Coulrophobia Cabin

Content warning: murder, mutilation, mentions of child abuse

The cabin was a small, wooden structure, dark and dingy, dusty and cobwebbed. A skylight let in the faintest hint of opalescent moonlight and it bathed the contents of the upperfloor loft in a cold metallic glow; a wardrobe, a dressing table with a large mirror, and boxes of junk piled two or three high. Outside snow fell ceaselessly, dreamlike and surreal, the hibernal bluish-white frost juxtaposed by the comforting warmth of the logfire inside the ramshackle hut.

A tall, solid, brachycephalic figure stood in the centre of the room, he was a bag of sand with a homemade haircut, and he lit a fat brown cigar which glowed intensely in the gloom, the nepheligenous figure was Bonzo.

Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.

Bonzo was a psychopath, no empathy, no emotions, no fear. Maybe it was his tormented childhood, maybe he was born that way, his brain worked differently to others, every traumatic experience as a child rewired and recoded his brain until it was a malfunctioning circuitboard in the chassis of his thickboned skull. Well, almost malfunctioning. He didn’t use drink as a crutch or drugs as an escape route, he didn’t like the loss of control which came with inebriation. He had a different outlet…

He sat down before the mirror and looked into his face; the weatherworn flesh which sagged and wrinkled, cracks on his skin forming deep crevices, like the bed of some long-since dried-up creek. His nose hooked and his cheekbones jagged, his vapidly emotionless eyes peered out from beneath beetling grey eyebrows, his thin dry lips encased a mouthful of crooked teeth, yellowing from tobacco. His hair, niveous like the snow outside, stuck up wildly at either side of his head, bald in the middle like an inverted mohawk, two scraggly trees dying at either side of an arid, desiccated valley.

He lay and watched the snow land and melt silently against the windowpane, curling tendrils of smoke around his mouth, at the centre of each unique snowflake is a single piece of dust which can be anything from volcanic ash to a particle from outer space, he thought deeply about that as he chewed his cigar.

Drip, drip, drip, drip.

This was his outlet, this was how he coped with life. He took a can of temporary hair dye and shook it with a harsh rattle, then sprayed the white hair he did have a bright crimson colour. He then applied the rest of his makeup, painted his entire face white with a greasepaint, once this was completed he dipped a brush in some red paint and drew exaggerated rubescent lips around his pale thin ones, as well as a touch of red on the tip of his long proboscis.

Taking the meaty cigar which was fuming away in the ashtray he sucked down a couple of deep drags, to the beef, and extinguished it, before applying black paint round his eyes. Filling a tube sock with talcum powder and tying a knot in it, he dabbed at his face to dry the grease and set the makeup. A slightly demonic clown's face now stared at him from the mirror, nothing remained of the sad, puffy old man from a few minutes ago.

This was his outlet, this was his release. He sipped a cold coffee and, dragging a wig of long scraggly orange hair over his head, he rose and walked to his wardrobe where he donned a tuxedo like that which a fancy waiter might wear. Sliding a coronation into his breastpocket and pulling a cloak round his shoulders, he drained the last of his cup and headed, carefully, down some croaking stairs.

Creak, croak, creak, croak.

Drip, drip, drip, drip.

Downstairs was another room, slightly larger, but still cramped. Its main features were cluttered bookshelves, dusty old tomes adorned their broken ribs, a stout writing desk, and a cranky foldout bed. In the corner was a rusty tin bath sitting before an open fire, the flames danced and spat aggressively.

The only personal items were a dented guitar with missing strings and a bedraggled teddy bear propped up next to it, complete with the obligatory missing eye. An old disused cabin, located in the back-of-beyond, one-roomed with an upstairs bit that was really just a wooden ledge with steps leading up to a sort of hayloft.

For twenty years he had been a butcher, now retired, so retired in fact, that he had went vegan. He was concerned about his carbon footprint. He turned his attention to a small leatherworn briefcase and clicked it open, inside lay the tools of his ex-trade. He always had used Victorinox, they were the best, it’s tough enough doing professional butchery without being impeded by a shitty knife.

He slid one out and inspected its keen, shimmering blade in the frolicking firelight, an eight inch flexible filleting knife, its steel was as pitiless as the midnight sun, as was Bonzo’s expression, as he turned to the source of the persistent dripping noise.

Drip, drip, drip, drip.

The steadily-dripping blood had formed a small wine-dark puddle beneath each of his victims' heads, where they hung upside down like bats, all three of them, meathooked. There’s not much difference between hacking-off the hindquarters of a cow, cutting the hip with a saw, and yanking out the ribs, as there is disembodying some greasy, unctuous paedophile.

Likewise, trimming and butterflying chicken breasts and removing the tongue, eyes and fingers of some grimy, perverted sexcase, both tasks are equally mundane to the butcher-clown and achieved easily enough with the aid of a good knife and a little skilled experience. Once you’ve dragged the guts and viscera out of a few hundred rabbits, it’s no big deal to slit open the corpulent belly of some sleazy, dirtbag child-molester. Extract his intestines like so much offal, unwinding in pink ribbons, flecked with bluevein. It's just sausages.

There was nothing lower than these fuckers, and Bonzo was sending them off the Shakespearean mortal coil one-by-one. For every victim hurt, Bonzo hurt their perpetrator worse, usually with a sharp, pointy blade in a very uncomfortable place. The blood of many a sex-offender had splashed his straw-covered cabin floor, the appendages of many a pederast had plopped onto it, glistening. The rotten stench of the fear of many a molester had seeped into the surrounding woods and still haunted them.

The three ensanguined figures suspended before him had long ago ceased wriggling, either through realisation of the futility, or through loss of blood and energy, or through a calm acceptance of their fate. Now they just hung and stared. Meat is meat. They looked no different to Bonzo than the carcasses of lambs and baby deer you would find in the walk-in fridge of his old butcher shop in the West End, and they garnered the same indifference from him. They had ceased squirming like fish-on-hooks and now just gazed into the abyss awaiting them with a terrified frozen expression on their countenance, their wide horrified troutlike eyes bulged out like glowing beacons on their bloodstained, exophthalmic faces.

The two at the sides the clown had lured in posing as a twelve-year old on the internet, and now they paid the price of not resisting their dreadful urges, their tongues lay in a bucket in the corner, and their skin had been decorticated and lay like discarded apple peels in their respective hairy pink heaps. It’s not a huge leap to go from skinning a pig to skinning a human, it all came off just as easy, the nipples looked the same, and anyway, these ugly bastards looked much better cleaned, dressed and trimmed. Presentable. The one in the middle though, he was a big prize, the biggest prize, and one Bonzo had waited many, many years for the perfect opportunity to seize. It had been a bit of work, but it had been worth it.

The grinning butcher casually and coldly sliced open the throats of the two at either side of his prize catch, they convulsed and struggled against their bonds, but this only made the blood flow faster, it splattered to the floor with a rhythmic pattering and after a while slowly died back down to a steady trickle. They were both dead in less than a minute and because the trachea had been expertly severed they made no sound but an adenoidal whistling, gurgling, coughing, through their severed windpipes, as they wriggled and writhed until their expiration. They died once their brains had emptied of blood, which didn’t take long hanging upside down, but the heart continued beating until there was no blood left to pump. Bonzo emptied the blood out of the pales and into the stream outside, where it dissipated quickly into the bubbling brook. Two less carbon footprints in the world, god-knows-how-many-children spared. Really, he was doing the planet a favour.

He returned indoors, dusted with snow, to find the whole gruesome scene had got his final captive excited again. He jerked and spasmed and tried to remonstrate through the electric tape which gagged his mouth, but all that could be made out was muffled cries of protest and the occasional stifled curse word. With the other two dealt-with and the mess cleared-up, Bonzo turned his full attention to his Prize.

He dropped to one knee so he could be eye-level with the upside down prisoner and peered menacingly, chuckling, with a lopsided grin into the familiar face. A face splashed over so many tabloids and glossy magazines, a face recognisable to anybody who had ever turned on a TV and watched some trashy programme on a Saturday evening. That porcine annoying face, those beady fucking eyes that are too far apart, that big flat nose, the carefully-maintained 5’o clock shadow, that botoxed, cosmetically-enhanced, galling, fucking-piece-of-shit-stupid-face! Not as recognisable now it was all covered in blood but still just as infuriating, Bonzo gave it a satisfactory kick.

His victim was in Glasgow for some big pop music award show, it hadn’t been hard to stakeout the three major hotels he was likely to be staying in, Bonzo had discovered he was in the Malmaison within the first twenty four hours of his arrival. A close watch of his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook feed had made him easy to track down and follow too. Bonzo still had contacts in the catering industry from his butcher days, and a friend-of-a-friend of a receptionist at the hotel provided the room number, Bonzo had said his niece was a big fan and no suspicion was roused.

Posing as a waiter working for an agency he had easily accessed the almost security-less building (one narcoleptic night porter) and with chloroform and a polite knock at the right door posing as room service, he had him. To get the body out he had carried it down the corridor acting like a friend escorting his drunk comrade to his room. He had then rolled the unconscious prick down the rubbish chute near the kitchen, where he could easily be collected by Bonzo from the skip in the back alley where it all came out. With his car parked at the back of the hotel it had been two hours in the boot for the captive, out of the jagged city and into the rolling hills of the countryside, just as a January snow started to sprinkle the landscape. And now he had the bastard, and nobody knew where he was. They were miles away from anyone, in the barren Scottish hills, no internet, no phone, no electricity, no help.

This media mogul, this creature, this cretin, this detritus, this Satan’s cocksucker, was responsible for ruining the lives of many a young child. But furthermore, he was accountable for the soulless, talentless garbage clogging up the charts for the last two decades like an industrial greasetrap that hadn’t been emptied in years, and just as foul. He was the reason we’d been having mediocre music shoved down our throat since the turn of the millennium. His only talent lay in exploiting other people’s talents and using them up and leaving a dried-out husk, like a blood-sucking parasite. Or flogging music that teenage girls would gobble up like unsupervised chocolate cakes in a meeting for clinically obese overeaters. He had offended our ears with some of the worst tripe to ever be drudged up out of humanity’s arsehole and put on a record. And as if all that wasn't enough, he had molested a whole slew of children and gotten away with it; too powerful, too many connections, paid off too many families, victims too scared to speak out against someone so famous, usual bullshit. Bonzo had been one of his victims, long ago, at the start of the bastard's showbiz career, Bonzo had been eleven at the time. He winced at the memory of the slimy tongue going down his throat, the groping hands in his shorts, reigniting his hatred for the man...

The killer pulled his iPod out and put on a song, ‘Tears of a Clown’ by Smokey Robinson, and he proceeded to sharpen his filleting knife on a whetstone, its sibilant rasping punctuating each trumpet note in the jaunty soul melody. His detainee started to protest and squirm more, but Bonzo ignored it, approached him and opened the zipper of the man’s trousers. Reaching in and fumbling around in his boxers, he pulled out the appendage which had been snuggled-up warmly inside the expensive cotton. The flaccid penis lay in his palm like a dead pink slug, recoiling, and, holding it by the foreskin and stretching it out, Bonzo removed it with a quick flick of the wrist and a flash of the blade. A startled yelp from the hostage as his John Thursday divorced his body forever.

A prodigious amount of blood splurted out and bespattered the clown’s white face, Bonzo was unperturbed, he removed the electric tape covering his hostage’s lips and when the bastard opened his mouth to scream Bonzo popped the disembodied phallus in to it and replaced the tape so he couldn’t spit it back out. Kneeling back down to eyelevel he said, ‘now, you have two choices, keep it in your mouth, or swallow it, I’ll be back in a while, I’m off for a powernap’, with a sneer he rose and walked away. Then he paused and turned back, 'oh, I almost forgot...'

The music mogul tried to scream but his voice was even more muffled now than it was before, with his mouth full of mucosa, dead muscle and connective tissue. Bonzo took a knife from his briefcase, a cheaper inferior knife, a crappy Global, and he heated it up on a hob of his gas-powered camping stove, singing along to Smokey as he waited, 'When there's no-one around, oh yeah, just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my sadness hid...'

Eventually the blade glowed white-hot, from whence, in short bursts, he pressed it against the music mogul’s groin wound with a hissssssss until it was fully cauterised. ‘There, that should keep you from bleeding to death until I return to finish torturing you, same way you’ve tortured my ears over the years with the shitty music you produce, same way you've tortured so many kids and gotten away with it. Well no more.’ Bonzo said all this as he wiped off the blade and replaced the knife into its container.

He went back up the protesting stairs as his castrated guest hung whimpering and moaning. The snow outside was coming down with renewed vigour now and Bonzo reclined into his fusty mattress, lit a cigar, and mindfully observed the trailing grey smoke as the song finished and silence enveloped the cabin again, only the gentle crackling of the dying fire's embers, and a soft, distorted sobbing could be heard…

Bonzo closed his somnolent eyelids and drifted off into a satisfied sleep. Outside the snow lazed its way down in coruscating flakes, and the surrounding cliffs stood black and funerial silent, the hills have no eyes.

                                                                                                                          C. T. Herron