Mat Johnson - Pym

“AAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!” he finished with, throwing his head back and showing his fangs impatiently.

Aargh indeed. The child, perhaps sensing that the stream held cooling liquid, ran toward its banks with the universal glee of youth and laid its head straight down. Leaning in to lap up the Kool-Aid contents timidly, like a fawn. Moving away from the child and toward Karvel’s deck, Sausage Nose kept a heavy hand on my shoulder, leaning down on it either to brace himself as he adjusted to walking on grass or to keep me from getting too far away from him. The creature didn’t release me until I led him directly to the many cooking pans that still lay forlorn across the dinner table. Before I could even offer these remains, he was all over them, forgoing hands and lifting the pans directly to his mouth to scrape them with his dry alabaster tongue.

“More food,” I said, pointing off toward the freezer. There lay the trays of pudding, each one having been boiled with the remainder of the rat bait for a definitive conclusion, in case the main course dosage failed to do its job. “I’m going to get more poison, to kill you,” I added, offering the most servile of smiles before slowly moving away. Despite my physical caution, I still almost had a glass baking pan thrown at my head by the monster and probably would have if at the last minute the brute had not noticed the morsels of Betty Crocker’s classic bread turkey stuffing stuck to the sides of it.

Augustus. It was not until just then, when I looked directly at the freezer door, that I realized my favorite Tekelian was still locked inside. Not wanting his presence to be revealed, not wanting our most recent guests to have an emotional reaction to this probable traitor, I barely opened the door before going through. And Augustus was still there, lying facedown in the back amid a few half-eaten Pillsbury crescent rolls. I was first struck by the smell. You would think that the frozen air would delete some of this stench, but no. The little storage room was putrid with Augustus’s stank, which was so much more rank than usual. Soon I could see why: fecal liquid emerging from the midsection of his robes poured into a puddle around his limp body. It was even whiter than his hair; if it wasn’t for the stank odor, I would’ve thought it was yogurt.

“Augustus? You’ve shit yourself,” I called to him, first in a whisper and then repeated with increasing volume with each unanswered entreaty. Getting as close as my nose would allow, I reached out for his shoulder. What I held in my hand was hard, and it was not that muscle had miraculously appeared since the last time I had touched my ally. I wanted to convince myself otherwise, but I knew what I would find even before I turned Augustus over and saw his face and those pale eyes staring open and lifeless toward the empty pudding pans he’d managed to consume. Augustus, my friend, was gone. That damn pudding. Augustus was my responsibility, and I’d failed him. But at the moment there was no time for self-flagellation. Only revenge and survival. And sadly, there was this one horrible positive that emerged in the back of my mind: the poison did work on them. It was only a matter of time or dosage.

I would have stayed hidden in that freezer if I could have. Just waited it out till the poison did its job and freed me from the Tekelian oppression. But an easy exit was not to be. The greedy monster outside beckoned, and within minutes he was throwing pots and pans at the freezer door as a sort of remote control, summoning me out again. Out of respect to our friendship, I closed Augustus’s eyes with my fingers and kept them shut by placing a bag of frozen peas over them. Careful not to step in his disgusting bodily fluids, I wrapped the shroud around his rigor-mortis-stricken corpse before gathering up as many pudding pans as I could carry at once and walked out to meet my impatient guest once again.

“You’re going to love this. It’s guaranteed to kill you,” I said and smiled on my arrival. The trays went down with a thunk before Sausage Nose, and despite the fact that he already looked ill, the shaking hands and sweating pale face evident, there was a clear expression of joy that he was going to indulge further in his unintentional suicide. Maybe it was my anger at the death of my friend or the simple bravado that comes from exhaustion, but before he could even dig into the first serving tray, I did something reckless. Slapping his marble hands playfully, I said, “No, no, no. It’s not quite done yet.” Reaching for the last box of Black Flag industrial-strength rat and vermin poison, I took a handful of those blue pellets into my palm and then, as if I truly was dropping rainbow sprinkles onto chocolate ice cream, I let them fall over the upper surface of the pudding in question. And they looked beautiful there. The monster gazed up at me, gazed at the box of poison that I had in my hand, saw the illustration of the rat there, and smiled. And then he started gorging.

The monster was so engrossed in his final meal that he didn’t notice much else, thinking little of anything but himself and his dessert. I was more considerate. Standing before the creature where he had come to lean against a stool, I thought of the Tekelian child. Looking to the stream that flowed not more than thirty yards beyond, I could see the kid remained on its belly, head at the syrupy stream still. The child, who must have been very thirsty, was so close to the water that at times its head disappeared below the surface, the food-coloring blue covering the back of its gray hair. It was an odd, overindulgent way of sucking in the blue sugar water, and it was this strange technique that led me to walk slowly off the porch toward the back. I was not more than ten yards closer when I realized the youth’s head was not simply bobbing happily atop the surface of the “water” but was bobbing in it with an up-and-down rhythm that matched that of the slight, pump-enhanced current. I knew that unless the Tekelians had some yet unseen, amazing amphibious ability to breathe underwater, this poor young thing was dead.

The smaller physiognomy, of course. The poison had done its job long before the colossal man killer behind me could even faint. I was never a particularly good liar. ‡Unsure and alarmed, I made the obvious mistake of freezing immediately, staring back to the deck where the gnarled-nosed gourmet clanked his head in the pans. No sooner did the creature catch my eye than I was exposed. Clearly, the beast could read my body language; my pause was the most easily decoded of mammalian reactions, I’m sure the average seal would react the same way. His mouth covered in wet brown, he darted his head to look beyond me to his young charge. Those crisp, ice blue eyes saw the scene and quickly recognized the horror for what it was.

Mr. Sausage Nose didn’t bother with the deck’s stairs, instead grabbing the railing with one hand and launching out into the air as if he could sustain that flight. For a moment there, as he hung above me, he seemed impossibly powerful and graceful, and I knew that, regardless of how much poison he had eaten, my death must be destined to arrive before his did. When he landed, though, stumbling to a stop, I could already see that his invulnerability had left him, that he was diminished. Lurching forward, exposing an awkwardness I had never seen among these creatures, Sausage Nose still managed to get to the small corpse in less time than the fastest human could have. Watching him drag the delicate, now limp body from its sugar-water grave, for the moment, I was overcome with more grief and empathy than fear. Or maybe it was that by this point the fear had become so commonplace in my system that it no longer had the impact it should. Regardless, I couldn’t deny the enormity of what we had done. No creature should have to know the loss of its young. Not even a worm. Not even an evil worm. But when the monster looked up to me, fixed me with those ice blue eyes and gave another scream, this sound beyond the range I knew any man was capable of, my knack for overwhelming fear returned, along with two other things: the enraged beast and his full attention.