His ominous voice contained a threat, but she was too dazed to perceive
what he was implying. She waited for him to say more.
His thin, bloodless lips slowly peeled back in an arctic smile.
“When you have children again, when you have kids you love and cherish,
I’ll come and take them away from you. No matter where you go, no
matter how far away, no matter what your new name may be. I’ll find
you. I swear I will. I’ll find you, and I’ll take your children just
like you took my little boy. I’ll kill them.” “You’re crazy,” she
said.
His smile became a wide, humorless, death’shead grin. “You won’t find
a place to hide. There won’t be one safe corner anywhere in the
world.
Not one. You’ll have to keep looking over your shoulder as long as you
live. Now get out of here, bitch. Get out before I decide to kick
your damned head in after all.”
He moved toward her.
Ellen quickly left the trailer, descended the two metal steps into the
darkness. The trailer was parked in a small clearing, with trees
bracketing it, but there was nothing directly overhead to break the
falling rain, in seconds Ellen was soaked to the skin.
For a moment Conrad was outlined in the amber light that filled the
open doorway. He glowered at her. Then he slammed the door.
On all sides of her, trees shook in the wind. The leaves made a sound
like hope being crumpled and discarded.
At last Ellen picked up her purse and her muddy suitcases. She walked
through the motorized carny town, passing other trailers, trucks, cars,
and under the insistent fingers of the rain, every vehicle contributed
its tinny notes to the music of the storm.
She had friends in some of those trailers. She liked many of the
carnival people she’d met, and she knew a lot of them liked her. As
she plodded through the mud, she looked longingly at some of the
lighted windows, but she did not stop. She wasn’t sure how her carny
friends would react to the news that she had killed Victor Martin
Straker. Most carnies were outcasts, people who didn’t fit in anywhere
else, therefore, they were fiercely protective of their own, and they
regarded everyone else as a mark to be tapped or fleeced in one way or
another. Their strong sense of community might even extend to the
horrid child-thing. Furthermore, they were more likely to side with
Conrad than with her, for Conrad had been born of carny parents and had
been a carny since birth, while she had been converted to the roadshow
life only fourteen months ago.
She walked.
She left the grove and entered the midway. Unobstructed, the storm
pummeled her more forcefully than it had done in the grove, it pounded
the earth, the gravel footpaths, and the patches of sawdust that spread
out from some of the sideshows.
The carnival was shut down tight. Only a few lights burned, they swung
on wind-whipped wires, creating amorphous, dancing shadows. The marks
had all gone home, banished by the foul weather. The fairgrounds were
deserted. Ellen saw no one other than two dwarves in yellow rain
slickers, they scurried between the silent carousel and the
Tilt-a-Whirl, past the gaudily illustrated kootch show, glancing at
Ellen, their eyes moon-bright and inquisitive in the darkness under
their rain hoods.
She headed toward the front gate. She looked back several times,
afraid that Conrad would change his mind and come after her.
Tent walls rippled and thrummed and snapped in the wind, pulling at
anchor pegs.
In the sheeting rain that was now laced with tendrils of fog, the dark
Ferris wheel thrust up like a prehistoric skeleton, weird, mysterious,
its familiar lines obscured and distorted and made fantastic by the
night and the mist.
She passed the funhouse, too. That was Conrad’s concession. He owned
it, and he worked there every day. A giant, leering clown’s face
peered down at her from atop the funhouse, as a joke, the artist had
modeled it after Conrad’s face. Ellen could see the resemblance even
in the gloom. She had the disconcerting feeling that the clown’s huge,