down the last of the
drink that she had mixed only minutes ago, and she quickly poured
another. She had two crutches: liquor and religion. She could not


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have withstood the past twenty-five years without both of those
supports.

Initially, the first year after she left Conrad, religion alone was
sufficient to her needs. She had gotten a job as a waitress, had
become selfsupporting after a rocky start, and had spent most of her
spare time in church. She had found that prayer soothed her nerves as
well as her spirit, that confession was good for the soul, and that a
meager Communion wafer taken on the tongue during Mass was far more
nourishing than any six-course meal.

At the end of that first year on her own, more than two years after she
had run from home to join the carnival and to be with Conrad, she felt
fairly good about herself. She still suffered from bad dreams most
nights.

She was still wrestling with her conscience, trying to make up her mind
whether she had sinned terribly or had merely done God's work when she
had killed Victor. But at least, as a hard-working waitress, she had
gained a measure of self-respect and independence for the first time in
her life. Indeed, she had felt sufficiently self-confident to return
home for a visit, intending to patch up her differences with her
parents as best she could.

That was when she discovered they had died in her absence. Joseph
Giavenetto, her father, was felled by a massive stroke just one month
after

Ellen ran away from home.          Gina, her mother, died less than six months
later.

It happened that way sometimes--wife and husband taking leave of life
within a short time of each other, as if unable to tolerate the
separation.

Although Ellen had not been close to her parents, and although Gina's
excessive strictness and religiosity had created a great deal of
tension and bitterness between mother and daughter, Ellen had been
devastated by the news of their deaths. She was filled with a cold,
empty, unfinished feeling. She blamed herself for what had happened to
them. Running away as she had done, leaving nothing more than a terse,
unpleasant note for her mother, not even saying goodbye to her
father-with those actions she might have precipitated her father's
stroke.

Perhaps she was too hard on herself, but she wasn't able to shrug off
the yoke of guilt.

Thereafter, her religion was not able to provide her with sufficient
comfort, and she augmented the mercy of Jesus with the mercy of the
bottle. She drank too much--more this year than last, not so much this
year as next year. Only her family was aware of her habit. The
churchwomen with whom she worked in charitable causes four days each
week would be shocked to discover that the quiet, earnest, industrious,
devout Ellen Harper was a different person at night, in her own home,
after sunset, behind closed doors, the saint became a lush.

She despised herself for her sinfully excessive fondness for vodka.

But without booze she couldn't sleep, it blocked out the nightmares,
and it gave her a few hours of blessed relief from the worries and
fears that had been eating her alive for twenty-five years.



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She put the bottle of vodka and the quart of orange juice on the
kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Now, when her drink
ran low, she wouldn't have to get up to freshen it, she would only have
to bestir herself when her ice had melted.

For a while she sat in silence, drinking, but then, as she stared at
the chair opposite her own, she had a memory-flash of Amy sitting there
this morning, looking up, saying, "I've had some morning sickness, I
missed my period, I'm really pregnant, I know I am . . ." Ellen
remembered, far too vividly, how she had struck the girl, how she had
shaken her senseless, how she had cursed her.

If she closed her eyes she could see herself pulling Amy onto the
floor, pushing the girl's head down to the tiles, screaming like a
madwoman, praying at the top of her voice . . .

She shuddered.

My God, she thought miserably, suddenly pierced by a painfully sharp
insight, I'm like my mother! I'm exactly like Gina. I've cowed my
husband just as she cowed hers. I've been so strict with my children
and so preoccupied with my religion that I've built a wall between
myself and my family--a wall exactly like the one that my mother
constructed.

Ellen felt dizzy, but not merely from the vodka. The patterns of
history, the familiar circles drawn by repetitive events, startled and
dazed her.

She covered her face with her hands, shamed by the new light in which
she suddenly saw herself. Her hands were cold.

The kitchen clock sounded like a ticking bomb.

Just like Gina.

Ellen grabbed her drink and took a long swallow of it.                     The glass
chattered against her teeth.

Just like Gina.

She shook her head violently, as if she were determined to cast off
that unwelcome thought. She wasn't as stern and distant and forbidding
as her own mother had been. She wasn't. And even if she was, she
couldn't deal with that insight now. With Amy's pregnancy, Ellen
already had too much to worry about.

She could deal with only one thing at a time.                 Amy's problem had to
come first.

If some horrible thing was growing in the girl's womb, it had to be
gotten rid of as quickly as possible. Maybe then, after the abortion,
Ellen would be able to consider her life and decide what she thought of
the woman she had allowed herself to become, maybe then she would have
the time to reflect on what she had done to her family. But not now.

God, please, not now.

She tilted her glass and chugged the rest of her drink as if it were
only water. With an unsteady hand she poured a little more orange
juice and a lot more vodka.




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Most nights she wasn't really drunk until eleven or twelve o'clock, but
tonight, by nine-thirty, Ellen was thoroughly intoxicated. She felt
fuzzy, and her tongue was thick. She was floating dreamily. She had
attained the pleasant, mindless state of grace that she had desired so
strongly.

When she glanced at the kitchen clock and saw that it was nine-thirty,
she realized it was Joey's bedtime. She decided to go upstairs, make
sure he said his prayers, tuck him in, kiss him goodnight, and tell him
a bedtime story.

She hadn't told him any stories in a long, long time.                    He'd probably
like that.

He wasn't too old for bedtime stories, was he? He was still just a
baby. A little angel. He had such a sweet, angelic, baby face.

Sometimes she loved him so hard that she thought she'd explode. Like
now. She was brimming with love for little Joey. She wanted to kiss
his sweet face. She wanted to sit on the edge of the bed and tell him
a story about elves and princesses.

That would be good, so good, just to sit on the edge of the bed with
him smiling up at her.

Ellen finished her drink and got to her feet. She stood up too fast,
and the room spun around, and she grabbed the edge of the table in
order to keep her balance.

Crossing the living room, she bumped into an end table and knocked over
a lovely, hand-carved, wooden statue of Jesus, which she had bought a
long time ago, in her waitressing days. The statue fell onto the
carpet, and although it was only a foot high and not heavy, she fumbled
awkwardly with it, trying to retrieve it and set it back where it
belonged, her fingers felt like fat sausages and didn't seem to want to
bend the right way.

She wondered fleetingly if the bedtime story was a good idea after
all.

Maybe she wasn't up l to it. But then she thought of Joey's sweet face
and his cherubic smile, and she went upstairs. The steps were
treacherous, but she reached the second-floor hallway without
falling.

When she entered the boy's room, she found that he was already in
bed.

Only the tiny nightlight was burning, a single small bulb in the wall
plug, ghostly, moon-pale.

She stopped inside the doorway, listening. He usually snored softly
when he slept, but at the moment he was perfectly quiet. Maybe he
wasn't asleep yet.

Swaying with each step, she walked gingerly to the bed and looked down
at him.

She couldn't see much in the dim light.

Deciding that he must be asleep, wanting only to plant a kiss on his
head, Ellen leaned close-And a leering, luminous, inhuman face jumped
out of the darkness at her, screeching like an angry bird.


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She shrieked and staggered backwards.               She collided with the dresser,
hurting her hip.

In her mind she saw a kaleidoscopic tumble of dark, horrific images: a
bassinet shaken by the fury of its monstrous burden, enormous, green,
animal eyes gleaming with hatred, flared, twisted nostrils sniffing,
sniffing, a pale, speckled tongue, long and bony fingers reaching for
her in the flutter-flash of lightning, claws tearing at her . . .

The nightstand light came on, dispelling the awful memories.

Joey was sitting up in bed.           Mama?"     he said.

Ellen sagged against the dresser and drew deeply, thirstily of the air
that, for a few seconds of eternal duration, she had been unable to
draw into her lungs. The thing in the darkness had only been Joey. He
was wearing a Halloween mask that had been shaded with phosphorescent
paint.

"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded, pushing away from the
dresser, moving toward the bed.

He quickly pulled off the mask.            His eyes were wide.          "Mama, I thought
you were Amy."

"Give me that," she said, snatching the mask out of his hands.

"I put a rubber worm in Amy's cold cream, and I thought it was her
coming to get even with me," Joey said, urgently explaining himself.

"When are you going to outgrow this kind of stupid thing?"                      Ellen
demanded, her heart still beating rapidly.

"I didn't know it was you!           I didn't know!"

"This kind of prank is sick," she said angrily. Her pleasant vodka
haze had evaporated. Her dreamy laziness was gone, replaced by
nightmare tension. She was still drunk, but the quality of her high
had changed from bright to somber, from happy to grim. "Sick," she
said again, looking at the Halloween mask in her hand. "Sick and
twisted."

Joey cowered back against the headboard, gripping the covers with both
hands, as if he might throw them aside and leap out of bed and run for
all he was worth.

Still quivering from the shock of seeing that grinning, fanged,
luminous face leap out of the darkness, Ellen looked around at the
other weird items in the boy's room. Spooky posters hung on the walls:
Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and
another horror-movie creature that she couldn't identify. On the
dresser, the desk, and the bookshelves there were monster
models--three-dimensional plastic figures that Joey had glued together
from kits.

Paul permitted the boy to pursue this macabre hobby, and he insisted it
was a common interest among kids Joey's age. Ellen had never
strenuously objected.

Although the boy's fascination with horror and blood worried her, it
had seemed like a relatively minor matter, the sort of thing she always
conceded to Paul, so that he would feel comfortable about conceding the


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larger and far more important issues to her.

Now, infuriated by the scare that Joey had given her, upset by the
unwanted memories that the prank had resurrected for her, her judgment
still distorted by vodka, Ellen threw the mask into the wastebasket.

"It's time I put an end to this nonsense. It's time you stopped
playing around with this creepy junk and started behaving like a
normal, healthy boy." She plucked a couple of monster models from the
dresser and dropped them into the wastebasket. She swept up the
miniature ghouls and goblins from his desk and put them with the rest
of the trash. "In the morning, before you go to school, take down
those awful posters and get rid of them. Be careful not to chip the
plaster when you pull the staples out of the wall. I'll get some good,
no-nonsense prints to hang in here. You understand?"

He nodded.     Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, but he didn't make a
sound.

"And no more of these practical jokes of yours," Ellen said harshly.

"No more rubber spiders.          No more phony snakes.          No more rubber worms
in cold cream jars.

Do you hear me?"

He nodded again. He was rigid, sickly white. He appeared to be
overreacting to her admonitions. He didn't look like a boy who was
facing his stern mother, he looked more like a boy facing certain
death. He looked as if he were convinced that she was going to take
him by the throat and kill him.

The terror in Joey's face jolted Ellen.

I'm just like Gina.

No!   That was unfair.

She was only doing what must be done. The child needed to be
disciplined and given guidance. She was merely fulfilling her duty as
a parent.

Just like Gina.

She pushed that thought aside.

"Lie down," she said.

Joey obediently slid under the covers once more.

She went to the nightstand and put her hand on the lamp switch.

"Did you say your prayers?"           "Yeah," he said weakly.

"All of them?"

"Yeah."

~ Tomorrow night you'll say more prayers than usual."

, "Okay-" ' Y'll say them with you to make sure you don't miss a word
of them." "Okay, Mama She switched off the light.

In a small, uncertain voice, he said, "I didn't know it was you, Mama."


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 aGo to sleep."       "I thought it was Amy."

Suddenly she wanted to reach down and lift him from the bed and clasp
him to her bosom. She wanted to hug him tight and kiss him and tell
him everything was all right.

But as she began to lean down toward him, she remembered the Halloween
mask.

When she had seen that fearsome countenance, she had thought that the
demon in Joey had surfaced at last. She had been sure--just for a
second or two, but long enough to have her complaisance blasted to
bits--that the long-expected transformation had occurred. Now she was
afraid that she would lean down and hug him and encounter another
sneering troll's face--except that this time it would be no mask.

Maybe this time he would grab her and pull her close, the better to
tear out her stomach with his sharp and gleaming claws.

The torrent of love washed through her and out of her, leaving a barren
wasteland composed of uncertainty and fear. She was afraid of her own
child.

Seesaw.    Seesaw.

Abruptly she was aware, once more, of how drunk she was.

Rubberjointed.

Unsteady.     Dizzy and vulnerable.

Beyond the vague glow of the night-light, the darkness pulsed and
shifted and edged nearer, as if it were a living creature.

Ellen turned away from the bed and quickly left the room, weaving
through the shadows. She closed Joey's door behind her and stood for a
moment in the upstairs hallway. Her heart was slamming like a loose,
windblown shutter in a storm.

Am I mad? she asked herself. Am I just like my own mother--seeing the
work of the Devil in everyone, in everything, in places where it
doesn't really exist?

Am I worse than Gina?

No, she told herself adamantly.            I'm not crazy, and I'm not like
Gina.

I've got good reason. And at the moment . . . well .                       . . maybe I've
had too much to drink, and I'm not thinking straight.

Her mouth was dry and sour from the booze, but she wanted another
drink. She longed to recapture that feeling of floating, that bright,
pleasant mood she had enjoyed before Joey had scared her with his
Halloween mask.

She already felt the omens of a hangover: a faintly queasy stomach that
would gradually succumb to a growing, roiling nausea, a dull throbbing
in her temples that would become a splitting headache. What she
needed, before she felt any worse, was some hair of the dog that had
bit her. A whole lot of hair. Several glassfuls of hair from that
funny old dog, the dog that came in a clear bottle, the dog that was
distilled from potatoes. Wasn't vodka made from potatoes? Potato



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juice--that was what would make her feel right again.

Lubricated by some potato juice, she would be able to slip back into
that comfortable mood just as easily as slipping into a soft, fluffy
old robe.

She knew she was a sinner. Pouring down the booze like she did was
unquestionably sinful, and when she was sober she could see the
spiritual stain that alcohol had left on her.

God help me, she thought.          God help me because I just can't seem to
help myself.

- She went downstairs to get another drink.

Joey stayed in bed for ten minutes after his mother left the room.

Then, when he felt it was safe to move, he snapped on the lamp and got
up.

He went to the wastebasket by the dresser and stared down at the pile
of monster models. They overflowed the can, a tangle of snarling,
reaching plastic creatures. Dracula's head had been knocked off. A
couple of the others also appeared to be damaged.

I won't cry, Joey told himself firmly. I won't start bawling like a
baby. She would enjoy that. I'm not going to do anything she would
enjoy.

Tears continued to slide down his cheeks, but he didn't call that
crying.

Crying was when you wailed your head off and got a runny nose and
blubbered and got red in the face and just totally lost control of
yourself.

He turned away from the wastebasket and went to his desk, from which
Mama had removed all of the miniature monsters he had collected. The
only thing left was his bank. He picked that up and carried it to the
bed.

He saved his money in a one-gallon Mason jar. Most of it was in coins,
squeezed bit by bit from his small weekly allowance, which he earned by
keeping his room neat and by helping around the house. He also earned
quarters by running to the 7-Eleven for Mrs. Jannison, the old lady
who lived next door. There were several dollar bills in the jar, too,
most of those were birthday gifts from his Grandma Harper, his Uncle
John Harper, and his Aunt Emma Williams, who was Daddy's sister.

Joey emptied the contents of the jar onto the bed and counted it.

Twenty-nine dollars. And a nickel. He was old enough to know that it
wasn't a fortune, but it still seemed like a lot of money to him.

You could go a long way on twenty-nine dollars. He wasn't sure exactly
how far you could go, but he figured at least two hundred miles.

He was going to pack up and run away from home.                  He had to run away.

If he stayed around much longer, Mama was going to come into his room
one night, really drunk, really pissed, and she was going to kill
him.

Just like she had killed Victor.


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Whoever Victor was.

He thought about what it would be like, going off on his own to some
strange town, far away. It would be lonely, for one thing. He
wouldn't , miss Mama. He wouldn't even miss his father very much. But
he sure would miss Amy. When he thought of leaving Amy and never
seeing her again, he felt his throat tighten, and he thought he was
going to bawl.

Stop it!    Be tough!

He bit his tongue until the urge to cry subsided and he was sure he was
in control of himself.

Running away from home didn't mean he would never see Amy for the rest
of his life. She would be leaving home, too, in a couple of years,
going away to live on her own, and he could join up with her then.

They could live together in an apartment in New York City or someplace
great like that, and Amy would become a famous painter, and he would
finish growing up. If he showed up on Amy's doorstep a couple of years
from now, she wouldn't turn him in to Mama, not Amy.

He felt better already.

He put his money back in the big Mason jar and screwed the lid on
tight. He returned the jar to his desk.

He would have to get coin wrappers from the bank and package his
nickels, dimes, and quarters into rolls, then trade them in for folding
money. He couldn't run away from home with his pockets stuffed full of
loose, jangling change, that would be childish.

He slipped into bed again and turned off the light.

The only thing bad about running away was that he would miss the county
fair in July. He had been looking forward to it for nearly a year.

Mama didn't approve of going to the fair and mixing with those carnival
people. She said they were dirty and dangerous, a bunch of crooks. I
Joey didn't put much faith in what Mama said , about anyone. So far as
Mama was concerned, there was hardly a person in the whole world .

who was free of sin.        P Some years his father took him to the carnival
.

on Saturday, the last day of the fair. But other years there was too
much work at the law office, and Daddy couldn't get away.

This year Joey had intended to sneak off to the carnival on his own.

The fairgrounds were less than two miles away from the Harper house,
and he had to travel only two streets to get there. It was an easy
place to find, high up on the hill. Joey had planned to tell his
mother that he was going to the library for the day, which he
occasionally did, but then he was going to take his bicycle out to the
fairgrounds and have himself a real ball all morning and afternoon,
getting home just in time for supper, without Mama being any the
wiser.

He especially hated to miss the fair this year because it was going to
be bigger and better than ever. The midway would be run by a different


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outfit from the one that had always come to Royal City in the past.

This carnival was supposed to be humongous, the second largest in the
world, two or three times bigger than the rinky-dink carnival that
usually came to town.

There would be a lot more rides than there had been in other years, a
great many new things to see and do.

But he wouldn't see or do any of them if he was two hundred miles away,
starting a new life in a strange city.

For almost a full minute Joey lay in the darkness, feeling sorry for
himself-and then he sat bolt upright, electrified by a brilliant
idea.

He could leave home and still get to see the fair.                   He could do both.

It was simple.      Perfect.

He would run away with the carniual!

WEDNESDAY MORNING THE test results came back from the lab.                      Amy was
officially pregnant.

Wednesday afternoon she and Mama went to the bank and withdrew enough
money from Amy's savings account to pay cash for the abortion.

Saturday morning they told Amy's father that they were going shopping
for a few hours. Instead, they went to Dr. Spangler's clinic.

At the admissions desk Amy felt like a criminal. Neither Dr. Spangler
nor his associates, Dr. West and Dr. Lewis, nor any of his nurses was
Catholic, they performed abortions every week, month in and month out,
without attaching any moral judgment to the act. Nevertheless, after
so many years of intense religious instruction, Amy felt almost as if
she were about to become an accomplice to a murder, and she knew that
at least a residue of guilt would remain with her for a long, long
time, staining any happiness she I might be able to achieve.

E She still found it difficult to believe that Mama had agreed to let
her abort the fetus. She wondered about the fear in her mother's
eyes.

The operation was done on an outpatient basis, i and a nurse took Amy
to a room where she could undress and put her clothes in a locker.

Mama remained in the waiting room.

i In the prep room, after a nurse had taken a - blood sample, Dr.
Spangler came in to chat with s her for a moment. He tried to put her
at ease. He was a jovial, chubby man with a bald head and . bushy
gray sideburns.

' "You're not very far gone," he said. "This will be a simple
procedure. No serious chance of complications. Don't worry about it,
okay?

It'll be over before you realize it's begun."

- In the small operating room, Amy was given a mild anesthetic. She
began to drift out of her body as if she were a balloon rising into a
high, blue sky.



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In the distance, beyond a haze of light and a curtain of whispering
air, Amy heard a nurse talking softly. The woman said, "She's a very
pretty girl, isn't she?" aYes, very pretty," Dr. Spangler said, his
voice fading syllable by syllable, almost inaudible. "And a nice girl,
too. I've been her doctor since she was a little tot. She's always
been so polite, selfeffacing . . ."

Soaring up and away from them, Amy tried to tell the doctor that he was
wrong.

She wasn't a nice girl.          She was a very bad girl.           He should ask
Mama.

Mama would tell him the truth. Amy Harper was a bad girl, evil inside,
loose, wild, untrustworthy, just no damned good. She tried to tell Dr.
Spangler how worthless she was, but her lips and tongue wouldn't
respond to her urging. She couldn't make a sound--until she said,
"Uh," and opened her eyes in the recovery room.

She was on a wheeled cart with railed sides, flat on her back, staring
at an acoustic-tiled ceiling. For a moment she couldn't figure out
where she was.

Then she remembered everything, and she was amazed that the abortion
had been such a quick and easy procedure.

They kept her in the recovery room for an hour, just to be sure she
wasn't going to hemorrhage.

By three-thirty she was in the Pontiac with her mother, on the way
home.

During the first half of the short drive, neither of them spoke.

Mama's face looked like a stone carving.

Finally Amy said, "Mama, I know you'll want me to keep a curfew for a
couple of months, but I hope you'll let me work evenings down at The
Dive, if that's the shift Mr. Donnatelli gives me." "You can work
whenever you want to work," her mother said coldly.

"I'll come home straight from work."              "You don't have to," Mama said.

"I don't care what you do. I just don't care anymore. You won't
listen to me anyway. You won't behave yourself. You've loosened the
reins on that thing inside of you, and now there's no holding it
back.

There's not a thing I can do.            I wash my hands of you.           I wash my
hands."

"Mama, please.      Please.      Don't hate me."

"I don't hate you. I just feel numb, blank. I don't feel much of
anything for you right now." "Don't give up on me."

"There's only one road to Heaven," Mama said. But if you want to go to
Hell, you'll find a thousand roads that'll take you there. I can't
block all of them."

"I don't want to go to Hell," Amy said.

"It's your own choice," Mama said.             "From here on it's your own
doing.


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Do whatever you want. You'll never listen to me anyway, so I wash my
hands." As she spoke she pulled the car into the driveway of the house
on Maple Lane.

"I'm not coming in with you. I've got to do some grocery shopping. If
your father's back from the office, tell him the reason you look so
pale is because you ate a hamburger for lunch, while we were shopping
at the mall, and it didn't agree with you. Go to your room and stay
out of his way. The less he sees of you, the less likely he is to get
suspicious."

All right, Mama."

When Amy went in the house she found that her father hadn't returned
from the office yet. Joey was still playing at Tommy Culp's house.

She was alone.

She changed into pajamas and a bathrobe, then called Liz Duncan.

"It's over."

"Really?"     Liz asked.

"I just got home."        "You're all scraped out?"

"Do you have to put it so crudely?" Amy asked. That's what they do,"
Liz said blithely. "They scrape you out. How do you feel?"

"Scraped out," Amy admitted miserably.

"Sick in the tummy?"

"A little.     And I ache .       . . down there."

"You mean you've got a sore cunt?"             Liz asked.       "Do you have to talk
that way?"

"What way?"

"Gross."

"That's one of my most charming qualities--my complete lack of
inhibitions.

Listen, other than your tummy and your cunt, how are you feeling?"

"Very, very tired."

"That's all?"

"Yes.    It was easier than I thought it would be."

"Gee, I'm relieved.        I was worried about you, kid.             I was really,
really worried."

"Thanks, Liz."      "Are you grounded for the summer?"

"No. I thought there'd be a curfew for a while, but Mama says she
doesn't care what I do. She's washed her hands of me."

"She said that?"

"Yes."     aMy God, that's terrific!"


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"Is it?"    Amy wondered.

"Of course it is, you silly ass.             You make your own rules now.

You're free, kid!" Liz put on a phony Southern Negro dialect: Yo'
massah have done turned yo' loose, chile!"

Amy didn't laugh. She said, aRight now, all I care about is getting
some sleep. I was awake all last night and most of the night before.

And with this business today .            . . well, I'm dead on my feet."

"Sure," Liz said.       "I understand.        I won't keep you on the phone for an
hour.

Get some rest.      Call me tomorrow.         We'll make plans for the summer.

It's going to be a blast, kid. We'll make some memories and blow out
all the candles for our last summer together. I've already got a
couple of guys in mind for you."

UI don't think a guy is exactly what I need right now," Amy said.

"Oh, not in the next ten minutes," Liz agreed. "But after you've had a
couple of weeks to recover, you'll be ready to get back in the swing of
things."

"I don't think so, Liz."

"Sure you will.       You're not going to become a nun, for God's sake.

You need to get some of that old salami once in a while, kid. You need
it the same way I need it. We're two of a kind in that respect.

Neither of us can do without a guy for long."

"We'll see," Amy said.

"Only this time," Liz said, "you're going to do what I tell you.

You're going to get a prescription for the pill."

I really don't think I'll need it," Amy said.

"That's what you thought the last time, dope."

A few minutes later, in her room, Amy knelt at the side of her bed and
started to say her prayers. But after a minute or two she stopped
because, for the first time in her life, she had the feeling that God
wasn't listening. She wondered if He would ever listen to her again.

In bed she cried herself to sleep, and no one woke her for dinner or
for Mass the next morning. When she opened her eyes again, it was
eleven o'clock Sunday morning, and scattered, white clouds were racing
like great sailing ships across the sea-blue sky beyond her window.

She had slept eighteen hours straight through.

As far as she could remember, this was only the second time she had
missed Sunday Mass since she was a few months old. The other time had
been when she was nine and in the hospital, recovering from an
emergency appendectomy. She had been scheduled to be discharged on
Monday, and her mother had argued with the doctor about letting her out



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one day early so she could be taken to church, but the doctor had said
that church wasn't the best place for a child recuperating from
surgery.

She was relieved that Mama hadn't forced her to go to church this
morning.

Apparently Mama didn't think that her wicked daughter belonged in a
church anymore.

And maybe Mama was right.

The following day, Monday, May 26, two sign painters went to work on
the large billboard at the entrance to the county fairgrounds, just
outside the Royal City limits. By midafternoon they were finished.

COMING COMING COMING ** JUNE 30

THROUGH JULY 5

** THE ANNUAL ROYAL COUNTY FAIR *HARNESS RACING *ARTS & CRAFTS SHOW
*LIVESTOCK AUCTIONS *GAMES, THRILL RIDES MDWAY ATTRaCTION BY: A MONTH
AFTER the abortion, the last week of June, Amy was working at The Dive,
nine-to-five Monday through Friday, and noon-to-six on Saturday. The
place was jumping every minute with a tanned and energetic crowd of
teenagers.

At six o'clock Saturday evening, as Amy was getting ready to go home,
Liz Duncan came in, looking like a million bucks in tight red shorts
and a white T-shirt, no bra. "I've got a date with Richie tonight.

He's going to meet me here at six-thirty.                Want to wait with me so I
don't get lonely?"

"You wouldn't get lonely," Amy said. "If you sat down alone, every guy
in the place would be hanging on you in two minutes."

Liz looked speculatively at the kids in The Dive, then shook her
head.

"Nope.

Once I've dated a guy and then dropped him, he knows it's over for
good, he knows it isn't worth his time to pitch me for a rematch."

"So?"

"So most of the guys in here wouldn't bother me if I sat down alone
because I've already screwed most of them."

"Gross," Amy said.

"But almost true," Liz said.

"You're bad."

"That's why the boys like me. Listen, are you going to keep me company
till Richie gets here?" "Sure," Amy said.

She went to the fountain and drew down two Cokes, and she and Liz took
the first booth at the front of the room, where they had a view of Main
Street.

Liz's car was parked out front.            It was a yellow Toyota Celica.


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Her parents had given it to her as a surprise graduation gift.

"No matter how hard I try," Amy said, "I can't picture you and Richie
Atterbury as a couple."

"Why not? We were both unique in school," Liz said. "He was the class
genius with an IQ of oneeighty, and I was the class slut with a hundred
and eighty names on my scorecard."

"I don't know why you keep putting yourself down like that," Amy
said.

"You haven't had anywhere near a hundred and eighty guys, for God's
sake."

"I'm not putting myself down," Liz said. "Honey, I revel in it. I
love what I am. It's the only way to fly." aRichie was always so
shy."

"He's not so shy anymore," Liz said.              She winked.

Listen, it's been a ball teaching Richie what the : game is all
about.

He was so gangly and clumsy and naive! A real challenge. But he's
coming along. He's coming along real nice. He has a real taste for
corruption."

, "And you're corrupting him?"

: "ExactlY."

Isn't that a bit melodramatic?"

, "No. Because that's exactly what I'm doing.                   I'm corrupting Richie
Atterbury, boy genius."

, "Elizabeth Ann Duncan, sultry temptress, the b all-knowing wanton
woman of exotic Royal City," Amy said sarcastically.

:, Liz grinned. "That's me. You know, just three weeks ago, when I
first started going out with him, Richie had never smoked grass? Can
you O imagine? Now he's a regular pothead."

That's the only reason you're dating him?                Just so you can corrupt
him?"

"No," Liz said. "It's a hell of a lot of fun to open him up to new
things, new experiences. But even if he already knew his way around,
he'd be fun to be with. He's clever, witty. And he seems to know
something interesting about almost everything. I've never dated a
genius before. It's different." "Sounds like maybe this one will last
a little longer than the others," Amy said.

"No way," Liz said quickly.           "I figure another month, six weeks at the
outside.

Then bye-bye, Richie. No matter how clever he is, I'll be bored with
him by then. Besides, even if I wanted something permanent with
someone, which I don't want, but even if for some weird reason I did, I
wouldn't want anything permanent with anyone here in this jerkwater
town. I don't want anyone holding me back when I'm ready to split for
the west." "You're still planning on goingn "Hell, yes. I'll work in


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my father's office until the middle of December, build up a nest egg,
and then knock off a couple of weeks before Christmas.

After the holiday, I'll pack my clothes into my little yellow car, and
I'll be off like a shot to the land of sun and opportunity."
"California?"

Y've decided on Vegas," Liz said.

aLas Vegas?"      "That's the only Vegas I know."

"What will you do there?" "Sell it," Liz said, grinning again.

"Sell what?"

"Don't be dopey." "I'm not being dopey." "As dense as a post." "I
don't understand. What are you going to sell?" "My ass." "Huh?" "I'm
going to do some heavy hooking." "Hooking?"

"Jesus!n Liz said. "Listen, kid, don't you realize how much money a
high-priced call girl can make in Vegas? A six-figure income, that's
how much."

Amy stared at her in disbelief. "You're trying to make me believe that
you're going to Vegas to be a whore?" "I'm not trying to make you
believe anything," Liz said. "I'm merely telling you the facts, kid.

Besides, I'm not going to be an ordinary whore. Whore is a low-class
word. Whores are cheap. I'm going to be a personal escort, an
intimate companion to a new gentleman every evening. Intimate
companions are quite expensive, you know. And I'm going to be more
expensive than most of them."

"You aren't serious." "Of course I am. I've got a good personality, a
damned nice face, long legs, a cute little butt, almost no waist at
all, and these." She thrust her chest out, and her large, uptilted
breasts strained against the thin T-shirt. "If I can learn not to
spend every dime I make, and if I can find a few good investments, I'll
be worth at least a million by the time I'm twenty-five."

"You won't do it."

"Yep."     "You're putting me on."

: "Nope.    Listen, I'm a regular nympho.             I know that.       You know that.

Practically everyone knows that.             I can't keep my hands off the guys,
and I like variety.

So if I'm going to be screwing around every day of the week, I might as
well get paid for it." Amy stared at her searchingly, and Liz met her
eyes, and at last Amy said, "My God, you really mean it."

"Why not?"     aLiz, a prostitute's life isn't pleasant.                 It isn't fun and
games.

It's lonely and grim." "Who says?" "Well . . . everyone says."
"Everyone is full of shit." "If you go away and do something like this
...

Liz, it'll be such a .         . . such a tragedy.          That's what it'll be.

You'll be throwing your whole life away, ruining everything." "You
sound like your mother," Liz said scornfully.


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"I don't, either." "Oh, yes you do," Liz said.                  "You sound exactly like
her."

Amy frowned. "I do?"          "Smug, moralistic, self-righteous." "I'm just
worried about you."

"I know what I'm doing," Liz said. "Listen, when you're a high-priced
call girl, you party all the time. What's so lonely and grim about
that? It is fun and games. Especially in Vegas, where there's never a
dull minute."

Amy was stunned. She had never imagined that she would one day have a
friend who was a prostitute. For a while they sat in silence, sipping
their Cokes and listening to a Bob Seger number that was blasting out
of the jukebox with the force of a jackhammer.

When the music stopped, Liz said, "You know what would be great?"
"What?"

"If you came along with me to Vegas." "Me ?"                 "Sure.     Why not?"   aMy
God," Amy said, shocked by the idea.

"Listen, I know I'm a damned desirable little package," Liz said.

"But I'm not one bit sexier than you are.                You've got just what it
takes to be a huge success in Vegas."

Amy laughed with embarrassment.

"You really do," Liz insisted.

"Not me."

"They'd be standing in line for a chance to get in your pants.

Listen, kid, in that town you'd outdraw Liberace and Frank Sinatra
combined." "Oh, Liz, I couldn't do that sort of thing. Not in a
million years." "You did it with Jerry."

"Not for money."

Which is foolish."        "Anyway, that was different.            Jerry was my steady
boyfriend."

"What's so great about steady?" Liz demanded. "Did going steady mean
anything to Jerry? He dumped you the second he heard you were knocked
up.

He wasn't considerate or sympathetic or loyal or anything else a steady
is supposed to be. I guarantee you, none of the men you'd be escorting
in Vegas would treat you that shabbily." "With my luck," Amy said, "my
first client would turn out to be a homicidal maniac with a butcher
knife." "No, no, no," Liz said. "Your clients would all come with
seals of approval from hotel pit bosses and other casino executives.

They'd send you only the high rollers--doctors, lawyers, famous
entertainers, millionaire businessmen .

. .You'd only take on the best people." "This may come as a surprise
to you," Amy said, abut even a millionaire businessman can turn out to
be a homicidal maniac with a butcher knife. It's rare. I'll grant you
that. But it's not impossible." "sO you carry your own knife in your
purse," Liz said. "If he starts acting creepy, you make the first


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cut." "You have an answer for everything, don't you?"

"I'm just a girl from       little old Royal        City, Ohio," Liz said, abut I'm
not a hick." "Well, I       don't think I'll        be going to Vegas with you at
the end of the year,"       Amy said. "It's         going to be a long, long time
before I'm even ready       to go on a nice,        quiet, no-sex date. I've sworn
off men for a while."        "Bullshit," Liz        said.

"It's true."      "You haue been a stick-in-the-mud so far this summer,"
Liz said.

aBut that'll pass." "No. I mean it." "Last week you went to the
doctor I recommended," Liz said smugly.

"sO?" "sO you got a prescription for the pill. Would you get a
prescription for the pill if you really intended to be a wallflower?"
"You talked me into that," Amy said.

"For your own good." "I wish I hadn't gone to that doctor. I won't be
needing the pill or anything else until I'm out of college. I'm going
to sit back, with my knees together, and be virginal." aLike hell you
are," Liz said. "Two weeks from now, you'll be flat on your back,
pinned under one stud or another. Two weeks at most. I know it. I
know you backwards and forwards, up and down, inside and out. You know
how it is that I'm able to read you so clearly? It's because you're
exactly like me.

We're two of a kind. Peas in a pod. Oh, not on the surface,
necessarily. But deep down, deep in your heart where it counts, you're
exactly like me, honey.

That's why we'd be great together in Vegas.                 We'd have a ball."

Richie Atterbury walked up to the table. He was a tall, thin boy, not
handsome but not unattractive, either. He had thick, dark hair, and he
wore horn-rimmed glasses that made him look a little bit like Clark
Kent. "Hi, Liz. Hi, Amy."

Amy said, "Hello, Richie. That's a pretty shirt you're wearing." "You
really think so?" he asked.

aYes.   I like it a lot."

"Thanks," Richie said awkwardly. He looked at Liz with his big,
lovesick, puppy eyes, and he said, "Ready for the movie?"

Can't wait," Liz said. She stood up. To Amy, she said, "We're going
to the drive-in. That's really fitting, too." She grinned wickedly.

"Because Richie sure knows how to drive it in." Richie blushed.

Liz laughed and said, "The only way I'm going to see much of this movie
is if we set up a series of mirrors to reflect it onto the ceiling of
the car."

"Liz, you're terrible," Amy said.

"Do you think I'm terrible?" Liz asked Richie.

"I think you're terrific," Richie said, daring to put an arm around her
waist.

He still seemed somewhat bashful, even if Liz had made him more than
passingly familiar with sex and drugs.


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Liz looked at Amy. "See? He thinks I'm terrific, and he was the class
genius, so what do you know about it?" Amy smiled in spite of
herself.

"Listen," Liz said, "when you're ready to start living again, when
you're sick and tired of playing Sister Purity, give me a call. I'll
line someone up for you. We'll double-date." Amy watched Liz and
Richie as they walked outside and got into the yellow Celica. Liz
drove. She pulled away from the curb with a torturous squeal of tires
that made everyone in The Dive look toward the front windows.

After Amy left The Dive at twenty minutes till seven, she didn't go
straight home. She walked aimlessly for more than an hour, not really
window-shopping in the stores she passed, not really noticing the
houses she passed, not really enjoying the clean spring evening, just
walking and thinking about the future.

When she got home at eight o'clock, her father was in his workshop.

Her mother was sitting at the kit,chen table, leafing through a
magazine, listening to a radio call-in program, and sucking on vodka
and orange juice.

"If you didn't have dinner at work," Mama said, "there's some cold
roast beef in the refrigerator." "Thank you," Amy said, abut I'm not
hungry. I ate a big lunch." 1-15

: "Suit yourself," Mama said.            She turned up the volume on the radio.

Amy interpreted that as a sign of dismissal.                 She went upstairs.

She spent an hour with Joey, playing fivehundred rummy, his favorite
card game. The boy didn't seem himself. He hadn't been the old,
effervescent Joey since Mama had made him get rid of his monster models
and posters. Amy worked hard at making him laugh, and he did laugh,
but his good humor seemed like a facade to her. He was tense
underneath, and she hated to see him that way, but she couldn't figure
out how to reach him and cheer him up.

Later, in her room, she stood nude again in front of the full-length
mirror.

She appraised her body with a critical eye, trying to decide if she
did, indeed, measure up to Liz. Her legs were long and quite well
shaped. Her thighs were taut, the muscle tone in her whole body was
very good. Her bottom was round and sort of perky, very firm. Her
belly was not just flat but slightly concave. Her breasts weren't as
large as Liz's, but they weren't small by any definition, and they were
extremely well shaped, up-thrust, with large, dark nipples.

It was definitely a body well designed for sex, for easily attracting
and satisfying a man. The body of a courtesan? The body of, as Liz
put it, an intimate companion? The legs and hips and buttocks and
breasts of a whore? Was that what she had been born for? To sell
herself? Was a future as a prostitute unavoidable? Was it some how
her destiny to spend thousands of sweaty nights clutching total
strangers in hotel rooms?

Liz said she saw corruption in Amy's eyes.                Mama said the same thing.

To Mama, that corruption was a monstrous, evil thing that must be
suppressed at all costs, but to Liz, it was nothing to be afraid of,


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something to be embraced.

There couldn't be two people more different than Liz and Mama, yet they
agreed on what was to be seen in Amy's eyes.

Now Amy stared at her reflection in the mirror, peered into the windows
of her soul, but although she looked very hard, she wasn't able to see
anything more than the characterless surfaces of two dark and rather
pretty eyes, she couldn't see either the rot of Hell or the grace of
Heaven.

She was lonely, frustrated, and terribly, terribly confused. She
wanted to understand herself. More than anything she wanted to find
the right role for herself in the world, so that for the first time in
her life she would not feel tense and hopelessly out of place.

If her hope of going to college and her dream of becoming an artist
were unrealistic, then she didn't want to spend years struggling for
what she was not meant to have. Her life had been too much of a
struggle already.

She touched her breasts, and her nipples sprang up at once, stiff,
proud, as large as the tips of her little fingers. Yes, this was a bad
thing, a sinful thing, just as Mama said, yet it felt so good, so
sweet.

If she could be sure that God would listen to her, she would get down
on her knees and ask Him for a sign, an irrefutably holy sign that
would tell her, once and for all, whether she was a good person or a
bad person.

But she didn't think God would listen to her after what she'd done to
the baby.

Mama said she was bad, that Something lurked inside of her, that she
had let go of the reins that had been holding that Something back.

Mama said she had the potential to be evil.                 And a mother should know
that kind of thing about a daughter.

Shouldn't she?

Shouldn't she?

Before he went to bed, Joey counted the money in his bank again.

During the past month he had added two dollars and ninety-five cents to
the contents of the jar, and now he had exactly thirty-two dollars.

He wondered if he would have to bribe someone at the carnival to let
him run away with them when they left town. He figured he would need
twenty dollars as a minimum bankroll, which would keep him in grub
until he started earning money as a carny, sweeping up after the
elephants and doing whatever else a ten-year-old boy could find to do
on a midway. So that left only twelve bucks that he could spare for a
bribe.

Would that be enough?

He decided to ask his father for two dollars to go to the Sunday
matinee at the Rialto theater. But he wouldn't actually spend the
money on the movies. He would go over to Tommy Culp's house and play
tomorrow afternoon, pretend that he'd seen the movies when his father


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asked about them, and add the two bucks to his escape fund.

He returned the bank to the desk.

When he said his prayers before going to bed, he asked God to please
keep Mama from getting pissed and coming into his room again.

The next day, Sunday, Amy called Liz.

"Hello," Liz said.

"This is Sister Purity," Amy said.

"Oh, hello, Sister." "I've decided to leave the nunnery."
"Hallelujah!"

"It's cold and drafty here in the nunnery." "Not to mention boring,"
Liz said.

'7What have you got for me that I won't find boring" "How about Buzz
Klemmet?"

"I don't know him," Amy said.

"He's eighteen, soon nineteen I think. He was in the class ahead of
ours--" "Ah, an older man!" "Bbut he dropped out of school in eleventh
grade. He works at the Arco station on the corner of Main and
Broadway." "You sure know how to pick them," Amy said sarcastically.

"He may not sound like much," Liz said, abut wait till you see him.

He's a hunk."

"A hunk of what?" "Pretty muscle." "Can he speak?" "Just well enough."
"Can he tie his own shoelaces?" "I'm not sure," Liz said. "But he
usually wears loafers, so you won't have to worry about that." "I hope
you know what you're doing." "Trust me," Liz said. "You'll love
him.

What night should I set it up for?"              "Doesn't matter," Amy said.            "I
work days."

"Tomorrow night?" "Fine." "We'll double," Liz said. "Me and Richie,
you and Buzz." "Where do you want to go?" "How about my place? We'll
play some records, watch a movie on my folks' videocassette machine,
roll a few joints. I got some bitchin' grass that'll mellow us out
real fast."

'7What about your parents?"           Amy asked.

"They're leaving on a two-week vacation today.                  New Orleans.        I'll have
the house all to myself."

"They trust you alone there for two weeks?" "They trust me not to burn
the place to the ground," Liz said.

"And that's really all they care about. Listen, kid, I'm glad you
finally came to your senses. I was afraid the summer was going to be a
bummer. We'll sure raise hell now that you're back in the swing of
things." "I'm not sure I want to get back in the swing of things, at
least not all the way, if you know what I mean. I want to have some
fun. I want to date. But I don't think I'm going to screw around
anymore. Not until college is behind me." "Sure, sure," Liz said.



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"I mean it." "Take it at your own pace, honey. Anyway, we'll sure have
some fun with my old man and old lady out of town." "And the county
fair is next week," Amy said.

"Hey, yeah! I really get off on smoking some good dope and then
hopping on those thrill rides." "I suspect you would." "And did you
ever get high and then go through the funhouse, with all those fake
monsters jumping out at you?"

"Never did," Amy said.

"It's hilarious."

"I'll look forward to it," Amy said.

JANET MIDDLEMEIR WAS a safety engineer for the I county. Her job was
to make certain that all public buildings--courthouses, firehouses,
libraries, schools, sheriff's substations, government-subsidized sports
arenas and stadiums, and so forth-- were at all times clean, well
lighted, and safe for both visitors and workers. She was responsible
for the inspection of the structural integrity of those buildings as
well as for the condition and suitability of all machinery and all
major nonmechanical equipment within their walls. Janet was young,
only a few years out of college, only two years on the job, and she was
still as dedicated to her work as she had been when she had first
started, her duties seemed almost holy to her, and the words "public
trustn still held some meaning for her, even if they didn't mean much
to some of the people with whom she worked in the county and state
bureaucracies. She had not yet been a public employee long enough to
be tainted by the inevitable corrupting influences that were attendant
to any government program. She cred.

On Monday, June 23, when the carnival came to Rockville, Maryland,
Janet Middlemeir presented herself at the office-trailer that provided
working space for Mr. Frederick Frederickson, the silver-haired owner
and operator of Big American Midway Shows. With characteristic
directness and crispness, Janet stated her intention of going through
the lot from one end to the other, until she was fully satisfied that
the thrill rides and the other large attractions were safely erected.

She would not approve the opening of the carnival if she felt that it
represented a threat to the well-being of the citizens of her county.

She was pushing her authority a little bit, perhaps even exceeding
it.

She wasn't entirely sure that the carnival's equipment came under her
jurisdiction, even though it stood on the county-owned fairgrounds.

The law was vague on that point. No one from the county Office of
Public Safety had ever inspected the carnival before, but Janet felt
she couldn't shirk that responsibility. Just a few weeks ago a young
woman had died when a carnival ride had collapsed in Virginia, and
although that tragic accident hadn't happened on the lot of Big
American Midway Shows, Janet was determined to put Big American under a
microscope before the fairground gates swung open.

When she stated her intentions to Mr. Frederickson, she was afraid
that he would think she was trying to shake him down, and she didn't
know quite how she would handle him if he tried to bribe her. She knew
that carnivals employed a man whose job it was to bribe public
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of the show and patched things up with the police and certain other key
government employees, lining their pockets with folding money and books
of free tickets for their friends and families. If a patch didn't do
his job, the police usually raided the midway, closing down all the
games, even if it was a straight carnival that didn't dupe the marks
out of their money, unpaid and angry about it, the police could shutter
even the cleanest girly shows and legally declare the thrill rides
hazardous, quickly and effectively bringing the carnival to its
knees.

She didn't want the people at Big American to think she was after a
fast buck.

Fortunately, Mr. Frederickson was a well-educated, well-spoken,
courtly gentleman, not at all what she had expected, and he both
recognized and admired her sincerity. No bribe was offered. He
assured her that his people were as concerned about the health and
safety of their customers as she was, and he gave her permission to
poke around in every corner of the midway for as long as she liked.

Frederickson's superintendent of transportation, Max Freed, issued her
a badge with the letters VIP on it, so that all the carnies would
cooperate with her.

For most of the morning and afternoon, wearing a hard hat, carrying a
big flashlight and a notebook, Janet prowled the grounds, watching the
midway rise like a phoenix, inspecting bolts and rivets and
spring-locked joints, crawling into dark, tight places when that was
necessary, overlooking nothing. She discovered that Frederick
Frederickson had been telling the truth, Big American was conscientious
about maintenance and more than conscientious, downright fussy, about
the erection of rides and sideshows.

At a quarter past three she came to the funhouse, which appeared to be
ready for business a full hour and fifteen minutes before the gates
were scheduled to open. The area around the attraction was deserted,
quiet. She wanted someone to give her a guided tour of the funhouse,
but she couldn't locate anyone associated with it, and for a moment she
considered skipping the place.

She hadn't found even one major safety problem anywhere else on the
midway, and it wasn't likely that she would uncover a dangerous
construction-code violation here. She'd probably just be wasting her
time.

Nevertheless .      ..

She had a strong sense of duty.

She walked up the boarding ramp, past the ticket booth, and stepped
down into the sunken channel in which the gondolas would move when the
ride was started up. From the boarding gate the channel led to a set
of large plywood doors that were painted to resemble the massive,
timbered, iron-hinged doors of a forbidding castle. When the ride was
in service, the doors would swing back to admit each oncoming car, then
fall shut behind it.

At the moment, as she approached the entrance, one door was propped
open. She i peered inside.

The interior of the funhouse wasn't as dark now as it would be when the
ride was in operation. A string of work lights ran the length of the



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track and disappeared around a bend fifty feet away, when the place was
open for business, those lights would be extinguished. Yet even with
that chain of softly glowing bulbs, the funhouse was gloomy.

- Janet leaned through the doorway.              "Hello?"

No one answered.

. "Is anyone there?"        she asked.

Silence.

She switched on her flashlight, hesitated only a second, and stepped
inside.

The funhouse smelled damp and oily.

She knelt and inspected the pins that joined two sections of track.

They were securely fastened.

She got up and moved deeper into the building.

On both sides of the track, slightly elevated from it, life-sized
mechanical figures stood in secret niches in the walls: an ugly,
leering pirate with a sword in his hand, a werewolf, claws coated with
silvery, day-glow paint that would make them look like glinting blades
in the dark, phony but realistic blood on his wolfish snout and on his
two-inch-long fangs, a grinning, blood-drenched ax-murderer standing
over the hideously wounded corpse of one of his victims, and many
others, some more gruesome than those first few. In this light Janet
could see that they were only clever, lifelike mannequins, but she felt
uneasy around them.

Although none of them was animated, as all of them would be when the
funhouse was in operation, they looked as if they were about to pounce
on her, to her chagrin, the damned things spooked her. But her dislike
of them didn't prevent her from inspecting the anchor bolts on a few of
them to make sure they wouldn't topple down into a passing gondola and
injure a rider.

Walking along the passageway, looking up at the monsters, Janet
wondered why people insisted on referring to a place like this as a
funhouse.

She turned the bend at the end of the first length of track, moved
farther into the funhouse, turned another corner, then another,
marveling at the richness of invention that had been employed in the
design of the place. It was huge, as large as a medium-sized
warehouse, and it was crammed full of genuinely frightening things. It
wasn't the sort of amusement that appealed to her, but she had to
admire the work, the craftsmanship, and the creativity that had gone
into it.

She was in the center of the enormous structure, standing on the track,
looking up at a man-sized spider hanging overhead, when someone put a
hand on her shoulder. She gasped, jumped, jerked away from the
unexpected contact, turned, I and would have screamed if her throat
hadn't frozen. i A man was standing on the tracks behind her. He was
extremely tall, at least six and a half feet, broad-shouldered,
barrel-chested, and he was wearing a Frankenstein outfit: a black suit,
a black turtleneck, monster gloves, and a rubber mask that covered his
entire head. "Scared?" he asked. His voice was exceptionally deep


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and hoarse. She swallowed hard, finally breathed, and said, aYes, my
God! You scared me half to death." , "My job," he said. "What?"

"Scare the marks.       My job."      "Oh.    You work here at the funhouse?"

"My job," he said. n She decided that he must be dull-witted. His
simple, halting declarations resembled the speech patterns of a
severely retarded child. Trying to be friendly, hoping to keep him
friendly, she said, My name's Janet. What's yours?" "Huh?" "What's
your name?"

"Gunther." "That's a nice name." "Don't like." "You don't like your
name?" "NO "What would you like to be called?" "victor." "That's a
nice name, too." "Victor his favorite." "Whose favorite?" "His," She
realized that she was in a bad spot--in a strange and poorly lighted
place, out of sight and perhaps out of earshot of anyone who might be
inclined to help her, alone except for a badly retarded man big enough
to break her in half the way she might break a breadstick.

He took a step toward her.

She backed up.

He stopped.

She stopped, too, shaking, aware that she couldn't outrun him.

His legs were longer than hers, and he was probably more familiar with
the terrain than she was.

He made an odd sound behind the mask, it was like a dog sniffing busily
at a scent.

"I'm a government official," she said slowly, hoping he would
understand. "A very important government official."

Gunther said nothing.

"Very important," Janet said nervously. She tapped the VIP badge that
Max Freed had given her. "Mr. Frederickson told me I could go
anywhere I wanted on the midway. Do you know who he is? Do you know
Mr. Frederickson?"

Gunther didn't reply. He just stood there, big as a truck, looking
down at her, his face hidden behind that mask, his arms dangling limply
at his sides.

"Mr. Frederickson owns this carnival," she said patiently.                      "You must
know him.

He's probably .       ..

your boss.     He told me I could go wherever I anted."

Finally Gunther spoke again.           "Smell woman."

What?"

Smell woman.      Smell good.      Pretty."      "Oh, no," she said, starting to
sweat.

want pretty."

' "No, no," she said.         "No, Gunther.       That wouldn't be right.           That


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would only get you in trouble."

He was sniffing again. The mask seemed to interfere with the scent he
was trying to catch, and he reached up and pulled the Frankenstein
monster face off, revealing his own face.

When Janet saw what had been hidden by the mask, she stumbled backwards
on the track and screamed.

Before anyone could possibly have heard her cry, Gunther sprang at her
and cut the scream short with one blow of his big hand.

She fell.

He dropped on top of her.

Fifteen minutes before the fairground gates opened to the public,
Conrad made a final inspection tour of the funhouse. He walked the
length of the track to be sure there were no obstructions on it, no
forgotten tools or misplaced pieces of lumber that might derail one of
the gondolas.

In the Hall of the Giant Spiders he found the dead woman. She was on
the tracks, below one of the big, phony tarantulas. She was sprawled
on , top of her bloody clothes--naked, bruised, slashed. Her head had
been torn off, it rested, face up, a yard away from her body.

At first he thought Gunther had killed a carnival woman. That was
unquestionably the worst thing that could happen. The bodies of
outsiders could be disposed of in such a fashion as to direct the
police away from everyone connected with Big American Midway Shows.

But if one of the carnival's own was found raped and mutilated, the
police would be summoned onto the lot, and Gunther would interest them
sooner or later.

The carnies accepted the boy now, as they accepted all freaks, because
they didn't have any knowledge of his uncontrollable need to rape,
kill, and taste blood. He hadn't always been this violent. The
carnies knew he was different, but they didn't realize how dangerously
different he had become during the past three years, when he had
belatedly acquired a sex drive. No one ever paid much attention to
Gunther, he was almost a shadow in their midst, a marginally perceived
presence. But if a carny woman was killed, someone would take a much
closer look at Gunther than ever before, and there would be no way to
hide the truth.

After an initial rush of panic, Conrad saw that the dead woman was not
from the carnival. He had never seen her face before. There was still
a chance that he could save Gunther and himself.

Aware that he didn't have much time to conceal the evidence, Conrad
stepped around the bloody remains and hurried toward the end of the
Hall of the Giant Spiders. Just before he reached the next turn in the
tracks, he climbed out of the gondola channel and stepped into a
tableau featuring t vo animated figures: a man and a man-sized spider
locked in mortal combat, unmoving now that there were no marks to
witness their struggle. The battling man and tarantula were posed in
front of a jumbled pile of papier-mache boulders. Conrad went around
behind the false rocks and knelt down.

The glow from the string of work lights above the tracks did not reach
back here. He put a hand out in the darkness in front of him and felt


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the rough board floor. After a few seconds he located the ringbolt for
which he had been searching. He pulled on the ring, lifting a
trapdoor, one of six that were scattered around the funhouse for
maintenance purposes.

He slid on his belly, backwards through the trap, feeling with his feet
for the rungs of a slanted ladder that he knew was there. He found the
ladder and descended into pitch blackness. Just after his head was
below the funhouse floor, his feet touched the plank flooring of the
bottom level, and he pushed away from the ladder and stood up
straight.

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.

l 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


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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." i 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?"

UOf 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. I As soon as the albino was out of sight, Conrad dragged
the tarp behind the papier-mache 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.



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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,


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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?

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 Erron station, Conrad
managed to find the pleasant apartment complex in which the woman
lived.

There were a number of long, two- and threestory, colonial-style
buildings angled through and around the park-like 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


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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 il 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, dnder the stark light of the sodium-vapor lamps, there was


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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 t o 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.

He left Janet Middlemeir's car keys on the kitchen counter                     and picked
up the folded tarp. As he stepped out of the apartment he                      wiped the
doorknobs with his handkerchief. He didn't have an arrest                      record, his
fingerprints weren't on file anywhere, but nevertheless he                     was
cautious.

He walked away from the apartment complex. The fairgrounds lay nine
miles to the west, but he wasn't going to cover the entire distance on
foot. He intended to call a taxi to take him back to the carnival, but
he didn't want to risk summoning a ride from anywhere near the
Middlemeir apartment, the cabdriver would keep a record of the trip and
might even remember his passenger's face. A mile from the woman's
place, he disposed of the tarp in a big trash bin behind another
apartment building. After walking another mile, he came to a Holiday
Inn. He stopped in the hotel bar, had two double Scotches, and then
took a cab to the fairgrounds.

In the taxi he thought back over what he had done from the moment he
had found the corpse on the gondola tracks, and as far as he could see,
he hadn't made any serious mistakes. The coverup probably would
work.

Gunther would remain free--at least a while longer.

Conrad couldn't let them take Gunther from him. Gunther was his son,
his very special child, his own blood. But more than that, Gunther was
a gift from Hell, he was Conrad's instrument of revenge. When Conrad
finally found Ellen's children, he would kidnap them, take them to an
isolated place where their screams couldn't be heard, and turn them
over to Gunther. He would encourage Gunther to play with them in
cat-andmouse fashion. He would urge Gunther to torture them for
several days, use them sexually again and again, no matter if they were
girls or boys, and then, only then, tear them apart.

Sitting in the darkness in the back of the taxi, Conrad smiled.

He seldom smiled these days.           He hadn't laughed in a long, long time.

He wasn't amused by those things that amused other people, only death,
destruction, cruelty, and damnation--the dark handiwork of the god of
evil, whom he worshipped--could bring a smile to his lips. Ever since


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he was twelve years old, he had been unable to obtain joy or
satisfaction from innocent, wholesome pleasures.

Not since that night.

Christmas Eve.

Forty years ago .       ..

The Straker family always decorated their house from top to bottom for
the Christmas season. They had a tree as tall as the ceiling would
allow. Every room was festooned with evergreen wreaths, nut wreaths,
candles, Nativity scenes, tinsel, Christmas cards received from friends
and relatives, and much more.

The year that Conrad turned twelve, his mother added a new piece to the
family's enormous collection of holiday decorations. It was an
all-glass oil lantern, the flame was reflected and refracted within the
angled walls of the lamp, so that there were a hundred images of fire
instead of just one, and the eye was amazed and dazzled.

Young Conrad was fascinated by the lantern but wasn't permitted to
touch it because he might burn himself. He knew he could handle the
lantern safely, but he couldn't convince his mother of that. So when
everyone else was asleep, he crept downstairs, struck a match, lit the
lantern--and accidentally knocked it over. Burning oil spilled across
the living room floor. At first he was sure he could put the fire out
by beating it with a sofa cushion, but just a minute later, when he
realized his folly, it was too late.

He was the only one to escape unscathed.                His mother died in the
blaze.

His three sisters died. His two brothers died. Papa didn't die, but
he was scarred for life--his chest, his left arm, his neck, the left
side of his face.

The loss of his family left Papa with mental and emotional scars every
bit as horrendous as his physical injuries. He wasn't able to accept
the idea that God, in whom Papa devoutly believed, would let such a
tragic accident happen on Christmas Eve, of all nights. He refused to
believe it had been accidental.

He made up his mind that Conrad was evil and had set the fire on
purpose.

From that day until Conrad finally ran away several years later, his
life was hell. Papa constantly badgered and accused him. He was not
allowed to forget what he had done. Papa reminded him of it a hundred
times a day.

Conrad breathed guilt and wallowed in self-hatred.

He had never been able to run away from his shame. It came back to him
every night, in his dreams, even now that he was fifty-two years old.

His nightmares were full of fire and screams and the scarred, twisted
face-of his father.

When Ellen    became pregnant, Conrad had been certain that, at last, God
was giving    him a chance to redeem himself. By raising a family, by
giving his    own children a wonderful life filled with love ! and
happiness,    perhaps he would be able to atone for the death of his


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mother, his sisters, and his brothers. Month by month, as Ellen became
heavier with child, Conrad became increasingly sure that the baby was
the beginning of his salvation.

. Then Victor was born. Initially, for just a few hours, Conrad
thought that God was heaping more punishment on him. Rather than give
him a chance to atone for his sins, God seemed to be rubbing his face
in them, telling him in no uncertain terms that he would never know
grace and spiritual comfort.

After the first bitter shock had passed, Conrad began to see his mutant
son in a different light. Victor hadn't come from Heaven. He had come
from Hell. The baby was not a punishment from God, it was a great
blessing from Satan. God had turned His back on Conrad Straker, but
Satan had sent him a baby as a gesture of welcome.

That might have seemed like tortuous reasoning to a normal man, but to
Conrad, desperate to find release from his guilt and shame, it made
perfect sense. If the gates of Heaven were forever closed to him, he
might as well face the gates of Hell with eagerness and accept his
destiny without remorse. He longed to belong somewhere, anywhere, even
in Hell. If the god of light and beauty would not give him absolution,
then he would obtain it from the god of darkness and evil.

He read dozens of books about satanic religions, and he quickly
discovered that Hell was not the place of brimstone and suffering that
Christians said it was.

Hell was a place, said the satanists, where sinners were rewarded for
their sins, it was, in every respect, the place of their dreams. Best
of all, in Hell there was no such thing as guilt. In Hell there was no
shame.

As soon as he accepted Satan as his savior, Conrad knew that he had
made the right decision. The nightly dreams of fire and pain did not
stop, however, he found a greater measure of peace and more contentment
in his daily life than he had known since before that fateful Christmas
Eve, and for the first time in memory, his life had meaning. He was on
earth to do the devil's work, and if the devil could offer him
self-respect, he was prepared to labor long and hard for the cause of
the Antichrist.

When Ellen killed Victor, Conrad knew she was doing God's work, and he
was furious. He almost killed her. But he realized that he might be
imprisoned or executed for murdering her, and that would keep him from
fulfilling the role that Satan had written for him. It occurred to him
that if he got married again, Satan might send him another sign,
another demonic child who would grow up to be the scourge of the
earth.

Conrad married Zena, and in time Zena bore him Gunther. She was the
devil's Mary, but she didn't realize it. Conrad never told her the
truth.

Conrad saw himself as Joseph to the Antichrist, father and protector.

Zena thought the child was just a freak, and although she didn't feel
comfortable with it, she accepted it with the equanimity with which
carnies always accepted freaks.

But Gunther wasn't merely a freak.

He was more than that.         Much more.


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He was holy.

He was the coming.        The dark coming.

As the taxicab sped toward the fairgrounds, Conrad looked out at the
quiet, suburban houses and wondered if even one person out there
realized they were living in the last days of God's world. He wondered
if even one of them sensed that Satan's child was on earth and had
recently reached his brutal maturity.

Gunther was just beginning his reign of terror.                  A thousand years of
darkness would descend.

Oh, yes, Gunther was much more than just a freak.

If he were    merely a freak, that would mean that Conrad was wrong in
everything    that he had done during the past twenty-five years. It
would mean    more than that, it would mean that Conrad was not just wrong
but stark,    raving mad.

So Gunther was more than a freak.             Gunther was that legendary dark
beast slouching toward Bethlehem.

Gunther was the destruction of the world.

Gunther was the herald of a new Dark Age.

Gunther was the Antichrist.

He had to be.      For Conrad's sake, he had to be.

ll FOR JoEY, THE week prior to the county fair crept by like a snail.

He was eager to become a carny and leave Royal City behind forever, but
it seemed to him that the time for his escape would come only after his
mother had murdered him in his bed.

There wasn't anyone around to help make the time pass more quickly. He
avoided Mama, of course. Daddy was, as always, preoccupied with his
law practice and his railroad models. Tommy Culp, Joey's best friend
from school, was away on vacation with his family.

Even Amy was hardly ever around these days. She worked at The Dive
every day but Sunday. And during the past week she had been out every
night, dating some guy named Buzz. Joey didn't know what Buzz's last
name was. Maybe it was Saw.

Joey hadn't intended to go to the fairgrounds until Saturday, the last
day, so that no one would figure out where he had gone until the
carnival was far, far away in another state. But by the time Monday,
June 30, rolled around, he was so keyed up that he couldn't keep his
resolve. He told his mother he was going to the library, but he got on
his bicycle and pedaled two miles to the county fairgrounds. He still
wasn't going to run away from home until Saturday. But Monday was the
day that the carnival set up, and he figured he ought to learn how that
was done if he was ever going to be a carny himself.

For two hours he wandered around the midway, keeping out from underfoot
but getting a good look at everything, fascinated by the speed with
which the Ferris wheel and the other rides took shape. A couple of
carnies, big men with lots of muscles and lots of funny tattoos, kidded
him, and he joked right back at them, and everyone he met seemed to be


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just swell.

By the time he reached the site on which the funhouse was being
erected, they were hoisting a giant clown's face to the top of the
structure.

One of the workers was a man in a Frankenstein mask, and that made Joey
giggle. One of the others was an albino, he glanced at Joey, pinning
him with colorless, rainwater eyes as cold as winter windows.

Those eyes were the first things in the carnival that Joey didn't
like.

They seemed to look straight through him, and he half-remembered an old
story about a woman whose eyes turned men to stone.

He shivered, turned away from the albino, and walked toward a place in
the middle of the midway, where they were putting up the Octopus, one
of his favorite rides. He had taken only a few steps when someone
called to him.

"Hey, there!"

He kept walking, even though he knew it was himself the man was calling
to.

"Hey, son!     Wait a minute."

Sighing, expecting to be thrown off the midway, Joey looked back and
saw a man jumping down from the front platform of the funhouse. The
stranger was tall and lean, maybe ten years older than Joey's father.

He had coal-black hair, except at the temples, where it was pure
white.

His eyes were so blue that they reminded Joey of the gas flames on the
kitchen stove at home.

As the man approached he said, "You aren't with the carnival, are you,
son?"

"No," Joey admitted glumly.           "But I'm not getting in anyone's way.

I'm really not.       Someday .      . . maybe .      . . I'd like to work in the
carnival.

I just want to see how things are done. If you'll let me stay and
watch for a while--" "Whoa, whoa," the stranger said. He stopped in
front of the boy and stooped down. "You think I'm going to throw you
out?"

"Aren't you?"

"My heavens, no!"

"Oh," Joey said.

"I could tell you weren't just a gawker," the man said. "I could see
you were a young man with a genuine interest in the carnival way of
life."

"You could?"

"Oh, yes.     It just shines through," the stranger said.


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"Do you think I could be .           . . a carny someday?"          Joey asked.

You? Oh, sure. You've got the stuff," the stranger said. "You could
be a carny or just about anything you wanted. That's why I called out
to you. I could see the right stuff shining in you. I sure could.

Even from up there on the platform."              Well .     . . gee," Joey said,
embarrassed.

"Here," the stranger said. "Let me give you these." He reached into a
pocket and withdrew two rectangles of thin, pink cardboard.

"What are those?"       Joey asked.

"Two free passes to the fairgrounds."               "You're kidding."

"Do I look like I'm kidding?"            Why give them to me?"

"I told you," the stranger said. "You have the right stuff. As the
carnies say, you're with it and for it. Whenever I see someone who's
with it and for it, someone who's a carny at heart, I always give them
a couple of free passes. Come any night and bring a friend. Or maybe
your brother.

Do you have a brother?"

No," Joey said.

"A sister?"     "Yeah."

"What's her name?"

"Amy."    "What's your name?"

"Joey."

"Joey what?"

"Joey Alan Harper."

"My name's Conrad. I'll have to sign the back of the passes." He
produced a ballpoint pen from another pocket and signed his two names
with a flourish that Joey admired. Then he handed over the free
passes.

"Thanks a lot," Joey said, beaming.              "This is terrific!"

"Enjoy yourself," the stranger said, grinning. He had very white
teeth. "Maybe someday you will be a carny, and you'll hand out free
passes to people who are obviously with it and for it."

"Uh .    . . how old do you have to be?"             Joey asked.

"To be a carny?"

"Yeah."

"Any age, just about."

"Could a kid join up if he was just ten?"

"He could easy enough, if he was an orphan," Conrad said. "Or if his
parents just didn't care about him at all. But if he had a family who
gave a hoot, they'd come looking for him, and they'd take him home."


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"Wouldn't you . . . you carnival people . . . wouldn't you hide the
kid?" Joey asked. "If the worst thing in the world for him was to be
taken home, wouldn't you hide him when his folks came looking?"

"Oh, couldn't do that," the man said. "Against the law. But if nobody
cared about him, if nobody wanted him, the carnival would take him
in.

It always has, and it always will. What about you? I'll bet your
folks care about you a lot." "Not a lot," Joey said.

"Sure. I'll bet they care a whole bunch.                 What about your mother?"
"No," Joey said.

"Oh, I'll bet she cares a lot. I'll bet she's really proud of a
handsome, intelligent boy like you."

Joey blushed.

aDo you get your good looks from your mother?"                  Conrad asked.

"Well . . . yeah . . . I look more like her than like my dad."
"Those dark eyes, that dark hair?"

"Yeah," Joey said. aLike Mama's." "You know," Conrad said, "I knew
someone once who looked quite a bit like you." "Who?" Joey asked.

"A very nice lady."        "I don't look like a lady!"            Joey said.

"No, no," Conrad said quickly. "Of course you don't. But you have her
dark eyes and hair. And there's something in the lines of your face
.

. . You know, it's just possible she could have a boy your age now.

Yes. Yes, it's quite possible. Wouldn't that be something--if you
were the son of my long-lost friend?" He leaned closer to Joey. The
whites of his eyes were yellowish.

There was dandruff on his shoulders. A single breadcrumb was stuck in
his mustache. His voice became even heartier than before when he said,
"What is your mother's name?"

Suddenly Joey saw something in the stranger's eyes that he liked even
less than what he had seen in the albino's eyes. He stared into those
two crystalline blue dots, and it seemed to him that the man's
friendliness was an act. Like on that TV show, "The Rockford Files,"
the way Jim Rockford, the private detective, could be so charming and
so friendly, but he was just putting it on in order to get some vital
information out of a stranger without the stranger knowing that he was
being pumped. All of a sudden Joey felt that this guy was putting on
the charm just like Jim Rockford did.

Joey felt as if he were being pumped for information. Except that
under his phony friendliness, Jim Rockford really was a nice guy. But
underneath Conrad's smile, there wasn't a nice guy at all. Deep down
in his blue eyes there wasn't anything warm or friendly, there was
just. . . darkness.

"Joey?"

"Huh?"



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"I asked you what your mother's name is."

"Leon"," Joey lied, without really understanding why he must not tell
the truth. He sensed that telling the truth right now would be the
worst thing he could ever do in his whole life. Leon" was Tommy Culp's
mother.

Conrad stared hard at him.

Joey wanted to look away but couldn't.               "Leon"?"     Conrad asked.

"Yeah." "Well . . . maybe my friend changed her name. She never did
like the one she was born with. Your mother might still be her. About
how old would you say your mother is?"

Twenty-nine," Joey said quickly, remembering bhat Tommy Culp's mother
had recently had a twenty-ninth birthday party at which, according to
Tommy, all the guests had gotten pissed.

"Twenty-nine?"      Conrad asked.        "You're sure?"

"I know exactly," Joey said, "because Mama's ,birthday is one day
before my sister's, so we always get two parties close together every
year.

This last time my sister was eight, and my mother was ienty-nine."

He was surprised that he could lie o easily and smoothly. Usually he
was a lousy liar, he couldn't fool anyone. But now he was different.

Now it was almost as if someone older and wiser were speaking through
him.

He didn't know why he was so positive that he had to lie to this man.

Mama couldn't be the woman that Conrad was looking for. Mama wouldn't
ever have been friends with a carny, she thought they were all dirty
and crooked. Yet Joey lied to Conrad, and he had the feeling that
someone else was guiding his tongue, someone who was looking out for
him, someone like . . .

God. Of course that was a dumb thought. To please God, you always had
to tell the truth. Why would God take control of you just to make you
lie?

The carny's blue eyes softened, and the tension went out of his voice
when Joey said his mother was twenty-nine. "Well," the carny said, "I
guess your mother couldn't be my old friend. The woman I'm thinking of
would have to be around forty-five."

They looked at each other for a moment, the boy just standing there and
the man stooping down, and finally Joey said, "Well .

. . thanks a lot for the free passes." "Sure, sure," the man said,
standing up, obviously no longer the least bit interested in the boy.

"Enjoy them, son."        He turned and walked back to the funhouse.

Joey went across the midway to watch the workers erect the Octopus.

Later, the encounter       with the blue-eyed carny seemed almost like a
dream. The two pink        passes--with the name Conrad Straker neatly
written on the backs       of them, below the printed words, "this pass
authorized by"--were       the only things that kept the incident real and


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solid in Joey's memory. He remembered being afraid of the stranger and
lying to him, but he couldn't recapture the gut feeling that had made
him so certain that lies were necessary, and he felt somewhat ashamed
of himself for not telling the truth.

That night, at six-thirty, Buzz Klemmet picked up Amy at the Harper
house. He was a ruggedly handsome guy with a lot of hair, muscles, a
cocky attitude, and a carefully cultivated toughguy image. Mama had
met him once, the second night he'd come for Amy, and she hadn't liked
him one bit. In keeping with her statement that she no longer cared
what happened to Amy, Mama hadn't said a word for or against Buzz, but
Amy could see the loathing in her mother's eyes.

Tonight, Mama stayed in the kitchen and didn't even bother to come out
to glare at Buzz.

Richie and Liz were already in the backseat of Buzz's vintage GTO
convertible.

The roof was down, and as soon as Buzz and Amy got in, Richie said,
"Hey, put the top up so we can pass a joint around on the way to the
fairgrounds without everyone seeing us." "Good old Royal City, Ohio,"
Liz said. "Still frozen in the Middle Ages. Would you believe there
are some places in this country where you can smoke grass right out in
the open without getting thrown in jail?"

Buzz put up the top, but he said, "Hold the joint until after we've
stopped for gas."

Half a mile from the Harper house, they stopped at a Union 76
station.

Buzz got out to check the oil, and Richie got out to pump the gas.

As soon as Liz and Amy were alone in the car, Liz leaned forward from
the backseat and said, "Buzz thinks you're the hottest thing he's ever
seen.

Oh, sure," Amy said.

"No, he really does."         "He tell you that?"

Yeah."

aWe haven't done anything," Amy said.

"That's one reason he thinks you're so hot. He's such a dreamboat that
he's used to girls just falling on their backs for him. But you tease
him along, let him feel a little, and then stop him right on the
brink.

He's not used to that. It's different for him. He's got the idea that
when you finally give in you'll be absolutely wild." "If I give in,"
Amy said.

"You'll give in," Liz said confidently.               "You still don't want to admit
it, but you're just like me."

Maybe.

"You've been dating him every night for a week, and each night you let
him get a little farther than the night before," Liz said. "You're
coming out of your shell an inch at a time." aBuzz told you exactly



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how far I've let him go?"          Amy asked.

"Yep," iz said, grinning.

"Jeer," Amy said. "He's got such class." "Oh, hell," Liz said, "he
wasn't tattling on you. It's not like he told a stranger. I'm your
best friend. And Buzz and I go way, way back.

I used to screw around with him, and we're still the best of buddies.

Listen, kid, when we leave the carnival tonight, let's go back to my
house. My folks are still away. You and Buzz can use their bedroom.

Stop teasing the guy.

Give him a break.       Give yourself a break.           You want the old salami just
as much as I do."

Buzz and Richie got back in the car, and Richie fired up a joint.

While Buzz drove to the fairgrounds, they passed around the dope, and
each of them took a couple of deep drags, holding the smoke in their
lungs as long as they could.

In the parking lot at the fairgrounds, they lit another joint and sat
in the car until they had done that one, too.

By the time they reached the ticket booth, Amy was feeling warm, airy,
and a bit giggly. As she drifted onto the carnival lot, into that roar
of sound and whirlpool of motion, she had the peculiar feeling that
tonight was going to be one of the most important nights of her life.

Tonight she would make decisions about herself, tonight she would
either accept the role in life that both Liz and Mama believed she was
suited for, or she would make up her mind to be the good, responsible
person that she had always wanted to be. She was standing on a thin
line, and it was time to jump one way or the other, time to make up her
mind about herself. She didn't know how she knew that, but she did
know it. The feeling was unshakable. At first it sobered her and made
her a little bit afraid, but then Liz made a very funny crack about a
fat woman who was walking up the midway in front of them, and Amy
laughed, and the grass had its effect, and the laugh turned into an
uncontrollable giggle, and she was floating again.

T H R E E THE

AMY DISCOVERED THAT Liz was right about a little grass making the
thrill rides even more fun than usual. They rode the Octopus, the
Tilt-a-Whirl, the Dive Bomber, the Whip, the Loop-de-Loop, the
Colossus, and others. The ramps seemed higher than those on thrill
rides that Amy had ridden in - previous carnivals, the dips seemed
deeper, the i whipping action, the spinning, soaring, diving, twisting,
and turning all seemed wilder and faster than ever before. Amy held
onto Buzz and screamed with delight and with a quiver of genuine terror
as well. Buzz pulled her close, he used her fear and the sudden
lurchings of the rides as excuses to cop some quick, cheap feels.

Like Liz, Amy was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, but no bra. Buzz couldn't
resist touching her breasts and her long, bare, nicely tanned legs.

Each time she got off a ride, Amy was disoriented for a minute or two
and had to cling to Buzz, and he liked that, and she liked it, too,
because Buzz had such big, hard, muscular arms and shoulders.


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Only forty minutes after they arrived at the fairgrounds, they slipped
off the midway, between a couple of sideshows, to the back lot, where
rows of carnival trucks were parked. They went around behind the
trucks, into a deserted culde-sac that ended at the fairgrounds'
ivy-covered fence. They stood in shadow-dappled, summerevening
sunlight and passed around a third joint that Liz took out of her
purse, they sucked in the sweet smoke, held it down as long as they
possibly could, then let it out with urgent gasps of pleasure.

"This one's a little different," Richie said as the hand-rolled
cigarette made its second circle around their huddle.

"This one what?"       Amy asked.

"This joint," Richie said.

'eah," Liz said.       "It's spiced up."         "With what?"       Buzz asked.

"Trust me."

"Angel dust?"      Richie asked.

"Trust me," Liz said.

"Hey," Buzz said, "I'm not sure I like smoking something that I don't
know what it is."

"Trust me," Liz said.

"I trust you about as far as I can throw you," Buzz said.

"Doesn't matter," Liz said.           "We've almost finished the joint
anyway."

Buzz was holding the stub. He hesitated, then said, "Oh, hell, why not
live dangerously." He took one last drag on it.

Richie started to kiss Liz on the neck, and Buzz kissed Amy, and
without quite realizing how it happened, Amy found herself pinned
against the side of one of the trucks, and Buzz was running his hands
up and down her body, kissing her hard, pushing his tongue into her
mouth, and then he tugged her T-shirt out of her shorts and got one
hand under it and squeezed her bare breasts, thumbed her nipples, and
she moaned softly, concerned that someone might walk around behind the
trucks and see them, but unable to express her concern, responding even
to Buzz's crude caresses.

Suddenly Liz said, "Enough, you guys. Save it for later. I'm sure as
hell not going to lie down right here, in broad daylight, and take it
in the dirt." "The dirt is the best place," Richie said.

"Yeah," Buzz said. "Let's do it in the dirt."                   "It's the natural
thing," Richie said.

"Yeah," Buzz said.

"All the animals do it in the dirt," Richie said.

"Yeah," Buzz said. "Let's be natural, just hang loose and be real
natural." "Stifle yourselves," Liz said. "There's a lot more carnival
to see.

Come on.


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Let's go."

Amy tucked in her T-shirt, and Buzz gave her one more wet kiss.

Back on the midway, Amy thought the rides seemed to be spinning faster
than before. All the colors were more vivid, too. The dozens of
different sources of music seemed louder than they had been ten minutes
ago, and each song possessed a subtleness of melody of which she hadn't
been previously aware.

I'm not totally in control of myself, Amy thought worriedly, dizzily.

I'm not out of control yet, but I'm liable to wind up that way. I've
got to be careful. Sensible. Watch out for that dope. That damned,
spiced-up dope. If I don't watch myself, I'm going to end up in a
bedroom at Liz's house, with Buzz on top of me, whether that's what I
really want or not. And I don't think that's what I want. I don't
want to be the kind of person Liz and Mama say I am. I don't. Do I?

They rode the Loop-de-Loop again.

Amy clung to Buzz.

After spending Monday morning and part of the afternoon at the
fairgrounds, watching the carnies set up their equipment, Joey hadn't
intended to return to the carnival until Saturday night, when he would
run away forever. But Monday evening he changed his mind.

Actually, his mother changed it for him.

He was sitting in the family room, watching television, drinking Pepsi,
when he accidentally knocked over his glass. The soda splashed on his
chair and spilled all over the carpet. He got a bunch of paper towels
from the kitchen and cleaned up the mess as best he could, and he was
sure that he hadn't permanently stained either the carpet or the
chair's upholstery.

In spite of the fact that the damage wasn't serious, Mama was furious
when she walked in and saw him with handfuls of Pepsi-soaked paper _ towels
  Although it was only seven-thirty, she was half drunk
already.

She grabbed him and shook him and told him that he behaved like a
little animal, and she sent him to bed more than two hours early.

He felt miserable. He couldn't even turn to Amy for sympathy because
she was out somewhere, on another date with Buzz. Joey didn't know
where she and Buzz had gone, and even if he did he v couldn't run after
her, whimpering about how Mama had shaken and scared him.

In his room Joey sprawled on the bed for a while, crying, utterly
disconsolate, angered by the injustice of it all--and then he thought
of the two pink passes that the carny had given him earlier in the
day.

Two passes.

He would use one to get into the fairgrounds on Saturday evening, when
he would try to join up with the carnies by telling them that he was an
orphan and had nowhere else to go. But that left one pass, and if he
didn't use it between now and Saturday, it would only go to waste.




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He sat up on the edge of the bed and thought about it for a few
minutes, and he decided that he could sneak off to the carnival, have a
lot of fun, and sneak back into the house without his mother knowing
that he'd been gone. He got up and pulled the drapes shut, so that
hardly any of the fading, summer-evening sunlight reached into the
room. He took a spare blanket and an extra pillow from his closet and
used those to form a dummy under the covers. He switched on his dim
night-light, stepped back from the bed, and studied his handiwork
critically.

Even with the splinters of light showing at the edges of the drapes, he
thought the dummy would pass Mama's inspection. Usually she didn't
come to his room until eleven o'clock at the very earliest, and if she
waited that long tonight, until well after dark, when the room would be
illuminated by only the night-light, the trick would surely work, she
would be fooled by the dummy.

The hard part was going to be getting out of the house without drawing
her attention. He took a few dollar bills from his thirty-two-dollar
kitty and tucked the money into a pocket of his jeans. He also
pocketed one of the carnival passes and stuck the other one under the
glassjar bank that stood on his desk. He carefully opened his bedroom
door, looked both ways along the upstairs hall, stepped out of the
room, and closed the door behind him. He crept to the stairs and began
the long, tense journey down toward the first floor.

Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie stopped in front of a sideshow that
advertised a magician called Marco the Magnificent. The come-on was a
large poster that showed a screaming woman being decapitated by a
guillotine, while a grinning magician stood with his hand on the
executioner's lever.

"I love magicians," Amy said.

"I love anyone I can get my hands on," Liz said, giggling.

My Uncle Arnold used to be a stage magician," Richie said, pushing his
glasses up on his nose to take a closer look at Marco's lurid poster.

"Did he make stuff disappear and everythingn Buzz asked.

Liz said, "He was so bad that he made audiences disappear."

Amy was giddy from the spiced-up pot that she had smoked, and Liz's
little joke seemed hysterically funny. She laughed, and her laughter
infected the others.

"No, now, really, honestly," Buzz said when they finally got control of
themselves. "Did your Uncle Arnold make his living that way? It
wasn't just a hobby or something" "No hobby," Richie said. "Uncle
Arnold was the real thing. He called himself the Amazing Arnoldo. But
I guess he didn't make much of a living at it, and he got to hate it
after a while. He's been selling insurance for the past twenty years."
 "I think being a magician would be neat," Amy said. "Why did your
uncle hate it?" "Well," Richie said, "every successful magician has to
have a trick that's all his own, a special illusion that makes him
stand out in a crowd of other magicians. Uncle Arnold had this gimmick
where he made twelve white doves appear, one after the other, out of
thin air, in bursts of flame.

The audience would applaud politely when the first dove appeared, and
then they'd gasp when the second and third ones popped up, and by the



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time half a dozen birds had materialized, the audience was cheering.

When the entire dozen had been brought out of their hiding places in my
uncle's clothes, each presented in a little puff of fire, you can
imagine the ovation the audience gave him." "I don't understand," Buzz
said, frowning.

'eah," Amy said. "If your uncle was so great, why'd he quit and start
selling insurance?" "Sometimes," Richie said, "not often, but about
once in every thirty or forty performances, one of the doves would
catch fire and burn up alive, right there on stage. It hummed out the
audience, and they booed Uncle Arnold."

Liz laughed, and Amy laughed, too, and Liz did an imitation of a
burning dove trying to slap the flames off its wings, and Amy knew that
it wasn't really funny, knew that it was a horrible thing to happen to
the poor birds, and she knew she shouldn't laugh, but she couldn't help
herself, because it seemed like the most hilarious story she had ever
heard.

"It wasn't very funny to Uncle Arnold," Richie said between whoops of
laughter. aLike I said, it didn't happen often, but he never knew when
it was going to happen, so he was always tense. The tension gave him
an ulcer. And even when the birds didn't burn up, they shit in his
suit pockets."

They all laughed again, with renewed vigor, holding onto each other.

People passing them on the midway gave them strange looks, which only
made them laugh even harder.

Richie treated everyone to tickets for Marco's next show.

The ground inside the magician's tent was covered with sawdust, and the
air was musty. Brightly colored plastic flags and posters of Marco
decorated the dimly lighted, canvas-walled space.

Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie joined two dozen spectators who were crowded
around a small, raised stage at one end of the tent.

A moment later Marco appeared in a cloud of blue smoke, taking a bow as
a tape-recorded fanfare filled the room. It was painfully obvious that
he had merely stepped through a slit in the rear wall of the tent,
using the smoke for cover. In fact he hadn't even stepped onto the
stage, he had stumbled.

Liz glanced at Amy.        They both giggled.

"Thank God he's a magician and not a tightrope walker," Richie
whispered.

Amy felt as if she were standing on balloons, balancing precariously,
about to perform some splendid magic act of her own.

What had Liz added to that joint?

Marco's appearance was as pathetic as his entrance. He was a
middle-aged man with bloodshot eyes, and he was heavily made up to
resemble the Devil. His lips were red, his face was frost-pale, his
eyes were outlined with thick black mascara, and his widow's peak was
also accentuated with mascara. He wore a shabby tuxedo and a pair of
white gloves that were marred by several large yellow stains.



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"He shouldn't wear those gloves when he jerks off," Liz whispered.

They all laughed.

"Gross," Richie said.

"He looks gross enough to do it," Buzz whispered.

Marco glanced nervously at them, unable to hear what they were
saying.

He smiled at them and doffed his top hat in a feeble attempt to win
their silent attention.

"Whatever you do," Liz told the others, "for God's sake don't let him
shake hands with you ." They all laughed again.

A few of the other spectators were glancing at Amy, some just curious,
some disapproving, but she didn't care what they thought. She was
having so much fun.

Marco decided to ignore them, and he picked up a deck of cards that was
on the small table in the center of the stage. He shuffled the cards
and wrapped them in a silk handkerchief, with only one edge of the deck
exposed.

He placed that bundle in a clear glass goblet, every movement performed
with a flourish. When he stepped back and pointed at the goblet, cards
began to rise individually from the silk-swathed deck: first the ace of
diamonds . . . then the ace of clubs . . . the ace of hearts . . .

and finally, mistakenly, the jack of diamonds. Marco looked
embarrassed, quickly swept the cards away, and went on to his next
trick.

"Boy, does he stink," Buzz said softly.

"It's those gloves you smell," Liz said.

aRichie, is this guy really your Uncle Arnold?" Amy asked.

Marco blew up a balloon and knotted it. When he touched                     a burning
cigarette to the balloon, the sphere popped noisily, and                    a live dove
appeared in the heart of the explosion. It was a better                     illuion than
the card trick, but Amy still saw the bird dart out from                    beneath the
magician's tuxedo jacket.

Marco performed two more tricks that drew only half-hearted applause
from the audience, and then Liz said, "Are you guys about ready to
8put?" "Not yet," Richie said.

This is a fuckin' bore," Liz said.

"I want to see the finale," Richie said.                "The guillotine."           "What
guillotine?" Buzz asked.

"The one on the poster outside," Richie said. "He chops off some
broad's head." "That's the only way he's ever going to get head from a
woman," Liz said, giggling.

Marco spoke for the first time. His voice was surprisingly rich and
commanding. "And now, for those of you who are connoisseurs of the
bizarre, the macabre, the gruesome, the grotesque . . . I will close
my show with what I fondly refer to as The Impaler."


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" "What about the guillotine?"            Richie said Buzz.

"Asshole," Liz said.        "That's just a come-on."

Marco rolled a large upright box to the center of the stage. It was a
foot or so shorter than a coffin, but otherwise it looked exactly like
the centerpiece of a funeral.

"I hear you mumbling out there," Marco said.                 "I hear you saying .

. . the guillotine . . . the guillotine. Unfortunately, that device
belonged to my predecessor. Both it and he are being held by the
police due to an unfortunate accident. The last lady who assisted him
lost her head and caused a messy scene."

The audience laughed uneasily.

"What a cornball act," Liz said. "Jesus." But on the contrary, to Amy,
Marco appeared to have undergone an eerie metamorphosis. He was not
shabby and silly-looking now, as he had been when he first stumbled
onto the platform. His crude makeup no longer seemed like a joke,
second by second he looked increasingly demonic, and there was a new,
terrifying, evil gleam in his eyes. His nervous smile had become a
knowing, wicked leer. When his eyes met Amy's, she felt as if she were
staring at twin windows that offered a glimpse of Hell, and she was
cold all the way through to the marrow.

Don't be ridiculous, Amy told herself, shuddering. Marco the
Magnificent hasn't changed. It's only my perception of him that's been
altered. I'm having a mild hallucination. Tripping. Flying. It's
that damned joint.

The drugs.

What spice did Liz add to that grass?

Marco held up a two-foot-long, pointed wooden stake. "Ladies and
gentlemen, I promise you'll enjoy this illusion more than you would
have enjoyed the guillotine. It's really much, much better." He
grinned, and there was something dark and unwholesome in that
Cheshire-cat expression. I need a volunteer from the audience. A
young woman." His malevolent eyes slowly swept the faces below him. He
raised one hand and pointed ominously at each woman, one after the
other, and for a breathtaking moment he seemed to stop at Amy, then he
moved his hand again and stopped even longer at Liz, but finally he
chose an attractive redhead.

"Oh, no," the redhead told him. "I couldn't. Not me." "Of course you
can," Marco said. "Come on, folks, let's give this charming, brave
young lady a hand." The audience applauded on cue, and the woman
reluctantly walked up the steps to the stage.

Marco took hold of her arm as she reached the platform.                     "What's your
name?"

"Jenny," she said, smiling shyly at the audience.

"You're not afraid, are you, Jenny?"

"Yes," she said, blushing.

Marco grinned.      "Smart girl!n He escorted her to the coffin.                    It was



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standing on end, tilted back slightly on large metal braces. Marco
pulled open the lid, which was hinged at the left side. "Please step
into the box, denny. I promise that you will feel absolutely no pain
whatsoever." With the magician's help, the redhead stepped backwards
into the box, facing the audience. Her

1.: neck fit into a U-shaped cutout in the top of the box. Because the
coffin was short, her head stuck out of it when Marco closed the lid.

"Comfortable?"      Marco asked.

"No," the woman said nervously.

"Good," Marco said. He grinned at the audience, then secured the front
of the box with a large padlock.

A premonition of disaster, a feeling that she was in the presence of
Death, seized Amy in its I invisible, icy hands. I Just the damned
drugs, she told herself.

Marco the Magnificent spoke to the audience.

aIn the fifteenth century, Vlad the Fifth of Wallachia, known as Vlad
the Impaler to his frightened subjects, tortured tens of thousands of
male and female prisoners, mostly foreign invaders. Once, the Turkish
army turned back from a planned invasion when it encountered a field
where thousands of men were propped on spikes that had been driven all
the way through their bodies by Vlad's hand-picked death squads.

Tiring of his name, Vlad selected a new one, that of his father, an
equally nasty man known as Dracul, meaning the Devil." Adding the
letter A,' he became Dracula, the son of the Devil. And so, my
friends, are legends born." !

"Cornball," Liz said again. jr But Amy was mesmerized by the strange,
new, and dangerous creature that appeared (at least to her eyes) to
have taken possession of Marco's .

body. The bottomless, all-knowing, evil eyes of --~ the magician met
Amy's eyes again and seemed out in horror.

to see all the way through her before they looked away.

Marco displayed the two-foot-long, pointed wooden stake once more.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I present .             . . The Impaler."

" "About fuckin' time," Liz said.

Marco picked up a small but heavy mallet. "If you will look at the
front of the box, you will see that a small hole has been drilled
through the lid."

Amy saw the hole.       A bright red heart had been painted around it.

"The hole lies directly over the volunteer's heart," Marco said.

He licked his lips, turned, and carefully inserted the stake into the
hole. aDo you feel the point of the stake, Jenny?" She giggled
nervously. es." "Good," the magician said. "Remember . . . there
will be no pain at all."

Holding the stake in his left hand, he raised the mallet in his
right.


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"Absolute silence!        Those of you who are squeamish, avert your eyes.

She will feel no pain .          . . but that does not mean there will be no
blood!"

"Huh?" Jenny said. "Hey. wait. I--" "Silence!"                      Marco shouted, and
he swung the mallet hard against the stake.

No!   Amy thought.

With a sickening, wet, tearing sound, the stake sank deep into the
woman's chest.

Jenny screamed, and blood gushed from her twisted mouth.

The audience "sped.        A couDle of people cried

Jenny's heaa slumped to one side. Her tongue lolled.                     Her eyes stared
sightlessly over the heads of the people in the tent.

Death miraculously transformed the face of the volunteer. The red hair
turned to blond. The eyes changed from green to blue. The face was no
longer that of Jenny, the woman who had walked onto the stage from the
audience.

It was now Liz Duncan's face. Every plane, every hollow, every
feature, every detail belonged to Liz. It wasn't just a trick of the
light and shadows.

It was Liz in that coffin. It was Liz who had been impaled. It was
Liz who was dead, blood still oozing from between her ripe lips.

Having trouble drawing her breath, Amy looked at the girl beside her
and was amazed to see that her friend was still there. Liz was in the
audience--yet somehow she was also on the stage, in the box, dead.

Confused, disoriented, Amy said, aBut it's you. It's you . . . up
there." Liz-in-the-audience said, "What?" Liz-in-the-coffin stared into
eternity and drooled blood.

Liz-in-the-audience said, "Amy? Are you all right?" 'Liz is going to
die, Amy thought. Soon. This is some sort of premonition . . .

clairvoyance .      . . whatever you call it.            Could that be true?

Could it?     Will Liz be killed?         Soon?     Tonight?

Marco's look of shock and horror, which he had assumed the instant that
blood began to spurt from his volunteer's mouth, now melted into a
grin. The magician snapped his fingers, and the woman in the box
suddenly came to life, the pain vanished from her face, she smiled
dazzlingly-- and she no longer resembled Liz Duncan.

She never did look like Liz, Amy thought.                It was just me.        The
drugs.

Hallucinations.       It wasn't a premonition, Liz isn't going to die
soon.

God, am I out of it!

The audience sighed with relief as Marco pulled the stake out of the
hole in the lid of the box. The magician had ceased to look


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sinister.

He was the same shabby, pudgy, inept man who had stumbled through the
canvas flap ten or fifteen minutes ago. The omniscient, evil
personality no longer looked out through Marco's eyes, his resemblance
to the Devil was gone.

Imagination, Amy told herself.            Delusions.      It meant nothing.

Nothing at all.

Liz isn't about to die.          None of us is going to die.            I've got to get
hold of myself.

Marco helped Jenny out of the box and introduced her to the audience.

She was his daughter.

"Another cheap trick," Liz said, disgusted.

As she left Marco's tent, Amy sensed the disappointment in her three
companions. It was almost as if they had hoped that a woman really
would be pierced through the heart or have her head chopped off by a
guillotine. The spice that Liz had added to the last joint of grass
was something extremely powerful, for already it was making them
fidgety, restless, they required more and bigger thrills to dissipate
their newfound, nervous energy. A decapitation and some spilled blood
were apparently just the sort of things that Buzz and Liz, if not
Richie, needed to see in order to burn off the chemicals bubbling in
their bloodstreams, the sort of thing they needed to experience in
order to mellow out again.

No more dope tonight, Amy vowed. No more dope ever.                     I don't need
drugs to be happy. Why do I use them?

They went to a sideshow called Animal Oddities, and the bizarre
creatures in that attraction gave Amy the willies. There was a goat
with two heads, a bull with a three-eyed, triple cranium, a disgusting
pig with eyes on either side of its snout plus two more eyes higher in
its head, greenish drool trickling over its cracked and leathery lips,
two extra legs coming out of its left side. They finally came to a pen
that contained a normallooking lamb, and Amy reached out to pet it, but
when it turned toward her, she saw it had an extra nose and a bulging,
sightless, third eye on the side of its head, and she pulled her hand
away. The nightmarish animals were a beer chaser to the whiskey-like
effect of the spiced grass she had smoked, when she left Animal
Oddities, she felt higher, more thoroughly detached from reality than
when she had entered.

They rode the Rocket-Go-Round. Amy sat in front of Buzz on the
motorcycle-like seat, in one of the two-passenger, bullet-shaped
cars.

In the relative privacy of that rapidly spinning container, he put his
hands on her braless breasts.

The centrifugal force pushed her back against him, and she felt the
heat and size of his erection as his crotch was jammed hard against her
buttocks.

Y want you," he said, putting his mouth against her ear, making himself
heard above the roar of the Rocket-Go-Round and the fierce whining of
the wind.


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It felt good to be wanted so badly, to be needed as Buzz needed her,
and Amy wondered if maybe it was a good thing to be like Liz. At least
you always had someone around who needed you for something.

At Bozo the Clown's booth, both Buzz and Richie                 managed to hit the
bull's-eye and dunk the jeering clown in a huge                 tub of water. Buzz
went about it doggedly, buying three baseballs,                 then three more, then
three more, until at last he connected and sent                 Bozo into the tub.

Richie, on the other hand, disdained that approach. He considered the
situation with a mathematician's eye and sensibilities, threw two bad
pitches, learned from each of them, and banged the bull's-eye on his
third try.

Later, when their car stopped for a moment at the top of the Ferris
wheel, with the diamondbright midway spread out below them, Buzz kissed
Amy, kissed her deeply, hungrily, his tongue probing her mouth. His
hands were all over her. She knew that tonight had to be the turning
point in their relationship.

Tonight she would either have to drop him or give him what he wanted.

She couldn't stall any longer.            She had to decide who and what she
was.

However, she was so high, so loose that she didn't want to thinkouldn't
think-about complex problems like that. She just wanted to float
along, enjoying the lights, the sounds, the blur of motion, constant
action.

After the Ferris wheel, they boarded the bumper cars and bashed each
other mercilessly. Sparks crackled and flew from the exposed-wire grid
overhead. The air smelled of ozone. Each noisy, shattering collision
sent a jolt of sensual pleasure through Amy.

On one side of the bumper-car pavilion, the carousel turned in a blur
of brilliant lights. On the other side, the Tilt-a-Whirl spun, rose,
fell.

Calliope music mixed with the roar of the crowd and the constant
chatter of the pitchmen and the crashing of the bumper cars.

Amy loved the carnival. As she pursued Richie's car and slammed into
it broadside, as she was spun around by the impact, she thought that
the carnival, with all of its lights and excitement, might be a little
bit like Las Vegas, and she wondered if perhaps she would enjoy going
to Nevada with Liz.

From the bumper cars they went to Freak-orama, and Amy's disorientation
was made worse by what she saw in that place: the three-eyed man whose
skin was like the skin of an alligator, the fattest woman in the world,
sitting on a gigantic couch, dwarfing that piece of furniture, her body
nothing more than a lump, her facial features lost in doughy fat, a man
with a second pair of arms growing out of his stomach, and a man with
two noses and a lipless mouth.

Liz, Buzz, and Richie thought Freak-o-rama was the best thing on the
midway.

They pointed and laughed at the creatures on exhibit, as if the people
at whom they were laughing could neither see nor hear them. Amy didn't
feel the least bit like laughing, even though she was still very high


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on grass.

She remembered Jerry Galloway's curse and Mama's certainty that the
baby would be deformed, and such sights as those in Freak-o-rama struck
too close to home to amuse her. Amy was embarrassed, both for herself
and for the pathetic freaks who posed for a living in the stalls. She
wished there were some way she could help them, but of course she
couldn't, so she listened to her friends making wisecracks, and she
smiled dutifully, and she tried to hurry them along.

Strangely, the most frightening exhibit in Freako-rama was the baby in
the enormous jar. All of the other human oddities were whole and of
such size that they might potentially pose a threat, but the dead,
harmless thing in the jar, no possible threat to anyone, was the most
unsettling of all. Its large green eyes stared blindly out of its
glass prison, its twisted, flared nostrils seemed to be sniffing at Amy,
Liz, Buzz, and Richie, its black lips were parted, and its pale,
speckled tongue was visible, and it looked as if it were snarling at
them, at nobody else but them, as if it would close its mouth after
they walked away.

"Creepy," Liz said. "Jesus!" "It isn't real," Richie said. Yt wasn't
ever alive. It's just too freaky. No human being could give birth to
that." "Maybe no human being did," Liz said.

"That's what the sign says," Buzz observed."                 Born in 1956, of normal
parents."

" They all looked up at the sign on the wall behind the jar, and Liz
said, "Hey, Amy, its mother's name was Ellen. Maybe it's your
brother!"

Everyone laughed--except Amy. She stared at the sign, at the five
large letters that spelled her mother's name, and yet another tremor of
premonition passed through her. She felt as if her presence at the
carnival was not happenstance but destiny. She had the uncanny and
distinctly unpleasant feeling that her seventeen years of life could
have led her nowhere else but here on this night of all nights. She
was being maneuvered, constantly manipulated, if she reached overhead,
she would feel the strings of the puppetmaster.

Was it possible that this thing in the bottle actually had been Mama's
child?

Was this the reason Mama had insisted that Amy have an abortion
immediately?

No.   That's crazy.       Absurd, Amy thought desperately.

She didn't like the idea that her life had been funneled inexorably to
this tiny spot on the surface of the earth, at this minute among the
trillions of minutes that composed the flow of history. That concept
left her feeling helpless, adrift.

It was just the drugs. She couldn't trust her perceptions because of
the drugs. No more grass, ever again.

"I don't blame its mother for killing it," Liz said, peering at the
thing in the jar.

i , "It's just a rubber model," Richie insisted.

"I'm going to get a closer look," Buzz said, slipping under the


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restraining rope.

aBuzz, don't!"      Amy said.

- Buzz approached the platform where the jar stood and leaned close to
it. He reached out, put a hand to the glass, slowly ran his fingers
down across the front of the jar, beyond which rested the face of the
monster.

Abruptly he jerked his .          hand away.      "Son of a bitch!n "What's the
matter?" Richie asked.

. "Buzz, come back here, please," Amy said.

Buzz returned, holding his hand up for them to see.                   There was blood on
one of his fingers.

, "What happened?" Liz asked.

"Must have been a sharp seam on the jar," Buzz said.

"You better go to the first-aid station," Amy said. "The cut might be
infected." aNah," Buzz said, determined not to let a crack show in his
macho image. "It's only a scratch. Funny, though, I didn't see any
sharp edges." Maybe you didn't cut it on the glass," Richie said.

"Maybe the thing in there bit you." "It's dead." "Its body is dead,"
Richie said, "but maybe its spirit is still alive." "A minute ago you
told us the goddamned thing was just a rubber fake," Amy said.

"I've been known to be wrong," Richie said.

"How do you explain it biting through the jar?"                  Buzz asked
sarcastically.

"A psychic bite," Richie said.            "A ghost bite."

"Don't give me the spooks," Liz said, hitting Richie on the shoulder.

"Ghost bite?"      Buzz asked.       "That's stupid."

The thing in the bottle watched them with its clouded, emerald,
moon-lamp eyes.

The name Ellen seemed to burn brighter on the sign than any of the
other words.

Coincidence, Amy told herself.

It had to be a coincidence. Because if it wasn't, if this really was
Mama's child, if Amy had been brought to the carnival by some
supernatural force, then the other premonitions might also be true.

Liz actually might die here.

And that was unthinkable, unacceptable.               So it was coinciaence.

Ellen.

Coincidence, damn it!

Amy was relieved when they left Freak-o-rama.

They rode the Shazam and took another turn on the Loop-de-Loop, and
then suddenly they were all starving. It was a drug-induced hunger,


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the insatiable appetite familiar to all serious pot smokers.                        They ate
hot dogs, ice cream, and candy apples.

Eventually they found themselves in front of the funhouse.

A big man in a Frankenstein costume capered on a low platform,
threatening the people who were boarding the cars to go into the
funhouse. He waved his arms and snarled and jumped up and down in a
terrible imitation of Boris Karloff.

"He's a real ham," Richie said.

They moved a few feet to the barker's plat form, where a tall,
distinguished-looking man was ballying the passing crowd.

He looked down at them as he talked, and he had the bluest eyes Amy had
ever seen. After a few seconds, she realized that the giant clown's
face atop the building had been painted in the barker's image.

"Terror-fying! Terror-fying!" the barker shouted. "Goblins, ghosts,
and ghouls! Spiders larger than men! Monsters from other worlds and
from the darkest bowels of this one! Are all of the creatures that
stalk the funhouse merely make i. believe . . . or is one of them
real? See for yourself! Learn the truth at your own peril! Can you
stand the test, the tension, the fear?

Are you man enough? Ladies, are your men strong enough to comfort you
inside . . . or will you have to comfort them? Terror-fying!" "I love
to go through the funhouse when I'm high as a kite," Liz said. "When
you're really, truly wrecked, it's a gas. All those dumb plastic
monsters jumping out at you."

, "sO let's gO," Richie said.

"No, no," Liz said. "We've got to save it until ~ we're really high."
"I'm really high now," Amy said.

"Me too," Buzz said.

"Oh, we'll get more wasted than this," Liz said.                  "This is nothing."

"If I get more wasted than this," Richie said, "I'll have to be
institutionalized." "Make it a cell for two," Buzz said.

"That's the idea," Liz said excitedly. "You've got to be really
wrecked to fully appreciate the funhouse."

Not me, Amy reminded herself.            No more dope tonight.          No more dope
ever.

They bought tickets for a ride called the Slithering Snake. The man at
the controls was a dwarf, and while Liz waited for the ride to start,
she teased the little man, made jokes about his height. He glared at
Liz, and Amy wished her friend would shut up. When the Slithering
Snake finally began to move, the dwarf got his revenge, he gave it much
more speed than usual, and the chain of cars flashed around the
looping, rising, falling track so fast that Amy was terrified it was
going to fly off the rails. What should have been a thrilling ride
became a knuckle-whitening, stomachclenching ordeal, a sweat-popping
torture that seemed like it would never end. Incredibly, even under
those conditions, when the automatic canvas cover closed over the
fast-moving train, Buzz took advantage of the darkness to take
advantage of Amy, his hands were all over her.


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This whole night is like the Slithering Snake, Amy thought.                         It's out
of control.

After they rode the Octopus again, after they gleefully bashed each
other around in the bumper cars once more, they returned to the
cul-de-sac behind the carnival trucks, at the perimeter of the
fairgrounds, and Liz stoked up another of her specially spiced
joints.

Darkness had come to the fairgrounds now, and they weren't able to see
each other clearly as they passed the reefer around. They made jokes
about some stranger stepping out of the darkness and taking a toke
without anyone being the wiser, and they kidded each other about seeing
freaks hiding under the trucks around them.

Amy tried to fake it when the joint came to her. She took a drag on
it, but she didn't inhale. She held the smoke in her mouth for a
moment, then blew it out.

Even in the darkness, with only the glowing tip of the cigarette and
the sound of indrawn breath to judge by, Liz realized that Amy hadn't
really taken a good pull on the weed. "Don't hold back on us, kid,"
she said sharply. "Don't be a party pooper." "I don't know what you
mean," Amy said.

aLike hell you don't. Take another hit on that joint. When I'm wasted
I like a lot of company in the same condition." Rather than irritate
Liz, Amy took another drag on the joint and sucked the smoke deep this
time. She hated herself for her lack of willpower.

But I don't want to lose Liz, she thought.                I need Liz.       Who else do I
have?

When they walked back onto the midway, they nearly collided with an
albino.

His thin, cottony white hair streamed behind him in the warm June
breeze. He turned transparent eyes on them, eyes like cold smoke, and
he said, "Free tickets to Madame Zena's. Free tickets to get your
fortunes told.

One for each lady, compliments of the carnival management. Tell all
your friends that Big American is the friendly carnival." Surprised,
Amy and Liz accepted the tickets from the worm-white hands that offered
them.

The albino vanished in the crowd.

THE FOUR OF them crowded into the fortuneteller's small tent. Liz and
Amy sat in the two available chairs, at the table where the crystal
ball was filled with lambent light. Richie and Buzz stood behind the
chairs.

Amy didn't think that Madame Zena looked much like the Gypsy she was
supposed to be, even dressed up in all the colored scarves and pleated
skirts and gaudy jewelry. But the woman was very pretty, and she was
suitably mysterious.

Liz got her fortune told first. Madame Zena f: asked her all sorts of
questions about herself and her family, information that she needed (so
she said) in order to focus her psychic perceptions. When she had no
more questions to ask, she peered into the crystal ball, she leaned so


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close to it that the eerie light and the shadows it cast made her
features look different, hawklike.

In four glass chimneys, in the four corners of the tent, four candles
guttered.

In its large cage to the right of the table, the raven shifted on its
perch and made a cooing sound in the back of its throat.

Liz glanced at Amy and rolled her eyes.

Amy giggled, giddier than ever from the dope.

Madame Zena stared into the crystal ball with a theatrical scowl, as if
she were struggling to pierce the veils that concealed the world of
tomorrow. But then the expression on her face changed and became a
look of genuine puzzlement. She blinked, shook her head, and leaned
even closer to the glowing sphere on the table.

"What is it?" Liz asked.

Madame Zena didn't respond.           Her face held a ghastly look, so real that
Amy was unnerved by it.

"No .   . ." Madame Zena said.

To Liz, apparently, Madame Zena still seemed to be putting on an act.

Liz evidently didn't see the uncontrived horror in the fortune-teller's
face, which Amy was sure she saw there.

"I don't .     . ." Madame Zena began, then stopped and licked her lips.

"I never . . ." "What am I going to be?" Liz asked. "Rich or famous
or both?" Madame Zena closed her eyes for a moment, slowly shaking her
head, then looked again into the crystal. aMy God . . . I . . . I
.

. ."

We should get out of here, Amy thought uneasily. We should go before
this woman tells us some , ,_ thing we don't want to hear. We should
get up and leave and run for our lives.

Madame Zena looked up from the crystal ball.                 All the blood had drained
from her face.

"What an actress!n Richie said softly.

"Bunch of mumbojumbo," Buzz said sullenly.

Madame Zena ignored them and spoke to Liz.                "I .    . . I would rather
not . . .

tell your fortune . . . just yet. I need . . . time. Time to
interpret what I've just seen in the crystal. I'll read your friend's
future first, and then . . . I'll come back to yours, if that's all
right." "Sure," Liz said, enjoying what she thought was a con game of
some sort, a way to prime the customer for a joke or a request for
money to pay for a more detailed reading. "Take as long as you
want."

Madame Zena turned to Amy. The fortuneteller's eyes were not what they
had been a few minutes ago, now they were haunted.


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Amy wanted to get up and leave the tent. She was experiencing the same
kind of psychic energy that had electrified her at Marco the
Magnificent's show. A chill, clammy sensation swept through her, and
she saw stroboscopic images of graves and rotting corpses and grinning
skeletons, nightmare flashes as if clips of film were being projected
on a screen behind her eyes.

She tried to stand up.         She couldn't.

Her heart was hammering.

It was the drugs again. That was all. Just the drugs. The spice Liz
had added to the pot. She wished she hadn't smoked any more of it, she
wished she'd stood up to Liz and refused.

"I'll have to ask you some questions.               . . about yourself .            ..

and your family," Madame Zena said haltingly, without any of the
theatrical pizazz that she had shown while plying Liz with her spiel.

"It is just as I told your friend here . . . I need the information in
order to focus my psychic perceptions." She sounded as if she wanted to
jump up and run out of the tent every bit as much as Amy did.

aGo ahead," Amy whispered. "I don't want to know . . . but I've got
to." "Hey, what's going on here?" Richie asked, picking up on the new,
evil vibrations that now filled the tent.

Still blissfully unaware of the sudden seriousness in the
fortune-teller's demeanor, Liz said, aSsshh, Richie! Don't spoil the
show." To Amy, Madame Zena said, "Your name?" "Amy Harper." "Your age?"
"seventeen." "Where do you live?" "Here in Royal City." aDo you have
any sisters?" "NO." "Brothers?" One .

"His name?" "Joey Harper." "His age?" aTen." I Ys your mother alive?"
aYes." "What is her age?" "Forty-five, I think."

Madame Zena blinked, licked her lips.

What color hair does your mother have?"

"Dark brown, almost black, like mine." "What color are her eyes?" "Very
dark, like mine." "What is . . ." Madame Zena cleared her throat. The
raven flapped its wings.

Finally Madame Zena spoke again. "What is your mother's name?" "Ellen
Harper." The name clearly jolted the fortune-teller. Fine beads of
sweat broke out along her hairline.

"Do you know your mother's maiden name?" aGiavenetto," Amy said.

Madame Zena's face became even whiter, and she began to tremble
visibly.

What the hell . . . ?" Richie said, perceiving the very real fear in
the phony Gypsy, baffled by it.

"Ssshh!"    Liz said.

What a bunch of crap," Buzz said.

Madame Zena was obviously reluctant to look into the crystal ball, but
at last she forced her eyes to it. She blinked and gasped and cried


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out.

She pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. She swept the
glass sphere off the table, it crashed to the earthen floor, but it was
too ~ heavy to break that easily. "You've got to get out of here," she
said urgently. "You've got to go. Get away from the carnival. Go
home and lock your doors and stay there until the carnival leaves
town."

Liz and Amy stood up, and Liz said, "What's all the malarkey? We were
supposed to get our fortunes told for free. You haven't told us how
we're going to be rich and famous."

From the other side of the table, Madame Zena stared at them with wide,
frightened eyes. "Listen to me. I'm a fake. A phony. I don't have
any psychic ability. I just con the marks. I've never seen into the
future.

I've never    seen anything in that crystal ball except the light from the
flashlight    bulb in the wooden base. But tonight . . . just a minute
ago . . .     my God, I did see something. I don't understand it. I
don't want    to understand it. My God, Jesus, Jesus Christ, who would
want to be    able to see the future?

That would be a curse, not a gift. But I saw. You've got to leave the
carnival now, right away. Don't stop for anything. Don't look back."
They stared at her, amazed by her outburst.

Madame Zena swayed, and her legs seemed to turn to mush, and she
collapsed into her chair again. "Go, damn you! Get the hell out of
here before it's too late! Go, you goddamned fools! Hurry!"

Out on the midway, standing in a pool of flashing lights, with people
streaming past, with waves of calliope music breaking over them, they
looked at each other, waiting for someone to say something.

Richie spoke first.        "What was that all about?"

"She's nuts," Buzz said.

"I don't think so," Amy said.

"A real looney-tune," Buzz insisted.

"Hey, don't you guys understand what happened?" Liz asked.                      She laughed
happily and clapped her hands with delight.

"If you've got an explanation, tell us," Amy said, still chilled to the
bone by the look that had come over Madame Zena's face when she had
peered into the crystal ball.

"It's a scam," Liz said.          "The carnival security men spotted us smoking
dope.

They don't want that kind of trouble on their lot, but they also don't
want to call the cops. Carnies don't truck with the cops. So they
arranged for the albino to give us free tickets to Zena's, so she could
try to scare us off." "Yeah!n Buzz said. "I'll be damned. That's it,
all right." "I don't know," Richie said. "It doesn't make a lot of
sense. I mean, why wouldn't they just have their goons throw us out?"
"Because there's too many of us, dummy," Liz said. "They'd need at
least three bouncers. They wouldn't want to make a big scene like
that." "Could she have been sincere?" Amy asked.


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I "Madame Zena?" Liz said. "You mean to tell me you believe she really
saw something in her crystal ball? Horseshit!n -.t,' They talked about
it some more, and gradually ' t' they came to accept Liz's theory. It
seemed to make more sense by the minute.

But Amy wondered if it would make any sense L at all if they weren't
half wasted on dope. She thought of Marco the Magnificent, Liz's face
on the woman in the coffin, Buzz cutting his finger on the jar that
contained the monster. It was too much to think about, too scary.

Even if Liz's explanation was thin, it was at least conveniently
simple, and Amy gladly accepted it.

"I have to pee," Liz said. "Then I want some ice cream and a ride
through the funhouse. After that we can split for home." She tickled
Richie under the chin. "When we get home, I'll take you on a thrill
ride better than anything they have here." She turned to Amy. "Come
to the restroom with me."

"I don't really have to," Amy said.

Liz took her hand. "Come on. Keep me company. Anyway, we have to
talk, kid." "Meet you at the ice-cream stand over there," Richie said,
pointing to a joint beyond the carousel.

"Back in a jiffy," Liz assured him. Then she pulled Amy through the
crowd, toward the edge of the midway.

Conrad was standing in the shadows beside Zena's tent when the four
teenagers came out and stopped in the pool of flashing red and yellow
light that was cast by the nearby Tilt-a-Whirl. He heard the blond
girl say that she wanted to use the restroom, get an ice cream, and
then take a tour of the funhouse.

As soon as the group split up and moved away, Conrad slipped into
Zena's tent.

As .

he went inside, he pulled down a canvas flap that covered the entire
entrance, on the outside of it, there were six wordsLOSED/WILL RETURN
IN TEN MINUTES.

Zena was sitting in her chair. Even in the flickering light of the
candles, Conrad could see that she was ashen.

"Well?" he said.

"Another dead end," Zena said nervously.

"This one looks more like Ellen than most of the others that I've sent
to you." "Just coincidence," Zena said. 1- "What's her name?" "Amy
Harper."

Those four syllables electrified Conrad. He remembered the small boy
to whom he had given two free passes just this afternoon. That child's
name had been Joey Harper, and he had said that his sister's name was
Amy. He, too, had resembled Ellen.

What did you learn about her?"            he asked Zena.

"Not much." "Tell me."         "She's not the one."



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"Tell me anyway.       Brothers?      Sisters?"

Zena hesitated, then said, "One brother." tWhat's his name?" "What
does it matter? She isn't the one you're looking for." "Just curious,"
Conrad said evenly, sensing that she was hiding the truth from him, but
afraid to believe that he had found his prey after all this time.

"What's her brother's name?" "Joey."              "What's her mother's name."
"Nancy," Zena said.

Conrad knew she was lying.           He stared down at her and said, "Are you
sure it isn't Leon"?"

Zena blinked.      "What?     Why Leon"?"

"Because this afternoon, when I happened to have a friendly little chat
with Joey Harper while he was watching us erect the funhouse, he told
me that his mother's name was Leon"." Zena gaped at him, amazed and
perplexed.

Conrad walked around the table and put a hand on her shoulder.

She looked up at him.

He said, "You know what I think? I think the boy lied to me. I think
he sensed danger somehow, and he lied about his mother's name and
age.

And now you're lying to me." "Conrad . . . let them gO." Her words
were an admission that he had found Ellen's children, and a shattering,
explosive elation tore through him.

"I saw something in the crystal ball," she said in a voice that
contained fear and awe. "It's not even crystal. It's just a cheap
piece of crap.

There's nothing magical about it.             Yet .     . . tonight .       . . when those
girls were here .

. . I saw images in the ball. It was awful, horrible. I saw the blond
screaming, her hands thrown up in front of her face as if she were
trying to ward off something hideous that was reaching for her. And I
saw the other one . . . Amy . . . in torn clothes, all covered with
blood." She shuddered violently. "And I think . . . the boys, too .

. . in the background of the vision . . . the boys who were with those
girls . . . all bloody." "It's a sign," Conrad said. Y told you,
I've been sent signs.

This is another one. It tells me not to wait. It tells me to get Amy
tonight, even if I have to take care of the others as well." Zena shook
her head. "No. No, Conrad, I can't let you do that.

You can't have your revenge. It's sick. You can't just go out there
and kill those four kids." I "Oh, I probably won't kill any of them
with my own hands," he said.

"What do you mean?" "Gunther will take care of them." "Gunther? He
wouldn't hurt anyone." "Our son has changed," Conrad said. "I'm the
only one who knows how much he's changed. He's come of age at last.

He needs women now, and he . takes what he needs. He doesn't just
screw them, either. He leaves quite a mess behind. I've been covering



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up for him the last few years.

And now I'll be repaid. He'll give me the vengeance I've dreamed about
for so long." "What do you mean when you say he takes women?" "Uses
them and then rips them apart," Conrad said, knowing that she was the
type who would feel morally responsible for the actions of her freakish
offspring, smiling as he saw the pain flicker across her face.

"How many?"     she asked.

"I've lost count. A few dozen." aMy God," Zena said, shaken to her
roots. "What have I done? What have I brought into the world?" "The
Antichrist," Conrad said.

"No," she said. "You're not in your right mind. You have delusions of
grandeur. It's nothing as special as the Antichrist. It's just a
vicious, mad beast. I should have had Ellen's good sense. I should
have killed it like she killed Victor. Now . . . I'm responsible for
everyone who has died and for everyone who will die before it's
finished."

Standing over her, Conrad reached down, put his hands on her throat,
and said, "I can't let you spoil everything."

Zena struggled. But she didn't have a strong enough desire to live,
while Conrad had an exceedingly strong desire to kill her. He had
never known such power and purpose as that which coursed through him
now. He felt supercharged, crackling with a demonic energy. Zena
thrashed and kicked and scratched his face, but she died much more
easily than he had expected. He dragged her body into the darkest
corner of the tent, later, he would figure out some way to get rid of
it.

The raven squawked hysterically.

Afraid that the bird would draw someone to the body before it could be
disposed of, Conrad opened the cage, thrust his hands inside, seized
the raven, and broke its neck.

He left Zena's tent and hurried back to the funhouse. Amy Harper and
her friends would be arriving shortly, and he wanted to be prepared for
them.

Tonight Joey was a winner.           He won sixty-five cents pitching pennies.

He won a small teddy bear by throwing darts at balloons. And he won a
free ride on the carousel when he managed to grab a brass ring the
first time around.

He was on the carousel, riding a black stallion like the one in the
movie of the same name, when he saw Amy. He hadn't considered the
possibility that her date had brought her to the carnival, but there
she was, in dark green shorts and a pale green T-shirt. She wasn't
with Buzz, though. She was with Liz, and the two girls were headed
toward the edge of the midway. Joey lost sight of them as the carousel
revolved, and when he came around again, they had disappeared in the
crowd.

When he got off the merry-go-round a couple of minutes later, he went
looking for his sister. He knew she would enjoy hearing how he had
fooled Mama. She would think he was clever and brave for coming all
the way to the fairgrounds on his own. He valued Amy's approval more
than anything else, and he was eager to hear what she would say when


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she saw him here all by himself.

THE COMFORT STATION was brightly lighted. It smelled of damp concrete,
mildew, and stale urine. The sinks were stained by years of dripping,
mineral-rich water.

After Amy and Liz washed their hands, as they were leaning toward the
mirrors, fixing their makeup, two older women left the restroom, and
the girls were alone.

"You feeling high?"        Liz asked.

aYes."

"Me too. All the way up. I'm fuckin' wired, for sure.                       Are you just
high, or are you really wired?"

"I'm totally wasted," Amy said, squinting into the mirror, applying
lipstick with a shaky hand.

"Good," Liz said. "I'm glad you're really wrecked. Maybe you'll
finally loosen up." "I'm loose as a goose," Amy said.

"Great," Liz said.        "Then I won't have to sell you on it." "Sell me on
what?"

The orgy," Liz said.

Amy looked at her, and Liz grinned almost drunkenly, and Amy said,
"Orgy?" - "I've already sold the idea to those two pussyhounds out
there," Liz said.

aBuzz and Richie?"

"They're both game."

"You mean .     . . the four of us in one bed?"

E . "Sure," Liz said, putting away her own lipstick, , snapping her
purse shut.

"It'll be fantastic!"         "Oh, Liz, I don't know about that.               I don't--"
"Let it slide, kid."

"I've got college and_n "You've got the pill.                 You won't get knocked up
again. Don't be so damned prim.

Go with the flow, kid. Be what you are. Stop pretending you're Sister
Purity." "I couldn't--" "Of course you could," Liz said. "You will.

You want it.      You're just like me.

Face facts and enjoy yourself."

Amy put one hand on the sink to steady herself.                  It wasn't just the
dope that made her feel woozy.

' She was dizzied by the prospect of just letting go, being like Liz,
forgetting about the future, living just for the moment, incapable of
guilt or remorse. It must be nice to live that way. It must be so
relaxing, so free.

Liz moved close to her and said, "My place. As soon as we leave the
fairgrounds. The four of us. My parents have a king-size bed. Think


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of it, honey. You can have both those guys at the same time.                        They're
both dying to slip the old salami to you.

It'll be great. You'll have a ball. I know you will because I'll have
a ball, and you're just like me." Liz's melodic, rhythmic voice was
draining all the energy and all the will out of Amy. Amy leaned
against the sink and closed her eyes and felt that warm, seductive
voice pulling her down, down into a place she wasn't sure she wanted to
go.

Then Amy felt a hand on her breast.              She opened her eyes with a
start.

Liz was touching her intimately, smiling.

Amy wanted to push the other girl's lewd hand away, but she couldn't
find sufficient strength to present Liz with even that small token of
resistance.

"I've always wondered what it would be like, you and me, just us two
girls," Liz said.

"You're wasted," Amy said. "You're so high you don't know what you're
saying." "I know exactly what I'm saying, kid. I've always wondered
.

..

and tonight I can find out. We can make some real memories, kid." She
leaned close, kissed Amy lightly on the mouth, tongue flicking like the
quick tongue of a snake, and then she left the restroom, twitching her
bottom as she went.

Amy felt dirty, but she also experienced a tremor of pleasure that
oscillated through every inch of her.

She looked in the mirror again, squinting because the bright
fluorescent lights stung her bleary eyes. Her face looked soft, as if
it were melting off her bones. Searching once more for that wickedness
that others could see in her, she stared into her own eyes. All of
Amy's life, her mother had told her that she was filled with a terrible
evil that must be repressed at all costs.

After years and years of listening to that hateful line, Amy didn't
like herself very much. Her self-respect had been whittled down to a
fragile stick, Mama had wielded the whittling knife. Now Amy thought
she finally could see a hint of the evil that Mama and Liz saw in her,
it was a peculiar shadow, a writhing darkness deep in her eyes.

No! she thought desperately, frightened by the speed with which her
resolution was dissolving. I'm not that kind of person. I have plans,
ambitions, dreams.

I want to paint beautiful pictures and bring happiness to people.

But she could vividly recall the thrill that had snapped through her
like an electric current when Liz's tongue had licked her lips.

She thought of being in bed with Richie and Buzz, both of them using
her at the same time, and suddenly it wasn't impossible for her to
picture herself in that situation.

Standing there in the harshly lighted comfort station, acutely


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uncomfortable in the stink of mildew and urine and rotting hope, Amy
felt as if she were waiting in the anteroom of Hell.

At last she walked to the door and opened it.

Liz was waiting outside, in the night.               She smiled at Amy and held out
her hand.

Conrad sent Ghost off to work at the grab joint, which was busier than
the funhouse tonight. As soon as the albino was gone, Conrad shut the
ticket booth and sent Elton to assist at the pitch-anddunk, which
formed the third corner of Straker's three-cornered carnival empire.

Elton gave him an odd look. The funhouse was much too busy to justify
closing it down for the night. But unlike Ghost, Elton never asked
questions, he simply did as he was told.

When those marks who were already in the funhouse came out through the
big, swinging exit doors and disembarked from their gondolas, Conrad
shut down the power to the track. He didn't switch off the lights or
the music, in fact he turned up the volume on the music and on the
voice of the laughing clown as well.

Gunther watched Conrad with puzzlement. But when the situation was
explained to him, he understood at once, and he went into the funhouse
to wait.

Conrad took up a position by the shuttered ticket booth. He turned
away the marks when they asked if they could buy tickets. For the rest
of the night, the funhouse would be open for only four very special
people.

After they ate ice-cream bars covered with chocolate and nuts, Liz and
Amy and Richie and Buzz went to the funhouse.

, The barker, the man with the brilliantly blue eyes who had been on
the elevated platform earlier, was no longer haranguing the people who
passed by.

He was standing at the ticket booth, which appeared to be closed.

"Oh, no," Liz said disappointedly. "Mister, you aren't going to shut
down for the night already?" "No," the barker said. "We just had a
minor mechanical problem." "When will it be fixed?" Liz asked.

"It's fixed already," the barker said.               aBut I've got to wait for the
boss to get back before I start up."

- "How long will that be?"           Richie asked.

The barker shrugged.        "Hard to tell.        The boss likes, shall we say, to
tipple.

If he's tippled too much while we were fixing the motors, he might not
be back at all."

Ah, shit!"     Liz said.      "We saved this for last because it's my
favorite."

The barker looked at Amy, and she didn't like what she saw in his
eyes.

His gaze was so intent and somehow menacing, hungry.



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I should have worn a bra, Amy thought.               I shouldn't have tried to be
like Liz.

I shouldn't have gone out in short shorts, a flimsy T-shirt, and no
bra. I'm just advertising myself. No wonder he's staring at me like
that.

"Well," the barker said, sweeping them all with his gas-flame eyes,
"I'll tell you what. You don't look like an ordinary group of marks to
me. You look like you're with it and for it." "You bet your ass we
are," Liz said.

"Whatever that means--with it and for it," Buzz said.

"It's a carny expression," the barker told them. "It means what it
says and says what it means." Liz laughed. "Which makes everything
perfectly clear." The barker grinned and winked at her.

"You're a pretty sharp dude," Liz said.

"Thank you," the barker said. "And you're a very sharp lady.                        But I'll
take your money just the same."

Richie and Buzz dug in their pockets for money.

The barker glanced at Amy again.             That same hunger.

Amy crossed her arms over her breasts, so he couldn't see her nipples
through the pale green T-shirt she wore.

Joey had just about give up trying to find Amy in the crowd that surged
around the midway-- and then he saw her. She was with Liz, Buzz, and
another boy. The carny who had given Joey the free passes was helping
them into a gondola at the funhouse boarding gate.

Joey hesitated, remembering how weird the carny had acted this
afternoon. But he was so eager to tell Amy about how he had fooled
Mama that he shrugged off his misgivings and headed toward the
funhouse.

.- .

'1.

The gondola seated four: two forward, two behind. Liz and Richie took
the front seats, Amy and Buzz sat in back of them.

They started with a jolt that made Liz yelp and laugh.                     The phony
castle doors opened, swallowed them, and closed again.

At first the gondola moved rapidly into the pitch blackness, but then
it slowed. A light popped on to the left of the track and above it,
and a leering, grizzled pirate laughed and thrust a sword at them.

Liz squealed, and Buzz took the opportunity to put his arm around
Amy.

On their right, just past the pirate, a very realistic-looking werewolf
was crouched on a ledge, suddenly illuminated by a moon that lit up
behind him.

His eyes glowed red, there was blood on his huge teeth, and his claws,
which he raked at the gondola, gleamed like splinters of a mirror.



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"Oh, protect me, Richie!n Liz shouted in make believe terror.

"Protect my virgin body from that horrid beast!n She laughed at her own
performance.

The car slowed even more, and they came to a display in which an
ax-murderer was standing over one of his victims. The ax was buried in
the dead man's skull, cleaving his forehead in two.

The gondola came to a complete stop.

"What's wrong?"          Liz asked.

"Must have broken down again," Richie said.

They were sitting in purple-brown shadows. The only light came from
the ax-murderer exhibit beside them, and that was an eerie, greenish
glow.

"Hey!" Liz shouted into the darkness and into the waves of creepy
music that crashed over them. "Hey, let's get this show on the road!"
"Yeah!" Buzz shouted. "Hey, out there!"

For a minute or two they all called to the barker, who was on the
platform outside, beyond the closed doors of the attraction, no more
than thirty or forty feet away. No one responded to them, and at last
they gave up.

"Shit," Liz said.

"What should we do?"           Amy asked.

"Stay put," Richie said. "It'll start moving again eventually."
"Maybe we should get out and walk back to the doors," Buzz said.

"Absolutely not," Richie said. "If we did, and then the ride started
up again, our gondola would go offwithout us. And if another car came
through the entrance doors, it would run us down." "I hope we don't
have to wait in here too long," Amy said, remembering the way the
barker had looked at her. "It's spooky."

"What a pain in the ass," Liz said.

aBe patient," Richie said.              "We'll be rolling soon."

"If we've got to just sit here," Liz said, "I wish they'd shut off that
fuckin' music. It's way too loud.

..

.

, i_ .

Something creaked loudly overhead.

1What was that?"          Amy asked.

They all looked up in the darkness.

"Nothing," Buzz said.            "Just the wind outside." "There isn't any wind
tonight," Amy said.

The creaking noise came again.               This time there were other loud sounds



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with it: a scraping, a thud, an animal-like grunting.

"I don't think we--" Richie began.

Something flashed out of the darkness and seized him by the throat. An
arm thrust down from the low, unlighted ceiling over the gondola, an
arm that ended in a large, long-fingered, furcovered hand that was
tipped with murderously sharp claws. Though the arm moved fast, they
all saw it in the backwash of green light from the ax-murderer exhibit,
but they couldn't see what was in the blackness above, at the other end
of the arm.

Whatever it was, its claws pierced Richie's throat, hooked deep into
his flesh, and the thing hauled him up, off his seat. Richie kicked
frantically, his shoes drumming on the front of the gondola for a
second or two. Then he was out of the car, up, up, dragged through a
hole in the ceiling, as if he weighed only a few pounds.

Overhead, a trap door banged shut.

The attack had transpired in only three or four seconds.

For a moment Amy was too stunned to move or speak. She stared at the
darkness above, where Richie had disappeared, and she couldn't make
herself believe what she had seen. It had to be a trick, part of the
funhouse tour, an incredibly clever illusion.

Apparently Liz and Buzz thought the same thing, for they, too, were
mesmerized.

Gradually, however, Amy realized that Richie was really gone and that
no carnival in the world would risk injuring a customer with a trick as
dangerous as that one.

Liz said, "Blood."

That single word broke the spell.

Amy and Buzz looked at her.

Liz was turned part of the way around in the front seat. She was
holding up her arms. They were spattered with something wet and
dark.

Even in the green light, it was obvious that Liz was spotted with
blood.

Richie's blood.

Amy screamed.

As SOON AS Conrad switched off the power to the tracks, stranding the
carload of teenagers, he went down the boarding ramp toward the
midway.

He intended to walk around to the back of the funhouse, enter by the
rear basement door, lock it after him, and locate Gunther. He wanted
his son to kill three of those kids, but not Amy Harper. Amy, of
course, would have to suffer for several days before she died, she
would have to be well used, perhaps by both himself and Gunther, that
was the way Conrad wanted it, the way he had dreamed of it for
twenty-five years. He had instructed Gunther carefully, but he wasn't
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began. Gunther needed to be reminded, he needed constant guidance
through the next critical hour.

But when Conrad reached the bottom of the ramp, as he was about to head
for the walkway between the funhouse and Freak-o-rama, he saw the
boy.

Joey Harper. Amy's little brother was standing over by the second set
of castle doors, through which the gondolas exited the funhouse.

He must have seen his sister go inside, Conrad thought.                     He's waiting
for her.

When she doesn't come out, what will he do?                 Go for help?       Seek out a
security guard?

Joey glanced at him.

Conrad smiled and waved.

He would have to do something about the damned boy, and quick.

Buzz climbed onto the ledge where the axmurderer display was bathed in
green light, and he pulled the ax out of the skull of the mannequin
that was crumpled at the foot of the mechanical madman. Ax in hand, he
jumped down into the gondola channel, where Amy and Liz were huddled
together, waiting for him.

"It's a real ax," he said.           "Not very sharp, but it ought to be of some
use."

"I just don't understand," Liz said shakily.                 "What is going on here?

What the fuck is this all about?"

"I don't know for sure," Buzz said.              "I can only guess.         But you saw
that hand .

. ."

"It wasn't a hand," Liz said.

"Claw, paw, whatever you want to call it," Buzz said. "Anyway, it was
just like the hands on the thing in the jar, that dead freak we saw
pickled in formaldehyde over at Freak-o-rama. Only this hand was a lot
bigger."

Amy had to make an effort to speak.              She was surprised she could talk
at all.

"You mean . . . you , think we're trapped in here with a freak that
kills people?" "Yeah," Buzz said.

"It didn't kill Richie!" Liz said, her voice cracking.                      aRichie isn't
dead. He's alive. He's. . . somewhere . . .

and he's alive." "It's possible," Buzz said.                 "Maybe it's just a
kidnapping scheme or something.

Maybe they're just going to hold Richie for ransom. It's possible." He
and Amy exchanged looks, and although it wasn't easy to read his
expression in the green light, Amy knew that Buzz felt the same way
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Richie couldn't possibly be alive. There wasn't one chance in a
million that he would ever smile at them again. Richie was dead, gone,
forever.

aWe've got to get out of here and call the cops," Liz said.

UWe've got to save Richie."

- "Come on," Buzz said.          "We'll walk back to the t'' entrance doors.

If we can't open them, maybe this ax is just sharp enough so that I can
chop a way out." There was no light whatsoever between the green glow
of the display on their left side and the front doors, thirty feet
away.

Liz looked down the tomb-black tunnel and said, "No. No, I can't walk
through all that darkness. What if it's waiting there for us?"

"You have matches in your purse," Amy said.                 "We can use those to find
our way."

"Good idea!"      Buzz said.

Liz rummaged through her purse with shaking hands and found two packs
of matches, one full and one half-empty.

Buzz took them from her. He walked off, into the darkness, struck a
match, and was visible again. "Let's go."

"Wait," Liz said.       "Wait a minute.        Maybe .      . ."

"Maybe what?" Amy asked.

Buzz shook out the match as it came close to burning his fingers, and
he stepped back into the green light.

Liz shook her head to clear it. "I'm so damned wasted. I'm                          really
wrecked. I can't think straight. So isn't it possible that                          maybe this
isn't really happening? Isn't it possible that this is just                         a bad
trip? That was PCP I mixed in the last two joints. You can                          have a bad
trip on A-dust, you know.

Some of the worst trips you ever had.               Maybe that's what this is.

Just a bad trip."       aWe wouldn't all be having the same hallucination,"
Buzz said.

"How do I know you're even real?"             Liz asked.      "You might just exist in
my mind.

Maybe the real Buzz is sitting beside Amy in the back of that gondola,
halfway through the funhouse by now. Maybe I'm in that car, too, so
spaced out I don't realize where I am."

Amy gently slapped Liz's face. "Listen. Listen to me, Liz. This
isn't a bad trip. Not the way you mean it. This is real, and I'm
scared out of my wits, so let's stop fooling around and get the hell
out of here."

Liz blinked, licked her lips. "Yeah. You're right.                      Sorry.       It's just
. . . I wish I didn't feel so wasted."

Buzz lit one match, then another and another, and they followed him
down the dark tunnel toward the funhouse entrance.


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Joey stood with the barker in front of the funhouse, trying to remember
why he had been frightened of this man earlier in the day. Now the
carny was as friendly as a person could be, and he had a smile so nice
that Joey couldn't help smiling, too.

"Have you been through my funhouse yet, son?"                    the barker asked.

"No," Joey said.          "I've been on a lot of other things, though."

He had been avoiding the funhouse because he felt uneasy about Conrad
Straker, even though Straker had given him two free passes.

aMy funhouse is the best attraction on the midway," Conrad said.

"Why don't you let me take you on a personally guided tour?                            How about
that?

Not just an ordinary ride like all the marks get, but a guided tour
with the owner. I can show you the workings of it, the
behind-the-scenes stuff that few people are ever fortunate enough to
see. I'll show you how the monsters are built, how they're made to
move and growl and gnash their teeth. Everything.

All of it.

I'll show you the kind of things that a with-it-and-for-it person would
enjoy learning about." "Gee," Joey said, "you'd really do that?"
"Certainly," the barker said heartily. "As I'm sure you noticed, I
closed the funhouse down for the night. The ticket booth is closed, as
you can see. I just sent the last car through, four nice teenagers."

"One of them was my sister," Joey said.

"Oh, really? Let me guess. There was one who looked like you. The
dark-haired girl in the green shorts." "That's her," Joey said. "She
doesn't know I'm here tonight. I want to wait for her to come out .

.

. to say hello. Hey, maybe she would like the guided tour, too.                             Could
she come along I'll bet Amy would really enjoy it."

The front doors of the funhouse were designed to open inward on
hydraulic rams. There were no handles on them, nothing by which they
could be gripped or moved.

"If I could get hold of an edge," Buzz said, "maybe I could pry them
open. But they're closed so damned tight." "It wouldn't matter if you
could get your fingers through a crack," Amy said.

"You wouldn't be able to pull the doors open anyway. I'll bet they're
just like the automatic door on the garage at home. As long as they're
hooked up to the hydraulic system, they can't be opened manually."
"Yeah," Buzz said. "You're right. I should have thought of that." Amy
was surprised that she was holding up so well. She was scared, and she
got a sinking feeling--part grief and part disgust--when she thought of
what happened to Richie. But she wasn't coming apart at the seams. In
spite of the dope she had smoked, she was in control of herself. In
fact she was thinking faster and clearer than Buzz. She didn't
consider herself to be a strong person, Mama always told her that she
was weak, flawed. Now her fortitude amazed her.




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Liz, on the other hand, was rapidly breaking down. Her eyes brimmed
with a steady flow of tears. She looked drawn, years older than she
had looked minutes ago. She mewled like a scared kitten.

"Don't panic," Buzz said.          "I've still got the ax."

Amy lit a series of matches while Buzz swung the ax at the door--six,
eight, a dozen blows.

At last he stopped, breathing hard. "No good. There isn't any edge on
the damned blade." "Someone must have heard all that pounding," Liz
said.

"I doubt it," Amy said. "Remember, the actual funhouse entrance is set
back at least fifteen feet from the ticket booth and the midway, beyond
the boarding ramp, at the end of the entrance channel. No one passing
by is likely to hear the ax, not above all this music and that laughing
clown." aBut the barker's out there," Liz said. "He'll hear it." "For
Christ's sake, Liz," Buzz said, "get your head together. The barker's
not on our side. He's obviously part of it. He lured us in is what he
did." "sO some freak could kill us?" Liz asked. "That doesn't make
sense.

That's ridiculous. The barker doesn't even know us. Why would he
choose a bunch of kids at random and throw them to . . . that thing?"
"Don't you listen to the news on TV?" Buzz asked. "Things don't have
to make sense anymore. The world's full of crazies." aBut why would
he do it?" Liz demanded.

"Maybe just for kicks," Amy said.

aWe'll scream," Liz said.          aWe'll scream our fuckin' heads off."
"Yeah," Buzz said.

"No," Amy said. "That's useless, too. The music is louder than usual,
and so's the clown's laugh. Nobody's going to hear us--or if someone
does, he'll think we're just having fun in here. People are supposed
to scream in a funhouse." "So what are we going to do?" Liz asked. "We
can't just wait here for that thing to come back. We've got to do
something, damn it!" aWe'll go around to some of these mechanical
monsters and see if we can find anything else like the ax, stuff we can
use to defend ourselves," Buzz said.

"The ax isn't even sharp," Liz said petulantly. "What the hell good is
it?" "It's sharp enough to hold that thing off," Buzz said, hefting the
ax in both hands. "Maybe it's too dull to cut wood, but it'll sure do
some damage to that bastard's face." "The only way you're going to
hold off that freak is with a shotgun," Liz said shakily.

As the flame neared Amy's fingers, she dropped the match she was
holding. It was burnt out by the time it reached the floor. For a
couple of seconds they stood in a darkness like no other that Amy had
ever experienced.

The darkness did not merely seem to contain a threat, it was the
threat. It seemed to be a living, evil, purposeful darkness that
pressed close around her, seeking, touching with its cool, black
hands.

Liz whimpered softly.

Amy struck another match, and in the welcome burst of light, she said,
"Buzz is right. We've got to arm ourselves. But that won't be


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enough.

Even a shotgun might not be enough. That freak could drop out of the
ceiling or pop up from the floor so fast that you wouldn't have time to
pull the trigger anyway. What we've got to do is find another way
out."

"There isn't a way out," Liz said.             "The exit door will be just like
this one.

You won't be able to open it or chop it down.                 We're trapped." "There's
probably an emergency exit," Amy said.

"That's right!n Buzz said. "There has to be an emergency door
somewhere. And maybe a service entrance, too." aWe'll arm ourselves as
best we can," Amy said, "and then we'll go looking for a way out." "You
want to go deeper into this place?" Liz asked incredulously.

"Are you out of your fuckin' minds? It'll get us if we go in there." I
"It's just as likely to get us if we stand here by the doors," Amy
said.

"Right," Buzz said. "Let's get moving." "No, no, no!" Liz said,
shaking her head violently.

The flame flickered.

Darkness.

Amy struck another match.

The renewed light revealed Liz crouching very i = low against the
sealed doors, looking up at the ceiling, shivering like a cornered
rabbit.

Amy took the girl by the arm and pulled her to her feet. "Listen,
kid," Amy said gently, "Buzz and I aren't going to just stand here
until that thing comes back for us. So you have to go with us now.                       If
you stay here alone, you're finished for sure. Do you want to stay
here all by yourself in the dark?"

Liz put her hands to her eyes, wiped away the tears, droplets still
glistened in her lashes, and her face was wet. "All right," she said
unhappily, "I'll go. But I'm sure as hell not going to go first."

"I'll lead the way," Buzz assured her.

"I won't go last, either," Liz said. , "I'll bring up the rear," Amy
said. "You'll be safe in the middle, Liz. Now let's gO.

They fell into line and took only three cautious '5.

steps before Liz stopped and said, aMy God, how did she know?" "How did
who know what?" Amy asked impatiently.

"How did that fortune-teller know something like this was going to
happen?"

They stood in baffled silence for a moment, and the match went out, and
Amy fumbled for a long time with the next one before she finally got it
burning, suddenly her hands were shaking. Liz's unanswerable question
about the fortune-teller had sparked a strange feeling in Amy--a tingle
along her spine, not a shiver of fear, but an unnerving quiver of deja
vu. She felt that she had been in this situation before--trapped in a


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dark place with exactly this same horrible freak. For a few seconds
that feeling was so shatteringly powerful, so overwhelming, that she
felt as if she might faint, but then it passed.

"Did Madame Zena really see into the future?" Liz asked. "That isn't
possible, is it? That's too damned weird. What the hell is going on
here?" Y don't know," Amy said. aBut we don't have time to worry about
that now.

First things first. We've got to find that emergency exit and get out
of here." Outside, the clown laughed.

Amy, Liz, and Buzz moved deeper into the funhouse.

For a minute after Joey asked for a rain check on the guided tour,
Conrad stood behind the boy, staring at the double exit doors,
pretending to wait for the sister and her friends to come out of the
funhouse.

"What's taking them so long?"            Joey asked.

"Oh, it's the longest ride on the midway," Conrad said quickly.

He pointed to a poster that proclaimed precisely that virtue of the
funhouse.

"I saw that," Joey said. aBut it can't be this lOng." "Twelve full
minutes." "They've been in there longer than that." Conrad looked at
his watch and frowned.

"And why haven't any other cars come out?" Joey asked. "Weren't there
cars ahead of them?" Conrad stepped up to the gondola channel by the
exit ramp and looked down at the tracks. Faking surprise, he said,
"The center drive chain isn't moving." "What's that mean?" Joey asked,
stepping up beside him.

"It means the damned machinery has broken down again," Conrad said.

"It happens every once in a while.             Your sister and her friends are
stuck in there.

I'll have to go inside and see what's wrong with the equipment." He
turned away and started around the side of the funhouse. Then he
stopped and looked back as if he had forgotten Joey for a moment.

"Come along, son.

I might need your help."

The boy hesitated.

"Come on," Conrad said.          "Let's not leave your sister sitting in the
dark."

The boy followed him to the rear of the funhouse.

Conrad opened the door that led to the room beneath the main floor of
the structure. He went inside, felt for the light chain, pulled on
it.

Joey entered after him. "Wow!n the boy said. "I didn't realize
there'd be so many machines!n Conrad closed and locked the door behind
them. When he turned to Joey, he grinned and said, You lying little
shit. Your mother's name isn't Leon"."


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, Amy, Liz, and Buzz were deep in the funhouse when a string of lights
came on above the track. They had turned several sharp bends, had
edged nervously down a couple of long, dark straightaways, and had just
started up a steep slope, past wax dummies of monsters from various
science fiction movies.

The lights didn't completely dispel the darkness.                   Deep shadows lay
close by.

But any light at all was welcome, for Amy had only one match left.

"What's happening?" Liz asked anxiously. She was frightened of any
change in their situation, even if that change meant light instead of
darkness.

"I don't know,' Amy said uneasily.

"It's turned the lights on so it can look for us more easily," Liz
said.

"That's what's happening, and you know it." "Well, if that is the
case," Amy said, "we'll be a lot harder to find if we keep moving."
aRight," Buzz said. "Let's don't just stand here. Let's find a way
out."

"There isn't one," Liz said.           But she moved uphill with them.

When they reached the top of the rise, they found a large display
featuring six man-sized, tentacled, bug-eyed monsters. The aliens were
disembarking from a flying saucer, absurd shapes frozen in the
frost-pale backwash from the lights above the tracks.

"That saucer's pretty damned big," Buzz said. Y'll bet we could all
three hide in it." "They'd be sure to look in there," Amy said. aWe
can't stand still, and we can't hide. We have to get out." Just as she
finished speaking, the drive chain in the center of the tracks started
to move.

They all jumped, startled.

In the distance an approaching gondola rattled noisily along the
rails-clatter-clunk-clatterclunk--a hard, sharp sound, audible above
the music and the recorded laughter, growing louder by the second.

"It's coming for us," Liz said.            "Oh, Jesus, Jesus, that freak is
coming to get us!"

The dull, rusty knife that Amy had taken off one of the monster models
now seemed like a laughable weapon.

Clatter-clunk -clatter-clunk .            ..

"Quick," Buzz said.        "Get off the tracks."

They clambered onto the wide ledge where the six aliens were coming out
of the flying saucer.

Clatter-clunk-clatter-clunk .            ..

"You two go over by the spaceship," Buzz said.

Make yourselves visible.          Make sure his attention is on you."



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~ "What are you going to do?"               Amy asked.

Buzz grinned.         It was a strained, frightened, utterly humorless grin.

He was struggling to maintain his macho image. He pointed to a
papier-mache boulder and said, "I'm going to stand over there by that
rock. When the car comes up the hill . . . when the bastard in it
sees - the two of you, I'm going to chop him before he has a chance to
jump out onto the tracks." "It might work," Amy said.

Sure," Buzz said.          "I'll split him wide open."

Clatter-clunk-clatter-clunk .               ..

The gondola turned the nearest corner and ~ started up the slope toward
them.

Liz tried to run and hide.

Amy grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her over to the flying saucer,
where the occupant of the gondola would spot them just as he reached
the crest of the hill.

Buzz positioned himself beside the rock, completely visible to Liz and
Amy, but hidden from the oncoming car. He held the ax in both hands.

: Clatter-clunk .          . . clatter-clunk .          . . clatter .       . . clunk .    .

.

The car was slowing down as the grade of the tracks increased.

Buzz lifted the ax over his head.

Amy saw the front of the gaily painted car move into sight.

"Jesus, let me go, let me go, Amy," Liz said.

Amy held her wrist even more firmly.

The first seat of the car was visible now.                   It appeared to be empty.

Clatter .        . . clunk .      . . clatter .        ..

Very slowly now.

Hardly moving now.

Finally the rear seat came into view.

Amy squinted. If the lights had been just a fraction dimmer than they
were, she wouldn't have been able to see the thing in the backseat of
the gondola.

But she did see it. Just a lump. A formless shadow.                         It was crouched
on the floor of the car, trying to deceive them.

Buzz saw it, too. With a karate-like yell of fury, he stepped out from
behind the boulder and swung the ax down, below the level of his feet,
into the gondola. It connected with such force at the extreme end of
its arc that it was jerked out of his hands.

The thing in the car didn't move, and the car itself ground to a
complete stop.



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"I got him!"      Buzz shouted.

Liz and Amy rushed to him.

Buzz got down on his knees, reached into the gondola channel, into the
car, and seized the ax handle again. He pulled up, and the thing into
which the dull blade had sunk was lifted up with it.

A head.

Not the freak's head.

The freak hadn't been on that rear seat.

The dull blade of the ax was embedded deeply in Richie's skull.

Brains oozed from the fissures I in the bone and slid down his bloody
face.

Liz screamed.

Buzz dropped the ax and turned away from the gondola.                    He vomited on
the papier-mfiche boulder.

Amy was so stunned that she let go of Liz's hand.

Liz was screaming at Buzz now. "You stupid son of a bitch! You killed
him! You killed Richie!n Both Liz and Amy had armed themselves with
dull, rusty knives that they had taken from the funhouse displays, and
now Liz raised her knife as if she might attack Buzz with it. "You
stupid asshole! You killed Richie!n "No," Amy said. "No, Liz. Baby,
listen. Buzz didn't kill him.

Listen, Richie was already dead. It was just his corpse in that car."
Sobbing with terror, her fear magnified by the drugs that she had taken
all evening, Liz turned and ran before Amy could grab her. She fled
across the flying saucer display, between two tentacled aliens whose
rubbery appendages wobbled in the air after she brushed past them. She
vanished in shadows, behind the papier-mfiche rocks.

aLiz, damn it!n Amy said.

The sound of the other girl's panicked flight faded rapidly.                        She
disappeared into the bowels of the funhouse.

Amy turned to Buzz again.

He was on his knees.        He had just finished being violently sick.

The stink was terrible.          He wiped the back of his hand across his
soiled mouth.

"Are you okay?" Amy asked.

"Holy Christ, it was Richie," he said weakly.

"He was already dead," Amy said.

aBut it was Richie!n "Don't flake out on me," Amy said.

"I . . . I won't." "You're okay?"              "I guess .       . . yeah."      "Get hold
of yourself."

"I'm all right."       aWe have to keep our cool if we're going to survive."



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aBut this is crazy," Buzz said.

"It's crazy," Amy agreed. aBut it's happening." "Locked in a funhouse
with a . . . a monster." ~ "It's happening, and we have to deal with
it," she said patiently.

Buzz nodded, sucked in his stomach, struggled to regain his macho
self-confidence. "Yeah. We'll , deal with it. We can handle it.                            I'm
not afraid of any freak."

The instant he finished speaking, a blossom of blood appeared in the
center of Buzz's forehead.

At first Amy didn't even realize it was blood. It A' looked black,
like a spot of ink. But then the wan light caught it at a slightly
different angle, and she could see that it was red.

Then there was a follow-up noise that echoed through the cavern an
instant after the blood appeared, it was barely louder than the clatter
that the moving gondola had made--crack!

Buzz's mouth fell open.

.

....

..

Less than a second after that, while Amy was still unaware of what was
happening, Buzz's right eye exploded in a spray of blood and ruined
tissue and splintered bone, and the dark, empty socket looked like a
screaming mouth.

Again: crack!

Blood and pieces of flesh spattered the front of Amy's green T-shirt.

She whirled around.

The barker was standing only ten feet away. He was pointing a small
handgun at Buzz. It wasn't a very big gun, it looked like a toy.

Behind Amy, Buzz sighed and made an odd gurgling sound and slumped over
in his own vomit.

This can't be happening!             Amy thought.

But she knew it was. She knew that this night had been waiting to
happen for a long, long time, it was a night written into her life
before she was born.

The barker smiled at her.

"Who are you?"         she asked.

"The new Joseph," he said.

"What?" "I'm the father of the new God," he said.                       His smile was
sharklike.

Amy held her rusted knife at her side, hoping the barker wouldn't see
it and that somehow she would get close enough to him to use the
blade.


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"Say hello to your little brother," the barker said. He was holding a
rope in one hand. He pulled on it. Joey staggered out of the
darkness, at the other end of the leash.

"Oh, God," Amy said.        "God, help us."

"He can't help you," the barker said.               "God is weak.       Satan is
strong.

God can't help you this time, bitch."

LIZ STUqBLED INTO someone in the shadows. He was big. She cried out
before she realized that it wasn't the freak. She had walked into
another of the mechanical monsters, which were all motionless and
silent now.

LiZ was sweating, shaking, disoriented. She kept colliding with things
in the darkness, and each time her heart nearly stopped. She knew she
should either sit down until she was calm again--or go back to the
gondola channel, where there was some light, but she was too frightened
to do what she ought to.

She staggered forward, hands out in front of her, the knife in one
hand, gagging when she thought of Richie with the ax buried in his
head, resisting the urge to throw up, her head light from the effects
of adrenaline and dope, just trying to save herself, gasping,
whimpering, aware that all the noise she was making might be the death
of her, but unable to be silent, just trying to save herself any way
she could, hoping she would luck into an exit, counting on the fact
that she'd always been a very lucky girl, wishing (crazily) that she
had time to stop and smoke another joint, and that was when she tripped
over something and fell, hard, onto the plank floor, and she reached
back to free her foot, and she discovered a metal ring in the floor, a
large ring in which she had caught the toe of her shoe, and she cursed
the pain in her twisted ankle, but then she saw a thread of light
coming up through the floor, light from a room below, and she realized
that the ring was a handle on a trapdoor.

A way out.

Laughing excitedly, Liz scrambled off the trap, on which she had been
sprawled. She knelt in front of the door and took hold of the ring.

The door was warped, it didn't want to open. She grunted, put all her
strength into one hard tug, and finally the trap swung up.

Light filled the funhouse around her.

The huge, hideous freak was standing on the ladder directly under the
trapdoor. He reached up, fast as a striking snake, seized a handful of
Liz's long blond hair, and dragged her, screaming, through the hole in
the floor, into the funhouse basement.

"Let my brother go," Amy said.

"Not likely," the barker said.

, , .i, , ,.t.

i.

ú, Joey's hands were tied behind his back.                Another rope was tightly



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knotted around his neck, the barker held the loose end of that leash.

Joey's throat was rope-burned, and he was crying.

Amy looked into the brilliantly blue but inhuman eyes of the barker,
and for the first time in her life she knew beyond all doubt that she
wasn't the evil person her mother had always insisted she was. This
was evil.

This man was evil. This maniac. And the murderous freak that had
killed Richie. This was the quintessence of evil, and it was as
utterly different from her as she was different from . . . Liz.

Suddenly, incredibly, in spite of the fact that both she and Joey
seemed close to death at that moment, Amy was filled with a bright,
cascading river of self-confidence, with a great and good feeling about
herself that she had never experienced before. That river washed away
all the dark, confused, and bitter emotions with which she had been
plagued for so long.

Simultaneously, she had another flash of deja vu. She had the uncanny
feeling that this scene had been acted out before, perhaps not in every
detail, but in essence. And she felt, too, that she was somehow
connected to the barker far less casually than she appeared to be. A
tremendous sense of destiny settled like a cloak upon her shoulders, a
certainty that she had been born and had lived only to come to this
place at this time. It was an eerie feeling, but now she welcomed
it.

Move, act, be brave, a voice said within her.

Holding her rusty knife at her side, hoping that the barker hadn't seen
it, she moved toward Joey. "Honey, are you all right?

Did he hurt you? Don't cry. Don't be afraid." She concentrated all of
her attention on Joey, so that the barker wouldn't think she was making
a move against him, and when she stooped down toward Joey, she abruptly
changed directions, turned, launched herself at the carny, and drove
the rusty knife through his throat.

His hateful eyes popped open.

He fired the pistol reflexively.

Amy was aware of the bullet's slipstream kissing her cheek, but she
wasn't afraid. She felt as if she were protected.

The barker gagged and dropped the gun and put his hands to his
throat.

He went down hard, and he stayed down, dead.

Liz scuttled backwards on her hands and feet, like a beautiful spider,
along the earthen floor of the funhouse basement, until she backed up
against the softly vibrating metal casing of a large piece of
machinery. She crouched there, her heartbeat so forceful and rapid
that it seemed capable of smashing her apart from within.

The freak watched her. After pulling her down through the trapdoor, he
had cast her aside. He hadn't lost interest in her. He just wanted to
see what she would do. He was teasing her, offering her an illusive
chance of escape, playing the cat to her mouse.



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Now that she had put fifteen feet between herself and the freak, Liz
stood up.

Her legs were weak.        She had to hold onto the humming machine in order
not to collapse.

The creature stood half in shadow, half in yellow light, its green eyes
glowing. It was so tall that it had to crouch a bit to keep from
hitting its head on the low ceiling.

Liz looked around for a way out. There wasn't one. The lower level of
the funhouse was a maze of machinery, if she tried to run, she wouldn't
get far before the freak would be all over her.

The thing took a step toward her.

"No," Liz said.

It took another step.

"No. stop." It shuffled closer, until they were only six feet apart,
and then it stopped and cocked its head and stared down at her with
what appeared to be curiosity.

"Please," she said.        "Please let me go.         Please."

She had never expected to hear herself begging anyone for anything.

She prided herself on her strength and toughness. But she was begging
for her life now, and she found it easy to grovel when so much was at
stake.

The freak began to sniff at her as a hound might sniff at a new
bitch.

His wide nostrils flared and quivered as he snorted with increasing
excitement.

"Smell good," the freak said.

Liz was startled to discover that he could speak.

"Smell woman," he said.

A spark of hope flickered in Liz.

"Pretty," the freak said.          "Want pretty."

My God, Liz thought, almost giddy now.               Is this what it comes down
to?

Sex? Is that the way out for me? Why not? Hell, yes! That's what
it's always come down to before. That's always been my way out.

The freak shuffled closer, raised one of its huge, rodent claws.

It gently stroked her face.

She tried to conceal her revulsion.              "You .     . . you like me, don't
you?"

she asked.

"Pretty," he said, grinning, showing his crooked, sharp, yellow
teeth.


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"You want me?"

"Real bad," he said.

"Maybe I could be nice to you," she said quaveringly, trying hard to
slip back into the role of the sexpot, the teaser, the fun girl, the
party image she had sanded and buffed and polished until it was smooth,
comfortable, and splinter-free.

The thing's wickedly taloned hand slid down from her face to her
breasts.

"Just don't hurt me, and maybe we can work something out," she said
shakily.

The thing licked its black lips, its tongue was pale and speckled,
utterly alien. It hooked one claw in her T-shirt and shredded the thin
fabric. One razorlike nail made a long, shallow cut across her right
breast.

"Wait," she said, wincing.           "Now wait a second."         Panic rose in her
again.

The freak pushed her against the purring machine.

Liz squirmed, tried to shove the creature away.                  It seemed to be made
of iron.

She was powerless against it.

The thing appeared to be far more excited by the thread of blood that
decorated her bare breast than it was by her nakedness. It tore off
her shorts.

Liz screamed.

The freak slapped her, almost rendering her unconscious with that
single blow, and then bore her down onto the floor.

A minute later, as Liz felt the creature spreading her legs and
entering her, she also felt its claws piercing her sides. As a cold,
maroon darkness swept over her, she knew that sex was indeed the
answer, as always, but this time it was the final answer.

Amy thought she heard Liz scream. It was a distant sound, a short,
sharp cry of terror and pain. Then nothing but the usual funhouse
noises.

For a moment Amy continued to listen, but when she couldn't hear
anything except the eerie music and the laughing clown, she turned to
Joey again. He was standing to the left of the barker's corpse, trying
not to look at it. Amy had untied the boy. Although tears were
streaming down his face, and although his lower lip was quivering, he
was trying to be brave for her.

She knew that her opinion mattered more to him than did that of anyone
else, and she saw that even now, even under these circumstances, he
was concerned that she think well of him. He wasn't sobbing. He
wasn't panicked. He wasn't going to break down entirely. He even made
an effort to be nonchalant, he spat on his ropeburned wrists and gently
smeared the saliva over the angry red marks, soothing the chafed
skin.


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"Joey?" He looked up at her.

"Come on, honey. We're going to get out of here." "Okay," he said, his
voice cracking between the syllables. "How?

Where's the door?" "I don't know," Amy said. aBut we'll find it." The
feeling of being watched over and protected was still with Amy, and it
buoyed her.

Joey took hold of her left hand.

Holding the barker's pistol in her right hand, Amy led the boy through
the shadowy funhouse, past mechanical monsters from Mars and wax
zombies and wooden lions and rubber sea beasts. Eventually she saw a
shaft of light coming up from the floor, back in the darkness to the
left of the track, where the glow from the work lights didn't reach.

Hoping the light represented a way out, she led Joey behind a pile of
papier-mache boulders, where she found a trapdoor in the floor.

"Is this the way out?" Joey asked.

"Maybe," Amy said.

She got down on her knees, leaned forward, and looked into the dimly
lighted basement of the funhouse. The place was filled with humming
motors, with rumbling machines, with giant pulley wheels
and gears, with banks of levers, with enormous drive belts and drive
chains--and with shadows. She hesitated. But then that reassuring,
inner voice urged her not to retreat, and she knew she was meant to
descend into the lower chamber, there was nowhere else for her to go.

She sent Joey down the ladder ahead of her, covering him with the
gun.

When he was at the bottom, she followed quickly. Very quickly--because
suddenly she wasn't sure Joey was protected by the unseen power, as she
felt herself to be.

Perhaps Joey was vulnerable.

"This is the cellar," Joey said.

aYes," Amy said. aBut we're not underground. The cellar is really the
first floor, so there's almost sure to be a door to the outside." She
held his hand again, and they eased down the aisle between two rows of
machinery, turned a corner into another aisle--and saw Liz. The girl
was on the floor, on her back, head twisted and bent unnaturally to one
side, eyes wide and sightless, stomach torn open, dressed only in
blood.

"Don't look," Amy said to Joey, trying to shield him from the awful
sight, even as her own stomach flip-flopped.

"I saw," he said miserably.           "I saw." Amy heard a deep-throated
growl.

She looked up from Joey's tear-stained face.

The hideous freak had entered the aisle behind them. It was crouched
to avoid hitting its enormous, gnarled head on the low ceiling. Green
fire flickered in its eyes. Drool coated its lips and mat ted the wiry
fur around its mouth.


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Amy wasn't surprised to see the thing. In her heart she had known this
confrontation was unavoidable. She was walking through these events as
if she had rehearsed them a thousand times.

The creature said, "Bitch. Pretty bitch." His voice was thick.                      It
came out of cracked, black lips.

As if drifting through a slow-motion dream, Amy pushed Joey behind
her.

The freak sniffed. "Woman heat. Smell nice." Amy didn't back away
from it. Holding the pistol at her side and slightly behind her,
hoping the freak would not see it, she took a step toward the thing.

"Want," it said.       "Want pretty." She took another step, then a third.

The freak seemed surprised by her boldness.                 He cocked his head, stared
at her intensely.

She took a fourth step.

The creature raised one hand threateningly.                 The claws gleamed.

Amy took two more steps, until she was only an arm's length from the
freak. In one smooth, swift movement she raised the gun and extended
it and fired into the thing's chest--once, twice, three times.

The freak staggered backwards, driven by the fusillade. He crashed
into a machine, throwing several levers with his outcast arms. The
wheels and gears began to turn all over the basement, the belts started
moving, and the drive chains .Y.

clattered from one steel drum to the next.

But the freak didn't fall down. He was bleeding from three chest
wounds, but he was still on his feet. He pushed away from the machine
and moved toward Amy.

Joey screamed.

Her heart pounding, Amy raised the gun, but waited. The freak was
almost on top of her, swaying, eyes unfocused now, drooling blood. She
could even smell its fetid breath. The thing swung one massive hand at
her, trying to rip open her face, but it missed by inches. Finally,
when she was absolutely sure that the bullet would not be wasted, Amy
fired another round into the creature's face.

Again, the freak was flung backwards. This time he fell hard against
the heavy, main drive chain that operated the gondolas overhead. The
sharp-toothed chain caught in his clothes, jerked him off his feet, and
dragged him violently down the aisle, away from Amy and Joey. The
creature kicked and screamed but couldn't free himself. The legs of
his trousers tore as he skimmed across the floor, and then his skin was
scoured offwith equal efficiency. His left hand snagged for a moment
where the chain passed under and then over a steel drum, for a second
or two the mechanism jammed, but then the powerful motors pulled the
chain into motion again, the freak's hand came through the huge gear
with a couple of fingers missing. Then the beast was being dragged
back toward Amy and Joey. It was no longer struggling with the chain,
it hadn't the strength left to resist, it was howling in agony now,
spasming, dying. Nevertheless, as it passed them, it reached for Amy's
ankle. Failing that, it managed to hook its claws through one leg of


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Joey's jeans. The boy yelped and fell and started sliding after the
freak, but Amy moved quickly, she grabbed the boy and held on tight.

For a moment the chain froze again, and the freak stopped moving, and
they strained in a macabre tug-of-war, but then one of the thing's
claws snapped, and Joey's pants tore, and the chain began to clatter
again, and the freak was carried away. It was tossed and battered like
a rag doll until it finally became pinned in the huge, main cogwheel,
where the thumb-sized teeth of the gears ground most of the way through
its neck before freezing up.

The freak was motionless, limp.

Amy threw down the pistol she had taken from the barker.

Joey was staring at her, wide-eyed, shocked.

"Don't be afraid," she said.

He ran into her arms and hugged her.

Suffused with joy in spite of the blood and horror all around her,
overflowing with the exhilarating joy of life, Amy realized that the
barker had been wrong when he'd said that God could not help her. God
had helped hen-God or some universal force that sometimes went by the
name of God. He was with her now.

She felt Him at her side. But He wasn't at all like poor Mama said He
was. He wasn't a vengeful God with a million rules and harsh
punishments.

He was simply .       . . kindness life and gentleness and love.                    He was
caring.

. And then that special moment passed, the aura of His presence faded,
and Amy sighed. She picked up Joey and carried him out of the
funhouse.

AFTERWORD IN 1980, WHEN my nOVe1S had nOt Yet begUn to appear on
bestseller lists, Jove Books asked me to write the novelization of a
screenplay by Larry Block (not the Lawrence Block who writes the
marvelous Matthew Scudder detective novels and other fine suspense
fiction, another Larry Block specializing in film writing), which was
being shot by Tobe Hooper, the young director who had made a name for
himself with a low-budget horror film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had
always thought that transforming a screenplay into a real novel would
be interesting and demanding, so I was motivated by the challenge. To
be truthful, I was also motivated by the financial terms, which were
more generous than what I was receiving for my own novels. When I
signed on to write The Funhouse, the inflation rate was 18% and
interest rates were well above 20%, and it seemed .

chapters, which were the scenes with which the movie was almost solely
concerned. I didn't start to use the screenplay until I had written
four-fifths of the book.

The project was fun, however, because I'd long had a serious interest
in carnivals and had collected a lot of material about them. As an
unhappy child in a severely dysfunctional family, living across the
street from the fairgrounds where the county fair pitched its tents
every August, I had often dreamed about running away with the carnival
to escape the poverty, fear, and violence of my daily life. Years
after writing The Funhouse, I made far more extensive use of my


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carnival knowledge in Twilight Eyes. But writing The Funhouse was
satisfying in part because I knew that the carnival lore I was putting
into it was not only accurate but fresh to readers, for this was an
American subculture about which few novelists had ever written with any
real knowledge or accuracy.

When The Funhouse was first published by Jove--a paperback imprint
owned by the Berkley Publishing Group, which was a division of G. P.

Putnam's Sons, which was owned by MCA, the media giant that also owned
Universal Studios (life is more complex out here in the late 20th
century than in the carnivalit was supposed to hit stores
simultaneously with the film's appearance in theaters. However, late
in the game the film was held back for additional editing, and the book
was dropped into the marketplace three months ahead of the movie.

Surprisingly, The Funhouse quickly went through eight printings and a
million copies, and appeared on the New York Times paperback bestseller
list. It was a satisfying success for a paperback original (that is, a
book that had no hardcover history to build upon), and it sold
steadily--until the film opened.

Now, you must understand that ordinarily a film sells books. If a book
does well before a movie is made, it will often do exceptionally well
when it has the flick to support it. This was not the case with The
Funhouse.

Upon release of the film, the sales of the book plummeted.

A mystery?

Not really.

Let's just say that Mr. Hooper had not realized the potential of the
material to the extent that the studio, probably Mr. Block, or Hooper
himself would have hoped. Instead of serving as an advertisement for
the book, the film acted as a curse upon it. Months later, The
Funhouse had vanished from bookstore shelves, never to be seen again.

Well, almost never.

The book had been written under the name "Owen West" because Jove hoped
to create a brand-new name (or new brand name) in horrorsuspense and
use the extra punch of a film to really send off the author's "first"
book in a big way. The second West book was The Mask, and although
sales were good, the success of the first book redounded to Mr. West's
benefit less than the failure of the movie detracted from his
reputation. By the time I delivered the third of the West books, The
Pit, novels under my own name had become more successful than those
written as West, and it seemed wise to fold his identity into mine.

The Pit was retitled Darkfall-- a great relief to me, as I could easily
imagine the intense pleasure nasty-minded critics would get from merely
adding an s to the second word of the original title--and was published
under my real name.

I now tell people that West died tragically, trampled by musk oxen in
Burma while researching a novel about a giant prehistoric duck which
he'd tentatively titled Quackzilla.

Eventually The Mask was republished under my name and sold far better
than it had for poor, luckless, ox-flattened West.



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And now here is The Funhouse under my name at last, thanks to the
efforts of people at MCA Publishing, Berkley Books, and the kind
cooperation of Larry Block. It doesn't rank with Watchers or Hideaway
or a number of my best novels, but it's as good as some and maybe
better than others. I like it. I have books I'll never let see print
again. Readers shouldn't have to pay for stories that a novelist wrote
while he was still learning, just to be able to see how badly he was
able to screw up before he found his way.

The Funhouse, I think, is better than that.                 It's fun.      It has
something to say.

The background is authentic. And not least of all, it's pretty damn
scary, even if I say so myself. I hope you enjoyed it.

And a moment of silence, please, for the late Mr. West, whose remains
continue to disintegrate , in that field in Burma, where the herd of
oxen-- and the movie version of The Funhouse--drove his too-mortal
flesh deep into the oily, black mud.

the end.




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