I’ve always hated clowns.
Even as a child, their painted-on smiles and glassy eyes disturbed me. There was something… fake about them. Something lurking behind the masks of laughter and bright colors. My parents thought it was cute to hire one for my seventh birthday. I still have nightmares about it.
But I never expected a clown to follow me into adulthood—much less to nearly kill me.
It all began a few weeks ago when I moved into my new apartment on the outskirts of town. It was cheap, small, and oddly isolated, but I needed the quiet. After a recent breakup and quitting a soul-sucking job, solitude sounded like therapy. The landlord, an elderly man with a limp, warned me, “Strange things happen around here after dark.” I laughed it off.
The first night was uneventful, though I did hear faint honking in the distance—like a car horn, but rhythmically spaced, as if someone was playing a tune.
The second night, I saw a balloon tied to my mailbox. A red one, swaying in the wind. I thought maybe a kid from the neighborhood had left it. But I hadn’t seen any kids around.
On the third night, I found the balloon inside my apartment.
It was floating in the kitchen when I came back from the store. No windows were open, the door was locked, and I lived alone.
I popped it without thinking, but my stomach twisted when I noticed something scrawled on the tile beneath it in smeared red ink—or maybe blood.
“Smile.”
I didn’t sleep that night.
The next day, I called the landlord. “Has anyone been in my unit?”
“No one but you,” he said calmly. “Though… unit 3C had someone complain about balloons a while back. Poor guy moved out overnight. Left everything behind.”
I was in 3B.
That night, the clown came back.
I woke to a soft knocking—tap, tap, tap—on my bedroom window. I live on the third floor.
Frozen in bed, I stared toward the window. At first, I saw nothing. Then something moved in the shadows—something large, crouched like a predator. Slowly, a face leaned into view.
It was a clown. Pale skin, blue diamonds under both eyes, and lips stretched in a grotesque smile that reached his ears. His teeth—yellowed and too many of them—grinned down at me through the glass.
I couldn’t scream. Couldn’t move. My heart thundered as he pressed a gloved hand against the glass and mouthed something.
“Let me in.”
I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, he was gone.
Morning came like a gift from God. I called the police. They searched the area, but of course, they found nothing. I told them someone had climbed to my third-floor window. They suggested I was dreaming.
That night, I didn’t go to bed. I sat with every light on, clutching a kitchen knife.
At 2:33 AM, I heard it.
Laughter. Soft, high-pitched giggles echoing down the hallway outside my door. It wasn’t a child’s laughter. It was wrong. Mocking. Unnatural. I crept toward the door and peeked through the peephole.
There he was.
The clown stood right outside, his head tilted, hands behind his back. His makeup was cracked now, flaking around the eyes, revealing pale, grayish skin underneath. He didn’t knock. He just stood there… smiling.
Then, from behind his back, he pulled a red balloon and gently placed it against my door.
Thump.
He vanished in a blink, like he’d never been there.
I didn’t open the door until sunrise.
But it didn’t stop.
Every night, more balloons appeared—on my couch, in the bathroom, one even tied to my ceiling fan.
And always, that word scribbled somewhere nearby:
“Smile.”
I became a prisoner in my own home. I barely ate. I barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that painted face, those rotten teeth, that broken grin.
On the seventh night, I found a clown nose on my pillow.
That was it. I packed a bag and ran. I didn’t care where I went, I just needed to get out. I jumped in my car and drove into town, heading straight for the police station.
But halfway there, I realized something was wrong.
I passed no other cars.
The streets were empty.
Storefronts were dark, even though it was only 8 PM.
And then I noticed them.
Clowns.
Standing on corners. Sitting on benches. Dozens of them. All motionless, staring at me as I drove by. They weren’t smiling. They just watched—silent and still as mannequins.
My phone had no signal. Every building I stopped at was locked. Even the police station was boarded up like it had been abandoned for years.
It was as if I’d crossed into another world. One where clowns ruled the streets.
And then came the balloons.
Hundreds of them, rising into the night sky, casting long, red reflections on the pavement. They floated ahead of me, leading me down a narrow alley.
I should’ve turned around.
But I didn’t.
Something in me—curiosity or madness—needed to see where it led.
At the end of the alley was a small door, painted white with a golden doorknob. I don’t remember getting out of my car, but suddenly I was standing in front of it. My hand reached out and turned the knob.
Inside was a circus.
A huge, impossible tent stretched beneath a starless sky, flickering with firelight. Rows of empty seats surrounded a center ring, where a spotlight beamed down on—
Me.
I was standing in the ring.
The audience wasn’t empty anymore.
The clowns were there. Every seat filled. Dozens—no, hundreds—of clowns, all staring, all smiling. Their faces twisted and broken, makeup smeared, some with hollow eye sockets, some with mouths stitched shut.
And then came the applause.
Slow, mocking claps echoed through the tent as the spotlight flickered. From the shadows emerged him—the original clown, the one from my window. He walked with a jerking motion, like a puppet on strings, and bowed dramatically.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a raspy, theatrical voice. “Tonight’s special guest… a man who refused to smile.”
I tried to speak. Tried to move. But my limbs were locked in place.
He pulled something from his coat—an old-fashioned razor—and approached.
“This won’t hurt,” he whispered. “Not after the first scream.”
He grabbed my face, his fingers ice-cold, and slowly began to carve a smile into my cheeks. I could feel the blood, hot and sticky, running down my chin.
The clowns cheered.
I screamed.
Then—darkness.
I woke up in my apartment.
The knife still in my hand. No balloons. No blood. No clown.
Just silence.
But when I looked in the mirror… the smile was still there.
Two scars stretched from the corners of my mouth, thin but deep. As if something had cut me—gently, precisely.
No one believed me, of course.
The police found no evidence. The landlord denied ever warning me. The building didn’t even have a unit 3C.
I moved out the next day.
But it follows me.
Every night, a balloon appears. Every night, I hear laughter.
I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. And when I look in the mirror… I swear the smile gets wider.
I know what it wants now.
It wants me to perform.
It wants me to smile.
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