The Fun House. By: Dean R. Koontz
The Fun House. By: Dean R. Koontz
Synopsis:
Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival.
She married a man she hated and begat a child she could never love.
Now Ellen has a new life, a new husband and two normal children.
Memory is drowned in alcohol and prayers–neither of which will save
her kids when the carnival comes back to town. A premiere release by
the bestselling author of Dragon Tears.
PROLOGUE.
ELLEN STRAKER SAT at the small kitchen table in the Airstream travel
trailer, listening to the night wind, trying not to hear the strange
scratching that came from the baby’s bassinet.
Tall oaks, maples, and birches swayed in the dark grove where the
trailer was parked. Leaves rustled like the starched, black skirts of
witches. The wind swept down from the cloud-plated Pennsylvania sky,
pushing the August darkness through the trees, gently rocking the
trailer, groaning, murmuring, sighing, heavy with the scent of oncoming
rain. It picked up the hurlyburly sounds of the nearby carnival, tore
them apart as if they were fragments of a flimsy fabric, and drove the
tattered threads of noise through the screen that covered the open
window above the kitchen table.
In spite of the wind’s incessant voice, Ellen could still hear the
faint, unnerving noises that issued from the bassinet at the far end of
the twenty-foot trailer. Scraping and scratching. Dry rasping.
Brittle crackling.
A papery whisper. The harder she strained to block out those sounds,
the more clearly she could hear them.
She felt slightly dizzy. That was probably the booze doing its job.
She was not much of a drinker, but in the past hour she had tossed down
four shots of bourbon. Maybe six shots. She couldn’t quite remember
whether she had made three or only two trips to the bottle.
She looked at her trembling hands and wondered if she was drunk enough
to do something about the baby.
Distant lightning flashed beyond the window. Thunder rumbled from the
edge of the dark horizon.
Ellen turned her eyes slowly to the bassinet, which stood in shadows at
the foot of the bed, and gradually her fear was supplanted by anger.
She was angry with Conrad, her husband, and she was angry with herself
for having gotten into this. But most of all, she was angry with the
baby because the baby was the hideous, undeniable evidence of her
sin.
She wanted to kill it–kill it and bury it and forget that it had ever
existed–but she knew she would have to be drunk in order to choke the
life out of the child.
She thought she was just about ready.
Gingerly, she got up and went to the kitchen sink. She poured the
half-melted ice cubes out of her glass, turned on the water, and rinsed
the tumbler.
Although the cascading water roared when it struck the metal sink,
Ellen could still hear the baby. Hissing. Dragging its small fingers
down the inner surfaces of the bassinet. Trying to get out.
No. Surely that was her imagination. She couldn’t possibly hear those
thin sounds over the drumming water.
She turned off the tap.
For a moment the world seemed to be filled with absolutely perfect,
tomblike silence. Then she heard the soughing wind once more, it
carried with it the distorted music of a calliope that was piping
energetically out on the midway.
And from within the bassinet: scratching, scrabbling.
Suddenly the child cried out. It was a harsh, grating screech, a
single, fierce bleat of frustration and anger. Then quiet. For a few
seconds the baby was still, utterly motionless, but then it began its
relentless movement again.
With shaking hands, Ellen put fresh ice in her glass and poured more
bourbon.
She hadn’t intended to drink any more, but the child’s scream had been
like an intense blast of heat that had burned away the alcohol haze
through which she had been moving. She was sober again, and fear
followed swiftly in the wake of sobriety.
Although the night was hot and humid, she shivered.
She was no longer capable of murdering the child. She was no longer