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 could 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.
