by David Haynes
The novelty wore off after two weeks, even with Stan who was usually a very patient dog. He would leave the room when the crying started, whether that be in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. It had no respect for location either.
He’d cried in the bank, behind the wheel of the car, in bed, and once when he was taking a crap. When the tears came, they came hard and there was usually little or no reason for them. They just needed to be out of his system.
It didn’t take long for him to realise that the tears were nothing to do with finding himself; they were a sign of something more serious, something damaging. But Mr Ego was shouting loudly, above the voice of Mr Reason, and he talked Ben out of a visit to the doctors. Mr Ego told him to pull his socks up and get on with it, get on with writing that next story before someone else stole it away. But the more he sat at the computer, staring with blurry eyes through lack of sleep, the worse things got. Fewer words appeared on the screen each day and the river of unending ideas – which had always run through his head, house, garden and the world beyond – dried up. It became barren. It became dead, just like him.
He’d thought about suicide. Several times. It seemed every time his eyes focused on the knife-block, he thought about it. What would it be like to take one of those polished steel handles and draw the blade across his throat? How would it feel to bleed himself dry? But at those times, Stan seemed to watch him. Standing beneath the knife-block with his big, brown, sad eyes staring up at him as if to say, ‘Don’t you dare, I haven’t had my breakfast!’ And then more tears would come and he’d end up sitting on the kitchen floor with a hungry greyhound nuzzling his hand. If it wasn’t for the dog, he might have done more than just consider it.
When Joanne rang and told him he was pencilled in to do a book signing, there was just enough of him left to reach down the phone and grasp her voice. Just enough to hear her read a fan letter from someone who said Ben’s books had changed his life, reformed and given him a new purpose. It was from an ex-con, an ex-addict. On some level that appealed to him.
That was when Ben made an appointment to see the doctor. That was when he spent half an hour snivelling, crying and wailing and everything came out. His guilt over his affairs and his terrible treatment of Rachel, the loss of his self-respect over that, the loss of motivation, the lack of joy, and the total and utter demise of his creativity.
After the visit, he definitely did feel like the fabled ‘New Man’. When the medication kicked in, it lifted him off the kitchen floor and dropped him back in the office. There had been ideas, there had even been a chapter or two, but that was as far as it went. He hadn’t cried since that day. Except once when he again watched Boromir say, “I would have followed you, my brother. My captain. My king.” It was an emotional scene, after all. The medication relieved the depression, but it couldn’t work magic and fan the creative spark that had all but gone out.
But now Ben cried. He stood by his computer and the tears fell silently down his cheeks. These were tears of relief, utter relief and joy. There were words again, a sheaf of papers all covered in beautiful words sitting neatly on the keyboard. Exactly where they had been last time.
He picked them up and started reading. Maybe drinking whisky wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
*
After reading for an hour, Ben slid the papers onto his desk and looked out of the little window. It faced onto a patchwork of fields which stretched up toward the horizon. There was only one other house in sight, so far away it looked as big as a Lego block.
This writing wasn’t his. Nor was the first part of the story. Neither were on his hard drive or backed up on his memory stick, and even in a confused delirium he would have saved his words. It only took one lost or accidentally deleted book to instil that into a writer.
So that left one person who could be responsible. The ghost, the fevered spirit his mind had conjured up.
The clown. The clown had been in his house, not once but twice.
The shudder that thought sent through his body made him groan involuntarily, and he stood up. He needed to call the police and report it. He walked through the kitchen toward the front room, pausing in the hall to lock the front door. In all the years he lived there, he had never worried about closing let alone locking the doors. He picked up the phone and hovered over the digits. What exactly was he going to say to them?
“Hello, I’d like to report a burglary.”
“When did it happen?”
“Last night. In the middle of the night. I don’t know when exactly because I’ve been ill and I drank too much whisky to help me sleep.”
“Okay, so what was stolen?”
“Well, nothing.”
“Right, so what happened?”
“A clown broke in with some stories he’s written, and he dropped them off for me. He wrote ‘Boo!’ on my wardrobe mirror, but that’s gone now so you can’t see it.”
“Maybe you ought to lay off the whisky, Mr Night?”
He fell onto the sofa head-first and buried his face in the cushion. He stayed that way for a minute until the thought of the fat copper’s arse pressing into the fabric moved him. What the hell was going on here? Had he finally lost his marbles?
No, he had flu, tonsillitis and probably a chest infection, but his marbles were all still there rattling around in his head. This was just weird.
He grabbed the remote and put the television on. It was as much to see what time it was as anything else. The light coming into the room from the front window seemed to be the same at all times of the day. Grey.
The box came to life on the news channel where he’d left it after the copper visited. He’d been an obnoxious idiot and didn’t look capable of catching anyone, let alone a murderer. Ben flicked off the channel as they were going live to a scene outside someone’s house. It was just babble to him, so he tapped in the number for sports news and watched it with an equal measure of gloom for a few seconds.
He switched it off again and listened to the wind squeezing into some unknown gap in the eaves. Rachel hated the sound, she said it was the noise ghosts made. He’d lost count of the number of tradesmen she asked to locate and repair whatever it was, but none of them could, of course. Old buildings, even renovated ones, liked to have a secret or two.
The sound didn’t bother him. In fact he quite liked it, especially when the wind brought the rain across the fields and dashed it against the windows. That was fine by him and it suited his writing somehow. Used to, anyway.
The writing in his office was good. It wouldn’t win any prizes for literature but the ideas for a story were there. If he could make it more cohesive, it had the beginnings of a decent book. There needed to be more of course, lots more but it was there and more importantly, the cogs had started turning again. Slowly and with plenty of creaking and groaning but they were moving. With a bit of lubrication he could make them shine.
Ben could feel the first signs of excitement in his stomach. That’s where it always started but it had been a while. That little tickle and flutter that titillated his body with the promise there would be bigger, better and altogether more satisfying sensations just around the corner. It was a drug. A drug which he was addicted to. It was one which he had been going cold turkey on for the last couple of years.
He got up from the sofa, wobbling as his head swam and his vision narrowed. He was dehydrated and hungry but he didn’t want to eat or drink, he just wanted to get to the book and start drafting out the first few chapters.
He walked slowly out of the lounge, but paused by the front door and put his hand on the key. If the intruder, whoever he was, wanted to hurt Ben, he’d been given ample opportunity to do just that. He had been in a stupor for a good portion of the last week and asleep for most of the last twenty-four hours. It was creepy, but he wasn’t here to hurt Ben, seemingly he was here to help him.
Ben turned it over in his mind. It was a fan, that was all. A fan who wanted to see his favourite char
acter reprised in a new story. A collaboration? A joint effort with an unknown writer who just happened to look like an ugly clown? A collaboration with Sparkles? He shivered. What a hideous thought. The writer had some skill but what he’d written wasn’t good enough to publish. It certainly wasn’t good enough to allow him access to the house.
He shivered again, walked to his office, picked up the bundle of papers and a pen. If he did a second draft of what was already written and put some Ben Night flourishes into the words, then it would grease the wheels a little more.
He walked back upstairs, re-reading the opening paragraphs.
“Sparkles finished tying the policeman to the chair and stood behind him. He put him in front of the mirror so he could see both of their reflections as he worked. Observing the victim’s face as he killed him was easy but observing his own was trickier. He wanted to see his own smile widen as the blood of the policeman spurted from his body.
“He tilted his head and looked at his face. He didn’t look good, he was looking ill, particularly where his nose was now deflated and... well, pale. The policeman’s nose was red, it was bright red and bulbous.
“He pushed the tip of the blade into one of his nostrils and felt the officer flinch. ‘Boo!’ he whispered into his ear. He could already feel his smile growing as he started cutting...”
When Ben read the words ‘policeman’ and ‘officer’, his mind showed him a picture of DC Kelly sitting in the chair, looking into his own reflection as the clown cut him to bits. He fell onto the bed and smiled. He had killed police officers, both male and female, in his other stories but never people he’d actually met. Never people he actually disliked. This made it more powerful. More real.
He read through the first page, making changes here and there, removing extra words that were unnecessary. The cogs were lubricated, not with oil but with blood. Just how he liked it.
If he were going to write another story about Sparkles, clowns and the circus, he might need to contact Jim Crawley for the purposes of research. Not that he liked the man, he was cringeworthy, but what he didn’t know about clowns and the circus wasn’t worth knowing.
8
Maldon liked colouring in. As far as he could remember, he had always liked it. One of his earliest memories was sitting on the carpet in the lounge, colouring in a picture of a fire engine. He had coloured it in red felt-tip pen, the brightest red in his pencil case, and it had been so dazzling that he thought the whole page might be burning in front of his eyes.
Even in the darkest moments of his life, before he found Ben Night’s books at least, he had coloured in. It didn’t have to be pictures, although he always preferred that. In the days of heroin, colouring books had been low on the list of priorities so he coloured on his skin. He covered his arms in wavy, vivid designs in the brightest colours he could imagine. He coloured other people’s flesh too. Sometimes when they were asleep, sometimes when they were awake and sometimes when they were in that in-between state that heroin gave them.
Nobody minded. Nobody ever minded because the colours were so bright and cheerful. It was light when their whole world was a grey, stinking swamp.
“There!” He put down the felt-tip pen and picked up the mask to admire his work. “That’s much better.”
“Well, if I could see it I could give you an honest opinion. I warn you, I’m not going out looking like a fool!”
“I wouldn’t do that!” He was slightly hurt by the suggestion.
“Let me see then. This very instant!”
Maldon sighed and put the Sparkles mask back on. He was extremely pleased with his efforts and he knew Sparkles would be too. He walked to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror.
“There. Happy?” he asked.
“Oh, I say!” Sparkles announced. “Turn to the side.”
Maldon did as he was instructed.
“Oh yes, now turn the other way. Quite delightful. Honk, honk!” Sparkles laughed like Muttley on the biggest dose of amphetamines anyone had ever consumed.
The fat policeman’s nose had been bulbous. But it hadn’t been red enough for Sparkles and so Maldon had been instructed to colour it bright crimson. It was a task he didn’t mind, and spent the last hour taking care not to go out of the lines and spoil everything. He had even touched up the diamond shapes on either side of his eyes.
He had no idea how women put make-up on in the mirror, because after he had cut out the old, saggy nose and glued the policeman’s nose on, he put Sparkles on his face and tried to colour it in while looking at his reflection. Sparkles had been irritating and kept trying to issue further instructions, criticising him when his hands moved in the wrong direction. In the end he had to put Sparkles on the floor and tell him to shut up while he went into his colouring-in world.
He took the policeman’s smile too. He cut it out and gave it to Sparkles, just like he wanted. It was wider than it had been before he killed the policeman but it wasn’t as wide as it should be.
Sparkles had been irritating in the copper’s house too. Telling him what to do, when to do it and even shouting at him in front of the policeman. The officer had wet himself when they were arguing like that. He was clearly upset about the whole episode and he had every right to be.
But all had been forgotten when they were in front of the mirror working with the knife. The copper screamed and Sparkles laughed and they had all been bathed in blood. His stinking, piggy blood.
“Is that better? Are you happier?” he asked.
Sparkles’s features drooped to one side, like they were sliding off his face.
“Do I look it?”
“Not really but I’m trying.” Sparkles was only secured by two rubber bands which were threaded through the mask and then hooked over his ears. It was uncomfortable and the mask slipped from side to side as he walked. It didn’t look good.
“I’d like for us to be closer. That would make me happier. Not entirely happy mind you, but happier.”
Maldon felt his spirits lift. Sparkles was demanding but he genuinely wanted for them to be as close as possible.
“Why don’t you take that little tube of superglue under there and hitch us together like an old married couple?”
He looked at the tube of glue on the floor under the sink. Someone had once told him that rubbing the stuff all over your fingertips made it impossible for you to leave your prints at a scene. What a load of old rubbish that turned out to be.
He bent down and picked it up.
“Till death do us part, dear Mouldy!” Sparkles squeaked in his high-pitched voice.
“Sure about this?”
In the mirror, Sparkles's smile grew, just a few millimetres but it grew nonetheless.
“Does that answer your question?”
Maldon slipped Sparkles off and used the mirror to apply glue to his skin. It stung a little but it would be worth it to see that smile again. He used most of the tube in small dots all over his face, forehead and neck, and when he finished he closed his eyes and pushed Sparkles back on. The music started immediately and it was beautiful, never mind that the key was all wrong and some of the notes were in the wrong order. It was chaotic, circus music. It was clown music.
He smoothed it out. keeping pressure on his hands until he could feel a cramp starting to build in his forearms. Then he opened his eyes. He looked better than ever and the smile had definitely grown, just a little but it was there, the start of a tilt at the corners. It was still pale but that would come in time too. By the time he’d finished he wouldn’t need to colour it in, it would be bright enough and wide enough for Sparkles to be completely happy again. For both of them to be happy again.
9
Things were getting messy for Jane Brady. Firstly, there was her team on Operation Mint – Harvey Newman’s murder. Then a second team on the child abuse enquiry, which was growing by the minute. And another team on Stu’s murder.
Even though major investigations like this were regionalised, Harv
ey Newman was taking more than his fair share of resources for both his life and death. Poor old Stu was stretching resources to their limit.
Add to that the number of detectives now working out of one office and things were starting to get confusing, as well as loud. She looked across the room. Someone was already sitting at Stu’s desk. Someone she didn’t know or recognise.
Jane had been offered counselling, and the DI even offered a few days off. She accepted one but not the other. If she took the counselling, they wouldn’t make her take the days off. She didn’t want or need to be away from the office. What she needed was to get her hands on the sick bastard who had cut Stu’s face off; sat him in front of a mirror like he was in a barber’s chair and cut him to bits while he watched. They were waiting for the reports, but she hoped to god Stu was long dead before he was carved up.
There were volunteers from all over the force, all over the country, to come and help with the investigation. The officers were willing to work around the clock to catch the killer. She was one of them and would have gladly worked a double shift to help, but they wouldn’t allow her to walk away from Bingo the paedophile.
“Jane, you got a minute?” DI White stuck his head around his office door and beckoned her over.
She walked in and sat down. He was usually immaculately dressed, but his shirt was open at the collar and his tie was in a ball on the desk. His chin had a day’s worth of growth on it.
“Boss?” she asked.
He looked distracted despite having just called her. He moved his mouse around frantically.
“Yes… sorry, Jane, I’ll be right with you.”
That irritated her. She had a lot to do and didn’t really have the time to sit here waiting for him to finish what he was doing. Why had he called her if he wasn’t ready?
