by Dean Koontz
“Not yet,” Richie said.
This is a fuckin' bore,” Liz said.
“I want to see the finale,” Richie said. “The guillotine.”
“What guillotine?” Buzz asked.
“The one on the poster outside,” Richie said. “He chops off some broad's head.”
“That's the only way he's ever going to get head from a woman,” Liz said, giggling.
Marco spoke for the first time. His voice was surprisingly rich and commanding. “And now, for those of you who are connoisseurs of the bizarre, the macabre, the gruesome, the grotesque . . . I will close my show with what I fondly refer to as The Impaler.”
“What about the guillotine?” Richie said Buzz.
“Asshole,” Liz said. “That's just a come-on.”
Marco rolled a large upright box to the center of the stage. It was a foot or so shorter than a coffin, but otherwise it looked exactly like the centerpiece of a funeral.
“I hear you mumbling out there,” Marco said. “I hear you saying . . . the guillotine . . . the guillotine. Unfortunately, that device belonged to my predecessor. Both it and he are being held by the police due to an unfortunate accident. The last lady who assisted him lost her head and caused a messy scene.”
The audience laughed uneasily.
“What a cornball act,” Liz said. “Jesus.”
But on the contrary, to Amy, Marco appeared to have undergone an eerie metamorphosis. He was not shabby and silly-looking now, as he had been when he first stumbled onto the platform. His crude makeup no longer seemed like a joke, second by second he looked increasingly demonic, and there was a new, terrifying, evil gleam in his eyes. His nervous smile had become a knowing, wicked leer. When his eyes met Amy's, she felt as if she were staring at twin windows that offered a glimpse of Hell, and she was cold all the way through to the marrow.
Don't be ridiculous, Amy told herself, shuddering. Marco the Magnificent hasn't changed. It's only my perception of him that's been altered. I'm having a mild hallucination. Tripping. Flying. It's that damned joint. The drugs. What spice did Liz add to that grass?
Marco held up a two-foot-long, pointed wooden stake. “Ladies and gentlemen, I promise you'll enjoy this illusion more than you would have enjoyed the guillotine. It's really much, much better.” He grinned, and there was something dark and unwholesome in that Cheshire-cat expression. I need a volunteer from the audience. A young woman.” His malevolent eyes slowly swept the faces below him. He raised one hand and pointed ominously at each woman, one after the other, and for a breathtaking moment he seemed to stop at Amy, then he moved his hand again and stopped even longer at Liz, but finally he chose an attractive redhead.
“Oh, no,” the redhead told him. “I couldn't. Not me.”
“Of course you can,” Marco said. “Come on, folks, let's give this charming, brave young lady a hand.” The audience applauded on cue, and the woman reluctantly walked up the steps to the stage.
Marco took hold of her arm as she reached the platform. “What's your name?”
“Jenny,” she said, smiling shyly at the audience.
“You're not afraid, are you, Jenny?”
“Yes,” she said, blushing.
Marco grinned. “Smart girl!” He escorted her to the coffin. It was standing on end, tilted back slightly on large metal braces. Marco pulled open the lid, which was hinged at the left side. “Please step into the box, Jenny. I promise that you will feel absolutely no pain whatsoever.”
With the magician's help, the redhead stepped backwards into the box, facing the audience. Her neck fit into a U-shaped cutout in the top of the box. Because the coffin was short, her head stuck out of it when Marco closed the lid.
“Comfortable?” Marco asked.
“No,” the woman said nervously.
“Good,” Marco said. He grinned at the audience, then secured the front of the box with a large padlock.
A premonition of disaster, a feeling that she was in the presence of Death, seized Amy in its invisible, icy hands.
Just the damned drugs, she told herself.
Marco the Magnificent spoke to the audience. “In the fifteenth century, Vlad the Fifth of Wallachia, known as Vlad the Impaler to his frightened subjects, tortured tens of thousands of male and female prisoners, mostly foreign invaders. Once, the Turkish army turned back from a planned invasion when it encountered a field where thousands of men were propped on spikes that had been driven all the way through their bodies by Vlad's hand-picked death squads. Tiring of his name, Vlad selected a new one, that of his father, an equally nasty man known as Dracul, meaning the Devil.” Adding the letter A,' he became Dracula, the son of the Devil. And so, my friends, are legends born.”
“Cornball,” Liz said again.
But Amy was mesmerized by the strange, new, and dangerous creature that appeared (at least to her eyes) to have taken possession of Marco's body. The bottomless, all-knowing, evil eyes of the magician met Amy's eyes again and seemed to see all the way through her before they looked away.
Marco displayed the two-foot-long, pointed wooden stake once more. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present . . . The Impaler.”
“About fuckin' time,” Liz said.
Marco picked up a small but heavy mallet. “If you will look at the front of the box, you will see that a small hole has been drilled through the lid.”
Amy saw the hole. A bright red heart had been painted around it.
“The hole lies directly over the volunteer's heart,” Marco said. He licked his lips, turned, and carefully inserted the stake into the hole. “Do you feel the point of the stake, Jenny?”
She giggled nervously. “Yes.”
“Good,” the magician said. “Remember . . . there will be no pain at all.” Holding the stake in his left hand, he raised the mallet in his right. “Absolute silence! Those of you who are squeamish, avert your eyes. She will feel no pain . . . but that does not mean there will be no blood!”
“Huh?” Jenny said. “Hey. wait. I—”
“Silence!” Marco shouted, and he swung the mallet hard against the stake.
No! Amy thought.
With a sickening, wet, tearing sound, the stake sank deep into the woman's chest.
Jenny screamed, and blood gushed from her twisted mouth.
The audience gasped. A couple of people cried out in horror.
Jenny's head slumped to one side. Her tongue lolled. Her eyes stared sightlessly over the heads of the people in the tent.
Death miraculously transformed the face of the volunteer. The red hair turned to blond. The eyes changed from green to blue. The face was no longer that of Jenny, the woman who had walked onto the stage from the audience. It was now Liz Duncan's face. Every plane, every hollow, every feature, every detail belonged to Liz. It wasn't just a trick of the light and shadows. It was Liz in that coffin. It was Liz who had been impaled. It was Liz who was dead, blood still oozing from between her ripe lips.
Having trouble drawing her breath, Amy looked at the girl beside her and was amazed to see that her friend was still there. Liz was in the audience—yet somehow she was also on the stage, in the box, dead. Confused, disoriented, Amy said, “But it's you. It's you . . . up there.”
Liz-in-the-audience said, “What?”
Liz-in-the-coffin stared into eternity and drooled blood.
Liz-in-the-audience said, “Amy? Are you all right?”
Liz is going to die, Amy thought. Soon. This is some sort of premonition . . . clairvoyance . . . whatever you call it. Could that be true? Could it? Will Liz be killed? Soon? Tonight?
Marco's look of shock and horror, which he had assumed the instant that blood began to spurt from his volunteer's mouth, now melted into a grin. The magician snapped his fingers, and the woman in the box suddenly came to life, the pain vanished from her face, she smiled dazzlingly— and she no longer resembled Liz Duncan.
She never did look like Liz, Amy thought. It was just me. The drugs. Hallucinations
. It wasn't a premonition, Liz isn't going to die soon. God, am I out of it!
The audience sighed with relief as Marco pulled the stake out of the hole in the lid of the box. The magician had ceased to look sinister. He was the same shabby, pudgy, inept man who had stumbled through the canvas flap ten or fifteen minutes ago. The omniscient, evil personality no longer looked out through Marco's eyes, his resemblance to the Devil was gone.
Imagination, Amy told herself. Delusions. It meant nothing. Nothing at all. Liz isn't about to die. None of us is going to die. I've got to get hold of myself.
Marco helped Jenny out of the box and introduced her to the audience. She was his daughter.
“Another cheap trick,” Liz said, disgusted.
As she left Marco's tent, Amy sensed the disappointment in her three companions. It was almost as if they had hoped that a woman really would be pierced through the heart or have her head chopped off by a guillotine. The spice that Liz had added to the last joint of grass was something extremely powerful, for already it was making them fidgety, restless, they required more and bigger thrills to dissipate their newfound, nervous energy. A decapitation and some spilled blood were apparently just the sort of things that Buzz and Liz, if not Richie, needed to see in order to burn off the chemicals bubbling in their bloodstreams, the sort of thing they needed to experience in order to mellow out again.
No more dope tonight, Amy vowed. No more dope ever. I don't need drugs to be happy. Why do I use them?
They went to a sideshow called Animal Oddities, and the bizarre creatures in that attraction gave Amy the willies. There was a goat with two heads, a bull with a three-eyed, triple cranium, a disgusting pig with eyes on either side of its snout plus two more eyes higher in its head, greenish drool trickling over its cracked and leathery lips, two extra legs coming out of its left side. They finally came to a pen that contained a normal-looking lamb, and Amy reached out to pet it, but when it turned toward her, she saw it had an extra nose and a bulging, sightless, third eye on the side of its head, and she pulled her hand away. The nightmarish animals were a beer chaser to the whiskey-like effect of the spiced grass she had smoked, when she left Animal Oddities, she felt higher, more thoroughly detached from reality than when she had entered.
They rode the Rocket-Go-Round. Amy sat in front of Buzz on the motorcycle-like seat, in one of the two-passenger, bullet-shaped cars. In the relative privacy of that rapidly spinning container, he put his hands on her braless breasts. The centrifugal force pushed her back against him, and she felt the heat and size of his erection as his crotch was jammed hard against her buttocks.
“I want you,” he said, putting his mouth against her ear, making himself heard above the roar of the Rocket-Go-Round and the fierce whining of the wind.
It felt good to be wanted so badly, to be needed as Buzz needed her, and Amy wondered if maybe it was a good thing to be like Liz. At least you always had someone around who needed you for something.
At Bozo the Clown's booth, both Buzz and Richie managed to hit the bull's-eye and dunk the jeering clown in a huge tub of water. Buzz went about it doggedly, buying three baseballs, then three more, then three more, until at last he connected and sent Bozo into the tub. Richie, on the other hand, disdained that approach. He considered the situation with a mathematician's eye and sensibilities, threw two bad pitches, learned from each of them, and banged the bull's-eye on his third try.
Later, when their car stopped for a moment at the top of the Ferris wheel, with the diamond-bright midway spread out below them, Buzz kissed Amy, kissed her deeply, hungrily, his tongue probing her mouth. His hands were all over her. She knew that tonight had to be the turning point in their relationship. Tonight she would either have to drop him or give him what he wanted. She couldn't stall any longer. She had to decide who and what she was.
However, she was so high, so loose that she didn't want to think - couldn't think - about complex problems like that. She just wanted to float along, enjoying the lights, the sounds, the blur of motion, constant action.
After the Ferris wheel, they boarded the bumper cars and bashed each other mercilessly. Sparks crackled and flew from the exposed-wire grid overhead. The air smelled of ozone. Each noisy, shattering collision sent a jolt of sensual pleasure through Amy.
On one side of the bumper-car pavilion, the carousel turned in a blur of brilliant lights. On the other side, the Tilt-a-Whirl spun, rose, fell. Calliope music mixed with the roar of the crowd and the constant chatter of the pitchmen and the crashing of the bumper cars.
Amy loved the carnival. As she pursued Richie's car and slammed into it broadside, as she was spun around by the impact, she thought that the carnival, with all of its lights and excitement, might be a little bit like Las Vegas, and she wondered if perhaps she would enjoy going to Nevada with Liz.
From the bumper cars they went to Freak-o-rama, and Amy's disorientation was made worse by what she saw in that place: the three-eyed man whose skin was like the skin of an alligator, the fattest woman in the world, sitting on a gigantic couch, dwarfing that piece of furniture, her body nothing more than a lump, her facial features lost in doughy fat, a man with a second pair of arms growing out of his stomach, and a man with two noses and a lipless mouth.
Liz, Buzz, and Richie thought Freak-o-rama was the best thing on the midway. They pointed and laughed at the creatures on exhibit, as if the people at whom they were laughing could neither see nor hear them. Amy didn't feel the least bit like laughing, even though she was still very high on grass. She remembered Jerry Galloway's curse and Mama's certainty that the baby would be deformed, and such sights as those in Freak-o-rama struck too close to home to amuse her. Amy was embarrassed, both for herself and for the pathetic freaks who posed for a living in the stalls. She wished there were some way she could help them, but of course she couldn't, so she listened to her friends making wisecracks, and she smiled dutifully, and she tried to hurry them along.
Strangely, the most frightening exhibit in Freak-o-rama was the baby in the enormous jar. All of the other human oddities were whole and of such size that they might potentially pose a threat, but the dead, harmless thing in the jar, no possible threat to anyone, was the most unsettling of all. Its large green eyes stared blindly out of its glass prison, its twisted, flared nostrils seemed to be sniffing at Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie, its black lips were parted, and its pale, speckled tongue was visible, and it looked as if it were snarling at them, at nobody else but them, as if it would close its mouth after they walked away.
“Creepy,” Liz said. “Jesus!”
“It isn't real,” Richie said. “It wasn't ever alive. It's just too freaky. No human being could give birth to that.”
“Maybe no human being did,” Liz said.
“That's what the sign says,” Buzz observed.” Born in 1956, of normal parents.”
“They all looked up at the sign on the wall behind the jar, and Liz said, “Hey, Amy, its mother's name was Ellen. Maybe it's your brother!”
Everyone laughed—except Amy. She stared at the sign, at the five large letters that spelled her mother's name, and yet another tremor of premonition passed through her. She felt as if her presence at the carnival was not happenstance but destiny. She had the uncanny and distinctly unpleasant feeling that her seventeen years of life could have led her nowhere else but here on this night of all nights. She was being maneuvered, constantly manipulated, if she reached overhead, she would feel the strings of the puppetmaster.
Was it possible that this thing in the bottle actually had been Mama's child? Was this the reason Mama had insisted that Amy have an abortion immediately?
No. That's crazy. Absurd, Amy thought desperately.
She didn't like the idea that her life had been funneled inexorably to this tiny spot on the surface of the earth, at this minute among the trillions of minutes that composed the flow of history. That concept left her feeling helpless, adrift.
It was just the drugs. She couldn't tru
st her perceptions because of the drugs. No more grass, ever again.
“I don't blame its mother for killing it,” Liz said, peering at the thing in the jar.
“It's just a rubber model,” Richie insisted.
“I'm going to get a closer look,” Buzz said, slipping under the restraining rope.
“Buzz, don't!” Amy said.
Buzz approached the platform where the jar stood and leaned close to it. He reached out, put a hand to the glass, slowly ran his fingers down across the front of the jar, beyond which rested the face of the monster. Abruptly he jerked his hand away. “Son of a bitch!
“What's the matter?” Richie asked.
“Buzz, come back here, please,” Amy said.
Buzz returned, holding his hand up for them to see. There was blood on one of his fingers.
“What happened?” Liz asked.
“Must have been a sharp seam on the jar,” Buzz said.
“You better go to the first-aid station,” Amy said. “The cut might be infected.”
“Nah,” Buzz said, determined not to let a crack show in his macho image. “It's only a scratch. Funny, though, I didn't see any sharp edges.”
Maybe you didn't cut it on the glass,” Richie said.
“Maybe the thing in there bit you.”
“It's dead.”
“Its body is dead,” Richie said, “but maybe its spirit is still alive.”
“A minute ago you told us the goddamned thing was just a rubber fake,” Amy said.
“I've been known to be wrong,” Richie said.
“How do you explain it biting through the jar?” Buzz asked sarcastically.
“A psychic bite,” Richie said. “A ghost bite.”
“Don't give me the spooks,” Liz said, hitting Richie on the shoulder.
“Ghost bite?” Buzz asked. “That's stupid.”
The thing in the bottle watched them with its clouded, emerald, moon-lamp eyes.
The name Ellen seemed to burn brighter on the sign than any of the other words.
Coincidence, Amy told herself.
