Clowns At Midnight

by Terry Dowling

  I was determined to see it like that, not just as a picturesque, late-in-the-day, summer landscape but as a setting for connections and accommodations, for separations, loneliness, courage and grief, for simply following through.

  The next turn in the road revealed a white wooden gate in the barbed-wire fence on the right. Beyond it a gravel access road led off through low swales to sheltering trees, no doubt to a home with electric lights, television sets and an Internet connection, people at their evening chores. The gate had a small No Trespassing sign fixed to the top rail and was padlocked—an unusual thing in the area from what I’d seen. There was a dark green oil-drum for a mailbox, with a white house number painted on its cutaway front face, and that was it.

  I stopped the car and got out, and was struck again by the deep silence, by the sheer vastness of the landscape.

  Too many years a town mouse, I decided. Being a country mouse wasn’t going to be easy, but at least I felt alive again. Day 5 and it did seem to be working.

  I had a spiel worked out. If anyone caught me rummaging in the mailbox, I’d say I was looking for the Rankin place, but wasn’t sure of the number, that I was hoping that a piece of mail might give a clue.

  I reached the gatepost with its green drum, peered inside and saw a single white envelope. I reached for it, turned it over, and read the name on the front.

  David Leeton.

  Nothing could have surprised me more. After all that had happened since deciding to explore the forest, here was my own name on an envelope in a mailbox along a deserted country road.

  Was I being watched? Had they seen me coming, known my actions before I did?

  Though addressed to me, I hesitated in opening it, even read the written name again as if I’d been tricked by some optical effect caused by the headache, the day’s heat and the lengthening shadows.

  It was addressed to me. It truly was. I tore it open, took out the single white page and read what was written there in the same assured script.

  Dear David (if we may)

  Beth and John Rankin said you’d be minding their house for a few months. Carlo and I would be delighted to have you over for dinner Saturday night so we can welcome you to the neighbourhood. Short notice, but we hope you can make it. Please phone us on 6662 7906 if it’s not convenient, otherwise we’ll see you around seven.

  Best Wishes,

  Raina (Risi)

  Just an invitation, but in the wrong mailbox.

  No, that wasn’t it. I saw it now. Left there for the postman or a passing friend to pick up, or the next person to go out, to take along to the Rankin mailbox on their way elsewhere. This had to be a common enough rural courtesy: outgoing mail picked up by neighbours going into town.

  Trusting that I’d soon have answers, I returned to the car, did a U-turn and drove back to Starbreak Fell.

  The bottle-trees winked and twinkled on the hillside as I turned in at the front gate. The unseen tower stood back behind the line of the forest with the day’s heat still in its stones, but the world was orderly again.

  Back at the house, there were two messages on the answering machine: the first from Julia, warm, unfailingly solicitous and only a little awkward, once again hoping I’d settled in okay and reminding me of her new number in case I wanted to talk, the second from Jack, checking in. I wiped them both, put on some music and set about making dinner. My headache had started to fade; I felt I was back in control. Things were starting to happen at last.

  At 10:30, after some more work on the novel, I did the very thing that made my condition so fascinating for Jack and, he claimed, so many others. As wilful counterphobe, I sat at the computer and did what Jack and I called a tolerance test.

  It was a simple, awful, compelling routine, and my first attempt at it since arriving at the Rankins’. I’d choose one of the five unmarked, identical-looking CDs from the special CD case marked TT, load whichever disk it was in the CD drive, then sample its thirty, carefully chosen image files. Perhaps I’d try the full progression, possibly do just a random selection. However I decided to play it, a few clicks of the mouse would take me on a journey through my own customised hell.

  Though it was hardly sensible to attempt a TT before bedtime, this was something I had to do, restoring another familiar boundary to the world. I settled back in the large swivel chair in John Rankin’s study, selected a disk at random and loaded it, steeling myself for what I’d find.

  A solitary yellow folder icon marked TT appeared on the screen. I double-clicked on it and opened a spread of image files marked 001, 002 and upwards.

  Which disk would it be? Part of me was hoping it would be the one I unofficially called Disk 3, reasonably safe with its photographs, etchings and promotion bills of many of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most famous clowns and augustes: Joey Grimaldi, Charlie Rivel, Emmett Walsh, the Fratellinis, Oleg Popov.

  It wasn’t. When I opened the third image, displayed before me was the group shot of Thomas the Tank Engine, Bertie and Percy, their expressive moon faces beaming out at me from a miniature landscape under an artificial studio sun.

  I knew the image ‘neighbourhood’ at once. It was Disk 4. The golden Mycenaean funeral mask unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann would be at 001, with the Disney Mickey Mouse logo following it. Image 004 would be the face of Big Brother from the 1955 film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the not quite subliminal ‘scare face’ flashed during William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Then it was the ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ devil close-up from Fantasia.

  How well I knew the territory. It was like using familiar maps to drive known terrain. Image 007 would be John Lithgow’s face looking out the plane window in the ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, showing the actor’s face intercut with the near-subliminal scare face. The tiki from the credits of Hawaiian Eye would be at 008, as sinister as ever, and the Skeksis close-up from The Dark Crystal at 009, and so on, up through the Hopi kachinas at 010, 011 and 012 to the quite subjective horrors of Tom Adams’s cover for Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, Rene Magritte’s The Rape, and J.K. Potter’s Big Mouth.

  Just anticipating them brought the shortening of breath, the prickling at the base of the neck, the powerful conviction that I should stop before I did myself too much harm.

  But I knew what lay ahead and it called to me. No-one but the ‘initiated’ can easily know what it’s like. Drama courses, writing courses, always emphasised the importance of finding appropriate, believable character motivation. Well, how could they encompass this: the drive to withhold and persevere? Capriciousness didn’t cover it. Perversity didn’t. You had to swing into psychopathology to allow it.

  Being a coulrophobe was bad enough, being terrified of clowns and, in a related way, masks, dolls, painted figurines, and yes, statues. But while most coulrophobes are often borderline autonomophobes—terrified of statues—far far fewer are that rare creature of which I’m one, a full-blown counterphobe: someone drawn to the very thing feared.

  Knowing about it as a clinical condition definitely helped, that it all took place in the paralimbic system, in that small area of the brain stem called the locus coeruleus, a key centre for anxiety and fear responses. Each phobic reaction produced a short-term crisis in the central nervous system. So easy to say.

  But for me, treatment-wise, it had never been a matter of just taking new and better SSRI’s like Prozac, Paxil or any of the newer psycho-pharmacological regulators. The counterphobia complicated everything.

  Part of me wanted to keep me there.

  Like now, running the TT images.

  And, more’s the wonder, it never felt like monomania, never tracked like obsession. I was inside that delicious David Leeton oxymoron of stressed calm. I truly felt I could stop, push back. I was choosing not to. Choosing. And that meant everything.

  But if a single shot of Thomas, Bertie and Percy could trigger the demon sequence like this, then the
timing probably wasn’t right. Time to shut it down. Time to choose that.

  Then I saw it.

  All the TT neighbourhoods had an identical number of icons, thirty different images all identically numbered so I’d never know which TT disk it was until I opened a particular image.

  I was looking at thirty-one!

  I didn’t need to count them. I knew how the file pattern looked on the screen, seven icons wide by four down, with two icons making the start of a final fifth row.

  Now there were three icons in that final row.

  CHAPTER 2

  I sat staring at the screen. Somewhere between the three toy locomotives of Image 003 and the Barbara Steele movie still at the old 030, new 031 spot was an extra image file. It was impossible, inconceivable. Someone had to have done it, replaced my CD with a substitute!

  A sudden breathlessness warned me to go no further. The tightness in my neck and shoulders did. But the flipside of my condition was engaged; the relentless counterphobic hunger to stay right there, to press on. A little bit of madness kept me at it.

  Perhaps I’d miscounted; perhaps I’d added a new image before leaving Sydney and simply forgotten.

  But no, no, you never simply forgot in matters like this. Compiling these disks had been a complicated ritual, a talismanic thing, commanding and dynamic. Each image was significant and hard-earned; each one included to provide its increment of controlled and appropriate terror.

  I had to know what the new image was. Foundering between half-clown and full, I clicked on Image 031.

  It wasn’t the intruder. There on the screen was an intensely subjective horror from my adolescence: Barbara Steele staring through the face grid of the iron maiden at the end of Roger Corman’s 1961 film, The Pit and the Pendulum.

  I’d have to go through the disk till I found it. Thomas and friends at third position probably did mean the Mycenaean mask and the Mickey Mouse icon were safely before it, but how could I be sure of anything now?

  Leave off, leave off.

  I clicked on Image 030, the old 029, George Tooker’s The Lesson, and clicked off it almost immediately, imagined that I carried the scream of that terrified, grief-stricken figure with me.

  It was doing harm, but I had to know.

  Old 027, new 028: Dave McKean’s ‘Aren’t I Just Good Enough to Eat?’ Joker from the Arkham Asylum graphic novel, vividly there, gorgeous, terrible, maiming. There and gone.

  Old 026, new 027. Fascination and dread had me in their braid.

  Robert Ingpen’s painting of the golden masked figure of El Dorado from Things That Never Were.

  There and gone.

  I knew the territory, knew what was coming. Should be coming.

  Old 025, new 026.

  Ingpen’s terrifying ‘six-pack’ from the same book—the six hideous faces illustrating the section on Masks.

  There and gone. My hands were shaking. Blood pounded in my skull.

  The Marilyn Pride ‘Demon Stone’ should be next. Old 024, new 025.

  But no, no!

  It was the intruder. Totally unexpected. Totally unfamiliar.

  A black square.

  No, not a square, a black page, as if I’d turned a page in a book and found it there, midnight black like the all-black mourning page in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy or ‘The Grue in His Natural Habitat’ black page in the Zork Nemesis computer game.

  Just a black page.

  But I hadn’t put it there, or, rather, had no memory of doing so. I had to allow that with all the upheaval of relocating north to Starbreak Fell, the turmoil of losing Julia to Mark, I might have done it and forgotten.

  But no! No. I had no reason to include a black page, a featureless black emptiness. Not among faces and images. I knew this neighbourhood. I’d have remembered. I’d have had a reason.

  And Julia wouldn’t have done it during one of her final visits. Couldn’t have. Burned new CDs identical to the ones in my TT file. Why would she? The ridiculousness of such a notion aside, I’d used Disk 4 during the week before I came north and it had had the familiar thirty images, two images into a final fifth row.

  It had been done here!

  I was well beyond half-clown now, heading for full-clown nightmare. A migraine was blooming, pounding in my skull. The sweats had started. Two hands seemed to be pressing on my ribs, two more on my neck and shoulders.

  In that first rush of full-clown panic, I shut down the system and pushed back, standing so violently that John Rankin’s chair went careening back on its casters, striking the bookshelves and juddering to a halt.

  I staggered to my room, hands at my temples, managed to get to my medication. The seconds were an eternity, but I swallowed two capsules, and crawled in under the bed covers. The house was locked. I was safe. I did my breathing exercises as best I could and tracked the medication spreading its nets of wonder in my blood.

  Soft and slow, Davey boy. Soft and slow. All the mantra I could manage. I reined in my breathing and matched my blood rhythm to it.

  The demons sank away. The native drums fell silent in all the jungles of the world as the nets opened wider, wider, like rings in pools of golden light, and I slept.

  We often solve problems in our dreams. I have many times, and now I did, sleeping, tangled in the nets.

  When the phone woke me close to ten o’clock the next morning, I had the answer. Stumbling to the phone in the study, feeling confused and leaden but blessedly free of clown-fear symptoms, I knew what had happened.

  The Rankins had a long lead time on their answering machine, presumably so they could get in from outdoors. The machine message had just started when I lifted the receiver.

  ‘Jack?’ I said, cancelling the message.

  ‘Hello? Is that you, Billy?’ It was a gruff male voice.

  ‘Billy? Who did you want?’

  ‘Billy Penner?’

  ‘No. No, it’s not.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, mate. Must have the wrong number!’ And whoever it was hung up.

  But I was glad to be awake, glad to be back in the study and at the computer. Despite the drug stupor, I felt easier, calmer.

  The day beyond the windows was fiercely hot again; the bright light changed everything.

  I restored the chair to its proper place and switched on the computer. The disk was still in the CD-drive; the thirty-one image files were soon arrayed across the screen again.

  Without hesitating, I clicked on Image 25. I half-expected it to be gone, even to have shifted position in the line-up, leading me a dance through the neighbourhood, but there it was.

  A dead black page. Basic black. Old night.

  Jack had put it there; I was sure of it.

  At our final meeting in his office in North Sydney, we’d used the disks together, had shared the images as an important and always effective familiarisation therapy. Sitting before his computer we had run the sequences, visited the neighbourhoods, chatting all the while.

  It was like defragmenting a hard drive, Jack had said. We were restoring order and proportion, demystifying the images, putting them back in the world as parts of ordinary lives. We’d done it with my hard-copy files of the Commedia masks several times, as well as the most famous clown make-ups: Grimaldi’s, Lou Jacobs’s, even good old Golden Arches Ronald’s; now we were exorcising the TT disks. I’d called it exorcising. He’d called it ‘re-naturing’ them. He’d called it defragmenting the hard drive. I’d called it blessing the fishing fleet.

  But I’d taken more than one toilet break, which meant going down the hall to the toilets serving that floor of professional suites. It would have been easy for Jack to replace one of the CDs, substitute a duplicate of my Disk 4 with that extra image.

  The question was why he’d do it, knowing the harm it could do? And why this image—this non-image?

  It was easy to provide answers now. The black door, the view through the black window. The black mirror. It would most likely be some optical effec
t, like one I’d recently been shown where you stared at four dots in the centre of a formless inkblot for thirty seconds, then closed your eyes and had an after-image of Christ, your own personal Shroud of Turin hanging across your inner sky. Or some subliminal trickery that would surface days, weeks, months later from the subconscious like freeway advertising was supposed to do.

  There was a definite boo-factor here, and a growing alarm at the prospect of a subliminal effect taking place the longer I gazed at the black field. But at least it hadn’t been done while I was here. Somehow knowing Jack was involved made it all right, made it part of a final test. He’d meant me to find it, knew that I would eventually. He would be watching to see how I reacted.

  This was something I would quiz Jack about at the appropriate time, something I’d let him bring up. I smiled at the thought. This was probably how it worked, an ultimate tolerance test. See if I could hold out. See who mentioned it first.

  I clicked off the black page, but stayed at the Rankins’ computer long enough to check the image neighbourhoods of the other four disks. They were all as they should be—thirty images each. Only Disk 4 had been modified.

  I shut down the computer and sat smiling at the darkened screen—a glossy echo of the black page. Yes, this would be the haunting. Every black vista would remind me of it now: looking down a lighted hall at the doorway to a darkened room, looking at the windows with night beyond. Clever Jack. So clever. Giving one new thing to draw me away from the rest. Making them seem known and commonplace by comparison. Defragmenting the David.

  I kept to the house for the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, mostly sitting in front of the Rankins’ portable air-conditioner and working on The Riddling Tree.

  My writing routine had already started to settle down and it was a good sign. There was an hour or two after sun-up, just before six, when I could sit with my laptop at a card table on the front veranda looking out at the far line of hills to the east and northeast. I’d done it three times so far, and on each occasion there was an early breeze to make it enjoyable.