Curse Of The Clown Read online

  ‘Fine. If you’re going to take out someone else, you can start with me, midget boy,’ said Barney.

  There was no derision in his tone. He wasn’t mocking him, he wasn’t trying to wind him up, he wasn’t trying to get him to make a mistake. This was just Barney’s life. Here was Barney, and here was a serial killer, and something would happen, and then something else would happen, and life would continue until there was nothing else left.

  ‘Really, who are you?’ asked Monk.

  She was poised, ready to throw herself between Barney and the coming attack, but if she could delay that attack, she would.

  ‘He’s Norman’s twin,’ said Sophia from behind.

  She was now a few yards away, standing against the wall, Keanu between her and the killer.

  ‘Ha!’ barked the Klown

  ‘Norman’s runt twin,’ said Sophia.

  ‘Really?’ said Keanu, and he looked at Barney. ‘Holy shit! Couldn’t have written this better myself. Does this mean there’s going to be a dinosaur in the next scene?’

  ‘Shut up!’ snarled the Klown.

  ‘A runt twin poisoned dwarf,’ said Keanu. ‘Like, oh my God!’

  ‘I’m not a fucking dwarf, you fuck!’ screamed the Klown.

  ‘So, what happened here?’ asked Monk. Her voice was level, questioning, trying to keep the narcissistic sociopath talking. Usually not difficult, but this narcissist was about to explode. And he had a razor. And skills.

  ‘Ha!’ barked the Klown. ‘Intending to keep me talking until the police arrive. Classic, stereotypical, unimaginative cop. Too scared to do anything off her own back, despite the numbers differential, waiting for the arrival of a SWAT team that will never come.’

  ‘If you’re going to kill us all,’ said Monk, not reacting to his tone, ‘you might as well fill us in on the details first.’

  ‘Why?’ scorned the Klown. ‘You think I gave Romney the details? Or that prick Jones? You think I gave that stupid little boy Norman all the details?’

  ‘Yet you’re doing Norman’s work for him?’

  ‘Someone had to!’

  ‘No they didn’t,’ said Monk. ‘No one had to kill Romney. No one had to kill Jones, or any of the others.’

  ‘Norman was going to do something stupid,’ said the Klown.

  ‘Like what?’ said Monk, and now her tone changed a little, unable to keep it devoid of expression. ‘If he wasn’t going to kill anyone, why did you have to do it for him?’

  ‘Don’t you see? Don’t you see what it’s like for people like Norman and me? They called him Norman, our parents, they called him Norman,’ and he’d spat the word parents, ‘because out we popped, and he was normal. My dad even fucking told me that later, when he was drunk and pissed off at me one night. Normal Norman, that’s what they called him. The normal newborn, against the runt of the litter. And all our lives we’ve had the abuse, everywhere we go. Norman got it as much as I did, because we were twins. Norman... he could never cope. Didn’t know what to do about it, or how to fight it. And so he retreated into the pathetic, waste of a person, this bumbling barbershop buffoon that nobody wanted.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The Klown scowled. Around him everyone waited, none of the police even attempted a move to the door. The moment was trapped by itself, all of them waiting to hear the explanation, one ear listening for the sound of a helicopter, or a fleet of motorboats, the arrival of reinforcements.

  ‘I don’t have one,’ said the Klown.

  ‘What’s your name?’ repeated Monk.

  She wasn’t sure how it would come about, but there was a potential end to this scene where they weren’t all dead and the Klown had escaped, and she needed to find out as much about him as she could before that happened.

  ‘You know what they called me? You know? Child 2. How does that sound? The normal kid was called Norman, and I was Child 2. That was all the compassion they could bother tossing the way of the runt little bastard they didn’t want.’

  He angrily held Monk’s gaze through the dim light of the room, eyes glinting by the light of a host of mobile phones.

  ‘They died when we were thirteen,’ he said. ‘In a mysterious car accident. Such a shame. The police never did find out who tampered with the brakes.’ A beat. ‘Fuckers,’ he tagged on a second later, which could have been referring to his parents, the police, or the assembled company.

  ‘So, how did this play out then? What’s with the clown crap?’

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered the Klown. ‘Fuck it, what does it matter?’

  The words what does any of it matter repeated in Barney’s head.

  ‘What does any of it matter?’ continued the Klown on cue. ‘Norman saw The Joker. Seriously, that was it, that was the size of it. Started wearing face paint, imagining himself as this vengeful villain or some shit. I never saw that stupid movie, but that was Norman. Always pretending to be something he wasn’t. And he was such a goddam pussy, couldn’t follow through on any of it. All those plans... He was going to take so much revenge. He was going to wreak vengeance on so many. Someone had to do it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re brothers. We’re twins. Twins. We stick together, even if it was in mutual loathing.’

  ‘That’ll be why you just hung him from the roof,’ said Monk.

  ‘Brothers fall out sometimes,’ said the Klown. ‘I finally roped him in to it, finally got him to take some responsibility. We took out the old boss and those coppers together. But I could tell Norman didn’t have the stomach for it. Too weak. Too damned weak! He followed the girl down here. He was going to tell her everything, then he was going to turn himself in. I mean, what a clown.’ A beat. He cackled. ‘Clown, right?’

  ‘And now the helicopter’s coming, and your time’s up, genius,’ said Barney. ‘What’re you going to do now?’

  The Klown cocked his head to the side, listening to the sound of the night.

  Silence.

  ‘There is no helicopter,’ he said. ‘There’s just you lot and me, and either you’re all going to end up dead, or I’m going to end up dead.’ He paused, then said, ‘Let the challenge begin.’

  Barney lifted his right index finger. The just a moment gesture. The not so fast, the hang on a second.

  They stood in silence again, all of them, and now they could feel it. The vibrations carried in the air. From across the water it was coming, and it was not alone. Three helicopters, maybe four, maybe five. A phalanx.

  ‘Ha!’ barked the Klown.

  He looked quickly around the assembled crowd. The making of the calculations. How many could he kill? How much time did he have? What would the odds be once the reinforcements arrived, and how many of them could he take on?

  And on top of all that, there was the other question. The existential one.

  Did he care?

  He lowered his head and took another turn around the room. He recognised the look on their faces. The fear was gone. Here he was, a murderous, demonic fiend, his razor dripping with blood, scowling face twisted with hatred and contempt, head bent low, eyes staring up in a classic pose of monstrous menace, yet the threat was no more. They were looking at him with disdain. He had talked too much, the tall tale of terror had been tainted. Now they would not be such willing victims.

  ‘Like I said before,’ said Solomon, stepping forward in front of Monk as the sound of the helicopters grew, the vibrations beginning to hit the windows, ‘you’re under arrest, Oompa Loompa Boy.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ shouted the Klown. A last look around the crowd, his eyes finally settled on Sophia, he narrowed his eyes and said, ‘I’ll be back, my pretty,’ and then he turned to the window.

  One step, two steps, and he leapt towards it. Keanu, alive to the threat, to the fear of the Klown’s haunting return, dived after him, to Sophia’s shout of, ‘No!’

  The Klown crashed through the window, arms up in front of his face. At the instant he hit the glass, about to start his short des
cent, Keanu swung a hand at him, catching him hard on the right ankle.

  The Klown’s clean jump through the window was interrupted. His foot snagged on glass, his momentum was taken to the right, his shoulder and head banged the side of the window, and now when he fell it was uncontrolled, arms flailing, legs frantically pedaling air.

  He hit the ground head first with such force his skull exploded. Only Keanu, who got to the window just in time, and old man Walker, who’d been standing beside the other window, saw the second of impact.

  ‘Holy fuck!’ shouted Keanu, as the others rushed to the windows, huddling round, to see what had become of the Koiffing Klown.

  And there he was, down below, body inert, head splattered, blood and brains strewn around the pavement like throw-up fifty yards along the road from a kebab shop first thing on a Sunday morning.

  40

  The Alanis Situation

  The sun will always come up, and so it did the following morning. Clouds chased on a fresh breeze, the blue sky decorated with flitting cumulous not bothering to hang around over the islands as they hurtled east, the cold sea burbled and spat, white waves broke on the rocks.

  A regular, sleepy November morning in Millport, with the exception of the enormous police presence, the cordon along Stuart Street in front of the Covenanter’s Head, the broken window on the first floor, and the tent around the entrance and covering the spot on the pavement where the Koiffing Klown had met his crushing end.

  In the square by the George at the bottom of Cardiff Street, where the buses turned, there remained two police helicopters.

  At the edge of the police cordon at that end, Big Alec Wendelbaum had brought over his ice cream van from Largs, and was parked in the midst of the crowd of spectators, doing unusually good business for this time of year. Ten yards from the cordon at the other end, was the door to the Millport barbershop, where perfectly regular Wednesday morning business was currently underway. Igor was sweeping up, Barney and Keanu were cutting hair, customers were waiting expectantly in line, eager to hear more details of the big story from the night before.

  Evil Dwarf Head Splat Dent To Tory Leadership Bid read the headline in the Times, although the paper had been dumped unread at the side of the customer bench.

  ‘So, I heard you literally killed this dwarf character single handed,’ said Keanu’s customer, Old Man Threadbare, whose hair was threadbare by nature. It was currently being coiffed into a perfect Gregor Fisher Hamlet.

  ‘No,’ said Keanu, ‘that didn’t happen.’

  His voice was subdued. Under other circumstances, Keanu might have been quite chipper about the unusual and exciting turn of events enlivening a Millport evening, but ultimately he had played his part in someone’s death. The death may have happened to a renegade, evil psychopath, resulting in literally everyone else on planet earth being safer, but death is as death does, and Keanu was in no mood to celebrate his intervention in events.

  ‘I heard you tangled up his limbs with nunchucks,’ said one of the customers on the bench, ‘before decapitating him with a fifteenth century Samurai sword you’ve kept in your bedroom since the time you trained for five years under the Japanese assassin Hirokami.’

  ‘Nah,’ said the next customer along, ‘that’s all to cock. The midget had a gun, Keanu leapt through the air doing some kind of Kung Fu typa shit, kicked the gun out his hand, caught it on the way down, then blasted the guy in the head from two feet, and his head literally exploded.’

  ‘Nah,’ said the next guy, ‘that wasn’t it. I’ve got it on good authority from someone who knows someone whose cousin is married to a guy who’s friends with a bloke who knows someone who was actually there, and they said Keanu literally crushed the guy’s skull with his thumbs, like the Mountain did to –’

  ‘Shut up!’ shouted Barney.

  Keanu started at the noise, and stood poised with his scissors hovering in the air, Igor stopped sweeping, and for a moment the shop was held in majestic, expectant anticipation, Barney staring angrily at the customers.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Barney, voice cold and angry. ‘It was none of them, none of those things.’ Another pause. ‘What is the matter with you people? You knew Maggie. You all knew her, I know you did... and she’s dead.’ Another pause, letting it sink in. Letting the shop know that majestic, expectant anticipation wasn’t really appropriate. ‘We didn’t know Norman, we didn’t know the killer, but that’s two more people who died. Six people died the night before last, another five in the days before that. And, really? This is what you want to do? Gossip, and cackle, and make up stories?

  ‘And if nothing else, it’s a police matter. Police business, under investigation. There’ll be inquiries, there’ll be God knows what going on, and so we can’t talk about it.’

  He looked harshly along the row, the men all now cowering before Barney’s wrath, as were the two customers in the chair.

  ‘I don’t want another word from any of you about the Klown, what happened last night, what happened at the weekend, or any of it.’ Another pause, then his voice dropped a little lower, slowing down. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

  Someone swallowed. No one said anything.

  Barney realised that he’d been brandishing the scissors towards them as a weapon, withdrew them, straightened up, allowed his face to soften, and looked around the shop.

  ‘Anyone got anything to say?’

  Silence.

  Barney gave them another moment, another stare or two, and then, with a snap of the fingers, the fight went out of him, the anger dissipated. His point had been made, the crowd had been silenced, the barbers could get back to business.

  He looked at Keanu and Igor, between them they shared the look of the fellow traveller, and they all returned to work.

  The clip of scissors, the steady, monotonous wielding of the brush, the quiet of a morning barbershop. Instantly, in the warmth of the room, Keanu’s customer’s head started to bob.

  Suddenly the door burst open, and Old Man McGuire came bundling in, looking around to see what was happening. As he closed the door, he seemed a little disappointed that everything looked much the same as usual.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘I heard Keanu eviscerated a satanic dwarf with a meat cleaver, before serving his head on a plate to the emperor king of a tribe of indigenous pigmy cannibals.’

  THE END OF A LONG DAY in the shop. Knowing it would likely be busy, despite two days previously when they’d thought everyone on the island had come in for a haircut, Barney had questioned the wisdom of opening at all. Yet after the evening before, they’d needed the routine, the something to fall back on, the get up and get ready for work, the opening of the doors, the mundane clip of the scissors, the hum of the razor, the white noise of the hair dryer. Some idle chatter might also have helped, but that had been a forlorn hope.

  Now, at least, the customers had dried up, afternoon had drifted inexorably into evening, darkness had come from the east, and the men of the shop were in their familiar positions, sitting on the bench and in barber chairs, cups of tea in hand.

  ‘You really roasted those guys’ nuts,’ said Keanu, looking at Barney.

  ‘Aye, sorry about that,’ said Barney, including Igor in the apology. ‘Not the vibe I’m looking for in the shop.’

  ‘They deserved it,’ said Keanu.

  ‘Arf!’ said Igor.

  ‘And, like, word obviously got around, because there may have been a constant drip feed of customers, and there may have been some questions, but nothing like those fools earlier on. Of course, under the law of shag one sheep, that’ll be you tagged forever as an angry old man with no sense of humour.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Barney, quietly. ‘You’re probably right. Anyway, how are you? Doing OK?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ said Keanu. ‘Sure, I’ve never killed a man before, but at least when I did he was a bastard, right?’

  ‘You didn’t kill him.’

  ‘I played my part.’
r />   ‘Arf!’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Barney. ‘And don’t be worrying about it, you may get some righteous banana-brain who makes something of your part in the man hitting the ground the way he did, but you’ve got a host of witnesses, including three police officers, on your side. You’re fine, kid.’

  Keanu bowed his head a little, took another drink.

  ‘I just have to live with it,’ he said.

  ‘Yep,’ said Barney, sympathetically.

  ‘How about you?’ asked Keanu, looking up. ‘Are the stories true? I mean, did you ever actually kill anyone?’

  Barney looked across the chasm of the shop. There was a question. Normally he would have shut it down, batted it aside or made a joke. He didn’t want to think about the old days. He didn’t want to think of those scissors stabbing inadvertently, and bloodily, into Wullie Henderson’s stomach. He didn’t want to think of the absurdity of Chris Porter falling over after being poked in the chest with a broom, banging his head, dying. Really? That had been ridiculous from the start. And he didn’t want to think of the one time in his life when he’d fired a gun, in the midst of a wrestling match with Brother Steven, the Mad Murdering Monk of St. John’s, a tangle of arms and legs and bodies, of how he’d pulled the trigger without really giving it any positive thought. It had just happened, and Steven was dead.

  It was another lifetime, so remotely long ago it could have been in another dimension. Yet, in a way, those scissors unintentionally thrust into Wullie’s midriff had been the start of this lifetime. Without it, who knew where he would be, but he would not have had the tumultuous years that he’d had, and more than likely would not have found himself wandering and aimless in Millport.

  No, he didn’t want to talk about it, but then this wasn’t about him. This wasn’t the time to bat it away. Gondor had called for aid.

  ‘There were a couple of accidents,’ said Barney. ‘Worse, on my part, much worse than what you did last night....’ He hesitated, waved a thoughtful hand, finally settled on, ‘You have to rationalise it, which, seriously, is not hard in your case, given who the little guy was, and you have to make sure you have people to talk to. Obviously, you’ve got me and Igor here...’