from a carnival sideshow, pitted and hollowed and riddled with holes. His face was honeycombed…and out of those chambers beetles were coming and going…along with rivers of black water.
Hopper let out a little cry and the rifle fell from his hands.
He did not know who this man was, only that he was a simmering malignance that would pollute and devour anything that got too close. He felt the man’s mind touch his own and his thoughts went to ash.
Oh, please, dear God…don’t touch me…
The beetles were everywhere, pouring out of the man in a swarm, moving through the water in clustered islands, crawling up Hopper’s legs, clustering on his raincoat like barnacles. Flying and swimming and enveloping.
And the man himself, that terrible dark man…you could not see him anymore. He was just a crawling, creeping mass of insects in the rough shape of a man. Infested.
Hopper screamed.
And then he was drowning.
Drowning in a rising sea of biting, nipping beetles. They covered his face and hands and slipped under his clothes, went for his eyes and the soft bulge of his throat.
But they didn’t get into his mouth until he opened it in a wide, wet scream.
Which echoed out raw and painful as he slipped beneath the waters. But the dark man would not let him go. He yanked Hopper up, held him there, brought his own hideous face in closer. He opened his mouth and there were squirming things inside. Things like dozens of bloated red tongues. But they weren’t tongues…just huge, slick carrion worms. They snaked out of his mouth and right past Hopper’s lips, sliding over his tongue and filling his throat.
Infested by worms and beetles, Hopper sank beneath the water.
“Desecrator,” said the dark man, melting away into the shadows.
28
Once upon a time, there was a clown named Grimshanks and he was a real jolly sort. He entertained at kid’s parties and local carnivals, was a real hoot at fund-raisers and private hoo-hahs. He was known as Koo-Koo the Clown and Boo-Boo and Laughing Lester, in fact a wide variety of harmless, fuzzy and cozy names, but to himself, when he looked at himself in the mirror with the whiteface on, he was Grimshanks, always Grimshanks. And it didn’t matter that his real name was Edward Shears or that he was an accountant by day?or had been, until those bloodsuckers at Stenig and Weinberg let him go…downsizing, they said. No, that was just stupid ephemeral stuff just like the rest of the world and none of it really mattered.
Nothing was real until he put on the makeup and saw Grimshanks grinning at him from the mirror.
It had been that way since he was ten years old.
He had trouble remembering what things were like before he was ten. He supposed they were ordinary and dull. But after he was ten? Then he became Grimshanks, a harmless clown that entertained at children’s parties and stalked boys by night.
As a kid, Eddie’d loved clowns and harlequins and jesters, the idea of playing dress-up and becoming someone else and something else. But it was just average role-playing and good fun, the sort of thing you let out at Halloween and locked away the rest of the year. That’s all it was. He was a normal boy. No obsessions, no compulsions. He collected baseball cards and Marvel superhero comic books. He was a boy scout and a damn good Little League pitcher. His old man had left when he was five, never to return, but Eddie lived with it and after awhile, he couldn’t even remember his father.
If life wasn’t good, then it was certainly livable.
Then one day, when he was ten, he’d been on his way home from over in Bethany. He had a big wad of gum in his mouth and as fate would have it, he’d grown tired of the taste and decided to spit it out. Right there on Locksley Avenue. He stepped off the curb and spat it out…right on the fender wall of the big black Chrysler driving by.
The car stopped.
So did Eddie.
The car was an older Chrysler Imperial hardtop, a black beauty. A big, boxy slab of Detroit steel like the sort of thing a gangster might drive or a TV cop. It sat there at the side of the road, idling, that big 440 under the hood purring like a tiger with a belly full of meat. It was a cool car. That’s what Eddie had thought, sounded like it had some real balls, could lay some real rubber. But as much as he liked street machines like that, he got a real bad feeling from it. Something in his guts clenched.
Time seemed to have slowed down and it was just him and that big black car. The street seemed empty, deserted. He wanted to run, knew he had better, yet he didn’t. And a voice, a scratchy, out-of-tune voice, said in his head: Well, now you’ve done it. You spit on that car and those guys in there aren’t going to like it much. Okay, you bought this one. Here’s your ride, sunshine. Here’s where you learn about the boogeyman?
“Hey, kid,” a guy in the front seat said in a nasal voice. “No, it’s okay, kid. I just want to talk to you.”
The guy doing the talking was behind the wheel, a little guy with bug eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, his thinning gray hair greased straight back.
“C’mere, kid.”
Something in Eddie was telling him to run like he’d never ran before, but he didn’t. He walked over to the car. There was a big guy in the passenger seat. He had a thick neck and a pockmarked face, eyes that were watery and gray.
Eddie swallowed something down. “I…I didn’t mean to spit on your car.”
Bug-eyes smiled and there was something wrong about that smile. A dead carp would smile up at you from a bucket like that…empty, lifeless. “Just an accident, eh, kid?”
“Sure.”
“We all have accidents, don’t we?”
“Sure.”
Bug-eyes kept smiling like he couldn’t stop. “See, this is an expensive car and we just can’t have kids spitting on it.”
“No, no…I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “I didn’t mean to.”
He felt trapped. Bug-eyes had a way of looking at you, making you feel like a fly stuck to one of those No-Pest Strips. You could buzz your wings and wriggle your legs, but you weren’t going anywhere. And something in his eyes told you that if you tried to get away, things could always get worse.
The other guy in the car still had not looked at Eddie. He was cracking shelled peanuts between his thumb and forefinger, chewing the nuts very slowly and deliberately.
“Denny?” Bug-eyes said. “Show our friend here about this car.”
“Listen, I’m sorry…”
Denny stepped out of the car, chewing nuts, his gray vapid eyes not even blinking. He smelled of oil and chemicals and leather. He was big and there were scars on his face like somebody had taken a knife after him.
“No, it’s okay, kid,” Bug-eyes said. “Denny won’t hurt you. He just wants to show you how expensive this car is. Go ahead, Denny, show him that back seat. Show him how it is back there.”
Denny opened the back door and motioned Eddie forward.
Eddie felt something sour bubble in his stomach, there was a tightness in his chest and a sharpness prodding at his bowels.
He approached the open back door like he was afraid it might take a bite out of him. He was too scared to run, too scared for everything. Anyway, he walked over there like he was walking up to an open casket. Denny was standing behind him by then and he could smell something coming off the man that wasn’t hair tonic or after shave lotion, but a smell that was cold and raw like thawing meat. And the back of the car, those dark leather seats…it smelled like blood in there, metallic and savage.
“See that upholstery, kid?” Bug-eyes said. “That’s real leather. Special ordered and all that. Now would you want some nothing punk kid spitting on those seats if they were yours?”
