Dean was running after the elder brother who had somehow sensed the coming of the murderer, but no matter how he pushed his legs he couldn’t bridge the distance. The waxy figure of the pale boy was bounds and strides beyond Dean’s grasp, gliding like a shadow. When they turned another corner, this time back into a familiar stretch of white hall, Dean almost breathed a sigh of relief that normalcy had returned to his surroundings, if not his situation. The figure up ahead also seemed to have reached some kind of clarity, and stopped in his tracks, turning to Dean and waiting with a vacant smile.
Dean was doubled over, hands on his thighs and panting breathlessly. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and looked up at the stray prisoner, stretching out his other hand in an attempt at a comforting gesture to ease tensions.
“It’s ok, I’m not going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you. Please, come with me.” Dean said, voice soft and appeasing.
“It’s too late.” the boy smiled sadly back at Dean. “We’re all already in checkmate. We have been from the beginning.”
“What do you mean? Can you explain it in a way that I understand what you’re talking about?” Dean asked.
“No.” the boy shook his head.
Then he passed through a white door at the end of the hall.
“Hey, wait!” Dean followed him.
The moment Dean stepped through the door, there was nothing beneath him but a dark vertical plunge down what looked like a bottomless shaft. His stomach lurched and winds whipped his falling body as he screamed in blind terror. He was falling down, and down, and down, seemingly without end. The gray walls rushed past him, darkened almost pitch black until the chasm was suddenly illuminated by flickering lights set into the wall in front of Dean’s tumbling form. Even through his terror, he perceived that the lights sparking in and out of life on the wall were the same kind of overhead phosphorescent lights that lit the basement and back halls. As he realized that the wall he fell across was in fact a ceiling, he had a sense of inversion heaped on top of the mortal terror of already falling miles down, completely out of control.
As if he were a stunt actor under the perspective trickery of a film camera, he felt the entire building rotate and shift around him. The effect this had on his body was like the centrifugal force that plastered riders back-first against the interior of the gravitron ride at carnivals and fairs, moving up and down his body as he twisted and spun, flipping head over heel in his freefall. His stomach felt plastered to his spine, and hot nausea was welling up inside his throat, even as he felt that vomiting would only choke himself, unable to dislodge anything from his throat under the pressure of the Gs. His sense of gravity was ultimately flipped 90°.
Then, Dean was no longer falling down a shaft; he was falling across a hall. With the focal point of gravity now under him, Dean began to land hard on the floor racing away under him. The first blow was enough to put him in a bone-rattling heap, and that was just the beginning as he continued to bounce and tumble over the ground, incurring painful bruises and road rash like a human skipping stone across a lake surface. Dean almost believed his momentum would never end, and he would simply be broken apart and smeared across the hallway like a plastic bag of chicken bones tossed with great force. In the real world, that might have been exactly what happened, but that was no longer a given.
The long, painful tumble ended only when Dean crashed, back-first, into a large wooden crate placed against the far wall. It shattered to splintered boards under the weight of Dean’s impact, and kicked up a surge of musty, centuries-old dust. Pain exploded into Dean’s back, and he clutched at it with hands that had been rubbed raw with friction, hissing and eyes tearing up involuntarily.
It was another trick, and a damn good one at that. The vivid pain made it clear to Dean that this was no dream, even if he couldn’t comfortably call the absurdity ‘real’. Wherever he was, physics were under the control of the serial killer. That was the only possible explanation for how any of this was happening. The realization that the game had already begun even back when the prisoners first disappeared along with the furnishings of their cells struck Dean like a bag of heavy, ice-cold bricks. The precinct had been a storage facility, true, but why had Dean and his coworkers not suspected something was wrong sooner when they happened upon halls that didn’t exist before? How deep did the killer’s warping of reality go? Could he influence their memories and twist their perceptions? Numb them to mitigating rationality that would otherwise steer them to question the strange dream logic of this dark dimension?
As Dean stood on bruised, creaking legs, he pulled his gun close to him and looked down the length of the hall he had fallen before gravity shifted. He narrowed his eyes. His ears began to pound for some reason, as though the ambient pressure was building. A tremendous roar began to build up from far down the hall, and Dean gaped in horror as a surging wave of dark blood filled the end of the hall from floor to ceiling, flooding rapidly down toward him like a crimson tsunami.
“Oh this is bullshit!” Dean grunted.
He turned over his shoulder and saw a victorian-styled window in the wall. Beyond it was a stretch of sweeping green grass, set against a backdrop of night void. Dean spared a final glance at the coming wave of blood, the cloying scent of iron thick and synesthetic all around him now, and glared. In the wall of gore, he saw the shredded corpses, some rotted and skeletal, others fresh and staring, caught in the hellish swell. There were dozens of them; all of the serial killer’s previous victims, if Dean were to guess.
Richie could have confirmed that theory if he were here now, and could spot the haggard, worn face of the crackhead vagrant rolling among the inglorious dead, his eyes cold and accusatory.
Dean jumped through the window, shattering what felt like sugar glass and thin wood framing with his shoulder and back, into the darkness of the unknown beyond, where he would take his chances. But before he did, he growled at the wave seconds before it could crash into and drown him.
“You’re going to pay for this. No one is above the law.” Dean promised the spectral presence of the maniacal clawed jester.
Elsewhere, Forest found himself pacing the perimeter of the flooded circle of area he had somehow become trapped in without noticing it. Cold, dark water rose up to his thighs, lapping at his wetted crotch, and the only source of illumination was a faint, glowing red tint coming from no identifiable lightsource. Forest’s hands traced the smooth, metallic contours of his meager prison, finding he was in a circle of enclosed steel or iron that rose cylindrically forty or fifty feet above his head. The waters churned with his movements like sudding backwash, and he thought he smelled the stink of bat guano or carcasses that had expired and rotted to sludge somewhere in the tank.
“It’s an old water silo…” Forest shuddered to himself.
His lip was white, stuck out almost petulantly like a child’s, shivering just a touch. He broke into panic again and began banging on the walls, hollering and shouting, screaming for help to come and get him out. When fists failed, he began pistol-whipping the walls, and when this roused no response, he fired one shot, then another, like signal flares. The old container creaked and groaned all around Forest, and he heard thunderous slams banging back at him from all around the outside of the silo, as though many people were emphatically knocking on a great iron door. The echoes of the knocking all around were concentrated by the strange acoustics, piercing deep into Forest’s eardrums and rattling his brain. He clutched at his ears, half-expecting them to bleed, and fell to his knees, slashing in the fetid water as he felt the vibration deep in his gut.
The gun tumbled out of his hand, and may as well have for all the good it did him, leaving nary a hole in the silo from either of the two shots he had fired off. Still, when the pounding stopped, Forest plunged his hands into the murk up to his shoulders, desperately scrambling for his lost firearm. When at last his fingers clutched the grip and trigger, Forest pulled the pistol from the stagnant water and fumbled with the clip upon finding the gun had jammed with gunk. His fingers fumbled at the cartridge, trying to inspect and clean it under his limited light. He thought of the intact, unused round that had been left with Randal’s corpse back in the station, and of the bullets the suspect had stolen from Dean when it was finished toying with him.
As if on cue, Forest startled under the rain of Dean’s unspent bullets falling down around him, splashing into the pool at Forest’s feet. He looked up, where the ammunition had fallen plentifully from the unseen top of the dark silo. Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Rattling shook the silo again, followed by the sound of claws striking steel.
“No!” Forest shrieked as the jester’s form dove from above in a tailspin-like formation, claws whirling along with the spook’s twisting form like helicopter blades.
Forest flashed his gun straight up and pulled the trigger with all his might, finally managing off a shot that dislodged the one wet bullet still stuck in the chamber. The muzzle flash illuminated the interior of the silo like a lightning strike for a split second in the moment before the jester’s claws were upon Forest. The officer’s screams echoed all through the chamber.
…
Wilcox was groaning, clutching at the back of his head and his stiff neck as he finally sat up from his concussive fall on the slick ground. There was a sizable bump on the back of his skull, and it was bleeding a little bit too. Wilcox was tougher for his age than most though, or at least he liked to think himself such, and he stood again, more pissed off than anything else. It was the distant sound of Forest’s screams that had woken him, trailing off like the last remnants of a temporary sandbar breaking apart in the pull of a receding tide. Hand in hand with that mental image, Wilcox could hear ocean waves softly crashing somewhere far off, as though they were close to the bay. At his feet had been the cause of Wilcox’s fall, an oily discarded banana peel, straight out of slapstick saturday morning cartoons. Wilcox eyed it disbelievingly, mustache twitching in irritation.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” he said of falling for such a trite cliche as slipping on a banana peel.
He ignored the embarrassment and moved on, gun cocked and loaded, ready to go at the first glimmer of danger. The soft tinkling of bells and the smell of fragrant burning incense guided him, carried by a gentle breeze that whistled through the halls. The halls felt particularly hollow now, creaking as though they were composed of flimsy aluminum alloy suspended in the sky and rocking in the aerial waves. A disorienting sense of vertigo and dizziness gripped Wilcox, whether for the trickery of the room or his moderate concussion just now he couldn’t say; perhaps it was both.
“Dean? Forest? Lester?” he called out.
His voice echoed down the halls as he walked, tickling his ears as the soundwaves rippled like from pebbles thrown in a pond. He came to a door - his door, marked with the golden placard bearing ‘Paul Wilcox’s Office’ set into the slot at the top of the door, resting eye-level. The doorknob was slick with blood. Wilcox gripped it anyway, and pushed the door, creaking loudly, open.
His door opened not onto his familiar office, with its cluttered desk, tubs of thumbtacks and paperclips, his littered cola cans, his supposedly disused antique ashtray and the secret store of Cuban cigars he kept in a hidden compartment at the bottom of his desk drawer - but onto a marble staircase exposed to the wind, surrounded on all sides by giant, swaying trees with willowy branches that seemed to whisper as the wind rattled their leaves. The staircase sloped sharply downward, each step spaced almost a foot apart from each other, into inky blackness from which the thick trunks seemed to rise, tall and imposing like wooded sentries, out of bottomless void depths.
Bloody footsteps in the shape of the jester’s wooden clogs tiptoed catlike all the way down - however far that was.
“I’m only seeing this because you’re letting me, aren’t you?” Wilcox growled onto the wind. “You’re going to regret being so cavalier. Who the hell do you think you are? Whoever you are…” he sighed.
The night air was cool and chilled him, making tense gooseflesh erupt all along the skin of Wilcox’s arms.
“Alright, fine. We’ll play in your court, freak. Forget arresting you, you’ll share the fate of the good men you killed here tonight.” Wilcox stifled his breath, kissed his silver banded wedding ring, and began descending the staircase into the forested darkness.
Then Wilcox was dwarfed by his surroundings, a tiny figure in an immense enclosed patio of some kind with green mesh walls bridging rails of white wood to an angular pyramid-like roof. The staircase was at Wilcox’s back, and beyond the stretch of crisscrossed red and gray brick floor at his feet was a wide opening to the left of one of the green walls. The patio spilled out onto a cement walkway flanked on either side by trailing green ivy sprawled out amidst wildflowers, with tendrils of it climbing high amidst rose trellises whose blood-red blossoms dotted their lengths. A dark blue tarp was stretched over standing pvc pipes stuck into the ground, spanning the length of a row of planter boxes with faded red wood rims, shielding the newborn sprouts against the wind and falling rain. In the distance were huge piles of exotic rocks and minerals, arranged in ordered chaos hills that formed narrow walkways. At every juncture between rows were barrels of stagnant liquid that looked something like oil drums. A large tree somewhere out of sight was continually spilling leaves that danced in the wind. A stray acorn broke under Wilcox’s boot, and a glance at the patio floor showed that innumerable weeds and moss had sprung up between the cracks of the bricks.
Wilcox carefully strode through the patio, stopping at its edge to find a three foot or so wooden statue of a jolly old sailor with a red nose and big white beard. He was dressed in a decorative naval blue overcoat, tan breeches, coal-black boots, and a white sailor hat. A corn-cob pipe hung out the corner of his painted face, and there was a mirthful sheen in the pupils of the statue. It was fine craftsmanship, and the placement of the only humanoid figure in the area made Wilcox suspicious.
Cautiously, he poked at the statue once or twice. It only wobbled a little bit, giving a satisfying sound of knocking wood. Nothing dangerous quite yet. In any case, Wilcox kicked the statue over all the same. He wasn’t in the mood to admire the killer’s sense of decor. A little white seagull, also painted wood, broke off from the statue’s shoulder, and its chipped beak pointed up at Wilcox, striking him oddly as a giant middle finger flipping him off.
He continued on his way, leaving the shadow of the patio and passing through a yard whose yellow picket fence, aged and decaying, he saw on the horizon the same way one sees rolling storm clouds or mist. They were somehow fuzzy and indistinct, as though Wilcox were looking at a picture that was out of focus. He couldn’t be entirely sure where the border between the yard and the fence lay, if that concept even applied here to begin with. He had no way to measure his steps or the time that passed, the only constant was the swaying of the leaves and the ambient drone of the wind and rain, now tapering off to a light shower. Little drops struck the back of Wilcox’s neck and caught on the white hairs that stuck out of his skin. Everything had become far too quiet for Wilcox’s liking.
The blood trail moved along a pathway of white tile stepping stones sunk deep into a muddy path collecting rainwater like a swollen gutter, and Wilcox followed this trail one step at a time, resolute in his stride and determined to bring this vicious criminal to justice for all of the pain he had caused. Wilcox crossed a gabled storage shed that was almost the size of a small barn, red paint running down its sides in blurry streaks. Framed by three long, rectangular-cut logs forming an unfinished square, a rusty-flecked iron archway was erected, a chain running through a loop in the top that dangled a large hook halfway off the ground - some kind of old crane or lifting mechanism, possibly for moving large crates of those decorative rocks, or sacks of planting soil. To Wilcox though, it looked like a bald gallows waiting grimly for the condemned; his time working as a guard on death row had never completely left him, and he shivered a bit more. As if to resonate with the image his mind had conjured of the hangman’s noose, a clock somewhere struck midnight, and twelve solemn chimes rang out, bellowing like screaming goats.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The trail ended at the threshold of a great, sprawling greenhouse composed at random of panes that were stained glass murals, like those in churches. Cubist patterns and complex webs stared back at Wilcox as he pushed into the warm, humid bubble of the greenhouse. Though he wouldn’t recognize it, Wilcox was surrounded by a labyrinth of plants identical to the one occupying the real life greenhouse Richie had accidentally fallen into at the beginning of his surprise journey. The words ‘morphic resonance’ passed through Wilcox’s mind for no reason.
Pushing through overgrown ivy vines that were so thick they resembled the untamed wilds of the deepest jungles, Wilcox found himself in the heart of the boxed wilderness, and it was here that the place distinguished itself from its earthly counterpart in the real Station Bay. At the center of a ringed procession of grassy strips narrowing at each layer till the innermost circle was only large enough to stand in, an ornate white fountain rose like an expansive layered wedding cake twenty feet high, each tier of the structure looking like a great dish that spilled water so finely from the rims that bits of it dissolved into mist partway down to the garden floor. At the top of the fountain was a spire from which a hand carved of stone reached toward a gorgeous red apple hanging just out of reach on the bow of an otherwise long-dead tree standing astride the fountain.
The fountain and tree were bathed in rainbow diamonds and hexagons by a circle of combined stained glass designs filtering the sudden moonlight above, from which a banded skylight of open slots in the glass ceiling let unchanged rays of lunar light cascade down.
In a word, the place was extravagant. And a bit gaudy for Wilcox’s tastes. Even if it had been neither of those things, the atmosphere of the garden was marred by the presence of innumerable bodies of the dead and dying wrapped in constricting bands of ivy, interwoven with ripped sheets of cream-colored funeral pall. Groans of mutilated, ravaged men and women still trapped in the jester’s web for him to carve up and work on at his leisure surrounded Wilcox.
My god, there are so many people here. How many have you already killed? Wilcox gaped, mouth dry and tongue chaffed.
The blood ended on the rim of the fountain. Wilcox drew his gun.
“Show yourself already, you scum.” he said venomously.
The jester obliged him, and rose, idol-like and with nary a muscle twitch, out of an impossibly shallow pool of water in the bottom receptacle of the fountain. Wilcox could see the reflected shimmer of coins that had been tossed into the water and wished upon, and heard the aquatic scurrying of startled koi. Wilcox’s man was exactly as he had been pictured - Dean had drawn him well in that photo-realistic style. Water dripped down from the tips of either end of the lithe figure’s conical hat, the plinking sound of the drops joined by the tinkling of bells. More miniature waterfalls of fountain water spilled from the edges of the jester’s carved theater mask mouth. Soft, gentle blue eyes peered at Wilcox from deep behind the shadowed eye holes of that Comedy mask. The jester crossed his gangly, poufed arms so that the long claws of his gauntlets fell around his elbows, trailing down to just past his thighs. He inclined his head in a shallow nod toward Wilcox.
“Welcome.” that cool, casual voice bade Wilcox.
“Goodbye.” Wilcox said.
He put pressure on the trigger. He had no intention of bantering with this lunatic. The time for words had passed.
The jester was there on the fountain one moment, then an inch from Wilcox’s face the next, faster than it took to pull the trigger. Wilcox had a complete thought in the space of that fraction of a second. He thought No one can move that quickly. He just blurred, as if from one frame of film to the next, skipping dozens. His speed isn’t human. No. He himself isn’t human. Not anymore.
A crack at the back of Wilcox’s heel was to thank for the old officer stumbling backward out of the clawing cat stroke of the jester’s sword paw. He felt his hip dislocate even as he leapt back, out of the grasp of those raking talons, which scuffed a piece from the tip of his nose as he fell into a widened stance, gun pointed unflinchingly into the monster’s face. Again, before he could shoot, the jester moved again, and a graceful sweep like a blurring comet tail of silver streaks graced Wilcox’s hands. His left hand fell away, unmarred, as his right hand which clasped the gun handle was relieved of its fingers. With a sick chopping sound, all five digits were rendered nothing more than stumps spurting blood. Like Dean’s stolen rounds in the water tower before, Wilcox’s severed fingers and thumb were now nothing more than festive confetti raining about their heads. With no way to hold his gun in his dominant hand, Wilcox was forced to let the pistol fall from his mutilated right hand. He sensed an unseen smirk behind the carved smirk of the jester’s theatre mask. The rain seemed to be falling slower too. Pain didn’t matter. Dismemberment didn’t matter.
Shooting the cocksucker right between his taunting eyes mattered.
Wilcox caught his falling gun with his intact left hand, and jammed the barrel up against the jester’s forehead.
That got a pause, and even a genuine gasp out of the clown.
Wilcox pulled the trigger.
A novelty Bang! flag unfurled from the thin wooden stick that lunged out of the muzzle, and hung there fluttering in the breeze in front of the jester’s face.
Wilcox’s face fell, along with his sinking heart.
“That was a close one, now wasn’t it?” the jester said softly.
The masked performer stepped back and gave a deep, self-aggrandizing bow.
“Fuck you.” Wilcox flipped the gun one-handed, grabbed it by the gag handle the jester had given him, and brought the blunt side of the warped firearm upside that freak’s head.
He nailed him solidly in the temple, reeling the jester backward and leaving a bloody divot. The bang flag snapped in half with the strength of the blow, and the gun cascaded to the floor, clattering across the bricks to lay in a puddle. The jester’s clawed hands flew to his head and clutched at his skull, shaking his head in the unexpected pain of the wound he shouldn’t have been dealt.
Wilcox stepped forward and lunged across the way with that same hand, throwing a heavy haymaker with all the strength he could muster. He was more than a gun and a badge. Being the law in a big city like Station Bay with the muggers and the murderers needed more than the ability to pass screening and a test, or good hands on the wheel of a cop car. It needed grit, it needed resolve, and it needed the strength to carry on the good fight no matter the odds. Wilcox didn’t have time for fairytales.
But while that was all well and good - he still wasn’t calling the shots.
The jester leaned back out of the way - no, under Wilcox’s punch, spine bending elastically backward like a man-sized cat ducking under a limbo pole. No man could move his body like that, not in any real and sane world. But this was not.
Then the jester was behind Wilcox, flashing out of view in a trail of afterimages just like he had moved when he took the old cop’s fingers. A gauntlet of four side-by-side curved blades rose high above Wilcox’s head and shoulders, then down his back. Wilcox felt his shoulder blades cleaved cleanly through and displaced by the stroke of the unstoppable blades rending his back flesh in ribbons straight down from the back of the neck to the tailbone. Blood sprayed in misty gouts from the four identical slash marks now branding his back, and Wilcox went face first down into the overgrown floor of the cathedral-like greenhouse. His eyes twitched, and sweat rolled down his forehead, tickling his nose flattened against the ground. A bit of stray blood leaked out of the corner of his mouth, and his whiskers were wetted irritably on the cold ground. As a small mercy, he hadn’t really registered the agony of the wound across his back yet.
The jester composed himself at Wilcox’s side, just out of view so that the shadow of his conical hat dangled over Wilcox’s paralyzed form, the bells jingling that mocking tone at him.
“Did you actually think you stood a chance in hell of besting me, Cox?” the jester audibly smirked.
“Don’t call me that. That nickname is a privilege that goes only to the ones I trust and respect. You have no right to call me that, you murdering scumfuck.” Wilcox grunted up at the lunatic who had put him in checkmate.
Wilcox could see the broken novelty bang flag lying on the ground just out of the corner of his eye. The flag was still fluttering at the tip.
“Oh don’t say such barbed things to me, Cox. We go way back, now don’t we?” the jester cood. “Don’t get all holier-than-thou on me, old buddy old pal. You’ve murdered people. You killed my mother in cold blood, don’t you remember?”
“What are you talking about? You’re delusional, I would never take an innocent life!” the man barked up at him. “What, was she someone on the row? I only stood watch, I had nothing to do with any of the executions! I was like a therapist for God’s sake! I may have killed people in the line of duty, but only when they fired the first shots. But you-”
The jester put a single claw to Wilcox’s tongue, lightly caressing it and holding it ever so gently in place outside of Wilcox’s mouth.
“There’s a special place in Hell for those who perjure under sworn oath, Mr Paul Wilcox.” he growled. “Jackson Street, at the intersection of Cross Avenue. The old projects. You remember them, don’t you, Cox? The domestic violence call you got? I know you’re getting up in years, but don’t tell me you’ve forgotten such a recent affair already, have you? I was only a boy, after all.”
Wilcox’s eyes went wide. He did remember the incident at Jackson Street. He could never forget it. It had been the greatest mistake that would haunt him to the grave.
“How could I have known what was going to happen to you when we left? I wasn’t within my legal authority to arrest your father, don’t you think I wanted to? Don’t you think I’d have rather turned in my badge than live with knowing I left a woman and child to such a fate? If I could have known then that that monster would -” Wilcox began, cutting his tongue on the jester’s unretracted claw and not caring.
“But you didn’t. You didn’t turn in your badge, and you didn’t speak up when you were offered that promotion a few years down the line, did you? Did you mean what you said to protect and serve, or were you just like all the tin-badge tyrants you swore not to become in the end?” the jester asked.
“I wanted to bring discipline back to the police, you think I don’t know what people think of us these days? That the entire scrolls of police brutality scandals don’t make me want to puke my guts out?! I wanted to change things from the inside, to-”
“You can’t fix a broken institution, Mr Paul Wilcox.” the jester said, his voice harsher now. “And you can’t go back in time.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t shoot that evil man on the spot. I’m sorry he was allowed to go free and beat your mother to death. I didn’t know. I didn’t have enough evidence.” Wilcox said, and he meant it.
“Sorry doesn’t bring her back, and it doesn’t bring back the home, childhood, and hope you stole from me.” the jester said, slowly as though he were explaining it to a young child.
“So you’re the one who unzipped his guts while he was drunk on the couch, I take it?” Wilcox asked, his voice soft and drained.
“That’s right.” the jester nodded - Wilcox could tell because he heard the jingle of bells again.
“I don’t blame you. Please, just promise you’ll make me the last one. If you want my blood, take it. Just leave this city alone. No one else needs to die.” Wilcox said, a single tear beginning to roll down his cheek.
“You’re a little too late to care about the fate of every other brat with a sob story in this big stinking city. But that’s besides the point. I’m specifically killing you, and only you for the oversight that stole my mother and put me on the streets. So, I’ll accept your apology when I’ve taken your life. But I’m not going to stop cleansing your city. I’ll keep going until the entire place is a ghost town, purged of all life.”
Wilcox’s eye began twitching, his pupil expanding and contracting at random as though he were suffering a stroke borne of mixed confusion and anger. “But why, goddamn you?!?”
“Why?” the jester kicked him in the ribs, eliciting a pained grunt. “For my fucking park trail!”
He kicked Wilcox in the ribs several more times, breaking them on the second and third swings. Then he stomped on the downed man’s back, setting the till-then numbed slash wounds alight with vivid, angry pain. Wilcox screamed, and it was like the sweetest orchestral melody to the jester’s ears.
“It’s too late for things like reasons and justifications. Far, far too late. The memories of that tragedy, and my bitterness, are the only things left. I sold everything else for this power, and now the only thing left to do is use it. The boy you should have saved died years ago, and now you and everything you cared about and swore to protect will share his fate. Station Bay will have new masters to inherit it. Better masters.”
The jester raised a claw overhead and clicked at a trigger in his gauntlet. The four blades shifted and slid into each other, overlapping and folding almost like a rigid oriental fan of steel, forming a single, thicker stabbing blade.
“As for you… I’m going to take my time with you…” the jester hissed.
Wilcox felt a single tear from the wounded manchild preparing to torture him fall on his wounded back, wetting ripped ribbons of flesh. Then the jester stabbed that conjoined blade through the back of his shoulder. Wilcox screamed. He kept screaming with every new, superficial blow the clawed killer dealt him.
“Your screams please me, but I think you can do better than that.” the jester looked to Wilcox’s severed fingers.
One of them bore a wedding ring.
“Ohhh, I see… you’re married, are you?” the jester spoke softly.
Wilcox grit his teeth.
“I bet she’s a dependable woman. She worries about how much you overwork yourself, and henpecks you sometimes, but only because she has your best interests at heart. You’d both be getting up in years now, but I think she’s maybe a few years younger than you. You’re from that era, aren’t you? When courtly love was still in fashion and it was expected for an older, worldly gentleman to woo a sweet maiden? I bet she steamed your clothes for you, and straightens your tie, and holds you close late at night when you come home, world-weary and jaded, wondering if it’s all worth fighting for. I bet she tells you how she still sees the idealistic young man she fell in love with in your eyes, and reminds you why you put on the uniform? Yes, I can see it perfectly. What a lovely, textbook couple. After you’re gone, she’ll be quite lonely, won’t she?”
Wilcox felt his blood beginning to boil.
“I’ll bet she would just love if someone paid her a visit. You still live in Oak Grove, don’t you, Cox?” the jester crouched low over Wilcox as he spoke, letting every venom-dripping word sink in.
He licked the back of Wilcox’s neck with a cold, noisome tongue as he let his ominous words hang on the air.
“If you so much as touch her, I’ll-” Wilcox began.
The jester stomped on his back again, eliciting another scream. “No matter how deeply you believe in justice - you’re still paralyzed. Strength is what determines who has God’s favor in this world, Wilcox. If you want to protect the innocent - then why are you so unforgivably weak? Lay there in despair and die like you ought to, you filthy mongrel!”
The jester repeatedly stabbed Wilcox’s shoulders with his conjoined single blades on either hand.
Then another gun was locked onto him. He heard the click of the chamber, and looked up into the bruised face of Dean, one boyish lock of hair still hanging over his forehead.
“That’s enough.” Dean said.
He pumped six shots, each sounding out thunderously, into the freak’s body. Two slugs went into the jester’s gut, two in his chest, one in his throat, and the last in his forehead. The jester suit sprouted crimson, blooming circles of blood, and the Comedy mask cracked slightly down the middle. From each hole, a splash of blood spurted.
The jester swayed on his feet, then fell over backward, his head loudly smacking the concrete at his back.
Wilcox didn’t fully come to again till he was already seated up against a potted plant, Dean looking over his wounds.
“Are you ok, Cox?” Dean asked, yanking his own utility belt free to wrap it about Wilcox’s shoulder wound and try to stem the bleeding with it as a makeshift tourniquet as best he could.
“No, Dean, I’m pretty far from ok.” Wilcox sighed.
More than the wounds, it was the cold truth in the jester’s words that left scars which would never fade. If only the boy that monster had once been could have known just how close to the brink the news of that night had pushed Wilcox, maybe they could have talked things out under different circumstances. Maybe he could have given an outlet for that pain to be released, so that it never fermented into the vile black evil that was unleashed on Station Bay.
Dean could guess at what his senior was thinking, and he gripped his arm, looking him in the eyes. “You didn’t kill all these people, Cox.”
Wilcox only looked down after a long while, with moist eyes.
“Yes, I did. Because I didn’t speak up.” he said.
“Everyone makes their own choices.” Dean said.
“And I’ve made mine.” the jester said softly, matter-of-factly.
The two officers could only stare in shock and cold horror as the bullet-riddled body of the jester stood again, rising in that same cat-like flexible way that he had dodged Wilcox’s punch, planting his feet in the ground at a sharp angle and lifting his willowy body up after them with no help from his arms. As he stood to his full height again, the blood was drawn back up into his wounds, and those holes in his body began to swirl closed and fade. The jester clenched his fingers at his sides, then opened them, and from each hand, three spent bullets dropped and tinkled to the floor.
“Where do you think we are, gentlemen?” the jester asked them.
They could only silently stammer.
“These - are my Backyards!” - the jester splayed both sets of claws out at their full, unfurled four-blade glory, arms stretched wide to either side - and rushed them down.
…