Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
JEX
The van is a rusted, windowless beast that smells like gasoline and bad intentions. I call it the Hearse of Hilarity, but right now, the only thing funny is the way Higgins is vibrating.
He’s sitting in the back, bolted to a wheel well, the nerve gas canister taped to his thigh like a ticking tumour. Every time we hit a pothole, he lets out a sound like a punctured accordion.
“Keep it steady, Knuckles!” I shout toward the front, where the big man is wrestling the steering wheel as if he’s trying to choke it to death. “We have precious cargo! We wouldn’t want Higgins here to go off prematurely. That’s a very messy way to exit the stage, isn’t it, Higgins?”
I’m sitting on a crate of Molotov cocktails, playing a game of ‘Knife Roulette’ between my own fingers on the metal floor of the van. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The blade misses my skin by a hair’s breadth every time.
“Please,” Higgins blubbers, the snot running down his upper lip. “Please, I have a mom. I have a—”
“Oh, everyone has a mom, Higgins! Even Aris had a mom, though I suspect she was a cold-blooded reptile with a penchant for taxidermy.” I stop the knife and point the tip at his nose.
“Let’s play a game. It’s called ‘The Truth or the Teeth.’ If you tell me something boring, I take a tooth.
If you tell me something juicy about the layout of the Soft Room…
you get to keep your smile for another five minutes. Ready? Go!”
“The—the sensors!” he gasps, flinching as the van swerves to avoid a police cruiser.
I don’t even blink at the sirens. We’re the ghost in the machine tonight.
“The perimeter fence is electrified, but the third sector is down! Aris diverted the power to the internal security grids! He’s obsessed with the basement level! He—he’s building something down there!”
“Building something?” I tilt my head, my eyes wide and shimmering with a dangerous, emerald light. “A playground? A nursery for all his little broken dolls? Tell me, Higgins… is my Queen in the basement?”
“No! She’s still in the Soft Room on the fourth floor! But he—he goes there every night. He stays for hours. He talks to her. The cameras… he turns them off.”
I feel a surge of white-hot rage, a jagged lightning bolt that fries the ‘Joker’ smile right off my face for a split second. I drive the knife into the floorboards between my boots. Klang.
“He turns them off,” I repeat, my voice a low, vibrating growl that makes the air in the van turn to ice. “The voyeur wants his privacy. He wants to watch her break in the dark where no one can see the stains he leaves.”
I stand up, the van swaying violently as Knuckles takes a corner on two wheels. We’re hitting the main highway now, the lights of the city a blurred, neon streak outside the tiny rust-holes in the van’s side.
“Hey, Knuckles! Give the neighbours a show!”
Knuckles slams a button on the dash. Suddenly, the van isn’t just a van—it’s a mobile riot.
A bank of high-intensity strobe lights I welded to the roof starts pulsing in a nauseating rhythm of violet and lime green.
A set of loudspeakers, salvaged from an old stadium, begins to blare a distorted, slowed-down recording of a calliope organ.
La-la-la-la-la-la…
It sounds like a carnival drowning in a bathtub.
We roar past a line of commuters, and I lean out the side door, clinging to the frame with one hand. I’ve got a flare in the other, the red phosphorus spitting sparks into the wind.
“HEY! LOVELY NIGHT FOR A RECKONING, ISN’T IT?” I howl at a terrified woman in a minivan. I toss a handful of Queen of Hearts cards into the slipstream. They flutter behind us like a trail of bloody breadcrumbs.
“Jex! The gate!” Pip screams from the passenger seat.
I look ahead. There it is. Hillside Sanitarium. It sits on the cliff like a jagged, white tooth, the searchlights cutting through the smog. The main gate is a wall of reinforced steel and shivering guards.
“Alright, Higgins! Curtains up!” I grab the kid by the collar and haul him toward the open door. The wind is whipping his tears across his face. “Time to go home! Remember: get to the main security hub. Don’t stop. Don’t talk to the guards. Just get in there and wait for the beep.”
“I can’t! They’ll shoot me!”
“Then die with a smile, kid! It’s better for the reviews!”
I give him a heavy, unceremonious boot to the backside, sending him tumbling out of the van as we slow down just enough for him to hit the asphalt and roll toward the outer checkpoint.
“KNUCKLES! FLOOR IT!”
The van roars, the engine screaming in agony as we aim the grill directly at the electrified fence. I grab two canisters of ‘The Punchline’ and pull the pins with my teeth.
“SMILE, DOCTOR!” I scream, the green gas beginning to hiss out of the canisters, swirling around me like a toxic shroud. “THE DEALER IS HERE TO COLLECT THE DEBT!”
We hit the fence with a bone-jarring CRASH, the sparks flying like a thousand tiny suns, and the world turns into a beautiful, screaming chaos of green smoke and violet light.
The green gas doesn’t just drift; it claims.
It pours out of the van’s shattered windows in thick, oily ribbons, crawling along the asphalt like a living thing.
It hits the first line of guards at the perimeter—men with high-and-tight haircuts and rifles they think make them safe.
They don’t even have time to scream before the “The Punchline” finds the wet membranes of their eyes and the pink lining of their throats.
“Watch the show, boys!” I howl, standing on the hood of the steaming van, my purple coat snapping in the wind. “The first act is always the most… revealing.”
The lead guard, a brick of a man named Jones—oh, I recognise that jawline from the files—drops his rifle. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at his own hands. To him, the skin is melting, turning into a swarm of black, buzzing flies that are eating their way up his arms.
“Get them off! GET THEM OFF!” he shrieks, his voice hitting a register that would make a soprano weep. He starts clawing at his own forearms, his fingernails digging deep, red furrows into his meat, trying to peel the hallucinations away.
Next to him, another guard turns toward his partner. But he doesn’t see a fellow officer. Through the haze of my green gift, he sees a towering, faceless demon with Hallow’s blue-and-red pigtails and a mouth full of jagged, rusted needles.
“Monster!” the guard babbles, his eyes weeping blood as the gas fries his synapses. He raises his sidearm and presses it against his partner’s temple. “STAY BACK, YOU BITCH!”
BLAM.
The partner’s head snaps back, a spray of crimson painting the white security booth behind them. It’s beautiful. It’s like a Jackson Pollock painting, if Jackson Pollock had a thing for high-velocity brain matter.
“Ooh! A plot twist!” I clap my hands, hopping off the hood and landing in the centre of the toxic fog. I breathe it in—deep. To me, it just tastes like peppermint and victory. My brain is already so far gone, the gas just feels like a warm hug from an old friend.
All around the gate, the “The Punchline” is doing its work.
The guards aren’t a team anymore; they’re a collection of panicked animals trapped in their own worst nightmares.
One man is curled in a fetal position, sobbing because he thinks the shadows are made of teeth.
Another is firing his shotgun into the empty air, screaming at “the ghosts” to leave him alone.
“You see, Knuckles?” I gesture broadly at the screaming, self-mutilating chaos. “People spend so much time pretending they aren’t afraid of the dark. All I did was turn the lights off.”
I walk past a guard who is trying to eat his own tongue. I stop, reach into my pocket, and tuck a Joker card into his belt. “Chew slowly, pal. Digestion is key.”
The sirens are wailing now, but they’re drowned out by the sound of the asylum’s internal alarms. The high-pitched skree-skree-skree is the perfect backbeat to the carnage.
The searchlights are swinging wildly, cutting through the green fog, making the whole scene look like a sick, strobe-lit rave in a slaughterhouse.
I look up at the fourth-floor windows. The Soft Room.
Somewhere up there, in the silence, Hallow is listening to the world catch fire. She might not know my name yet, but she can hear the punchline. She can feel the foundation of her cage beginning to crumble under the weight of my arrival.
“Higgins!” I shout, spotting the kid through the haze. He’s made it to the secondary blast doors, clutching the canister on his leg like a holy relic. He’s shaking so hard his teeth are probably rattling out of his gums. “Open the door, Higgins! Daddy’s home, and I brought the fireworks!”
Higgins fumbles with the keypad, his fingers slick with sweat and terror. The green gas is nipping at his heels, beginning to whisper his own secrets into his ears.
“Don’t let the voices in, kid! Just hit the buttons!”
With a heavy, mechanical groan, the secondary blast doors begin to slide open. The belly of the beast is exposed—white tiles, fluorescent lights, and the smell of bleach trying to hide the scent of suffering.
I pull my serrated blade and let out a long, jagged howl of pure joy.
“CURTAINS UP, DOCTOR ARIS!” I scream, sprinting toward the opening. “THE AUDIENCE IS WAITING, AND THE CLOWN IS OUT OF HIS CAGE!”