by Jeff Strand
It suddenly occurred to Jaunty that a scary clown running toward a crowd of people would not do much to ease their panic. He settled for walking instead.
Now that he was closer, he could see that they weren't crabs, they were spiders. Foot-long spiders. Spiders too big to be real, yet he knew the Mountain of Terror didn't have the means to create such a realistic illusion, at least not outdoors. In the carefully controlled environment of one of the rooms, sure, but not out here like this. Though Jaunty might discover later that it was all a very elaborate, very expensive illusion and feel kind of silly, right now he had to assume that it was indeed a bunch of giant spiders crawling toward the people in line.
Which meant that if he was smart, he'd turn and run in the opposite direction. Nobody would blame him for fleeing a wave of unnatural spiders, especially since he'd just been fired.
But clowns didn't run.
At least not without comedic intent. They'd run from an angry circus lion or a police officer if it made the audience laugh. Nobody would laugh if Jaunty ran now. They wouldn't even notice. And if he wasn't fleeing to entertain an audience, by God he wasn't going to flee at all.
Granted, he also had no intention of being stupid. He wasn't going to race toward the spiders and dive into a group of them, sacrificing himself to squish a few. But he was on the outside of the cordoned-off line and he could get close enough to one of the spiders to determine if they were actually dealing with a legitimate threat.
So he quickly walked toward the spiders.
There weren't many of them by the line yet, though there were a lot of them visible in the distance. One of the spiders veered away from the crowd, and though Jaunty wasn't paranoid enough to think that it was specifically coming to kill him, it certainly seemed to have him as a target.
It was about ten feet away, so he waited to see what it would do. As it kept moving toward him, Jaunty tried to look for anything that might indicate that it was not a genuine arachnid. Something "off," something too mechanical about the movement. Maybe the whirr of a motor. But there was absolutely nothing to make him think it was not a foot-long hairy brown spider on the loose.
As it got closer, Jaunty took a nervous step backwards.
No. He was not going to back away from a spider that, while enormous by the standards of its species, was much smaller than an adult male clown.
He stepped forward and stomped on it with his brightly colored oversized shoe.
He lifted his foot. He'd stomped it with the front part of his shoe, which didn't have his foot inside, and though the spider wasn't moving forward anymore it wasn't completely squashed. Its legs twitched.
Jaunty stomped it again with the full force of his shoe.
Again, he might learn later that it was all an extremely elaborate prank, but right now he saw no explanation beyond, "Yes, a wave of giant spiders is heading toward the haunted house." The people were right to panic and flee.
"Stay calm and back away!" shouted Jaunty, waving both hands toward the parking lot.
Either people couldn't hear him, didn't want to give up their spot in line until they knew exactly what the issue was, or they weren't inclined to trust a scary clown in smeared makeup. Aside from the people who were already trying to get away from the spiders, nobody else moved.
"This is not a joke!" he said, knowing that the sentence would be more credible if it weren't coming from a clown. "Everybody quickly and calmly return to your vehicles!"
A few more spiders crawled past the cordon. It wouldn't be long before it was a whole flood of them. In fact, Jaunty was in danger where he stood, so he ducked under the cordon. How could he convince people who were in line specifically to be scared out of their wits that they were about to be attacked by giant spiders?
A grinning man tried to stomp one of the spiders but missed. It crawled onto his shoe and then into his pants leg. The man immediately stopped grinning and bent down to try to squish the spider with his hands. Before he could do that, he cried out in pain.
At the sound of his screams, people began to pay more attention.
A woman on the other end of the queue began to shriek.
Then even more people began to scream.
"Spiders!" a man shouted. "Jesus Christ, look at the spiders!"
And with that, they had a good old-fashioned mass panic. It was possible that many, or even most, of the people in line thought it was a fun Halloween scare, but they still had to get out of the way of those who could see the wave of spiders approaching and were frantically trying to escape. Mass panic was not good. That was how people fell and got trampled on. It wasn't as if these spiders were moving at a supersonic speed, so if people would just walk rapidly toward the parking lot, they could get out of this without any casualties.
A screaming woman fell to the ground.
"Please stay calm!" Jaunty shouted, even though he doubted anybody could hear him, and nobody was going to take directions from a deranged clown. But if they didn't leave the area in an orderly fashion, people were going to get hurt.
The additional screams indicated that people were getting hurt.
A voice sounded over a loudspeaker: "Please, ladies and gentlemen, remain calm!" It must have been one of the actual security guards, who were there to handle emergencies but most likely hadn't anticipated that giant spiders would be involved.
The crowd became significantly less calm, as if the loudspeaker announcement confirmed that there was indeed something extremely bad happening.
Now there was lots and lots of screaming and lots and lots of people fleeing toward the parking lot. Pure pandemonium. As a clown, Jaunty loved pandemonium, but he loved controlled pandemonium. Truthfully, if everybody had just taken a deep breath and let go of their fear, they might have been able to work out an organized process for moving forward as a group and stomping on the spiders in an orderly fashion.
Or not. The wave of spiders showed no signs of letting up.
Jaunty had tried to keep things from getting out of control, but he simply wasn't loud enough. And now there was nothing more he could do.
Then, amidst the many screams, he noticed some screams that were even louder and more frantic than the rest. A little boy, maybe five or six years old, had been separated from his mother. She was calling out his name ("Ben! Ben! Ben!") but the momentum of the crowd was carrying her further and further away from her son. He fell to the ground.
So Jaunty had been wrong. There was something he could do.
He ran toward poor Ben. Then, in a moment that would've been a jump scare if this was a horror movie, a man staggered in front of him, with one spider on his face and one spider in his hair. He was frothing at the mouth. A couple of fleeing people accidentally bashed into him but he remained upright. He looked directly at Jaunty: "Help me!"
Jaunty would rather have helped the little boy first, but this man was closer and if Jaunty survived this experience he didn't want to have nightmare visions of the man with a spider in his hair that he'd refused to assist. "Lean your head down!" Jaunty told him.
The man just thrashed around and screamed.
"I can't get the spider out if you don't cooperate! Lean your head down!"
The man, obviously not thinking clearly (though Jaunty certainly didn't hold that against him considering the circumstances) tilted his head backwards instead. The spider bit him. The angle was perfect—Jaunty actually saw its twin fangs plunge into the man's flesh. Jaunty winced and put his white-gloved hand over his mouth. He didn't want to be here anymore.
Jaunty took a swipe at the spider, but it moved and all he did was slap the man across the face. He took another swipe, harder, but he missed the spider again and merely slapped the man harder across the face. However, the slap was hard enough to dislodge the spider, which dropped to the ground and crawled away in search of other prey.
"Thank you," the man said.
"There's still one in your hair."
The man resumed screaming. Instead of a
sking him to keep his head still, Jaunty just started swiping at his hair, until finally the spider fell off. The man's eyes went wide.
"It went down the back of my shirt!"
Jaunty spun him around and slapped at the moving bulge beneath the man's shirt. He squished the spider on the third try. There was no time to wait for the man to thank him—the little boy was still on the ground and his mother still couldn't get to him. Jaunty rushed forward.
Ben was scooting away from a spider and didn't realize that he was scooting closer to another one.
The crowd had thinned out in the back and Jaunty didn't need to shove anybody out of the way to reach the boy, though he would have if it had been necessary. He'd shove some innocent people to save a young boy, no problem. He picked up Ben before the child could get bit by the spider that was only a few inches from his right hand.
Ben gaped in horror. "Scary clown! Scary clown!"
The boy struggled to escape Jaunty's fearsome grasp. Jaunty hurried ahead, scanning the crowd for Ben's mother. There she was, on the far side of the queue, still trying to push through the fleeing people, now with a smear of blood on the side of her head.
Jaunty broke into a run, ignoring the way the kid kept hitting him. Ben's high-pitched shrieks, delivered right into his ear, were more difficult to ignore, but Jaunty remained laser-focused on the task of reuniting the boy with his mother.
Though the parking lot was too far away to see exactly what was going on, a lot of awful stuff seemed to be happening over there. People were not simply getting in their vehicles and driving away. He heard a collision over the sound of all the screaming.
He hoped the other clowns were safe. Surely the spiders hadn't invaded the haunted house yet. There were too many people in the way for Jaunty to see if spiders were crawling into the Mountain of Terror, though the main entrance door was wide open.
Somebody knocked Ben's mother to the ground. She got back up quickly. Jaunty didn't see a spider on her face.
Ben kept smacking Jaunty and screaming "Scary clown! Scary clown!" but Jaunty refused to pass the little boy on to somebody else. He was going to get this kid back to his mother, no matter how many bruises he received in the process. He wouldn't even lecture the mother about the fact that Ben was clearly too young for this haunted house anyway.
Now the kid was trying to poke out Jaunty's eyes. This rescue attempt was going very poorly, though since Ben was not being trampled by adults or bitten by giant spiders, Jaunty still considered it a win thus far.
"Stop that," he told Ben, not yelling at him but rather trying to keep his voice soothing, like Mr. Rogers explaining that trying to jab your fingers into the eyeballs of somebody who was trying to bring you back to your mother was not the way one should behave.
Ben did not stop. In fact, he got Jaunty's eye with his thumb. He didn't puncture the orb and cause any optical jelly to spill out, but it definitely hurt.
"Stop it!" Jaunty said, still not yelling but going for more of an authority figure vibe.
"Scary clown!"
"I'm not scary!"
"Scary clown!"
"I'm saving you!"
Ben got Jaunty in the eye again, and Jaunty stopped himself from saying something that would violate one of the eight clown commandments. It wasn't Ben's fault that he was young and frightened. Yes, it would be nice if he stopped trying to poke out the eyes of the friendly clown that was putting his own life at risk to save a strange child, but Ben's brain had not yet fully developed and Jaunty couldn't blame him for his wretched violent ungrateful behavior.
"Please don't do that again," said Jaunty.
"Oh, thank you!" the mother shouted as she finally pushed through the crowd of panicked people. She ran toward Jaunty, and he happily handed her son over to her. "Thank you so much!"
"Of course," said Jaunty. "That's what clowns do."
The mother hurried off. The queue was almost empty, with everybody now participating in the chaos at the parking lot. And with the people gone, Jaunty could see a great many spiders crawling around where they'd been standing in line. He was no arachnophobe, but this was terrifying.
He could also now see that the spiders were indeed crawling into the haunted house.
Perhaps the other clowns hadn't been warned that there was a wave of giant spiders pouring into their workplace, but they surely were aware that something was happening outside, right? There would be an effort underway to evacuate everybody from the building. Though he hadn't seen anybody emerge, and there were no costumed characters fleeing toward the parking lot, it would make sense that they'd evacuate people away from the spider horde.
Guffaw, Bluehead, Reginald, and Wagon were fine. He was sure of it. The spiders wouldn't have had a chance to make it anywhere near that far into the haunted house yet. Everybody inside was completely venom-free. And that included Depravo, against whom Jaunty held a grudge but not in an "I hope he gets eaten by spiders" way.
The chaos in the parking area had intensified. This was not people yelling at each other over traffic issues. People were getting attacked by giant spiders over there, no question. He assumed that fire trucks were already on their way; blasting the ground with a few fire hoses should take care of the problem. Since he didn't have a fire truck of his own, there wasn't much he could do to assist except try to stomp a few extra spiders.
He wouldn't venture into the haunted house. There was no reason for that. He'd just hurry around the building to see where everybody was being evacuated.
A woman screamed inside the haunted house.
Well...fudge.
He could wait for people to show up who were equipped to do battle with giant spiders, or he could run in there himself. Jaunty preferred the first option, but knew he would be choosing the second.
There were plenty of spiders crawling inside the Mountain of Terror. He'd just have to be careful. He was less acrobatic in his forties than he was in his twenties, but he still felt like he could evade spiders long enough to help save some people.
He ran toward the main entrance, weaving back and forth around the hundreds of spiders. It was a pretty big area, so it wasn't too hard for a nimble guy like him to avoid them, though he did step on a few. With almost everybody now in the parking area, he could hear the loud crunch as he stepped on each one.
He went inside. The main entrance led to another queue, but this one had lots of horror-themed decorations hanging around so that it didn't feel like people had another twenty minutes to stand in line. The area was devoid of all life except spiders. Fortunately, there were no dead spider-covered humans on the floor.
The light was purposely dim in here, though not so dark that he couldn't see the floor and the spiders. That wouldn't be the case after he went into the actual labyrinth, although presumably if they evacuated the house they would have turned on the lights so people could see properly.
The woman screamed again. She wasn't far.
Jaunty wished he had a broom or something to sweep the spiders away. There had to be a broom around here somewhere, but it wasn't in this area and he didn't have time to go around looking for the janitorial closet. He'd just have to be constantly wary.
As he reached the doorway, he noticed that spiders were already crawling on the walls. This observation did not make him happy. Spiders on the walls could mean spiders on the ceiling, and spiders on the ceiling could drop down on you if you were busy focusing on not letting them crawl on your feet.
This was dumb, right? Running into a giant spider-infested haunted house was dumb. Smart people didn't do things like this. The other clowns would never ask him to do this, even if they were currently in great peril.
Another scream. Sounded like the same woman.
He started to call out to ask if she was okay, but stopped himself in time, because obviously she wasn't okay and he didn't want her to think she was being rescued by an idiot. Jaunty took a deep breath and ran into the first room of the Mountain of Terror, which was the Vampir
e Room. It currently contained no vampires, but spiders were crawling on the gargoyles and on the upright coffins.
Jaunty moved through it quickly. He was less frightened than he would've expected. Oh, he was still absolutely terrified, but he would've expected to be too frightened to even move. He was proud of himself for not just lying on the floor in the fetal position.
His sense of pride vanished when he stepped into the next room and found the dead woman.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Guffaw had spent about a minute trying to hide how angry he was. Then he'd decided that anger made him scarier, so he might as well use it to remain in character. Then he'd decided that a zombie clown wouldn't be angry, so this was inappropriate character motivation. He really didn't know what to do with this kind of emotion.
He would never say this out loud, but he could think it: he was pissed at Jaunty.
None of them liked being here. Okay, it was more fun than he might have expected, and Bluehead in particular seemed to be having an absolute blast, but none of them wanted to be working in a haunted house. They were sucking it up and making the best of a bad situation. It was better than standing on a street corner with a "Will Juggle For Food" sign.
Everybody else was able to shove their emotions aside and do their job. Everybody else was thinking about the group. Jaunty, meanwhile, was being a selfish...Guffaw didn't want to think prick, but it was too late, he'd already thought it. Jaunty was being a selfish prick. Guffaw couldn't blame Depravo for firing him—if you were paid to perform a task, you were supposed to do it. Jaunty had put all of their jobs at risk.
Not once had Guffaw ever been forced to take the next step, and it broke his heart to think about it, but he might have to call for a vote to expel Jaunty from their group. Tears would stream down all of their faces as they watched Jaunty pack his meager belongings and head out toward an unknown future, yet he'd proven that he wasn't really a team player. He valued himself over the family.
A steady stream of people walked through the Scary Clown Room. Guffaw hoped they left it more frightened than when they entered, because scaring people is what they were being paid to do. He understood that fact, even if Jaunty didn't.