by Kim Foster
Emerald stopped working at the door. The image of her mother being eaten by the monster was too much for her to handle. She pulled the crow bar out of the door frame, spun around and ran at the Ludivine with everything she had.
“No! No, it's not true!!!!!”
It happened so fast, Josie could not step in, or help. So fast the Meat Ghosts could not have swung in and saved Ludivine.
It was pure instinct. Pure love for her mother. Pure hurt from losing her.
Emerald rammed the crow bar into the heart of the jellyfish, sending her screaming and wailing, and dissolving into a puddle of jelly on the floor. Ludivine melted, right there into the floorboards.
"Bangkok! Bangkok!" she squawked, over and over.
In less than 10 seconds all that was left was mounds of jelly, and puddles of stinking sea water. The one or two tentacles that were left thumped and writhed in the last throes of their death.
The Meat Ghosts were angry. They tumbled toward them, hooks sliding fast and hard on the ceiling rails. Josie grabbed the crow bar from Ludivine’s remains and busted open the door.
“Let’s go!” he said to Emerald as if she were right behind him.
Except she wasn’t.
He found Emerald standing over the dying Ludivine. She was shaking.
“The Meat Ghosts are coming,” he said to her.
“We have to go.”
The Meat Ghosts were on them, tumbling toward them, thrusting themselves forward. Josie grabbed her pack and pulled her through the door, slamming the door shut, and locking it behind them.
The Meat Ghosts thumped madly at the door, trying to break it down.
They held the door shut with their backs up against it. It was minutes before the flailing finally stopped. They just sat there, listened to the banging, trying to get their heads around what happened.
“Bangkok killed my mother," she said, breaking the silence.
Josie held her hand. He had never really held a girls hand before. But he knew she probably needed it.
It was weird. Very soft. Not unpleasant.
“We don’t know that...I think if he did, I would know.”
Emerald looked at him, confused.
“I know what Bangkok feels,” Josie confessed.
“Sometimes I know so much of what he feels that I start to merge with him.”
“You become the monster?” she asked and dropped his hand without realizing it.
“You are one of us’…I heard Ludivine say it....And-and-you ate the eyeball!"
"I...what?"
Emerald was putting it together in her head. She looked at him like he was pure evil. He felt her fear and it stung him. He thought she believed in him.
“You were going to go with her,” she told Josie. “Ludivine held out her hand to take you to feed with her, and you were going to go.”
"And you ate the pig eyeball!"
"Yeah, you said that already," Josie said, irritated.
Josie didn't really want to know what he did to the eyeball, but it obviously accounted for the sandy feeling in his mouth, and the Vaseline-flavored after-taste.
They were both quiet for a minute.
“Look, I don’t remember, okay?" he said, looking at the floor, playing with a knot in the floorboards with his sneaker.
“The same thing happened in Trinket’s room. I was standing there, over her bed, and then I woke up. It was the next morning…”
“And Trinket was gone?”
Josie nodded.
“Maybe I’m the monster.” he said, sadly, and got up, without looking at her face.
“Or just like him.”
They said nothing for awhile. Josie looked around. They were in the market proper of the Organic Food Shop. He could see the shelves filled with fruit and vegetables. The nearly empty seafood counter. The wall of refrigerators and freezers. It was dark here, the whole shop lit only but the light from the lamp post shining in the large shop front windows.
“Ja-ja”
They both heard it. A sound a baby would make.
“Ja ja …ja”
It came from the seafood counter. There were crab pots lined up against the wall, probably used for nothing but decoration. They ran toward the sound, pushing away boxes and bins.
“Trinket! Trinket!”
Josie couldn’t believe what he saw.
A cage sitting on boxes lined up against the wall.
And in the cage, a baby. A red-haired baby.
eight
FISH HEAD
There she was. Trinket.
A cage sitting on boxes lined up against the wall.
She was inside a crab pot, a steel cage fishermen used to hunt crab out in the deepest parts of the ocean. The fishermen put bits of fleshy eel meat into the cage and dropped it into the ocean so that it settled at the floor. Crabs went in for the eel. Crab pots were good for imprisoning crabs and little girls. Once they were in, they weren’t getting out.
Trinket was slouched into a corner of the crab pot. Her back up against one side of the metal cage. She didn’t look happy to see Josie and Emerald, in fact, she looked petrified. Whatever had been happening to her this whole time in the Organic Food Shop, had left her quiet, submissive and so scared she could barely move.
Josie noticed she was trembling. She couldn’t even look at him.
He pulled at the cage door and the thick lock that secured it. The crab pot was stuck to the wall with chains and bolts.
“Trinket, Trinket….You’re okay,” he said.
The baby cowered in the back of the cage.
“No,” she spat at him through her dummy and shrunk her body away.
Josie fumbled with the lock, and Emerald handed Josie some wire cutters and a mallet she had in her back pack.
“I’m going to need more than these. The wires are thick,” he said, but he went to work anyway, trying to bust open the cage and free her.
“Honey, honey…” Emerald spoke to Trinket.
“I’m Emerald and this is Josie. We live next door to you.”
Trinket ignored her
“We are here to help...We won’t hurt you," Emerald tried to talk to her the way her mom had spoken to her when she was scared. She almost couldn't remember it anymore. Memories of her mother were starting to get loose and flimsy. She could barely imagine what it would be like not to remember her.
She pushed the thought away.
“Bangkok," Trinket squawked, and hid her face in her knees, which were scrunched up around her chest.
“Bangkok isn’t here. We want to take you home, Trinket,” Josie said firmly, trying to whack a bolt with his mallet.
He wasn’t lying. Josie knew Bangkok wasn’t there yet, but he could feel him coming closer. He had fed well in the shallow reefs off the coast, mostly an appetizer of groupers and hammer-head sharks. Then he went out deeper, where he found tuna, Great Whites, humpback and pygmy whales, dolphins and blubbery seals. Josie knew it, because he felt full and satiated.
Bangkok wasn’t going to eat Trinket now. He would devour her bone by bone later when he needed to make himself more powerful. Children made him stronger and meaner.
No, this time Bangkok didn't need to eat Trinket. He wanted Josie. He wanted Josie to become his human extension, to do his work, to find children that would fill him with energy, youth, everything the monster needed to become unstoppable.
“Mama,” Trinket squealed and started to cry.
She sucked on her dummy nervously.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Emerald watched Trinket come apart.
“Mama. Go see Mama.”
Emerald wiggled a couple fingers in the cage, hoping Trinket would take them. But she didn’t. Trinket kept her head rolled up against her legs, rocking back and forth.
“How’s it coming?” Emerald asked impatiently.
“It’s not.” Josie banged the cage with the wire cutters. “Dammit, it just won’t come.”
“Maybe try to pry the whole pot off
the wall and we can carry the whole thing out.”
“Good idea.”
“Okay Trinket, we’re gonna get you out of here…” Emerald tried to soothe the girl, but she wouldn’t look at her. She no longer knew who she could trust.
Trinket hadn’t been hurt in any real physical way. Ludivine had given her bits of bread from the shop and cups of water. But what was truly traumatic for this girl, or any other child in her position, was simply being locked away from her family, left alone to cry inside a crab pot, not knowing if she would live her whole life this way. Not knowing when the monster who came to stare at her, and let his horde of eels snap at her feet, would simply decide to gobble her up.
Trinket was so lonely she could barely speak. So scared of every movement around her that she spent her time in the crab pot rolled up into a small ball. She rocked and sang to herself, and hoped she’d see her Mamas. But she knew somehow that Bangkok would never let that happen. She, like Josie, knew what he wanted, could feel it. He would devour her, when the time was right, and she, like all the other human babies, would make him more powerful.
He would never let her go. Even in her young brain, she knew that.
“Got it!” Josie yelled at Emerald. “Just one more wire and I think I can lift this pot off the wall.”
“Great!...Did you hear that Trinket, we’re going to get you out of here...just hold on.”
Josie had busted open one of the bolts and was trying to pry the pot off the wall with the crow bar and mallet. He was making a racket, slamming the mallet onto the bolts. He wondered about the reporters from the news vans, whether they could hear and if they could, if they could do anything about it.
“Um...Josie?”
Emerald stopped cold. She stared straight ahead to the freezer cases.
Josie looked. The doors opened. A stream of frigid air crashed through the market.
"People," Josie thought. But then he squinted and got a better look.
"Uh-oh..." Josie said, thinking aloud.
"Not humans..."
They were more like fish heads with human bodies, arms and legs.
They moved slowly and sluggishly, out of the freezer cases, as if they weren’t completely sure how to use their appendages. It was as if their fish heads had been haphazardly plopped onto these weird human bodies and they were told to move.
“Sculpin!” Emerald yelled at him.
She had seen them many times while scuba diving, and she suspected they were everywhere in the shallow tide pools at Bondi and Bronte. Sculpin were fish with bony, wide, ugly bobble heads. They were the color of mud, had weird wiggling whiskers, and flat heads. Their faces were so wide that it looked like someone had taken hold of their cheeks and pulled them in both directions. They skulked on the bottom of the ocean, feeding off of whatever bits they could scavenge, tearing chunks off a dead fish or eating leeches and insect eggs.
They were bottomless pits, eating anything that would fit in their mouths. And their mouths were wide and huge. Emerald knew at once these creatures would rip them limb from limb.
Josie and Emerald yanked on the cage, as hard as they could. The Sculpin kept coming, wave after wave of creatures stepping clumsily out of the freezer cases, some of them falling onto the shelves and taking out a soup display, or a rack of cookies. Others walked so poorly, they tripped and knocked down the Sculpin near them. They tumbled out of the cases and were streaming towards them in nearly every aisle.
“Oh man…” Josie started banging harder and more frantically at the bolts, trying to dislodge the cage.
Trinket was on her knees now, watching the Sculpin inch toward them, closer and closer. She darted over to Emerald and linked her fingers around the cage and Emeralds fingers.
“No go!” she said through her dummy, and then it clinked through the cage and fell on the floor.
“No go!” her eyes rimmed with fat tears.
“We won’t leave you,” Emerald said.
“No go!” she kept saying it over and over, watching the Sculpin getting closer and closer.
“Help me pull this cage off!” Josie screamed to Emerald.
“PULL!”
They both grabbed the wires of the cage and pulled. It groaned, but it wouldn’t give. They pulled hard, and still the cage wouldn’t budge.
“Josie hurry!” A Sculpin was now right behind Emerald, it’s mouth wide and open, its teeth sharp and pointy, ready to bite her.
Then another was there, hunched over the cage, lolling it’s huge green tongue down into the cage toward Trinket. She cowered in the corner, making herself as small as possible.
“Josie!” Emerald screamed as she felt the Sculpins wet mouth on her shoulder.
Another Sculpin grabbed her hair, and sucked it into his mouth.
Josie tried one last great pull on the cage, only to have it stay there, un-moveable.
He had no choice, if he stayed with Trinket, he and Emerald would be eaten by the Sculpin.
Two more Sculpin were at the cage, banging their fists on the wires, trying to pull them up, like guitar strings, and break them.
Josie saw they couldn’t do it. They still couldn’t use their hands very well. And they weren’t able to get enough of a grip with their teeth to break through the crab pot.
“We have to go!”
Josie threw the mallet at the head of a Sculpin and it made a squishy sound, like something hard hitting through rotten fruit. A chunk of the Sculpin’s oily face blew back and landed next to the watermelons.
“C’mon! Through Aisle 7,” Josie pointed, there were no Sculpin there yet.
“We can get through the front door.”
“We’re not leaving her!” Emerald shouted back at him.
“We have to! They can’t get to her in the crab pot, but they can eat us alive!” he said to her, looking her straight in her eyes.
“I won’t leave her.," she said, steely and again, so sure of herself.
“You go, Josie.” Looking right through him. “Coward.”
And at that, Emerald jumped up the seafood counter, then on the big lobster tank, and made a running leap across the aisle to the fruit stand.
She chose lemons first, hard little balls that she whipped at the Sculpin as they stumbled over to her, their mouths agape and drooling, their whiskers twitching, their eyes lolling around in their sockets. She whipped the lemons so hard that she lopped off chunks of their big heads, sending fat pieces of fish flying around the room.
Jose ran as fast as he could down aisle 7. His head was aching and that familiar Bangkok sadness was creeping into his brain. He ran as fast as he could, until he got to the front door of the shop. He was about to hit the locks and escape, but something made him turn around. He saw a sea of moving Sculpin lumbering like zombies toward the fruit counter and Emerald, standing on the counter, sending a tirade of lemons at them as they approached.
She whipped lemons at them like she had been playing baseball for years. She showed no fear for herself. She was ready to die to save Trinket, to stand up for what she felt was right. A part of him thought she was nuts. He saw her like she was an alien from another planet. All he wanted was to be normal, to have normal problems, to be rid of haunted food shops and nightmares and awful monsters from the deep. He wanted to run. He wanted to vanish.
He unlatched the front door.
He stood there with his head on the door, unable to go back or go forward. That was his whole life, he thought. Unable to go forwards or backwards.
Then he heard metal rattling and shaking loudly. And screaming. Trinket. A Sculpin was trying to rip the crab pot off the wall. He pulled the door open, tried to tune out the sounds.
“Crap," he muttered to himself and shut the door.
He ran to aisle 3 for some rope and then to the refrigerator cases lining the wall in aisle 1.
He pushed the doors shut, stopping the influx of Sculpin and threaded the rope through all the handles and secured them. The Sculpin tried to bust th
rough, banging and pushing at the doors, but they couldn’t open them. They were eaters, but they had small offish brains. They couldn’t figure out why the doors wouldn’t open and spun around confused and slamming into shelves, up-ending boxes and bags of frozen food, and banging into each other.
They kept coming, and bunched up together in the cases, a bottleneck of hungry moaning fish creatures. They lashed out at each other, tearing each other to shreds, claws slashing bodies, teeth sinking into flesh, eating each other’s faces, screeching and writhing they were eaten and ate each other alive.
Their screaming was unbearable.
Josie tuned out the noise of the dying creatures and ran to a towering soup display. He climbed to the top of it and grabbed cans of soup and hurled them at the Sculpin who was slamming the crab pot back and forth against the wall.
The Sculpin moaned and chunks of his head flew through the room. But then the bolt cracked, making a loud popping sound, and the wall caved and buckled a bit, and the crab pot snapped off in the arms of the creature. The fish started to pull at the wires, trying to get at the girl. Other Sculpin came over to help and a horde of fish creatures engulfed the crap pot. Inside, Trinket screamed. He had never heard screaming like that.
“All the agony in the world,” he thought.
Josie picked up another can and hurled it, and another, until the Sculpin were swaying like a branches in a storm, little bits of brain chunks flew everywhere as cans hit their big heads, and spun them open. Josie kept slinging the cans at them, ripping some straight through their bodies, until intestines and kidneys and livers broke open onto the floor.
But he couldn’t stop there. Something was in him now. Bangkok was closing in. Josie felt his rage seep inside his chest. He felt what the monster felt, but really it was his own anger, too.
He wanted Bangkok dead.
He wanted all of the fish creatures dead.
He wanted his parents to believe him.
He wanted the kids at school to not think he was a murderer.
He wanted to have friends.
He didn’t want to be alone all the time.
He didn’t want to be invisible or be a freak anymore.
He wanted to open the stupid crab pot.
He wanted Trinket to be home with her moms.
