with, and capable of violence. At times he was sweet, every bit as
charming as when he had been courting her. But he could turn vicious
with the unexpected, inexplicable suddenness of a wild animal. During
the past year his dark moods had seized him with increasing
frequency.
He was sarcastic, petty, nasty, grim, and quick to strike Ellen when
she displeased him.
He enjoyed slapping, shoving, and pinching her. Early in the marriage,
before she was pregnant, he had hit her in the stomach with his fist on
two occasions. While she’d been carrying their child, Conrad had
restricted his attacks, contenting himself with less brutal but
nonetheless frightening abuse.
By the time she was two months pregnant, Ellen was almost desperate
enough to go home to her parents. Almost. But when she thought of the
humiliation she would have to endure, when she pictured herself begging
Gina for another chance, when she thought of the smug
self-righteousness with which her mother would greet her, she wasn’t
able to leave Straker.
She had nowhere else to go.
As she grew heavy with the child, she convinced herself that a baby
would settle Conrad. He genuinely liked children, that was obvious
because of the way he treated the offspring of other carnies. He
appeared to be enchanted by the prospect of fatherhood. Ellen told
herself that the presence of the baby would soften Conrad, mellow him,
sweeten his temper.
Then, six weeks ago, that fragile hope was shattered when the baby
arrived.
Ellen hadn’t gone to the hospital. That wasn’t the true carny way.
She had the baby at home, in the trailer, with a carnival midwife in
attendance. The delivery had been relatively easy. She was never in
any physical danger. There were no complications. Except . . .
The baby.
She shivered with revulsion when she thought of the baby, and she
picked up her bourbon once more.
As if it sensed that she was thinking about it, the child squalled
again.
“Shut up!” she screamed, putting her hands over her ears. “Shut up,
shut up!”
It would not be quiet.
The bassinet shook, rocked, creaked as the infant kicked and writhed in
anger.
Ellen tossed down the last of the bourbon in her glass and licked her
lips nervously and finally felt the whiskey-power surging into her
again. She slid out of the booth. She stood in the tiny kitchen,
swaying.
The dissonant music of the oncoming storm crashed louder than ever,
directly over the fairgrounds now, building rapidly to a furious
crescendo.
She weaved through the trailer and stopped at the foot of the
bassinet.
She switched on a lamp that produced a soft amber glow, and the shadows
crawled away to huddle in the corners.
The child stopped struggling with its covers. It looked up at her, its
eyes shining with hatred.
She felt sick.
Kill it, she told herself.
But the baby’s malevolent glare was hypnotic. Ellen could not tear her
eyes from its medusan gaze, she could not move, she felt as if she had
been turned to stone.
Lightning pressed its bright face to the window again, and the first
fat drops of rain came with the subsequent growl of thunder.
She stared at her child in horror, and beads of cold sweat popped out
along her hairline. The baby wasn’t normal, it wasn’t even close to
normal, but there was no medical term for its deformity. In fact you
couldn’t rightly call it a child. It was not a baby. It was a
thing.
It didn’t seem deformed so much as it seemed to belong to a species
ent*ely different from mankind.
It was hideous.
“Oh, God,” Ellen said, her voice quavering. “God, why me? What have I
done to deserve this?”
The large, green, inhuman eyes of her offspring regarded her
venomously.
Ellen wanted to turn away from it. She wanted to run out of the
trailer, into the crackling storm, into the vast darkness, out of this
nightmare and into a new dawn.
The creature’s twisted, flared nostrils quivered like those of a wolf
or a dog, and she could hear it sniffing eagerly as it sorted out her
scent from the other odors in the trailer.