The horror... the horror...

I don't remember when it first began.

I don't remember the first time I caught sight of a painted grin in the midst of a crowd. The first time I noticed that the crowd at a ball game had a few too many fright wigs dotted amongst the spectators, or spotted a polka-dotted shirt worn with a business suit. I remember thinking it odd, though, that baggy pants would become so popular with so many different social groups. Even when I saw three of them in the space of less than an hour, each with sad face and damned eyes not hidden, but accentuated, by their pancake makeup, their weary hands twisting tubes of air into ghastly shapes to be handed listlessly to random passersby, each of whom found themselves caught suddenly in a bitter depression; even then, I didn't realize the truth.

Once it became obvious, it was much too late, of course. Once those of us still unaffected began to mutter about the changes (Models walking the runway in floppy shoes; The President appearing at a press conference with two bright red circles on her cheeks, a bent top hat, and one tooth blacked out), the battle was already lost, and they had taken over.

The streets were filled with dour, dead-eyed harlequins, knocking one another over with ladders, spraying seltzer into each other's pants, and landing their pratfalls with a thud that reminded one of a dead body falling to the floor. The gutters were filled with the detritus of pies flung into faces, and confetti from buckets that should have been filled with water.

The soul of our civilization gasped and choked under the unholy assault. From our hiding places, those few that remained could hear the constant, soul-crushing call of the never-ending calliope, each note just off enough to kill sleep and work itself into a tired brain, until finally, the end came. Time and again, the mind of one of us would finally crumble under the assault, and they would change. Skin would whiten, lips would redden, shoes and pants would enlarge, and finally, some flimsy pretext would cause them to fall backwards, landing with feet raised and legs splayed. I swear you could hear the soul of the person crack, and when they arose, they would follow the sound of the organ, and take their place in the carnival of the damned that our world had become.

Some worlds end in fire. Some end in ice. Our world met it's end in the cruelest way imaginable. Our world ended in...

The Clownocalypse.