The Funhouse Read Free

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 monster. It was not a human being. Therefore, if she destroyed it, that act of destruction would not seal the fate of her immortal soul.
        On the other hand, how could she be certain that it wasn't human? It had been born of man and woman. There couldn't be any more fundamental criterion for humanity than that one. The child was a mutant, but it was a human mutant.
        Her dilemma seemed insoluble.
        In the bassinet, the small, swarthy creature raised one hand, reaching toward Ellen. It wasn't a hand, really. It was a claw. The long, bony fingers were much too large to be those of a sixweek-old infant, even though this baby was big for its age, like an animal's paws, the hands of this little beast were out of proportion to the rest of it. A sparse, black fur covered the backs of its hands and bristled more densely around its knuckles. Amber light glinted off the sharp edges of the pointed fingernails. The child raked the air, but it was unable to reach Ellen.
        She couldn't understand how such a thing could have come from her. How could it possibly exist? She knew there were such things as freaks. Some of them worked in a sideshow in this very carnival. Bizarre-looking people. But not like this. None of them was half as weird as this thing that she had nurtured in her womb. Why had this happened? Why ?
        Killing the child would be an act of mercy. After all, it would never be able to enjoy a normal life. It would always be a freak, an object of shame, ridicule, and derision. Its days would be unrelievedly stark, bitter, lonely. Even the tamest and most ordinary pleasures would be denied it, and it would have no chance of attaining happiness.
        Furthermore, if she were forced to spend her life tending to this creature, she wouldn't find any happiness of her own. The prospect of raising this grotesque child filled her with despair. Murdering it would be an act of mercy benefitting both herself and the pitiful yet frightening mutant