Clown in the Moonlight

by Tom Piccirilli

  "It isn't, but thanks."

  Grimm is shaggy-headed with thick glasses, morbidly obese, going maybe four hundred pounds, but he carries it pretty well like some fat guys do. He makes quick, sharp moves, light on his feet. He practically gambols around the place, making sure his friends and the coven members have everything they need.

  "You came with Mercy, right?" he asks.

  "Yes."

  "Her and the other two, you known them long?"

  "No, not long at all."

  "I can tell."

  "What do you mean? How?"

  He stares at me, openly puzzled but not hostile, the way most people get when you turn down their hospitality.

  "You're not like them."

  "What are they like?"

  "You'll find out soon enough. Just be careful."

  I genuinely appreciate his concern. I wonder if he really knows anything about them, or if word has just filtered down. He keeps to himself, away from his wife's coven, away from anyone who doesn't share his interests.

  He moves off to the kitchen and returns to the coven offering around drinks, chips and salsa. They ignore him, even his wife, the White Queen, all of them talking about drawing down the moon and finding the proper spells and rituals to appeal to the earth goddess.

  He changes the pornie anime tape again and puts in something else that seems to be just more of the same. The kids perk up some and laugh as demons with forked dicks chase virgins with big moist eyes through the streets of Tokyo.

  I drift. I brush shoulders. I smile at hot chicks and they sometimes smile back. They sometimes withdraw as if I'm holding a meat cleaver. I sit on a bottom stair and light a cigarette. A punk with peach fuzz bums one off me.

  The conversations are full of laughter and flirting. Occasionally there's a hard edge, someone who's pissed and trying to contain himself. It's always a nerd discussing comic books or sci-fi television shows. The sharp corners of his rage wear off quickly. He acquiesces. Maybe one superhero isn't necessarily that much better than another. Friends shake hands. Friends sip beer. Friends wallow in their latent homosexuality.

  Mercy is seated on the couch, sandwiched between Jenx and Kip, three peas in the coven pod. I don't know what their story was. I don't much care. Mercy catches my eye and waggles her fingers at me and makes a gesture that I took to mean she is nearly done listening to the White Queen discuss her ceremonies and great occult powers.

  Grimm climbs across the crowd to his recliner, sits for five minutes, and then climbs out again to take me on a tour of the house. He's distracted by me, curious about me, and possibly wary of me. He wants me to take his warning about mercy and her friends seriously. I'm thankful he's such a nice guy.

  I follow him around while he shows me his gun collection, his comic book collection, and his action figure collection. A lot of the toys are still in their packaging and he hands them to me beaming proudly, naming off Star Wars characters, superheroes, and robots out of classic science fiction movies.

  Some of them I recognize from the days when my father used to take my mother and me to the drive-in. Back then, he stewed in his own pain and regrets but it hadn't started to bleed out of him yet. He was still holding on, he was still a pretty good husband and father. He got excited by films and would sit hunched in the driver's seat, hugging a bowl of popcorn to him, the awkward metal speaker hanging on his half-rolled down window. He would turn to me in the backseat and ask if I was having fun. I'd nod. My mother would feign interest in the movie and laugh when my father laughed.

  I'm impressed by Grimm. I'm impressed with anyone who can keep hold of something–anything–for so long, even if they are only toys.

  "You sure I can't offer you anything?" he asks.

  "I'm fine."

  It annoys him a little. He's a good host and doesn't like that I'm not partaking of the goodies as much as I should. Everyone else is chowing down, liquoring up, snorting, smoking, toking, fooling around. His concentration coils around me.

  So I ask about the little Japanese teenie-boppers being sexually mishandled by mutants and monsters and he perks right back up.

  "The Japanese know what it's all about," Grimm tells me. "They understand that if you indulge in fantasy, you ease the psychic and carnal constraints on yourself. The more you're repressed and censored, like we are here in the US, the greater the pressure builds until you're acting out your most violent fantasies. You do the evil or perverse deed instead of just watching them in cartoons."

  He waits for my assent. I nod and give it to him.

  He strokes his shaggy beard down into a tight, sharp point. "It's why televangelists who are always preaching out against sex are the biggest deviants of all. They're forever being caught in truck stop bathrooms with tranny hookers and double handfuls of booze and stroke mags. What everybody else figures out at twelve these preachers can only obsess about until their brains and nuts overheat."

  It seems to make about as much sense for the way things are heading as anything else, so I just wag my chin in agreement with him.

  "There's something about you, man," he says.

  "What?"

  "I don't know. You just...you just..."

  "You want me to leave."

  "No, not at all. But I have a feeling about you. You know how there's people you're drawn to? That you want to be friends with? Or enemies with? For no reason you can understand? That's how I am with you." He smiles and chuckles uncomfortably. "Maybe this weed is making me paranoid or something. Usually doesn't happen, but...this night. It's a weird night, what they're planning to do."

  "The coven?"

  "Yeah, they got some kind of ritual that's going to start later. I don't get it all. But my wife. She can do it, you know."

  "Do what?"

  "Whatever she puts her mind to. Love spells, blessings, remove curses and change your bad luck. She takes pride in showing people the way."

  "The way toward what?"

  "The way. The right way. The way of positivity. Mercy and her friends, she welcomed them into her coven so she could...rehabilitate them."

  "Do you think that's possible?"

  "Yes. My wife is powerful. She's helped people toward the right-hand path before."

  "Mercy, Jenx, and Kip call themselves the New Knights of the Black Circle," I tell him. "Do you know that name?"

  "No. Should I?"

  I would ask him about Ricky, but everyone knows Ricky's name. He's become a cultural icon since his suicide. Parents use him as an example for why heavy metal music can kill. Sociologists publish volume after volume on his case history, proving the power of peer pressure and how kids can keep an awful secret from the authorities so long as they share it among themselves. Teens emulate him, they dedicate songs to him over the radio. Not just heavy metal demonic bullshit, but love ballads. Girls weep for him. They romanticize murder and suicide and insanity. They wear T-shirts proclaiming RICKY LIVES FOREVER. I know it's the truth.

  I nod again. I don't know what else to do. I wonder why a man married to a woman who could bless you and change your bad luck would need a case full of guns, but I guess that had more to do with throwing parties with pounds of coke on hand than white magic.

  "Is that what the coven's in there doing?" I ask. "Changing people's luck? Sending out positive energy to grace everybody?"

  "Not yet. Maybe tonight. I'm not part of the coven, I don't partake in the rituals. But sometimes evil forces try to disturb the white magic, and I'm on hand to make sure that doesn't happen."

  "Are those evil forces susceptible to a snub .38 or a 12-gauge?"

  "Most things are," he says, and hits me with a leer.

  Most things aren't, but there's no point in arguing. He moves back to his recliner and talks to the nerds and I wander around the party a little more.

  From another room I gaze over the tops of heads and watch the gathered coven. They're a goofy looking bunch circling the White Queen, making little signs and gestures, spelling words in the air
, waving holy plants about. I catch the scent of holly and mint.

  They hold hands and chant some kind of prayer or charm, and then the White Queen, all three hundred pounds of her, hugs each of the other members in turn. She blesses them. She points them toward positivity and love.

  Mercy makes a beeline for me. She slides up close again. She has no understanding of personal space and makes sure she rubs against me, hard and sexual, pressing her chest to mine, her lips only three inches away from mine when she speaks. She rubs the back of her knuckles against the side of my face, a gentle, soft, meaningless demonstration that makes me want to shut my eyes and let out a quiet groan.

  I have been lonely these last two years. Without Linda, without Gwen, without Ricky. I stand before my mother's grave in my solitude and desolation and ask her for advice and guidance. Sometimes I hear her voice, and sometimes I don't.

  "We're going to perform a ceremony tonight," Mercy says. She knows how ridiculous it sounds coming from her, and she can't keep a girlish giggle from fluttering free. I know it's the laugh she lets loose when she thinks of garroting boys with the razor wire wreathed in her hair.

  "What kind?" I ask.

  "A purification rite."

  "That sounds...righteous."

  "Oh it is," she assures me, her breath cool against my five o'clock shadow. "It certainly is." Then she puts her lips to my ear and whispers, "But I think there might be some sex magic to it." She wags her eyebrows and hits me with a sloe-eyed gleam while I wonder how different sex magic might be from the regular thing. "And some blood sacrifice."

  "Sacrifice," I repeat. It's a word that holds more power than she'll ever understand. I can feel the depths of the ocean stir at the sound of it. The trees around the hospital sway with its understanding.

  Mercy takes no notice. "Out there in the pines under the moon."

  Out there in the pines under the moon, where the shadows crawl, and Ricky still keeps watch. I think of the ancient cemeteries hidden beneath the floor of the forest, the hidden stones bearing names of colonists who'd died of cholera or yellow fever centuries ago. Or the mass graves in potters' fields where they buried the corpses of the patients, dead from too much electroshock, drowned in the hydrotherapy tubs, raped, impregnated by doctors, victim piled on top of victim in cardboard coffins.

  "You people certainly know how to throw a party."

  "It's not a joke, you know. Not to them. Especially Kip. He's been seriously into this for months."

  "And you? Is it a joke to you?"

  She just hits me with the grin again, eases up closer, and throws a leg around mine. Some of the nerds perk up and check out her ass. I stand my ground as she slithers around me like the serpent across the branch of the tree of knowledge. The symbols of our lives are everywhere you look. They find us no matter what we do or where we hide. She nips at my throat. She catches a vein between her teeth and licks and sucks.

  I glance over at Kip, who's reading through papers covered with symbols, discussing them with the White Queen. They seem to be on the verge of an argument. His shoulders are hunched, his eyes ablaze. He's a little heated as the White Queen points at the instructions and tries to explain them to her own satisfaction. She smiles through it all even while Kip grimaces. Her understanding only angers him more.

  Jenks has moved off from the group and sips from a bottle of Jameson's, snickering to himself. I can tell by his expression that he wants to cut something. A stray dog, a person walking by in a crowd. He wants to see blood run. In a pinch he'll bleed himself, just to see the coursing red. His gaze flicks here and there. It finally meets mine. His sneer solidifies. He likes seeing Mercy working me in the corner, up against the wall.

  "This blood sacrifice," I say. "You talking about chasing down bunnies or something a little bigger?"

  Mercy gives me a final love bite. It hurts. It arouses me. I think of Linda and Gwen and all our scars. Mercy raises her lovely face to me, her features highlighted by all that black makeup set against her wondrously white skin. The razor wreath wound in her hair flashes with reflections of the lights and television.

  She condescends and tells me, "Probably something bigger."

  "You're not going to let Kip try to reach into his secret pocket for his butterfly blade and slash open my carotid, are you?"

  She titters at that. It's the kind of titter that originally sounds adorable the first couple times you hear it, but eventually makes you want to puke.

  "That's not for me to decide," Mercy said, "it's for you. How badly do you want to live?"

  "Good question."

  "Is it?"

  "It is. Do you have an answer?"

  "I was asking you."

  Still grinning, so close that her lips land on mine from time to time as she speaks, she moves her hand to my groin. She rubs and finds me already hard. She smiles and it's her first real smile since I've met her. She's proud of making me want. Our mouths brush together. The feel of her moist breath on my face is starting to make me a little high. It's a good feeling, one I haven't had in a long while.

  "I want to live more at certain times of the day than others," I admit.

  "How about now?"

  "I'm holding out a little hope that the night might turn out to be a memorable one."

  "So, you feel like being bathed in moonlight and getting laid?"

  I picture her bathed in moonlight, naked, dancing, out in the woods, with the night birds in the tree tops, the coven writhing around us, and I feel like getting laid.

  "Sure."

  She asks, "Are you everything I need?"

  3.

  Of course I'm not. I'm not everything that anybody needs. I'm nothing that anybody needs. The last time I visited Linda on the coma ward I said it to her. I told her to let me go. The machines rasped and blinked and keened in response. I hid in shadow while the night nurses went on about their business. One of them, a cute little Filipino, got some action off one of the oncologists. They did it out in the open, in a free bed on the ward, in front of the eyes of more than a dozen patients frozen in time, trapped between their first and last breaths. At two in the morning Gwen turned up. I don't know how she sneaked in, or why, but she sat beside Linda in the dim room and held her hand. She said nothing at first, and did nothing, except let out quiet, tormented sobs.

  Gwen had changed a great deal since the night on the beach, in the graveyard hidden by sand and sawgrass, and Ricky's boys threw her at the bottom of the pit. With Ricky dead his influence has lessened. She was more demure, more caring, full of deeper regrets and fears. She attended college and went to church every week.

  I watched from the shadows and wondered if she was better off now, wearing sweaters buttoned to the top button, her hair pulled back, her face a little plainer without makeup. She wasn't dead and a lot of other people were. She lived through an experience that would have killed many others.

  I wanted to talk to her, but there wasn't much point. I would've only frightened her. I would've only scared her off, and she was already scared enough. I couldn't offer any kindnesses, especially after the two nights we shared. One in bed, one in the pit. One proved rage, one proved life. I wondered what she confessed to the priests, how much she'd said aloud. If she'd told the truth the Vatican would have sent word to have her exorcized, ostracized, ex-communicated. They would've huffed incense and hurled holy water in her face.

  She murmured to Linda as the machines beeped and hummed in tune with our hearts.

  "It's time to wake up. It's time that you heard me say how sorry I am for everything that happened. You're my best friend. You're my only friend. I can't go on any farther without you. I need you here."

  She washed Linda's face down with a kerchief dipped in ice water.

  I sent my will into the machines so I could live inside Linda's lungs. I was the blood beating in and out of her circulatory system. I was her brain wave activity, her mired memories, her stardancer fantasies. I was sluggish. I slept.

  I
withdrew. Linda wasn't quite ready to awaken yet, but it would happen soon enough, so long as Gwen didn't quit on her. They both needed someone who had been to the same places, who'd been lured by the same black dream. They had shared love and blood. They had shared Ricky. They had shared me. They'd sipped on my rage and it had changed them as it had changed me.

  Baphomet had a long reach. So did Ricky. I could feel their presence drawing near once again. Gwen felt it too. She froze up and let out small sounds of anxiety. Ricky and the Devil waited for Linda the way they waited for everyone. They called to her across the dark oceans the same way that Gwen called to her from her bedside, begging her to return to life. Gwen wanted her friend back. Baphomet wanted his minion, his offering. I didn't know exactly what Ricky wanted, but he wanted the same thing from me.

  Gwen held Linda's hand up to her eyes, bathing her skin in tears. She whispered, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please wake up, please come back, I swear it'll be different this time. Come back to us. Come back to me, please."

  I could almost hear Ricky's insane laughter. So could Gwen.

  On a strap around her shoulder hung her handbag. She opened it and pulled out a nickel-plated snub-nose .32. She snapped open the cylinder and checked to see if it was loaded. All six chambers were full. She snapped it closed again and sat staring at the piece for a minute.

  The Filipino nurse was getting hammered again. This time in ICU down the hall. I could hear her whining moans and the groans of her lover, the Ecuadorian night janitor. They weren't going to make their rounds and stop Gwen.

  "I'm not going to let him do anything else to us," she said.

  She pointed the barrel at Linda's forehead.

  I moved from the shadows and presented myself. I snatched the gun from her hand. Gwen gasped and took in a deep breath, preparing to scream. I dipped down and muffled her shriek with a kiss. She shouted down my throat and inflated my lungs with her terror.

  I broke off and said, "It's all right, I'm here to help."

  Gwen backed away until she hit the windows. She stood silhouetted in the dim room ignited only by moonlight. The burning silver traced her form.