CLOWNS VS. SPIDERS

A novel by Jeff Strand

Clowns Vs. Spiders copyright 2019 by Jeff Strand

Cover design by Lynne Hansen http://www.LynneHansenArt.com

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.

For more information about the author, visit http://www.JeffStrand.com

Subscribe to Jeff Strand's free monthly newsletter (which includes a brand-new original short story in every issue) at

http://eepurl.com/bpv5br

PROLOGUE

One hundred and one years ago

"That ship is being steered by ghosts."

Captain Blackhorse snatched the telescope out of his first mate's hand. Superstitious fool. Blackhorse looked through the lens himself, and...yes, the ship off in the distance was covered in eerie white tendrils that seemed to glow in the moonlight. An uneducated man could be forgiven for thinking there were phantoms aboard.

"Gather a few men and row over there to investigate," said Blackhorse.

Pauler frantically shook his head. "I won't go near that ship."

"Are you disobeying my order?"

"I'd rather be executed than cursed."

Blackhorse chuckled. "Your cowardice is duly noted. Stay behind, then. Let the men know that they'll receive double shares of whatever is aboard."

Though they weren't actually pirates, Blackhorse wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to scavenge valuables from an abandoned ship. There wouldn't be chests filled to the bursting point with treasure, but there might be things they could sell when they finally reached land. Or perhaps food that hadn't rotted. That would be a nice treat. Even if the ship was barren, they should try to find out what had happened.

The idea that somebody aboard might need help did not figure into Blackhorse's decision-making process.

Pauler left, looking ashamed of his lack of courage. Overall, he was a fine first mate and for now there was no reason to shoot him.

* * *

Four men, two of them volunteers, boarded the small, visibly unsafe boat and rowed toward the ship. Belief in ghosts was something for centuries past, yet it was difficult to look at the ship with its billowing tendrils and not think it was somehow haunted.

"We should leave this alone," said Christian, who had not volunteered. "What if the men aboard died of disease?"

"Then don't inhale and don't touch anything," said Robert. The other men laughed, though their laughter was less about amusement and more about trying to prove they weren't frightened. Because all of them were frightened.

The rowboat began to take in water before they reached the ship, so Robert claimed the official duty of bailing water while the others rowed.

"Those aren't ghosts," said Matthew.

"Of course they're not," said Robert, tossing a bucket of water over the side. "Nobody thought they were."

"Look at them," said Matthew. "I think they're webs."

"That's disconcerting," said Isaac.

They rowed up alongside the ship.

"They're webs, all right," said Robert. "Be careful with the lanterns when we get on board."

A rope ladder dangled over the side of the ship. They rowed up next to it.

"Maybe this should wait until sunrise," said Christian. "It doesn't seem like a good task for the darkness."

"Do you think the captain is going to drop anchor and wait here all night?" asked Robert. "They're just webs."

"And webs mean spiders."

"Are you afraid of spiders?"

"I'm not afraid of a spider," said Christian. "I'm afraid of spiders that enveloped an entire ship in their webbing, yes."

"We don't know how long this ship has been floating out here. They may have had years to work."

"Spider webs don't last for years."

"Enough," said Robert. "You don't have to go aboard. I know how scary a spider can be to a timid little girl like you. We need somebody to stay and bail out the rowboat anyway."

"Too bad we don't have any curds and whey for him," said Matthew. Everybody except Christian laughed.

"Try not to let the boat sink while we're gone," said Robert, standing up and reaching for the lower rung of the ladder. He climbed to the top, with a lantern in one hand, then boarded the ship. Matthew and Isaac followed.

Though the entire deck was not covered with webs, most of it was. There was no sign of a crew. No sign of life, including spiders.

"We're not cowards, but let's also not be stupid," said Robert. "Everybody stay alert. This does seem like an abnormal amount of web activity."

Robert, Matthew, and Isaac walked slowly along the deck. The floorboards creaked, because that's what boards were supposed to do when one was walking on a creepy abandoned web-covered ship.

"Hello!" Matthew called out. "Is anybody on board? Does anybody need help?"

Silence.

"Does anybody here know how to tell poisonous spiders from non-poisonous ones?" Isaac asked. "Just in case we encounter them?"

"Assume they're poisonous, and don't put your body where one can bite you," said Robert.

They continued walking.

"I don't like this," said Isaac. "I'm sorry. I know you'll make fun of me like we made fun of Christian, but I don't like this at all. He was right—we should wait until daylight."

"We're not going to wait all night to keep a spider from crawling on us," said Robert. "We work on a ship where rats scurry over our feet while we sleep; why are you all so petrified of insects?"

"Spiders aren't insects," said Matthew. "They're arachnids."

"You need to look deep within your heart and ask yourself if you truly believe that I wanted that information. Go on, ask yourself. Was there any chance that I cared if spiders are insects or arachnids? Any chance at all?"

"There's nothing wrong with being accurate. Also, the proper term is venomous, not poisonous."

"If you two want to go back to the rowboat and suck your thumbs, it's fine with me."

"I didn't say anything about being scared," said Matthew. "I corrected your terminology. If I'm in a state of mind to do that, it means I'm not scared."

"Shut up."

It was quickly clear that there was nothing of interest on the upper deck. When they reached the trapdoor that led below deck, Robert crouched down beside it and grabbed the handle. He hesitated.

"Open it," said Matthew.

"I will. I don't have to rush right into it."

"Are you scared that a flood of spiders will come pouring out?"

"I'm taking my earlier advice that we shouldn't be stupid. I'm not going to just throw open a trapdoor without thinking. What if the inside of the ship is filled with a plague-ravaged crew, driven mad by their disease?"

"We'd probably have heard them moving around down there."

Robert opened the trapdoor. Neither spiders nor insane crewmembers spewed forth. Robert waited a moment, then held his lantern and peered down into the opening.

"More webs," he said. "You two can wait up here. I'll go down myself, and call for you if there's anything worth bringing back."

Matthew and Isaac nodded. Robert descended into the lower deck.

He wasn't going by himself to demonstrate his bravery. He was, in fact, feeling less brave with each passing moment, and he was worried that if a spider did crawl over his boot that he might let out a yelp, subjecting him to massive amounts of ridicule. Better to be down here by himself. Nobody would see if he flinched.

The webs were thicker down here. He knew very little about spiders (though he had known they were arachnids—he simply didn't care) but he was pretty sure that a normal quantity of spiders wouldn't generate this many webs. He briefly considered not investigating and just reporting back that there'd been nothing down here worth taking, but if he got caught in his lie, the repercussions would be severe.

He slowly walked forward, soon reaching a point where he had no choice but to push webs out of his face. They clung to his hand and he wiped them off on his trousers.

He needed something better than his hands to clear the webs out of the way. A wooden chair rested against the wall, so he toppled it onto its side.

"I'm about to make a loud noise," he called out. "Don't be alarmed!"

"Okay, we won't," Matthew called down.

He stomped on one of the chair legs, breaking it off. Then he picked up the leg and resumed walking, using the wood to clear webs out of his path. Very quickly, it looked like he was holding a stick of unappetizing cotton candy.

The webs got thicker and thicker. This was a terrible idea. He was done. He'd tell Matthew and Isaac that there was nothing worth taking and suggest that they go down there to verify his story, and they'd say no, that was fine, they believed him, and then the four of them would report back to Captain Blackhorse that they should sail away and forget about this web-covered ship.

What the hell was that up ahead?

He held the lantern out in front of him.

Now he saw spiders. Lots of spiders. Hundreds of them.

Spiders twice the size of his hand.

They were crawling over what appeared to be web-cocooned human bodies.

Robert did not scream.

He did drop the lantern, which shattered on the highly flammable web-covered floor.

The spiders scurried toward him.

* * *

"Is everything all right?" Matthew called out at the sound of the crash.

The sudden orange glow indicated that, no, everything was not all right.

Robert's shriek confirmed this.

Isaac immediately ran back toward the rowboat. After a second of indecision, Matthew decided that his conscience would torment him for the rest of his life if he didn't at least look to see what was happening below deck and make sure Robert wasn't completely doomed before they abandoned him.

Robert's shrieks hadn't stopped.

Matthew ducked his head down into the trapdoor opening. Robert, clothes and hair on fire, ran toward the ladder, arms flailing. A huge writhing mass followed him.

Robert veered off course, smacked into the wall, and fell to the floor.

Matthew decided that his assistance was unnecessary at this point and stood up. The flood of spiders they'd expected when the trap door was first opened made their appearance.

This was not a good time to stop and gape, but Matthew couldn't help himself. He'd never heard of spiders growing this large. They were as big as his head.

The actual flames from below deck were already visible. More and more spiders poured out, and Matthew found himself instinctively stomping on them instead of fleeing.

"Hurry!" Isaac shouted at him, just before he climbed over the side of the ship to descend the rope ladder.

As Matthew splattered a giant spider beneath his boot, several of them scurried up the back of his legs. He ran forward, lost his footing, and struck the floorboards, crushing several spiders beneath him.

He screamed and screamed as they covered him.

* * *

"What the hell is going on over there?" asked Captain Blackhorse. "Those idiots have set the ship on fire!"

He peered through the telescope. One of the men (Ivan? Isaac? Ian?) was climbing down the ladder so quickly that he dropped his lantern, which plunged into the ocean. He leapt down into the rowboat and gestured frantically to the other man.

Blackhorse frowned and squinted, trying to get a better look at what was spilling over the side of the ship. He handed the telescope to Pauler. "Take a look. See what that is."

Pauler looked through the telescope. "I'm not sure. Bugs?"

* * *

Isaac and Christian rowed as vigorously as they could. Hundreds of spiders, maybe thousands of them, crawled over the side of the ship.

It was okay. They were safe now. The spiders were drowning themselves.

"We should have known better!" Isaac said. "You never investigate a web-covered ship after sunset!"

At least it was over now. The ship would sink. He'd have an exciting and unbelievable story to tell his grandchildren, along with a permanent phobia of arachnids.

"What are they doing?" Christian asked.

"What do you mean?"

"It looks like they're swimming."

The webs on the upper deck of the ship were burning now, and in the light of the fire Isaac could see that, yes, a mass of spiders was moving along the surface of the water, toward them.

The men rowed even faster.

The other ship wasn't far, and the rowboat slammed into the side. "Careful!" a man, Edward, shouted down at them.

"Let us up!" Christian screamed.

"Do you want me to fly down there and magically whisk you up? The ladder's on the other side!"

Isaac and Christian resumed rowing. The spiders—lots and lots and lots of them—were still coming after them. The burning ship was beginning to sink.

They smashed the rowboat into the other side of the ship as well. Both men stood up at the same time, and Isaac barely resisted the urge to shove Christian out of the way. Christian climbed up the ladder and Isaac followed.

"You didn't secure the rowboat!" said Edward, peering over the deck.

"Forget the rowboat! Don't you see what's out there?"

Edward took a closer look. "Are those spiders in the boat?"

"They reached the rowboat already?" asked Christian. "Where's the captain? We need to get out of here as quickly as possible!"

Pauler hurried over to them. "What happened? What was on the ship? Was it spiders?"

Isaac looked over the side. "They're on our ship!"

Dozens of spiders were crawling up the side of the ship, with a line of them stretching across the water all the way back to the burning vessel.

Shortly after that, there was a great deal of screaming.

Some of the men jumped overboard to take their chances in the cold ocean. They perished more quickly than the others, though drowning is a truly awful way to go, even when the alternative is to be swarmed by oversized venomous spiders.

The rest of the crew did what they could to survive, but there was nowhere to run, and by sunrise all of them were dead.

The ship drifted on its own, making landfall two days later, just as the spiders' food supply began to run low.

The spiders moved from the ship to the land. Many of them died as they traveled through the forest, decomposing and being cleaned up by nature before humans could marvel at their size.

Finally they found a cave. Plenty of tunnels. A perfect place to settle down and live, undisturbed and undetected.

Plenty of room for their numbers to grow.

CHAPTER ONE

Eighty-Three Years Later

Jaunty the Clown loved the rodeo. Yes, it was smelly and dusty, and it was uncomfortable to wear greasepaint and a baggy, heavily padded hobo costume in the blazing summer heat. But he loved the crowds. Loved the hooting and hollering. Loved making people laugh out loud with his wacky antics.

Admittedly, he didn't love putting his life in danger to distract an angry bull, which was the primary reason he was out there. Entertaining the audience came a distant second to making sure a cowboy didn't die a grisly death under the hooves of the bull who'd just thrown him off its back.

"Protect the rider first," his boss had told him during his extremely brief training session. "If he gets trampled because you were focused on getting laughs, that's on your conscience."

So after each cowboy struck the ground, Jaunty would run around and attract the bull's attention. The audience would laugh and laugh as the furious animal ran at him, intending to impale him with its horns. Sometimes Jaunty would hide behind a barrel and pretend to be biting his fingernails in terror. Sometimes, if it was safe, he'd do a pratfall. Every once in a while the bull would bash into him, which delighted the crowds more than it delighted Jaunty.

Yet he loved the experience. He was making people happy.

And he was saving lives. Perhaps not in a firefighter or paramedic way, but there would be a lot more mangled cowboys if he weren't on the job. Once a rider had fractured his spine in the fall. Jaunty had kept the bull away from him and kept the audience delighted and amused while the cowboy was carried off in a stretcher, never to ride again.

He had higher aspirations than this, but for now, at twenty-three years old, there were far worse jobs he could have straight out of Clown College. It was a good life. Though he didn't like the way that bull was looking at him...

It was Tyrannosaurus, the biggest and meanest of the bulls. (Technically his name was "Tyranosaurrus," but that was a misspelling and he was indeed named after the dinosaur.) Jaunty had worked with this bull countless times over the summer. He was one seriously angry beast, and there'd been a couple of close calls. Right now, in his bucking chute, Tyrannosaurus was staring at Jaunty in an unnerving manner, less like an enraged bull and more like a sociopath. Jaunty didn't want to read too much into the bull's expression, but it seemed to say, "Tonight you die, clown. Tonight you die."

He was imagining it, of course. The afternoon was the hottest of the summer so far and it was baking his brain a little.

The cowboy jumped onto the bull's back. The crowd cheered as the gate opened.

A couple of seconds later, the cowboy was on the ground. Jaunty didn't need to do anything to attract the bull's attention; it ran straight for him, a homicidal glint in its eye. Jaunty jumped into one of the large wooden barrels that was there to protect him from injury or death, much to the merriment of the crowd.

Tyrannosaurus smashed into the barrel. Though Jaunty was enough of a showman to kind of wish that the barrel had shattered in a dramatic manner, all it did was fall over. Jaunty was capable of running on top of a barrel, rolling it hundreds of feet, but that trick didn't work very well on dirt and sawdust and it was best saved for times when a bull wasn't trying to murder him. Instead, Jaunty crawled out and sprinted toward one of the other barrels. Tyrannosaurus followed.

This particular rodeo was not funded well enough to employ multiple clowns, so Jaunty was on his own.

The announcer's voice blared over the loudspeaker: "Uh-oh, ladies and gents, it looks like Jaunty the Clown's in trouble!" The audience laughed and cheered. Jaunty looked forward to being out of imminent danger so he could get the audience to laugh with him rather than at him.

This time Tyrannosaurus did not smash into the barrel. He ran around it. Jaunty ran around it as well. Unfortunately, he was not as speedy as a bull. He felt the impact, hit the ground hard, and squeezed his eyes shut as he waited for approximately two thousand pounds of bovine to step on his skull. Oh, what a crunching sound it would make!

When he opened his eyes a couple of seconds later, his head remained un-squashed. Tyrannosaurus was running back to his cage.

Good. He wasn't dead. There were a lot of children in the audience and Jaunty didn't want them to be traumatized by the sight of clown brains stuck to the hoof of a bull.

He got up and tried to wave to the crowd, but his right arm wasn't working. He waved with his left hand instead. Then he danced around in a merry circle, at least for a couple of seconds, before a bolt of pain shot through his right arm and he realized that his dance moves were jiggling a broken bone. Jaunty did not scream. He gritted his teeth and tried to keep from blacking out.

"Whoooooo-weeeeee, that was a close one!" said the announcer. "Ignore the blood, ladies and gents—it looks like Jaunty was carrying around some ketchup packets. That clown sure does love his french fries!"

Jaunty glanced at his arm. Blood was soaking through the fabric. There was a bulge that he suspected might be protruding bone. It was probably time to exit the ring and seek medical attention.

* * *

"Yeah, that's pretty bad," said Harvey, the rodeo's doctor and concession stand manager. "I think we should wait for an ambulance to show up. If I did anything I'd probably just make it worse. Does it hurt?"

Jaunty nodded.

"Dumb question," Harvey admitted. "You've got a broken bone poking out of your skin. Of course it hurts. If I were in that much agony, I'd ask to be put out of my misery."

"I don't want to be put out of my misery."

"Oh, I won't. They'd let me shoot a horse with a broken leg but not a clown with a broken arm. Horses never break their legs around here, though." He let out a wistful sigh. "Someday."

"How long do you think my arm will take to heal?" Jaunty asked.

"I'd say your days of rodeo clowning are over. Unless you want to be an unfunny clown who just lets his arm dangle, upsetting people."

"I can't tell if you're being serious or messing with me."

"Well, Jaunty, I started drinking at nine this morning, and I was still drunk from last night, so to be honest I don't know either."

"I wish the paramedics would get here."

"Me too," said Harvey. "How long ago did you call them?"

"I didn't. Didn't you?"

Harvey shook his head. "I assumed you did. You're the one with the broken arm."

Jaunty stared at him for a moment, and then decided that this must be a perfectly normal dialogue exchange that he was mishearing due to blood loss. Then he passed out.

* * *

Jaunty sat up in his hospital bed, feeling miserable. His arm was wrapped in bandages and he wasn't sure if the pain or the itching was worse. He'd refused painkillers because he was a clown who did not take drugs.

Somebody knocked on the open door. A man in a black suit stood there. "May I come in?"

"Sure."

The man walked into the room and stood beside the bed. "Looks like you had some bad luck."

"Yeah. Are you from the insurance company?"

"Oh, no, no, no. My name is...well, my stage name is Guffaw the Clown. I enjoy a good rodeo, and I was in the audience today. I noticed that after your gruesome accident, you kept your focus on entertaining the crowd. I was impressed."

"That's why I'm out there. What kind of clown would I be if I paid more attention to my blood than the audience?"

"Exactly! You get it! And I can tell that you're the kind of person who follows the eight clown commandments!"

"Of course," said Jaunty. "I will keep my acts, performance and behavior in good taste while I am in costume and makeup. I will remember at all times that I—"

"No need to go through them all," said Guffaw. "There's no shame in being a rodeo clown, but I've got an opportunity for your star to shine brighter. A traveling circus! You'll see the entire Midwest! You'll join me and the other clowns in acts of dexterity and hilarity that will enchant audiences of all ages! With your passion, your dedication, your devotion to clowning—we'd love to have you become part of our team, Jaunty."

Jaunty couldn't believe what he was hearing. "A traveling circus is my dream," he said, a tear forming in his eye.

"Then let's make that dream come true."

"I'm not supposed to wobble the bone around, though. It could cause permanent damage."

"Oh, right, sure. We wouldn't bring you on board right away. What I'm saying is that I'll leave you my business card, and after your arm is usable again, give me a call."

* * *

Jaunty followed the doctor's orders and his arm healed properly. When he called Guffaw, he was worried that the clown would no longer remember him, but they reminisced about their conversation in the hospital and then Guffaw sent him a bus ticket to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

There he met Wagon the Clown, who wore sad clown makeup. He'd come from an abusive household where his only moments of happiness came from making his mother laugh. He'd tried to make her laugh as often as possible. Now he wanted to do the same for the rest of the world.

He met Bluehead the Clown. She had bright blue pigtails and big red freckles on her white makeup. She giggled a lot, but not in a creepy way. She was the most athletic of the clowns, stunning the audience with her acrobatic abilities. The actual circus acrobats resented her a bit.

He met Reginald the Pleasant Clown, an African American clown who wore white makeup around his eyes and mouth and red makeup to give himself bright rosy cheeks. His persona was based on conducting himself with great dignity at all times, as an amusing counterpoint to the rest of the silliness happening in the ring.

Jaunty, Guffaw, Wagon, Bluehead, and Reginald became the best of friends. (Guffaw, Wagon, Bluehead, and Reginald were already the best of friends, but it wasn't long before Jaunty felt like an equal part of the "best of friends" group.)

The next eighteen years were the best years of Jaunty the Clown's life.

And then it all ended.

* * *

"What can I tell you?" said the circus owner, Mr. Gristle. "People just don't like clowns."

Guffaw was not smiling, which was rare. "Clowns bring joy to—"

"No. No, they don't. When people think of clowns, they think of creepy fuckers hiding in closets. They think you've got a butcher knife behind your back. They think you're lurking in the sewer, ready to yank off some little kid's arm in the rain."

"We provide clean, wholesome entertainment."

"You don't get it. It doesn't matter what you do. Society doesn't like clowns. If you went around and did a survey and asked a hundred random people if they thought clowns were funny or scary, ninety-eight of them would say scary. That's the way of the world now. Clowns aren't known for wacky antics with seltzer water anymore. They're known for standing in the backyards of frightened children. Just standing there. Motionless. Staring. Clowns are chilling."

"We're not chilling," said Guffaw.

"I'm not getting through to you and that's fine. It doesn't matter. I'm not renewing any of your contracts. You can still be clowns, but not at my circus."

* * *

"What are we going to do?" asked Bluehead, as the five clowns sat in their dressing room for the last time.

"It's going to be okay, I promise," said Guffaw. "He doesn't know what he's talking about. We'll find another circus."

"For all of us?" asked Jaunty.

Guffaw lowered his eyes. "I don't know. We may have to split up. Just temporarily."

"We'll never find a circus that's looking for five new clowns," said Wagon. "There's no way our act will stay together."

"That's not true," said Guffaw. "Maybe we'll start our own show. An all-clown show!"

"Didn't you hear your own recap of the conversation?" asked Bluehead. "People don't like clowns anymore. We'll be lucky if we get to do birthday parties. I started out doing birthday parties. The kids cry."

"I don't want an office job," said Reginald. "I'll shrivel up and die in that environment."

"Nobody is getting an office job and shriveling up and dying," Guffaw insisted. "We're clowns, and we're staying clowns. We are Guffaw the Clown, and we are Wagon the Clown, and we are Bluehead the Clown, and we are Reginald the Pleasant Clown, and we are Jaunty the Clown. That is who we are. Yes, we have a challenge ahead of us, but clowns don't back down from a challenge. We're middle-aged and we have no other skills—we're clowns for life!"

Everybody cheered.

Mr. Gristle peeked his head into the dressing room. "What are you cheering for? I didn't rehire you."

"Go away," said Guffaw, politely. "This is none of your concern."

Mr. Gristle glared at him. "Hurry up and clear out. I need that dressing room for the kangaroo."

Guffaw returned his attention to the others. "We'll get through this, I promise. All I ask is for a little patience."

"I can have a little patience," said Jaunty. "In fact, I can have a lot of patience. You're all the only family I have."

"Same here," said Bluehead. "You've been my family for over twenty years, and my biological family died in that car accident when I was sixteen. That's four years longer. I have nobody else. I don't want anybody else."

"Then we will stay together," said Guffaw. "No matter what."

* * *

Two months later, Guffaw called everybody together in the living room of the trailer they all shared. "I've found something," he announced.

"For all of us?" asked Reginald.

"Yes. Now, it doesn't pay much. And it's only six weeks of work. But it will keep us in macaroni and cheese for a while longer."

"Fantastic!" said Jaunty. All of them had been actively searching for work, but there were simply no opportunities for five clowns. "Is it a circus?"

"No."

"A stage show?"

"No."

"A movie?"

"No." Guffaw sighed. "I don't expect you all to be happy about this, so I'm just going to come out and say it. We're going to be scary clowns at a haunted house."

CHAPTER TWO

"I'm sorry," said Reginald. "Could you repeat that?"

Guffaw repeated it.

"Hmmm. That's what I thought you said."

"We're not scary clowns," said Bluehead. "We're funny clowns."

"I know what we are," said Guffaw. "We're also starving clowns. How much joy will we bring to the children of the world if the news has to report about a trailer full of dead clowns? You think that won't fuel some nightmares?"

"I'd like to think that it would make children sad instead of scared," said Wagon. "But I get your point."

"It's a really popular haunted attraction in Virginia. Tens of thousands of visitors between mid-September and Halloween. They need performers for the Scary Clown Room."

"I hate this idea," said Jaunty. "We're supposed to bring a sense of wonder and delight. I juggle for kids; I don't hide under their bed."

"Right," said Reginald. "How can I be Reginald the Pleasant Clown if I'm doing unpleasant things? The name wouldn't work anymore."

"This goes against everything we stand for," said Bluehead. "I won't do it."

"Me either," said Wagon. "I vowed to make the world smile, not scream."

"Fine," said Guffaw. "I'm so glad this trailer is chock full of integrity. Because that's going to pay for food, right? If we don't work, what are we supposed to eat?"

"The souls of children?" asked Jaunty.

Everybody gave him a dirty look.

"What? I'm getting in character. If Guffaw wants to turn us into monsters, we'd better start acting like them."

"This isn't what I wanted for us," said Guffaw. "But we've all been looking for something to do. Every night we gather right here in this living room, and every night we all report back complete failure. Nothing would make me happier than if we lived in a magical fantasy land where we could survive on cream pies that grew on trees, but that's not the case. And unless one of you found something better, something that keeps us together and lets us be wholesome entertainers, we really don't have a choice. Have one of you found something better? Have you, Jaunty?"

Jaunty looked at the floor, which needed vacuumed. "No."

"Have you, Wagon?"

Wagon looked at the floor, sadly. "No."

"Have you, Bluehead?"

Bluehead looked at the floor, her pigtails drooping. "No."

"Have you, Reginald?"

Reginald looked at everybody else looking at the floor, then looked at the far wall. "No," he said. "I have not."

"I didn't think so," said Guffaw. "Look, I'm taking the job. I hope the rest of you do, too. But nobody is forcing you to do this. You can go get a job in retail."

"I can't," said Reginald. "I'm a good clown because I love humanity. Working retail would change that."

Jaunty stood up. "None of us want this. But Guffaw has always had our best interests at heart, and if he thinks this is the way to go, I know he's right. Eighteen years ago I was sitting in a hospital bed, recovering from a broken bone that went right through my arm. I've shown you all the scar many times. If anybody wants to see it again, I'm happy to pull up my sleeve. Anyway, my plan was to sit in that bed and feel sorry for myself. But do you know who showed up? I know you do; you've all heard this story. Guffaw the Clown showed up, and he brought me into this family. I trust him with my life. We all do. We do dangerous stunts, and we have to trust each other with our lives, so why don't we trust Guffaw now? We should. I do. He's only failed us that one time."

"To be fair, that one time was a pretty big failure," said Wagon.

"I thought we weren't going to talk about that ever again," said Guffaw.

Wagon shrugged. "Jaunty brought it up."

"I actually think it has relevance to the current discussion," said Jaunty. "Everybody remembers what happened on that dark day ten years ago, right?"

"Of course we remember," said Bluehead.

"Guffaw got us a sponsorship for a new brand of greasepaint. Oh, we were so excited! I still remember all of the grins in our dressing room while we applied it before the show. And we proudly went out on stage, and all five of us had horrific allergic reactions. We were letting out grunts of pain and clawing at our faces. Reginald was foaming at the mouth and Wagon's lips were bleeding. On that day, were we not scary clowns?"

Nobody answered.

"We were straight out of a fever dream," said Jaunty. "None of us brought honor to the profession of clowning during that performance. But what did we do after that? Did we switch over to a life of lurking in the shadows, offering poisoned lollipops to unaccompanied minors? No. We waited a few days for our faces to heal, and then we went right back out there and put on a fantastic show. Smiles everywhere we looked! We made it through that, and we can make it through this."

"It's not really the same thing," said Wagon.

"It's close."

"It's not that close."

"It's close enough for my speech. What I'm saying is that we've been frightening before, and we can be frightening again, and it won't change who we are at our cores. We won't be scary clowns. We'll just be acting like scary clowns."

Reginald stood up. "I would rather behave like a scary clown for six weeks than work an office job or behind a retail counter or starve to death. I will put my trust in Guffaw. Jaunty is right—aside from that one nightmarish incident, he's never done wrong by us."

Bluehead stood up. "The only relevant job offer I received was to dance erotically in front of clown fetishists. I would've been allowed to keep my pants on, but still. I agree that Guffaw has earned our trust almost every time, and I will stand behind him."

Wagon stood up. "I don't like it but I'll go with the majority."

"Then it's settled," said Guffaw. "We have a week to exercise and get back down to our optimal clowning weight, and then we're off to Virginia. I've already found a trailer we can live in. It's terrible, but so is this one. I wish there was another option, but we live in a free market economy and it's not like we can force somebody to give us work at gunpoint."

"Hmmm," said Bluehead, stroking her chin.

"Stop stroking your chin."

"It itched."

"Will we have to change our makeup?" asked Reginald.

"Yes, I'm afraid so," said Guffaw. "We're scary clowns. That means fangs, claws, contact lenses, blood, and maniacal cackling."

"I don't cackle," said Reginald.

"We'll work it out. Maybe Bluehead can be our designated laugher. She just needs to make her giggle sound less like 'I'm amused' and more like 'I'm going to sink my teeth into your left eyeball.' We'll all have our own duties."

"I won't threaten anybody's pets," said Jaunty.

"Nobody has to threaten any pets," said Guffaw.

"I mean it. If they try to make me say that I'm going to cook and eat some little boy's dog, I will walk right out that door and not come back. That's a line I will not cross."

"You do get that haunted houses are meant to be entertainment, right? We're not actually torturing anybody, and we're not trying to put any children in therapy. It's fun Halloween scares. If you tell a kid you're going to eat his doggie, you'd probably get fired."

"Good," said Jaunty.

"In fact, let's make that clear right now. Nobody threatens to eat any pets. No dogs, no cats, no goldfish, nothing. That's too mean-spirited. That's not why we're there."

"What about threatening to take a bite out of a kid's arm?" asked Bluehead. "Like, are we supposed to gnaw on them with fake teeth?"

"This is a no-touch haunted house," said Guffaw. "You won't be gnawing on any arms. You can lean your head forward with your mouth wide open and act like you're going to bite their arm, but you won't actually get close."

"How close? Sixteen inches?"

"I don't have the answers to all of your questions. When we get there, we'll work out all of the action and rehearse and everybody will know what they're supposed to do. This isn't such a bad thing. Maybe we'll have a good time."

"We're clown traitors," said Wagon. "We're now part of the problem. I hope we don't have a good time. We need the money and I'm grateful to Guffaw for finding us a job, but we'll need an extra layer of greasepaint to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror."

"But you're in?" asked Guffaw.

"Yeah."

* * *

A week later, Jaunty, Guffaw, Bluehead, Wagon, and Reginald got into a car that was too small to comfortably seat five adults, but did not have enough clowns inside to generate the hilarious "clown car" effect when they all emerged. Though Bluehead was the smallest, she was prone to motion sickness when she sat in the back, so Jaunty, Wagon, and Reginald were squeezed together for eleven and a half very long hours.

When they arrived at their new trailer, they discovered that several cats were already living there. None of them had the heart to chase them away, so they added cat food and kitty litter to their shopping list. After drawing straws to determine who would go to the store and who would stay behind to unpack and clean up the trailer, Guffaw and Jaunty headed off to buy macaroni and cheese and other groceries.

Mount Tulip, which was not a mountain and did not have any tulips, was a small town with one grocery store, one hardware store, one bank, one movie theater, one library, one Laundromat, and six churches. There was a diner, a pizza place, a coffee shop, and an ice cream stand. Not much else. It didn't seem like the kind of place that would have a nationally famous haunted house attraction, but people planned whole vacations around The Mountain of Terror, which was also not a mountain.

The Mountain of Terror prided itself on using top-notch actors, and the owner was delighted to have people with two decades' of clown experience occupying the Scary Clown Room. They would not have creative control over the room, but the owner promised to take full advantage of their skills.

"This looks like a nice place to live for a few weeks," said Jaunty.

"Yep," said Guffaw. "I like small towns. The people are friendly."

"Four different people have waved to us since we left the trailer. Sincere waves."

"Too bad we can't set up a permanent clown show in a place like this. Rent a small performance space. Have thousands of people come into town for it the way they do for the haunted house."

"It would be nice," said Jaunty.

"Oh well. At this point, I'm just happy to have a job."

They bought groceries for the week and returned to the trailer. They didn't have to report to the Mountain of Terror until noon the next day, but everybody was exhausted from the drive and after finishing their macaroni and cheese they went to sleep.

* * *

"How's it going, everybody?" asked the college-age kid. "I'm Pete. My stage name is Depravo the Clown. I'm in charge of the Scary Clown Room, and it's cool to meet all of you."

"You go by Depravo?" Jaunty asked.

"Yeah."

"It's not a very clowny name."

"His backstory is that when he was a kid, maybe five or six years old, his entire family was killed by a group of feral clowns. For most of his life he sought revenge, but he grew to understand their motives and became a murderous clown himself. You'll each need a backstory, too. I'll quiz you on it when you get here tomorrow. Make it really demented. The more fucked up the better."

"Clowns don't curse," said Wagon.

"Excuse me?"

"Clowns don't use that kind of language."

"Are you messing with me?"

"No, sir."

"When I'm in makeup, I've got blood dribbling down the side of my mouth that's supposed to be from the throat of a newborn baby. However, you're right, it's against our policy to use foul language in front of customers, so don't do it next week when we have guests coming through. Until then, Depravo the Clown will use the f-word as much as he wants. Got it?"

"He gets it," said Guffaw. "I'm sorry. We come from a family-friendly environment."

"Yes, I apologize," said Wagon. "I'm still getting used to the idea of being nightmare fuel."

"Whatever," said Depravo. "Okay, you've got your backstory homework. I'm told you can do tricks and stuff. Show me what you've got. I know you're kind of old, but can any of you do cartwheels?"

"We can all do cartwheels," said Guffaw.

"Good, good. It's a small room. Can you do cartwheels without smacking into the wall or each other?"

"Absolutely."

"Awesome. Upside-down clowns are scary as shit. Let's see it."

Each of them demonstrated their ability to do a cartwheel, then all five of them demonstrated their ability to do cartwheels without colliding.

"Can you juggle?" asked Depravo.

"Of course," said Guffaw.

"Maybe you could juggle severed heads or severed arms. Something severed."

They all demonstrated their juggling abilities, using beanbags rather than severed body parts.

"Can you guys ride a unicycle?"

"Yes," said Guffaw.

"Did you bring one with you?"

"No."

"Damn. I don't know where you'd even get a unicycle. Oh well. So we've got cartwheels and juggling. Now we need evil clown laughs. Let's hear you cackle." He pointed to Reginald. "What's your name again?"

"Reginald the Pleasant Clown."

"Not anymore. You're Reginald the Bloodlusty Clown."

"Will the patrons know our names?"

"No."

"I'd rather stick with Reginald the Pleasant Clown, then."

"You won't be able to get into character if you're Reginald the Pleasant Clown. You're not pleasant. You're a psycho asshole. You stab people because it amuses you. So let me hear you be amused about having stabbed somebody."

Reginald nodded, and then laughed with great dignity.

"Way more psychotic. That's a zero. I need a nine or ten."

Reginald laughed again.

"That was a two. That's the way you would laugh if you understood the joke in a Shakespeare play."

Reginald laughed once more.

"Still a two. I'm getting complete sanity out of that laugh. I want an unhinged laugh."

Reginald cleared his throat, took a moment to compose himself, then laughed.

"Nope. Still terrible. You're doing a 'ha ha ha' laugh and it should be a 'hee hee hee' laugh. Forget it." He pointed to Bluehead. "Let's hear your scary laugh."

Bluehead giggled.

"See, that almost made me shit my pants. That's what you should all aspire to."

"Is that what we really want when customers are close together in a small space?" asked Wagon. "I don't see how that would be fun for anybody."

"I meant metaphorically shitting their pants."

"Okay. Yeah, that would be better."

Depravo frowned. "I'm getting this feeling like the five of you aren't really into the idea of scaring people. You understand why you're here, right?"

"Yes," said Guffaw. "We absolutely understand why we're here. I apologize. We performed in a very different environment for a long time, but I promise it won't affect our work. Every single one of us will bring our murderous clown A-game."

Jaunty nodded. "We'll get this out of our systems and come back ready to scare, scare, scare! In fact, that will be our cheer. Scare, scare, scare! Everybody now!"

"Scare, scare, scare!" chanted the clowns, with a respectable amount of enthusiasm.

"Oh, come on, you can do better than that!" said Jaunty. "This is the Scary Clown Room at the Mountain of Terror! By golly, let's hear your Scary Clown Room spirit!"

"Scare! Scare! Scare!"

CHAPTER THREE

The barricade around the entrance to Tulip Cave had been there for so long that only the "K" and the "U" were still visible in the "Keep Out" sign. Teenagers often snuck past the barricade at night to drink and hold hands, but nobody ever tried to get inside the cave itself. This was because the entrance had collapsed many decades ago, and mischief-seeking teenagers were generally not inclined to haul away several thousand pounds of rubble.

 The land around the cave had recently been purchased by a pair of entrepreneurs who'd noted that if huge numbers of people poured into town for the Mountain of Terror, they might stick around to spend additional money on another nearby attraction. They hadn't yet decided what this might be. Cave tours, maybe. Depended what the cave was like inside.

In an official sense, they were less "entrepreneurs" than "brothers who'd inherited an extremely large amount of money and couldn't figure out how to spend it all." They'd donated some of it to charitable causes, but that got boring after a while, and they'd decided that they should become responsible businessmen.

The brothers were not one of the four people standing at the entrance to the cave. They were in Italy, sharing a prostitute even though they could easily afford one for each of them. One of the people in front of the cave was Timothy Kubler, who worked for the brothers and knew damn well that they would never bother to do anything with this cave. He would blast open the entrance, peer around with a flashlight, send the brothers a few pictures, and move on to the next project that would fail to hold their interest even though they weren't doing any of the work.

Technically, it wasn't necessary to blow up the cave entrance. They could use heavy machinery. But the brothers wanted an explosion, captured on video, and since they had the means to hire a pair of demolition experts and get the necessary permit, they were going to get an explosion.

Timothy took pictures as the experts set up the dynamite.

"This is very exciting," said Maxwell Gord. He was a nationally famous spelunker who would venture into the cave—not very far—and see if the brothers' plan was even remotely feasible. Timothy assumed that bringing tourists into a long-dormant cave was a completely ridiculous idea that would never happen, but he figured he should get somebody like Maxwell to sign off on that.

"It's really not," said Timothy.

"Of course it is. Who knows what could be inside this cave?"

"Rocks, probably."

"Perhaps a whole new ecosystem."

"Sure. Maybe it's filled with dinosaurs."

"It could be a letdown," Maxwell admitted. "They might blow open the entrance and find that it only goes back a few feet. But based on the location, this could also be the entrance to a massive system of underground caverns, going on for miles."

"So you think this plan could work?"

"Oh, no. Buying land with an unexplored cave with the intention of turning it into a tourist attraction is a terrible idea. It's never going to happen. The insurance alone would be a non-starter. But it's very exciting for me."

Timothy shrugged. "Fair enough, fair enough."

"How long do you think it's going to take them to get inside?"

"I don't know. If people are setting up dangerous explosives, I'm happy for them to work at their own pace."

"I wasn't suggesting that you should rush them. Would it offend you if I said that I see no spark of joy in you? You seem like a man who has lost his zest for life. A man who goes through the motions, who is a hollow shell of what he used to be."

"No offense taken. I think that's accurate."

A few minutes later, the demolition experts reported that they were ready. Everybody put on their earmuffs and protective eyewear, and stood far enough away that a jagged shard of rock wouldn't fly through the air and impale itself in one of their necks. Timothy held his phone and waited as the expert at the plunger counted down from three. Then he plunged.

Even with earmuffs, the explosion was louder than Timothy expected and he dropped his phone. He cursed and picked it up. The brothers were going to be very pouty about not having a good video of the demolition. Maybe he could fix it with CGI.

The four of them watched as the cloud of dust settled. It did indeed look like there was now an open entrance to the cave.

"Outstanding," said Maxwell. "I'll go get my equipment from my car."

"What equipment?" Timothy asked.

"My spelunking equipment. What else?"

"You're not spelunking. You're walking a few feet in there, taking some pictures, and walking out."

"I get what you're saying, and I remember you saying that when you hired me, and a few more times after that, but it would break my heart to just take a quick peek and leave."

"We just set off a big pile of dynamite. The cave could be unstable. It's way too dangerous. Really, we should be sending a robot in there before you."

"I'll be fine. I'm very good at this."

"No."

"I'll sign a waiver."

"You already signed a waiver. The answer is no."

"All right. You're the boss. Though I should go get all of my equipment for when I step into the cave, even if I'm not going to explore anything. You never know. I'll be right back."

Timothy wanted to argue further, then decided that he didn't really want to argue further. If the jackass went more than a few steps into the cave, he'd have one of the demolition guys chuck an unlit stick of dynamite in there to scare him back out.

Maxwell returned with far too much equipment, including one of those helmets with a light on it. He looked positively giddy.

"You're acting like you've never explored a new cave before," said Timothy.

"I haven't."

"What?"

"I haven't."

"Yes you have."

"You may be thinking of my dad. I'm Maxwell Gord, Jr."

"Shit."

"It'll be fine, I promise. I won't take any unnecessary risks."

"No risks," said Timothy. "You'll take no risks. I do not empower you to decide which risks are necessary and which ones are unnecessary. You take no risks. Understand?"

"Why are you so uptight?"

"Because I don't want you to die in a cave-in, that's why! I don't want you to plummet sixty feet and shatter your legs!"

"You don't even know me."

"So? I can point to any random person on the street and say that I don't want them to die in a cave-in."

Maxwell considered that. "That's very compassionate of you. You're a good man, Mr. Kubler. I swear that I will take no risks at all."

"Fine. Go on in."

Maxwell walked over to the cave entrance. He stepped on top of the rubble, looked back at Timothy, and gave him a thumbs-up sign that Timothy did not return. He turned on his headlamp, peered into the entrance, turned back to give Timothy another thumbs-up sign, then ducked down and stepped into the cave, disappearing from sight.

"Hey," Timothy said to one of the demolition experts. "If I walked over there, is it possible that the ground could collapse beneath my feet?"

"Well, anything's possible."

"If I walked over there, would you be inclined to shout out a warning?"

"Not unless I heard a rumbling."

"Thanks." Timothy cursed again, a higher-tier expletive than his last one, then carefully walked over to the cave entrance, ready to flee at the first sign that the ground might be unstable. He could see light shining inside, so Maxwell hadn't gone too far.

He made his way up the pile of rubble. Maxwell was inside the cave, kneeling down. There didn't seem to be much room to move around.

"Anything cool?" Timothy asked.

"It's a big drop. I can't even see the bottom. And it'll be hard to squeeze through. You'd have to blow up some rock and make this part bigger, or you'll lose the revenue from overweight visitors. Then you'd have to figure out how far down this goes and figure out a way to get your customers to the bottom. Probably have to install an elevator—you can't really have tourists scaling down a vertical rock wall. Not practical."

"So you're saying that the whole thing is a dumb idea?"

"Well, it's not a smart idea."

"Thanks. That's what I'll report back. I appreciate your help."

Timothy walked back down the pile of rubble. The demolition guys had finished packing up their stuff.

"I'll be in touch if I need you to blow up any more of this cave, but I think this is as far as it goes," he told them.

"Do you want us to leave you any dynamite, just in case?" one of them asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That was a joke."

"Oh."

"It would be incredibly irresponsible of us to leave dynamite behind. This isn't a Roadrunner cartoon where TNT explodes and the victim is left covered with soot and maybe their nose is crooked. The real world results are horrific. You should look up pictures of it someday. So the joke is that I casually mentioned leaving some behind, when in fact I would never consider doing such a thing."

"I understood the joke."

"Oh. You didn't seem like you did."

"I did."

"Okay. Pleasure working with you."

The demolition guys went back to their car and drove off. Maxwell had not yet emerged from the cave.

"Maxwell!" Timothy called out.

"What?"

"Come on out!"

"I'm trying to see what's down there. I'm lowering a flashlight."

"No. The job is over."

"I'll be there in a few."

"I know you signed a waiver, but there are still liability issues involved here. There could be methane gas or something. Get the hell out of there."

"I can see the bottom now."

"What's down there?"

"Nothing. Looks like the cave keeps going, though."

"That's fascinating. Am I gonna have to drag you out of there by your collar?"

"I'm not wearing a collar."

"Shirt collar. Stop delaying."

"Something's moving down there."

"A dinosaur?"

"I can't tell what it is. Now there's something else. A bunch of them now."

"Animals?"

"Bugs, I think. They're starting to climb up the side of the cave, so, yeah, it's definitely bugs."

"Get out of there, Maxwell."

"I think I'm stuck."

"You think you're stuck? Either you're stuck or you're not."

"I'm definitely stuck. Oh my God, I'm stuck! I'm stuck! They're getting closer!"

Timothy hurried up the pile of rubble.

"It's spiders!" Maxwell screamed. "Huge spiders! Get me out of here! Get me out of here!"

Timothy paused. He liked to think of himself as a brave guy. He'd served his country, and once while extremely drunk he'd waded into a pond so that he could wrestle an alligator. That said, he had more than a touch of arachnophobia, and somebody shrieking that huge spiders were crawling up a cave wall toward them was kind of a deterrent toward remaining in this particular area.

No. He couldn't let Maxwell get swarmed by spiders. It was too extreme of a punishment for being a dumbass. He hurried the rest of the way up to the cave entrance.

"They're almost here!" Maxwell wailed.

Timothy stepped into the cave, where Maxwell was frantically trying to pull himself out of the gap in the rock. Timothy grabbed Maxwell's feet, then decided that giving him a great big tug might snap his neck, so instead he grabbed the bottom of Maxwell's shirt and tugged.

Maxwell did not pop free.

"Help me! Help me! Help me! They're—"

Maxwell's words became muffled. His body began to thrash around, and Timothy lost his grip on his shirt. He grabbed the waistline of Maxwell's pants and pulled as hard as he could.

That worked. The rest of Maxwell slid into view, with spiders crawling on his arms and shoulders. And on the back of his neck. And in his hair.

Maxwell rolled over onto his back, crushing some of them. Spiders crawled all over his chest. The reason his scream was muffled was the four thick squirming spider legs that protruded from his mouth.

These spiders were huge. Timothy didn't know his varieties of spiders very well—these had brown bodies and they weren't tarantulas or black widows, the two he could identify. Right now it wasn't important what kind they were. They were gigantic spiders and nothing else mattered.

Timothy knew he should flee, but no matter how frightened he was, he couldn't let the poor guy die like this. He had to get the spiders off of him, immediately. Timothy slammed his foot down on a couple of them that were crawling next to him. They crunched underneath his shoe.

The spider's legs completely disappeared inside of Maxwell's mouth, cutting off his scream completely. That spider must've been smaller than the others, though Timothy now noticed that the sides of Maxwell's mouth were split open, so crawling inside hadn't been an effortless process.

His face was already grotesquely swollen. White fluid leaked from several spots.

Timothy, in a complete panic, continued to stomp on the spiders, as hard as he could. They needed to die. All of them.

The part of his mind that was still thinking rationally—a very small part at the moment—suggested that he was doing more harm than good as he squashed the spiders that were on Maxwell. The rest of his mind didn't give a shit. These things were unnatural. Unholy. Spiders simply did not get this big.

Their bodies crunched, and the tiny rational part of Timothy's mind tried to convince him that the other sounds might be Maxwell's bones cracking. Timothy continued to stomp as spiders scurried up his legs. He should have fled. He should flee now. He couldn't stop himself from stomping on the spiders, even as more and more of them continued to crawl out of the gap, more than he could crush by himself.

He was definitely breaking Maxwell's ribs. He needed to stop.

After stomping on his throat, he stopped.

Timothy suddenly realized the horror of what he'd done. He only had a second to process that he'd just murdered somebody, and then he cried out in pain as one of the spiders that had crawled inside of his pants leg sunk its fangs into his flesh.

Maxwell was dead. It was time to run.

Timothy made it three steps.

He tumbled down the pile of rubble, bashing his head so hard against the ground that he faded in and out of consciousness during the last few minutes of his life, which was the greatest gift he could have ever received.

CHAPTER FOUR

Opening night.

The clowns were allowed to do their own makeup, as long as Depravo deemed it to be freaky enough. Jaunty was still a hobo clown, but he now had fangs (which were annoying), red contact lenses (which were uncomfortable), and blood trickling down the sides of his mouth (which had no impact on his comfort, since he was used to wearing makeup).

Wagon was no longer a sad clown. In fact, he had a huge, terrifying grin that showed how much it amused him to murder people. Even when Wagon's actual mouth frowned, which was most of the time, he was grinning. With practice, he had eventually come up with a maniacal laugh that Depravo deemed to be of sufficient pants-shitting quality. He wore a red fright wig and had claws instead of hands, which he would use to pop balloons as people walked through the room.

Bluehead went with a scary baby-doll clown look. She was remarkably skilled at keeping her expression frozen in place, and she moved around like a marionette. Her giggle had a mechanical quality to it, and she made it skip like her voice box was broken. She was way too good at this. Jaunty didn't like to be around her anymore.

Reginald had suggested that he could wear some chains and be a scary slave clown. Depravo had responded that this was probably not the best approach to take. Reginald continued to throw out ideas, including a scenario where the other clowns whipped him, that made all of the Caucasians extremely uncomfortable. Depravo had finally said that perhaps Reginald should keep his existing look, and maybe just stare at people or something. Reginald would later admit that his plan had worked perfectly.

Guffaw went for a zombie clown look, with white cheeks over grey rotted makeup. His clown suit was filthy and in tatters, as if he'd been buried in it and dug his way out of the grave. Patches of hair were missing from his green wig. He'd perfected his shambling undead walk and seemed to be having fun with it.

Depravo was a demonic clown, dressed in red and orange with clown makeup over skull makeup. He did a lot of lewd waggling of his tongue. It was supposed to be an artificially long prosthetic tongue, but it kept falling out, so he used his real tongue, which Jaunty felt was sufficiently long on its own. He flashed heavy metal signs and had a booming, satanic laugh.

The décor motif for the Scary Clown Room was "carnival in Hell." The backstory, presumably, was that if you were a bad person during your time on earth, you would go to Hell, where the carnival workers weren't all that interested in providing quality entertainment. There was a cotton candy stand, but the cotton candy was served on top of severed heads, like hair. (An animatronic clown held one of these treats.) A shooting gallery had humans, also animatronic, as targets. Creepy carnival music played in the background.

The live clowns each had their own area of the room, with at least one thing to hide behind so they could spring out at unsuspecting patrons. They each had their own set of props to juggle. Jaunty juggled plastic butcher knives, Bluehead juggled baby doll heads, Reginald juggled regular apples because his other suggestions were too racially insensitive, and so on, except for Depravo, who didn't know how to juggle. They had an area where they could do cartwheels without kicking a customer in the face, or whatever clown tricks occurred to them, as long as they stayed within the boundaries.

"Don't touch anybody," said Depravo. "Ever."

"We would never consider doing that," Guffaw told him.

"I don't just mean reaching out and groping some chick's boobs. That goes without saying, even in the dark. I mean that if somebody freaks out and punches you in the face, you don't get to punch them back."

"Somebody's going to punch us in the face?" Bluehead asked.

"I don't mean that they're going to pin you down to the floor and start whaling on you. People get scared and sometimes they lash out without thinking about it. You probably won't actually get punched but you might get slapped. There'll be medics around. Just don't seek retribution is all I'm saying."

"Maybe if we treat them with kindness they won't try to harm us," said Reginald.

"Getting slapped is no big deal," said Depravo. "Your makeup cushions it a little, and your clown noses will help protect you. If you want, we can do an exercise where we all slap each other until we lose our fear of it."

"No, thank you," said Wagon.

Depravo shrugged. "The offer stands. All I'm saying is that if you have rage issues, keep them under control while the attraction is open."

"If somebody slaps us, can we snarl at them?" asked Bluehead.

"Yes," said Depravo. "You certainly can. You can snarl at them even if they don't slap you. You can snarl at anybody at any time for any reason."

"Thanks," said Bluehead. "I probably won't but it's good to have the option."

"Scaring small children is totally fair game, but if they start to cry, stand down. I know you're all like 'We're merry clowns who bring delight to youngsters' but scaring people can be as addictive as snorting a line of coke. You want more and more of it. You start seeking greater and greater highs. Then suddenly you're waving a fake serpent at a little girl who's crying and hugging her mother's leg and you don't know when you lost your way. It's okay to make them cry, but once they've started, you're done."

"Can we reassure them that everything will be all right?" Reginald asked.

"No. Any further questions?"

All of the clowns shook their heads.

"Good. People have been waiting in line for a couple of hours already, and we don't open for another half hour, so make sure you put on a good show and give them their money's worth."

* * *

Jaunty needed to work off some nervous energy, so he walked through the Mountain of Terror, exchanging brief pleasantries with all of the new friends he'd made along the way. He'd been surprised by how nice the other actors in the haunted house were. Not a devil worshipper among them, as far as he could tell. Just a large group of heavily tattooed and pierced kids working hard and having fun. (He hated that he thought of them as "kids," but compared to the middle-aged clowns, most of them were indeed kids.)

Walking at a brisk pace it took about fifteen minutes to get through the entire attraction. When the actual customers went through, their fright would last about thirty or forty minutes. It was significantly better than the haunted house at the state fair when he was a kid, where you'd get in the car, ride in the dark past a couple of skeletons that didn't move, and then emerge four ride tickets poorer. The detail in the Mountain of Terror sets was amazing—it was kind of a shame that the lighting would be so low.

There was a Cannibal Redneck Room, where an overweight inbred family would munch on what looked like smoked turkey legs, but which the audience knew came from no turkey. There was a Mirror Maze where you'd get lost, though not lost enough to stop the line from moving because they had a lot of people to move through the attraction. There was a Mad Scientist Room where a presumably unlicensed lab technician played God, with unfortunate results.

There was a graveyard where the tombstones all had amusing epitaphs ("Here Lies Part Of Jody Kramer; Not A Real Good Lion Tamer") though many of them were rejected by management for poor taste. Jaunty had overheard the conversation where the tombstone crew was informed that leukemia jokes were not funny, no matter how clever the rhyming scheme.

The Hallway of Statues had a dozen real statues and three actors pretending to be statues. A couple of the statues were mounted on springs so that they would wobble slightly, giving the impression that they were actors with nefarious intentions. The actors weren't in place yet, but Jaunty still found walking down the hallway to be a nerve-wracking experience.

There was a Ventriloquist Dummy Room where all of the eyes followed you. Jaunty did not believe in the supernatural but one of the dummies in particular seemed to be possessed. He knew it wasn't. That would be silly. Possessed ventriloquist dummies did not exist. That said, if it ever leapt out and tried to stab him to death, Jaunty's reaction would be less "Oh my God, how can such a thing exist?" and more "Yep, called it."

One room was filled with sewer rats, most of them fake. (The real ones were caged and treated well.) There was a Slasher Room where "not close enough to constitute copyright infringement" versions of Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and the killer from Scream, which was itself a "not close enough to constitute copyright infringement" costume, lurked. There was an insincere pumpkin patch.

There was a room filled with melting mutants chasing people in decontamination suits around barrels of hazardous waste. There was an empty room where absolutely nothing happened, but since the customers didn't know nothing would happen, it would make them very nervous. There was a Vampire Room with hissing galore. There was a Butcher Shop that was extraordinarily gross. There was the Giant Hand And Head Room, where a giant animatronic hand would reach for customers, as if planning to deposit them into the mouth of the Giant Head.

Plus several more rooms, and a gift shop at the end.

Jaunty returned to the Scary Clown Room, then went through the hidden door that led to an employees-only hallway. A small table with their makeup supplies was pressed against the wall, where Bluehead and Wagon were sharing a mirror as they applied their last-minute touches. It wasn't a fancy setup, but it was convenient, so the clowns could sneak out for a moment if they were perspiring too much.

Bluehead glanced back at Jaunty. "How do I look?"

"Nightmarish. Haunting. Chilling."

"If I were a real doll, would you set me on your bedstand and let me stare at you all night while you slept?"

"Nope."

"Perfect, thanks!"

Jaunty glanced in the mirror. His makeup looked fine. "I've decided that I'm just going to have fun with this," he said. "It's not the clowning I want to be doing, but it's better than not clowning at all. If we had a Head Clown, I think he or she would understand."

"You're rationalizing," said Wagon.

"Oh, yeah. I'm rationalizing my rear end off. What else are we supposed to do? Sit around in a cloud of self-loathing? At least we're still entertainers—we're not dragging people behind Dumpsters and robbing them."

"Yes, that's what the Head Clown would say: At least you're not robbing people behind Dumpsters."

"You know what I mean."

Wagon nodded. "I do. It'll be fine."

The door opened and Depravo peeked his head into the hallway. "They've started letting people in! It's almost time to get spoooooooky!"

The Scary Clown Room was near the end of the Mountain of Terror journey, so they had a while to wait before their first victims passed through. But Jaunty's stomach still clenched up. And yet he couldn't deny the sense of anticipation. They'd put quite a bit of work into this, and now their efforts were going to pay off.

Twenty-eight minutes later, Depravo gave the clowns their five-minute warning. "Places, everyone!" he said. "Harness your inner psychopaths! Let's do this!"

Jaunty, Guffaw, Bluehead, Reginald, Wagon, and Depravo got into their respective spots. Guffaw, Bluehead, Reginald, and Depravo would be visible as people walked through the room, while Jaunty's job was to stay hidden until a whole group walked past, and then leap out at the straggler. Wagon's job was to leap out at the person at the head of the group. Sometimes they were to mix it up and leap out at somebody in the middle. Nobody was safe.

A few minutes later, a line of teenagers walked into the room. They all had big smiles on their faces. They moved tentatively forward, going "Eeww" at the severed head with cotton candy on top and watching Reginald juggle. The girl in front screamed as Wagon popped out from behind a stack of wooden crates. Everybody laughed.

They were having a good time!

The clowns were making people happy!

Jaunty leapt out at the guy in the back. He didn't scream, but he did pick up his pace.

More and more people walked through. Couples holding hands. Parents with their kids. Large groups of friends. Not everybody was having a good time; some teenagers were trying to convey an air of being bored by the sheer lameness of the whole spectacle, but the people who were really scared still seemed to be enjoying themselves, even the woman whose face was pressed tightly against the back of the man in front of her so that she wouldn't have to see any of the horrors that surrounded her.

Jaunty kept glancing over at Guffaw, Bluehead, Reginald, and Wagon. It was hard to gauge their current emotional state while they were looking like nightmare creatures, but none of them seemed miserable. It was entirely possible that they'd look back upon this experience with some degree of fondness, instead of trying to purge it from their memories.

A young woman, about eighteen years old, walked past Jaunty and he leapt out with a non-clownish roar. She cried out in surprise. As her boyfriend laughed, she playfully slapped him on the shoulder. "Gaaah! I hate clowns!"

Jaunty lowered his eyes and ducked back down into his hiding spot.

She hated clowns.

He wasn't here to change her mind, to make her see the delight that clowns could bring. He was here to exploit that fear, to make her hate clowns even more than she did when she stepped into the Mountain of Terror.

Why had he thought this would be fun?

Jaunty just crouched there for a while, feeling lost.

"Hey!"

Jaunty looked up and saw Depravo signaling to him.

"You've missed the past couple of groups! Interact, dammit!"

Another line of people entered the room. Jaunty didn't want to do this anymore, but he also didn't want to get the others in trouble, and he needed to pay for his share of the trailer and the macaroni and cheese. He wasn't going to let one young woman saying that she hated clowns destroy him.

He popped into view with a hair-raising cackle.

A little girl shrieked and burst into tears.

Jaunty almost wanted to burst into tears himself.

CHAPTER FIVE

"It's time to come in now," Pearl called out the back door.

"Why are you making them come in?" asked Elwood. "They're playing outside. Do you know how long it took me to pry them away from the video games? The only time these kids get any fresh air is when they stay with us."

"It's getting dark out."

"They're staying in the yard. It'll be fine. Let them play."

"Never mind," Pearl called out to their grandchildren.

Elwood and Pearl had only one child, their daughter Donna who lived in North Carolina. She was divorced from her deadbeat husband and had custody of their three boys. She'd had children late in life, as had Elwood and Pearl, but once they got started she'd pumped three of them out in rapid succession. Mason was eight, Oliver was seven, and Aiden was six, so Donna had a permanent twitchy eye.

Elwood and Pearl enjoying having their grandchildren around and had a standing offer that whenever Donna wanted to make the three-hour drive and drop them off for the weekend, she was welcome to do so. She frequently took them up on that offer.

Elwood glanced out the back window. Oliver and Aiden were trying to kick the soccer ball into the net while Mason played goalkeeper. As far as he was concerned, if they were out there getting low-tech exercise, they could stay outside until midnight.

He wandered into the kitchen to grab a beer out of the fridge. He popped off the bottle cap, took a long swig, and quietly belched. Then he noticed movement to his left.

He looked over there. Nothing.

He took another swig of beer, almost emptying the bottle. There was the movement again—something scurrying across the kitchen window. Looked like a spider but it was way too big.

He walked over to the window. It was a spider. Two spiders, in fact. If he weren't still on the first of the two beers he allowed himself every day, he'd think he was drunk. They looked like wolf spiders, and he knew that those bastards grew big, especially in Australia, but if you included their legs these things were as long as his forearm.

"Hey, Pearl! Come take a look at this."

Pearl saw what he was talking about as soon as she walked into the kitchen. "That must be Mason playing a practical joke."

"You think they're fake?"

"You think they're real?"

Elwood walked over to the window to get a closer look. Despite their size, those spiders sure looked and moved like they were real. A third one crawled onto the window.

"Let's bring the kids inside," Elwood told Pearl.

One of their grandchildren screamed.

Elwood and Pearl rushed out of the kitchen. As Pearl threw open the back door, they saw Mason, Oliver, and Aiden running toward them. The grass seemed to be moving.

The kids hurried inside and Pearl slammed the door shut behind them. Elwood gaped out the window. The grass wasn't moving; there were so many spiders crawling over it that it looked like it was moving.

What the hell was happening? Where did they all come from?

Aiden was sobbing and Pearl scooped him up into her arms.

"Did any of you get bit?" Elwood asked.

His grandchildren shook their heads.

"You're safe. We'll just stay inside. They can't—"

His sentence was proven to be a lie before he even finished it. A few of the giant spiders were crawling across the kitchen floor. They weren't moving any more quickly than a normal spider, but they certainly looked like they had targets in mind.

Time to get out to the car and flee.

Elwood took Mason and Oliver's hands as they went into the living room. He looked out the front window. No sign of any spiders in the front yard, and the car was parked close. They'd be fine. He let go of Mason's hand, grabbed the car keys off the hook, and opened the door. The five of them ran out to the vehicle. After the grandchildren were safely in the back seat, Elwood turned to Pearl. "I'll be back in a second. Going to get Harvey."

Pearl nodded. "Please be careful."

Elwood went back into the house and hurried down the hallway. The last door on the right was their bedroom, where their bulldog Harvey would be in his usual spot on the bed. Harvey wasn't a very active dog anymore and didn't leave the bed much except at mealtime and for outdoor restroom breaks. He could no longer jump up onto the bed by himself, so they'd made him a ramp.

A giant spider was on the bed, crawling toward him.

There were a couple of others—one crawling on the dresser and one on the ceiling. At least it wasn't the massive wave of them that were outside. Elwood didn't question how they got inside. They had an occasional mouse problem, so why not spiders?

Harvey snapped at the spider, which seemed unimpressed. It didn't stop moving.

Elwood scooped up the bulldog. Elwood wasn't exactly young, and Harvey wasn't exactly small, so he had to hold the dog against his chest to keep from dropping him.

The spider on the ceiling leapt down upon the bed. It didn't gracefully slide down on a thread of web—the goddamn thing leapt.

Elwood backed out of the room, then yelped as something crunched underneath his feet. He looked down. He'd stepped on two legs of a spider. Quickly, Elwood finished the job. Thank God he'd been wearing shoes.

Now there were several spiders in the hallway. If he tried to run, he'd risk dropping Harvey, so he did a quick walk, crushing another spider that came straight at him without fear.

There were a couple of spiders on the living room ceiling. He gave them a wide berth as he hurried toward the front door, wondering when Harvey had started weighing eight hundred pounds. Harvey whimpered but didn't struggle to get out of Elwood's arms.

A spider gracefully slid down on a thread of web.

It was right in the middle of the open doorway. If this giant spider invasion were happening a few years ago, Elwood would've just ducked underneath it, but he had a bad back and this was going to be a more difficult process. He couldn't put Harvey on the floor and let the bulldog run to the car—there were now spiders all over the driveway.

Another spider descended. Surely the spiders weren't consciously trying to trap him in his home, but it did stop at a point lower than the first spider, making his escape through the doorway even more of a challenge.

Elwood needed at least one arm free, so he shifted Harvey's weight, struggling not to drop the dog. He grabbed a jacket that was hanging next to the doorway and frantically waved it at the two spiders, dislodging them from their webs. As they hit the ground, he stomped on both of them.

A third spider was beginning to descend in the doorway but it hadn't gotten far, so Elwood ducked underneath it and went outside, taking the jacket with him. 

There were hundreds of spiders in his front yard. Where had they all come from? Many of them were already crawling on the car. Mason, Oliver, and Aiden were screaming in the backseat, but it seemed to be in response to the overall terror of the situation and not because a spider was back there with them.

He hurried over to the car, almost losing his grip on Harvey but managing to not drop his beloved pet, though he dropped the jacket. There were several spiders crawling on the driver's side door, including one that completely covered the door handle.

The passenger side had fewer spiders, but Pearl needed a new hip and she'd injure herself trying to scoot over the center console into the driver's seat. No way could Elwood lift his foot high enough to squash the spiders on the door.

If they opened and closed the door really, really quickly, he should be able to get Harvey into the back seat with his grandchildren before any spiders got inside. He couldn't open the door himself, though.

"Oliver! Aiden! Get as far to the other side as you can!" he said. He would've waved to demonstrate, but he didn't have a free hand. The boys immediately did as they were told.

"Mason, you're going to open the door and I'm going to put Harvey in there. A spider or two might get in. Grab something to crush them with."

Mason nodded bravely, and held up a hardcover Hunger Games book.

A spider crawled over Elwood's shoe. He ignored it and held Harvey next to the door. "Now!"

Mason opened the door. Elwood tossed the bulldog into the back seat. Mason closed the door, bisecting a spider that tried to get inside.

Elwood didn't think any spiders had gotten in there, but then Mason started smashing something with the book, over and over. When he held it up, spider guts were smeared all over the back.

So now Elwood had only his own safety to worry about.

He looked over at his jacket. Several spiders were crawling on it.

He considered taking off his shirt and using it to brush the spiders off the door, but truthfully the process of removing his shirt would take longer than just finding something else to use. Getting old sucked.

He used his left foot to squash the spider that had crawled on his right foot.

Elwood made the mistake of looking to the side of his house and for a moment was completely paralyzed with fear. He couldn't believe how many spiders were headed this way. It was like a river of them.

Where had they come from? It was as if God said, "Well, humanity, you had a decent run, but it's time for your extermination, so have fun as you die screaming!"

He could not afford to stand there, paralyzed with fear. Every second counted.

He glanced around the yard. Aiden had been playing with a plastic toy truck earlier, and it was the closest spider-crushing item available. Elwood walked over to it, groaned as he bent over to pick it up, and then returned to the car.

It hadn't taken very long, but the number of spiders on the car had already doubled. He should've told Pearl to get in the driver's seat—he didn't want her to leave him behind to perish, but she could've at least driven the car to a less spider-infested area while he followed on foot.

He used the plastic truck to smash a few spiders that were in the way, then opened the driver's side door. He got inside as quickly as he could, which was not quickly enough to stop some spiders from crawling inside before he closed the door.

How many of them? Eight? Nine?

"Everybody watch out," said Elwood, as he took the keys out of his pocket and shoved them into the ignition. "Some of them are in here! Mason, be ready with that book!"

"Okay, Grandpa!"

The car, a reliable, fuel-efficient automobile, started when he turned the key. Elwood squished two spiders with his foot and one with his elbow. Where were the others?

One was right there on his leg. He cried out and slapped it with his bare hand. That wasn't enough to crush it. He balled his hand into a fist and smashed it a few times until it was unquestionably dead. No time to wipe the gook off his hand—he grabbed the steering wheel and floored the accelerator.

"They might have gone under the seat, so everybody put your feet up," he said.

"What's making this happen?" asked Pearl. "Floodwaters driving them out from where they were living?"

"I just want to know how they got so big. They may have spiders like that in South America or something, but not here in Virginia. This is crazy."

"I see some legs!" Oliver shouted.

Elwood couldn't see what Mason was doing, but he heard a few thumps. Then Mason sat back up again. "I got it."

"Good boy," said Elwood. Now that he was safe, he found himself wanting to burst into tears, but he kept himself calm. He didn't want Pearl and the grandchildren thinking he didn't have everything under control.

He blinked some sweat out of his eyes.

He realized that his left arm was going numb, but he didn't have time to deal with that right now, or the tightness in his chest.

"Are you okay?" Pearl asked.

Elwood tried to reassure her that he was fine, but couldn't get the words out. He tried a different tactic, sarcastically asking why she thought he'd be okay right now when nature was running amok all around them, but he couldn't form that particular sentence, either.

Then a stinging pain shot through his ankle, which he didn't think was one of the symptoms of cardiac arrest.

He looked down and, yeah, there was a spider on his foot. He shook it off. The pain didn't fade.

Elwood tried to explain to everybody what was happening, explain that Mason might have to climb over the seat and drive, even though he was only eight years old, but the only sound he could force himself to make was to cry out again when another spider bit him.

This was immediately followed by a third bite. Whether it was a third spider or the first one again, he didn't know. But he did know that he couldn't just let these things keep biting him, especially if he was simultaneously having a heart attack.

The smart course of action would have been to stop the car, deal with the spider problem, and then resume driving. Terror, pain, and the dizzy spell kept Elwood from making the wise decision. He was driving too fast under normal circumstances, when he was fully alert and aware, and in his current condition there was no real way this could end except for the car smashing into one of the many trees in the area.

Elwood, who had not fastened his seatbelt, smacked into the steering wheel.

Pearl, who had not fastened hers either, smacked into the dashboard.

There were cries of pain from the back seat.

Elwood wanted to just slip into a relaxing sleep, but sat up and shook it off. He could sleep later. Right now he had to get his wife and grandchildren out of this nightmare. Pearl wiped blood from her mouth and looked into the back seat. "Is everybody okay?"

"I hit my head," said Aiden.

"Mason? Oliver?"

Mason and Oliver indicated that they were okay. Elwood's sense of relief only lasted an instant, because everything suddenly went into sharp focus. He was aware that this had not been a minor accident. He couldn't have hit the very large tree more directly if he'd been specifically aiming for it. He would not simply be putting the vehicle into reverse, backing up, and driving off to safety.

The other very important thing he somehow hadn't noticed was that both the front and rear windshields had shattered in the accident.

This removed the appealing option of "just wait for help to arrive." Elwood retained the presence of mind not to curse around his grandchildren, but he couldn't project a sense of serenity. He was freaking out, and he was pretty sure everybody knew it.

They could outrun their attackers. They were just spiders.

Okay, maybe he and Pearl couldn't outrun them, but the children could. The children would be safe. Harvey, too.

Elwood looked around to orient himself. He really hadn't driven very far. If he'd gone a little further before he crashed the car, they might be away from the wave of spiders, but here there were still plenty of them around.

"Boys, you're going to get out and run," Pearl said, looking into the backseat. "Hold each other's hands. Just run as fast as you can down that road until you reach Mrs. Craft's house. If the spiders are there, just keep running. Don't let go of each other's hands. Do you understand?"

Elwood couldn't hear anything, but he assumed the boys were nodding.

"Grandpa and I will be fine. Don't worry about us."

"The spiders are gonna get you!" said Aiden.

"No," said Pearl. "No, they're not. Go now. Go."

The back door opened and the boys scrambled out of the car. Some spiders had already crawled onto the crumpled front hood. Elwood did everything he could to stay awake. It was surprising that various aches kept him up at night, yet he was having trouble remaining conscious despite the agonizing pain in his foot.

A spider crawled in through the broken front windshield. Elwood looked around for the plastic truck but couldn't find it.

"Can you run?" Pearl asked.

Elwood nodded, even though he definitely couldn't run.

He turned to watch the boys. Mason, Oliver, and Aiden all fled, with a frantically barking Harvey running next to them. They were holding hands, just like Pearl told them. They were good boys. They'd be fine.

Aiden fell.

His brothers pulled him up.

There was something on his back.

"Oh my God!" Pearl wailed.

Aiden fell again, taking Oliver with him.

"We have to go help them!" said Pearl, throwing open the passenger-side door. Elwood didn't know how he felt about this.

Oliver got to his feet, and Elwood could see that he was covered with spiders, which snapped Elwood out of his lethargy. He tried to tell Pearl not to get out of the car, explain that if three healthy young boys couldn't outrun the spiders, an old lady sure as hell wasn't going to make it, but she'd already gotten out of the vehicle.

Mason frantically tried to pull his brothers up.

All three of the boys were screaming.

Harvey was running in circles and barking, though the dog didn't seem to have any spiders on him yet.

Now both Aiden and Oliver were covered with spiders.

Mason, God bless him, refused to leave them behind, even though Elwood could see that the younger brothers were doomed.

Pearl, miraculously, made it about twenty feet before the spiders brought her down. Much further than Elwood would've expected.

Mason fell.

Harvey ran off.

More spiders poured into the vehicle. Elwood brushed them off his arms and legs and chest and face but more kept coming.

Pain shot through his flesh wherever the spiders bit him. Pretty soon everything hurt.

It looked like Harvey was going to make it to freedom, though.

Elwood took that small bit of solace as he flopped over in his seat and was covered by a blanket of spiders.

CHAPTER SIX

The crying little girl's parents quickly escorted her from the Scary Clown Room. They did not look back at Jaunty with raw hatred in their eyes, but he kind of wished that they did. He deserved it.

Depravo gave him a thumbs-up. With the makeup and poor lighting, Depravo obviously couldn't see how heartsick Jaunty was over this. He wasn't "slash his own wrists" heartsick, but he did feel like he was going to throw up. The guests would think it was part of the experience, if perhaps more graphic than they wished, but the other clowns wouldn't appreciate seeing him vomit. Jaunty signaled to Depravo that he needed a break, then went through the exit door.

The actors in the haunted house were allowed to take occasional breaks, since nobody would be frightened by monsters who'd wet their pants, but you were supposed to wait until there was a gap in the line. Jaunty didn't care if he got chewed out. This was an emergency.

He stepped into the hallway and took a moment to catch his breath and wait for the urge to vomit to fade.

He'd made a sweet, innocent little girl cry.

Of course, it was bound to happen. Tens of thousands of people would come through this attraction over the next six weeks. Little girls were going to cry over the scary clowns. There was no possibility of avoiding this scenario, so it was good that it happened early on the first night. He'd be prepared for the next time.

But Jaunty didn't want to be prepared for the sight of a little girl that he'd made cry. This should always be upsetting. He should never, ever think to himself, "Oh well, that's part of the job. She'll get over it."

He simply was not cut out for this line of work.

He didn't want to get the others in trouble, but he didn't think he could go back in there.

Depravo wouldn't punish the other clowns. He'd fire Jaunty, and then Jaunty would wash off his makeup and go get a job as a coffee barista or something. Perhaps he'd wear his red clown nose to amuse the customers. No, management probably wouldn't allow it. Either way, he'd find some other job until they were back doing a non-evil clown show. The others would understand.

Maybe.

Or maybe not. None of them wanted to be doing this. If he was the only one to quit, the other clowns might hold it against him. They might banish him from the trailer they were renting. He might have to eat his macaroni and cheese alone.

Get back in there. Stop acting like you're superior to the others.

He wondered how long he could get away with not jumping out at people before Depravo noticed. Not long.

He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, and did some deep breathing exercises. Maybe if he took a couple of minutes to focus, to clear his mind, he could walk back in there and do the scary job that he was being paid for.

Just a couple of minutes.

Less than one minute later, the door opened. Depravo walked into the hallway.

"What's up?" he asked, sounding annoyed.

"Just composing myself."

"You need to stop being such a fucking baby about this. We hired real clowns so you could do all that acrobatic shit, but we never imagined how whiny you would be. 'Waaahhh, a little girl is going to have nightmares!' Nobody forced her to come in here. Well, maybe her parents did, but now they've learned a valuable lesson. And do you know what irritates me the most?"

"What?" Jaunty asked.

"You could've just pretended you were taking a dump. You could've worked out your issues in the bathroom, told me that dinner didn't agree with you and you had a massive blast of diarrhea, and I wouldn't have said anything about it. Instead, you're standing here looking like you're having a dark night of the soul, and it pisses me off."

"I'm sorry."

"You're fired."

Jaunty lowered his eyes and sighed.

"Do you have anything to say to that?" Depravo asked.

"What can I say? I understand your decision."

"See, the thing is, you weren't even really fired. I wanted you to promise to do better. But now you are fired."

"I'll do better."

"Too late."

"No, wait. I did have a very dark couple of minutes of the soul, and I decided that I couldn't let my friends down."

"Believe me, we're not friends."

"I meant the other clowns," said Jaunty.

"Oh. Yeah, okay, that makes more sense."

"But I do consider us friends."

"Whatever."

"Even with the age difference."

"You're still fired."

"Actually, I don't think you have the authority to fire me."

"Technically, no," Depravo admitted. "But if I tell our boss that you've been derelict in your duties and that I think you should be let go, he'll fire you, no questions asked."

"You're probably right."

"I am right. So if I say you're fired, you can consider yourself good and fired, even if the official firing doesn't happen until later."

"You don't need to fire me. I looked deep within myself and discovered a renewed commitment to the cause of being a scary clown. I'm no longer Jaunty the Clown. I'm Haunty the Clown."

Depravo considered that for a moment. "Haunty is a good name," he said. "I'm surprised we didn't come up with that sooner."

"While we're standing here talking, people have two fewer clowns to frighten them, and that's just wrong. Give me one more chance. I promise it won't happen again."

"Fine. But only because you're a good juggler. Now get your ass out there and be scary!"

* * *

"Are you fucking kidding me?" asked Depravo, seven minutes later.

"Did you hear the way she was sobbing?" Jaunty asked. "The sound of a crying child is not magical to me, okay? It stabs me in the heart! I can't do this!"

"We post warnings all over the place saying that the attraction may not be suitable for children under twelve! If parents choose to ignore them, that's not our problem! You promised me it wouldn't happen again!"

"I know."

"To me it would be a badge of honor if I could make two kids cry within ten minutes of each other! I'd ask for a goddamn Mountain of Terror gold medal! You're living the dream! But, nooooo, instead of patting yourself on the back you've gotta go the self-loathing route! It's pathetic! You're fired again!"

"You can't fire me," said Jaunty. "I quit."

"No, I can fire you, because you didn't quit before I told you that you were fired. This isn't a quit. This is a firing."

"All you're doing is recommending that I be fired. You're setting up a future event. I'm quitting now."

"I never actually said that you weren't fired before. You might have been trespassing for these past few minutes. So the wheels of the machinery that were going to lead to your firing were turning before you quit."

"I think you mean cogs."

"No, I mean wheels, you pedantic motherfucker!"

"Sorry. I shouldn't have corrected you. I'm under a lot of stress right now."

"Get out of here," said Depravo. "And don't leave with your head held high. I want you to walk out of here with your head hung, your shoulders slumped over, and your goddamn feet dragging along the floor. There's no glory to what is happening here. It's all shame. A great big cloud of shame. I want everybody who sees you to know that you're a broken man. They should wonder if you'll ever be whole again, and the answer is a big fat no. In your attempts to salvage the dignity of the clown race, you've brought disgrace to clowns everywhere! You fucking suck, Jaunty! Now get out of here. Just looking at you makes my eyes sick! Go away! Fuck off! Leave!"

The door opened and Guffaw stepped into the hallway. "Is everything all right?"

"No, everything is not all right," said Depravo.

"Please don't fire him for making those little girls cry," said Guffaw. "He didn't mean to do it. It's the makeup. He's too scary. Maybe we can tone it down a bit."

"That's not why he's fired! He's fired for being a total pussy!"

"Also, I quit," said Jaunty.

"You quit?"

"His firing overrides the quit," said Depravo. "And now we've got three clowns yapping away in the hallway while paying customers walk through the Scary Clown Room that now has a distinct scarcity of scary clowns! Guffaw, get the fuck back in there! I'll get the fuck back in there, too! Jaunty—and, yeah, you've forfeited the name Haunty—get the fuck out of here!"

Guffaw took a step forward. "Could we—"

"We'll talk about it tonight," said Jaunty. "Don't worry about me. Go out there and be scary."

Guffaw looked uncertain, but then he nodded and left. Depravo gave Jaunty the finger with his right hand, then his left, then with both hands at once, before returning to the Scary Clown Room.

Jaunty was not going to leave with his head hung. Yes, he felt miserable right now, but he'd eventually stood his moral ground. A cloud of shame would not follow him. Though he also didn't deserve to walk out with his head held high. He'd walk out with his head in a normal position.

The Mountain of Terror hadn't been open long enough for any of the cast members to be taking breaks yet, so all he saw as he walked down the winding hallway were a couple of the medics who were stationed around the attraction. He smiled and waved as he passed them. No need to burden them with his problems.

He reached the exit door, took one last look around, realized that because it was basically just an empty hallway there was nothing to get nostalgic about, and walked out of the building.

Wow. The queue of people waiting to get inside the haunted house was nuts! He'd known it was a popular attraction, but until he saw everybody in line it hadn't sunk in just how popular. They'd never had lines like this for the circus.

"Mommy, it's a clown!" said a little girl.

Jaunty looked at her and waved.

The little girl burst into tears and buried her face in her mother's skirt.

Right. He was still made up as a scary clown. Now was not the right time to be waving to young children.

He spat out the fangs and removed his contact lenses. Then he ran his palm over his face a few times, trying to wipe off the makeup.

As he walked past, a man called out to him. "Disturbing smear to the makeup, bro! Good job!"

Jaunty wanted to punch something. Not a human or an animal or an object that he might damage, and not hard enough to injure his hand, but he wanted to hit a punching bag or something like that. Or he'd punch the air. He couldn't punch the air now because he didn't want any kids to see a creepy clown swinging his fist like he'd gone insane, but as soon as he was away from the crowd he was going to fully express his frustration. The air around him was doomed.

* * *

"They lie about the wait," said Larry.

"What do you mean?" asked Penny.

"It says that we've got a two hour and fifteen minute wait from this point, but we'll be in there in two hours five minutes, tops. See, if they tell you that you're going to stand in line for two hours and fifteen minutes, and you only stand in line for two hours and five minutes, you're happy. You feel like you lucked out. If they tell you that you're going to stand in line for an hour and forty-five minutes, and you stand in line for two hours, you're pissed. In the first scenario you're happy, and in the second scenario you're pissed, even though in the first scenario you spent five minutes longer in line. It's all psychological. Promise small, deliver big."

Larry hoped that Penny was impressed by his explanation of how line-waiting times worked. It was their first date, and he'd used up a lot of his best material on the drive over. It worried him that Penny might have already known that they exaggerated the wait times, and her nodding was just to be polite. Damn it! He was always doing this. He was always sharing information that the recipient already knew.

"Did you already know that?" he asked.

Penny shook her head. "Oh, no," she said, but her tone was unconvincing.

"You'd tell me if you did, right?" he asked. Damn it! Now he sounded desperate! He was always sounding desperate! This was why he was in college and still technically a virgin.

This was going to be a really long two hours and five minutes. Worth it, though, if she got scared—or, better, pretended to get scared—and grabbed him. He was worried that he might get startled and grab her, but he'd be as vigilant as possible to make sure the many jump scares therein didn't impact him.

Instead of answering his question, Penny stared at him as if he'd just said something stupid like "You'd tell me if you did, right?" This date was going horribly. Maybe he should fake the stomach flu before she made up her own excuse to end it.

They avoided eye contact with each other for a few moments.

"Whoa, look at that," said Penny, pointing.

A spider was crawling toward them. A big one, too big to be real. Had to be remote control. Whoever designed it had done an excellent job, because it was moving exactly like a real spider. Larry also supposed it could be a hologram, though he honestly didn't know if hologram technology had reached the point yet where it could create the convincing illusion of a giant spider crawling along pavement toward them.

Two guys next to them also noticed the spider. "That thing is wicked!" one of them said.

"Here, spider, spider, spider!" said the other, beckoning to it.

"Look at that design work," said Larry. "That's some serious attention to detail."

"What kind of spider is that?" Penny asked.

Larry knew this! "A wolf spider," he said. "I mean, obviously not a real wolf spider. That's just the kind it was modeled after."

"I knew it wasn't a real wolf spider," said Penny.

"I know you knew that," said Larry. "I didn't mean that you thought it was a real spider." Maybe he should just shut up for the next couple of hours.

The spider was only a few feet away. Apart from the size, it was shockingly realistic. There was nothing to give away that it was merely a remote controlled haunted house prop. If this was the kind of stuff they had to entertain guests while they stood in line, Larry couldn't imagine how cool the haunted house would be once they finally got inside.

It kept moving toward them.

Larry, Penny, and the other two guys stepped out of the way as the spider actually crawled into the queue. This was surprising. If somebody got spooked, they might stomp on it, and this thing had to be really expensive. Maybe it was super durable.

Even this close, it was believable as a real spider. The legs moved perfectly, and its fangs were twitching. If he found something like this while he was out walking, he might've thought it was a real spider that got too close to some toxic waste.

Another guy next to them in line nudged the woman next to him. "Check that out!"

She looked down, screamed, and stomped on the extremely expensive remote controlled spider. It splattered. When she lifted her foot, a thick line of ooze stretched from the bottom of her shoe to its body, like cheese on a piece of pizza.

Larry frowned. Was it a puppet? No, that was ridiculous, there was no puppeteer. But if it wasn't an electronic spider and it wasn't a real one, what the hell was it?

Of course it wasn't a real one. It was too big, right?

While the woman scraped her shoe across the cement to wipe off the slime, Larry noticed that a couple more spiders were crawling toward the people in line. He couldn't help becoming a little nervous. He wasn't sure what lacked more credibility: real live giant-sized spiders, or animatronic spiders with a realistic covering of spider guts that the Mountain of Terror wanted people to step on.

He didn't want to share his "these might be real spiders" theory with Penny, since she might just shake her head sadly and walk away without a word. But he genuinely did not have a good feeling about this.

"I think those are real spiders," said Penny.

"I think so, too! I totally think they're real!"

"What do we do?"

"Don't let them crawl on us."

There weren't just two more coming. There were a bunch. Larry felt like he should warn people. He waved both hands in the air. "Hey, everyone! Everyone?"

The crowd was too noisy. If he'd had a gun, he could've shot it in the air to shock everybody into silence, but of course he didn't have a gun. So he just kept shouting.

"Everybody! Everybody! Hey, I need everybody to listen!"

The people in close vicinity were looking at him, but nobody else was paying attention. He needed to get out of line and find a microphone. They had to have some sort of speaker system here, right?

"I'll be right back," he told Penny, as he slipped out of line.

* * *

Jaunty watched some guy near the end of the line duck underneath the cordon and start jogging toward the main entrance. There was a bit of a commotion amongst the people who'd been standing next to him. A woman was checking the bottom of her shoes as if she'd stepped in doggie doo. He wondered what was going on.

More commotion. People started backing away.

Jaunty couldn't see anything that was scaring them, unless maybe an actor in a zombie costume was crawling along the ground toward them. Though they didn't seem to be backing away in a giggly this-is-a-fun-kind-of-scare manner.

He walked around to get a better view of what might be causing this reaction.

Something was crawling toward them. Crabs? Were there crabs moving toward the people in line? Where would crabs come from? Had somebody set a bunch of crabs loose as a prank? Jaunty hadn't heard anything about the Mountain of Terror authorizing this kind of thing. They had actors going around to entertain the crowd while they waited, but they wouldn't want something that would cause chaos in the line. Crowd management was difficult enough as it was.

Jaunty ran over there to see if he could help.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It suddenly occurred to Jaunty that a scary clown running toward a crowd of people would not do much to ease their panic. He settled for walking instead.

Now that he was closer, he could see that they weren't crabs, they were spiders. Foot-long spiders. Spiders too big to be real, yet he knew the Mountain of Terror didn't have the means to create such a realistic illusion, at least not outdoors. In the carefully controlled environment of one of the rooms, sure, but not out here like this. Though Jaunty might discover later that it was all a very elaborate, very expensive illusion and feel kind of silly, right now he had to assume that it was indeed a bunch of giant spiders crawling toward the people in line.

Which meant that if he was smart, he'd turn and run in the opposite direction. Nobody would blame him for fleeing a wave of unnatural spiders, especially since he'd just been fired.

But clowns didn't run.

At least not without comedic intent. They'd run from an angry circus lion or a police officer if it made the audience laugh. Nobody would laugh if Jaunty ran now. They wouldn't even notice. And if he wasn't fleeing to entertain an audience, by God he wasn't going to flee at all.

Granted, he also had no intention of being stupid. He wasn't going to race toward the spiders and dive into a group of them, sacrificing himself to squish a few. But he was on the outside of the cordoned-off line and he could get close enough to one of the spiders to determine if they were actually dealing with a legitimate threat.

So he quickly walked toward the spiders.

There weren't many of them by the line yet, though there were a lot of them visible in the distance. One of the spiders veered away from the crowd, and though Jaunty wasn't paranoid enough to think that it was specifically coming to kill him, it certainly seemed to have him as a target.

It was about ten feet away, so he waited to see what it would do. As it kept moving toward him, Jaunty tried to look for anything that might indicate that it was not a genuine arachnid. Something "off," something too mechanical about the movement. Maybe the whirr of a motor. But there was absolutely nothing to make him think it was not a foot-long hairy brown spider on the loose.

As it got closer, Jaunty took a nervous step backwards.

No. He was not going to back away from a spider that, while enormous by the standards of its species, was much smaller than an adult male clown.

He stepped forward and stomped on it with his brightly colored oversized shoe.

He lifted his foot. He'd stomped it with the front part of his shoe, which didn't have his foot inside, and though the spider wasn't moving forward anymore it wasn't completely squashed. Its legs twitched.

Jaunty stomped it again with the full force of his shoe.

Again, he might learn later that it was all an extremely elaborate prank, but right now he saw no explanation beyond, "Yes, a wave of giant spiders is heading toward the haunted house." The people were right to panic and flee.

"Stay calm and back away!" shouted Jaunty, waving both hands toward the parking lot.

Either people couldn't hear him, didn't want to give up their spot in line until they knew exactly what the issue was, or they weren't inclined to trust a scary clown in smeared makeup. Aside from the people who were already trying to get away from the spiders, nobody else moved.

"This is not a joke!" he said, knowing that the sentence would be more credible if it weren't coming from a clown. "Everybody quickly and calmly return to your vehicles!"

A few more spiders crawled past the cordon. It wouldn't be long before it was a whole flood of them. In fact, Jaunty was in danger where he stood, so he ducked under the cordon. How could he convince people who were in line specifically to be scared out of their wits that they were about to be attacked by giant spiders?

A grinning man tried to stomp one of the spiders but missed. It crawled onto his shoe and then into his pants leg. The man immediately stopped grinning and bent down to try to squish the spider with his hands. Before he could do that, he cried out in pain.

At the sound of his screams, people began to pay more attention.

A woman on the other end of the queue began to shriek.

Then even more people began to scream.

"Spiders!" a man shouted. "Jesus Christ, look at the spiders!"

And with that, they had a good old-fashioned mass panic. It was possible that many, or even most, of the people in line thought it was a fun Halloween scare, but they still had to get out of the way of those who could see the wave of spiders approaching and were frantically trying to escape. Mass panic was not good. That was how people fell and got trampled on. It wasn't as if these spiders were moving at a supersonic speed, so if people would just walk rapidly toward the parking lot, they could get out of this without any casualties.

A screaming woman fell to the ground.

"Please stay calm!" Jaunty shouted, even though he doubted anybody could hear him, and nobody was going to take directions from a deranged clown. But if they didn't leave the area in an orderly fashion, people were going to get hurt.

The additional screams indicated that people were getting hurt.

A voice sounded over a loudspeaker: "Please, ladies and gentlemen, remain calm!" It must have been one of the actual security guards, who were there to handle emergencies but most likely hadn't anticipated that giant spiders would be involved.

The crowd became significantly less calm, as if the loudspeaker announcement confirmed that there was indeed something extremely bad happening.

Now there was lots and lots of screaming and lots and lots of people fleeing toward the parking lot. Pure pandemonium. As a clown, Jaunty loved pandemonium, but he loved controlled pandemonium. Truthfully, if everybody had just taken a deep breath and let go of their fear, they might have been able to work out an organized process for moving forward as a group and stomping on the spiders in an orderly fashion.

Or not. The wave of spiders showed no signs of letting up.

Jaunty had tried to keep things from getting out of control, but he simply wasn't loud enough. And now there was nothing more he could do.

Then, amidst the many screams, he noticed some screams that were even louder and more frantic than the rest. A little boy, maybe five or six years old, had been separated from his mother. She was calling out his name ("Ben! Ben! Ben!") but the momentum of the crowd was carrying her further and further away from her son. He fell to the ground.

So Jaunty had been wrong. There was something he could do.

He ran toward poor Ben. Then, in a moment that would've been a jump scare if this was a horror movie, a man staggered in front of him, with one spider on his face and one spider in his hair. He was frothing at the mouth. A couple of fleeing people accidentally bashed into him but he remained upright. He looked directly at Jaunty: "Help me!"

Jaunty would rather have helped the little boy first, but this man was closer and if Jaunty survived this experience he didn't want to have nightmare visions of the man with a spider in his hair that he'd refused to assist. "Lean your head down!" Jaunty told him.

The man just thrashed around and screamed.

"I can't get the spider out if you don't cooperate! Lean your head down!"

The man, obviously not thinking clearly (though Jaunty certainly didn't hold that against him considering the circumstances) tilted his head backwards instead. The spider bit him. The angle was perfect—Jaunty actually saw its twin fangs plunge into the man's flesh. Jaunty winced and put his white-gloved hand over his mouth. He didn't want to be here anymore.

Jaunty took a swipe at the spider, but it moved and all he did was slap the man across the face. He took another swipe, harder, but he missed the spider again and merely slapped the man harder across the face. However, the slap was hard enough to dislodge the spider, which dropped to the ground and crawled away in search of other prey.

"Thank you," the man said.

"There's still one in your hair."

The man resumed screaming. Instead of asking him to keep his head still, Jaunty just started swiping at his hair, until finally the spider fell off. The man's eyes went wide.

"It went down the back of my shirt!"

Jaunty spun him around and slapped at the moving bulge beneath the man's shirt. He squished the spider on the third try. There was no time to wait for the man to thank him—the little boy was still on the ground and his mother still couldn't get to him. Jaunty rushed forward.

Ben was scooting away from a spider and didn't realize that he was scooting closer to another one.

The crowd had thinned out in the back and Jaunty didn't need to shove anybody out of the way to reach the boy, though he would have if it had been necessary. He'd shove some innocent people to save a young boy, no problem. He picked up Ben before the child could get bit by the spider that was only a few inches from his right hand.

Ben gaped in horror. "Scary clown! Scary clown!"

The boy struggled to escape Jaunty's fearsome grasp. Jaunty hurried ahead, scanning the crowd for Ben's mother. There she was, on the far side of the queue, still trying to push through the fleeing people, now with a smear of blood on the side of her head.

Jaunty broke into a run, ignoring the way the kid kept hitting him. Ben's high-pitched shrieks, delivered right into his ear, were more difficult to ignore, but Jaunty remained laser-focused on the task of reuniting the boy with his mother.

Though the parking lot was too far away to see exactly what was going on, a lot of awful stuff seemed to be happening over there. People were not simply getting in their vehicles and driving away. He heard a collision over the sound of all the screaming.

He hoped the other clowns were safe. Surely the spiders hadn't invaded the haunted house yet. There were too many people in the way for Jaunty to see if spiders were crawling into the Mountain of Terror, though the main entrance door was wide open.

Somebody knocked Ben's mother to the ground. She got back up quickly. Jaunty didn't see a spider on her face.

Ben kept smacking Jaunty and screaming "Scary clown! Scary clown!" but Jaunty refused to pass the little boy on to somebody else. He was going to get this kid back to his mother, no matter how many bruises he received in the process. He wouldn't even lecture the mother about the fact that Ben was clearly too young for this haunted house anyway.

Now the kid was trying to poke out Jaunty's eyes. This rescue attempt was going very poorly, though since Ben was not being trampled by adults or bitten by giant spiders, Jaunty still considered it a win thus far.

"Stop that," he told Ben, not yelling at him but rather trying to keep his voice soothing, like Mr. Rogers explaining that trying to jab your fingers into the eyeballs of somebody who was trying to bring you back to your mother was not the way one should behave.

Ben did not stop. In fact, he got Jaunty's eye with his thumb. He didn't puncture the orb and cause any optical jelly to spill out, but it definitely hurt.

"Stop it!" Jaunty said, still not yelling but going for more of an authority figure vibe.

"Scary clown!"

"I'm not scary!"

"Scary clown!"

"I'm saving you!"

Ben got Jaunty in the eye again, and Jaunty stopped himself from saying something that would violate one of the eight clown commandments. It wasn't Ben's fault that he was young and frightened. Yes, it would be nice if he stopped trying to poke out the eyes of the friendly clown that was putting his own life at risk to save a strange child, but Ben's brain had not yet fully developed and Jaunty couldn't blame him for his wretched violent ungrateful behavior.

"Please don't do that again," said Jaunty.

"Oh, thank you!" the mother shouted as she finally pushed through the crowd of panicked people. She ran toward Jaunty, and he happily handed her son over to her. "Thank you so much!"

"Of course," said Jaunty. "That's what clowns do."

The mother hurried off. The queue was almost empty, with everybody now participating in the chaos at the parking lot. And with the people gone, Jaunty could see a great many spiders crawling around where they'd been standing in line. He was no arachnophobe, but this was terrifying.

He could also now see that the spiders were indeed crawling into the haunted house.

Perhaps the other clowns hadn't been warned that there was a wave of giant spiders pouring into their workplace, but they surely were aware that something was happening outside, right? There would be an effort underway to evacuate everybody from the building. Though he hadn't seen anybody emerge, and there were no costumed characters fleeing toward the parking lot, it would make sense that they'd evacuate people away from the spider horde.

Guffaw, Bluehead, Reginald, and Wagon were fine. He was sure of it. The spiders wouldn't have had a chance to make it anywhere near that far into the haunted house yet. Everybody inside was completely venom-free. And that included Depravo, against whom Jaunty held a grudge but not in an "I hope he gets eaten by spiders" way.

The chaos in the parking area had intensified. This was not people yelling at each other over traffic issues. People were getting attacked by giant spiders over there, no question. He assumed that fire trucks were already on their way; blasting the ground with a few fire hoses should take care of the problem. Since he didn't have a fire truck of his own, there wasn't much he could do to assist except try to stomp a few extra spiders.

He wouldn't venture into the haunted house. There was no reason for that. He'd just hurry around the building to see where everybody was being evacuated.

A woman screamed inside the haunted house.

Well...fudge.

He could wait for people to show up who were equipped to do battle with giant spiders, or he could run in there himself. Jaunty preferred the first option, but knew he would be choosing the second.

There were plenty of spiders crawling inside the Mountain of Terror. He'd just have to be careful. He was less acrobatic in his forties than he was in his twenties, but he still felt like he could evade spiders long enough to help save some people.

He ran toward the main entrance, weaving back and forth around the hundreds of spiders. It was a pretty big area, so it wasn't too hard for a nimble guy like him to avoid them, though he did step on a few. With almost everybody now in the parking area, he could hear the loud crunch as he stepped on each one.

He went inside. The main entrance led to another queue, but this one had lots of horror-themed decorations hanging around so that it didn't feel like people had another twenty minutes to stand in line. The area was devoid of all life except spiders. Fortunately, there were no dead spider-covered humans on the floor.

The light was purposely dim in here, though not so dark that he couldn't see the floor and the spiders. That wouldn't be the case after he went into the actual labyrinth, although presumably if they evacuated the house they would have turned on the lights so people could see properly.

The woman screamed again. She wasn't far.

Jaunty wished he had a broom or something to sweep the spiders away. There had to be a broom around here somewhere, but it wasn't in this area and he didn't have time to go around looking for the janitorial closet. He'd just have to be constantly wary.

As he reached the doorway, he noticed that spiders were already crawling on the walls. This observation did not make him happy. Spiders on the walls could mean spiders on the ceiling, and spiders on the ceiling could drop down on you if you were busy focusing on not letting them crawl on your feet.

This was dumb, right? Running into a giant spider-infested haunted house was dumb. Smart people didn't do things like this. The other clowns would never ask him to do this, even if they were currently in great peril.

Another scream. Sounded like the same woman.

He started to call out to ask if she was okay, but stopped himself in time, because obviously she wasn't okay and he didn't want her to think she was being rescued by an idiot. Jaunty took a deep breath and ran into the first room of the Mountain of Terror, which was the Vampire Room. It currently contained no vampires, but spiders were crawling on the gargoyles and on the upright coffins.

Jaunty moved through it quickly. He was less frightened than he would've expected. Oh, he was still absolutely terrified, but he would've expected to be too frightened to even move. He was proud of himself for not just lying on the floor in the fetal position.

His sense of pride vanished when he stepped into the next room and found the dead woman.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Guffaw had spent about a minute trying to hide how angry he was. Then he'd decided that anger made him scarier, so he might as well use it to remain in character. Then he'd decided that a zombie clown wouldn't be angry, so this was inappropriate character motivation. He really didn't know what to do with this kind of emotion.

He would never say this out loud, but he could think it: he was pissed at Jaunty.

None of them liked being here. Okay, it was more fun than he might have expected, and Bluehead in particular seemed to be having an absolute blast, but none of them wanted to be working in a haunted house. They were sucking it up and making the best of a bad situation. It was better than standing on a street corner with a "Will Juggle For Food" sign.

Everybody else was able to shove their emotions aside and do their job. Everybody else was thinking about the group. Jaunty, meanwhile, was being a selfish...Guffaw didn't want to think prick, but it was too late, he'd already thought it. Jaunty was being a selfish prick. Guffaw couldn't blame Depravo for firing him—if you were paid to perform a task, you were supposed to do it. Jaunty had put all of their jobs at risk.

Not once had Guffaw ever been forced to take the next step, and it broke his heart to think about it, but he might have to call for a vote to expel Jaunty from their group. Tears would stream down all of their faces as they watched Jaunty pack his meager belongings and head out toward an unknown future, yet he'd proven that he wasn't really a team player. He valued himself over the family.

A steady stream of people walked through the Scary Clown Room. Guffaw hoped they left it more frightened than when they entered, because scaring people is what they were being paid to do. He understood that fact, even if Jaunty didn't.

"Ooooh, I'm sooooo scared!" said a very large man holding the hand of a very tiny woman. He meant this in a sarcastic manner, and it would certainly embarrass him if he flinched, since he was working very hard to convey the attitude that the carnival from Hell was remarkably unfrightening for him to experience. Normally Guffaw would not want to embarrass a man in front of the woman he was trying to impress, but normally he was not angry, so he suddenly lurched forward.

The man jumped. The woman laughed.

"Fuckin' clowns," said the man as they continued on their non-merry way.

There was a female scream off in the distance. Of course, screams were constant background noise in this haunted house, but this one seemed more intense and was easy to hear even over the circus music. One of the actors must have been doing an outstanding job.

* * *

Reginald the Pleasant Clown looked over in the direction of the scream. It came from the right, so the screaming woman had yet to enter their room. Reginald hoped she was able to work out her issues before she encountered the nightmare clowns; from the sound of it, this haunted house was not enjoyable for her.

She screamed again.

It sounded like somebody being murdered. Of course, none of the actors would actually murder a customer, so he was hearing it wrong, unless somehow a serial killer had decided that the haunted house would provide him with the necessary cover to claim a victim without being caught. There were security cameras all over the place, so the serial killer was in for a rude awakening if that was legitimately the source of the scream. It probably wasn't a serial killer, though. It was just a poor woman who didn't think it was fun to be scared.

"Boo," Reginald said to a man as he passed. Leaping out at people was undignified, as was shouting, so Reginald had settled for nodding politely and saying "Boo" in an even tone. He felt that he was still doing his part, because it distracted customers enough that they were much more startled when Bluehead popped up and did her terrifying clown doll giggle.

"Boo, ma'am," he said to an elderly woman.

He hoped things were okay with Jaunty. He understood that Jaunty had walked out on the job, but Reginald wasn't sure if it was permanent or if he could be persuaded to return. Jaunty's absence meant that the other clowns had to be twenty percent scarier to make up for the shortfall, so hopefully Jaunty would see the error of his ways.

Now the woman in the other room was constantly screaming, as if a serial killer was repeatedly slamming his bloody knife into her chest, staring into her eyes to watch the precise moment that her life force seeped out of her body. This didn't seem normal. No matter how badly she'd been startled by a ghost or a werewolf, she shouldn't be screaming like that.

He didn't want to break character by asking Bluehead if she felt the same way, so he continued to politely say "Boo" to passersby for about a minute, as the screaming continued. Finally there was a gap in the line.

"Does that sound like abnormal screaming?" he asked.

Bluehead nodded. "Yeah. At first I thought somebody was taking this too seriously but now I'm wondering if she's actually in trouble."

"Should we see if she needs help?"

"It's at least two or three rooms away. There are a dozen actors between us and the screaming. Surely somebody is helping her."

"Maybe they're all assuming the same thing."

"We shouldn't leave our post."

"We can be frightening while we walk," said Reginald.

"Okay."

* * *

Bluehead would never admit this to the others, and she didn't like admitting it to herself, but she loved being a scary clown.

This wasn't the discovery of some sadistic impulse inside her. There was nothing remotely mean-spirited about it. She'd simply realized that scaring people who'd paid good money to be frightened was a lot of fun. She'd never lurk outside of somebody's home after dark and peer into their window, but consensual scaring was a hoot.

In fact, she wondered if she might like it more than non-scary clowning.

It could've just been the novelty of it. After a few weeks in the Mountain of Terror she might be bored of the experience and ready to go back to delighting small children with comedic antics. Right now, though, she was in paradise.

At least she had been, until she heard a woman screaming like she was being devoured.

She didn't want to leave the Scary Clown Room and get in trouble like Jaunty had. That said, she agreed with Reginald that they didn't want to let something bad happen to the woman because everybody else assumed that she was being cared for. If the screams were part of the show, well, they'd sheepishly return to their room. Better to be sheepish than wracked with guilt.

As another group of people entered the room, Bluehead and Reginald walked toward them. Bluehead didn't want to break character, but she figured that Depravo wouldn't shout at her, considering the circumstances.

"Hey, is everything okay back there?" she asked, using her normal voice and not the "spooky clown doll" voice she'd perfected.

The first two people in line giggled and quickly moved past her.

She repeated the question, but nobody wanted to answer. They didn't seem upset, so maybe there was nothing wrong. Or they thought the screams were included in their admission fee.

She yelped as somebody grabbed her arm. Depravo.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"The screaming woman might need help."

"We have medics to take care of that kind of thing."

"Then why is she still screaming?"

"I can't have you walking through somebody else's scene. Clowns stay in the clown room. You wouldn't want the Crocodile Lady walking through our room, would you?"

Bluehead really didn't want to be insubordinate. She wanted to keep this job. But clearly there was a problem, and it didn't sound like anybody else was taking care of it. She had no medical training or any particular skills that would be useful if the woman was hurt, but she did have a loud voice that she could use to alert others to the issue, if necessary.

The woman screamed again. It was genuinely horrific.

"All right, go," said Depravo. "But move quickly and get back here right away. Respect the other rooms."

"We will," said Bluehead, as she and Reginald darted for the exit.

* * *

Where the heck are they going? Wagon wondered. Being in this room made him even sadder than usual, and if Bluehead and Reginald were leaving, he was leaving, too. He started to follow them.

Depravo stepped in his way. "No."

"But—"

"No."

"But they—"

"The Scary Clown Room needs scary clowns! We're one of the top draws of this place and people are walking through and barely seeing any clowns! And we're here arguing instead of scaring customers! Now either you can go back to your spot and do your job, or we'll pretend that a clown getting his ass beat is part of the show!"

"It makes me sad that you're threatening physical violence," said Wagon.

"Get back to your spot! Next year we're going back to using high school kids. You guys are a constant ride on the drama llama. Jesus!"

Wagon returned to his spot, head hung. A line of customers was still coming through, so he resumed juggling severed hands.

* * *

Reginald excused himself as he walked through the torture chamber. He and Bluehead were moving against the flow of traffic, but people made room for them to pass, probably because they didn't want to get too close to the clowns. An executioner turned to look at them, though they couldn't tell if he was annoyed since his head was covered with a black hood.

Both the performers and customers seemed oddly unconcerned about the screaming woman. Perhaps he and Bluehead were simply used to the circus environment, where the sound of a woman shrieking in that manner meant that her leg was crushed by an elephant. (Reginald had never witnessed a woman having her leg crushed by an elephant—this was merely an example of what might have caused somebody to scream like this at the circus.) (In fact, the only elephant-related injury he'd ever been made aware of was when the elephant's keeper got severely intoxicated and slipped on some elephant dung, but he was uninjured.) (Technically, he was injured, but the injury was mild enough that everybody could laugh and laugh at his misfortune without any feelings of guilt.)

It didn't take long for Reginald and Bluehead to cross through three terrifying rooms until they reached the cemetery where the woman was screaming. She was also laughing, though not nearly as loud as she was screaming.

* * *

The woman was accompanied by two Mountain of Terror employees who were trying to guide her to the exit. She was being uncooperative, probably because she was clearly drunk off her heinie. She wobbled as she screamed. Though from another room her scream sounded credibly like it came from somebody who was in grave danger, now that Bluehead could see her, it was just some lady who was taking the joke too far. The official haunted house policy was that you weren't allowed to enter if you were inebriated, but it wasn't as if they conducted Breathalyzer tests at the front entrance.

Bluehead felt kind of stupid. Though she never wished feelings of stupidity upon her fellow clowns, she hoped Reginald also felt dumb.

One of the graveyard ghouls tapped her on the shoulder. "Hey, clown! Nothing to see here! They're handling it. Get back to the circus."

Bluehead nodded. This was why alcohol was a bad substance. It turned this woman, who was probably very polite and soft-spoken in her everyday life, into an obnoxious fool who was disrupting the experience for everybody else. She wanted to say something to this effect, but it would be unnecessary—Reginald felt the same way toward alcohol as she did. That woman should stick to soda pop.

Bluehead turned to go, but before she turned all the way, she noticed something peculiar.

A very large spider was descending from the ceiling on a string of web toward the top of the woman's head.

Of course, very large spiders were not out of place in a haunted house like this. No, Bluehead didn't remember any of them being part of the cemetery room, but she wasn't familiar with every single detail of every single room. What struck her as odd was the idea that somebody would lower the fake spider toward the woman when employees were clearly trying to diffuse the situation and guide her to the exit. Though the people around here loved pranks, they were also committed to providing a fun and safe experience for all of their customers, and scaring the bejesus out of a drunken lady who should never have been let inside in the first place seemed really irresponsible.

Amazing production values on that spider, though. Kudos to the creative team.

One of the employees batted the spider away.

It latched onto his hand.

He pulled away and tried to shake it off. It scurried up his arm.

He brushed it off with his other hand and the spider simply crawled onto that hand instead.

"Not funny!" he said.

Then he winced in pain.

The woman laughed.

"That really frickin' hurt," the man told the other employee. "Who designed this thing?"

Another spider came into view, very close to where the first spider had descended. The woman didn't notice this one.

Bluehead didn't think she should return to the Scary Clown Room quite yet.

The man grabbed for the spider, missed, grabbed again, missed again, and finally got a hold of it. He picked up the spider by whatever the main part of its body was called. Its eight legs writhed. It looked shockingly realistic.

He crushed it, and slime oozed down his wrist.

The woman screamed. Ironically, this scream was less intense, even though there was now a giant spider on top of her head.

The line of people had stopped moving to watch what was happening. No way would anybody have authorized holding up the line to do a little self-contained show like this. It was important to keep the line moving. This was probably still a prank, but it was going to get somebody fired.

The second employee who'd been trying to calm down the woman dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He frantically tapped the screen and turned on the flashlight function.

When he aimed the light at the ceiling, Bluehead gasped. There were seven or eight giant spiders up there.

One dropped from the ceiling and landed on her shoulder.

This really didn't seem like a prank.

* * *

Reginald plucked the fake spider from Bluehead's shoulder and tossed it aside. It didn't feel particularly fake, and he was impressed by the way it squirmed so realistically in his hand before he flung it away.

Another spider landed on her blue hair.

People were starting to freak out as if these were, in fact, legitimate oversized spiders. Which seemed ridiculous until Reginald grabbed the spider off of Bluehead, examined it very briefly, and determined it to be real.

"These are real spiders!" he said, not shouting the words but speaking with less dignity than usual.

Many others in the area seemed to have arrived at that same conclusion.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said a voice over the intercom. "We are discontinuing tonight's entertainment. Please proceed toward the exits."

The lights did not come on. This was surprising. If you were trying to evacuate people from a haunted house that had been overrun by giant spiders, you'd want to turn on the lights so they could see where they were fleeing.

Now there was a great deal of screaming. There were definitely more than seven or eight spiders in here.

This particular room didn't have an exit to the well-lit hallway, so everybody would have to proceed to the Scary Clown Room. "Everybody move forward," Reginald announced to the panicked customers. "Keep the flow of traffic in the same direction that it was moving before the spiders arrived!" He gestured with both hands to remind them of the direction in which they'd been traveling.

A man lurched past with a spider on his chest. He shoved Reginald out of the way. Reginald didn't blame him for his rude behavior—he had a giant spider crawling on his chest, after all. Reginald stumbled backward, stepped on a spider, lost his footing, and fell to the floor, his head smashing against a tombstone.

Fortunately, it was a Styrofoam tombstone. It split in half upon impact, but did no damage to Reginald's skull.

A line of haunted house patrons moved quickly and efficiently through the graveyard. Those were the people who did not currently have spiders on them. The ones who did were moving quickly yet not efficiently.

A spider scurried onto Reginald's leg.

Another spider scurried onto his arm.

He no longer felt the compulsion to maintain his air of quiet dignity.

CHAPTER NINE

Jaunty slapped his hand over his mouth. The woman lying on the floor was covered with spiders. He almost couldn't tell it was a woman. She had to be dead; otherwise, she'd be reacting more poorly to being covered with spiders.

Unless she was unconscious.

Or paralyzed by spider venom. Lying there, completely aware of what was happening to her, feeling the hundreds of spider legs crawling over her body, yet unable to move.

She was probably dead.

Probably.

And "probably" meant that "lying there completely aware of what was happening" was also a possibility. Which meant that Jaunty had to get those spiders off of her.

He was wearing white clown gloves. He'd be okay.

He kicked a bunch of spiders out of the way so he could get close enough to her to brush off the others. Jaunty realized that he was whimpering, but that was fine, he was allowed to whimper in this situation. He frantically started brushing the spiders off her chest, making sure not to let them crawl on him. He was starting to hyperventilate. He hated this. This wasn't fun at all. He wanted to be done. He didn't want to touch any more spiders.

A spider was on top of her face, mounted like that scary lobster-thing in Alien. (Jaunty had never watched the movie, of course, but he'd seen pictures of that moment.) He brushed it off.

Then he turned his head and vomited. The woman's face was horrifically swollen, a mix of purple and dark red and yellow. Milky fluid leaked from her nose and the sides of her mouth. Her wide-open eyes were glazed over.

There was no good reason to keep brushing spiders off her.

A puke-covered spider darted away.

Jaunty stood up. It was very much time to leave...except he saw that there were now far more spiders crawling around the way he'd come. He couldn't turn back if he didn't want his own face to become grotesquely swollen. He'd have to go deeper into the haunted house and hope that things got less scary.

* * *

Guffaw, Wagon, and Depravo had dropped their scary clown act and were directing fleeing customers toward the open exit door. Guffaw wished the voice over the intercom had provided them with more information. Was it a fire? A bomb threat? A shooter? A terrorist attack? A chemical spill? Guffaw wasn't going to abandon his spot until the guests were safely through the exit, but it would've been nice to know how much he was risking his own life in doing so.

Several actors came through as well. Guffaw asked if they knew what was going on, but they all just shook their heads and kept moving.

It didn't take long to clear the place out. There were several exits and presumably most of the guests had departed through the earlier ones. Guffaw, Wagon, and Depravo stepped into the end of the line and followed everybody into the hallway, then out behind the building.

"Any idea what's happening?" Guffaw asked a portly man who stood in front of him.

The man stepped away from the scary clown.

The Grim Reaper was standing a few feet away. Guffaw walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. "Do you know what's going on?"

"I heard something about spiders," said the Grim Reaper.

"Spiders?"

The Grim Reaper nodded.

"They're evacuating the building because of spiders?"

"That's what I heard."

"Seems extreme."

The Grim Reaper shrugged. "Just passing on what I've heard."

"Thanks." Guffaw returned to Wagon and Depravo. "He says it's spiders."

"Spiders?" Wagon asked.

"That's what he said."

"Why would they evacuate the building for spiders?"

"I don't know."

"So, like, some lady got bit by a black widow, you think?" asked Depravo.

"Could be."

"I've literally never heard of a building being evacuated because of spiders. I've heard of condemned buildings where there are spiders all over the place, but I've never heard of actually making people hurry out of a building because of them. Though I guess where there's one black widow there might be two, and you can't have people walking around in the dark if somebody saw a black widow inside. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen. It sucks, though, because by the time they get exterminators in there to fumigate the place and kill the spider, we'll have lost a whole night of business."

On the other side of the building, people began to scream.

"You hear that?" Depravo asked.

Guffaw and Wagon nodded.

"Somebody must've seen the black widow."

"I don't think it's just a black widow," said Guffaw. "When people see spiders, it tends to be more of a squeal than a scream. It's a 'Get me away from this spider' reaction but not panic. We're hearing panic."

"You're right," said Depravo. "That's definitely the sound of panic."

"Panic is so depressing," said Wagon.

"Why are people panicking over spiders?" asked Guffaw.

"Maybe it's not spiders," said Depravo.

"The Grim Reaper said it was spiders."

"The Grim Reaper might've heard wrong."

"Maybe it's a bomb," said Guffaw. "A bomb would cause panic. Why are we standing so close to the building?"

"I'm surprised nobody is giving us instructions to move away from the building," said Depravo. "I've only been through a couple of bomb threats, but that's usually how it works. They don't want you to get hit by shrapnel."

They listened to the sounds of panic for a moment.

"That doesn't sound like people reacting to a bomb threat," said Wagon. "It sounds like there's something sad happening to them, right now. Like toxic waste spewing from the side of the building, and they all see the impact it's having on a melting person."

"Or maybe it's several black widows," said Depravo. "If you guys had black widows on you right now I'd probably be screaming and running away."

"But I already said that spider sightings are more of a squeal than a scream," said Guffaw. "I don't care if it's a half-dozen black widows—that's not how people react."

"I guess you're right," Depravo admitted.

"Do they even have spiders in Virginia?" Wagon asked.

"Of course they do," said Depravo. "Why wouldn't they?"

"I don't know. The weather."

"Are you an idiot?"

"No, I'm just not a spider expert. I didn't go to school to study spiders. I went to Clown College. Do you know what subject we don't learn in Clown College? Spider geography. So excuse me for not having an encyclopedic knowledge of spiders."

"I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of yaks, but I know whether or not they live in Virginia. Which they don't. At least not out in the wild."

"I feel like we're getting distracted," said Guffaw. "It sounds like people are getting hurt."

A man stepped around the corner of the building. The clowns were near the back, but the man was easy to see because the crowd quickly moved away from him. He had three spiders crawling on him. The fact that Guffaw could see these spiders from two hundred feet away was alarming. Each of the spiders was about the size of the man's head.

Guffaw wanted to say something casual, like, "Well, I guess we understand the spider issue now," but instead he just gaped.

People fled. More spiders crawled into the open space around the man, moving quickly.

Where were the other clowns? Guffaw didn't see Bluehead and Reginald. Hopefully they evacuated in the front of the building. And hopefully Jaunty was long gone and in no danger.

Another man stumbled into view with a spider on his throat.

Guffaw found himself frozen in shock for approximately three seconds. Then he shook it off. He heard a couple of screams inside the haunted house. "People are still inside," he said. "We have to help them."

"I would've agreed with you before I saw the giant spiders," said Depravo.

"This is our chance to redeem the good name of clowns! We could save people! We could change the narrative and make society think of clowns as heroes instead of nightmares! It's good for clowns and for the people we rescue! Win-win!"

"I don't care about the good name of clowns," said Depravo.

"I know you don't. I was mostly aiming that speech at Wagon."

"We're wasting time," said Wagon, heading back toward the entrance to the haunted house.

"No, wait, I'll go with you," said Depravo. "I'm your supervisor."

Guffaw, Wagon, and Depravo hurried back inside the building. The well-lit hallway contained no giant spiders that they could see, but there was plenty of commotion coming from inside the attraction itself.

"Isn't there a light switch for the inside part?" asked Guffaw.

"It's all the way up front."

"Why wouldn't somebody have turned it on?"

"Maybe they're dead."

That was a reasonable answer. Guffaw tried not to think about it.

He also tried not to think about how many spiders might be inside the haunted house to cause that many people to cry out in pain and terror. Maybe it was only one and the people were being melodramatic.

They went inside the Scary Clown Room, which was one of the few rooms in the haunted house to be brightly and colorfully lit. No spiders that Guffaw could see.

One of the screams in the distance sounded familiar. "Does that sound like Reginald?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Wagon. "I've never heard him scream."

"I don't think he ever has screamed," said Guffaw. "But that sounds like him, right?"

Wagon nodded. "Let's save him."

The next room was much darker. Depravo took out his cell phone, turned on the flashlight, and used it to illuminate their way. Still no spiders.

They kept going. The cemetery had spiders.

Reginald lay on his back on the floor. Bluehead was crouched next to him, trying to calm him down.

"Are you okay?" Guffaw asked.

"No!" Reginald shouted. "I had great big spiders on me!"

"But they're not on you now?"

"No! But they were!"

"They were gigantic spiders," Bluehead explained. "That's why he's so upset."

"We saw them," said Guffaw. "Actually, we see them right now. We should leave." He didn't do a careful count, but even in the poor lighting he could see at least a dozen spiders crawling around the room.

"Oh, yeah, they're all over the place," said Bluehead. Her voice trembled. "There's one there, and one there, and one there, and...all over the place. If Reginald weren't frozen with terror we'd be long gone."

"I apologize," said Reginald.

Guffaw reached down and took one of Reginald's hands. Bluehead held the other. They quickly pulled him to his feet.

"Thank you," said Reginald. "That's all I needed. I can move now."

"Our plan was to walk the length of the haunted house to make sure nobody else needed help," said Guffaw.

"Sounds noble," said Reginald. "Count me in."

"Count me in, too," said Bluehead. "But we should go now because I squished six or seven spiders before you got here and more and more keep coming and though I may not seem completely traumatized I really am."

"Everybody should grab a tombstone," said Depravo, pulling one out of the phony dirt. "We need something to smash the spiders with."

"The tombstones are Styrofoam," said Guffaw.

"So? They're spiders. You can crush a spider with a Styrofoam tombstone. And it means that if a spider starts crawling on somebody you can hit them with all of your might and not worry about hurting the person."

"That makes sense," Guffaw admitted.

Everybody grabbed a tombstone, not taking the time to choose those with the cleverest epitaphs. Then they proceeded into the next room.

This one was an underwater scene, though with blue paint standing in for water. The fanged mermaids had all evacuated; the animatronic tentacles remained. There were spiders everywhere.

"Holy shit, look at that," said Depravo, shining his phone-light at the ceiling. "They're already making webs all over the place!"

Guffaw was amazed. Unless the spiders had been here for quite a while without anybody noticing, they were spinning webs at an astounding pace. Guffaw had been more concerned about getting bitten than getting cocooned, but now he was worried about both.

A spider dropped onto his head.

Guffaw yelped.

Depravo brought the tombstone down upon Guffaw's skull with both hands. The tombstone broke into three pieces and spider guts splattered everywhere. Two severed legs slid down Guffaw's face.

"Gaahhh," said Guffaw, meaning "Thank you."

Depravo tossed the Styrofoam pieces aside. "We should keep moving."

They waited for a spider-covered animatronic tentacle to move out of the way, then hurried into the next room, which had so many spiders that Guffaw questioned the wisdom of their mission. He wanted to walk the fine line between "heroic" and "heroic sacrifice."

Several spiders were dangling from the ceiling.

The clowns hurried through the room. Depravo brushed against a tentacle and cried out as a spider scurried onto his chest. Guffaw smashed his tombstone against it, cracking the Styrofoam in half, then tossed it away with the still-twitching spider stuck to it.

Instead of bonding over saving each other's lives, Guffaw and Depravo kept moving.

* * *

Jaunty whimpered frequently as he quickly but carefully made his way through the haunted house. He hadn't seen any bloated corpses since the woman earlier, which made him happy. If he could see exactly zero more dead women before he exited the building he'd be extremely pleased.

He reached the mirror maze. There were a lot of spiders crawling on the mirrors, which made it look like even more spiders than there actually were. Maybe this was a good spot to turn back.

No. He'd feel terrible if he discovered that somebody died one room past the mirror maze.

On the other hand, he'd also feel terrible if he died as the result of hundreds of giant spider bites. Perhaps even worse.

There was a wooden chair in the corner, which is where a ghostly bride had been seated, smiling vacantly as she pointed to the entrance of the maze. Jaunty picked up the chair. Mountain of Terror management would be angry with him for smashing up the mirror maze, but he didn't see any other way to get through it without dying a horrible death.

He slammed the chair into the first mirror wall. Broken glass and spiders rained onto the floor. He kept going, swinging the chair back and forth, pretending that he didn't enjoy the destruction.

* * *

"What the hell is that?" asked Depravo at the sound of shattering glass.

Guffaw was pretty sure that it wasn't spiders breaking things. Somebody else was still in the haunted house. Somebody, from the sounds of it, who was in serious danger.

"Let's go," said Guffaw, picking up his pace.

The next room was the Cannibal Redneck Room. Guffaw knew this from memory, not because he actually had a chance to walk into the room. He was about to, when the actor who played Bubba Earl burst through the doorway. Unlike his character, Bubba Earl had a soft voice and a New England accent. Also unlike his character, Bubba Earl was not actually three hundred pounds, but rather "two-ninety after a healthy dump."

Bubba Earl, covered head to toe with spiders, was not watching where he was going.

The collision was not gentle.

Guffaw lost his balance. His clown shoes slipped out from underneath him and he fell to the floor.

Bubba Earl also fell. The only thing to break his fall was Guffaw.

Guffaw bellowed in pain, as two hundred and ninety-ish pounds of spider-covered hillbilly landed on top of him. Bones broke.

A frantic Bubba Earl pushed himself up, which would have been the considerate thing to do under normal circumstances, but in this case meant that several head-sized wolf spiders dropped off his body and onto Guffaw's.

Guffaw was vaguely aware of the other clowns rushing to assist him, but he was more aware of the spiders crawling all over his chest and neck and face. One of them sunk its fangs into his skin, just above his left eye. Another sunk its fangs into his lower lip. It hurt infinitely worse than he would have expected.

Bluehead, Reginald, Wagon, and Depravo desperately began brushing the spiders off of him.

"Get away from me!" Guffaw screamed. "Get away! Stop touching me!"

He wasn't sure why he said this. They were helping him. It was the hysteria speaking. In fact, it was difficult to hear his own words, as if he was listening to himself screaming from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Bubba Earl crawled away from him, then collapsed.

Wagon smacked away the spider that had bitten him near the eye. At least they weren't bashing him with the tombstones. Even Styrofoam would've felt bad on his broken bones. Ha ha ha.

He wasn't sure why he thought "ha ha ha."

Guffaw tried to use his right hand to grab the spider that had bitten his lip, but that arm wouldn't move, so he used his left instead. The spider scurried away before he could grab it. The lower half of his face was going numb.

"Get away! Get away! Get away!" he screamed.

His fellow clowns moved out of the way. Not far—just enough to give him room to breathe, though he was suddenly having difficulty breathing. He sprung to his feet, feeling like several more bones snapped in the process. Where was he going? Why was he doing this? What was his master plan?

A spider bit him on the back of the neck, but it didn't hurt as much as the other bites.

He lurched forward. Maybe he was trying to spare the other clowns the horror of watching him die. Because he was going to die. That was not up for debate. Guffaw the Clown was doomed.

He stumbled into the Cannibal Redneck Room. The smaller actor was draped over the BBQ grill, unmoving, his body barely visible underneath the spiders.

Guffaw fell to his knees. Somebody else burst into the room, holding a chair. Ah, a chair. It would be nice to sit on a chair right about now. Yes.

The person with the chair, who wore smeared makeup but looked vaguely familiar, knelt down next to him. He said Guffaw's name very loudly. Guffaw wondered who it was. He seemed nice.

Guffaw tried to greet him, but blood spewed out of his mouth when he tried to speak. He'd almost forgotten about his internal injuries.

He flopped forward and died in the stranger's arms.

CHAPTER TEN

"No, no, no, no, no!" Jaunty said, as he gently lowered Guffaw to the floor. Guffaw's head lolled backwards, and though Jaunty hadn't checked for a pulse it was obvious that his closest friend, his father figure, was dead.

The other clowns ran into the room.

"He's dead," Jaunty wailed. "Guffaw's dead."

Depravo's demonic face looked distraught even through the makeup. "Did you come through the front entrance?" he asked.

Jaunty nodded.

"And nobody else is in here?"

"Right."

"Then we've covered the whole thing and we need to get the fuck out of here!"

"We can't leave him here to be eaten!"

Depravo looked up at the ceiling. Several spiders were descending from their webs. "You take his arms. Reginald, take his legs. Bluehead and I will get the spiders off of him while we walk. Wagon, try to keep the path clear in front of us."

Jaunty picked up his broken friend. He was too upset by Guffaw's death to focus on the spiders that were crawling over the dead clown's body toward Jaunty's hands. Bluehead knocked them off with a tombstone.

The sobbing clowns carried Guffaw through the haunted house. Working as a team, they were able to keep anybody else from getting killed by spiders, though there were at least nine close calls. They made it to the Scary Clown Room, which was already the Scary Clown & Scary Spider Room, and carried him out into the hallway. The hallway also had plentiful spiders now, though not as many as inside the actual haunted house, and they were able to leave the building without any gruesome incidents.

There was still pandemonium in the parking lot, though not as much as before. People seemed to be escaping in their vehicles. Less reassuringly, there were a few bodies on the ground, each of them covered in a blanket of spiders.

"Don't look at the corpses," Depravo suggested. "Just keep moving."

So many spiders. Hundreds of them, if not thousands. Where had this many giant spiders been hiding all this time?

Guffaw's face was badly swollen, though at least his greasepaint made the sight less grotesque than the dead woman Jaunty had found earlier. He still wished they were carrying Guffaw facedown. He also wished he could stop crying, because it was distracting him from staying alert about the spiders. The other clowns were doing a good job of keeping the spiders away, but with this many arachnids around, he needed to be as vigilant as possible.

Jaunty was starting to lose his grip on Guffaw's arms, so he stopped and readjusted his position. His love of slapstick antics did not extend to dropping his friend's dead body.

There were sirens in the distance. The police and the paramedics would make everything okay.

Somebody lay on the ground, weakly flailing around. The idea of leaving an injured person behind sickened Jaunty, but what could he do? Even if the clowns picked the person up and swung them around and around until all of the spiders flew off, they certainly were covered in bites. They couldn't be saved.

And he didn't have the courage to put them out of their misery. The merciful thing to do would be to leap into the air as high as he could—which was pretty high—and land with both feet on their head. Splatter their brains and end their agonized existence. But he couldn't bring himself to do something like that.

They moved past the person on the ground, plus many more who may or may not have been already dead, until they reached the parking lot.

Employees had their own section of the lot, which was the furthest from the building. Cars were leaving the lot at a steady rate. A dead man lying on the ground didn't have enough spiders covering him to hide that his legs had been run over.

The sirens didn't sound like they were getting closer.

A woman ran past them. She seemed to recoil at the sight. If scary clowns carrying a dead clown was a more upsetting image than the death all around her, this woman had issues.

Wagon let out a squeak as a spider crawled on his foot. He kicked his foot high in the air, sending the spider sailing about twenty feet. "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," he insisted.

They reached the employee lot. "Which car is yours?" Depravo asked.

"It's at the very end!" said Wagon, pointing.

"The shitty multi-colored one?"

"Yeah."

They hurried over to the car, which was right next to a spider-covered chain link fence. Though most of the vehicles were gone, there was a truck directly behind them and a car next to them. As far as Jaunty could see, the truck was empty. The car was not. The two teenagers inside would not be driving it anywhere.

"Guffaw has the keys," said Wagon. "I'll get them if nobody else volunteers but I'd rather not."

"I'll get them," said Bluehead. She patted Guffaw's right pocket, then turned her head as she reached inside and retrieved the key ring. She handed the keys to Wagon, who went around to unlock the trunk.

"We can't just throw him in the trunk!" said Jaunty.

"Do you want his dead body in the car with us? That's morbid, Jaunty."

"I respect Guffaw to the fullest but I don't want him slumped against me as we drive out of here," said Reginald.

"I agree," said Bluehead. "I love him and I understand that he won't have started to smell yet, but having him in the car with us just isn't appropriate."

Jaunty decided that they were right. It was a tight fit with all of the clowns in there so it wasn't as if they could scoot away from the corpse. He and Depravo gently lowered Guffaw's body into the trunk and then closed the lid before any spiders could get in there with him.

Guffaw was always the driver, but Jaunty would have to take on that role now. He got in the front. Reginald got in the passenger seat. Bluehead, Wagon, and Depravo got in the back.

"It's okay if I flee with you guys, right?" asked Depravo. "I took an Uber here."

"Of course," said Jaunty.

"I'm sorry I fired you."

"I'm sorry I quit."

"We'll talk the rest of it out at a more appropriate time," said Depravo. "I just wanted to do a quick apology so you weren't stewing over it."

"It's fine. I wasn't stewing." Jaunty turned on the engine.

"Watch out!" said Reginald.

Since the car was not yet in motion, Jaunty wasn't sure what he was supposed to avoid. Then he noticed the other car careening toward them. Jaunty was boxed in, so he couldn't back up or really do anything but hope that the car didn't strike them.

The car didn't hit them. It crashed into the fence. Didn't break through. Came to a stop.

Now they were completely boxed in.

The car didn't back up. In fact, they couldn't see the driver anymore. They waited patiently for a few moments for the driver to pop back into view, put the vehicle in reverse, and back out of their way, but that did not happen.

"Somebody should move that car," said Reginald.

"I know," said Jaunty. "I keep waiting but I think the driver is hurt."

"I meant one of us."

"Oh."

"Since I'm the one who said it out loud, I suppose I volunteered myself," said Reginald.

"I don't think that's necessarily the case, but if you are officially volunteering, I don't think anybody will argue."

"I'll do it," said Bluehead.

"No, no," said Reginald. "I'd like to redeem myself for my earlier paralysis."

"There's no need for redemption," said Bluehead. "If I had spiders crawling on me like that, I would've done the exact same thing. In fact, I'd still be screaming."

"That said, I think I should be the one to go out there."

Reginald got out of the clown car and walked around to the other side of the car that had struck the fence. He walked back very quickly, got inside the clown car, and locked the door.

"The driver is dead," he reported. "There are more spiders in the car with him than I would have expected. I could reach in there, put the car in neutral, and physically roll it out of the way, but I'd need volunteers to help."

Spiders had already started crawling all over the vehicle.

Depravo lowered his phone and cursed. "Can't get through to 911. All circuits are busy."

"Other people must be calling about the giant spiders," said Wagon.

"You think?"

"Maybe we could switch to a different car," said Bluehead.

"Does anybody know how to hotwire one?" asked Depravo.

Nobody did.

"None of you have criminal pasts?" asked Depravo. "What kind of clowns are you?"

"Clowns aren't supposed to have criminal pasts," said Jaunty.

"I thought circuses were seedy environments where you ripped off gullible marks and stuff."

"No, you're thinking of the old-time carnivals that had freak shows."

"Maybe we should just wait it out," said Wagon. "Every second we're out there is one more second we can get bit. If a fire truck shows up, they can blast those things with water and wash them away. It's not like we're trapped out in the middle of nowhere. We're at the most popular attraction in town. They aren't going to leave us here to die."

"Normally I prefer doing something over doing nothing," said Reginald. "But Wagon has a point. It's five clowns versus thousands of giant spiders. We should let the authorities handle it. We're safe in here, as long as the spiders can't chew through metal or glass, which I assume they can't."

"It's probably the smart thing to do," said Bluehead. "We won't be here long enough to have to start worrying about food sources. At some point I'll go insane and decide to take my chances with the spiders, but I'm not there yet. Let's wait it out."

Jaunty turned off the engine. "No action it is."

* * *

Half an hour later, the clown car was completely covered in spiders. Jaunty could occasionally clear a viewing area by starting the engine and turning on the windshield wipers, but for the most part it was difficult to see what was happening around them.

"I know we all voted in favor of it," said Wagon, "but I'll take the blame for this idea. It wasn't a good one."

"I would've thought we'd get through to 911 by now," said Bluehead. "Or that somebody would have showed up to rescue us. Or that the spiders would've left. Or that one of us would have volunteered to exit the car and go for help."

"Government services have a lot on their plate right now," said Jaunty. "I'm sure they're killing the spiders sector by sector. They'll get to us. We'll be fine. I'm not the least bit hungry and I don't have to go to the bathroom."

"I had to go to the bathroom before the spiders even started attacking," said Bluehead. "And I'm the only one who can't just pee out the window."

"I have to pee, too," said Depravo, "but I'll let my bladder explode before I stick my dick out that window."

Jaunty turned around in his seat and glared at him. "You're not my boss anymore, so how about you not use the d-word around me, okay?"

"I'm still everybody else's boss."

"Do you really think they're going to reopen the Mountain of Terror this season? If the windows weren't covered in spiders, I'd see at least a half-dozen dead customers." Jaunty felt guilty about the casual reference to death—those customers probably had families and pets—but he wasn't in the mood for Depravo to talk about his genitalia in crude terms.

"Can I say wiener?"

"Wiener is fine."

"Then I shan't be extending my wiener out the open window lest it doth get bitten by a spider."

"Not quite Shakespearian."

"What's your problem, Jaunty?"

"My problem is that Guffaw is dead in the trunk of this car, and we may very well be joining him. In being dead. Not in being in the trunk. So, yes, please forgive me, Depravo the Satanic Clown, if I'm a bit testy!"

"I apologize," said Depravo. "And when I asked what your problem was, I obviously knew what the problem was. I only said that because I'm also completely stressed out."

"That's all right," said Jaunty. "This is difficult for everybody."

"Honestly, we should all be proud of ourselves," said Bluehead. "There have been a lot of tense moments, but nobody has gone completely nuts. I'd say that considering the circumstances, we're an amazingly sane car full of clowns. You think the actors from the other rooms are handling it like this? You think the skeleton dancers aren't at each other's throats right now?"

"I'm not trying to subvert your inspirational message," said Wagon. "But the skeleton dancers probably aren't trapped in a parking lot right now. Again, I take full responsibility for this—I just wanted to point that out."

"Fair enough," said Bluehead.

"We need a distraction," said Jaunty. "Let's all share our best memory of Guffaw."

"I feel like I'm being argumentative here and it's not my intent," said Wagon. "But sharing our best memories of Guffaw is kind of going to do the opposite of distracting us. It's really just going to remind us over and over that he's dead. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. I'm just saying that I'm not sure I'll feel distracted."

"I think it's a good idea," said Bluehead. "It'll remind us of happier times."

"Which is basically any time that's not now," said Wagon. He sighed. "You know what? I'm going to stop talking. I feel like I'm bringing everybody's mood down and I don't want to be that guy."

"I remember that time when one of us made fun of Guffaw for putting so much ketchup on his macaroni and cheese, and he said 'Oh, you haven't seen too much ketchup yet!' and he emptied the entire rest of the bottle—which was almost full when he started—into the bowl. And then he ate the whole thing. It made him physically ill and we had to go out and buy more ketchup, but he'd do anything for a laugh." Jaunty wiped a tear from his eye. "He was such a great guy."

"Rats," said Bluehead. "I was going use the ketchup memory."

"Speaking of rats," said Wagon, "If we're trying to distract ourselves from the horror surrounding us, we should at least be happy that there aren't giant rats out there along with the giant spiders. Imagine how much worse that would be."

"You're continuing to not help," said Reginald.

"Sorry."

"What's your favorite memory of Guffaw?" Jaunty asked.

Reginald thought for a moment. "I hate to say the ketchup anecdote, but that's what springs to mind. It's because I'm too terrified to think clearly right now. He's done a lot of funny things, kind things, beautiful things, but I can't specifically recall any of them. If you hadn't shared the ketchup story, I wouldn't have been able to think of that one, either."

"My favorite memory is when he told me that you could all do cartwheels," said Depravo. "And he wasn't lying. You could all do cartwheels. I was impressed."

"He did love doing cartwheels," said Jaunty, and began to cry. This made Reginald cry, which made Bluehead cry, which made Wagon cry, and then all of the clowns except Depravo were weeping, but even Depravo was misty-eyed.

They reminisced for a long time. The fond memories of their friend made it possible for Jaunty to, for seconds at a time, forget that the car was covered with spiders. Then he'd glance at the windshield and be reminded.

Hours later, they were still trapped in the car. They'd befouled a soda bottle, and Bluehead had ruined a comic book to form a makeshift funnel.

"Who knows how much longer we'll be here?" asked Jaunty. "We should take a nap. It'll make the time go faster if we're unconscious, and we'll be rested in case we have to abandon the car and make a run for it. I'll keep watch for the first shift."

Everybody agreed that this was a good idea, and soon the car was filled with snoring clowns. Jaunty just stared at the windshield, wishing they had more than one comic book in the car.

The snoring should have kept him awake, but instead it made him tired.

He was exhausted.

Jaunty knew that closing his eyes would be a terrible idea, so he held them open for as long as he could. But he had to blink sometime.

He blinked.

He blinked again.

On the third blink, his eyes stayed closed.

* * *

When Jaunty opened his eyes, the car was dark.

But not simply because it was night. The entire automobile, or at least all of the windows, were completely covered with webs.

Jaunty was glad they had an old car without power windows—he didn't need to turn on the engine to roll down the window, which would have awakened the others. He rolled it down just far enough that he could stick his hand outside. He brushed away some webs, giving him a tiny view of the outside world.

Webs everywhere. Nothing but spider webs, as far as he could see.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jaunty quickly rolled up the window. The other clowns weren't going to like this.

"Hey, everybody?" he said. "You should wake up."

The clowns began to stir. The realization that the car was completely covered with spider webs woke them up pretty quickly.

"Not to be a downer, but it doesn't look like anybody is coming to rescue us," said Jaunty.

"I'm not getting any signal," said Depravo, looking at his phone.

"I'm not going to lie," said Jaunty. "I fell asleep for a few hours even though I was supposed to be the one keeping watch, and when I peeked outside everything was covered with webs. I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted," said Wagon.

"No! Apology not accepted!" said Depravo. "How could you fall asleep? It wasn't even all that late!"

"I'm not trying to make excuses, but Guffaw died horribly, spiders went on a rampage, and I lost my job. It was an exhausting day."

"Let's not point fingers," said Bluehead. "We've got more important things to worry about than debating which one of us fell asleep instead of keeping watch."

"The identity of the sleeper isn't up for debate!" said Depravo. "Jaunty fell asleep, and now we're all boned!"

"Let's not overreact," said Wagon. "What would Guffaw want us to do now?"

"Not fall the fuck asleep!"

"If we all die, I'll accept the blame," said Jaunty. "But it's time to move past my fatal blunder and figure out what we're going to do. Sure, there are a lot of webs, but maybe the spiders themselves have moved on."

"That seems unlikely," said Reginald.

"Yet not impossible. I don't know how spiders work. If they ate all of the corpses littered around the area, maybe they're off in search of other prey. I apologize—that was macabre. Those corpses belonged to human beings and I'm disappointed if they became food. Still, we can't stay in the car forever, so until we're proven otherwise I think we should assume that the spiders are gone."

"No, we can't stay in the car forever," said Bluehead, "but we can wait it out for a while longer. I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't had a single cannibalism-related thought the entire time we've been trapped in here. I could easily go another forty-eight hours before my mind starts moving in that direction."

"Oh, yeah, I'm not the slightest bit close to thinking about cannibalism," said Wagon. "If Bluehead hadn't brought it up, it would never have crossed my mind. And we'll get thirsty before we get hungry anyway."

"And just to be clear, the thought of drinking anybody's blood is the furthest thing from my mind," said Bluehead. "I mean, I guess there are other things that are further, like mathematical theorems or philosophy and stuff. I'm just saying that I can go a really long time before I start looking at anybody's veins. A long time."

"I don't want to be in here with you guys anymore," said Depravo.

"We're safe for now," said Jaunty. "But the longer we wait, the hungrier and thirstier we'll get, and the more our muscles will atrophy. I vote that we get out and push that car out of the way so we can drive out of here. All in favor, say aye."

Everybody said "aye."

"Should one of us stay in the car with Bluehead just in case things are worse than we realize and we need to repopulate the earth?" asked Wagon. "I'm not saying that I'd be the one to do it. I'm just making sure we look at this from all sides."

"It wouldn't work," said Bluehead. "None of you want to hear about my uterus, so let's just say that it wouldn't work. When I was much younger it was harder to accept that I could never bear children, but I came to terms with it, and I knew that I could always adopt. And now, with our future so tentative, I'm relieved that I never brought a child into the world. I couldn't handle the thought of my son or daughter being killed by those spiders while I watched. It would destroy me inside."

"I'm so sorry," said Reginald. "I never knew."

"None of you knew. It wasn't something I was comfortable talking about. And of course you're all too much like brothers for me to ever think of procreating with any of you, so there was never any reason for the topic to come up."

"You people are fucked up," said Depravo.

"We're clowns," Jaunty explained.

"It's time to stop talking and start moving a car out of the way," said Reginald. "The logical next step is for one of us to get out of this car to make sure it's safe for the others. That way we minimize our losses if there's a swarm of spiders ready to pounce."

"Fine, I'll do it," said Jaunty.

"I wasn't recommending anybody in particular," said Reginald. "I would've volunteered myself had you not spoken up."

Jaunty grabbed the door handle. "If I knock on the window, it's safe to come out. If I scream, it's not. If I frantically pound on the window, it's not safe, but you should be able to tell the difference between me knocking on the window and frantically pounding on it. The longer I talk the more scared I'm getting, so I'll just go."

He opened the door. Before he could change his mind like a shameful coward, he quickly got out of the car and shut the door.

Everything in the well-lit area was white. It was like there'd been a heavy snowfall, except that it was all webs. Every car was wrapped in its own cocoon. The Mountain of Terror was completely hidden. Webs covered the ground—there were only a few spots where the pavement beneath was visible.

The spiders had not left the area. There were fewer of them now, but Jaunty still saw dozens of them crawling on the webs. Though the idea of getting right back in the car held great appeal, it was probably a better idea to stick with the plan. They'd all be safer if they could actually drive the car instead of just sit in it.

He knocked on the window.

The clowns got out. They all took a moment to gape at the web world.

"Everybody watch yourselves," said Jaunty. "There are spiders all over the place."

He walked over to the driver's side front door of the other car. Webs gathered on his shoes with each step, until his feet looked like oversized Q-tips. He pushed the webs off the window, so that he could see inside: more webs. A cocooned driver. And a few spiders.

This was fine. The spiders were no big deal. All he had to do was open the door, reach inside, and put the vehicle in neutral. He could do that without any of the spiders getting on him.

There were also a couple of spiders on the roof, and one crawling along the door. He was pretty sure he could avoid those, too.

He opened the door. The driver's wrapped body flopped out onto the ground. A spider that had been on the driver's head crawled toward Jaunty. He stomped on it. When he lifted his foot, it was gone. He made a sound like a Chihuahua yipping. But when he contorted his leg to see the bottom of his foot, the crushed spider was stuck to the bottom of his shoe—it hadn't disappeared up his pant leg. He scraped it off.

Jaunty didn't want to touch the dead body—at least he prayed the driver was dead, and not simply paralyzed underneath a layer of webs—so he leaned over it, watching carefully for spiders. He grabbed the web-covered gearshift and put the car into neutral.

"I'm feeling a really bad panic attack coming on," said Wagon. "It's not here yet, but I thought everybody should know."

There was an excellent chance that by rolling the car backwards, they were going to roll over part of the driver, but Jaunty decided that he'd rather hear the crunch than mess with the body.

The clowns got into position, making sure their hands weren't too close to any spiders, and then they rolled the car backwards. The driver's body scraped across the ground for a few feet, then came free of the vehicle entirely. Fortunately, it didn't go beneath a tire.

When they'd moved the car far enough out of the way that they could get their own car out of its parking space, they hurried back. Jaunty hoped it was his imagination that the spiders seemed to be moving directly toward them, though by the time he stomped on the fourth one he knew that he wasn't imagining a darn thing.

They cleared the webs away from the windows, then they all got back into the car.

"Any spiders in here with us?" Jaunty asked.

Everybody checked. The car was, as far as they could tell, spider-free.

Jaunty turned the key in the ignition. He'd been worried that spiders had made their way into the inner machinery of the vehicle and clogged up the engine with webs, but hadn't shared this so as not to concern the others. The car started fine, thank goodness.

Driving slowly, Jaunty pulled out of the parking spot and made his way toward the exit. He hoped many spiders were meeting their demise underneath the tires. He also hoped that too many webs weren't sticking to the tires—he didn't want to have to keep stopping to clear them out.

"How can there be that much web out there?" asked Reginald. "That's a preposterous amount of web."

"Big spiders," said Bluehead. "And lots of them."

"Even so, that's an absurd amount of web. They'd have to be mutants."

"I assumed they were mutants from the beginning," said Wagon. "I didn't say anything because I figured we were all on the same page."

They reached the exit to the parking lot. Jaunty glanced to the left and to the right. It seemed kind of dark in both directions, at least compared to the well-lit exterior of the Mountain of Terror. Still, if they'd been left unrescued in the parking lot for several hours, who knew how long it might take for the spider-exterminating army to arrive? They had to get out of here. He turned left and drove slowly down a road that may or may not have been barren—there were webs that stretched all the way across both lanes, so it was impossible to say what lay ahead.

"What if the whole world is covered?" asked Wagon.

"It's not," said Bluehead.

"But what if it is? What if spiders are the new humans?"

"They're not."

"What if our cruelty to spiders caused this to happen? I've killed spiders that weren't really even doing anything. I've walked through webs and all I cared about is that I got web on my face, even though the spider lost a home. This could be karma."

"It's not."

"Now that I think about it, I've lost track of all the spiders I've killed in my lifetime," said Wagon. "I've never plucked off their legs or anything, but I've been stomping and spraying them since I was a little kid."

"It's not karma," said Bluehead. "Or, if it is, then the world will be overtaken by even bigger flies going around killing the giant spiders."

"That doesn't make me feel the least bit better," said Wagon.

The car began to make a weird sound, sort of a grinding. Jaunty applied the brakes.

"What's wrong?" asked Reginald.

"I think the tires have too much web stuck to them. Each person will get out and clear off the tire closest to them. Depravo, since you're in the middle, your job is to squish any spiders that get inside while everybody is getting out of the car."

Depravo nodded. "Got it."

"Three, two, one, go!"

Everybody quickly got out of the vehicle, shut the doors behind them, and went to work like a racing car pit crew. Jaunty crouched down, astounded by how much web the front left tire had accumulated. It didn't come off all that easily.

None of the other clowns started screaming, so he assumed that nobody was currently being attacked by spiders.

He got most of the web off the tire, and then had to get it off his white gloves, which presented its own challenge. Jaunty didn't want to wipe it off on the car or his pants, so he scraped it off on the ground as well as he could. Then he got back into the car. The other clowns followed.

"We good?" he asked.

"No spiders got inside," Depravo reported.

"Perfect." Jaunty took the car out of park and resumed driving.

About a minute later, he heard the same scraping and stopped again.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't think of any way to stop this from happening."

Everybody got out, cleared the tires, and got back in.

They drove for another minute. Repeated the same process.

"We're getting pretty good at this," said Bluehead. "I don't know if it's a transferrable skill, but we are unemployed again, so the more we learn the better."

"Do you think we're the only ones left in town?" asked Jaunty. "It all seems eerily quiet."

"It would explain why the military isn't going around with flamethrowers," said Reginald.

"It's not a very big town. So all we have to do is drive to the barricade, and not get killed when we clean off the tires. Can't be that hard."

"How would they put up a barricade against spiders, though?" asked Wagon. "You can stop cars from getting out, because cars need roads, but unless they have the town completely surrounded in a circle, the spiders are going to get past them."

"I vote that we say only optimistic things until we get out of this mess," said Jaunty. "All in favor, raise your hands."

Jaunty and Bluehead raised their hands.

"Burying our head in the sand is no solution," said Reginald. "If Wagon wants to bring up worst case scenarios, it's not fun to hear, but it's better to think about them now than to reach the edge of town and be surprised to find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape."

They paused the conversation to clear webs off the tires.

"I just think we should continue to see the sunny side of life," said Jaunty. "That's what clowns are supposed to do."

"It's not realistic right now," said Wagon. "When we tell our story to others, we can choose to share only the lighthearted moments, but right now we have to accept that we're in deep doody. Yes, I said doody. You're lucky I didn't say crap. Guffaw is dead, and it's not out of the question that two or three more of us will die before this is over, so we have to accept the severity of the situation."

"Fine," said Jaunty. "Let's at least find a middle ground between self-delusion and nihilism."

There was a car up ahead. It was on the side of the road, at an angle that didn't look like somebody had simply parked there because it was convenient. They pulled up next to it just as it was time to clear off the next batch of webs.

The lamppost didn't provide a lot of illumination inside the car, but Jaunty could see at least three web cocoons inside the vehicle. They didn't necessarily contain human bodies, though since they'd just decided to cease and desist on the self-delusion, he had to concede that they were almost definitely human bodies.

They got out of the car and cleared off the tires. Everybody got back inside.

"Oh, God," said Bluehead.

Jaunty looked back at her. "What?"

"One of the cocoons twitched."

Everybody stared out the window for a moment.

"I don't see anything," said Reginald.

Then the cocoon in the driver's seat twitched. It was unmistakable. Only somebody who really, really, really did not want to accept that the person inside might still be alive could claim to have not seen the twitch.

"They're probably too far gone to save," said Wagon.

"Probably," said Jaunty.

"I mean, we're not just going to tear off the web and find a perfectly healthy person."

"Nope."

"Trying to help them would be a waste of time and put us at serious risk."

"Yep."

The clowns all sighed, knowing that they were indeed going to get out of the car and try to help the doomed people wrapped in the cocoons.

"We don't all need to go," said Bluehead. "Two of us should be enough. We'll draw straws to decide."

"We don't have any straws," said Depravo.

"We draw imaginary straws," Jaunty explained. "We work on an honor system."

He held out his empty fist and everybody drew a non-existent straw. Jaunty and Wagon lost.

They got out of their car and walked over to the other one. Now they could see that there were four cocoons, two in the front and two in the back. The two in the back were smaller—presumably the car contained two adults and two kids.

There were also several spiders crawling on the cocoons.

"It would be very unintelligent of us to open that door," said Jaunty.

"I agree," said Wagon.

All four of the cocoons were twitching.

Jaunty opened the door.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jaunty stepped back as a couple of spiders spilled out of the open car door. It was just his imagination that they were slightly larger than the others spiders they'd encountered, of course. It took a couple of stomps for Jaunty to crush one, while the other scurried underneath the car before Wagon could flatten it.

There were other spiders still inside the car, so Jaunty carefully dragged the cocoon in the driver's seat out of the car, hopefully decreasing the chances of a nasty arachnid surprise while he unwrapped it. The cocoon twitched as he gently lay it on the ground.

Wagon shut the door. Then he slammed his fist against a spider that crawled off the roof of the car.

"You're going to be okay," Jaunty assured whoever was inside the cocoon.

"Clowns aren't supposed to lie," said Wagon.

Jaunty pulled the webbing off the face of the wrapped person. It was a man—maybe. His face was too swollen to say for sure. His eyes were wide and his face was frozen into an expression of pure terror. Fluids leaked from his mouth, eyes, and nostrils. His lips quivered as if he was trying to scream, but there was no sound.

Jaunty was no doctor. Could this man be saved? Was he already too far gone?

And if he wasn't too far gone...what were they supposed to do with him and the others? They couldn't fit the four cocoons into their automobile. The best they could do was clear the spiders out of the car—and it would take a while to be sure they got all of them—and hope for the best. That didn't seem like it was worth the risk.

"What are we even trying to do here?" he asked Wagon. "I mean, did we think we'd rip off the webs and the guy would thank us and go on his merry way?"

"We couldn't just leave them."

"Why not? What exactly have we accomplished?"

Jaunty gasped as he felt something crawling over his back. He frantically batted at it, but it was in that hard-to-reach place right between his shoulder blades. He spun around.

"Get it off me! Get it off me!"

"There's nothing on your back!"

"I can feel a spider on it!"

"There isn't one!"

"Then it's under my suit!"

Wagon slapped the back of Jaunty's suit a few times. "There's nothing under there, Jaunty. I promise you."

Jaunty turned around. "Maybe I imagined it. That's where we are now. I'm imagining giant spiders on my back. I want to protect humanity as much as the next clown, but unless there's a jug of spider anti-venom in the trunk next to Guffaw's dead body, we can't do anything to help these people."

As if to emphasize this point, a glob of whitish yellowish reddish slime dribbled out of the side of the man's mouth.

"Do you think a spider laid eggs inside of him?" Wagon asked.

"I'd be surprised if one didn't."

"Maybe we should at least clear the webs away from their eyes so they can see."

"See their ghastly fate?"

Wagon considered that for a moment. "If you had spiders crawling all over you, would you want to see them, or would you want to be blindfolded by webs?"

"I think I'd rather have my eyes covered."

"Would you? It seems to me like fear of the unknown would be scarier."

"But it's not unknown. They know it's spiders."

"Yeah. Still, I think I'd rather see what was going on."

"All right," said Jaunty. "And maybe this will make it easier for them to breathe."

They opened the other three car doors and very carefully reached inside to tear the web off the faces of the unfortunate victims. The woman up front looked just as bad as the driver. The children in the back looked far worse. Jaunty had to choke back a sob as they shut the doors again.

"If this happens to me, I want you to finish me off," Jaunty told Wagon. "Just throw my cocoon to the ground, jump into the air, and stomp on my skull until it breaks apart. I don't want to live like that."

"Noted," said Wagon.

"And I'll do the same for you."

Wagon shook his head. "No, I want to live as long as possible. Even if spiders are dragging me away, don't do any of that 'merciful death' stuff. I want to squeeze out every speck of life I can, even if I'm in agonizing pain. Don't pull the plug on me."

"Oh," said Jaunty. "Okay. I won't."

"Tell the others."

"I will."

"I mean it. I want you to exhaust every possible option, no matter how experimental the procedure, before you let me die."

"Gotcha."

They returned to their car and got inside.

"How bad was it?" asked Bluehead.

"There were swollen paralyzed children with pus or something leaking out of their faces," said Jaunty.

"So it was pretty bad," said Wagon.

"They understood that based on what I said," Jaunty told him.

"I just wanted to contribute."

Jaunty started the engine. He drove for about fifteen seconds, and then the car stopped.

"Are the tires covered already?" asked Depravo.

"They shouldn't be," said Jaunty. "We should've had at least another thirty to forty-five seconds of driving time. We need to check this out."

They drew imaginary straws. Jaunty and Wagon lost again.

The tires hadn't gathered all that much webbing yet. They crouched down to peer underneath the car. The illumination of the street lamps didn't do much good down there, but it did appear that the underside of the vehicle was clogged with webs.

"I'm not reaching under there," said Wagon.

"Me either," said Jaunty.

They stood up. Wagon glanced around. "I'll go get something to clear it out," he said.

Wagon carefully watched the ground as he stepped off the road and walked over to the nearest tree. He reached up and snapped off a branch.

Dozens of spiders rained down upon him.

Wagon spent a moment shrieking and flailing his spider-covered arms. Then he dropped to his knees.

Jaunty sprinted toward him. He heard the car doors opening as the other clowns got out to help. As Jaunty stepped off the road, he froze—there were spiders all around Wagon, and he wasn't sure how to reach his friend without getting swarmed by the spiders himself.

Wagon cried out in pain. A spider crawled onto his face.

No time to think about his personal safety. Jaunty hurried over to Wagon and tried to brush the spiders off of him, while kicking his own feet back and forth to keep spiders from getting on him.

"Help me!" Wagon screamed.

Jaunty grabbed a spider out of Wagon's hair and flung it away. Another spider took its place. Jaunty flung that one away as well.

"Stand up!" he told Wagon.

Instead of standing up, Wagon pitched forward, landing face-first on the ground. Several spiders immediately scurried onto him.

Reginald, Bluehead, and Depravo ran over there. The clowns worked together, trying to brush the spiders off of Wagon while keeping new ones from crawling on him. It wasn't easy. There were spiders all over the ground now, with others still falling from the tree. Wagon, understandably, was doing a lot of screaming, though it was muffled since his face was pressed against the ground.

Jaunty and Depravo picked Wagon up—Jaunty grabbing his feet, Depravo grabbing his arms—and carried him to the road. Before they could reach the car, Depravo shouted, "Fuck!" and let go. Wagon's head smashed against the pavement. The web didn't seem to cushion the landing.

 Depravo brushed off the spider that had crawled from Wagon's body onto his. Spiders on the ground were already moving toward the dropped clown, so Depravo and Jaunty hurriedly picked him up again. Wagon's head lolled backwards, but not before Jaunty saw the trickle of blood running down his temple, clearly visible against his white greasepaint. He was no longer screaming.

More and more spiders ran onto the road, as if the spider rainfall had spurred a call to action. Was every tree completely full of them? Or had Wagon just had the terrible luck to choose a really awful place to grab a branch?

One crawled up the back of Jaunty's leg. He winced and shook his leg, trying to dislodge it. It didn't fall off. Another spider crawled on his other leg. He alternated shaking his legs, wishing he had a better way to get them off. This ranked in the top five instances of his life in which he wished he had access to a fire hose.

Bluehead and Reginald were having the same problem. Too many spiders at once.

"Frick!" shouted Depravo, apparently so stressed out that he used an alternative to profanity instead of cursing.

Jaunty could feel Wagon's legs slipping out of his grasp. There were worse things that could happen, such as the top half of his body slipping out of Depravo's grasp again, but Jaunty wanted to avoid any further harm to his friend.

"I'm losing him...I'm losing him..." said Depravo, contorting his body around as if there were multiple spiders crawling on it that he very much wanted to remove. "Lower him! Lower him!"

Before Jaunty could lower him, Depravo let go again, and Wagon bashed onto the road. Depravo clawed at his own back. Reginald hurried over to him and smacked his back a few times, and Jaunty saw three spiders drop to the ground.

Wagon was already getting swarmed again.

He was foaming at the mouth.

Jaunty and Reginald picked Wagon up, but he had spiders crawling on him and those needed to be dealt with before they got him back into the car. They both seemed to realize at the same time that "shake Wagon really hard," though an ugly option, was the best choice.

They violently shook their unconscious clown friend. Some of the spiders dropped onto the ground. Others did not.

"It's not working!" said Depravo.

"Shake harder!" said Jaunty.

They shook Wagon even harder. Jaunty wished he could brace Wagon's head so that it didn't jiggle around so much in the process, but he only had two hands. Another couple of spiders dropped off. Jaunty only saw one more climbing on his chest. He couldn't brush it off without setting Wagon back down on the spider-covered pavement.

"Let's get him in the car," said Jaunty. "We'll worry about getting the spiders off him later."

They walked the rest of the way to the automobile. Reginald opened the back passenger-side door for them. As they struggled to get Wagon inside, Jaunty noticed that there were spiders dangling from his back. They lay him on the seat, which may or may not have crushed the spiders underneath him.

Wagon's eyes popped open. He opened his mouth and froth poured out instead of words or screams.

A pair of spider legs emerged from underneath him.

Bluehead cried out. Jaunty glanced back to see her frantically brushing a spider off the back of her leg.

Jaunty pushed down on Wagon's chest, hoping to crush the spider that was beneath him. Its legs kept moving, though it seemed to be stuck.

They had to get the door closed or spiders would just keep crawling inside the car. Wagon's feet were in the way, so Jaunty shoved them inside, and then slammed the door.

This didn't come close to solving the problem. Wagon was now taking up the entire back seat. Either somebody had to sit on him or ride in the trunk with Guffaw's dead body. Neither of those were acceptable options.

"Everybody else in the front!" said Jaunty. "I'll kill the spiders in the back."

Bluehead, Reginald, and Depravo got into the front seats. Bluehead sat in the driver's seat, while Reginald sat on Depravo's lap. This was unquestionably not the lap-sitting arrangement that Depravo would prefer, but they wouldn't be crammed up front for long. Jaunty opened the door and awkwardly climbed into the back seat. He lifted Wagon into a sitting position, then bent him over.

There were three spiders on his back. Two of them were crushed and dead. The third was locked onto the back of his neck. Jaunty grabbed it and squashed it in his fist.

Were there any other spiders back here?

Jaunty quickly looked around. He didn't see any.

No, wait, there was one on the floor. He stomped it.

There didn't seem to be any others. One benefit to having the spiders be this huge was that they couldn't hide as easily.

"Wagon, talk to me," he said.

Nothing spewed out of Wagon's mouth this time, but his eyes were vacant.

"Please, Wagon! We need you! Don't die on me, okay?"

"I'll..." Wagon gasped.

"You'll...?"

"...try not to die."

"Good. Great. That's all I can ask. Thank you." Jaunty tapped the back of Bluehead's seat. "Let's get out of here."

"We never solved our first problem," Bluehead said. "We still have to clean out underneath the car."

Jaunty had an intense desire to use foul language, but retained his self-control and uttered a family-friendly variant instead.

"There are millions of spiders out there," he said, feeling guilty about the exaggeration. "We have to wait for them to clear out."

Wagon began to foam at the mouth again, as if to remind Jaunty that there was a ticking clock on his lifespan. If they sat here and waited for the spiders to go away, he'd die before they got him to a hospital.

"I'll do it," said Wagon, barely audible.

"Do what?"

"Get the spider webs out from under the car."

"Why would you even say that?" asked Jaunty. "You're the person least equipped to do it."

"Somebody has to do it, or I'm going to die. And since I'm already covered in spider bites, it might as well be me." It took Wagon quite a while to finish this sentence, but Jaunty didn't want to express impatience with somebody who might not speak many more sentences.

"No," said Jaunty. "That's ridiculous."

"More ridiculous than one of you also getting swarmed? I refuse to just sit here and die, and I refuse to let any of you get killed on my behalf, so it needs to be me."

"You can barely move!"

"All I need to do is flop my arms around."

"No."

Wagon reached for the door handle. Jaunty grabbed his arm to stop him. Wagon leaned down and bit Jaunty's hand. Jaunty let go, and then wondered in horror if Wagon's saliva contained spider venom, then wondered if it made him a bad person that he was worried about the venom, then decided that it was a completely reasonable thing to worry about, and then realized that Wagon had opened the door and was trying to get out of the car.

Spiders were already crawling inside.

Jaunty supposed he couldn't blame Wagon for having gone insane—he too would probably be making poor decisions if he was dying from countless spider bites—but this was really inconvenient.

Wagon toppled out of the car, striking the pavement. Jaunty scooted across the seat toward the open door. He felt like he should say "Noooooo!" but was too shocked to speak. Bluehead said it for him.

Spiders were already crawling all over Wagon.

He twisted himself around so that his legs were underneath the car, apparently trying to clear out the webs that had gathered under there. He gazed up at Jaunty as if suddenly realizing that he'd doomed himself.

"Close the door!" Wagon shouted.

"But you—!"

"I'm sacrificing myself, dummy! Close the effing door!"

Jaunty closed the door and choked back a sob. The clowns just sat there, not sure what to do next. It seemed very wrong not to help their friend, but what were they supposed to do?

A few moments later, Jaunty looked out the window. Wagon was completely covered with spiders and no longer moving.

"I hate to be cold-hearted," said Jaunty, "but if he gave his life for us, we should probably drive away before the spiders make more webs."

"But we'll run over him," said Bluehead.

Jaunty considered that. "I think he'd be okay with that."

Bluehead started the engine. The car rolled over Wagon as if going over a very crunchy speed bump. Jaunty wished he'd thought to have everybody make enough noise to muffle that sound.

Wagon had done it, though. The car was temporarily drivable again.

They drove down the street, everybody lost in their own haunted thoughts.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mayor Lester Fawn didn't have to practice his serious and concerned facial expressions—he'd never felt more serious or concerned.

"I want every single person in Mount Tulip brought to safety," he told the room of advisers. "Every single one. I don't care what kind of economic damage it wreaks upon our town. Close the haunted house. I know tourists have been looking forward to going through the haunted house all year, and I know that the financial impact will be devastating, but prosperity is not worth the loss of even one precious human life. Is that understood?"

"They evacuated and closed the haunted house as soon as the spiders got inside," said a man in a dark blue suit. "There were casualties, including the owner, but I assure you, the Mountain of Terror is not open for business right now."

"Good. Like I said, it's terrible for our community. Lots of lost income. Lots of disappointed people. Residents will be going bankrupt over this, believe me. But that's all irrelevant when you compare it to the precious nature of human life."

"I agree, sir."

"What about the military? Are they here yet?"

"They're on the way."

"If they have to drop a bomb on this town to eradicate the spider menace once and for all, you should know that I'm going to sign off on it. I hope it doesn't come to that. But wiping one small town completely off the map is worth the sacrifice if it prevents a worldwide giant spider infestation."

"They're unlikely to nuke the town, sir."

"I didn't say nuke," said Mayor Fawn. "That would create its own set of problems. I saw one of the spider victims about five minutes before I got here, and it's an image I won't ever erase from my mind, but it doesn't compare to radiation poisoning. Fingernails falling out. I meant a smaller bomb."

"Atomic bomb?"

"No, smaller."

"I'm not an expert on bomb sizes, sir," admitted the man in the dark blue suit. Mayor Fawn knew he should know the guy's name, considering how closely they worked together, and it would be incredibly awkward if he had to ask. He kept trying to catch a glimpse of his badge but couldn't quite make it happen.

"Me either," said Mayor Fawn. "The military won't ask for my recommendation anyway, so I guess it's irrelevant. What else are we doing to keep this from becoming apocalyptic?"

"We have lots of flamethrowers currently in use. The problem is that the spiders don't die right away, so you end up with burning spiders running around, which is an issue."

"Jesus Christ, they're impervious to fire?"

"No, no, it just takes a minute. But it's a very frightening minute."

"What about pesticides?"

"That's one of our top priorities. Unfortunately, it's not like crop duster planes are loaded up with Raid and ready to go. They're working as quickly as they can."

"Well, tell them to work faster."

"Yes, sir."

"Actually, no, don't. They might overlook an important detail. We won't want that. Let them work at their own pace. How is the evacuation going?"

"As far as we know, it's mostly complete. Presumably there are people who purposely didn't leave or are trapped in their homes, so attempts are underway to find and rescue them."

Mayor Fawn nodded. "Very good, very good. This is a pretty positive update, all things considered. Does anybody know where the hell the spiders came from?"

"Yes, sir. A cave. The entrance was blown open by the new property owner, and a massive number of spiders came out. If they'd said something sooner, we could have blocked the entrance again, but they were killed by the spiders."

"The entrance is sealed now, right?"

"Yes, sir. But we think the spiders had all emerged by then."

"That's disappointing. Would've been nice to know that we stopped some of them."

"I agree, sir."

"How did the spiders get in the cave?"

"Unknown, sir. There's a theory that over a hundred years ago a small island was populated by oversized arachnids, and that a ship that stopped there was overrun by the creatures, which were then transported to the United States, where they made their way into an underground cave system to reproduce into vast numbers. But it's just a theory."

"Sounds credible. Keep up the good work."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

None of the clowns spoke as they continued driving down the web-covered street. It was impossible for them to maintain upbeat attitudes when two of their number had died horrible deaths. Poor Guffaw. Poor Wagon. Who was next?

Jaunty forced himself to stop thinking that way. Nobody was next. Everybody else was going to survive this experience. From this moment forward, no more dead clowns!

He had to keep driving through webs that stretched from one side of the road to the other. This led to giant spiders crawling over the front hood and windshield of the car. They didn't try to clear off the entire automobile each time they got the webs off the tires, so there were now at least a dozen spiders on the vehicle.

Jaunty had almost suggested that everybody share their fondest memory of Wagon, then decided against the idea.

They cleared the webs away from the tires and quickly got back inside. The car drove about ten more feet and then stopped.

"Fudge," said Jaunty and Reginald, at the exact same time. Under other circumstances they would've joked about this synchronicity, but in their current predicament it didn't seem appropriate.

They'd have to clean the underside of the car again. This was an unappealing task, since it was what caused Wagon's death. If they lost somebody every time they cleared the webs out from underneath the vehicle, they'd be down to a Final Clown before they knew it.

"Are there any volunteers?" asked Jaunty.

There were no volunteers.

"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it," said Reginald. "And I've learned a lot recently. Sacrifice is a noble thing, but you have to weigh the return on investment."

"Right," said Bluehead. "Wagon died for us, and all he did was get us an extra couple of blocks further. Now we're in the exact same predicament. I love you all dearly, but if I die today I want it to be to save humanity or something, not just to get you guys a little closer to the edge of town."

"I completely understand," said Jaunty. "If we drew straws again and I lost, I'd be pretty upset about being sentenced to death. So I guess our plan is to just hang out in the car and wait to be rescued, right?"

"That sounds reasonable," said Reginald.

"I wish we'd thought of that before Wagon died. We could've waited just as easily in the haunted house parking lot. This new plan makes his death even more senseless."

Everybody spent a few moments being sad.

"What happens when we start to go stir crazy?" asked Bluehead.

"We'll worry about that when it happens," said Jaunty.

"I'm just saying, we're sitting in a car coping with intense grief and everything around us is covered by spider webs. Sanity is going to start slipping. We should work out a plan of action before we start gnawing on each other."

"I thought you said you were forty-eight hours away from thinking about cannibalism."

"Well, some time has passed since then."

"Not forty-eight hours."

"I didn't mean that we'd start gnawing on each other for food. That's what makes it even more insane—we'd be gnawing with no purpose."

"I assure you, my teeth will stay covered by my lips," said Reginald.

"Seriously, you people are mentally ill," said Depravo. "Who the hell has conversations like this? When you hear yourselves talking, do you think that normal sentences are coming out of your mouth? Is it just that you don't have human interactions outside of your own little group?"

"It's probably that last one," said Jaunty.

"I'd like everybody to shut up for a while, or I'm going to be the one going insane," said Depravo. "I'm scared and my makeup itches and I can't listen to you guys anymore."

"You're a guest in our car," said Jaunty. "We could ask you to leave."

"Ask away! A few more minutes stuck in here and I'll be ready to feed myself to the spiders! You guys are like listening to the worst karaoke imaginable, which is all karaoke!"

"No more talk of feeding ourselves to spiders," said Reginald. "Depravo is rude but he's right. We should all stop talking for a while, if only to preserve oxygen."

 "We can just crack the windows if we need oxygen," said Jaunty. "The spiders are too big to get through a small crack. That's what makes them so scary."

"I know that. I was trying to accommodate our guest."

"I agree with Depravo," said Bluehead. "Not the rude stuff he said about our speech patterns, but that we should sit here silently for a while. It'll relax us, and we can visualize being rescued. Everybody picture a helicopter swooping in and lowering a ladder to us. The color of the helicopter doesn't matter. Don't close your eyes, though—we don't want to fall asleep again."

Jaunty didn't much want to be left alone with his thoughts, which were primarily focused on spiders ripping away generous strips of his bloody flesh, but he didn't want to generate more conflict in these close quarters. So they all sat quietly. Jaunty hoped that Reginald, Bluehead, and Depravo were having better thoughts than him.

A spider crawled across the windshield and stopped right in front of him. The spider couldn't break through glass, as far as they knew, but Jaunty prayed it would leave. It was creeping him out. He couldn't see its many eyes, but he couldn't shake the feeling that they were staring right at him, letting Jaunty know that he would be its next victim.

He resisted the urge to try to brush it away through the glass.

"Anybody else hear that?" Bluehead asked.

Jaunty listened closely. Yes. Sounded like a car engine.

Getting closer.

Could they be saved?

It was unlikely that this car would have room for four more people, but maybe it was a military truck, out to collect survivors. If not...well, even if only one of them made it to safety, that person could let everybody know that there were clowns in need of rescue.

The vehicle, which had a noisy engine, was definitely getting closer. It was approaching from ahead of them.

If it was a truck, maybe the webs weren't sticking to the underside. The four of them might be able to hop into the back and speed away to freedom.

One problem Jaunty could foresee, and it could be a pretty big deal, was that the many webs stretching across the street were hiding what lay ahead. They'd driven through the webs behind them, but there were plenty of webs ahead, and a vehicle controlled by a nervous driver might not be completely focused on the possibility of a stopped car in the road.

With all of the webs on the road, Jaunty was not one hundred percent certain that the clown car was completely in the right lane.

So while he wanted to adhere to his natural optimism, he had to consider the possibility that the oncoming vehicle might plow into their car. Since they couldn't safely exit the vehicle, there wasn't much he could do except honk the horn and flash the headlights over and over.

Jaunty could see the other vehicle's headlights through the webs.

It appeared to be coming straight at them.

Then it swerved away.

Then it swerved back.

Jaunty blasted the horn. At least this vehicle couldn't box them in like the other one had in the parking lot, but a collision would be far worse.

"Don't hit us!" he shouted, while continuing to blast the horn. The oncoming vehicle would not be able to hear his voice even if he weren't honking, so it was not a productive thing to shout, and if he had the opportunity to reflect upon it later he'd feel most sheepish indeed, but right now he was less concerned about feeling silly than about this vehicle smashing into them.

The brakes squealed.

The vehicle, a pickup truck, tore through a web. It was in their lane.

Jaunty braced himself for impact.

The truck slid forward. Mere feet separated them, then inches, then a fraction of an inch, and then—

Impact.

But gentle impact. The truck tapped into the clown car with a soft thud.

For a moment, the occupants of the two vehicles just stared at each other through their windshields—or, what little remained of the truck's windshield. Jaunty felt that the past few hours had been very unpleasant for the clowns, but a quick glimpse showed that things had not been great for the man and woman in the truck, either. They appeared to be middle-aged, though the blood smeared on their faces made it difficult to say for certain. The hood of the truck was crumpled up as if it had been in a head-on collision.

The man and woman got out of the truck. This made Jaunty suddenly nervous, as if they posed a threat, even though the idea of running into a pair of married serial killers right now would be an absurd twist even by the standards of the day's events.

The man's thick beard, rugged appearance, and plaid shirt made him look like a lumberjack. Provided he wasn't a maniacal killer, this was nice to see—they could use somebody with strong chopping skills. Though as he exited the truck, Jaunty noticed that he was missing his left arm just above the elbow. The stump was wrapped in a bloody cloth.

The woman looked like a country music singer, though her hat and cleavage were covered in blood. She appeared to have all of her appendages.

They rushed over to the driver's side of the car. Jaunty rolled down his window.

"Can we get a ride with you?" the woman desperately asked. "Our windows are shattered and the spiders keep getting in whenever we drive through a web!"

Even without an arm, the lumberjack was going to take up a lot of room in the car. It was going to be extremely difficult to fit four people into the backseat. Jaunty didn't want to be a self-centered piece of garbage, but he didn't see how they could accommodate this request.

Then it occurred to him that the couple probably assumed that the clown car was mobile. They were unlikely to want to just wait out the spider-ocalypse (a term Jaunty just thought of, that he hoped he got to say out loud before somebody else thought of it) in a tiny car stuck in the middle of the road. Especially since blood was actively dripping from the cloth wrapped around the man's stump.

"Our car doesn't work," said Jaunty. "It's too clogged up with webs."

"Oh," said the woman. "That won't help, since my husband is bleeding to death."

"My tourniquet is fine," said the man.

"It's not fine. It's leaking."

The man lifted what remained of his arm. "This is a solid tourniquet. About as good as you can get with a shirt and two sticks."

"Don't wave your stump at them."

"I'm sure they've seen worse tonight."

"We have," said Jaunty.

"See?"

"I have to apologize for my husband," said the woman. "He's unfocused from the loss of blood. I can't blame him. I wouldn't be thinking straight if I lost most of my arm."

"The spiders didn't eat it, did they?" asked Jaunty. If these spiders had evolved to the point where they could bite people's arms off, he was done.

"No, no, it got crushed when we crashed the truck," said the man. "It was really awful. I had to—"

"They don't want the details," said the woman.

"Have you seen that movie where Seth Rogen is that mountain climber who gets his arm crushed by a boulder?"

"You mean James Franco."

"Right. James Franco. He's done a lot of movies with Seth Rogen, though. He had to cut his own arm off to get free. That's pretty much what happened except we had better equipment and my wife cut off my arm while I was unconscious. Did the tourniquet myself, though."

"Impressive," said Jaunty. "I feel like you should get out of the road."

The man nodded. "You're damned right we should. Anyway, not to be defeatist, but you're all probably going to die in that car if you're just sitting there waiting to be rescued. You're welcome to ride in the back of our truck. Some spiders will get in, obviously, but at least you'd be moving toward safety."

"I think that's a great idea," said Jaunty. He glanced around at the other clowns. "Any objections?"

"No," said Reginald.

"Nope," said Bluehead.

"Fuck no," said Depravo.

Jaunty waited for the other clowns to speak up, until he remembered that Guffaw and Wagon were dead. He spent two seconds being incredibly depressed, then shook it off. "We'd love to come with you," he said. "Thank you!"

The clowns got out of the car. They quickly climbed into the back of the truck, where at least six spiders were waiting. They crushed them all with their feet while the man and woman got into their truck and drove off. Jaunty was surprised that the one-armed man drove instead of the two-armed woman, but he didn't want to say anything and make them think he was prejudiced against single-armed individuals.

"This is much better," said Reginald. "For the first time in a while, I don't feel like we're all going to die grisly deaths. The possibility still exists; I just don't think it's inevitable."

This was a soothing thought.

As they rode through the town, Jaunty kept hoping that the webs would become less prevalent, that maybe they'd started off in the worst spot and things would improve as they made their way out of town. But this was not the case. The web world continued. Based on his prior experience unwrapping the cocoons, Jaunty knew it was not worth letting the man bleed to death to try to save them.

They passed a few cars with cocooned people inside.

"It's nice that they're letting us ride in their truck even though we're made up like scary clowns," said Bluehead. "Most people would've screamed and sped off."

"Should we be concerned about their lack of fear?" asked Jaunty. "What if they're taking us someplace sinister?"

"The Mountain of Terror is a nationally famous haunted attraction," said Depravo. "They know you're actors."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense," said Jaunty. "Now I feel bad for thinking they may have had evil motives."

"Don't let me stop you from feeling bad," said Depravo.

They continued to ride. Jaunty prayed that they would not encounter anybody in need of rescue. If they found an abandoned baby, he'd have to try and save it, even if it meant that the truck drove off without him.

"I feel like we're drowning in negativity," said Bluehead. "What if we all go around and say something good about spiders? Not the spiders around here, of course. I mean spiders in general. They're helpful to the environment and it's not fair to judge all of them for the sins of their brothers."

"Fuck spiders," said Depravo.

"We lost our job because of bad clowns," said Bluehead. "It's unfair to blame us for under-the-bed clowns just like it's unfair to blame all spiders for today's death count. We're likely to come out of this nightmare with an intense hatred of spiders, so why not start to try to work through it now? What else have we got to do?"

"Stay alert for spiders trying to kill us," answered Reginald.

"We can stay alert for these spiders, while acknowledging the good that other spiders bring to the world."

"Fuck spiders," said Depravo.

"Nobody asked for your opinion," Bluehead told him. "Unless you're saying that spiders are excellent lovemaking partners, and I completely disagree with that, your comments aren't in the spirit of this discussion."

"I plan to have a hatred and fear of spiders for the rest of my life," said Reginald. "I won't even call it an irrational hatred or fear. I will be perfectly okay with it. Not one day will go by where I try to rid myself of it. Twenty-four hours ago I was no fan of spiders, and now I consider them my least favorite of all living creatures, ranking below great white sharks, skunks, and manatees. I agree with Depravo: fudge spiders."

"Our future feelings about spiders aren't important," said Jaunty. "What's important is that right now we want to kill as many of them as possible."

The truck drove through a particularly large web, hopefully killing a few spiders.

The man began to shriek. In the rearview mirror, Jaunty could see that a spider was now crawling on his face.

As he flailed around in panic, Jaunty could not see the man's foot, but the sudden acceleration of the truck implied that it was pressed tightly against the gas pedal. As the truck moved faster and faster, and then took a sudden change of direction that was aimed less at the street ahead and more at a brick wall, Jaunty grew concerned.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Look out!" Jaunty shouted. He didn't really expect the man to heed his warning while he had a giant spider covering his face, but it would've been lazy to say nothing at all.

The woman pulled the spider from her husband's face and flung it out the windshield. The unfortunate spider was then between the truck and the brick wall at the moment of impact and was splattered beyond recognition.

Jaunty, Reginald, Bluehead, and Depravo, who were not wearing seat belts because the back of the truck was not equipped with them, were all thrown forward. They were all good at engaging in slapstick pratfalls without getting injured, though they'd never practiced these skills during a high-speed collision.

They all smashed into each other. Hard.

After a few moments, Jaunty lifted his head. His neck did not appear to be shattered, which was a relief. "Is everybody okay?" he asked.

"No," said Reginald.

"No," said Bluehead.

"No," said Depravo.

None of them had their vocal cords crushed, at least. The clowns got up. There were bumps and bruises galore, but nobody seemed to have any broken bones or arterial spurting.

The man and woman up front...did not look good.

The front of the truck had been crushed like a beer can on the forehead of a drunken frat boy. The steering wheel was imbedded so deeply into the man's chest that the quality of his arm tourniquet was now irrelevant. The woman turned her head, but it wasn't to look back at the clowns, it was because a large jagged piece of metal had sliced through most of her neck. Her head flopped to the side, not quite falling off, though it would get there if left unattended. Jaunty gasped with horror, slapped his hand over his mouth, and tried not to vomit.

Bluehead and Depravo also tried, unsuccessfully.

They were now much worse off than before, when they'd been in a completely enclosed vehicle and hadn't seen a woman's head almost come off. They had no choice but to abandon the truck and hope there weren't as many spiders around here. Though just a quick glance around the area made it clear that there were plenty of spiders around.

The clowns leapt out of the back of the truck. Nobody tried to suggest that it might still be possible to save the man and woman—their mutilation was too extreme for even the most optimistic of minds to think it was reversible.

Jaunty wondered where they were. And when he saw what the brick wall was in front of, his heart didn't exactly soar, but he suddenly could look ahead to a time when he could turn his frown upside-down. He frantically pointed. "A swimming pool! We're outside of a swimming pool!"

"So?" asked Depravo. "You wanna do some laps?"

"We can all swim! We'll be safe in the water!"

The clowns exchanged glances with each other. When they'd finished exchanging those glances, they all seemed to realize that this might be their salvation. They opened the gate and hurried toward the brightly lit swimming pool area, which had nary a corpse floating in it. There were webs and spiders all over the place, but the pool itself was a kidney shaped blue chlorine-filled sanctuary!

They all removed their clown shoes, then jumped in and swam to the middle, where the water was deep but not over their heads.

"We're saved!" said Jaunty. "Spiders can't swim, so all we have to do is wait here for help to arrive."

"Are you sure spiders can't swim?" asked Bluehead.

"I've never heard of it."

"I think there are some that can walk on the water, like Jesus spiders."

"Yes," said Reginald, "but it's because they're light and their legs don't break the surface tension of the water. Big spiders like these wouldn't be able to do that."

"Okay, good," said Bluehead. "I still think I read something about swimming spiders, but it would've been a long time ago and I've read a lot of things that I misremember or purposely misinterpret."

"If spiders could swim, there'd be a bunch of them in the pool already," said Jaunty, though as he said it he wasn't sure that line of logic held up.

"They wouldn't have had a reason to go in the pool before. Now they would," said Depravo, nailing the possible logic lapse in Jaunty's previous statement.

"I'm sure the spiders won't be able to come after us," said Jaunty. "Swimming spiders would be so scary that there's no way they'd be allowed to exist."

The clowns continued to stand in the pool. The water was starting to acquire a mild red tint from the injuries they'd acquired in the crash, though at least it wasn't a thick cloud of shark-attracting blood. Not that Jaunty thought there was a shark in the pool. That would be ridiculous.

Spider-Shark...duuunnn-dun, duuuunnn-dun...

"I can't swim," said Depravo.

"You can't?" Jaunty asked.

Depravo shook his head. "I never learned. Nobody ever made me."

"Well, fortunately we can just stand here. You don't have to tread water or anything."

"I know. I'm very happy about that. I just wanted to mention it in case it becomes necessary for us to swim to the deep end for some reason."

"Good to know," said Jaunty. "Thank you for being proactive. That's the clown way."

"Lots of spiders around the pool," said Bluehead.

"Yes, there sure are," said Jaunty. "But they can't get at us."

"Is it my imagination or are they looking at us?"

"It's your imagination. They have tiny eyes without pupils and there's no way you can tell where they're looking."

"It seems like they're gathering around the edge of the pool."

"Yes, no argument there. The spiders are definitely gathering around the edge of the pool. Can't delude ourselves into thinking that's not the case. But it doesn't matter. They can pile themselves up twenty feet high around the pool and it doesn't matter. We're safe."

"I don't feel safe," said Reginald.

"Your feelings are wrong. We're completely safe. The spiders can't touch us. We can even taunt them if we want."

"I'm not taunting the deadly spiders," said Reginald.

"I'm not saying that we should taunt them. That's how karma gets you. I'm just saying that we could taunt them, because they no longer pose a threat. The only way they can get us is if nobody comes to rescue us for so long that we can't stop ourselves from drinking pool water and get poisoned."

"Or we fall asleep and drown," said Reginald.

"No, because we'd sleep in shifts and have the awake clowns hold up the sleeping ones."

"That didn't work in the parking lot."

"We're safe now," said Jaunty. "Can't we just enjoy it?"

"The woman's head was almost completely detached from her body. I won't be able to enjoy anything for quite some time. A bag full of kazoos could fall from the sky and I'd still be haunted by all of the blood and her dead eyes."

"I see your point."

The clowns continued to stand in the pool.

"At least restroom facilities are no longer an issue," said Depravo.

Jaunty didn't know whether to scold him for being disgusting, or praise him for being practical. He decided to say nothing. Instead, he kept his attention on the huge number of spiders that were crawling toward the edge of the pool.

"I don't like that one in the corner," said Bluehead.

"The one that's dipping its legs into the water?" asked Reginald.

"That's the one."

"Let it crawl into the pool," said Jaunty. "We can all laugh at it while it drowns. Stupid spider, not understanding its own limitations. Ha!"

The spider didn't crawl into the pool. It leapt into it.

"That's right! Drown, you dork! Become a cautionary tale!"

The spider dipped below the surface, then bobbed back up. It began to swim toward them.

"Hmmm," said Jaunty.

He waited for the spider to succumb to nature's plan and go underneath the surface again. It didn't. It kept swimming toward them.

Another spider leapt into the pool. And then another.

"Nope," said Jaunty. "Nope, nope, nope! I'm not okay with this!"

Now dozens of spiders were leaping into the pool. Jaunty had one flash of optimism—unlike gremlins, they weren't multiplying when wet—but it was quickly replaced by raw terror.

Spiders were swimming toward them from all sides.

"Everybody out of the pool!" Bluehead screamed, while the other clowns screamed without using words. As Jaunty splashed through the spider-laden water, he realized that everybody was moving in a different direction. This didn't seem like the best strategy, but there was no time to coordinate their escape efforts now, so he focused on his own desire not to be killed by aqua-spiders.

There were too many of them. If he walked to the edge of the pool he'd have spiders all over his chest. He'd have to swim underwater and find a relatively spider-free spot to emerge.

He took a deep breath and dunked his head beneath the water. He opened his eyes, which immediately burned from the chlorine, and did a breaststroke toward the pool wall. There were countless spiders floating above him, but at least they didn't seem to be able to dive. Eerie spider shadows covered the bottom of the pool.

He looked around. No clear spots. He kept swimming.

Jaunty let out an underwater yelp as a spider dropped directly in front of him. The spider continued to plummet, passing harmlessly past him on its way to the bottom. Sadly, the other spiders on the surface of the pool seemed to be fine.

He'd wasted most of his lung capacity on the yelp, so Jaunty had to take a breath quickly. With his burning eyes he looked around for the spot with the fewest spiders, swum over there, and poked his head out of the water.

A spider immediately crawled on top of his head. Jaunty sucked in a deep breath then ducked his head back underwater before the spider could sink its fangs into him.

He looked around the pool. He could see three other thrashing clown bodies—none of his friends had escaped yet.

He swam back to the center, where there were the fewest spiders, and popped up so that he could ascertain where the safest spot was to climb out of the pool. They all looked pretty terrible, but if he swam straight ahead it seemed slightly less terrible than his other options. He took another deep breath.

"Help! Help!"

It was Depravo. He was in the deep end, arms flailing. Jaunty wanted to ask why he'd gone into the deep end, but the answer was probably that as an inexperienced swimmer he hadn't known which direction the deep end was in, and most likely instead of answering the question he'd simply shout "Help! Help!" again.

Bluehead was their best swimmer, and Reginald was the tallest, but Jaunty was the closest, so the task of saving Depravo from drowning fell to him.

He swam underwater until he reached Depravo. He lifted his head out of the water and brushed a spider off his chin. Then he brushed a spider off Depravo's chin.

"Grab a hold of me," he said. "Don't let go."

Depravo wrapped both of his arms around Jaunty's torso and squeezed way too tight. Not ideal, but they didn't have far to swim. Jaunty ducked back below the surface and began to swim to the other side of the pool. He probably should have told Depravo to take a deep breath first, but he'd just hope that the instruction was understood.

They both sunk to the bottom.

He wanted to inform Depravo that this wasn't working, that maybe they should settle for holding hands, but there was no way to verbally convey this message underwater. When he tried to gesture he realized that he didn't know the proper gestures for "Let me go or we'll both drown." And Depravo most likely had his eyes squeezed shut anyway.

No way was it going to end like this. If Jaunty died tonight, it was going to be from spider venom, not drowning. He tried to pry Depravo's arms from his body, but his former manager had a death grip on him. So he slammed his head backwards, hitting Depravo in the face. A cloud of blood suddenly appeared and the grip loosened.

He grabbed Depravo by the wrist and pulled him along the bottom of the pool.

They reached a shallower part and stood up, surrounded by spiders. Depravo uttered obscenity after obscenity as blood trickled from his nostrils.

Jaunty violently splashed at the water in front of him.

It was a reaction borne of sheer panic, and he was surprised to discover that it worked. The spiders were decent swimmers, but they couldn't navigate makeshift rapids. He splashed and splashed as hard as he could. The spiders couldn't reach him. Well, except the two that were already on him. He ducked under the water to get rid of them, then stood back up and resumed splashing.

Depravo stopped cursing and started splashing.

Reginald and Bluehead had already figured this out. They were on opposite sides of the pool, splashing the spiders away. This wasn't a long-term solution, since more spiders continued to leap into the pool, but it was keeping all of the clowns alive for now.

Reginald was also pushing water over the edge of the pool onto the spiders that were gathered there, which wasn't sweeping them away as if they'd been struck by a tidal wave, but was at least giving him a small area to climb out of the water.

That seemed like a smart technique. Jaunty and Depravo splashed their way to the edge, then vigorously tried to wash away the spiders that were by the side. They climbed out of the pool. There were spiders everywhere—their clown shoes were covered with them, and would have to be abandoned.

The four clowns ran for the pool exit, crushing spiders with their wet-socked feet as they went.

As they returned to the street, Jaunty felt a crushing sense of disappointment. He'd thought they were safe, but now they were carless, shoeless, and wet.

The new plan seemed to be: run.

They ran down the street, their socks squishing with each step, and webs sticking to their feet.

A long web stretched from an abandoned car to the side of a building, and Jaunty picked up his pace, since he couldn't leap over it or crawl underneath it. He ran into the web, expecting it to snap like the tape at the finish line of a race, but apparently he was nowhere near as strong as a motor vehicle.

The web did not break.

He realized to his horror that he was very much stuck.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jaunty tried to tug free. It didn't work.

He tried to twist his way out of the web, which was precisely the wrong approach and got him even more stuck.

Several spiders, alerted to the disturbance of a trapped clown twisting around in the web, crawled toward him. Jaunty wasn't going to panic quite yet. His friends would help him. They wouldn't let him get swarmed.

Reginald took one of his hands, Depravo (whose nose was still bleeding) took the other, and they both pulled. Jaunty moved forward but didn't come free of the web. Bluehead knocked the spiders off before they could reach Jaunty and kicked them away.

Jaunty wondered what would happen if they let go of him. Would he shoot backwards like a slingshot? Probably not—too slapsticky.

"I think he's coming loose," said Reginald. "Bluehead, take one of his legs."

"Which one?"

"Doesn't matter."

Bluehead grabbed his left leg. Reginald, Depravo, and Bluehead pulled with all of their might (at least Jaunty assumed it was with all of their might; he wasn't currently inhabiting their bodies), stretching the web further and further until he finally ripped free. The four clowns tumbled onto the sidewalk, acquiring more scrapes and bruises. Depravo bashed his face against the cement and sat up, covered with webs and additional blood.

"Thank you," Jaunty told them. He didn't expect Depravo and him to become best friends forever, but the fact that they'd saved each other's lives would hopefully eliminate the awkwardness of Jaunty's firing.

The clowns got up. This time they took the long way around the web.

As they gazed down the street, there were spiders everywhere. Jaunty couldn't even pretend to guess how many. Way more than a thousand. Enough that, left on their own, they would probably run out of food sources and die off, though that wouldn't happen quickly enough for it to be a feasible survival plan for the clowns.

"What about a fire hydrant?" Jaunty asked. "We open up a fire hydrant and flood the street!"

Reginald shook his head. "I don't have a huge pentagonal hydrant opening tool handy. Do you?"

"No," Jaunty admitted.

"It won't work, then. Unless you've acquired superhuman strength and can just kick one open. Have you acquired superhuman strength?"

"You don't have to be sarcastic."

"I'm never sarcastic."

"I know that none of you probably care about this right now," said Bluehead, "but I wanted to point out that our makeup has held up amazingly well for all of the spider-fighting and swimming we've been doing. You all still look like scary clowns. I'm saying this out loud so that we remember to go back to that brand later."

"Noted," said Reginald.

"Holy shit!" said Depravo, pointing at the sky. The way things were going, Jaunty assumed that he was pointing out a thousand more spiders falling from the heavens, but no, it looked very much like a helicopter off in the distance! Helicopters could transport people out of spider-ravaged towns to safety!

Reginald and Bluehead let out a simultaneous "Holy cow!" at the sight. The four clowns began to jump into the air and wave to attract the helicopter's attention, while being careful to monitor their immediate surroundings and not get attacked by spiders.

"Here! Over here!" Jaunty shouted. He knew the pilot couldn't hear him—the helicopter was far away and those things were very loud—but he shouted anyway. The other clowns joined in.

"Does anybody have a flare?" Bluehead asked. She had to know, cognitively, that nobody had a flare in their pockets, and if they did it would've been ruined from being submerged in the pool, but Jaunty didn't blame her for asking.

"Let's make a human pyramid!" said Jaunty. "Nobody can ignore a human pyramid!"

"We only have four people," said Reginald.

"So?"

"You can't make a pyramid out of four people. That's not how pyramids work."

"Depravo probably doesn't know how to make a human pyramid anyway. If we leave him out of it, we can make a three-person pyramid, easy! You, me, then Bluehead on top!"

"I know how to make a human pyramid," said Depravo, "but if I were a helicopter pilot and I saw clowns making a human pyramid in the middle of this chaos, I'd assume they were mentally ill and fly someplace else."

"I can't argue his point," said Reginald.

"Fine," said Jaunty. He almost followed that with "Whatever," but decided that would be childish, though less childish than "Whatevah!" "So what's your brilliant idea?"

"I don't have one," Reginald admitted. "I hoped somebody had a flare."

They resumed jumping and shouting. It looked to Jaunty like the helicopter was flying further away from them rather than getting closer, but he didn't want to say anything. They couldn't stand here jumping and shouting much longer—there were too many spiders around.

The helicopter was definitely not on its way to pick them up. They all seemed to realize this at once. The jumping and shouting ceased.

"Dammit," said Depravo, wiping away some blood from underneath his nose.

"Maybe we scared it off by being too high energy," said Bluehead.

"Or they just don't like clowns," said Reginald. "Many people don't. If people liked clowns, we'd still be performing family friendly shows and we wouldn't be here surrounded by bugs."

"The helicopter was too far away to see that we were clowns or to gauge our energy level," said Jaunty. "They just didn't see us, that's all. Or they did see us, but they also saw a larger group of people to save. Either way, I'm sure it was nothing personal, and we should really keep moving."

They hurried down the street, kicking spiders out of the way as they went. Jaunty thought he should be less frightened of the giant spiders by now, since he'd spent so much time around them, but that wasn't the case.

Depravo suddenly cried out and disappeared, as if he'd fallen into an open manhole.

The other clowns stopped running. Depravo had indeed fallen into an open manhole, presumably one that had been covered by webs. They must not have been as strong as the web that they just rescued Jaunty from, or maybe they weren't adhered as well to the edges of the manhole, or maybe Depravo was heavier than he looked. It was also unclear why there'd be an open manhole, unless somebody had opened it to escape from the spiders.

"Are you okay down there?" asked Jaunty, when Depravo briefly stopped screaming in pain.

"I think I broke my leg!"

So no, he was not okay. Depravo was Jaunty's least favorite member of the group by far, but he certainly wasn't going to let him perish down there, and he knew Reginald and Bluehead would agree. Without hesitation, Jaunty climbed down the ladder.

Depravo lay on the cement. His leg wasn't bent backwards in half or anything like that, so perhaps it wasn't actually broken. He'd taken out his cell phone and was using the flashlight feature to illuminate his surroundings. There were fewer spiders down here than up above, which was nice, but there were also sewer rats, which was less nice.

Bluehead climbed down the ladder.

"There are rats down here," said Jaunty.

Bluehead climbed back up the ladder.

As Reginald descended the ladder, Jaunty stomped on the four or five spiders that were crawling toward Depravo. The rats were keeping their distance, but Jaunty could see their beady glowing eyes all over.

Jaunty put his hands underneath Depravo's shoulders. "Here, I'm gonna help you up," he said. "Say a bad word if it hurts too much."

"Fuck!" said Depravo. "I really think I broke something."

"We can't just leave you down here," said Jaunty. "The rats will skeletonize you."

"I know, I know," said Depravo. Jaunty and Reginald pulled him up to a standing position. He screamed and dropped his phone, casting them into almost complete darkness.

Jaunty crouched down and felt around for the phone. His hand touched a spider, and he immediately recoiled. He'd leave the phone where it was.

"I'm trying to keep the spiders off the ladder!" Bluehead called down to them. "But there are too many of them and some are getting on the ladder and if I knock them off they'll fall down on you!"

Jaunty thanked her for the update.

He couldn't hear the spiders, but he could definitely hear the rats, squeaking and scurrying around in their greasy fur. He wished he had the low moral character to just say, "Sorry, Depravo, gotta goooooo!" but that wasn't going to happen. Sure, he'd leave Depravo behind if it became clear that he'd been pumped too full of spider venom or rat rabies to survive, but he was going to do his best to ensure that Depravo's bloodstream remained uncontaminated.

Something crawled over his foot. He kicked it out of the way. Spiders on his feet were even worse than cold wet socks.

"Is there any way you can climb the ladder?" Jaunty asked.

"I'll try."

"I'll climb up to the top, then Bluehead can hold my legs while I reach down to help pull you up," Reginald told Depravo. "If I get swarmed by too many spiders she may have to let me go, and then I'll fall on top of you and break more of your bones, but I can't think of a better plan right now."

"Let's do it," said Depravo.

Jaunty could barely see Reginald as he climbed back up the ladder. He heard a high-pitched squeal behind him, which he assumed was a rat being attacked by a spider. The squealing and thrashing continued for several seconds. It sounded like the spider won.

"All right, take my hands," said Reginald, leaning down into the manhole.

Depravo took Reginald's hands. Then he flinched and cried out.

"Sorry!" Bluehead called down. "I had to knock a spider off the edge! I'll have to knock off more of them so brace yourself!"

Jaunty placed his hands firmly on Depravo's buttocks and pushed him up as Reginald pulled. A falling spider hit Jaunty right in the face and bounced off.

"I'm losing you!" said Reginald.

Depravo braced his injured foot against one of the ladder rungs as everybody caught their breath. Then they resumed the process, and a moment later Depravo was out of the manhole.

Jaunty began to ascend the ladder. A spider bounced off his forehead. Another spider landed on his shoulder but didn't bounce off. He let go of the ladder with his right hand to brush it off, just as a spider landed on his left hand. Jaunty released the ladder with his left hand, meaning he had zero hands on the ladder. He fell backwards.

He was skilled at taking a fall and landed without harming himself. But his right hand came down on a rat, smashing it but not killing it. The mangled creature writhed underneath his gloved hand and he quickly scooted away, accidentally hitting another rat with his left hand.

Jaunty heard more squeaks and thrashing, as if multiple rats were now being attacked by multiple spiders. Whimpering without shame, he crawled back over to the ladder. A falling spider hit him in the eye. It didn't puncture the orb, but it hurt like heck.

Something bit his foot through his sock. It felt more like a rat than a spider. He kicked it away, confirming that it was indeed a rat.

He scrambled up the ladder and out of the manhole.

Depravo had an arm around both Bluehead and Reginald's shoulders. "Jaunty's alive!" Bluehead said. "We can start walking now." They moved forward, helping a limping Depravo.

"Do we have a plan?" asked Jaunty, though he said the words out of order because he was still in a state of intense anxiety from all of the rats.

"To keep walking," said Reginald.

"That's a bad plan. Look at all those spiders. They'll get all of us eventually, and Depravo first. We need to find a safe place, like...the hardware store!" Jaunty pointed to Mount Tulip Hardware. "There'll be stuff we can use to defend ourselves! Shovels and wrenches and pliers!"

"And I bet they'll have rope!" said Bluehead.

"Why do we need rope?"

"To tie up the spiders!"

They hurried toward the front doors of the hardware store. Depravo put weight on his injured foot and let out a howl of cosmic agony, so they slowed down just a bit. They reached the storefront and took a brief "stare in abject horror" break. Through the glass doors, they could see spiders galore and at least a half-dozen dead, swollen, grotesque human bodies.

The automatic sliding doors opened.

The clowns hurried away, causing Depravo to let out another scream of soul-shredding misery. When he was done screaming, which wasn't in a timely manner, he said, "Just leave me. I'm slowing you down. I'll get you all killed."

"No," said Reginald. "You are slowing us down and you may get us all killed, but we're not leaving you."

"I can't have your deaths on my conscience," he said. "Just leave me."

"It's very selfish of you to worry about your own conscience right now," Bluehead told him.

"Consciences are irrelevant," said Reginald. "Depravo will be dead in twenty seconds if we just drop him on the ground. That's not much time to be consumed by guilt, and at least half of those seconds will be spent focusing on the spiders."

"Fine, fuck my conscience," said Depravo. "What I mean is that I don't want any of you to die because of me! Just leave me behind! Do it! As your manager, I'm ordering you to leave me behind!"

"Then just let go of our shoulders," said Reginald. "You're still limping along with us, when all you'd have to do is stop moving. It's not like we're dragging you."

Depravo said nothing. He continued to limp along with them.

"Look!" said Jaunty.

Everybody looked.

"It's the library! It doesn't have an automatic sliding glass door! Maybe that's a safe place to hide from the spiders!"

"That idea is so crazy it just might work!" said Bluehead.

They hurried over to the front entrance of the library. The door was opaque wood, so there was no way to tell what nightmares might lurk within. Jaunty placed his hand on the door handle. "Everybody watch out in case millions of spiders pour out."

He opened the door. Millions of spiders did not pour out. They went inside, shutting the door behind them.

There were plenty of spiders inside the library, but not nearly as many as there were outside. Reginald and Bluehead walked Depravo over to a table and pulled out a chair for him. He plopped down onto it and thanked them.

Jaunty walked around. "This seems...unsafe, but an improvement." He selected a heavy hardcover book from one of the shelves and used it to smash a spider, splattering its arachnid guts across the spines of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Jaunty, Reginald, and Bluehead walked around, surveying their surroundings.

"Are there any dead bodies?" asked Depravo.

"Not that I can...oh, wait, there's one. No, two." A pair of cocooned bodies lay on the floor between two shelves of the Fiction section. Jaunty hoped their final books had been ones they enjoyed.

"There's one over here," said Bluehead from another row. "And some severed fingers."

"Okay, so, the library isn't as safe as we'd like," said Jaunty. "But if we go on a spider-smashing rampage we can clear the area, and then maybe relax a bit. Everybody grab a book."

Jaunty smashed another spider, then realized that a better technique was to fling books at the spiders, so the clowns began to do that. They missed most of the time, but there were numerous books available on the shelves so they had almost unlimited ammunition.

"What the hell are you doing?" a voice called out.

Jaunty turned around. A very angry looking elderly woman stood there, pointing a shotgun at him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jaunty put his hands in the air. "Please don't shoot me," he said.

The elderly woman took a step forward. "You're a clown. I hate clowns."

"I'm not a scary clown. It's just makeup."

"All clowns are scary."

Jaunty shook his head. "No, they aren't. Some clowns bring joy to the world. We juggle and do magic tricks and put smiles on faces both young and old."

"Nope. I don't like Bozo the Clown, I don't like Ronald McDonald, I don't like Howdy Doody—"

"Howdy Doody is a puppet."

"Puppets are even worse."

"They sure are. And ventriloquist dummies are even worse than regular puppets. That's what you should be worried about, not clowns."

"Well, when a group of ventriloquist dummies break into my library, I'll deal with them. Right now all I see is Pennywise."

Jaunty glanced behind him. Reginald and Bluehead were there, also with their hands in the air.

"Pennywise isn't real," Jaunty said. "Neither is the Joker. Neither are the Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and neither is John Wayne Gacy, and—okay, John Wayne Gacy was real, but he's been dead since 1994. We're not like any of them."

"You all look like Satan clowns."

"It's just makeup," Jaunty explained. "I mean, obviously it's just makeup. Our faces weren't born like clown faces. What I'm fumbling around to say is that we're actors from the Scary Clown Room at the Mountain of Terror haunted house, so while we are indeed professional clowns, we're playing the roles of scary clowns, because we lost our...actually, I can see from your scowl that you're not interested in our backstory or really any kind of explanation so I'm just going to keep standing here with my hands in the air and hope that you're merciful."

"May I ask a favor?" asked Reginald.

"Sure," said the woman.

"There's a spider crawling on my leg and I'd really like to get it off. May I move around just enough to get rid of it?"

"I never said you couldn't move."

"Oh. The shotgun implied it. Thank you." Reginald frantically shook the spider off his leg, then stomped on it.

Jaunty had been waiting for Depravo to sneak up behind the elderly woman and knock her unconscious, but apparently that wasn't going to happen.

"If you wish to take shelter in this library, that's fine with me," said the woman. "It didn't work out for the other poor bastards, but you might have better luck. However, I expect you to respect the books. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Jaunty.

"Good." The woman lowered the shotgun. "My name is Rose. I'm a librarian."

"So was that shotgun already here at the library, or did you run home to get it?"

"I have a large stockpile of weapons here," said Rose. "Things that shoot, things that are sharp, and things that blow up."

"Was that to prepare for the apocalypse?" asked Reginald.

"No. The public library system is a crucial part of society, but when you have leaders who cringe at the thought of reading a book, library funding is in danger. I decided that if they tried to close down this library, I was taking as many of them with me as I could before I died in a hail of bullets. That's how much I believe in the sanctity of the written word."

"All right," said Jaunty.

"So," said Reginald, "let's say that nobody was currently coming to shut down the library, but the entire town was overrun by deadly giant spiders. Any chance we could borrow those weapons?"

"Sure," said Rose. "I have plenty. Follow me."

The three clowns who could walk on their own followed Rose down a short hallway, narrowly avoiding a few spiders along the way. She opened a door and led them into a back room filled with cardboard boxes.

"The boxes with my weapons are labeled 'Subsidy Press Donations,' because nobody will look in them. Help yourself to whatever you wish, as long as you return it in two weeks."

"Do you have a flamethrower?" asked Bluehead.

"No," said Rose. "I have an acetylene torch, but that's in case I need to torture somebody for information."

They opened the boxes. Guns a-plenty. Grenades. Knives. A machete.

"Are these plastic explosives?" Reginald asked, peeking into one of the boxes.

"Oh, yeah. I could bring this entire building down if I needed to. That's a last resort, obviously."

"Obviously."

"So have you just been hanging out here, massacring spiders?" Jaunty asked.

"Goodness, no. I've been hiding in a conference room. One door to protect, and these spiders can't burrow through doors. A perfectly safe place to hide until this all blows over. I have doughnuts. Stale from this morning, but still, doughnuts. Glazed."

Jaunty couldn't believe what he was hearing. They were saved! There was absolutely no reason to believe that these spiders would mutate and be able to dig through heavy wood. All they had to do was stay in the conference room with the door closed, enjoy some stale doughnuts, and wait to be rescued.

And yet...

"We can't do this," he told Bluehead and Reginald. "Look at all of the grenades. Think of how many people we can save from spiders with those. We have no idea how many innocent people are still trapped in Mount Tulip, and I can't justify hiding here when we could be saving them with our newfound arsenal. I won't hold it against you if you don't want to join me," he said, even though he knew he totally would.

"We're with you all the way," said Bluehead. "I couldn't live with myself if we didn't kill spiders that were going to kill people."

Reginald nodded. "We're sticking together, no matter what. Human lives are far more important than glazed doughnuts."

"There's been a misunderstanding," said Rose. "I wasn't offering to let you stay in the conference room with me. Being trapped in a small room with clowns is my idea of hell on earth. And I have no idea how long those doughnuts have to last. The conference room is my sanctuary, not yours. Find your own."

Jaunty frowned. "You know, we specifically said out loud just now that we weren't going to hide out with you. You could have said absolutely nothing and we would have thought you were a kind and generous soul."

Rose shrugged. "I have nothing to prove to clowns."

"Our friend hurt his foot and can't walk. Could he stay here?"

"Is he a clown?"

"He...looks like one, yes."

"If you wanted to take your friend with you, one of our regular patrons is in a wheelchair and because of that he, sadly, couldn't get away from the spiders. He died near the back, in the 170 section. This obviously would turn you into the kind of people who would steal a wheelchair out from under the corpse of a man who recently died a horrible death. His family is probably still praying for his safe return. Bit of a moral dilemma. Anyway, the chair is there if you need it."

They returned to the main area of the library. Depravo was still seated, with a few dead spiders around him. "What's the plan?" he asked.

"We're going to get a wheelchair for you then head back outside to kill spiders with grenades."

"Works for me."

Jaunty, Bluehead, and Reginald went to the row where an obese man sat dead in his wheelchair. The spiders had not yet finished cocooning him, so his head, leaking badly and with his tongue lolling out of his mouth, was visible.

"He doesn't need that wheelchair anymore," said Jaunty.

"That is correct," said Reginald.

They stood there for a moment.

"There's nothing wrong with taking it," said Jaunty.

"That is also correct," said Reginald.

They stood there for a longer moment.

"Somebody has to say it," said Bluehead. "I think we'll all go to hell if we dump the dead guy on the floor."

"No," said Jaunty. "I don't agree with that. We'll be using that wheelchair to do good. I'm not saying it'll fast track us to heaven, but our motives are pure. Look at him. What we'd be doing is a pretty minor indignity compared to what those spiders already did to him. If he was alive and had to choose which was worse, being taken out of his wheelchair or oozing the way that he is, I can guarantee you he'd choose 'oozing' and I never even met the guy."

"If robbers beat somebody with crowbars, stole their wallet, and left them for dead in a dark alley, and you came upon them and swiped a quarter from their pocket, what you're doing is not as bad as what the robbers did but it's still evil," said Bluehead.

"But if you swiped that quarter because you needed it to call the police to report a fire that was about to consume an orphanage, burning dozens of children alive, you were in the right."

"Yep, I totally agree with your point," said Bluehead. "Let's dump him."

Jaunty had envisioned a process where they tipped the wheelchair and gently eased the dead gentleman onto the floor. It was quickly clear that it wasn't going to work out like this. After a couple of minutes of trying to maintain the dignity of his corpse, the three clowns finally just worked together to tilt the chair up enough that he slid out and fell to the floor. His swollen head burst open upon impact.

They scooted the wheelchair away from the body and, without saying a word to each other, made a vow never to speak of this experience again.

They wheeled the chair over to Depravo. He wrinkled his bloody nose at it. "There's fluid on the armrests."

"It's just pus," said Reginald.

Depravo sat in the chair without further comment. They pushed him into the back room and explained the deal with the weapons. Then they made their selections.

Bluehead took a machete. She swung it a few times with the skill of a master machete-wielder, though in a "Samurai swordsman" fashion and not a "masked killer of teenagers" fashion.

Reginald took a machine gun. He did not test it indoors.

Depravo also took a machine gun. The back of the wheelchair had a vinyl bag in which to store things, so they filled it to overflowing with grenades, then put some more on Depravo's lap.

Jaunty took an aluminum baseball bat that had spikes on it. These spikes were not glued to the bat and there was no evidence that they'd been fused to it with a soldering iron. Instead, it seemed to have been originally molded as a baseball bat with spikes. Jaunty really wanted to know where Rose acquired such a thing, but she was already in the conference room and he didn't want to disturb her.

As they walked toward the library exit, Jaunty wondered if they were making a mistake. They were safe here. They could ride this out. Maybe there was nobody out there who even needed to be rescued. They might be marching out to their deaths while the entire rest of the town except Rose had been safely evacuated.

Maybe.

But if they could save even one person, or even one dog, they needed to get out there and do it. They were heavily armed, and by golly they were going to kick some spider posterior.

"Let's mess up some spiders," he told the others. "To save lives—not for revenge or pleasure."

He held open the door while Reginald pushed Depravo outside. Then the clowns walked down the sidewalk, with a bit of swagger to their step.

There was a large cluster of spiders up ahead. Jaunty picked up one of the grenades from Depravo's lap, pulled out the pin, and flung it. It landed exactly where he'd aimed.

A moment later, purple smoke began to spew from the grenade.

"Oh," said Jaunty. "I guess these are smoke grenades. Not quite as useful for our purposes."

"Yeah, these would actually make things worse for us," said Reginald. "Although I can see why Rose would want them. They'd be helpful if there was a raid on the library. Not sure why she'd need this many of them, but it's not my place to question her."

Jaunty sifted through the grenades to see if any of them were different and might explode, but no, they all looked the same. He didn't want to just dump them onto the street, so he opened the door to the library again and the clowns took all of the grenades back inside and returned them to the box. Then they left the library, walking with slightly less swagger.

The grenade was still spewing smoke, so they walked the long way around it because the smoke was making it more difficult to see the spiders.

"Cover your ears," said Depravo, pointing his machine gun at a cluster of spiders up ahead. He squeezed the trigger, and the spiders disintegrated into mush.

"Nice job!" said Jaunty, when Depravo finished shooting.

"I was aiming at different spiders, but I'll get the hang of it."

Bluehead swung her machete back and forth a few times, slicing up a spider with each swing. Jaunty swung his baseball bat, sending a few mangled spiders flying into the air.

The arachnids didn't stand a chance.

It was time for clowns versus spiders, and the spiders were toast.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The machine guns made things a lot easier.

Sadly, they had far from an unlimited supply of ammunition, so they couldn't just mow spiders down left and right. After about fifty spiders were shredded by gunfire, they decided that they had to conserve bullets for times when they were in greater danger.

Bluehead was amazing with her machete, turning the act of spider slaying into interpretive dance. Most of them she simply stabbed, but she also used the blade to flip some of them into the air and then halve them on the way down. Yes, she was shamelessly showing off, but they were entertainers at heart, and it was nice to see her embracing that aspect of their lives again.

Jaunty was not as graceful with his bat, but he was able to kill a substantial number of spiders with it. He almost suggested turning it into a contest to see who could end the most spider lives, then decided that adding a playful competition would be disrespectful to the memories of those who'd perished tonight.

The machete was also great for cutting down webs, and for removing the webs that collected on Depravo's wheels. They were making speedy progress and leaving countless smashed and dismembered spiders in their wake. The downside was that they knew they were slaughtering only a small percentage of the spiders that had overtaken the town—nothing they'd done so far would entitle them to a medal of honor. Being responsible for a 0.3% reduction in the spider population (Jaunty of course had no idea how many spiders were out there and what the actual percentage might be, but 0.3% sounded about right) wasn't the same as actively saving lives.

But there didn't seem to be any lives to save. Everybody they came across was dead.

Jaunty worried that he might be becoming desensitized to the sight of death. Then they found a dead guy with a spider digging out his eyeball and Jaunty was sensitized right over again.

There were a couple of close calls, including one where Depravo claimed he'd soiled his pants but was exaggerating. Overall, though, he felt like they were winning the clowns versus spiders battle, though he supposed it depended on how you calculated the clowns versus spiders exchange rate. Surely two dead clowns were not the equivalent of two dead spiders. The loss of the first two spiders they'd squashed was miniscule in the grand scheme of things, whereas the loss of Guffaw and Wagon would linger for the rest of the remaining clowns' lives.

God, he missed Guffaw and Wagon.

"God, I miss Guffaw and Wagon," he said, believing it to be a sentiment that didn't need to be kept in his own mind.

Bluehead sniffled. Then Reginald sniffled.

"I miss them too," said Bluehead, the heartbreak in her voice almost unbearable to hear.

"Why did you bring them up?" asked Reginald. "We were having a merry time having finally gained the upper hand on these creatures, and now we're obligated to think about our dead friends. There was going to be plenty of time to mourn later. I've had very few moments of joy since the spider invasion began and you've ruined one of them."

"What were the other moments of joy?" asked Jaunty.

"None of your business. They were superficial. Next time, ask before you decide to bring everybody's mood down. That's not what Guffaw and Wagon would have wanted. They'd have wanted us to be happy right now."

Bluehead nodded. "Guffaw would have wanted us to cheer and fling severed spider legs into the air."

"I don't think that's accurate," said Jaunty.

"I knew him longer."

"Fine. I messed up. I should have just thought about how I missed them instead of saying it out loud. The next time I have emotions I'll know to stuff them deep inside to fester."

"That's not what we meant and you know it," said Reginald. "Nobody said anything about any emotions festering. All I'm saying is, read the room. I miss Guffaw and Wagon so much that I've been on the verge of a primal scream of misery this entire time, but there's a time and place for everything."

"We shouldn't be fighting," said Bluehead. "We need to make up."

"Let's sing a happy clown song," said Jaunty.

"Please don't sing a fucking song," said Depravo.

They had a catalog of nearly seventeen thousand happy clown songs to choose from, but Jaunty, Reginald, and Bluehead decided to respect Depravo's wish that they not sing one, since he was injured. They continued on their spider-killing way.

"Help!" somebody shouted in the distance.

There was no need to sing! This scream for help was like music to Jaunty's ears! Somebody needed assistance! They picked up their pace, though not to the point where they stopped being cautious about their own surroundings.

"Help!" shouted somebody else from around the same place. More than one person needed help! The clowns could rescue multiple people! This was fantastic!

"Wait," said Reginald. "What if it's a trap?"

"Why would it be a trap?" asked Bluehead.

"They might be after our supplies."

"It's only been a few hours," said Bluehead. "Society hasn't had time to break down that much. We're still pre-apocalypse or mid-apocalypse. The bandits don't show up until post-apocalypse."

"Yeah, you're right," said Reginald.

As they reached the end of the block, they saw one of the people who'd called for help: a guy balanced on a narrow ledge outside the second floor window of a building. Dozens of spiders were scaling the wall toward him, and he frantically tried to kick them away. A woman was inside at the open window, swatting at spiders with a broom handle.

"I think I'm pretty good with the machine gun," said Depravo, "but I can't shoot all of those spiders without accidentally killing that dude."

The man cried out, lost his grip, and fell. He plummeted to the ground, doing a belly flop onto the sidewalk. From the solids and liquids that shot from his body upon impact, it was clear that the webs did little to cushion his fall. Spiders on the ground immediately began to swarm him.

"That wasn't us!" said Jaunty. "We didn't distract him! He didn't even see us!"

The woman let out a wail of despair.

"Don't jump!" Jaunty shouted. "You can live without him!"

The woman looked over at them, then quickly moved out of sight.

"Now what?" asked Bluehead. "Do you think she's angry?"

"I don't know," said Reginald.

"It wasn't our fault," said Jaunty. "That would've happened even if we didn't show up. We didn't shout anything or start firing a machine gun or even make eye contact with him. He shouldn't have been out on that ledge in the first place."

"Is he still alive?" asked Bluehead.

"No," said Reginald. "It's the spiders making his body jerk around like that."

"We should see if she needs help or comforting," said Jaunty.

The other clowns agreed. Jaunty and Bluehead walked toward the entrance to the building, killing spiders along the way, while Reginald wheeled Depravo behind them.

The woman burst out of the building and ran for Jaunty, arms outstretched.

His first thought was that she was running toward him to hug him. That was nice. He could use a hug himself after the grisly sight he'd just witnessed. Then he noticed that she was holding a butcher knife. He noticed the knife in time to realize he wasn't going to be hugged but not in time to avoid being stabbed.

The blade got him in the chest. He'd often wondered how he'd react if he ever got stabbed with a butcher knife, and now he knew: he'd stand there, looking confused and betrayed.

She yanked the knife out of his chest. "I'm not going to die at the hands of goddamn clowns!" she screamed.

Jaunty started to explain things to her, then decided to dodge the knife instead.

It was a really powerful downward swing. Jaunty was confident that if he hadn't stepped out of the way, she would have slashed him open from his neck to just above his right knee.

She swung again, slashing him across the chest.

"Go back to hell!" she screamed.

Jaunty tried to grab the knife out of her hand but missed. He didn't want to look down to see how badly he was bleeding. No gouts of blood were currently spurting from his midsection, so he took that as a promising sign.

"Punch her in the face!" he told Bluehead. "You're allowed to do it! You're a girl!"

The woman let out the most deranged-sounding scream Jaunty had ever heard, then stabbed at him again. Bluehead lunged for her—a poorly timed lunge that put her in the path of the butcher knife and got her stabbed in the upper right arm.

"Should I machine gun her?" Depravo asked.

"No!" said the other three clowns.

Bluehead punched the woman in the face. Her head shot back so violently that Jaunty thought it might pop free, though of course it didn't. She dropped the knife, which landed on a spider, slicing off its two front legs.

The woman stumbled backwards, lost her balance, and fell. Spiders scurried onto her.

Jaunty and Bluehead pulled her to her feet. She still had spiders on her. They quickly began to brush them off.

The woman punched Bluehead in the stomach, doubling her over.

Jaunty still could not bring himself to hit a female, so he continued to brush the spiders off her.

Bluehead head-butted the woman in the stomach, doubling her over as well.

Jaunty brushed a spider off her back.

Reginald shoved the wheelchair forward, bashing Depravo's legs into the woman. She fell again. Jaunty didn't really want to help her up and get stabbed again, but he also didn't want to stand around and let her die.

"Leave her alone!" a man shouted.

Jaunty and the others turned toward the sound of the voice. It was three men, strong-looking ones, holding pieces of plywood with nails in them.

"You don't think we have enough to deal with right now?" asked one of the men. "You're gonna add evil clowns to the mix?"

"We're not evil," Jaunty insisted, as the woman thrashed around with a spider on her breast.

The men walked forward, clearly relishing the opportunity to use their nail-boards. "I've always hated clowns," said the one who had thus far done all of the speaking for the trio. "All you do is cause nightmares. How many children have you traumatized, huh?"

"Zero! We're not child-traumatizing clowns! We bring joy!"

"Bullshit! Clowns bring terror!"

The woman howled in agony as spiders sunk their fangs into her tender flesh.

"Get the hell out of here!" shouted Depravo, waving his machine gun at them. "You don't know anything about clowns! These are the best people I know!"

"A clown with a machine gun," said the man. "Typical."

"No! It's not typical! It's completely abnormal! Everything about this is abnormal! These are good clowns, kind-hearted clowns, and fuck you if you think differently!"

"We just watched you murder that poor woman."

"Wrong!" said Depravo. "First of all, she's not dead yet. Second of all, there's way more to it than that. She had the same prejudices against clowns that you do, and she attacked my friends when they were trying to help her! She didn't have to be lying there with her body swelling up! That's a choice she made when she went after them with a butcher knife!"

"You pushed that other guy out of a window," said the man. "We heard him land."

"No. We would have tried to catch him if he'd fallen just a bit later."

"He would have shattered his bones against your wheelchair."

"I mean that my friends would have tried to catch him."

The man next to the one who'd been doing all the talking shook his head. "I don't trust anything I hear from clowns! They're worse than vampires! They're worse than zombies! They're worse than mummies!"

"Yeah!" said the third man. "Clowns are the devil!"

"The only good clown is a dead clown! But not a reanimated dead clown! Just a regular dead clown!"

Jaunty felt that this encounter was going poorly.

Suddenly there was a loud burst of gunfire. Several large chunks disappeared from the first man's face. He touched his index finger to a large missing section of his forehead, then dropped to the ground.

Depravo tossed his machine gun away. "I didn't mean to do that! I was trying to shoot above their heads! I was trying to scare them away! My aim was off! It was a tense situation!"

Everybody started freaking out at once, except the dead man. Reginald dropped his own machine gun, as if afraid that he might accidentally commit murder as well. Jaunty wished he hadn't done that, because the two other men were coming at them with their poking boards, and the machine gun would be a great deterrent.

Jaunty stepped forward, waving his spiky baseball bat and baring his teeth. "Stay back!" he shouted. "If a clown kills you, your entire family dies, too!"

The men exchanged a confused glance.

"That's not true," Jaunty admitted. "I was trying to be scary. Please don't spread that rumor."

The men looked at each other again, and seemed to come to the unspoken conclusion that they had to find their inner courage and dispatch the deadly clown menace. They resumed walking toward them, waving their boards. Jaunty had to reluctantly give credit where it was due: the men were outnumbered, they were facing their primal fear, and even without the machine guns the clowns had better weapons. These men were not cowards.

"We should be cooperating!" Jaunty told them as they got closer. "With those boards with nails in them, you could help us kill even more spiders! The spiders are the true villains here!"

The men were now close enough that Jaunty could see that these were rusty nails in their boards—the danger was even greater than he'd initially realized.

He swung the bat, aiming for the first man's (formerly the second man, but with the first man now dead it didn't make sense to keep thinking of them as the second and third men) board. As he swung, he questioned this decision. He might break the board in half, which would give the man two boards, which he could then slam into each side of Jaunty's head. Oh well. Too late now. He had too much momentum going to change course.

The bat struck the board.

The board did not break in half.

It slammed against the man, jabbing large rusty nails into his chest.

His eyes went wide. He looked down at the imbedded board. His mouth opened and closed a few times but no sound came out. Finally he popped the board free. A gout of blood shot out of the spot where his heart was located. He fell to the ground.

"That's...that's not even close to what I meant to happen..." said Jaunty.

Spiders swarmed the fallen man.

The new first man took a great big step backwards. "You're not gonna devour my soul, you fuckers!" he shouted.

He turned and ran. Then he slipped on a spider, fell, and landed on his board. Spiders swarmed him.

Jaunty kicked the spiders away from Reginald's machine gun, then picked up the weapon and handed it to him. "This went terribly," he said. "That doesn't mean we can't save another group of survivors. Let's not take our eyes off the prize."

"You're bleeding," Reginald told him.

Jaunty glanced down. There was indeed an alarming amount of blood on the front of his clown suit. "I'm okay. I think the butcher knife bounced off a rib."

He kicked the spiders away from Depravo's machine gun and retrieved that weapon as well. He set it on Depravo's lap. "I'm gonna suggest that you not aim at humans anymore."

Depravo cried out.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," said Jaunty. "I didn't mean to remind you of the manslaughter!"

"No! It's my leg!"

There was a spider on Depravo's left leg. Jaunty gently stabbed it with one of the spikes on his baseball bat, not hard enough to puncture Depravo's leg, then tossed it aside. "There. All better."

"It bit me!"

"Where?"

"On my leg!"

"Oh no! Bluehead, let me have your machete!"

Bluehead handed him the weapon. He used it to slice Depravo's pant leg up to his waist. As he pulled the fabric aside, he saw two definite holes in Depravo's leg. He had indeed been bitten.

"Oh, thank God," said Bluehead.

"What do you mean?" asked Jaunty. "He got bit!"

"When you asked for the machete, I thought you were going to lop his leg off to stop the venom from spreading. I'm relieved that you only cut his pants."

"It hurts so bad," said Depravo. "Please...I don't want to become one of those things."

"Uh, that's not how it works," said Reginald.

"You're going to be okay," said Jaunty. "One spider bite isn't going to kill you. The corpses we've found were bitten hundreds of times. You have nothing to worry about."

"You'll kill me if I start to transform, right?"

"Yes. Yes, I will. But like Reginald said, that's really not what's happening here."

As they wheeled him away, Jaunty was a bit ashamed to discover that his thoughts were running more toward self-preservation than trying to locate new people to save. Maybe it wasn't possible for them to change people's perception of clowns. Maybe they should just go back to the library.

"Look!" said Reginald as they went back onto the main street. An empty jeep was parked there, engine running. "They must have heard the guy hit the cement from the second-floor, then they got out of the vehicle to investigate! Or it belongs to somebody else who just died! Either way, we've got a jeep! It's high enough off the ground that the webs won't get clogged underneath it, and if I'm wrong about that, we've got a machete and a bat to clean them out without reaching our arms underneath the vehicle! We're saved!"

The clowns ran over to the jeep, which miraculously had no spiders inside. They got Depravo into the front passenger seat (there was no room for the wheelchair, but if they were lucky they wouldn't need it again, since their next stop would be the hospital), and then Reginald and Bluehead sat in the back while Jaunty drove. They had seven-eighths of a tank of gas. Way more than enough to get out of Mount Tulip.

"I'm gonna floor the gas pedal, and we are gonna drive, drive, drive out of this flipping town!" Jaunty announced.

The other clowns cheered.

The jeep sped off toward freedom.

* * *

Tulip Cave began to rumble.

The Mother of Spiders would rest no longer. Most of her children had left the cave, except the newest ones, while she remained in the deepest, darkest section, the only chamber of the cave large enough to contain her gargantuan size, a size that grew larger with every passing year.

She broke free of her century-long confinement, smashing through rock as if it was something much more fragile than rock. Dozens of stone tunnels collapsed as she crawled to the surface.

Finally, she emerged.

The ground shook with each massive step.

The Mother of Spiders was ravenous.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"I can't lie," said Jaunty. "I feel better now that we're fleeing instead of trying to find people to rescue, and I don't care who knows it."

"You should care a little," said Reginald. "It's a very self-centered attitude."

"I guess I mean that I don't care who knows it in this jeep. You all feel the same way, right? I mean, nobody can argue that we absolutely suck at saving people."

"With practice, we might improve," said Reginald.

"Yeah, and with practice we might leave a trail of accidental corpses in our wake. We're clowns, and we have to accept that we're also buffoons."

"He's right," said Bluehead. "We haven't saved a single person. Our greatest claim to heroism is that we didn't accidentally kill Rose."

"As far as we know," said Jaunty.

"Hey, you guys kept me around even though I fired Jaunty and I used a lot of bad words," said Depravo. "Most people would've fed me to the spiders as a distraction. By the way, I can't feel my leg and I've hallucinated a couple of times."

"We'll get you to a hospital soon," said Jaunty. "Bluehead and I can get stitches while they siphon the poison out of you."

The jeep bounced as if Jaunty struck a speed bump, but he hadn't seen anything in the road.

"Was that another body?" asked Reginald.

"Not as far as I know."

The jeep bounced again.

"There was definitely nothing in the road," said Jaunty. "It's like the road itself is bouncing. That seems odd. Roads don't generally bounce."

He stopped the jeep. They waited quietly.

There was a loud thump that reverberated throughout the area as the jeep bounced with the impact. "Do you think they're dropping bombs?" Bluehead asked. "Because I don't know if that's awesome or if we should be scared for our lives."

"It doesn't sound like bombs," said Jaunty, who had only heard bombs go off in movies. "It sounds more like, I don't know, they're dropping tanks."

"Surely they're not dropping tanks," said Reginald.

"Oh, they're definitely not dropping tanks," said Jaunty. "That's just what it sounds like."

"So what do you think it actually..." Reginald trailed off.

"Why'd you trail off?" Jaunty asked.

Reginald pointed ahead, toward a two-story building on the left that was a couple of blocks away. Jaunty's mouth dropped open wider than he'd ever imagined was physically possible. He'd seen many things recently to make him question the way he thought the world operated, but gazing upon what appeared to be a really, really, really big spider leg was more than his mind could handle right now. He completely shut down for three seconds. At the conclusion of the three seconds, he spoke: "Ah. Okay."

The leg took another step forward, confirming that this was indeed what was causing the jeep to jostle. More of the creature came into view. By this point they all knew that "gigantic spider" was what they were staring at, but they waited for the monster to crawl into the middle of the road.

It was the size of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house.

Its back was moving in a strange way. As Jaunty looked more closely, he saw that its back was completely covered with a writhing mass of smaller spiders—it was carrying its babies.

"Can we go now?" Bluehead asked.

"Yes," said Jaunty. "Yes, we certainly can."

He put the jeep into reverse and floored the gas pedal. The vehicle rocketed backwards. Jaunty was focusing ninety percent of his attention on the behemoth and only ten percent on the road behind him, so when he noticed the teenaged boy running out into the street, waving his arms for attention, Jaunty didn't have time to slam on the brakes before the jeep smashed into him.

Everybody screamed.

Jaunty hoped the kid was all right, although the big splash of blood on the rear windshield wasn't a promising sign.

He got out of the jeep, whispering near-profanities under his breath. When he got to the back, he couldn't see the kid. Either the impact had sent him sailing into the air, landing out of sight, or he was underneath the vehicle.

Jaunty crouched down. He was underneath the vehicle.

The teenager was all the way under there, wedged in tight. He was on his side—that is, most of his body was on its side. It was clear from the placement of his head and the abundance of red liquid that the kid was no longer alive.

If you wanted to look at the bright side, it was good that the kid had died instantly, or at least only suffered for a few seconds. If he was still alive and trapped under the vehicle, he'd die a much worse death from the spiders that were already crawling on him. If their roles were reversed, Jaunty would definitely prefer a super quick death to a slow, claustrophobic one.

He stood up, stared at the heavens, and screamed.

Though the situation was worthy of quite a bit more angst, they did have a house-sized spider to worry about. Jaunty got back into the driver's seat, figuring there was a pretty good chance the jeep wouldn't drive because the teenager's corpse was tightly wedged underneath it, but deciding to hope for the best.

He floored the accelerator. The tires squealed but the jeep didn't move.

"I think it's because his body is stuck under there," said Reginald, helpfully.

Jaunty turned the steering wheel to the left then to the right, as if trying to grind the teenager's body further down into the pavement. It didn't work.

"It wasn't your fault," said Bluehead. "He shouldn't have stepped behind the car when you were shooting backwards to avoid the giant spider."

"I'm not worried about my conscience right now," said Jaunty.

They all returned their attention to being terrified of the spider. It was moving almost in slow motion, but it had a long stride. The pavement cracked under its feet with each step, so it must've had a very dense body and been even heavier than it looked.

"I know we keep having to abandon vehicles," said Jaunty. "But we need to do it one more time."

Everybody got out of the jeep, taking their weapons with them.

The monster spider continued to move toward them, the ground shaking with each step. Jaunty couldn't be sure that it was specifically after them, or if it just happened to be going in their direction anyway, but this was the most frightened he'd been in an experience where he'd been pretty much constantly frightened.

"Run!" he shouted.

Everybody turned to flee. Depravo's foot made an unpleasant sound and he fell. Reginald immediately helped him back up.

"C'mon, let's go!" said Reginald.

"I'll slow you down."

"Yes, you will. A lot. So let's not waste time."

Depravo shook his head. "I haven't done anything truly evil in my life, but I've been a dick sometimes. I don't feel like I need to sacrifice myself for the crime of being a dick. But I'm not going to let you guys help me out of here. And if you don't help me out of here, I'm dead. And if I'm dead, I might as well sacrifice myself. Is this making sense?"

"Sort of," said Jaunty.

"What I'm saying is that I'm going to take my new machine gun and empty all of the ammunition into this giant spider, which may or may not kill it. I hope it does. If not, well, I died trying."

"You don't have to do this," said Reginald.

"Oh, believe me, I know. Make sure everybody knows I did this willingly. Don't tell the story like I just got killed by a giant spider while we were trying to escape. This is some noble shit."

"What if the machine gun bullets just bounce right off it?" Bluehead asked.

Depravo shrugged. "They might. Better than not shooting it at all." He turned toward Jaunty. "I know this is kind of an empty symbolic gesture, but I'd like to rehire you for the Scary Clown Room in the Mountain of Terror."

Jaunty still had a major problem with the whole idea of posing as scary clowns, but he couldn't reject a doomed man's symbolic gesture. "Thank you," he said. "I accept."

They hugged.

The monster spider was now only a block away. Depravo limped toward it, sort of using the machine gun as a crutch. The clowns watched him go.

"Are we being irresponsible?" asked Bluehead. "Should we bring him with us against his will?"

"I hate to agree with Depravo," said Jaunty, "but I think he's right about getting us all killed. And we don't know that the bullets will harmlessly bounce off the spider. He might shoot it a few times in the head and finish it off once and for all. True irresponsibility would be not letting him try."

Bluehead nodded. "I guess you're—oh my God!"

"What?"

"Can you see? That spider has ten legs!"

"I can't see," said Jaunty.

"It has ten of them! It's some sort of mutant! I know that eight legs versus ten isn't all that important when you're talking about a spider that big, but it just feels way freakier to me now. Why does it have ten legs? Is it even still a spider? What is it?"

It also had a body that was only one segment instead of two. And its head stuck out in front, almost humorously small for the creature's overall size but still a very large spider head, and it was attached near the bottom of its body instead of the top. That said, Jaunty felt comfortable calling it a giant spider.

"We should go," said Reginald. "Depravo is giving us an opportunity to escape and we need to take it."

"I completely understand what you're saying," said Jaunty. "But I need to see how this plays out."

"Me too," said Bluehead.

Depravo had almost reached the monster spider. Truthfully, he was making pretty good time, and might not have slowed them down enough to get them all killed. Then the machine gun slipped out from under him, his foot twisted, and he fell.

"Die, you son of a bitch!" he shouted at the spider.

Then he opened fire.

The monster spider raised up a bit as the bullets tore across its front legs. Some baby spiders spilled off its back. Jaunty was pleased to see what appeared to be small pieces of spider meat coming off.

The spider smashed one of its front legs down upon Depravo.

Jaunty screamed.

The spider lifted its leg. It had landed right behind Depravo instead of crushing him.

Jaunty stopped screaming.

Depravo stood back up as he continued to fire the machine gun. Chunks fell off the spider's gigantic underside. It was difficult to gauge emotions in a spider, but it seemed to be angry about this.

The spider leaned down. Jaunty thought with horror that it was going to slam its immense fangs into Depravo's body, but instead it opened its mouth—it had an actual mouth!—revealing even more fangs.

Jaunty resumed screaming.

It chomped down upon Depravo.

The blood-spurting stumps of his legs, severed below the knee, flopped over.

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!" shouted Reginald.

The monster spider raised its fearsome head. It swung its front legs to the side, smashing into a building and causing most of the front wall to collapse. The spider turned and gave the building its full destructive attention. Two women, who'd presumably thought they had a pretty decent place to hide, fell out of the second floor.

One woman was lucky and landed on her head. The other woman landed feet-first. The spider bent down and took a great big bite out of her, removing most of her torso. Then it finished her off with two more bites.

Jaunty stood paralyzed as it ate the other woman. Then it turned back toward the remaining clowns.

He desperately wanted to run, but his legs weren't working.

He suddenly remembered that the monster spider was not his only arachnid problem, and used the spiked bat to clear out the many spiders that had gathered around him while he was watching people get eaten.

They needed to run for their lives. There was nothing in the clown code of conduct that said they had to stand around while a house-sized spider devoured them. It was time to flee...which would presumably put them into an even worse predicament, but there was nothing they could do about that right now.

"Are your legs frozen in terror?" he asked Reginald and Bluehead.

"Yes," said Reginald.

"Yep," said Bluehead.

"We need to break free of it," said Jaunty.

"I've been trying ever since it bit Depravo in half," said Reginald. It was unlike Reginald to misstate something to such an extent (the first bite consumed far more than half of Depravo), proof of just how frightened the clown was.

The monster spider turned toward the building on its other side. Its mighty legs smashed through the brick wall, tossing rubble everywhere.

People screamed.

No, children screamed.

They were on the first floor of the building. Six or seven young children, with an older woman (Their mother? Their teacher? Their nanny? Just some nice lady who was out rescuing children?) nearby. She quickly ushered them away from the destroyed wall and out of sight.

The clowns could no longer flee.

If the monster spider kept smashing away, it would bring down the entire building upon those children. Jaunty had failed to save a lot of people since the beginning of the spider invasion, but he was not going to fail to save these children.

"We can't run away," said Reginald. "We have to save those children."

"Right," said Jaunty, mildly annoyed that Reginald had brought up the idea first, making it look like perhaps Jaunty had wanted to run but now been shamed into heroism by his fellow clown. "That's what I was going to say, too."

"I believe you," said Reginald. If there was one thing Reginald the Pleasant Clown didn't do, it was fib. Jaunty was confident that he did indeed believe him. Though of course it was a petty thing to worry about right now and Jaunty was kind of ashamed. He assumed it was his brain trying to distract him from the unspeakable terror.

The spider smashed through more of the building as it went after its young prey.

"Shoot it," said Bluehead. "Make it come after us instead of the kids!"

Reginald pointed his machine gun at it and pulled the trigger.

As the first few shots struck it, the spider turned to face them. But then it returned its attention to the succulent children.

"We need to get closer!" said Jaunty.

He raised his spiked bat into the air. Bluehead raised her machete into the air. Reginald kept his machine gun pointed at the spider.

The three clowns let out a battle cry and rushed forth.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Were they running toward their deaths?

Perhaps.

Jaunty was surprisingly okay with this. Granted, he was working under the assumption that they'd be saving the lives of all of those children. If he, Bluehead, and Reginald got killed by the monster spider and then it turned and gobbled down the children and their guardian, he'd be much less okay with it.

Reginald shouted something that they couldn't hear over his machine gun, which Jaunty assumed was a variation on "Over here!" followed by an unkind comment about the spider's personal appearance. The spider turned away from the delicious and nutritious children once again and took a big step toward the charging clowns.

When Jaunty saw Depravo's pool of blood and what remained of his legs, he was suddenly a bit less okay with the idea of running toward his death. But they couldn't chicken out now. There were children in danger. At the very least, he hoped he'd get a dramatic death where he got to say something profound as trickles of blood ran down the side of his mouth. He didn't want a death where he got splattered without fanfare.

Reginald kept shooting the spider. The flurry of bullets was having an undeniable impact, though not enough for the spider to flop over on its back and fold in its ten legs. If they had unlimited ammunition, Reginald could just keep pumping steel into the behemoth until it succumbed to its inevitable death, but...

He stopped shooting.

"Are you out of ammo, or taking a break?" Jaunty asked.

"Out of ammo."

"All right. I was hoping you were taking a break. That gun looks heavy."

"It's heavier than you'd think, but not unmanageable." Reginald lowered the gun. "I can start beating it with this thing, but it's not going to be as effective."

"No, I think it's Bluehead's and my turn."

They could, in theory, fling their weapons at the spider. But no way could a machete and a spiked baseball bat dispatch that creature unless they were superhumanly accurate. Though Bluehead had great talent, Jaunty couldn't imagine that she could throw the machete like a javelin, skewering the spider right through its brain. It wasn't completely impossible, but it was an unlikely enough scenario that they were better off holding onto their weapons.

Which meant getting close to the spider.

Really close.

"How long do you think it would take to hack one of its legs off with that thing?" he asked Bluehead.

"Well, its legs are the size of trees, so I guess however long it would take me to chop down a tree with a machete. It wouldn't be quick."

"So that's not a good plan. We either need to get on top of it or underneath it. On top it's covered with baby spiders. Below it could just plop down and flatten us. Those both seem bad."

"Do baby spiders bite?" asked Bluehead.

"I'm sure they do."

"But are they venomous?"

"I'm sure they are."

"Hmmm."

Jaunty agreed with her reaction of "Hmmm." Leaping upon a giant spider that was covered with a thick layer of smaller spiders felt like it might be a suicidal sort of plan. Again, if this was their final stand, Jaunty was okay with that, but he didn't want to jump on the monster spider, go "Argh!" and then be immediately consumed by the babies.

They almost lost their balance as the spider took another ground-shaking step toward them.

And then Jaunty got an idea.

No, he didn't like that idea and he didn't have access to a fire truck.

This was followed by another, much more practical idea.

"Depravo is dead," said Jaunty. "But his greatest gift to humanity may be that he died before he ran out of machine gun ammunition. If one of us can get up there with his gun and then sort of, y'know, hold the gun really low and spin it around in a circle, I think he or she might be able to clear out enough of the baby spiders that the others can hack up the momma spider with the other weapons."

"I like that plan," said Reginald. "What I don't like is the idea that we have to run inside a building, hurry to the roof, and then leap down upon the spider to get on its back. What if it crawls away? What if it destroys the building while we're running up the stairs? Too many variables."

"That's not how we're going to get up there," said Jaunty.

"Then how?" asked Reginald.

"Yeah, then how?" asked Bluehead.

Jaunty checked to make sure the monster spider wasn't about to destroy any more of the building with the innocent children in it, then returned his attention to the conversation with his fellow clowns.

"The spider is as tall as a house, right?" he asked.

"Yes," said Reginald.

"What else is as tall as a house?"

"A giraffe, but I'm sure a giraffe doesn't figure into your plan."

"A helicopter?" asked Bluehead. "Is your plan to somehow lure the helicopter back here?"

"No," said Jaunty. "What's as tall as a house? Three clowns, perched on each other's shoulders!"

"My God, you're right!" said Reginald.

"We're all limber! We stack ourselves, and then the clown on top clears out the baby spiders with the machine gun. It's sad that they won't get the opportunity to grow up into vicious killers but we can't worry about that right now. Then that clown pulls up the other two clowns, we slay the giant spider, and we're done!"

"I'm the most acrobatic," said Bluehead. "I'll be on top."

"I'm the strongest," said Reginald. "I'll be on the bottom."

"And I'm the most average," said Jaunty. "I'll be in the middle."

Jaunty went over and retrieved Depravo's machine gun, saying a quick silent prayer over his severed legs. No time to wipe the blood off the weapon. He gave the dripping gun to Bluehead, and she gave the machete to Reginald.

"If one or more of us die, I just want to say that it's been an honor clowning around with you," said Reginald.

The three of them hugged, being careful not to stab each other with the machete or the spiked bat in the process. Then Jaunty climbed up and sat on Reginald's shoulders. Bluehead climbed up both of them and sat on Jaunty's shoulders.

Reginald walked them toward the spider. It might have been more practical to wait until they were closer to the beast before they climbed on each other's shoulders, but this felt more dramatic.

Jaunty thought the spider grinned at them with its fanged mouth.

Nope. That had to be his imagination. He considered asking the others if they'd noticed it, but decided that if they thought they saw a giant spider grin at them, he'd rather they keep the nightmarish observation to themselves.

The spider turned directly toward them, as if preparing for battle.

It slammed eight of its ten legs onto the ground, smashing through the pavement. Reginald, Jaunty, and Bluehead stumbled backward, then stumbled forward, then stumbled backward again, and then fell.

They got up quickly.

"Is that all you've got?" Jaunty shouted.

"It probably has a lot more, so maybe don't taunt it," said Bluehead.

"Climb back on!" said Reginald. "We still have a job to do!"

"Uhhhh..." said Jaunty. "Did you, uh, notice the, uhhhh...?"

"Yes," said Reginald, holding up his arm that now had a machete blade sticking all the way through it. "Please remove it."

Jaunty gently slid the blade out of Reginald's arm. "Does it hurt?" he asked.

"Quite a bit, yes. But at least I'm on the bottom, so I won't bleed all over you two. Let's do this!"

"Are you sure you're up for it? That wound looks like a gusher."

"Let's do this!"

They got back into their clown stack and turned to face the enemy.

"I think it just grinned at us!" said Bluehead.

They cast their fear aside and charged at it.

The spider slammed its legs down again, destroying more of the road. Reginald, Jaunty, and Bluehead wobbled violently but did not fall.

And then they were right there in front of a terrifying giant spider and Jaunty thought he could feel its hot foul breath right on his face even though he didn't think that matched up with standard spider biology.

Bluehead leapt onto its back.

She did a few frantic kicks, clearing out her immediate area, then crouched down and opened fire. Jaunty couldn't see exactly what was happening up there, because he was making it a point not to get shot in the head, but lots of small spiders poured off the side of the monstrous one. He did notice the irony that he thought of these spiders as "small," whereas twelve hours ago he would've said "Whoa! Those are the biggest spiders I've ever seen!"

More and more dead baby spiders fell to the ground in an arachnid rain.

Finally the gunfire stopped. "I'm out of ammo," said Bluehead, "but I cleared out a lot of space. C'mon up!"

She leaned over the side of the creature from hell and extended her hands to Jaunty. She helped pull him up, while he kept his legs firmly on Reginald's shoulders, and Reginald placed his own feet against the side of the spider to help himself climb up. It was a rather impressive acrobatic feat for the three of them to make it to the top, though there was no time to admire their accomplishment.

There were significantly more baby spiders up here than Jaunty would've hoped to see, but he obviously wasn't going to criticize the job Bluehead had done.

It suddenly occurred to Jaunty that they were all now standing on the back of a house-sized spider. He knew this was how things would work out when he was climbing up there, but still, he couldn't believe it. Sheer fright overtook him. His legs buckled beneath him and he fell to his knees.

"No," said Reginald. "You have to stay strong! I'm losing lots of blood and I don't think I'll be awake much longer, so I need you two to bring your A-game to this! Be brave! Do it for the children!"

He handed the machete to Bluehead. She immediately began to slam it deep into the spider's back, over and over again.

Reginald was right. Jaunty had to push past the fear or he'd end up between the spider's jaws, which would be even scarier than being up here. He stood up, then smashed the spiked baseball bat against the spider's back. Some goo sprayed from the wound. Excellent. Goo was good. This was going to work.

The spider turned and the clowns almost spilled over the side.

It smashed into the building with the children.

It wasn't just using its legs this time. It was walking right into the structure, smashing through brick and wood and carpet and appliances and everything else.

Children shrieked in terror.

Jaunty and Bluehead kept whacking and stabbing the spider, while Reginald went around kicking baby spiders out of the way.

The entire building was going to collapse!

An extremely large piece of rubble struck the spider, coming inches from hitting Jaunty. He hoped it hurt.

Reginald bonked his head on a large chunk of dangling ceiling.

The spider continued to smash through the building. Pipes burst and electrical wires sparked. A four-poster bed slid down the spider's back and the clowns barely dove out of the way in time.

Something smacked into Jaunty's head. His vision went black for a second.

A large piece of wood hit Bluehead. She lost her balance, tumbled backwards, and fell off the spider.

"No!" Jaunty screamed.

He rushed over to the side. Bluehead was still hanging on to one of the spider's legs, but she had both of her arms wrapped around it. She'd lost her machete.

The spider broke through to the other side of the building, which collapsed behind them.

The children screamed. They were still alive! Jaunty didn't have time to do a full count, but it looked like all of them, plus the guardian. They fled as the spider continued its pursuit.

Jaunty whacked the spider with the baseball bat, over and over and over and over, sending up big thick wet globs but not seeming to do much to slow the monster. It was simply too huge to kill with a spiked baseball bat.

Could they steer it off a cliff?

No. There were no cliffs around here. And they had no method of steering the spider. They were its passengers with no say in its final destination.

"This isn't working!" shouted Bluehead from below.

She was right. This wasn't working. If they kept up their current strategy, the spider would have a sore back and several human children in its stomach. They had to figure out something else.

The grenades!

No, they'd been smoke grenades and they left them at the library.

The helicopter! The helicopter might show up in the nick of time and tilt itself so that its propeller blades sliced through the spider! Half of the spider would fall in one direction, half would fall in the other, and the beast would be destroyed!

No, the clowns would die in the process, and the helicopter was nowhere to be seen. They needed a plan that didn't rely on others showing up to save them.

"I hate to say this, but you can see how bad off I am," said Reginald, holding up his blood-drenched arm. "I'm going to pass out soon."

Jaunty's eyes widened. "Say that again!"

"I'm going to pass out soon."

Jaunty's eyes narrowed. "No, wait, that's not helpful at all."

"Just thought I should let you know before I got too dizzy to speak. I hope I don't slide off its back."

"Say that again!"

"Just thought I should—"

"No, the part about sliding off its back!"

"I hope I don't slide—"

"Off its back! We've been trying to ruin its back! But what's more vulnerable than its back?"

"Ummmm..."

"Its head! We need to wreck its head!"

"Its head is inconveniently located. It's not like a normal spider head! That's why we didn't go for it sooner."

"I know, but now we have no choice! I need you to hold my legs while I dangle over the side and beat the holy heck out of its head with the baseball bat."

Reginald nodded. "Okay."

As they scrambled over to the front of the spider, Jaunty wished one of the other clowns was going to handle this part. But Reginald was too badly injured, Bluehead was stuck on its leg, and it had been his idea. Jaunty had to do it.

Jaunty lay down flat on his stomach.

Reginald held his legs.

Reginald passed out.

Jaunty slipped over the side.

He landed on the spider's head, which was about the size of the bull at the rodeo that broke his arm all those years ago, though of course it was a completely different shape. He almost slipped off the spider's head as well, but locked his legs around it. The spider looked up at him with its numerous eyes and Jaunty just couldn't handle the overwhelming terror anymore. He began to weep. 

Then he smashed the baseball bat into its skull, if spiders had a skull; if not, he just bashed it into the top of its head.

The spider seemed unhappy about this.

He kept hitting it with the bat, now trying to spike a different eye with each blow.

The spider lurched forward.

Jaunty almost fell off, but though he twisted around he didn't completely lose his grip. He did realize that his left leg was now right next to the spider's giant mouth.

He swung his leg out of the way as the spider tried to take a bite.

He was totally blubbering at this point.

The spider snapped at his leg again. Its fangs caught on his pant leg.

Jaunty made the least brave sound he'd ever emitted in his life.

The spider was stumbling ahead, almost at a run now.

He slammed the baseball bat into the spider's head again and again.

And again and again and again.

Then the bat, slick with spider gore, slipped out of his hands and plummeted to the ground.

This was bad, but through his tear-filled eyes Jaunty saw plenty of holes he'd made in the spider's head. He slammed his fists into them, digging as far into the spider's cranium or exoskeleton or whatever as he could. He grabbed large handfuls of muck and flung it away.

The spider, now blind unless Jaunty had missed an eye somewhere, kept picking up speed.

It was headed straight for a building.

Jaunty twisted himself around, tore his pants free of the spider's mouth, and then, using every last remaining ounce of his clown strength, he climbed up onto its back.

The spider crashed into the building.

Its head exploded upon impact.

The spider collapsed, bringing down much of the building and making a massive hole in the pavement underneath it.

Smoke and dust filled the air.

For a few moments, Jaunty just lay there, eyes squeezed shut.

Then he felt a baby spider crawl on his leg so he kicked it over the side.

He opened his eyes.

Reginald was on the spider's back next to him, still breathing.

Bluehead gave him a thumbs-up, causing her to lose her grip on the spider's leg and fall to the ground. But since the spider was dead, she didn't fall very far. She gave him another thumbs-up.

Soon the air was filled with the sounds of cheering children and the approaching military tank.

EPILOGUE

One of the kids had an iPhone, and had captured the entire battle with the giant mother spider. Jaunty wished he weren't doing so much crying in the video, but it didn't matter—the clowns were still heroes.

The town of Mount Tulip had been blanketed with pesticide and was now filled with dead spiders. There were so many of them that their bodies had no value on eBay. Anybody who wanted a spider souvenir could have one.

Mayor Fawn praised the clowns, saying that all of the destruction and almost irreparable damage to the town's infrastructure was irrelevant when compared to the lives of the children they'd saved. And yes, the children were all terminally ill, being cared for by a nurse, but that too was irrelevant.

Reginald's arm would work properly again. Not soon, but eventually. And when he could juggle again, he, Jaunty, and Bluehead were ready to open the Wacky & Delightful Guffaw & Wagon Tribute Clown Theater. (Jaunty felt a little guilty that Depravo didn't make it into the name, but the name "Depravo" just didn't suit the family friendly tone they were going for with this particular endeavor.)

It was a whole new world. Everybody loved clowns. Movies about scary clowns were removed from online streaming services, and plans were cancelled for It: Chapter Three, enraging Stephen King, who tweeted that they'd made a powerful enemy.

Clowns were no longer nightmarish. They were delightful. They were joy-bringers.

Were all of the fatalities worth it in the end? No, thought Jaunty. Probably not. There'd been an awful lot of them beyond the deaths they personally witnessed.

But as he, Reginald, and Bluehead sat on the porch swing of their brand-new trailer, eating the finest macaroni and cheese in the Midwest, they had to admit that life was pretty good for a clown.

The End

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Giant arachnid-sized thanks to Tod Clark, Donna Fitzpatrick, Paul Goblirsch, Kate Halpern, Lynne Hansen, Michael McBride, Jim Morey, Rhonda Rettig, and Paul Synuria II for their assistance with this project.

Sincere apologies to people who were rooting for the spiders.

Remember: Readers who leave reviews deserve great big hugs!

Subscribe to Jeff Strand's free monthly newsletter (which includes a brand-new original short story in every issue) at

http://eepurl.com/bpv5br

Books By Jeff Strand

My Pretties. A serial kidnapper keeps women locked in cages that dangle from the ceiling of his soundproof basement. But he may have met his match in the two young ladies who walk the city streets at night, using themselves as bait...

Five Novellas. A compilation of Stalking You Now, An Apocalypse of Our Own, Faint of Heart, Kutter, and Facial.

Ferocious. The creatures of the forest are dead...and hungry!

Bring Her Back. A tale of revenge and madness.

Sick House. A home invasion from beyond the grave.

Bang Up. A filthy comedic thriller. "You want to pay me to sleep with your wife?" is just the start of the story.

Cold Dead Hands. Ten people are trapped in a freezer during a terrorist attack on a grocery store.

How You Ruined My Life (Young Adult). Sixteen-year-old Rod has a pretty cool life until his cousin Blake moves in and slowly destroys everything he holds dear.

Everything Has Teeth. A third collection of short tales of horror and macabre comedy.

An Apocalypse of Our Own. Can the Friend Zone survive the end of the world?

Stranger Things Have Happened (Young Adult). Teenager Marcus Millian III is determined to be one of the greatest magicians who ever lived. Can he make a live shark disappear from a tank?

Cyclops Road. When newly widowed Evan Portin gives a woman named Harriett a ride out of town, she says she's on a cross-country journey to slay a Cyclops. Is she crazy, or...?

Blister. While on vacation, cartoonist Jason Tray meets the town legend, a hideously disfigured woman who lives in a shed.

The Greatest Zombie Movie Ever (Young Adult). Three best friends with more passion than talent try to make the ultimate zombie epic.

Kumquat. A road trip comedy about TV, hot dogs, death, and obscure fruit.

I Have a Bad Feeling About This (Young Adult). Geeky, non-athletic Henry Lambert is sent to survival camp, which is bad enough before the trio of murderous thugs show up.

Pressure. What if your best friend was a killer...and he wanted you to be just like him? Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Novel.

Dweller. The lifetime story of a boy and his monster. Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Novel.

A Bad Day For Voodoo. A young adult horror/comedy about why sticking pins in a voodoo doll of your history teacher isn't always the best idea. Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Young Adult Novel.

Dead Clown Barbecue. A collection of demented stories about severed noses, ventriloquist dummies, giant-sized vampires, sibling stabbings, and lots of other messed-up stuff.

Dead Clown Barbecue Expansion Pack. A few more stories for those who couldn't get enough.

Wolf Hunt. Two thugs for hire. One beautiful woman. And one vicious frickin' werewolf.

Wolf Hunt 2. New wolf. Same George and Lou. 

The Sinister Mr. Corpse. The feel-good zombie novel of the year.

Benjamin's Parasite. A rather disgusting action/horror/comedy about why getting infected with a ghastly parasite is unpleasant.

Fangboy. A dark and demented fairy tale for adults.

Kutter. A serial killer finds a Boston terrier, and it might just make him into a better person.

Faint of Heart. To get her kidnapped husband back, Melody has to relive her husband's nightmarish weekend, step-by-step...and survive.

Mandibles. Giant killer ants wreaking havoc in the big city!

Stalking You Now. A twisty-turny thriller soon to be the feature film Mindy Has To Die.

Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary). First in the Andrew Mayhem series.

Single White Psychopath Seeks Same. Second in the Andrew Mayhem series.

Casket For Sale (Only Used Once). Third in the Andrew Mayhem series.

Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley"). Fourth in the Andrew Mayhem series.

The Andrew Mayhem Collection. All four novels for one low price!

Suckers (with JA Konrath). Andrew Mayhem meets Harry McGlade. Which one will prove to be more incompetent?

Gleefully Macabre Tales. A collection of thirty-two demented tales. Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Collection.

Elrod McBugle on the Loose. A comedy for kids (and adults who were warped as kids).

The Haunted Forest Tour (with Jim Moore). The greatest theme park attraction in the world! Take a completely safe ride through an actual haunted forest! Just hope that your tram doesn't break down, because this forest is PACKED with monsters...

Draculas (with JA Konrath, Blake Crouch, and F. Paul Wilson). An outbreak of feral vampires in a secluded hospital. This one isn't much like Twilight.

For information on all of these books, visit Jeff Strand's more-or-less official website at http://www.jeffstrand.com