Clown in the Moonlight Read online

  Clown in the Moonlight

  By Tom Piccirilli

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 by Tom Piccirilli

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  http://www.sxc.hu/profile/henry_azui

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY TOM PICCIRILLI FOR YOUR KINDLE

  NOVELS:

  A Lower Deep: A Self Novel

  Nightjack

  Sorrow's Crown – A Felicity Grove Mystery

  The Dead Past – A Felicity Grove Mystery

  The Fever Kill

  The Night Class

  NOVELLAS:

  All You Despise

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Ed Gorman)

  Frayed

  Fuckin' Lie Down Already

  Loss

  Short Ride to Nowhere

  The Last Deep Breath

  The Nobody

  Thrust

  You'd Better Watch Out

  COLLECTIONS:

  Futile Efforts

  Pentacle – A Self Collection

  Tales From the Crossroad, Vol 1

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  All You Despise – Narrated by Brett Barry

  Loss – Narrated by Chris Patton

  Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson

  The Fever Kill – Narrated by Scott Slocum

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  CONTENTS

  Clown in the Moonlight

  The Last Kind Words – A Preview

  Shadder – A short story from the collection Futile Efforts

  Nightjack – A preview

  PART I

  AND THE TREES BOWED DOWN

  1.

  The fever takes hold, my heart begins to hammer, and I can taste the sweet dollop of murder in the night. I shake my head and try not to laugh. No matter where you go, what you do, you can't outmaneuver your fate. Linda has a tight hold on my wrist as she leads me through the park into Aztakea Woods. She's a powerful little cheerleader, barely five foot tall but all tendon and tit and muscle, and when we make love on the floor of the gazebo or the back of my Mustang, she nearly bucks me off. I've got bruises and welts all over. So does she, but she likes them.

  She's excited now in a way I haven't seen before, guiding me down a barely recognizable dirt trail. She knows where she's going, even in the dark. She's been here before.

  The wind's risen and I can hear the heavy lapping of the Long Island sound, the salty scent heavy in the air.

  "The Acid King showed me," she says, and there's an odd lilt of laughter in her voice.

  I'm new to town and still don't recognize all the players. I've known Linda two weeks and they've been fun and freaky days. She tries to draw out the worst in me. It's not difficult. If someone cuts us off on 25a she attempts to goad me into racing or fighting with strangers. She whispers what she'll do to me if I win.

  We move into a clearing and the moonlight ignites her perfect teeth. Her pale skin glows as she smiles at me and presents the scene on the ground. She can't help snickering. It's an ugly but sexy sound. She moves against the breeze and her long hair rises against my lips, tickling. I taste fruity shampoo and stale sweat. I glance down and I'm staring at a mutilated corpse without any eyes.

  She places her hand on my chest as if she expects my heart to stop. She waits for me to suck in enough air to scream. Her nails dig deep. I like the pain she offers. It's minor and only scratches the surface. Her beautiful face shifts into an expression of delighted anticipation. She expects cursing, crying, or perhaps terrorized whining. Or maybe depraved laughter. It's obvious she's brought other boys here before. Weaker boys, ones she can control, ones she abuses and scoffs at callously. I take a shallow breath and let it out slow.

  Apparently she enjoys my non-reaction. She throws herself into my arms and kisses me passionately. Our tongues tangle. Her moans are so loud, full of a kind of torment, that I can imagine them coming from the dead guy. She says my name and couches it in lust and demand. I know which way this is going. Maybe I want it to go there, maybe not, but I won't resist. A growl works down my throat, a snarl works up it. I try to break her hold but I don't try very hard. Her tongue's burying itself in my throat, her breasts heaving. She draws away and gives a rasping cackle. That laugh drives into my head like metal shavings.

  The corpse is my age and size. He's got good muscle mass. I'm not paranoid and I don't think Linda's a murderer, she digs the dramatic reveal too much, but I keep my eyes open through our kiss. So does she. Our tongues grapple. I reach for her hands to make sure they're empty.

  He's been dead for a couple of days at least. Maggots ravage the flesh in the June heat, the body poorly hidden beneath a thin layer of leaves and dirt.

  "Don't tell anyone," she says.

  She knows I can't tell anyone about this. I've got what the courts call "anger management issues, " "impulse control difficulties," and "violent tendencies." They've forced my old man to move us three times around Long Island in the past few years. I've been in jail and I've been in Bellvue under suicide watch. All told I preferred my year-long stint in prison to the six-month stay in the psych ward. My father was more embarrassed visiting me in the hospital. He's been in jail himself, which he considers a natural part of the rites of manhood. He's never been in group therapy, which he thinks is for mama's boys and queers.

  The face is unrecognizable, utterly disfigured, more like shredded meat than anything else. Whoever did this took his time. I spot teeth marks and a lot of stab wounds, perhaps as many as fifty. The remains of a small blackened campfire sit in a ring of flat stones at the center of the clearing. I can still smell a hint of smoke. The area is covered in muddy footprints and matted leaves. It must've been raining the night it happened. Since then at least a dozen visitors have come through.

  The Acid King has brought a lot of folks by to see his handiwork.

  Linda reaches under my T-shirt and untucks it from my jeans. She groans and launches herself into my arms again, the scent of her hot cooze overwhelming the stink of the rotting corpse. Death sets her to trembling like razor-wire. There were a ton of guys on C-Block who'd been sent to the bin because of girls just like her. Some of them had regrets. Some of them didn't.

  Her upper thighs are wet with need. She tugs her blouse up over her head and throws it towards the body irreverently. She's not wearing a bra and she feeds me her nipples, which are coated in running silver as the clouds part and the moon washes over us. She hikes her skirt up. She's not w
earing any underwear either. She knew this moment had to happen. I probably did too somehow. She helps me get my jeans off and we flop over into the brambles, briars scratching me up just as bad as her nails or a leather cat o' nine tails.

  The sound of night birds makes me look up through the trees but Linda draws me down. We make a vicious, venomous love that lasts no more than three minutes. It feels like we've fucked forever. It feels like we've fucked beyond death. She laughs through it all or maybe there are watchers in the brush and the trees.

  I'm so out of breath I'm hyper-ventilating. She keeps turning her cheek to me as if she wants to be slapped or punched. She doesn't know what she's asking. Or maybe she does.

  My rage tries to rise within me and I strap it back down to the gurney. I cage it and quarantine it. In any case, I don't hurt her. I don't hit or bite or bleed her. She glares at me with the fiery moon in her eyes and a grunt of frustration escapes her lips. She slaps me across the face. She's upset I'm not more impressed with torture and murder.

  2.

  Back in my '66 Mustang Coupe, as we cruise from Cow Harbor Park down 25a, she lights two cigarettes for us, and tells me the story.

  They call Ricky Kelso the Acid King because he deals LSD to the kids around Northport. He's a homeless seventeen-year-old dropout loser with a fried brain. He dabbles in the occult, the leader of a loosely-organized band of burnouts calling themselves the Knights of the Black Circle. They supposedly pray to Satan and hold ceremonies in a scattering of old cemeteries lining the North Shore. Ricky's big on human sacrifices, he tells everyone. He was arrested a few months ago for digging up graves and stealing bones and body parts to use in ritual black witchcraft.

  He's spent time locked up in Amityville Psych Center for drug rehab and psych care. His parents tried to commit him, but the psychiatrists concluded Ricky wasn't psychotic or dangerous.

  When I was in Bellevue, all the patients and the orderlies used to look down their noses at the privileged "guests" of APC, what with their nervous conditions and their lightweight treatments like aromatherapy and massages. In Bellevue, we headcases were hardcore. When we weren't in group therapy or bashing the shit out of clay making bad ashtrays, we were being drowned in the hydro tanks and threatened with lobotomies. We were slicing ourselves from wrist to forearm with sharpened two-inch-long safety scissors used to cut construction paper. The orderlies carried leather strops and chain collars for anybody who got out of line. You didn't get a window, much less a stroll around a manicured estate.

  I feel my first twinge of real disgust for Ricky Kelso.

  The dead guy is Gary Lowers. At a party a few months back, while Ricky was passed out on a basement couch, Lowers snagged ten hits of PCP from Ricky's pocket. A few hours later, when Ricky shook out of his hangover, he ran around the house making savage threats. Someone squealed on Lowers. Ricky cornered him a few days later. Despite giving back half the stolen goods and promising to pay off the rest–a total of maybe fifty bucks–Lowers failed to come up with the cash. Ricky stomped him a couple of times but he couldn't shake the money loose.

  It put Gary Lowers in perspective. He was someone who wanted to bleed. He was a thief. He could've easily ripped off half a C-note from someone who wouldn't smack him around nearly as much as Ricky did, but Lowers just let it slide. He saw which way things were headed and didn't do anything to stop it.

  On the night of the murder, Ricky invited Lowers to Aztakea Woods with a couple of other friends, saying he was ready to forgive the incident. After taking several hits of mescaline, Ricky, Gary, and two other punks whose names Linda didn't know or didn't want to say, made camp along the trail.

  Linda's breath fogs the windshield as she speaks. She notices her reflection and takes the time to reapply lipstick, preen her hair. She plucks some grit from her earlobe. The farther we get from the body, the more she returns to her usual shallow, regal self.

  A storm's coming in off the water, the spring night almost chilly now. I crack my window and let the breeze brush across my throat. A few raindrops spatter across the interior of the car door and spritz my hot skin.

  I pull to a red light and hear the night birds still singing. I shut my eyes and let their song carry my pulse for a minute. The swaying stop light creaks on the wire. A car pulls up behind me and the driver flicks the high beams. I check the rearview and try to make out the driver. The silhouette is large, looming over the steering wheel, crouching forward in an awkward pose. The body language is hateful, but the tightly tapped "toot toot" of the horn is friendly.

  Linda says, "The light's changed."

  I ease my foot down on the gas pedal. The driver behind lets me get a hundred feet ahead before filing in behind me. 25a has a lot of tight turns. I make three, driving slowly, but the car behind never catches up.

  Things were vicious and ugly for Gary Lowers, right from the start, but he must've known they would be. Ricky started a fire using Gary's socks and the sleeves from his denim jacket as kindling for the wet firewood. I pictured it, Gary being forced to take off his shoes and hand his socks over, watching Ricky strike his lighter over and over trying to get them to burn. Standing barefoot in the dank, mossy undergrowth. The cold starlight cascading, his three friends growing more degenerate, abominable. The situation escalated when Ricky suggested they use some of Gary's hair in the blaze.

  Lowers should've made a run for it then, but he stuck. He had a death wish. I'd known punks like that before. I might've even been one when I was younger. I might even be one now. You wanted to see how long you could last. You wanted to see who drew the line and who crossed it first. You want to face down the pale rider, you want to impale yourself upon the tips of black wings.

  Ricky scuffled with Gary, bit him on the neck, then stabbed him in the belly, face, and chest. It started fast but then slowed down. It had to have gone on for hours.

  "What kind of knife was it?" I ask.

  Linda says, "I don't know. A switchblade, I think."

  It wasn't. A switchblade would've snapped the first time it struck bone. No way could that much damage be inflicted on Gary's corpse with a hinged weapon.

  I reach over and place my hand on her inner thigh. I take more tight curves. She's no longer wet. I let my fingers sweep and play. I touch her outer lips. She flinches. She grabs my wrist with both hands as if to stop me, but she isn't strong enough. She lays back in her seat, frowning at me. My thumb finds its way inside her. She grunts softly. She pouts. I wonder if she's about to cry. I've taken her black power over the situation and made it mine.

  "Finish the story," I say.

  She continues, panting now. She tells me how the others helped Ricky hold Gary down during the attack. By then Gary must've known he was dying, but he still went with it. All four of them tangled together like lovers in the mud and blood. His eyes being torn out, his guts spilling. While Gary lay dying Ricky commanded, "Say you love Satan."

  Blind, Gary replied, "I love my mother." Like all suicides, he had a lot of guts.

  Linda responds to my kneading, toying touch. She tries to grab my wrist again and stop me, but I snap loose and backhand her across her mouth almost gently. I work my fingers against her tongue and make her taste herself. She sucks on my thumb for a while. I replace my fingers inside her cunt and with only a few flicks of my thumbnail she cries out and cums.

  I think about the eye-gouging. Even in prison, even on the ward, nobody ever went that far. Lunatics and cons had some personal restraint. I wonder if Ricky used the point of his blade, a burning sharp stick, his thumbs, or his teeth. Killing someone was one thing, but taking their eyes, that's something else. And Gary, unseeing, gushing, but still hanging on, unwilling to give in.

  Linda, having achieved orgasm for the fourth time in the last half hour, stretches out in the front seat and places her feet in my lap. She works her toes against my crotch. I can see in the passing street lights that my palm print is visible, pink against the corner of her mouth. She whispers, "Ricky said
that a crow brought him a message from Satan that morning, telling him to do it, to kill Gary." She says Ricky's name with reverence, adoration, perhaps even love. "And when it was done, the trees bent over and bowed to Ricky."

  She stares at me, lit by the dashboard, and tries to gauge my reaction, to see if I believe. I shift into third and blaze past a sheriff's car parked in front of a pizza joint. I slow down in the hopes that he'll tear ass after me, give me a little run, really let me put the hammer down, get Linda warbling, but he doesn't follow.

  She wants to go back and look at the dead kid's face again. I don't. She calls my name as if I'm very far away. Perhaps I am. The scene not only excites her sexually, she wants to be a part of the violence, the desecration of flesh, the revolt against God. I understand. She starts to masturbate in the passenger seat. She continues saying my name for a while before she switches over and calls out for Ricky. When she's done, she twists in her seat and unzips my fly, working me with her hand at first and then her tongue. I ride her face viciously. I ease down harder on the pedal. She looks up at me and giggles. She wants me to scream. She wants me dead. My cock is rock. My face is unmoved stone. I explode. The moonlight smashes down. I glance through the window at the occasional clusters of deep woods along the road. I see Gary Lowers without eyes, watching me. Linda cleans me off and zips me up. I slam it into fourth.

  3.

  Rain pours down and there's death on the road. Flares burn around an accident, cops halt us and wave us through slowly as rubber-neckers check out the damage, searching for pieces of shattered bodies. A harsh crimson glow makes everyone look like they've dragged themselves out of intensive care burn units. I can't shake the feeling that I'm being followed by crows. Rain washes in across the back of my neck.