kevin hedman

Oh Jesus Christ, that better not be him, Annabelle thought, and right away she felt stupid for doing so. Of course it wasn’t him. He wouldn’t be dressed like that. No way. Maybe she was drunk—only slightly, she only had three weak and overpriced white wine cocktails, so only slightly—but she definitely wasn’t high. Or tripping. Or rolling. That was what people on ecstasy said, right? Hell, she couldn’t remember. That had all been so long ago, in the much better 1990s, and she was a far more responsible person now.

Well, maybe not responsible right now. Right now she was just a little bit in the bag and loitering in the sparse front space of a mid-tier semi-fancy hotel. Her high heels hurt her feet and she didn’t like the way the assholes from out of town got quiet when they looked her way. They were all square-shaped and clad in suits that made them look stupid. What they were doing there was anyone’s guess; what she was doing there she hoped they couldn’t guess. Because if they guessed, they’d probably come over and say things to her. Say that she ought to bring the bride down for them to fool around with. Say she ought not let herself get tied down too soon and then giggle at the whole “tied down” thing. Annabelle had been hearing that sort of thing all night.

In a way, it was good that the clown was there. People didn’t pay so much attention to her since there was a clown to look at. Even the drunkest douchebags coming back after their big night on the town spent only moments staring into her cleavage before catching sight of the clown about thirty feet on. Tits on display downtown was nothing out of the ordinary, but a clown? A full-on grease-paint-smeared-squeaky-nosed-orange-haired-creepy-eyed clown. That was something else.

Don’t kid yourself, Annabelle. Chloe’s tits would trump a whole army of clowns, she told herself. It was the kind of thought she didn’t fancy. She felt she ought to have set that kind of teenage jealousy aside sometime before her early thirties. But apparently not. Apparently not after three weak drinks. It was embarrassing, the girly shit her generation still couldn’t get over.

She wouldn’t have been there at all if it hadn’t been for girly shit. What are bachelorette parties except for the worst kind of girly shit? Who sows their wild oats anymore? Who has wild oats? No, it was like anything else in the world nowadays—a ritual for people to go through so they can move on to something else. Annabelle was keen to move on to something else now. She could catch a cab home. It was only a couple of miles. She was an attorney, she could make up a plausible excuse. Perhaps her boyfriend with meningitis. That would do the trick. Meningitis was serious and he had really been there for her throughout that whole panic-attack problem she had awhile back.

But no, no, she wouldn’t be going anywhere. Somewhere in the midst of the night she had fallen into the role of the responsible one. So she was in it for the long-haul, almost sober and in charge until the last woman standing was no longer in danger of groping some stiff-haired reprobate in a two-hundred dollar shirt with skulls on the front.

Where is this guy? What kind of customer service is this? She thought of the complaint line for his agency and couldn’t help smiling. Maybe it was a call center somewhere in Bangalore, some crisp-voiced Indian honor student trilling out a committee-written script, “I’m sorry, ma’am, that the Cowboy Stud was late for your occasion. May I offer a discount on future services? Perhaps you would be happier with the Manly Firefighter, ma’am?”

That is, unless the clown was him. That didn’t make sense, though. Rebecca wouldn’t request a clown. No one would request a clown, would they? It just didn’t seem within the realm of what could conceivably happen.

But here she was, waiting for someone in a costume. And there the clown was, obviously waiting for someone also. There was an uneasy feeling trickling down her spine, because all of a sudden it was perfectly obvious—the clown was here for her. She couldn’t fathom why and she couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong, but she knew it was true. No matter how long she tried to act like some cowboy would come, there would be no cowboy. Not tonight. Something in the evening had gone wrong, and from here on out, things would range from uncomfortable to appalling.

Don’t be so dramatic, she commanded herself. To the clown, she said, “Are you from the Ladies’ Choice people?”

The clown nodded. “Took you long enough, princess,” he mumbled. His voice was rough and his appearance—at least as far as he could tell—was not particularly promising. The chalky white paint would have made any man look ghastly, but it didn’t seem to her that someone in his line of work should have so many jowls or such yellow teeth.

“I think we asked for a cowboy,” Annabelle said. “I wasn’t expecting…you.”

He didn’t respond to this. He just looked her up and down. When he grinned, a bunch of tiny cracks spread across the livid red paint circling his mouth. He beamed up at her and that was another thing—he beamed up at her. The clown was really short. He only came up to her chest.

So although his smile was terrible, she couldn’t help feeling sympathy. His work must have been terrible on his ego. How many groups of horny and intoxicated women had he disappointed in his career? How had that twisted him inside? Unless he got off on that kind of thing. The world is full of all sorts of perversions. The twinge in her spine grew worse all of a sudden, and she found herself saying, “Well, are you all set to go up?”

“Oh, I’m ready,” he said. “Are you ready?”

She didn’t like his voice. She didn’t like the way he sounded as arrogant as a man who wasn’t five-foot-four and decked out in a clown suit. She didn’t like the gravelly tone he had, because it didn’t seem to match the happy look on his face. “Follow me then, okay? We’re up on the eleventh floor…”

He spread out one of his arms in a courtly gesture and the pom-poms stuck to the front of his outfit shook jauntily. She crossed the lobby quickly and he jogged along behind her. When they passed the out-of-towners, one of them crowed, “Look at this, guys! The story of my life!” and the rest started in with their hearty, beer-scented laughter.

“Shove it up your ass, you faggot.” the clown told him. He didn’t raise his voice, but he did break his stride. He stared into the small crowd of men until the slowest of them had stopped laughing. Annabelle had to fight the urge to pull the clown into the elevator, but the men did nothing. They just fell silent and gave the clown their dumbest, drunkest gapes. Before anything else could happen, the clown followed her into the small mirror-walled chamber. When the doors closed and shut them up inside, he gave her a slow and slippery wink. “They’re lucky I didn’t turn their stinking guts into balloon animals,” he explained, and then he let out a rasping, crackling laugh that lasted nearly the entire way up.

It’ll all be over soon, Annabelle thought. She led the clown down the stylishly-dark hallway, resolved to find all of this funny one day. It was an easy commitment to make. Everything’s funny eventually. Horror movies from the 1950s? Hilarious. She loved them when they came on television. Goddamn, she wished she was watching television right now.

“What’s your name, anyway?” she asked.

“Stabby the Clown,” he said, and the laughter that accompanied this comment was quieter and gentler, but somehow even less pleasant.

“Great,” Annabelle said, “Listen, I don’t know really how all this works. Aren’t you supposed to bring your own music or something?”

The clown nodded and said, “Oh, I’ve thought of everything.” She watched him reach down the front of his balloon pants and fumble around in there. It seemed like there were fasteners of some sort in there, because she heard them click open. A second later, he drew out a dented-up transistor radio that had been carelessly painted pink. “See?” he said proudly, waving it around in front of her, and for the first time that evening the tingle in her turned into an actual shiver.

Weird. This is fucking weird. She was standing in front of their room, and she could hear their voices piercing through the door. Sometimes they all spoke at once, and when that subsided, one of them would yell out something that got them all going again. Even though the words were unclear, the content was obvious. Natasha was always bringing conversations back to pubic waxing. Natasha was obsessed with the subject and had been for months now. It was as if she was frantic for one of them to tell her that Brazilians had gone out of style months ago.

“Okay, here we go…” she said, more to herself than to the clown. She took a deep breath and went in, “All right, ladies!” she announced, willing herself to mimic some semblance of jauntiness, “Get ready for…ummmmm...this guy!”

He stayed in the hall while her friends and fellow bridesmaids all went “Wooooo!” in unison. For a moment, she hoped that the piercing noise they made sent him scurrying up the hall, down the fire stairs, and far far away. But of course that was never going to happen. No way this was going to wind up good. No way.

Instead, she heard him fumbling with his radio until it came on. A burst of static rode on top of their fading cheers and then turned into a merry calliope song. It was only a few banging notes piled up on top of each other, and it went on and on and on. Chloe broke out laughing at the noise of it. She spilled red wine onto the bed she was splayed across. Rebecca shot a quizzical look at Annabelle, who could only shrug mightily and shrink down as far as possible in the further corner of the room.

“Let’s see it!” Noelle barked into the dark hallway. Her voice was hoarse because she was both the drunkest and the loudest of them when she was drunk. There was a flush across her cheeks. A blushing bride for real, that was her. Her pants were down a few inches too far—Annabelle could see scant satin panties bunched up in her butt crack.

“What the hell is this?” Jenna cried, her hands over her ears but her face still in the waning stages of being amused. Beyond being obnoxious, the music he was playing was loud. Annabelle hadn’t noticed that at first. It was so loud it seemed like the managers would come up and tell them to be quiet. That was something to hope for, she supposed.

A moment later, the clown leapt into the room. He was making a howling sound that could hardly be heard over his music. He threw down his radio and it bounced across the carpet to land near the furthest bed, where it continued to gush its madcap carnival tune. He clasped his hands behind his head and began to thrust his pelvis. Since his pants were as huge as a family-sized tent, his grim-faced pumping seemed far more awkward than lewd. What made it bad was that everyone in the room except him was screaming. Grown women, all of them, and all of them screaming. The clown ate it up. He mugged for them. He lurched closer to them and shook his fists in fake rage when they slid as far away as they could get.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Natasha cried. She was covering her eyes and shaking her head, but it might have been that she was laughing too. She was the type to laugh at everything. She was a sweet person, mostly loved, and she believed with all her heart that nothing too bad could happen while she was giggling. Rebecca, who had always been less of an idiot, dashed straight for the bathroom and locked herself in as soon as the clown’s back was turned. Annabelle could hear her pretending to throw up in there.

Her retches might have been real if she had stuck around to see the clown take off his shirt. He was a chubby thing, and even the thick white paint he was smeared with couldn’t hide the matted hairs on his floppy pectorals, his drooping shoulders, his sweaty back. His gut swung back and forth as he danced, a bright white blob that kept its own rhythm as his movements grew less and less related to any kind of actual dancing. The word that occurred to Annabelle was obscene. She felt it was obscene even before he struggled out of his pants and started leaping around in his underwear.

He was wearing ordinary briefs that were a bit too big even for his wobbly bulk. Parts of him shook inside the thin fabric, bits of sallow and unpainted skin could be glimpsed through the various small tears throughout its unclean expanse. “Get out! Just get out!” Jenna shouted.

“I don’t understand this,” Noelle said to Annabelle.

“He said the agency sent him,” Annabelle replied, unable to meet her friend’s furious eyes. She didn’t think she should be blamed for this. This wasn’t her fault. She had only a feeble grasp of what was happening, but she couldn’t believe for a moment that she had caused it somehow. You brought him here, Noelle’s eyes still said, you brought this thing in here. Annabelle felt that to be unwarranted. You bitch. This isn’t me, you bitch. Don’t you dare lay this on me. She made her face as firm as she could and she strode straight up to the clown, saying “Enough! That’s enough!”

The clown made a sad face that certainly wasn’t sincere, but at least he stopped dancing. “You pre-paid for a whole half hour,” he said.

“That’s fine. We don’t care. Just go, please?” she said. She couldn’t stand the way he batted his red-crusted eyes, so she stepped away to deal with the radio. She couldn’t find an off-switch, but she managed to make it quieter by squashing it facedown on one of the beds. In the sudden almost-quiet, she could hear Chloe’s sniffling. Her chest was heaving and her soft features were all screwed up.

Annabelle got it in her mind to comfort her, but before she could reach out she felt the clown’s sweaty hand fall upon her bare shoulder. “I haven’t even met the bride yet,” he rasped, “Is this the bride?” His voice was lewd and avid, and he used his big, floppy clown shoes to slide across the carpet toward her bed.

 “No!” Annabelle shouted, “There is no bride here! You have no business here anymore! I want you out of here!"

There was a brief moment in which no one spoke and then the clown cast his glance over all the women before him. He settled his eyes on the second bed, where Noelle, Natasha, and Jenna were all piled precariously on the very furthest corner. “Is this one always such a nag?” he asked them.

“What’s your problem?” Noelle asked back.

“It’s between my legs, the same as yours,” the clown retorted.

Noelle had been drinking all night. Her judgment was impaired. She rose to her feet, used the bed stand to steady herself, and tottered toward the clown. “Fuck you, clown. Do your bride thing and leave. I’m sick of this shit.”

The clown’s gapped, mustard-colored grin returned. He pointed toward the dark room adjoining theirs. The other part of their makeshift suite, the room scattered with all the sex toys Rebecca had twisted their arms into buying for her. “We’ve gotta do it in there. Or these whores are gonna get a bit too excited.” he said.

“Watch how you talk about my girls, okay?” Noelle said, but she led the mostly-naked clown into the second room regardless. He scooped up his radio and wedged it into his armpit. Hopping into the air, he clapped his hands together a few times. After that, he whirled around and gave Annabelle once last wink before slamming the door shut with such force that the stack of overnight bags across the room toppled over.

For a while, all of them stayed where they were, each one looking away from the rest. The calliope song rang out loud once more, muffled only a bit by the wall between them and it. “He said the agency sent him,” Annabelle told them all. It was the best excuse she had.

 “We have to call them,” Jenna said.

 “Rebecca!” Annabelle called out.

 A moment later, the bathroom door cracked open a bit. “Is he gone?” she asked.

“What kind of stripper service did you call? I mean holy shit...”

“I don’t know. It was on the Internet. You know, you just go on the Internet to find these things nowadays. Is he gone?”

Chloe let out a sudden shriek and flew across the room. Pounding on the door, she cried out “Let her go! Let her go, you sick bastard!” She hit the wood as hard as she could and then she slumped over, the mascara streaked down her face making her look a bit like a truck-struck raccoon. “He took her. That clown took her...” she said in between gasps and hiccoughs.

“Let’s just calm down, okay? Can we just calm down?” Annabelle said.

Natasha slammed back whatever was left in the bottle of blueberry vodka left on the nightstand and started to giggle. “That was awful,” she said “Poor Noelle. He was so short and hairy, wasn’t he?”

“Shut up.” Jenna said. “Listen. Do you hear that?” Once they all got quiet, it was clear that the calliope sound was receding. The scratchy notes grew softer and softer until the real sound had vanished, leaving only the memory of its melody to trill on indefinitely.

Annabelle pulled open the door to the hallway and peered out. The corridor’s harsh kind of quiet seemed like a rebuke to the racket they had just been a part of. The dark out there was a challenge. Her eyes were unaccustomed to it, the shiny white of the clown’s skin had burned itself into her retina so that she saw flashing, florescent silhouettes of him dancing off into the distance. Once she had blinked them all away, the only thing remaining were the oversized footprints in the thick carpet. Were they wet with something? She couldn’t tell for sure, but they looked wet. Why would they be wet? Transfixed, she took a few halting steps towards the first of them. She got down on her knees and reached out toward it, telling herself that it was just a trick of the light. Even though there wasn’t any light to trick her. A trick of the lack of light, she hoped as her hand hesitated above the breadloaf-sized spot.

Back in the room, Natasha was rapping on the inner door. “Hey, Noelle-baby!” she said, “Did you survive that? Wasn’t that fucked up?”

Chloe’s soft voice spoke up again. “I want to get out of here. Let’s all get out of here.”

“Come on, Noelle! You’re scaring Chloe!”

“I’m not scared. I just want to get out of here...” she replied, her voice keening and words unconvincing.

Annabelle stepped back into the room, shut the door behind her, and leaned heavily against it. “It’s going to be bad,” she said.

“What’s going to be bad?” Rebecca asked. She was sitting primly on the edge of the bed. She was pawing through the downtown welcome guide the hotel had left in their room, her face cast down at the crumpled pages snapping beneath her flying fingers.

Jenna said, “Let’s all just relax. That’s what we need to do. It was just a clown.”

“It’s going to be bad,” Annabelle said again.

Natasha just giggled, ignoring them all. “Alright, Noelle-baby, I’m coming in there! You hear me?” She had her hand on the knob and her body against the door. As she pushed, the darkness in the other room went from being a narrow line to a thick line to a line so wide any of them could just walk through if they wanted.

“Don’t go in there!” Annabelle wailed, “It’s going to be bad in there!” She knew they wouldn’t listen, though. She slid down the wall until she was sitting on her haunches in front of their last way out. Collapsed there, she clasped her hands to her ears because she knew what was going to come next. The only thing left was to wait for it and then suffer it for the rest of her life.

All rights reserved to Kevin Hedman