A CLOWN WITH AN AXE WALKS INTO A CHURCH…
Short Story by James D. Pratt
Copyright 2010 James D. Pratt
Smashwords Edition
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“A clown with an axe walks into a church…”
Sounds like the start of a bad joke, right? And that would be appropriate. There’s nothing funny about clowns. I mean, think about it. They’re painted up like dead prostitutes. They purposefully mess up whatever they’re trying to do because the whole absurd point of a clown to spread chaos. If madness had a face, it would be the eerily goofy, makeup-smeared face of a clown. What was it Lon Chaney said? Oh yeah. ‘There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight’. So imagine my surprise at the way things turned out when I finally met a clown.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before the clown, there was the Incident. Then things really got weird.
When the Incident happened (and to this day no one knows what the Incident actually was) and those things started coming through, seeping into our reality through the cracks between worlds or dimensions or whatever like cockroaches scurrying out from beneath a refrigerator, I was away on a business trip hundreds of miles from home. The first thing I did when I realized the newscasts weren’t some sort of movie promo or hoax was to call Amy and make sure she and Tyler were alright. She sounded understandably shaken but was otherwise okay. She said she was going to take Tyler to her dad’s farm a few miles out of town, which would be just as safe a place as any I guess. “I love you, Davis,” was the last thing she said to me. All the phones are dead now and I haven’t heard from her since.
As for me, I had the same idea as a bunch of other people and headed for the nearest church, in this case the Dead Horse Creek Baptist Church. It was a little hypocritical, I’ll admit. I’ve considered myself an agnostic for a long time or, in other words, an atheist who hasn’t worked up the courage to take the final plunge. I used to mock religion back in the old days. The idea of a kind and loving God in the context of such a messed up world, full of unnecessary suffering and petty cruelty and unspeakable wickedness, just seemed absurd. I have my faith back now. There’s a God for sure. The only problem is He’s insane.
In the beginning there were almost thirty of us. In the space of maybe a month that number was whittled down to five, mostly by members of our group getting picked off when we’d go scavenging for food. There’s no rhyme or reason to the behavior of the things, but once something catches their attention they’re relentless. I’ve only seen one person die that way, Mitch something, a used car salesman whose last name I can’t remember. We were in the ruins of a supermarket that had already been mostly picked clean when one of them just unfolded from thin air. I saw it spontaneously appear, a hideous abomination produced by the alien physics of some unimaginable world. A shapeless, cancer-ridden mass the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, it never touched the ground but seemed to ooze through the air. Though we momentarily shared the same reality it was sort of fuzzy and indistinct, like an image on an old TV screen. I wondered what it would feel like to touch the thing, if my hand would pass right through it like it wasn’t there at all. The thing dripped filth, was filth, and before anybody could move it was on top of Mitch, literally dissolving him bit by bit until there was nothing left. Mitch’s insides swelled up and burst as his flesh sizzled and bubbled and melted like butter on a skillet. Even as Mitch was devoured he was changing, becoming like one of them. He screamed and flailed with mutant appendages more like tentacles than human limbs as his liquefied parts were greedily slurped up by the thing through one of its many toothless orifices.
The other way our numbers have dwindled is due to the deceptively named H-Virus. That was what we ended up calling it, in lieu of “delayed spontaneous hyper-dimensional mutation phenomena”. That was the original name suggested by Terry Feinstein, the guy who theorized what it was. Terry was a book editor and would-be sci-fi writer and as far as I was concerned his theory was as good an explanation as any.
Here’s the lowdown on the H-Virus. A couple of times after a close encounter with one of those things, hours or days later somebody in the group would start screaming and thrashing around. Their bodies would contort and swell as the cosmic cancer building up inside then began to leak out and then erupt from every orifice. Skin stretched to the limit, they would finally split open like an overstuffed sausage and their insides would come spilling out. But that wasn’t the end of it. Death would have been too merciful. The process was actually a terrible transformation that changed them into a boneless heap of living filth. They would lash out at everything around them with flailing tendrils that used to be their limbs and intestines, crushing and strangling anything they could catch. The worst part was that their still-human heads would be screaming the whole time.
Terry theorized that the things are from a region of space with more spatial dimensions than the three-dimensional world we occupy (four counting time), or maybe from another universe entirely, one that developed in a way a lot different from our own. It was possible, Terry thought, that the things carry a “pocket” of their own reality with them and that if you come into contact with this pocket you could become infected with that other place, sort of like a virus. When one of them gets a hold of you, it’s over pretty quick but even if you get away, the end result is still the same. One moment you feel fine, then the next thing you know your body is undergoing a horrible transformation, as if you’d been dragged to whatever hell the things came from and brutally remade in their image.
Somebody suggested calling it the “H-Virus”, the “H” standing for “hyper-dimensional”, and the name stuck. The ironic thing was, Terry, the guy who diagnosed it, was the second person to contract it and he killed three people before somebody managed to get close enough to smash his head in with an iron bar. For some reason he’d been screaming the name “Maria” the whole time. I asked around afterward and nobody knew who Maria was. I guess we never will.
Like I said, in the space of a month we were down to five. They were:
Davis Waites – Me, the guy who’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sam Baird – The local mayor who’d bravely taken refuge in the church during his town’s ongoing hour of need. Typical A-type/take-charge personality, because there always has to be one in every group. I didn’t like him. Even his haircut annoyed me.
Emily Baird – High school science teacher and Mayor Baird’s sister. One of the locals (who has since gone on to his final reward) told me that there’d been rumors back in high school of Sam and Emily engaging in non sibling appropriate behavior. She seemed to only have a smidgeon of her brother’s sense of self-entitlement but I found her to be weird and unpredictable.
Julia Guzman – A cute little dispatcher for the local branch of a national telephone company. Julia had been on her way to work when the cracks starting appearing and the things started coming through. She thought it was the biblical Armageddon (and who’s to say she’s wrong) and pulled into the parking lot of the first church she saw.
Joey Kincaid – An eight year old boy whose mother, Janice, had been killed by Terry Feinstein after the H-Virus took over. Julia had sort of adopted Joey.
There wasn’t a lot to do in the church. One of the ways we’d pass the time was speculating what the Incident really was.
“You heard about CERN?” Sam asked. “Those guys were using a particle accelerator to try and recreate the Big Bang. Why the hell would somebody want to do that?”
Emily shook her head. “Mmm, I’m not sure that’s what they’re trying to do.” She was the only one that could contradict Sam and not expect a bitingly sarcastic response. “I think they’re just looking for undiscovered particles and things like that.”
Sam snickered. “Were looking for undiscovered particles. Anyway, it looks like they got more than they bargained for. Maybe this is God’s way of telling us to back off. There are just some things Man wasn’t supposed to know.”
Julia shook her head. “They couldn’t recreate the Big Bang. How can you recreate something that never happened?” She firmly believed the world was six to eight thousand years old, humans had at one time shared the planet with dinosaurs, that God was still in Heaven, and that everything happening was all part of His much touted but vaguely defined master plan.