Boo!

by David Haynes

  There was no time to think about that, she had to act. She took the last few steps quickly, not caring if she alerted the killer to her presence. She held the gas out in front and ran into the room.

  She gasped when she saw what was happening in the mirror. White’s dead eyes – she hoped he was dead – stared at her in reflection. A clown stood behind him like a barber, slowly cutting around White’s mouth. She could hear the knife slicing through his flesh and his humming was louder now, creepier and out of tune.

  The clown looked away from his reflection and for a split–second, his eyes met hers. His own mutilated face, so pale, like death itself, was framed in her mind forever.

  He smiled a hideous, malformed grin and whispered, “Boo!”

  Jane thought of nothing other than bringing him to the floor and choking the life out of him. She rushed forward. She could hear high-pitched laughter as the edges of her vision closed in. It wasn’t in the instruction manual but as she ran forward, she sprayed gas in front of her like a shield. It was only as she hit that shield that she realised she had gassed herself as well as the clown.

  “Police officer, drop the knife!” she screamed.

  The clown tried to jump to the side to avoid the spray, but had still been hit by a good dose. It was impossible to avoid it. He was standing with his back against a bank of built-in wardrobes and there was blood everywhere. It was on the carpet, on the clown, dripping from his knife in thick globules.

  She crashed into him with her eyes stinging, her vision almost gone entirely. She hoped he was in a similar condition. She heard him grunt as she lashed out with her fist. She had no idea where she had caught him but it felt hideous, almost slimy.

  She knew the knife was her main threat. He was holding it in his right hand. She turned away from that side and brought her left knee upwards with a sharp motion. It was aimed at his balls but she knew from the impact that it caught his inner thigh only.

  She blinked rapidly but the gas was biting into her eyes, which watered with a thousand tears. Almost blind, she made a grab for the wrist holding the knife and smashed it into the wardrobe three times before he reacted.

  He was taller than her but not well-built or particularly strong. Nevertheless he managed to bring his free elbow up and smash it under her chin. She heard her teeth crack together as her head jarred backwards. Jane knew if she let go, she was done for. The gas was empty and by the time she racked her baton he would be on her, on her with the knife sticking in her throat. All that was left was her strength and her fight.

  “Drop the knife!” she hissed at him and swung her other knee into his thigh.

  Somebody screamed then and it wasn’t her. It hadn’t come from the clown either. That meant it came from White. He was still alive. The shock made her momentarily lose her strength. The clown seized his chance and shoved her backwards.

  She staggered away from him, looking at White’s reflection in the mirror. His eyes were bulging and as he opened what was left of his mouth, blood gushed out and rolled down his chin.

  Jane felt a scream rise in her throat but there was no air left in her body to push it out. She watched White’s head slump forward. It only took a second but it felt like longer. It was enough time for the clown to deliver a powerful punch to the side of her face. The blow knocked her off her feet and she sat, dazed on the blood-soaked carpet.

  She looked up at the clown through stinging, foggy eyes. He was the stuff of nightmares. His face was a warped patchwork of skin and in there somewhere was a part of Stu Kelly and Jim Crawley.

  Anger pushed away the shock. She tried to get back on her feet. Her legs didn’t feel like her own and they wouldn’t stand under her. She groaned, crawled across the carpet.

  “You’re under arrest for murder, you...” Then his fist came down on her face again and a massive white light lit up her vision like a nuclear bomb. She collapsed face-first onto the carpet.

  *

  Jane screamed. She screamed like she had never screamed before, stinging her throat like acid on its way out. But she could feel his knife cutting through her skin. Deeper and deeper through the strata of her flesh, the sharp and dirty blade sank. He was trying to cut her eye out, trying to tease it from the socket so he could use it as his own. His face was beside hers. It was wan and ghostly; a patchwork of Newman, Kelly, Crawley and White all mashed together in a slimy, greasy leather. Dripping. Dripping slowly onto the carpet where it swirled into the fabric and made a vile soup.

  Her stomach heaved and she screamed out a torrent of yellow liquid onto that same carpet. She was alive. She was alive and wasn’t being cut into pieces. Her eyes felt like someone had attempted to remove them, though. As she tried to open her one good eye, a stab of pain sliced through her skull and flew out in a great steaming hiss from between her swollen lips.

  Why am I not dead? she thought, looking at the back of White’s head. Why am I not just like him? A blue strobe flashed across the mirror she could not stand to look into. Was she in the circus?

  “Steady,” a voice said from beside her. Panic flew through her body like an angry hornet. She flailed her arms about and screamed again.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  A hand gently touched her shoulder and she turned her head. A female police officer in a bright yellow jacket smiled down at her.

  “Paramedics are on the way. Just lie still.”

  She rolled over. “It’s not my blood,” she said. When she tried to open her other eye again, she knew it was swollen shut. “The clown, where’s the clown?” She knew she sounded almost hysterical. It wasn’t through fear though, it was because she didn’t want him to get away.

  “Gone by the time I got here. Helicopter’s up and another dog handler’s on the way but we’ve lost him.”

  “Shit,” Jane hissed, shuffling onto her bum. She found the courage to look at White’s reflection. The clown had clearly finished the job he was part-way through when she interrupted him, but in a hurry. A lump of skin hung from White’s cheek. She didn’t need to ask whether he was alive, he couldn’t be. It was better that way.

  How long had he been tortured before she arrived? A wave of emotion swept over her. Tears fell from her cheeks.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “About ten minutes. Not long.”

  Jane leaned on the officer as she got to her feet. The room started spinning, first one way then the other. She had never been very good on rollercoasters. She closed her eye but it was no good, the world was moving around her and she couldn’t stop it.

  “How many units have we got looking for him?” Her lips felt enormous and her words sounded distorted but still intelligible.

  “The helicopter, and two others, another dog unit on the way and me in – ”

  “The car! What about the car, is it still there?”

  “What car?”

  Jane took a step forward, and nearly fell. The officer held her arm. “I don’t think you should be mo...”

  “We need more. He couldn’t have got very far.” She felt groggy but her mind was slowly kicking into gear. She hadn’t been out of it for that long. There was still a chance to get something out of this mess. There was still a chance to get the bastard. She couldn’t even say what make of car it was. She hadn’t looked closely enough. Maybe she should have, maybe she should have run a check on it but she wanted to get inside, she wanted to make sure White was... “CSI’s on the way? What about the DCI?”

  “I’m not sure, comms were...”

  “Where’s my radio? My bag?” She remembered leaving it at the bottom of the stairs but she needed it. She needed to start directing the search, calling for more troops. “It’s at the bottom of the stairs,” she said to herself and tried to walk, but her legs gave way and she fell to the floor.

  “That’s it. Do... not... move!” the officer shouted. A second later, Jane heard her galloping down the stairs.

  “There’s nothing here!” she s
houted up. “There’s no bag.”

  Jane groaned. He had access to a police radio now, he could hear everything they were saying, could follow their search pattern. He also had her bag. She tapped her pocket, which was empty. He had her phone too.

  She crawled onto the landing and slumped against a wall. Being in that room, in that hell, for another second was just too much. She lifted her hands to her face and tried to pick a strand of hair away from her eye but it was stuck, glued to her face by White’s blood.

  Jane slammed her fists into the carpet as hard as she could and sobbed.

  18

  “That was close, buddy-boy!”

  Maldon drove quickly through the suburban streets, his eyes stinging and nose running. The police radio was on the seat next to him, along with the tall, bald policeman’s face. The radio was buzzing with chatter about what he’d just done.

  He could already feel the telltale itch that always came after. It was his smile growing, millimetre by glorious bloody millimetre. By the time he fixed the smile properly onto Sparkles, it would run from ear to ear. It couldn’t get any wider. But all was not well.

  He knew the police would eventually ‘sting’ the radio so his time was limited, but he listened to the confused mass of voices and changed his route accordingly. It wasn’t difficult, he had ten minutes start on them.

  It was a good job the woman officer kept her diary in her bag. In the back were all of her passwords, including one for the radio. She was pretty. Even though she had tried to knee him in the balls, she was really very attractive.

  He took her phone as much out of curiosity as anything, but it gave him a thrill to reach into her pocket and take it. Her trousers were tightly stretched over her thigh as she lay in the bloody sponge of carpet. It made the rectangular outline of her phone stand clear through the fabric. As he reached into her pocket, he felt the warmth of her flesh seep through his gloves, making him shudder. It wasn’t affection, she was unconscious, but it was the heat of another human being, a person who was not an evil life-sucker like these others. It was an electrifying sensation, one he had not felt for a very long time. It had made him jerk away and almost fall backwards.

  Sparkles had urged him not to do it again, had threatened him, but it was too much and he removed a glove and slid his hand back inside her pocket. Her skin burned through the thin fabric and sizzled on his own. He had groaned at the pleasure of it. It was warmth, it was tenderness. It was alien.

  Sparkles had heard the sirens in the distance. It was Sparkles whose voice screamed above the crash of his heart and told him to move.

  “Go, go, go!” Sparkles had bellowed into his ear. The strength of his voice pushed Maldon away, skidding across the carpet and into the wall.

  He gripped the steering wheel harder and tried to ignore the tingle of electricity that still wriggled through his fingers; his ungloved, unprotected fingers. But her touch had not widened his smile, as he thought it might. No, it had diminished it. Just by a touch, an almost undetectable amount, but it was there, just at the corners of his deformed and mutilated lips. A lessening. He wasn’t angry about it, not as he had been when the others took his smile. No, this time he felt... sad. He felt very, very sad.

  “Cry baby custard, cry baby custard,” Sparkles sang as he drove. Maldon didn’t react. He didn’t know how to.

  He drove to the car park near his house, intending to torch the car. Intent on finishing the job he had started. Instead he just sat there for a while and listened to the early morning silence. Occasionally a vehicle would drive past on the main road, but mostly there was just an eerie silence which he found hypnotising.

  He was no stranger to this time of day. Indeed, he had spent a good deal of his life prowling the streets looking for houses, sheds and cars to break into. But for the first time, he heard the night. His mind was silenced, the anger was gone and its absence was frightening. It was his compass, his purpose, his reason. It was who he was. He had carried it around for so long that he didn’t know what, or who, he was without it.

  He touched his face and felt the cold, miserable skin of three dead men under his fingers. He would add the tall policeman’s flesh to it now. It was the last piece of the picture and it would finally give him his smile back completely.

  But then what? Where would he go?

  He adjusted the mirror and took the tube of superglue from the glovebox. He hadn’t had time to do a neat job in the house, so he took his bloody knife and carved the skin into the shape he needed, making sure to keep the lips intact. His knife cut through dead flesh easily and sliced through the cheap plastic seat too. When he was happy, he covered it in glue and held it up to his face. His reflection was awful, truly hideous. There were bits and pieces of face sticking out all over the place, layer on layer of dead flesh, all piled up into a revolting, greasy mask. Watery discharge oozed from his nose and mingled with dried blood.

  He pushed the last piece into place, just below his ears and he gasped. All at once he was transformed. Gone was the repellent facade and in its place was a young boy. A grinning, laughing lad with a carefree look in his eyes. A beautiful boy without a worry in the world.

  He touched the mirror with a bloody finger. It was him. It was Maldon Williams before... before the clown took everything from him.

  And then it was gone. He twisted the rear-view mirror around and around until it snapped and fell into his lap. Sparkles looked up at him with that maniac grin and laughed.

  “You can take the boy out of the clown, but you can’t take the clown out of the boy!”

  He had done everything Sparkles asked. Everything he had been told would bring about his own real smile. And yet they were all dead and it hadn’t worked. Sparkles had lied. The smile on his face wasn’t his own and he felt no different. Why, why, why?

  Maldon slammed the car into gear and raced out of the car park. He knew where he had to go. The only person who knew what clowns were really like.

  19

  The door to Jane’s apartment swung open. She reached inside to press as many light switches as she could. The alarm chirruped and flashed a lurid green on the wall opposite. The house was secure so she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. As she tapped the security code into the key pad, she was glad she had committed it to memory and not written it in the back of her diary like all the other passwords.

  She took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen. DCI Hargreaves had wanted to take her home but she refused. Not because she wasn’t nervous, she was, but she wanted him to get the surveillance on Night’s house organised.

  The forms were all saved on her hard drive, so all Hargreaves had to do was print them off again and get a team out there.

  She opened the fridge and pulled two bottles of beer onto the counter. It was late morning, but she didn’t care. Not after today, not after what she had been through. She knocked the cap off both bottles and took them to the bathroom. A long hot bath was what she needed. She hoped the beer would help her sleep. If not, there were another ten in the fridge that would definitely do the job.

  She turned the taps on and lifted the first beer to her mouth. She grunted, the cold bottle both soothing and excruciating against her swollen lips. She kept it there though and downed half of it. She put the full one down beside the bath and carried the other to her bedroom.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a set of grungy overalls, usually reserved for prisoners, and they were so long that they covered her feet and dragged on the carpet.

  The paramedic had examined her but she wouldn’t allow him to take her to hospital. He wanted to do an X-ray on her head to check her eye socket for possible fractures. The swelling was so bad the vision in her right eye had gone completely, and the swollen skin was stretched to its limits. Her mouth wasn’t in great shape either. When the clown had brought his elbow up under her chin, she had bitten into her top lip. It was also swollen and it made talking difficult.

  Jane had barely
recognised two members of her own team who came into the back of the ambulance to talk to her. She spoke to them calmly but despite having worked with them around the clock for the last week, she couldn’t remember their names. She didn’t mention that to anyone.

  The female detective had taken her clothes and slipped them inside the evidence bags. The CSIs had taken photographs of her, and swabs from her hands and under her nails. She couldn’t remember if she had scratched him but she just held her hands out for them.

  And then Hargreaves had come in and knelt on the floor beside her. He was usually a no-nonsense, straight down the line detective but as she spoke, he became human. In the corner of his eyes, Jane saw tears forming. She reached out and took his hand but neither of them spoke for a while.

  “I know you’ve already told Lenny and Lewis about it, but could you go through it again with me?” He released her hand.

  Jane nodded and went through what had happened again. She could see Hargreaves wincing when she described hearing the knife cutting through White’s flesh. Her voice wobbled when she told him about how White had screamed.

  “I’ll come back to the nick and write a statement.” She shuffled off the trolley.

  “No. No you won’t,” Hargreaves started. “I’ll take you home and you’ll sleep. Lewis made notes so the statement will wait.”

  Jane opened her mouth to speak, but she could feel her emotions betraying her and closed it before she started wailing.

  “Anything else I need to know?” he asked.

  Jane started to shake her head then stopped. She had been coming to see White to start the surveillance authorisation, but also to brief him on Stu’s write-up of the rape. It suddenly seemed completely unimportant.