The Funhouse

there.
        At last he could delay no longer. He steeled himself for the worst, opened the door, climbed into the Travelmaster, and switched on the lights.
        There wasn't anyone in the cockpit. The kitchen was deserted, and so was the forward sleeping area.
        Conrad walked to the rear of the main compartment and paused, trembling, then hesitantly slid open the door to the master bedroom. He snapped on the light.
        The bed was still neatly made, precisely as he'd left it yesterday morning. There wasn't a dead woman sprawled on the mattress, which was what he had expected to find.
        He sighed with relief.
        A week had passed since he had found the last woman. He would shortly find another. He was certain of that, grimly certain. The urge to rape and kill and mutilate came at weekly intervals now, far more frequently than had once been the case. But apparently it had not happened tonight. Feeling marginally better, he went into the small bathroom to take a quick, hot shower before going to bed-and the sink in there was streaked with blood. The towels were darkly stained, sodden, lying in a pile on the floor.
        It had happened.
        In the soap dish, a cake of Ivory sat in a slimy puddle, it was red-brown with blood.
        For nearly a minute Conrad stood just inside the doorway, staring apprehensively at the shower stall. The curtain was drawn. He knew he had to whisk it aside and see if anything waited behind it, but he dreaded making that move.
        He closed his eyes and leaned against the doorjamb, weary, pausing until he could regain sufficient strength to do what must be done.
        Twice before, he had found something waiting for him in the shower stall. Something that had been ripped and crushed, broken and chewed on. Something that had once been a living human being but wasn't anymore.
        He heard the shower curtain rattling back on its metal rod: snickety-snickety-snick.
        His eyes snapped open.
        The curtain was still closed, hanging limply, unstirred. He had only imagined the sound.
        He let out his breath in a whoosh !
        Get on with it, he told himself angrily.
        He licked his lips nervously, pushed away from the jamb, and went to the shower stall. He gripped the curtain with one hand and quickly jerked it aside.
        The stall was empty.
        At least this time the body had been disposed of. That was something to be thankful for. Handling the disgusting remains was a chore that Conrad hated.
        Of course he would have to learn what had been done with the latest corpse. If it hadn't been taken far enough away from the fairgrounds to deflect police suspicion from the carnival, he would have to go out soon and move it.
        He turned away from the shower stall and began to clean up the bloody bathroom.
        Fifteen minutes later, badly in need of a drink, he fetched a glass, a tray of ice cubes, and a bottle of Johnny Walker from the kitchen. He carried those items into the master bedroom compartment, sat on the bed, and poured two or three ounces of Scotch for himself. He sat back, propped up by three pillows, and sipped the whiskey, trying to attain a state of calm that would at least permit him to hold his glass without constantly rattling the ice in it.
        A mimeographed copy of Big American Midway's season schedule was on the nightstand. It was tattered from much handling. Conrad picked it up.
        From early November until the middle of April, BAM, like other carnivals, shuttered for the off-season. Most of the carnies, people from every roadshow there was, wintered in Gibsonton, Florida-known as “Gibtown” to show-folk-where they had created a year-round community of their own kind, a carny Shangri-La, a retreat, a place where the bearded lady and the man with three eyes could get together for a drink at the neighborhood bar without anyone staring at them. But from April through October, Big American traveled incessantly, settling into a new town every week, pulling up its fragile roots six days later.
        As he sipped his Scotch, Conrad Straker read through the Big American schedule, letting his eyes linger on each line of it, savoring the names of the towns, trying to get a psychic fix on one of them, trying to figure out in which burg he would (at long last) come across Ellen's children.
        He hoped she had at least one daughter. He had plans for her son if