Dean Koontz - (1980) Read online

  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.

  She looked at her trembling hands and wondered if she was drunk enough to do something about the baby.

  Distant lightning flashed beyond the window. Thunder rumbled from the edge of the dark horizon.

  Ellen turned her eyes slowly to the bassinet, which stood in shadows at the foot of the bed, and gradually her fear was supplanted by anger.

  She was angry with Conrad, her husband, and she was angry with herself for having gotten into this. But most of all, she was angry with the baby because the baby was the hideous, undeniable evidence of her sin.

  She wanted to kill it--kill it and bury it and forget that it had ever existed--but she knew she would have to be drunk in order to choke the life out of the child.

  She thought she was just about ready.

  Gingerly, she got up and went to the kitchen sink. She poured the half-melted ice cubes out of her glass, turned on the water, and rinsed the tumbler.

  Although the cascading water roared when it struck the metal sink, Ellen could still hear the baby. Hissing. Dragging its small fingers down the inner surfaces of the bassinet. Trying to get out.

  No. Surely that was her imagination. She couldn't possibly hear those thin sounds over the drumming water.

  She turned off the tap.

  For a moment the world seemed to be filled with absolutely perfect, tomblike silence. Then she heard the soughing wind once more, it carried with it the distorted music of a calliope that was piping energetically out on the midway.

  And from within the bassinet: scratching, scrabbling.

  Suddenly the child cried out. It was a harsh, grating screech, a single, fierce bleat of frustration and anger. Then quiet. For a few seconds the baby was still, utterly motionless, but then it began its relentless movement again.

  With shaking hands, Ellen put fresh ice in her glass and poured more bourbon.

  She hadn't intended to drink any more, but the child's scream had been like an intense blast of heat that had burned away the alcohol haze through which she had been moving. She was sober again, and fear followed swiftly in the wake of sobriety.

  Although the night was hot and humid, she shivered.

  She was no longer capable of murdering the child. She was no longer even brave enough to approach the bassinet.

  But I've got to do it! she thought.

  She returned to the booth that encircled the kitchen table, sat down, and sipped her whiskey, trying to regain the courage that came with intoxication, the only sort of courage she seemed able to summon.

  I'm too young to carry this burden, she thought. I don't have the strength to handle it. I admit that. God help me, I just don't have the strength.

  At twenty Ellen Straker was not only much too young to be trapped in the bleak future that now seemed to lie ahead of her, she was also too pretty and vibrant to be condemned to a life of unremitting heartache and crushing responsibility. She was a slender, shapely girl-woman, a butterfly that had never really had a chance to try out its wings. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, so were her large eyes, and there was a natural, rosy tint to her cheeks that perfectly complemented her olive-tone skin.

  Before marrying Conrad Straker, she had been Ellen Teresa Marie Giavenetto, the daughter of a handsome, Italian-American father and a Madonna-faced, Italian-American mother. Ellen's Mediterranean beauty was not the only quality about her that revealed her heritage, she had a talent for finding joy in small things, an expansive personality, a quick smile, and a warmth that were all quite Italian in nature. She was a woman meant for good times, for parties and dances and gaiety.

  But in her first twenty years of life, there had not been very much laughter.

  Her childhood was grim.

  Her adolescence was an ordeal.

  Although Joseph Giavenetto, her father, had been a warm, good-hearted man, he had also been meek. He had not been the master of his own home, and he hadn't had a great deal to say about how his daughter ought to be raised. Ellen had not been soothed by her father's gentle humor and quiet love nearly so often as she had been subjected to her mother's fiery, religious zealotry.

  Gina was the power in the Giavenetto house, and it was to her that Ellen had to answer for the slightest impropriety, real or imagined.

  There were rules, an endless list of them, which were meant to govern Ellen's behavior, and Gina was determined that every rule would be rigidly enforced and strictly obeyed.

  She intended to see that her daughter grew up to be a very moral, prim, God-fearing woman.

  Gina always had been religious, but after the death of her only son, she became fanatically devout. Anthony, Ellen's brother, died of cancer when he was only seven years old. Ellen was just four at the time, too young to understand what was happening to her brother, but old enough to be aware of his frighteningly swift deterioration. To Gina, that tragedy had been a divine judgment leveled against her. She felt that she had somehow failed to please God, and that He had taken her little boy to punish her. She began going to Mass every morning instead of just on Sundays, and she dragged her little girl with her.

  She lit a candle for

  Anthony's soul every day of the week, without fail. At home she read the Bible from cover to cover, over and over again. Often, she forced Ellen to sit and listen to Scripture for hours at a time, even before the girl was old enough to understand wh
at she was hearing. Gina was full of horrible stories about Hell: what it was like, what grisly tortures awaited a sinner down there, how easy it was for a wicked child to end up in that sulphurous place. At night young Ellen's sleep was disturbed by hideous, bloody nightmares based on her mother's gruesome tales of fire and damnation. And as Gina became increasingly religious, she added more rules to the list by which Ellen was expected to live, the tiniest infraction was, according to Gina, one more step taken on the road to Hell.

  Joseph, having yielded all authority to his wife early in their marriage, was not able to exert much control over her even in ordinary times, and when she retreated into her strange world of religious fanaticism, she was so far beyond his reach that he no longer even attempted to influence her decisions.

  Bewildered by the changes in Gina, unable to cope with the new woman she had become, Joseph spent less and less time at home. He owned a tailor shop--not an extremely prosperous business but a reliably steady one-- and he began to work unusually long hours. When he wasn't working he passed more time with his friends than he did with his family, and as a result Ellen was not exposed either to his love or to his fine sense of humor often enough to compensate for the countless, dreary hours during which she existed stoically under her mother's stern, somber, suffocating domination.

  For years Ellen dreamed of the day she would leave home, she looked forward to that escape with every bit as much eagerness as a convict anticipating release from a real prison cell. But now that she was on her own, now that she had been out from under her mother's iron hand for more than a year, her future looked, incredibly, worse than it ever had looked before. Much worse.

  Something tapped on the window screen behind the booth.

  Ellen twisted around, looked up, startled. For a moment she couldn't see any thing. Just darkness out there.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  Who's there?" she asked, her voice as thin as tissue, her heart suddenly beating fast.

  Then lightning spread across the sky, a tracery of fiery veins and arteries.

  In the flickering pulse of light, there were large white moths fluttering against the screen.

  "Jesus," she said softly. "Only moths."

  She shuddered, turned away from the frantic insects, and sipped her bourbon.

  She couldn't live with this kind of tension. Not for long. She couldn't live in constant fear. She had to do something soon.

  Kill the baby.

  In the bassinet the baby cried out again: a short, sharp noise almost like a dog's bark.

  A distant crack of thunder seemed to answer the child, the celestial rumbling briefly blotted out the unceasing voice of the wind, and it reverberated in the trailer's metal walls.

  The moths went tap-tap-tap.

  Ellen quickly drank her remaining bourbon and poured two more ounces into her glass.

  She found it difficult to believe that she had wound up in this shabby place, in such anguish and misery, it seemed like a fever dream. Only fourteen months ago she had begun a new life with great expectations, with what had proved to be hopelessly naive optimism. Her world had collapsed into ruin so suddenly and so completely that she was still stunned.

  Six weeks before her nineteenth birthday, she left home. She slipped away in the middle of the night, not bothering to announce her departure, unable to face down her mother. She left a short, bitter note for Gina, and then she was off with the man she loved.

  Virtually any inexperienced, small-town girl, longing to escape boredom or oppressive parents, would have fallen for a man like Conrad Straker.

  He was undeniably handsome. His straight, 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 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.

  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.