Zom-B Underground by Darren Shan Page B

look.”
    The man giggles. It’s a strange, jangly sound. It makes me grit my teeth. I start to sit up angrily. Then the man steps inside and I sink back with confusion and disgust.
    It’s a clown, but no clown that you’d ever see in a circus, not unless it was a circus in hell.
    He’s dressed in a pinstripe suit, but with colorful patches stitched into it in lots of different places. There are plenty of bloodstains too.
    A severed face hangs from either shoulder. The faces have been skinned from the bone. I think one came from a woman and the other from a man, but it’s hard to be sure.
    Lengths of gut are wound around both his arms, long strands of intestines, glistening and dripping. Along his legs several ears have been pinned to the fabric of his trousers.
    He’s wearing a pair of oversized red shoes, a small skull sticking out of the end of each. They could be the skulls of some breed of monkey, but I don’t think they are. I think the skulls came from human babies.
    The clown’s hair has been sourced from a variety of heads. There are all sorts of locks, every type of color, shade and length, stuck to his skull. No… not stuck. As he comes closer and giggles again, he bends slightly and I see that the clumps of hair are stapled to his scalp. There are dried bloodstains around many of them, and fresh blood flows from a few.
    The clown has a painted white face, but that’s the only traditional touch. The flesh around his eyes has been carved away and filled in with what looks like soot. A pair of
v
-shaped channels run from beneath either eye to just above his lips, which have beenpainted a dark blue color. The channels have been gouged out of his cheeks and the exposed bone has been dyed bright pink. Instead of the usual red ball over his nose, he’s somehow attached a human eye to it. Little red stars have been dotted over it.
    I do nothing as the surreal clown advances. I’m frozen in place. I’m praying that this is an illusion, a product of my fevered brain. But he doesn’t look like a dream figure. By all rights he shouldn’t belong to this world, but he certainly seems at home in it.
    The clown hops from foot to foot, performing a strange little shuffle, still giggling, drawing closer. Now I spot a button on his chest, round and colorful, the sort a child might paint. Daubed on the button, in very ragged handwriting, is what I assume is his name.
    Mr. Dowling.
    He reaches the foot of my bed and beams at me, lips closed, eyes wide, looking crazier and more menacing than anything I’ve ever seen. His eyes continually twitch from one side of their sockets to the other. His skin is wriggling, as if insects are burrowing beneath the flesh, close to the surface.
    I want to kick out at the nightmarish clown, or slide past him and race from the cell. But I can’t move. It’s like I’m locked down tight. I can’t even whine.
    The clown reaches out and slowly strokes my right cheek. His fingers are long and thin. Much of the flesh has been sliced away from them. I glimpse bones through a mishmash of exposed veinsand arteries. He’s not a zombie–he has normal-looking nails, and I can feel his pulse through the touch of his fingers–so I can’t understand how he tolerates these open, seeping wounds.



Withdrawing his hand, the clown–
Mr. Dowling
–leans over until his face is in front of mine. His eyes steady for a moment and he looks straight at me. Only it’s more like he’s looking through me. I feel as if he’s reading my thoughts, stripping my mind bare, unraveling all of my secrets.
    The clown’s smile spreads. His eyes start dancing again. He opens his mouth.
    Spiders fall from his blue lips, a rain of arachnids, small and scuttly. Hundreds of legs scrape my face as they pour upon me, over my eyes, into my mouth, up my nose.
    With a scream of shock and terror, I snap back to life, hurl myself from the bed and roll across the floor, swiping spiders from my face, mashing them to pieces