SHE WAS ONLY A CLOWN is a special serialized novella presented in weekly installments every Saturday. Click here to read chapter 1, click here to read chapter 2, click here to read chapter 3, click here to read chapter 4, click here to read chapter 5, click here to read chapters 6 an 7, click here to read chapters 8 and 9, click here to read chapters 10 and 11, click here to read chapters 12 thru 14, click here to read chapters 15 and 16, click here to read chapters 17 and 18, click here to read chapters 19 thru 21, click here to read chapters 22 and 23, click here to read chapters 24 and 25, click here to read chapters 26 and 27, click here to read chapters 28 and 29, click here to read chapters 30 thru 32, click here to read chapters 33 and 34, click hereto read chapter 35, click here to read chapter 36 and click here to read chapter 37.
Chapter 38
Mark’s heart slammed in his chest as he saw the demonic clowns popping up all through the woods. Five of them, ten, twenty. Where were they coming from? Why didn’t they make a sound?
There were tall clowns, too tall and long to be human with hair that moved as though on fire. Fat clowns so thick and round they could not have moved through the thick underbrush, their undulating bodies betraying the hideous suggestion that more bodies were trapped inside them, fighting to get out. These otherworldly clowns ran the gamut of colors from so bright they seemed to emanate light to so dark they seemed to seep out of the night itself.
More and more clowns appeared everywhere he looked, every time his eyes moved. Every time he blinked there were dozens more. They couldn’t be real. Mark would have heard them walking up, crunching the leaves and twigs. There were clowns not ten feet from him where seconds ago there was nothing but empty woods. Impossible.
Then again, it was a night of impossibility. As Mark staggered once again to his feet, he realized these demons were not here to drag him down to hell. No. He was wrong about that. These laughing nightmares were here to create hell on Earth. And they meant to add him to their clownly legion.
Even though he’d just run into the woods to escape the horrors of his deformed and undead brothers, Mark found himself backtracking toward the clearing still lit by the 4 wheelers his brothers had ridden up on when they were still alive.
Had that really only been an hour ago? Mark felt like he’d lived two lifetimes in that short span. Felt like his entire understanding of reality had been shattered and reformed in less than the time it usually took him to fuck a fag and blow a load in his cum jar.
Carefully he made his way back toward his brothers, toward Ruby and toward Elwood and the clown girl who’d started this whole night of madness. Slick with cold sweat, fighting back nausea, he stumbled ahead. Taking huge ragged breaths, he eventually staggered back into the blinding light of the 4 wheelers, away from the army of monstrous clowns.
As he entered the clearing, his heart alternated between intervals of fast hammering and beats so slow he was sure it had stopped altogether. He knew he was dying. He knew he would not survive the night. A kind of calm came over him when he stopped struggling so hard to live and focused his will down on one final objective before the demons of the night took him.
But Mark’s newfound resolve was immediately extinguished as his eyes adjusted to the light. His brother’s stood in a semi-circle, as they’d done before as human men when they’d gang raped the clown girl, only now, they held in their twisted clutches Ruby the dog. Raping her.
Worse, his dead brothers were not just violating the canine’s orifices, their tendrils and dicks had bore new holes throughout her body which they now rhythmically penetrated as the dog yelped and bucked in their arms.
But worse still, as Mark dragged himself closer to his brothers he saw that Ruby’s own tendrils, the ones she’d grown out of her back minutes before now wrapped around the Nelson brothers’ blood slicked erections, stroking them in time to her own penetrations.
“Jesus fuck!” Carl proclaimed as he slammed Ruby with a pair of tentacles grown side by side out of his serpent-like trunk where his dick would have been located on his normal body. The penis-like limbs dug into Ruby’s stomach like leaches feasting on a fresh wound. “I never knew fuckin’ a dog could be so dang satisfying!”
Jacob’s enormous mouth bounced up and down as he burst into laughter. “The shit you don’t know! Quit lyin’ just cause you’re dead!”
“I ain’t lyin’!” Carl said, defensively.
“What about that time you got all hopped up on crystal meth and snuck into skinny Marco’s barn and rape-murdered all his dalmatian bitch’s pups as they were born?” Philip said, snickering at his demonic brother’s sudden shyness.
“Aw, hell,” Carl said, pouting. “I told you guys to keep that a secret!” A sly smile formed across his misshapen face. “I stuck them little fuckers on my pecker and jacked em like pocket pussies till there weren’t nothing left of em!”
All three brothers burst into sadistic laughter as Mark did his best to sneak past them. His target lay ahead. He only needed a few more steps and he’d have what he wanted. He’d be able to do this one last thing before he succumbed to his wounds.
“Baby brother! Ya’ll come back to play?”
Mark jammed his eyes closed, wincing as if he could will his demon brothers’ notice away if he tried hard enough.
Just a few more steps.
“Hey!” Jacob said, huge fanged mouth flapping. “I’m talkin’ ta you boy!”
Mark hurried forward, stumbling toward his goal, nearly tripping over his own numb feet. The feeling in his extremities was gone. An awful coldness crept into his core as his heart weakly thumped what were surely its final few beats.
And then he stopped. Not by his on volition. He lurched forward, but didn’t move. Stuck.
“Come back, little brother.” Carl said, giggling. “There’s enough Ruby to go around!”
Mark glanced back, careful not to move the sign post. A long black tendril extended out from Carl’s slithering, armless torso. It was lodged into Mark’s back, preventing him from further forward progress.
Now that he saw it, he could feel it worming around in his guts, searching for something. Undaunted, Mark lurched forward, dragging the probing tentacle with him. He only needed three more steps.
One.
Mark felt another jab. This one in his side. Looking back he saw that it was Jacob who had slung out a tethering limb. Mark grunted and shifted every last bit of his weight forward.
Two.
This time pain stung him in the shoulder as Philip sent an anchoring protrusion out to stop him.
Mark felt all three tendrils prodding his innards. But, Mark realized, they were not searching for any tangible meat inside him. Even as the slimy tentacles massaged his heart, lungs, kidneys and liver, he knew what they were searching for.
His soul.
They could have it, right after he finished his Earthly business.
Three.
Mark stood nose to nose with Elwood. His brothers’ taunts behind him, the tugging of their tendrils, their frantic grabbing at his soul could wait five more seconds.
Elwood, the faggot who started all of this. The faggot who lured Mark out into the woods, who got his brothers killed who unleashed this hell on Earth.
He was responsible for it all. And he would pay with his life.
The clown girl still touched Elwood’s face. The two of them stood, not moving, still as stiff as statues.
As Mark reached up and grabbed hold of the stake in his throat, the clowns appeared.
All across the perimeter of the clearing, instantly, their eyes glowing. The clowns filled the woods on all sides. Hundreds, thousands of them.
They all watched. The fat ones, the tall ones, the ones made of squirming people, the ones with no faces and the ones that were all faces. They watched as Mark yanked the sign post from his throat.
With the very last of his lifeblood dripping from the wound, Mark raised his arm weakly, intent upon jamming the blood-stained stick into one of Elwood’s damned black eyes.
But that’s not what happened.
As Mark’s shaking, numb arm came down for the blow, a tendril escaped from Elwood’s mouth, snaked through Mark’s own mouth and jammed itself out the hole in his neck.
Mark stood, wide eyed, stuck in place by black tentacles from all directions, each worming around in his guts, feeling for his soul.
He dropped the sign post, let his weight sag against the steel-like tendrils impaling his body. It felt good to let go. He felt his consciousness slipping away one last time. Felt the blessed darkness of oblivion washing over him.
And then he felt a thousand more tendrils penetrate his body.
The multitude of clown-things all around the clearing, they’d attached their own tendrils to his body. To his hands, his feet, his arms, his legs, over every inch of his torso, his face, his head. He was a living pin cushion.
Living? How?
Living dead, he realized. Just like his brothers. Like his dog and Elwood and the clown girl. All this time he’d been fighting for his life. He hadn’t realized his life was already over. His corpse walked. His soul animating it with the help of whatever devil that propelled all of the demons around him.
And then he saw that devil.
The tendrils found his soul. He felt their cold, wormy grip slither around his consciousness. His essence. After one tentacle wrapped around his bodily ghost, the others pounced like hungry jackals until a feeding frenzy erupted for his metaphysical being.
That’s when the sky came alive.
The gargantuan celestial being hung high up above the Earth but even still dominated the skyline directly above the wooded clearing. Its apendages slowly waved, blinking in and out of view as Mark’s awareness of the dimensional rift in which the being resided waxed and waned. Each of its titanic arms snaked down to the planet’s surface, all attached, invisible to the normal naked human eye, to the heads of every clown monster, all of Mark’s demon brothers, Elwood and the clown girl and even Ruby the dog.
Mark now understood why the clowns could move so quickly, defying Earthy physics. Even now the celestial being, the.. God, was plucking more and more clowns up from all corners of the globe, setting them down in the woods, allowing them to tether themselves to Mark’s dead human body.
But for what purpose?
That knowledge came to Mark in one violent moment as every tendril squirming inside of him took root in his soul and yanked.
Mark ceased to exist. At least as one being. One consciousness. He was shattered into a thousand pieces and sucked up through the tubers infesting his body like they were hungry vacuums.
The thousand Marks were sucked up high into the sky, higher and higher up the invisible arms of the space god, racing faster and faster toward its center mass. Toward its inner mind.
And every one of the thousand versions of Mark heard the same command in the same instance.
As the shattered consciousness entered the entity’s titan body, they all chanted the same mantra. The same order given to them from On High.
They knew but one thing.
Kill. Elwood.
***
Check back next Saturday for chapter 39!