Killbo wasted no time making his way to the clown’s lair and promptly explained that the deed was done. “Now it’s time for you to meet you end of the contract,” he said.
“What contract?” The clown looked puzzled.
“Don’t toy with me, beast.”
“I’m being sincere,” the clown said, blinking absently and looking dumbfounded. “I remember giving you a little pep talk and opening a portal and you went in it before I could show you anything to sign. You should have heard me shouting, ‘wait, Killbo, wait! You forgot to sign this!’ after you went in. Sorry. No contract, no deal. I’ve got standards to uphold. Verbal agreements are legally non-binding. My legal advisers would never let me hear the end of it if I—“
Killbo cut him off right there. “I did what you asked,” he spat through gritted teeth. “You’ll teach me your tricks or it will be you I send to hell next.”
“You say that as if I’ve never been,” the clown mused in a droll, unimpressed tone. Then it rubbed its tummy jovially. “Remember that little bit about me being the 9th Lord of Hell? I wasn’t joking. Need proof? Do you want to see my ID?” The creature rummaged through its pockets histrionically, but never came up with anything.
“Hell’s my hometown. Not that I’m in any rush to get back. The place has really gone to piss over the years. All these immigrants moving in, can you imagine? Where are they coming from if they’re in such a rush to get into hell of all places! And to think we used to have such quiet neighborhoods. Hardly anyone even speaks Demonic any more. Though I do suppose my folks would appreciate the visit. My mother always says, ‘son you never write’. She sounds so disappointed. I tell her, mom I’m busy with my career mom, there’s always something I have to do mom, you wouldn’t believe the hours I’m working, this holiday season, I promise mom, I’ll—”
Killbo leapt like a lynx on crack straight onto the clown’s face and buried a dagger into its eye down to the hilt.
The clown threw its head back in shock and stood completely still for a moment. “Oh my god. My eye. You took out my eye. No, oh god no, my eye! It hurts, oh god no it hurts. God no. Please no.” The creature retched and shook. “Dear god no!” It screamed and wailed with hands over its face in an abject portrait of agony.
Then Dimply stopped the performance abruptly and brought its head back up and smirked. “Just kidding. Stop. Just stop. Seriously. You’ll embarrass yourself.” The creature grasped the handle of the dagger and pulled it out with his whole eye skewered on it. In the empty socket Killbo could see fires flit and flicker like serpent’s tongues. Dimply casually grasped the dislodged eye with thumb and forefinger and yanked it free from the blade and flicked it away. It then brought out a balloon, blew it up slightly so that it was the size of an egg, tied it off and popped it into the eye socket. Its eyeball was restored as good as new.
“And get this. To top it all off, you just killed, in totally overblown, theatrical fashion I might add, the one guy who recognized how much of a cosmic threat I am and sought to banish me from the material plane! So thanks for that.”
Killbo seethed with unthinkable rage but stayed motionless.
“You halflings are so easy to manipulate. You made a bargain with the sketchiest blighter anyone could possibly imagine, and all it took was me is suggesting a good time and you scampered right off to do it. One look at me just screams ‘get away’” The creature grinned savagely, basking in total victory. “Want to know what I think?” The demon continued.
“No.”
“I think you want to fancy yourself above the your halfwit, I mean halfling, race. I know your record. Why is it that you kill more halflings than any other race? Is it self-loathing?” The clown put its finger on its chin clinically.
Killbo assumed the clown was being rhetorical but then realized it was expecting an answer.
“I’m not playing any more of your games, hellhound.”
“Humor me. It’s for your own good.”
“I highly doubt it.”
“You’ll never leave here if you don’t.” the clown said with utter seriousness.
“Is it because you’ll kill me?”
“Something will.”
Killbo sighed, and cursed himself for putting himself in this fruitless situation. “You’re wrong. That my marks tend to be of my own kind is a fluke, owing to halflings being the most populous fodder in the region. It’s simply a matter of convenience.”
“Elaborate.” The clown blinked emptily, taking on the airs of a concerned therapist.
“There’s nothing more to be elaborated. That’s the explanation.”
“There’s always something more.” The clown hinted at mysteriously.
Killbo put some thought into it. “It’s true that I sometimes kill because I don’t like the look of someone, but I want my works to be individualized, bespoke. I want to eradicate the person, not exterminate the type. I read of killers who only hunt blondes, or go only for those of swarthy complexion, and scoff. Though indeed I do find most examples of my race soft and weak, I don’t kill them for it. Frankly, I feel that discriminating on the basis of race is bigoted.”
The clown was perfectly quiet for a few seconds. Then it exploded into an uproarious, world-upending laughter. The laughter was a sonic assault. It seemed to shake the very foundations of the cosmic order, as if it threatening to shatter it into a thousand pieces and to reset the cycle of creation. “Because, because it’s b…b…bigoted!”, Dimply spluttered the words out, hardly able to suppress its giggles enough to utter the sentence. A canned laugh track also erupted from the crowd of animatronic trash people in the audience. Their syringe and spoon arms clapped.
Killbo endured this harassment in bitter silence.
“A serial killer with a conscience, now I’ve seen it all.” The clown wiped a tear of joy from its newly reformed eye. “That’s precious, it really is.” Its laughter began to die down. “Bigoted,” it repeated to itself once before cracking up a little again.
“You know what,” the clown went on ruthlessly, “I yield the floor to you. I concede, I’ve been out-clowned. That was comedy gold. Hold on, let me write that one down.”
“Why are done you wasting time?” Killbo spat out. “What are you getting out of this?”
“Wasting time? My existence precedes the material plane, kiddo. I have all the time in the world and then some. It’s your time I’m wasting. And the reason why is that it amuses me. Why do anything for any other reason? Does me mildly inconveniencing you make me so horrible? You’re the one who commits murder as a hobby.”
“You’re lying. You want something. Out with it then. Enough dancing around it like some prissy nonce.”
“Alright, you got me. I confess I do have an aim in all this. I wasn’t just messing around when I had you go kill that guy. It’s true, I needed him gone. I did employ some treachery to get things moving. But I always intended to give you new powers, in a manner of speaking. But, you see, I’m not exactly the most organized unholy abomination slash sentient aggregate of pure negative karma slash walking metaphor for the cruel insanity of the killer instinct. I don’t make bargains. But I do give tests. You passed. So I have a proposal for you.” The clown squared up its shoulders and adopted a regal posture. “Let’s join forces.”
“If that means I have to constantly hear you speak, best you destroy me body and soul now,” Killbo said.
“Hey, hey. Hear me out. Look, I can feel your ennui. I can taste your boredom, smell it. It’s enough to make me sick.” The clown gagged as if holding back vomit. “Boredom is odious to me. Boredom has an intolerable, nauseating presence. It’s the most evil thing there is, far worse than anything you’ll find crawling around in hell. It’s this gelatinous, grey thing. It fills a room, seeps into every crevice. It pools in people’s souls. There it swells, sticks to them, drains them out, dries them up, makes them stale and dusty until they wither and flake away, leaving nothing but a sad, meager shell, the merest, thinnest outline of a life. Hell is known for its tortures, but one thing you can’t say of it is that it’s boring. There are worse fates than hell, believe me. At least the tortured souls in hell are subjected to some thrills in the course of the eternity of their punishment, and different ones all the time to boot, lest the demons get bored. A life without any excitement is just tragic. It’s not even a life, but a mere physiological process, a mockery of what it means to be alive. How many of your victims, whose lives of crushing monotony toiling at their jobs you have graciously deprived them of, sitting in their offices at their desks? *Freed* them from? The reason it’s getting so dull is there’s no real payoff for ending such empty lives. You’re doing them a favor. Even though they’re filled with terror at the prospect of losing those lives as you take them, and even though they can never thank you for taking once they’re dead, they would if they could. That’s not living. That’s not even surviving. That’s simply existing, and that is a travesty. When you boil it down to the basics like that, merely existing does not stack up next to not existing, not like really living does. It’s no good being a gradually spoiling, meaty sack of wasted potential whose every day grows more tiresome than the last. Oblivion is objectively the better alternative.
“Yes. You’ve gotten bored with the regular kills. You can’t even make their deaths buy you the hedonism you sacrificed them for. You’re clawing, swiping, desperately lunging at an itch you can never quite scratch, tucked deep in some corner of your lizard brain that’s juuuust out of reach. It’s driving you mad. And it’s not the low-intensity, manageable, cold psychopathy you’re used to. It’s slowly making you certifiably insane. At this rate, Killbo, one day you’ll get sloppy. You’ll get caught because you don’t care any more, and they won’t even have enough respect for you to execute you or even toss you in a dungeon to forget about and leave to rot.”
The clown paused for dramatic effect.
“Your future is a padded cell in an insane asylum, your mind reduced to fragments. A broken, rudderless ship caught in a bottomless whirlpool. And you will be deprived of the mercy you’ve granted so many others. In the end the boredom eating away at you will be all that’s left.”
Killbo’s lip curled with resentment. The fiend was more rhetorically gifted than he wanted to admit.
“But just think. With us working together, you can skip the small fry you’re so used to hunting. You’re like a fox chasing rabbits. Where’s the fun? Where’s the challenge? They don’t put up a fight. Come on. You kill halflings man! These innately trusting, gentle critters. It’s actually kind of sad. With me you’ll be a tiger and take down elephants. Go for the big game. Legendary heroes, mighty wizards, powerful kings, ageless demigods. Who knows, maybe even a god or two. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful?” Dimply now seemed to sparkle with a bright and hopeful aura.
“What do I give you in return?” Killbo asked.
“You’re still thinking in terms of bargains and diabolical pacts. No contracts. No fine prints. No hidden fees. Just fun. You will be my chosen. Together, we will paint this world red. Scour it clean of its most pompous, arrogant pretenders. We will correct the god’s mistakes. Up till now, murder has been a private, secret thing for you. I say, why not make a statement? It’s time to make your presence felt, to carve an ugly, aching scar on the face of all Creation. Now’s your chance for eternal triumph over the ignoble, tedious heat death of the universe, your shot at beating back the restless creep of cosmic tedium, once and for all.
“Have your doubts? How about a demonstration of of my power. I have to be honest with you Killbo. They’re on to you. By they I mean them.” The clown pulled out and displayed an enchanted mirror. The mirror showed what was happening outside the tent in the alleyway. Multiple policelings, armed with muskets and hand cannons, had surrounded the structure and cordoned it off with defensive barricades.
“See, turn me down and this is what’s waiting for you. I was right.”
The clown picked at its nail. “Well, that’s because I tipped them off. But no, not like that. They don’t know your identity. I only left a clue about your murders earlier today, a letter, claiming I knew where the murderer was told them he was armed and extremely dangerous, and told them to come here. I just needed some volunteers for my little performance. So sit back, relax, and enjoy.” Dimply winked and handed Killbo the mirror.
“Won’t revealing the location of your hideout bring more trouble in the future?” Killbo inquired.
“I wouldn’t worry. This party’s on wheels. Anywhere there’s a lot of trash, I can magically translocate my lair. I’m never found unless I want to be. Or unless people get around to cleaning up this dump of a city. Now, without further ado. The show is about to start.”
The clown did an unexpectedly acrobatic backflip and disappeared into a waiting trash vortex.
What happened next was unspeakable. When the clown had finished, nothing remained of the policelings but a red mist, a drizzle of viscera raining from the sky and wetly hitting the cobblestones, and as many wide bloodstains as there were once bodies.
When the clown returned he said, “so what do you think?”
Killbo said nothing. Instead he just grabbed the clown’s claw, like a lost child grasping at his daddy’s hand.
The crowd cheered and jubilant music played. Colorful lights flashed all around, and bright streamers unfurled from the rafters. Fireworks and sparklers went off and ribbons and confetti puffed into the air.
“I’ve got a feeling this is the start of something special,” the clown declared ominously.
All hell cried out in jubilation.