Part I - Part II
I appreciated all of the thoughtful comments that Redditors left on my first post.
So many of you seem desperate to know what drove the final nail into the coffin. First of all, I failed to mention a few egregious events.
Crying on the Carousel:
After u/Jeffinj420 suggested that the land might be possessed by something, it reminded me of a dreadful thing that happened.
A girl started bawling on the carousel, so I offered to babysit. Meanwhile, her parents, obliging her whinging brother, joined the slightly-older boy on the ride for a second time. The little girl, no more than three or four years old, was sobbing profusely.
“Not a fan?” I asked.
I immediately cringed at my atrocious attempt to make small talk with a toddler. The girl cranked her head backwards to gaze up at me, and tears were drenching her cheeks. I’d seen upset children at the adventure park before, but I didn’t see sadness in the girl’s eyes. I saw fear.
“It was over there,” She said, pointing at the woods.
“What did you see?” I asked her.
“I’m not supposed to say,” She whispered. “I don’t want it to take me.”
We stood in silence until her family came off the carousel, and I didn’t tell them what her daughter had told me.
The Second Ghost Train Incident:
When I told Tess’ tale, I must confess that I was disingenuous. I didn’t divulge everything that happened to the poor girl. In my defence, I didn’t really want to talk about the final part of her story.
No customers ever had any issues on the Ghost Train ride, as far as I’m aware. Nobody ever ran out of there in floods of tears. That should’ve been disparaging, especially when one considers that realhorrors lurk within those tunnels. Thinking about it, why would a customer ever mention anything strange that they might’ve witnessed? They might’ve just believed it to be part of the ride.
One evening, I was inspecting the Ghost Train ride. Those tunnels, even when lit with the orange hue of dingy lights, harboured a heavy darkness. Of course, I chalked it up to my imagination. Ever since the night of Tess’ disappearance, I hadn’t been the same person.
As I rounded the final corner of the tunnel, I cried and rocketed out of my flesh.
A mannequin. Like the ones we found by the obstacle course in the woods, it was wearing clothes. The official park uniform. I already knew what name was printed on the badge. Tess.
The most terrifying thing about that mannequin was its pale, featureless face. As I dragged it out of the tunnels, I took a closer look. It was probably just a drop of water from the ceiling, but it looked like a tear trickled from one of the mannequin’s eyes.
Clownville:
Everything disintegrated in August. All of the park’s horrendous tragedies were either secrets or, in the case of D-11, easily rationalised. The actions of the blueberry man had not yet come to light, so it was only the case of the two missing children from the obstacle course that had led to any form of police investigation.
But our gates were still open. I wish we’d been closed down sooner.
There’s a story that I’ve been hesitant to tell. It’s about the park section that, for the purposes of anonymity, I shall call Clownville. I wanted to include a miniature circus in the park to distinguish it from my competitors. I suppose I couldn’t really settle on an overarching theme for the adventure park.
“Look at this creepy thing,” Paul said.
My friend passed me a clown mask. It differed from the others. It had disproportionately-small black eyes. The painted smile on the front seemed far too jolly, and something about a cheerful clown is disconcerting, isn’t it?
“Maybe John wants a special mask that distinguishes him from the other clowns?” I suggested.
John was our Chief Clown. It was a title he boastfully bestowed upon himself during his very first circus performance. It made him happy, and that’s the ideal clown, so I allowed it. He always seemed a little too engrossed in the character, but I didn’t really care. The visitors were enthralled, after all.
“What distinguishes John from the other clowns is that he’s a fucking nut-job,” Paul said.
I snorted. “Y’know, Samantha said that she would headbutt John if he were ever to refer to her as ‘Cute Clown’ on stage again.”
“Why did he give them such weird fucking names?” Paul asked.
“It educates the little ones about harmful stereotypes from a young age, and what’s more special than that, Paul?” I asked. “Chubby Clown, Cute Clown, Crazy Clown, and Chief Clown. And the biggest clown of all? The idiot who thought Clownville was a good idea. Me.”
Paul laughed. “With Richard gone, John keeps saying he’s gonna get you up on that stage to perform with him. What’s your clown name?”
I thought for a moment. “Coerced Clown.”
Richard quitted the week before, so I had been trying to find a fifth clown for John’s big Saturday show. Hiring a willing clown in my town was an impossible feat, but Richard’s part wasn’t exactly hard to perform. Plus, he was on a much lower salary than the others, which is why John had called him Cheap Clown. All he had to do was pass tools to the more skilled performers and occasionally crack a joke. I could do that. I just didn’t want to do it.
John was persistent, however. And as the week progressed, his eagerness for me to perform in his show viciously bloomed. His demeanour was beginning to unsettle people. Since donning the new mask at the start of the week, his mood changed. He’d transformed from strange to sinister.
John had always been exuberant and far too passionate about the circus, but he started to develop a feverishness. We never saw him without his mask. Nobody could call him John without invoking his wrath. He was Chief Clown.
By Friday, many employees were describing John as unhinged. There was a minor brawl in the changing room between him and Keith, who played Chubby Clown.
“I don’t get paid enough for this shit,” Keith fumed. “Either he goes or I go.”
“We know,” Paul said. “But a lot of people booked tickets for Saturday, and I don’t know whether the park could take the financial hit of issuing a refund for everyone. Do you think you’d be able to do tomorrow’s big show? We wouldn’t be able to hire a trained trapeze artist to replace you. We haven’t even been able to replace Richard yet. The boss is getting involved. That’s how you know it’s serious.”
We managed to convince Keith to persevere. Samantha simply avoided John. Thomas, otherwise known as Crazy Clown, was such a boisterous bundle of madness that he didn’t seem to care.
“This is the most interesting John’s ever been,” He joked with us.
On Saturday evening, one hour before the seven o’clock show, I was in the dressing tent with Paul and Josie. My sister was trying to make Richard’s large clown costume look a little more shapely on my slender body.
“We need a belt or something,” She said. “Maybe two belts.”
“As long as it stays up on stage, I don’t mind,” I said.
“Might get us a bit more press if you do something like that,” Paul chuckled.
Once I was ready, I waddled over muddy grass to the actors’ tent in my clunky, uncomfortable costume. It was a rainy night. Loud. Too loud to hear what had transpired in the tent. I’ll never forget the rush of vomit to my mouth when I walked through the tent flaps.
Chubby Clown, Cute Clown, and Crazy Clown were all sitting on the sofa before me. Each of them was still and lifeless. At first glance, their masks appeared to have been fastened to their faces, but then I realised that their masks had become their faces. Their flesh had been surgically removed, and their clown masks had been unevenly stitched to their heads. There were streaks of blood on the sides of their gleefully-grinning mask-faces.
I’m not sure how long I froze, but I was suddenly aware of guttural breathing.
Squirrelled away in the corner of the tiny tented area, I saw him. John. Chief Clown. He no longer looked human. He was on his haunches. The horrible, black-eyed mask had been stitched to his face. That jolly grin beamed at me. On the grassy ground, I spotted an assortment of bloodied surgical tools and circular strips of flesh. Faces.
Before I could utter a sound, Chief Clown was scuttling towards me on all-fours. He lunged, and I blindly swung my fist. It connected with John’s jaw, producing an almighty cracking sound, and the deranged sub-human fell backwards. I grimaced in horror at his twisted neck. I’ve killed him, I thought.
Then, possessed by some supernatural force, he began to writhe, and he snapped his neck into a horrifying contortion that would’ve killed any living human. His black eyes, surveying me from a masked head that was now hanging upside down, were piercing.
He screeched in a voice that was like no earthly sound I have ever heard. I gazed into the face of the thing that I was sure would end me. And I knew, in that moment, it was the thing that haunted my land. The king. The thing that girl had seen in the woods. The thing that had reduced poor souls into mannequins.
“Die, you fucker!” Paul screamed.
I didn’t hear my friend enter the tent. I had been too deeply transfixed by the haunting eyes which burrowed into my soul. Chief Clown turned to face Paul, but it was too late. My friend buried the hatchet, both figuratively and literally, disconnecting John’s upside-down head from his torso in a swift motion.
We both stood there for several minutes, eyeballing John’s decapitated corpse. Paul and I were waiting for the thing that had possessed him to revive his body. Thankfully, he lay still.
A mass murderer. That’s what the police called him. Paul and I knew better. We saw what Chief Clown became in his final moments.
____
I refuse to sell the park. Nobody else needs to suffer there. That land isn’t meant for us.