The Funhouse

a whole lot of fun. He beat her, as usual, for an almost grown-up person, she sure didn't know much about financial wheeling and dealing.
        He loved Amy more than anybody. Maybe that was wrong of him. You were supposed to love your mother and father most of all. Well, after God. God came first. Then your mother and father. But Mama was hard to love. She was all the time praying with you or praying for you or giving you a lecture on the proper way to behave, and she told you over and over again that she cared that you grew up the right way, but she somehow never showed you that she cared. It was all talk. Daddy was easier to love, but he wasn't around that much. He was busy doing law stuff, probably saving innocent men from the electric chair and things like that, and when he was home he spent a lot of time alone, working on the miniature layouts he built for model trains, he didn't like you messing around in his workshop.
        Which left Amy. She was there a lot. And she was always there when you needed her. She was the nicest person Joey knew, the nicest he ever expected to know, and he was glad that he had her for a sister instead of that crabby, nasty Veronica Culp, who his best friend, Tommy Culp, had to share a house with.
        Later, after the Monopoly game, when he was in his pajamas, teeth brushed, and ready for bed, he said his prayers with Amy, which was much better than saying them with Mama. Amy said them faster than Mama did, and she sometimes changed a word here and there to make the prayers a little bit funny. Like, instead of saying, “Mary, Mother of God, hear my plea,” she might say, “Mary, Mother of God, hear my flea.” She always made Joey giggle, but he had to be careful not to laugh too loud because Mama would wonder what was so funny about prayers, and then everyone would be in trouble.
        Amy tucked him in and kissed him and finally left him alone in the moonglow of his night-light. He snuggled down in the covers and fell asleep almost instantly.
        Sunday had been a fine day indeed.
        But Monday began badly.
        Not long after midnight, in the first few minutes of the new day, Joey was awakened by the spooky, mush-mouthed sound of his mother's whispered conversation. As on other occasions, he kept his eyes closed and pretended to be sleeping.
        “My little angel… maybe not an angel at all… inside…”
        She was really sloshed, pickled. According to Tommy Culp, when somebody was falling-down drunk, you said they were “pissed.” Mama was sure pissed tonight.
        She rambled on about how she couldn't decide whether he was good or bad, pure or evil, about how there might be something ugly hidden inside of him and waiting to break out, about how she didn't want to bring devils into the world, about how it was God's work to rid the world of such evil any way you could, and she talked about how she had killed somebody named Victor and hoped she would never have to do the same thing to her precious angel.
        Joey started to shiver and was deathly afraid that she would discover he was awake. He didn't know what she might do if she knew he had heard her weird mumblings.
        When he felt on the brink of telling her to shut up and go away, Joey tried desperately to tune her out. He forced himself to think of something else. He concentrated on putting together a detailed mental picture of the big, vicious alien creature in The Thing , which he had seen just that afternoon at the Rialto. The thing in the picture was like a man, only much bigger. With gigantic hands that could tear you to pieces in a minute. And sunken eyes full of fire. And yet it was a plant. An alien plant that was almost indestructible and lived on blood. He could vividly recall the scene in which the scientists were looking for the alien behind a series of doors, they didn't find it, and they finally gave up, and then the very next door they opened, when they weren't expecting anything, the monster jumped out at them, growling and spitting and eager to eat somebody. Remembering the unexpected fury of the monster's attack, Joey felt his blood turn to ice as it had in the theater. That scene was so spine-chilling, so tingly-icky-awful that it made his mother's drunken rambling seem harmless by comparison. The things that happen to people in horror movies were so terrible that they made the scary things in life seem tame. Suddenly Joey wondered if that was why he