The Funhouse

mind with worry and fear. But the baby had been normal. For a short while, a few blessed weeks at most, she had been relieved, all doubts about her genetic fitness banished by the sight of that pink, giggly, supremely ordinary infant.
        But before long it occurred to her that all freaks were not necessarily physically deformed. The flaw, the twisted thing, the horrible difference from normal people-that could be entirely in the mind. The baby she'd borne for Conrad was not merely deformed. It was wicked, it radiated wickedness, it reeked of malevolent intent, a monster in every sense of the word. But wasn't it r. conceivable that her new girl-child was just as wicked as Victor, except that there were no outward signs of it? Perhaps a worm of evil nestled deep within the child's mind, out of sight, - festering, waiting for the proper time and place to emerge.
        Such a disturbing possibility was like an acid. It ate away at Ellen's happiness, it corroded and then destroyed her optimism. She soon ceased to take any pleasure in the baby's gurgling and cooing. She watched the child speculatively, wondering what nasty surprises it would spring on her in the future. Perhaps, one night, when the child was grown tall and strong, it would creep into its parents' bedroom and murder them in their sleep.
        Or perhaps she was crazy, perhaps the child was as ordinary as it appeared to be, and the problem was in her own mind. That thought did occur to her rather frequently. But each time she began to question her sanity, she remembered the nightmarish battle with Conrad's vicious, bloodthirsty offspring, and that grisly, vivid memory never failed to convince her that she had good reason to be wary and afraid.
        Didn't she?
        For seven years she resisted Paul's desire to have another child, but she got pregnant in spite of her precautions. Again, she went through nine months of hell, wondering what sort of strange creature she was carrying in her womb.
        Joey, of course, turned out to be a normal little boy.
        On the outside.
        But inside?
        She wondered. She watched, waited, feared the worst.
        After all these years, Ellen still wasn't sure what to think of her children.
        It was a hell of a way to live.
        Sometimes she was filled with a fierce pride and love for them. She wanted to take them in her arms and kiss them, hug them. Sometimes she wanted to give them all the affection that she never had been able to give them in the past, but after so many years of guarded feelings and continuous suspicion, she found it virtually impossible to open her arms to them and to accept such a dangerous emotional commitment with equanimity. There were times when she burned with love for Joey and Amy, times when she ached with a surfeit of unexpressed love, times when she wept at night, silently, without waking Paul, soaking her pillow, grieving for her own cold, dead heart.
        At other times, however, she still thought she saw something supernaturally wicked in her progeny. There were terrible days when she was convinced they were clever, calculating, infinitely evil beings engaged in an elaborate masquerade.
        Seesaw.
        Seesaw.
        The worst of it was her loneliness. She could not share her fears with Paul, for then she would have to tell him about Conrad, and he would be devastated to learn that she had been hiding a checkered past from him for twenty years. She knew him well enough now to understand that what she'd done in her youth would not upset him a tenth as much as the fact that she'd deceived him about it and had kept on deceiving him for so very long. So she had to deal with her fear by herself.
        It was a hell of a way to live.
        Even if she could make herself believe, once,L' and for all, that they were just two kids like any other two kids, even then her worries wouldn't be:- at an end. There was still the possibility that one of Amy's or Joey's children would be a monster like Victor. This curse might strike only one out of every two generations-the mother but not the child, the grandchild but not the great-grandchild. It might skip around at random, raising its ugly head when you least expected to see it. Modern medicine had identified a number of genetically transmitted diseases and inherited deficiencies that skipped some generations in a family and struck others, leapfrogging down the decades.
        If