Eddie shook his head.
The streets were still deserted. Nobody was around. Not some kids rollerskating or some lady walking her dog or some guy strolling down the walks from work with a lunch pail in hand. Nobody, nothing. Everything was silent and deadly.
“Touch those seats, kid,” Bug-eyes said. “I want you to feel how expensive they are.”
“No…”
“I think you should. Denny? Do you think he should?”
“Yeah.”
“See, kid? We want you to do it,” Bug-eyes said and it was not a request. He wanted Eddie touching those seats and he was almost excited by the idea. His voice had gone high and wavering. “Touch ‘em, kid, touch those fucking seats. Put your hands on ‘em, that’s right, touch ‘em…run your fingers over that hide, real slow and easy- like…”
Eddie was trembling and sobbing because he knew where this was going. This was one of those educational movies the police showed at school, where some pervert offers a kid candy and that dumb kid gets in and nobody ever sees him again. That’s what was happening and Eddie was petrified. So he didn’t try to escape. He didn’t even fight when Denny pushed him into the back seat, jumped in with him and clamped a big, salty hand over his mouth.
“Don’t squirm, kid,” Bug-eyes told him. “Denny won’t hurt you…unless I tell him to. And if I tell him…you don’t want that do you?”
And that’s how Eddie’s first ten years of life were wiped out.
Denny stuck a rag over his mouth and there was a chemical on it. He fought, but soon enough he just fell into darkness.
When he woke, he was tied to a mattress in a cellar somewhere. The walls were moist and water was dripping. The rafters overhead were spun with ancient cobwebs. It smelled dank and dirty down there. But he wasn’t really scared until the door opened and the two clowns came in.
They called themselves Bobo and Ripples.
Bobo wore a baggy plaid costume with orange pom-poms down the front, his face painted a stark white. There were little tufts of red hair at his ears. Ripples wore lots of ruffles and ribbons, his face painted with an unhappy clown smirk. Ripples never talked, but Bobo did. He told Eddie all the things they were going to do to him. And true to his word, they did them. Sometimes they made him do things to them. Sometimes they took pictures. Eddie was down there for months and it was an obscene, vile existence.
Then one night they dumped him in a park over in Elmwood Hills and Bobo, smelling of greasepaint and body odor, told him, “If you tell, we’ll find you. And when we find you, we’ll peel your skin off and cut out your eyes and fuck your skull.”
And that’s how Eddie died.
After that, he was never the same. He laughed, but he did not smile. He spoke, but he did not emote. Something had dried up in him. He could no longer feel. He was numb and frostbit and senseless. Sometimes he would cut himself with a razor or a shard of glass and he always bled, but he felt no pain. He felt nothing. Maybe a ten-year old boy had gotten into that car, but what was dumped in that park was just a shell, a rotting husk, something that had been eaten down to the skeleton. Maybe it looked like a boy, but inside there was just darkness and cobwebs and a dripping sound just like in the cellar.
That was how Grimshanks was born.
Because one day, feeling empty as always, Eddie had seen a clown on TV and that clown was him. After that, he thought about clowns and dreamed about clowns and slowly became a clown. Like Bobo and Ripples, he would dress up at night and paint his face. And when you did that, you were someone else. You were Grimshanks. Sure, you could be a buffoon and work the kiddie parties and then at night, you could hunt boys. Boys that willingly got into cars. Boys that needed to be taught a lesson.
But that was all Grimshanks’ doing.
You could not truly be blamed if he got a little out of hand from time to time. If sometimes he taught boys lessons and buried what remained of them in the cellars of abandoned buildings. That was his fault.
By the time Eddie/Grimshanks was thirty, he’d taught six boys a lesson. The first one he’d dumped in the Black River. The others in cellars. Sometimes he dismembered them and sometimes he kept his favorite parts. Then one day, they down-sized him at Stenig and Weinberg. But that was all a lie. They had seen the pictures on his laptop and they hadn’t liked those pictures.
So they fired him.
When he left the office that last, fateful day, nobody would look at him and those few that did eyed him like something offensive and skittering they wanted to crush under their shoes.
So that night, out of frustration and anger, Grimshanks in full costume?he had to be in full costume, otherwise he was just Eddie and Eddie was cowardly and frightened?picked up a teenage boy on Angel Street, just off the University. That boy had gotten into his car, thought the clown thing was funny. Kept thinking it was funny until old Grimshanks pulled into that dark alley and started doing those silly things to him, took out his party favors and told that boy what he was going to do with him. But that boy was smart. When Grimshanks got him pinned down, he jabbed his thumbs into Grimshanks’ eyes and got away.
After that, Eddie just died away completely. In fact, he hadn’t really been alive in countless years. But that boy went to the police and then Grimshanks had to be real careful because the police were watching for him. They’d already figured out the funny clown angle from the greasepaint smudges he left on the remains of his victims.
So Grimshanks became clever.
He rented a ratty, cold water flat down by the river in Bethany where people never asked questions. In that neighborhood, they sold things and bought things, but never questioned. But even so, Grimshanks came up with a real lark of an idea. During the day, he dressed up as a guy named Eddie that he had made up out of thin air…but at night? At night, Grimshanks slithered out in full costume to slake his hunger.
Because Grimshanks was always hungry.
Then the flooding started.
There were police in the streets, frequenting those dead-ends of Bethany they normally did not go to. After two nights of being locked in that smelling, fly-specked room, Grimshanks decided to play a trick on those police who kept knocking at the door. He tied a noose and slipped it around his throat and it was all merry fun. He tied the other end of the rope around a light fixture overhead, got up on a stool and jumped off.
But no one ever found him.
For within days, Bethany was flooded and by the end of the week, Grimshanks’ basement flat was underwater and poor old Grimshanks just floated around down there with that noose around his throat, drifting in the dark, filthy waters, bloating up and blackening. Things nibbled on him and other things tunneled into him and it was no fun at all.
Then, after many days of this, something in the water activated something in Grimshanks. He started to move and his white clown fingers began to tremble. And in that grinning, distended face, two dead yellow eyes opened.
And the fun began again.
29
About ten minutes after Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle went down the block to Wanda Sepperley’s place, Lily felt it growing in her as perhaps it had been growing all day. A secret garden of dread that she tended and tended alone with cold fingers, one that she seeded and nurtured, was about to bring to blossom, feeding it with her pain and watering it with the sap of her soul which now ran as cold and poisoned as the drainage from a coffin. But it belonged to her and she coveted it and no eyes would look upon it and no mind could hope to divine its dark mystery.
None but her own.
The ice cream made and stored now in its wooden bucket down in the cellar freezer, there was nothing but
