The Mirrors Page 12

  The woman from Kentucky has bleached-blond hair, and a cigarette dangles out of her mouth. She has the burnt-brown look of a Caucasian who visits the tanning bed far too often. For no apparent reason, she’s sweating heavily.

  We see her watching Witchfinders vs. The Evil Red on a television. She grins, stamps her cigarette out in the ashtray, and momentarily moves off-camera. When she returns, there’s a razor blade in her hand.

  She positions the blade vertically, so that the cut will run parallel to the vein (or, if she’s lucky, actually strike it). She closes her eyes and digs the razor into her wrist, wincing when it makes contact but getting a good anchor a half-inch under the skin. She drags the blade upward, eviscerating dermis, vein, and muscle alike—all the way to the crook of her elbow.

  Somehow, in the midst of this madness, the woman from Kentucky maintains the presence of mind to move the webcam so that we see a close-up of the wound. A tide of blood rises up from the slashed veins. We hear, over and over, the accusation—”Sorcery!” Most viewers assume this is coming from the television in the background. But a significant minority swear it’s too loud and clear to be that. Those are the same people who insist they can see a tiny humanoid figure rising like a welt from the woman’s dark, damp upper arm.

  The Suffering Clown

  Black greasepaint—the vacuum of space. A half-dozen white asterisks painted, pox-like, atop the darkness—stars. When the suffering clown smiled, they stretched.

  He sat on a chair in the middle of the supermarket parking lot, fidgeting with the tassels of a flannel blanket draped over his lap. It could only have offered token protection against the cold.

  My four-year-old couldn’t resist the temptation to investigate. We’d just spent a tense half-hour in the store, butting heads over his compulsive requests for any plastic trinket or box of junk food that crossed our path. When he discovered the clown in the parking lot, what else could he be expected to do but walk over and introduce himself, dragging me all the way? Children here in Hanswurst, Indiana, and the surrounding environs are used to such oddities in parking lots. Here in Hanswurst, parking lots serve much the same purpose as a European town square. Anyone—politicians, performance artists, or even recruiters for armies or cults—can set up impromptu engagements there. The clown was obviously ready to put on a show for passers-by.

  The flickering parking lot lamps provided an effect not unlike that of strobe lights, facilitating and impeding sight with equal measure. When the clown smiled his lips curled back, revealing twisted yellow teeth and bumpy gums. When the clown smiled, he stared at my son for too long, too wide-eyed. A full minute passed with his face frozen in that overly congenial grin.

  If I were the sort of man who watched horror films, I might blame the clown’s creepiness on some diabolical nature intrinsic to his profession; but, after absorbing the entire scene, I realized his stilted, awkward manner owed more to illness than to any character defect. Indeed, he was as frail a specimen of buffoonery as I’d ever the misfortune to behold.

  I doubt he could have tipped the scale at three digits. The loose fit of his silken yellow costume implied recent, significant weight loss. Clear plastic tubes delivered oxygen into his red rubber nose. A minivan was parked behind the clown’s chair.

  Its hatchback was open, and I spied beverages and snack food inside (as though he were at a Hanswurst High football game, tailgating). To my chagrin, I also spotted a package of adult diapers alongside the food. The thin plastic grocery bag wasn’t tall or opaque enough to obscure it.

  The clown shouldn’t have been out on a night like that—the sort of night I made my son wear a jacket and hat, whether he wanted to or not. Rain glistened the cracked asphalt. An unseasonal thunderstorm had passed through less than a half-hour before. The wind howled, sending clouds blowing through the night sky as though tugged by an unseen hand. Their departure unveiled the full moon first, followed by the multitude of stars in all their twinkle-twinkle splendor.

  A potbellied man wearing a blue, grease-stained mechanic’s shirt and threadbare trousers threw his calloused hand out for me to shake. The name patch sewn on his shirt announced him as “Butch.” He looked up at the clearing sky. “Weather’s breakin’. The show must go on! Just one dollar, mister.”

  My son craned his head up to mine. “Please, Dad? Pleeeassssseee can I see the show?”

  I turned to Butch. “You’ll have to pardon us, but it’s pretty cold and getting late. The boy’s only a preschooler. His bedtime’s soon.” It was as polite a refusal as I could muster. What I wanted to tell this man was that his clown was in no condition to work. What sort of entertaining little show could he be expected to perform while incontinent and demented? I didn’t say that, though, because some clown promoters take it personally when you refuse their services.

  “Please, sir, have a heart. This fella—König’s his name— hasn’t had the pleasure of performing for a single customer tonight, with it rainin’ so hard.”

  “What’s his act have to do with the weather?”

  “The rain smears his makeup. We can’t have that.

  Besides, for the audience to appreciate his powers, the night sky has to be clear. You see, this here ain’t no ordinary clown— nosiree.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  Butch scowled. “This act is absolutely one-of-a-kind. No one else in all of clown history has attempted it, sir. This clown can kill stars (and I ain’t talkin’ about the Hollywood kind).”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t know any better way to explain it, mister. If a kid comes up to this clown and smudges one of the white stars on his face into the black base coat, a corresponding star up there in the sky dims and dies. It’s easy enough to show you— all it takes is a dollar.”

  “But I like stars,” my son said. (I had to confess to feeling a swell of paternal pride when he said that; I could see that my boy had internalized the appreciation of nature his mother and I had worked so tirelessly to instill in him.)

  Butch sighed. “Look, it’s not like there’s any real shortage of ’em out there. We got more of ’em than we know what to do with.”

  I never could keep a poker face. My skepticism must have been obvious. I tried to let out a hearty laugh, but all that escaped was a raspy, nervous giggle.

  Butch tried a new approach. He took a glance at my casual attire, apparently sizing me up as just another of Hanswurst’s rednecks. “Hey,” he said, “you hunt deer?”

  “I can’t say I have. I own a gun for self-defense, of course. I just don’t feel the need to fire it at a dumb animal.”

  “W-well,” he stammered, “I was just going to say that killing stars is a little like killing deer—it’s mercy killing. You see, the problem with both of them is overpopulation …”

  “The only thing I see overpopulating Hanswurst these days is parking lot performers. Now, if you’ll excuse us, my son needs to go to sleep. We don’t have time to watch this invalid attempt some cheap parlor trick.”

  König let out an incoherent, mournful wail. His awkward smile had been replaced with an even more awkward grimace.

  Butch clinched his fists and cleared his throat. His face flushed. He started hollering. “Jeez, mister. What do you wanna do, make him cry? Don’t you see the risk he takes on, coming out here like this? In his condition? I mean, do you even care what his condition is?”

  Caught off-guard by the severity of Butch’s anger, I had no words to offer in my own defense. König’s oxygen hissed. The lights teased us, staying on for several seconds before returning to their flickering ways. Finally, Butch continued ranting to fill the ugly void.

  “He has cancer, mister. In his esophagus, his lungs, his brain, his liver, his pancreas, and his blood. Each day this little guy struggles to tread water in an ocean of pain. But he doesn’t whine. The only time he gets pissed off is when he runs into an unappreciative audience. Don’t you realize that this show is the only thing that keeps
König from dying?”

  My little boy looked up at me, eyes wide and glistening at Butch’s disclosure. I felt like such an insensitive jerk. It all made sense. Hanswurst, Indiana, was too remote a location to host a circus of any size. All the clowns in our region worked freelance for whichever promoter would be willing to take them on for a few weeks. Therefore, none of them had health insurance. If König wanted to afford even the least promising cancer treatments, he’d need cold hard cash; thus the extreme measures—courting pneumonia on a cold night just to snag even a handful of customers.

  I took out my wallet and gushed apologies. “I’m so sorry. I, well, I just didn’t know he was that sick.” It was a lie that didn’t convince König or Butch, but I didn’t care all that much about them. At this stage of the game, I was just trying to preserve my reputation with my son. I was just trying to role model sympathy for the less fortunate. I didn’t want him to go away from tonight thinking it was okay to humiliate a cancer patient (even if he set himself up for humiliation with that bizarre outfit and those grandiose claims).

  “Look,” I continued, “I know that the show only costs a dollar, but seeing as it’s been a rough night—and considering all that your clown has been through—what do you say I give you a five?” I presented the bill to the promoter.

  Butch smiled and snatched the Abe Lincoln away. The money seemed to calm him down. “Getting paid’s nice, but the most important thing for König is performing. The immune system is a funny thing, you know, mister? Nothing puts more pep in this guy than pickin’ off a star or two before bedtime. For real, it does his body good.”

  I smiled. Nodded.

  “The show will start in just a couple of minutes. Let me get it set up.”

  König let out a high-pitched gurgle and shook his gloved fists.

  “Awww,” my son said. “What’s the matter, Koonig?”

  Butch bent down to my little boy. “Oh, don’t you worry, kiddo. Mr. König’s okay. I know him well enough to be able to tell that this noise he’s making now is a good thing. That’s just his way of showing he’s excited and happy that he’ll be able to perform for you!”

  Butch opened the back seat of the minivan and pulled out a tripod. Once it stood erect, he retrieved a series of metal tubes and went to work putting them all together. “It’ll just take a few minutes to get this here telescope assembled before the show, so you can verify my clown’s the real deal.”

  My boy and I looked at each other, then at König. I had to do a double-take. His face paint hadn’t changed, but something in the structure of the visage underneath had. His chin had become longer, his forehead higher. His ears had grown bigger. My son didn’t say anything, but he took a step back.

  König himself just stared at us and flashed his creepy little dying man’s grin.

  Butch clapped his filthy hands together. “Okay, now we’re ready for some clownin’! Ordinarily, I’d go into my whole carnival barker routine building excitement about König’s amazing powers, but we sort of covered that part earlier and we’re not likely to get any more foot traffic around here until the cashiers on second shift count out their tills. So let me just tell you how this works. Earlier today, König sat quietly—all by himself—and meditated. This is what gave him intuition as to which patch of the night sky needed weeding. Then he took his magic clown paint and decorated his face in the manner you see before you.”

  “It’s magic?” my little boy asked.

  “Yup,” said Butch. “Just like I said: If a young child places his or her hand on König’s face paint and smears away one of the stars, a matching star disappears from the sky—never to nuisance us with its light ever again.”

  “Like killing lightning bugs,” my youngster said, smiling and clapping.

  I cringed. Did my boy really take that much joy in destruction? Maybe he hadn’t internalized a love of nature after all.

  Butch smiled. “Yes, that’s it. Exactly like killing lightning bugs. So are you ready?”

  “Boy, am I!”

  I looked at König again and was rendered uncomfortable by the inescapable perception that his skull had yet again undergone transformation when I wasn’t looking. Now his face was heart-shaped, with high cheekbones. His chin was pointed—almost dainty.

  My son approached the clown on tiptoe, trying in vain to reach his face. “Which star should I kill, Dad?”

  “Whoa,” Butch said. “Wait … Before you touch a star on König’s face, I want you to see the matching star up in the sky.” He gestured toward a stepladder he’d brought in front of the tripod. My son jogged toward it, climbed up the steps, and began to look through the telescope.

  Butch smiled. “See all those stars?”

  “Uh-huh!”

  “Which one do you want to kill?”

  “There’s a real bright one. Let’s make that one go ’way.”

  “Alrighty, then … with the help of König the Clown, I think we can do just that!” My boy jumped off the stepladder, and Butch moved it away from the tripod and put it in front of König’s chair. “Now climb up that ladder again and see Mr. König.”

  “How come I have to come over there? How come he can’t come see me?” A bright child, my boy, asking such an observant question.

  “Well,” Butch said, frowning, “if you want to know the truth, son, König the Clown is so sick that he can’t even walk anymore.” Then, with a single twitch of his meaty paw, he tore the flannel blanket off the clown, revealing the rust-pocked wheelchair in which he sat. The wheels looked low on air. Several of the spokes were fractured. It was a contraption from another generation, perhaps purchased for a few dollars at the local Goodwill. It should have been in a medical museum, not a rain-slicked parking lot.

  My son looked as if he was going to cry. Even his brain— so new to the world—could detect that something was amiss with the wheelchair. He couldn’t place the antique medical device as something that was old, because his life experience stretched only a few years. But he could definitely intuit that it didn’t belong.

  Butch spoke up, shaking both of us out of our daze. “If you want Mr. König to feel better and be able to leave the wheelchair, you have to hop up there and help him kill stars. It’s the best medicine in the whole wide world! König, do you want to point to the star on your face that matches up with the one the little boy wants to kill?”

  The clown raised a trembling hand up to his right cheekbone, fingering the appropriate star.

  “Okay then, son, all you have to do is smudge it out with your fingers.”

  My boy climbed the stepladder and reached up to the clown’s face. But the star wouldn’t budge.

  Butch sighed. “The bright ones are sometimes a little harder. I’ll tell you what to do: Why don’t you spit in your hand and use that to wipe the star away?”

  I felt the need to intervene. “Sir, pardon me but this really is unusual—”

  My son spit in his hand.

  “Stop that right now, mister! That’s not how we behave!”

  Ignoring me, the boy wiped his slobbery palm over König’s cheekbone. A single white asterisk melted into the black background. When it was over, the marred makeup looked like nothing so much as one of the finger paintings adorning our refrigerator back at the house. Five stars remained, and by the smile on my son’s face I could tell that they might also be endangered if I didn’t immediately hoist him away from the stepladder.

  Butch looked through the telescope. “And … it’s gone! Wanna come see?”

  I set down the lad, then hunched over and looked. Black emptiness occupied the space previously allocated to the bright star. I pulled my eye away from the lens. “It’s just a trick,” I said. “While our attention was focused on the clown, you must have moved the telescope to a different section of sky.”

  König wailed with newly plump lips.

  Butch sneered. “Tell you what, buddy: If by sunrise you still think we’ve bamboozled you, we’ll give you back your money. De
al?”

  Had I been a wise man, I would have asked him then and there just what he meant. As it was, I turned my back to him, grabbed my boy with my left hand, and steered our grocery cart back to our car with the right.

  That night had simmered with unease. The following morning, this boiled over into terror. My boy was nowhere to be found. A sticky, smeared, gore-colored residue stained his bedsheets. It was as though he’d melted and a cosmic finger had reached down to make a swirly, preschoolish finger painting out of the remains. His mother balled her fists and shrieked.

  My first call was to 911. For some reason they sent an ambulance. We felt just as puzzled as the paramedics were when they arrived at our house. It took another half-hour for the Hanswurst Police to arrive. They asked questions. Trying not to sound crazy, I let them know my concerns about König the clown.

  The sergeant taking my report rolled his eyes. “You expect me to believe that a wheelchair-bound cancer patient did that to your son?”

  “So you know him?”

  He stroked his walrus mustache with his chubby thumb and index finger. He took a too-long pause. When he finally did speak, his voice was tremulous. “Y-you shouldn’t ask the law a question like that, mister.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  His face took on a sheen of sweat. “Who do you think is the most likely suspect in this case? Who had access to the boy during the night?”

  “You really think my wife or I could do something like that? We have no motive. That’s our son!”

  He walked closer up to me. Almost belly to belly. “No,” he whispered. “Off the record, sir, I know you didn’t do it. But if you call 911 and the police come, then someone (someone human and only human—someone who’s just one discrete human, I should add) has to be arrested and tried. You should have just pretended this didn’t happen, like the rest of us. As it is, I’ll have to ask you to place your hands behind your back, sir.” He took out his handcuffs. They were riddled with specks of rust, but appeared to still have enough sturdy steel left in them to restrain me.