The Funhouse

by Dean Koontz

  “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.”

  “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-mâché 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.

  “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-mâché 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!” 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!”

  “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-mâché rocks.

  “Liz, damn it!” 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.

  “But it was Richie!”

  “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.”

  “We have to keep our cool if we're going to survive.”

  “But this is crazy,” Buzz said.

  “It's crazy,” Amy agreed. “But 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.

  “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.”

  16

  LIZ STUMBLED 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.

  Joey's hands were tied behind his back. Another rope was tightly 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 déjà 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.

  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.

  “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 nothi
ng 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 rope-burned wrists and gently smeared the saliva over the angry red marks, soothing the chafed skin.

  “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. “But 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-mâché 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.