Dean R Koontz - The Fun House.pdf

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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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