LUMP

by Claire L. Fishback

Every session went this way. It wasn’t until session six that I mentioned hypnosis.

  “Brian, this is Dr. Ceruthers. He’s a doctor, like me, only he specializes in hypnosis.” I looked at Brian who stared with wide eyes at Dr. Ceruthers. “I need to know what happened, Brian,” I said. “That way I can figure out what I can do to help you.”

  Dr. Ceruthers smiled at Brian and held out a hand. Brian flinched and pulled his hands away.

  “That’s okay, Brian,” he said, smiling again.

  “Don’t do that,” Brian said.

  Dr. Ceruthers frowned. “Do what?” He asked.

  “Don’t smile like that.” Brian started to breathe hard through his nose. His chest rose and fell heavily. “Don’t smile like that,” he repeated, though Dr. Ceruthers wasn’t smiling. “It’s like them, it’s just like them,” Brian turned to me, eyes wide. “He’s one of them,” he said in a panicked whisper.

  “Brian, it’s okay,” I said. “He’s a doctor. He’s going to hypnotize you, so I can find out what happened when you were young.” I helped him lay down on the couch, but he kept his eyes on Dr. Ceruthers, his eyebrows furrowed with worry.

  Dr. Ceruthers moved closer and Brian recoiled and reached for me. I pulled away and sat out of his view. Brian fought the hypnosis for a few seconds, but finally he fell in deep. I only asked one question, and he began to unfold his childhood.

  Brian was only five when his parents decorated his room with a clown theme. They believed it would bring him great joy to see all the smiling and happy clowns before he went to sleep. They believed the clowns would make him dream of the circus and fun. Brian had only nightmares.

  It was two years later, and night after night of nightmares about clowns choking him in his sleep or attacking him with balloon animals that stung like bees, that he started to hallucinate. He had the same hallucination every night at the same time when the closet door creaked open and the tips of two oversized shoes appeared. The clown was over six feet tall, he had red hair that stuck out at the sides. He had a big red nose that he honked to make Brian laugh, but it never made Brian laugh. It made him cry. Brian’s tears only enraged the clown.

  “You don’t think that’s funny?” he shouted. “You don’t think Chuckles is FUNNY?”

  After that, the clown’s face contorted, his teeth grew to razor-sharp fangs, his white gloved hands sprouted thick claws that tore through the fabric with a flesh tingling rip.

  Brian covered his head with the blankets and breathed heavily. He could see the silhouette of Chuckles pacing at the end of the bed, coming closer and closer. He felt the claws caress the blanket where Brian lay under the covers.

  “It was always painful,” Brian said in a weak voice laced with intense lethargy. “He stabbed me straight through the stomach with his claws.” At this, he lifted his shirt to show me eight scars on his stomach, each one poorly healed and obvious puncture wounds with lumpy scars.

  I shuddered at the sight of them and rubbed my arms to get rid of the gooseflesh.

  “I was afraid to show my parents, they never came when I screamed,” his breathing quickened. “They never came when I screamed and every night Chuckles, oh God,” he started to whimper, and tears streamed from his eyes. “He did this to me every night until I stopped sleeping in that room.”

  “We need to wake him,” Dr. Ceruthers said. “He’s going into shock.”

  “One more question,” I whispered to him.

  “Dr. Mantovia,” Dr. Ceruthers addressed me. “Melissa,” he said.

  “One more,” I looked at him. “What happened when you stopped sleeping in the room?” I asked Brian.

  Brian tossed his head from side to side, his eyelids twitched, agitated.

  “I could hear him laughing,” Brian said. His feet kicked, his hands twitched restlessly. “I could hear him laughing and calling my name, but he couldn’t leave my room.”

  “Why do you think he couldn’t leave your room?” I asked.

  Brian didn’t answer and Dr. Ceruthers stepped in and woke him gently with a three, two, one, snap.

  “What happened?” Brian asked, sitting up. He rubbed his eyes. “Why am I all sweaty?”

  “You told me about your childhood,” I told him.

  He looked at Dr. Ceruthers and brought his knees to his chest.

  “I don’t like him,” he said.

  “I’ll leave,” Dr. Ceruthers said.

  “You showed me your scars,” I said after Dr. Ceruthers had left.

  Brian put his feet back on the floor and held his head in his hands, leaning on his knees. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms.

  “How did you get those?” I asked him. I wanted him to tell me what he thinks happened, not what his brain remembered.

  He remained silent for a minute as if processing the question.

  “I got them when I was young,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Did either of your parents, or perhaps a sibling, do that?”

  “No,” he said. “No one ever harmed me.” He avoided eye contact. When he finally looked up, there were tears in his eyes. His lip trembled when he spoke again. “It was the clown,” he said. His face twisted briefly, then he gained control. “Chuckles,” he said. “That man, that doctor that was here, he smiled like that clown.”

  “How did Chuckles do that to you?” I asked.

  Brian’s chest heaved a couple of times, he looked up at me and yelled, “He stabbed me!” His shoulders shook, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “He stabbed me with his claws!” Tears poured from his eyes and he started to wail. I sat next to him and held him while he cried against my shoulder.

  I requested his medical records later that day only to find that Brian was a very healthy kid. There was mention of the wounds, a description of them revealed they went all the way through to his back, but somehow missed his organs. His response was noted when asked about them. There was a referral to a psychologist, the one whose office I took over. There was also a letter to child protective services that looked like it was never mailed.

  The medical doctor had the same questions I did. If the wounds appeared to go all the way through, how was there no internal damage? What really caused these injuries?

  I went home that night feeling drained but satisfied with my findings. I felt like I was making a real breakthrough with Brian. When I got home there was a package on my stoop. I brought it inside and opened it. Among the hundreds of Styrofoam packing peanuts there was a figurine. I chuckled at sight of it.

  “How appropriate,” I said, placing the figurine on my dresser. It was a porcelain clown who looked in the midst of dancing. He had a huge smile on his face and held a bouquet of balloons. There was no card.

  I curled up in bed and fell to sleep.

  The closet door creaked open, and I opened my eyes. It opened more, and I sat up, waiting. Two long shoes came through the doorway, followed by a tall clown wearing red and white. He had frizzy red hair that stuck out from the sides of his head, and a red ball for a nose. He honked it, but I didn’t laugh. I trembled all over, a cold sweat slithered down my back. I pulled the covers close.

  “You don’t think that’s funny?” His voice came. It was a grating sound, like the sound of a car driving on gravel while the fan belt squealed. “You don’t think that’s funny?”

  I ventured a weak laugh that turned into sobbing. I looked from Chuckles to the bedroom door, gauging if I could make it. He was at the end of my bed, and when I looked at him again, he was smiling, exposing a row of sharp fangs. He held up his gloved hands and I watched as claws ripped through the fingers.

  “Please, go away!” I said. “You’re all in my head, you’re a nightmare, you can’t hurt me!”

  “Go away, go away,” he mocked. He came closer. All I could do was cringe and will him away. He wasn’t real. He was a frightened boy’s imagination, a grown man’s fear. I closed my eyes and when nothing happened, I opened them in time to watch him bring his claws dow
n upon me.

  A loud bang woke me up. I struggled against the sheets that had wound around my legs as I slept. I scrambled to lift my shirt and looked at my stomach. I sighed with relief when there were no puncture marks. I sat up, breathing heavily and rubbed my temples and forehead. I looked at the dresser and the clown figurine was gone. My heart hammering in my chest, banged a staccato rhythm against my ribcage. I peered over the edge of the bed and saw it lying on the floor, broken. It was three in the morning.

  I went to the kitchen and started the coffee pot. While I waited for the gurgles that meant fresh, hot coffee, I grabbed the broom and dust pan to clean up the clown figurine. When I got to the bedroom, it wasn’t on the floor in pieces, it was on the dresser where I had placed it before I went to bed.

  “I could have sworn,” I said to myself. “Come on, Melissa, pull it together,” I gripped the handle of the broom so hard my hand hurt. “You know it was on the floor, right?”

  I decided it was probably a good idea to get out of the house. I grabbed a cup of coffee to go and went to the office. My first patient wasn’t until nine, but I could catch up on some paperwork and maybe get a few more zs on the couch.

  When I got there, I felt so exhausted that I curled up on the couch and fell asleep. I didn’t dream of anything, but I was woken up when someone knocked on the door. It was my receptionist. She said Brian was there and he had to see me. It was eight.

  “Brian,” I said, opening the door after I straightened myself up. “You’re early.”

  He pushed past me and sat on the couch panting. “I know,” he said. He swallowed and tried to catch his breath. “I know I’m early, but I had to come to see,” he said.

  “See what?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I should know what he had to see. “Did he get you?” He asked.

  My heart skipped a beat, but I kept my poise. I sat down across from him.

  “Did who get me?” I asked. My voice sounded high, pinched, and I cleared my throat.

  “Chuckles,” Brian said. “He came to me last night, the first time in over a decade, but he left through the window,” he said. He was shaken but remained as calm as he could. “He said he was going to find who I told, what happened yesterday when I was here?”

  “Um, oh,” I thought for a moment. “Chuckles left you?” I said. “That’s good news!”

  “What happened?” He asked again, undeterred.

  I thought of a million things I could tell him, but they would all be a lie.

  “You were hypnotized,” I said after a long sigh. “Dr. Ceruthers hypnotized you and you told me everything about your childhood.”

  “That’s not what was supposed to happen,” Brian whispered. “He’s loose, he can get anyone, any child!” He rambled on about this for a moment. “He’s out,” he said. “At least you’re safe.”

  “I got a present yesterday,” I said. “It was a figurine. Do you know anything about it?”

  “No,” Brian said, his face was blank, and his eyes scanned back and forth as if reading something in his mind. “He’s out. I have to stop him.”

  “He came to my house,” I said.

  Brian’s head jerked up. His eyes were wide.

  “He was going to stab me with his claws, but I woke up and it was just a nightmare,” I told him.

  “It was no nightmare,” Brian said. “You woke up before he could stab you? That just means something distracted him. There must have been something in the room that bothered him enough to pull him away from you.”

  “The figurine,” I said. “It was a clown that looked like him, holding balloons and dancing. I woke up and it was on the floor, broken, but when I came back in to clean it up, it was fine.” I suddenly felt silly confiding in my patient something that could have been my own mental lapse.

  “A clown figurine? Where did you put it?” He asked.

  “In my bedroom, on the dresser,” I said.

  “That’s it,” he said, nodding his head. He suddenly got up. “I have to go,” he said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I have to find something, you want to come?”

  “I have patients,” I said. “But I guess can reschedule them.”

  A few minutes later, I couldn’t believe what I was doing. Was I, a professional who dealt with people that are mentally unstable, slipping into that very niche of people myself? I asked my receptionist to reschedule all my patients that day. They could wait. Brian had me convinced I was in some sort of trouble and wherever it was we were going would help to figure out what was going on. I was sitting in the passenger seat of his Volkswagen beetle, an old one. It jostled and lurched down a cobbled street and he parked outside the library.

  “I remembered something,” he said with a grin that was unusual for his gloomy façade. “It was this book that a co-worker showed me a long time ago to freak me out. He knew about my aversion to clowns,” he shuddered, but continued. “He told me there was a clown in this book that came from a figurine, just like our clown.”

  I wasn’t too keen on his lumping me together with him in reference to the clown I saw in my nightmare.

  He dragged me into the library and pulled me to the fiction section. He scanned the titles until he found the right one. He pulled it from the shelf. On the cover was Chuckles the clown complete with sharp teeth and claws.

  “That’s a work of fiction,” I said. “It won’t have any facts about what this figurine is.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Doctor,” he said. He opened the book and flipped to a glossy page amongst the acid-free pages. “See?” He showed me the picture. It was the figurine. “This book is about the very figurine from my past, and now your present.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. I was skeptical, but a few minutes later I was checking the book out to read further into it. Perhaps it was some kind of group hallucination.

  Brian and I parted ways at the office and I went home. The first thing I did was remove the clown figure from my bedroom. I placed it back in the box it came in and set it by the front door. Then I took the book and settled on my own sofa and started to read.

  The book was fascinating. It recapped several stories of the very thing that Brian said happened to him. Children with bleeding wounds that went all the way through yet were superficial. The main story of the book was about a man who had a story very similar to Brian’s. In fact, you could say it was the exact same story as Brian’s. In the very end, the clown attacked one of the grown children, but he was able to fend him off. He trapped the clown’s soul in the figurine and the clown was never seen again.

  I grabbed the box and took it to the post office.

  “Is there any way you can tell me who sent this or where it came from?” I asked the postmaster. “I found it on my doorstep, but there’s no return address, and I don’t want it. I need to know where it came from.”

  The postmaster examined the box. “It looks like there was a delivery confirmation,” he said. “I might be able to look the information up that way. Give me just a minute.”

  When the postmaster came back out, he told me he couldn’t tell me who sent it, but where it came from. He told me it was sent from the post office in a little town called Morrisberg. The town was familiar. I went straight to the office.

  I searched my computerized files for any references to Morrisberg. Only one came up. Brian Waterby. I couldn’t assume that he sent me the package, though. I read through his file, noting that each session he spoke about clowns. I listened to the recording of his hypnosis, listened hard for any variances in his voice.

  I finally decided to go home and get some rest. I put the box on the table and started a bath, lit a few tea candles, and placed them around the tub. When the tub was full and bursting with bubbles, I slipped out of my dress and into the hot water. I placed a rag over my face and drifted off.

  I woke up to a loud bang. It sounded like the front door slamming shut. The candles had burned so low the wax smo
thered the flames. The bathroom was enveloped in darkness. The water was lukewarm.

  “Hello?” I called into the darkness. I had left the bathroom door open, so it wouldn’t get too steamy. “Is someone out there?”

  It was times like this that I wished I had a dog to warn me. Or a man to protect me.

  I heard footsteps. My heart quickened. I swallowed a dry lump in my throat and slowly got up, eyes wide against the darkness. I strained to hear, but all I could hear was my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I pulled on my robe. I looked around the dark bathroom for a blunt object, but all I could find were bottles of various cleansers. I grabbed the largest one and held it like a club.

  The footsteps continued. I heard a shuffling sound from the kitchen. Someone was going through the box with the figurine in it. The footsteps went across the living room. A bang, a hiss of pain; the coffee table. I ducked behind the bathroom door and held my breath; I could have sworn whoever was out there could hear my heart beating. I held the bottle against my chest and waited. I heard another door close and let my breath out slowly. I peeked my head out and looked around. My whole condo was dark, but I knew it well enough to navigate. I went to the kitchen slowly, making sure to avoid the coffee table. I pulled a knife slowly from the block and put it in the pocket of my robe.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Is someone here?”

  No one answered. The box with the Styrofoam peanuts was spilled over on the table. The figurine was missing. Did the perpetrator come in and steal the figure? I went to the bedroom, senses still on high alert, my heart still pounding but slowing. I turned on the small lamp on my bed table and gasped. The figurine was on my bed. The clown’s face smiled up at me. I shuddered and grabbed it. I took it into the kitchen and wrapped it in a towel, then threw it on the floor as hard as I could. I threw it over and over again, until I knew the clown was in pieces. Then I put it in the garbage disposal and listened as the porcelain was beat against the blades and was merely a tinkle of tiny fragments.

  I was exhausted at this point. Fear was very wearing. I slipped between the sheets, careful of the knife in my pocket, and went to sleep.