The Funhouse

leering, luminous, inhuman face jumped out of the darkness at her, screeching like an angry bird.
        She shrieked and staggered backwards. She collided with the dresser, hurting her hip.
        In her mind she saw a kaleidoscopic tumble of dark, horrific images: a bassinet shaken by the fury of its monstrous burden, enormous, green, animal eyes gleaming with hatred, flared, twisted nostrils sniffing, sniffing, a pale, speckled tongue, long and bony fingers reaching for her in the flutter-flash of lightning, claws tearing at her…
        The nightstand light came on, dispelling the awful memories.
        Joey was sitting up in bed. Mama?” he said.
        Ellen sagged against the dresser and drew deeply, thirstily of the air that, for a few seconds of eternal duration, she had been unable to draw into her lungs. The thing in the darkness had only been Joey. He was wearing a Halloween mask that had been shaded with phosphorescent paint.
        “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, pushing away from the dresser, moving toward the bed.
        He quickly pulled off the mask. His eyes were wide. “Mama, I thought you were Amy.”
        “Give me that,” she said, snatching the mask out of his hands.
        “I put a rubber worm in Amy's cold cream, and I thought it was her coming to get even with me,” Joey said, urgently explaining himself.
        “When are you going to outgrow this kind of stupid thing?” Ellen demanded, her heart still beating rapidly.
        “I didn't know it was you! I didn't know!”
        “This kind of prank is sick,” she said angrily. Her pleasant vodka haze had evaporated. Her dreamy laziness was gone, replaced by nightmare tension. She was still drunk, but the quality of her high had changed from bright to somber, from happy to grim. “Sick,” she said again, looking at the Halloween mask in her hand. “Sick and twisted.”
        Joey cowered back against the headboard, gripping the covers with both hands, as if he might throw them aside and leap out of bed and run for all he was worth.
        Still quivering from the shock of seeing that grinning, fanged, luminous face leap out of the darkness, Ellen looked around at the other weird items in the boy's room. Spooky posters hung on the walls: Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and another horror-movie creature that she couldn't identify. On the dresser, the desk, and the bookshelves there were monster models-three-dimensional plastic figures that Joey had glued together from kits.
        Paul permitted the boy to pursue this macabre hobby, and he insisted it was a common interest among kids Joey's age. Ellen had never strenuously objected. Although the boy's fascination with horror and blood worried her, it had seemed like a relatively minor matter, the sort of thing she always conceded to Paul, so that he would feel comfortable about conceding the larger and far more important issues to her.
        Now, infuriated by the scare that Joey had given her, upset by the unwanted memories that the prank had resurrected for her, her judgment still distorted by vodka, Ellen threw the mask into the wastebasket. “It's time I put an end to this nonsense. It's time you stopped playing around with this creepy junk and started behaving like a normal, healthy boy.” She plucked a couple of monster models from the dresser and dropped them into the wastebasket. She swept up the miniature ghouls and goblins from his desk and put them with the rest of the trash. “In the morning, before you go to school, take down those awful posters and get rid of them. Be careful not to chip the plaster when you pull the staples out of the wall. I'll get some good, no-nonsense prints to hang in here. You understand?”
        He nodded. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, but he didn't make a sound.
        “And no more of these practical jokes of yours,” Ellen said harshly. “No more rubber spiders. No more phony snakes. No more rubber worms in cold cream jars. Do you hear me?”
        He nodded again. He was rigid, sickly white. He appeared to be overreacting to her admonitions. He didn't look like a boy who was facing his stern mother, he looked more like a boy facing certain death. He looked as if he were convinced that she was going to take him by the throat and kill him.
        The terror in Joey's face jolted Ellen.
         I'm just like Gina.
         No! That was