Free ZOM-B Baby by Darren Shan Page B

the clown?’
    ‘Oh yeah. That’s Mr Dowling.’
    ‘You know his name?’ Timothy sounds amazed.
    ‘Of course. There’s a big badge on his chest with his name on it.’
    ‘Really? I never got that close to him. And the man with the eyes? Do you know him too?’
    I make a growling noise. ‘Him especially. He paid me a home visit back before all the madness started. I call him Owl Man. You’ve seen him too?’
    Timothy nods, then stands and scurries away from the table, beckoning for me to follow. He leads me back to the room of finished canvases and roots through a pile stacked against one of the walls. I’d find it hard to distinguish between them since it’s so dark – the windows are boarded over – but his eyes must have adjusted to the gloom over the months he’s spent living and working here.
    ‘I hung this up when I finished it,’ he mumbles as he searches, ‘but it gave me the shivers, so I took it down again. Those eyes followed me every time I passed, and not in a good way.’
    He produces a medium-sized canvas and carries it to one of the rooms with no windows, the onlyplaces in the building where he dares turn on lights at night. He sets the painting down and stands back to study it, then slides aside to make space for me.
    I don’t recognise any of the buildings, just plain office blocks that could be anywhere in London. But there’s no mistaking the horrific clown at the centre of the painting, Mr Dowling in all his dreadful finery. I’m familiar with the mutants surrounding him too, in their standard hoodies, with their rotting skin and yellow eyes.
    And there’s Owl Man, tall and thin, except for a ridiculously round pot belly. He has white hair and pale skin, but doesn’t appear to be deformed in any other way. Except for his eyes, the largest I’ve ever seen, at least twice the size of mine. They’re almost totally white, but with an incredibly dark, tiny pupil at the heart of each.
    ‘If I hadn’t seen him in the flesh, I wouldn’t have believed his eyes could have been that big,’ I whisper.
    ‘I know,’ Timothy says. ‘I almost made them smaller, to make them appear more in keeping withthe size of his face, but I try not to distort reality when I paint.’
    ‘What were they doing?’ I ask.
    ‘Just talking. At least the man with the eyes was talking. The clown didn’t seem to say much.’
    ‘He can’t speak. He communicates with his mutants by making squeaking noises which they can interpret.’
    Timothy stares at me. ‘You seem to know a lot about them.’
    ‘Our paths have crossed a few times.’
    I study Mr Dowling and Owl Man. The clown is the more frightening of the two, but Owl Man’s eyes are unsettling — as Timothy said, they seem to follow me when I move. I wouldn’t want to run into either of those eerie men on a dark night. Or a sunny day, come to that.
    ‘Where did you see them?’ I ask, turning away from the painting and trying to put it from my thoughts.
    ‘Somewhere in the City,’ Timothy says. ‘I was wandering as normal, saw them in the distance anddecided after one look that they weren’t the sort of people I’d like to get better acquainted with. I managed to sneak close enough to sketch them. They didn’t hang around for very long. As soon as they left, I hurried back here and worked up the painting. I didn’t want to forget any of the finer details.’
    ‘When was this?’
    He has to think. ‘Not long after you left. Maybe a week or so after.’
    ‘Have you seen them since?’
    He shakes his head. ‘I haven’t been looking either. There are some things which even I shy away from. I’m determined to capture this city in all its nightmarish glory, but I’ve a feeling I wouldn’t last long if that clown and his crew were aware of me. I doubt they’d be as easy to shake off as the zombies if they gave chase.’
    ‘You’ve got that right,’ I sigh. ‘They let me go for some reason, but if they’d wanted to stop me, I don’t