by Adam Cesare
“Dad’s good. But if I have to nail together one more sign, I’ll lose it,” Quinn answered. “Nobody wants them on their lawns.”
“Why more signs?” Rust asked. “Isn’t he running unopposed?”
“Exactly,” Quinn said, laughing.
Glenn Maybrook was still seeing patients, but he swore he’d give up his practice completely as soon as the town found a replacement. Hopefully before he was officially sworn in as mayor. But Quinn wasn’t sure her dad could stop being a doctor, no matter how hard he tried.
The table lapsed into quiet. Quinn sipped her coffee. Cole started to check his phone, but then caught himself and laid it, facedown, on top of the napkin holder. Rust tried to pretend that he wasn’t watching the door of the diner, making sure he had an eye on every patron. But Quinn could see that the boy was still worried, coiled, ready to strike. Of the three of them—and they were all in counseling, were all exhibiting symptoms of PTSD in one way or another—Rust was the one who seemed least likely to “get over it” anytime soon.
To treat Rust’s burns, the doctors had shaved his head. Now that it was growing back, his hairstyle was asymmetrical, much shorter on the burned side. Redneck Rust, Eagle Scout and noted plaid enthusiast, looked like a punk.
His boyfriend, on the other hand, had gained ten or fifteen pounds and trimmed his long hair. The weight showed in Cole’s face, making him look handsome, bigger, more like you’d expect of the captain of the football team. His eyes were no longer sunken, and because it was now winter, he’d started wearing zip-up sweatshirts and hunting jackets.
To Quinn, sitting across from them in the booth, it was like the two boys had switched places.
When Quinn looked in the mirror, she couldn’t see many physical differences, but she bet they were there, that her father could spot them.
And yes, she did feel different.
Her hands would occasionally shake, and she kept lights on around the house all the time. Little things, but not insignificant. You didn’t get over killer clowns quickly. Her dreams were terrible, but her dreams had been terrible since Mom. But then she’d lived through something terrible. No one expected that she wouldn’t be changed by the experience.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Quinn had been the one who convinced her dad that they needed to stay in town. Easy as it would be to leave it all behind, she felt that they couldn’t retreat. This was their home now. Blood had been spilled to make it that way, and leaving now would have meant the bastards won.
Arthur Hill and George Dunne’s plan had worked. The two of them and their twelve (that the FBI knew of) conspirators had saved Kettle Springs.
Though not in the way they’d intended or anticipated.
The town’s population might have been decimated, but in the days and weeks after, there was an influx of new life. Television news media, state and federal law enforcement, and even a handful of true crime documentarians had flooded the town. All these new people needed places to stay and places to eat, and their residency had offered a sustained months-long boost to the economy.
Quinn had declined multiple offers to speak on-camera about her experiences. But that didn’t mean other kids weren’t talking. One production team had secured an exclusive with Cole and Rust, to be interviewed together, and had already presold the planned three-part miniseries to Netflix.
Some of the thornier locals were bristling at the attention, but most appreciated these outsiders.
The cameras and reporters made Quinn feel safe. Extra eyes were always on the lookout, ready to catch a clown or a clown sympathizer that may have escaped the initial roundup.
Most of the clowns, especially Sheriff Dunne, hadn’t been tech-savvy enough to cover their digital footprints. Even if they had survived and succeeded in killing Quinn and her friends—they would have been caught.
There was no doubt in her mind that they would have been caught.
Shortly after the arrival of the FBI, there had been a round of questionings and arrests. Arthur Hill’s phone records, the sheriff’s office emails, GPS of any phones that had been pinged as attending Kettle Springs Improvement Society meetings: no accomplice was able to hide. Not that there were many living accomplices. Ironic, Quinn thought, that it was the phones they hated so much that had gotten them caught.
School had come back into session at the beginning of December. Around twenty of the returning students had been in the Tillerson B-field that night. Most of them had survived being locked in the barn and had then escaped into the corn before the clown reinforcements had arrived. Another fifteen or so of the KSH student body simply hadn’t gone to the party, which in Quinn’s mind was a point in favor of staying in on weekends. A win for sweatpants and bad TV.
No, the “blighted crop” of Kettle Springs hadn’t been culled. And even if Cole, Quinn, and Rust had died in that refinery, the clowns wouldn’t have won. The kids would have persisted.
Quinn took comfort in that. The fact that history bent toward progress, no matter how hard the assholes tried pushing back.
Their food arrived and they all sat up straighter. After a few bites, Quinn put her forehead to the cold glass of the window and looked down Main Street. Businesses had been quick to remove Frendo-themed window displays. Demand for white paint and power-washers had been at an all-time high as people removed the clown from murals and signage around town.
“Theater looks about ready to open,” Quinn said. The Eureka was under new management and someone had fixed the marquee so all the letters would light, not just the E, K, and A.
“It’s coming along.” Rust nodded. He’d been helping with restoration after school.
“What are they going to play opening weekend?” Quinn asked Cole.
Cole chewed, his mouth full of blueberry hotcakes, swallowed, then spoke. “I don’t know. I’m letting Ms. Reyes choose. Probably something old and dumb.”
Cole had been a rich kid before, but now he had access to money he’d never have been able to spend if his father were alive. Now he had “Buy up Main Street” money. Quinn wanted to ask if there was any news, any developments, on the insurance front, but it all came back to one very touchy subject with Cole:
From the amount of blood at the scene, the extent of the manhunt that ensued, Arthur Hill had been declared legally dead, but there was still no body.
Drones had been used to search the cornfields. Dogs brought in. Blood had been found leading from where he’d been shot, out one of the exits of the Baypen factory, but there the trail went cold. With acres on either side and a six-hour head start before any search crews could be rerouted away from plucking kids out of Tillerson’s B-field, there were many directions Arthur Hill could have run, but more places he could have just died, alone and cold.
It was like the corn had swallowed him up.
So Quinn didn’t ask about Arthur Hill. She focused on her chipped beef, on small talk with her friends, and on the future of Kettle Springs.
Epilogue
Terry stole a glance behind him to watch the only passenger in the small jet.
The man was seated in the second of two rows of seats, body angled into the aisle, in full view from the cockpit.
Terry watched the man open and close his fist. He’d been repeating the same motion for hours.
The lone passenger was clenching one of those stress balls, passing it back and forth between his hands, but focusing on his left. The man grimaced against each squeeze, and Terry guessed that it was some kind of physical therapy. For an injury.
But Terry wasn’t being paid to guess. Wasn’t being paid cash, neat little stacks that added up to over six times his normal charter fee, to guess.
The man with the stress ball was traveling light and he wasn’t going too far.
Under the sunglasses the man had a familiar face. A familiar face that Terry could swear had hired him before. But Terry wasn’t going to allow himself to try to place the face.
Normally Terry would ju
st yell back into the cabin, but today he used his headset to say:
“Landing soon. Please take a moment to check your seat belt.”
This wasn’t Terry’s first flight to Cuba since normalized relations. But it was the first where he’d quickly googled “Cuba extradition with US?” before takeoff and wished he hadn’t.
This guy wasn’t visiting the country to search for classic cars or pick up a few boxes of Cohibas.
The man hadn’t removed his sunglasses the entire flight. Instead of stowing his black garment bag flat in the compartments above his seat, he’d hooked the hanger of the bag over a headrest and laid the bag flat, seating the bag across from him like his suit was an extra passenger.
Must be one hell of a suit, Terry thought, and prepared for landing.
A few things had become clear to Arthur Hill, in the wake of his failure.
First, he realized that money wasn’t everything. But that it was enough to keep you alive and out of jail. If you kept cash on hand.
Second, he realized that failure was temporary. If you were determined enough to see your plans through to the end.
Third, and this one was important: he realized that if you wanted a job done right, you had to do it yourself.
That was what he’d done wrong. He’d tried to approach revenge like a business and delegated.
But if he wanted something done right, he had to do it himself.
This was the mantra he repeated over and over, as the pilot dropped the landing gear and made their final descent onto the island.
The pilot had recognized him. Arthur was sure of it. Either from past flights or from the news. It didn’t matter where, really.
That flash of recognition three hours ago was all the prompting Arthur Hill needed to disengage his seat belt, ignoring the pilot’s announcement that they were landing, and slip into the plane’s cramped bathroom.
He brought his garment bag with him.
George Dunne had been right: there was power in symbols. You could get people to rally around them. Pin their hopes on them. And this symbol was Arthur’s legacy. His birthright.
Balanced in the small bathroom, he pulled up his jumpsuit and pulled down his mask.
Then he sat on the small aluminum toilet, waiting for touchdown and taxiing to be finished.
These Phenoms were considered “very light” jets. There would be no ground crew he had to worry about, just finding his way off the runway or out of the hangar after disembarking.
The knife was heavy in Arthur Hill’s hand and he wondered if this was going to be as easy as it seemed.
He’d been responsible for dozens of deaths. But not the one he truly wanted. And that was because . . .
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Acknowledgments
It takes a village to raise a book. And thankfully Clown in a Cornfield was raised in a kinder village than Kettle Springs.
Tremendous thanks must go to everyone at HarperCollins, Writers House, and Temple Hill Entertainment.
David Linker and Petersen Harris have been kind, funny, patient, and supportive throughout this process, and the book owes its existence to them. Even if sometimes they lapse into sports talk, leaving me baffled.
Further thanks to Camille Kellogg, Jen Strada, Jenna Stempel-Lobell, Alison Klapthor, and Jessica Berg. Editorial and design masters who stopped this from being a series of run-on sentences, printed incorrectly. And thanks to everyone at Harper’s marketing and publicity teams.
Thanks to cover illustrator Matt Ryan Tobin, someone whose incredible work I’ve always admired, but never dreamed would grace one of my books!
Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, and Alli Dyer at Temple Hill. Alli was an MVP when it came to the book’s small-town America verisimilitude.
Alec Shane at Writers House: a super cool, no-nonsense guy in a business that can be mostly nonsense.
I know there are a fleet of other people at these institutions who’ve helped shape the book, all deserving of thanks, and if I had all their names we’d just add a couple pages and roll credits.
On the personal side of things:
Big thanks to writers Scott Cole, Patrick Lacey, Matt Serafini, and (although he lives in Australia so doesn’t get to hang as much) Aaron Dries. Many writers get to have peers, a circle, but not many people get to call that circle their best friends.
Also shout out to my non–horror writer friends (yes, I have a few) Kyle, Josh, Chuck, Andrew, and Becca.
The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, for letting me creep around for hours a day.
My Twitter (it’s @Adam_Cesare!), YouTube, and other social media families: thank you for the quality content and for being very nice to me for too many years.
It’s very possible that you were drawn to this book by the cover and Clive Barker’s lovely quote. I’ve been a lifelong fan of Mr. Barker; his writings, art, and films have changed my life for the better, so to have him praise my work is a surreal experience. Thank you, sir. Deepest thanks also to Madeleine Roux, Paul Tremblay, Grady Hendrix, Nick Antosca, and Stephen Graham Jones. A writer’s life is a harried and email-heavy life. That these tremendously talented creatives were there to correspond and offer kind words is humbling to say the least.
Jen, to whom this book is dedicated, who’s signed herself up for a lifetime of me reading grisly descriptions of death and dismemberment as she tries to drift to sleep. She wanted me to tell you that she abhors violence, hate, and senseless cruelty. That she hopes to see them erased from the world. And I do too, but that’s kind of what the book’s about, isn’t it?
My in-laws: Susan, Harvey, and Mike, who’ve welcomed me into their family not unlike that movie with John Lithgow and the Bigfoot. They knew I was strange, but they grew to love me anyway.
My parents, Carol and Richard, who not only raised me right, gave me every opportunity in life, instilled in me a love of reading, art, and wonder, but also probably were WAY too permissive with the types of movies they’d allow their kid to see. They are the best.
Thank you and love to these people and more.
And to you, the reader, for giving the book a chance and making it this far. If you liked the book: please review. If you didn’t like the book: also review, but maybe try it one more time before you do?
Thanks,
Adam
About the Author
Photo by Stacy Scranton
ADAM CESARE is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of Video Night, The Summer Job, Tribesmen, and others. He writes a monthly column for Cemetery Dance Online. He also has a YouTube review show called Project: Black T-Shirt, where he discusses horror films and pairs them with reading suggestions.
www.adamcesare.com
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Copyright
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD. Text copyright © 2020 Temple Hill Publishing LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2020 by Matt Ryan Tobin
Cover design by Jenna Stempel-Lobell
Digital Edition AUGUST 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-285461-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285459-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935558
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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