by Tim Curran
Nothing was real until he put on the makeup and saw Grimshanks grinning at him from the mirror.
It had been that way since he was ten years old.
He had trouble remembering what things were like before he was ten. He supposed they were ordinary and dull. But after he was ten? Then he became Grimshanks, a harmless clown that entertained at children’s parties and stalked boys by night.
As a kid, Eddie’d loved clowns and harlequins and jesters, the idea of playing dress-up and becoming someone else and something else. But it was just average role-playing and good fun, the sort of thing you let out at Halloween and locked away the rest of the year. That’s all it was. He was a normal boy. No obsessions, no compulsions. He collected baseball cards and Marvel superhero comic books. He was a boy scout and a damn good Little League pitcher. His old man had left when he was five, never to return, but Eddie lived with it and after awhile, he couldn’t even remember his father.
If life wasn’t good, then it was certainly livable.
Then one day, when he was ten, he’d been on his way home from over in Bethany. He had a big wad of gum in his mouth and as fate would have it, he’d grown tired of the taste and decided to spit it out. Right there on Locksley Avenue. He stepped off the curb and spat it out…right on the fender wall of the big black Chrysler driving by.
The car stopped.
So did Eddie.
The car was an older Chrysler Imperial hardtop, a black beauty. A big, boxy slab of Detroit steel like the sort of thing a gangster might drive or a TV cop. It sat there at the side of the road, idling, that big 440 under the hood purring like a tiger with a belly full of meat. It was a cool car. That’s what Eddie had thought, sounded like it had some real balls, could lay some real rubber. But as much as he liked street machines like that, he got a real bad feeling from it. Something in his guts clenched.
Time seemed to have slowed down and it was just him and that big black car. The street seemed empty, deserted. He wanted to run, knew he had better, yet he didn’t. And a voice, a scratchy, out-of-tune voice, said in his head: Well, now you’ve done it. You spit on that car and those guys in there aren’t going to like it much. Okay, you bought this one. Here’s your ride, sunshine. Here’s where you learn about the boogeyman?
“Hey, kid,” a guy in the front seat said in a nasal voice. “No, it’s okay, kid. I just want to talk to you.”
The guy doing the talking was behind the wheel, a little guy with bug eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, his thinning gray hair greased straight back.
“C’mere, kid.”
Something in Eddie was telling him to run like he’d never ran before, but he didn’t. He walked over to the car. There was a big guy in the passenger seat. He had a thick neck and a pockmarked face, eyes that were watery and gray.
Eddie swallowed something down. “I…I didn’t mean to spit on your car.”
Bug-eyes smiled and there was something wrong about that smile. A dead carp would smile up at you from a bucket like that…empty, lifeless. “Just an accident, eh, kid?”
“Sure.”
“We all have accidents, don’t we?”
“Sure.”
Bug-eyes kept smiling like he couldn’t stop. “See, this is an expensive car and we just can’t have kids spitting on it.”
“No, no…I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “I didn’t mean to.”
He felt trapped. Bug-eyes had a way of looking at you, making you feel like a fly stuck to one of those No-Pest Strips. You could buzz your wings and wriggle your legs, but you weren’t going anywhere. And something in his eyes told you that if you tried to get away, things could always get worse.
The other guy in the car still had not looked at Eddie. He was cracking shelled peanuts between his thumb and forefinger, chewing the nuts very slowly and deliberately.
“Denny?” Bug-eyes said. “Show our friend here about this car.”
“Listen, I’m sorry…”
Denny stepped out of the car, chewing nuts, his gray vapid eyes not even blinking. He smelled of oil and chemicals and leather. He was big and there were scars on his face like somebody had taken a knife after him.
“No, it’s okay, kid,” Bug-eyes said. “Denny won’t hurt you. He just wants to show you how expensive this car is. Go ahead, Denny, show him that back seat. Show him how it is back there.”
Denny opened the back door and motioned Eddie forward.
Eddie felt something sour bubble in his stomach, there was a tightness in his chest and a sharpness prodding at his bowels.
He approached the open back door like he was afraid it might take a bite out of him. He was too scared to run, too scared for everything. Anyway, he walked over there like he was walking up to an open casket. Denny was standing behind him by then and he could smell something coming off the man that wasn’t hair tonic or after shave lotion, but a smell that was cold and raw like thawing meat. And the back of the car, those dark leather seats…it smelled like blood in there, metallic and savage.
“See that upholstery, kid?” Bug-eyes said. “That’s real leather. Special ordered and all that. Now would you want some nothing punk kid spitting on those seats if they were yours?”
Eddie shook his head.
The streets were still deserted. Nobody was around. Not some kids rollerskating or some lady walking her dog or some guy strolling down the walks from work with a lunch pail in hand. Nobody, nothing. Everything was silent and deadly.
“Touch those seats, kid,” Bug-eyes said. “I want you to feel how expensive they are.”
“No…”
“I think you should. Denny? Do you think he should?”
“Yeah.”
“See, kid? We want you to do it,” Bug-eyes said and it was not a request. He wanted Eddie touching those seats and he was almost excited by the idea. His voice had gone high and wavering. “Touch ‘em, kid, touch those fucking seats. Put your hands on ‘em, that’s right, touch ‘em…run your fingers over that hide, real slow and easy-like…”
Eddie was trembling and sobbing because he knew where this was going. This was one of those educational movies the police showed at school, where some pervert offers a kid candy and that dumb kid gets in and nobody ever sees him again. That’s what was happening and Eddie was petrified. So he didn’t try to escape. He didn’t even fight when Denny pushed him into the back seat, jumped in with him and clamped a big, salty hand over his mouth.
“Don’t squirm, kid,” Bug-eyes told him. “Denny won’t hurt you…unless I tell him to. And if I tell him…you don’t want that do you?”
And that’s how Eddie’s first ten years of life were wiped out.
Denny stuck a rag over his mouth and there was a chemical on it. He fought, but soon enough he just fell into darkness.
When he woke, he was tied to a mattress in a cellar somewhere. The walls were moist and water was dripping. The rafters overhead were spun with ancient cobwebs. It smelled dank and dirty down there. But he wasn’t really scared until the door opened and the two clowns came in.
They called themselves Bobo and Ripples.
Bobo wore a baggy plaid costume with orange pom-poms down the front, his face painted a stark white. There were little tufts of red hair at his ears. Ripples wore lots of ruffles and ribbons, his face painted with an unhappy clown smirk. Ripples never talked, but Bobo did. He told Eddie all the things they were going to do to him. And true to his word, they did them. Sometimes they made him do things to them. Sometimes they took pictures. Eddie was down there for months and it was an obscene, vile existence.
Then one night they dumped him in a park over in Elmwood Hills and Bobo, smelling of greasepaint and body odor, told him, “If you tell, we’ll find you. And when we find you, we’ll peel your skin off and cut out your eyes and fuck your skull.”
And that’s how Eddie died.
After that, he was never the same. He laughed, but he did not smile. He spoke, but he did not emote. Something had dried up in him. He could no
longer feel. He was numb and frostbit and senseless. Sometimes he would cut himself with a razor or a shard of glass and he always bled, but he felt no pain. He felt nothing. Maybe a ten-year old boy had gotten into that car, but what was dumped in that park was just a shell, a rotting husk, something that had been eaten down to the skeleton. Maybe it looked like a boy, but inside there was just darkness and cobwebs and a dripping sound just like in the cellar.
That was how Grimshanks was born.
Because one day, feeling empty as always, Eddie had seen a clown on TV and that clown was him. After that, he thought about clowns and dreamed about clowns and slowly became a clown. Like Bobo and Ripples, he would dress up at night and paint his face. And when you did that, you were someone else. You were Grimshanks. Sure, you could be a buffoon and work the kiddie parties and then at night, you could hunt boys. Boys that willingly got into cars. Boys that needed to be taught a lesson.
But that was all Grimshanks’ doing.
You could not truly be blamed if he got a little out of hand from time to time. If sometimes he taught boys lessons and buried what remained of them in the cellars of abandoned buildings. That was his fault.
By the time Eddie/Grimshanks was thirty, he’d taught six boys a lesson. The first one he’d dumped in the Black River. The others in cellars. Sometimes he dismembered them and sometimes he kept his favorite parts. Then one day, they down-sized him at Stenig and Weinberg. But that was all a lie. They had seen the pictures on his laptop and they hadn’t liked those pictures.
So they fired him.
When he left the office that last, fateful day, nobody would look at him and those few that did eyed him like something offensive and skittering they wanted to crush under their shoes.
So that night, out of frustration and anger, Grimshanks in full costume?he had to be in full costume, otherwise he was just Eddie and Eddie was cowardly and frightened?picked up a teenage boy on Angel Street, just off the University. That boy had gotten into his car, thought the clown thing was funny. Kept thinking it was funny until old Grimshanks pulled into that dark alley and started doing those silly things to him, took out his party favors and told that boy what he was going to do with him. But that boy was smart. When Grimshanks got him pinned down, he jabbed his thumbs into Grimshanks’ eyes and got away.
After that, Eddie just died away completely. In fact, he hadn’t really been alive in countless years. But that boy went to the police and then Grimshanks had to be real careful because the police were watching for him. They’d already figured out the funny clown angle from the greasepaint smudges he left on the remains of his victims.
So Grimshanks became clever.
He rented a ratty, cold water flat down by the river in Bethany where people never asked questions. In that neighborhood, they sold things and bought things, but never questioned. But even so, Grimshanks came up with a real lark of an idea. During the day, he dressed up as a guy named Eddie that he had made up out of thin air…but at night? At night, Grimshanks slithered out in full costume to slake his hunger.
Because Grimshanks was always hungry.
Then the flooding started.
There were police in the streets, frequenting those dead-ends of Bethany they normally did not go to. After two nights of being locked in that smelling, fly-specked room, Grimshanks decided to play a trick on those police who kept knocking at the door. He tied a noose and slipped it around his throat and it was all merry fun. He tied the other end of the rope around a light fixture overhead, got up on a stool and jumped off.
But no one ever found him.
For within days, Bethany was flooded and by the end of the week, Grimshanks’ basement flat was underwater and poor old Grimshanks just floated around down there with that noose around his throat, drifting in the dark, filthy waters, bloating up and blackening. Things nibbled on him and other things tunneled into him and it was no fun at all.
Then, after many days of this, something in the water activated something in Grimshanks. He started to move and his white clown fingers began to tremble. And in that grinning, distended face, two dead yellow eyes opened.
And the fun began again.
29
About ten minutes after Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle went down the block to Wanda Sepperley’s place, Lily felt it growing in her as perhaps it had been growing all day. A secret garden of dread that she tended and tended alone with cold fingers, one that she seeded and nurtured, was about to bring to blossom, feeding it with her pain and watering it with the sap of her soul which now ran as cold and poisoned as the drainage from a coffin. But it belonged to her and she coveted it and no eyes would look upon it and no mind could hope to divine its dark mystery.
None but her own.
The ice cream made and stored now in its wooden bucket down in the cellar freezer, there was nothing but waiting and listening and wondering. Rita Zirblanski was sleeping on the couch, oblivious to all. Her sister, Rhonda, lounged in a chair staring intently at a guttering candle. And Lily? Lily waited without knowing exactly what for, but certain that when the time came, when her garden brought forth vibrant and morose flower, that she would know it and recognize it as such. But until then there was the grayness of that sodden night, the exhalation of the diseased wind against the house, and silence that whispered dire things in the back of her mind.
Lily sat up in her rocking chair suddenly. She cocked her head, a thin smile spreading over her lips which were as colorless as her face now.
Rhonda studied her in the shifting orange light. “What…what’s the matter, Mrs. Barron?”
Lily brushed trembling fingers over her face, amazed, it seemed, by the chill of her flesh and its creeping dampness. “I…I thought I heard someone…”
Rhonda sat up. “Outside?”
But Lily shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
Rhonda looked towards the curtained window. “Was it…Mr. Barron?”
Lily shook her head. “I thought…I thought I heard someone call my name.”
Rhonda stared at her, as if maybe seeing her for the first time. Although she had always liked Lily, there were things about her now that were disturbing. She had always been a woman that walked tall and proud and fine, but now she was hunched-over and weak and contaminated like a dirty millpond. No, not physically. Maybe mentally and maybe psychically, but surely spiritually. There was something coming off Lily Barron, a hot and sour smell like rotting flowers or maybe a dank smell of sweating subterranean concrete…regardless, you could only truly smell it with your mind, but the odor was appalling.
Rhonda, like Rita, did not scare easily, but Lily scared her now. Disturbed her, unsettled her.
Lily stood up, cocking her head again like a puppy sensing its master’s approach. “It’s so quiet…I keep thinking somebody’s whispering my name. You’re not doing that are you?” But before Rhonda could answer, Lily just shook her head. “No, it wasn’t you…maybe it was someone else.”
Rhonda wanted to say something but there was nothing to say.
Lily walked to the window and drew the curtains aside, stared out the window, saw her own ghostly reflection, the rushing sea of Crandon beyond. “The water is up by the porch now and it’s still rising. By morning, it’ll climb the steps…and by tomorrow sundown? It’ll be coming into the house, flooding and drowning and washing away everything. Sinking the neighborhood, this house like a ship, pulling it down into weedy, slimy places. It’ll be dark and muddy down there, Rhonda. Things will skitter and things will crawl…but we won’t be alone down there. There’ll be others down there, people we know and people we miss. They’ll hold our hands and tell us things…down below…then we can drift with them in the hollows and sluices and watery places where things float and bob and call us by name…”
Rhonda was staring at her with wide, white eyes now. Those eyes did not blink. “Are…are you okay, Mrs. Barron?”
Lily nodded. “I’m fine. Maybe I’m tired and restless, I don’t know. God, I feel
like I’m in a cage in this house, don’t you? I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe I’m dreaming while I’m awake or maybe I just woke up in the middle of a dream.”
She looked out through the rain-spattered panes, saw the crawling shadows out there, the rain stippling the ever expanding dark pools which were swallowing the city. She saw the swirling tides and spinning eddies as the sea of gray water filled the streets and rushed over the lids of sewer gratings. Leaves and sticks floated, unnamable things which were dim and slow-turning. A wedge of moon tried desperately to break the black tapestry of clouds overhead, silvered light reflected off the murky waters. She saw a ripple out there, then another, a suggestion of movement beneath the leaves and silt.
“Is…is something out there?” Rhonda’s voice asked.
But Lily did not answer her.
She heard a splashing, saw waves of dark water crest into the yard, breaking uneasily over the base of the birdfeeder, making her dying beds of cowslip and goldenrod bob and sway like swamp lilies. She sensed, rather than saw, movement out there. Shadows that would not be still, but rose and fell and slithered away, tangling with the shadows of the huge oaks out there. She heard a splashing, dragging sound like someone stepping through the flooded yard, pushing mounds of wet leaves before them.
But she could see nothing, just a whisper of shadow that melted into the hedges and was consumed by itself.
“You should try to close your eyes for awhile,” she told Rhonda, looking away from the window only a moment. But when she turned back, she saw a spiraling shape rise up from the water. It stood there, staring up at the house with reflective eyes, something made of rags and leaves and draping shrouds. Then it sank back into the water.