Jamie, wide-eyed, watched his reflection's mouth move as it spoke to him in his own voice, the reflection's pleading eyes fear-filled. He screamed for the second time that night, ran out of the room in time to see Dean burst from his own room, naked, to investigate. Dean's eyes went wide. "Holy shit balls. What the hell are you wearing?"
Jamie, scared and sweating, pulled the clown shirt off—or tried to. The shirt wouldn't come off. Nor the pants or shoes. They clung hard, seemed to fight back as he tugged at them. "Look, don't freak out," Jamie began, but Dean's door slammed shut and no more sounds came through the walls that night.
•
Saturday morning: Dean was all sexed out. That Jodi was pretty cool, and wild enough to be a regular, but of course she was no Emily. No one in the world ever would be. Now and then he'd catch a look at Emily in her cheer squad outfit on TV during a Broncos game, and it never failed to bring him to the brink of tears.
Jodi had ducked out to meet a friend and do that shopping thing women seemed to dig so much. There'd be no car park fights with husbands for him to worry about this time, another plus, although he'd actually made some pretty good friends out of those dudes once they'd blown off some steam.
He ignored the ringing landline phone, suspecting it was work calling, but Jamie woke and answered it. No clown suit this morning, and just what the hell that had been all about Dean did not care to ponder. A dress-up role-play thing would have made sense if the guy hadn't come home alone. You never really knew someone til you lived with them, he supposed.
Dean paused in his doorway as Jamie's voice rose in anger. "How did you get this number?" he yelled into the phone. "All right, Mrs. Rolph. You got me pegged. I am a murderer. I killed your son, okay? I rubbed his face with a cheese grater til his scream was loud enough to break glass, is that what you want to hear? Then I ran him over with a wheat thresher. Slowly. Fed his body to wild pigs, and they told me he tastes like shit. I kept the finger bones, and I have them in a little jar. Every full moon I take the bones out and rub them on my crotch. Happy? You call me again, and I will visit you next. Oh, you bet it's a threat. Oh, you're recording all this? Neato. Yeah I slipped up, huh? You're a real super sleuth. You do that, tell the cops I said hi. Bye bye now." Jamie slammed the phone down, slammed his bedroom door and went back to sleep.
Dean frowned. He would be lying to himself if he said what he'd just heard was not the cause for some concern. Jamie would surely explain when he next awoke. "Cheese grater?" he murmured.
Dean's mobile rang with his Beethoven ring tone (violin concerto in D-major, the only classical music he knew.) As always he looked hopefully for Emily's name on the caller ID, but it was only Paulie. "Sup?" said Dean.
"Man, I knew you had some balls, but I'm telling you, you have got some balls." Dean smiled, pleased—the conversation had started well. "Check this out," Paulie went on quickly. "Police hunt violent attacker clown. From the news dude, online. I'll text you the link. Check it out, a guy in a clown suit beat up like ten people last night, almost trampled this dude to death, put like three in hospital, smashed up some cars and maybe there's more than one of them out there."
Dean was not smiling now. He could not remember—had Jamie been wearing the clown suit when he walked in the door? Dean had to swallow before speaking. "What's this got to do with me and my balls?"
"Man, let me tell you something about your roommate." And so Paulie told him all he knew, and then all he guessed and suspected.
•
It was near evening when Jamie woke again, kitchen and coffee and possibly nightclub bound. Also he wanted to get online, look into community theater, see if a guy like him could just walk up and get a role in some comedy. Dean, sans shirt, stood by the window, and Jamie noted without much interest or alarm the baseball bat in Dean's hands. "Howdy," said Jamie in the cowboy accent they had been amusing each other with for a couple of days now.
"Okay, let's just keep this quiet and calm," said Dean. "Jodi's having a quick nap in my room. No need to go crazy."
"Keep what quiet? Go crazy why?"
"I had you committed."
It took half a minute for the words to actually register within Jamie's skull. When they did, he knew it was not a joke. "You what?"
"Okay, I guess committed is a bit of an exaggeration. But they're sending people to talk to you. Medical people, mostly. From the hospital. Maybe there'll be police with them too—they were a bit iffy on that point." Dean hesitated. "Not that I, you know, emphasized that they should send cops to handle you. But it sometimes works out that way if the patient won't go willingly or seems real unstable or violent."
"The patient? Won't go? Willingly?"
"Hey let's keep this quiet. For myself? I personally don't doubt you're sane? Not for a minute. But then I'm not a professional medical guy. And it's like I told them, I never actually saw you do anything all that violent, not when I was around anyway. So stay cool and this should all go just great."
I will now kick this guy's teeth down his neck, Jamie thought. He is dead. So very dead. The knife rack caught his eye, sang a siren song. The rolling pin hung up on its stand looked a decent place to start. He grabbed it. It felt so natural in his hand.
Just then the front door burst open.
***
2. BELOW
The hated wooden building had taken a battering which had ripped like skin its cracked shell to show the secrets of its horrid flesh, and show the man who was its beating heart and scheming brain for years uncounted, every day doing secret things, terrible things the world just outside the house doesn't want to know of. Much less does the world far, far above want to know of the experiments, arts and pleasures of the man, and the often living flesh he uses as clay playthings. Nor does it want to hear the pain that is his music, conducted with pale twitching fingers. The Funhouse owner is known to some as, and loves to be called, "the Matter Manipulator." And how he loves the furtive queasy looks they give him, the way they hurry out of his path when he goes outside that battered wooden cage to ogle the flesh he may one day use for his projects.
Some repairs have been done to the Funhouse of course, for it has been nearly a year since the night of Kurt's rampage through the showgrounds, the night the proprietor was provoked at last into bursting out of his human form and devouring everything he could. Some planks were hammered over, cracks plastered, leaving only the glow of reddish light to bleed through slim gaps and cracks like unwelcome light seeping in through eyelids of waking sleepers. Just the occasional shuffle and moan can be heard by the gypsies and dwarfs now and then hurrying by that foul place . . . and of course, they tell themselves they'd not heard a thing, and refuse to remember that this or that old acquaintance had, long ago, been sent to that house for some breach of circus rules, never to return. There is much else to busy one's mind with. George Pilo, Kurt's brother and the new boss, has given his orders, barked and spat them like gunfire all about the place, apostrophized with the crack of that dreaded, hated lash. There is work to do, so much work repairing, resurrecting, cleaning, rebuilding. The world needs its distractions and entertainments, after all. It needs its circus.
Down to the circus's very foundation pulses a growing urgency, restlessness, and hunger. Yet like something injured it has held off, held off, not yet sure enough of itself to brave the rigors of its trade, troubled by premonitions of its own total doom, troubled that some of them up there know the circus is here, have seen it naked without its glamour to shield their eyes and memories. And it is nervous. Its collapse has left a gap in the world which will be filled sooner or later, by their show or by someone, something else's. This fear too gnaws through the showgrounds, so that little by little each day's activity grows more hurried: the tap tap of hammers, clang of tent pegs, flutter of unfurling newly woven canvas, the carny rats bustling around frantic to look busy and escape the lash.