There was a clown in the storm drain. Simon noticed it for the first time on a rain-soaked afternoon in mid-November, walking home with Harley after school let out for the day. It was holding a bunch of brightly-coloured balloons and it smiled with yellow teeth and beckoned them closer, promising all the delights of the circus that two small boys could ever want.

Simon moved his grip from Harley's hand to his upper arm and walked a little faster, though Harley struggled and whined and demanded that they go back, because he wanted candyfloss.

That evening, as Simon was brushing his teeth in preparation for bed, the clown came back. It whispered to him from inside the bathroom sink, but Simon ran the water to drown it out and, when he was done, leant over the basin and carefully, deliberately, spat minty-green toothpaste in the clown's eye. Then he climbed into Harley's bed and sat up all night, holding a baseball bat.

In the morning, Simon awoke to find Harley outside, playing with the sprinkler in the bare brown earth of the Holmes's front yard. When he poured bubble mix under the stream of hot water cascading into the cracked and stained bathtub, he could see the clown watching him through the overflow drain. He plugged the little holes with a flannell and when it was ready, he stripped and got in with his brother. The played pirates, and boats, and dinosaurs, and Simon kept his back pressed against the wet flannel, to make sure it was still in place.

Their mother complains that the sink is backing up, and screams at their father about makeup smears in the bathroom, demanding to know who he's invited over this time. Their father storms out of the house, and their mother cries herself to sleep in her bedroom. Simon and Harley eat peanut butter on stale crackers and watch old cartoons on their small television.

When he's sure Harley's asleep, Simon fetches a bottle of Quik-E-Plumber from under the kitchen sink and stands under the spray from the shower until it's run cold. He's shaking by the time the clown shows up, and has to clench his teeth to stop their chattering, so he can't say anything brave or clever as he empties the caustic soda into the clown's greasepainted face.

After the the hissing and the screaming and the shuddering has stopped, and brown, foul-smelling goo begins to ooze up out of the drain, Simon steps out of the shower and lets the cold spray wash it off the tarnished enamel.

Marilyn Teller doesn't ask why he's fully dressed and soaked through and knocking on her door at ten o'clock at night with his six year old brother in tow. Instead she runs a bath so hot that the air in the bathroom becomes nearly opaque and dresses them in some of Marshall's old clothes that they're swimming in, but are at least warm and dry, and feeds them piles of toast and bacon and mugs of hot chocolate that are almost too big for them to hold.

She's washing the dishes when she tells her husband in an off-hand tone that sometimes, she would really like to tie rocks to the elder Holmeses feet and throw them into Lake Eerie. Edgar shushes her with a worried look at the two boys huddled on their couch under mounds of blankets, but Simon doesn't hear. He's fast asleep, in a warm room where murderous clowns won't try to eat him, because the things in the dark and under your bed know not to come after you when your parents are around.