Laughter in Crimson

This was a dream I had last night. It left me chilled and a tad frightened.....

Visiting my cousin at a juvenile mental institution, he was in the middle of a class located in a science laboratory, all the students were dressed in white jumpsuits. On the television was a repeated showing of the incident that sent him off the deep end. During the halftime of a major sporting event, my cousin reached out to hug his father when a heart attack claimed the man’s life. My cousin caught his dying body and held him until he died. He then yanked the boy behind him to the ground and broke his neck and then broke his dead father’s neck. It replayed on an endless loop while everyone watched it except him. The psychologist on duty was using it as a tool in some form of group therapy.

Assured that my cousin was accommodated appropriately, even though he never lifted his head up once to look up at me; just kept coloring a picture he’d drawn, I left the classroom to meet with a detective and a staff member to fill me in on details of a string of murders plaguing the institution. Mostly young women strangled or stabbed. There had been a man found stabbed much more violently than the women, but it was believed that he had stumbled upon the murderer during his ritualistic killing and ruined the murderer’s momentary bliss. While they explained it to me, I felt like on the horizon I could see what the killer saw; the locations of the murders, the blood flying in the air, my hands around their throats. I could even feel the cold steel of the knife and the peeling off of blood soaked gloves from a clown outfit – yellow with multi-colored polka dots and white ruffles on the cuffs.

I checked out the locations myself. One was at the bottom of a stairwell leading from a rear parking lot to the nurses’ changing stations. The area was cold and resounding. The entire time there were two men, I’m assuming they were janitors as they were dressed in grey jumpsuits. They kept watching me, talking about me. Frustrated, I chose to confront them, but they disappeared.

The other murder happened inside the storage unit closer to the back of the institution. Entering, there was a walkway stained with blood where the man, the groundskeeper, had stumbled upon the murderer during his killing. The walkway was paralleled by a fenced in storage house where old furniture, books, and old everything else were kept before they were auctioned off, donated, or forgotten. While studying the scene, again, the room was cold. I almost felt in the presence of omnipotence. I definitely felt eyes watching me. I turned to see a shadow fleeing the area, but no sounds of a door being opened or closed; but someone else had been in there with me.

On my way to share my thoughts with the Institution’s director, I crossed paths with a tall, heavy set man who seemed naturally strong. He was dressed in a white muscle shirt and the bottom half of his jumpsuit with the rest hanging behind him. I stopped. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. He slowed down but hesitated to turn. I rushed over to him before he could have another thought. “Sir!”

He turned around. I saw fear in his eyes. “You,” I said. He tried moving back but I grabbed him by his shirt and insinuated major violence with my other hand and malice in my eyes. “I’ve got you, motherfucker.”

In failsafe wall hidden behind his locker paneling was the yellow clown suit I had seen in my vision along with a clown makeup kit, a rainbow wig, latex gloves, and a knife that had been rinsed well but still held traces of dried blood.

The killer had been hauled off, the drama had died down; the campus was quiet again. Suddenly, I felt ill. I felt frightened. I turned around – at the entrance of the stairwell leading to the changing station was another clown dressed in a red pointed hat, a red and black outfit, smiling a wicked red smile, waving at me with bloodied white gloves. Then, he shuffled back into the institution.