The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  SAFETY CLOWN

  Next to the letters, someone had drawn a primitive yellow sun, with pathetic first-grade rays pointing in too many directions, so that it looked more like a beetle. I parked, walked along the fence until I located an opening, and stepped through it.

  I got maybe five steps into the lot before I stopped. Strands of fog brushed against my face and hands like a spider web I’d walked through. My shoulders crept up, my hands curled in my pockets, and I stood rooted, listening. Peering to my left, I confronted the dead headlights of five hulking white vans. I looked right and found five more vans facing me in a perfect line. No movement, no lights, no people anywhere.

  I was in a parking lot, after all. Discovering actual vehicles parked there rated fairly low on the discomforting revelations scale. Except for what was sprouting from them.

  Clinging to them?

  I took a step back, realized that put me closer to the vans behind me, and checked them, too. Sure enough, giant cockroach-shaped shadows clung vertically to each sliding passenger door from top to bottom, spindle-legs folded underneath and laced through the handles, tiny heads jutting from between knobby, jointed shoulders. It was the fog – only the fog – that made them twitch, as though preparing to lift into the air like locusts.

  “Hey Jaybo,” a voice called, surprisingly close behind me, and I turned again. From somewhere among the left-hand vans, a man had emerged. He had red hair, dark coveralls, a grease rag sliding around and between his fingers like a snake he was cradling.

  The barker’s voice I’d heard on the phone yesterday answered him. “Yep?”

  “Think our lucky newbee’s here.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  The guy in the coveralls flipped his grease rag into his shoulder and stared me up and down. “Kind of short. Too thin, like maybe he needs some ice cream. Good bones. I like him.”

  A door clicked open toward the back of the lot, and another face peered out. This one was narrow, with bulbous green eyes and a mouth that hung a little open even at rest, like an eel’s. “Come on in,” Jaybo said, and retreated into the lighted space.

  Why did I have to be here this early, anyway?

  The manager’s office proved to be a silver Airstream trailer lodged against the wall of a warehouse. Making my way there, I sensed shapes drifting behind windshields, cockroach shadows shivering as the vans rocked and the fog swept over them, and with a flash of disappointment I realized that these had to be the ice-cream trucks. I’d been hoping for the milkman-style vehicles that used to service us, with their bright blue stickers of Popsicle Rockets and Igloo Pies pasted unevenly all over the sides like Garbage Pail Kid stickers on a lunchbox. I wondered if these vans even played music.

  Hand extended, I stepped into the trailer. “Good morning, Mr Jaybo, I’m Max Wa—”

  “Just Jaybo. You’re not that short.”

  Instead of accepting my offered shake, he waved one arm in the air between us. The arm had no hand on the end, or at least no fingers, ending in a bulging ball of red skin. I dropped my own hand awkwardly to my side.

  “Thin, though.” He cocked his head. Up close, his eyes were almost yellow behind his filthy round glasses. Stubby silver hair studded his skull like pins in a cushion. “Think you’re going to love all kinds of things about this job.”

  Except for a small stack of ledger paper and a pen cup full of cheap, chewed-on Bics, Jaybo’s desk had nothing on it. On the wall behind him, he’d tacked a massive map of San Diego county, with snaky pink and blue lines criss-crossing it like veins. Other than the map and a green, steel file cabinet, the trailer’s only adornment was an Al Italia calendar, two years out of date, opened to April and featuring a photograph of a woman with astonishingly long, silky brunette hair and a smooth-fitting stewardess uniform, smiling sweetly. The caption read, ROMA? PERFECT.

  “You’re Italian?” I asked as Jaybo settled behind the desk and dropped both hand and stump across it. There was nowhere for me to sit.

  “If she is,” he said, smiled with his mouth still dangling open, and wiggled the fingers he had at me. “License.”

  I gave mine to him. He noted the details on his ledger. Remembering this was an interview – the whole morning had felt more like sleepwalking – I straightened, smoothing my checked shirt where it disappeared into the waist of my khakis.

  “Like kids, Maxwell?”

  “Always. Last summer I—”

  “Like making people’s days better? Giving them something to look forward to?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re hired. You’ll train today with Randy. Randy!”

  I shuffled in place. “That’s it?”

  Jaybo turned slightly in his chair and winked, either at me or his Al Italia woman. “I know trustworthy people when I meet them. And anyway.” He grinned, thumping his stump on the desktop. “You’re going to love this job.”

  The door of the Airstream burst open, and I turned to find the entry completely blotted out, as though some massive, magic beanstalk had sprouted there in the three minutes I’d been inside. The beanstalk bent forward, and an ordinary head popped under the top of the doorframe.

  “Randy,” said Jaybo. “This is Max. Make him one of us.”

  Randy had neatly cropped brown hair with a few shoots of grey along the temples, slitty brown eyes, and a jaw so long I half-expected him to whinny. Inviting me out by inclining his head, Randy withdrew, revealing the foggy world once more as he stood to his full height.

  He wasn’t that big, out in the air. My head nearly reached his shoulders, which looked square and hard under a tight green camouflage T. So maybe six-five? Six-seven? If he stood with his legs together, I thought I could probably get my arms around his calves. Maybe even his knees.

  Wordlessly, he lead me around back of the trailer toward the long cement warehouse that formed the property’s northernmost boundary. He whistled quietly but expertly as he did so, with little trills and grace notes. After a few seconds, the tune registered, and I started laughing.

  Randy swung that epic jaw toward me. “Join in. I know you know it.” His voice had an odd, strangled quality, as if his throat were too narrow for the rest of him, like the barrel of a bassoon.

  I did as he’d directed. “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes.” Maybe the vans played music after all.

  The warehouse door was metal and ribbed and freshly painted white. Still whistling, Randy beat on it with the heel of one huge hand, and it shuddered like a gong.

  “C’mon, Monkey, open up, we got joy to spread.” The jaw swung my way again like the boom of a sailboat. “Randy, by the way.”

  “I’m Max.”

  “Imax. Big Screen.”

  I had no idea whether that was a non-sequitur or a nickname, but it made me laugh again. Randy pummelled the door some more, and it jerked and lifted off the ground on its chain. Freezing air spilled over our feet.

  “Freezer,” I announced, instantly felt stupid, and so employed Mom’s Law of Idiotic Comments: go one stupider. “For the ice-cream.”

  “Big Screen,” Randy said, and thumped me on the shoulder.

  Inside, I found myself facing a desk made from a slab of wood and twenty or so stacked milk crates. This desk was as empty as Jaybo’s except for a sleek black Thinkpad folded open. Behind the desk on a swivel chair sat the grease-rag guy who’d greeted me, wearing gloves now. Beyond him, ceiling-high stacks of cardboard boxes with clear stretch-plastic tops fell away in rows to the back of the warehouse and out to both side walls.

  “How many, Randy-man?” said the guy at the desk. His rag lolled from the pocket of his work-shirt like a friendly, panting tongue.

  “Feeling good today, Monkey. Thinking Big Screen here’s going to bring me luck. Let’s go twenty and twenty.”

  Monkey shook his head and tapped the tab key on his keyboard. “Going to put us all to shame. You’re learning from the best, kid. All-time champ.”

  Resum
ing his whistling, Randy marched past the desk, tousling Monkey’s hair. At the first stack, Randy hunched, got his arms around the bottom box, and held there like a weightlifter preparing for a clean-and-jerk. Then he just stood up, no effort at all, and the boxes came off the ground and towered in his arms.

  “Goddamn, Randy,” said a new voice from the entry, and I turned to find three new people lined up by Monkey’s desk. The speaker had to be over seventy, long and thinner than I was in his grey denim jacket and red Urban Outfitters cap. Next to him stood a Chinese kid about my age, and behind them a yellow-haired forty-something woman in sneakers and a sundress.

  “Morning, slow pokes,” Randy said, pointing toward another stack with his foot. “Big Screen, grab me another five, would you, and bring them out front?”

  “Must eat half of it himself,” the old guy muttered.

  “He doesn’t touch ice cream and you know it,” said the woman in the sundress, and Randy nudged her affectionately with his elbow as he strode past.

  Under cover of the patter, I approached the nearest stack of boxes, slid my arms around the top five, and gasped. They were freezing. As soon as I lifted them, the crook of my elbow began to ache, and my fingers cramped. But at least they were lighter than I was expecting. I gazed through the clear plastic of the topmost box. There they were, in their garish orange and Kool Aid-red wrappers. We’ll be bringing Popsicle Rockets when we come . . .

  “Hey, Randy,” Monkey called as the big man reached the door. When Randy turned, Monkey tossed him a long white envelope, overstuffed and rubber-banded twice around. Without any sort of hitch or arm adjustment, Randy stretched out his fingers and snatched the envelope out of the air, pressing it against his tower of boxes. “Might want to count that.”

  The sound Randy made came as close to pshaw as anything I’ve heard an actual human attempt. He strode into the fog, and I hurried after him.

  “See, Big Screen,” he said without turning around, “we’re all independent contractors. Great system. You pay for your product up front, in full, so the trick is buying only what you’re going to sell. Jaybo gets thirty percent, Monkey gets five for keeping your van running smooth, and that’s it. Rest is yours, in cash, free and clear.”

  Even after he mentioned the vans, I somehow forgot about the cockroach things until we were halfway back to the front of the lot. The cold and the weight from the boxes seemed to have latched onto my ribs like pincers. When I remembered and looked up, the figures were where I’d left them, just hanging against the van doors the way spiders do when you stare at them.

  Randy went right on talking. “But see, the best thing about Sunshine Safety Clown, Jaybo’s got the routes laid out for you. Long a route as you want, street by street, stop by stop. These are guaranteed sales, man. Guaranteed. You saw Jaybo’s map?”

  “And his girl,” I murmured, boxes starting to slip, eyes still flitting between vans.

  “What girl?” Randy said, lowering into a squat and settling his boxes on the asphalt next to the front-most right-hand van.

  “Guess we have different priorities.” I lowered my own boxes a little too fast. The bottom one thumped.

  “Careful, Big Screen. You bought those, you know. Alright, I’ll open her up and let’s feed her.”

  Did I imagine him pausing for just a moment as he approached the van’s side? His fingers drummed the thighs of his jeans, and his whistling ceased. Then he jammed his hand between those giant, spindly legs, twisted sideways as though tearing out a heart, and ripped open the van door.

  He came back fast, whistling, and hoisted the top five boxes off his stack.

  “Randy, what is that?”

  “What?” he said. But he knew what I meant.

  “On the side of the van.”

  “He’s . . . a friend. Load up, and I’ll show you.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, we arranged ice cream cases in the freezer bins that lined the inside walls of the back of the van. Around us, meanwhile, activity increased throughout the lot as more doors slid open and more ice cream disappeared into bins. Randy worked quickly. When we’d finished, he banged the bin lids shut and hopped out fast and started around front.

  “Close that door, will you?” he called over his shoulder.

  If there’d been a way up front from where I was, I’d have used the inside handle. But the back of the van had been sealed off, probably to help maintain coolness, and so I had no choice but to hop down and face the bug thing.

  Up close, it looked wooden. The fog had left a wet residue on its slats, and I could see splotches of coloured paint all up and down them. I remembered my mother taking me to the natural history museum in Balboa Park once to see new-born moths dangling from their burst cocoons, wings drying.

  Randy stuck his head out the passenger window. “Hurry up. Don’t let the heat in.”

  With a grunt I didn’t realize was coming, I reached into the nest of slats, grasped the metal handle at their centre, and yanked. The door leapt onto its runners and swung closed with a click.

  “Okay. Back up,” Randy said. “Further.”

  I could see him at the wheel, hand poised over the control panel. When he saw me looking, he nodded. “Say hello,” he said, and pulled down hard.

  For a second, the bug thing quivered on the pegs holding it to the van. Then it unfolded. First a leg, human-shaped, popped free of the nest and dropped earthward as though feeling for the ground. As soon as that one was fully extended, another fell. The legs had purple striping, as did the arms, which clicked open, pointing sideways. Finally, the head sprang up, tiny black eyes staring at me above a deflated balloon nose, wide red happy mouth.

  Thinking that was it, I peeled myself off the neighbouring van where I’d been watching. Then the whole clown pivoted on its pegs and swung perpendicular to Randy’s door. Its puffy marshmallow of a right hand pointed its little red STOP sign right at my heart.

  I stepped around it to the passenger side window. “That’s for cars, right? So kids can cross the street?”

  Randy nodded.

  I grinned. “It’d work on me.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Jaybo made those?”

  Randy shook his head. “Loubob.” When he saw my expression, he cocked his head in surprise. “You know Loubob?”

  Memory poured through me, of my father with his determined, trembling hands on the steering wheel as he drove us to Loubobland the night before Halloween, two months before he died. The last time I’d been in a car with him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been there. The muffler men.”

  “The muffler men,” said Randy, and nodded. “Hop up.”

  I did, remembering that long, silent drive east into the farmlands of Fallbrook, the sun pumping redness over the horizon as it sank behind us. I couldn’t recall a single thing my father and I had said to each other. But I could still see Loubob’s junkyard. He’d been a carnival skywheel technician, the story went, then a funhouse specialist, then a circus-truck mechanic before retiring to sell off a career’s worth of accumulated spare parts and create annual Halloween displays out of rusted mufflers and scrap metal and hand-built motors. His muffler men wrapped themselves around eucalyptus tree trunks as though trying to shinny up them, shambled from behind junk piles like prowling silver skeletons, dangled from overhead branches to bump shoulders with shrieking guests. My father had loved it.

  When I’d buckled myself in, Randy released the lever on the control panel, and the Safety Clown clattered back into place against the side of the van. Randy blasted the horn. An answering blast followed almost immediately from deep in the lot. Over the next sixty seconds or so, blasts erupted from all the vehicles around us. But no one honked more than once, and when I’d come back to myself enough to glance at Randy, I found him counting silently.

  Eight. Nine.

  Before the tenth horn blast had died to echo, he punched the gearshift into drive and moved us out of the lot. My eyes flicked to t
he side mirror, where I saw the clown shuddering as the wind rushed over it, and beyond that, the rest of the vans falling into line in rhythmic succession.

  “You always leave all together?”

  Randy shrugged. “Tradition. Team-building, you know?”

  “Then shouldn’t I have met the rest of the team?”

  “They won’t be selling your ice cream.”

  We were headed, I realized, for the port, and for the first time, the absurd hour made a sort of sense. The workers down here had been on all night, probably shifting huge crates inside cargo containers that trapped heat like ovens.

  “So what are yours?” Randy said as we crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, angling between grunting eighteen-wheelers as we approached the docks. Between trucks and stacked crates and gantry cranes, I caught glimpses of big ships hulking in the fog, their steel siding so much more solid, somehow, than the glass-and-concrete structures perched on the land behind us.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you guessed we have different priorities. I’m not sure I liked that. I want to know what yours are.”

  Startled, I turned toward his enormous frame – a super-freighter to my weekend eight-footer – and decided on caution.

  “Just . . . spread a little happiness,” I said. “Get some myself. Make buttloads of money so I don’t have to eat Top Ramen and bologna at the end of next semester. Maybe get laid for the first time since high school.”