Seven Deadly Pleasures

by Michael Aronovitz

  Evan snorted a laugh at himself and instantly regretted it. Hard breathing in any way, shape, or form was not the wisest idea right now. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger and cursed himself for not setting up his humidifier earlier in the month. He'd had nosebleeds in the cold weather since junior high school, and he knew better. It's just that he seemed to forget every year whether he was supposed to dig out the humidifier when he brought his sweatshirts out of the closet or when he started actually using the heat all night. He suddenly thought that it would be a good idea to keep a notebook for that kind of stuff. He hated nosebleeds. Even when they stopped, they fucked his confidence for a day or two.

  He passed Ardmore Avenue and felt a sneeze coming. This would be an interesting test. Sometimes he had a bleeder for just a minute or so, but now it would be determined whether or not he was going to have a gusher. He moved his head down a bit, studied the road, memorized his position as opposed to the oncoming vehicles across the double yellow line that made whoosh sounds on the wet street as they passed, and let his mouth come open.

  His nostrils flared out, his eyes squeezed shut, and he sneezed.

  No blood, no gusher. He would have felt it immediately.

  He opened his eyes to check and possibly realign his position on the road, and he saw something in the afterimage left by the sneeze. It was right on his eyes, like a brand. Behind the image, the road was clear through the windshield, the drooping trees with huge L-cuts in them to let through the electric cables, the dark sky pushing black clouds behind a traffic light suspended on a steel cord, but this thing, this "face" stayed superimposed on all that for a good few seconds.

  Evan had two immediate thoughts. First, why is this image in my head, and second, how is it so goddamned vivid?

  The shape was the bust of a circus clown with fat cheeks that had red dots on them. The thing was wearing a white party hat with red and blue stripes going up to the tip like a barber pole. There was a golden star at the top on a thin post. The shape wore a skull cap that was as powder-white as the face paint, but there was a clear line where it ended at the top of the forehead and along the temples. Wide eyebrows drawn in arches were colored in solid blue, but that was where the jolly stuff ended.

  The brow arches were not located on the front of the face. They were in three-quarter view, almost as far back as the ears hidden by the skull cap. They sat above bulging eyes, wet black eyes bursting out of the head on the sides the way they did on birds. There was no nose, just a furrow with two seed-shaped breathing holes slanted inward. The entire bottom portion of the face was a mouth with no chin. There was a red lip drawn across the top of the maw, and there were teeth, so called. At first, it seemed as if the top row was made of dark, slithery streamers for lack of a better word, like small versions of those rubber strips that dragged over your windshield at the car wash. They were snakes poking out of the gums. The bottom, where the grinding teeth usually stood, was one wide piece of curved bone, sparkling in an idiot's grin. Around the neck, there was a ruffle piece with blue trim and crescent moon patterns. The image stood on Evan's eyes for a moment, then started to fade.

  Evan shook his head, hard. He blinked twice and widened his eyes. He touched his upper lip, checking for blood almost in afterthought, and banged a right on Bryn Mawr Avenue. He passed the hospital and the library, then doubled back a block on Lancaster. When he parked in the handicapped spot in front of the video store, he realized he was sweating.

  What the fuck was that? He wasn't one to like carnivals, and he'd never actually been to a circus. He knew that clowns were also a cliché horror thing, but they had never really interested him in that way either. Political thrillers tickled his fancy more than those jack-in-the-box slashers. He shut the car off and put both hands up on the steering wheel. He'd never paid attention in that high school psych class about Freudian stuff, but he had to wonder how this thing with bird-eyes and greasy-looking snake teeth had made it into his conscious awareness. For something to come into the conscious, didn't it have to be planted somewhere in your experience?

  He got the movie and pushed open the door. He stepped in a puddle and soaked his sneaker. He cursed softly. Then he laughed. It was drizzling. He ran his free hand through his hair and it comforted him. He stuck the DVD in the drop slot and by the time he got back to the car the memory of the image had already tapered off. Maybe it was the wind on his face. It felt good. Sweet and damp. Evan loved the autumn. It meant burning leaves, and Thanksgiving, and bare trees scratching art onto a cold, naked sky. Made you want to stop for a moment, cross your arms across your chest, and marvel at the wonder of things.

  He pushed back into the vehicle, turned the key in the ignition, and started thinking about change, about possibilities. Maybe he would take a class or something, go back to school, go into teaching. He went for the back exit of the parking lot because there was a light there after you wrapped around. For some reason he liked going home via Lancaster Avenue, and he hated making that left out by Bertucci's against the flow of traffic.

  He passed the Viking Culinary Center, pulled up, and waited for the light. Across the street in the Walgreens parking lot, a woman with blonde hair braided in long pigtails got out of a maroon Dodge Caravan with a soccer magnet on the back window. She was wearing a white back-ring halter top, cowboy boots, and a short brown leather skirt with a slit in it. She dropped her keys and bent over. Something in the background moved, and Evan's eyes drifted upward.

  There was something in the second-floor picture window. Movement. Colors.

  For the second time that day Evan blinked. The Walgreens used to be a Barnes and Noble bookstore. The second floor where the sports books had been along with the children's racks, the brown tables with the wooden chairs only a foot high, and the gourmet coffee shop, was now dark and vacant.

  There was a clown up there. He was there in the window. This one had on a big fireman's hat and a mop of bright orange, frizzy hair sticking out to the sides. He had a huge, red bulb of a nose that was tied around the back of his head with a rubber band, and a reflective silver collar piece that rose up almost higher than the back of his head. He was wearing a baggy tinsel-green jumpsuit with oversized buttons that had propellers that moved. His shoes were enormous duck-foot cushions with sparkly, coiled circular twirlers on the toes that gave the optical illusion that they were disappearing into themselves and simultaneously growing as they spun. He had white face paint and black arches drawn high above the eyes that protruded out the sides of his head. There were short black mime lines drawn vertically on the lids and below the lower rims, and that gave the immediate impression that the black eyes were smiling.

  There was a kid with him, a little boy of around five or six, in sweat pants and a navy blue pullover with a hood on the back. He had brown hair in a bowl cut and his eyes looked almond-shaped. He could have been Asian, but it was hard to tell. The two looked like they were playing "Catch Me If You Can." The kid ran to the left and out of sight deeper into the space. The clown looked one way, then the other. He put up his hands and gave a big shrug. Then he brought his elbows up twice, leaned down a shoulder, dug at some imaginary dirt with the sole of his foot, and galloped out of sight into the darkness.

  A moment later the boy was back at the glass. His face was wet with tears. He looked over his shoulder and tried to run to the right. The clown then emerged and grabbed him by the back of the hood. Clotheslined, the kid's feet almost kicked out from under him. The clown yanked him across and lost his grip for a second. The kid fell toward the glass, then pressed up against it, his face a wide grin of terror. He pounded the window with his open palms. Evan saw it shake with the contact.

  The woman by the minivan did not hear a thing. She shut her door, adjusted her purse, and reached up the sides of her ribs to straighten her bra with an exasperated little tug and twist with both hands. Evan usually took his time to savor that particular move, but was compelled to glance back up to
the dark glass. The kid was facing sideways now, trying to run, clawing at the grip the clown still had on his throat through the hood. With his free hand, the huge circus creature drew something from the back of his jumpsuit. It was a meat hammer. He raised it up and looked right at Evan. He nodded his head as if they were sharing the cutest little secret, and then he brought the weapon down.

  The head of it disappeared into the boy's skull. Something dark splashed the window, and wet matter sprayed the clown on the cheek. A black tongue squirted from the thing's mouth and lapped the splatter off his face. The boy was going through convulsions and a milky discharge was coming out of his mouth. The clown yanked out his weapon, and slyly looked out at Evan. The head was sideways. One black eye winked. Then he lowered his face to the back of the boy's head and let the snakes in his gums start the feeding process.

  The light turned green and Evan hit the gas. He screeched across Lancaster Avenue, bumped into the parking lot, took up two spaces on a slant, and jumped out of his car like a plainclothes cop in a TV movie. Still, the moment he passed through the doors of the store his courage withered. He was going to blurt out that there had been a murder up on the second floor, but he had not planned for the change in atmosphere. The dark sky and wet streets lost their mystery in here under the fluorescents. It was like watching old "Twilight Zone" episodes in the living room with the lights off, then having Mom come in, flick on the overheads, and start grilling you about fourth-period calculus.

  Up one of the rows there was an elderly man wearing an arm cast that was dirty and yellowed at the edges where his fingers poked through. He had a brown scarf around his neck with one end almost brushing the floor as he bent over to check out the laxatives. There was a fat African American woman in a caramel-colored pants suit waiting in front of the photo counter. She had blue eye shadow and heavy triangular earrings that kept jangling back and forth while she spoke through her teeth in an angry grin to a bow-legged teen who wore new-creased blue jeans low enough so you could see the shape of his butt through an old pair of black running shorts. There was a small grouping of mainline moms over by the pharmacy having an animated conversation in a blur of jogging spandex, ponytails, raised sunglasses, and freckled cleavage.

  There were two counter girls up front in blue smocks with name tags, but the shorter one with all the face piercings was counting her drawer. The plainer one with the mild acne and auburn hair tucked behind her ears was managing a line five customers deep.

  What was Evan supposed to say?

  "Hey y'all! There's a dead kid upstairs with his head bashed in! The clown with the snakes in his mouth did it!"

  Couldn't you get in trouble for bringing out the cops for what seemed like a prank?

  He walked toward the middle of the store and noticed that his wet sneaker was squeaking and squelching a bit on the hard white floor. The blonde woman with the cowboy boots was squatted down, sifting through the Clairol, Redken, and Essensity products on a low shelf. Evan noticed that she had pretty fingernails, half blue and half white, with silvery trim.

  "Hey," he said.

  She pushed up and balanced the thin steel handles of the shopping basket on her forearm. She had nice eyes and heavy mascara. Her nose was a bit too big, but she had that hourglass thing going for her. Evan suddenly wondered if there was any blood left on his upper lip. In all the excitement he had never checked in the rearview.

  "So tell me you didn't hear someone pounding on the window out there," he said.

  "What?"

  "When you got out of your car. You dropped something and someone was banging on the second-floor window. You're telling me you didn't hear anything?"

  She stopped chewing her gum for a second and put all her weight on one leg. With her free hand, she took a long, braided lock of hair and tossed it behind her shoulder.

  "Fucking stalker."

  She brushed past and Evan felt his face redden up. He balled his fists and moved to the back of the store. They had only really used about a third of the ground floor. There was new drywall in the rear by the auto parts, and a thin hallway that led to a locked door with a steel keypad on it. Evan peered through. There was the old Barnes and Noble first-floor bathroom, some blue chairs, a microwave, and a row of temporary lockers. If there was a stairway it was not in this sightline. And Evan could not remember where it had been anyway.

  He strode back to the front of the store and approached the counter. The girl counting bills didn't even look up.

  "I'm closed."

  The stud in her eyebrow looked like real diamond. Her hair was tied back and thrust through a leather Concho, or whatever you called that oval piece with the stick running through it. She had some brown moles at the peak of her forehead that were going to look really hideous when she crossed the age of fifty or so.

  "How can I get upstairs?" He bent down a bit. "Hello?"

  "You can't."

  "I left my jacket up there."

  "No ya didn't."

  "Yeah, I did. Yesterday—"

  "It's locked and they knocked out the stairway. Ya got to take the elevator and it's out of service."

  She looked up and cocked her head. She had a wide face and dimples. The nose piece was subtle but the two ball-studs through the upper lip were just a bit too much. She smiled a little.

  "Watcha want, anyway?"

  Evan was suddenly attracted to her and he did not understand it in the least. He sensed that she sensed this and he looked away, past her shoulder. His eyes settled on a folding chair, set behind her to the right beneath the cigarette display. There was a green jumpsuit laid across it and on the floor was a big fire hat with frizzy orange hair stapled to the brim. She turned to look where he was looking, her eyes staying with his as long as possible. When she turned back she had her mouth opened slightly. She was curling her tongue around the silver stud that was pierced through it.

  "It's a return," she said. "The kid said it was too baggy."

  Evan went up on his toes and leaned across a bit. The suit was nowhere near big enough to have fit the thing he saw in the window. And this hat had a golden label on the front that said "Engine 52." The one he had seen was blank.

  Maybe someone stuck the label on for show.

  "Can I see that?" Evan said.

  "Sure."

  But as she turned he changed his mind. The momentary pull she'd had on him was gone, and he didn't want his fingerprints on that thing on the chair. He walked toward the glass doors and looked along the ceiling for surveillance cameras. He didn't see any and it did not really matter. The guy did not come in through the front entrance and he probably wasn't even up there anymore. If the counter worker was unaware of an access point, the escape would be just as invisible as the entry. There was probably a ladder back by a cutout behind some piping near an old emergency exit or something.

  Even if the thing cleaned off the window and took the kid's body with him there had to be some trace of DNA left up there. He'd get in his car, call the police on his cell, and anonymously report what he had seen. Then he would have done his duty. He'd just ignore the question of why the kid was up there in the first place. He'd just leave out the part about the eyes on the sides of the head and the moving teeth. He'd let the professionals figure that garbage out for themselves.

  But he never called the police.

  He swerved back onto Lancaster Avenue, went around an old bat in a Volkswagen going about three miles an hour and got stuck in the turning lane two blocks down. Just before hitting the last digit in 911, something made him glance to the left.

  What he saw in the dark windows of the building across the street was not of this earth.

  It was a violent infestation.

  It defied rational definition and made his skin crawl.

  The huge glass windows were sectioned off by three-by-three white square frames. Through them, Evan could see that the "things" vertically filled the first four to five feet of the space from the floor up and went wall to wall
about fifty feet across. They were man-sized and swarming over and across and underneath and between each other. Evan had once seen news footage of rats that had overrun a section of a downtown junkyard, crawling across the bodies of their mates, and this was the same plague on a larger scale. The movement was a constant and violent blur of bright satin colors, arms intertwined and writhing through legs mixed in with flashes of red painted smiles, and stretched balloon pants. There were ball noses and squirting joke flowers and bowler hats being crushed and popping back into shape and French berets slipping in and out of the cracks along with white gloved fingers and leggings with stripes on them all knotted up and wriggling between and around wristlets with bells, neck frills, gaudy vests, and ruffled-up cummerbunds.

  There were people walking on the sidewalk in front and no one was noticing.

  Evan jerked the wheel to the right, hit the gas, and sped away down the avenue. He knew he wasn't crazy. If he had gone insane he wouldn't recognize all the normal stuff. He'd be in fairytale la-la land, dribbling on his shirt, picking at his hair, and believing he was someone like Gandhi, or King Henry the Eighth, or Marilyn Monroe.

  This was something different.

  There was a tear in the fabric here and the virus was getting in.

  The face of Rudi DiDomenico flashed into his mind. Rudi was a counter customer who came in with a batch of homemade wine every year around Easter. He was short and always wore overalls and flannel even in the summertime. Rudi drove a van with a model of a huge bug on top of it. They called it the roach-wagon. Rudi was an exterminator, and Evan had worked out a deal with him where the guy bought his twenty-four-inch straight shank carbide bits in bulk for just a thirty-five percent markup twice a year.

  Rudi had once said that the key to stopping an infestation was to find the "point of entry."

  Evan raced through the intersection at City Line Avenue and sped back toward West Philly. He wouldn't be home for a good while.