The Circus Freak - and the boy who was afraid of clowns

Twenty-Fifth Chapter

"FUCKER! PIG!" RENATO GRUNTED, as he opened his apartment door. He was certainly upset for having met Valdo. And what if the police car had gotten there two minutes earlier? They would have surely seen him throw the body of the nosey gateman. The Father helped me, he thought. He had finally had proof of being protected, his body was actually "closed", which meant his body was protected from enemies. Every time one of his enemies died, his Father warrior became happier and more satisfied. The red-haired girl, the clown doctor, the short gateman, they were all Dragons of Xangô's fire.

But, it was not enough.

It was 4 a.m. and Renato was awake, still. He walked around in the living room, thinking, rethinking his methods, searching for failures that could give him away. Strangling was certainly the most pleasant way of killing for Renato, maybe because of his disease, asthma. Since he was a child, he felt how unpleasant asphyxiation was. Breathing was something so simple, every live person could just simply breathe, but Renato sometimes couldn't. Asthma was not so common. It was some type of invasion, an evil possession, conducted by those evil clowns from the child's room lamp; they would enter little Renato's mouth when his mother turned the lights off. Strangling clowns was surely awesome, but he needed a more practical and discrete way of killing. He needed to find victims that were not as close to him. He needed to find more clowns.

Once more, the words of the White Fairies came to his mind: "The fire from the mouth of the dragon burns the soul of the weak and weakens the soul of the strong! The touch of light or of red fire could curse the blessed, and purify the rake. The point at which the light does not shine, nor does the fire burn, would be the weakness of the two."

He realized that it didn’t matter how the white light entered; what mattered is its brilliance and purifying effect.  He grabbed his Taurus 380, which he kept in his bedroom drawer, by his bed. He released the loader, touching the circular button on the back of the stock. Then he took the bullets out, every one of them from the loader, and put them on the living room table. Suddenly he rushed to the bathroom, grabbed a shaving blade and a towel. After that he went to the small perfume room and picked up a bottle of correction fluid from right by his notepad. The night with Natália came to his mind. He remembered his finger anointed with white paint invading the pale body of the red-haired Natália one last time.

He took a seat, straightened his posture so that his spine was upright as it leaned against the back of the chair. Then he observed the 9mm pistol bullets set apart one inch from each other. Renato wrapped the hand towel around his right hand, to protect the tips of his fingers from the virgin blade.  With the same hand, he held one of the munitions strongly. With his other hand he wrote on the bullets – using the tip of the steel blade – the initials, L.S.B.

"I am dressed in the weapons of George." He repeated at each blade stroke. "White savior light!" Then he would put the bullet right back in the gun. He repeated the same ritual sixteen times, marking every bullet from the pistol.

"I am dressed in the weapons of George." "White savior light!"

Renato felt a weird pain in his chest, remorse. It was not that he had regretted killing the gateman all of a sudden, nor did he have an instant of goodness. His biggest regret was to not have purified the body of the gateman. "The white paint!" He thought. He got so mad, it was a terrible mistake. Renato had left the dead body impure, red. No, he would never fail again. Each bullet from his pistol would carry a spot of light, a salvation for the soul of a dragon. The bullets had to be painted, each one of them, with the correction fluid.