The afternoon of my fifth grade graduation I organized a séance.
That might sound odd, or offbeat, but where I come from circles of children trying to speak to the dead is pretty common phenomenon. The affinity towards conversing with spirits that Czech kids of the 90s had is most likely a by-product of the nation’s status as the second most atheist country in the world. Much like our parents, we would still categorically deny the existence of higher power, but when it came to life after death my generation was a bit more loosey-goosey with its beliefs.
The concept of life after death is an attractive prospect for any creature that is aware of its own mortality and the idea of ghosts trapped in our realm has its own spooky appeal, but there’s something else that drove crowds of kids to sit in candle-lit circles when I was growing up.
Séances gave us a chance to hold girl’s hands without drawing any unwanted attention.
So, with the hopes of getting some “experience” before entering my teens and finally feeling Katherine Novaková’s palms, I organized a séance on the afternoon of my fifth grade graduation.
I thought that in the basement of my Soviet-era apartment block I would find a semblance of romance, but instead, in those musty dark halls, I discovered a dark power beyond my comprehension.
There were six of us sitting in the basement, preparing for the ritual. A summer thunderstorm was prefacing its arrival with a quiet drizzle on the windows that revealed the feet of the outside world. As me and Katherine drew the pentagram, the rest of the group intermittently chatted about other séances they had attended and tips and tricks on how to make a Tomagotchi live forever.
Every time the elevator would groan to life, all conversation would cease. In retrospect I don’t think any adults would have had an issue with us trying to commune with the dead, but in that moment it felt like we were doing something that would get us punished if we got caught.
The mood in the basement was electric, partially because of the dark ritual we were about to organize and partially from the pop-rocks that Mrs. Novaková had given to our little rag-tag group of ghost chasers. The sugar high mixed with the excitement of the forbidden was palpable.
After we finished drawing the pentagram and lighting the candles our group fell into hushed anticipation.
All that was needed was the sacrifice.
“I got your stupid fish,” Honza Hejduk announced as he entered the basement. His blonde locks and glasses were wet from the bad weather outside. As soon as he saw me sitting next to Katherine, trying to re-draw a wonky side of the pentagram, his eyes lit up with jealousy.
Hejduk poured out the bag of frozen minnows that were meant to be his turtle’s lunch into the center of the pentagram and started to strut around the basement like he owned the place.
“Wow, you have a really shitty basement Alex. Didn’t know your parents were this poor.”
Hejduk and me used to be friends. The previous summer our parents had signed us up for a summer camp that was obviously for babies. For two weeks Hejduk and me were trapped out in the Beskydy Mountains with a bunch of nine-year-olds filling up stupid coloring books. With nothing better to do, we shared secrets, secrets that strengthened our relationship from acquaintance status to best-friend territory. Those secrets brought us together while we were at camp, but by the time we were back in Prague they became weapons.
Any semblance of camaraderie disappeared the moment Katherine Novaková grabbed both of our hearts with her soft palms.
“Man, there’s rust everywhere, does anyone in this apartment have a new bike?” Hejduk examined the bike-rack with the gusto of a food-inspector who’s about to shut down a restaurant. “Actually, Alex, where’s your bike?”
“At my grandparents,” I lied.
“Huh. Just starting to realize that I have never actually seen you ride a bike. Weird.” Hejduk turned around and looked straight in my eyes. He was sending a message. “Well, if you guys want to go riding bikes after this dumb ghost stuff, I can lend Alex my old bike. My parents got me a new one for how well my report card turned out.”
“We’re not going to ride bikes, Honza,” Katherine said, “It’s raining outside. Plus, this ghost stuff isn’t stupid, it’s actually pretty cool.”
Katherine shot me a smile. She was on my side. I did my best to smile back, but deep inside I knew that she wouldn’t be defending me if she knew the truth.
I didn’t know how to ride a bike.
“Whatever,” Hejduk said, forcing his way into our circle so that he could sit on the other side of Katherine, “What dumb ghost are we annoying today?”
“Yeah Alex, what sort of spirit are we communicating with?” Katherine asked, still smiling in a way that made my heart beat faster.
“Well, first we have to hold hands so that there is a complete circle of energy-“ A lump manifested in my throat. As I spoke Katherine put her hand into mine. We were basically kissing, or at least, that’s what I told my cousins later, “-a complete circle of energy so that the spirit doesn’t leave.”
The rest of the circle joined hands around the pentagram and frozen fish of the basement floor.
My knowledge of séances was limited to a three-paragraph article I had read from the bathroom literature at my aunt’s house, but I had enough imagination in me to wing the ceremony.
“And now everyone repeat after me- Dear spirit, we have come here to talk with you, please do not get angry with us.”
The other kids repeated the chant with sudden reverence. Setting up the ceremony was all fun and games but as soon as we were actually communicating with the nether realm, as soon as there was a chance that we might make a ghost angry, everyone wanted to make sure to proceed with caution.
The musty basement had turned spooky.
Everyone was listening to me, Katherine’s hands oozed with anticipation. “Oh spirits, help us contact the man who is buried beneath the basement, the famed Nazi commander, the one and only-“
There was a painting of him on the stairway that led up to the computer labs. It wasn’t really a painting, it was a print-out of a painting that someone had put into a nice frame with the hopes of making our school look classier. Regardless of the medium through which his face was portrayed, every day, as we walked up those stairs, I saw those tired evil eyes.
“…The one and only, Jan Amos Komenský!”
The elevator groaned in understanding. For a split second the whole group was caught in breathless anticipation about ghosts, but then Katherine’s hand fell out of mine.
The circle was broken. Hejduk had his arms firmly crossed.
“Did I hear you correctly? Did you say Jan Amos Komenský is a Nazi that is buried beneath your apartment?” His voice was filled with venom. “You know my parents didn’t just buy me the new bike because I’m a cool dude, right? They bought me the bike because I aced all of our history quizzes. Everyone knows that Jan Amos Komenský is buried at the Prague Castle and that he lived two thousand years ago and that he invented homework.”
“Hejduk, come on, stop being a jerk,” Katherine defended me again.
My mind reeled back to history class. Komenský being buried beneath my apartment was made-up set dressing for the séance but I could have sworn that he had some tie to the Nazis. My young mind must have had trouble differentiating between totalitarian systems and achievements in education. Either way, Hejduk had called me out on my bullshit.
“I’m just saying that Alex knows just about as much about Jan Amos Komenský as he does about riding bikes.”
Everyone’s eyes focused on me. Hejduk had burnt my secret. Everyone knew.
I could see Katherine’s smile dim. She couldn’t love a boy who still used training wheels. We could never be. Hejduk had taken away my one shot at true love.
A sudden rage boiled in my brain.
I wasn’t the only one in the circle with secrets.
“Okay Hejduk, you caught me, I tried to pull a fast one on ya. And you’re right, I don’t know how to ride a bike.” My admission wiped the grin off his face. He no longer had any sway. But I still did.
“But you know who does know how to ride a bike? The real ghost that we have all gathered here to talk to. The ghost of a man scorned by life itself, a spirit that has had everything that he cared for burnt to a crisp because of a flimsy bicycle, a shell of a once happy person – Gabi the clown.”
“Dude, no, come on.” Hejduk’s voice took on the audacity of a kitten stuck in a drainpipe. “Come on man, let’s not.”
“Dear spirit, we have come here to talk with you, please do not get angry with us.”
At first he refused to take part in the ritual, but as the rest of the group obediently chanted along, his arms uncrossed. Hejduk became a part of the circle.
As he mumbled along the final words of the incantation it was hard to hide the smile from my face. I was going to hurt him for hurting me.
I was going to reveal his secret in front of everyone.
“Oh Gabi,” I started, with as much spooky gusto as my tween voice would allow me, “We know that you are trapped between our world and the circuses of heaven. Your clown make up must be smudged from the rain outside, your long clown feet must be tired from walking our realm. Come sit with us for a spell. Come bring us some joy as we leave the world of children and enter the domain of teens. It is a sorrow filled time for all of us, and we could really use a clown.”
“This is so dumb and fake,” Hejduk said with a shiver in his voice that did little to mask his fear. Everyone in that basement knew something was up, yet as terrified as the kid was, he didn’t let go of Katherine’s hand.
“Alex, is Gabi the clown real?” Katherine asked.
“Of course he’s not!” Hejduk yelled, “Alex is just making stuff up trying to be scary. But you know what? It’s not working. Only an idiot would be scared of… cl- clo- Only an idiot would be scared of dumb shit like this!”
Water from the thawing minnows was starting to spread out through the basement floor. In the dim light of the candles I could see Hejduk watch the stream advance towards him. His eyes blazed with fear.
“Of course he’s real Katherine, he was a clown who lived back in the 1800s,” I said, making my voice as deep as I could, “Have you never heard the story of Gabi the clown?”
The basement shook with the dark whines of metal rope as the elevator moved above us. Hejduk let out a strained wheeze, trying to keep his shit together. It was time for some narrative laxatives.
I closed my eyes and started to weave a story out of the ether.
“Gabi the clown used to be a happy clown. His job was his life. For years he would travel with the circus and entertain children all over the country. Oh how he adored putting on his clown make-up, oh what a spring to his step the clown shoes provided, Gabi was a man who lived a life of unadulterated joy that he shared with the world. He loved his job, he loved being a clown, but there was something else he loved even more –
“Katya, his wife, a trapeze artist who had joined the circus after running away from an orphanage. It’s in her soft hands that he found the true beauty of life, it’s in her smile that he found the joy that made his act such a show of pure bliss and laughter. The two of them lived happily, but one day, as the traveling circus set up on a field in the countryside, everything changed.
“No one knows how the fire started, it was as if it came out of nowhere, but by the time the flames were noticed it was already too late. The audience was screaming in fear and Katya was trapped at the top of the tent as the flames ate away at the scaffolding.
“There wasn’t nearly enough water in the circus to put out the fire. There was chaos everywhere. Gabi watched as the circus burned, as his wife screamed from the high top, and he knew, that if no one acted soon, if no one went to get help, everything that he ever cared about would end up in flames.
“There was a town near by, surely the fire brigade there would be able to put out the fire. Gabi the clown ran outside and jumped on the nearest form of transportation he could find: a wood-framed bicycle.
“He pedaled down the uneven country roads with the speed of a trained athlete. Gabi’s long clown feet worked as hard as they could to get help swiftly, but the faster he went the more the frame of the bicycle groaned. In a sharp turn, with the lights of the nearest town burning in the distance, the bicycle fell apart. The clown flew off his bike and cracked his head into a tree.”
“W-what, that’s it?” There was a twinge of bravery in Hejduk’s voice, “Some stupid cl… clown with a dead wife who can’t ride bikes? This is stupid.”
An expression of utter delight spread over his face as soon as he stuttered the word out.
My eyes narrowed. “He didn’t die that night. No, Gabi the clown woke up on the side of the road to the rumble of horses. The fire at the circus had gotten so big that the fire brigade became aware of it on their own. They tried to put it out, but they were too late. By the time Gabi arrived at the circus there was nothing left but the charred remains of the life he once loved.”
“He was no longer a happy clown,” I said, “Now he was a depressed clown.”
The elevator groaned again. A bolt of lightning cut through the panel houses; our little window to the outside world shook with force. The fear was back in Hejduk’s eyes.
“It didn’t take him long to find her burnt body. As Gabi looked upon the charred remains of the only person he had ever loved he knew he couldn’t go on without her. How could he possibly make children laugh with the knowledge that he would be coming back home to an empty bed? How could he live without her tender caress? Without her smile?”
The wind outside howled hard enough to make the candles flicker. Hejduk’s eyes were closed, he was gently rocking back and forth, whatever fear I was forcing him to confront was carved deep into his mind. For a split flick of the flame I felt bad for him but then-
“What happened next?” Katherine asked. A reflection of the candle-lit pentagram danced in her fiery eyes. Our sweat was mixing between our clasped hands; I could feel a faint echo of a racing heartbeat. Whatever empathy I had for Hejduk was overtaken by my need to make Katherine love me.
“He went mad. Gabi started putting his clown make-up on his burnt, dead wife’s face.” A soft groan came from Hejduk, a groan that told me he was near his breaking point, “He painted the same face that he would wear in front of the children on the face of his dead wife and then… Then he ripped off his own face and sowed her face onto his. That way they would be together forever.”
“No…” Hejduk whispered.
“But that’s not all. Gabi also chopped off his own hands and replaced them with his wife’s hands. That way he would never miss her gentle touch.”
“No!” Hejduk screamed, breaking the circle, “You’re making all of this up! You’re just some idiot who can’t ride a bike! None of this happened! Cl… Clo… None of this is real!”
Hejduk was on his feet now, raving, making an ass of himself.
“Clowns aren’t real?” I asked.
“Gabi the cl- Gabi isn’t real! You’re lying! No one would survive having their face ripped off!”
“That’s why he’s a ghost,” Katherine whispered. She still had my back.
“Exactly! He died right after he finished attaching his dead wife’s hands to his hands. And do you know where they buried him?”
“No! You’re lying! You’re a liar! Gabi isn’t real!” Tears were streaming down his face. With Hejduk’s embarrassing performance no one cared if I could ride a bike anymore.
The smell of fish was permeating from the center of our circle to the rest of the basement. A horrid storm raged outside. The candles were starting to go out one by one. The atmosphere for the killing blow was set.
In the dying light I tapped the center of the circle.
“Liar! You’re a liar Alex! This is stupid! This is all so stupid!” Hejduk’s face was red with rage. His hands were curled up into fists and he was coming straight for me.
“He’s gonna get you Hejduk,” I said, still sitting in my spot in the circle.
Hejduk stopped dead in his tracks.
“W-why? Why would he want to get me?”
“Because you have a new bike, and Gabi the clown loves new bikes. And also…” I gestured to his feet. “You broke the circle.”
“Ghosts hate that,” Katherine whispered. Suddenly, her grip on my hand tightened. “What’s that smell?”
A séance-worth of tween noses twitched. We all looked towards the minnows at center of the pentagram. Even in the faint light of the remaining candles, we could see wisps of gentle smoke emanating from the fish that Hejduk had brought. It smelt like we were in the middle of a canned tuna factory.
“You’re a liar Alex. You’ve made all this up. Admit it! Admit that you’re a liar!” Tears were streaming down his face. The smoke coming from the mound of fish pushed him over the edge.
The suddenly putrid pile of minnows unnerved me as much as the rest of the group, but I still had to finish off my bout of psychological terrorism.
“No, Hejduk,” I said as the air in the room dropped to a sea-side stillness, “Gabi the clown is real… and he’s coming for yo-“
SNAP!
A flash of light went off from the center of the circle before plunging the basement into complete darkness. Giblets of hot minnow guts sprayed over our little séance. We all ran and never turned back.
The afternoon of my fifth grade graduation I held a séance and it ended with a bang.
The basement group split up after the séance. Everyone was off to different middle schools across the city and I was whisked out of the country when my mom’s job took us abroad.
The memories of that afternoon lasted for a couple of traumatic nights, but as I got older, as things more pressing than dead bike riding clowns entered my world, the memory of that night was safely filed away beneath childhood hyperbole. The explosion of fish bothered me for a while, but I eventually convinced myself that someone must have snuck a firecracker into the pile of minnows while I was terrorizing Hejduk.
Once a Facebook account became a requirement for modern life I ended up seeing glimpses of the lives that the other people from the basement group were living. Some of them had kids, some of them had pseudo-successful businesses, Hejduk ended up becoming a police officer. I didn’t really care. The only person who I properly kept tabs on was Katherine.
My affection towards her has definitely diminished since the days of pop-rocks, but somewhere in the back of my head I still had a thing for the first girl that I ever had a thing for. Whenever the two of us were in-between relationships we’d hit each other up and chat, but the planets never aligned for long enough to actually have the two of us sit down for a drink.
Until tonight.
I found myself at the tail end of a series of unsatisfying relationships and Katherine had just moved back in with her parents after getting un-engaged. We figured we would kick back a couple of beers in the old neighborhood and check notes on how our lives turned out.
The Gabi the clown conversation came up almost instantly. Neither of us knew exactly what transpired that stormy afternoon. I floated my firecracker theory but Katherine said there was no way that someone could have snuck anything into the center of the circle without at least one of us noticing. She also mentioned that she heard rumors that someone had stolen Hejduk’s new bike within a week of our séance.
There was mystery in the air. But a single mystery can’t hold up an entire date. After two beers Katherine changed her stance on the firecracker theory and after three we agreed that the story of the bike theft was probably just a product of the schoolyard rumor mill.
Turns out the two of us had very little chemistry outside of talking about made up ghost-clowns. Katherine’s voice strained whenever she talked about her fiancé and by the time I was halfway through my forth beer I started to miss my latest ex.
After I walked Katherine home I decided to take a little stroll around the neighborhood and visit my old tween stomping ground. I would have hit up my fourth-beer ex, like I usually do, but the light drizzle on my touch screen made it difficult to tap out a message that would be worth replying to.
In a gathering storm I walked alone, thoughts of childhood and lost loves churning through my brain.
That’s when I saw him.
He was standing in the dim light of one of the street lamps. Rags hung from his sickly body. They might have been a clown costume once upon a time but now they were far too dirty and worn to look like anything but a potato sack. His hands were the jet-black color of long-dead skin. His foreign feminine face peeled from his skull revealing bits of rotted muscle and yellowed bone beneath. The only thing that truly made him look like a clown was his bulbous red nose.
He rode his bike towards me. I was too terrified to move.
“Huy-huy!” Gabi laughed his clown laugh but there was no joy beneath the sounds coming out of his mouth. “Why did do this to me?”
If I had any answers to give they were pushed back by the staggering smell of burnt minnows. I was frozen in place by fear. The only concrete thought in my head was my need to vomit.
“Huy-huy! Why must I suffer? Why must I live without my Katya?”
It wasn’t until the coarse tips of his burnt ladyfingers brushed up against my arm that I snapped out of my shock. I pushed the dead clown off his bike and ran for my life.
His words echoed with me well past the subway ride back home.
“Huy-huy! Why must I suffer? Why? Huy-huy! Answer me! Why?”
I can’t sleep. Whenever I close my eyes all I can see is that horrible rotting face, those thin black hands, all I can think about is Gabi the clown. Whatever theories Katherine and me developed about fireworks and the playground rumor mill have scattered in the fish-scented wind. I made up Gabi the clown, but whatever happened in that basement on that one story afternoon made him real.
The clown’s suffering is my fault. I am the one who brought him to life. I am the one who burnt down his circus and killed his wife. I am the reason why he rides through the night on his bicycle searching for answers he will never find.
My mind is filled with guilt, and fear, and confusion, but beneath it all there is something else. Beneath it all, there’s a part of me, a cruel part of me which I would like to pretend doesn’t exist but it still does, beneath it all I wonder whether Hejduk’s squad car has ever gone to my old neighborhood and passed by Gabi the clown.
As terrified as I am of my own creation, I would pay good money to see Hejduk’s face when he would find out I'm not a liar.