I stood outside the poet’s house on the third of November.
I held a gasoline canister in one hand and a zippo lighter in the other.
He had to die. I was the man tasked with killing him.
The neighborhood was quiet except for the sound of sprinklers. The perfume scent of the gasoline was so abundant I was afraid it might give my presence away if it seeped under the doorway of the abode.
I crouched on his porch. I was nestled in between a few Halloween decorations. One was of a deflated witch with emerald skin nailed to the wall next to the main window. A plastic gargoyle faced a row of shrubberies that divided his estate from the neighbor’s.
I knew his schedule as well as he did. He would have coffee and pancakes. He would shower and shave. Then he would grab his pre-made lunch from the refrigerator, fish out his keys, step out into the morning fog and commute to the college he taught at.
I waited for him to crack his front door open so I could force him backward into the living room and ask him the questions I needed the answers to before I ended his existence.
I dreamed of grabbing him by the front of his tweedy jacket and slamming him into one of his bookshelves until he begged for his life. I yearned to draw blood.
This potential outcome made my entire body electric at the mere visualization.
I clenched my jaw and almost grounded my teeth when considering the struggle I endured to find his address. The hours of waiting outside the campus grounds to trail him. The residents of this private community I had to bribe for the codes to enter through the the main gate. The home surveillance systems and HOA-hired patrol I had to be cognizant of.
I parked on the other side of the street since other homeowner vehicles took up every square inch of parallel parking on the avenue.
I mapped out how I would get away. I charted my course of the tennis courts I would sprint through and the pools whose fences I would leap over to get to my truck.
His phone rang.
I watched him answer the device as he paced in front of his fireplace. I could barely make out any of what he said in response to the person on the other end.
“Fine,” I heard him say as he looked at the ceiling in frustration, “but I better be getting paid to take today off.”
My heart beat as I considered how he may not leave the domicile and I would have to find another way in.
I crept around to the backyard and found a covered patio with a sliding glass door. Moonlight shone on the acres of dewy grass I crunched beneath my boots.
I ran gloved fingers over the frame and found it was not secure. People like this Professor never thought their upper-class areas of living could ever be breached and it made them complacent as a result.
I illegally entered his home.
Allow me to explain how I got to this point.
*
It was Halloween evening.
I sat in our bedroom in a bluish silver jumpsuit and a hollowed-out plastic mask meant to resemble an iconic slasher from a series of films about teenagers who spent their unlucky summers camping.
My wife Deanna stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She was dressed as a clown from a famous horror movie based on a macabre novel written by an author from the East Coast whose name I cannot recall.
Trick-or-treaters had already rang our doorbell three times hours earlier. We had to turn off the lights at the front of the garage to deter them from knocking since we were out of candy and needed time to prepare our costumes.
I stared at the woman I married. Even in a ridiculous red and yellow three-piece pants and neck ruffle I still found her to be the most attractive person I had ever had the honor of meeting.
She squeezed the tube of white lite formula and dabbed it all over her face after dark crimson lipstick was applied.
“Ready?” Deanna asked a few minutes later as she stood in the doorway. Her jacket was already slung over her arms.
“I was born for this,” I said with a smile as I grabbed my plastic butcher knife and sliced at the air to mimic a kill-crazy rampage.
*
We left and I drove us to the costume party. It was held at a friend’s house.
We danced and participated in a game where the best disguise was voted for. Deanna made it into the top five and won second place. She was narrowly beaten by a couple who came as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots.
I felt the contest was judged unfairly since she was outnumbered by the two people who took home the grand prize. I may have been biased as her husband.
“Have you heard of the clown tongue twister?”
The question was asked by a woman dressed as Snow White. A blood-red apple dangled from her wrist. She stood beneath a ceiling fan whose blades were outlined in gold.
“No,” Deanna said.
Snow White smiled and pulled out her phone. She typed something into the browser and brought up a poem.
“It was written when coulrophobia was rampant in this country,” Snow White said. “This was a few years back when everyone was witnessing clowns allegedly commit illegal activities. It went around on social media. Careful though. Rumor is that anyone who reads it will die.”
“Can you say that word again?” I asked. “Cull row what?”
“The irrational phobia of clowns,” Snow White said.
Deanna squinted at the screen and read the words: “‘Cuckoo clown is cast out, cries and chants, causing cast out cannonball-like crashes.’ Seems so silly.”
Snow White’s mouth fell open.
“You’re adventurous,” Snow White said.
My wife laughed and shrugged it off.
We walked outside into the night and made our way to the vehicle which was parked underneath the multitudinous swaying branches of trees and a fire hydrant. Deanna had finished a blackberry cocktail in the middle of the event so I was the designated driver.
“Oh my God it’s Deanna,” a male voice said behind me. “I thought you were in prison.”
I turned around and saw a couple with their trick or treater kids. The father was the one who had spoken. He was dressed up as a zombie late-night talk show host.
My wife and I stood there motionless. I knew what was coming and I tried to contain my temper.
“You pushed Marie Eidinger off a cliff the year we graduated,” he said with a pointed finger.
I looked over.
Deanna lowered her head and got into the SUV. I made a motion towards the stranger before I heard my wife’s voice.
“Take me home,” she said. “Don’t make a scene.”
I got behind the wheel and started the ignition.
“That’s not right,” I said as I put the vehicle in reverse and made our way onto the main road. The tires destroyed the foliage of the leaf-strewn street.
“People are allowed to have wrong opinions.”
“You sure you don’t want me to turn around and teach him a lesson on what respect is?”
“No. That’s Bill Wedler. He was always a bully. I think he was a distant relative of Marie’s.”
She and Marie had been best friends before her untimely death.
Deanna was the last person to see Marie alive. After her tragic fall into the ocean from a steep rocky height Deanna was questioned by police before being cleared as a suspect. Although I knew she was innocent, it was a malicious small-town rumor that never dissipated.
We went to bed that night and the uncomfortable confrontation seemed to float away once we put on a horror movie and fell asleep in each other’s arms.
When I awoke Deanna was not breathing.
*
I was in the poet’s house. His mahogany oak walls had paintings of European cottages and landscapes.
I dropped the canister and lighter. I pulled out a knife and brought it level between us. His calmness caught me off guard more than his realization that he had an intruder with a weapon to his chest.
“I don’t have much money,” he said in a monotone as he raised his hands in the air. “I have some jewelry in the bathroom upstairs. I have a rare first edition of Wordsworth. It’s probably worth -“
“That’s not why I’m here,” I said. “Take a seat. If you make any fast movements you’re getting stabbed.”
He nodded and followed my instructions. He seemed younger and less intimidating than I predicted he would be up close.
I held a print out of the clown’s tongue twister. It was folded and I tossed it to him.
“Read that,” I said.
“‘Cuckoo clown is cast out, cries and chants, causing cast out cannonball-like crashes.’”
“Who wrote that?”
“I did,” he said with a concerned look on his face as though he was questioning my mental health. I suppose he had every reason to.
“You like to curse people,” I said. “To hunt down the original writer of the piece was the greatest challenge I’ve ever had. I had to get a hacker I know to track the original uploader but we found you. You wrote it to harm readers. People treat it like any other tongue twister. A fun parlor trick with a dangerous reputation. It’s so much more lethal than that. I bet I’ll find grimoires on your shelves if I search hard enough.”
“That’s an urban myth,” he said. “Words can’t harm people. Especially not a silly poem.”
“My wife Deanna read it at a party on Halloween and a day later she was dead. The coroner said the cause was the failure of the nervous system. Her lungs and heart and kidney stopped working after. They speculated that someone may have slipped something into her drink at the party. Maybe so and I plan on righting that as well. Yet I think there are unseen forces in this world and you’ve experimented with them against people.”
He stared at me without expression. His pacified behavior infuriated me.
“I want to know why you wrote this. It wasn’t good enough to stick with haiku’s? You had to will bad luck onto others?”
The man shook his head and stared at the carpet for a moment before he met my gaze again.
“Do you know my last name?”
“Williamson,” I said. “You teach English literature at the local college.”
“That wasn’t my birth name,” he said. “I legally changed it to the pen name I’ve been using for the longest time. My actual last name is Eidinger.”
I felt goosebumps break out on my skin as I chewed on what he had admitted.
“Your deceased wife killed my sister. I broke into your house a few weeks ago and slipped thallium poison into the tube of makeup she would use on Halloween. The clown tongue twister and the recitation of it by the lady dressed as Snow White was a mere flourish on my behalf. The person who introduced the twister to her at the party was a student of mine. She did find the mission I gave her an odd one. She was maybe dismissive of it as a bit pretentious. Snow White thought of it as a way for me to publicize my material. Of course the reality is far more insidious. If you’re going to kill me then do it now. I’d like a glass of Scotch before you try. The bottle is in the cupboard behind you.”
I screamed and sprinted towards him with the knife pointed directly at his heart.
*
I am currently in Tunisia typing this. A country without an extradition treaty was important to me to come to for obvious reasons.
As I stare out at the sunset I dread going to sleep tonight. My nightmares have been filled with visions of a clown ripping my tongue out and laughing as he throws it into a bottomless puddle outside of the poet’s house.