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 if 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.
“Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!” the clown called after them. “I smell the blood of an Englishman! Be he ‘live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread! Hee, hee! Ho, ho! Ha, ha!”
His voice and ensuing laughter echoed through the building, screeching and perverse. They could hear him coming up the stairs now, the water squishing from his big floppy shoes. More water running from his suit and the holes in his hide. He pushed a wave of warmth before him that was sickening like spoiled pork.
“Tara? Where is my Tara?” he called after them. “I love Tara my little pussy, her snatch is so warm! And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm! So I’ll not fuck her or suck out her guts! But pussy and I, very gently we shall play!”
Tara just went hysterical at the sound of that voice echoing and echoing. She began to slam herself against the upstairs walls, screaming and spitting and clawing out at anyone who dared touch her. “Why doesn’t he stop? Why doesn’t he stop?” she sobbed and cried. “Why the hell doesn’t he stop?”
They took hold of her and dragged her down the hallway and into some kind of storage room they found. There was another entrance on the other side. Chuck locked the door, precious good that would do them. The other door was open and they fell through it and right away a flashlight beam struck them dead in the faces.
“Hey, you guys,” a kid’s voice said to them. “That clown’s going to kill you! If you don’t want to die, you better come with me…”
