painted eyes were watching her.
She looked away from it and hurried on.
When she reached the main gate of the county fairgrounds, she stopped,
abruptly aware that she had no destination in mind. There was no place
for her to go. She had no one to whom she could turn.
The hooting wind seemed to be mocking her.
Later that night, after the storm front passed, when only a thin, gray
drizzle was falling, Conrad climbed onto the dark carousel in the
center of the deserted midway. He sat on one of the gaily painted,
elaborately carved benches, not on a horse.
Cory Baker, the man who operated the merrygo-round, stood at the
controls behind the ticket booth. He switched on the carousel’s
lights. He started the big motor, pushed a lever, and the platform
began to turn backwards. Calliope music piped loudly, but it wasn’t
able to dispel the dreary atmosphere that surrounded this ceremony.
The brass poles pumped up and down, up and down, gleaming.
The wooden stallions and mares galloped backwards, tail-first, around,
around.
Conrad, the sole passenger, stared straight ahead, tight-lipped,
grim.
Such a ride on a carousel was the traditional carnival way to dissolve
a marriage. The bride and groom rode in the usual direction, forward,
when they wanted to wed, either of them could obtain a divorce by
riding backwards, alone. Those ceremonies seemed absurd to outsiders,
but to carnies, their traditions were less ridiculous than the straight
world’s religious and legal rituals.
Five carnies, witnesses to the divorce, watched the merry-go-round.
Cory Baker and his wife. Zena Penetsky, one of the girls from the
kootch show. Two freaks: the fat lady, who was also the bearded lady,
and the alligator man, whose skin was very thick and scaly. They
huddled in the rain, watching silently as Conrad swept around through
the cool air, through the hollow music and the fog.
After the carousel had made half a dozen revolutions at normal speed,
Cory shut down the machine. The platform gradually slowed.
As he waited for the carousel to drift to a stop, Conrad thought about
the children Ellen would have one day. He raised his hands and stared
at them, trying to envision his fingers all red with the blood of
Ellen’s offspring. In a couple of years she would remarry, she was too
lovely to remain unattached for long. Ten years from now she could
have at least one child. In ten years Conrad would start looking for
her. He would hire private investigators, he would spare no expense.
He knew that, by morning, Ellen would not take his threat seriously,
but he did. And when he found her years from now, when she felt safe
and secure, he would steal from her that which she valued most.
Now, more than at any other time in his mostly unhappy life, Conrad
Straker had something to live for. Vengeance.
Ellen spent the night in a motel near the county fairgrounds.
She didn’t sleep well. Although she had bandaged her wounds, they
still burned, and she couldn’t find a comfortable position. Worse than
that, every time she dozed off for a few minutes, she was plagued by
bloody nightmares.
Awake, staring at the ceiling, she worried about the future.
Where would she go? What would she do? She didn’t have much money.
Once, at the deepest point of her depression, she considered suicide.
But she quickly dismissed that thought. She might not be condemned to
Hell for having killed the child-thing, but she surely would be damned
for taking her own life. To a Catholic, suicide was a mortal sin.
Having forsaken the Church in reaction to her mother’s zealous support
of it, having been without faith for a few years, Ellen discovered that
she now belieued. She was a Catholic again, and she longed for the
cleansing of confession, for the spiritual uplift of the Mass. The
birth of that grotesque, malevolent child, and especially her recent
struggle with it, had convinced her that there were such things as
abstract evil and abstract good, forces of God and forces of Satan at
work in the world.
In the motel bed, with the covers drawn up to her chin, she prayed