Lucid Nightmares

Chapter 5

"So, uh," Christian said as he shoved off and decapitated a clown that looked like it was drawn by a toddler. "Why did you accept that invitation to Mammon's party? You clearly hate him." The next day they had had to deal with a nightmare about clowns, but that wasn't all; these clowns looked like children made them in arts-and-crafts and moved as if they were 2D, thoroughly mixing up Christian's depth perception.

"Because that asshole knew what he was doing," Gwendolyn replied, shooting a paper clown behind Christian and hacking another in half with her scythe. "See, when a demon invites you to a party and you either refuse the invite or you accept it and don't go, they can put a curse on you."

"Huh. Interesting." Christian awkwardly dodged a clown head on a chainsaw tricycle as it flew past him, the clown head laughing away. Gwendolyn stuck her scythe blade into the spoke and the tricycle flipped backwards, flinging the head at Christian, who kicked it back at Gwendolyn. It was like a game of hacky sack for a bit. "What kind of curse?"

"It really depends on the kind of demon. And mostly just how much of a dick they are." Gwendolyn flipped the head up with her foot and bunted it over with her knee.

"You sound like you speak from experience." Christian said, catching the head with his own knee and kicking it back.

"I rejected an invite from a really fancy demon lady, probably a Greed demon from the way she was dressed. Anyway, the next day after waking up, any type of light hurt my eyes so much that I had to exit a Nightmare early before I could destroy it. The first time I wasn't able to kill a Nightmare in one go." Gwen caught the head with a downward cleave of her scythe, cutting it in half and making it spill out what linked like red stop-motion yarn. "And then just to be a bitch to Mammon, I accepted his party invite like, a couple months ago, but then ghosted him. After that, my credit cards were all maxed out for about a month. It was worth it, though."

"So he basically trapped us into going," Christian said as they calmly walked out of the circus tent they were currently in. Outside was a very dark, fog-obscured fairground. Cotton candy melted from the moisture sat sadly on faded carts, the huge ferris wheel in the middle of the grounds looked skeletal, and there was no end to the circus area as far as they could see.

"Pretty much, yeah."

"So why did he ask Lucifer? I mean, he's Lucifer's son, why would he curse his own father?"

"Because, like I said, that asshole knew what he was doing. If you listened closely, Mammon was being really passive-aggressive and vague about the invitation with his dad, but with us, it was a direct 'I'm inviting you' type thing. Technically he didn't invite Lucifer; he was just throwing the fact that there was a party onto the table."

"Huh." Now that he thought about it, it definitely did sound that way. "Either way, this whole thing is kinda suspicious to me. I really find it weird that a Greed demon would just throw a party out of the goodness of his heart, y'know?"

"That's also what's nagging at me," Gwen replied. She stopped and listened. They heard what sounded like a crowd of clowns off to their right through a wooded area. "I seriously think Mammon has something going on, and I wanna see what it is. Unfortunately, that means I have to wear my pretty dress in front of him." They started jogging towards the noise in the creepy forest.

"What's your pretty dress?" Christian said with a smirk; Gwendolyn always wore "pretty dresses." Today she wore a black and red dress that was crisp up top and then flared out at the bottom with large frills.

"You'll just have to wait and see."

They came up to the clown crowd, which seemed to be circling something and jeering. Gwendolyn shot her way through the crowd, Christian slicing at anyone who came at them, until they came to what the clowns were crowding; there was a child sitting with her head in her knees and sobbing and a tall clown loomed over her with a red balloon. He held a sack behind his back.