The Green Clown

Adrien Carver
Jul 27, 2017 · 8 min read

The clown had a green face, which was something she’d never seen before.

It was grinning at her, from the window of the second floor of the antique shop. It wore a silver costume, big blue buttons down the front. White gloves.

Its face was completely green. There was what looked like either dark blue or black around the eyes and the mouth. The green was pea green. Like he’d smeared strained peas all over his face.

His cheeks were high in a toothy smile. His teeth were white and straight. He was bald on top of his head, and there were orange tufts of hair sticking out from behind his ears.

Jazz stared at the clown from the driver’s seat of her Ford sedan.

The fuck am I looking at? She thought to herself.

She had just walked out of the Treasure Box and stuck her key in the ignition when she’d had the feeling someone was watching her.

She looked up, and there was the clown in the window.

Jazz began to think she was looking at a creepy mannequin, but then the grinning clown raised a gloved hand and gave her a wave.

Bye-bye.

Fucking-A. Did Miss Wiley know there was a creepy guy in a clown costume upstairs?

Jazz took the key out of the ignition, and got out of the car.

The clown was still waving to her from the window.

Jazz ran back into the store, eyes on the creep the whole time.

Miss Wiley was still behind the glass counter with all the lockets and watches and vintage hummel figures inside it.

“Did you forget something?” she said to Jazz.

“There’s a clown upstairs,” said Jazz. “Did you know that?”

“A clown?”

“Yeah, he’s got green face paint on. I thought he was a doll or something but then he waved at me. He’s creepy as all hell.”

Miss Wiley blinked at her, and then got a concerned look on her face.

“I got in my car, and just happened to look up, and he’s looking at me from the left-most window of the second floor.”

“That room is all storage,” said Miss Wiley. “There’s someone up there? How could he get up there?”

“Should we call the police?”

“I don’t think so,” said Miss Wiley, coming around from the counter and making for the stairs. “That room is ALL storage. It’s packed with boxes. There’s no way someone could stand by the window.”

They walked up the rickety stairs together.

“I swear to God, I saw him,” said Jazz.

The room in question was at the end of the hall, last door on the right.

They opened it, Jazz’s blood pressure rising.

The room was indeed packed with boxes. The sun shone through the dusty window. The boxes were all stacked right up against the wall. There was a narrow path to the other wall, but no space near the window.

“Did you see this?” Miss Wiley said, walking in the narrow corridor created by the boxes and grabbing a porcelain doll from atop of a box near the window. “Did you see Mindy?”

The doll was a small brunette girl wearing a sun-yellow dress. Her eyelids fluttered as Miss Wiley picked her up.

“That’s nowhere near the window,” said Jazz. “And no, I saw a clown with green face paint on and this shiny silver outfit. Like, you know, like, from the circus.”

Miss Wiley put Mindy the doll down. Its eyes closed.

“Jazz, honey, you need to go home and get some sleep.”

Jazz looked around the room. She shook her head.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t want some murderer coming downstairs…”

“I understand. I’m glad there wasn’t anyone here.”

Jazz walked back out to her car, the Christmas bells on the door tinkling as it slammed behind her.

She got in her car and started it.

She lifted her head to look at the window.

There was no clown.

======================================

“Poor Jazz saw Mr. Shicookie standing in the old poker room upstairs on her way out the door today,” said Miss Wiley to her husband, John.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, maybe you could just have word with him about scaring the wrong people? The poor girl was so concerned, and then she thought she was losing her mind when we went upstairs and he was gone.”

“Not my problem,” said John. He was fixing a crystal lamp the shop had received earlier that month. “He haunts the place, he’s been here longer than we have.”

“I know, dear, but Jazz is such a sweetheart, she came back inside after leaving because she thought he was going to rob me or something.”

John grunted. He was a large man, bald, big bellied, with a shiny forehead and wire-rimmed glasses. His wife, Hannah, was a short woman with glasses and straight grey hair that hung to her shoulders. They had met each other at Woodstock and opened up the Treasure Box together upon John’s graduation from U of M, way back in 1973.

Soon after opening the store, they’d become aware of a strange presence in the old place. It had once been a luxurious home for a banker in the city, and after that it had been a hotel. Then it had lain vacant for a decade or so until John and Hannah bought it and turned it into the city’s most popular antique shop.

The presence they felt was menacing, but there was a playfulness to it as well. It had never harmed either of the Wileys, although neither of them had given it much of a reason to, either.

The presence didn’t show them its true form until one particularly profitable day. They were closing up and counting the cash from the register and planning on going to the expensive sea food restaurant downtown when all of a sudden John looked across the main show room and barked, “Who the hell are you?”

Hannah had looked up and seen a clown standing against the southern windows. Except he wasn’t standing. He was floating above the couches. His feet, clad in giant rubber orange shoes, hung down with the toes pointed at the floor. He was dressed in a silver suit and had pea-green face paint on, with midnight blue trim around his eyes and mouth. He was bald with orange tufts of hair around his ears, and he had an orange nose and orange circles painted on his sharp cheeks. He was grinning at them.

“We’re closed,” barked John. “Gotta leave.”

“John,” Hannah had said, grabbing his arm.

The clown had given them a wave and disappeared into thin air.

“The hell was that?”

John had stormed over and inspected the area, furious that some creep was trespassing in his new store and trying to scare people.

“It’s cold over here,” he said. There was no sign of the clown.

“Let’s just go home, John,” Hannah had said, and the incident had been pushed to the back of their busy minds.

“She is a nice girl, John, so helpful,” said Hannah. “Would you please have a word with him? He never listens to me.”

John sighed. He clearly was not going to be able to finish fixing this lamp right now. Not until he appeased his wife.

“Fine,” he said.

He trudged upstairs.

Mr. Shicookie had written his name across the front counter in black ink the morning after he’d appeared to them. That’s how the Wileys learned his name.

They’d Googled up his unusual name but nothing came up. Then they’d checked the University’s archives and found an old newspaper article about an old gambler who used to have a side job as a clown. He was notorious for his green face paint and his antics. He was gunned down outside the shop one morning in the 1920’s when it was a hotel, suspected of cheating at a poker game.

“Well, that explains it,” said John. “We got ourselves a resident ghost.”

“Oh, John, do you think he’s dangerous?”

“Don’t know. But I ain’t saying anything now. We just opened.”

Mr. Shicookie was super creepy, but he proved harmless. Until now, almost no one they personally knew had ever seen him.

John went into the doll room and cleared his throat.

“You in here?” he asked.

He felt a chill from behind him and turned to see Mr. Shicookie peeking at him from the doorway of room 3, which was where all the lamps were kept. The fucker was always smiling like that. Creepy as hell.

“Hey, my wife says you gave one of our new tellers quite a start,” John said, talking to the ghost like he was talking to an employee. “She’s just a college girl. She’s a real nice girl, real sweetheart. Hannah loves her and she’s only been here two weeks.”

Mr. Shicookie didn’t respond — he never did. He just kept floating in the door way with half his grinning face visible, that high-cheeked smile on his puke-green face. That smile made him look like that sumbitch John Kerry. His stupid tufts of carrot-colored hair drove John crazy. No wonder those gangsters had shot him.

“I know you’re gonna do whatever the hell it is you want,” said John. “But now I can tell Hannah that I said something. So yeah, that’s it.”

He paused a second.

“Thanks.”

John walked down the hallway towards Mr. Shicookie, and Mr. Shicookie disappeared just before John got to the doorway he was floating in.

“Rest in peace, already,” John muttered under his breath as he trudged back down the stairs.

=====================================

“This is actually really fucking irritating,” John muttered as he watched Mr. Shicookie do back flips over all the merchandise. The clown flipped from display to display, light as air. The merchandise never even moved when he touched it with either his hands or feet, but John still cringed, expecting something to teeter and then fall and shatter.

“If you break anything I’m taking the damn vacuum to you,” he barked. “See how you like being inside a wind tunnel bag for a coupla weeks.”

Mr. Shicookie grinned and kept playing.

“That does it,” thought John. “I’m sick of him. And now he’s appearing to employees. Not gonna work.”

So just like that, John took it upon himself to look up how to do exorcisms or how to get rid of ghosts.

To John’s utter surprise, it seemed the easiest way was to simply ask the ghost to leave.

“Look the ghost in the eye and tell it exactly what you want,” read Hannah. “Speak firmly. Ghosts might not know they’re dead — “

“He’s been dead for almost a century now,” barked John as Mr Shicookie swung from the ceiling fans. “It’s time to move the fuck on!”

“All right, John, all right,” said Hannah. Her husband could be such an old grump.

She looked at Mr. Shicookie and spoke calmly. She looked right into his eyes. She saw for the first time that they were orange as well.

“Mr. Shicookie, very sorry that those mobsters killed you and smeared your facepaint all over but I’m afriad that happened nearly one hundred years ago. My husband and I have put up with you for a long time now and we only want to run our shop in peace until we retire. Please go on to the next realm or whatever it is you do.”

She paused.

“Thank you.”

Mr Shicookie dropped from the ceiling fan. He stopped smiling. He looked deeply concerned.

He spoke to them.

“I’m dead?”

Their jaws dropped. His voice was pleasant. Hannah was reminded of Ronald McDonald from the children’s commercials.

“Yeah,” said John. “Long time now.”

Mr. Shicookie got an apologetic look on his face.

“I am so sorry to have troubled you,” the clown said.

He then disappeared like he always did, fading out in seconds, like fog.

“Is that it?” said Hannah. “He’s gone?”

She walked over to where Mr. Shicookie had stood. She felt around with her hands.

“It’s not cold anymore like it used to be when he’d leave a room,” she said. “I think it worked, John!”

“25 goddamn years and all we had to do was ask him to go,” grumbled John. “Remember when he startled you and you dropped that original Rockwell and shattered the frame?”

“Well, I guess we lucked out on this one,” said Hannah. “That didn’t end quite like I was expecting. I guess sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer.”

Adrien Carver

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Everything is a work in progress.

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