The Dead End sign should have been our first clue to turn around. But Craig had refused to ask for directions and he would never admit that he’d taken a wrong turn. I kept my mouth shut to keep the peace.
After we passed the sign, the road narrowed and there was no place to turn around. We pushed forward, looking for a wide spot in the road but the trees closed in tighter, branches scraping against the shiny red paint of Craig’s new Escalade. Curse words spewed from his mouth at every new scrape. I remained silent, knowing that to suggest we try to reverse out of there would only anger him further.
And now there we were. Stuck axle-deep in mud at the end of what could only be described as a trail – the road had ended miles back.
Craig swore and stomped on the accelerator again. The smell of hot rubber filled the cab and rooster tails of mud spewed out behind the vehicle. We weren’t going anywhere without a tow truck.
I checked my cell phone. No bars. Of course.
I calculated in my head the amount of time we had been driving since we passed the sign and tried to estimate how long it would take to hike back to the main road. Even the most optimistic estimate had us hiking through the woods in the dark. It was already 3:30, and the October sky was losing light fast. I didn’t relish the idea of walking that road even in daylight, clad in a cocktail dress and pumps, but at night…
Craig killed the engine and we sat in silence. He knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t dare say it. He fucked up. He should have listened when I told him not to try to take a shortcut just because Google said there was one. He should have turned back at the Dead End sign. I told him so. I told him so.
Dusk fell over the vehicle. I pulled my sweater around me but it was little help against the chill of the approaching night. A flash of light in the rear view mirror caught my eye.
“What’s that?” I finally dared to speak, having something to say other than ‘I told you so’.
Craig looked over his shoulder.
“A vehicle! Holy shit, we’re saved. Must be some hunters or something. Wait here.”
Craig jumped out and waited at the rear of the car for the approaching vehicle. He waved his arms to flag them down, not like they could have gone any further anyway.
I head a loud POP and my husband fell to his knees.
Two figures dressed in plaid approached the vehicle. I was trapped.
“Well, lookie here, Clem!” a voice said. “Looks like we’all won the lottery!”
We all have at least one. Some of us have more than one. Others, like yours truly, have an ever-growing list of fears, anxieties and outright phobias. Some of them, ok, most of them, are completely irrational. Where do these fears come from? We aren’t born with them. At what point do we acquire them? I have plenty of phobias: there’s social anxiety, which is essentially a fear of people, fear of answering telephones, FOBPOTS (Fear Of Being Put On The Spot), there are snakes of course, and old people on Rascal scooters… (Ok, I made that last one up.) And then there is coulrophobia.
That’s right.
Clowns.
Hate them. I just hate them.
Clowns are terrifying, plain and simple. Whoever got the idea that they are funny is one sick puppy, in my opinion. There is nothing funny about those white-faced, big-mouthed, floppy-shoe-wearing demon spawn. Nothing whatsoever. What the hell is funny about concealing one’s face in white grease and painting on a freaky looking over-exaggerated phony facial expression? Happy… sad… soulful and doleful, my ass. Pure evil has no soul.
I think clowns are psychopaths from the FBI’s Most Wanted list or maybe vicious Mafia hitmen who cooperated with police to save their own asses and now they’re in the Witness Protection Program. Whoever they are, they’re hiding their faces behind makeup so people won’t recognize them and masquerading as carnival folk or street performers. They even conceal their fingerprints with gloves and foot size with those ridiculous shoes. They have every detail covered to make sure nobody recognizes them.
Clowns.
Greasy, creepy ghouls passing themselves off as entertainers.
I’ve been asked why I have such a phobia but I’m not alone. I know of plenty of people who don’t like clowns. Little children routinely shriek in terror at the sight of them, and yet they continue to terrorize birthday parties and circus rings as if nobody has noticed that they are freaking the shit out of a lot of people.
It’s been suggested that perhaps I was frightened by a clown as a child and that memory developed into a full-blown phobia.
Yeah, maybe.
Frightened.
Excuse me while I scoff.
More like traumatized.
My earliest memory of being scared shitless by a clown dates back to when I was about five or six years old. It wasn’t at a birthday party or circus or any of the typical scenarios.
It was in my own home. In my bedroom.
I didn’t like the dark when I was little. What kid does?
I used to insist that my mother keep my bedroom door open and the hall light on when I went to bed. Who the hell can sleep when it’s dark? It’s scary as hell.
Once the lights are out, everything changes. That pile of clothes on top of the dresser becomes a severed rhinoceros head. The book bag hanging on the closet door becomes a dripping mass of flesh, torn from a screaming victim by a ravenous zombie. The cherubic faces of the dolls become ghoulish death masks with vacant black holes for eyes. The large teddy bear in the corner becomes a troll, crouched and grinning, waiting for me to close my eyes so it can sneak up to my bedside and do unspeakable things to me. The sock on the floor beside the bed becomes a grey bony hand, reaching out from beneath the bed, seeking a bare ankle to grab.
But nothing was worse than the night I saw the clown.
Over the years, I’ve convinced myself that it was just a dream, albeit an extremely vivid one.
I had closed my eyes, just for a few seconds, or perhaps I had actually dozed off, I’ll never know for sure.
When I opened my eyes, there it was.
It was sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed.
A clown.
It was horrible.
In the partial illumination from the hallway light, I could see its face clearly. It was one of those sad-faced clowns; the worst kind.
It sat quietly at the foot of my bed, staring at me from beneath a wild red afro.
Its eyes were the worst part. I’ve never forgotten those eyes; they haunt me still.
Bloodshot, droopy eyes like those of a bloodhound – a bloodhound that had been pulling downward on its cheeks the way children sometimes do and their mothers tell them their faces will freeze that way. I guess this creature never had a mother because his face was frozen in a permanent sag with lower lids hanging and looking all red and bloodshot. Below the saggy lower lids were those jiggly eyebags like I sometimes saw on old people’s faces and below that, more wrinkles, like the clown’s entire face was melting.
I swore right then that I’d never ever pull my eyes down to make a funny face again.
There was nothing funny about this clown’s face.
It just sat there in silence, fixing me with that doleful bloodhound gaze while I did my best to stay as still as possible. Maybe if it thought I was asleep it would leave me alone. But my eyes were open, saucer-wide in terror, so I knew that it knew I was awake and that I saw it.
The bedroom door was also at the foot of the bed, so in order to escape from my room I would have had to make it past the clown.
It hadn’t moved yet and I wondered how fast it was.
I was pretty fast. Maybe I could make it.
Then again, maybe not.
And so there we sat, the clown and I, locked into some kind of morbid staredown that would only end when one of us moved, after which I was certain that I would emerge the loser.
I prepared myself for the most gruesome and unimaginable death and I waited.
And waited.
The clown never moved.
I began to wonder if the clown was alive after all. Maybe it was some kind of dummy or mannequin that someone had placed in my room as a cruel joke. I couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. My parents? Never!
I realized then that the house was eerily quiet. Maybe there was a murderer in the house who had already killed my parents and had left the clown in my doorway like some grisly calling card or something. The clown murderer… it made sense, and at my age I could believe a story like that easily. Yep, the thing had to be fake. I was almost convinced.
And then it moved.
The clown moved, ever so slightly. I swear it did. I was positive I’d seen it move and the saggy bags under its eyes had jiggled, even though it seemed to be in exactly the same position as it was before.
Did it move?
I began to doubt my own eyes.
Then I heard a creaking noise.
I knew that sound.
It was the squeaky hinge of my bedroom door.
My heart began to pound.
Oh NO! NONONO! Please, no, anything but that! Please don’t shut the door!
I screamed silently in my head at first, then I tried to scream for real but discovered I was mute. I tried to shake my head NO at it, but found that I also couldn’t move. It had cast some sort of evil freezing spell on me or something.
I tried to move again, to shake my head from side to side to tell it not to do what it was threatening to do. I managed to move my head just a tiny bit, but it was probably not enough for the clown to see.
I tried pleading with the thing with my eyes, mentally begging it to have mercy on me and leave the door open.
I heard the creak again and the wedge of light that spilled into the room from the hallway narrowed.
I gauged the distance between myself and the door and wondered if I could move fast enough to escape before Droopy the Clown closed the door.
There was no way I was going to make it.
I was frozen.
I was a goner.
I thought that maybe if I didn’t look it would go away, but as soon as I closed my eyes I heard the hinge creak again. My eyelids snapped open and I was certain I saw the clown quickly open the door back up and resume its previous position.
Fine.
I would have to keep an eye on it then.
I couldn’t let it shut the door because once that door was shut I would be at the mercy of the droopy-eyed clown, the rhino head, the bony hand, the troll, the zombie and whatever that thing was that moved outside my window.
Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because the next time I opened my eyes it was daylight; the clown was gone, I was still alive and my bedroom door was still open.
Over time I convinced myself that it was just a dream; the product of a child’s overactive imagination. I never quite forgot about Droopy the Clown, as I secretly called him, but in time I accepted that he was imaginary.
That experience, whether real or imagined was the root of my present-day hatred for the grease-painted ghouls.
* * *
I still don’t like the dark much. I prefer to sleep with the bedroom door open and some form of lighting in the room. I find that leaving the TV set on with the volume low is an ideal way to provide dim light and a bit of background noise to muffle the spooky creaks and groans of this old house.
Tonight is different.
The storm outside has knocked the power out. It’s the middle of the night, so there’s no point in lighting candles. The logical thing is to just go to sleep. I close my eyes and am almost asleep when I hear the creak. It isn’t the sound of the storm or the usual house creaks.
I know that sound.
The creak of a hinge
A bedroom door hinge.
My bedroom door hinge.
NO! That’s impossible!
Heart pounding, I open my eyes just a crack at first, then all the way but I see nothing in the inky blackness.
Silly. Just getting a little spooked because of the storm.
CRACK! BOOM!
The lightning strike is so close I feel it as much as hear it. The entire house shakes.
The bright flash of lightning that accompanies the sound bathes the room in an electric blue-white glow.
For a brief moment there he is, plain as day.
Droopy the Clown.
Sitting by my bedroom door.
I must have been imagining things. Just freaked out because of the storm.
The lightning flashes again, momentarily blinding me. I close my eyes with the intention of shutting out the storm and all the imaginary visions that come with it.
That’s when I see him.
Imprinted in negative on the insides of my eyes is the last image I saw before the lights went out again.
DysFictional 