The Clowns

by Tim McBain

  She bent over and touched his arm, to see if his skin was warm or cool. It was cool, kind of moist, like touching a frog.

  She was breathing through her mouth because of the stench, and she couldn't help but feel like the day-old barf smell was permeating her nose and mouth and the pores of her skin. A sick feeling swelled in her gut.

  “Malcolm?” She had meant to speak his name in an authoritative voice, but all she could muster was a hoarse whisper.

  His name did nothing to rouse him.

  Shit, he's actually dead, she thought. She retracted her hand from his clammy arm.

  Suddenly his eyes snapped open, and he lurched upright in the chair. Chloe jumped back two paces.

  “Huhwhat? Whatizzit?” His words were slurred, bleeding together in a jumbled mess.

  “Christ! Jesus! Sorry!” Chloe said, taking another step away from him. “I thought you were fucking dead.”

  He slumped back into the chair, mouth slack, apparently unconcerned about his mortality. His mouth smacked opened and closed a few times, and she thought he might be tasting a few leftover morsels of vomit from the previous night.

  She waited for him to say something, but he did not. She'd caught him mid-heroin stupor.

  “More like heroin stupid,” Rick always said.

  Right. Rick.

  Tapping her pinkie finger against her lip ring, Chloe soldiered on.

  “So, uh, do you know if Rick's around?”

  Malcolm shook his head.

  “No, you don't know? Or no, he's not around?”

  Malcolm was still shaking his head back and forth. Something about the sensation must have been pleasant in his high-as-a-kite state.

  “Huh?”

  “Do you know where Rick is?” She stressed each word, as if talking to an elderly person with bad hearing and a shaky grasp on reality. Which Malcolm basically was, for all intents and purposes.

  “Oh. No, man. Haven't seen him today.”

  She puffed out her cheeks, stuffing her hands in her pockets. What could she do? If he wasn't here, he wasn't here. She'd have to break up with Rick some other time.

  “OK. Well, if you see him, will you tell him I stopped by?”

  Malcolm was still rocking his head in a gesture that said, “No.” But with his mouth, he said, “Sure. Right.”

  She turned to go, thinking that if Malcolm stayed awake enough to remember what she'd said for ten minutes, it would be a miracle. Just as she reached the hallway, he spoke again.

  “You know, I don't think he ever came home last night.”

  She hung back.

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  Malcolm shrugged. “Didn't sleep in his room anyway, because I crashed out in there. He woulda kicked me offa his mattress when he came in. He always does. Rick doesn't like to cuddle.”

  Malcolm pulled his face into an exaggerated frown, like this hurt his feelings. Then he chuckled, and spit gurgled from between his lips. Before the screen door smacked shut behind Chloe, Malcolm was passed out again.

  God damn junkies.

  Chloe headed for the park, the only other place she'd ever gone with Rick other than venues and random, sketchy basements for shows.

  On the way, she pondered whether or not Malcolm was full of shit. He was a junkie after all.

  Where would Rick even go other than the squat? He had no real friends, no family that she knew of. Though he didn't really talk much about them other than to say they were, “a bunch of fucking deadbeat rednecks.”

  If Malcolm wasn't full of it... holy hell. Could Rick be seeing someone else? Banging some chick on the side? Or maybe Chloe was the side chick. Though she was pretty sure to be a side chick you had to actually put out.

  That sleazebag. That would be just like him. So very Rick.

  God, why did she even care? Wasn't she here in the first place to tell him she never wanted to see him again?

  As she rounded a curve in the path that led to the park, she saw something in the middle of the sidewalk ahead. The jumble of stuff didn't make sense to her eyes until she got closer and realized it was a bag.

  No. Not just a bag.

  Rick's bag.

  She scooped the tattered, army green rucksack into her hands and looked around for a moment, thinking maybe he was nearby. She saw no one.

  She rifled through the bag. A Circle Jerks 7-inch, even though he didn't have a turntable or the reliable source of electricity needed to power one. His Discman, which he favored over an mp3 player or phone because it ran on batteries instead of needing to be charged in an outlet or computer. An open bag of Cool Ranch Doritos which had leaked greasy crumbs all over the place. Candy wrappers. A toothbrush. Hairspray. A box of Trojan BareSkin condoms. Ew. For her? Or for the theoretical side chick?

  Rick would never just leave his bag. It wasn't much, but his entire life was in that bag.

  She imagined him going and getting more beer after she left, getting wasted in the park by himself, and then, stumbling back to the squat, getting jumped by a group of thugs. But if that was what happened, where was he?

  She hurried on to the park, his bag slung over her shoulder.

  The park, just like the squat and the surrounding streets, was empty.

  Now what. Should she go back to the squat, try to badger more details out of Malcolm?

  Screw that. He wasn't a dependable source of information.

  Should she call the cops? God, Rick would just love that. If he showed up, unharmed, and found out she'd reported him missing to the police, he'd be furious. Or maybe he'd laugh and call her a pussy.

  If she did call the cops, she'd probably have to mention the squat, and then all those guys would be screwed. They'd hate her guts. She'd be branded a narc for eternity. No more shows. She'd get her ass kicked if she showed her face after getting a bunch of guys booted from their squat.

  Scratch the cops, then.

  Her parents? A short, bitter laugh came out of her then, and she thought of how that conversation would go.

  “So, mom, the twenty-year-old vagrant I'm dating is missing. His heroin addict squat-mate said he never came home last night, and I found his bag dumped on the trail a couple blocks from his house. His name? Oh, everybody just calls him Rick Dagger, because he supposedly stabbed someone once.”

  Ha.

  Ha.

  No.

  Not happening.

  It wasn't until she passed the alley where she'd seen the clown that it occurred to her that Rick's disappearance and the clown may somehow be connected.

  The police were out. She had no friends. Her not-boyfriend was mysteriously missing. And her parents treated her like a pariah almost as much as peers did.

  But there was still someone she could turn to.

  “Fuck me,” she said under her breath.

  Turdholder.

  Chapter Nine

  October 29th

  6:41 PM

  Moffit kneeled in the tall grass to relieve the ache in his legs from squatting for so long. The moisture from his breath clung to the inside of the mask, clammy cheeks slicked and sliding up against the rubber. It felt awful.

  “How do we… “ Danny said. “What do we do if, like, he never comes out?”

  “What’s it been? Ten minutes? Just wait. He’ll come out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Look, you got somewhere more important to be?”

  Danny didn’t answer for a second.

  “Well, no.”

  “Then zip it.”

  The words sounded strange coming out of Moffit’s mouth, and not just because they were muffled by the latex stretched across his lips. They were his father’s words. Whenever he was annoyed, and he just wanted to watch football, which was most of the time, that was what he said. “Zip it.” Jesus. No one Greg's age said zip it.

  His face flushed under the mask. The warmth radiated out from his cheeks, a slow swelling of the temperature, and he was happy to have the clown fac
e sheathed over his own to conceal the redness that he was certain accompanied the heat.

  The glass apartment door swung open then, and Moffit held his breath for that beat as the figure took shape in the doorframe. An old lady with blue reusable grocery bags dangling from her hands. Damn.

  Moffit was sure that Danny was about to make some smartass remark, and he clenched his teeth to brace himself for the annoyance, but the comment never came. Well… good. Maybe he was done complaining for a while. That’d be nice.

  The old lady’s taillights spilled a red glow over the parking lot, and then she was gone.

  “Did you…” Danny said, turning to stare into the dark behind them. “I think I heard something. In the woods.”

  “Probably just the car pulling out. The tires rolled over bits of gravel, and it echoed funny.”

  “No, bro. There’s someone out here.”

  Moffit’s spine stiffened, the rigidity pulling him all the way upright. He listened. His breath was loud against the latex, so he held it.

  Nothing. No sounds but the occasional car whooshing by every so often.

  “I don’t hear shit,” he said, letting the muscles in his back slacken a touch.

  “Yeah,” the red-haired boy said. “Yeah, maybe it was nothing.”

  Danny didn’t quite believe it was nothing, but in truth, he’d been scared since before they even set foot in the woods, and it was now getting hard to distinguish paranoia from reality. Maybe it was nothing. He hoped so.

  Here we go again, Danny figured. He always got dragged along on Moffit’s adventures. Too scared to say no. Too scared to admit he was frightened of or disgusted by most of the things they did. So here he was, cowering out in the woods, waiting around to spook some kid he barely knew, his bladder aching with that stabbing, feverish pain of being too full. But he was too scared to wander off and take a leak by himself, of course.

  He’d always been scared of new people, new things. Scared of asserting himself. In kindergarten, he’d been too scared to tell the teacher he had to go to the bathroom, slinking off to the corner and pissing himself instead.

  Maybe that was how he wound up aligning himself with a bully like Moffit. Cruel or not, Moffit was strong. Fearless. A leader for a lemming to follow. A lemming like me, he thought.

  The wait stretched out a while, though, and they remained silent. Something like a calm came over Danny. A trance almost, he thought. Like he’d been hypnotized into forgetting his fear.

  “Oh shit. There he is,” Moffit said.

  “Huh?”

  “Second floor. Third window from the right.”

  The scrawny figure filling the window frame was Turdholder, all right, and it looked like he was sliding on a jacket.

  “Fuck yeah,” Moffit said. “I knew he’d come out sooner or later. We’re about to do this.”

  Moffit rocked forward so that he was standing up on his knees, his posture taut with anticipation.

  “Keep that phone ready.”

  The surge of adrenaline that came with the excitement pushed Danny over the edge. The stab in his bladder intensified from a needle prick to the thrust of a broad sword. Time to go. Immediately.

  “So hey, I have to piss real quick.”

  “What? Christ. Hurry up.”

  He clambered up onto his feet, his legs numb and prickling from so much time crouching. A few crashing footsteps concealed him in the taller brush, and he fumbled at his zipper.

  The urine skimmed the blades of grass and slapped at the ground. The relief poured into his skull, a wave of euphoria washing over his brain. There was no pleasure in life quite like letting go like this.

  After the last few drops were shaken free, he zipped up and turned to head back. He prepped the phone once more, fully ready now to scare the bejesus out of Turdholder and be done with this. He started filming, a little smile curling his lip now that this was almost over.

  A thought interrupted the relief, however, shattering the post-urinal bliss. Moffit had been quiet this whole time. Eerily quiet.

  He eased back the five paces to where they’d been, the fear returning all at once, his heart hammering at the walls of his chest. God, just let it be paranoia again.

  He stepped out of the shadows to the cleared out spot their feet had trampled in the grass. He saw Moffit hunched there, arms hugged around his middle and wiggling, and he was relieved once more to find his friend alive and moving. But then he heard the moist sounds – little pats and slaps, not unlike the noise of a dog licking the hairless patch of flesh in its armpit.

  The phone light caught the crouched boy’s torso and that which glistened below his wriggling arms. His middle was wet. Red. Opened up.

  Danny gasped, the reality of what he was looking at occurring to him bit by bit.

  Greg Moffit was desperately trying to shove his intestines back into his abdomen and having little success. He pawed at the guts with cupped hands, pushing the strands around as much as anything, like a child trying to scoop up spaghetti with a spoon.

  “Shit,” Moffit said almost inaudibly. Based on the deadpan delivery, Danny knew he must be in shock, must not know or understand exactly what was happening here.

  “Oh, Jesus, Greg,” he hissed, eyes glued to the tubes slithering out of his friend’s belly. “Are you OK?”

  “Obviously fucking not,” Moffit said.

  His head bobbed up so he could glare at Danny.

  Blood throbbed out of his belly in sheets, the muscles contracting in wild bursts. He coughed, the hack choking itself into a gurgle as the blood caught in his throat, and then he coughed again, the thick red spluttering out to drain down his chin.

  The shock of this spectacle threw Danny so thoroughly that he hadn’t quite considered how it had happened to Moffit. He backpedaled without thought, like he could just drift away from this scene, and it wouldn’t be real anymore.

  A twig snapped behind him, and he jumped straight up. He would have pissed himself if he hadn’t just gone. He whirled to find exactly what he’d feared he would.

  The clowns stood before him, six of them, weapons hanging limp at their sides, their legs just more than shoulder width apart. All eyes locked on his.

  His throat closed up, clenching like some strange sphincter at the back of his mouth. He could muster no great scream, not even so much as an exaggerated gasping inhale. He blinked. Otherwise, he was motionless.

  Moffit watched the clowns close on his friend, leaving his wound to witness the fresh horror before him. He was cold, so cold, the warmth draining out of him along with his blood. He lived long enough to see the axe split Danny’s head and to see the clowns surround the fallen body to feast.

  He lay back, head settling in the tall grass, and he looked up into the heavens, finding that gray clouds swathed everything up there. And that was all. No light flared in the sky above. No calm or peace came over him as his life slipped away. He was very cold and very alone.

  Chapter Ten

  October 30th

  7:06 AM

  The cold stung in Phillip’s nose and in the tips of his fingers. This was the chilliest morning yet, and it was the first time this school year that waiting for the bus had bordered on unbearable. It was hard to believe that it would only get colder and harsher from here as winter came around.

  Frost coated the ground, a sparkling layer atop the grass that twinkled in the early morning light. His eyes couldn’t help themselves. They kept tracing the frosted shimmer to its edge, glancing at the place where the grass ended and the woods began. The place where the clowns had been. The foliage there looked a little disturbed, he thought, the tall grass all mashed down in one area, but it was hard to be sure from this distance. Maybe he was just being paranoid.

  The bus arrived, the door swinging open with a hiss, and he climbed the steps into the warmth, the cold and the clowns once more vacating his thoughts. The atmosphere on the bus was subdued this morning. Quiet. Sleepy. He closed his eyes upon taking his seat, t
he heat enveloping him, and he drifted into a half-sleep state.

  His mind went blank, focusing only on the sensation swelling back into his hands and nose, on the heat settling over him like blanket. It was a pleasant feeling. A peaceful one.

  After what seemed like no more than a minute, the engine’s vibration changed as the bus idled in front of the school, waking him. He filed back into the cold along with the others, all of the pressures of the impending day seeping back into his consciousness.

  He’d only taken two steps onto the concrete when he heard the voice call out from behind him.

  “Phillip.”

  He stopped, his shoulders scrunching up along the sides of his neck involuntarily, a gesture that looked like someone who’d just gotten splashed with frigid water. He turned.

  A girl sat in a Chrysler Le Baron there, glaring out the open window, eyebrows raised in anticipation of his response. He recognized her by sheer quantity of eyeliner as much as anything. It was Chloe Trepper. Though he knew who she was, he didn’t know her personally apart from all of the crazy rumors he’d heard. She was a witch, some said. Others said she boiled and ate her pet rat. Still others claimed that she’d masturbated with a frozen hot dog at Shelly Kwiatkoski’s party. He didn’t quite buy these things, but even so, he couldn’t think of any reason in the universe that she would talk to him voluntarily.

  He looked around, trying to spot someone else she might be talking to, but everyone else had hustled in to get out of the cold. He pointed a finger at his chest, poking it into his coat three times, the international hand signal for, “You talking to me?”

  “Yeah, you,” she said. “Get in.”

  She tilted her head toward the passenger seat as she said it.

  Again, he looked around. This couldn’t be real.

  “But school is about to start?”

  “I know about the clown,” she said.

  His posture went rigid, snapping upright as though he’d just suffered a slight electrical shock. He thought for a moment.

  “Well… I just got a tardy in art yesterday, so I’m kind of on thin ice.”

  The girl rolled her eyes.