something whispers from within the shadows
first place - summer 2001

© 2000 Jack Fisher
All rights reserved.

"Don't fall asleep, little Alex, or I'll eat your face like a chicken."

It was the soft night breeze and the lapping of the curtains against his cheek that teased Alex asleep. The persistent screaming of the alarm clock prompted Alex's mother to go up to his room the next morning. She swung open the door, yelling.

"Dammit, Alex, you're not staying home to-"

And she fell to her knees, screaming.

It was the second week of chaos.

When Carl Fitzmorris, recently appointed chief of police for two months arrived on scene, he knew He was back. Photographers were bent over the body. They flashed pictures and walked away with their cameras buzzing. The entire playground was outlined with yellow police tape that flipped and vibrated in the wind. The body looked like it had been dropped from the sky where it landed on the white, dusty stones. Between the pop and flash of red-and-blue police strobes, Carl could see that a bouquet of flowers was planted in the center of the boy's face.

"Not again," he whispered.

Mothers from neighboring houses close to the community playground stood on their front lawns to see what all the commotion was about. When they hauled the boy out in a body bag, they fell to their knees and sobbed on their children's shoulders while others covered their mouths with a quivering hand, blinking away tears and praying.

"Who's doing this? Jesus Christ..." one of the Criminal Investigative agents mumbled, watching them load the body.

"I have no idea," Carl responded.

He lied.

Before Carl had a little belly, before he was married with two grown kids, he had a scarred past with the town of Stillwater Falls. He was fresh from the Academy, a probationary member. Scored a ninety-eight percent on his written entrance exam, one of the highest in the county. Just a month into service, he was partnered up with a portly officer twice his age—Ted Sims. Teddy, they called him. It was his first homicide—a back-up assistance—and, oddly enough, he remembered that shortly after the call was assigned that his body had intermittent periods of spasms. Nerves.

"They finally caught this one," Teddy said. "This crazy bastard hasn't been caught for months and they finally got him."

"What'd they get this one for?" Carl asked.

"Murder." Teddy flashed a quick glance at Carl. "A child killer."

"Shit."

"Yeah, well, he's in for it tonight, boy," Teddy said. "This one's something inhuman." He squinted. "Something unnatural."

"Like a ghost?"

"This one lured them like the Pied Piper. Fell off the train and rolled into town, I guess. Lured them kids right from their own backyards and lead them off into the woods..."

Carl's brow furrowed.

"There were the stories, you know? The stories told around campfires, stories written on bathroom walls about him. He was a goddamn urban legend. They say his father was a failed doctor with a wife dying of a heart condition ... they say that his father killed dozens in search of a heart to replace his wife's ticker until they finally got him. They jailed him and hauled his by-then dead wife to the morgue. No sign of the boy."

"How'd he get away?"

"Here's the sick part. They say his father hid the boy inside his mother's dead body and stitched him up inside her. And when her body was dropped off in the morgue, he split his way through her belly and took off into the woods."

"Some story," Carl said. He shook off a surge of the chills.

When they arrived on scene, Carl could see that they had someone pinned down near the edge of the woods in a cul-de-sac. An officer had his knee between the man's shoulder blades and a gun to his head while he fished for his handcuffs. Ted threw the car into park, swung open the door, and grunted as he hoisted himself out. "Wait a minute, Mike," he said, surveying the area.

"We're going to fix this crazy fuck right here. None of this cuffing and booking shit. This is it. Carl, pop the trunk and bring me the can of gasoline from in there." He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. The man they had apprehended was partially bald with bits of sparse pig hairs growing from his scalp. He was ill-kept and unshaven with pure black eyes, deep doll's eyes. The other three officers watched, shaking their heads in disgust.

"Flip 'im over."

The man looked like a frightened rabbit. He had pissed himself, and, when the breeze picked up a bit, revealed that he'd perhaps defecated himself as well. Most of his upper teeth were missing and his fat, wet lips trembled. What bothered Teddy was the fact that the bastard never talked. Not even a whimper. Just shook violently.

Carl came over with the can. His stomach flurried.

"This man killed eight kids, men," said Teddy, unscrewing the cap off the gasoline can. He took a long drag on his cigarette. "Child killers don't deserve to live."

"Do it," one of the cops mumbled. "Burn him!" Teddy motioned for everyone to stand back. Teddy started blessing him with the gasoline, getting him good and soaked. And when the can was empty, he flicked his cigarette at the killer's face.

"Holy shit," Carl said. The six of them stood and watched the body burn until the skin flaked like hot cinders.

Susan, the only surviving child, spoke with a pad of paper and a pencil now. She drew the psychologist's pictures, pictures of circus people and flying acrobats on fire, flaming and rolling in the dirt with their hair and eyebrows glowing yellow, skin sloughing off their faces. She wrote a story in blue crayon once, which was read one night by the hospital staff after she fell asleep. It told the story of the clown man who did this terrible thing to her.

The clown man that ate her tongue.

People began turning to one another and pointing fingers. They were beginning to think that it was one of their own committing the heinous murders, because they couldn't come to grips with who, or what, could do such things. They had seen it all. Families started packing up their belongings and leaving. Tourists avoided Stillwater Falls and let their summer homes go vacant. The people were constantly on guard, calling the police for every little noise they heard at night, screaming at every shadow that moved.

"We have to put more men out on the streets at night, Phil!" Carl demanded. "Children are dying! There's a goddamn maniac out there and he has to be stopped! Now!"

"Dammit, Carl, I know that, but we need more summer dollars to keep these men on overtime. You know how goddamn hard it is!"

Carl opened his desk drawer, took out a manila envelope and threw it across the room at the sergeant.

"Phil, look at those pictures. Look at them! Crime scene photos, pictures of every murder that's taken place in the past two weeks."

Phil fingered through the stack. He stopped and pointed at one shot. "This one's still alive?"

"Susan Daily. Yanked from her bed through an open window. Her jaw was broken and her tongue severed. She managed to escape. How? I don't know. And you mean to tell me we can't get more summer dollars somehow? Look at that girl, for Christ's sake! Attacked!"

Carl was growing tired of playing petty policeman games. He had no choice but to believe that it was the same guy that his late partner torched twenty years ago.

"Mom, there's someone out there," said Christian Matthews.

"Someone out there?" his mother asked, rushing over to the back door. "Where?"

"Right there." He pointed to the tool shed. "He's behind the tool shed. See? He's in a costume!"

Terri Matthews called the police. They came and inspected the yard, looked under the crawl space with their flashlights, up in the trees, and underneath their cars.

Nothing.

The next morning, Mrs. Matthews was on the phone with the 911 operator again, screaming hysterically. She was hyperventilating and gagging on vomit. Christian Matthews was strung up like a dead sparrow against the wall of the tool shed with fishing line.

The clown's face looks like worms burrowed in and out of it. His burnt skin is pulled taut like a mask of thick, pink spider webs. His huge red mouth curves into a smile that meets his pure-white eyes. He wears a flamboyant, multi-colored vest that exposes his chest, which is nothing more than a rotten cage of bone and gray marrow. The clown cartwheels through the late Teddy Sims' bedroom window where his wife sleeps soundly. The cat sluices out of the room.

He lands as soft as a feather on the carpet and remains in a crouched position, flexing his fists and smiling. The clown, with its slick, greasy face and bulging white eyes, stands up. He bends over Ms. Sims and breathes in her dreams, tastes her nightmares. She twitches in her sleep. Before she can turn over, the clown withdraws the gleaming garden claw from behind his back—

And swings.

The doorbell rang.

When Carl opened the front door, a vase full of flowers—daisies and black-eyed susans—fell over.

"What the fuck—" His words trailed off as he inspected the yard, the empty streets. The vase rolled off the steps. The only sound was the wooden swing in his neighbor's backyard, which squeaked on phantom winds.

No one.

"Someone here?" he called, expecting no reply, of course.

That night, after Carl stepped out of the shower, there were letters traced on the bathroom mirror in the steam: COME AND GET ME, PIG BOY! The letters were crooked and they dripped like beads of running blood.

Something was in the cemetery digging in a crescent of hush shadows. A figure— dressed as a clown and as raw and stinking as the corpses around it—was exhuming a body. It dug wildly, dirt and pebbles flying, like a dog hiding a bone. It stopped for a moment; the dirt stopped falling ... and then it started again. And when it was done, there was a heap of moist soil that piled up next to a headstone that read:

And from within the unearthed grave, the clown giggled.

Carl couldn't think of a better place other than the schoolyard. It symbolized the clown-ghost and all that he had done in life and in death. Carl parked alongside the stone playground and turned off the little green Toyota. He opened the glove compartment, grabbed the small gold cross his mother had given him the day he graduated from the Academy, and slipped it into his pant pocket. Then he loaded the .45 caliber handgun. Whether or not a bullet could kill a ghost, he didn't know.

As Carl walked into the maze of playground equipment, he heard the sound of flags flapping on rain-smelling winds. His stomach flurried with anticipation and his heart beat like a bat's.

"Over here, Police Boy!" The clown's voice was girlish, giggly. He didn't sound like he was once a man, a man with thick, striated vocal cords and an Adam's apple. In actuality, they were burnt beyond recognition from when they lit him like a candle. His throat, instead, vibrated with loose bits of fire-eaten flesh, and when it giggled, small bubbles of ichor and mucus bubbled forth.

The M-shaped monkey bar set stood out like a giant spider with rusty, chipped legs. On top, in the center, sat the clown and next to him, the body of Theodore Sims. The same man who was once Carl's partner on the force, the man who thought he had closed this storybook twenty years ago.

Teddy sat upright, right there next to the clown like he was alive, fresh from the grave.

His eyes were wide—black, without a tinge of color—yet still wide and glistening, and his cheeks shown red, almost purple. One corner of his mouth hung lower than the other and there was a pencil-thin line of frayed blood coming from one of his nostrils.

Teddy spoke.

"Hey, Carl!" His voice buzzed. Carl stepped back. The gun nearly shook out of his hand and the clown smiled with its bright, grease-painted face cracking. Crumpled school papers and leaves scattered across the powdery stones.

"Oh..." Ted's face moved like it was being operated by remote control, like a robot. The clown had his hand up inside the rotting Ted Sims' body, right into his spinal column, and was working him like a puppet, like a ventriloquist's dummy. He paused.

"Don't worry, Carl; He just wants to kill you."

His other nostril began to bleed. The clown pulled his hand out of Teddy and it made a terrible squish-slosh like a shaken ice slurry. Ted's black, hollow eyes shut and he slumped forward.

The clown pushed him aside and got up, steadying himself on the bars. Carl half expected a searing heat or a robust wind when the clown rose, but instead what emanated from the maniac was so bitter, so cold, that he reached up to touch his nose to make sure it hadn't fallen off from frostbite.

He was alone with the creature. In the soft, metallic breeze the trees moaned and swayed.

The trees are screaming, thought Carl.

"You will be too," said the smiling clown with hideous eyes.

Carl, with the courage and stamina of his father, brought up the gun and shot at the burnt thing that stood ahead of him. The bullet absorbed in a polka dot on his rag tag attire. Another shot. Gone. After the second shot, Carl knew that bringing the .45 was futile.

The clown was an evil, so introverted in its own malice and misshapen history, that it delighted in Carl's meek attempts at killing it. It giggled. Cackled. For a moment, it almost seemed funny to Carl; he almost laughed to himself, listening to the giddy giggles of this crazed freak, but his face was paralyzed with fear. He hadn't that many bullets left in his gun.

The clown stood there, towering above Carl in the distance with its brightly colored garments fluttering and snapping in the wind.

Briefly, Carl was going to turn and run, pray that the clown didn't tackle him from behind. An image of it knocking him down and tearing out his throat changed his mind. It'd be like running from a vicious dog—a mad dog senses fear and a run provokes an attack.

Just when Carl was ready to empty the chamber of his gun right dead center in the clown's maddening face, it took on a whole different form, a different shape.

Its eyes lolled and rolled around in its head, and then they fell out of his face and hung on strings of muscle. They spun and expanded, spread apart and then back together again. Its limbs became hideous extensions of charred flesh, burnt and dripping skin. The smell that wafted on newly stirred storm winds seared Carl's nose hairs.

As the clown mutated, it growled.

"You pigs burnt me!" Its voice became watery. "And now you're fucking deeeead!"

Carl fell backwards. His gun went flying and lodged in the stones. He rolled over and clambered to get up, spitting and whimpering.

Parallel to the school, set back some in the distance. stood a church with thorny features, delicious stained glass floor-to-ceiling windows, lightening rod spires, exquisite and intricate buttresses. From atop this holy domain stood a bell tower constructed of brick and mortar.

The rain came and it slowly washed away the bright colorfulness of the clown, exposing his true self. The clown leapt from off the top of the monkey bars and floated down to the stone like a leaf.

As the rain fell harder, the church bell began to toll. The gong reverberated across town, echoing through the forests and frightening flocks of crows from the eaves.

The clown looked nothing like a clown except for its silk, fluorescent yellow rag-tag. Instead, it looked like it had been deep-fried in hot oil. It was hairless, its entire nose was missing, exposing septum and bone. Its skin was the color of mud. Some areas were blacker than others. His ear lobes were crisp and curled up like the tips of an elf's shoe. There were sharp, spiny ridges along the scalp where the fire was the hottest. Clusters of bead-sized pustules released steam on its face.

Carl wished he'd never been born.

The church bell gonged louder and faster.

Carl managed to stand and stagger over to where the gun had landed. For a second, he caught a glimpse of Teddy's body. It had fallen face-first into the ground and his limbs were twisted in all unnatural positions, and Carl noticed the crimson flow from his back.

The clown cackled dementedly. Its tongue hung down to its waist and twitched, lips curled back to its ear nodules. Carl grabbed the gun, cocked the hammer, aimed, and fired right into the clown's face.

The bullet jolted its head back, entered one eye and exited out the back of the head. It startled the clown at first and took him aback. He stumbled and regained his step.

"...dead," the clown salivated.

Gong ... gong .... gong .... gong.

As the clown came closer, Carl could feel the heat. The berries on the holly trees burst in unison and the leaves burst into flames. "The wind grew stronger and the rain came sideways. Carl was numb. He didn’t know how many bullets were left.

He fired a shot through the throat. The clown's face bubbled out and then in again, stretching and changing colors. Carl fired again.

Nothing.

Empty.

The fire within the clown's night-colored eyes began to kindle and spire.

"Shit!" Carl threw the gun at him. He turned to run and the clown tore him back, smashing him against the ground. The clown straddled over him, its rough, uneven fingers wrapping around Carl's throat.

Gong ... gong ... gong.

The clown's eyes swirled all the colors of madness, and it delighted in seeing Carl gasp for air. He clawed at his pants until his fingernails bled, desperately trying to get the cross. The clown lifted him up by the throat and smashed his head into the ground. Dizzy and ready to burst, Carl singed the bastard's forehead with the crucifix. It sizzled like fried lard. The clown released its grip from around Carl's neck and fell back, screaming and tearing at its face. Carl kicked him back and pinned him down. He held the cross to its head until it burned a hole right through.

Gong....

The clown rolled and flailed. Its jaw fell off as sparks burst from the crucifix-shaped hole in its head. Its tongue flickered and flapped up and down as its body convulsed and seized in the downpour of rain. Lightning cracked and illuminated the town, turning everything into skeletons for a moment.

Carl fell back, rubbing his throat and choking for air with his eyes winced shut against the noise. When Carl was able to breath again, all that was left of the maniac was a smoldering mess of yellow silk, pom-poms, and bone.

The church was empty. Yellow candles flickered in absent winds. Carl knelt before the orchid-laden altar and made the sign of the cross. He remained there for hours, soaking wet and praying. Lightning continued to flash outside and the stained-glass windows cast broken shadows across the pews. Just as Carl was about to get up and leave, a little boy who was no more than eleven stepped out from one of the side candle rooms, as silent as a ghost. He stood there without blinking, without moving. Carl was going to say something, but instead he felt faint. He slowly blinked his heavy, swollen eyes—

And the boy was gone.

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