The ground swelled again, then finally burst upward as if releasing gas trapped in the earth. The crater left in its wake wasn’t large, just enough to fit the dirty, painted face pressing itself into the air. Edges of flaking white paint along the cheeks blended with the dirt surrounding it, and fragments of a blackened carpet fell away like a hood, every detail lost in the darkness of the basement. Some of the clown’s skull poked through its face, and the remaining flesh was torn and thin like wet tissue, preserved enough to retain only a semblance of the nightmare visage of Jacob Pallasso, nothing more. The red stains still spotting the thin lips and remnants of white on the exposed cheeks, were enough to remind one of the clown it once was. Eyes, long dead and yellow but preternaturally preserved by the necklace now discarded across the room, stared into the darkness. One long-dried cut of black tape curled over the left eye like a false lash. The creature that had been Jacob Pallasso sensed, more than heard, the couple’s whispered debate on the living room couch one floor above. This made it smile, though the act was less an expression than a quivering of tight flesh around the jaw. The face pressed farther from the gray mixture of dirt and rotted carpet. A chunk of concrete slid across its forehead, tearing loose a swath of tissue-thin skin. No blood, the body too long dried out, only the exposing of white bone. The eyes shifted, the leathery tongue licked shredded lips, and somehow it sensed the small bundle of boy sleeping in the smaller of the two bedrooms overhead.
The mouth twitched, opened to a crevice.
Billy, it whispered, or tried to. No sound, but something like breath escaped the lips, stale and rotted like garbage at the bottom of a dumpster. The single word drifted up as only a thought, seeking an audience. The utterance was followed by a small avalanche of gray soil when the face pushed up farther, squeezed itself slowly from the grave to expose more of the cheeks. The piece of concrete on its forehead fell away. When the mouth moved again, a clod of earth fell into it.
Billy, it silently repeated, pushing the dirt free with its tongue.