The Funhouse

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    PROLOGUE.
        
        Ellen Straker sat at the small kitchen table in the Airstream travel trailer, listening to the night wind, trying not to hear the strange scratching that came from the baby's bassinet.
        Tall oaks, maples, and birches swayed in the dark grove where the trailer was parked. Leaves rustled like the starched, black skirts of witches. The wind swept down from the cloud-plated Pennsylvania sky, pushing the August darkness through the trees, gently rocking the trailer, groaning, murmuring, sighing, heavy with the scent of oncoming rain. It picked up the hurly-burly sounds of the nearby carnival, tore them apart as if they were fragments of a flimsy fabric, and drove the tattered threads of noise through the screen that covered the open window above the kitchen table.
        In spite of the wind's incessant voice, Ellen could still hear the faint, unnerving noises that issued from the bassinet at the far end of the twenty-foot trailer. Scraping and scratching. Dry rasping. Brittle crackling. A papery whisper. The harder she strained to block out those sounds, the more clearly she could hear them.
        She felt slightly dizzy. That was probably the booze doing its job. She was not much of a drinker, but in the past hour she had tossed down four shots of bourbon. Maybe six shots. She couldn't quite remember whether she had made three or only two trips to the bottle.
        She looked at her trembling hands and wondered if she was drunk enough to do something about the baby.
        Distant lightning flashed beyond the window. Thunder rumbled from the edge of the dark horizon.
        Ellen turned her eyes slowly to the bassinet, which stood in shadows at the foot of the bed, and gradually her fear was supplanted by anger. She was angry with Conrad, her husband, and she was angry with herself for having gotten into this. But most of all, she was angry with the baby because the baby was the hideous, undeniable evidence of her sin. She wanted to kill it-kill it and bury it and forget that it had ever existed-but she knew she would have to be drunk in order to choke the life out of the child.
        She thought she was just about ready.
        Gingerly, she got up and went to the kitchen sink. She poured the half-melted ice cubes out of her glass, turned on the water, and rinsed the tumbler.
        Although the cascading water roared when it struck the metal sink, Ellen could still hear the baby. Hissing. Dragging its small fingers down the inner surfaces of the bassinet. Trying to get out.
        No. Surely that was her imagination. She couldn't possibly hear those thin sounds over the drumming water.
        She turned off the tap.
        For a moment the world seemed to be filled with absolutely perfect, tomblike silence. Then she heard the soughing wind once more, it carried with it the distorted music of a calliope that was piping energetically out on the midway.
        And from within the bassinet: scratching, scrabbling.
        Suddenly the child cried out. It was a harsh, grating screech, a single, fierce bleat of frustration and anger. Then quiet. For a few seconds the baby was still, utterly motionless, but then it began its relentless movement again.
        With shaking hands, Ellen put fresh ice in her glass and poured more bourbon. She hadn't intended to drink any more, but the child's scream had been like an intense blast of heat that had burned away the alcohol haze through which she had been moving. She was sober again, and fear followed swiftly in the wake of sobriety.
        Although the night was hot and humid, she shivered.
        She was no longer capable of murdering the child. She was no longer even brave enough to approach the bassinet.
        But I've got to do it! she thought.
        She returned to the booth that encircled the kitchen table, sat down, and sipped her whiskey, trying to regain the courage that came with intoxication, the only sort of courage she seemed able to summon.
        I'm too young to carry this burden, she thought. I don't have the strength to handle it. I admit that. God help me, I just don't have the strength.
        At twenty Ellen Straker was not only much too young to be trapped in the bleak future that now seemed to lie ahead of her, she was also too pretty and vibrant to be condemned to a life of unremitting heartache and crushing responsibility. She was a slender, shapely girl-woman, a