Free Tell My Sorrows to the Stones by Christopher Golden Page B

Rose moved on. She’d mentioned a carnival somewhere, and a little league baseball tournament later in the week, but Benny hadn’t really been listening. Kind as she’d been to him, a woman as attractive as Rose wasn’t interested in doing more than selling him a book, and she’d done that already.
    He stayed up all through that cool night, reading Tovolo’s words over and over until the battery of his flashlight began to give out, the light to dim. By then, the horizon had begun to glow with the promise of dawn, but Benny read the final chapter of the book over a few more times. At first, he’d thought the whole thing was some kind of joke, Tovolo trying to pull one over on the reader, or attempting some tongue-in-cheek social commentary about circus life that didn’t quite translate in his imperfect English. The book had been broken down into thirds—part one a memoir of his life, part two a kind of compendium of what he considered the funniest gags, and part three a reminiscence about his lifelong interest in the darker aspects of the history of clowns, everything from suicides and murders to haunted circuses and black magic.
    The final chapter concerned Tovolo’s lifelong struggle with his own talent, and his belief that he had never been funny enough. Two small circuses had merged, forcing him to perform alongside his longtime rival, Vincenzo Mellace, and every time the audience laughed for Mellace, Tovolo had wanted to set himself on fire. The reference to self-immolation made Benny shiver every time he read it, and he wondered if it had been written before or after the tragic blaze that had led to the Italian’s retirement.
    Tovolo had befriended a Belgian fire-eater who had come over from the other circus and who shared his hatred of Vincenzo Mellace. The fire-eater’s mother travelled with her son, and sometimes told fortunes on the show grounds after the audience had gone home and the circus folk had drunk too much wine.
    She had been the one to instruct him as to the ingredients for the elixir, and to explain to him precisely how to summon the spirit of
Polichinelle
, the patron of clowns, the demon known to children as the jester puppet Punch.
    As the circus folk began to rise that Saturday morning, the day arriving overcast and bleak, Benny read Tovolo’s final chapter over and over. Each time, he held his breath as he read the last few lines.
    Mellace’s routine was a disaster
, he had written.
He has performed Busy Bee thousands of times, and yet it seemed like his first. Laughter was sporadic at best, and mostly sympathetic at that. There were boos. For myself . . . I could do no wrong. They laughed at a simple chase on the Hippodrome Track. They howled when Rostoni and I performed the Shoot-Out. And when I went out to do the Cooking Class gag on my own, it felt like a dream of how smoothly I have always wished for a performance to unfold.
    God, how they laughed.
    I cannot say for certain that Polichinelle was in my corner tonight, but he was certainly no friend to Mellace. If offering the demon a little of my blood and a handful of days at the end of my life is all that is required for me to become the greatest clown in the world, it is a small price to pay.
    When Benny heard Oscar and Tiny calling for him, he closed the book, yet as he went about his morning, he could think of nothing but the elixir and the summoning spell that the fire-eater’s mother had given to Tovolo. One line kept repeating itself in his head.
    God, how they laughed
.
    The blood seeping out of the midget car was Benny’s first clue that something had gone awry. The audience kept laughing—either they hadn’t seen it yet or they thought it was part of the show—so Benny didn’t slow down. He waddled on his big shoes, storming with exaggerated frustration toward Clancy the Cop, and slapped the other clown in the face with a rubber chicken.
    It looked like it hurt.
    The audience roared.
    He’d asked the demon