The Funhouse

by Dean Koontz

  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.

  “Yes,” Amy said. “But 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 matted the wiry fur around its mouth.

  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 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 off with 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 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 novels 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, The 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 as if total economic collapse was imminent. I was not receiving peanuts for my own novels, as I had for many years, but had worked my way up to compensation in cashews; nevertheless, given the economic climate, the offer for The Funhouse was enough of an improvement to be irresistible.

  Yes, sometimes writers do have to take money - as well as art - into consideration. That is, if they like shoes, having something to eat now and then, and having more than a supermarket shopping cart in which to store their worldly possessions. Oh, I know some writers who are above such grubby motivations. Of course, every one of them has a trust fund, wealthy parents, wealthier grandparents, or a well-paid working spouse to fall back upon. Nothing allows an artist to ignore the importance of money more than having enough of it to begin with. I've always thought that having to be concerned about finances for at least the first decade or two of his professional life actually improves a writer's work; it puts him in closer touch with average citizens and their concerns, insuring more relevance in his fiction.

  Anyway, I accepted the offer to write The Funhouse. The script was good as a screenplay but offered enough material for no more than 10% or 20% of a novel. This is not unusual. Movies are shallow compared to novels, shadows of stories when compared to real stories. I had to build up the characters, create back-stories for all of them, and develop a plot that built toward the events on the carnival midway in the latter 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 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 carnival) - it 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 horror-suspense 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.

  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.