Bounce

Iron Age Media Image Prompt

The following is a sort-of free form story written for the above image prompt (which I happily provided for the Halloween season) from Iron Age Media website.

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Its face was a bone-chilling white, with ears which seemed to stretch up all the way to the top of its hairless skull. The white color was so ingrained into the skin, Johnny couldn’t tell if there was natural skin under the paint despite the ghastly wrinkled which framed its hideous grimace. Lips were pulled taunt over yellowed teeth like pillars of a disgusting rot, and in that smile-not-a-smile Johnny stood petrified. Shadows in the hallway gave the clown’s eyes such a sunken look he could only see deep wells of evil instead of eyes. They both stood unmoving in the night, with Johnny becoming mesmerized by fear.

He had woken up without cause. It was a normal night. His sister would be in bed in the next room, because he had finally convinced his parents he could have one to himself. He was in seventh grade, after all. It had been quite awhile since he had woken up like this, but he couldn’t help take advantage of the newness of it. Nobody would be awake and he could see what being up late might feel like. He could sneak downstairs and maybe turn on the TV. Quietly turn on the TV, of course. Also quietly eat the leftover candy. No one could catch him.

The clown still gently touched the mirror in the downstairs hallway to the kitchen, no longer admiring its reflection, and instead staring at Johnny. Johnny’s eyes slowly adapted until he could see more of his intruder, and it wore one of those silly, full neck collars from his school history book. It had hugely puffed shoulders too, striped crimson and dark grey. Despite the silly look, Johnny slowly began to get increasingly scared, and tried to stammer out a warning.

An already wide grin grew wider.

“Mm-my parents are upstairs,” Johnny offered. He wanted to add more to that statement, but his mind had already made itself up to run upstairs. There wasn’t too much else it could think about.

The clown was not deterred by that information, or at least it looked so still to Johnny the figure could have been mute. Slowly, ever so slowly, a gloved hand pointed upstairs. The red yarn which composed the glove seemed ragged and well-worn, almost like what he would see on a homeless person. There was so much red under the terribly pale streetlights filtering in from the front door window.

Johnny turned to race up the stairs and suddenly found himself rolling off a bed. The fall bewildered him a moment, and it was still dark in his room. His mind raced from what he saw, but the heightened sense began to calm as it felt more and more like a dream. A wild, scary dream that he couldn’t immediately shake. The carpet of the floor felt soft beneath him, and he tried to gain control of his breath.

After a few minutes, he quietly whispered, “What was that?” and then sat up off the floor.

The nearly floor-to-ceiling mirror on the closet door was wrong, and it was on the wrong side of the room. His bed was too close to the wall. There was light where it wasn’t supposed to be. Despite it being dark, the colors in the night were wrong. This was his sister’s room, their old room. He carefully peered over the side of the bed to see a disrupted cover blanket, yet his sister was gone. The panic started to build again.

Johnny was much more cautious this time heading downstairs. With his sister’s door closed, he took a full ten seconds to twist the doorknob to prevent the click it had when he was small. If he pulled the door open too quickly, it would make a dragging noise against the carpet so he was methodically slow with it. Plush carpet continued into the hallway, but the center of the upstairs hallway always creaked. So Johnny clung close to the wall as he passed by his room and towards whatever might wait beneath him.

He didn’t have to walk far before he could see a body at the bottom of the stairs, but it wasn’t his sister. Johnny wanted so desperately to turn on the light switch right next to him. He even reached up his hand to flip it on, but strangely misjudged where it was. The boy didn’t try again though. Something kept him from wanting to know. The fear of the unknown clown had crept through his mind from the back of his skull until it clenched his whole being. Unconsciously, he scratched at a fingernail using his other hand, and some red fingernail paint peeled off.

Johnny stopped what he was doing and looked down at his hand, and then at the pajamas he was wearing. The clothes looked like his sister’s clothes, and his hand too strange to be his. Another horrifying thought overtook the mental image of the clown, and it involved who he was. What has the clown done? he thought to himself. Who am I now?

Many thoughts spilled out of the deep recesses of his brain and into his consciousness. I don’t want to be my sister. I want to be me. Can I be changed back? Am I my sister now, or was...was she always me? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do? How do I wake up from this?

Instinct was all Johnny had left—primitive, responsive instinct. There was a knife in his room, so he got up and raced for it without concern for the noise. It was a Boy Scout knife, but it was all his brain could come up with for defense. In his former room, by the bed, in the nightstand drawer, under some notebooks laid the knife where he last put it. He fumbled yanking it from its spot and it rolled under the bed. Johnny snatched it wildly, and then tore at every part of the multi-tool until he found its short-ish knife.

This was it. Johnny gathered himself and then ran back towards the stairs. At the bottom, the harlequin stood over its victim, Johnny’s own body. It wasn’t looking down at him—or whoever that person was now—but it was instead looking up the stairs at Johnny. He ran down halfway, until he saw the clown wave a hand.

The grin seemed wider than a shark’s mouth, with as many teeth. Its eyes—despite how the outside light shadowed its face deeper than before—Johnny saw the center of its eyes and they were filled with sadistic delight. The figure waved again and then it collapsed on the floor next to his.

Johnny stood frozen on the stairs, but for how long he didn’t know. He was certain now this must be a dream, but he couldn’t understand why it didn’t feel like a dream. The shock was overwhelming his senses. Johnny fell to a step on the stairs in anguish, and grabbed his head in his hands. He was trapped there.

The stairway light popped on above him, and he turned to see who it was. The light was too bright in the dead of night, and he covered his eyes to block out the intensity. Slowly everything finally came into focus.

His father was at the top step, grinning.

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I hope you enjoyed this little look into a potential story idea I’ve had. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please do subscribe with the button below to catch new stories. Also take a look at my past entries on substack!