Yet, perhaps there were some dreams so preposterous they could only be true.
No clowns, he said to himself, as he stood watching the door, and the stairway, and the spotlight of the moon. Quaid knew only fragile minds, so weak they couldn’t give him a clue to the nature, to the origin, or to the cure for the panic that now held him in thrall. All they did was break, crumble into dust, when faced with the slightest sign of the dread at the heart of life.
He knew no clowns, never had, never would.
Then it appeared; the face of a fool. Pale to whiteness in the light of the moon, its young features bruised, unshaven and puffy, its smile open like a child’s smile. It had bitten its lip in its excitement. Blood was smeared across its lower jaw, and its gums were almost black with blood. Still it was a clown. Indisputably a clown even to its ill-fitting clothes, so incongruous, so pathetic.
Only the axe didn’t quite match the smile.
It caught the moonlight as the maniac made small, chopping motions with it, his tiny black eyes glinting with anticipation of the fun ahead.
Almost at the top of the stairs, he stopped, his smile not faltering for a moment as he gazed at Quaid’s terror.
Quaid’s legs gave out, and he stumbled to his knees.
The clown climbed another stair, skipping as he did so, his glittering eyes fixed on Quaid, filled with a sort of benign malice. The axe rocked back and forth in his white hands, in a petite version of the killing stroke.
Quaid knew him.
It was his pupil: his guinea-pig, transformed into the image of his own dread.
Him. Of all men. Him. The deaf boy.
The skipping was bigger now, and the clown was making a deep-throated noise, like the call of some fantastical bird. The axe was describing wider and wider sweeps in the air, each more lethal than the last.
“Stephen,” said Quaid.
The name meant nothing to Steve. All he saw was the mouth opening. The mouth closing. Perhaps a sound came out: perhaps not. It was irrelevant to him.
The throat of the clown gave out a screech, and the axe swung up over his head, two-handed. At the same moment the merry little dance became a run, as the axe man leapt the last two stairs and ran into the bedroom, full into the spotlight.
Quaid’s body half turned to avoid the killing blow, but not quickly or elegantly enough. The blade slit the air and sliced through the back of Quaid’s arm, sheering off most of his triceps, shattering his humerus and opening the flesh of his lower arm in a gash that just missed his artery.
Quaid’s scream could have been heard ten houses away, except that those houses were rubble. There was nobody to hear. Nobody to come and drag the clown off him.
The axe, eager to be about its business, was hacking at Quaid’s thigh now, as though it was chopping a log. Yawning wounds four or five inches deep exposed the shiny steak of the philosopher’s muscle, the bone, the marrow. With each stroke the clown would tug at the axe to pull it out, and Quaid’s body would jerk like a puppet.
Quaid screamed. Quaid begged. Quaid cajoled.
The clown didn’t hear a word.
All he heard was the noise in his head: the whistles, the whoops, the howls, the hums. He had taken refuge where no rational argument, nor threat, would ever fetch him out again. Where the thump of his heart was law, and the whine of his blood was music.
How he danced, this deaf-boy, danced like a loon to see his tormentor gaping like a fish, the depravity of his intellect silenced forever. How the blood spurted! How it gushed and fountained!
The little clown laughed to see such fun. There was a night’s entertainment to be had here, he thought. The axe was his friend forever, keen and wise. It could cut, and cross-cut, it could slice and amputate, yet still they could keep this man alive, if they were cunning enough, alive for a long, long while.