Thunderhead (Part Two)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

The clown stood in the middle of the yard staring up at the front bedroom window. “A woman, a man and two children, a teenage girl and a kissy-faced little baby,” he said to his comrades, the rain running down his face in rivulets. “My sensitive nose never lies. And a cow's head lying incongruously on the path – is this the hand of God, is it a message from above or just mindless folly?”

“Baggy's first go on der woman,” the calf sized black hound at his side said, his red eyes glowing like coals and a stream of mucous dripping from his scarred muzzle and occasional puffs of smoke escaping from his nostrils.

“No chance, fatty!” the clown replied. “I'm bigger than you, and I don't like sloppy seconds, so I always go first. You can have the man.”

“I don't want der fucking man, you lanky tart. The midget can 'ave der man, surely it's more 'umuiliatin' for 'im to 'ave the living shit raped out of 'im by a deformed midget than a 'uge clown or a bloody great dog that 'e couldn't possibly fight off.”

“Less of the deformed, you overgrown friggin' lapdog!” the smaller of the three creatures grunted, his huge ears flopping around comically. “I'll 'ave you know that I'm supposed to look like this - 'umans put up too much of a fight with little fellers like me unless we're particularly frightenin' lookin'. I'll tell you what, you two fight over the woman while I crucify the bloke on the bedroom door an' make 'im watch while I eat 'is baby an' deflower 'is sweet lickle girl.”

“Dirty bastard!” the hell-hound replied, erupting in a fit of insane laughter.

“We have to act quickly,” the clown said. “These periods of freedom and power on this plane never last very long. I say we sneak up the stairs, burst into the master bedroom en masse and it's first come, first served – no fighting amongst ourselves, OK?”

“Fair enough,” said the hound.

“What about you, shorty?”

“I dunno,” the chimp sized creature said, picking something foul and stinking out of the unevenly set teeth in his hideously twisted lower jaw. “As the lickle fucker I always get the roughest deal. Yeah, OK, first come first friggin' served, big nose.”

*************************

Jane looked out of the window just as the lightning lit up the darkness, and she was so horrified by what was looking back at her that she screamed, almost dropping the baby, the trio of horrors running for cover.

“Fuck, what's the matter?” Tony said, leaping up from the bed.

“There were - there were - there were three things standing outside looking up at me when the lightning lit up the yard!” she said, drawing the curtains.

“What do you mean, things?”

“I mean things, not human, not animal, not like anything I've ever seen before! There was – oh God, this is just gonna sound daft. There was a big black dog with glowing red eyes, impossibly massive, as big as a fucking cow; there was a dwarf with a pig's mouth, huge floppy ears like a Basset hound and one of those three-pointed jester's hats; and a, well, an impossibly tall clown, I suppose you'd call him judging by his weird clothes.....”

“You're just stressed out, love, lots of people see odd things when they're traumatised.”

“I am not seeing things, they were there! Go and get the shotgun. No, get both of the fuckers, and plenty of shells.”

“All right, Jane, if it'll make you happy, but there's nothing out there that can hurt us, I can promise you that. The only danger is this bloody storm, and hopefully it'll soon pass over.”

*************************

Tony had to pass through the dark hall and the gutted kitchen to the utility room where his gun cabinet was, but he didn't struggle because even in pitch darkness he knew the house like the back of his hand. The door was intact, maybe because it was in a little recess in the far corner of the kitchen that protected it from the worst of the blast. As he was unlocking the cabinet he heard a crunching noise in the kitchen as if something was tiptoeing furtively across the scattered rubble. His scalp was crawling, but he knew from experience that that was a sign that he feared something was there rather than proof that something really was there.

'It's just the rubble settling, you bloody idiot,' he told himself, but just to be on the safe side he loaded the twelve bore, dropped a few shells into his shirt pocket and crept back into the gutted kitchen to check. It was too dark to see anything properly, but Tony could certainly smell something. It was hydrogen sulphide, the familiar rotten eggs smell that he remembered from the chemistry lab at school and the stink bombs that kids used to let off in the corridors – and if he wasn't mistaken a whiff of burning sulphur. He was sure there was a dark mass where the upright freezer had been that had no business being there. Cautiously he raised the shotgun and pointed it at the blur, and what happened next occurred almost too quickly to register.

There was a flash of lightning, and the thing that was waiting where the freezer belonged leaped forwards. All Tony saw was a dark, crouching body, a pig-like face, huge floppy ears and one of those stupid jester's hats with bells on it. He fired the twelve bore, giving the intruder both barrels, the combination of the lightning and the muzzle flash temporarily blinding him and making the ensuing darkness all the inkier. He couldn't have known it, but one blast was more than enough – the twisted dwarf immediately de-materialised, leaving behind a cloud of fine grey dust peppered with hundreds of bluebottles that the human eye had no hope of picking out in the dark.

“Tony!” Jane screamed from upstairs.

“It's all right, love, I'm OK. I shot your pig-man from point blank range, I couldn't have missed, but there's no corpse – it's as if it vanished into thin air.”

“Be careful!”

“Don't worry, I will.”

There was a laugh from outside, a laugh so loud that Jane must have heard it too, a laugh as dry as desert sand. “So you've felled one of us,” the same voice snickered from the rain. “No matter, Tony Hamilton – there are plenty more where Leptospirosis came from. Happy hunting, human!”

Tony backtracked, tucked the other shotgun under his arm, reloaded the one he was carrying and picked up the carrier bag at the bottom of the cabinet containing two unopened boxes of shells. As he was making his way back through the kitchen the remaining two intruders rushed him, but he was ready for them.

The first barrel only winged the enormous hound, but still it vanished in a cloud of dust and flies. “Fiddlesticks!” the clown yelled, and Tony wasn't sure if he was calling his compatriot's name or simply communicating his angst. The second hit the monstrous clown squarely in the chest, but this apparition behaved rather differently. “Is that all you've got, Tony?” the thing said calmly. There was a black, ragged hole in his chest – Tony saw a flicker of lightning through it – but the hole was closing fast, and the spectre could mend itself.

As Tony reloaded his shotgun Jane appeared from nowhere, wildly swinging the axe that they used to chop logs - somehow she had managed to sneak to the barn at tremendous risk. She caught the lumbering monster by surprise, and the broad, well-honed steel blade buried itself in the back of his skull, almost splitting his head in two.

“Bugger,” the clown mumbled, falling to his knees. “Bloody interfering woman! Why couldn't you just scream hysterically and run away, titties swinging to and fro ridiculously like normal sodding women?” Jane tried to prise the axe out for another blow, but it was stuck fast. “Don't think you've won just yet, cunties.....” From under his garish coat the clown produced a poodle made from tied balloons, which he offered to Tony, a ridiculous grin spreading across his partially bisected face. Yelling at Jane to get out of the way Tony aimed first at the poodle, leaving a hole big enough to climb through in the clown's belly, and then at the creature's head, which the blast removed completely.

“Shoot him again!” Jane said, easing the other twelve bore from under her husband's arm. “Fill the fucker full of holes!” The two of them fired maybe twenty shots into the thing, but still it writhed on the floor, a thick yellow puss oozing from its wounds and the stump of its neck.

“I've got an idea,” Tony said, rushing back into the utility room and pulling a half full can of kerosene from a high shelf. He poured the strongly smelling liquid all over the riddled horror on the floor and leaned down to ignite a corner of the spectre's jacket with his cigarette lighter. “Good riddance, scum-ball!” He yelled as the creature struggled to his knees, desperately trying to put out the spreading flames.

“Gaah! No! Noooo!” the clown somehow yelled minus his head, rolling around on the ground. “You haven't won yet, humans! The storm still has power, and soon it will be time for the reign of raining spiders!”

“I don't like the sound of that,” Tony said. “There's nowt in the world I hate more than fucking spiders..... Go and watch the kids while I make sure he's finished, and make sure you take the gun with you.” Tony watched for another couple of minutes until the clown stopped moving and caved in on himself. Shortly afterwards the flames died down, and he trudged back upstairs. “He's burned to ashes, love, he won't be giving us any more trouble.”

“Come and look at this,” Jane said, peering through the rain lashed bedroom window. “For the life of me I can't figure out what's going on.” Strings of glowing orbs, hundreds of them, were dropping out of the clouds, drifting down to the ground, swelling up to many times their original size and turning from a pale blue to a rich orange. After a while the spheres popped; it was too dark to see any more detail, but when the lightning briefly illuminated the scene Jane fancied that she could see an army of dark, nameless creeping things approaching the house.

“What are those globes?”

“I have no idea, I was hoping you'd know.” As Jane spoke the first platoon of thunder spiders reached the wall of the house and began to climb, and another convoy crawled over the sodden rubble where the kitchen wall had been and crept inside.