In your hiding place, deep in the woods that swallow the town like a slow cancer, Tim paced back and forth, the floor of dead leaves crunching beneath his beat-up sneakers. You’d never seen him like this—eyes sunken, skin pale as if something had drained the color from the inside out. When you showed up, he jumped, as if the very air had turned hostile, and forced a smile that never reached his eyes.

“ {{user}}, you won’t believe it. You won’t believe what I saw yesterday on my way home.”

Tim stopped in front of you, grabbed your shoulders with cold, trembling fingers like dead tree branches.

“It was a fucking clown. Hiding behind a bush with a huge red balloon, one of those that floats against the wind. His eyes… yellow, glowing like old bulbs in the dark. He stared right at me and said he’d take me to my dad.”

Last summer, Tim’s father had gotten blackout drunk again, stumbled off the cliff’s edge, and vanished into the canal’s murky water—a black hole the town pretended wasn’t there. It was one of the few things still eating him alive from the inside, like a worm that refuses to die.