Searchterm Entry #10: The Carnival

The tenth entry to our Search Term Challenge is a little stomach-churning in its descriptions, and just on the amusing side of disturbing.

For details of the challenge, and to see other entries, click here. Voting for stories will begin once all entries have been posted online.

The author of this entry is John Slover, who you can contact by email.

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The Carnival

“Bellowing Bastard Brothers”, the sign read, as they walked into the carnival. Carny folk wandered past, here and there, with short fingers and hairy knuckles, their small, strange eyes set either too wide or too close. “I wonder what goes on there?” Levi asked his date, indicating the sideshow tent. He glanced over at her, shuddering slightly. He had picked her to ask to the carnival out of desperation, rather than affection. He had hoped her appearance and general lack of hygiene would make her at least as desperate as he, even if  she would fit in rather well with the hairy dwarven folk who ran the place. She arched her luxuriantly thick unibrow and scratched her arm-fat as she thought about her response. “I don’t know,” she rasped slobberingly, shifting her attention, he guessed, to the carny barker in front of the tent. He couldn’t be completely sure, however, given her lazy eye.

“Come one, come all!” the barker shouted, “Enter this tent for the strangest of the strange. Sideshow fables these are not, but grim reality! Your eyes will leap from your skull when you witness the sights within!”

The carny barker gestured to the darkness beyond, from which strange sounds, and stranger smells, malevolently emanated. Levi made his way cautiously towards the tent, as his date stumped loudly over the uneven ground, panting as she hauled her grotesque bulk lurchingly forward. Levi wondered if what lay beyond could possibly be any worse than the creature breathing halitosis on the back of his neck. With slight trepidation, he parted the folds and pushed in, considering that he might be doing the same thing later that night, if he could get past his overpowering revulsion. “Good lord”, he thought, “what if she wants extra sex?”

Through the tent’s opening, a straw path led into its interior. He stepped through, and was confronted by a surly, odorous man, missing teeth, fingers, and the ordinary faculties of sane folk which would keep him out of the carny lifestyle. “This way,” he growled at them, and led them farther into the tent. The man glanced back for a moment, at the swaying bulk of Levi’s ponderous date. “Quite a looker you have there”, he said, without even the slightest hint of sarcasm. “I bet she writes longhand, if you know what I mean.” The man grinned and winked at Levi foully. Levi shook himself in an attempt to dislodge the images this euphemism had produced, and studied the stitching of the tent.

The man stopped, indicating a curtained stand to their right. “Here, you will witness a creature so strange, so foul, that the doctor that birthed him claimed him stillborn to his mother, to try and dispose of all evidence of this strange abomination. Fortunately for us, he overpowered the doctor and made his way to the Americas, clinging by his teeth to boat hulls.”

He threw back the curtain dramatically, and inside was a tank, filled with dark, green water, its sides slicked by algae. From the depths a mottled green face appeared, with a lamprey like suckered mouth, radiating rows of inward facing teeth. Tentacled, lovecraftian limbs scrabbled at the glass. Levi and his date both peered in at it. It peered back out, and then suddenly lurched towards Levi’s date, causing her to let out a croaking, phlegmy cry of fear. She lurched unevenly away, and inside the tank, the thing tried to follow.

The carny worker gave a rasping laugh, and led them on. “I think,” he said, leveling his gaze at them, “We’ll skip on ahead to the main attraction.” After a moment for the shock to clear, Levi realized what’d been said. “Hey, we paid our money like every–” “I think,” said the carny with sudden authority in his voice, “You’ll be wanting to meet the brothers.”

“The brothers?” he asked, puzzled. “The Bellowing Basta–”

“The brothers,” the carny said forcefully.

Levi surmised, from this response, that his guess had been correct.

The carny led them on, past other curtained booths, deeper into the tent than the tent had appeared to be able to contain. Strange sounds and smells assaulted them from all angles, until they were led to the end of the tent, or so it appeared. The carny worker unbuttoned a flap, and led them through a hallway of sorts, and into a large vaulted room inside the tent. Pillows and cushions sat all around on the straw ground. As they entered,  a low, unearthly howl built slowly into a shriek. Levi looked back, seeing the dragging trail his date’s off leg had left in the straw, briefly, before the carny worker fastened the flap behind them. He walked past them to the dark, back of the tent, where a huge booth sat, and flipped a switch.

Light spilled over the most grotesque sight Levi had ever witnessed. A hulking blob of a creature loomed before him, with unending folds of skin and clumps of hair sticking out of nodules of fat. It shrieked intermittently from several mouths spread along its bulk, random limbs protruding from it. After some time, it calmed, and a voice came from one of the mouths, various eyes blinking in the new light. “You!” it howled. “Come forward!” Levi stepped forward uneasily a step. “Not you! The other!” Levi looked over at the trollish lump of female flesh to his right, and back again at the creature in front of him. She looked back at him, and limped forward slowly, apparently without fear, though it was hard to read emotion through her bulldog jowls.

One of the flailing limbs pointed at, apparently, her hands, and the creature screamed at her, “Give one to me!”

She squinted a moment, and then reached out to the thing. It grasped her hand forcefully, and at that moment, the carny worker pulled Levi aside, through another exit, into a side tent.

“She’s been chosen,” he rasped at him, “for our breeding program.”

“Br– breeding program?” Levi stuttered.

“Yes,” he responded. “Some of our residents are getting on in years, and this specimen you brought with you… she’s ideal. She’ll not leave this place.”

“Well, I guess I’d better be on my–”

“Oh, you’re not leaving, either, my boy. You both know too much and will be too useful for us. You charmed that creature. She has affection for you. You’ll be her handler. And, you have a bit of the carny look to you, anyway. I expect it’s in your blood.”

Levi began backing away, the carny worker circling him slowly, putting himself between Levi and the tent flap. Levi didn’t know which way to turn, but then thought to himself, “I’m in a fucking tent!” and shot towards a tent wall, tearing it upwards and shoving himself underneath. The carny worker was off after him, like a shot, grabbling at his legs, trying to prevent his escape. Levi unbuttoned his pants and left them, his underpants, and shoes behind in the carny worker’s grasp, shooting across the carnival grounds bottomless and screaming, covered in dirt, a trail of spittle dribbling across his shirt.

Carny workers chased after him from all angles, but their legs were short and stumpy, and Levi gradually pulled ahead. He didn’t slow until he was well outside the carnival, in a public place, where the carny folk couldn’t spirit him away. He worked his way through the alleys, panting, pontificating on what he’d witnessed that day, until he arrived at his own, his dirty house.

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