Chapter 1
A Nightmare at the Funhouse
A summer evening at the Dunwiddie County Fair.
High above the crowded fairgrounds, the August moon hangs like a fat gold coin against a sky that glitters with a billion stars.
And she’s smiling. She’s happy. She’s watching Santuzzi the Fire Eater wow his audience with fiery tricks. Watching his huge mouth open wide . . . hissssssttt! as he spits a ball of blue flame directly at her!
She shrieks with terrified laughter . . . shrieks at the handsome young man holding her arm. “Eric, look out!”
He laughs . . . and she laughs with him. They duck away just in time to avoid the blazing fireball spinning and tumbling past them and then vanishing into the distance.
He gazes deep into her eyes. “That was close, honey! Too close, if you ask me. Let’s get out of here! Are you in the mood for some ice cream?”
She nods. She pulls him close and gives him a ferocious hug. He laughs, then turns and leads her along the roaring midway toward the refreshment stands. There are a dozen of them—neon-lit Plexiglas sheds full of sizzling corn dogs and sugary fried dough and succulent Italian sausages. Beyond their brightness, looming 80 yards distant, is the mile-long harness track that rings the Dunwiddie Fairgrounds like a glowing noose.
Could anything be more perfect?
The summer breeze ripples through her soft blonde hair. She’s enjoying herself thoroughly, as she listens to a circus calliope wheeze and grind through one of the old-timey popular tunes they so often play at these picturesque summertime fairs.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage,
I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’d look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!
He turns to her. “Chocolate, strawberry or vanilla—and they’ve also got mint chocolate chip. What’ll it be, honey?”
She smiles, full of joy, full of love for him. Then she looks toward the illuminated ice cream stand—The Big Lick—and the elderly, white-haired woman leaning from the window, awaiting her order.
“Eric, I think I’ll have . . .”
But now she hesitates.
How odd. For some reason she doesn’t understand, the little old lady in the window is glaring at her. Sneering at her, with eyes full of icy hatred.
“What is it, ma’am?” she asks in a quavering voice. “Is something wrong? Is something the matter?”
The old lady doesn’t speak for a moment. Then her mouth falls open. Her voice is cold, full of menace.
“What’s wrong here is you, bitch.”
“Me?” Stung to the quick, she recoils physically, as if she’s just been slapped.
“Me?” she asks again. “Me?” Her stunned eyes are suddenly full of tears.
“Nasty bitch like you doesn’t deserve to live!”
Amazed and horrified, she turns for comfort to her Eric—
He’s gone.
Nowhere in sight.
Dazed and blinking, she watches a man in a filthy apron step up behind the elderly woman in the window.
“That’s her, Elmer,” says the ice cream lady. “That’s the dirty cunt I told you about.”
She can’t believe she’s hearing this. She’s weeping now, weeping openly.
But Elmer doesn’t seem surprised. He’s nodding his head, nodding rapidly, and she’s horrified to see that he has some sort of brownish-purple growth hanging from his neck. Is it a goiter? A hideous tumor? Is it full of tiny red bugs, vicious stinging insects crawling through the man’s grotesque deformity?
“Bitch,” says Elmer. He holds up his right hand—and now she sees the brutal-looking meat cleaver. The blade winks and glitters in the light from the electric sign, The Big Lick.
Elmer slides open the side door of the shed.
He shouts at his partner. “Let’s git her, Edna!”
Now they’re both lunging through the side door, their scowling eyes locked on hers. They’re going to kill her!
She turns. “No, please!”
She runs. She staggers forward, nearly falls, twists an ankle. Hobbling now, and desperate, she looks back over one shoulder . . . and sees how they’re gaining ground on her. The cleaver whistles through the air, blade glinting, and she hears the old lady shouting again and again: “Chop her to pieces! Chop her to pieces!”
She runs! Runs! But after a few steps she stumbles sideways, loses her balance, falls through an open doorway marked:
SUMMERTIME FUNHOUSE!
HALL OF MIRRORS!
Dark in here—pitch-dark—and snarling, guttural laughter.
A voice shouts, “Squirt her! Squirt the bitch!”
Something wet, slimy . . . it’s all over her face! And then a light winks from a wall—and she catches a sudden flash of silver—and a blade sizzles through the air, a gleaming blade, blue steel, a hissing blade—just missed her!
“Help me!”
SUMMERTIME FUNHOUSE!
She screams it again, “Help me!”
But now the wood-plank floor starts to bend. It buckles in the middle, she’s sinking into the floor, and she reaches out wildly for something to hold onto. She clutches at something rubbery, spongy, full of liquid, and now it’s squirting yellow-wet onto her clean white blouse.
It’s a giant pig bladder, expanding, leaking, stinking, and fouling her neatly combed hair with its spreading filth.
HALL OF MIRRORS!
“Grab her, Elmer!”
A hand darts from a wall, a rubber hand, blood-soaked. It jams straight into her shuddering gut—“I GOT HER, ELMER! BRING ME THE CLEAVER!”
And then something cold, wet, slimy . . . wrapping itself around one side of her neck, an eel, a poison eel, needle-sharp teeth going for her jugular—
POW!—she crashes through a wall of canvas . . . and all at once she’s back out in the air, with the stars wheeling and glittering high above her sweating head.
Once again, it’s a summer evening at the Dunwiddie County Fair.
Frantic, she lurches toward the distant harness track. It’s her only hope now. If she can just reach the grandstand, if she can just reach that big crowd sitting in the bleachers, if she can just scream for help . . . surely help will arrive and she will be saved. Saved!
For a few terrible seconds, her life hangs in the balance.
Sobbing with relief, she realizes she’s going to make it. She’s going to win this race around the harness track. Already she can see the crowd in the grandstand watching her run along the damp turf . . . already she can see how amazed they are to watch a woman racing down the homestretch. A frantic woman who staggers on every other step, screaming desperately:
“Help me!”
“HELP ME!”
Ten more steps, only ten steps and she will be safe—
She skids to a stop.
Stunned by a wave of paralyzing horror, she realizes the worst—
All of the people in the grandstand . . .
They all have white hair. They all wear pale blue smocks with the same logo stitched over the left pocket: a huge red tongue licking a vanilla ice cream cone. All of the men have masses of diseased flesh hanging from their brutally disfigured necks.
Her mouth falls open.
Her eyes are huge, huge, as she sends up the most terrible, the most agonizing scream of her life: “Nooooooooooo!”
But her scream will go unheard, unheard, as the entire world collapses inward on itself, goes utterly and forever black.
***
The sleeper opened one bloodshot eye. She focused it on the team of researchers—and then she began shrieking like a maniac trapped in the depths of Hell.
“You must . . . make them . . . STOP!”
A moment later she came howling off the laboratory bed, her fists whirling and saliva flying from her distended mouth.
“I’ll kill you, all of you, you dirty motherfuckers!”
Her first blow landed on the right shoulder of a red-haired woman in a white lab coat. She wore a plastic I.D. tag above the front pocket.
Alix Cassidy, Ph.D., Assistant Director
Sleep Disorder Center of Atlanta
“Sandra, Sandra, hang on, it’s me!” Dr. Cassidy shouted as the sleep subject’s fist slammed into her shoulder, momentarily knocking her off balance.
“It’s Alix, Sandra—everything is okay, do you hear me? You’re at the Sleep Disorder Center. You’re gonna be okay!”
But the terrified young woman heard none of this. Crazed with fear, she was struggling to crawl down off the bed, while thrashing wildly about and cursing a blue streak.
Responding instantly, two other research laboratory workers were now struggling to hold the flailing Sandra Nadeau in place, along with Alix.
“It’s me, Sandra. It’s Alix! You’re in the sleep lab, honey. You’re gonna be okay!”
For a few moments, these calming words appeared to soothe the nightmare sufferer. Now her features sagged and her eyes flooded with tears. “I went to buy ice cream,” she moaned, “and then the bitch came after me!” She sobbed once and rubbed her inflamed eyes. But then, all at once, she flared again: “Hey, fuck you! Okay? Fuck all of you! They were going to kill me! Don’t you get it? Filthy bastards, dozens of them— they were going to cut me to pieces!”
With a ferocious kick, she managed to thrash one leg free. A moment later she was sliding halfway off the bed and dangerously close to breaking their grip entirely.
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