Gargarius The Clown

Clowns might think it is all fun and games. Just wait until Jeremiah gets there.

Ah. So. "You are Gargarius." The sombrero man leaned forward, foot on the curb, an arm casually folded over one knee. "The clown. Gargarius. The Clown." The man spoke with a crunch of dry gravel under a heavy tread.

Gargarius, untastefully dressed in his yellow and black regalia simply stared. His eyes had shrunken into hollows of nightmare blackness. In the centers, glowing embers that promised an inferno.

"You are guilty of much, my friend Gargarius." The sombrero man had a matchbook in one hand. He twirled it about, flipping it from finger to finger, bouncing it off his knuckles as he did. A cigarette appeared in a corner of his mouth, but he continued to speak.

"You are a feeder. Murderer. A taker. You know me?" The cigarette lit itself. The matchbook continued to dance. And Gargarius continued to stare. Only now, the stare was joined by a growing leer on that painted over face.

The makeup, a plaster of white powdery something, cracked and flaked showing a diseased and mottled face. An insect boiled up from behind a strip of that peeling mass and zipped up into the air. Gargarius's tongue flashed out and twisted itself around the buzzing creature. It retracted slowly holding the wriggling mass and fed it with a pampered care into the impossibly wide mouth.

The leer was now a smile. A sad and dissolute look that utterly belied the enormous and completely mismatched body. Whereas the head was of normal proportions, the body was a balloon of flab. The legs too small to carry that weight. But yet, Gargarius stood. Balanced, his hands clasped before him around his waist as if to hold up his carcass of stomach. He crunched down slowly on his insect meal. Deliberately. Enormous bovine teeth grinding with a slow and leisurely inevitability.

At that moment the sombrero wearer straightened with a sudden creak of ancient leather.

The matchbook disappeared, replaced by a baroque and ancient musket. It was aimed already. Pointed unerringly at Gargarius's peeling head.

"You are judged." He pulled back on the trigger, leather gloved finger moving with glacial slowness. The musket fired with a noiseless blast of orange and red flames. Launching a speeding ball of iron-banded, obsidian rock.

It smacked into Gargarius's still smiling face and caved it in.

The whole face pulled in around the impact crater as if sucked into a black hole.

Sombrero man spat. An elaborate and elegant gesture that ejected spittle feet away from him into the dirt and dust of the road that Gargarius had been standing on.

Was *still* standing on.

That cratered face remained. The legs bowed slightly, and the blob of body barely contained in the frill of clown attire swayed a little.

A distant voice floated out. "Still here, Jeremiah!" The voice turned to a snarl and Gargarius's unseeing body leapt towards the sombrero man.

It transformed as it flew. Elongating, thinning into a tapeworm twist of horrid flesh. The face remained, a ruined cavern of nothingness from which twin infernos still glinted.

The thing twisted about, attempting to ribbon itself around the musket wielder.

But the sombrero man simply stepped back. A patient and almost timeless move. Precise. Only a pace. And then he produced a second weapon. This one a sword. He swung it. Twice then paused. Then cut about himself with a speed that defied the eye.

With each cut, that segmented parasitic body was sliced. In moments it lay on the ground, now a heaving and bubbling mass of corruption.

And the sombrero man casually flicked a match from his matchbook onto the pile of flesh before him.

It lit. A roaring flame began to consume what once was Gargarius the Clown.

And as it did, there came a giggle. It burst upward, a gas bubble of sound.

"I shall return. And with better form next time!"

Sombrero man stood relaxedly. The guns had vanished. The cigarette in the corner of his mouth had unlit but was consumed down to just a nub. He sucked in a breath. He nodded. Watched the fire burn itself out leaving nothing but a dusting of fine ash that blew into the air and disappeared in some unfelt breeze.

He turned and opened the wooden door that had manifested in the middle of the dusty road.

It creaked open with a groan of ages gone and yet to come. Beyond the gaping portal, a roiling mass of fog and a night sky devoid of any star. A soul gripping void.

He stopped, one foot raised and looked over his shoulder.

Then he spoke again. His voice now a slow cracking of stone. "No Gargarius. Your father's court has recalled you. I shall see you there."

He stepped through the door, and it boomed closed. Then faded away. A brief curl of dust cloud was all that marked what had transpired.