Len had never forgotten that: Carlton the Clown.
He’d wanted only three minutes alone with Jerry Carlton, but they wouldn’t give it to him.
Just three minutes…
And nearly every night, because he made a mistake, Len Schneider dreamed of a kid with no face, turning his head from where it was nuzzled into his pillow and staring at him with empty eye sockets, trying to speak without lips…
This time, Len Schneider vowed to himself, he’d get his three minutes.
And he wouldn’t make any mistakes
~ * ~
Schneider was convinced the Wendt kid was not merely missing. Everything pointed to it. The kid’s mother (another thing that made it worse: there was no father, he had died in a construction accident four years ago) swore her son had never left the house by himself before. Which led Schneider at first to conventional lines: that whoever had taken the child had learned the house routine, and knew that there was a window of opportunity every once in a while when the child was alone for a half hour, between his afternoon sitter leaving and his mother getting home from work.
But there were no signs of forced entry, which led Len automatically to the next line of enquiry: that the child had unlocked the back door himself and let the abductor in.
Which could have happened—although, again, there was no evidence that anyone had been in the house. It had been a quick snatch, if that had been the case—which meant that the boy had probably known the assailant.
Which was possible, up to a point—the point being a weird one. It had rained a few days before the abduction, and the ground had been fairly soft—but there were only one set of footprints in the backyard, leading away from the house to the back fence.
Indicating that someone had lured him over the fence—something he had never done before—without actually stepping into the backyard himself.
When he asked Mrs. Wendt for a list of people, with the emphasis on males, who might be enough of authority figures in her son Jody’s eyes to entice him to do such a thing, her face went blank. There were no clergy, no relatives, no real male role model who he would follow over that fence, she was sure.
He told her to think about it, and if anyone came to her to let him know right away.
~ * ~
At that point Schneider did the conventional thing: he followed the child’s footprints as far as he could. And it was quite a job: behind the Wendt property was a patchwork quilt of pumpkin fields owned by various farmers. He nonetheless was able to follow the boy’s movements through four of these fields to the edge of a fifth, which then dropped off down to a shallow valley and a thin ribbon of water known as Martin’s Creek.
From the marks he found, it looked as though the boy had slid or fallen down the embankment.
There were indications that he had crossed the creek at one point.
For a moment Schneider’s heart climbed into his throat, when he saw how deep the creek was at the point the boy entered. He followed the line of water downstream, fearing that the boy’s drowned body might turn up at any moment.
But he found markings on the other side of the water at a shallower area where a fallen tree bridged the creek (perhaps the boy was in trouble until he came up against this spot) and these fresh marks led into the tangle of trees on the other side of water.
The odd thing was that there were only the boy’s tracks. He broadened his search, and discovered that, a second, oddly-shaped set of tracks led from the pumpkin field behind the Wendt house down the embankment into the woods, but they were nowhere near the boy’s.
Which led him to believe that, perhaps, the boy had been following someone?
Out of breath and sweating a little, his slight paunch only one indication of how out of shape he was (thirty years old and already starting to look like an old cop), he found himself at a spot in the patch of woods marked by a broken pumpkin where both sets of tracks converged.
It was here, obviously, that the boy was abducted.
There were signs of a struggle. And then only the second set of prints—which were very odd indeed, not shoe or boot prints but large flat ovoids, which made him think that someone had worn some sort of covering over his shoes, to disguise the prints—led away.
And then, abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, among a gloomy stand of gnarled trees, so thick and twisted they blocked all light from above, they stopped.
At that point the hair on the back of Schneider’s head (where there still was hair, a good part of the top of his head being bald) stood on end. He looked at the clearing he stood in, covered with leaves and dead branches.
Where…
He brought in dogs, of course, and along with two uniformed policemen he brushed the area of leaves and twigs, looking for an underground opening. But there was none. Even the dogs, who had been given a piece of Jody Wendt’s clothing, had stopped at the same spot Schneider had.
One of them threw back its head and bayed, which, again, made the hair on the back of Schneider’s head stand on end.
Jody Wendt had disappeared into thin air.
3
The poster, which read: UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU! was upside down. He was glad his mom had taught him to read. There was more writing at the bottom of the poster, but he couldn’t make out what it said because it was too small and it was also upside down. So was everything else. The sign was in bright colors, red and blue and yellow and green, as if the colors had been splashed on or finger-painted—they ran over their borders and looked still wet. The room smelled like paint, like the time his mother had painted his bedroom in March and left all the windows open. He’d slept on the couch in the living room that night (sneaking the television on at three in the morning, but there had only been commercials on for exercise equipment—some of which Mom had—and for calcium and vitamin supplements—he had soon tired and turned the TV off; even out here he could faintly smell the paint on the walls of his room) and when he went back to his room the next night he got sick to his stomach, even though the paint was dry and the windows had been left open a crack. A week later all his own posters and his bookshelf with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (his favorite book) and The Wizard of Oz and Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn’t were back, and the smell was gone. He’d forgotten his room had ever been painted.
But the smell wasn’t gone here—it was stronger. It had a curious burning odor underneath the paint smell, as if someone was heating paint in a pan.
That was funny, heating paint in a pan…
He felt light-headed, and suddenly wanted to throw up.
Ahhhhh…
The discomforting noise he made caused another noise out of his vision, a shuffling like a dog had been disturbed. He could not see. Except for the upside-down poster and an upside-down coat hook next to it with a rain coat which was hung near the floor and ran up the wall (again: funny! And despite his queasy stomach he gurgled a short laugh) he could see little else. The wall was colored chocolate brown, and it was stuffy in the room.
Again he heard the dog-shuffle.
Something new came into his view, in front of the wall poster—something just as brightly colored. It was accompanied by the shuffling noise, which was caused, Jody saw, when he strained his eyes to look up (which hurt) by the slow movement of a pair of huge clown feet, which were red with bright yellow laces. His vision in that direction was impeded by a sort of cap that appeared to be on his head, though he felt nothing there. There was a sharp rim, and he could see no farther. What he saw of the ceiling under the clown’s feet, was the same color as the wall.