Billy gripped the doorframe and swung himself into the kitchen, toward the phone mounted on the wall. The command from his father was his only thought. Call 9-1-1. Mom was hurt, Daddy would help her. Daddy would also stop the monster. It hurt him, but he could hear his father’s voice shouting downstairs, so he was alive and fighting the clown. He wouldn’t die. Mom wouldn’t die. His parents would always be there to protect him.
Call 9-1-1. That was Billy’s job. The kitchen was blessedly bright. He leaned against the wall beside the phone, for a terrible few seconds forgetting what it was he was supposed to do. Run outside, away from the house, after I call 9-1-1.
Billy reached for the handset of the phone on the wall. Gram Lucy had never owned a cell phone The autumn leaves swarmed back and over him. A whirlwind, like an entire tree had been lifted above him and shaken until every leaf fell free. They slapped against his face, arms and hands but he slapped back at them. They kept returning. He waved one arm back and forth in front of his face like a windshield wiper and reached with the other. A leaf fluttered into his mouth. He spit it out but another climbed in. Spitting and waving his left hand Billy’s right connected with the cordless phone in its wall cradle. The necklace was still wrapped around his fingers and he couldn’t get a grip on the handset, which finally fell, landing with a loud plastic crack at his feet. He shouted, “No, no!” into the maelstrom and dropped to his knees. The leaves leaped onto his back like a thousand tiny bats, covering him. He fumbled with both hands now, keeping his mouth closed tight and squinting his eyes, trying to ignore the scratches and slapping on his face and neck. Every time he reached with his right hand, the stupid necklace banged against the floor. He shook his hand but it never came free. No time. Fingers of both hands, opened and closed, finding only leaves, a chair leg, the phone!
He brought it to his face. He pressed the TALK button and heard the dial tone, as he whispered, “Please, please work, please work.” The numbers glowed. Billy made out the 9, pressed it, then the 1, pressed it once, twice. He tried to put it to his ear but the leaves slapped around it. A distant woman’s voice buzzed through the earpiece, then the phone was out of his hand. Like a mad flock of birds, the whirling leaves carried it away, letting it drop again with another clunk on the floor across the room.
When he reached for it again, something grabbed his ankle. His leg went numb, then was pulled out from under him.
“Billy,” the dead thing’s voice said. “Here you are, you naughty boy!” He landed on his side and twisted around, kicking out as hard as he could with his free leg. His bare foot hit something that felt like sticks in a paper bag. Through the fluttering leaves he saw the clown slide across the floor. Feeling returned immediately to his other leg, so he scurried away, crawling backward toward the outside door. The leaves rose like a swarm of bees, blocking the ceiling light and casting the room in a flickering underwater glow. Billy kept sliding backward. The back door, he thought. Escape. He turned around and rushed on hands and knees toward it, but more leaves covered the door handle. They would stop him, he knew that now, like they’d done when he tried to shut the basement door earlier. Keep him from escaping.
He turned around and pressed his back against the door. The legless, dried corpse of the bad clown from his nightmares lifted itself on its arms. It was close enough to simply reach out and grab him. Billy pulled his legs under himself and shouted, “Daddy!” but his voice was so weak. His father wouldn’t hear him because he was too busy helping Mom. They’re okay, he thought. They’re okay.
The clown’s face stretched, pulling the skin so tight it looked as if it would tear apart. It didn’t. Fingers scurried forward like pale spiders, then the arms pulled the rest of its body forward, a little more, a little more after that.
“There’s only one way to escape me, Billy, before it’s too late.”
The necklace was warm in his hand. He glanced down at it, then lifted it in front of his face. The chain, which had wrapped so tightly around his hand, loosened, then hung like a hypnotist’s watch.
“Billy…” the dead thing whispered. It was only a blur beyond the ball, the rings curving around Saturn, humming. Whispers, humming whispers. Some mental connection made—the necklace and the ball surrounded by rings. Rings. Billy, and Frodo Baggins the Hobbit. Billy had watched that long movie, remembered shouting into the pillow he’d held against his mouth at the long-awaited conclusion, telling Frodo to throw the ring into the volcano. But he hadn’t, had he?
The clown slid closer, whispered his name again. Heavy footfalls on the stairs. Daddy’s coming. Daddy will save me like he saved Mom. He thought this even as the magic necklace and its rings hummed a song of safety for him and his family. The clown reached out for his curling toes. Billy put the necklace over his head and let it drop.
The air was dark and clear. Not the burnt autumn smell, but cool summer green. Billy sat against a tree atop a soft bed of grass. The grass was damp, soaking into his pajama bottoms, but that was all right. This was right. This was a special place, where he was safe. The fact that a second earlier he was in his kitchen with a monster crawling toward him was a distant consideration, barely a thought.
The night wasn’t completely dark. The overhead stars were so bright, they illuminated everything in a soft glow. A tall shadow stood in the woods twenty yards across the clearing in front of him.
“That’s right, Billy,” his father said. Was that his father? It sounded a lot like him. The shadow moved from the trees.
Not his father. The bark of the tree behind Billy pressed into his back. His heart beat faster, the panic of moments ago finding purchase once again. The clown stepped into the clearing. He was tall, outfitted in baggy gray and white that glimmered in the starlight. The lips turned up in a smile within a dark crescent of makeup. Bushy hair poked from either side of an otherwise bald head, forming horns. Round red nose. When the man reached two white-gloved hands in his direction Billy feared those arms would stretch across the distance between them. The gloves only turned, palm-up.
“Welcome to my woods,” the clown said, in a voice so much like his father’s Billy stared harder to see if indeed it was his Dad behind all that frightening paint, “to our woods.” It stepped forward in shoes three times too big. Stepped again, and again, stopping only when it reached the center of the clearing.
“Your woods, now,” the clown added, tilting its palms toward him. Whispers from the trees, so soft that Billy thought at first it was only wind, but the voices grew louder, more urgent, like the leaves in the house, sometimes laughing, other times speaking in words he couldn’t quite make out, except that they were impatient. The sounds amplified and spread out behind the clown and finally took physical form as shapes moving past the deeper shadows of the woods beyond, moving into the clearing like a hunched pack of wolves. Billy made out no details except their egg-yellow eyes blinking from feral faces black as the rest of their bodies. Sometimes eyes blinked into existence from their shoulders and chests. So hard to tell. They formed up behind the clown like fog, but in outline only. Except the eyes, dozens or hundreds of them. The clown raised its arms to the shining stars and laughed, “Here at last! My heir, our salva—”
The shadows leaped onto the tall man’s shoulders, weighing him down though they looked no more substantial than the shadows they’d emerged from. Some wrapped around the backs of his legs. The clown’s laughter turned to screams as he fell beneath them, glee sharpened to terror. He spoke no more, too busy thrashing against the black tide. Between the dark bodies, Billy saw glimpses of the clown, his stomach ripped open, spilling a glistening black ooze—blood, he thought, it’s blood because they’re eating him—across the shiny outfit. When one of the shapes buried its snout into the belly and pulled free a long rope of intestine Billy screamed, too, and covered his face. This did not mask the sound of the slaughter, the wet ripping and slathering of a hundred black mouths. He realized he would not know if they turned his way, would have no chance to run if they did. He moved one hand aside, enough to see a large swatch of darkness break free of the pack. Twin yellow eyes glowed with a mad, animalistic frenzy. It stood there, staring at him, and Billy could sense something coming from it. Some kind of anticipation. As if the death of the clown in this place signaled the end of the old, and the beginning of the new. Billy was supposed to do something to acknowledge that.
The dark, feral thing moved closer, and Billy feared for his life again. It seemed about to leap, when something grabbed Billy from behind, reached around to grip the necklace around his throat and pulled. The chain dug like a blade into the flesh of his neck and then broke free, releasing him, and pulling him out of the dangerous place.
The kitchen flashed across his vision, bright, smelling of autumn leaves and dust. So dusty.
Dad stood over him, the necklace’s broken chain in his good hand. The other hand, bleeding from the wrist, hung by his side. The sphere and its orbiting rings slid free, clanged to the floor beside Billy’s bare feet. His father kicked it away. His eyes were wild with anger. That was good, right? Dad was beating the monster. His father’s arms and pajama pants were smeared in gray dust. Streaks of blood across his bare chest, spots dotting his cheeks. The blood is from the clown monster, Billy thought, Not Mom. Mom’s okay. Mom’s okay.
“Don’t you ever put that on again, Billy!”
Billy nodded, trying not to think how much that voice sounded like the clown’s in the other place. He raised both his arms to the sides of his head, pressed them against his ears while he watched his father turn back to the dead thing in the center of the kitchen. It looked different now, like an old dried out bag. The pick was buried in its back. One of the arms had been pulled free and lay curled around the leg of the kitchen table. Dad pounced onto the dead clown like the black monsters had done in the clearing and tore more pieces free, stomping on it with his feet, shouting things like, “No more, you’re dead! Stay dead! You killed her! You killed her! You’re dead! You killed her!”
His father’s words—You killed her!—played over and over in Billy’s head, filling him with cement. He couldn’t move. To lower his arms, to move a toe, would be to think about the words’ meaning. You killed her! No! Mom was okay. Everything would be okay.
Dad never stopped, not even when there was nothing under him but a smear of dust on the floor. Now and then he’d lean over, grab a previously discarded piece of the clown and rip and tear, as Billy watched, frozen. Then the house filled with blue and white lights, and, a little later, red lights too. Men came in, each with one hand on the butt of their guns just like the cops on TV. His father had his good hand open in their direction, to show he didn’t have a weapon, and he was pleading with them. Billy did not move. He watched everything like a statue. Everything would be okay. He knew that was true when one of the policemen ran downstairs, shouted for someone to get an ambulance. Why would they call an ambulance if his mother wasn’t going to be just fine?
The last he saw of his father that night, he was being dragged into the living room. In that final glimpse the man stared back into the kitchen and into Billy’s eyes, shouted his name, like the monster had done in the basement. But it was a different voice. This one belonged to his father.
Then he was gone and Billy tried to think of something to do, but his body wouldn’t move. He had to help his dad, somehow. Help his mom. Then it came to him, a snippet of memory. Gram Lucy. She would always do the same thing if there was a problem in the house. Billy could do what she did, and he would not have to move much at all.
A fat policeman—he had a gun, too, like the others—stepped around the stain on the kitchen floor and slowly knelt in front of Billy. He moved a hand between them like waving away smoke.
He whispered, “Son?”
Billy stared, then began to whisper Gram Lucy’s prayer, the Hail Mary, at least as much of it as he could remember. The policeman said, “What was that, son?”
Son? The word reverberated inside his skull, losing all meaning.
Over and over, Billy prayed. As long as he didn’t stop, everything would be all right. As long as he didn’t stop, the monster could never come back.