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She Was Only A Clown Chapter 35

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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 and click here to read chapters 33 and 34.

chapter 35

“You were right. We’re not really here,” Elwood’s head said.

Kiana stood, eyes wide, queer look on her face. “Huh?”

Elwood’s arms crawled over to his torso and popped themselves back on as though they were toy soldier limbs. He grabbed his head and set it on his neck before climbing back onto his lower body. Then he stood, bloody and crooked, but whole.

“This is a projection. This room. This nightmare, Mandee, us. The whole thing is just a psychic manifestation.”

The Mandee beast roared again and swiped its claws at Elwood but he casually ducked out of the way and walked back to where Kiana stood as though dodging nothing more than an annoying wasp.

“Come on. We’ve got to go,” he said, grabbing his female companion by the hand.

“W-what about that?” she said, pointing her ax at the beast looming above them.

Black spikes erupted from Mandee’s exposed flesh. Whip like tendrils emerged from her eye sockets. It was doing its best to look as menacing and terrifying as possible.

Elwood was unfazed.

“Remember when you said you turned the ice pick on your own face but couldn’t feel anything? It got me thinking. This thing, this alien was able to show me whole other worlds and I felt like I was really there. It made me re-live the worst moment of my life, the suicide of my uncle that I caused. But how could I be in all of those places when I’m really standing outside in the woods? How could you really be here when you’re out there with me? No, none of this is real. Watch.”

With that, Elwood faced the towering horror blocking his path. “If it can make itself big and scary and do all of these horrible things to us, why can’t we do horrible things right back?”

One of the Mandee-thing’s huge hands slashed out, meaning to decapitate Elwood all over again but Elwood effortlessly side-stepped the swing with preternatural speed. He grabbed hold of it and concentrated. After several seconds the Mandee-beast screamed in pain and smoke rose from the wrist of the huge claw as Elwood’s hand began to glow red. The claw caught fire and melted off at the wrist, falling to the floor, smoldering. The Mandee-beast recoiled the huge arm. Elwood looked back at Kiana and smirked. “That’s what I thought.”

She watched him, shocked at his newfound abilities. Then she saw the tendrils in Mandee’s eyes dart out like striking snakes toward him. “Elwood!”

Before he could react, the tendrils wound around his arms, pinning them to his sides. The vaginal tongue slimed up his leg and then slowly coiled around his neck, choking off his air supply.

But Elwood only struggled for a moment. He opened his mouth. His teeth elongated and became huge shark-like fangs. He leaned over and effortlessly bit through the eye-tendrils and the vagina-tongue in one enormous bite.

“You are no one! You are nothing!” the beast said from a new mouth grown in place of its severed hand on the mutilated wrist of its breast-arm. “What do you hope to accomplish, mortal? Swine? I am forever. I am everything! I am everywhere!”

“C’mon, let’s get outta here,” Elwood said, his voice distorted from the size of his mouth and huge fangs. Ignoring the twisted monster screaming at him, he turned back to face Kiana. “We’ve got work to do.”

Kiana shook her head. “I-I Don’t think I should leave.”

Elwood looked on, astonished. “What are you saying? You just asked me to rescue you. I AM rescuing you! We have to leave now before it’s too late! It doesn’t really know we’re here yet. I’ve felt its true gaze. This monster it created from Mandee’s body is like scratching an itch. Unconscious. Just an automatic response to me invading your nightmare. But if it devotes any more of its attention to us, it will trap us inside your nightmare forever!”

“I can’t,” Mandee whimpered. “Just leave me. I deserve this. There ain’t no good in me. I ain’t good at all.”

The Mandee-beast cackled behind them. “She’s not like you, Elwood,” it said, green blood oozing from its new wrist-mouth. “Not as dense, stupid. She knows her place! Knows she belongs to me! I underestimated how… hopeful you were. I would never have probed your mind and folded you into my multitude if I’d known there lay such a spark of defiance inside you still. It tastes… rotten.”

Elwood grunted in frustration, finally giving in to the beast’s taunts. He turned, confronting the writhing corpse and all its awful appendages.

Screaming, he ran toward the beast. As he did so, his arms split in two and each of his now four hands elongated to sword-like points. He charged headlong into the claws, mouths and whipping tendrils, flailing and chopping, lobbing off hunks of monster flesh in a black and green blur until the Mandee-thing lay in ruin, just chunks of twitching meat.

“It’s right, Elwood. Just go. Why’d you even come here? I’m all bad news.”

“Stop it!” Elwood screamed. “We’re going now!”

Kiana wasn’t having it. As Elwood moved forward to compel her, she took a step back, shaking her head.

And then the twitching pieces of meat started to laugh. Each bloody bit grew a mouth, tittering and jeering in unison. “She will be your end, Elwood. Your undoing. Trust in her and you shall taste bitter defeat as sure as sunshine.”

“You’re better off without me,” Kiana added. “Thank you for trying but… I’m not your hero.”

“She’s not your hero, Elwoooooood!” the chunks mocked, falling into more mean-spirited laughter.

Elwood shook his head. “I will not leave without you. I–”

THERE YOU ARE

The voice of the entity shattered the windows in the torture room revealing the yawning eternal blackness outside Kiana’s nightmare. The window frame distorted and began to shrink. The walls shook and contracted, knocking the many murder devices to the floor. Mandee’s death mattress was pushed toward the center of the room as the whole nightmare began to come apart.

“Get outta here!” Kiana screamed, terror in her eyes as she realized they’d been found. “Go kill this motherfucker!”

Elwood raised all four of his sword arms and leaped at Kiana. “Not without you!”

The blades met Kiana’s neck and separated her head from her body cleanly. Her arms flailed and twitched in shock as blood spurted from her neck, but before her head could hit the floor, Elwood’s arms fused and his hands returned to normal, catching it. He cradled the head and made his way toward the door, ignoring the cacophony of laughter and jilted mockery coming from the mounds of flesh and gore.

Kiana’s head looked back at her body in horror as it collapsed to the floor and was quickly crushed under the contracting walls. “I swear I’m no good for you, Elwood! Why would you trust a psycho killer like me? Why aren’t you afraid I’ll just kill you, too?”

Elwood stepped over the laughing mouths and stood in front of the churning chaos as the door frame squeezed smaller and smaller by the second.

“Because,” he said, smiling as he leaped into the blackness. “I’m already dead.”

***

Be Back here next week for chapter 36!

Where Are The New Clown Chapters?

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If you’re an avid Strangehead, a citizen of Strangeville or one of my obsessive haters with more social media sock accounts than past sexual history, you may have wondered why I haven’t posted a new SHE WAS ONLY A CLOWN chapter in the past few months. The short answer is because I haven’t written any yet. Here’s the long answer:

I was presented with an opportunity in my personal life that I could not let pass me by. It was one of those opportunities that I would have regretted for the rest of my life had I not dived in and given 100% of my attention and devotion.

This opportunity consumed all of my free time and I was left with very little time to tend to my writing. I always knew this would be a temporary life change and that, regardless of the outcome of the personal opportunity, I would return in earnest to my writing life. After all, I am a writer and writers write.

Also I would be lying if I said I hadn’t written any. In fact I have prepared more than 5,000 words worth of SHE WAS ONLY A CLOWN chapters. Chapters 35-38, an entire month’s worth of the SHE WAS ONLY A CLOWN serial are ready to go.

Starting next week, we will return to our regularly scheduled Saturday postings as we descend into the madding cosmic horror and backwoods carnality of the final act of SHE WAS ONLY A CLOWN.

Will Elwood and Kiana the Clown Girl defeat the alien entity? Or will the galactic world eater plunge Earth into madness with clown hysteria? Will it consume us all?

We will learn Elwood’s and indeed our very planet’s fate starting next week. BUT for Strange Sayings newsletter subscribers, we have a special treat! All four chapters will be available to read in the March edition of the Kevin Strange newsletter, and free of charge, as always.

Don’t subscribe? No problem! All you have to do is fill out the form on the side of this page (or scroll to the bottom if you’re viewing this article on a smartphone) and enter a valid email address. That’s all you have to do to catch up on Kevin Strange’s newest and most brutal cosmic horror novel to date!

Sorry for the delay, gang. But we are BACK in business starting next week!

She Was Only A Clown Chapters 33 And 34

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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, and click here to read chapters 30 thru 32.

Chapter 33

The clown girl wept openly, her story finished. She sobbed into her knees which she’d drawn up to her chest. She was folded like a child’s highchair, making herself look even more slight than her already petite frame suggested.

Even after the vile tale she’d just told, Elwood felt a measure of sympathy for her, even if that sympathy in turn made him question his own morality.

Then he remembered he was a piece of shit himself. Maybe not quite on the level of a murderous psychopath, at least not yet. He figured, given a few more years, he might very well have turned out exactly the same way as Kiana.

Kiana. It was so weird finally putting a name to the face of the vicious and terrifying clown girl who had massacred the Nelson brothers with such precise sadism and gusto.

Now he understood why.

“So you don’t remember anything from the woods? The Nelsons? Me?”

Kiana shook her head. “Are you gonna kill me, mister?”

“No…” Elwood said. “I’m just a guy. I’m here to–” he hesitated. What exactly was he here to do? He’d been so focused on finding the real mind behind the clown girl that he hadn’t exactly thought his plan through any further.

“I’m trapped here just like you,” he said finally.

“Can you get us out? Can you wake us up, mister? Can you get me to my mom!” She was getting hysterical again, crying and clinging to Elwood’s shirt.

“I-I don’t think so.” Elwood was again in a position he’d never been in before. A woman had never looked to him for protection, for help. The look in her eyes, the way she held on to him. He still did not have sexual feelings, but some paternal sense emerged from deep within him. Some latent gene switched on under the stress of the present insanity before him.

He did something he never dreamed he would do in his life. He pulled the girl close and held her tightly.

Then he told her the truth.

“No. I can’t. I can’t get you out of here. We’re inside of its mind. Inside the devil. Our souls. We’re trapped here, probably forever.”

Kiana cried harder, burying her face into Elwood’s chest as he explained uncle Jeff, the Nelsons, what happened in the woods, his nightmare, the dead planet, the crustacean species and everything he knew about the entity.

They sat together for a long while after Elwood had finished. They didn’t speak. He granted her all the time she needed to process what had happened to her. Hell, Elwood was still processing what he’d seen, what he’d done out there in the woods.

Finally Kiana spoke. “So we’re trapped inside of its mind. And you broke out of your nightmare to come find me inside my nightmare. But just our minds. Our bodies are still out there in the woods doing god-knows-what to bring about some kind of mass chaos event that allows this inter-dimensional alien to eat our entire planet and all the life on it? That about sum it up?”

“Yep,” Elwood said.

“How is this real? How the fuck did this happen to us of all people? I’m a psycho slut serial killer and you, no offense darling but you’re just a sad redneck with bad luck and worse friends.”

Elwood considered this for a while. “We’re bad people. But we’re the worst kind of bad people. We’re bad people who hate ourselves more than we hate the world and this… thing, this alien wants to use that hatred to eat our planet.”

“Why do you care? You’re just a white trash piece of shit, honey. You ain’t no hero.”

Elwood chuckled. “It asked me the same thing when I was trapped in my own nightmare. I don’t really know. When it showed me that other world, those other people and what it made them do. I couldn’t be like them. I couldn’t let it win. Maybe it was wrong about me. Maybe I don’t hate myself more than I hate my world. Maybe I just hate myself and much as I hate this fucking thing that’s trying to consume everything I’ve ever known.”

“And how are we gonna stop it?”

Elwood smirked knowingly, like a kid about to show his friend his dad’s porno magazine stash. “You just gotta trust me.”

Kiana looked at him, confused, overwhelmed by what she’d been told. Just as she made to respond, Mandee’s body flopped to life on the mattress.

Chapter 34

Kiana dove toward Mandee’s twitiching body. “No! Stay dead you fucking cunt! Stay fucking dead!”

Elwood grabbed the charging girl by her shoulders and pulled her back.

“No. It’s him. He’s found us. We have to go now.”

“Go where?” Kiana said, panic in her eyes. “I thought you said we was trapped here forever?”

Elwood spun her around and headed for the open door. The chaos outside spun slowly as ever, threatening the edges of Kiana’s nightmare.

“In its mind, yes. But not in our individual dreams. I have a theory. I think I know where its brain is. I think I know where we really are.”

Kiana looked confused. “What do you mean really are? We’re not really here?”

Before Elwood could answer, it happened.

Mandee’s mouth snapped open. But she didn’t speak. Instead her throat pulsed and bubbled, causing a nauseating gurgling sound to issue from her mouth before a thick black gunk slimed out and roiled down her cheeks and chin.

Her eyes opened, searching, confused.

Two thin black insectoid legs rose out of the putrid liquid, their sharp tips pointing at the ceiling. These leg-stalks grew thicker and taller as they emerged, becoming impossibly long, causing Mandee’s head to jerk violently the segmented joints forced their way out of her mouth, each one larger and thicker than the last until Mandee’s mouth could no longer accommodate their size.

She tried to reach out toward Kiana and Elwood, even the embrace of her killer preferred to the awful fate that befell her now.

Mandee’s cheeks burst and stretched until her jaws were ripped open at horrific angles as her eyes rolled into the back of her head.

The legs bent and turned downward, their sharp, taloned ends found purchase on the mattress and the floor, lifting mandee’s upper body off the ground. The legs now supported all of her weight.

Mandee’s own legs jerked apart in the next moment. More of the black gunk shot forth, this time from the dead girl’s vagina.

A slimy green tongue slithered out of the hemorrhaging orifice, whipping around like a deadly reptile.

Kiana made a revolted noise and nearly gagged as Mandee’s legs continued to bend outward until her pussy lips stretched and tore. Sharp white fangs pierced the skin, penetrating her ripped open vaginal walls, creating a grotesque parody of a mouth where her genitals has just been.

This new beast rose up on its insect legs, the remaining parts of Mandee still recognizable hanging limp and inert, and screamed at Kiana and Elwood. Its roar sounded like a thousand different dying animals.

It crouched down and leaped across the room landing directly in front of the open door. In front of Elwood and Kiana’s only means of escape. Its monstrous body and Mandee’s limp limbs blocking completely their exit.

When it spoke, its voice was unmistakable. Elwood was right, the entity had found them.

And it was pissed.

“BETRAYERS! Ten thousand deaths would be a fate too merciful for you! I shall rend your minds in agonizing slowness, stripping layers of sanity from your shrieking psyches for an eternity of eternities! Let your insolence serve as a reminder that I am GOD here! Now and FOREVER!”

“Let me outta here motherfucker!” Kiana screamed, yanking free from Elwood’s grasp. She launched herself toward Victor’s wall of torture weapons. Her hands landed on a short ax. She tore it from the wall and lunged at the Mandee-beast, intent on chopping her way through.

Her first swing found purchase. The head of the Ax buried deep into the insect-like leg closest to her, causing a stream of bright green fluid to spew forth.

The Mandee-beast screamed, shrill and high as it pitched away from the violence.

But before she could swing the ax again, two more limbs erupted from Mandee’s ruined body, this time from her pert tits. Two huge black arms with hands tipped in sharp claws burst from the dead girl’s tender flesh, obliterating her breasts in the process.

Kiana had no time to react as the hands reached for her. She closed her eyes and braced for oblivion, but at the last second she was knocked free.

Landing on her ass she looked up at Elwood standing in her place. The huge hands closed around him, severing his arms, head and torso at the waist in an instant.

“NOOOOO!” Kiana screamed. She’d only learned of her possible escape from her endless nightmare minutes before but she’d already made the fatal mistake of putting her faith and hope in the strange little man that had invaded her dream. And now he was dead.

He hadn’t told her his plan. He hadn’t told her how to find the entity’s brain. If Elwood’s description of the votex of chaos was to be believed, even if she was able to fight her way free and fling herself through the doorway and into the psychic energy looming behind the Mandee-beast, she would be forever alone out there without another mind with which to anchor to the way Elwood’s mind had anchored to her’s when he’d found her here. She would be lost. Cursed to float in the madness for eternity.

“Better than spending one more fucking second in here with you!” she yelled, gripping up the ax, preparing to cut her way through or die trying.

And then a weird thing happened.

Elwood’s severed head rolled to face her. His eyes opened and he spoke.

***

Be Back here next week for chapter 35!