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 normallooking 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.
Y 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 diamondbright 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 thinkouldn'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-orama, 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 Freako-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. Yt 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 di
dn'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 trust 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.
i , "It's just a rubber model," Richie insisted.
"I'm going to get a closer look," Buzz said, slipping under the restraining rope.
aBuzz, 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!n "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." aNah," Buzz sa id, 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.
It had to be a coincidence. Because if it wasn't, if this really was Mama's child, if Amy had been brought to the carnival by some supernatural force, then the other premonitions might also be true.
Liz actually might die here.
And that was unthinkable, unacceptable. So it was coinciaence.
Ellen.
Coincidence, damn it!
Amy was relieved when they left Freak-o-rama.
They rode the Shazam and took another turn on the Loop-de-Loop, and then suddenly they were all starving. It was a drug-induced hunger, the insatiable appetite familiar to all serious pot smokers. They ate hot dogs, ice cream, and candy apples.
Eventually they found themselves in front of the funhouse.
A big man in a Frankenstein costume capered on a low platform, threatening the people who were boarding the cars to go into the funhouse. He waved his arms and snarled and jumped up and down in a terrible imitation of Boris Karloff.
"He's a real ham," Richie said.
They moved a few feet to the barker's plat form, where a tall, distinguished-looking man was ballying the passing crowd.
He looked down at them as he talked, and he had the bluest eyes Amy had ever seen. After a few seconds, she realized that the giant clown's face atop the building had been painted in the barker's image.
"Terror-fying! Terror-fying!" the barker shouted. "Goblins, ghosts, and ghouls! Spiders larger than men! Monsters from other worlds and from the darkest bowels of this one! Are all of the creatures that stalk the funhouse merely make i. believe . . . or is one of them real? See for yourself! Learn the truth at your own peril! Can you stand the test, the tension, the fear?
Are you man enough? Ladies, are your men strong enough to comfort you inside . . . or will you have to comfort them? Terror-fying!" "I love to go through the funhouse when I'm high as a kite," Liz said. "When you're really, truly wrecked, it's a gas. All those dumb plastic monsters jumping out at you."
, "sO let's gO," Richie said.
"No, no," Liz said. "We've got to save it until ~ we're really high." "I'm really high now," Amy said.
"Me too," Buzz said.
"Oh, we'll get more wasted than this," Liz said. "This is nothing."
"If I get more wasted than this," Richie said, "I'll have to be institutionalized." "Make it a cell for two," Buzz said.
"That's the idea," Liz said excitedly. "You've got to be really wrecked to fully appreciate the funhouse."
Not me, Amy reminded herself. No more dope tonight. No more dope ever.
They bought tickets for a ride called the Slithering Snake. The man at the controls was a dwarf, and while Liz waited for the ride to start, she teased the little man, made jokes about his height. He glared at Liz, and Amy wished her friend would shut up. When the Slithering Snake finally began to move, the dwarf got his revenge, he gave it much more speed than usual, and the chain of cars flashed around the looping, rising, falling track so fast that Amy was terrified it was going to fly off the rails. What should have been a thrilling ride became a knuckle-whitening, stomachclenching ordeal, a sweat-popping torture that seemed like it would never end. Incredibly, even under those conditions, when the automatic canvas cover closed over the fast-moving train, Buzz took advantage of the darkness to take advantage of Amy, his hands were all over her.
This whole night is like the Slithering Snake, Amy thought. It's out of control.
After they rode the Octopus again, after they gleefully bashed each other around in the bumper cars once more, they returned to the cul-de-sac behind the carnival trucks, at the perimeter of the fairgrounds, and Liz stoked up another of her specially spiced joints.
Darkness had come to the fairgrounds now, and they weren't able to see each other clearly as they passed the reefer around. They made jokes about some stranger stepping out of the darkness and taking a toke without anyone being the wiser, and they kidded each other about seeing freaks hiding under the trucks around them.
Amy tried to fake it when the joint came to her. She took a drag on it, but she didn't inhale. She held the smoke in her mouth for a moment, then blew it out.
Even in the darkness, with only the glowing tip of the cigarette and the sound of indrawn breath to judge by, Liz realized that Amy hadn't really taken a good pull on the weed. "Don't hold back on us, kid," she said sharply. "Don't be a party pooper." "I don't know what you mean," Amy said.
aLike hell you don't. Take another hit on that joint. When I'm wasted I like a lot of company in the same condition." Rather than irritate Liz, Amy took another drag on the joint and sucked the smoke deep this time. She hated herself for her lack of willpower.
But I don't want to lose Liz, she thought. I need Liz. Who else do I have?
When they walked back onto the midway, they nearly collided with an albino.
His thin, cottony white hair streamed behind him in the warm June breeze. He turned transparent eyes on them, eyes like cold smoke, and he said, "Free tickets to Madame Zena's. Free tickets to get your fortunes told.
One for each lady, compliments of the carnival management. Tell all your friends that Big American is the friendly carnival." Surprised, Amy and Liz accepted the tickets from the worm-white hands that offered them.
The albino vanished in the crowd.
THE FOUR OF them crowded into the fortuneteller's small tent. Liz and Amy sat in the two available chairs, at the table where the crystal ball was filled with lambent light. Richie and Buzz stood behind the chairs.
Amy didn't think that Madame Zena looked much like the Gypsy she was supposed to be, even dressed up in all the colored scarves and pleated skirts and gaudy jewelry. But the woman was very pretty, and she was suitably mysterious.
Liz got her fortune told first. Madame Zena f: asked her all sorts of questions about herself a
nd her family, information that she needed (so she said) in order to focus her psychic perceptions. When she had no more questions to ask, she peered into the crystal ball, she leaned so close to it that the eerie light and the shadows it cast made her features look different, hawklike.
In four glass chimneys, in the four corners of the tent, four candles guttered.
In its large cage to the right of the table, the raven shifted on its perch and made a cooing sound in the back of its throat.
Liz glanced at Amy and rolled her eyes.
Amy giggled, giddier than ever from the dope.
Madame Zena stared into the crystal ball with a theatrical scowl, as if she were struggling to pierce the veils that concealed the world of tomorrow. But then the expression on her face changed and became a look of genuine puzzlement. She blinked, shook her head, and leaned even closer to the glowing sphere on the table.
"What is it?" Liz asked.
Madame Zena didn't respond. Her face held a ghastly look, so real that Amy was unnerved by it.
"No . . ." Madame Zena said.
To Liz, apparently, Madame Zena still seemed to be putting on an act.
Liz evidently didn't see the uncontrived horror in the fortune-teller's face, which Amy was sure she saw there.
"I don't . . ." Madame Zena began, then stopped and licked her lips.
"I never . . ." "What am I going to be?" Liz asked. "Rich or famous or both?" Madame Zena closed her eyes for a moment, slowly shaking her head, then looked again into the crystal. aMy God . . . I . . . I
.
. ."
We should get out of here, Amy thought uneasily. We should go before this woman tells us some , ,_ thing we don't want to hear. We should get up and leave and run for our lives.
Madame Zena looked up from the crystal ball. All the blood had drained from her face.
"What an actress!n Richie said softly.
"Bunch of mumbojumbo," Buzz said sullenly.
Madame Zena ignored them and spoke to Liz. "I . . . I would rather not . . .
tell your fortune . . . just yet. I need . . . time. Time to interpret what I've just seen in the crystal. I'll read your friend's future first, and then . . . I'll come back to yours, if that's all right." "Sure," Liz said, enjoying what she thought was a con game of some sort, a way to prime the customer for a joke or a request for money to pay for a more detailed reading. "Take as long as you want."
Dean Koontz - (1980) Page 19
