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.
There wasn’t anyone around to help make the time pass more quickly. He
avoided Mama, of course. Daddy was, as always, preoccupied with his
law practice and his railroad models. Tommy Culp, Joey’s best friend
from school, was away on vacation with his family.
Even Amy was hardly ever around these days. She worked at The Dive
every day but Sunday. And during the past week she had been out every
night, dating some guy named Buzz. Joey didn’t know what Buzz’s last
name was. Maybe it was Saw.
Joey hadn’t intended to go to the fairgrounds until Saturday, the last
day, so that no one would figure out where he had gone until the
carnival was far, far away in another state. But by the time Monday,
June 30, rolled around, he was so keyed up that he couldn’t keep his
resolve. He told his mother he was going to the library, but he got on
his bicycle and pedaled two miles to the county fairgrounds. He still
wasn’t going to run away from home until Saturday. But Monday was the
day that the carnival set up, and he figured he ought to learn how that
was done if he was ever going to be a carny himself.
For two hours he wandered around the midway, keeping out from underfoot
but getting a good look at everything, fascinated by the speed with
which the Ferris wheel and the other rides took shape. A couple of
carnies, big men with lots of muscles and lots of funny tattoos, kidded
him, and he joked right back at them, and everyone he met seemed to be
just swell.
By the time he reached the site on which the funhouse was being
erected, they were hoisting a giant clown’s face to the top of the
structure.
One of the workers was a man in a Frankenstein mask, and that made Joey
giggle. One of the others was an albino, he glanced at Joey, pinning
him with colorless, rainwater eyes as cold as winter windows.
Those eyes were the first things in the carnival that Joey didn’t
like.
They seemed to look straight through him, and he half-remembered an old
story about a woman whose eyes turned men to stone.
He shivered, turned away from the albino, and walked toward a place in
the middle of the midway, where they were putting up the Octopus, one
of his favorite rides. He had taken only a few steps when someone
called to him.
“Hey, there!”
He kept walking, even though he knew it was himself the man was calling
to.
“Hey, son! Wait a minute.”
Sighing, expecting to be thrown off the midway, Joey looked back and
saw a man jumping down from the front platform of the funhouse. The