Octopushead marched down the 3&1/3 regiment of the chain gang of former clowns astounded by their decrepitude and tattered costumes. Here he was, in the middle of a solar desert, many kilo-miles from his happy suburban home, and it seemed the decaying failure of the clowns was a hideous metaphor for his own failure as a commandant of the circus performers forced labour camp 9. In the distance he heard an elephant bellow, from behind an array of red and purple mesas which swayed and shifted like plants in the desert winds. Clearly the animals were yet again unwilling to partake of their share of the work. Octopushead wondered if they would take industrial action again, or attempt a breakout. It was only with the loss of several fine tin foil men that they had prevented Larry Lion escaping last months. The horrific tears and mangled remains of those tin foil men, utterly unable to resist Larry’s savage claws, claws which he had been sharpening in secret for weeks, these nightmare thoughts still regularly haunted Octopushead’s conscious each successive day.
He was overworked, and, after the last prison freighter had encountered severe turbulence due to a cacophony of astral projections from a nearby barbershop and ditched several kilo-miles out in the parched ocean, supplies had been running low. Without his heroin, that most secret of vices, necessary to maintain his forever splintering sanity, Octopushead had been experiencing creeping bouts of The Fear. As Octopushead was terrified of clowns, his job as their Overseer was a particularly strong catalyst for these outbursts of psychic energy. The last few days alone the heads of three clowns had been caused to explode like eggs with hand grenades inside them because of panic attacks brought on as he was forced to manually restrain them. His job was at stake, he needed to score, and soon.
Each day the itch got worse, he could feel it at that moment, a creeping, prickly feeling under the rough wool of his resplendent uniform, like it was some static interface with his skin. His attention to duty waxed and waned like the tide; when he caught a clown shirking he administered the ritual sowing of a live, sexed up monkey to the back of the inmate’s head, yet at other time his attention to the strict and serious regulations of the penal colony was lax at best. Clowns would caper and prank each other, and he seemed to be almost unable to summon the effort to even give them a solid beating. Some days he didn’t even break any bones. Octopushead thought of his wife, how she abhorred his job, thought it was cruel to treat clowns and other circus folk like this. Octopushead’s buddies had informed him that her perverse sympathy was due to her likely gypsy ancestry, but Octopushead simply thought that she held the heartfelt belief that clowns could be tolerated. Also he would never marry a gypsy, for fear of their wicked spell craft.
Octopushead had argued with his beloved, Squidface Clam-minge, many times, but try as he might he could not conquer his fear of the clowns as something hideous, unnatural, untermench. Only a few of his closest friends knew that clowns had killed his parents one fateful night as they were walking home from an Operatic rendition of Naughty Nurses Nine. Even Squidface only knew the bare outline. Thanks to his smack withdrawal, it all seemed like it was happening right about now…
The rain on the streets, forming great, spinning whirlpools that lasted fractions of seconds. The amber city lights like fireflies trapped in jars. The rumble of traffic filling his ears and body with the vibrations of the city, like some giant hideous organism, perhaps an aardvark, as it ponderously plodded to the future but never seemed to leave the present. His father, a wealthy entrepreneur, one Sebastian Scalloptit. His mother, a lawyer by trade, but he remembered her most for her compassion, for her smile, and for her briny smell. Mrs. Cocksucker Van de Fellaté was one of the most popular debutantes of the year when she had been seduced by his farther, and that beauty still lingered on, in its way. His father reminded him to never kiss his mother on lips, as she had a taste for landwomen, but otherwise they had the perfect family.
And then, on that fateful night, moments before his parents were brutally run down and left spazzed multifariously, hung upside down on life support, twenty clowns on the run were carjacking a small business owner in a mini. All twenty clowns piled in, but the generous camp diets had made them corpulent and there was no room to steer or control velocity. The mini sped along the road, out of control. At that moment his father, Scalloptit, was fiending for smack, and spotting a man he assumed in his weakened state to be a dealer he knew, shouted at him and began to cross the road without looking, dragging his wife along. The man was in fact a pony called Albert, and he didn’t sell drugs but was a community support officer, a duty which saw him take a key role in managing the aftermath of the pending and now imminent disaster. Octopushead’s dad always needed smack to pay his mother, he told him, otherwise she wouldn’t be willing to ingest his landwomen and she would starve to death. Octopushead never really understood any of that, and was pondering it over again when he heard the car of clowns smash into his parents.
The rest was a blur, as he had just previously stolen and used the last of his father’s heroin. Also he was 7, and could never remember much of that age anyway. The incident, however, had taught him several valuable lessons, primarily not to put yourself at the mercy of clowns when you haven’t had the horse in a while. And yet this was what he was doing right now. He cursed his stupidity not to have had a larger stash. In his anger, he took his club to a nearby clown, but all he heard was squeaking of the clown’s bulbous red nose.
Later Octopushead found himself in the mess hall with not memory of how he got there, or anything since the beating of the clown. Clearly his need for heroin was intense, he had to score, and soon, reality was decaying, and he had no intention of letting it run out anytime soon. He had done it once, while hiking for several days in the great Breast Mountains, let his supply run dry until his mind became detached from the corporeal world and he went to the shadow realm. He had no intention of returning. The indistinct memories made him shudder as he ushered prisoners in with his baton, the hideous sound of muted shopping mall music, the sparse but manageable crowds of contented people, the good deals everywhere… Octopushead woke up on an Oriental Schooner in the middle of a grey and turbulent sea.
Again, he had no memory of reaching this place, or the (he assumed budget) whore lying next to him in the bed of the opium den. He was no longer even sure if he was later in time than his position as an Overseer or not, maybe that was still in the future and this was soon to be the memory he was remembering in the camp mess hall. He no longer felt the need for smack now though. The water was seeping into the ship, it came up half a foot against his bed. Addicts sat in the water, gazing deep into the beyond, some lay in bed, emaciated, others huddled in covers. A laudanum bottle bobbed past the bed, but he had no desire to grab it, to chug the entire cork stopped bottle. He still had a need though, this time for opium.
Octopushead heard a throaty laughing from one corner. An immense and corpulent moor
sat cross-legged on a buckling stool, a hookah pipe in his hand, and yellow teeth bobbling beneath an immense moustache. He reminded Octopushead very much of a clown, and he wondered if the man had any clown genes, it would explain a lot. This man was surrounded by many glittering wall hangings, yet looking closer Octopushead could see that they were the flayed hides of poor, misfortunate tinfoil men. He felt disgusted, and wretched. Even weaker than before, he gestured pitifully and slowly at the pipe, Opium, Opium he begged in a cracked voice like wind over the top of a dying mountain, but the moor just sat there a laughed again, his deep, booming laugh. Out his mouth poured rolls and rolls of paper covered in mad scribbles, like a plenitude of tumbling tongues. They wrapped as if guided by some mysterious force about the opium den, about the struts of the ship, and at the head of this mass of paper tentacles was the moor, like some fat and crazed abdomen, covered in gold and silks.
The paper sheets heaved and the boats supports buckled, tearing the vessel apart, wood cracking, splintering, coming apart like torn muscle, and Onctopushead was too weak to stand, let alone stop them. Vainly he flicked water with his fingers at one paper roll, but only got it marginally damp. He felt the boat give way beneath him, and he tumbled into the ocean, only to wake up in pitch darkness. The only sound was his own breathing, slow and tense. He got up off what felt like a dusty floor and tried to squint. Still nothing. Then dazzling lights thumped on, and carnival music filled the air and all around him, crowds cheered. Oh god, he said, I must have travelled back in time, I’m in a circus ring! His body spasmed like a dying spider, and then he heard the sound of a mini cooper engine starting, somewhere backstage, a sound getting closer, closer with its rhythmic chugging. A nightmare come alive. And he didn’t even have any smack.
Fin.
