Resurrection

by Curran, Tim

  “Listen!” Tara said. “Do you hear that? Do you?”

  They all began to talk at once, but Chuck could not hear them. He could only hear the tinny, rising melody of a calliope, the sort of thing that always provided the background music for merry-go-rounds.

  “There’s gotta be some kind of fair out there,” Brian said.

  “It’s nuts,” Jacob said, denying it, yet pleased at the idea.

  The music kept playing, the rain falling off to that cold, windy drizzle again. The seven of them stood there up to their waists in that filthy water, smelling not sewage and backed-up pipes now, but sweet things and salty things, and the music played on…so wonderful, so inviting. The clouds even parted and a soft down of moonlight lit up the world, washing everything down with a ghostly luminance.

  “Look!” Tara cried out. “Over there!”

  “A clown!” Cal said. “A real clown!”

  And they all got very excited, calling out to him, even though Chuck warned them not to. Because maybe he was the only one who really saw what was standing under that department store canopy, something hunched and wormy and foul.

  Then the clown was gone.

  But Chuck had seen it. What it was and what it was not.

  “C’mon,” he said, barely able to control the terror inside him. “We better go back the other way.”

  But Cal laughed in his face. “Why?”

  “He’s losing it,” Kyle said.

  “No, listen to me”

  But they did not want to listen.

  “Maybe the clown can help us,” Tara said.

  “Yeah, he’ll know the way out,” Mark agreed.

  “Sure,” Cal said.

  But Jacob just stood there. “I don’t know…I don’t really like clowns.”

  Which got the Woltrip brothers laughing and Chuck wanted to laugh, too. He felt the laughter bubbling up from his belly, because it really was funny, wasn’t it? The absurdity of this situation? The seven of them standing in that reeking water in a flooded, deserted part of town seeing clowns and hearing calliopes and smelling cotton fucking candy? Hee, hee, hee, it was hilarious!

  “He’s right,” Chuck said, trying to get a hold of himself. “That’s no clown…it’s…it’s a monster! Like those things that tried to get in the bus!”

  “Tell him to stop,” Tara said, the fear encroaching on her now, too.

  “Yeah, shut up, faggot,” Cal told him.

  “I’m going to talk to that clown,” Kyle said.

  He started moving off and Chuck grabbed him and then both Kyle and Cal shoved him away and he went down, sinking into that cold, stinking water, and rising up quickly, gagging. “You…you can’t go!” he told them.

  Then just in front of them, a wave of water moved past like something big had skimmed by just under the surface. Like maybe a crocodile. And that served to sober them up, at least for a minute or two.

  And then a voice, piping and musical and silly, said, “Hey, you kids! You gonna stand there and freeze or what? C’mon, it’s dry over here! It’s fun over here! C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

  The clown was only about twenty feet away this time.

  His suit was orange-and yellow checked with great green pom poms running down the front, a bright red ruffled collar and cuffs, and oversized white clown gloves. His face was completely white, the lips painted black, his eyes set inside black harlequin diamonds. On his head was a bright blue jester cap with tinkling bells at the tips. He was grinning happily, a mound of cotton candy on a stick in one hand.

  “Cmon!” he said. “I won’t bite you!”

  Chuck watched the kids begin to slowly move in his direction. They couldn’t see him as he was and they couldn’t smell that awful odor wafting off of him. They were moving towards him and his grin widened and you could see that behind that smile were teeth, really big teeth. Whatever spells he was casting and whatever dark magic he sprinkled into the wind, oh, it worked just fine.

  “Don’t,” Chuck heard himself say, that calliope music so loud now it drowned out his words. “Please, don’t…”

  Chuck was looking into the clown’s eyes and seeing what was really behind them, that malignant gnawing emptiness, that slimed pit of bones and carrion that it had for a mind.

  Don’t be such a spoiled little party pooper! that sing-song voice said in his mind and he knew it belonged to the clown. Play along with me, Chucky! You’ll have fun! You’ll have lots of good, gobby fun! I promise you that! Grimshanks promises you and Grimshanks always keeps his promises and especially to fine, plump little boys like you, Chucky-fucky-sucky! Lookit the fun your friends are having! Oh, it’ll be a merry, silly lark we’ll have! You can have fun, too! Just like them! You can laugh and gorge yourself with sweets right to the end! Oh, boo-hoo, Chucky-fucky, you’re no fun at all! And I thought you could play with me, be with me! You hate them as much as I do! Why not play my games with me? I’ll show you what you do with these sweet-meats, I’ll show you how to fuck and suck and slit and tear them! I’ll show you how to play with their great big globs of greasy grimy kiddie guts and fondle their underparts and make balloon-animals from their entrails! Hee, hee, hee, ho, ho, ho!

  “Shut up!” Chuck said, hands pressed to his ears. “You just shut up!”

  But the clown voice, oh so unfunny now, would not shut up. How about that Tara? it said. I bet she’s got a sweet, saucy little cunt for us to chew and bite! Would you like that? I’ll teach you how to make them scream! What hurts and what feels good! Just you and me, Chucky-fucky! We’ll fuck ‘em and slit them and rip them wide open and then bury what’s left down in dirty, damp cellars! Take my hand, you randy little prick! Because I love you! I alone love you! They won’t be there for you when you fall, but I will! You’ve tasted the darkness and smelled the fear and know what it’s like to be shivering and alone! Just like me! Remember one thing, you humpty-dumpty little cockfuck: when you fall, they won’t be there to put you back together again, but I will! I’ll pick up your pieces and lick the sweet juice from every one, lick, lick, lick, and lick!

  “NO!” Chuck screamed into the wind and rain. “NO! I WON’T LISTEN! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME LISTEN!”

  And then everyone stopped, because the clown was gone.

  The music had stopped.

  And the breeze just smelled like dankness and rot again, dead things and moldering things, sewers and nitrous cellars.

  “Where did he go?” Kyle asked.

  They had all scattered now. They were no longer closely bunched together where even in this terrible situation there might have been a modicum of safety. Now they were scattered out. Kyle in front, Cal at his side. Tara and Jacob four feet away from them, Mark off to the left and Brian to the right. And Chuck standing far behind, gasping and shaking and ready to lose his mind.

  Another wave pushed through the rotting leaves in front of them. Then another splashed behind. Something brushed against Chuck’s ankle and he let out a cry.

  You know where I am, Chucky! the clown said in his head. Tell ‘em all where I am…here, there, and nowhere! Tell ‘em how I hunted down boys in the night, Chucky! Tell ‘em what I did when I got them in my car! Go ahead, Chucky, tell ‘em! Tell ‘em all about Grimshanks! Tell ‘em how I died with that fucking rope around my neck, the water rising and things chewing on me and tunneling up my ass and down the head of my dick! Tell ‘em about it! Tell ‘em how I slink through sewers and giggle outside little boy’s windows at night, the moonlight winking off my teeth!

  “Get out of here!” Chuck called out to them. “Everyone! We have to go now!”

  But they were stunned and dazed and torpid, like dusty toys on a shelf that needed a good winding. They looked around, the fear sinking into them and cutting them open, making them bleed like Chuck was bleeding only it was too late now, too goddamned late and they just didn’t know it.

  The water splashed and the leaves sluiced and the moonlight winked out above. And then there was darkness like that which co
uld be found in deep graves and inside zippered body bags. The blackness of death and something even beyond death. A ravening, claustrophobic blackness that wrapped hands around your throat and sucked the wind from your lungs, pressed you down into sunless crevices and buried you beneath rotting cellar floors where a sweet and profane voice promised you that death would not be the end, but a blasphemous beginning.

  There was a fountain water in front of the Woltrip brothers that sprayed them with leaves and silt. Chuck put the light on the disturbance and immediately regretted it. The water boiled and bubbled and the clown rose up not three feet away. But he did not rise like a swimmer from the depths, but with a corkscrewing motion like he was standing on a slowly turning pedestal.

  He rose to full height, slicked with slime and mud, tiny glittering red beetles scurrying down his face which was an anemic clown-white, inflated from the gases of decay. The flesh itself was set with minute cracks and tiny punctures, droplets of black juice running from them and gathering in a spiderweb tracery. His lips were huge and blubbery like those of someone suffering an extreme allergic reaction. And the teeth behind them, long and narrow and yellow and terribly sharp, set in gums flecked with gray sores. But it was his eyes that the Woltrip brothers saw and felt. Set in those crayoned black diamonds, they were sunken back into the skull, pale and viscous and slimy like egg sacs, pulsing with a circuitry of pink veins.

  “Hee, hee, hee,” the clown said. “Now it’s just you and me…”

  Kyle fell back a few feet, water surging around him, but Cal did not. Or could not.

  And that’s how Grimshanks wanted it.

  When he spun his web, he did not care for his meaty fat flies to get away. Not when they were so close. Close enough to touch and drool over.

  One of the other kids screamed and the clown mocked it with roughly the same sound as a man vomiting down a mineshaft. As his grin widened with malevolent delight, that network of tiny cracks and crevices spread out until his face began to resemble old pine bark, corrugated and flaking. Those dead eyes blazed, an oily ooze dripping from his mouth.

  “Bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish, how many pieces do I wish?” he asked Kyle, his breath high and hot like a gangrenous wound. “Just one…”

  Kyle never had a chance.

  He was dead from the moment the clown selected him. Those huge white hands darted out and grasped Kyle on either side of his head. Chuck had thought the clown wore gloves, but he wore no gloves. These were his hands…white and bloated and pulpy, strings of tissue dangling from them. He jerked Kyle to him and crushed him in a loving embrace, hugging him to his gas-filled belly. And then without further ado, those teeth slid from the gums and sank into Kyle’s throat. It sounded like pitchforks spearing a soft pumpkin. Kyle trembled and gurgled, maybe trying to speak and Grimshanks tore his throat out, swallowing down something, blood spraying into the air and catching Cal right in the face.

  Chuck held the flashlight out, illuminating it all.

  He couldn’t seem to stop himself.

  Grimshanks stared right at him as he squeezed Kyle to him, crushing the boy with such pressure that Kyle’s guts bulged from his mouth like those of a stepped-on toad. Then he began to take bites out of him, slashing with those teeth and tearing out strips of flesh. When the flashlight finally fell from Chuck’s hand, the last thing he saw was Grimshanks peel Kyle’s face from the bone beneath, shaking it from side to side in his jaws.

  The light had failed and thank God for small mercies, but still you could hear that abomination eating Kyle, chewing and slurping, yanking things out of the boy that sounded like wet snakes and snapping bones in his teeth.

  Tara was screaming.

  One of the boys was, too. But there was no time for that. No time at all and they all seemed to know it. Jacob grabbed Tara and maybe she grabbed him and they started trying to run in the water which was about as easy as tapdancing through molasses. They stumbled and fell, pulling each other up, and Mark and Brian were with them, Chuck behind them telling them to move, move, move! They sloshed through the water, making for the nearest building which was really their only chance.

  Behind them, the clown continued chewing on Kyle, his mouth packed with meat and blood, and through it all, he sang like a boy whose mouth was stuffed with Jello: “Lambsie dotes and dosie dotes and little Lambsie divy”

  It was all horrible.

  The five of them tried to move away as fast as they could, but it was no easy bit. But they moved together, trying the doors in the buildings they came to. But opening a door that was held shut by water and accumulated mud was nearly impossible.

  “Hurry!” Chuck kept telling them. “Hurry!”

  “Why won’t he go away? Why won’t he just go away?” Tara was saying.

  The drizzle faded and the moonlight broke through again. As the others tried doors and windows, Chuck looked back to make sure the clown was still where they’d left him. He was. Only now he had Cal and what was left of Kyle was floating in the water around him. He kept dunking Cal into the drink with those gargantuan white hands. “This little pig went to market!” Dunk. “This little pig stayed home!” Dunk. “This little piggy had roast beef, but boo-hoo, Grimshanks had none!” He held Cal under again and when he brought him back up he was just limp and flopping. “This little piggy cried, ‘Wee, wee, wee, wee!’ All the fucking way home!” And then he dunked Cal back under, held him by the head and bobbed him up and down in the area of where his crotch might be.

  Chuck didn’t even want to think what that might represent.

  The kids, all crying and moaning now, kept moving along, Chuck ordering them to do so. There wasn’t much holding them together and there wasn’t much of a chance, but something inside him and maybe inside them all made them keep going, trying more doors and windows.

  And when Chuck looked back again, the clown was gone.

  Just the remains of Kyle floating around and Cal face down in the water. But no clown, no goddamn clown. He could have been anywhere. In front of them, behind them, waiting to reach up and snare another snack. There was just no way to know. No possible way. The water surged around them, ripples spreading out and this was even worse than seeing that monster face to face.

  And then that sing-song voice rose up, echoing and echoing: “Where is Grimshanks? Where is Grimshanks? Can you see? Can you see? He is right behind you, he is right behind you…big, big surprise!”

  This time it was Chuck who screamed.

  For the clown was indeed right behind them. It was floating along, up and out of the water, the tips of its comically oversized clown shoes dragging across the surface of the water. It floated slowly in their direction like a ghost, its eyes yellow and glowing, its stark-white face spattered with blood, a strand of flesh dangling from its jaws. “Hey, boys and girls, how do you do? Lookit the silly fucking thing old Grimshanks can do!”

  As they watched, drawn down into themselves with limitless horror, that bulbous and hideous clown began to mimic its own grisly death. Its white rubbery neck stretched and stretched until it was easily three feet long and you could actually see where the noose cut into it, even if you couldn’t see the noose itself. The clown’s eyes rolled back into their dark sockets and its head dangled bonelessly to the side on that broken neck. You could see where the neck bone bulged under that white flesh, the skin there lividly purple. The clown’s swollen black tongue hung from its mouth.

  It was dead.

  Hanging from an obscene rope, twisting slowly from side to side. And then there was a cracking sound as the neck realigned itself and those eyes opened and the mouth slit open in a grin. The mouth continued to open until it seemed wide as a manhole and then a spray of human remains and black vomit gushed out in a stream and struck Jacob in the face and with enough force to knock him right into the drink. The others fell away from him and he rose back up, still covered in that oozing filth. He was screaming, plumes of steam rolling from his face that was popping and blistering as i
f the clown had spit acid at him.

  Then Grimshanks dove on him and held him in those doughy white hands, hugging him while Jacob steamed and his flesh sputtered. “Do you wanna watch, Chucky-fucky? Do you? Do you, huh?” And then that fissured white face grinned and the tongue came out, black and glistening like a fattened jungle snake. It rolled out of the mouth six, seven inches and kept coming, licking Jacob’s face. And the effect of that was like a knife, for Jacob’s burning face split right open as the tongue slavered him, one of his eyes melting right out of its socket and sliding down his cheek.

  Jacob was liquefying.

  Maybe the clown’s tongue was sharp as a knife, but its saliva was horribly corrosive and Jacob’s face went to hot tallow that slid from the skull in hot runnels. Then the clown reeled in its tongue and its head suddenly jerked up in the air four feet, swaying from a long, trunk-like neck in imitation of a Jack-in-the-box. The head giggled and darted at the others, trying to take a bite from them.

  Shouting and shrieking, the kids stumbled along through the water.

  And it was Brian that found deliverance.

  An open window.

  He went through first and Tara followed, Chuck pushing Mark in behind them. Then he went through, landing in stinking water on the other side. Mark and Chuck both grabbed the sill and forced it down, but it had expanded from moisture and they could only close it just over half way. There was still a ten-inch gap and the clown started to squeeze through right away. There was no possible way he could fit being so round and puffy, but he kept pushing, bulging through the opening like a bubble of white rubber.

  But by then the others were gone.

  They were in some kind of office building. Struggling through nearly four feet of water, they felt along the walls in the corridor, finding one locked door after another. The moon had slid into the clouds again and the blackness was absolute. Then they found a lobby and a set of stairs. They fought their way up, amazed at how free they felt out of the water. But they were still heavy and wet, though they didn’t seem to notice.