It’s been a real bullshit day for Carolyn, and being damned to hell was really just the capper. “This sucks,” she tells the demon slowly flensing the skin off her lower leg.

“Tuesdays, amirite?” says the demon, who doesn’t stop flensing.

“No, really, I hate this. I don’t like any part of this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just life in late stage capitalism, ain’t it? Life’s a bitch like that. Still—” the demon has the chipper nonemotive voice of a high quality voicemail system— “we struggle on the best we can. Other leg, please!”

Carolyn holds out her leg. “It’s just—” she screams hoarsely as the knife slips skillfully but incredibly painfully between the skin and the muscle of her calf— “I had plans this morning, you know? I was going to go to the bank.“

The demon pauses, looks sympathetically into her eyes for a second. “Oh, honey,” it says, not unkindly, “we both know you were never going to go to the bank.”

Flensed, he yet lives; breathes, moves, poses in wet and bloody glory. Cobbled together from sawdust and stage makeup.

Thus:

Pirates along the Levantine coast, and a beautiful dark-eyed boy. Leopards on the foredeck, ivy on the oars. Dolphins roll in the wake, eyes dark and inhuman and rapacious. Tethys, world-girdling Tethys, is dark and deep, bitter as herbs.

or

Abandoned by god and his maker, a collection of corpses, he crouches in a woodshed, teaches himself English (how) and reading (why) from a half-used catalog from Sears and Roebuck. Shoes are expensive this year; there’s a slimming machine, a complicated bit of deadly nonsense jerryrigged together much as he is, all leather belts and sharp edges and ungrounded electricity. Outside a Christian and a Muslim are planning an elopement, but inside he dreams of capitalism.

and

Westward, from the cities to the plains to the mountains to the cities. Once the notional roads swallowed armies whole in mud deep enough to drown an elephant. A future president broke his back, cursing, hauling a truck through the mud, dreamt of a vast network of tar black as the sea, crushed rock knitting the ruins of empire together like the veins god put inside him, thick, slow, and inescapably seen.

While I work, he sleeps with his feet against mine, warms me in the icy room with the heat of his body. I can feel him dreaming, running down some impossible hallway, skimming the top of a rolling green hill on a sunswept day in March, walking beside the lake in November.

We spend too much time together.

We stifle in this too-small apartment, rub each other raw with proximity. On bad days I close the door and clench myself against his incoherent yelling a fierce wordless sound as he screams at people passing our door toward the elevator, walking by on the sidewalk. Other days I rage myself hoarse and he runs away, huddles himself small in the bedroom.

We have been hurt before, know we will be hurt again.

Overcaring, we touch too much, comfort too aggressively. He pushes his face into mine as I cry, I hold him still when he shakes with fury. We do not want to touch, or be touched, but most of all we long for stillness.

The spells are cast, the circle is inscriped; at the seven theologically significant points are, respectively, a feather, a coin, a dish of oil, a piece of fruit, a bone, an old shoe, and a new one. The stars, such as they are, are right.

A billow of sulfurous smoke, like the air over a hot spring, and a voice unlike any human sound.

YOU HAVE SUMMONED ME AND SO AM I HERE
SPEAK YOUR EVERY EARTHLY DESIRE AND I SHALL GRANT IT

Much excitement from the assembly. One steps forth and casts back his hood. He has a babyish face, round and unlovely, a tangled mop of curly hair and a moustache struggling to find purchase on his lip. “Servant!” he cries; his voice cracks a little with excitement. “We have summoned you to teach us your dark and esoteric arts! Give us—”

YES

“Give us—”

YES

“Give us dominance in the crypto sphere!”

SO IS THE CONTRACT STRUCK

Things go great for a year and a half and then the roof falls in when they start embezzeling from their suckers. Demoniacal knowledge is nothing compared to the patience of a determined auditor.

Murderclown is old, and Murderclown is tired.

The face in the mirror is lined, the cheeks grown gaunt with age; the years of rubberfaced malevolence have etched themselves into his skin, and without an active energetic hoist there’s a marked tendency toward hangdog droopiness. Murderclown rinses the blood from his hands, slaps himself twice, and forcibly yanks himself back into an approximation of the old cocaine cheer. “Showtime,” he mutters, and grins. avoiding eye contact.

Murderclown has craft, but the ideas don’t come like they used to.

It’s different when you’re young, you’re crammed to the gills with outside concepts, and something like hiding in a sewer or dressing up like a zombie or going undercover as an escort just to stab a guy seems fresh and wild, but after a certain point you start referencing your own long history instead. It’s easier, and if you don’t feel the same wild hit of experimentation that you used to, well, at least people still whisper your name, don’t they?

Murderclown used to be a horror story. He used to be a legend. Mad dog, they still call him, but lately—there’s an affection there. “Stabbed by Murderclown” is a story now for the out of towners to carry back, the ones who survive, anyway, one more tourist requirement, like photos in front of the arch or a walk down the gentrified remains of the red light district.

These days he’s an institution.