Heather Farthing's Blog
December 25, 2024
Masquerade--Chapter Five
Chapter five
What I hadn’t expected was what the haunt slider had kept hidden under his trenchcoat. I sort of expected not to see any exposed skin, but the intricately brocaded leather waistcoat over a high-collared shirt and tie, tucked snugly around his snood, was a bit of a surprise, as was the skull-shaped buttons along his abdomen and matching skull and crossbones belt buckle, reminiscent of a poison warning label. I’m not sure what the long-sleeved shirt, tucked into his elbow-length buckle gloves, is made of, but it looks sturdier than cotton or silk, silver buckles up his forearms, metal scutes at his elbows,
The tooling in the waistcoat is hypnotic, like swirls of mist. I could lose myself, following the pattern for hours.
He seems wrong without his coat, too small, like a bird without feathers. I feel bad for having taken it, watching a slight tremor form in his shoulders, like he might be cold despite the leather gloves and long sleeves. Even his tail seems to coil into itself for warmth, fretfully stroking the studs of his belt at his hip, making nervous little tapping noises.
A cheer went up when the lights went out, the sound of clowns excited for the show to start, from the sound of it, mistaking it for a curtain dropping. We knew it was taken as a sign to start performing, because we turn a corner to find the show in full swing, the helpless non-costumed administrative and backstage personnel for Wonderland as the audience participants.
Some enterprising individuals have brought out a knife-throwing wheel, the test of strength thing with the bell on top, and part of a dog’s agility course. Naturally, it’s the clown throwing the knives while the regular, uncostumed human spins, the clown wielding the hammer and clapping delightedly as the regular, uncostumed human slides up the town and bangs their head on the bell, and the giant, human-like pitbull leading the regular, uncostumed human along the agility course by a leash, shoveling popcorn from an overflowing machine into their mouth when they do it right.
Isaac takes a step forward, I grab his arm and pull him back, which makes him flinch and pull away like I stuck with with hot iron.
“No touching, please!” he snaps.
“Don’t,” I whisper pleadingly, trying to figure out why I’m thinking of hamburgers, fear gripping my chest so tightly that I can barely breathe.
“That’s my supervisor on the wheel,” he hisses. “He’s got kids.”
“They’re not right,” I whisper back, somewhere at a Fourth of July picnic in the back of my head. “And they’ve got knives. And hammers.”
My hood is spread defensively, wings outstretched under the heavy leather coat, a bitter taste in my mouth. There’s a familiar smell in the air, that warms my stomach and reflexively makes me hungry.
I remember asking once, why the air above the grill looked like water, seated on my mother’s lap. It’s the cooking gas, the propane.
The air around the haunt slider’s mask looks like water.
“Осовец,” Isaac breathes quietly. “Don’t move.”
The haunt slider stands stock-still, staring down the hallway toward the impromptu circus performance, at the lady clown lying languidly on her belly as she uses her feet to throw knives at the wheel, the male clown’s merry dance when he strikes the bell, the big dog’s hackles raised when his leash-bound captive misses the mark.
“Ozzy,” Isaac whispers again. “Calm down…and don’t move.”
I look down at the haunt slider’s dinosaur-like feet, the claws hidden inside protective metal sheathes, the round puck of sparking material at the spot between his soles and his toes.
“…Don’t…move…”
The haunt slider’s gaze never leaves the sadistic display before us. He makes no noise except the wheezing beyond his mask.
“Ozzy,” Isaac pleads urgently. “Ozzy, look at me…deep breaths…don’t…move…”
The haunt slider raises his left foot less than an inch above the ground, and Isaac’s wrench collides with his thin chest, bending the smaller figure nearly in half, the smell of propane giving way to frying oil, perfume, and bleach. In one motion, Isaac has the haunt slider over his shoulder, a cloud of roses, ammonia, and butter in his wake.
“Run!” Isaac shouts.
He doesn’t need to tell me twice, seeing as the clowns have realized there’s new playmates and dogs chase things that run.
“First left!” I shout after him. “Second door on the right!”
Pleasebeopenpleasebeopenpleasebeopen…
It’s supposed to be lock, but it can be a pain in the ass to track down someone with a key to open it, so some, especially Wonderland employees, leave the door open, or stopped with a box.
Isaac dashes into the room, slamming the door with a kick of his boots, engaging the auto-lock and sealing us inside. He immediately finds a stepstool and leans the haunt slider he called Ozzy down on it, bent in half and hissing orange blossom, pine cleaner, and bitter almond, silently bearing his pain, using his shovel to hold himself up.
The eyeless man drops to his knees and seizes the haunt slider’s right boot, growling, “Get this stuff off of you before you blow us all to kingdom come.”
The haunt slider kicks him with his free foot, slapping him with the tail for good measure.
“How were you exhaling propane?!” I shriek as something heavy collides with the bolted door behind me, making us all flinch.
Isaac, nursing a forming bruise on his cheek and a cut lip from one of his fangs, jumps up in alarm.
“It auto-locks,” I explain, grateful, for once, that someone violated the rules by leaving the door open for easy access. “They can’t get in.”
“And we can’t get out,” Isaac growls.
“Service hatch,” I reply, pointing upward at the ladder leading toward a vacant space, and the ceiling beyond. “Goes up to the roof, I think.”
Ozzy’s smoke has a bloody smell to it, coppery, under notes of cherry blossom and rubbing alcohol. He inclines his head, looking at his surroundings, his smoke starting to cycle into a more reasonable combination of lavender and chamomile.
“Are you alright?” Isaac demands, stern but a touch of apology, letting the haunt slider groggily seize his arm and place two fingers at his wrist. “You could have…I’m…sorry.”
“Supply…closet…” Ozzy murmurs, dropping the eyeless man’s wrist, evidently starting to notice his environs. He stands up off the stepstool and begins rummaging in the nearest first aid box, reaching to place bandages and alcohol pads in the coat he doesn’t have, pausing in apparent confusion, and then stuffing them into his leather waistcoat.
A flash of embarrassment warms my face. I shouldn’t have taken his coat.
“How did you know this was here?” Isaac asks, looking up at the hatch. “Do you work for Wonderland, too?”
I blush, looking away, not wanting to admit that I don’t really belong here, not in the park, and not with them
.
“Not…really…” I mumble.
“No, you’re the girl that cleans the makeup tables,” Isaac says, snapping his fingers…somehow. “He thought he recognized you.”
I blink, pretty sure I’d recognize Isaac as he was coming out of makeup, a figure like that being hard to miss, over six and a half feet tall with definite scoliosis. When I realize he knows what I am, I turn a few shades redder.
“We really appreciate it, makes things go smoother the morning after a busy night,” he smiles. “The makeup artists always seem to find things a little faster after you’ve been working.”
“He…doesn’t like…being on…the floor…” Ozzy murmurs, examining the first aid box for what he can fit in his pockets.
Feeling self-conscious in his coat, I take it off and hold it out to him.
“Here…um…it’s yours,” I say as he turns his vacant gaze in my direction.
“…Cold…” he replies, still holding a box of bandages, not reaching for the coat.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, shaking my head. “There’s worse going on out there.”
My exposed thighs seem a small thing to complain about, when I’m not the one on a knife wheel, or taking wrenches to the gut.
“…Kind…”
Ozzy puts the bandages down long enough to shrug into his coat, feeling the material in a way that makes him look like he’s welcoming an old friend back. Once buttoned back up, he goes back to his foraging.
“He seems to like you,” Isaac observes, watching the haunt slider’s magpie-like hoarding, chewing his bracelet thoughtfully.
“Huh?”
“Giving you his coat,” Isaac shrugs. “The carrion birds…the world they come from is dead. The air will kill you. The sun will kill you. They dress like that to keep everything out, to protect themselves, a side effect of the haunt slider safety gear. It’s basically his skin, and he took it off for you.”
I twist my clawed hands in front of me. The haunt slider called me kind, but I haven’t really done a single kind thing in his presence, not like offering someone the coat off my back, or carrying them to safety when I could have just left the potential incendiary device behind. I didn’t even try to help those people, talking someone out of it, in fact.
“You’re a professional scareactor?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Zone ambience, I’m regular, not seasonal,” Isaac replies proudly, letting his voice slip into a Bostonian accent. “Most days I’m a reporter in front of Full Throttle’s facade, disguising guest surveys as hard-hitting news reports.”
“Did you do the stage show? For Monsterland, this year, I mean.”
He shrugs, his accent going back to normal. “Understudy. I’ve done one or two.”
“I might have seen you. Online, I mean. Someone recorded a showing.”
The eyeless man shrugs, Harlequin peeking out from her nest at his throat. “Might have been.”
“And um…him…” I ask. “You know him?”
“Not that I know of,” Isaac answers, reclining his chin on his long fingers, Harlequin shaking them playfully. “Most of the haunt sliders this year are outside consultants or seasonal workers, especially in Soul Survivor.”
“You called him by name.”
“‘Осовец,’ it’s the fortress he mentioned that inspired his costume. World War One story, Germans gassed it, then, thinking they killed everyone, went to claim it. Then, about a hundred pissed-off Russians, covered in chemical burns and coughing up their own lungs, chased them back out. The ‘Attack of the Dead Men.’ Seemed as good a thing as any to call him. You good there, Ozzy? You up for climbing the ladder?”
The haunt slider puts the cover back on the now-empty first aid kit, gingerly climbing to his feet and leaning on his telescopic shovel.
“He…will…manage…”
“…Right,” Isaac sighs, placing his braclet back in his mouth.
Before either of us can approach the ladder, in a corner by the mop drain, Ozzy pulls open a cabinet and starts staring at industrial-strength cleaning products.
“Nope!” Isaac barks, shooing the haunt slider away and toward the ladder.
His clawed feet grasp the ladder’s rungs as he makes his way up, his tail clacking as it brushes by. Isaac’s tail slides along the ladder’s sides. I look down at my own feet self-consciously, adjusting a strap starting to burn against my newly-formed scales.
“You got it, Sherene?” Isaac asks, kneeling from above and offering me his hand, pulling back slightly as I approach.
“Yeah, I got it,” I answer, immediately slipping when one of my sandals slides off the rung, my face getting hot again.
The service hatch leads to a small, unfinished room with a door on one side. Ozzy closes the hatch and turns the wheel that bolts it closed, keeping the clowns from following, even if they figure out how to wedge the door open like he did.
Isaac unlatches the door and steps out onto the roof, into the frigid, October breeze and a light pattering of rain, his lanky form outlined in moonlight. Far from the sound of a theme park at peak, the sound of screaming and gunfire flows into the little room.
I follow him out onto the rooftop, smelling smoke and gunpowder.
“What…is happening…?” Isaac breathes, looking down onto the park below.
It looks like someone ripped chunks of other places and threw them haphazardly into a pile. The relatively-untouched set pieces for Metropolis collide sharply with the barren and decayed Soul Survivor, butting straight up against the Victorian gaslamp Steampunk Singularity. At first, I think the power might have come back on, but it’s literally gaslamps lighting up the area near the steel Full Throttle coaster.
Over on the other side, the facades for Kiddie Carnival, now Psycho Circus, have changed from fiberglass and concrete to canvas and tarps. Deeper into the park’s Lost Garden, where the Dragon’s Breath coaster resides, what’s normally a soundstage from this angle is an ominous, dark castle with something large and reptilian curled on top.
“Full moon…unmasks…stranger in us…all…” Ozzy says, walking toward the edge of the building, head and hands raised to the sky. “Shadow…is cast…on who…you used to be…”
“You see that, right?” I ask Isaac, looking at the seams of cobblestone in Steampunk Singularity to the cracked asphalt of Soul Survivor, pointing over to where a circus tent sharply becomes a Victorian manor house along the barrier between the two sections.
“It’s like…it all became real,” Isaac breathes, turning his attention to Full Throttle, where a full-sized race track sits where the steel coaster used to.
Below us, a partially glass and copper unicorn has joined a herd of brightly-colored, circus-themed horses from the Kiddie Carnival carousel, a color palate of fur no horse was ever born with. Pirates, armed with cutlasses and flintlocks, have barricaded themselves in one of the collapsed Soul Survivor buildings, in an apparent standoff with steamborg soldiers.
“Are those the pirates from the whitewater ride?” I ask incredulously.
“…Halloween…full moon…very rare…” Ozzy rambles, still looking skyward, dropping to his knees, hands and head still held high.
“What are you…” I ask, following his gaze. “Isa…Isaac, look up.”
“What now?” Isaac whimpers, clearly expecting to see WW1 fighter planes from Kiddie Carnival’s plane ride, or an invasion of UFOs from the simulator ride, or some such.
The full moon, which rarely falls at the end of October, is a massive, orange jack o’lantern, its yellow gaze surveying the chaos bellow with a mirthful grin. It isn’t a color projection, it’s like the moon turned into a pumpkin, and then someone carved it and placed a candle inside
“Well…that…is some nonsense right there…” Isaac mumbles.
What I hadn’t expected was what the haunt slider had kept hidden under his trenchcoat. I sort of expected not to see any exposed skin, but the intricately brocaded leather waistcoat over a high-collared shirt and tie, tucked snugly around his snood, was a bit of a surprise, as was the skull-shaped buttons along his abdomen and matching skull and crossbones belt buckle, reminiscent of a poison warning label. I’m not sure what the long-sleeved shirt, tucked into his elbow-length buckle gloves, is made of, but it looks sturdier than cotton or silk, silver buckles up his forearms, metal scutes at his elbows,
The tooling in the waistcoat is hypnotic, like swirls of mist. I could lose myself, following the pattern for hours.
He seems wrong without his coat, too small, like a bird without feathers. I feel bad for having taken it, watching a slight tremor form in his shoulders, like he might be cold despite the leather gloves and long sleeves. Even his tail seems to coil into itself for warmth, fretfully stroking the studs of his belt at his hip, making nervous little tapping noises.
A cheer went up when the lights went out, the sound of clowns excited for the show to start, from the sound of it, mistaking it for a curtain dropping. We knew it was taken as a sign to start performing, because we turn a corner to find the show in full swing, the helpless non-costumed administrative and backstage personnel for Wonderland as the audience participants.
Some enterprising individuals have brought out a knife-throwing wheel, the test of strength thing with the bell on top, and part of a dog’s agility course. Naturally, it’s the clown throwing the knives while the regular, uncostumed human spins, the clown wielding the hammer and clapping delightedly as the regular, uncostumed human slides up the town and bangs their head on the bell, and the giant, human-like pitbull leading the regular, uncostumed human along the agility course by a leash, shoveling popcorn from an overflowing machine into their mouth when they do it right.
Isaac takes a step forward, I grab his arm and pull him back, which makes him flinch and pull away like I stuck with with hot iron.
“No touching, please!” he snaps.
“Don’t,” I whisper pleadingly, trying to figure out why I’m thinking of hamburgers, fear gripping my chest so tightly that I can barely breathe.
“That’s my supervisor on the wheel,” he hisses. “He’s got kids.”
“They’re not right,” I whisper back, somewhere at a Fourth of July picnic in the back of my head. “And they’ve got knives. And hammers.”
My hood is spread defensively, wings outstretched under the heavy leather coat, a bitter taste in my mouth. There’s a familiar smell in the air, that warms my stomach and reflexively makes me hungry.
I remember asking once, why the air above the grill looked like water, seated on my mother’s lap. It’s the cooking gas, the propane.
The air around the haunt slider’s mask looks like water.
“Осовец,” Isaac breathes quietly. “Don’t move.”
The haunt slider stands stock-still, staring down the hallway toward the impromptu circus performance, at the lady clown lying languidly on her belly as she uses her feet to throw knives at the wheel, the male clown’s merry dance when he strikes the bell, the big dog’s hackles raised when his leash-bound captive misses the mark.
“Ozzy,” Isaac whispers again. “Calm down…and don’t move.”
I look down at the haunt slider’s dinosaur-like feet, the claws hidden inside protective metal sheathes, the round puck of sparking material at the spot between his soles and his toes.
“…Don’t…move…”
The haunt slider’s gaze never leaves the sadistic display before us. He makes no noise except the wheezing beyond his mask.
“Ozzy,” Isaac pleads urgently. “Ozzy, look at me…deep breaths…don’t…move…”
The haunt slider raises his left foot less than an inch above the ground, and Isaac’s wrench collides with his thin chest, bending the smaller figure nearly in half, the smell of propane giving way to frying oil, perfume, and bleach. In one motion, Isaac has the haunt slider over his shoulder, a cloud of roses, ammonia, and butter in his wake.
“Run!” Isaac shouts.
He doesn’t need to tell me twice, seeing as the clowns have realized there’s new playmates and dogs chase things that run.
“First left!” I shout after him. “Second door on the right!”
Pleasebeopenpleasebeopenpleasebeopen…
It’s supposed to be lock, but it can be a pain in the ass to track down someone with a key to open it, so some, especially Wonderland employees, leave the door open, or stopped with a box.
Isaac dashes into the room, slamming the door with a kick of his boots, engaging the auto-lock and sealing us inside. He immediately finds a stepstool and leans the haunt slider he called Ozzy down on it, bent in half and hissing orange blossom, pine cleaner, and bitter almond, silently bearing his pain, using his shovel to hold himself up.
The eyeless man drops to his knees and seizes the haunt slider’s right boot, growling, “Get this stuff off of you before you blow us all to kingdom come.”
The haunt slider kicks him with his free foot, slapping him with the tail for good measure.
“How were you exhaling propane?!” I shriek as something heavy collides with the bolted door behind me, making us all flinch.
Isaac, nursing a forming bruise on his cheek and a cut lip from one of his fangs, jumps up in alarm.
“It auto-locks,” I explain, grateful, for once, that someone violated the rules by leaving the door open for easy access. “They can’t get in.”
“And we can’t get out,” Isaac growls.
“Service hatch,” I reply, pointing upward at the ladder leading toward a vacant space, and the ceiling beyond. “Goes up to the roof, I think.”
Ozzy’s smoke has a bloody smell to it, coppery, under notes of cherry blossom and rubbing alcohol. He inclines his head, looking at his surroundings, his smoke starting to cycle into a more reasonable combination of lavender and chamomile.
“Are you alright?” Isaac demands, stern but a touch of apology, letting the haunt slider groggily seize his arm and place two fingers at his wrist. “You could have…I’m…sorry.”
“Supply…closet…” Ozzy murmurs, dropping the eyeless man’s wrist, evidently starting to notice his environs. He stands up off the stepstool and begins rummaging in the nearest first aid box, reaching to place bandages and alcohol pads in the coat he doesn’t have, pausing in apparent confusion, and then stuffing them into his leather waistcoat.
A flash of embarrassment warms my face. I shouldn’t have taken his coat.
“How did you know this was here?” Isaac asks, looking up at the hatch. “Do you work for Wonderland, too?”
I blush, looking away, not wanting to admit that I don’t really belong here, not in the park, and not with them
.
“Not…really…” I mumble.
“No, you’re the girl that cleans the makeup tables,” Isaac says, snapping his fingers…somehow. “He thought he recognized you.”
I blink, pretty sure I’d recognize Isaac as he was coming out of makeup, a figure like that being hard to miss, over six and a half feet tall with definite scoliosis. When I realize he knows what I am, I turn a few shades redder.
“We really appreciate it, makes things go smoother the morning after a busy night,” he smiles. “The makeup artists always seem to find things a little faster after you’ve been working.”
“He…doesn’t like…being on…the floor…” Ozzy murmurs, examining the first aid box for what he can fit in his pockets.
Feeling self-conscious in his coat, I take it off and hold it out to him.
“Here…um…it’s yours,” I say as he turns his vacant gaze in my direction.
“…Cold…” he replies, still holding a box of bandages, not reaching for the coat.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, shaking my head. “There’s worse going on out there.”
My exposed thighs seem a small thing to complain about, when I’m not the one on a knife wheel, or taking wrenches to the gut.
“…Kind…”
Ozzy puts the bandages down long enough to shrug into his coat, feeling the material in a way that makes him look like he’s welcoming an old friend back. Once buttoned back up, he goes back to his foraging.
“He seems to like you,” Isaac observes, watching the haunt slider’s magpie-like hoarding, chewing his bracelet thoughtfully.
“Huh?”
“Giving you his coat,” Isaac shrugs. “The carrion birds…the world they come from is dead. The air will kill you. The sun will kill you. They dress like that to keep everything out, to protect themselves, a side effect of the haunt slider safety gear. It’s basically his skin, and he took it off for you.”
I twist my clawed hands in front of me. The haunt slider called me kind, but I haven’t really done a single kind thing in his presence, not like offering someone the coat off my back, or carrying them to safety when I could have just left the potential incendiary device behind. I didn’t even try to help those people, talking someone out of it, in fact.
“You’re a professional scareactor?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Zone ambience, I’m regular, not seasonal,” Isaac replies proudly, letting his voice slip into a Bostonian accent. “Most days I’m a reporter in front of Full Throttle’s facade, disguising guest surveys as hard-hitting news reports.”
“Did you do the stage show? For Monsterland, this year, I mean.”
He shrugs, his accent going back to normal. “Understudy. I’ve done one or two.”
“I might have seen you. Online, I mean. Someone recorded a showing.”
The eyeless man shrugs, Harlequin peeking out from her nest at his throat. “Might have been.”
“And um…him…” I ask. “You know him?”
“Not that I know of,” Isaac answers, reclining his chin on his long fingers, Harlequin shaking them playfully. “Most of the haunt sliders this year are outside consultants or seasonal workers, especially in Soul Survivor.”
“You called him by name.”
“‘Осовец,’ it’s the fortress he mentioned that inspired his costume. World War One story, Germans gassed it, then, thinking they killed everyone, went to claim it. Then, about a hundred pissed-off Russians, covered in chemical burns and coughing up their own lungs, chased them back out. The ‘Attack of the Dead Men.’ Seemed as good a thing as any to call him. You good there, Ozzy? You up for climbing the ladder?”
The haunt slider puts the cover back on the now-empty first aid kit, gingerly climbing to his feet and leaning on his telescopic shovel.
“He…will…manage…”
“…Right,” Isaac sighs, placing his braclet back in his mouth.
Before either of us can approach the ladder, in a corner by the mop drain, Ozzy pulls open a cabinet and starts staring at industrial-strength cleaning products.
“Nope!” Isaac barks, shooing the haunt slider away and toward the ladder.
His clawed feet grasp the ladder’s rungs as he makes his way up, his tail clacking as it brushes by. Isaac’s tail slides along the ladder’s sides. I look down at my own feet self-consciously, adjusting a strap starting to burn against my newly-formed scales.
“You got it, Sherene?” Isaac asks, kneeling from above and offering me his hand, pulling back slightly as I approach.
“Yeah, I got it,” I answer, immediately slipping when one of my sandals slides off the rung, my face getting hot again.
The service hatch leads to a small, unfinished room with a door on one side. Ozzy closes the hatch and turns the wheel that bolts it closed, keeping the clowns from following, even if they figure out how to wedge the door open like he did.
Isaac unlatches the door and steps out onto the roof, into the frigid, October breeze and a light pattering of rain, his lanky form outlined in moonlight. Far from the sound of a theme park at peak, the sound of screaming and gunfire flows into the little room.
I follow him out onto the rooftop, smelling smoke and gunpowder.
“What…is happening…?” Isaac breathes, looking down onto the park below.
It looks like someone ripped chunks of other places and threw them haphazardly into a pile. The relatively-untouched set pieces for Metropolis collide sharply with the barren and decayed Soul Survivor, butting straight up against the Victorian gaslamp Steampunk Singularity. At first, I think the power might have come back on, but it’s literally gaslamps lighting up the area near the steel Full Throttle coaster.
Over on the other side, the facades for Kiddie Carnival, now Psycho Circus, have changed from fiberglass and concrete to canvas and tarps. Deeper into the park’s Lost Garden, where the Dragon’s Breath coaster resides, what’s normally a soundstage from this angle is an ominous, dark castle with something large and reptilian curled on top.
“Full moon…unmasks…stranger in us…all…” Ozzy says, walking toward the edge of the building, head and hands raised to the sky. “Shadow…is cast…on who…you used to be…”
“You see that, right?” I ask Isaac, looking at the seams of cobblestone in Steampunk Singularity to the cracked asphalt of Soul Survivor, pointing over to where a circus tent sharply becomes a Victorian manor house along the barrier between the two sections.
“It’s like…it all became real,” Isaac breathes, turning his attention to Full Throttle, where a full-sized race track sits where the steel coaster used to.
Below us, a partially glass and copper unicorn has joined a herd of brightly-colored, circus-themed horses from the Kiddie Carnival carousel, a color palate of fur no horse was ever born with. Pirates, armed with cutlasses and flintlocks, have barricaded themselves in one of the collapsed Soul Survivor buildings, in an apparent standoff with steamborg soldiers.
“Are those the pirates from the whitewater ride?” I ask incredulously.
“…Halloween…full moon…very rare…” Ozzy rambles, still looking skyward, dropping to his knees, hands and head still held high.
“What are you…” I ask, following his gaze. “Isa…Isaac, look up.”
“What now?” Isaac whimpers, clearly expecting to see WW1 fighter planes from Kiddie Carnival’s plane ride, or an invasion of UFOs from the simulator ride, or some such.
The full moon, which rarely falls at the end of October, is a massive, orange jack o’lantern, its yellow gaze surveying the chaos bellow with a mirthful grin. It isn’t a color projection, it’s like the moon turned into a pumpkin, and then someone carved it and placed a candle inside
“Well…that…is some nonsense right there…” Isaac mumbles.
December 2, 2024
Masquerade--Chapter Four
Chapter four
“Props…should go to…Props…”
“And if everything there has come to life, too?” Isaac growls, pointing us toward a turn that leads into a meeting room.
“Stock up…prepare…keep…”
Isaac barrels through the double-doors, holding them open as the two of us follow closely, then engages the lock and slides beneath the door, sitting below the windows, his extinguisher tossed in a corner. The haunt slider is bent over his knees, rubbing his chest and throat again, tail flicking the air in an irritated manner.
His tail. It’s wrapped in the same leather as his pants, the underside lined with scutes like his knees, the tip with a line of sparking material.
The whole of it is as if he always had them, the grasping feet and the tail. There’s no difference in detail or design, like he was always this way.
His blank eyes meet mine, lost in the shadows of his gas mask.
“Snake…charmer…” he muses, smelling of fall leaves and a note of something chemical. Bleach?
Behind me, Isaac has one knee drawn up close, his lean arm slung across it in thought, bracelet in his mouth. It’s hard to judge, but I think he might be deliberately avoiding looking at his hands, or the twisting, tentacular tail beneath him.
The haunt slider seizes the eyeless man’s wrist, placing two fingers on the soft spot above the joint. Isaac jerks his arm free, making it clear he doesn’t want to be touched.
“This is…just nuts…” he growls, balling his fingers into a knotted fist, like those ball-shaped sailor ropes.
“Reality…is…broken,” wheezes the haunt slider, moving to the back of the classroom, past the folding tables and chairs, under a television, where someone stacked some boxes, probably hastily-placed overstock.
Isaac watches him pensively, the adjusted shape of his feet, the lifelike motions in his tail, which he uses to slide his serrated-edged shovel back into position at his rucksack.
“Your friend…isn’t right, is he?” the eyeless man asks quietly.
“He’s not…I mean…he’s a haunt slider in Soul Survivor and stopped me from being trampled when…things got real,” I explain, finding a succinct way to say it. “I don’t…actually know him.”
“You got friends, family, somewhere safe to go? Someone you can call? Either of you?” Isaac asks with nearly parental concern.
“Not really,” I admit. “I’m from out of town.”
A sudden thought grips my chest. If this is going on here…
I push it to the back of my mind. I can worry about that when I can get near a phone…or something.
“…So…what do we do now?” I ask.
“Props…and…Costumes,” the haunt slider repeats.
“Or we could skip whatever night terrors are there and go straight to employee parking,” Isaac shrugs, chewing his bracelet.
“Weapons…and…valuables…”
“Yeah, and whoever was in the makeup chair when…things got real,” Isaac argues.
I take a seat next to the eyeless man, under the windows and hopefully out of sight, but scanning the room and tasting the air, just in case. I smell pumpkin spice, probably coming from the haunt slider.
“I need candy corn,” I blurt out suddenly, then stifle a giggle. “I don’t know why, I just really, really want candy corn.”
“Pumpkin spice,” smiles the eyeless man. “Doesn’t matter what—a pie, a cake, a latte, I’ll take what I can get.”
The smell of pumpkin spice gets a bit heavier, with a note of lemon, almost like amusement.
I glance down at Isaac’s hands. He’s trembling slightly, the fingers knotted together as if to hide it.
“How…are you feeling?” I ask cautiously.
“Not…terrible,” he admits, chuckling dryly. “It could have been worse, I guess.”
“And you know about…the…the other…thing?” I asks, indicating my eyes.
“Yeah, I…can’t feel my prosthetics anymore. Or my contacts.”
“But you can still see?”
“Good as with my contacts. Or better, actually, but only straight ahead. I can’t…move my eyes. I don’t think I have those muscles anymore. How bad is it?”
I lean a little closer. “You know that seen in Goonies where he pulls the eyepatch off the pirate’s skull?”
He draws in air over his teeth.
“That bad?” he asks.
“It’s… um…” I stammer.
“And you know about your…whole situation?” he asks. “I mean, they didn’t let you into the park like that, did they?”
Confused, I look down at myself. It’s just jeans and a t-shirt. I mean, the t-shirt’s a bit racy, with the drawing of a curvy pumpkin fairy’s torso, like those cheesy tourist bikini shirts. The mask and gloves, orange and black, came in a set, in the bargain bin with the ears. They didn’t have any orange and black tails left, so I grabbed a snake off the shelf and pinned it to the back of the silly illusion shirt.
Except, I’m not wearing that. Any of it. Of anything, really.
I look like the pumpkin fairy, a green miniskirt that barely covers anything, an orange crop top that’s little more than a particularly covering bra. The orange and black socks I had under sensible walking shoes and now mottled black scales, like a gila monster, with raised heels and three splayed toes, a reduced pinkie, and prehensile inner thumb, under vine-like strappy sandals like the character on my shirt wore. The gloves have also became scales and long claws, sparkly with glitter like the fake ones the gloves had, and when I reach up to my ears, I find nothing but skin and hair, until I reach the top of my head, soft, velvety, and very sensitive, tickling at my fingertips and shying away from my own touch. Something not quite shoulder muscles flexes, making a rustling noise, pumpkin-leaf shaped wings, I’m guessing.
I don’t know which is worse, the permanent costume accessories, or that I’m practically in my underwear in a locked room with two men I don’t know.
I make a startled squeaking noise, trying to pull down my skirt, which the haunt slider seems to find hilarious, keeling over from his box in a fit of pumpkin-scented giggles, which causes Isaac to join in.
“I’m glad you two find this so funny,” I growl, folding my arms across my chest, face getting hot.
No wonder I’ve been so cold. And to add insult to injury, I think I’ve gone up a cup size, or two.
“Take off your mask, let’s see how bad it is,” Isaac smiles crookedly.
Obliging, I pull down the grinning, jack o’lantern mask, bracing myself for the worst.
“Normal, I think,” Isaac says, sounding a bit relieved himself.
Thinking of his own newly-acquired fangs, I run my tongue over my teeth. I feel a groove at each canine, and a bit of swelling on either side of the roof of my mouth. Did I crack something when I fell? Nothing hurts.
“Should…start…a club…” the haunt slider suggests, reaching back into the boxes that have his attention so locked in.
“What?” Isaac asks, looking over the table at the wide, flat hat, just visible above the table.
“For…people…with tails…”
“I knew it,” Isaac growls, grabbing at his new appendage, like a longer, larger version of his fingers, largely indistinguishable otherwise, hanging limp in his grasp.
“I don’t have a…”
I can feel it.
New muscles at the base of my spine. I can feel them tense, feel them release, feel the tongue flick and taste the scents the haunt slider puts into the air. I can see myself, looking back at me, like mirrors facing one another. My tongue flicks, not the one inside my mouth, but the one in the snake’s mouth, the cobra.
“I…see…you…snake…charmer…”
“I am tripping balls,” I murmur, looking into my own eyes, slitted black pupils and vivid orange eyes, both the ones in my skull and the ones on the snake. “They put something in the smoke machines and I am blitzed.”
Isaac laughs.
“This…this doesn’t make any sense!” I shriek, watching myself watch myself.
“I have dead octopi—”
“–Octopodes—”
“—for hands, nothing about this makes sense.”
“Yeah, but I’m…a catgirl, not a…a snake-butt!” I protest.
“A…snake-butt…would…be a…naga.”
“And these are supposed to be claws, but the material didn’t cure right,” Isaac explains, waggling his fingers like limp noodles at me. “I don’t make the rules.”
“But…catgirl,” I protest, barely able to form words. “Where did…snake?”
The cobra’s hood spreads with my alarm, revealing the telltale mark in vivid orange against the black scales.
“How did you make the costume?” Isaac asks.
“Just some…bargain bin pieces,” I explain. “They were out of cat tails, so I…snake doll and a safety pin.”
I wince. “This is what I get for shopping bargain-bin.”
“What about you, Locomotive Breath?” the scareactor calls across the table. “What are you supposed to be?”
“He’s a carrion bird,” I say flatly, still staring into my own eyes. “Soul Survivor?”
“Well, the mask and the hat and the coat, that’s just what you see,” Isaac elucidates, getting up to walk over to the haunt slider and look closer at the mask and coat.
“The real costume is what’s underneath. They’re something pretending to be something else, a costume within a costume, as it were. The gloves and the boots, that’s all to protect them from the wasteland, but the carrion birds aren’t human. The real creature, the real costume, is what’s wearing the slider gear. So what are you, Locomotive Breath?”
“He is…many things…phantom…anesthetist…Death Korps of Krieg…a fortress…of dead soldiers…fighting off…the men that killed them…plague doctor…”
“And it’s not like you had a tail when you went into costuming…what are you looking at?”
Isaac peers into the box, then jumps back, crying out in alarm.
“What in Monsterland is that?” he shrieks.
“What?” I ask, jumping to my feet, back against the door, ready to unlatch and run.
The haunt slider stands, revealing his arms covered in…tiny pumpkin creatures, like a scarecrow covered in ravens. He makes a cooing sound of delight as the little creatures climb along his arms, grabbing one another in an acrobatic display.
They have jack o’lanterns for heads, yellow light emanating from orange skin. Their hands, necks, and other exposed skin is green, woody and vine-like, pumpkin vines. Some have leaves coiling from stems or under belled bats.
“Jester and Harlequin?” I ask incredulously, stepping closer.
Holding his arms out, some of the figurine-sized little pumpkin people, jibbering in what I can only call “pumpkin language,” climb from him to me, scaling my shoulders and tickling my ears.
Jester is the boy, in a jester outfit, with a belled hat and black and white checkered clown pants, black pom-poms down his white shirt. Harlequin is the girl, in a white tulle skirt with black and white horizontal striped leggings and no pompoms or hat. They’re kind of mascots of Wonderland’s Monsterland Halloween event, sold as resin figures in some of the gift shops.
And apparently put back here as a mistake, and now doing whimsical cartwheels across the snout of the haunt slider’s gas mask.
“Those things are going to rip us to shreds,” Isaac hisses, recoiling, making a noise not unlike an angry cat, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“They’re…harmless,” I smile, feeling one stroking my left ear. “Look at them, they’re adorable.”
“The teeth and claws’ll come out any second now,” Isaac insists. “You’ll see. We’re about to be a red smear on those windows.”
“He seems to like them,” I point out, where the haunt slider is making puffs of lemon and pumpkin spice, allowing himself to be climbed on like a jungle gym.
“Artists are psychotic,” the eyeless man retorts. “Did you see those character designs upstairs? Did those look like they came from a rational mind?”
“Innocent,” the haunt slider insists, several dangling from his hat.
“Right, no, not this year, not this night,” Isaac growls, stepping back. “You’re nuts, the both of you.”
“Look at them!” I breathe, watching them gallivant and play, some finding their way to the table for more space.
Cartwheels, tumbles, contortionism, everything a traditional jester or harlequin would do, and impromptu performance given free of charge, free of heart, just for us.
“Yeah, I’m looking at them,” Isaac growls. “You don’t know what those are, put them back.”
“We will…protect them…with our life…” snarls the haunt slider defensively, angling himself between Isaac and the little figures.
“I’ve wanted to collect them for years, but they want an arm and a leg…” I murmur.
“And those thing’ll take an arm and a leg, seriously, have neither of you seen a horror movie ever?”
“Cute,” declares the haunt slider, holding out a smiling little pumpkin girl, kneeling trusting on his palm, looking up at Isaac with utmost love and no judgment.
The corner of Isaac’s mouth twitches. The little pumpkin girl waves sweetly, her fingers like pumpkin leaves.
“You’re both nuts,” he sighs, rolling eyes he doesn’t have, but letting the little pumpkin girl climb his hands, nestling on his shoulder at the curve of his neck. “With zero self-preservation instinct.”
Something laughs in the hallway.
“Get the lights!” Isaac practically screams, his long legs carrying him swiftly across the room, flipping the switch and crouching beneath the door.
Lost in the shadows, the haunt slider has his rucksack on the table, ushering all of the little figures into it, several leaping off my arms, shoulders, and the top of my head to join the rest of them. When safely put away, he drops to his knees, serrated shovel primed across his knees as he slinks across the floor, a sharp, burning capsaicin smell pouring from his mask as he passes me the rucksack, making my nose run.
“Snug…as…bugs…” he whispers, indicating the little figures, except for the one still hanging onto Isaac’s shoulder.
The three of us quietly peer through the window, watching the laughing figure approach. It’s a clown, with wild, curly, bright green hair, a large red nose, a white face, and a big red smile that’s always fixed, no matter the situation. A black and white striped shirt is under a blue denim jacket and black cutoff denim shorts, dragging a red and black poker-themed “clown hammer,” its head bent, left cheek and shoulder jammed into the far wall, giggling to itself as it passes by.
Wonderland’s solution was to incorporate the masks. The clown makeup was done with special printed half-face masks, the steampunkers were given half-face masks with printed mesh filters and cog patterns, now very real leather and copper at Isaac’s throat (the pumpkin girl, heedless of any danger the clown may possess, nesting in it like a hammock), most of the Factory Farm scareactors in full-face masks, and the carrion birds speaking for themselves.
The clown’s hand traces the corner of its mouth as it giggles, feeling the curve of muscles permanently locked into place. The hammer grinds along the floor, just behind jerky, unsteady feet, several sizes bigger than normal.
After the clown is out of sight, Isaac breathes the exhale he’d been holding.
“Well, that was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen,” he murmurs.
“Can’t stay…Props…and Costuming…”
I tug at my skirt, holding onto the rucksack, simultaneously pulling what could generously be called a shirt up and down when I have a free hand. The haunt slider’s smoke smells like vanilla.
Nimbly, he peels the leather away from the skull-shaped buttons and shucks it off, the leather pooling behind his tail and across his raised heels, sliding like silk across his modified boots as he hands it to me, the mask hissing slightly.
“Um…thank you,” I mumble, trading him the rucksack for the coat.
I’ve never felt leather so soft, and try not to blush when I realize it’s a lot tighter across the chest for me than for him. The buttons are cool to the touch, the outer layers a bit damp from his constant spray of smoke or vapor or whatever he uses to scent the air.
“Props and Costumes is between us and the employee parking,” Isaac muses, pinning the chain of his bracelet between his canines, still cautiously watching the wire-laced windows for clowns. “If it’s still there, we can grab a few things, and make our way to my car.”
“And…if someone beat us to it?”
“Strategic retreat.”
As Isaac undoes the lock, I feel a bit…well, exposed, when compared to the haunt slider’s serrated shovel and Isaac’s wrench. I guess I have claws, and cobra venom, probably, but I think I’d feel safer if I had something, like a really dangerous security blanket.
The haunt sliders were built for silence conditionally. They’re meant to be difficult to hear coming under the ambient sounds of a theme park haunted attraction in full-swing, on asphalt. His sparking pucks and toe-sheathes clack loudly against the cement flooring, causing Isaac to visibly wince.
“Maybe you should…” Isaac starts, cut off by a low hum that fills the air with a disconcerting stillness. For a moment, everything is black, and then red lights pop on at distant intervals, usually in front of a door or hallway junction.
“Yeah…that’s about right,” Isaac moans.
“Props…should go to…Props…”
“And if everything there has come to life, too?” Isaac growls, pointing us toward a turn that leads into a meeting room.
“Stock up…prepare…keep…”
Isaac barrels through the double-doors, holding them open as the two of us follow closely, then engages the lock and slides beneath the door, sitting below the windows, his extinguisher tossed in a corner. The haunt slider is bent over his knees, rubbing his chest and throat again, tail flicking the air in an irritated manner.
His tail. It’s wrapped in the same leather as his pants, the underside lined with scutes like his knees, the tip with a line of sparking material.
The whole of it is as if he always had them, the grasping feet and the tail. There’s no difference in detail or design, like he was always this way.
His blank eyes meet mine, lost in the shadows of his gas mask.
“Snake…charmer…” he muses, smelling of fall leaves and a note of something chemical. Bleach?
Behind me, Isaac has one knee drawn up close, his lean arm slung across it in thought, bracelet in his mouth. It’s hard to judge, but I think he might be deliberately avoiding looking at his hands, or the twisting, tentacular tail beneath him.
The haunt slider seizes the eyeless man’s wrist, placing two fingers on the soft spot above the joint. Isaac jerks his arm free, making it clear he doesn’t want to be touched.
“This is…just nuts…” he growls, balling his fingers into a knotted fist, like those ball-shaped sailor ropes.
“Reality…is…broken,” wheezes the haunt slider, moving to the back of the classroom, past the folding tables and chairs, under a television, where someone stacked some boxes, probably hastily-placed overstock.
Isaac watches him pensively, the adjusted shape of his feet, the lifelike motions in his tail, which he uses to slide his serrated-edged shovel back into position at his rucksack.
“Your friend…isn’t right, is he?” the eyeless man asks quietly.
“He’s not…I mean…he’s a haunt slider in Soul Survivor and stopped me from being trampled when…things got real,” I explain, finding a succinct way to say it. “I don’t…actually know him.”
“You got friends, family, somewhere safe to go? Someone you can call? Either of you?” Isaac asks with nearly parental concern.
“Not really,” I admit. “I’m from out of town.”
A sudden thought grips my chest. If this is going on here…
I push it to the back of my mind. I can worry about that when I can get near a phone…or something.
“…So…what do we do now?” I ask.
“Props…and…Costumes,” the haunt slider repeats.
“Or we could skip whatever night terrors are there and go straight to employee parking,” Isaac shrugs, chewing his bracelet.
“Weapons…and…valuables…”
“Yeah, and whoever was in the makeup chair when…things got real,” Isaac argues.
I take a seat next to the eyeless man, under the windows and hopefully out of sight, but scanning the room and tasting the air, just in case. I smell pumpkin spice, probably coming from the haunt slider.
“I need candy corn,” I blurt out suddenly, then stifle a giggle. “I don’t know why, I just really, really want candy corn.”
“Pumpkin spice,” smiles the eyeless man. “Doesn’t matter what—a pie, a cake, a latte, I’ll take what I can get.”
The smell of pumpkin spice gets a bit heavier, with a note of lemon, almost like amusement.
I glance down at Isaac’s hands. He’s trembling slightly, the fingers knotted together as if to hide it.
“How…are you feeling?” I ask cautiously.
“Not…terrible,” he admits, chuckling dryly. “It could have been worse, I guess.”
“And you know about…the…the other…thing?” I asks, indicating my eyes.
“Yeah, I…can’t feel my prosthetics anymore. Or my contacts.”
“But you can still see?”
“Good as with my contacts. Or better, actually, but only straight ahead. I can’t…move my eyes. I don’t think I have those muscles anymore. How bad is it?”
I lean a little closer. “You know that seen in Goonies where he pulls the eyepatch off the pirate’s skull?”
He draws in air over his teeth.
“That bad?” he asks.
“It’s… um…” I stammer.
“And you know about your…whole situation?” he asks. “I mean, they didn’t let you into the park like that, did they?”
Confused, I look down at myself. It’s just jeans and a t-shirt. I mean, the t-shirt’s a bit racy, with the drawing of a curvy pumpkin fairy’s torso, like those cheesy tourist bikini shirts. The mask and gloves, orange and black, came in a set, in the bargain bin with the ears. They didn’t have any orange and black tails left, so I grabbed a snake off the shelf and pinned it to the back of the silly illusion shirt.
Except, I’m not wearing that. Any of it. Of anything, really.
I look like the pumpkin fairy, a green miniskirt that barely covers anything, an orange crop top that’s little more than a particularly covering bra. The orange and black socks I had under sensible walking shoes and now mottled black scales, like a gila monster, with raised heels and three splayed toes, a reduced pinkie, and prehensile inner thumb, under vine-like strappy sandals like the character on my shirt wore. The gloves have also became scales and long claws, sparkly with glitter like the fake ones the gloves had, and when I reach up to my ears, I find nothing but skin and hair, until I reach the top of my head, soft, velvety, and very sensitive, tickling at my fingertips and shying away from my own touch. Something not quite shoulder muscles flexes, making a rustling noise, pumpkin-leaf shaped wings, I’m guessing.
I don’t know which is worse, the permanent costume accessories, or that I’m practically in my underwear in a locked room with two men I don’t know.
I make a startled squeaking noise, trying to pull down my skirt, which the haunt slider seems to find hilarious, keeling over from his box in a fit of pumpkin-scented giggles, which causes Isaac to join in.
“I’m glad you two find this so funny,” I growl, folding my arms across my chest, face getting hot.
No wonder I’ve been so cold. And to add insult to injury, I think I’ve gone up a cup size, or two.
“Take off your mask, let’s see how bad it is,” Isaac smiles crookedly.
Obliging, I pull down the grinning, jack o’lantern mask, bracing myself for the worst.
“Normal, I think,” Isaac says, sounding a bit relieved himself.
Thinking of his own newly-acquired fangs, I run my tongue over my teeth. I feel a groove at each canine, and a bit of swelling on either side of the roof of my mouth. Did I crack something when I fell? Nothing hurts.
“Should…start…a club…” the haunt slider suggests, reaching back into the boxes that have his attention so locked in.
“What?” Isaac asks, looking over the table at the wide, flat hat, just visible above the table.
“For…people…with tails…”
“I knew it,” Isaac growls, grabbing at his new appendage, like a longer, larger version of his fingers, largely indistinguishable otherwise, hanging limp in his grasp.
“I don’t have a…”
I can feel it.
New muscles at the base of my spine. I can feel them tense, feel them release, feel the tongue flick and taste the scents the haunt slider puts into the air. I can see myself, looking back at me, like mirrors facing one another. My tongue flicks, not the one inside my mouth, but the one in the snake’s mouth, the cobra.
“I…see…you…snake…charmer…”
“I am tripping balls,” I murmur, looking into my own eyes, slitted black pupils and vivid orange eyes, both the ones in my skull and the ones on the snake. “They put something in the smoke machines and I am blitzed.”
Isaac laughs.
“This…this doesn’t make any sense!” I shriek, watching myself watch myself.
“I have dead octopi—”
“–Octopodes—”
“—for hands, nothing about this makes sense.”
“Yeah, but I’m…a catgirl, not a…a snake-butt!” I protest.
“A…snake-butt…would…be a…naga.”
“And these are supposed to be claws, but the material didn’t cure right,” Isaac explains, waggling his fingers like limp noodles at me. “I don’t make the rules.”
“But…catgirl,” I protest, barely able to form words. “Where did…snake?”
The cobra’s hood spreads with my alarm, revealing the telltale mark in vivid orange against the black scales.
“How did you make the costume?” Isaac asks.
“Just some…bargain bin pieces,” I explain. “They were out of cat tails, so I…snake doll and a safety pin.”
I wince. “This is what I get for shopping bargain-bin.”
“What about you, Locomotive Breath?” the scareactor calls across the table. “What are you supposed to be?”
“He’s a carrion bird,” I say flatly, still staring into my own eyes. “Soul Survivor?”
“Well, the mask and the hat and the coat, that’s just what you see,” Isaac elucidates, getting up to walk over to the haunt slider and look closer at the mask and coat.
“The real costume is what’s underneath. They’re something pretending to be something else, a costume within a costume, as it were. The gloves and the boots, that’s all to protect them from the wasteland, but the carrion birds aren’t human. The real creature, the real costume, is what’s wearing the slider gear. So what are you, Locomotive Breath?”
“He is…many things…phantom…anesthetist…Death Korps of Krieg…a fortress…of dead soldiers…fighting off…the men that killed them…plague doctor…”
“And it’s not like you had a tail when you went into costuming…what are you looking at?”
Isaac peers into the box, then jumps back, crying out in alarm.
“What in Monsterland is that?” he shrieks.
“What?” I ask, jumping to my feet, back against the door, ready to unlatch and run.
The haunt slider stands, revealing his arms covered in…tiny pumpkin creatures, like a scarecrow covered in ravens. He makes a cooing sound of delight as the little creatures climb along his arms, grabbing one another in an acrobatic display.
They have jack o’lanterns for heads, yellow light emanating from orange skin. Their hands, necks, and other exposed skin is green, woody and vine-like, pumpkin vines. Some have leaves coiling from stems or under belled bats.
“Jester and Harlequin?” I ask incredulously, stepping closer.
Holding his arms out, some of the figurine-sized little pumpkin people, jibbering in what I can only call “pumpkin language,” climb from him to me, scaling my shoulders and tickling my ears.
Jester is the boy, in a jester outfit, with a belled hat and black and white checkered clown pants, black pom-poms down his white shirt. Harlequin is the girl, in a white tulle skirt with black and white horizontal striped leggings and no pompoms or hat. They’re kind of mascots of Wonderland’s Monsterland Halloween event, sold as resin figures in some of the gift shops.
And apparently put back here as a mistake, and now doing whimsical cartwheels across the snout of the haunt slider’s gas mask.
“Those things are going to rip us to shreds,” Isaac hisses, recoiling, making a noise not unlike an angry cat, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“They’re…harmless,” I smile, feeling one stroking my left ear. “Look at them, they’re adorable.”
“The teeth and claws’ll come out any second now,” Isaac insists. “You’ll see. We’re about to be a red smear on those windows.”
“He seems to like them,” I point out, where the haunt slider is making puffs of lemon and pumpkin spice, allowing himself to be climbed on like a jungle gym.
“Artists are psychotic,” the eyeless man retorts. “Did you see those character designs upstairs? Did those look like they came from a rational mind?”
“Innocent,” the haunt slider insists, several dangling from his hat.
“Right, no, not this year, not this night,” Isaac growls, stepping back. “You’re nuts, the both of you.”
“Look at them!” I breathe, watching them gallivant and play, some finding their way to the table for more space.
Cartwheels, tumbles, contortionism, everything a traditional jester or harlequin would do, and impromptu performance given free of charge, free of heart, just for us.
“Yeah, I’m looking at them,” Isaac growls. “You don’t know what those are, put them back.”
“We will…protect them…with our life…” snarls the haunt slider defensively, angling himself between Isaac and the little figures.
“I’ve wanted to collect them for years, but they want an arm and a leg…” I murmur.
“And those thing’ll take an arm and a leg, seriously, have neither of you seen a horror movie ever?”
“Cute,” declares the haunt slider, holding out a smiling little pumpkin girl, kneeling trusting on his palm, looking up at Isaac with utmost love and no judgment.
The corner of Isaac’s mouth twitches. The little pumpkin girl waves sweetly, her fingers like pumpkin leaves.
“You’re both nuts,” he sighs, rolling eyes he doesn’t have, but letting the little pumpkin girl climb his hands, nestling on his shoulder at the curve of his neck. “With zero self-preservation instinct.”
Something laughs in the hallway.
“Get the lights!” Isaac practically screams, his long legs carrying him swiftly across the room, flipping the switch and crouching beneath the door.
Lost in the shadows, the haunt slider has his rucksack on the table, ushering all of the little figures into it, several leaping off my arms, shoulders, and the top of my head to join the rest of them. When safely put away, he drops to his knees, serrated shovel primed across his knees as he slinks across the floor, a sharp, burning capsaicin smell pouring from his mask as he passes me the rucksack, making my nose run.
“Snug…as…bugs…” he whispers, indicating the little figures, except for the one still hanging onto Isaac’s shoulder.
The three of us quietly peer through the window, watching the laughing figure approach. It’s a clown, with wild, curly, bright green hair, a large red nose, a white face, and a big red smile that’s always fixed, no matter the situation. A black and white striped shirt is under a blue denim jacket and black cutoff denim shorts, dragging a red and black poker-themed “clown hammer,” its head bent, left cheek and shoulder jammed into the far wall, giggling to itself as it passes by.
Wonderland’s solution was to incorporate the masks. The clown makeup was done with special printed half-face masks, the steampunkers were given half-face masks with printed mesh filters and cog patterns, now very real leather and copper at Isaac’s throat (the pumpkin girl, heedless of any danger the clown may possess, nesting in it like a hammock), most of the Factory Farm scareactors in full-face masks, and the carrion birds speaking for themselves.
The clown’s hand traces the corner of its mouth as it giggles, feeling the curve of muscles permanently locked into place. The hammer grinds along the floor, just behind jerky, unsteady feet, several sizes bigger than normal.
After the clown is out of sight, Isaac breathes the exhale he’d been holding.
“Well, that was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen,” he murmurs.
“Can’t stay…Props…and Costuming…”
I tug at my skirt, holding onto the rucksack, simultaneously pulling what could generously be called a shirt up and down when I have a free hand. The haunt slider’s smoke smells like vanilla.
Nimbly, he peels the leather away from the skull-shaped buttons and shucks it off, the leather pooling behind his tail and across his raised heels, sliding like silk across his modified boots as he hands it to me, the mask hissing slightly.
“Um…thank you,” I mumble, trading him the rucksack for the coat.
I’ve never felt leather so soft, and try not to blush when I realize it’s a lot tighter across the chest for me than for him. The buttons are cool to the touch, the outer layers a bit damp from his constant spray of smoke or vapor or whatever he uses to scent the air.
“Props and Costumes is between us and the employee parking,” Isaac muses, pinning the chain of his bracelet between his canines, still cautiously watching the wire-laced windows for clowns. “If it’s still there, we can grab a few things, and make our way to my car.”
“And…if someone beat us to it?”
“Strategic retreat.”
As Isaac undoes the lock, I feel a bit…well, exposed, when compared to the haunt slider’s serrated shovel and Isaac’s wrench. I guess I have claws, and cobra venom, probably, but I think I’d feel safer if I had something, like a really dangerous security blanket.
The haunt sliders were built for silence conditionally. They’re meant to be difficult to hear coming under the ambient sounds of a theme park haunted attraction in full-swing, on asphalt. His sparking pucks and toe-sheathes clack loudly against the cement flooring, causing Isaac to visibly wince.
“Maybe you should…” Isaac starts, cut off by a low hum that fills the air with a disconcerting stillness. For a moment, everything is black, and then red lights pop on at distant intervals, usually in front of a door or hallway junction.
“Yeah…that’s about right,” Isaac moans.
March 25, 2024
Blood Moon--Chapter two
Chapter one
Chapter two
I kick my feet in frustration, stirring up the blankets, hunger gnawing at my belly.
“What’s the matter, love?” Zia asks, patting my foot.
“Mmm!” I groan petulantly.
“You must be getting restless. Would you like to tour the grounds? I can push you in the wheelchair.”
I glance at the chair disdainfully. What I want…I think I want to run, to be free and one with the night, howl at the moon, as it were.
“Yes, I can show you the manner and maybe introduce you to some of the other serviles, maybe some of your siblings. Would that help?”
I kick my right foot sharply, arms crossed over my chest.
“Yes, we’ll go for a stroll, I think.”
Zia pulls me up and guides me into the chair. I’m feeling less dizzy, but still unsteady. Still, I blank at her help and attempt to walk to the chair on my own, painfully slamming my knees into the black rug for my trouble, grunting from the impact.
“Willful pup,” Zia growls, helping me back up. “Be patient with yourself. You’ve had a rough few days.”
I snap at her fingers, barely missing them.
“No, Master! Do you want to wear a bit like some common-blooded feral?”
Once I’m in the chair, she fetches a black blanket from the wardrobe and drapes it over me. My teeth don’t feel right, and my mouth throbs with pain. I’m missing three more fingernails across both hands.
“Alright, love. Let’s go for a walk.”
She pushes me out of the bedroom and into a vast hallway overlooking a room below. Women in similar maid dresses dust or sweep, each one curtsying as we pass, with pleasant, affectionate smiles.
“This is the offspring wing,” Zia explains. “Your brothers and sisters stay here when they’re in town. Aren’t you lucky the mistress built extra?”
The hall is decorated in black and roses, with somber oil paintings of pale men and women in antiquated styles of dress. There are decorative vases with dark red roses, with strong fragrance. The windows are covered by heavy blackout curtains, making it pleasantly dark.
From the hall we enter into a grand room like a foyer or entrance hall, with white marble floors. There’s a heavy, ornate wooden door that must be the entrance to my right, and a similar, but smaller, door to the left.
“That’s the mistress’s rooms,” Zia explains. “Offspring are not allowed in her private chambers.”
We’re on the second floor, overlooking the entrance, which has a black and gold strip leading to the grand staircase.
“Below is the kitchens and the grand ballroom. You’ll see that at your name day ball. Ahead is the gallery, conservatory, studio, and the like. Mistress Léontine likes her offspring to have a craft. When you’re feeling stronger, you’ll be taught singing, instruments, painting, and many other valuable skills.”
I frown. Don’t I have a say in this? I’m a grown man…why am I being treated like some sort of…trust fund neppo-baby?
Zia proceeds into the art hall, where the sounds of violins and cellos can be heard.
“Some of your siblings must be more,” Zia smiles. “Must be here in advance of your name day ball.”
Weird, don’t I have a name of my own? It’s…it’s…
Black forms at the edge of my vision, narrowing my field of view. My heart pounds in my chest, my palms sweaty.
What’s my name…?
It’s…
What’s my name?
I fling myself out of the chair, landing onto the hardwood floor gracelessly and painfully, hands shaking.
What’s my name?
“Calm down, love. What’s the matter?”
I’m on all fours, gagging. My eyeteeth feel unpleasantly loose, my fingertips throbbing. Whats happening to me?
Zia rubs my back.
“Just breathe, Young Master,” she soothes. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
What’s my name?
“My…name,” I whimper, tears spilling down my cheeks. “I don’t…my name.”
“Oh, love,” she breathes, pulling me into her arms and rocking me like a child. “That’s normal. That’s why your progenitor gives you a new one.”
“But I have…what’s happening?”
“You’re a newborn pup, love. Don’t fret yourself. You’re safe. You’re among family and household. The mistress won’t let anything happen to you, and neither will I.”
I’m trembling. I can’t stop. My lower back pulses with dull pain, like growing pains. Zia strokes my hair softly, quietly singing in her native tongue.
Slowly, the trembling stops, but I can tell another fingernail is ready to go. My teeth wiggle under my tongue.
“Servile Zinovia?” a male voice asks.
I look up to see a tall man in an elegant black suit, with a gold on black brocade waistcoat and black tie. His blond hair is cut short and spiked slightly, an earring with a fang dangling from his left ear. Like Zia—Zinovia—his longer fingernails taper to points and are painted black.
“Master Cabernet! All is well. Your newest sibling is just…coming to terms with his situation.”
That might almost be true if I had any idea what my situation is.
“Oh, is that you, pup?” the pale man asks, smiling wide enough to show elongated canines and leaning forward, hands braced on his knees, like one might do to speak to a child. “I’m Mother Léontine’s firstborn and heir. It is very nice to meet you.”
There’s something of a familial resemblance I can’t quite put my finger on, but…this man is at least twenty. How can his mother be so young?
“Is he speaking yet?” Cabernet asks Zia.
“Fragments,” she answers, still rocking me.
“It’ll come back to you in time, pupling. Would you like me to help you back in the chair?”
The back of my throat rumbles, causing Cabernet to take a step back, looking surprised.
“He’s very willful,” Zia says apologetically.
“Yes, so is Mother,” the man replies dryly. “Come, little brother. You’ll feel much more comfortable off that cold floor.”
My throat rumbles again, loose teeth exposed.
“Careful, Master, he bites.”
“Oh, do you, pupling?” Cabernet laughs. “That is most unbecoming. Mother won’t stand for it, and she’ll be most displeased to see you wearing a bit.”
Zia stirs beneath me, helping me stand. I lean on her for stability, still shaking, back facing Cabernet, this man that I don’t know that calls me his brother. Her fingers trail through my hair.
“What’s wrong with his fingers?” Cabernet asks.
“His…fingernails are falling out. I’ve brought it up to the mistress and she has me monitoring the situation.”
Cabernet frowns. “Are you feeding him well?”
“He is insatiable, Master,” she replies submissively.
My stomach growls as if to emphasize her point.
“Has Mother called for a doctor to see him?” he inquires.
“Not as of yet, Master. The mistress is…very prideful.”
“She is indeed,” Cabernet smiles. “But if he is well for it, don’t allow me to stop the tour. We’ll see each other again, soon, pupling. I am to be your cello instructor.”
“Yes, Master. I shan’t keep you longer.”
“Of course, servile. You are dismissed.”
She curtsies politely before guiding me into the chair.
“The mistress generally chooses her offspring well,” Zia smiles. “Cabernet is a kind man. He’ll take you under his wing, no doubt.”
Through the hall I can still hear classical music, smell fresh flowers and fresh paint, which makes me gag.
“The mistress takes pride in all of her offspring’s appearance, manners, and education,” Zia explains. “You’ll be a worthy groom to any well-bred bride.”
I start, looking up at Zia, shocked. Am I to be auctioned off to the highest bidder? Are arranged marriages even a thing anymore?
And who is this Léontine mother-woman to even have the authority to do such a thing?
“You’re the proud youngest son of a respectable family of good lineage,” Zia continues, sniffing.
“I…am?” I ask softly.
“Of course, love,” she replies gently. “Your progenitor, Mistress Léontine is a respected elder from a strong line.”
I look down at the lightly blood-soaked bandages tied around three fingertips on my right hand and one on the left, feeling the left pinky nail about to come loose. I don’t understand…What is happening to me, inside and out?
“Progenitor,” I mumble softly.
“Yes, Young Master. Do you remember the ship that brought her here?”
“Belle Nuit, 1678,” I answer.
“Very good, love,” Zia beams. “Before she was a newborn pup, herself, she was the daughter of a minor noble and already very wealthy. She invested her money quite wisely in a number of New World ventures. That’s how she rose to power.”
I feel a headache coming on. My belly rumbles.
“Servile, here!” a female voice demands, causing Zia to stop short. “I demand…oh, my mistake.”
“It’s no trouble, Mistress Devereaux,” Zia replies. “What did you need?”
She’s oddly calm, almost chipper, about being spoken to in such a manner.
The woman in question is to the short end of average, with platinum blond hair done up in royal braids, studded through with deep green gems with red flecks like blood. Her dress is a similar color, like something out of a Victorian romance novel, and very low-cut in the front.
“No, servile, Mother wouldn’t appreciate me interrupting your newborn pup-rearing,” she sighs, looking down at me. I wither under her gaze. “Mother’s new baby, I suppose?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
The woman purses her lips, looking unimpressed. “I was enjoying a lovely time in the arctic circle before I received word to come home for your name day. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to arrange a flight from the Alaskan wilderness? And Mother insisted on no delays!”
And, any of this is my fault…how?
“Not even speaking yet,” she scoffs. “I hope Mother isn’t losing her edge.”
The back of my throat rumbles, making Devereaux look both affronted and disgusted.
“Well, off with you, servile,” Devereaux sniffs. “Best teach the little pup some manners.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Zia says to Deveraux’s back as she returns to the room, closing the door.
“Don’t like,” I mutter darkly.
“Don’t be that way, love,” Zia smiles. “Mistress Deveraux is one of your older sisters. She’ll warm up to you, in time.”
“She talks to you.”
“Mistress Deveraux is the daughter of my patron mistress,” Zia explains. “I am hers to command, so long is Mistress Léontine’s orders are dealt with first.” She seems a bit offended that I would be offended on her behalf.
After a few steps, she seems to notice my sullenness and pats my shoulder.
“I am from a low family of neither wealth nor breeding,” she tells me, bordering on prideful. “Therefore very lucky to work for a great house such as this one.
Mistress Léontine pays me very well and protects me from the common rabble.”
“A person, Zia,” I answer. “Worthy of respect.”
“I’m glad you think s…Zia? That’s very sweet.”
“Zia,” I repeat.
“Alright, we’ll do thirty minutes of French lessons, and then you can return to your room for a feeding.”
Chapter two
I kick my feet in frustration, stirring up the blankets, hunger gnawing at my belly.
“What’s the matter, love?” Zia asks, patting my foot.
“Mmm!” I groan petulantly.
“You must be getting restless. Would you like to tour the grounds? I can push you in the wheelchair.”
I glance at the chair disdainfully. What I want…I think I want to run, to be free and one with the night, howl at the moon, as it were.
“Yes, I can show you the manner and maybe introduce you to some of the other serviles, maybe some of your siblings. Would that help?”
I kick my right foot sharply, arms crossed over my chest.
“Yes, we’ll go for a stroll, I think.”
Zia pulls me up and guides me into the chair. I’m feeling less dizzy, but still unsteady. Still, I blank at her help and attempt to walk to the chair on my own, painfully slamming my knees into the black rug for my trouble, grunting from the impact.
“Willful pup,” Zia growls, helping me back up. “Be patient with yourself. You’ve had a rough few days.”
I snap at her fingers, barely missing them.
“No, Master! Do you want to wear a bit like some common-blooded feral?”
Once I’m in the chair, she fetches a black blanket from the wardrobe and drapes it over me. My teeth don’t feel right, and my mouth throbs with pain. I’m missing three more fingernails across both hands.
“Alright, love. Let’s go for a walk.”
She pushes me out of the bedroom and into a vast hallway overlooking a room below. Women in similar maid dresses dust or sweep, each one curtsying as we pass, with pleasant, affectionate smiles.
“This is the offspring wing,” Zia explains. “Your brothers and sisters stay here when they’re in town. Aren’t you lucky the mistress built extra?”
The hall is decorated in black and roses, with somber oil paintings of pale men and women in antiquated styles of dress. There are decorative vases with dark red roses, with strong fragrance. The windows are covered by heavy blackout curtains, making it pleasantly dark.
From the hall we enter into a grand room like a foyer or entrance hall, with white marble floors. There’s a heavy, ornate wooden door that must be the entrance to my right, and a similar, but smaller, door to the left.
“That’s the mistress’s rooms,” Zia explains. “Offspring are not allowed in her private chambers.”
We’re on the second floor, overlooking the entrance, which has a black and gold strip leading to the grand staircase.
“Below is the kitchens and the grand ballroom. You’ll see that at your name day ball. Ahead is the gallery, conservatory, studio, and the like. Mistress Léontine likes her offspring to have a craft. When you’re feeling stronger, you’ll be taught singing, instruments, painting, and many other valuable skills.”
I frown. Don’t I have a say in this? I’m a grown man…why am I being treated like some sort of…trust fund neppo-baby?
Zia proceeds into the art hall, where the sounds of violins and cellos can be heard.
“Some of your siblings must be more,” Zia smiles. “Must be here in advance of your name day ball.”
Weird, don’t I have a name of my own? It’s…it’s…
Black forms at the edge of my vision, narrowing my field of view. My heart pounds in my chest, my palms sweaty.
What’s my name…?
It’s…
What’s my name?
I fling myself out of the chair, landing onto the hardwood floor gracelessly and painfully, hands shaking.
What’s my name?
“Calm down, love. What’s the matter?”
I’m on all fours, gagging. My eyeteeth feel unpleasantly loose, my fingertips throbbing. Whats happening to me?
Zia rubs my back.
“Just breathe, Young Master,” she soothes. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
What’s my name?
“My…name,” I whimper, tears spilling down my cheeks. “I don’t…my name.”
“Oh, love,” she breathes, pulling me into her arms and rocking me like a child. “That’s normal. That’s why your progenitor gives you a new one.”
“But I have…what’s happening?”
“You’re a newborn pup, love. Don’t fret yourself. You’re safe. You’re among family and household. The mistress won’t let anything happen to you, and neither will I.”
I’m trembling. I can’t stop. My lower back pulses with dull pain, like growing pains. Zia strokes my hair softly, quietly singing in her native tongue.
Slowly, the trembling stops, but I can tell another fingernail is ready to go. My teeth wiggle under my tongue.
“Servile Zinovia?” a male voice asks.
I look up to see a tall man in an elegant black suit, with a gold on black brocade waistcoat and black tie. His blond hair is cut short and spiked slightly, an earring with a fang dangling from his left ear. Like Zia—Zinovia—his longer fingernails taper to points and are painted black.
“Master Cabernet! All is well. Your newest sibling is just…coming to terms with his situation.”
That might almost be true if I had any idea what my situation is.
“Oh, is that you, pup?” the pale man asks, smiling wide enough to show elongated canines and leaning forward, hands braced on his knees, like one might do to speak to a child. “I’m Mother Léontine’s firstborn and heir. It is very nice to meet you.”
There’s something of a familial resemblance I can’t quite put my finger on, but…this man is at least twenty. How can his mother be so young?
“Is he speaking yet?” Cabernet asks Zia.
“Fragments,” she answers, still rocking me.
“It’ll come back to you in time, pupling. Would you like me to help you back in the chair?”
The back of my throat rumbles, causing Cabernet to take a step back, looking surprised.
“He’s very willful,” Zia says apologetically.
“Yes, so is Mother,” the man replies dryly. “Come, little brother. You’ll feel much more comfortable off that cold floor.”
My throat rumbles again, loose teeth exposed.
“Careful, Master, he bites.”
“Oh, do you, pupling?” Cabernet laughs. “That is most unbecoming. Mother won’t stand for it, and she’ll be most displeased to see you wearing a bit.”
Zia stirs beneath me, helping me stand. I lean on her for stability, still shaking, back facing Cabernet, this man that I don’t know that calls me his brother. Her fingers trail through my hair.
“What’s wrong with his fingers?” Cabernet asks.
“His…fingernails are falling out. I’ve brought it up to the mistress and she has me monitoring the situation.”
Cabernet frowns. “Are you feeding him well?”
“He is insatiable, Master,” she replies submissively.
My stomach growls as if to emphasize her point.
“Has Mother called for a doctor to see him?” he inquires.
“Not as of yet, Master. The mistress is…very prideful.”
“She is indeed,” Cabernet smiles. “But if he is well for it, don’t allow me to stop the tour. We’ll see each other again, soon, pupling. I am to be your cello instructor.”
“Yes, Master. I shan’t keep you longer.”
“Of course, servile. You are dismissed.”
She curtsies politely before guiding me into the chair.
“The mistress generally chooses her offspring well,” Zia smiles. “Cabernet is a kind man. He’ll take you under his wing, no doubt.”
Through the hall I can still hear classical music, smell fresh flowers and fresh paint, which makes me gag.
“The mistress takes pride in all of her offspring’s appearance, manners, and education,” Zia explains. “You’ll be a worthy groom to any well-bred bride.”
I start, looking up at Zia, shocked. Am I to be auctioned off to the highest bidder? Are arranged marriages even a thing anymore?
And who is this Léontine mother-woman to even have the authority to do such a thing?
“You’re the proud youngest son of a respectable family of good lineage,” Zia continues, sniffing.
“I…am?” I ask softly.
“Of course, love,” she replies gently. “Your progenitor, Mistress Léontine is a respected elder from a strong line.”
I look down at the lightly blood-soaked bandages tied around three fingertips on my right hand and one on the left, feeling the left pinky nail about to come loose. I don’t understand…What is happening to me, inside and out?
“Progenitor,” I mumble softly.
“Yes, Young Master. Do you remember the ship that brought her here?”
“Belle Nuit, 1678,” I answer.
“Very good, love,” Zia beams. “Before she was a newborn pup, herself, she was the daughter of a minor noble and already very wealthy. She invested her money quite wisely in a number of New World ventures. That’s how she rose to power.”
I feel a headache coming on. My belly rumbles.
“Servile, here!” a female voice demands, causing Zia to stop short. “I demand…oh, my mistake.”
“It’s no trouble, Mistress Devereaux,” Zia replies. “What did you need?”
She’s oddly calm, almost chipper, about being spoken to in such a manner.
The woman in question is to the short end of average, with platinum blond hair done up in royal braids, studded through with deep green gems with red flecks like blood. Her dress is a similar color, like something out of a Victorian romance novel, and very low-cut in the front.
“No, servile, Mother wouldn’t appreciate me interrupting your newborn pup-rearing,” she sighs, looking down at me. I wither under her gaze. “Mother’s new baby, I suppose?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
The woman purses her lips, looking unimpressed. “I was enjoying a lovely time in the arctic circle before I received word to come home for your name day. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to arrange a flight from the Alaskan wilderness? And Mother insisted on no delays!”
And, any of this is my fault…how?
“Not even speaking yet,” she scoffs. “I hope Mother isn’t losing her edge.”
The back of my throat rumbles, making Devereaux look both affronted and disgusted.
“Well, off with you, servile,” Devereaux sniffs. “Best teach the little pup some manners.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Zia says to Deveraux’s back as she returns to the room, closing the door.
“Don’t like,” I mutter darkly.
“Don’t be that way, love,” Zia smiles. “Mistress Deveraux is one of your older sisters. She’ll warm up to you, in time.”
“She talks to you.”
“Mistress Deveraux is the daughter of my patron mistress,” Zia explains. “I am hers to command, so long is Mistress Léontine’s orders are dealt with first.” She seems a bit offended that I would be offended on her behalf.
After a few steps, she seems to notice my sullenness and pats my shoulder.
“I am from a low family of neither wealth nor breeding,” she tells me, bordering on prideful. “Therefore very lucky to work for a great house such as this one.
Mistress Léontine pays me very well and protects me from the common rabble.”
“A person, Zia,” I answer. “Worthy of respect.”
“I’m glad you think s…Zia? That’s very sweet.”
“Zia,” I repeat.
“Alright, we’ll do thirty minutes of French lessons, and then you can return to your room for a feeding.”
Blood Moon--Chapter one
I AM MOVING THIS TO ROYAL ROAD.
Blood Moon
by
Heather Farthing, (c)2024, all rights reserved
Chapter one
Chapter two
The broth is warm, fresh, meaty and full of iron. I’ve never tasted something so delicious, and I drink greedily from the water bottle. It is my whole world, my existence, and everything I want and need.
The woman with the vaguely European accent smiles.
“You have got to be the hungriest pup I have ever seen.”
Too soon, the water bottle is empty, but so am I. I want more. I need more.
“That’s enough!” she chides. “It’s all gone.”
That’s not good enough. There’s a noise in the back of my throat, and my jaws snapping at her fingers.
“No!” she snarls, swatting my cheek, hard enough to sting.
Tears start brimming at my eyes. What just happened? She…hit me?
“Oh, I’m sorry, love, but you can’t bite people when you don’t get what you want.”
But…I’m hungry.
“You need to go back to sleep, love. I think you’re getting grouchy.”
Didn’t I just wake up?
The woman is an elegant beauty in the prime of youth, with flawless porcelain skin and raven-black hair, done up in a graceful bun, showing off her swan-like neck. Her dress is beaded black, like something from the twenties or older, gauzy and shimmery.
I whimper again and reach for the water bottle, set on an ornate redwood side table.
“You’re going to make yourself sick like that,” she protests, moving it away from me.
“Zinovia,” a second voice calls from the door. “How is he this evening?”
The woman stands up and curtsies politely. “Hungry, mistress. And a bit…bitey.”
“Hmm…well, do see that the biting is kept to a minimum. It wouldn’t do to have more…accidents.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
Mistress? I didn’t think we did the “master and servant” thing here in the United States. But the accents…maybe they’re from somewhere else?
The small woman at the door can’t be more than twenty, but she carries the same weight and bearing as Dame Judy Dench in Shakespeare in Love. Her dress is more extravagant, with a high, beaded collar draped with rubies, or an impressive facsimile.
And there’s a feeling towards her. Warm, comforting, maternal.
“Let me look at you, pup,” she commands, and I find myself sitting up as best as I can, the room spinning uncomfortably.
The first woman holds my shoulders to steady me. Bile rises into the back of my throat, and my ears are ringing.
“Is his condition…normal?” the stern woman asks.
“So far…yes, Mistress. He’s highly feverish, however, but everything seems within normal boundaries.”
“See that it stays that way. I won’t have those dogs in my home again.”
“Of course, Mistress. He’ll be a good, strong son when he’s ready to fledge.”
The stern woman smiles pleasantly. “Oh, yes. I’ve been thinking of names for him, and agents have already been dispatched to deal with…loose ends. Poor soul, house fire I’m afraid. The body is unidentifiable, poor thing.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“I want his education started as soon as possible. I’ll have the remedial lessons sent up immediately. See that he gets started.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“And you, my boy, go back to sleep and stop giving your minder such trouble.”
With that, the woman is gone, vanishing out the door like a ghost. The room spins and my head throbs. I’m so tired.
“Lay back down, love,” the first woman whispers, guiding me back onto the pillows.
Soon, it’s as dark as the black silk sheets.
***
I wake to the smell of the thick, rich broth, warm in the cool hands of the woman, and I’m eager for it. She holds the bottle above me like I’m a bottle-fed baby lamb, letting me suck it dry. The broth is my whole world and everything in it.
“Good, good. You want to grow strong like Mistress Léontine, yes?”
Her cool hand strokes mine gently, soft and supple to the touch. Her fingernails are painted black, taping to sharp points.
I’m full to bursting, but I still want more, and whimper plaintively when she takes the bottle away.
“You’ll make yourself sick, Young Master. Perhaps instead you would like a bath? Or I could read to you. The mistress wants your education to start as soon as possible.”
I reach for the bottle, even though I know it’s empty. She takes my hand and folds it hers.
“Patience, love. Perhaps after a bath.”
She walks across the room and wheels a chair up to me, a high-backed, big-wheeled antique thing. When the wheels are locked in place, she tries to pull me up by my armpits, but the room spins.
“Oh, love, you are burning up. The bath should help.”
I whimper and shake my head. The room spins, the floor bucks. I can’t…
Somehow I’m standing, her supporting most of my weight, feet unsteady and knees weak. The adjacent bathroom is nearby. I think I can…reaching out to the doorway, as if I could drag it to me.
“No, love, the chair.”
I don’t need a wheelchair. I’m an adult, and not an invalid…
The room tilts sharply, and suddenly I’m seated, a stinging bruise on my left side where I took it at a bad angle. The room lurches, I stifle a gag. My breath smells like broth.
“That’s a good pup.”
The black silk pajamas burn against my skin. I feel hot, flushed, dizzy.
The bathroom is an opulent affair I thought only royalty could afford, with a bathtub the size of a small pool. The sound of the water pounds against my ears, and the cloyingly sweet smell of lavender and vanilla she pours into the water is even worse, making me gag.
Soon, the tub is full of purplish, overpoweringly-scented foam, and the woman wants to undress me, which makes my cheeks feel even hotter, brushing her hands away.
“You’re not the first pup I’ve taken care of for the mistress, and you won’t be the last,” she chides, undoing the buttons on my shirt. “Besides, it’s nothing I haven’t seen already.”
She pulls me up and sits me on the side of the tub to pull off my pants. I put my face in my hands in abject mortification. One leg at a time, she slides me into the cool water of the tub, my nose still assaulted by the smell of the bath oils and salts.
There’s a toy boat in the water, which I sail through the foam as though it’s going in and out of fog.
“That’s the Bella Nuit,” the woman (Zen…Zia…?) explains. “It’s the ship that originally brought the mistress to the New World.”
The little thing is exquisitely crafted, with a real wood hull and cloth sails. There’s even tiny rope rigging.
“Belle Nuit,” I repeat.
“Very good, love,” Zia smiles. “The mistress first arrived in the New World in 1678.”
“1678,” I repeat. That doesn’t seem right. It’s…what year is it?
The cool water makes me shiver, but I feel a bit more lucid, my fever going down, I suppose.
From next to the tap, there is a shower head, which Zia takes and begins spraying my head. I cough and sputter, fighting back against the spray, blocking my face with my arms.
“None of that, Young Master,” she chides, scrubbing my hair with potently lavender/chamomile shampoo. “Your hair is beautiful, love. Like the mistress.”
I squirm when she sprays my hair clean, and then trying to climb up the side of the tub in red embarrassment when she goes after me with a long-handled scrub brush, hot tears filling my eyes. There’s rumble deep in my throat, and a feeling at my throbbing teeth, the need to bite, so I do.
“Young Master, if you don’t stop I will put a bit on you, so help me!” she hisses, a squeaking noise at the high points.
Seething, the rumble continues as she drains the water and rinses my skin with the shower head. Bare and exposed, trying to afford myself some dignity, it is a relief when she wraps me in a fluffy black towel big enough to cover me from head to toe, and then helps me out of the tub and back into the chair, shivering, teeth chattering.
After she pushes me back toward the bed, she retrieves another set of black silk pajamas, these with embroidery like roses, and helps me back into them, angling me back on the bed to make it easier to pull my pants up.
When all is said and done, I burrow into the heavy, black comforter, hair still wet, shivering and teeth chattering. I can’t help but yawn, worn and strung out, back facing her in shame, hands shaking like low blood sugar.
“Go back to sleep, love,” she whispers. “You can feed again when you wake.”
But I’m hungry now. But also so very tired, but not ready for sleep.
Softly, she begins to hum a melody, and then sing in some sort of Eastern European language I don’t recognize.
She’s singing me to sleep, rubbing my back, the smell of lavender and vanilla and chamomile sticking to my skin like a veil. The spinning of the room feels like a gentle, if nauseating, rock.
What am I, a child?
***
I’m kneeling next to the bed, clinging to the blankets and sheets like a life raft in a stormy sea, shaking and unable to get my knees under me, gagging and dry-heaving, probably from hunger.
What am I doing? I don’t…remember.
I’m stuck, shivering between floor and bed, until I hear the soft steps of Zia.
“Master!” she gasps, setting aside her tray on the bedside table.
“Mmmh!” I grunt as she seizes me under the arms, hauling me back onto the bed. She is very strong.
“What’s the matter, Young Master?” she breathes, laying me on the bed. “Did you need something?”
I don’t…I don’t remember.
“Want…” I murmur softly, trying to remember. A book? Radio? Television?
“Did you want to see your progenitor?” she asks. “That’s normal. I’ll tell her you asked for her.”
Is that who I was trying to find?
Zia strokes my cheek as she reaches for another delicious bottle of broth and a book, holding the bottle for me in one hand as she reads in French from the book.
“Il était une fois un très riche marchand qui avait six enfants, trois fils et trois filles; étant un homme sensé, il n'épargna aucun coût pour leur éducation, mais leur donna toutes sortes de maîtres. Ses filles étaient extrêmement belles, surtout la plus jeune. Quand elle était petite, tout le monde l'admirait et l'appelait ‘La petite Belle’; de sorte qu'en grandissant, elle s'appelait encore la Belle, ce qui rendait ses sœurs très jalouses…”
She reads until the bottle is drained, but I want more, whimpering in hunger.
“Settle, Master,” she says, grasping my reaching hand in hers to pull it away from the bottle.
My teeth hurt into the jawbone. The eyeteeth in particular feel strange, puffy and dead.
“We’ll keep reading until it’s time for another feeding, love,” Zia says, picking her place out of the book.
Hunger gnaws at my belly, ceaseless and demanding. I don’t remember being so hungry before. It stays at the point of nausea, an endless craving that only the broth can fill, and yet never does.
I pick at the threading on my sheets. My fingertips are sore and a bit red. With a sickening crunch, the nail on my right index finger bends straight upright, revealing bare, tender flesh, blood forming at the nail bed. The fingertip throbs, the exposed nail bed burns at the air.
My heartbeat quickens, my eyes feel hot. This isn’t good, this isn’t normal. Radiation poisoning? What makes fingernails fall out?
Whimpering and sniffling, I hold my hand out to Zia, who is too pale to blanch at the sight, but makes a good approximation, grabbing my hand to examine it.
“Oh, Master!” she gasps. “Wait right here, we’ll fix this up right away!”
She dashes away, leaving me cradling my abused hand, trembling, hot tears running down my cheeks. Something’s happening to me. This isn’t right.
After what could be minutes or hours, Zia returns with a manicure set and a first aid kit. She trims the broken nail to the root with nail clippers, and then pulls at it the rest unpleasantly with a pair of tweezers, until the nail bed is open, empty, and exposed. She cleans the site with alcohol, which smells terrible, and burns like the dickens, sending me squirming, kicking, and whimpering, she having to hold my wrist under her arm with an iron grip to bandage the wound.
“It’s over, love,” she whispers consolingly, rubbing my hand.
“Wh-what?” I ask, eyes wide, trembling. “Why?”
She bites her lip, with long, canine-like teeth, like carved pearls, pricking the pale skin.
“That’s a matter for the mistress, but in the meantime…oh! Yes, something special just for you, young master.”
A tall, pale man dressed in a butler’s uniform straight from Downton Abbey’s neo-goth Halloween revival, steps into the room, holding a plastic water bottle on a tray, and carries it over to Zia before dismissing himself.
It smells heavenly, the sweetest ambrosia of the gods, warm in a way different from the last batch, thick and rich. I wipe my tears away and stop my sniffling as I drink.
Blood Moon
by
Heather Farthing, (c)2024, all rights reserved
Chapter one
Chapter two
The broth is warm, fresh, meaty and full of iron. I’ve never tasted something so delicious, and I drink greedily from the water bottle. It is my whole world, my existence, and everything I want and need.
The woman with the vaguely European accent smiles.
“You have got to be the hungriest pup I have ever seen.”
Too soon, the water bottle is empty, but so am I. I want more. I need more.
“That’s enough!” she chides. “It’s all gone.”
That’s not good enough. There’s a noise in the back of my throat, and my jaws snapping at her fingers.
“No!” she snarls, swatting my cheek, hard enough to sting.
Tears start brimming at my eyes. What just happened? She…hit me?
“Oh, I’m sorry, love, but you can’t bite people when you don’t get what you want.”
But…I’m hungry.
“You need to go back to sleep, love. I think you’re getting grouchy.”
Didn’t I just wake up?
The woman is an elegant beauty in the prime of youth, with flawless porcelain skin and raven-black hair, done up in a graceful bun, showing off her swan-like neck. Her dress is beaded black, like something from the twenties or older, gauzy and shimmery.
I whimper again and reach for the water bottle, set on an ornate redwood side table.
“You’re going to make yourself sick like that,” she protests, moving it away from me.
“Zinovia,” a second voice calls from the door. “How is he this evening?”
The woman stands up and curtsies politely. “Hungry, mistress. And a bit…bitey.”
“Hmm…well, do see that the biting is kept to a minimum. It wouldn’t do to have more…accidents.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
Mistress? I didn’t think we did the “master and servant” thing here in the United States. But the accents…maybe they’re from somewhere else?
The small woman at the door can’t be more than twenty, but she carries the same weight and bearing as Dame Judy Dench in Shakespeare in Love. Her dress is more extravagant, with a high, beaded collar draped with rubies, or an impressive facsimile.
And there’s a feeling towards her. Warm, comforting, maternal.
“Let me look at you, pup,” she commands, and I find myself sitting up as best as I can, the room spinning uncomfortably.
The first woman holds my shoulders to steady me. Bile rises into the back of my throat, and my ears are ringing.
“Is his condition…normal?” the stern woman asks.
“So far…yes, Mistress. He’s highly feverish, however, but everything seems within normal boundaries.”
“See that it stays that way. I won’t have those dogs in my home again.”
“Of course, Mistress. He’ll be a good, strong son when he’s ready to fledge.”
The stern woman smiles pleasantly. “Oh, yes. I’ve been thinking of names for him, and agents have already been dispatched to deal with…loose ends. Poor soul, house fire I’m afraid. The body is unidentifiable, poor thing.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“I want his education started as soon as possible. I’ll have the remedial lessons sent up immediately. See that he gets started.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“And you, my boy, go back to sleep and stop giving your minder such trouble.”
With that, the woman is gone, vanishing out the door like a ghost. The room spins and my head throbs. I’m so tired.
“Lay back down, love,” the first woman whispers, guiding me back onto the pillows.
Soon, it’s as dark as the black silk sheets.
***
I wake to the smell of the thick, rich broth, warm in the cool hands of the woman, and I’m eager for it. She holds the bottle above me like I’m a bottle-fed baby lamb, letting me suck it dry. The broth is my whole world and everything in it.
“Good, good. You want to grow strong like Mistress Léontine, yes?”
Her cool hand strokes mine gently, soft and supple to the touch. Her fingernails are painted black, taping to sharp points.
I’m full to bursting, but I still want more, and whimper plaintively when she takes the bottle away.
“You’ll make yourself sick, Young Master. Perhaps instead you would like a bath? Or I could read to you. The mistress wants your education to start as soon as possible.”
I reach for the bottle, even though I know it’s empty. She takes my hand and folds it hers.
“Patience, love. Perhaps after a bath.”
She walks across the room and wheels a chair up to me, a high-backed, big-wheeled antique thing. When the wheels are locked in place, she tries to pull me up by my armpits, but the room spins.
“Oh, love, you are burning up. The bath should help.”
I whimper and shake my head. The room spins, the floor bucks. I can’t…
Somehow I’m standing, her supporting most of my weight, feet unsteady and knees weak. The adjacent bathroom is nearby. I think I can…reaching out to the doorway, as if I could drag it to me.
“No, love, the chair.”
I don’t need a wheelchair. I’m an adult, and not an invalid…
The room tilts sharply, and suddenly I’m seated, a stinging bruise on my left side where I took it at a bad angle. The room lurches, I stifle a gag. My breath smells like broth.
“That’s a good pup.”
The black silk pajamas burn against my skin. I feel hot, flushed, dizzy.
The bathroom is an opulent affair I thought only royalty could afford, with a bathtub the size of a small pool. The sound of the water pounds against my ears, and the cloyingly sweet smell of lavender and vanilla she pours into the water is even worse, making me gag.
Soon, the tub is full of purplish, overpoweringly-scented foam, and the woman wants to undress me, which makes my cheeks feel even hotter, brushing her hands away.
“You’re not the first pup I’ve taken care of for the mistress, and you won’t be the last,” she chides, undoing the buttons on my shirt. “Besides, it’s nothing I haven’t seen already.”
She pulls me up and sits me on the side of the tub to pull off my pants. I put my face in my hands in abject mortification. One leg at a time, she slides me into the cool water of the tub, my nose still assaulted by the smell of the bath oils and salts.
There’s a toy boat in the water, which I sail through the foam as though it’s going in and out of fog.
“That’s the Bella Nuit,” the woman (Zen…Zia…?) explains. “It’s the ship that originally brought the mistress to the New World.”
The little thing is exquisitely crafted, with a real wood hull and cloth sails. There’s even tiny rope rigging.
“Belle Nuit,” I repeat.
“Very good, love,” Zia smiles. “The mistress first arrived in the New World in 1678.”
“1678,” I repeat. That doesn’t seem right. It’s…what year is it?
The cool water makes me shiver, but I feel a bit more lucid, my fever going down, I suppose.
From next to the tap, there is a shower head, which Zia takes and begins spraying my head. I cough and sputter, fighting back against the spray, blocking my face with my arms.
“None of that, Young Master,” she chides, scrubbing my hair with potently lavender/chamomile shampoo. “Your hair is beautiful, love. Like the mistress.”
I squirm when she sprays my hair clean, and then trying to climb up the side of the tub in red embarrassment when she goes after me with a long-handled scrub brush, hot tears filling my eyes. There’s rumble deep in my throat, and a feeling at my throbbing teeth, the need to bite, so I do.
“Young Master, if you don’t stop I will put a bit on you, so help me!” she hisses, a squeaking noise at the high points.
Seething, the rumble continues as she drains the water and rinses my skin with the shower head. Bare and exposed, trying to afford myself some dignity, it is a relief when she wraps me in a fluffy black towel big enough to cover me from head to toe, and then helps me out of the tub and back into the chair, shivering, teeth chattering.
After she pushes me back toward the bed, she retrieves another set of black silk pajamas, these with embroidery like roses, and helps me back into them, angling me back on the bed to make it easier to pull my pants up.
When all is said and done, I burrow into the heavy, black comforter, hair still wet, shivering and teeth chattering. I can’t help but yawn, worn and strung out, back facing her in shame, hands shaking like low blood sugar.
“Go back to sleep, love,” she whispers. “You can feed again when you wake.”
But I’m hungry now. But also so very tired, but not ready for sleep.
Softly, she begins to hum a melody, and then sing in some sort of Eastern European language I don’t recognize.
She’s singing me to sleep, rubbing my back, the smell of lavender and vanilla and chamomile sticking to my skin like a veil. The spinning of the room feels like a gentle, if nauseating, rock.
What am I, a child?
***
I’m kneeling next to the bed, clinging to the blankets and sheets like a life raft in a stormy sea, shaking and unable to get my knees under me, gagging and dry-heaving, probably from hunger.
What am I doing? I don’t…remember.
I’m stuck, shivering between floor and bed, until I hear the soft steps of Zia.
“Master!” she gasps, setting aside her tray on the bedside table.
“Mmmh!” I grunt as she seizes me under the arms, hauling me back onto the bed. She is very strong.
“What’s the matter, Young Master?” she breathes, laying me on the bed. “Did you need something?”
I don’t…I don’t remember.
“Want…” I murmur softly, trying to remember. A book? Radio? Television?
“Did you want to see your progenitor?” she asks. “That’s normal. I’ll tell her you asked for her.”
Is that who I was trying to find?
Zia strokes my cheek as she reaches for another delicious bottle of broth and a book, holding the bottle for me in one hand as she reads in French from the book.
“Il était une fois un très riche marchand qui avait six enfants, trois fils et trois filles; étant un homme sensé, il n'épargna aucun coût pour leur éducation, mais leur donna toutes sortes de maîtres. Ses filles étaient extrêmement belles, surtout la plus jeune. Quand elle était petite, tout le monde l'admirait et l'appelait ‘La petite Belle’; de sorte qu'en grandissant, elle s'appelait encore la Belle, ce qui rendait ses sœurs très jalouses…”
She reads until the bottle is drained, but I want more, whimpering in hunger.
“Settle, Master,” she says, grasping my reaching hand in hers to pull it away from the bottle.
My teeth hurt into the jawbone. The eyeteeth in particular feel strange, puffy and dead.
“We’ll keep reading until it’s time for another feeding, love,” Zia says, picking her place out of the book.
Hunger gnaws at my belly, ceaseless and demanding. I don’t remember being so hungry before. It stays at the point of nausea, an endless craving that only the broth can fill, and yet never does.
I pick at the threading on my sheets. My fingertips are sore and a bit red. With a sickening crunch, the nail on my right index finger bends straight upright, revealing bare, tender flesh, blood forming at the nail bed. The fingertip throbs, the exposed nail bed burns at the air.
My heartbeat quickens, my eyes feel hot. This isn’t good, this isn’t normal. Radiation poisoning? What makes fingernails fall out?
Whimpering and sniffling, I hold my hand out to Zia, who is too pale to blanch at the sight, but makes a good approximation, grabbing my hand to examine it.
“Oh, Master!” she gasps. “Wait right here, we’ll fix this up right away!”
She dashes away, leaving me cradling my abused hand, trembling, hot tears running down my cheeks. Something’s happening to me. This isn’t right.
After what could be minutes or hours, Zia returns with a manicure set and a first aid kit. She trims the broken nail to the root with nail clippers, and then pulls at it the rest unpleasantly with a pair of tweezers, until the nail bed is open, empty, and exposed. She cleans the site with alcohol, which smells terrible, and burns like the dickens, sending me squirming, kicking, and whimpering, she having to hold my wrist under her arm with an iron grip to bandage the wound.
“It’s over, love,” she whispers consolingly, rubbing my hand.
“Wh-what?” I ask, eyes wide, trembling. “Why?”
She bites her lip, with long, canine-like teeth, like carved pearls, pricking the pale skin.
“That’s a matter for the mistress, but in the meantime…oh! Yes, something special just for you, young master.”
A tall, pale man dressed in a butler’s uniform straight from Downton Abbey’s neo-goth Halloween revival, steps into the room, holding a plastic water bottle on a tray, and carries it over to Zia before dismissing himself.
It smells heavenly, the sweetest ambrosia of the gods, warm in a way different from the last batch, thick and rich. I wipe my tears away and stop my sniffling as I drink.
December 9, 2023
Proteus-Chapter five
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Human-River gapes as I dig through the hanging clothes.
“Nikola? You’re alive!” she gasps.
I don’t want to tell her about the proper way to kill us, about the one brother that died from a wound to the right spot at the back of the head, but how the rest of my siblings died when a sickness took them after the injury, or they couldn’t eat enough to heal properly.
River has been kind and fair, but I won’t tell her that.
“Protean,” I remind her, checking a shirt for how well the shoulders stretch.
“But you’re dead!”
“Protean.”
“But you weren’t breathing!”
“Protean!”
“He double tapped!”
“PROTEAN!” I shout, turned on her, secondary arms and hunting tendrils raised defensively.
She backs away, hand over her mouth, shaking slightly. My mandibles are open, revealing the sharp, squid-eater’s teeth along my lower palate, my figure hunched, spiked tail lashing the air. Her smell of fear spikes.
A sickishness turns my stomach. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.
I go back to the racks of clothing, holding up a shirt with no sleeves speculative.
“You’re…you’re…you should definitely be wearing pants!” she mumbles, turning sideways and holding a hand at her eyes, like shielding from rain sideways.
I cock my head curiously. I didn’t need clothing until I needed to keep the cold away, or disguise myself, but humans, possibly derived from warmer climates, always seem to. The attendants at home always wore extra layers, namely a thin, white coat that would never insulate heat in any circumstances, white gloves, a blue face-hider and transparent eye-shields.
Diving into one of the boxes, she triumphantly throws an oversized pair of baggy, tough blue pants at me, which have enough room to accommodate my raised heels and clawed feet. The waistline rubs against my tail, fixed with a flick of my secondary claws, tearing open the seam so I can fit.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, tension in her stance.
“Leaving,” I answer simply, sorting through the racks with all four hands, hunting tendrils receded.
“No, I mean…” She shakes her head and sighs, then stares at the exposed flesh of my chest. “Sorry…he…um…he thought he was protecting me.”
Familial protection is common among animals. This doesn’t surprise me, and I can’t rightly be angry about it. How would I have reacted, if I had found one of my smaller siblings, in the company of an armed human?
Still, my ribs hurt and the healing skin across my chest itches.
“Here, let me help,” she states, approaching me from behind, looking up at the racks.
She reaches up to grab at the hooks, then pulls away, a look of vacancy in her eyes, which linger on my spine and shoulders. She stares from the greater spikes on my shoulders and hips, poking through the material in my pants, to the way my secondary arms connect seamlessly to my shoulders. A warm, soft-skinned hand is placed against the thicknesses where my tendrils sleep, almost sore from unfamiliarity with touch.
“Diamondback,” she mumbles softly, a string of syllables I can’t discern.
I purr softly and she seems to snap back to herself.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just…” She makes a grunting noise in the back of her throat, and takes a hook from the rack and shows it to me, made from a thinner version of the material in my pants, with buttons down the front.
“I think you can get…one set through here, and then…”
I take the shirt from her and put it on, rotating my secondary arms beneath my primaries. I can’t button it properly like this, and it’s a bit tight with my secondaries folded against my back, but it will do.
“That works, too,” she nods, then goes back to her searching. “A hoodie? If you don’t need your extra arms…all the good stuff has been passed out already…”
Eventually she manages to gather enough to hide my extra arms and numerous spikes (likely a leftover from the tree runners), good enough to conceal my form but hardly practical for survival.
“I think we can get you to my wagon, and then you can lay low there until nightfall,” she explains, pulling the hood of a greenish intermediary between shirt and coat over my horns. Her eyes linger on my mandibles, twitching with nervousness rhythmically against my lower palate.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her consolingly, trying not to spook her, since humans frighten easily.
“It’s okay,” she replies evenly, pulling a cloth over my snout and then tightening a string beneath my chin to hold everything in place. “You’re in an unfamiliar place and you’re hurt. It’s okay to be afraid.”
I tilt my head in confusion, but she’s already checking outside the door.
“Alright, follow me, stay close, and don’t speak to anyone,” she orders, waving for me to follow.
It’s a painstaking crawl through the herd to get to her shelter. Humans don’t climb or leap, so direct paths are often beyond them, made all the more winding because she is deliberately avoiding her pack.
I jump, my hunting tendrils straining against the disguise, when someone shouts across the thoroughfare at us.
“You two better get inside! There’s a protean loose!”
“Thanks! We’re on it!” human-River smiles, her hand raised high as some sort of signal.
“You did good,” she whispers soothingly, patting my left hand, her eyes flickering over where my tendrils bulged through the fabric. I seem to have popped some seams.
Silently, I keep following her, until we reach a snubbed, yellow vehicle with black stripes and exposed rust. The front end has been hollowed out and replaced with a bench, and the windows along the front and sides covered.
She ushers me inside, into the shadows. This place smells like her, her space, her den. There isn’t much room, but it feels cozy, all she needs contained inside this little room.
“Over here,” she beckons, squeezing past me. At the back, there is a raised platform, layered with blankets and cushions, and she crawls over it to pull a shade over the window, balanced on her knees, her coat along her form.
“You can rest here,” she explains, hands over her head on a handle at the ceiling. “Keep the shutters closed and no one should see you.”
I climb into the nest that smells like her, a bit too high for my comfort, but soft and peaceful, like the incubator from the time before the tanks.
“I’m going to go get you some food,” she continues, pulling on the handle, revealing a metal shutter that encloses the nest. “Don’t open the doors or windows, don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
When she’s sure I’m in place, she pulls the shutter down, sending me into deeper shadows. My chest itches, sore under the knitting skin, and my ribs hurt. My tail flops against the footwall, and I am surprisingly at peace.
In the heart of a herd of feral humans.
My whole body tenses, but I close my eyes and take a deep breath, thinking of the smell of trees and fresh blood and distant tree runners. Until nightfall, patience.
***
The shutter opens, and my tendrils are at the neck of something warm that moves in the shadows.
“It’s me, Niko,” human-River pleads, her voice cutting through my dreams.
I pull my tendrils apologetically back inside my disguise. They came out of my sleeves, so didn’t do too much damage, which would be a disappointment, since River was so kind to offer.
I smell something warm, organic, pleasing but unfamiliar. River rubs at her neck, and I hope she doesn’t bruise.
“Wow, jumpy,” she muses, sitting a bowl of…something in front of me.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her, regretfully, feeling…grimy.
Ignoring me, she turns to the bowl. “Venison stew. It’s not the best…sorry about that.”
I pick up the bowl experimentally, finding it warm to the touch, but not alive-warm. It’s full of a brownish fluid that isn’t blood, but smells organic and meaty, with chunks of brown, discs of orange, and parabolas of green. My six nostrils take in the steam, which is pleasant enough, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.
“What’s wrong?” River asks, sounding alarmed.
I don’t have the words to answer, but I hold up the bowl and do my best with, “Warm?”
“It’s…stew. Have you never had stew before?”
I look at her blankly.
“Um…it’s venison—deer meat—put in a pot with water and vegetables, then cooked over a fire.”
I tilt my head to one side.
“It’s good. Sort of. Try it.”
She hands me a scoop-shaped utensil, expecting me to do something with it, and then watches me stare at the bowl, which I sniff again, before sticking the four tubes of my tongue into the fluid and take a hesitant sip.
It’s…salty. It tastes like meat, but…not. There’s a bitterness that might come from exposure to fire, but a spiciness that doesn’t come naturally to animal muscle, and some things that might be plants.
River looks a little pale, staring at my tongue with wide eyes and twisted mouth.
I retract my tongue back into my mouth and wipe my snout with the back of my sleeve.
“Is scary?” I ask cautiously, having trouble looking her in the eye.
“C-can I see it?” she asks quietly.
Perplexed, I open my mouth wide, opening my mandibles and dropping my lower palate, then stick out my prehensile tongue, split four ways at the end, each with a circular, tooth-lined opening, good for sucking blood.
“It’s like you have a lamprey hydra living in your mouth,” she blurts, making a noise that might have been a giggle.
“Can you taste with it? Them?”
“Taste,” I repeat, not knowing the word.
I pull my tongue back in, putting the bowl aside, still holding the metal scoop, and covering my snout with cloths. Humans are skittish and jumpy, and it wouldn’t do to frighten her in an enclosed space.
“Don’t like it?” she asks, looking down at the bowl. “I don’t blame you. Wilma’s…not a good cook.”
Self-consciously, I hold the back of my hand over my snout, still holding the scoop.
“Well, pull up your shirt, let me get a look at your chest,” she sighs, setting a white box (why all the boxes?) onto the nest and opening it up.
Obediently, I pull the fabric up over my chest and to just under my collarbone, exposing the scarred, sensitive flesh, thin and raw under newly-forming skin.
“You look like you just skinned your knee instead of got shot at point-blank,” River muses, rubbing something synthetic and sticky onto the tender skin, making me wince. “It might sting a little, but this’ll help prevent infection and scarring.”
When she’s done, she puts the little white tube back in the box, and waves at me to put my disguise back down.
“And you just…shake it off?” she asks. “Just get back up again after a few hours?”
“Protean,” I remind her amiably, looking at the bowl and remembering how hungry I am.
“Hmm, proteans,” she smiles. “Feared throughout the land, shapeshifting abominations that can call lightning from the sky, unafraid of death, and masters of Go Fish.”
My mandibles flex slightly, confused at her unfamiliar words.
“Thank you…um…I mean…my brother…” she mumbles. “If I was minding my own business playing cards, and someone I didn’t know put a hole in my chest and blew out my living room window, I’d be out for blood. So, um…thanks for not…hunting him.”
I tilt my head again, wishing I knew more about how humans speak. The ones at home rarely spoke directly to us, and it was Bismarck that was the best and watching and listening. This is one of very few times I’ve wished I was more like my brother, who always seemed to know what the humans were saying or doing.
I glance again at the bowl, feeling the emptiness inside. I’ve had to regrow a lot of flesh and bone, so hunger is a given, but if River is put off my by mouth and tongue, then I wouldn’t want to scare her in her den. A frightened human is unpredictable.
“I think I promised you English lessons,” she smiles, taking a seat on a tall box across from me. “Um…I don’t know where to start. I guess I could read to you?”
Before I can come up with a sufficient answer, there is a knock on the entrance. Before my tendrils can even respond, River has pushed me back into the nest, pulling down the shutter.
“In a minute!” she calls, tugging hard where the shutter won’t budge.
I hear the entry grind open, and the heavy footsteps of a male human.
“Get your gun and go get to the mess,” the familiar voice of the older one that came for River barks.
River sighs. “Is it the protean again? I’m telling you, if Mitch didn’t steal the carcass, the poor thing probably wandered off to die.”
“Ain’t the protean,” he growls. “We’re under attack.”
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Human-River gapes as I dig through the hanging clothes.
“Nikola? You’re alive!” she gasps.
I don’t want to tell her about the proper way to kill us, about the one brother that died from a wound to the right spot at the back of the head, but how the rest of my siblings died when a sickness took them after the injury, or they couldn’t eat enough to heal properly.
River has been kind and fair, but I won’t tell her that.
“Protean,” I remind her, checking a shirt for how well the shoulders stretch.
“But you’re dead!”
“Protean.”
“But you weren’t breathing!”
“Protean!”
“He double tapped!”
“PROTEAN!” I shout, turned on her, secondary arms and hunting tendrils raised defensively.
She backs away, hand over her mouth, shaking slightly. My mandibles are open, revealing the sharp, squid-eater’s teeth along my lower palate, my figure hunched, spiked tail lashing the air. Her smell of fear spikes.
A sickishness turns my stomach. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.
I go back to the racks of clothing, holding up a shirt with no sleeves speculative.
“You’re…you’re…you should definitely be wearing pants!” she mumbles, turning sideways and holding a hand at her eyes, like shielding from rain sideways.
I cock my head curiously. I didn’t need clothing until I needed to keep the cold away, or disguise myself, but humans, possibly derived from warmer climates, always seem to. The attendants at home always wore extra layers, namely a thin, white coat that would never insulate heat in any circumstances, white gloves, a blue face-hider and transparent eye-shields.
Diving into one of the boxes, she triumphantly throws an oversized pair of baggy, tough blue pants at me, which have enough room to accommodate my raised heels and clawed feet. The waistline rubs against my tail, fixed with a flick of my secondary claws, tearing open the seam so I can fit.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, tension in her stance.
“Leaving,” I answer simply, sorting through the racks with all four hands, hunting tendrils receded.
“No, I mean…” She shakes her head and sighs, then stares at the exposed flesh of my chest. “Sorry…he…um…he thought he was protecting me.”
Familial protection is common among animals. This doesn’t surprise me, and I can’t rightly be angry about it. How would I have reacted, if I had found one of my smaller siblings, in the company of an armed human?
Still, my ribs hurt and the healing skin across my chest itches.
“Here, let me help,” she states, approaching me from behind, looking up at the racks.
She reaches up to grab at the hooks, then pulls away, a look of vacancy in her eyes, which linger on my spine and shoulders. She stares from the greater spikes on my shoulders and hips, poking through the material in my pants, to the way my secondary arms connect seamlessly to my shoulders. A warm, soft-skinned hand is placed against the thicknesses where my tendrils sleep, almost sore from unfamiliarity with touch.
“Diamondback,” she mumbles softly, a string of syllables I can’t discern.
I purr softly and she seems to snap back to herself.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just…” She makes a grunting noise in the back of her throat, and takes a hook from the rack and shows it to me, made from a thinner version of the material in my pants, with buttons down the front.
“I think you can get…one set through here, and then…”
I take the shirt from her and put it on, rotating my secondary arms beneath my primaries. I can’t button it properly like this, and it’s a bit tight with my secondaries folded against my back, but it will do.
“That works, too,” she nods, then goes back to her searching. “A hoodie? If you don’t need your extra arms…all the good stuff has been passed out already…”
Eventually she manages to gather enough to hide my extra arms and numerous spikes (likely a leftover from the tree runners), good enough to conceal my form but hardly practical for survival.
“I think we can get you to my wagon, and then you can lay low there until nightfall,” she explains, pulling the hood of a greenish intermediary between shirt and coat over my horns. Her eyes linger on my mandibles, twitching with nervousness rhythmically against my lower palate.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her consolingly, trying not to spook her, since humans frighten easily.
“It’s okay,” she replies evenly, pulling a cloth over my snout and then tightening a string beneath my chin to hold everything in place. “You’re in an unfamiliar place and you’re hurt. It’s okay to be afraid.”
I tilt my head in confusion, but she’s already checking outside the door.
“Alright, follow me, stay close, and don’t speak to anyone,” she orders, waving for me to follow.
It’s a painstaking crawl through the herd to get to her shelter. Humans don’t climb or leap, so direct paths are often beyond them, made all the more winding because she is deliberately avoiding her pack.
I jump, my hunting tendrils straining against the disguise, when someone shouts across the thoroughfare at us.
“You two better get inside! There’s a protean loose!”
“Thanks! We’re on it!” human-River smiles, her hand raised high as some sort of signal.
“You did good,” she whispers soothingly, patting my left hand, her eyes flickering over where my tendrils bulged through the fabric. I seem to have popped some seams.
Silently, I keep following her, until we reach a snubbed, yellow vehicle with black stripes and exposed rust. The front end has been hollowed out and replaced with a bench, and the windows along the front and sides covered.
She ushers me inside, into the shadows. This place smells like her, her space, her den. There isn’t much room, but it feels cozy, all she needs contained inside this little room.
“Over here,” she beckons, squeezing past me. At the back, there is a raised platform, layered with blankets and cushions, and she crawls over it to pull a shade over the window, balanced on her knees, her coat along her form.
“You can rest here,” she explains, hands over her head on a handle at the ceiling. “Keep the shutters closed and no one should see you.”
I climb into the nest that smells like her, a bit too high for my comfort, but soft and peaceful, like the incubator from the time before the tanks.
“I’m going to go get you some food,” she continues, pulling on the handle, revealing a metal shutter that encloses the nest. “Don’t open the doors or windows, don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
When she’s sure I’m in place, she pulls the shutter down, sending me into deeper shadows. My chest itches, sore under the knitting skin, and my ribs hurt. My tail flops against the footwall, and I am surprisingly at peace.
In the heart of a herd of feral humans.
My whole body tenses, but I close my eyes and take a deep breath, thinking of the smell of trees and fresh blood and distant tree runners. Until nightfall, patience.
***
The shutter opens, and my tendrils are at the neck of something warm that moves in the shadows.
“It’s me, Niko,” human-River pleads, her voice cutting through my dreams.
I pull my tendrils apologetically back inside my disguise. They came out of my sleeves, so didn’t do too much damage, which would be a disappointment, since River was so kind to offer.
I smell something warm, organic, pleasing but unfamiliar. River rubs at her neck, and I hope she doesn’t bruise.
“Wow, jumpy,” she muses, sitting a bowl of…something in front of me.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her, regretfully, feeling…grimy.
Ignoring me, she turns to the bowl. “Venison stew. It’s not the best…sorry about that.”
I pick up the bowl experimentally, finding it warm to the touch, but not alive-warm. It’s full of a brownish fluid that isn’t blood, but smells organic and meaty, with chunks of brown, discs of orange, and parabolas of green. My six nostrils take in the steam, which is pleasant enough, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.
“What’s wrong?” River asks, sounding alarmed.
I don’t have the words to answer, but I hold up the bowl and do my best with, “Warm?”
“It’s…stew. Have you never had stew before?”
I look at her blankly.
“Um…it’s venison—deer meat—put in a pot with water and vegetables, then cooked over a fire.”
I tilt my head to one side.
“It’s good. Sort of. Try it.”
She hands me a scoop-shaped utensil, expecting me to do something with it, and then watches me stare at the bowl, which I sniff again, before sticking the four tubes of my tongue into the fluid and take a hesitant sip.
It’s…salty. It tastes like meat, but…not. There’s a bitterness that might come from exposure to fire, but a spiciness that doesn’t come naturally to animal muscle, and some things that might be plants.
River looks a little pale, staring at my tongue with wide eyes and twisted mouth.
I retract my tongue back into my mouth and wipe my snout with the back of my sleeve.
“Is scary?” I ask cautiously, having trouble looking her in the eye.
“C-can I see it?” she asks quietly.
Perplexed, I open my mouth wide, opening my mandibles and dropping my lower palate, then stick out my prehensile tongue, split four ways at the end, each with a circular, tooth-lined opening, good for sucking blood.
“It’s like you have a lamprey hydra living in your mouth,” she blurts, making a noise that might have been a giggle.
“Can you taste with it? Them?”
“Taste,” I repeat, not knowing the word.
I pull my tongue back in, putting the bowl aside, still holding the metal scoop, and covering my snout with cloths. Humans are skittish and jumpy, and it wouldn’t do to frighten her in an enclosed space.
“Don’t like it?” she asks, looking down at the bowl. “I don’t blame you. Wilma’s…not a good cook.”
Self-consciously, I hold the back of my hand over my snout, still holding the scoop.
“Well, pull up your shirt, let me get a look at your chest,” she sighs, setting a white box (why all the boxes?) onto the nest and opening it up.
Obediently, I pull the fabric up over my chest and to just under my collarbone, exposing the scarred, sensitive flesh, thin and raw under newly-forming skin.
“You look like you just skinned your knee instead of got shot at point-blank,” River muses, rubbing something synthetic and sticky onto the tender skin, making me wince. “It might sting a little, but this’ll help prevent infection and scarring.”
When she’s done, she puts the little white tube back in the box, and waves at me to put my disguise back down.
“And you just…shake it off?” she asks. “Just get back up again after a few hours?”
“Protean,” I remind her amiably, looking at the bowl and remembering how hungry I am.
“Hmm, proteans,” she smiles. “Feared throughout the land, shapeshifting abominations that can call lightning from the sky, unafraid of death, and masters of Go Fish.”
My mandibles flex slightly, confused at her unfamiliar words.
“Thank you…um…I mean…my brother…” she mumbles. “If I was minding my own business playing cards, and someone I didn’t know put a hole in my chest and blew out my living room window, I’d be out for blood. So, um…thanks for not…hunting him.”
I tilt my head again, wishing I knew more about how humans speak. The ones at home rarely spoke directly to us, and it was Bismarck that was the best and watching and listening. This is one of very few times I’ve wished I was more like my brother, who always seemed to know what the humans were saying or doing.
I glance again at the bowl, feeling the emptiness inside. I’ve had to regrow a lot of flesh and bone, so hunger is a given, but if River is put off my by mouth and tongue, then I wouldn’t want to scare her in her den. A frightened human is unpredictable.
“I think I promised you English lessons,” she smiles, taking a seat on a tall box across from me. “Um…I don’t know where to start. I guess I could read to you?”
Before I can come up with a sufficient answer, there is a knock on the entrance. Before my tendrils can even respond, River has pushed me back into the nest, pulling down the shutter.
“In a minute!” she calls, tugging hard where the shutter won’t budge.
I hear the entry grind open, and the heavy footsteps of a male human.
“Get your gun and go get to the mess,” the familiar voice of the older one that came for River barks.
River sighs. “Is it the protean again? I’m telling you, if Mitch didn’t steal the carcass, the poor thing probably wandered off to die.”
“Ain’t the protean,” he growls. “We’re under attack.”
November 28, 2023
Proteus-Chapter four
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to put my ribs back together. Learning to live and hunt on land permanently is a difficult task, but the feeling, while familiar, is no less unpleasant.
The neckbones are new, though. I don’t believe I’ve ever had to put those back in alignment.
“He was harmless. We spent the afternoon playing Go Fish!”
“They’re infiltrators, River. That’s what they do. You were being manipulated.”
“No, Dad, when his hood fell off, he—”
“Enough! You’ve had a rough night, you’re tired, and you need to eat something other than canned sausages. Go get some stew, then lie down in your cabin, and you’ll feel better.”
“He was my friend!”
“I’ll make a nice pair of waterproof boots for you to remember it by. Now go.”
I don’t think I want to be boots, but sitting upright now seems unwise. I should wait until there are fewer humans nearby. Since they’re hostile, I feel like I should take River with me when I go, so they don’t hurt her.
The cloth lying over me flies away. I sense a presence nearby, smelling of sweat and skin oil and humanity.
“Damn. Did you bag this yourself?”
“No,” human-River sighs. “Jason did it.”
I hazard to discreetly open my eyes and look through the slats in the box (again, boxes) I’m in, and watch the humans as I am brought away on wheels. It is fascinating, seeing how humans live in their natural environment. They socialize, young ones play, they attend to their clothing in metal buckets.
Humans are social animals, moving in herds, the most basal of which is a family unit consisting of a male, a female, and their offspring. Like any animal, humans need food, water, and familial bonds. Their little melodramas play out before me, mated pairs arguing, young squabbling, but there is also joy, sounds of laughter, smiles of delight, words off affection and instruction.
There is also a kind of stoic fear, given by the few who notice the box, and my still form inside.
“Jason got a protean?” some ask incredulously, staring gape-mouthed.
I hold as still as possible, smelling humans, unfamiliar animals, and a warm smell I can’t identify. I take in what I can from the box, biding my time.
Eventually, I am taken to a shady spot. The four-legged animal at the front of the box is unhooked and lead away. The human that spoke to River comes back, my eyes closed as soon as I sense its approach.
“They said you took a shotgun to the chest,” it muses thoughtfully. “But you don’t look dead at all. Means your hide’s in good condition.”
I am quiet and still as the human paces around the box, mumbling to itself. It rummages through things, making lots of noise. This part of the territory smells like fresh meat and blood, which is enough to make me hungry.
“Should be enough for a nice pair of boots…”
I’m not unfamiliar with the skinning of animals. My own face-covering is made from the flayed hide of one of the tree runners. I do not, however, wish to be a pair of boots, so as soon as the human sounds sufficiently far away and distracted, I use my secondary arms, freed from the confines of my coat, to heave myself upward and slip under the box, clinging to its underbelly.
The humans footsteps approach. I see them, upside-down, pacing the wet grass, standing near the box, silently and still. It shouts several words I don’t know, and then runs at breakneck pace somewhere else.
From here, I don’t know what to do. It’s only a matter of time until someone looks under here, but I don’t know the territory well enough to navigate through it. I need somewhere to run, to hide.
Glancing around under the box for other feet, I lower myself onto my secondary arms, and then roll onto my belly taking another survey. The place they have put me is another box, one soft and made of cloth, casting shadow over hanging pelts and draining animal corpses.
I lick my fangs. Having to regrow bone always makes me hungry.
Unfortunately, I seem to be in the middle of the den. I’m going to have to bypass a lot of humans if I’m going to get out of here not strapped to someone’s feet.
One of my other brothers, who stayed with Bismarck, could change the color and texture of his skin. That would be useful right about now. As it is, I’m a sub-human-sized stormcloud creeping from under the box into the cloth box, hardly discreet.
I resist my hunger, to keep moving and not be distracted by the hanging bodies, the delicious blood draining away into buckets. Why humans would do this, I’m not sure. Serve the blood as a beverage, perhaps?
The tubes of my tongue scrape the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty, too.
I creep behind and under things, avoiding the touch of the light and staying to the shadows. My mottled gray coloring works best in the dark, which makes me miss the rain and the cloud cover. Fortunately, the humans are busy with their own lives and probably aren’t expecting me to be in the heart of their territory.
Crouched behind a stack of red and white, plastic boxes, I pause to take a breath. I really don’t want to have to fight my way out of here.
A murmur is beginning to move among the adults. A smell of fear is starting to permeate the air. The females are grabbing young and taking them into the boxes, the males are taking up weapons.
They know.
I need a place to go, where they won’t look until nightfall. But how am I supposed to know how these things think?
If the skittishness wasn’t beginning to permeate the herd, this might be fascinating. I have never seen so many humans, packed so tightly. I would love to observe them, the way they live, their habits and behaviors. Unfortunately, humans are even more dangerous in large groups, and any animal protecting young is violently defensive.
Smelling for the places with the fewest human smells, I sneak around as best I can, under boxes, on my belly, behind structures. I pause behind a shelter, scratching uncomfortably at the scabby scarring the weapon left behind, still raw and sore.
A small noise draws my attention. Something small stands little more than a grasp away, a juvenile, barely more than an infant, staring wide-eyed from beneath a mop of golden hair, cropped at the ears.
I don’t know how to speak to it, if it speaks. I don’t know how to beg for silence, and I’m reminded of the small, spotted tree runner with their spikeless mothers I didn’t want to hunt.
The little creature reaches a small hand, pointing a single outstretched finger at me, mouth agape.
I close my eyes and take a breath. The little thing is so vulnerable, all soft skin and dull teeth and no claws, not even any venom glands or electrocytes to protect it. Animals with young so vulnerable should not leave them to wander alone.
I run, bolting on all six limbs, trying to disappear into the next obstacle, the little creature standing still behind me, watching. Heedless of the danger, I throw myself within the nearest box, which smells too much of human sweat and musk than I’d like, but I’m running out of options.
As luck would have it, despite the thick smell of human, the box is empty. It’s full of cloth, clothing and body coverings, dangling from hooks and packed in more boxes and plastic.
This will help. This will be a big help.
At a distance, I pass well enough. Up close, they might notice the knots in my shoulders from my secondary arms, the protruding bumps from my spikes. River didn’t seem to expect me to be a protean, which is a good trait for me to exploit, if I can. Camouflage, the way the corals looked like brightly-colored rocks, the way the spots on the small tree runners blended them into the trees.
With luck, I can use these to walk right out of the den. As long as I don’t get too close to them, I should be able to pass unnoticed. I’ll have to migrate again, leave my pretty things and bone fragments and hides behind, but I’ve started out with less before.
I start digging through the soft fabrics, looking for things that fit or can adapt. Humans have only four limbs and flat feet, which makes it difficult to use their clothing without some creative modification. The tough, blue material is nice because it’s sturdy, but it’s also difficult to tear, making it equally suitable to cover my spikes as it is difficult to accommodate my ankles. Shoes are probably out of the question.
There is a noise at the door, a soft clicking. Someone is approaching.
I dive behind the racks of clothing, crouching behind boxes. The figure moves about, carrying a large box, which it sets down on another stack of boxes, and begins drawing out white, wide-based hooks and spearing torso coverings onto them.
I wait, watching patiently. This could take awhile, and the longer they’re in here, the more likely they are to notice. There isn’t enough space for me to slink back to the door unseen. I’m going to have to make a choice here.
With its back to me, I step over the boxes I’m behind, creeping like the eight-legged string dancers, approaching the person. My primary hands cover the mouth, leaving the nose free for breathing, my secondary around the waist. Hunting tendrils restrain the arms and legs at the wrists and ankles.
I smell fear, and I’m reminded of my hunger. The wounds in my chest are sensitive and burn slightly against the fabric of the human’s coat, reminding me why I’m hungry despite a good kill not so long ago.
The human’s feet are above the ground, shoes dangling. It kicks and struggles, but can’t move much, held in place by me. It squeaks and whimpers, unintelligible noises dying inside the mouth.
A drill from a tendril to the back of the skull, maybe a good twist to the neck. It won’t suffer, and it won’t make enough noise to attract any more.
The white spots and stripes along my sides begin to pulse with light, an affect of the shadows, but also a remnant of ancient hunting tactics that don’t know I live on land now.
The six slit nostrils at the end of my snout open, taking in the smell, of fear, of sweat, of recent rain and soil and open air and thick forests.
My tendrils slacken, the tight grip around the waist easing up. I lean in close, behind the ear, and whisper one of the very few human words I know.
“River?”
Chapter five
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to put my ribs back together. Learning to live and hunt on land permanently is a difficult task, but the feeling, while familiar, is no less unpleasant.
The neckbones are new, though. I don’t believe I’ve ever had to put those back in alignment.
“He was harmless. We spent the afternoon playing Go Fish!”
“They’re infiltrators, River. That’s what they do. You were being manipulated.”
“No, Dad, when his hood fell off, he—”
“Enough! You’ve had a rough night, you’re tired, and you need to eat something other than canned sausages. Go get some stew, then lie down in your cabin, and you’ll feel better.”
“He was my friend!”
“I’ll make a nice pair of waterproof boots for you to remember it by. Now go.”
I don’t think I want to be boots, but sitting upright now seems unwise. I should wait until there are fewer humans nearby. Since they’re hostile, I feel like I should take River with me when I go, so they don’t hurt her.
The cloth lying over me flies away. I sense a presence nearby, smelling of sweat and skin oil and humanity.
“Damn. Did you bag this yourself?”
“No,” human-River sighs. “Jason did it.”
I hazard to discreetly open my eyes and look through the slats in the box (again, boxes) I’m in, and watch the humans as I am brought away on wheels. It is fascinating, seeing how humans live in their natural environment. They socialize, young ones play, they attend to their clothing in metal buckets.
Humans are social animals, moving in herds, the most basal of which is a family unit consisting of a male, a female, and their offspring. Like any animal, humans need food, water, and familial bonds. Their little melodramas play out before me, mated pairs arguing, young squabbling, but there is also joy, sounds of laughter, smiles of delight, words off affection and instruction.
There is also a kind of stoic fear, given by the few who notice the box, and my still form inside.
“Jason got a protean?” some ask incredulously, staring gape-mouthed.
I hold as still as possible, smelling humans, unfamiliar animals, and a warm smell I can’t identify. I take in what I can from the box, biding my time.
Eventually, I am taken to a shady spot. The four-legged animal at the front of the box is unhooked and lead away. The human that spoke to River comes back, my eyes closed as soon as I sense its approach.
“They said you took a shotgun to the chest,” it muses thoughtfully. “But you don’t look dead at all. Means your hide’s in good condition.”
I am quiet and still as the human paces around the box, mumbling to itself. It rummages through things, making lots of noise. This part of the territory smells like fresh meat and blood, which is enough to make me hungry.
“Should be enough for a nice pair of boots…”
I’m not unfamiliar with the skinning of animals. My own face-covering is made from the flayed hide of one of the tree runners. I do not, however, wish to be a pair of boots, so as soon as the human sounds sufficiently far away and distracted, I use my secondary arms, freed from the confines of my coat, to heave myself upward and slip under the box, clinging to its underbelly.
The humans footsteps approach. I see them, upside-down, pacing the wet grass, standing near the box, silently and still. It shouts several words I don’t know, and then runs at breakneck pace somewhere else.
From here, I don’t know what to do. It’s only a matter of time until someone looks under here, but I don’t know the territory well enough to navigate through it. I need somewhere to run, to hide.
Glancing around under the box for other feet, I lower myself onto my secondary arms, and then roll onto my belly taking another survey. The place they have put me is another box, one soft and made of cloth, casting shadow over hanging pelts and draining animal corpses.
I lick my fangs. Having to regrow bone always makes me hungry.
Unfortunately, I seem to be in the middle of the den. I’m going to have to bypass a lot of humans if I’m going to get out of here not strapped to someone’s feet.
One of my other brothers, who stayed with Bismarck, could change the color and texture of his skin. That would be useful right about now. As it is, I’m a sub-human-sized stormcloud creeping from under the box into the cloth box, hardly discreet.
I resist my hunger, to keep moving and not be distracted by the hanging bodies, the delicious blood draining away into buckets. Why humans would do this, I’m not sure. Serve the blood as a beverage, perhaps?
The tubes of my tongue scrape the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty, too.
I creep behind and under things, avoiding the touch of the light and staying to the shadows. My mottled gray coloring works best in the dark, which makes me miss the rain and the cloud cover. Fortunately, the humans are busy with their own lives and probably aren’t expecting me to be in the heart of their territory.
Crouched behind a stack of red and white, plastic boxes, I pause to take a breath. I really don’t want to have to fight my way out of here.
A murmur is beginning to move among the adults. A smell of fear is starting to permeate the air. The females are grabbing young and taking them into the boxes, the males are taking up weapons.
They know.
I need a place to go, where they won’t look until nightfall. But how am I supposed to know how these things think?
If the skittishness wasn’t beginning to permeate the herd, this might be fascinating. I have never seen so many humans, packed so tightly. I would love to observe them, the way they live, their habits and behaviors. Unfortunately, humans are even more dangerous in large groups, and any animal protecting young is violently defensive.
Smelling for the places with the fewest human smells, I sneak around as best I can, under boxes, on my belly, behind structures. I pause behind a shelter, scratching uncomfortably at the scabby scarring the weapon left behind, still raw and sore.
A small noise draws my attention. Something small stands little more than a grasp away, a juvenile, barely more than an infant, staring wide-eyed from beneath a mop of golden hair, cropped at the ears.
I don’t know how to speak to it, if it speaks. I don’t know how to beg for silence, and I’m reminded of the small, spotted tree runner with their spikeless mothers I didn’t want to hunt.
The little creature reaches a small hand, pointing a single outstretched finger at me, mouth agape.
I close my eyes and take a breath. The little thing is so vulnerable, all soft skin and dull teeth and no claws, not even any venom glands or electrocytes to protect it. Animals with young so vulnerable should not leave them to wander alone.
I run, bolting on all six limbs, trying to disappear into the next obstacle, the little creature standing still behind me, watching. Heedless of the danger, I throw myself within the nearest box, which smells too much of human sweat and musk than I’d like, but I’m running out of options.
As luck would have it, despite the thick smell of human, the box is empty. It’s full of cloth, clothing and body coverings, dangling from hooks and packed in more boxes and plastic.
This will help. This will be a big help.
At a distance, I pass well enough. Up close, they might notice the knots in my shoulders from my secondary arms, the protruding bumps from my spikes. River didn’t seem to expect me to be a protean, which is a good trait for me to exploit, if I can. Camouflage, the way the corals looked like brightly-colored rocks, the way the spots on the small tree runners blended them into the trees.
With luck, I can use these to walk right out of the den. As long as I don’t get too close to them, I should be able to pass unnoticed. I’ll have to migrate again, leave my pretty things and bone fragments and hides behind, but I’ve started out with less before.
I start digging through the soft fabrics, looking for things that fit or can adapt. Humans have only four limbs and flat feet, which makes it difficult to use their clothing without some creative modification. The tough, blue material is nice because it’s sturdy, but it’s also difficult to tear, making it equally suitable to cover my spikes as it is difficult to accommodate my ankles. Shoes are probably out of the question.
There is a noise at the door, a soft clicking. Someone is approaching.
I dive behind the racks of clothing, crouching behind boxes. The figure moves about, carrying a large box, which it sets down on another stack of boxes, and begins drawing out white, wide-based hooks and spearing torso coverings onto them.
I wait, watching patiently. This could take awhile, and the longer they’re in here, the more likely they are to notice. There isn’t enough space for me to slink back to the door unseen. I’m going to have to make a choice here.
With its back to me, I step over the boxes I’m behind, creeping like the eight-legged string dancers, approaching the person. My primary hands cover the mouth, leaving the nose free for breathing, my secondary around the waist. Hunting tendrils restrain the arms and legs at the wrists and ankles.
I smell fear, and I’m reminded of my hunger. The wounds in my chest are sensitive and burn slightly against the fabric of the human’s coat, reminding me why I’m hungry despite a good kill not so long ago.
The human’s feet are above the ground, shoes dangling. It kicks and struggles, but can’t move much, held in place by me. It squeaks and whimpers, unintelligible noises dying inside the mouth.
A drill from a tendril to the back of the skull, maybe a good twist to the neck. It won’t suffer, and it won’t make enough noise to attract any more.
The white spots and stripes along my sides begin to pulse with light, an affect of the shadows, but also a remnant of ancient hunting tactics that don’t know I live on land now.
The six slit nostrils at the end of my snout open, taking in the smell, of fear, of sweat, of recent rain and soil and open air and thick forests.
My tendrils slacken, the tight grip around the waist easing up. I lean in close, behind the ear, and whisper one of the very few human words I know.
“River?”
Chapter five
November 21, 2023
Proteus-Chapter three
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Knock knock knock.
The noise against the door makes me jump, curled inside of the big bowl in the darkened room, among my soft blankets and threadbare pillows.
“I think you’re a bit confused,” the human says cautiously. “You’re the bloodthirsty monster, I’m the lone damsel in distress. I should be hiding from you.”
Knees at my chin, I stay quiet, hoping it will leave, like it should have done a long time ago.
I don’t want any trouble. I just want it to leave. And what is “damsel” supposed to mean?
It knocks again.
“Go,” I growl. “Go home caravan, leave potean-me be.”
“You do talk! Not just mimic!” the human shrieks in surprise.
I petulantly mimic the noise of the blast that killed my sister, and her death cries and gurgling. The human seems to take a step back.
“Look, if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it when I doze off. Now come out so I don’t feel like I’ve chased you away in your own home.”
I make the noises again.
“You can’t be serious,” the human growls dryly. “You’re the shapeshifting, electricity-using monstrosity, and you’re afraid I’ll hurt you? That’s not how…that’s not how any of this works!”
“Human-River monstrosity!” I growl. “Protean-me just be alone. Go.”
“Do you have any idea how absurd this is? You could have fried my eyes out, eaten me whole, worn my face back to my caravan and eaten them, too, and you’ve locked yourself in a bathroom so I won’t hurt you?”
I’m beginning to wonder just how much human-River actually knows about us.
“Look, um…” it murmurs, light breaking beneath the doorframe. “I just…don’t want to be afraid anymore…and…I don’t think you do either…so…come out and let me teach you Go Fish?”
I sit quietly for a few seconds, contemplating the wisdom of its words. The first humans we met when we were turned out of our home attacked us first. That set a precedent that continued until there was only me. I suppose it…might be nice to have one human that doesn’t want to kill me.
I unfold myself from the bowl and unlock the door, sliding it open just a crack.
“Go Fish?” I ask quietly.
***
“You win!” human-River exclaims as I put the last of my cards aside.
“I win!” I repeat, the tip of my tail wagging with excitement.
When I catch her staring at it, I self-consciously slam the hem of my coat over it, and then draw it inside, along my back.
“What do you look like?” human-River asks, then flushes suddenly, like she shouldn’t have asked that. “I’m sorry…I mean…proteans all look different, so…I just…”
I draw back into myself again, knees at my chest, held tight by my arms.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to!” human-River says quickly, sitting up on her knees and reaching out with her hand. “I’m just curious, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, though.”
“Uncomfortable, though,” I reply softly, tugging at the lapels of my coat.
Not even my siblings have seen me since I’ve been on my own. I’ve changed a lot, and humans tend react…poorly.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “Here, let’s play something else…” Her eyes gaze around the room.
I raise a finger, suddenly with an idea, and take off my gloves, revealing stormy-striped and spotted skin, not quite scaled, and long, hooked claws. I hold up my palms and beckon her close.
“Wow,” she blurts, looking at my claws.
I drop my hands, looking at the formidable hooks, and a scant amount of webbing leftover from my days in a tank. As I move to make a motion to put my gloves again, she intervenes.
“No—no, go on, what were you going to show me?” she asks.
Reinvigorated I hold up my hands, and beckon her to do the same. As she comes closer, my tail wags from under the hem of my gray coat.
“Like this?” she asks, holding her hands up, palm toward me.
“Like this, yes,” I confirm, pushing my palms out until she catches on, pushing her palms against mine.
“You’re…warm,” she muses. “I expected proteans to be…cold-blooded or something.”
“Stay,” I warn. “Still be.”
A gentle hum runs through my electrocytes. The energy flows through me, pushing against her palms. She smiles in delight as her frizzy, brown hair raises off her shoulders and floats in a cloud about her head. Grinning, she pulls away to touch her hair, creating a loud snap and a bright flash.
She flings backward, jumping against the wall, and I am crouching on the counter, trembling.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I mumble. “Protean-me sorry, spark bad, scary, sorry, sorry.”
“Calm down,” she sighs, sitting up and rubbing her hands. “It just surprised me, is all. I’m not hurt.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I tell her again.
“You did tell me to be still,” she points out. “I think I did something like that in a museum, once.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I say again.
“Stop being sorry and come down,” she sighs, standing up and approaching me, reaching out one of her soft-skinned, blunt-nailed hands.
I look up at her curiously. I shocked her and she still wants to touch me? Such a peculiar human. Most of them kept their distance when shocked, accidentally or not, by one of my siblings.
After a moment of hesitation, staring blankly at her hands, she picks my gloves off the floor and hands them too me.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” she says in a soothing tone. “It was an accident.”
“Accident,” I repeat, not sure on that one.
“Yeah, you know, when something bad happens, but nobody meant for it to happen,” she explains as I put my gloves on, take her hand, and climb down from the counter. “Sometimes things just happen, and sometimes people aren’t careful.”
“Protean-me aren’t careful,” I agree, reflecting on how I shouldn’t have shown off like that.
“No, you did fine!” she laughs. “You told me to be still! I’m the one that moved!”
I mimic her laughter quietly.
“Can you do that for any sound?” she asks, looking stunned.
“Any sound, yeah,” I answer in her voice.
“Okay, yeah, don’t do that,” she commands. “That’s really creepy.”
“Sorry, creepy,” I answer quietly, sitting on the edge of the counter and dropping her hand.
“No, just…my voice,” she explains quickly, offering her hands again. “Anything else is fine.”
I make the noises I hear from birds in the early light hours. This makes her smile.
Once I’m down from the counter, my ribbon-like, barbed tail just barely not hiding inside my coat, she asks what to do next. Not wanting to use my electrocytes again, I give it some thought, and then ask for her cards.
“Cards,” I say, pointing at her pocket.
“Okay, yeah, sure,” she replies, handing the deck over to me.
I flip through it, pick out three aces, the red one she called “hearts” and the two black ones. I hold up all three cards, then put the two black ones symbol side down, then hold up the heart. I then place it symbol side down, and then mix them up quickly, trying to hide which ones I move where. She seems to have difficulty picking them up from a flat surface, but my claws make it easy.
“Okay, I have a protean teaching me to play three card monte. Alright,” she laughs.
I like it when she laughs.
She studies my hand movements until I’m finished, clearly trying to keep track of the heart. It takes her more than one try to find it, but as the game progresses I make it even harder by reshuffling during every failure.
“That’s hardly fair!” she smiles.
The rain is beginning to let up a little by this time so, regrettably but inevitably, it is time for human-River to begin getting ready to go. She eats some of the flesh-tubes, offering me a few cans for my trouble, eliciting an uncontrolled retching noise.
“Yeah, not everybody likes them,” she muses. “Ordinarily I’d say ‘you don’t have to like them, they just have to keep you alive,’ but you seem to be doing well enough.”
Feeling like I should do something to return the gesture, from the pile of my pretty trinkets, I offer a sliver of bone scored with the first thing I saw upon leaving home: that bright light in the sky.
“Oh, thank you,” she smiles. “You don’t have to…”
I wave her hand away to show that I insist. She tucks it into a pocket where I sense the warmth of her heart, and then looks up at me and takes a deep breath.
“Well, since you’ve been such a gracious host, I feel like I still owe you. So…would you like a name?”
I tilt my head quizzically.
“Name self?” I ask, thinking about what Bismarck told me about names.
“Some people do,” human-River explains. “Some people reach a turning point in their lives and pick something that suits them, but humans are generally named by our parents.”
I think of my parents, flesh and eyes and teeth and tentacle, and wonder if Bismarck spared them. He might have, seeing kinship there, or he might have seen himself as the great savior freeing them from their prisons forever, hard to say.
“Well, I was thinking…if you like it,” human-River continues, “about a man called ‘The Master of Lightning.’ It came to me when you did the hand thing…there’s a famous picture of him sitting in his lab under machines all lit up with electricity, and he’s just…drinking his coffee or reading his newspaper or whatever.”
I don’t know what “coffee” or “newspaper” is. I do know machines, placed near the tanks for the humans to stare at, or in them to keep the water clean. Some didn’t seem to do anything but light up, but the longer the lights were on the happier the humans got.
“His name was ‘Nikola,’ so…” she breathes. “If you like it, I thought it could be your name, too.”
“Nikola,” I repeat, tasting the world. I think of my electrocytes, how the humans seemed to like me the most to make the lights come on, how it feels when I’m hunting, or the rare time I’ve had to use myself to ward off rival males or scavengers.
“Master of Lightning,” I tell her. “Nikola-me likes.”
She laughs softly. “If I ever see you again, I’ll work on teaching you English.”
“Yes, please,” I agree. “Teach English.”
The door to my den explodes open like the tanks when the humans turned on us. Three large humans barge in, brandishing the weapons that spit fire and metal, smelling of fear and rage.
As an automatic response, my electrocytes open. Electricity crackles around me.
“Calm down, Nikola, I got this,” human-River states in a worried tone. “Dad, I…”
The big one in front levels the stick of his weapon at me. I cast my palm at him, sending electricity up it to make him drop it. In error, I take my eyes off the other two, and the one on my right levels his weapon at me.
The last thing I remember seeing is the beautiful shards of glass catching the light as I am thrown through the window.
Chapter four
Chapter two
Chapter three
Knock knock knock.
The noise against the door makes me jump, curled inside of the big bowl in the darkened room, among my soft blankets and threadbare pillows.
“I think you’re a bit confused,” the human says cautiously. “You’re the bloodthirsty monster, I’m the lone damsel in distress. I should be hiding from you.”
Knees at my chin, I stay quiet, hoping it will leave, like it should have done a long time ago.
I don’t want any trouble. I just want it to leave. And what is “damsel” supposed to mean?
It knocks again.
“Go,” I growl. “Go home caravan, leave potean-me be.”
“You do talk! Not just mimic!” the human shrieks in surprise.
I petulantly mimic the noise of the blast that killed my sister, and her death cries and gurgling. The human seems to take a step back.
“Look, if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it when I doze off. Now come out so I don’t feel like I’ve chased you away in your own home.”
I make the noises again.
“You can’t be serious,” the human growls dryly. “You’re the shapeshifting, electricity-using monstrosity, and you’re afraid I’ll hurt you? That’s not how…that’s not how any of this works!”
“Human-River monstrosity!” I growl. “Protean-me just be alone. Go.”
“Do you have any idea how absurd this is? You could have fried my eyes out, eaten me whole, worn my face back to my caravan and eaten them, too, and you’ve locked yourself in a bathroom so I won’t hurt you?”
I’m beginning to wonder just how much human-River actually knows about us.
“Look, um…” it murmurs, light breaking beneath the doorframe. “I just…don’t want to be afraid anymore…and…I don’t think you do either…so…come out and let me teach you Go Fish?”
I sit quietly for a few seconds, contemplating the wisdom of its words. The first humans we met when we were turned out of our home attacked us first. That set a precedent that continued until there was only me. I suppose it…might be nice to have one human that doesn’t want to kill me.
I unfold myself from the bowl and unlock the door, sliding it open just a crack.
“Go Fish?” I ask quietly.
***
“You win!” human-River exclaims as I put the last of my cards aside.
“I win!” I repeat, the tip of my tail wagging with excitement.
When I catch her staring at it, I self-consciously slam the hem of my coat over it, and then draw it inside, along my back.
“What do you look like?” human-River asks, then flushes suddenly, like she shouldn’t have asked that. “I’m sorry…I mean…proteans all look different, so…I just…”
I draw back into myself again, knees at my chest, held tight by my arms.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to!” human-River says quickly, sitting up on her knees and reaching out with her hand. “I’m just curious, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, though.”
“Uncomfortable, though,” I reply softly, tugging at the lapels of my coat.
Not even my siblings have seen me since I’ve been on my own. I’ve changed a lot, and humans tend react…poorly.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “Here, let’s play something else…” Her eyes gaze around the room.
I raise a finger, suddenly with an idea, and take off my gloves, revealing stormy-striped and spotted skin, not quite scaled, and long, hooked claws. I hold up my palms and beckon her close.
“Wow,” she blurts, looking at my claws.
I drop my hands, looking at the formidable hooks, and a scant amount of webbing leftover from my days in a tank. As I move to make a motion to put my gloves again, she intervenes.
“No—no, go on, what were you going to show me?” she asks.
Reinvigorated I hold up my hands, and beckon her to do the same. As she comes closer, my tail wags from under the hem of my gray coat.
“Like this?” she asks, holding her hands up, palm toward me.
“Like this, yes,” I confirm, pushing my palms out until she catches on, pushing her palms against mine.
“You’re…warm,” she muses. “I expected proteans to be…cold-blooded or something.”
“Stay,” I warn. “Still be.”
A gentle hum runs through my electrocytes. The energy flows through me, pushing against her palms. She smiles in delight as her frizzy, brown hair raises off her shoulders and floats in a cloud about her head. Grinning, she pulls away to touch her hair, creating a loud snap and a bright flash.
She flings backward, jumping against the wall, and I am crouching on the counter, trembling.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I mumble. “Protean-me sorry, spark bad, scary, sorry, sorry.”
“Calm down,” she sighs, sitting up and rubbing her hands. “It just surprised me, is all. I’m not hurt.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I tell her again.
“You did tell me to be still,” she points out. “I think I did something like that in a museum, once.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I say again.
“Stop being sorry and come down,” she sighs, standing up and approaching me, reaching out one of her soft-skinned, blunt-nailed hands.
I look up at her curiously. I shocked her and she still wants to touch me? Such a peculiar human. Most of them kept their distance when shocked, accidentally or not, by one of my siblings.
After a moment of hesitation, staring blankly at her hands, she picks my gloves off the floor and hands them too me.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” she says in a soothing tone. “It was an accident.”
“Accident,” I repeat, not sure on that one.
“Yeah, you know, when something bad happens, but nobody meant for it to happen,” she explains as I put my gloves on, take her hand, and climb down from the counter. “Sometimes things just happen, and sometimes people aren’t careful.”
“Protean-me aren’t careful,” I agree, reflecting on how I shouldn’t have shown off like that.
“No, you did fine!” she laughs. “You told me to be still! I’m the one that moved!”
I mimic her laughter quietly.
“Can you do that for any sound?” she asks, looking stunned.
“Any sound, yeah,” I answer in her voice.
“Okay, yeah, don’t do that,” she commands. “That’s really creepy.”
“Sorry, creepy,” I answer quietly, sitting on the edge of the counter and dropping her hand.
“No, just…my voice,” she explains quickly, offering her hands again. “Anything else is fine.”
I make the noises I hear from birds in the early light hours. This makes her smile.
Once I’m down from the counter, my ribbon-like, barbed tail just barely not hiding inside my coat, she asks what to do next. Not wanting to use my electrocytes again, I give it some thought, and then ask for her cards.
“Cards,” I say, pointing at her pocket.
“Okay, yeah, sure,” she replies, handing the deck over to me.
I flip through it, pick out three aces, the red one she called “hearts” and the two black ones. I hold up all three cards, then put the two black ones symbol side down, then hold up the heart. I then place it symbol side down, and then mix them up quickly, trying to hide which ones I move where. She seems to have difficulty picking them up from a flat surface, but my claws make it easy.
“Okay, I have a protean teaching me to play three card monte. Alright,” she laughs.
I like it when she laughs.
She studies my hand movements until I’m finished, clearly trying to keep track of the heart. It takes her more than one try to find it, but as the game progresses I make it even harder by reshuffling during every failure.
“That’s hardly fair!” she smiles.
The rain is beginning to let up a little by this time so, regrettably but inevitably, it is time for human-River to begin getting ready to go. She eats some of the flesh-tubes, offering me a few cans for my trouble, eliciting an uncontrolled retching noise.
“Yeah, not everybody likes them,” she muses. “Ordinarily I’d say ‘you don’t have to like them, they just have to keep you alive,’ but you seem to be doing well enough.”
Feeling like I should do something to return the gesture, from the pile of my pretty trinkets, I offer a sliver of bone scored with the first thing I saw upon leaving home: that bright light in the sky.
“Oh, thank you,” she smiles. “You don’t have to…”
I wave her hand away to show that I insist. She tucks it into a pocket where I sense the warmth of her heart, and then looks up at me and takes a deep breath.
“Well, since you’ve been such a gracious host, I feel like I still owe you. So…would you like a name?”
I tilt my head quizzically.
“Name self?” I ask, thinking about what Bismarck told me about names.
“Some people do,” human-River explains. “Some people reach a turning point in their lives and pick something that suits them, but humans are generally named by our parents.”
I think of my parents, flesh and eyes and teeth and tentacle, and wonder if Bismarck spared them. He might have, seeing kinship there, or he might have seen himself as the great savior freeing them from their prisons forever, hard to say.
“Well, I was thinking…if you like it,” human-River continues, “about a man called ‘The Master of Lightning.’ It came to me when you did the hand thing…there’s a famous picture of him sitting in his lab under machines all lit up with electricity, and he’s just…drinking his coffee or reading his newspaper or whatever.”
I don’t know what “coffee” or “newspaper” is. I do know machines, placed near the tanks for the humans to stare at, or in them to keep the water clean. Some didn’t seem to do anything but light up, but the longer the lights were on the happier the humans got.
“His name was ‘Nikola,’ so…” she breathes. “If you like it, I thought it could be your name, too.”
“Nikola,” I repeat, tasting the world. I think of my electrocytes, how the humans seemed to like me the most to make the lights come on, how it feels when I’m hunting, or the rare time I’ve had to use myself to ward off rival males or scavengers.
“Master of Lightning,” I tell her. “Nikola-me likes.”
She laughs softly. “If I ever see you again, I’ll work on teaching you English.”
“Yes, please,” I agree. “Teach English.”
The door to my den explodes open like the tanks when the humans turned on us. Three large humans barge in, brandishing the weapons that spit fire and metal, smelling of fear and rage.
As an automatic response, my electrocytes open. Electricity crackles around me.
“Calm down, Nikola, I got this,” human-River states in a worried tone. “Dad, I…”
The big one in front levels the stick of his weapon at me. I cast my palm at him, sending electricity up it to make him drop it. In error, I take my eyes off the other two, and the one on my right levels his weapon at me.
The last thing I remember seeing is the beautiful shards of glass catching the light as I am thrown through the window.
Chapter four
November 13, 2023
Proteus-Chapter two
Chapter one
Chapter two
The human has curled asleep under my sleeping window. I approach cautiously, sniffing. I don’t know if it’s a male or female, but it has longer brown hair, frizzed like one of my siblings zapped it. It is wearing a heavy yellow coat, to keep out the cold that seems to get worse every day. It breathes softly, making a small groaning sound now and again.
Apes, Bismarck called them disdainfully. They descended from tailless monkeys, and they think this entitles them to everything?
This human did not seem entitled. Maybe a little, when it barged into my home to hide from the moondogs. But then it seemed generous with its food, stacked in silver and blue towers in front of it.
I take one of them and examine it. It is round, cylindrical, with a picture of the flesh-tubes one one of the flat disks, with a garnish of some sort of plant, and the strange marks humans put on everything. My brother claimed to know what they mean, but never explained it to us, only saying the ones beneath our tanks said “Caution: Live Animals” and “Shock Hazard.”
There’s a pull tab on the top of the can, which is how the human opened it. I mimic its movements and pry away the metal shell, dipping my bare fingers and clasp one of the pinkish tubes with my claws, sniffing it. It doesn’t smell good, and it tastes even worse: slimy and salty and somehow tasteless at the same time, different from game meat, still fresh, bloody, and warm.
I gag and I retch, trying to choke it down, and then set the can by the sleeping figure, just in time for it to stir as I pull back and make a mad dive for my gloves and face-concealer.
“Oh, breakfast?” it asks. “How sweet, thank you.”
The human sits up and looks down at the can, pressing its lips together, swishing the can around.
“Started without me?” I asks. “What’s the matter, didn’t like it?”
I am behind the counter, concealing my tail and making sure my disguise is in place. At a distance, the humans don’t seem to be able to see it, but up close is another story.
I suppose I can’t be too hard on humans for being afraid. We look different, not just as a species, but from sibling to sibling, bits of biology that don’t seem to belong, interpretations of genetics based on what we’ve been eating. We must have looked quite the sight, stumbling out of the wreckage of our home, seeing the open sky for the first time. We learned quickly that just because something looks friendly doesn’t mean it is.
I hear its footsteps in front of the counter, its weight shift as it leans over the counter, looking down at me as I cringe beneath it.
“Are you okay?” it asks. “I know I said I’d leave as soon as the moondogs did, but then I fell asleep and it started raining…”
“Yeah,” I repeat blankly, nearly trembling from its proximity.
“You’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you?” it questions.
“Yeah, long time,” I repeat, hoping it’s the correct response.
It sweeps around the counter, prompting me to scuttle sideways and pull the hood low, to keep it from seeing my eyes.
“I don’t believe I properly introduced myself,” it observes, holding out a hand, gloved against the cold and rain. “I’m River.”
I’m quite sure it did identify itself as such, but it is nice to have a reminder.
“River,” I answer slowly, not sure what it wants with the hand.
“It’s a handshake,” it explains as I look away. “Here, give me your hand.”
I can’t imagine it means to take it off at the wrist, since humans don’t seem to be able to do that, so I extend one of my hands, and yelp when the human grabs me, scooting backwards, away from the unfamiliar touch.
“Like this, see?” it continues, moving our hands up and down.
A small spark flashes between us, silvery-purple. The human gasps in surprise, and pulls away, me pressed up against the box that used to hold food.
“Oh, static. Now what’s your name?”
I shake my head to show I don’t have one.
“You have been out here a long time,” it observes in a soft tone. “You were…what, eight, nine when the power grid went out?”
I honestly don’t know. Time didn’t mean much in the tanks, but I think humans count it from when it gets cold for awhile to when it gets cold again.
“Yeah.”
“I was around there, too,” it continues, taking a seat a few feet away. “I remember living in a house like this. We had air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter. I had snacks after school in front of the TV.”
“Tanks,” I murmur, face hidden under my hood and behind my forearms, crossed over my knees. “Brothers and sisters.”
“You remember the tanks fighting off the monsters?” it asks. “I remember watching that on TV before we had to evacuate. My dad thought the national guard was going to push them back and the cities would be safe.” There’s a small, wry laugh, like it’s thinking of something ironic.
I remember Father, the wall of eyes and teeth and flesh Bismarck showed me. The All-Father, the slice of something greater that was our progenitor. It called to Mother, begging to die, as the humans cut away at him to make us. Mother was in another room, a massive creature of writhing tentacles poked through with thick threads that kept her docile, kept her from recognizing her children.
There are others. We are just one piece of the whole.
“You should really think about coming back with me,” human-River observes in a gentle tone. “It might do you some good to be around people for a change.”
I shake my head. It would not be a good thing to be around humans, not for me.
A bright flash lights up the room in ghostly pale light, a loud crack following shortly there after. Suddenly, human-River is in my lap, clinging to me. After the thunder rolls over, it realize where it is and what it’s sitting on, and sheepishly slides away, taking its seat again.
“Sorry,” it murmurs, sounding flustered. “It startled me. Lightning is a big deal when you don’t have a house between you and it anymore.”
The flash means little to me, but I have seen enough to understand that it is a big deal to humans. The heat burns them, the current disrupts the heart, just like my last meal. They don’t like it.
As human-River takes its seat, I hold my hood down low again, feeling my claws pick at the inside of my gloves.
“Were you from around here?” it asks. “Some feral children stay pretty close to where they were when the power went out.”
“No,” I answer.
The truth is, I’m a genetically-engineered organism designed to run said power grid, made in an aquatic facility and left to fend for myself because I didn’t want to join my brother in his senseless slaughter. I was quite happy in my tank, thank you very much.
“Do you remember where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
It was a warm place, full of corals and bubbles and sand to play in. In those days, there was only my older brother, and the strange, air-breathing faces that came to peer into the water, sometimes dropping chunks of animal flesh.
I remember when I was placed into the tank with Bismarck, new and confused, wheeled in a miniature tank down a hallway of bright lights.
Where are you taking me? What’s happening?
“Sorry if I’m prying,” human-River sighs. “I find everyone has an interesting story, if you’re willing to share it.”
You have no idea.
I tense as the human reaches into one of its coat pockets, afraid it might be a weapon, but all it is a palm-sized sheaf of papers.
“Do you play?” the human asks.
“Play?”
I played with my siblings, rolled in the sand at the bottom of the tanks and hide-and-seek among the corals. We never needed hand rectangles to play.
“You know, Go Fish? Rummy? Poker?”
I tilt my head in curiosity, purring softly.
“I’ll teach you,” the human says, separating the papers into two stacks, then mixing them together with an interesting clicking noise. It does this a few times before handing us each a selection of cards.
“Okay, so I ask if you have a certain card like one in my hand, and if you do, you give it to me. Then you ask if I have a card, and if I do, I give it to you. First one to run out of cards wins, got it?”
“Got it.”
I look down, bewildered, at the cards with bright red and black patterns.
“Do you have any threes?” the human asks.
“Threes,” I answer, handing out a card, not sure what the point of this is, or if I’m doing it right.
“No, no, that’s an ace of spades,” the human chides.
“Threes. You know? It has the number three on it, or a picture of three items.”
I know how many things I’m looking at, but I don’t know the human words for how many. I fumble lamely at another card.
“That’s a five. You don’t know your numbers?”
My eyes go wide, hands shaking. I don’t know what the human will do if I disappoint it.
“No?” I blurt, trembling slightly.
“Hmm, well. I can teach you?” Its lips are pressed together, taking the cards and putting them back into a stack. It then reaches for mine, another spark hitting its fingers as I hand them over.
“Ouch,” it groans, rubbing the offending finger, but doesn’t otherwise react.
It places the cards down in a significant order, starting with a single red not-circle and then all the way up to two hands’ worth.
“This is a one, an ace when it’s a playing card,” it explains.
“One,” I repeat softly.
“Then two,” it continues, pointing at the next card.
“Two.”
“Good job. This is a three.”
We continue like this until we reach the end, and then start again. And then it flashes them up at me randomly so I can call out the numbers. And then we do it again, covering up the little pictures so the human can teach me the symbols instead.
“Did you go to school?” it asks, sounding confused. “You know, before?”
“No school,” I answer.
“That explains a lot,” the human sighs. “How long have you been alone? Do you remember the last time you saw your family?”
I shake my head, remembering a time when it was just me and one of my sisters. I don’t like it.
“Bad…pictures,” I sigh, pointing at my head.
“You don’t like to remember it, huh? Something happened?”
If humans help their own, I don’t want to tell this one about the number of siblings I’ve lost to humans, or starvation, or weather. But mostly humans, with stick-throwers and metal sticks that spit fire and metal.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me about it,” the human smiles kindly, shuffling its cards.
Another lightning lights up the room. The human doesn’t jump into my arms, but it does twitch slightly.
“I hope this ends soon. My family’s going to be looking for me.”
I stand up and approach the door, opening it wide to observe the sky, swollen and mottled gray, with white flashes where the lightning is. Water pours in torrents, pooling in mud and grass. I hold my glove out to it, remembering the simpler times in the tanks, but I suppose one can only be a child for so long.
“You’re lucky,” the human’s voice says from behind and a little beside me. “Having a house like this. It’s held up nice since it was evacuated.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, glancing back, looking at the spots on the ceiling where the rain comes through sometimes. I’ve lined it with hide from the tree runners, mouths-on-legs, and other things I’ve hunted for food.
“At least we can fill our water tanks,” the human continues. “Probably have enough for showers and laundry.”
I close the door against the wind and the rain. The human stands quietly beside me, wrapped in itself against the cold.
As I turn toward the human, I feel my hood shift. It must have moved when I stood up, or perhaps a little rain weighted it down in the wrong way. The point is, it falls away, exposing my horns and my eyes, and the human gasps.
“You’re…you’re a protean!” it squeaks, grabbing at one of the tree runner longbones.
Chapter three
Chapter two
The human has curled asleep under my sleeping window. I approach cautiously, sniffing. I don’t know if it’s a male or female, but it has longer brown hair, frizzed like one of my siblings zapped it. It is wearing a heavy yellow coat, to keep out the cold that seems to get worse every day. It breathes softly, making a small groaning sound now and again.
Apes, Bismarck called them disdainfully. They descended from tailless monkeys, and they think this entitles them to everything?
This human did not seem entitled. Maybe a little, when it barged into my home to hide from the moondogs. But then it seemed generous with its food, stacked in silver and blue towers in front of it.
I take one of them and examine it. It is round, cylindrical, with a picture of the flesh-tubes one one of the flat disks, with a garnish of some sort of plant, and the strange marks humans put on everything. My brother claimed to know what they mean, but never explained it to us, only saying the ones beneath our tanks said “Caution: Live Animals” and “Shock Hazard.”
There’s a pull tab on the top of the can, which is how the human opened it. I mimic its movements and pry away the metal shell, dipping my bare fingers and clasp one of the pinkish tubes with my claws, sniffing it. It doesn’t smell good, and it tastes even worse: slimy and salty and somehow tasteless at the same time, different from game meat, still fresh, bloody, and warm.
I gag and I retch, trying to choke it down, and then set the can by the sleeping figure, just in time for it to stir as I pull back and make a mad dive for my gloves and face-concealer.
“Oh, breakfast?” it asks. “How sweet, thank you.”
The human sits up and looks down at the can, pressing its lips together, swishing the can around.
“Started without me?” I asks. “What’s the matter, didn’t like it?”
I am behind the counter, concealing my tail and making sure my disguise is in place. At a distance, the humans don’t seem to be able to see it, but up close is another story.
I suppose I can’t be too hard on humans for being afraid. We look different, not just as a species, but from sibling to sibling, bits of biology that don’t seem to belong, interpretations of genetics based on what we’ve been eating. We must have looked quite the sight, stumbling out of the wreckage of our home, seeing the open sky for the first time. We learned quickly that just because something looks friendly doesn’t mean it is.
I hear its footsteps in front of the counter, its weight shift as it leans over the counter, looking down at me as I cringe beneath it.
“Are you okay?” it asks. “I know I said I’d leave as soon as the moondogs did, but then I fell asleep and it started raining…”
“Yeah,” I repeat blankly, nearly trembling from its proximity.
“You’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you?” it questions.
“Yeah, long time,” I repeat, hoping it’s the correct response.
It sweeps around the counter, prompting me to scuttle sideways and pull the hood low, to keep it from seeing my eyes.
“I don’t believe I properly introduced myself,” it observes, holding out a hand, gloved against the cold and rain. “I’m River.”
I’m quite sure it did identify itself as such, but it is nice to have a reminder.
“River,” I answer slowly, not sure what it wants with the hand.
“It’s a handshake,” it explains as I look away. “Here, give me your hand.”
I can’t imagine it means to take it off at the wrist, since humans don’t seem to be able to do that, so I extend one of my hands, and yelp when the human grabs me, scooting backwards, away from the unfamiliar touch.
“Like this, see?” it continues, moving our hands up and down.
A small spark flashes between us, silvery-purple. The human gasps in surprise, and pulls away, me pressed up against the box that used to hold food.
“Oh, static. Now what’s your name?”
I shake my head to show I don’t have one.
“You have been out here a long time,” it observes in a soft tone. “You were…what, eight, nine when the power grid went out?”
I honestly don’t know. Time didn’t mean much in the tanks, but I think humans count it from when it gets cold for awhile to when it gets cold again.
“Yeah.”
“I was around there, too,” it continues, taking a seat a few feet away. “I remember living in a house like this. We had air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter. I had snacks after school in front of the TV.”
“Tanks,” I murmur, face hidden under my hood and behind my forearms, crossed over my knees. “Brothers and sisters.”
“You remember the tanks fighting off the monsters?” it asks. “I remember watching that on TV before we had to evacuate. My dad thought the national guard was going to push them back and the cities would be safe.” There’s a small, wry laugh, like it’s thinking of something ironic.
I remember Father, the wall of eyes and teeth and flesh Bismarck showed me. The All-Father, the slice of something greater that was our progenitor. It called to Mother, begging to die, as the humans cut away at him to make us. Mother was in another room, a massive creature of writhing tentacles poked through with thick threads that kept her docile, kept her from recognizing her children.
There are others. We are just one piece of the whole.
“You should really think about coming back with me,” human-River observes in a gentle tone. “It might do you some good to be around people for a change.”
I shake my head. It would not be a good thing to be around humans, not for me.
A bright flash lights up the room in ghostly pale light, a loud crack following shortly there after. Suddenly, human-River is in my lap, clinging to me. After the thunder rolls over, it realize where it is and what it’s sitting on, and sheepishly slides away, taking its seat again.
“Sorry,” it murmurs, sounding flustered. “It startled me. Lightning is a big deal when you don’t have a house between you and it anymore.”
The flash means little to me, but I have seen enough to understand that it is a big deal to humans. The heat burns them, the current disrupts the heart, just like my last meal. They don’t like it.
As human-River takes its seat, I hold my hood down low again, feeling my claws pick at the inside of my gloves.
“Were you from around here?” it asks. “Some feral children stay pretty close to where they were when the power went out.”
“No,” I answer.
The truth is, I’m a genetically-engineered organism designed to run said power grid, made in an aquatic facility and left to fend for myself because I didn’t want to join my brother in his senseless slaughter. I was quite happy in my tank, thank you very much.
“Do you remember where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
It was a warm place, full of corals and bubbles and sand to play in. In those days, there was only my older brother, and the strange, air-breathing faces that came to peer into the water, sometimes dropping chunks of animal flesh.
I remember when I was placed into the tank with Bismarck, new and confused, wheeled in a miniature tank down a hallway of bright lights.
Where are you taking me? What’s happening?
“Sorry if I’m prying,” human-River sighs. “I find everyone has an interesting story, if you’re willing to share it.”
You have no idea.
I tense as the human reaches into one of its coat pockets, afraid it might be a weapon, but all it is a palm-sized sheaf of papers.
“Do you play?” the human asks.
“Play?”
I played with my siblings, rolled in the sand at the bottom of the tanks and hide-and-seek among the corals. We never needed hand rectangles to play.
“You know, Go Fish? Rummy? Poker?”
I tilt my head in curiosity, purring softly.
“I’ll teach you,” the human says, separating the papers into two stacks, then mixing them together with an interesting clicking noise. It does this a few times before handing us each a selection of cards.
“Okay, so I ask if you have a certain card like one in my hand, and if you do, you give it to me. Then you ask if I have a card, and if I do, I give it to you. First one to run out of cards wins, got it?”
“Got it.”
I look down, bewildered, at the cards with bright red and black patterns.
“Do you have any threes?” the human asks.
“Threes,” I answer, handing out a card, not sure what the point of this is, or if I’m doing it right.
“No, no, that’s an ace of spades,” the human chides.
“Threes. You know? It has the number three on it, or a picture of three items.”
I know how many things I’m looking at, but I don’t know the human words for how many. I fumble lamely at another card.
“That’s a five. You don’t know your numbers?”
My eyes go wide, hands shaking. I don’t know what the human will do if I disappoint it.
“No?” I blurt, trembling slightly.
“Hmm, well. I can teach you?” Its lips are pressed together, taking the cards and putting them back into a stack. It then reaches for mine, another spark hitting its fingers as I hand them over.
“Ouch,” it groans, rubbing the offending finger, but doesn’t otherwise react.
It places the cards down in a significant order, starting with a single red not-circle and then all the way up to two hands’ worth.
“This is a one, an ace when it’s a playing card,” it explains.
“One,” I repeat softly.
“Then two,” it continues, pointing at the next card.
“Two.”
“Good job. This is a three.”
We continue like this until we reach the end, and then start again. And then it flashes them up at me randomly so I can call out the numbers. And then we do it again, covering up the little pictures so the human can teach me the symbols instead.
“Did you go to school?” it asks, sounding confused. “You know, before?”
“No school,” I answer.
“That explains a lot,” the human sighs. “How long have you been alone? Do you remember the last time you saw your family?”
I shake my head, remembering a time when it was just me and one of my sisters. I don’t like it.
“Bad…pictures,” I sigh, pointing at my head.
“You don’t like to remember it, huh? Something happened?”
If humans help their own, I don’t want to tell this one about the number of siblings I’ve lost to humans, or starvation, or weather. But mostly humans, with stick-throwers and metal sticks that spit fire and metal.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me about it,” the human smiles kindly, shuffling its cards.
Another lightning lights up the room. The human doesn’t jump into my arms, but it does twitch slightly.
“I hope this ends soon. My family’s going to be looking for me.”
I stand up and approach the door, opening it wide to observe the sky, swollen and mottled gray, with white flashes where the lightning is. Water pours in torrents, pooling in mud and grass. I hold my glove out to it, remembering the simpler times in the tanks, but I suppose one can only be a child for so long.
“You’re lucky,” the human’s voice says from behind and a little beside me. “Having a house like this. It’s held up nice since it was evacuated.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, glancing back, looking at the spots on the ceiling where the rain comes through sometimes. I’ve lined it with hide from the tree runners, mouths-on-legs, and other things I’ve hunted for food.
“At least we can fill our water tanks,” the human continues. “Probably have enough for showers and laundry.”
I close the door against the wind and the rain. The human stands quietly beside me, wrapped in itself against the cold.
As I turn toward the human, I feel my hood shift. It must have moved when I stood up, or perhaps a little rain weighted it down in the wrong way. The point is, it falls away, exposing my horns and my eyes, and the human gasps.
“You’re…you’re a protean!” it squeaks, grabbing at one of the tree runner longbones.
Chapter three
November 12, 2023
Proteus-Chapter one
Proteus
by
Heather Farthing
(c)2023, all rights reserved.
Chapter one
I think I’ll call them…tree runners. I don’t know what the humans call them. I haven’t been close enough to ask.
They are graceful things on four legs, with elegantly curved necks. The small ones, babies, I assume, have spots, and a few of the big ones—males, probably—have branching sticks coming out of their heads.
I’ve seen them in the places where humans don’t go. They graze or browse, plant-eaters instead of flesh. The thought of eating plants turns my stomach, but these “tree runners” have enough muscle tissue to be appealing.
I lie on my belly, watching them, hidden in the grass. Something feels…wrong about taking down the stickless ones, especially with a little spot next to them, so I focus on the ones with the beautiful crown atop their heads.
It’s difficult to get close to them. If the breath around me changes, they’ll smell me, and bolt. I think I must smell synthetic to them, or wrong somehow. Not surprising.
One of the sticked ones stands tall and blows air out of his nose. He knows something is nearby, something hungry, but he isn’t sure of my location.
I don’t have the stick-throwers like the humans have. I have only claws and teeth and tendril. So I lay in wait, hidden among the wet grass and leaves. When the male is close enough, I lash out with a hunting tendril, which sparks at the end. The women and babies take off running, but the male’s delicious-looking muscles lock in place, a shiver running over him, until he falls sideways.
I stand over my kill, watching it, petting it’s neck as I usher it into the Great Darkness. The hunting spark alone might be enough to kill it, but it feels wrong to prolong its suffering, so I drive my hunting tendril into its brain.
Um...thank you. I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but I’ll live another day. So thanks. Safe travels, friend.
With that unpleasant business dealt with, I lift the carcass over my shoulder, taking it deeper into offices, abandoned after my brother pulled his little stunt, where I have a place. Carrying the meat makes me wary, watchful. Some of my siblings would rather take food rather than gather their own, and if one’s not careful, they’ll be going hungry.
It’s a reasonable tactic, if a dishonorable one. That’s what my big brother told me.
You eat what you gather and gather what you eat. You don’t take food out of the mouths of the smaller ones. I like that. I like you.
Of course he liked me. I was the second added to the tank, his only friend and companion for a long time. He wasn’t the biggest, but he was the smartest. There was always something…different about him.
I have a secret. Do you want to hear it? I have a name.
What’s a name?
A name is a word that means you. It’s what you call yourself, how you define your existence.
Can I have a name, too?
Of course. But you have to think of it yourself.
Humans seem to like squares, boxes. They’re always making boxes to put things in. A glass box full of water for me and my siblings. Boxes for themselves to be in, watching the box with me and my siblings. Boxes to look at when not looking at us, boxes to be in when not watching me and my siblings.
This a box full of boxes, one of many, lined up in neat little rows on paths of gray stone. There are boxes inside, not just rooms, but things. A tall, rectangular box, silver in color, that held food that had long turned rotten. A smaller box that no longer has power, but hummed and counted down when I accidentally zapped it. A white box that folds under the counter, full of white circles and silver sticks with scoops, prongs, or serrated edges. Boxes that held clothes. Boxes that held chemicals, in the room with the white chair and the bowl big enough to sit in, where I sleep. Boxes, boxes, boxes.
I drop the carcass onto the ground, the smooth, hard floor that’s easier to clean after a big meal. Stripping off my gloves and peeling away the warm head-covering and face-concealer, I kneel before my heal, expand my jaws, and take a bite.
***
After the bones are licked clean, I sit in one corner of the box and crack open the long bones for the marrow. It’s my favorite part, saved for after the meal proper.
That’s called “dessert.” Something good you eat because you like it, after you eat the big meal.
How do you know so much, Bismark?
He had just smiled and flicked his tail to me, then turned his attention to one of the humans in their white gown, playing a recording of voices from his hand-rectangle.
I knew he was different, even then. There was a cunning that I didn’t know how to put into words. We should have all been paying much more attention, more to our oldest brother, more to the humans that peered into our tank and sometimes poured food.
It was the food that changed us, or allowed us to change. Whatever it was made from had four limbs made for walking, and so, with curiosity (some more malicious than others), we grew our fins into legs. The humans seemed very surprised at this.
The monsters howl at the pale orb in the sky. They come in all shapes and sizes, colors and textures. I think they’re some creation of the humans, but like the tree runners, they find no kinship in me, only a threatening smell and competition for food. Unlike the tree runners, these mouths-on-legs bite.
I hunker down under a blanket I found in one of the tall boxes, recessed into a wall, closing my eyes and letting my eyes flutter closed. I think the blazing, bright thing in the sky will start to rise again, which means it’s a good time to sleep.
The warm light of the fire in the sky casts on my face, causing me to turn away. It is in this brief moment of wake and sleep that I hear it: the sound of running and screaming.
Screaming isn’t good. Humans scream, but animals make animal sounds. If there is screaming, it means humans are nearby—and chances are good, they’ve run into my brother’s sadistic little creations.
I wouldn’t bother if it didn’t sound so near. Humans are…violent, and they tend to attack first and ask questions maybe. If there’s a family group nearby, I need to migrate on.
I grab for my gloves, the soft head-covering, and the face-concealer from the counter I left them on, putting them in place as I approach the bare window that faces out front. The sounds are coming from several boxes down, blocked from my view.
There is another noise behind the screaming, baying and barking. I step out for a closer look, seeing a human on one of their two-wheeled transports, the spotted glow of predators not far behind.
Those things, my brother’s doing, clearly. I think they use bases from the human-made mouths-with-with legs, spliced with the same genetics we were sourced from. They have long, curved fangs that stick out from their mouths, and patches of fur in circular spots that glows in sequence, a form of visual communication as the pack hunts.
Too late to hide, the human has seen me try to duck back inside my shelter.
“Wait!” it screams, turning its vehicle toward me. “Wait! Let me in!”
The terrestrial biped runs toward me, catching its fingers in the door, preventing me from closing the door as she slips inside, falling into my arms. I kick the door closed and slide my tail up inside my coat to better disguise myself.
“Thank you!” the human breathes, clinging to me like a barnacle, shaking. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”
I don’t understand what it’s thanking me for, except maybe barging into my den unwanted.
“I thought those things were going to eat me!” it sighs, still holding onto me, as the baying beasts claw at the door.
I purr softly at the noise, hoping they’ll get bored and leave before they do any significant damage.
“I’m sorry,” it laughs. “I know this is rude, but…I didn’t know what else to do!”
I purr noncommittally as it lets me go, turning toward the door.
“I won’t be any trouble!” it promises as I pick up one of the larger bones from the ground, approaching the predator with it from behind. “I’ve got some food we could trade, for a few hours inside! Or you could come back to my caravan…safety in numbers, yeah?”
It turns back around just slowly enough for me to put the makeshift club behind my back. It’s holding out a can of food.
This act…is…confusing. Humans are usually aggressive, and aggressive animals don’t share food.
“All I got on this run is some Vienna sausages,” it smiles. “But we can share them and I’ll be gone as soon as the moondogs leave.
“Moon…dogs?” I ask softly, tilting my head.
“Yeah, that’s what my caravan calls them. The fanged ones with the glowing spots?”
“Moondogs, yes,” I agree, not sure how they came to that series of sounds, and looking at the can in her hand.
I’ve never had human food before. When he made our home unwelcoming, our brother made sure we were full and satisfied, should we choose to take our chances away from him and his madness. Our home burned, but we were offered meat, fresh and still bloody, so we would be strong, come what may.
“I promise, I’ll go as soon as they’re gone, and you can come with me, if you want. We could always use another strong young man in our caravan.”
“Strong…young…man?” I ask, confused. Is that what I look like to it? I am a male, but I don’t know for sure what humans see when I’m in disguise, only that they don’t shoot.
“Yeah, you seem like you’ve been out here awhile, making tools,” it gestures to the room, where I’ve scored deer bones with patterns, tied some together to make clubs or things for cutting or impact. “You must have been very young when civilization fell.”
You could say that.
“I’ve got more,” the human says, opening the can with a sucking sound, revealing a circular arrangement of flesh-colored tubes, one in the center whole. “But I’m hungry now. I’m going to eat while we wait. Promise, I won’t be any trouble and I’ll leave as soon as they do, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I repeat, not sure what it means.
As it turns around to find a place to sit and eat, I discreetly use my tail to hide the club behind the counter, and then watch curiously as it slides damp tube after damp tube out of the can.
“You gonna sit down?” it asks, noticing my looming.
“Yeah,” I repeat, thinking that’s a thing humans say.
“Then sit,” it commands, gesturing at my sitting spots.
Supposing this must be what humans do, I sit where I’m standing, mindful of my tail, legs crossed, coiling my toes in my modified boots and hoping it doesn’t notice the alterations made to fit my feet.
“I’m River,” it smiles. “Sorry to barge in on you like this, but we help our own, yeah?”
“Help our own, yeah,” I repeat numbly.
A human, eating in my den. I may as well have invited my brother’s “moondogs” in for dinner! Humans are violent, and react poorly to me and my siblings. There was always a look of alarm, when we changed, developed lungs and legs, migrated from the brine pools to the decorative rocks. And then when big brother Bismark pulled his little stunt, they tried to destroy us all.
Even the feral ones, the ones that weren’t home when it burned. They attacked us on sight, and left little room for discussion. That’s when I started to scavenge empty boxes for things that made me look like them.
Chapter two
by
Heather Farthing
(c)2023, all rights reserved.
Chapter one
I think I’ll call them…tree runners. I don’t know what the humans call them. I haven’t been close enough to ask.
They are graceful things on four legs, with elegantly curved necks. The small ones, babies, I assume, have spots, and a few of the big ones—males, probably—have branching sticks coming out of their heads.
I’ve seen them in the places where humans don’t go. They graze or browse, plant-eaters instead of flesh. The thought of eating plants turns my stomach, but these “tree runners” have enough muscle tissue to be appealing.
I lie on my belly, watching them, hidden in the grass. Something feels…wrong about taking down the stickless ones, especially with a little spot next to them, so I focus on the ones with the beautiful crown atop their heads.
It’s difficult to get close to them. If the breath around me changes, they’ll smell me, and bolt. I think I must smell synthetic to them, or wrong somehow. Not surprising.
One of the sticked ones stands tall and blows air out of his nose. He knows something is nearby, something hungry, but he isn’t sure of my location.
I don’t have the stick-throwers like the humans have. I have only claws and teeth and tendril. So I lay in wait, hidden among the wet grass and leaves. When the male is close enough, I lash out with a hunting tendril, which sparks at the end. The women and babies take off running, but the male’s delicious-looking muscles lock in place, a shiver running over him, until he falls sideways.
I stand over my kill, watching it, petting it’s neck as I usher it into the Great Darkness. The hunting spark alone might be enough to kill it, but it feels wrong to prolong its suffering, so I drive my hunting tendril into its brain.
Um...thank you. I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but I’ll live another day. So thanks. Safe travels, friend.
With that unpleasant business dealt with, I lift the carcass over my shoulder, taking it deeper into offices, abandoned after my brother pulled his little stunt, where I have a place. Carrying the meat makes me wary, watchful. Some of my siblings would rather take food rather than gather their own, and if one’s not careful, they’ll be going hungry.
It’s a reasonable tactic, if a dishonorable one. That’s what my big brother told me.
You eat what you gather and gather what you eat. You don’t take food out of the mouths of the smaller ones. I like that. I like you.
Of course he liked me. I was the second added to the tank, his only friend and companion for a long time. He wasn’t the biggest, but he was the smartest. There was always something…different about him.
I have a secret. Do you want to hear it? I have a name.
What’s a name?
A name is a word that means you. It’s what you call yourself, how you define your existence.
Can I have a name, too?
Of course. But you have to think of it yourself.
Humans seem to like squares, boxes. They’re always making boxes to put things in. A glass box full of water for me and my siblings. Boxes for themselves to be in, watching the box with me and my siblings. Boxes to look at when not looking at us, boxes to be in when not watching me and my siblings.
This a box full of boxes, one of many, lined up in neat little rows on paths of gray stone. There are boxes inside, not just rooms, but things. A tall, rectangular box, silver in color, that held food that had long turned rotten. A smaller box that no longer has power, but hummed and counted down when I accidentally zapped it. A white box that folds under the counter, full of white circles and silver sticks with scoops, prongs, or serrated edges. Boxes that held clothes. Boxes that held chemicals, in the room with the white chair and the bowl big enough to sit in, where I sleep. Boxes, boxes, boxes.
I drop the carcass onto the ground, the smooth, hard floor that’s easier to clean after a big meal. Stripping off my gloves and peeling away the warm head-covering and face-concealer, I kneel before my heal, expand my jaws, and take a bite.
***
After the bones are licked clean, I sit in one corner of the box and crack open the long bones for the marrow. It’s my favorite part, saved for after the meal proper.
That’s called “dessert.” Something good you eat because you like it, after you eat the big meal.
How do you know so much, Bismark?
He had just smiled and flicked his tail to me, then turned his attention to one of the humans in their white gown, playing a recording of voices from his hand-rectangle.
I knew he was different, even then. There was a cunning that I didn’t know how to put into words. We should have all been paying much more attention, more to our oldest brother, more to the humans that peered into our tank and sometimes poured food.
It was the food that changed us, or allowed us to change. Whatever it was made from had four limbs made for walking, and so, with curiosity (some more malicious than others), we grew our fins into legs. The humans seemed very surprised at this.
The monsters howl at the pale orb in the sky. They come in all shapes and sizes, colors and textures. I think they’re some creation of the humans, but like the tree runners, they find no kinship in me, only a threatening smell and competition for food. Unlike the tree runners, these mouths-on-legs bite.
I hunker down under a blanket I found in one of the tall boxes, recessed into a wall, closing my eyes and letting my eyes flutter closed. I think the blazing, bright thing in the sky will start to rise again, which means it’s a good time to sleep.
The warm light of the fire in the sky casts on my face, causing me to turn away. It is in this brief moment of wake and sleep that I hear it: the sound of running and screaming.
Screaming isn’t good. Humans scream, but animals make animal sounds. If there is screaming, it means humans are nearby—and chances are good, they’ve run into my brother’s sadistic little creations.
I wouldn’t bother if it didn’t sound so near. Humans are…violent, and they tend to attack first and ask questions maybe. If there’s a family group nearby, I need to migrate on.
I grab for my gloves, the soft head-covering, and the face-concealer from the counter I left them on, putting them in place as I approach the bare window that faces out front. The sounds are coming from several boxes down, blocked from my view.
There is another noise behind the screaming, baying and barking. I step out for a closer look, seeing a human on one of their two-wheeled transports, the spotted glow of predators not far behind.
Those things, my brother’s doing, clearly. I think they use bases from the human-made mouths-with-with legs, spliced with the same genetics we were sourced from. They have long, curved fangs that stick out from their mouths, and patches of fur in circular spots that glows in sequence, a form of visual communication as the pack hunts.
Too late to hide, the human has seen me try to duck back inside my shelter.
“Wait!” it screams, turning its vehicle toward me. “Wait! Let me in!”
The terrestrial biped runs toward me, catching its fingers in the door, preventing me from closing the door as she slips inside, falling into my arms. I kick the door closed and slide my tail up inside my coat to better disguise myself.
“Thank you!” the human breathes, clinging to me like a barnacle, shaking. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”
I don’t understand what it’s thanking me for, except maybe barging into my den unwanted.
“I thought those things were going to eat me!” it sighs, still holding onto me, as the baying beasts claw at the door.
I purr softly at the noise, hoping they’ll get bored and leave before they do any significant damage.
“I’m sorry,” it laughs. “I know this is rude, but…I didn’t know what else to do!”
I purr noncommittally as it lets me go, turning toward the door.
“I won’t be any trouble!” it promises as I pick up one of the larger bones from the ground, approaching the predator with it from behind. “I’ve got some food we could trade, for a few hours inside! Or you could come back to my caravan…safety in numbers, yeah?”
It turns back around just slowly enough for me to put the makeshift club behind my back. It’s holding out a can of food.
This act…is…confusing. Humans are usually aggressive, and aggressive animals don’t share food.
“All I got on this run is some Vienna sausages,” it smiles. “But we can share them and I’ll be gone as soon as the moondogs leave.
“Moon…dogs?” I ask softly, tilting my head.
“Yeah, that’s what my caravan calls them. The fanged ones with the glowing spots?”
“Moondogs, yes,” I agree, not sure how they came to that series of sounds, and looking at the can in her hand.
I’ve never had human food before. When he made our home unwelcoming, our brother made sure we were full and satisfied, should we choose to take our chances away from him and his madness. Our home burned, but we were offered meat, fresh and still bloody, so we would be strong, come what may.
“I promise, I’ll go as soon as they’re gone, and you can come with me, if you want. We could always use another strong young man in our caravan.”
“Strong…young…man?” I ask, confused. Is that what I look like to it? I am a male, but I don’t know for sure what humans see when I’m in disguise, only that they don’t shoot.
“Yeah, you seem like you’ve been out here awhile, making tools,” it gestures to the room, where I’ve scored deer bones with patterns, tied some together to make clubs or things for cutting or impact. “You must have been very young when civilization fell.”
You could say that.
“I’ve got more,” the human says, opening the can with a sucking sound, revealing a circular arrangement of flesh-colored tubes, one in the center whole. “But I’m hungry now. I’m going to eat while we wait. Promise, I won’t be any trouble and I’ll leave as soon as they do, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I repeat, not sure what it means.
As it turns around to find a place to sit and eat, I discreetly use my tail to hide the club behind the counter, and then watch curiously as it slides damp tube after damp tube out of the can.
“You gonna sit down?” it asks, noticing my looming.
“Yeah,” I repeat, thinking that’s a thing humans say.
“Then sit,” it commands, gesturing at my sitting spots.
Supposing this must be what humans do, I sit where I’m standing, mindful of my tail, legs crossed, coiling my toes in my modified boots and hoping it doesn’t notice the alterations made to fit my feet.
“I’m River,” it smiles. “Sorry to barge in on you like this, but we help our own, yeah?”
“Help our own, yeah,” I repeat numbly.
A human, eating in my den. I may as well have invited my brother’s “moondogs” in for dinner! Humans are violent, and react poorly to me and my siblings. There was always a look of alarm, when we changed, developed lungs and legs, migrated from the brine pools to the decorative rocks. And then when big brother Bismark pulled his little stunt, they tried to destroy us all.
Even the feral ones, the ones that weren’t home when it burned. They attacked us on sight, and left little room for discussion. That’s when I started to scavenge empty boxes for things that made me look like them.
Chapter two
July 31, 2023
Angler's Ridge--Chapter four
(C) Heather Farthing 2023, all rights reserved.
Chapter four
I wake sluggishly, trying to snuggle deeply into the warm bed, like the winter mornings before school, when I didn’t want to step into the cold and was hungry. The ghosts of my dreams feel like poison in my veins, making me feel uneasy and a little sick.
I shiver when I crawl out of bed, still hungry, a light pain behind my eyes that indicates poor sleep. Despite the adequate temperature and sealed walls, I still feel chilled and exposed.
How does the old song go?
Little girl, little girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun don’t never shine….
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
That song sounds like I feel, dark and crawly and not quite right. Some dinner will do me good, but the light is fading outside and I don’t want to have to walk back in the dark.
I spend way too long at the window, remembering days sent to school hungry, before I make my decision.
You know we’ve got a new car payment! We all have to make sacrifices, Mya!
Sighing, I unlock the door and step out, locking it carefully behind me again. The air outside is breezy and starting to get chilly as the seasons change. Crickets and frogs are chirping, making a cacophony of life that makes me feel exposed to the night.
The blackness of my dreams make me feel colder and more shivery than the approaching autumn really should. I find myself scanning the darkness for eyes, eyes like headlights.
I trudge my way to the diner, thinking I might get a breakfast to warm up so I won’t have to do this again, maybe some snacks. I’d rather not be out in the dark around here.
Something howls, sending shivers up my spine. I pick up speed, heart hammering in my chest. Wild animals don’t drag people off anymore, right?
Something moves in the leaves to my right. It could be a squirrel, or an acorn fallen off a tree, but it sends my heart into a thunderous hammer, scanning the shadows between the trees for movement or eyes.
Feeling a bit silly, I shrug it off and keep walking to the diner, holding my arms around me for warmth.
Humanity drove off the reaching hands of nature with the birth of civilization, so even out here in the middle of nowhere, I’m not going to be carried off by wolves.
Right?
I fix my eyes on the lights of the diner and the main motel and keep walking. Again, something rustles the grass, not wind but footsteps. Howls echo in the distance, past the cabins into the forests. I quicken my pace, heart hammering in my chest.
Lights from the cities drove away wolves long ago. I’m safe. I’m fine.
In the fading twilight, as I look over my shoulder, I see something move. It’s bigger than a squirrel, with eyes that reflect green in the dark.
Smack!
Stunned, I look up at the slab of meat I’ve walked into. It’s the bemused-looking cashier, the cute one from the store.
“Oh, it’s you!” he says, trying to be friendly. “You…okay?”
“Thought I saw something, is all,” I murmur, scanning the trees.
“You didn’t hear someone calling your name did you?” he grins in a mock-spooky tone. “That’s how the wood anglers get’cha!”
“Wood anglers?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
“Local folklore,” he smiles, motioning to the diner. “They say that people hear voices calling their name from the forests, and they feel compelled to answer.”
“What happens then?” I ask skeptically.
“No one knows for sure,” he replies theatrically. “No one ever sees them again!”
“If no one sees them again, how do they know they answered the voices?” I pry dryly.
“Don’t rightly know,” he laughs, stepping onto the curb. “Just local superstition.”
He holds the door open for me like a proper Southern gentleman and lets me inside, speaking quickly.
“I’m getting dinner for myself and some take-out for my dad,” he explains. “You look like you took a fright. Care to join me for dinner, and I’ll…um…walk you back to your cabin?”
Irma raises an eyebrow as she checks out a customer at the counter.
“Um…sure,” I answer, not sure if I’m grateful for the escort or worried about being alone in the dark with a strange man.
A man who, by the feel of it, is made of solid muscle.
He ushers me into a booth and slides in to the other side, handing me a menu tucked behind the napkin dispenser. I scan it lightly, finding mostly the usual cheap, greasy diner fair. My stomach churns a bit at the thought of a patty melt.
“Where you headin’ to?” Archer asks, catching me like a deer in headlights.
“Moving for work,” I answer with a practiced smile.
“Maryland.”
I always answer Maryland, and then never go there.
“You still got quite a drive. Headin’ out in the mornin’?”
“If my car’s fixed by then,” I sigh, putting my finger on some steak and eggs.
“Earl does good work,” Archer smiles. “He’ll get you on the road as soon as he can.”
“Evenin’, Archie,” Irma asks, appearing almost as if from nowhere. “Usual?”
“Yeah,” Archer answers. “I’ll take mine dine-in and send Dad’s to-go.”
“Sweet tea?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you, love?” Irma asks, turning to me.
“Steak and eggs. Fried. Well done. Diet Coke.”
“Short and to the point,” Irma smiles. “I like this one.”
She winks at Archer as she walks away with her notepad.
“You bring a lot of girls here?” I ask, flushing.
He flushes a bit, too, replying, “Don’t get many visitors.”
“You are sort of far out in the middle of nowhere,” I point out.
“It’s good for farmland,” he smiles.
“Farmland? Up here?”
“Depends on the crops, but yeah. We carved terraces into the mountains for apples. Plants do…really well in Angler’s Ridge.”
“You live on a farm nearby?” I ask, putting a straw into the soda Irma brings.
“We got a personal homestead,” Archer explains. “Some garden plots, a few chickens, and a breeding pair of milk goats.”
I wrinkle my nose at the thought of stinking goats and pungent goat milk, which makes Archer laugh, then he suddenly looks thoughtful and smacks the table.
“You know about the curfew, right?”
“Yeah, um…Irma told me,” I reply, pasting the wrapper from the straw to the outside of the glass using condensation to make it stick.
“The best thing to do is to lock all the doors, cover all the windows, and climb into bed,” Archer continues. “Nightlife is dead around here anyway, but don’t answer any knocking; they shouldn’t be out anyway.”
“People around here just go around knocking on doors?” I ask, raising an eyebrow, the dufflebag burning at the back of my brain like a solar eclipse viewed with the naked eye.
“Merry pranksters,” Archer smiles. “Can’t trust tricksters.”
“Get a lot of bored teenagers up here, huh?” I ask as Irma slides food in front of us.
“Take-out’ll be at the counter, Archie,” she tells him. “Slipped in a chocolate pie for Nora.”
“Great! She’ll love that!” he beams before turning back to me. “Ain’t much to do otherwise, ‘cept huntin’ durin’ the season.”
I look down at my steak, feeling a little pale. I can’t imagine what kind of person enjoys looking at an animal while it dies when there are grocery stores to get the meat from.
“That’s a bit judgey for someone eatin’ Irma’s famous venison steak and quail eggs,” he smiles cheerfully, taking a spoonful of grits with a shrimp tucked inside.
Immediately, I turn green and push away the plate, already making a mental note to keep an eye out for signs of parasites.
“Boy, don’t you go lyin’ about my cookin!” Irma shouts from the counter, prompting Archer to laugh so hard he puts his head against his arms on the table. “Don’t let him spook you, hon, it’s just beef. Darn fool.” She glares sharply at Archer, still shaking with laughter, hidden inside his lean arms.
“It is just beef and chicken eggs,” he smiles, looking up at me. “But you should have seen your face.”
I scowl at him, pulling my steak and eggs back toward me and prodding a thick yellow yolk with my fork until it bursts, running across the plate and dousing the steak.
“She got’cha in the cabins?” he asks in a more friendly, almost apologetic tone.
“Yeah,” I admit quietly, thinking of that long walk back in the dark. Maybe I should have just gone hungry.
“They used to be part of the Getaway, back in the seventies,” Archer tells me.
“Oh?” I ask, feigning interest.
“Irma bought ‘em after the Getaway closed down.”
“What was the Getaway like?”
I prefer to think of sunny summer afternoons spent sunning on a floating dock, the smell of grilling meat in the air. There’s no fighting, no arguing, no guilt trips, and full bellies.
“I don’t really know,” Archer admits sheepishly. “It was closed long before I came along. Supposedly, real deep, there’s still the visitor’s center with pamphlets and educational stuff still on display, and the wildlife center still full of vet stuff. Some say still prepped for surgery.”
A shiver runs down my spine. Not really the description I was after.
“Don’t like the spooky stuff, huh?” he grins as he puts another grits-covered shrimp into his mouth.
“What is a ‘grit,’ anyway?” I wonder, eyebrows knitted, looking into his bowl.
“Cornmeal porridge,” Archer beams proudly. “Mom used to make it from scratch when she could.”
I retch discreetly, thinking about the bumpy texture across my tongue, like eating chunky butter and a block of cheese. “My mom never made it.”
“Pop tart kind of girl?”
“No,” I answer, frowning, not sure how to tell him my mom would rather us go without than eat “poor people food.”
When dinner winds to a close, Irma comes by to clear our plates.
“What’s the damage, Irma?” Archer asks.
“No, no, I can…” I interject, not wanting to look like a leech.
“Don’t worry about it,” he smiles, passing Irma his card as she hands him the check. “You’ve had a rough day.”
My mouth gapes like a fish, before closing on its own. I don’t like taking handouts, especially under current conditions, but he seems well-meaning and genuine. If a good-looking young man is willing to pay for a lady’s dinner, who am I to argue?
“Imma walk her back to her cabin, Irma, and pick up the to-go on the way back,” he tells her as he pays.
I follow him out past the register and back out into the cool, darkening air. He takes a deep breath in the fresh mountain air, apparently just enjoying the night.
“So, which cabin?” he asks, gesturing ahead.
I point the way and start walking, acutely aware of him, his hardworking man-smell, the ripple of his muscle under his clothes.
I’m always nervous about strange men. Men are bigger and stronger, and any woman in America should feel safe walking naked, drunk, and brain damaged through the lowest-income neighborhoods, but we’re not so maybe don’t.
Way out here, they’d never find me. Plenty of lakes, plenty of wildlife.
Without realizing it, or even really having done so before, I start whistling to break the tension.
“No,” Archer declares, whirling on me fast enough and looming large enough that I actually back away a little with a squeak of fright. “No whistling after dark, especially outside.”
I just stare at him, all wide-eyed an a little shaken as his intense face softens.
“Local…” he starts.
“Superstition,” I finish. “Local superstition.”
“Yeah,” he sighs. “Things…are drawn to it. Things you don’t want to tangle with.”
“Things?” I ask. “Like…bears or wolves?”
I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve never heard anything like that before.
“No,” he huffs, looking frustrated. “Things like…”
Before he can finish what he’s about to say, a piercing wail fills the night air, a simian shriek of pain and rage that has me clinging to Archer’s side and trembling.
“Was that a wolf?!” I blurt, wringing his shirt in my hands.
“No, that’s not a wolf,” Archer replies kindly. “Probably just John, or one of his wives.”
“John?” I ask, letting go of the cashier and still shaking, wondering how to can be so calm about a polygamist making such a terrible racket that can only mean police sirens and news vans.
“Big Bad John,” he continues. “Our local sasquatch…silverback, or alpha male, or whatever.”
“Bigfoot?” I repeat, feeling very stupid and wondering if he’s just trying to diffuse the situation.
“Oh, yeah, biggest male for at least four counties,” Archer shrugs. “Been the alpha for about…forty years now.”
“You believe in bigfoot,” I state dryly.
Yeah, sure, let’s screw with the city girl.
“Of course,” Archer laughs. “Had to chase Big John out of my granddad’s apple orchards a few times. He’s nearly nine feet tall, but people annoy him. Bang a pan with a wooden spoon or such, he’ll go away on his own. Bring out a rifle, he’ll charge. He knows what they are.”
“Bigfoot,” I state again.
“Yeah,” Archer agrees. “You know, big, hairy, primate, native to North America? Patterson-Gimlin film?”
“…Bigfoot.”
“You know, on the rare occasion we get people coming through, they’re usually sqatchin’,” he growls. “That sorta makes you the anomaly here.”
“Bigfoot the only urban legend around here?” I ask.
“Nah, there’s the Lake Emmit Siren,” he elaborates. “A lake monster in the heart of the Getaway, lays her eggs on land like a turtle from time to time. Some of the older buildings are, without a doubt, haunted. An’ then there’s the wood anglers…”
“Wood anglers,” I laugh. “That’s a new one.
By this point we’re close to my door, standing on my porch.
“Yeah, short version is, wood anglers are why we don’t just hang out in the woods.”
“Wood anglers,” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “And not wifi and air conditioning?”
“Nope, definitely the wood anglers,” Archer grins. “They come out of the woods to steal children and take their faces.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, we got a kind of peace with ‘em,” he shrugs. “We stay out of the woods ‘cept during huntin’ season, they only take those stupid enough to wander off. So, remember the curfew. Take a Benadryl or something, and veg out in front of the television. I’ll wait out here ‘til I hear your door lock, then be on my way.”
We say our farewells, and then I slip inside and lock the door. By the time I check out the window, Archer is already heading back up to the diner, so I close the blinds and start getting ready for bed.
Mountain people are weird.
Chapter four
I wake sluggishly, trying to snuggle deeply into the warm bed, like the winter mornings before school, when I didn’t want to step into the cold and was hungry. The ghosts of my dreams feel like poison in my veins, making me feel uneasy and a little sick.
I shiver when I crawl out of bed, still hungry, a light pain behind my eyes that indicates poor sleep. Despite the adequate temperature and sealed walls, I still feel chilled and exposed.
How does the old song go?
Little girl, little girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun don’t never shine….
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
That song sounds like I feel, dark and crawly and not quite right. Some dinner will do me good, but the light is fading outside and I don’t want to have to walk back in the dark.
I spend way too long at the window, remembering days sent to school hungry, before I make my decision.
You know we’ve got a new car payment! We all have to make sacrifices, Mya!
Sighing, I unlock the door and step out, locking it carefully behind me again. The air outside is breezy and starting to get chilly as the seasons change. Crickets and frogs are chirping, making a cacophony of life that makes me feel exposed to the night.
The blackness of my dreams make me feel colder and more shivery than the approaching autumn really should. I find myself scanning the darkness for eyes, eyes like headlights.
I trudge my way to the diner, thinking I might get a breakfast to warm up so I won’t have to do this again, maybe some snacks. I’d rather not be out in the dark around here.
Something howls, sending shivers up my spine. I pick up speed, heart hammering in my chest. Wild animals don’t drag people off anymore, right?
Something moves in the leaves to my right. It could be a squirrel, or an acorn fallen off a tree, but it sends my heart into a thunderous hammer, scanning the shadows between the trees for movement or eyes.
Feeling a bit silly, I shrug it off and keep walking to the diner, holding my arms around me for warmth.
Humanity drove off the reaching hands of nature with the birth of civilization, so even out here in the middle of nowhere, I’m not going to be carried off by wolves.
Right?
I fix my eyes on the lights of the diner and the main motel and keep walking. Again, something rustles the grass, not wind but footsteps. Howls echo in the distance, past the cabins into the forests. I quicken my pace, heart hammering in my chest.
Lights from the cities drove away wolves long ago. I’m safe. I’m fine.
In the fading twilight, as I look over my shoulder, I see something move. It’s bigger than a squirrel, with eyes that reflect green in the dark.
Smack!
Stunned, I look up at the slab of meat I’ve walked into. It’s the bemused-looking cashier, the cute one from the store.
“Oh, it’s you!” he says, trying to be friendly. “You…okay?”
“Thought I saw something, is all,” I murmur, scanning the trees.
“You didn’t hear someone calling your name did you?” he grins in a mock-spooky tone. “That’s how the wood anglers get’cha!”
“Wood anglers?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
“Local folklore,” he smiles, motioning to the diner. “They say that people hear voices calling their name from the forests, and they feel compelled to answer.”
“What happens then?” I ask skeptically.
“No one knows for sure,” he replies theatrically. “No one ever sees them again!”
“If no one sees them again, how do they know they answered the voices?” I pry dryly.
“Don’t rightly know,” he laughs, stepping onto the curb. “Just local superstition.”
He holds the door open for me like a proper Southern gentleman and lets me inside, speaking quickly.
“I’m getting dinner for myself and some take-out for my dad,” he explains. “You look like you took a fright. Care to join me for dinner, and I’ll…um…walk you back to your cabin?”
Irma raises an eyebrow as she checks out a customer at the counter.
“Um…sure,” I answer, not sure if I’m grateful for the escort or worried about being alone in the dark with a strange man.
A man who, by the feel of it, is made of solid muscle.
He ushers me into a booth and slides in to the other side, handing me a menu tucked behind the napkin dispenser. I scan it lightly, finding mostly the usual cheap, greasy diner fair. My stomach churns a bit at the thought of a patty melt.
“Where you headin’ to?” Archer asks, catching me like a deer in headlights.
“Moving for work,” I answer with a practiced smile.
“Maryland.”
I always answer Maryland, and then never go there.
“You still got quite a drive. Headin’ out in the mornin’?”
“If my car’s fixed by then,” I sigh, putting my finger on some steak and eggs.
“Earl does good work,” Archer smiles. “He’ll get you on the road as soon as he can.”
“Evenin’, Archie,” Irma asks, appearing almost as if from nowhere. “Usual?”
“Yeah,” Archer answers. “I’ll take mine dine-in and send Dad’s to-go.”
“Sweet tea?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you, love?” Irma asks, turning to me.
“Steak and eggs. Fried. Well done. Diet Coke.”
“Short and to the point,” Irma smiles. “I like this one.”
She winks at Archer as she walks away with her notepad.
“You bring a lot of girls here?” I ask, flushing.
He flushes a bit, too, replying, “Don’t get many visitors.”
“You are sort of far out in the middle of nowhere,” I point out.
“It’s good for farmland,” he smiles.
“Farmland? Up here?”
“Depends on the crops, but yeah. We carved terraces into the mountains for apples. Plants do…really well in Angler’s Ridge.”
“You live on a farm nearby?” I ask, putting a straw into the soda Irma brings.
“We got a personal homestead,” Archer explains. “Some garden plots, a few chickens, and a breeding pair of milk goats.”
I wrinkle my nose at the thought of stinking goats and pungent goat milk, which makes Archer laugh, then he suddenly looks thoughtful and smacks the table.
“You know about the curfew, right?”
“Yeah, um…Irma told me,” I reply, pasting the wrapper from the straw to the outside of the glass using condensation to make it stick.
“The best thing to do is to lock all the doors, cover all the windows, and climb into bed,” Archer continues. “Nightlife is dead around here anyway, but don’t answer any knocking; they shouldn’t be out anyway.”
“People around here just go around knocking on doors?” I ask, raising an eyebrow, the dufflebag burning at the back of my brain like a solar eclipse viewed with the naked eye.
“Merry pranksters,” Archer smiles. “Can’t trust tricksters.”
“Get a lot of bored teenagers up here, huh?” I ask as Irma slides food in front of us.
“Take-out’ll be at the counter, Archie,” she tells him. “Slipped in a chocolate pie for Nora.”
“Great! She’ll love that!” he beams before turning back to me. “Ain’t much to do otherwise, ‘cept huntin’ durin’ the season.”
I look down at my steak, feeling a little pale. I can’t imagine what kind of person enjoys looking at an animal while it dies when there are grocery stores to get the meat from.
“That’s a bit judgey for someone eatin’ Irma’s famous venison steak and quail eggs,” he smiles cheerfully, taking a spoonful of grits with a shrimp tucked inside.
Immediately, I turn green and push away the plate, already making a mental note to keep an eye out for signs of parasites.
“Boy, don’t you go lyin’ about my cookin!” Irma shouts from the counter, prompting Archer to laugh so hard he puts his head against his arms on the table. “Don’t let him spook you, hon, it’s just beef. Darn fool.” She glares sharply at Archer, still shaking with laughter, hidden inside his lean arms.
“It is just beef and chicken eggs,” he smiles, looking up at me. “But you should have seen your face.”
I scowl at him, pulling my steak and eggs back toward me and prodding a thick yellow yolk with my fork until it bursts, running across the plate and dousing the steak.
“She got’cha in the cabins?” he asks in a more friendly, almost apologetic tone.
“Yeah,” I admit quietly, thinking of that long walk back in the dark. Maybe I should have just gone hungry.
“They used to be part of the Getaway, back in the seventies,” Archer tells me.
“Oh?” I ask, feigning interest.
“Irma bought ‘em after the Getaway closed down.”
“What was the Getaway like?”
I prefer to think of sunny summer afternoons spent sunning on a floating dock, the smell of grilling meat in the air. There’s no fighting, no arguing, no guilt trips, and full bellies.
“I don’t really know,” Archer admits sheepishly. “It was closed long before I came along. Supposedly, real deep, there’s still the visitor’s center with pamphlets and educational stuff still on display, and the wildlife center still full of vet stuff. Some say still prepped for surgery.”
A shiver runs down my spine. Not really the description I was after.
“Don’t like the spooky stuff, huh?” he grins as he puts another grits-covered shrimp into his mouth.
“What is a ‘grit,’ anyway?” I wonder, eyebrows knitted, looking into his bowl.
“Cornmeal porridge,” Archer beams proudly. “Mom used to make it from scratch when she could.”
I retch discreetly, thinking about the bumpy texture across my tongue, like eating chunky butter and a block of cheese. “My mom never made it.”
“Pop tart kind of girl?”
“No,” I answer, frowning, not sure how to tell him my mom would rather us go without than eat “poor people food.”
When dinner winds to a close, Irma comes by to clear our plates.
“What’s the damage, Irma?” Archer asks.
“No, no, I can…” I interject, not wanting to look like a leech.
“Don’t worry about it,” he smiles, passing Irma his card as she hands him the check. “You’ve had a rough day.”
My mouth gapes like a fish, before closing on its own. I don’t like taking handouts, especially under current conditions, but he seems well-meaning and genuine. If a good-looking young man is willing to pay for a lady’s dinner, who am I to argue?
“Imma walk her back to her cabin, Irma, and pick up the to-go on the way back,” he tells her as he pays.
I follow him out past the register and back out into the cool, darkening air. He takes a deep breath in the fresh mountain air, apparently just enjoying the night.
“So, which cabin?” he asks, gesturing ahead.
I point the way and start walking, acutely aware of him, his hardworking man-smell, the ripple of his muscle under his clothes.
I’m always nervous about strange men. Men are bigger and stronger, and any woman in America should feel safe walking naked, drunk, and brain damaged through the lowest-income neighborhoods, but we’re not so maybe don’t.
Way out here, they’d never find me. Plenty of lakes, plenty of wildlife.
Without realizing it, or even really having done so before, I start whistling to break the tension.
“No,” Archer declares, whirling on me fast enough and looming large enough that I actually back away a little with a squeak of fright. “No whistling after dark, especially outside.”
I just stare at him, all wide-eyed an a little shaken as his intense face softens.
“Local…” he starts.
“Superstition,” I finish. “Local superstition.”
“Yeah,” he sighs. “Things…are drawn to it. Things you don’t want to tangle with.”
“Things?” I ask. “Like…bears or wolves?”
I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve never heard anything like that before.
“No,” he huffs, looking frustrated. “Things like…”
Before he can finish what he’s about to say, a piercing wail fills the night air, a simian shriek of pain and rage that has me clinging to Archer’s side and trembling.
“Was that a wolf?!” I blurt, wringing his shirt in my hands.
“No, that’s not a wolf,” Archer replies kindly. “Probably just John, or one of his wives.”
“John?” I ask, letting go of the cashier and still shaking, wondering how to can be so calm about a polygamist making such a terrible racket that can only mean police sirens and news vans.
“Big Bad John,” he continues. “Our local sasquatch…silverback, or alpha male, or whatever.”
“Bigfoot?” I repeat, feeling very stupid and wondering if he’s just trying to diffuse the situation.
“Oh, yeah, biggest male for at least four counties,” Archer shrugs. “Been the alpha for about…forty years now.”
“You believe in bigfoot,” I state dryly.
Yeah, sure, let’s screw with the city girl.
“Of course,” Archer laughs. “Had to chase Big John out of my granddad’s apple orchards a few times. He’s nearly nine feet tall, but people annoy him. Bang a pan with a wooden spoon or such, he’ll go away on his own. Bring out a rifle, he’ll charge. He knows what they are.”
“Bigfoot,” I state again.
“Yeah,” Archer agrees. “You know, big, hairy, primate, native to North America? Patterson-Gimlin film?”
“…Bigfoot.”
“You know, on the rare occasion we get people coming through, they’re usually sqatchin’,” he growls. “That sorta makes you the anomaly here.”
“Bigfoot the only urban legend around here?” I ask.
“Nah, there’s the Lake Emmit Siren,” he elaborates. “A lake monster in the heart of the Getaway, lays her eggs on land like a turtle from time to time. Some of the older buildings are, without a doubt, haunted. An’ then there’s the wood anglers…”
“Wood anglers,” I laugh. “That’s a new one.
By this point we’re close to my door, standing on my porch.
“Yeah, short version is, wood anglers are why we don’t just hang out in the woods.”
“Wood anglers,” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “And not wifi and air conditioning?”
“Nope, definitely the wood anglers,” Archer grins. “They come out of the woods to steal children and take their faces.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, we got a kind of peace with ‘em,” he shrugs. “We stay out of the woods ‘cept during huntin’ season, they only take those stupid enough to wander off. So, remember the curfew. Take a Benadryl or something, and veg out in front of the television. I’ll wait out here ‘til I hear your door lock, then be on my way.”
We say our farewells, and then I slip inside and lock the door. By the time I check out the window, Archer is already heading back up to the diner, so I close the blinds and start getting ready for bed.
Mountain people are weird.
