This is an unedited excerpt of one of the two novels I’m currently working on, one which is tentatively titled Carnival of Chaos/Festival of the Flesh (working title only at the moment). It will be, or it is intended to be, a full length in two parts-the Carnival, and the Festival-approximately thirty chapters a part.
He was in a tiny cloistered space, completely dark, maybe three feet by three feet. He couldn’t tell if there was a ceiling in the place, reaching up to find one located nothing and if there was anything above, it was a whole lot higher than his hands could stretch.
Silence surrounded him, along with this utter darkness and it was disquieting, eerie and haunting to hear absolutely nothing.
He ran his hands along the walls but there was nothing to feel but smooth flat planes, slightly cool to the touch.
Abruptly one of these walls enclosing him fell right away, and all of a sudden the total quiescence was being shattered by a cacophony of noise rushing in.
The darkness inside was obliterated by a raft of illumination, lights, bright colours, so brilliant and dazzling that they hurt his eyes.
When his eyes had a second to adjust he saw the colours and lights stemmed from Carnival rides, attractions, flares of neon signs and the like; reds, oranges, blues, yellows.
A giant Tilt A Whirl car swept past in front of him, apparently connected to nothing, moving around in erratic circles, kicking up showers of sparks.
In it was Mister E, his greasy face shining under the glow of a mass of lights, his grin a savage shark-like expression.
“Welcome to the Hunt, Jason!” He boomed into a megaphone, the voice resonating horrendously around the arena. “This is where it begins for you!”
Jason turned around and around, eyes trying to take in everything around him.
The dark enclosure he’d stepped out of had inexplicably vanished, instead he was surrounded by towering fences, spiked, tipped with pale skulls, shrunken heads, all screaming at him.
Powerful figures moved all around him in a swirling mist, made multi-coloured by the myriad lights from twisted incarnations of the Carnival rides, giant slides with jagged blades and sharp points protruding from them, Dodgem Cars in the shapes of hunched goblin monsters, slowly revolving Ferris Wheels with dead passengers.
Other faster crazy careening rides spun wildly out of control and from their carriages flew body segments, a bloody rain of severed hands, feet, sex organs, internal organs.
These human-like shapes milling around him wore an assortment of coverings over their faces; gimp masks, gas masks, executioner hoods, balaclavas, animal masks, fright wigs, demonic featured things.
They wielded a plethora of weapons in massive clenched fists; daggers, swords, sledgehammers, axes, hatchets, some of these ferocious implements looking as ancient as time itself but vicious and lethal nonetheless.
Jason ran.
He found himself hurtling down a passageway, or was it a tunnel?
Either way, it was made of chainlink meshed material, and outside, scores and scores of snarling barking dogs gnashed their teeth, lunged at him through the barrier, flung themselves bodily at him.
He heard feet pounding on the floor behind him, gaining. He knew it was the masked hordes on the chase. The Hunt.
With him the Hunted.
Ahead in the distance, he saw a great black trailer ablaze, orange flames and dark choking clouds of smoke pouring from it.
For some reason he figured that must be his destination. Would getting there end the Hunt? Was there any end to the Hunt?
There must be, for by the time he actually made it to the trailer he was in the Splatterhouse; walls dripping red blood, organs sticking to them as if they had been flung forcibly against them.
Hands snatched at him, tried to trip him up, tried to grab his clothes and hair; disembodied extremities falling off the walls with fingers curling around his ankles.
His progress was stunted by this, it felt worse than when he was being pursued by the masked chasers in the narrow tunnel bordered by canine fiends as he seemed to be getting nowhere.
Every step he took shook the Splatterhouse walls and cascaded more blood down them, shook more mutilated flesh off them to fall upon him.
A tangle of entrails dropped in ghastly ropes around his neck, an eyeball bounced off his cranium.
Rolled along the plane of the floor, splashing into a puddle of congealing blood, staring at him.
The masked Hunters came right through the walls. They ripped through them with their blades, sliced great holes and jagged rends in them as if they were actually composed of flesh, forcing their bodies through their created apertures, looking like mutated creatures in the midst of a gruesome birth.
Some of them swung trophies in one hand, their weapons in another.
Jason realised he wasn’t, or hadn’t been the only one in the Hunt.
Those others who’d fallen prey to the Hunters in the nightmarish Carnival grounds had their dismembered heads slung by the hair, their torn throats spraying fresh blood as their killers tore through the walls of the Splatterhouse.
He saw faces he thought he knew, others he didn’t recognise among these gory prizes.
He thought he saw Ben, Emily, maybe Gerald and Rollo, others, eyes still frozen and fixed with the terror, or the surprised moment a cleaving blade detached their skull from their body.
One of his masked tormentors loomed through a wall, tearing fissures in it and gouting renewed torrents of blood from it.
The man-or beast-wore Stix’s face. It wasn’t Stix, it was literally his face, ripped from him and plastered on in the fashion of a rudimentary mask.
The Hunter swung only a weapon, a glass bottle with a busted neck of sharp teeth so one hand was free.
This hand reached up and wrenched the bloodied skinmask away, flinging it at Jason. It missed him but showered him in droplets of claret as it flew past his ear and splattered against the wall, impossibly still looking at him with the eyes of Stix still intact in it.
The former wearer of the clowns face was the drunken barstool resident of the Lonely Bull tavern, his teeth bared in a hideous grin.
“The hunting season, the fucking season! It’s coming on,” he declared as he lurched nearer. “It’s coming on!”
Then Jason was back in the dark, but with a light radiating somewhere in the distance.
He stumbled his way towards it, feeling like he was wading through kneedeep treacle.
The light came from a big circular wheel, like some ridiculous game show accessory and strapped to it by hands, feet and throat was Blades.
Lodged in it and around him were knives hurled by unseen assailants, some in fact in him already, pinning him like darts stuck in a human dartboard.
Rivulets of blood tickled from his mouth, from his other penetrated parts and some of the handles of the weapons were shaking and quivering with the force of impact as if they’d just been thrown.
As Jason neared, and once again the dark enveloping him fell away to be replaced with agonizing bursts of colours, pinwheel sparks and inane carousel music, shouting, gleeful mocking laughter, a knife whistled through the air and seared Blades right through the throat.
His eyes and tongue bulged out as a welter of blood erupted.
It drenched Jason and he saw that the person who’d thrown it was the dark haired policeman from the coffee shop, the bristling ends of his dark moustache dribbling with red blood.
“Jesus son, what’s the rush? Got a hot date with the barber? What’s the rush? The hunting season, the fucking season, its coming on. Its coming on!”
Mister E appeared alongside him, dressed up like a ringmaster, eyes glinting with unearthly menace, his pencil moustache a black slash above his lips.
He held Loco’s severed head impaled on a human spine-or maybe that was his own spine, ripped out as if by Predator, still attached to the vertebrae in his neck-and Chippy’s in the other.
He banged their faces together like a toy monkey clapping cymbals.
“It’s the Festival of the Flesh!” He announced maniacally, spilling a flood of high pitched ear puncturing laughter.
Jason saw he was in an area ablaze with gaudy colour and light, a sideshow alley filled with carousels and merry go rounds, made up not of bright horses, circus animals or fun vehicles but instead, twisted dragons, gargoyles, impossible nightmare beasts, skeletons, oozing sluglike things and others that just seemed to be big hunks of raw flesh, dripping blood down the colourful sides of the carousel base.
Demonic faced clowns with sharp crooked teeth, acrobats tying themselves into impossible knots and breaking bones in the process, more masked beings and other oddities swelled around, tossing segmented sections of human meat to and at one another, some chewing upon it, sending blood coursing down chins.
They parted as Mister E approached, banging his Loco and Chippy faces against one another, further cracking their skulls and damaging their features more, fountaining crimson geysers from them.
“The Festival of the Flesh!” Mister E declared through a megaphone which he somehow had strapped to his face, making him look like a deformed elephant in a top hat. “We’ve got positions for the beauties, lots of positions for those fine pieces of flesh, and Blood Games for the rest. The Festival of the Flesh!”
jimgoforthhorrorauthor 