Dean Koontz - (1980)

by The Funhouse(Lit)

  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 officials, they called him the "patch" because he went into town ahead 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 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 an d 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 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 ha
lf 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 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 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 i n 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 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 o
f 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.

  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.