Jazz, Monster Collector in: Downtown Clowntown (Season One, Episode Three)

nster Collector in:

  Downtown Clowntown

  season one, episode three

  RiFT

  Copyright 2011

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

  persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

  JAZZ, Monster Collector

  Season One: Earth’s Lament

  RiFT

  Season-1, Episode-3: Downtown Clowntown

  I was deep inside Clowntown, one of the most dangerous places this side of the wilds. The Not Now Stone had regenerated my battered, beaten, burned, and partially digested body. I’d decided to ignore my usual apprehensions and be thankful about having used it. I was back in fighting shape, but my clothes were tattered and stained…with my blood. I was starving and the clock was ticking. I still had over twenty-three hours to find my way out of this monster ghetto, but if anything kept me from reaching the jar of soul-lution at my office in Nitsburg, I would suffer a horrible, and excruciating, series of injuries. I needed to scrub the stone and I couldn’t let anything get between me and that old pickle jar.

  When I heard the laughing, I knew that something was about to get in my way.

  Clowns, just great; they had about as much love for me as I did for them. Given better circumstances I would have set up an ambush and dusted these creeps, but my situation was dire at best. Still, considering my strategic options, an ambush might be my least unattractive option—it would certainly be fun.

  But I’d try hiding first.

  I reached inside my cotton jacket, drew the macdaddy revolver from my shoulder harness, and moved as quickly and as quietly as I could, backtracking my steps to an old brick building I’d passed earlier.

  I stopped outside of the decorative iron gate. This building was unique for Clowntown as it still had its windows and doors intact, and lacked the colorful, smiling faces the Clowns mark their territory with. A building with no graffiti stands out in this neighborhood. I scanned the windows and walls, looking for a clue. Something about this place had kept the militant monsters and violent vermin away. Maybe, if whatever it was didn’t kill me, or worse, the clowns would pass it by.

  More laughter, coming closer.

  Keeping low and my pistol at the ready, I crept along the brick walk and up the short stack of concrete steps, the shreds of my long, pleated skirt dragged behind me. The door was a heavy, fiberglass model, popular before the coming of Mirth and its vast supply of magical construction methods. It was, of course, locked. I slipped the magnetic pick from the seam of my shirt and slid it in the door. As soon as I did my shadow-sight caught a glimmer of enchantment. Something was protecting the house. But the cackling laughter was very near and I needed the drop on these clowns, so I tripped the lock, opened the door, and slid in with my revolver at the ready.

  I shut the door, closing out the fading light of day. My shadow-sight took over. A childhood ‘accident’ had rendered me completely color blind, but I’d also gained the ability to see in all but complete darkness, and what I saw really creeped me out.

  There was a long, floral print sofa in front of a bay window treated with a pair of pleated curtains, drawn closed. A thick cushioned recliner stood in one corner, and a wooden rocker was nestled beside the brick fireplace. Several photographs were arranged on the mantle. I was standing on a deep pile, wall to wall carpet. Gooseflesh swarmed over me, standing the hairs on the back of my neck and arms on end. I was in a living room, a perfectly preserved, museum quality replica of a room from a century ago—a room from my childhood.

  How could this house exist here, now, and in, of all places, Clowntown?

  I pulled the revolver’s hammer back, scanning every inch of the space—the striped wallpaper, the ceiling fan, the crochet throws—with my shadow sight. Aside from being able to see in the dark, it also allows me to see the normally invisible portions of the magical spectrum. I saw glowing, blue-white blotches everywhere—ghost fingerprints. Something spectral, something that had touched the other side, was in that house.

  Keeping my eyes and ears open, I crept across the room, pressed my back to the wall and looked around the corner into a dusty, but otherwise sublime, dining room, complete with cobwebbed candelabrum in the center of the table. I picked a pen up off the server. I hadn’t seen a regular, ink-filled writing instrument in a while.

  I tapped the pen on the top of the rocker, then gave the chair a persuasive tap with the tip of my moccasin boot and started it gently rocking. It was solid enough, real enough—this was no illusion. But why? Why was it there, intact? A thought struck me in the back of the head; maybe this was a set up. Maybe someone had figured out my secret, had set up this house as bait, someone resourceful, and moral-less, and with a twisted sense of humor, someone like the clowns. If so, then I’d just bungled in like a true amateur.

  Laughter, just outside the house; if they were springing a trap, now was the time. I shoved the pen in my pocket and ran to the front, gun in hand, and pressed to the wall beside the window. I tipped an edge of the curtain back with the pistol nozzle—clowns, a lot of clowns, out in the street. But there weren’t any near the house that I could see. In fact, they seemed to be keeping their distance; they even avoided looking at it. Was this part of the trap, or was there something else going on, something right in front of me that I’d missed?

  My left ear caught a creaking sound. I slowly turned my head. The wooden chair was still rocking back and forth. It hadn’t slowed a bit; in fact, it seemed to have gained both vigor and a sort of particular tempo. Most anyone else would have simply seen an empty chair rocking of its own accord, and if it were most anyone else, their hair would have stood on end as they let out a horrifying scream.

  But I’m not most anyone else. My short hair tends to stand up all on its own anyway, and I rarely scream, though I wanted to. I saw the chair’s occupant plain as could be. It was an old woman, her grey hair tied up in a tight bun, wearing a lace dress and had a thick sweater draped over her shoulders. She was thin, and gaunt, and the edges of her form wisped off into thin air. She was dead, a ghost.

  It sat with its bony, swollen knuckled fingers gripping the arms of the chair. Its grey eyes looked too big for its small head; they were empty and stared at me—no, stared through me, glaring. Ignoring it I checked out the window. I never paid much mind to ghosts. They were empty spirit, too lazy, or too stupid to move on, and few of them had enough energy to do more than ring a bell, flip a light switch, or rock a chair.

  The clowns had thinned out some; I wondered where they’d gone? One, the big one, probably the ringleader, stood in the middle of the street. Several others were gathered around him. Some debate was going on, they were probably wondering where I’d gone. Just then the leader’s head snapped over to the house. I backed out of the window and hoped he hadn’t seen the curtain move, but he probably had, that’d be my luck.

  I expected the ghost to be gone, most will fade into the ether if you ignore them, but it was still sitting there, rocking and staring. I raised my palms, the revolver dangling off a finger by the trigger guard. “What are you staring at gassy?” It was getting on my nerves, but didn’t react to me at all. Most ghosts can’t see the living; they’re as unaware of us as we are of them. Me, well I’m a special circumstance. “Go on, shoo!” I waved a hand through its form, displacing more of the ecto-fog that created the illusion of its form. “Move it out of here, go on.”

  It reacted at last. Its mouth dropped down to its lap, its mouth formed a huge, black gorge. It raised its hands, its fingers curling li
ke claws as they lengthened, and bellowed a terrible moan.

  I wasn’t impressed. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it. Now move on, out’a this realm before I flush you someplace worse.”

  It floated off the chair. As its twisted feet left the floor they dissolved into ecto vapor. It continued to grow larger and larger, as it did, spreading out its gassy form, it thinned and grew transparent.

  I’d had enough of the show. I pulled a small, hinged mirror from my jacket pocket, flipped it open, and held it up. “Take a gander of that grandma.”

  It howled a long, low moan of excruciating torment, turned its head, and flew away from me. By the time it hit the stairs it was little more than a faint wisp that dissolved completely at the second floor landing. Most ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts at all. In fact most aren’t even a human spirit; they’re just a bit of lingering life energy generated by repetitious brain patterns that, refusing to submit to mortal fate, defy death and remain, and, lacking a consciousness, are only able to repeat what they did in life. Denying that they’re little more than a flicker, they despise the undeniable truth of their reflection—tough crap.

  Now for the clowns.

  I didn’t want to risk being spotted, and figured the higher ground was better ground anyway, so I hustled up the stairs and moved into the front bedroom. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I went up. The clowns were a bunch of jerkity-jerks to let one little ghost scare them off the house.

  I stopped laughing when I heard the baneful wails drifting from somewhere inside the house. I let out a shuttering breath, closed my eyes and hung my head. Looked like the clowns weren’t so dumb and I was the jerk. Man, I hated wraiths.

  I slid the revolver away as it wasn’t going to do me any good. Wraiths are more than just dangerous; their very touch is death, and worse, as no sooner do you die then you rise up a wraith yourself. Try fighting something you can’t touch sometime, it’s harder than it sounds.

  The wailing was coming closer. I retrieved the piece of wax paper from my pocket, unfolded it, and broke the gob of putty it held into two pinches. Most wraiths have terror-bellows, their horrible wails can push a mind into a total panic, an inescapable state of absolute fear—as if their horrid appearance wasn’t enough to do it. I shoved the putty in my ears as I moved across the room, but I spotted it just as it did me. It was out in the hall, floating from room to room. As soon as it saw me its hideous mouth dropped open and it started to howl. I showed it the back of my first two fingers, and then ran.

  I shot through a connecting bathroom, all the towels were draped neatly over their rods, and into a small bedroom, slamming the doors behind me. I knew a door wouldn’t stop a wraith, but it was habit.

  The room was neat and tidy. The tightly made bed was in the shape of a race car. The curtains had dinosaurs all over them, and the lamp had a Superman shade. A baseball bat with several pegs pressed into it hung to one side of the door and served as a hat-rack sporting a baseball cap and glove. Mickey, was carved into the bat.

  Then, despite my globs of putty, I heard a loud, baneful wail and had to bite my cheeks to keep my