My search for Millie or any other member of my family ended in disaster. That story is basically done. What I want to do now is explain a few things. See, at first I thought I was looking for my sister just to see her and as I look back on this entire mess, I realize that there was more to it than that. I’ve been searching for Millie or Meaghan and I’ve also been searching for a way to keep Cecil Phelps.
Let me explain. Cecil died in a fire in Serenity Falls.
Cecil stayed dead. Cecil was a dreamer. He wanted to make his family proud and gain fame and fortune.
I don’t want those things. I don’t need those things and I don’t even aspire to them. They hold no special appeal for me. Not like they did for Cecil.
I think if I’d found Millie and had a real chance to say goodbye that maybe Cecil could have come back to stay instead of just visiting, but there’s nothing for him in this world. It’s too far removed from what he knew in the past. The circus isn’t the life it used to be and the only people he loved are gone.
I don’t need a family. I don’t even need friends. I have my values and I have the kids. Oh, I know, you can look at the things I’ve done and wonder how I could say a thing like that. But there are exceptions to every rule.
I do love children, and that’s the truth. I love to hear them laugh and to watch their eyes light up when they see a good magic trick. I love to see them smile and to watch them when they are happy.
And now and then I even like their parents. Only sometimes daddy says bad things and does worse, so I have to punish him. Now and then mommy thinks a drink of scotch is the bee’s knees and that her little ones can do just fine without her, so I test that theory. Occasionally, little Johnny decides to be a brat and so I have to punish him, or that nice Mr. Jones down the street does something to little Suzie that he shouldn’t and so I have to fix that, too.
There’s always a reason for what I do. Just don’t expect me to explain them all.
I’m a clown, and I like to make people smile.
And if I can’t make them smile, then I have to do other things to keep myself amused.
Cecil Phelps is dead.
My name is Rufo the Clown, and I believe in fixing the world one little step at a time.
Cecil mourned his sister and his parents and even his grandniece whom he never met.
Rufo doesn’t mourn anyone.
But now and then, Rufo gets even instead of getting angry.
The Carnivale de Fantastique caught my attention.
Killing my last kin caught my ire.
Payback, folks. I learned all about payback when I traveled with the Alexander Halston Carnival of the Fantastic. Only I have to say, in hindsight, I think Alex was a little kinder than me.
Michael stared at the special agents and shook his head. “You’re kidding me, right? This is a joke.”
Cantrell shook her head. “Nope. Completely serious.”
He looked from one undercover agent to the other again and again, waiting for one of them to crack a smile and give it up, but they were not smiling.
“Somebody killed two people and took Booker’s body?”
“That’s the way it looks.” King’s voice sounded dubious.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“If this was TV, I’d be calling on Scully and Mulder and this would be an X-File.” Cantrell crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “Nothing adds up.”
King came to the rescue before Carver was forced to ask for clarification. “Both bodies were badly mauled. Very badly. There are pieces missing.”
“Jesus.”
“There are also footprints leading away from the examination table. Bare, bloody footprints, complete with a toe tag.”
“Oh, bull shit!”
“Completely sincere, my man.” King held up a hand to God. “Got no reason to lie to you.”
“So this is still considered an open investigation?”
“Yep. And that means we still want you going to Philadelphia with us.”
“Yeah, well, I never unpacked, so that works for me.”
“Excellent.” Cantrell smiled as she stood up. “The troupe is already on their way, and we can meet up with them before the next show starts.” She fished in her pants pocket until she found her keys. “I’ll drive.”
“I need to get my stuff.”
“We’ll stop on the way.”
King chuckled and Cantrell shot him a murderous glare.
The man held up his arms in surrender and Carver watched them with no idea of exactly what was going on between the two of them. He’d figure it out as they went. In the meantime he had other places to be.
The breakfast spread was elaborate. There were pastries, urns of coffee, chafing dishes with scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon as well as biscuits and gravy. Enough food to feed easily thirty people and all of it set out for the members of the board and a small army of lawyers. Twelve people in all.
Almost everyone was there. Adam Salinger was having engine troubles, exactly as the clown had planned it.
Everyone else was eating, sitting down at the tables provided by the hotel in the private office that they had rented for the occasion. Absolutely no one was to disturb them for at least three hours, not even the hotel staff, because the nature of their discussions was sensitive to say the least.
Rufo the Clown stepped into the room with grease painted smile firmly in place, and an ax slung comfortably over his shoulder.
Eloise Fischer was the first to notice him. She stared for several seconds, her mind refusing to accept what she was staring at as surely as if a purple bear had tap danced into the place. The man was dressed in casual clothes, but his garish face, his blue hair and the ax certainly slid him away from the mundane category.
“Howdy, folks!” His voice was good-natured.
Eloise stood up, her mouthful of bacon forgotten and pointed at him. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “I was invited.”
“By who?” Her tone brooked no argument.
“Meaghan Phelps.” With that answer he swung the ax off his shoulder and drove it into the meaty neck of Richard Emery, the private investigator they’d hired to learn more about John Booker and anyone else who might be connected to the unexpected deaths.
Emery never even had a chance to scream before his life ended.
Eloise tried to scream, but as she drew in a deep breath for that exact purpose she sucked half-chewed bacon into her airway and started choking. The clown smiled in her direction and winked. “You wait right there. I’ll get to you, too.”
He hauled the ax out of Emery’s dead body and whipped it around with almost casual ease, a thick stream of crimson spraying the wall as he changed directions. Neil Porter had just stood up and was trying to get away from the madman when the ax drove into his upper back and the point of it burst through the front of his neatly pressed white shirt.
Paul Hammet, one of the sleaziest lawyers Eloise had ever met, tried for the door and the clown caught him, long elegant fingers hooking into the fatty jowls on the lawyer’s face and bringing him to a very abrupt halt.
Hammet tried to scream, but the sound was muffled. The clown shoved him backward and sent him crashing into the buffet table, spilling coffee, food and Sterno containers in the process. They got lucky: none of the jellied fuel cans caught the room on fire.
Hammet did not rise from where he had landed.
Chaos was the only word that came to mind as the rest of the people in the room tried to find a way out of the area as fast as humanly possible.
Eloise charged at the door with a lowered head, still coughing violently in an effort to clear her airway. The clown whipped a hand at her and a second after that she felt the throwing knife slam through the side of her neck. The blow was brutal, harsh enough to split her vertebrae and sever the spinal column. Eloise fell hard, slamming her face into the ground. The pain was a scintillating blast that flared and then vanished a moment later.
And after that, she lay still despite her best efforts to move.
The sounds continued for several more seconds, and more than once she saw a body fall at the edge of her vision. When silence reigned for a full minute she began to think that either she had gone deaf or the lunatic had departed the area. Neither proved to be the case.
The man in the clown face lifted her easily and moved her over to the table. He set her down and the table creaked threateningly under her weight.
“Now, see, I thought for sure you would be dead by now.” He smiled as he looked her over. “That’s okay, not much longer.” He moved and her head rolled to the side of its own volition. She wanted to move, but could not. That meant she got to see what he did to her long time friend Andy Finch, despite her prayers to the contrary.
The clown found his ax where he had left it buried in Porter, and hauled it free with a grunt. It took three swings to sever the head from the rest of the body.
When he was done and the stump was still bleeding freely, the clown grabbed a knife and started carving away at Andy’s face. Eloise cried, her mouth working, but very little sound coming from her throat. She was having trouble breathing, but couldn’t think of that as a bad thing as the clown-man turned Andy’s face toward her and showed her his workmanship.
“You know, when I was a kid we did this thing with potatoes, called potato stamping. I’ve kind of wondered if this would work.” He stared at her as he spoke, his mouth no longer smiling behind the blood red slash of makeup that made him grin just the same.
The clown looked at the wall that was currently covered with the charts Eloise had put up before the breakfast started and then dipped the freshly carved face into the pool of blood that flowed from the stump where the head had previously been attached.
Eloise tried to scream as he slammed the bloodied face into the chart and rolled the ruined head against the paper until he had left a bloody imprint. Potato stamp, indeed. She couldn’t gather up the breath to scream, nor could she force her lungs to work at breathing in or out.
When the print was done, the clown dropped Andy’s head and chuckled to himself. “Oh yes, I think I like it!”
He reached for Eloise and turned her head harshly to the left. Her mouth opened as the pain exploded in her neck. She was looking right at him when the knife came down and drove into her left eye socket, quickly, brutally cutting the organ free from her flesh. Oh, how she wanted to scream. Oh, how she wanted to die.
He finished cutting away the meat and viscera that were in his way in her left eye and commenced with the rest of the cutting. The man laughed and laughed again before he took the ax and ended her agonies.
And after that, Rufo the Clown worked on each of the heads available to him and used them exactly once. Then he settled back to wait.
Because he was hungry, he took a Danish from the tray that hadn’t fallen over and began to eat. And as he paused to chew, he contemplated what note to leave for his new special friend, Adam.
He crowed when the right message came to mind and then he wrote it in block letters across the wall, above the facial imprints.
Then he settled back to wait.
He couldn’t wait to see the expression on his buddy’s face.
Adam paid the cabbie and made sure to get a receipt. Taxes were a necessary evil and tax breaks were a force for good in his universe.
The car not starting had been a pain in the ass, but not the end of the world. He’d have been in much poorer spirits if he hadn’t spent the night getting to know Mary a lot better. She played a demonic seductress very well on stage and she fucked like an animal in real life. He’d already decided she would have a larger part next season, and that he would get an encore or two out of her before he told her she could have a larger part.
The performers had all left first thing in the morning and he’d stayed in her room long enough for one more quickie and then a shower. He wasn’t staying at the same hotel, but he’d planned on just driving back when he was finished. The rental car refused to start and he’d already called to bitch about the situation. They’d fix the matter in the next few hours and in the meantime he had a meeting to attend to.
He took his time riding up the elevator and swinging by his room before the meeting, because it wouldn’t do to come in to the meeting in the suit from the night before, especially since it now smelled very heavily of the rather exotic perfume that Mary overindulged in.
And then it was down to the meeting room, pleasantly relaxed and as ready for business as he ever would be.
Somebody had a very twisted sense of humor.
The words came into view one letter at a time but he processed the line quickly enough: GRAY SKIES ARE GONNA CLEAR UP….
And under those wet, red words, were a dozen wet, red smiley faces, each one with a happy grin and round, ragged eyes. Someone had been busy and had even painted teeth in some of the mouths. The details were lost in fuzz half the time, but they were there. He looked at the graffiti for several seconds, frowning and puzzled, before he noticed the first body.
He couldn’t see a head, just a body. There was blood all over the place, and the raw stump where the head should have been was a jagged, ragged mess.
“Oh God.” His stomach lurched hard to the left and Adam staggered forward, his traitorous eyes taking in the sights that would last with him for as long as he lived.
He found most of the heads in a pile. They’d been stacked together on a silver platter that was already holding a spread of pastries. Each face had been mutilated; the eyes cut away, the lips sliced off to make the smiling mouths on the faces he’d seen stamped on the walls. In every case the nose on the heads had been brutally mashed flat. The teeth he’d seen vaguely painted in place were real. That information alone made his ears ring with a high-pitched note. A severed lip hung on the edge of the table, bloodied and limp, a white slug with a trail of red.
“You get it?” The voice was the same one from the phone the night before. “‘Put on a happy face,’ get it? Isn’t that a hoot?” The man laughed as he walked forward, his hands holding the last head, the features too mutilated to let Adam even guess who it might have been. His face was hidden under clown makeup, only Adam could clearly see the mutilations along the too thin face. He looked almost as dead as the head he was casually tossing from hand to hand with a series of wet, meaty noises.
He tossed the head into the air, his hands soaked bloody red and the sleeves of his shirt washed in shades of crimson.
“I asked you a question last night, rube, and then I told you not to hang up on me.” All the cheer vanished from his voice as he spoke.
Adam started to run and saw the man throw his prize with a savage swing from the corner of his eye. He felt the head slam into his leg and knew before it happened that he was going down. Adam let out a shriek and crashed into the ground, his hands failing to catch him before he was sliding through coffee, pastries, eggs and blood.
His mind wanted to go completely blank, and his gag reflex kicked him in the guts and sent a dry heave through his entire body.
“Oh, oh dear Jesus.” He coughed and felt a cold saliva drool from his mouth as he looked down into the bloody froth he was laying in.
“What did I tell you? What did I say to you just last night, Adam? I told you to let me know where you hid my niece’s body! If you’d just opened your mouth and told me what I wanted, you could have avoided all of this!” The venom in the words was enough to make him shiver, even if the rest of the madness around him hadn’t been there.
Salinger opened his mouth and instead of words, gagged on the miasma that was still inches from his face.
“Get up!” The hand that lifted him from the ground was far too strong to be human. “Play time is done, Adam! I want to know where you buried Meaghan Phelps, and either you tell me now, or I swear what I do to you will make you scream for days and days and days!”
He looked at the clown, horrified to see that the thing looked even less alive than it had a moment before. The eyes were still blue, but buried deep in fleshless sockets and the gums had receded from the open mouth, the lips had withered and peeled back. There was a faint smell of old death on the thing that mingled with the coffee and blood and fresh murder to make a sickening scent.
Adam tried to answer, but when he opened his mouth to speak he vomited a thin stream of bile past his lips.
The clown monster hurled him across the room, smashing him into the stack of heads and then into at least two of the bodies tossed around like so much garbage.
“What the hell kind of man are you, Adam?” The voice was a dark rasp, a dry, lifeless thing. It mirrored the clown-corpse that stalked toward him, grinning twice over.
The hand that caught him was dry and leathery and oh, so hot. The face that loomed above him stared hard and then like magic a large blade blossomed from the other skeletal hand the thing held up.
“I’ll start with the toes, Adam. I’ll take them one at a time, peel the meat from the bones, do you understand me? One at a time until I have to work my way up your legs and then I’ll cut off your balls and keep going!”
“Nooooo! Please! Please!” Oh, how he cried. His tears came fast and hard and hot, furious, desperate pleas to save his life and his body from the bad thing leering down over him. He wet himself and wouldn’t have been shocked to shit himself, too.
The knife came down fast and slammed deep into the edge of the broken table that he’d landed on.
“Where…is…her…body?”
Adam spoke quickly, giving very detailed instructions on exactly where the body was buried, and how far the nightmare clown would have to dig. He cried throughout the entire process, having no doubt in his mind that he would die a horrible death as soon as he was done confessing.
Instead the clown stood up and calmly straightened out its clothes.
“I’m going to find her, Adam. If she’s not where you say she is, I’ll be back before the sun sets to kill you.” The face looked fleshier now, more alive. The twisted rage that had marked the features was faded as well, leaving a smile within a smile and cold glittering eyes that shone with amusement. “And Adam? Even if I DO find her body, that’s no guarantee that we’re done. You understand me? Do you get my meaning here?”
The man nodded silently and did his best not to cry anymore.
The clown moved, walking slowly away from him, not once bothering to look back.
Adam sat where he was for a long, long time, too weak and frightened to move. His heart hammered away inside his chest and adrenaline left him shaking.
When he finally stood up, the screams came out of him of their own volition. He couldn’t have stopped them if his life depended on it.
He was still screaming when management showed up, and when the police showed up not much later. He only stopped screaming when the sedatives were injected into his arm.