midway.
They pointed and laughed at the creatures on exhibit, as if the people
at whom they were laughing could neither see nor hear them. Amy didn’t
feel the least bit like laughing, even though she was still very high
on grass.
She remembered Jerry Galloway’s curse and Mama’s certainty that the
baby would be deformed, and such sights as those in Freak-o-rama struck
too close to home to amuse her. Amy was embarrassed, both for herself
and for the pathetic freaks who posed for a living in the stalls. She
wished there were some way she could help them, but of course she
couldn’t, so she listened to her friends making wisecracks, and she
smiled dutifully, and she tried to hurry them along.
Strangely, the most frightening exhibit in Freako-rama was the baby in
the enormous jar. All of the other human oddities were whole and of
such size that they might potentially pose a threat, but the dead,
harmless thing in the jar, no possible threat to anyone, was the most
unsettling of all. Its large green eyes stared blindly out of its
glass prison, its twisted, flared nostrils seemed to be sniffing at Amy,
Liz, Buzz, and Richie, its black lips were parted, and its pale,
speckled tongue was visible, and it looked as if it were snarling at
them, at nobody else but them, as if it would close its mouth after
they walked away.
“Creepy,” Liz said. “Jesus!” “It isn’t real,” Richie said. Yt wasn’t
ever alive. It’s just too freaky. No human being could give birth to
that.” “Maybe no human being did,” Liz said.
“That’s what the sign says,” Buzz observed.” Born in 1956, of normal
parents.”
” They all looked up at the sign on the wall behind the jar, and Liz
said, “Hey, Amy, its mother’s name was Ellen. Maybe it’s your
brother!”
Everyone laughed–except Amy. She stared at the sign, at the five
large letters that spelled her mother’s name, and yet another tremor of
premonition passed through her. She felt as if her presence at the
carnival was not happenstance but destiny. She had the uncanny and
distinctly unpleasant feeling that her seventeen years of life could
have led her nowhere else but here on this night of all nights. She
was being maneuvered, constantly manipulated, if she reached overhead,
she would feel the strings of the puppetmaster.
Was it possible that this thing in the bottle actually had been Mama’s
child?
Was this the reason Mama had insisted that Amy have an abortion
immediately?
No. That’s crazy. Absurd, Amy thought desperately.
She didn’t like the idea that her life had been funneled inexorably to
this tiny spot on the surface of the earth, at this minute among the
trillions of minutes that composed the flow of history. That concept
left her feeling helpless, adrift.
It was just the drugs. She couldn’t trust her perceptions because of
the drugs. No more grass, ever again.
“I don’t blame its mother for killing it,” Liz said, peering at the
thing in the jar.
i , “It’s just a rubber model,” Richie insisted.
“I’m going to get a closer look,” Buzz said, slipping under the
restraining rope.
aBuzz, don’t!” Amy said.
– Buzz approached the platform where the jar stood and leaned close to
it. He reached out, put a hand to the glass, slowly ran his fingers
down across the front of the jar, beyond which rested the face of the
monster.
Abruptly he jerked his . hand away. “Son of a bitch!n “What’s the
matter?” Richie asked.
. “Buzz, come back here, please,” Amy said.
Buzz returned, holding his hand up for them to see. There was blood on
one of his fingers.
, “What happened?” Liz asked.
“Must have been a sharp seam on the jar,” Buzz said.
“You better go to the first-aid station,” Amy said. “The cut might be
infected.” aNah,” Buzz said, determined not to let a crack show in his
macho image. “It’s only a scratch. Funny, though, I didn’t see any
sharp edges.” Maybe you didn’t cut it on the glass,” Richie said.
“Maybe the thing in there bit you.” “It’s dead.” “Its body is dead,”