The Funhouse

screamed.
        Gunther bellowed and shook his head and snarled and stamped his foot and hissed and waved his arms. He enjoyed his work.
        Smiling, Straker turned away from the funhouse and walked into the river of people that flowed along the midway. But as he drew nearer to Zena's tent, his smile faded. He thought of the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl he'd seen from the barker's platform a short while ago. Maybe this was the one. Maybe this was Ellen's child. After all these years, the thought of what she'd done to his little boy still filled him with a fiery rage, and the possibility of revenge still made his heart beat faster, still caused his blood to race with excitement. Long before he reached Zena's tent, his smile had metamorphosed into a scowl.
        
        * * *
        
        Dressed in red and black and gold, wearing a spangled scarf and a lot of rings and too much mascara, Zena sat alone in the dimly lighted tent, waiting for Conrad. Four candles burned steadily inside four separate glass chimneys, casting an orange glow that did not reach into the corners. The only other light was from the illuminated crystal ball that stood in the center of the table.
        Music, excited voices, the spiels of pitchmen, and the clatter of the thrill rides filtered through the canvas walls from the midway.
        To the left of the table, a raven stood in a large cage, head cocked, one shiny black eye focused on the crystal ball.
        Zena, who called herself Madame Zena and pretended to be a Gypsy with psychic powers, had not a drop of Romany blood in her and actually couldn't see anything in the future other than the fact that tomorrow the sun would rise and subsequently set. She was of Polish extraction. Her full name was Zena Anna Penetsky.
        She had been a carny for twenty-eight years, since she was just fifteen, and she had never longed for another life. She liked the travel, the freedom, and the carnival people.
        Once in a while, however, she grew weary of telling fortunes, and she was disturbed by the endless gullibility of the marks. She knew a thousand ways to con a mark, a thousand ways to convince him (after he had already paid for a palm reading) to shell out a few more dollars for a purportedly more complete look into his future. The ease with which she manipulated people embarrassed her. She told herself that what she did was all right because they were only marks, not carnies, and therefore not real people. That was the traditional carny attitude, but Zena could not be that hard all the time. Now and then she was troubled by guilt.
        Occasionally she considered giving up fortunetelling. She could take a partner, someone who had done the palm-reading scam before. It meant sharing the profits, but that didn't worry Zena. She also owned a bottle-pitch joint and a very profitable grab joint, and after overhead she netted more each year than any half-dozen marks earned at their boring jobs in the straight world. But she continued to play Gypsy fortune-teller because she had to do something , she wasn't the kind of person who could just sit back and take it easy.
        By the age of fifteen, she had been a well-developed woman, and she had begun her carnival career as a kootch dancer. These days, as she became increasingly dissatisfied with her role as Madame Zena, she frequently considered opening a girl show of her own. She even toyed with the idea of performing again. It might be a kick.
        She was forty-three, but she knew she could still excite a tentful of horny marks. She looked ten years younger than she was. Her hair was chestnut-brown and thick, untouched by gray, it framed a strong, pleasing, unlined face. Her eyes were a rare shade of violet-warm, kind eyes. Years ago, when she'd first worked as a kootch dancer, she'd been voluptuous. She still was. Through diet and exercise, she had maintained her splendid figure, and nature had even cooperated by miraculously sparing her large breasts from the downward drag of gravity.
        But even as she fantasized about returning to the stage, she knew the hootchie-kootchie was not in her future. The kootch was just another way of manipulating the marks, no different from fortune-telling, in essence it was the very thing that she needed to get away from for a while. She would have to think of something else she could do.
        The raven stirred on its perch and flapped its wings, interrupting her