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, click here to read chapter 37, click hereto read chapter 38, click here to read chapter 39, click here to read chapter 40, click here to read chapter 41, click here to read chapter 42, click here to read chapter 43 and click here to read chapters 44 and 45.
Chapter 46
“Mark’s the dude who fucked you in the woods, right? He seems like a bad guy!” Kiana yelled, still keeping her death-grip around Elwood’s neck while he hovered in the air in front of the Mark Nelson face made of fetus-creatures.
“He’s the worst,” Elwood whispered.
“How’d he get in here?”
“I don’t know,” Elwood said, growing his body larger, causing Kiana’s grip around his neck to break. She had to scramble onto his back to keep from falling into the boiling pinkness below.
In just a moment, Elwood’s flapping, hovering form was as tall as the mammoth Mark Nelson fetus-face bearing down on him. “But I’m going to have to fight him. You need to find my body. You need to finish this.”
“How? What do I do once I find you?”
Before Elwood could respond, A giant fist the size of a dump truck made of fetuses erupted from the tentacle floor, racing at lightning speed toward Elwood’s new giant form.
Quickly Elwood snatched Kiana from his back, now large enough to fit her entire body in the palm of his hand, and threw her as hard as he could at Mark’s ugly face. Screaming and flailing, Kiana smashed through one of Mark’s fetus-eyes, causing the amorphous thing to screech in pain as the creatures that made up his eyeball exploded on impact.
Elwood wasn’t fast enough to avoid the fist, though. Still as big as Elwood’s entire torso, it hit him with enough force to send him flying backwards more than a hundred yards. He bounced to a stop, squishing hundreds of fetus-things to a bloody, pulpy smear where he landed.
Elwood grabbed his head. His vision swam from the intensity of the sound of the psychic screams of the creatures he’d just obliterated. He was now so mentally in tune with the Entity, he could feel the deaths of the souls trapped inside the fetus-creatures. Whole civilizations were being wiped out by Mark’s possession of their bodies and the utter destruction it was wreaking on the spirits inside.
Suddenly the standing wave of pink liquid receded. The awful face of Mark Nelson receded, too. The fist collapsed back down to the tentacle floor, leaving the fetus things it was composed of dead or dying in puddles of the pink stuff.
What rose in their place was a naked body just taller than the giant that Elwood had become. The fetuses fused together, giving the new form a rough shape. Wailing faces, little arms and legs and nearly whole bodies jutted off this new thing, making it horrible to look at.
Mark Nelson, made flesh once again.
“Whas’a’matter, faggot? Got yerself a little headache?”
Elwood found it impossible to concentrate fully or focus on the threat in front of him. The mere act of Mark giving himself a body made of thousands of trapped souls was torturous. Elwood felt every step, every breath Mark took because the fetuses all mangled together felt them.
As Mark walked closer to where Elwood lay broken and damaged, the mutated redneck’s cock grew to an obscene length and thickness until it dragged on the ground behind him between his legs.
He stopped several yards from the downed astral-man. “Ain’t got nothin’ to say, huh? Shit, I didn’t come all the way up here inside this whatever-the-fuck we’re in just to be ignored.”
Elwood rolled onto his back and opened his eyes just in time to see Mark reeling his enormous schlong up into his hand like some kind of perverted laso.
Mark slapped the van-sized cockhead into his open hand with a wet, meaty thud sending new and powerful waves of agony through Elwood’s mind.
“This time, faggot. I’mma fuck you till you die from it.” Mark tapped the lengthy dickhead against his temple. “The big voice in my head tells me that’s what I was sent here to do. Fuck ya ta death.” Mark smiled. His teeth made of fetus-creatures wailed. “You gonna like that, though, ain’tcha faggot? You been waiting for me up here all this time playin’ hard ta get. Really you was wantin’ to die down there on planet Earth first time I fucked ya, huh? That’s what the big voice tells me. Tells me you love this big ole dick. Tells me I ain’t gotta be ashamed of fuckin’ on dudes anymore. Ain’t nobody up here give a rat’s fuck-ass what I be fuckin’. Says I can fuck on dudes forever up here!”
Elwood had to act. He pushed away the intolerable psychic torture permeating his being. He concentrated his thoughts on his best memory in the same way he’d instructed Kiana to when she was panicked and trapped inside the fetus-pod.
***
In Elwood’s memory, uncle Jeff was still alive and their relationship was still strong because the awful thing that happened to young Jake hadn’t happened yet.
On this day, the sun was shining bright and no one had insulted or beaten up Elwood on his way home from school. It was as perfect an afternoon as was possible in Elwood small, dreadful life in Hopp’s county Illinois.
With Elwood’s parents inside and Jake taking a nap, Jeff and Elwood hung out together in the back yard under the shadow of the barn that would eventually take Jeff’s life and provide Elwood with a reclusive nest in which he could hide from the whole world.
But on that day, it simply provided the two with shade from the bright sun and relief from the sweltering hot day.
“Listen, kid,” Jeff had said. Jeff always called Elwood kid, not in a condescending way, but in a soft, endearing way. Like, “I know what you’re going through and I promise it’ll get better.” And even though it never got better, Elwood never got tired of hearing it.
“I wanna give you something. I think you’re old enough now. Not old enough to understand the material. Fuck I’m almost 30 and I still don’t understand the material. But old enough to take care of it and not trash it, ok?”
Elwood nodded. He found it best if he didn’t talk a lot, even to Jeff. The more he opened his mouth the more trouble seemed to come his way. He spent his days only engaged in reality enough to get clothes on, get to school, eat, and get home. And some days even those minor tasks seemed impossible to perform.
Jeff reached into a box he’d brought out back with them and pulled out a small collection of comic books sealed in boarded bags. “This is issue 1 through 35 of the coolest comic book you’re ever gonna read. It’s called The Maxx. It’s about a homeless dude and the busty blonde social worker he’s in love with who bails him out of jail when he gets arrested for sleeping in alleys.”
Elwood took the comics, but looked skeptical at the cover of issue 1 after Jeff’s description.
“I know that doesn’t sound very cool but Maxx thinks he’s a powerful superhero in another dimension and there’s this weirdo bad guy named Mr. Gone who uses these little eyeless creatures called Izzes to do all his evil shit for him.”
“Izzes?” Elwood said, thumbing through the covers.
“There’s so many layers to the story. It’s all symbolism and allegory mixed in with some kind of twisted feminist theory. I don’t know man. You’ll love the fights Maxx has with the monsters in the Outback but… I just think you’ll connect with him. Maxx is… he’s off, like you, kid. Not in a bad way. Like in the everyone’s a hero to someone, somewhere kind of way. You know?”
Elwood looked at his uncle trying to figure out if he’d just been insulted or praised.
Jeff set his mouth, himself seeming unsure if he’d just called his nephew a loser to his face or not. “All I’m trying to say is I love you, kid. And I want you to have my favorite comic book of all time and I want you to take care of it. Maybe some day you’ll have some kids of your own and you can pass em down to them or something. Fuck I’m terrible at this. Just read the fuckers, ok?”
“Ok.”
No one had ever given Elwood a gift like that before and no one ever would again. Sure his parents got him Christmas and birthday presents but it was always socks or clothes or generic board games. Never anything… personal. Never something that showed Elwood that anyone truly understood his character and personality.
Elwood took the comics to his room and read every issue that night. As Jeff had said, he didn’t quite understand what he was reading, but he loved the fight scenes and the cool monsters. Mr. Gone and the Izzes were great and The Maxx gave him a warm, fuzzy feeling of kinship. As he lay in bed that night he wished as hard as he could that he would wake up in the Outback a hero strong enough to save Julie the Jungle Queen.
But when he woke the next day, he was simply Elwood and Elwood he would stay. But he did keep the comics. He read them after Jake’s accident. After Jeff’s suicide. After Elwood’s move into the barn. He would still read the Maxx from time to time even as he developed his fatal plan to become a stalking clown on Halloween.
And inside that barn is where those comic books currently sat. They’d survived every awful thing his shit life had thrown at him and Elwood would make damn sure they would survive this alien threat to the entire planet Earth.
Mark Nelson, the Entity, they could kill his body, rob him of his soul, but these motherfuckers would not have his Maxx comic books.
***
While Mark continued to ramble about his newfound acceptance of his homosexuality, Elwood curled the metaphysical bat wings attached to his back into fists. Then solidified the fists into enormous clubs complete with jagged spikes. Kneeling forward, Elwood launched the twin flesh-missiles from their stalks on his back directly into Mark’s chattering fetus-face.
The flesh-weapons exploded, taking with them Mark’s head, his right arm and most of his chest, leaving nothing but a naked giant with legs, one arm and the biggest dick Elwood had ever seen.
The psychic pain was the worst Elwood had experienced yet. He felt the death of every soul on a planet called Rixonia-Five-One-Seven. Rixonia had been a forest planet with trees so large they grew up from the bottom of the planet’s oceans and extended up into its atmosphere, giving the entire planet a shaggy, green appearance even from space.
The dominant species on Rixonia had been a hairy, marsupial people who used oversized teeth and claws to dig and burrow out city-sized colonies right inside the trunks of the trees. The Entity had caused mass chaos on that planet by convincing the Rixonians that a new type of semi-aquatic termite-like insect had infested the root systems of the majority of the planet’s trees.
The Rixonians had mercilessly fought each other over what they believed to be the few healthy, sustainable trees left to live in. The Entity had particularly enjoyed the flavor of that planet’s agony and misery.
Elwood knew this because the Entity knew this. And now the Rixonians were gone forever, every last mind obliterated in the explosion caused by Elwood himself. And yet, their loss was in vain.
No sooner had Elwood recovered from the psychic onslaught of the Rixonians’ deaths than the mangled body of Mark Nelson began to regenerate. Pink fluid geysered up from the jagged edges of his mangled trunk, and yet the headless body continued to walk forward, giant cock still swinging nonchalantly in his remaining hand.
Soon the geysering fluid gave way to an awful gurgling sound which produced pink froth and bubbles from the wounds. The gurgling gave way to laughing and then Mark’s ugly head, complete with shit-eating grin oozed its way up out of the mess of his torso along with a new arm. In seconds his body was whole again. In another second, he stood directly in front of Elwood.
The two impossibly tall men faced one another without speaking, both naked, one lythe and muscular, a sheen of sweat adding an air of aesthetic beauty to his form. The other a hideous amalgamation of equally hideous little fetal versions of himself, all asymmetrical, bulbous edges and puss-dripping, nauseating corners.
Elwood pushed the deaths of the Rixonians out of his mind. Silently he came to terms with the fact that he may have to slay dozens more civilizations inside the Entity in order to defeat it. He would kill a hundred billion more worlds here if it meant he could save his own.
He concentrated on the image of the Maxx comics in his barn. His dream had been to wake up in another world a hero. And here he was. He was the Maxx. The entity’s mind was the Outback. His dream had come true. He was a hero. And his Julie Winters? His jungle queen? Not Kiana. Kiana could take care of herself. She was as doomed as he and as instrumental in defeating the entity as he was himself.
No, his jungle queen was the Earth itself. All of the souls here were as dead as he was. Ghosts. Echos of worlds long eaten by the alien beast threatening the future of his own world. But Earth lived! As long as Elwood’s mind remained, the Entity would not have it!
Elwood grinned, empowered by these thoughts. He raised his fists and faced his lifelong bully, Mark Nelson head on, ready to fight until the bitter end.
And that’s when Mark threw his rope-like dick and stabbed Elwood directly in the heart.
***
Check back next week for chapter 47!