The Night Job

by Alan Ealy

After thirty-eight years of suffocating in lecture halls, Professor Milton Greaves retired. He had once filled blackboards with existential riddles and pontificated on morality, but now he sat in silence, alone, withering in a home that felt like a coffin with curtains.

Boredom turned to agitation. Agitation to decay. Until one night, walking past a graffitied underpass, he saw a flyer:

NOW HIRING: NIGHT MIME — No Experience. No Questions. Cash Paid.

The absurdity charmed him. He made the call.

---

Cosmo met him in a basement office smelling of mildew and wet paint. “You want purpose? Mime gives you that,” he said, handing over a canvas bag with gloves, striped shirt, and a sealed tin of white greasepaint. “Apply nightly. Perform in Zone 6. Don’t talk. Don’t break character. Ever.”

Milton obeyed. At first, it felt like a lark. People laughed. Tossed coins. He felt alive. But the paint... the paint didn’t come off. He scraped until he bled. And when he bled, the paint healed over it, thicker than before.

The transformation was slow—silent.

Then came the banker.

Drunk. Loud. Mean. “Clown!” he barked, shoving Milton into a trash bin. Something snapped. Milton mimed a noose and pulled down. The banker gasped. Gurgled. Collapsed. Dead. A smile stretched beneath the mime’s painted lips.

Milton kept performing. And killing.

The real estate agent who laughed too hard? Mimed a gunshot—she dropped, temple cracked on the pavement.

Teenagers who sprayed graffiti on his “stage”? He mimed a wall closing in—screams swallowed in brick silence.

He became a myth. The Red Hollow Phantom. Parents warned their children. “Don’t stay out after dusk. Don’t mock the mime.”

Each victim made the mask feel more real. The greasepaint now pulsed with warmth, as though it breathed with him. Cosmo sent no more messages. He didn’t need to. The job was permanent.

---

Over the years, police tried. Cameras captured nothing. Dogs wouldn’t track the scent. Survivors, if any, remembered only a blank stare and a final mime act—their fate foretold in silent pantomime.

He built a network of tunnels beneath the city—abandoned maintenance shafts, storm drains, cryptic lairs where he could rehearse. His collection grew: wigs, wallets, teeth.

By 2023, the body count was fifty-seven. By 2025, it was over a hundred. And Milton? Milton no longer existed. The paint had absorbed him.

He doesn’t eat. Doesn’t sleep. Just watches. Waits.

---

Sometimes, when the streets are empty and a lone soul stumbles home from a bar, there’s the faint creak of a wooden floorboard, a shimmer of white in the corner of their eye.

A mime. Pale. Smiling. Hand raised.

Pulling a rope.

And still—after all these years—not a single trace left behind. No fingerprints. No footsteps. No voice.

Because mimes, after all, don’t leave a sound.

And The Mime never gets caught.