The Funhouse

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 entirely 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.
         Kill it!
        The Bible said, Thou shalt not kill . Murder was a sin. If she strangled the baby, she would rot in Hell. A series of cruel images flickered through her mind, visions of a Hell that her mother had painted for her during thousands of lectures about the terrible consequences of sin: grinning demons tearing ragged gobbets of flesh from living, screaming women, their leathery black lips slick with human blood, white-hot fire searing the bodies of sinners, pale worms feeding off still-conscious dead men, agonized people writhing painfully in mounds of indescribably horrible filth. Ellen was not a practicing Catholic, but that did not mean that she was no longer a Catholic in her heart. Years of daily Mass and nightly prayer, nineteen interminable years of Gina's mad sermons and stern admonitions could not be sloughed off and forgotten easily. Ellen still believed wholeheartedly in God, Heaven, and Hell. The Bible's warnings continued to hold value and meaning for her. Thou shalt not kill.
        But surely, she argued with herself, that commandment did not apply to animals. You were permitted to kill animals, that was not a mortal sin. And this thing in the bassinet was just an animal, a beast, a