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mrmxlemons · 1 year

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Funeral Cake (1/5)

Art the Clown x gn!Reader / Original Character | AO3 Link

EXPLICIT 18+ ONLY, this is a black comedy but it will feature heavy content. I would recommend checking the tags more thoroughly in ao3 if you want a forewarning of future tags to avoid triggers/squicks. Warnings at the beginnings of the chapter are only for that specific chapter.

Chapter 1: Wash, Rinse, Repeat

summary: Sometimes the best way to handle murderous demon clowns is to not handle them at all.

warnings: gore and blood, magical lore elements, demon Art the Clown, stalking, implied murder, minor wound kissing, minor sickness

It was Halloween, and you were dressed up as a clown. Albeit a sad one.

The frown on your face was exaggerated with blue finger paint, a tear immortalized on your left cheek in the same shade. The ensemble was the cheapest you could find at Party City, complete with Pom-Poms and a jester hat that jingled with every motion.

Not your best work, but by far from your worst. It was, however, one of those investments that you had to wear all day just to break even how much you paid, which meant picking up your clothes from the laundromat in full makeup and costume.

You’d had to throw a couple of things back in to cycle for a few more minutes, somehow still not dry despite having gone through a total of three times now. It was quiet except for the tumble of clothes and the soft pop music crackling through the speakers from the local radio station. Outside you could hear the bus taking off, the sound overshadowed by the soft gurgles of the child staring at you from over it’s mother’s shoulder.

The baby didn’t seem deterred by your appearance in its ogling. There was still a minute left on the timer. Bored, you look back to the kid and muster your best silly face, feeling as though you owe it a performance for attentively watching you, only for the chubby cheeks to screw up before a wail came pouring out.

The mother turned and affixed you with a scalding stare for destroying the peace as she pat the child, cooing to calm it down. You had enough dignity to turn away, blushing under the waxy white painted across your cheeks.

Sheepishly you shuffled to the machine, hastily swiping out your socks and throwing them in the basket you’d lugged with. Should’ve just hung them up back at your apartment. Now you have to walk two blocks with a bag full of laundry dressed like a clown, feeling like a clown. Whatever.

The makeup hides the way you mope after being silently tongue lashed, but it doesn’t stop you from staring abashedly at your shoes as you jerk for the door. Even when you see another pair enter your vision, black and huge, you can’t manage to stop yourself. It’s too late.

You collide with someone, and it’s like running into a brick wall. You make a sound of fear and shock and nearly collapse, barely managing to stay on your feet. The person you run into is oddly silent. If it weren’t for the sound of the plastic garbage bag in their hand shifting you wouldn’t be sure if you touched someone else at all.

The jester hat was akimbo on your head, you righted it. Luckily nothing had spilled onto the floor, but the person you’d run into sported an expression of annoyance that rivaled the scorned mother. He was, however, ironically enough, also dressed like a clown—just a far more menacing, creepy, and fucked up looking one.

He was a lot more committed to the look, edging equal parts into sinister mime territory with a cap that finished where makeup couldn’t reach, and a suit that glimmered as though it were made of silk. If you weren’t standing close enough to see the grit of the threads appearing in the basic cross stitch you might’ve thought he was a professional.

Even the makeup was clean. The eyebrows were penciled in, thin and looping in a tall arch, and on the tip of the long prosthetic nose was a single black dot. All of the lines were starkly separated, strong cuts of black and white that framed the whites of dark, soulless eyes.

The heavy gaze pinned you in place. For all of your attempts of quickly leaving, getting out of dodge had seemingly completely escaped you in that moment. You felt weighted down by the heavy, oppressive stare and the snarl on tar-black lips. And the teeth—

You really, really didn’t want to have to think about the teeth. You really, really just wanted to get home.

The words tumble out of you. You’re not even sure where they came from. “Nice clown costume,” you say, “lot funnier than mine.”

You don’t find anything about his costume funny. Somehow you’re sure he can tell, with the way his eyebrows raise and lips start to slowly curl in a spine-chilling, too wide smile. His shoulder opens, and you can see the door behind him.

It feels like permission, and while you don’t necessarily need express permission from a complete stranger that you can leave, you feel better hastily sweeping past him with it.

You don’t look back.

Your cheeks are red. But you don’t look back, and you forget it all happened before the night is over.

—

You head back to the laundromat three days later. You’d gone out Halloween night and lost your hat, spilled a drink down the back of your shifty Halloween costume. So much for returning it.

Figured you’d at least try and wash it out before throwing it in the donation bin. But the laundromat was closed, there was caution tape all around the front door and the inside had been torn up. Weird, it hadn’t looked like it was about to undergo construction when you’d been there, what, less than a week ago?

You also didn’t remember the tiles being red, but you also had a really shit memory these days.

The nearest laundromat is another ten minute walk in the opposite direction. Not ideal but you’re already out, so you resign your fate and start making your way there.

The place is actually cheaper than your old mat of choice, but only by twenty five cents. And it’s completely empty. You push the change in and wait until the clothes start tumbling before you head for outside. Might go get a pack from the corner Bodega. Might just get some candy. You should really, really quit smoking.

You don’t make it to the door, and thankfully you don’t run into him like last time. You’re not sure your stomach could’ve handled it.

He stands in the doorway steadily dripping a thick, miasmas liquid that was so dark and pungent you nearly mistook it for something else entirely. Something that wasn’t very clearly blood.

The smell was unmistakable. You could taste it in the back of your throat—the tang of iron rolling gently down your esophagus until you choked on it.

And there is—there is so, so much of it. An ungodly amount. The black and white suit that you had only glimpsed before shines a bright and lurid red, staining the front and up the side in a wide gash. An arc. You almost forget if he had truly ever been a black and white thing, or if you had somehow missed this when you’d run into him the other day.

You hadn’t. You would’ve noticed this. Red splatter on his cheek, turning his hands a muddy brown. You wouldn’t have been able to run away from the smell without noticing, wouldn’t have been able to forget such a distinct, awful smile.

You hadn’t forgotten about running into him, no matter how hard you’d tried. He hadn’t done anything besides weird you out, but it was Halloween. Weird shit happened on Halloween. You chalked it down as that and got plastered, pushing him from your mind (even though he kept swinging back, a steady pendulum of obsession).

And he appears in front of you so suddenly, so starkly, that you almost wonder if you’d somehow summoned him. As though he was a figment of your imagination, a manifestation of your paranoia drenched in all the gory possibilities of what hid behind that horrifyingly exaggerated expression.

Panic courses through you like lightning, but instead of pushing you away it pushes you towards. Your feet move until you are right in front of him, hand outstretching.

“That’s a lot of blood, man.” Your voice is quiet when you ask, almost besides yourself, “Are you alright?”

You reach out against your better judgement, against any judgement, and touch a particularly deep bruising of crimson on the white costume. It looks clotted, and it doesn’t occur to you until the tacky, cold red touches your fingertips that all of this blood might not actually be his.

The realization makes you freeze. The sheer amount of blood on him would be enough to make any grown man go into shock, if it was, in fact, his blood. Yet here he stands, unshaken, with quiet and even breaths that make your own rapidly speeding heart rate feel like a drum in your ears.

Your eyes flicker up. The point of contact between you harrows at the hooded, knowing stare the clown gives you, the grotesque menagerie of black and white twisting into an inhuman smile with too-dark gums. His eyes are black, eclipsed of their humanity as they pin you into place, dead and starless. A void that rivals the night.

You stifle the urge to run as you withdraw your hand. Somehow you know as you look at him that if you turn and high tail it you’re going to enact a chain of events with consequences you’re not ready to consider. Set yourself up to be the perfect unwilling prey to a waiting, hungry hunter.

“Are you hurt?” More words spoken out of thin air, these far enough that you wouldn’t be sure you said them if the other party wasn’t mute.

The dead smile falls into a considering look, the eyebrows furrowing as if to say, do you think I’m hurt?

You know he’s not. You’re shocked when he nods his head in ascent that he is.

‘Liar’ sits on your tongue. Instead you ask him where, waiting on baited breath in and out of your mouth when he raises a single, bloodied finger.

It’s almost funny. No—it is funny, and you laugh. Just a little bit. Not enough to be mocking, but enough to show that hey, you get it. You get the joke.

Beneath a layer of dirt and grime on the very tip of one of his fingers is a small cut, barely big enough to qualify as a paper cut. When he holds it up there is blood beading along the seem, welling and waiting to get enough viscosity to pour down his finger. Become another inconsequential marking on the canvas of horror that is the rest of him.

The implication is nauseating. If that is truly the only place he is hurt then the rest of the enormous amount of blood painting him really isn’t his, and that warrants so much more concern than you’re willing to offer. Willing to consider.

“Does it hurt?” He doesn’t give you a response, he just pokes his finger up again, pouting in a way that reminds you of the clown face you’d worn no less than a couple of days before. “What, do you want me to kiss it better?”

You try to swallow the sick feeling even as you ask. Maybe you shouldn’t have, because the clown’s face splits into an enormous grin, surprised but happy, and then he nods.

Of course he doesn’t know what a rhetorical question is. But also, of course you aren’t going to be the one to tell him. If he wants you to kiss his finger you’re very damn well going to do it.

You look at his finger again. Gross doesn’t even begin to describe it. There is a definite red-brownish hue to the skin that looks too deeply caked on to be anything less than revolting, and a stain of similarly haunting color clings to the palm of his gloves.

Apprehension swirls in your tightening chest. You feel as though you are toeing a very precarious line between playful and something else by making him wait, but you can’t help but stare at your fate and wonder if there’s some other way.

You force steel into your spine and, without thinking more of it, you take his hand and press a firm, solid kiss to the cut. You can feel his blood and whatever else smearing across your lip, and before you can stop your tongue’s reaction it flickers out and catches the rest.

It tastes like rust, and rot.

Regret is the acid rearing in the back of your throat. You can hardly muster the ability to keep yourself from gagging as your face screws up in disgust. “All better?”

You can’t hide the expression from him, as hard as you might try to. Thankfully he seems positively tickled by the way you play along, his shoulders shaking and mouth falling open in silent glee.

The clown nods enthusiastically. You mimic the nod in a much less enthusiastic manner. Fuck quitting smoking, you really needed a cigarette now.

“Well, I’m just going to—to go around the corner, get a sandwich and some cigarettes.” You clear your throat, hiding the urge to gag. “Do you want anything?”

You don’t expect an answer, you only ask so that you can sidle past him without cause for alarm. The clown let’s you, though the cheerful countenance withers as he watches you curb around him.

Something painfully snags at your leg, the sound of plastic shifting pulling your eyes down to the large trash bag plopped nonchalantly at the clown’s side. Somehow you hadn’t noticed it before but now that you look you cannot unsee all the possibilities it’s presence infers.

Blood rolls off the large black boots and onto the linoleum floor. You can’t imagine why a clown would be carrying around a plastic bag brimming with things that poke sharply and rattle eerily when moved, and, to be frank, you don’t want to know whys or whats. You don’t want to know what’s in the bag or what caught on your pants.

You tug yourself free, unable to hide the terror lancing up through your tensed shoulders and stiff neck. Why would a clown covered in blood carry such a mysterious bag of things that poke and prod in the most painful way? Better not to know.

You hope, at least, that the acquiescence shines through your eyes. The clown tilts his head, the amusement slipping for a slippery and prying emotion you can’t pinpoint, but you can feel it trying to pin you in place.

“I’ll be back.” You say.

The pencil-thin eyebrows pinch together, the eyes glinting sharply. You’d better, they respond.

You walk past him, but it’s a farce. You’re not escaping. He’s letting you get away.

Why is he letting you get away?

He knows that you’re aware of what he’s done. Even if you managed to keep your cool well enough not to break down in front of him there is no way he couldn’t detect the apprehension rolling off of you. The pure, rancid fear.

You feel like a ghost, his eyes hollowing you out from behind until you’re out of sight. Then you’re leaning on the nearest brick wall, knees shaking so badly you nearly cave to the ground.

It takes every ounce of strength in you not to break down right there, to not start sprinting in any direction and never look back. To get the fuck away—wherever that may be. But even the minimal distance you’ve put between yourself and the clown brings no relief, and miles would do no different. Because the fact remains that you haven’t gotten away.

You have to go back. There’s no choice. If you don’t go back to him he’ll come to you, and with him entails an entirely new set of rules to abide by. Rules that he sets.

Rules to live by. Rules to die by.

You don’t walk to the closest station, even though you know it’s less than two blocks away. You don’t try and dial the police. You definitely don’t look behind you.

Somehow you’re sure that if you change the course of your actions because of him then he will suddenly become real. Right now he is just something you’re encountering, but the moment he enters your world, the moment you let this shift from a chance meeting to a confrontation, is the moment you go under the knife.

Fuck, this is so fucked. You couldn’t even think of eating a sandwich anymore. How long did you have before you had to get back to the laundromat? How long before he’d come looking for you?

A part of you fantasizes about this being something you’ve deluded yourself into thinking is real; the clown is really just a harmless, if a bit creepy man that doesn’t see a reason leaving Halloween to be the only day to dress up. Who knows, he could be a professional clown.

Its the same part of you that fantasizes telling the lady at the counter what you’ve seen. ‘There’s a clown covered in blood at Al’s Laundromat, he’s got a bag of tricks and I don’t think it’s the fun kind. Yeah, Al’s, right down the road.’

You ask for cigarettes instead, the long ones. It’s a lot easier to say that, a lot less words. Besides, you know he’s expecting you. You know what will happen if you don’t show up.

Your hands tremble as you light the tip against the struggling wind and make your way back to the laundromat. You want the life of the cigarette to be lackadaisical, to last you longer than the walk back to the laundromat, but you chase the buzz with quick steps. Antsy to get back.

Not eager. You don’t want to go back, but you don’t want to keep him waiting. It makes the buzz fade quicker than you’d like, the numbness slipping through your fingers before it can fully set into your spine.

You can see the sign of the laundromat gleaming in the sun, dim and dusty and likely filled with mosquitoes. People were walking by the murky panes of glass. None of them looked in. You almost prayed they would, just so you wouldn’t have to go inside. Likely they’d be better people than you and call the cops after seeing a murderer drenched in blood sitting inside, but who knows these days.

The panic trapped in the rib-woven confinement of your chest doesn’t ease as you take the final drags of your cig. The moment you’re in the line of sight you feel the eyes back on you, and it makes the end almost burn brighter, as if the cigarette is also too impatient to wait for you to return to the clown.

“The fuck has my life come to,” you grumble, stepping on the lit butt until it dithers out.

When you look up he is, of course, staring straight through you. You wave pathetically as if to affirm ‘hey, I’m back. Just like I promised!’ but the clown doesn’t look like he feels any particular way about it. In fact, his gaze is cold enough to make your stomach curdle, the hot ball of anticipation inside your gut hardening into the choking weight of fear.

Your fingers are slick with sweat as they press on the door. The clown is sitting in a chair conveniently close to where your outfit is still tumbling away in the dryer, and leading to him is a grossly vibrant trail of blood in the shape of comically large footprints

His expression doesn’t change as you drag you feet over to where he’s lounging, the black trash bag lopsided at his feet. Decay drips off him and onto the plastic seats, pooling in the curved bottom before dripping down the backs.

You change the clothes from the washer to the dryer. Thirty five minutes. How the fuck are you supposed to survive thirty five minutes with this guy?

If you sit right next to him you’ll get a proper whiff of his sins, if you sit too far maybe it’ll be your blood spilling on the floor. Not great options either way. Maybe it’s better to butter him up, though it’s hard to tell which he wants with the way he’s staring at you like he wants to skin you.

You choose what you think is the lesser of two evils and sit next to him, casual. You try not to let the look he levels you with steal your voice, not with the way his brown gunk-covered fingers tap impatiently on his thigh. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for you to step over the line so he can do something.

The time left on your machine reads thirty two minutes. Fine.

“You got a name?” You ask after looking back at him.

He bats his eyelashes playfully, why, little ol’ me? The expression warms up as you enter the arena of the game again, his game, watching as he digs through the bag before pulling out a square piece of paper.

It’s a business card. Your breath stops in your chest when, for a moment, you wonder if you really had read this whole thing wrong—was he just a really convincing mime that you’d happened to run into twice, eager to share his business?

The thought is short lived. When you take the card you can see the printed text is scratched out sloppily with a crayon. In the margins is the scratch of sloppy, childish writing:

“Art the Clown,” you read out loud, voice quiet.

Art folds his hands in front of himself and presses them under his chin, once more batting his eyelashes at you as though to say, guilty as charged.

It’s a mockery of sweetness, especially with such disgusting yellow teeth baring themselves at you like a shark. At least he doesn’t seem angry anymore.

You hand the card back to him, careful not to touch where the blood soaks through his gloves, before sitting down next to him. You try not to make it too obvious that you’re sitting as far from him as possible on the seat, but Art seems completely unaware of personal space as he leans in, thigh touching yours.

Wetness seeps through the place of contact. Iron is rich and burning in your nose.

You dig through your pockets and start talking as soon as you have four quarters in your palm. “Well, Art—if I were you, I’d wash that. Otherwise all the red is going to stain.”

You place the quarters into his palm, lean back in your seat, and close your eyes. You’ve got thirty more minutes, might as well try and fit a nap in. It’s not like anyone is going to bother you while Art is here, though that thought doesn’t bring you much comfort.

You count backwards from ten, breathing out of your mouth, and try to let the vibrations of the machines lull you to sleep.

#Art the Clown #art the clown x reader #art the clown x you #slasher fandom #slasher x you #the terrifier #gore

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