“He’s not a clown,” the Stranger said. “He’s just a thing painted to resemble one.”

“He comes out when the winds blow heavy out of the Doldrums,” the bar owner said. She had her shotgun pointed steadily at the door. “Every time he claims his fill of victims and disappears again. Three times we hired hunters to go after him, but none came back, and each reprisal inflicted on the town was worse than the last. Now we just hide, and hope it’s not our turn.”

“He’s not a clown,” the Stranger said again. “He’s a grotesque mockery of one.”

“Nobody cares, stranger,” the Pilkington said, and licked his lips. “What are you, some clown lover?”

Watching, the Stranger saw Pogo stop outside the shut apothecary shop. The clown-impostor laughed again then, and the sound was very human and very chilling, and it was the only sound in the whole town. Then he bounded at the windows and smashed them as easily as a child playing with toys, and he leaped inside, and then there were screams. When Pogo emerged, he was dragging one of the white-smock-wearing apothecary men by the scruff of the neck and he threw him on the ground and lifted his machete. The smile painted on his face never reached his lips or his eyes. He sniffed over his victim, lovingly, as though scenting a meal.

Someone—someone bold, or stupid, or still high on Sticks—stepped out of the shadows then with a gun raised and he fired at Pogo. The thing in the clown costume lifted the apothecary man one-handed and the bullets landed in the soft flesh of this human shield, and Pogo laughed and threw the machete at his attacker. He dragged the apothecary man with him and reached his attacker and the Stranger saw the machete was buried in the man’s chest and his blood stained the dry ground. Pogo laughed and pulled out his machete and raised it high in the air and screamed out in rage or defiance or joy, and then he brought it down and chopped off the man’s head with one strike, and he began to march down Main Street again using the head for a kicking ball. The head rolled ahead of him and the air smelled of cupcakes as the wind blew harder through the town.

“Will no one stop him?” the Stranger said, and the bar owner said, “No one dares,” and the Kid said, “Then I will.”

The Kid and the Stranger looked at each other and they were in agreement, and they made to move to the door.

“Hold up,” the Pilkington man, Clem, said. He turned to the bar owner. “Is there a reward?”

“The mayor offered one, before he was taken,” the woman said. “That was back when we still had hope. Now there are only the empty graves in the cemetery, waiting.”

“What was the last reward?” the Pilkington man said.