if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He is alive and then he is not.
He is standing – never particularly tall, but normal-sized, but then he is shrinking, hardening. His skin tightens and feels strange, slick. His mane and tail grow to absurd lengths, curl precociously against his flanks and neck. The black of his pelt warms to purple and pink streaks radiate in his mane and tail.
Then, darkness.
The air is stuffy but he realizes that he does not quite need air, not the way he once did. The new body – small and plastic and strange – has its own queer immortality. For a moment he lays there, eyes adjusting to the dust-mite darkness. Below and all around him shapes come into being, some soft mounds and some harder, made of the same stuff he is.
“Hello?” he calls out, soft, voice still sounding like a shout in this strange place.
He shifts and feels his back leg (which is thick and trunk-like, less the tapered things he is used to and more like bludgeons strapped to his body) touch a figure lying nearby.
The figure shifts and Sleaze whirls to face it, stomach tightening with the realization that he is not the only thing alive.
“Well hello there!” laughs the creature, which has climbed upright. He still cannot quite make it out – the only light comes from a crack above him – but he sees it is bipedal, and that in its right hand it clutches something.
(Its laugh is a bastardization of merriment; it is the kind of laugh bred in the dark corridors of insanity, the kind that leaks from the corners of the mouth like drool.)
It lurches forward, shuffling like the dead, and Sleaze stumbles backward on his thickened legs, crashing into more silhouettes.
They are also alive.
What he awakens is the fauna of the place. A wolf, snow-white, whose head was perpetually thrown back in a howl. A tiger, shoulder blades roiling under ropy muscles, awakens and purrs a low growl. They are all scarred, scratched from hours of play perhaps too rough (or perhaps the mutilations came from someone – something – else). They are all awake and Sleaze simply waits for them to descend.
They do not.
They are fixed on the figure he first awakened. He can see it better now. It is humanoid, but its face is pale white with exaggerated makeup on its pursed lips and a bulbous red nose. Its hair is blood-red and springs out from its head in a semicircle, but the crown of the head is white and bald.
In its hand its clutches balloons, blue and white and orange.
It smiles and Sleaze swears the corners of its mouth reach its ears, a Glasgow smile.
It smiles and Sleaze swears he sees not just teeth but fangs, and they are somehow infinitely worse than the predators he knows are at his back.
“What, no hello?” laughs the clown, throwing its arms back as if to embrace them.
“Come on then, say hello to old Pennywise.”
“You,” growls a creature behind him – it is the wolf, whose head has lowered, ears laid flat back. It moves forward, moves past Sleaze, who lets it, gladly.
He would rather let the wolves and tigers and god-knows what else consume him before letting the clown-thing lay hands on him.
“She doesn’t even like you,” growls the wolf.
Sleaze does not know who ‘she’ is. Does not know there is a girl who sleeps beyond these walls with fevered dreams.
“Ah, but she needs me! Who else will tell her what to do? Who else will whisper those things into her ear? Little Nerissa has a brother on the way, you know. I think I’ll have her help him down the stairs. Or perhaps teach him to swim. Or maybe just feed him a big ol’ spoonful of rat poison, whaddya think?” the clown claps its gloved hands, and Sleaze sees a dark stain across one of them.
“She threw you away.”
“No, she tried to throw me away. I had to have words with her after that. Made her microwave Elsa for that, didn’t I? Did you SEE her face after that? She got spanked for it, too. She cried for days after that. Hates being a Bad Girl.”
The clown somehow grins further, as if the smile could wrap itself around its head.
“And she can’t tell mommy or daddy about me, either. Then they’d know she was snooping and she’d get spanked again. I was daddy’s Special Collectible, the one he thinks the housekeeper stole.”
The clown’s eyes, glittery and dark, fix back onto Sleaze.
“But enough about our dear charge! Kapu, don’t you see we have a visitor? A little purple prince with bare knees. Oh Kapu, can’t I have him? He’d be such fun!”
“Please,” Sleaze says. He sounds desperate. He is desperate. He does not know this world, does not know the feud between the clown and the other animals at his back, “please, let me leave.”
“Leave?” laughs Pennywise, “oh darling, no one leaves. Besides, you should stay. It’s quite fun. We all float here.”
It laughs at itself then, the private inside joke from a story none of them know, the story where a clown named Pennywise lives in gutters and eats little boys.
(Nerissa had not meant to keep the toy clown, only play with him for a while. She did not know the story he came from, or why father kept him up on the shelf alongside the monster figurines. She’d liked the bright balloons, that was all. But then she’d forgotten to put him back, and by then father had come home and noticed he was missing, so she’d hid him at the bottom of the toy trunk and let the blame fall on the housekeeper.
The whispers began not long after that, the words coming in a dream-state when she didn’t know if she was asleep or not. She didn’t know it was the clown, at first. Not until one night she opened her eyes quick-quick, and saw it perched there. It didn’t move or speak a word, but she knew he had been shut in the toy box – he stayed there every night in case father walked in to say goodnight. She wouldn’t have taken him out.
The clown tells her to do things. At first it’s simple. She cuts Barbie’s hair, leaving her looking weed-whacked. But that’s okay. It wasn’t even her favorite Barbie.
But it escalates. The clown tells her to steal matches from the kitchen and burn Barbie’s hair off instead of just cutting. It tells her to throw Kapu across the room and try to cut off his ear with mom’s sewing scissors.
She tries to throw the clown away, sneaks into the kitchen at night and buries him under coffee grounds and the empty wine bottles mom hides there that she thinks no one knows about. When she reaches in to hide him she feels a sharp sting on her wrist and when she pulls it out she’s bleeding.
She tells herself it was a piece of glass from the trash, but in the back of her mind she knows that the clown bit her.
She goes to bed, wrist throbbing but mind relieved, and wakes up two hours later to the stench of wet coffee and sees him there, perched on her nightstand, the balloons reaching up up up as if he could float away.
We all float here, she thinks, not knowing why, before the panic sets in as she buries him once more at the bottom of the toy box.
She microwaves Elsa the next day, because the clown said if she didn’t things would be sobad for her, that he would tell and everyone would know she was a Bad Girl for sneaking into daddy’s study. She watches Elsa melt and cries while the whole kitchen stinks of burnt plastic and when the timer beeps and she pulls her out she drops her on the floor because she burns her hands.
Mom comes downstairs while the smoke alarm screams and spanks her, saying now Elsa’s gone, you killed her and she’s gone.
She curls around her stuffed dog that night but it’s not the same as Elsa and it takes Nerissa a very long time to fall asleep.
And when she wakes up the clown is there, and she thinks she can hear him laughing.)
Sleaze shakes his head, the memories – of the girl, of the clown watching, of the blue-dressed doll’s face melting inside a black box – clearing. He looks to his side and sees the tiger there, the knowledge in her eyes.
“Go,” the tiger says, “you’re not like us. You have a different magic, more like -” she pauses, as if she cannot bear to name him “ – more like it has. But good. You’re good, aren’t you?”
He doesn’t know how to answer the question. Is he good?
“We can hurt him in here. We can try. But we can’t leave the box, not like Pennywise can. So please…please go. Tell her it’s not her fault. Tell her she’s a Good Girl. She loves us, I know she does.”
Sleaze nods, numbly. It feels like a dream. Somewhere, the clown is laughing.
“Touch as many of us as you can, and then…we’ll go for its hands. Get his balloons.”
Sleaze does. He touches a cobra, an alligator, a panda. Sleek jungle cats to join the tiger, panthers and cheetahs and jaguars. Domesticated animals too, cats and dogs and pigs and more horses, breeds he cannot quite name.
The wolf – Kapu – leads the charge.
They descend on the clown, who is still laughing. The clown is stronger than he looks, and tears and bites at the animals.
But the tiger is fast and sleek, bred for this, and she sinks her teeth into the hand clutching the balloons. Pennywise shrieks and lets go before burying its mouth into her neck.
Sleaze does not – cannot – watch and stead lunges forward after the balloons. He grasps their strings with his teeth, and sees the clown’s hand rise up and then he feels something sinking in and thinks, wildly, oh god it has claws, but then he is floating towards the crack of light as the creatures skirmish below.
The balloons are not enough to dislodge the top so Sleaze scrambles wildly for purchase. His jaws ache and his side throbs. There will be a new scar there.
His front legs slip through the crack and he is able to clamber forward by the grace of his smaller body. There is a noise like gunshots as the balloons pop and he wonders if they struck something or if the animals below were destroying the clown.
He hopes they can do it.
But then there is no time to hope, no time to tell the girl anything, because he is sliding out of the crack, his absurdly long mane catching in a splinter, leaving a curled pink lock behind, and then Sleaze is falling over the side.
We all float here. he thinks, and laughs all the way down.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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(OOC: okay first of all I apologize for the novel and the unintentional kid backstory and if I broke the rules but I can't build happy worlds so whatever.
The "animals" are based off of Schleih animals - http://www.schleich-s.com/en/US/toys/
Pennywise the clown is an antagonist in Stephen King's novel It, and subsequently people have made figurines of him. Mine was based off of this - http://www.monstersinmotion.com/cart/ima...e-Mego.jpg - but with balloons.
thanks for indulging me <3)
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