The Funhouse

thoughts.
        An instant later Conrad Straker entered the tent. He sat in the chair where the marks always sat, across the table from Zena. He leaned forward, anxious, tense. “Well?”
        No luck,” Zena said.
        He leaned even closer. “Are you positive we're talking about the same girl?”
        “Yes.”
        “She was wearing a blue and gray sweater.”
        “Yes, yes,” Zena said impatiently. “She had the ticket that Ghost had given her.”
        “What was her name? Did you find out her name?”
        “Of course. Laura Alwine.”
        “Her mother's name?”
        “Sandra. Not Ellen. Sandra. And Sandra is a natural blonde, not a brunette like Ellen was. Laura gets her dark hair and eyes from her father, she says. I'm sorry, Conrad. I pumped the girl for a lot of information while I was telling her fortune, but none of it matches what you're looking for. Not a single detail of it.”
        “I was sure she was the one.”
        “You're always sure.”
        He stared at her, and gradually his face grew red. He looked down at the tabletop, and he became rapidly, visibly angrier, as if he saw something in the grain of the wood that outraged him. He slammed his fist into the table. Slammed it down once, twice. Hard. Half a dozen times. Then again and again and again. The tent was filled with the loud, measured drumbeat of his fury. He was shaking, panting, sweating. His eyes were glazed. He began to curse, and he sprayed spittle across the table. He made strange, harsh, animal noises in the back of his throat, and he continued to pound the table as if it were a living creature that had wronged him.
        Zena wasn't startled by his outburst. She was accustomed to his maniacal rages. She had once been married to him for two years.
        On a stormy night in August, 1955, she had stood in the rain, watching him ride backwards on the carousel. He had looked so very handsome then, so romantic, so vulnerable and brokenhearted that he had appealed to both her carnal and maternal instincts, and she had been drawn to him in a way she never had been drawn to another man. In February of the following year, they rode the carousel forward, together.
        Just two weeks after the wedding, Conrad flew into a rage over something Zena did, and he struck hen-repeatedly. She was too stunned to defend herself. Afterward he was contrite, embarrassed, appalled by what he had done. He wept and begged forgiveness. She was certain that his fit of violence was an aberration, not ordinary behavior. Three weeks later, however, he attacked her again, leaving her badly bruised and battered. Two weeks after that, when he was seized by another fit, he tried to hit her, but she struck first. She rammed a knee into his crotch and clawed his face with such frenzy that he backed off. Thereafter, forewarned, always watching for the first sign of one of his oncoming rages, she was able, after a fashion, to protect herself.
        Zena worked hard at the marriage, trying to make it last in spite of her husband's explosive temper. There were two Conrad Strakers, she hated and feared one of them, but she loved the other. The first Conrad was a brooding, pessimistic, violence-prone man, as unpredictable as an animal, with a shocking talent and taste for sadism. The second Conrad was kind, thoughtful, even charming, a good lover, intelligent, creative. For a while Zena believed that a lot of love and patience and understanding would change him. She was convinced that the frightening Mr. Hyde personality would fade completely away, and that in time Conrad would settle down and be just the good Dr. Jekyll. Instead, the more love and understanding she gave him, the more frequently he became violent and abusive, as if he were determined to prove that he was not worthy of her love.
        She knew that he despised himself. His inability to like himself and be at peace in his own mind, the frustration generated by his incurable self hatred- that was the root of his periodic, maniacal rages. Something monstrous had happened to him a long, long time ago, in his formative years, some unspeakable childhood tragedy that had scarred him so deeply that nothing, not even Zena's love, could heal him. Some horror in his distant past, some terrible disaster for which he felt responsible, gave him bad dreams every night of his life. He was consumed by an unquenchable guilt that burned in him year after year with