Clown in the Moonlight by Tom Piccirilli Read Free Book Online Page B

the shore, and they fill the infinitely forbidding sky.
    Gwen's screams are muffled into moans.   A part of me loves the noise of it, the honest and true depth of despair and pain.   I'm human.   I crave human anguish.   My own or anyone else's.
    It's probably a trap but I rush across the beach hunting for her.   The moon wants to see, so it finally appears and turns its face down to us.   I stumble over seashells and detritus hidden in the sand.   My mother appears in the dark, pointing out where I must go.
    I come to Gwen huddled inside a dug-out hole behind the dunes. Gwen is naked, bound by rope, covered in blood, a gag firmly placed in her mouth.   The bandages binding her many cuts and scratches from last night's love- and hate-making have unfurled in the wind.   There are fresh razor slashes on her belly, breasts, and thighs.   The trails of pulsing blood have run together, but I know the cuts spell out words, covenants, pledges.   The waves continue to crash, foam and seaweed rushing towards my feet.  
    Maybe he's left her here to show that he owns all of my women.   Maybe it's meant to infuriate me, or to turn me on.
    Gwen weeps and whines at me.   She kicks at the bottom of the pit.   The words on her burn so brightly that I have to shade my eyes.
    Breaking from the dark, two members of the Knights of the Black Circle snarl curses at me in their language of desecration.   They're each holding a straight razor.   I'm surprised they've become so banal, but the longer they stick with Ricky the worse it will become.   As they claim and reshape him, he is doing the same to them.   They walk toward me, slow and cool and casual as the front line of grunts in Lucifer's army.   
    Gwen's moaning is a contrapuntal to the quick breathing and occasional bursts of laughter coming from Ricky's boys.   The music of it fills me.   I stand my ground and wonder if Linda is dead yet.   If Gwen will even care now, one way or the other.   
    She's managed to work the gag loose.   She has a very powerful tongue.  
    Regardless of the fact that she's probably bleeding to death at the bottom of a pit, Gwen still gives orders.   She tells me to murder them.   She demands that I do it slowly.   She promises to fuck me righteously if I kill these two bastards.   She burns with hellish radiance.
    I search for Ricky.   I can feel him, watching, those demented, savage eyes are on me.  
    I call to him.   I do it silently and I do it loudly.   "Ricky!"
    The knights raise their blades and slash at the air.   Streaks of fiery red hang the air.   The whistling razors make me think of my father teaching me to shave when I was a kid.   It's one of the few memories of him that make me grin.   My face covered in shaving cream and my old man bonding with me, weapon in hand, passing on yet another ritual of manhood.   This one about power too.   A nick at the jugular could bleed you out in minutes.   My mother watched closely.   My mother stood guard, in the bathroom door.   He was afraid of her.   He had every right to be.  
    Ricky's boys know how to invoke even greater evils than themselves.   Their recitations and invocations draw more and more energy from the world.   Ricky's fire dims, the moon dulls, and Gwen weakens in her struggles.   My knees tremble but I keep on my feet.
    They leap and glide forward almost as if on wings, swinging the razors back and forth, the arcs of red light flashing across the sand.   I duck and bring my knee up into one groin, turn and elbow the other in the face.   They grunt with almost childlike wonder.   They know pain but not this kind of pain.   This is a mortal, human pain, something that's usually beneath them, except when they influence and come to be influenced by mutts like Ricky Kelso.  
    They both move across the graveyard sawgrass with a whuff of air that sounds like a cancer patient's final breath.   My violent tendencies take over.   With their own razors