Gauger: An Ancient Evil Revealed

Today is a momentous day, loyal ectomites. A day for celebration and the playing of blasphemous flutes, for on this day millennia ago, the universe shat out the ageless, unholy entity which would come to be known as Eliza Gauger; although this is only an approximation of “her” true name which requires at least five mouths to pronounce correctly.

References to The Gauger can be found in many ancient traditions — from the Sumerians to the Chinese — and in all of them she is represented in much the same way, usually as a rotund, squat creature with vaguely feminine proportions. The arms are especially long and thin however, though the legs seem devoid of joints. Interestingly, the face is not usually rendered in these early drawings or appears to have been excised in instances where the artist was brave enough to depict facial features. She is usually depicted as being seated on some sort of dais of platform with piles of meats in front of her, seemingly whole herds of animals. All accounts agree that the odor emanating from her was nigh unbearable.

Mention of the hideous freak becomes scattered during the intervening years; between the rise of Roman Empire and the 13th Century when an obscure, German manuscript is seized by the Inquisition from, of all places, a Catholic monastery. The manuscript, entitled Die Geheimnisse des Fleisches, details among other things a brief origin of The Gauger, or “Der Abfall bedeckte Elefantkönigin” as she is referred to in the manuscript. According to Die Geheimnisse des Fleisches The Gauger came into being in a parallel dimension — the document speaks of spheres beyond spheres — many eons before our universe came into existence. She spent much of her time wandering through various different facets of space-time before landing on Earth where she found an indigenous population who would supply her with not only a constant stream of flesh but also scrub her many folds.

Gauger-centric cult activity would erupt sporadically during the ensuing years across Europe, most notably in France in 1935 when a young denizen of that ill-fated nation named Jean-Paul Sartre would begin penning his philosophy of self-serving nothingness following a brief yet violent encounter with the aforementioned she-freak. After inspiring the creation of a philosophy that caused generations of misanthropes to question their very existence there was again another period of inactivity. But as the hushed strains of violins foretell tragedy in cinema so too did this quiet bode a great darkness soon to come.

Two decades later (although the exact dates remain unconfirmed), when the world found itself preoccupied with the vagaries of body-heat reactive shirts, acid-washed jeans, and insipid vocabulary, there came again the time for The Gauger to make its fearsome presence known. Years from this calamitous event scholars would suggest that the bastardization of the human language that truly gathered steam in the ’80s is what woke the savage beast, but all that is known for certain is that amidst the wailing of demented mental patients in the asylum her host’s corpus resided, the universe once again extruded the consciousness of an ancient evil from its greased sphincter.

Strangely (or perhaps not), it was here in this cathedral of madness that she stayed for many years. Having taken the form of a tragic Opheliac she found it all too easy to entice her unwary cohabitators into the confines of the boiler room claimed as her own. The fate of these poor souls is, at this point, tragically obvious. Devoured whole to sate an endless hunger, it’s said that the screams of her victims could be heard over the cement truck rumbling of her gizzard stones as they mashing her morsels into a fine paste.

Sadly, the passage of time affects even the corporeal manifestations of nameless evil, and eventually The Gauger’s ominous mountaintop buffet was emptied of its inhabitants and turned into a delightful condominium. Now, you may be thinking to yourself “Could not the master of horrors from beyond the stars stay where she pleased?” and to answer your question, yes, yes she could. But even a beast distasteful as The Gauger could never live among the latte-swilling ilk that would come to fill her former abode.

Cast adrift in the world she wandered; dragged from city to city by a train of mangy cats (ill-tempered as their master) lassoed to what can only be described as an aborted shopping cart. It was in this way she traveled, moving about the world for years until one day the misguided hand of fate intervened.

Sopping wet from a day’s feline-perambulation in the hot sun, The Gauger found herself in the doorway of one of Seattle’s ubiquitous Internet cafe’s. No one really knows why she tried it, but on this day, for no reason obvious to anyone but herself she decided to abandon her chariot in favor of her own spindly limbs. I’d like to say she moved with the grace of a swollen spider, gliding to the counter of the establishment to deliver her demands in the rapid-fire manner to which coffee-slaves have become accustomed, but such is not the case. From the very moment her cart was relieved of its burden it became obvious this endeavor was doomed. With a gurgling roar she trundled through the doorway of the cafe, only to draw a graceful arc through the air as her girth once more heeded the siren song of gravity.

As luck would have it the obscenely expensive laptops of the cafe’s clientele were spread about the joint, acting as a cushion for her fall. As the frame of her massive bulk began to spread across the floor, seemingly devouring all in its path, it was as if lightning struck. Apparently, in the many years spent wandering the globe The Gauger had mastered her girth, turning fat to fingers in a truly unwholesome display of prehensile cellulite. From the very moment bloated belly met keyboard the world was changed, and the hours that followed were filled with the clamor of notable bloggerati trying desperately to procure this unmitigated genius for their own.

“Who is this person”, the glorified town-criers asked themselves.

With a jiggling susurration she bellowed out her reply in a tyrannical screed that to this day has yet to be rivaled. All copies of the original transmission destroyed themselves hours after their cataclysmic introduction, but we’re told it began with “Actually,…” and that the word “jubblies” was heavily involved.

It was in this way The Gauger got her start in the world of unsolicited internet-based opinion, and it is in this way she collected her minions. Two of the longest residents of the madhouse in which she made her debut, seemingly lacking any luck aside from bad, had the misfortune of being in the cafe on that fateful day. Their tenacity — borne out of the years of escaping the clutches of a younger, more hungry Gauger — was to be their saving grace, urging them to burrow deep within the moist folds in which they’d been trapped rather than admit defeat and succumb to suffocation.

Years later they were discovered, naked and pale from years of near-subterranean dwelling within those folds, and put straight to work to pay off the back-rent they only then discovered they owed. For the sparing of their lives, it is in this way The Gauger is thanked, though we’re told that offerings of aged ham would have sufficed.