Read Online The Funhouse by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page A

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 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 had never 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 her—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