Gareth, the character described in this story is an uncredited side-character from the apocalyptic sci-fi / fantasy novel, The Last Days of Earth, book three of the trilogy Oræl Rides to War, by Andrew Hindle, aka. Edpool, aka. Hatboy.
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Andrew Hindle’s (aka. Edpool’s) website, for fiction and reviews and assorted social commentary:
There was a modest crowd in the amphitheatre by the time Gareth stepped out on stage. Not so large as to cause problems, not so small as to make the whole show a waste of time. It was ideal.
“So, uh, Gareth,” the backstage coordinator consulted an electronic clipboard, “that’s it? Gareth? That’s your full name? Is it, like, an artist name?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Gareth replied calmly. “Just Gareth.”
“Okay, that’s fine, great,” the coordinator frowned. “Only it says here that you’re putting on a show with some trained animals? Uh, we don’t have any permission forms for pets or livestock, and there doesn’t seem to be any shipping or quarantine info, although all the usual waivers are signed, uh…” they looked around the green room, which was not in fact green but a kind of dingy grey, like blue with a catastrophic mood disorder. “So … where are they?”
“Ah, that’s rather part of the act, I’m afraid,” Gareth said.
The murmur of the audience faded in anticipation as Gareth positioned himself front and centre, and the spotlight swung around and tightened, focussing on him.
“My friends,” he said, spreading his arms and smiling widely. “Are you having a fabulous RinthCon?”
The audience dutifully cheered and clapped and whistled.
“I don’t know if – I just mean, it’s important for us to … do you have them in a transport case somewhere, or…? Will you need any help bringing them onto the stage?”
“Oh no,” Gareth assured the coordinator. “I mean, yes, they are safety contained, but I will not need any assistance with them. Tricks of the trade, you understand.”
The coordinator looked as though this was not really a satisfactory amount of regulation-adherence and organisation, but also seemed to acknowledge that if Gareth didn’t fill his allocated slot with a trained-animal show, it wasn’t going to be something the RinthCon powers could lay at the coordinator’s feet.
“Okay,” they said, “uh, you’re up next. Break a leg out there.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Figure of speech.”
“My name is Gareth, and I have a very special surprise for you all. Something I don’t think any of you will have seen before,” he went on grandly, then stepped forward and lowered his voice to an intimate purr that nevertheless carried to the back of the amphitheater. The spotlight sharpened still further, sinking the rest of the stage into atmospheric shadow. The lighting people really knew their stuff, he thought appreciatively. “Once upon a time,” he intoned, “a dark and dreadful God walked the Earth. And great heroes united to slay that God.”
The crowd murmured, rustling slightly in their seats, evidently wondering when the trained animals came into it or if they’d stumbled into Story Time instead.
“Now, when a human is killed,” Gareth went on casually, “everybody knows that the body will decompose. The skin will wither and peel, the carcass will swell with gases, the flesh will putrefy.”
The murmuring grew a little uneasy, the shifting intensified. Parents began to look to their impressionable young, and towards the exits. Thinking it may have been a mistake to bring their children to such a performance. Gareth smiled and positioned himself more humbly, just an entertainer doing his spooky thing. Nothing to be concerned about, all part of the show. The audience settled.
“And of course,” he continued, “if a dead body is left near where people eat, or is disposed of in the water from which people drink, well. People get sick. Diseases spread. Carrion feeders are attracted to the body, and bring further risk to the community. Meat attracts scavengers. Scavengers attract predators.
“When a God is killed, all of these things still happen … but you see, my friends, the rot is not organic. The diseases not natural. The carrion feeders … not of this world.”
Gareth leaned over, rested his hands on his knees, and let out a long, watery belch.
The audience turned uneasy once more, although several younger members of the crowd giggled at the rude noise. The laughter trailed off as Gareth belched again, this one bubbling away into a wet, gurgling retch. Long streamers of bile looped from his mouth and spattered the stage.
The first abomination to emerge was relatively small, a hand and chubby, pallid arm like a doll or a drowned baby sliding out of his rippling throat and between his teeth, pudgy wet fingers flexing. It slid out, forearm and upper arm and then a third length, and a fourth, glistening in the spotlight. With a final retch Gareth pushed the thing free, and it landed in the puddle of bile with a slither and a splat. The audience recoiled and exclaimed in shock as the fingers scrabbled and pulled the tiny monstrosity around, its extended arm-joints rising and curling behind like a fat scorpion tail. At the rounded end of the arm, a tiny deformed face blinked out at the crowd with milky eyes, and a small mouth filled with row upon row of gleaming pearly baby teeth opened and let out a breathless mewling sound.
They came in rapidly-escalating succession after that, the second abomination crawling out of his mouth like a spider made of half-melted candles. Poking out leg after hook-tipped leg in a spreading flower over his face, it flexed and pulled itself free as though crawling from a burrow. A cephalothorax sheathed in overlapping dirt-caked fingernails and a bloated, translucent abdomen followed, a wet snarl of rat-tails at the end linking it to the rear-end of the third creature, similar in structure but with patchy, wiry tangles of slick black hair covering its body and bristling its legs. They fell out and separated with a clatter, chittering.
Some of the audience, those of greater mental fortitude than the rest, began to shuffle and scramble for the aisles at this point while the rest of the crowd sat transfixed. But even the strong-minded slowed, found their eyes dragged back as Gareth continued to regurgitate horrors.
It was some considerable relief, despite the pain, when Lionel emerged next. Gareth hadn’t named many of his passengers, but Lionel was one of the special cases. Lionel was possessed of near-sentience, and was the most … virile … of his collection, as well as the second largest of the brood. Gareth’s jaw flexed, dislocated, split along with his lips, his cheeks, bloodless, like tearing latex. His neck bulged as the twisted shape slapped and flailed itself free. Lionel was almost humanoid, except he had a row of flippers down each side of his torso instead of arms, cartilaginous extensions of the ribs which poked out through his loose grey skin. His legs were withered and misshapen things, unable to bear his weight, although the toxic spurs on his ankles were fully functional. His head was disproportionately small, the cranium bulging in some places and deeply dented in others, his face bloated and sagging towards his wattled neck as though in the process of sloughing off.
The spotlight jagged away from Gareth a little at this point, presumably as the lighting people abandoned their post and attempted to make a getaway. The narrow beam fell on Lionel’s swollen face, making the inky black orbs of his eyes retract into puckered recesses in his head, and driving a hiss of annoyance from his red, plump-lipped little mouth.
Another creature clawed free through the open ruins of Gareth’s face, this one a shovel-wide and segmented thing like a cockroach, its underside a mass of scrabbling six-jointed fingers and its head an intricate interlocking series of gleaming black hooks and fangs and palps, drizzling with clear venom. It fell to the stage and got in a brief hissing altercation with the pair of waxy-legged spiders, before unfurling a pair of surprisingly beautiful oily-sheened transparent wings. They dried and hardened swiftly, and with a rattling buzz the roach rose to hover in the air.
The next, and penultimate abomination also had a name, albeit a bit of a silly one. For historical reasons it was known as the Beefchain. It had been technically bovine at some point, the product of a genetic sequencing and food-production technology following the extinction of the cow due to a long-ago biological incident. Gareth tore further as the muscular, mottled serpent of rawhide and pulsating marbled flesh surged out of him, curving across the stage on a snail-trail of pink-amber amniotic sludge until the mass of coiled meat was larger than Gareth himself. The Beefchain had small, foetal or infant calf-legs protruding from occasional folds and crevices along its sweaty length, some of them kicking feebly but most of them hanging dead and necrotic. Its huge, rounded terminus was decorated with a long black-and-white tail, its front a mass of scar tissue and pink, half-healed burns. If it had ever had a head, the Beefchain didn’t have one now – and it didn’t seem to need one. It humped its way to the edge of the stage like a vast grub. The people in the front row slackened as it loomed over them, seeming to lose the facility to fight or flee.
Finally, with a clatter and a shrill squeal, the last monster fell from Gareth’s slowly-closing head. It was something like a leg-sized crustacean, fat with effluence that drooled from the shrieking folds between its antennae and pulsated in a heavy peristaltic line down the back of its shell. Its carapace, and its assorted limbs, were smooth and pale-pink, machined or pressed shapes of hardened plastic. They were decorated with stamps and stickers and markings, brand logos and production identifiers and advertisements in a dozen long-dead languages. One of them, Gareth noted in amusement as he finally pushed his face back together and his eyesight returned to normal, was new – a RinthCon emblem. The assemblage of mannequin and appliance parts squealed again as it crawled across the stage, coughing clots of feverish, maggot-filled waste as it went.
“My friends,” Gareth straightened his suit and stepped up among the semicircle of rumbling, chittering atrocities, “behold! The giela of perdition. The poisoned fruits of a garden forever violated by the butchering of a God. This fecund harvest of mortal arrogance is yours to enjoy.”
Gareth put one foot forward and executed a neat little bow, then turned on his heel and departed stage left, headed for the access passages and the depths of the Labyrinth below.
Behind him, finally, the audience found breath to scream.
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