“What the hell?” I barked into the silence.
Then—tap. A second stone struck the back of my head.
I turned.
There, half-shadowed beside the hedges, stood a man. My ownreflection.
Same build. Same posture. Same eyes. Except he wore a clown mask and clutched a red balloon like it meant something.
He raised one hand, crooked two fingers, and called me towards him.
And I followed. Not out of curiosity. Not out of fear. It was like stepping into a memory, or a dream I couldn’t wake from.
I passed the hedges, slipped past the old oak. The clown in a red suit moved like he knew the way, like he knewme. By the time we reached the woods, he stopped.
He turned.
The paint on his mask had cracked. His eyes, icy blue, met mine like glass to glass, and for a second, I wasn’t sure which of us was real.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, stepping toward him, trying to peel back the mask with just my eyes.
He tilted his head, amused. “They call me many things,” he said with a grin. “Clown.” He gave an exaggerated bow, fingers hooking into the corners of his mouth to stretch it wider. “Joker,” he cackled, the sound sharp and cracked. “Rio.” A chuckle, almost childlike. “But to you?” He took a step closer. “I’m yourfirstbrother.”
I scoffed, spun around like I could laugh it all away. “I don’t have brothers.”
“Believe whatever makes you sleep at night.” His voice dropped low. “But soon you’ll learn I’m the only one you’ve got.”
He leaned in, close enough that I could feel the heat off his breath. He inhaled deeply, nose grazing the air near my neck. “You stink of old money,” he said. “I smell like cotton candy. But soon…” His grin widened. “The only thing we’ll both reek of… is blood. Starting with dear old Dante Ricci.”
A sharpcrackof branches behind us.
I froze.
Something moved softly, slowly. I didn’t know if it was real or some illusion stitched together by whatever madness I’d stepped into, but I waited. Still as the grave. Then, she came into view.
A woman.
She wore an old white, stained dress. Her skin looked pale white, her face gaunt and lined with scars that told stories no one had ever listened to. Her crooked and yellowed teeth jutted out like broken fence posts. In her hand, she held an incense burner, swinging gently, thin trails of white smoke curling into the air like fingers.
The smell hit me fast. Sweet. Familiar.
Oleander flower.
The moment it reached my lungs, the world turned liquid. Shapes blurred. Colors bled into one another. My legs buckled slightly, and my vision warped like heat rising off asphalt. My throat burned.
Oleander is poison,my mother used to say.But in the right hands, it can steal the mind without ever killing the body.
They must’ve thought they were clever, using it on me. But I was already crazy. Already lost. They couldn’t take what was already broken.
They may have been my blood, but they were nothing to me.
Still… I wondered.Were they the ones waiting for me at Piazza Navona?Was this the truth I came looking for?Or just another carefully painted lie?
A woman’s voice sliced through the fog in my mind, soft, raspy, like it had clawed its way out of the earth.
“Get up,” she whispered. “Follow the white rabbit. At the end of the road lies your Wonderland… and inside, the House of Clowns.”
III. DOLL
