The world went away for a while. When it came back, I was lying in a morgue with my skull blown open. That was my first guess, anyway: I was stretched out on my back on a hard, cold surface; I was paralyzed, blind, and had a headache a hundred times worse than anything I’d ever experienced.
A couple centuries went by while I waited for someone to either cut my chest open or dump me into a coffin. Then the pain lowered a notch, and I could see again—not well, but enough to know that I still had eyes. The feeling came back in my arms, and I ran my hands over the thing I was lying on. It wasn’t a metal slab. It was lumpy, and covered in some kind of stiff hide: a leather couch. I raised a hand to my scalp. It hurt, but it was still there.
Now that I knew my brains weren’t going to fall out, I started to wiggle my head around experimentally. That’s when I saw the clown. He was about nine feet tall. He wore a cone-shaped hat cocked to one side, and a frilly silk suit with a ruffed collar and cuffs. His face was painted white; there was a black teardrop under his left eye and a wicked red grin around his mouth. He stood just at the end of the couch, above and behind me, poised like he was about to bend down and take a bite out of my face.
The sight of him got me up. There was a blur of motion and pain, and then I was at the couch’s far end, screaming at the top of my lungs. The screams drove needles into my brain, but the clown didn’t react, just stood there leering at me, and around the time my voice gave out I realized he was a mannequin, set up on a wooden pedestal.
I panned my head around slowly, wary of more surprises. The room was lit by old-fashioned gas lamps, their flames set just high enough to throw shadows. The lamps weren’t the only antique touch: the wallpaper, rugs, and most of the furniture looked like they could have come straight out of a Victorian-period shop. The only exception was a television, set up discreetly in a corner under a faded poster advertising something called the World’s Columbian Exposition.
There were no windows. The only exit I could see was a set of double doors. I wanted to run to them, but to do that I’d have to go past the clown mannequin.
The TV came on, showing a blue screen. It cast more light than all the gas lamps combined, and by its glow I saw a figure sitting in the shadowy hollow of a wing chair. Something told me this wasn’t a mannequin.
“Phil?” I whispered.
The figure leaned forward. Pebble-glass lenses flashed in the blue light. “Guess again.”
“Dixon…You work for the Troop?”
The lenses tilted as he cocked his head. “What an interesting question. I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
“You mean you’re a prisoner too?”
“A prisoner?”
“Yeah. Isn’t this…Where are we?”
“The Mudgett Suite.”
“Scary Clown headquarters? In Harrah’s?”
“This week.”
“So the Troop didn’t capture me? What happened, then? Why does my head hurt like this?”
“You were shot with an NC gun.”
“Yeah, I know, but narcolepsy’s not supposed to be painful.”
“It isn’t. You were poisoned by your own endocrine system. The effects are superficially similar to a drug overdose.”
“What about Wise?”
“Dead at the scene. He was hit with an aortic dissection and bled out internally.”
“NC guns don’t have a setting for that.”
“Organization NC guns don’t,” Dixon said. “And organization operatives don’t typically plant Mandrill bombs in cars, or feed strychnine-laced apple pie to shadow security teams. Which brings us back to the question of your allegiance.”
“You think I did it?”
“You’re the only survivor of a small massacre. Color me suspicious.”
“So I shot myself? With what?”
“When we found you, you were holding a Troop-issue NC gun. Your finger was still on the trigger.”
“No. No way. That wasn’t mine.”
“Of course it wasn’t…Tell me, is there something wrong with your own weapon, that you keep ending up with other people’s?”
“She must have planted it on me after she shot me…”
“She?”
“Jane. The bad Jane, I mean.”