Dean Koontz - (1980)

by The Funhouse(Lit)

  If she was someone with important carnival connections, Gunther's secret could no longer be concealed.

  Conrad found the sort of thing he was looking for in the last pocket he turned out. It was a laminated ID card that said she was Janet Leigh Middlemeir, she worked for the county Office of Public Safety, she was a safety engineer, whatever the hell that was, and she was accredited by the State of Maryland.

  A government official. That was bad. But not as bad as he had feared.

  At least she wasn't a sister or a cousin of one of the carnies. She didn't have any friends or relatives on the lot, no one who would be looking out for her.

  Evidently she had been on the midway strictly in a professional capacity, making spot safety checks. No one would have realized that she had disappeared in the middle of one of those inspections because no one would have been paying special attention to her. There was a good chance that Conrad could move the body and plant it far away from the carnival, in such a way that the police would think she had been killed after she quit working.

  But he couldn't do anything more until it was dark, it would be a risky bit of business even then.

  Now he had to get out front, on the barker's platform, before Ghost started wondering what had happened to him and came looking again.

  Conrad took a coil of rope from one of the storage shelves and threaded it through the eyelets around the edges of the tarpaulin. Then he pulled the rope like a drawstring and made a bag out of the tarp, with the dead woman and her belongings inside. He put the bag in the corner. He stripped out of the bloody coveralls and put them with the bag. His hands were bloody, and he wiped them off as best he could on a couple of dirty rags that were on the workbench, then he put the rags with his coveralls. Finally he stacked the other tarps on top of all that incriminating evidence, until there was nothing to see but a mound of rumpled canvas. No one would stumble across the dead woman, at least not during the few hours she would be there.

  Conrad put on his street clothes and left the funhouse by a rear door.

  Because the basement wasn't underground, the door opened onto the warm, late-afternoon sunshine behind the building.

  He walked to the nearest comfort station. Because the gates had opened only minutes ago, there weren't yet any marks in the restrooms. Conrad scrubbed his hands until they were as clean as a surgeon's.

  He returned to the funhouse and walked around to the front of it.

  The giant clown's face was laughing. Elton, one of Conrad's employees, was selling tickets. Ghost was working at the boarding gate. Gunther was dressed like the Frankenstein monster and was growling enthusiastically at the marks, he saw Conrad, and they stared at each other for a moment, and although they were too far apart to see each other's eyes, an understanding passed between them.

  --I did it again.

  --I know. I found her.

  --What now?

  protect you.

  Until night fell over the fairgrounds, Conrad worked on the pitchman's platform, ballying the marks, drawing them in with his polished spiel.

  As soon as darkness came, he complained of a migraine headache and told Ghost that he was going back to his motor home to lie down.

  Instead, he went to the large parking area adjacent to the fairgrounds, and he searched for Janet Middlemeir's car. He had the miniature license plate on her key ring to guide him, and even though there were a great many cars to check through, he located her Dodge Omni in just half an hour.

  He drove the Omni onto the lot through a service gate, well aware that he was leaving an evidential trail in other people's memories, but there was nothing else he could do. He parked in the shadows behind the funhouse.

  The service alley was deserted at the moment. He hoped no one would stroll past on the way to the comfort station.

  He entered the funhouse basement through the rear door and carried out the tarp that contained the corpse, while the marks screamed at mechanical monsters in the dark tunnels overhead. He put the gruesome bundle in the Omni's trunk, and then he drove away from the fairgrounds.

  Although he had never been so bold before, he decided the best place to leave the dead woman was in her own home. If the police thought she had been murdered in her own house by an intruder, they wouldn't be likely to link the killing with the carnival. It would look like just another random act of senseless violence, the sort of thing the cops saw all the time.

  Two miles from the fairgrounds, in a supermarket parking lot, he looked through the car, trying to find some indication of where Janet Middlemeir lived. He discovered her purse under the front seat, where she had left it while making her inspection tour of the carnival. He went through the contents of the purse and found her address on her driver's license.

  With the help of a map that he picked up at an Erron station, Conrad managed to find the pleasant apartment complex in which the woman lived.

  There were a number of long, two- and threestory, colonial-style buildings angled through and around the park-like grounds. Janet Middlemeir's unit was on the ground floor, at the corner of one of the buildings, and there was an empty parking slot behind her place, not more than fifteen feet from her back door.

  The apartment was dark, and Conrad hoped that she lived alone.

  He hadn't found anything to indicate that she was married. There were no rings on her hands, nothing in her purse bore the word "Mrs." Of course she might have a girlfriend rooming with her, or there might be a live-in boyfriend. That could mean trouble. Conrad was prepared to kill anyone who walked in on him while he was disposing of the body.

  He got out of the car, leaving the dead woman in the Omni's trunk, and he let himself into her apartment. A quick check of the closet in the single bedroom was sufficient to convince him that Janet Middlemeir lived by herself.

  He stood at the kitchen window and watched as a car drove into the parking area. Two people got out of it and went into an apartment two doors away. At the same time a man left yet another apartment, got into a Volkswagen Rabbit, and drove off. When all was quiet again, Conrad went out to the Omni, took the tarp from the trunk, and carried it inside, hoping that no one was watching him from a window in one of the other apartments.

  He took the tarp into the small bathroom and opened it there.

  Taking care to keep himself clean, he lifted the canvas and dumped the contents into the bathtub. There was still a great deal of blood trapped in the torn body cavity, and he spread some of the viscous stuff around, smearing it on the walls and the floor.

  He took a macabre pride in the cleverness of his plan. If he had left the dead woman in the il bedroom, the police pathologists would have realized at once that she hadn't been killed there, for they wouldn't have found enough blood on the carpet to support that theory. (Most of her blood had been spilled in the funhouse, on the gondola tracks, and had soaked into the boards there.) But when the cops found her here, in the bathroom maybe they would think that the missing pints of blood had simply gone down the bathtub drain.

  Conrad remembered the VIP badge on her blouse. He fished that out of the tub and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

  He also retrieved her hard hat, flashlight, and notebook, which were spotted with blood. He cleaned those off at the sink, then took them out to the foyer closet and put them on the shelf above the coatrack.

  He didn't know whether that was where she usually kept those items, but the police wouldn't know either, and it seemed a likely enough place.

  He folded the empty tarp.

  In the kitchen, in the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights, he inspected his hands carefully. He had washed them in the bathroom, when he had cleaned the articles that he'd taken to the foyer closet, but there was still some blood caked under his fingernails. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands once more, vigorously.

  He found the drawer in which the dead woman had kept her dish towels.

  He wrapped one of the towels around his right hand and took another one to the
kitchen door. He opened the door, which had three small, decorative windows arranged in the center of it. He looked out at the parking lot, dnder the stark light of the sodium-vapor lamps, there was no sound or motion. He put the folded dish towel against the exterior surface of one of the door's little panes, and then he struck the interior surface with his wrapped right hand, trying to make as little noise as possible. The glass broke with only a dull crack, and he used the folded towel to push the fragments inward onto the kitchen floor, so that it would look as if the killer had smashed the pane from the outside in the process of forcing entry. Conrad quietly closed the door, shook the dish towels to be certain there were no slivers of glass clinging t o the fabric, refolded them, and returned them to the drawer in which he-had found them.

  He suddenly realized that threads from the dish towels might be snagged on the shards of glass. He stared down at the bright fragments. He didn't have time to examine each of them. Likewise, he didn't have time to study the trunk of her car with a magnifying glass to see if there were spots of blood in it.

  There were probably other loose ends, too. He would just have to do the best he could and trust in the protection of the dark god who guided him.

  He left Janet Middlemeir's car keys on the kitchen counter and picked up the folded tarp. As he stepped out of the apartment he wiped the doorknobs with his handkerchief. He didn't have an arrest record, his fingerprints weren't on file anywhere, but nevertheless he was cautious.

  He walked away from the apartment complex. The fairgrounds lay nine miles to the west, but he wasn't going to cover the entire distance on foot. He intended to call a taxi to take him back to the carnival, but he didn't want to risk summoning a ride from anywhere near the Middlemeir apartment, the cabdriver would keep a record of the trip and might even remember his passenger's face. A mile from the woman's place, he disposed of the tarp in a big trash bin behind another apartment building. After walking another mile, he came to a Holiday Inn. He stopped in the hotel bar, had two double Scotches, and then took a cab to the fairgrounds.

  In the taxi he thought back over what he had done from the moment he had found the corpse on the gondola tracks, and as far as he could see, he hadn't made any serious mistakes. The coverup probably would work.

  Gunther would remain free--at least a while longer.

  Conrad couldn't let them take Gunther from him. Gunther was his son, his very special child, his own blood. But more than that, Gunther was a gift from Hell, he was Conrad's instrument of revenge. When Conrad finally found Ellen's children, he would kidnap them, take them to an isolated place where their screams couldn't be heard, and turn them over to Gunther. He would encourage Gunther to play with them in cat-andmouse fashion. He would urge Gunther to torture them for several days, use them sexually again and again, no matter if they were girls or boys, and then, only then, tear them apart.

  Sitting in the darkness in the back of the taxi, Conrad smiled.

  He seldom smiled these days. He hadn't laughed in a long, long time.

  He wasn't amused by those things that amused other people, only death, destruction, cruelty, and damnation--the dark handiwork of the god of evil, whom he worshipped--could bring a smile to his lips. Ever since he was twelve years old, he had been unable to obtain joy or satisfaction from innocent, wholesome pleasures.

  Not since that night.

  Christmas Eve.

  Forty years ago . . .

  The Straker family always decorated their house from top to bottom for the Christmas season. They had a tree as tall as the ceiling would allow. Every room was festooned with evergreen wreaths, nut wreaths, candles, Nativity scenes, tinsel, Christmas cards received from friends and relatives, and much more.

  The year that Conrad turned twelve, his mother added a new piece to the family's enormous collection of holiday decorations. It was an all-glass oil lantern, the flame was reflected and refracted within the angled walls of the lamp, so that there were a hundred images of fire instead of just one, and the eye was amazed and dazzled.

  Young Conrad was fascinated by the lantern but wasn't permitted to touch it because he might burn himself. He knew he could handle the lantern safely, but he couldn't convince his mother of that. So when everyone else was asleep, he crept downstairs, struck a match, lit the lantern--and accidentally knocked it over. Burning oil spilled across the living room floor. At first he was sure he could put the fire out by beating it with a sofa cushion, but just a minute later, when he realized his folly, it was too late.

  He was the only one to escape unscathed. His mother died in the blaze.

  His three sisters died. His two brothers died. Papa didn't die, but he was scarred for life--his chest, his left arm, his neck, the left side of his face.

  The loss of his family left Papa with mental and emotional scars every bit as horrendous as his physical injuries. He wasn't able to accept the idea that God, in whom Papa devoutly believed, would let such a tragic accident happen on Christmas Eve, of all nights. He refused to believe it had been accidental.

  He made up his mind that Conrad was evil and had set the fire on purpose.

  From that day until Conrad finally ran away several years later, his life was hell. Papa constantly badgered and accused him. He was not allowed to forget what he had done. Papa reminded him of it a hundred times a day.

  Conrad breathed guilt and wallowed in self-hatred.

  He had never been able to run away from his shame. It came back to him every night, in his dreams, even now that he was fifty-two years old.

  His nightmares were full of fire and screams and the scarred, twisted face-of his father.

  When Ellen became pregnant, Conrad had been certain that, at last, God was giving him a chance to redeem himself. By raising a family, by giving his own children a wonderful life filled with love ! and happiness, perhaps he would be able to atone for the death of his mother, his sisters, and his brothers. Month by month, as Ellen became heavier with child, Conrad became increasingly sure that the baby was the beginning of his salvation.

  . Then Victor was born. Initially, for just a few hours, Conrad thought that God was heaping more punishment on him. Rather than give him a chance to atone for his sins, God seemed to be rubbing his face in them, telling him in no uncertain terms that he would never know grace and spiritual comfort.

  After the first bitter shock had passed, Conrad began to see his mutant son in a different light. Victor hadn't come from Heaven. He had come from Hell. The baby was not a punishment from God, it was a great blessing from Satan. God had turned His back on Conrad Straker, but Satan had sent him a baby as a gesture of welcome.

  That might have seemed like tortuous reasoning to a normal man, but to Conrad, desperate to find release from his guilt and shame, it made perfect sense. If the gates of Heaven were forever closed to him, he might as well face the gates of Hell with eagerness and accept his destiny without remorse. He longed to belong somewhere, anywhere, even in Hell. If the god of light and beauty would not give him absolution, then he would obtain it from the god of darkness and evil.

  He read dozens of books about satanic religions, and he quickly discovered that Hell was not the place of brimstone and suffering that Christians said it was.

  Hell was a place, said the satanists, where sinners were rewarded for their sins, it was, in every respect, the place of their dreams. Best of all, in Hell there was no such thing as guilt. In Hell there was no shame.

  As soon as he accepted Satan as his savior, Conrad knew that he had made the right decision. The nightly dreams of fire and pain did not stop, however, he found a greater measure of peace and more contentment in his daily life than he had known since before that fateful Christmas Eve, and for the first time in memory, his life had meaning. He was on earth to do the devil's work, and if the devil could offer him self-respect, he was prepared to labor long and hard for the cause of the Antichrist.

  When Ellen killed Victor, Conrad knew she was doing God's work, and he was furiou
s. He almost killed her. But he realized that he might be imprisoned or executed for murdering her, and that would keep him from fulfilling the role that Satan had written for him. It occurred to him that if he got married again, Satan might send him another sign, another demonic child who would grow up to be the scourge of the earth.

  Conrad married Zena, and in time Zena bore him Gunther. She was the devil's Mary, but she didn't realize it. Conrad never told her the truth.

  Conrad saw himself as Joseph to the Antichrist, father and protector.

  Zena thought the child was just a freak, and although she didn't feel comfortable with it, she accepted it with the equanimity with which carnies always accepted freaks.

  But Gunther wasn't merely a freak.

  He was more than that. Much more.

  He was holy.

  He was the coming. The dark coming.

  As the taxicab sped toward the fairgrounds, Conrad looked out at the quiet, suburban houses and wondered if even one person out there realized they were living in the last days of God's world. He wondered if even one of them sensed that Satan's child was on earth and had recently reached his brutal maturity.

  Gunther was just beginning his reign of terror. A thousand years of darkness would descend.

  Oh, yes, Gunther was much more than just a freak.

  If he were merely a freak, that would mean that Conrad was wrong in everything that he had done during the past twenty-five years. It would mean more than that, it would mean that Conrad was not just wrong but stark, raving mad.

  So Gunther was more than a freak. Gunther was that legendary dark beast slouching toward Bethlehem.

  Gunther was the destruction of the world.

  Gunther was the herald of a new Dark Age.

  Gunther was the Antichrist.

  He had to be. For Conrad's sake, he had to be.

  ll FOR JoEY, THE week prior to the county fair crept by like a snail.

  He was eager to become a carny and leave Royal City behind forever, but it seemed to him that the time for his escape would come only after his mother had murdered him in his bed.