A Clown's Smile

I stalked silently down the stone steps, the temperature dropping with every descend of my colourful rubber boots. The basement- or was it a cellar? dark and dreary, was bone crushingly cold and smelled sharply like chlorine and spilled wine. My heightened senses (adrenaline) blessed me with the ability to hear the spiders scuttling around in their webs and the soft breathing of my victim below.

A downside of the job, if you didn't count the layers of thick white paint and colourful lipstick, was that you never knew the name of your victim until you saw their twisted and bloody body on the news the following day or week, hushed and hysterical voices swearing up and down that it was just a hoax. Just a hoax and it will end soon.

No one laughs at clowns anymore. Which suits us just fine. We're no longer trying to be funny.