The Funhouse

corner of one eye. She blinked away the salty fluid.
        If she could place the child in an institution, where it belonged, she would not have to murder it. But Conrad would never agree to giving up his baby. He was not the least bit revolted by it. He was not frightened of it, either. He actually seemed to cherish it more than he might have done a healthy child. He took considerable pride in having fathered the creature, and to Ellen his pride was a sign of madness.
        Even if she could commit the thing to an institution, that solution would not be final. The evil would still exist. She knew the child was evil, knew it beyond the slightest doubt, and she felt responsible for bringing such a creature into the world. She could not simply turn her back and walk away and let someone else deal with it.
        What if, grown larger, it killed someone? Wouldn't the responsibility for that death rest on her shoulders?
        The air coming through the open windows was much cooler than it had been before the rain had begun to fall. A chilly draft brushed the back of Ellen's neck.
        The child began trying to get out of the bassinet.
        Finally summoning all of her bourbon-inspired courage, her teeth chattering, her hands trembling as if she were afflicted by palsy, she took hold of the baby. No. The thing . She must not think of it as a baby. She could not allow herself the luxury of sentiment. She must act. She must be cold, unmoved, implacable, iron-willed.
        She intended to lift the loathesome creature, retrieve the satin-encased pillow that was under its head, and then smother it with the same pillow. She didn't want to leave any obvious marks of violence on the body. The death must appear to be natural. Even healthy babies sometimes died in their cribs without apparent cause, no one would be surprised or suspicious if this pitiful deformity passed away quietly in its sleep.
        But as she lifted the thing off the pillow, it responded with such shocking fury that her plan instantly became unworkable. The creature squealed. It clawed her.
        She cried out in pain as its sharp nails gouged and sliced her forearms.
        Blood. Slender ribbons of blood.
        The infant squirmed and kicked, and Ellen had great difficulty holding onto it.
        The thing pursed its twisted mouth and spat at her. A viscous, foul-smelling glob of yellowish spittle struck her nose.
        She shuddered and gagged.
        The child-thing peeled its dark lips back from its mottled gums and hissed at her.
        Thunder smashed the porcelain night, and the lights in the trailer blinked once, blinked twice, and lightning coruscated through the brief spell of blackness before the lamps came on again.
        Please, God, she thought desperately, don't leave me in the dark with this thing.
        Its bulging, green eyes seemed to radiate a peculiar light, a phosphorescent glow that appeared, impossibly, to come from within them.
        The thing screeched and writhed.
        It urinated.
        Ellen's heart jackhammered.
        The thing tore at her hands, scratching, drawing blood. It gouged the soft flesh of her palms, and it ripped off one of her thumbnails.
        She heard an eerie, high-pitched ululation quite unlike anything she had heard before, and she didn't realize for several seconds that she was listening to her own shrill, panicked screaming.
        If she could have thrown the creature down, if she could have turned away from it and run, she would have done just that, but suddenly she found that she was unable to release it. The thing had a fierce grip on her arms, and it wouldn't let go.
        She struggled with the inhumanly ferocious child, and the bassinet almost tipped over. Her shadow swayed wildly across the nearby bed and up the wall, bobbing against the rounded ceiling. Cursing, straining, trying to keep the creature at arm's length, she managed to shift her left hand to its throat, and then her right hand, and she squeezed hard, bearing down, gritting her teeth, repelled by the savagery she felt rising within herself, frightened by her own newly discovered capacity for violence, but determined to choke the life out of the thing.
        It wasn't going to die easily. Ellen was surprised by the rigid, resistant muscles in its neck. It crabbed its claws higher on her arms and dug its nails into her again, making ten fresh puncture wounds in her