by Mav Skye
She frowned at him, recalling what Diana had said the night before about the pills. Chloe would never have believed that either Wes or her Aunt would give her medication without her knowing it, but then again, she hadn’t expected them to keep secrets from her, either.
She needed proof, then Wes would be on her side again. “The clown pressed his face up against the door. Wasn’t there a paint smudge or something?”
“Yes, something was smeared on there,” he said. “But, Flip Flop could have just as easily gotten something on his nose and wiped it around on the glass.”
She pointed at the bandage on her arm. “What about this? How do you explain what happened to my arm? The doctors must know it was something sharp.”
Wes avoided eye contact. “The cleaver was lying beside you.”
“Yeah. I grabbed it for self-protection!”
“Look, I didn’t want to tell you this, but,” Wes stood and put his hands in his pockets and walked over to the bed, meeting her eyes. “They say you hurt yourself when you fell.”
“What? No!”
“Yes.”
It was Chloe’s turn to avoid eye contact. She smoothed the hospital blanket, thinking of something else that could prove the clown had been there, but nothing else came to mind.
Wes said, “Chasing Clowns—it’s always been our joke. Don’t you think it’s odd that as soon as you come back to your hometown, they start chasing you.”
A large lump formed in her throat. Chloe tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. “Mr. Jingles is real. He did this to me.” She glanced up at Wes once more, pleading with him to believe her.
He shook his head and touched the bed, next to her bandaged arm.
“Where’s my cell?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I’m going to call the station and make a report.”
Wes lowered his voice. “You’ll lose your job, Chloe.”
She pursed her mouth. “What do you mean?”
“Doctor Morgan is already worried about you. He will contact your boss and suggest you be put on leave if you continue this.”
Chloe said, “How would you know that? What I discuss with Doctor Morgan is between him and me—or isn’t it?”
Wes glanced away, guilt riddling his face.
Chloe set her jaw. She pronounced the next words slowly, her voice several octaves lower than usual. “I want my phone.”
Wes scavenged around in a small duffel bag of clothes that Tanya must have packed for her. He found her cell and placed it on Chloe’s open palm.
She closed her fingers around the bottom half of the phone, but Wes held onto the top half a second longer, touching Chloe’s fingers with his own.
“Whatever you do next is on your shoulders, not mine,” he said.
Those words sounded familiar. Where had Chloe heard them before? And then she knew that she’d heard it from before, the past. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Wes met her eyes then, sadness in them. “I wanted to believe that you were getting better.”
Chloe felt a sob rise in her throat, but she swallowed it back down and blinked the tears from her eyes. “You were supposed to be the one that believed me—believed in me.”
“I believe in you, Chloe, but I can’t believe in your clowns.”
“Clown,” she corrected.
Wes put his hands in his pockets, ignoring her statement. “The doc wants you here for another hour or so. Tanya will be over after she picks up the kids from school.” He nodded toward the hall and jutted his thumb toward the door. “I gotta get back to the restaurant.”
Chloe felt her momentary sadness turn to anger. “Right. Go follow your dreams while your wife gets hacked to pieces by clowns.”
“‘Clown,’” Wes lifted his fingers in quote marks, “you mean.”
“Don’t be a jackass.”
“Then, maybe you should grow up a little,” Wes said. “Let the past go. We all have to do it. That’s part of being an adult.”
“How can I let it go, if I never had it in the first place?”
Wes sighed. “Chloe, please, do this for me. For Shayla and Chev. This has all been hard on them. It’s time to let this fantasy go and deal with reality here.”
Chloe raised her voice. “I am dealing with reality, Wes. And you know what? Reality sucks!”
He yelled back at her. “No, Chloe. Reality is great. Reality is fine. It was, anyway, until you started seeing this Mr. Jingles.”
Exasperated, Chloe asked, “Do you think I want to see him?”
“I think you want to go back to California.”
Chloe’s mouth dropped. “You think I’m making this up?”
He looked away and bit his lip. “I didn’t say that.”
Chloe grabbed the dinner plate and threw it at him.
Wes dodged it and the plate exploded against the wall. “Hey!” He pointed at the shattered mess on the floor. “You’re behaving like a child!”
While Chloe looked for something else to throw, a passing brunette nurse popped in, her ponytail bouncing behind her. She said a little too cheerfully, “Everything okay?” She noticed the mess on the floor. “Oh. Looks like we dropped a plate?” It was a question.
The nurse looked at Wes, who looked at Chloe, but Chloe wasn’t paying attention to either of them.
She was listening. She heard the long, flat shoes slap the floor down the tiled hall.
Chloe knew what it was by the sound. She kept her eyes trained on the doorway, waiting for visual confirmation.
Wes whispered, “I think you better call the doctor.”
“Why?” asked the nurse. “Don’t worry about the plate, sir. We’ll have the kitchen send another meal down.”
“No, she sees one now.”
The nurse raised her eyebrow. “Sees what?”
It was at that second Chloe saw it in the hall behind the nurse. It had a bright suit with rainbow hair and white and dark face makeup with a jagged scar down the middle. It carried a red balloon.
Chloe pointed, choking on her words, and finally spit them out. “He’s here!”
Wes turned toward the hall. The nurse still stood there, looking from Wes to Chloe with confusion on her face.
The nurse and Wes said at the same time. “Who’s here?”
But Chloe was already moving. She leaped out of bed, the IV crashing to the floor behind her. Wes grabbed for her, but Chloe dodged his grasp, then shimmied away from the nurse like a seasoned quarterback.
The nurse tripped over the crashed IV, then into Wes. They both fell to the floor. Wes cried out for Chloe as she lunged out the door and down the hall, unaware of her gown flapping open behind her.
The clown strolled down the hall, away from her, whistling.
Chloe’s police mind latched onto the smaller details, while her primitive mind took note of the ones that were specific to her. He was a few inches taller than her, 5’10, broad shouldered and walked with an assured gait. He wore a rainbow jumpsuit that matched his frizzy rainbow hair. He wore white gloves and held a very familiar looking red balloon.
Chloe grew closer, closer to the clown. She shoved aside a doctor as he stepped out of an examination room. The file he was holding flew out of his hands and scattered to the floor.
“Police!” She cried out to the clown, not so much out of habit, but from a need to put the mounting pressure building in her chest into words.
The clown halted at her command. He spun on his heel, a silly confused look on his drawn-on face.
The clown wasn’t Mr. Jingles, but it was one of them—the clowns that chased her—and Chloe was going to nail it before it disappeared into a puff of smoke.
She leaped like a lion on an antelope. The clown let go of the balloon, and his faint smile turned into an exaggerated frown as Chloe struck him with the force of an elephant. She and the clown slid across the floor as if on a Slip ‘N Slide. She clutched at his nose and threw it. The big red ball hon
ked as it bounced down the hall.
The clown’s long red shoe caught on the edge of a doorframe and they began to roll one over the other—as if they were part of a circus act.
Finally, they struck a wall. Chloe was aware of a burst of clapping and an old man screaming. “Wowee! What a show!”
But then the sound of clapping was drowned in (her own?) screaming.
Chloe straddled the clown. Her hands moved, punched, pounded, and choked without any conscious thought or effort. Pure primitive Adrenaline rushed through her like a throbbing heartbeat. Blood and teeth flew out of its mouth, and then she went for its eyes. She felt someone grip her under her arms to drag her away. Another set of hands grasped around her bare ribs and tugged, but she locked her feet under the clown as her nails scraped the soft skin of its eyelids. She couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop until whatever made up the essence of that evil mask was gone. She’d take it apart piece by piece.
The clown would feel what she felt all these years, her childhood fractured and lost, buried beneath a deep, black horror always waiting to pull her into its abyss.
Chloe felt a sharp sting on her thigh, saw the needle plunge all the way in. She howled and raged like a wild woman as she felt that deep, frightening abyss snake through her veins, claiming her inch by inch as it had always done. Chloe knew that once more, like her memories, the clown would disappear. The doctors, Wes, and her Aunt would tell her it was all a hallucination in her head—a dream. And a dream is where the raging river of abyss deposited her, but it was not a dream of the present, but of the past.
10
The Horned One
CHANTING PIERCED THE DARK. IT WAS gentle, familiar. Chloe chased the thread of voices through the inky caverns and tunnels of her mind. She chased it until light burst through her eyelids like shooting stars. Her consciousness focused on the light, fluttering at it like a moth to a flame. The light pulsed the spectrum of the rainbow, fading and rising with the chant.
It told a story.
It told the truth.
And it was on these wings that Chloe eased into the thread of light. Instead of pursuing the light, its gravity pulled her through its deep waters.
Soft chanting weaved a pattern of words and images.
She saw a family, one of her kind, huddled in a tent of buffalo skin. Flames licked at a small log in the middle. A little girl was wept into her mother’s neck, burying her face into her mother’s hair, hair that was the color of raven wings. The mother comforted the little girl with one arm while holding a nursing infant in the other.
The little girl murmured. “Ayv asvnasdi uwedolisdi.”
Chloe was surprised to find she knew these words. I am sad.
The mother whispered, “Ayv asvnasdi utloy.” I feel the same.
The little girl withdrew her face from her mother’s hair. Chloe was startled by the little girl’s face. She wore a white mask, but half was painted black, separated by a lightning bolt. The nose was red, and the exaggerated grin stretching from ear-to-ear, crimson. Her hair was pulled tight into a bun.
The little girl spoke, and Chloe’s mind translated the words.
“I am so hungry.”
The mother responded, “We all are.” The baby at the woman’s breast fussed as if agreement. It was then, that Chloe noticed the woman’s breast was not full with milk, but sagging and dry.
The woman said to her daughter, “You must be strong. You must dance, or we will not eat.”
The little girl sniffed and looked down at her white dress, which Chloe realized was not a dress but a costume. She wore lacy white gloves. A silky white jacket covered her arms. Instead of buttons holding it closed, there was a diamond brooch. The kind only white, rich women wore.
Her mother said, “You must become the beast. The dancing beast that tricks the eyes, but not the heart.”
The little girl asked, “Like the horned one?”
“Just like the horned one.”
The girl looked at her hands and spread them on her dress. “But I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
The mother replied, “The horned one wishes not to hurt anybody, but by his very nature he must. He is hunted because of his beauty and innocence. He must fight. He must kill. After the battle, when he slips into the sea, he is invisible.
“He is invisible,” whispers the girl. “I will be invisible.”
The baby fussed again, clenching its tiny fists and tossing them into the air.
The mother responded, “Yes, but first you must dance.”
An ugly carnie with a long red nose stuck his face inside the flap of the tent. “Five minutes.”
The mother set the baby aside and helped the girl to her feet.
It was only then that Chloe saw the white tights, long tutu, and ballerina slippers. Dressed as a rich white girl, she resembled both a clown and a ballerina.
Wiping fresh tears from her face and forcing a smile, the mother pressed a hatchet into the little girl’s hands, and they stepped outside the tent. She began to sing and clap. “Dance! Dance! Dance!”
The little girl twirled like a ballerina and swung the hatchet above her head. She rose on tiptoe, piqued, then plied. She spread her arms with the hatchet as if she were to curtsy, but suddenly threw the hatchet above her head straight up into the air. The axe spun like cartwheels twice, rising first up, and then down before the girl gracefully caught the hatchet by the handle.
The mother clapped. “Well done. Go out and entertain, and when it comes time to…” her sentence trailed off, but the girl nodded, understanding. “Then you must make it quick, and hit right where I’ve shown you.”
The man with the long red nose, reappeared, snorting when the mother wrapped her arms around the little girl and hugged her close to her heart. He grabbed the girl by the upper arm. “It’s time.”
The little girl used her eyes to plead with her mother, but her mother only shook her head and whispered, “Dance.”
The man hauled the girl away, dragging her by her arm. The girl knew better than to cry; she simply tried to keep up as they entered the large red tent from the side.
Dozens of wooden bleachers, filled to the brim with families, surrounded the main stage. Carnies sold popcorn, and dry hay was scattered throughout.
Buckskin Henry rode on his horse, firing blanks into the air. He and his Cowboys had already gathered the Indians.
Clowns appeared and danced, mocking a fight, kicking the Indians in the behind off the stage and riding them away like ponies until there was only one Indian left. A Chief.
A clown forced the Chief to his knees, and tied him to a hitching post by the fire.
Buckskin Henry shot his gun again, and all the clowns and Cowboys disappeared—except for the Chief, who remained tied to the post. The lights on stage dimmed, and the audience ooohed and ahhed, they knew what came next. It wasn’t anything you’d find in a normal wild west show, and it was why this particular show drew the crowds from all over the world and sold out every single night. What came next was the gruesome glory of Buckskin Henry’s Curious Traveling Circus.
The man with the long red nose shoved the girl onto the stage. Her mother’s voice filled the tent. Dance! Dance! Dance!
And the little Clown Girl danced for her mother. She floated like a feather from one side of the stage to the other. She dipped, spun and leaped. The audience cried out in delight when she tossed the hatchet into the air and caught it with her tiny lacy gloved hands.
The Clown Girl drew close to the captured Indian. She acted as if she were very angry at him. She pulled her hair at the scalp, and waved the hatchet over it, implying that the Indian Chief had scalped someone close to her.
She placed her hands near her chest, over her heart. Her own mother!
A woman in the audience cried out, and then the audience hushed in anticipation.
The Clown Girl waggled her finger at the Chief, scolding him.
The Chief held his head high and proud. Despite the giant c
rimson grin drawn on the Clown Girl’s mask, he could not ignore the sadness in her eyes at what she must do next. Nor could she ignore the fear that he could not hide from his eyes.
They were both forced into this, and neither judged the other. Unseen to anyone but the Clown Girl, he nodded at her. He was ready.
The Clown Girl waved the hatchet in front of his face. The crowd understood that a crime had been committed, and the Clown Girl was the one to deal punishment.
The Clown Girl turned toward the audience. She drew her lips upward, exaggerating the crimson grin on the mask. She held the hatchet above her head with both hands, pumping it.
The crowd cheered, and egged her on. She walked up and down the stage, making eye contact. Her mother’s words filled her head.
Become the beast!
She pumped the hatchet again. The crowd went wild.
Trick the eyes, but not the heart!
The Clown Girl walked backward toward the fire and the Chief as the crowd cheered. She brought the hatchet to her chest, and curtsied, bowing her head. She breathed a prayer for strength and forgiveness.
Become the beast!
She suddenly rose, whirled around and swung, she buried the hatchet between the Chief’s eyes exactly how her mother taught her.
There was the loud crack as metal met bone.
The crowd shrieked in shock and awe, and then they fell silent.
With his hands still tied to the post, the Chief slumped to the hay on the ground. The campfire flared high.
The Clown Girl approached the Chief, her white dress and jacket sprayed with blood. With great effort, she withdrew her hatchet from the Chief’s bloody skull and the audience whispered as she cradled his head in her lap, and used the hatchet to peel back the skin on his forehead and remove his scalp.
Three minutes ticked by in silence as the crowd watched.
Covered in blood and tears, with a fixed crimson smile, the Clown Girl arose with the Chief’s scalp in one hand and the hatchet in the other.
Her hands quivered slightly, but she knew what torture her family would endure if the crowd saw. So she steadied her arms and listened for her mother’s voice: Dance! Dance! Dance!
