Half World

by Hiromi Goto

  has been lost

  O child of woe

  weep, accept

  your fate lies

  in the hand

  of the new

  master

  obey!

  A sound burst out from between Mr. Glueskin’s tacky lips. Guffawing, he let his glass fall and dropped both hands to his knees as he bellowed with maniacal joy. He smacked his wet palms against his thighs and ran a stationary staccato with his feet. His vinegar and rubber stink ballooned in the air. “Yes! Yes!” he crowed, hugging himself with glee. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew those rumors were false! No living things can be born into this Realm! I stopped this grotesquerie from being born here, and now we will kill her and eat her before the morning pale! Half Life forever! For all eternity! We will erode the barriers between Flesh and Spirit, and Half World will be the only cycle, for all time!”

  Melanie could not stop the fear that rose in her gorge. Tonight. He meant to kill her tonight.

  Would she truly die? Would she be doomed to relive her suffering for all eternity? Melanie stared fiercely at Fumiko’s profile. Mother, she entreated inside her heart.

  Fumiko slowly turned toward her.

  Melanie could not decipher her expression.

  Mr. Glueskin leapt to his feet. “More drink! Bring out the canapés! Music!” The doorbell pealed, and Mr. Glueskin clapped his hands with excitement. He turned toward the foyer, but stopped. Eyes narrowed, he whipped out a rope of tongue. The end snapped around Melanie’s wrists, binding them together, and he sailed the middle of his tongue to loop around the leg of the piano. When the post was encircled he broke off his tongue at the seal and yanked the remaining portion back into his mouth.

  Melanie pulled at her bonds.

  There was an elastic give, but no way she could break free.

  “Stay, piggy,” Mr. Glueskin said as he went to welcome the new guests. Melanie heard the insidious inflections of his voice, the murmuring responses of both humans and inhumans. . . .

  Melanie lowered the rope portion of her bonds to the floor. She stepped atop the tacky length with her feet and tried to pull both hands upward, but Mr. Glueskin’s tongue did not snap, only stretched like rubber.

  She sat upon the piano bench.

  The room was beginning to fill up with Bosch-like creatures: fish-headed men, a puppy with a boy’s face, hopping giant toads covered in bristling hairs, piglike simians and even some things that looked more plant than animal. Melanie didn’t know if some of them had started out human and chosen animal parts or if they had begun as animals and chosen human parts. In the end, did it matter? The few humans who had chosen to remain so kept their death mark upon them: a gaping hole in the chest, pox-ridden pustules, gangrenous, stinking limbs. . . . Were they like Boy Scout badges? Melanie wondered. Did they compare them and brag?

  Fumiko brought in more buckets of champagne on ice. The corks popped and guests squealed at the spray of bubbles. After topping empty glasses, she returned to the kitchen for the hors d’oeuvres. She brought the cellophane-covered silver platters into the room. Melanie could see things writhing against the plastic, little furred paws and tentacles and tails. When Fumiko removed the plastic, the little canapés leapt from the platter, scattering in all directions, and the guests shrieked with glee as they chased after their lively morsels. In the midst of the bedlam Melanie reached out to clasp her mother’s arm as she passed by.

  “It has to be tonight,” Melanie said urgently. “It’s going to be okay, Mum. We’re going to get out of here. We can be okay. I believe.” Melanie’s voice caught in her throat. “And I love you.”

  Fumiko stood without any expression. When Melanie released her arm she walked away without a word. Melanie batted her eyes hard and fast. Maybe her mother heard her. Somewhere deep inside. She took a deep breath and released slowly.

  And became aware that a crowd had gathered around her.

  Sucking back the ends of twitching tails that dangled from their mouths, the Bosch people stared at Melanie like she was a freak of nature. They poked each other, giggling, sneering, sniffing the air around her with goat muzzles and feathery gills.

  Someone stroked her bare arm. The touch was wet, slimy, like rotting ink-cap mushrooms. Melanie knocked it away with the flat of her hand, and the crowd of spectators gasped then tittered with nervous delight.

  Someone yanked her hair. Claws prickled the back of her calf. Melanie jerked her leg away. The mob drew closer, eyes glittering, the stink of rotting flesh sweet and vile.

  Melanie’s heart pounded as adrenaline surged, a high ringing in her ears.

  It had come so quickly. . . .

  She bared her teeth. She would not die without fighting.

  The starfish-child, her face like the center of a daisy, wriggled to the front of the pack. Her small eyes were round with concern, her lips downturned, wobbling.

  “Mr. Glueskin!” she called out in a high, tremulous voice. “They’re touching her and you didn’t give them permission!” she tattled . . . and winked at Melanie.

  Fear became understanding.

  Her tormentor was the only one who had the capacity to protect her. Melanie bit her lip. It was too messed up. She stared into the eyes of the starfish-child. Thank you, she thought fiercely.

  The starfish-child’s rows of suction-cupped tube legs rippled with strong emotion.

  Mr. Glueskin, cracking his tongue above their heads like a whip, broke through the mob. “Ingrates!” he seethed. “Pissant GREEDYGUTS!” he bellowed. The mob cringed backward like beaten dogs.

  “S-sorry,” a bone man stammered. “We’re s-sorry, s-sir!” He bowed subserviently, and Mr. Glueskin kicked him aside. The bones fell to pieces, and Mr. Glueskin scattered them in different locations. A little dog-boy snatched one up and ran off.

  “Hel-lohhhhhh! Ingrates! Freaks and idiots! Everything in its time, people! Everyone will get a piece of cake! Okay? Everyone will get pig cake! But not until I say so. And I get the FIRST PIECE!” he screamed, flecks of white glue splattering from his mouth. His eyes were alabaster orbs, a tiny prick of black in the center.

  Mad, Melanie thought. He was completely mad. And everything he said—they were like the words of a twisted and tormented monster child.

  What had made him this way? What happened when he was inevitably yanked back to the moment when he was horribly broken? Melanie shuddered with empathy and disgust. That he ended up so twisted, monstrous. . . . The evil done to him must have been unthinkable. The waves of revulsion and pity were overwhelming.

  Mr. Glueskin caught sight of the emotions on Melanie’s face.

  Rage twisted his loose features. Contorting, seething, he dropped his jaw to the ground, his mouth flapping wider than his body, like a gulper eel.

  Melanie stared down his maw. The moist acrid stink of vinegar burned her eyes, choking, vile and noxious. The skin inside his mouth, down his throat, gleamed white like larvae, threads of glue stringing downward like melting mozzarella. . . .

  Mr. Glueskin unrolled his widened, flattened tongue, like it was a red carpet. When it was completely distended he wrapped the sticky tip lovingly and gently around Melanie’s torso, pinning her arms to her sides.

  He squeezed ever so softly, like the most kindly embrace.

  Then began to gently pull her into his maw.

  The rope of tongue he had bound her with melted back into the rest of his mouth. There was nothing to keep her from being swallowed into death.

  A roaring filled Melanie’s ears. She cast her eyes grimly for one last look at her mother’s face.

  There. Her profile. She was looking out the window. Distant and unreadable. The gown of mirror shards was actually very beautiful. . . .

  Melanie would not go down without fighting all the way. She would wedge her legs sideways, she would claw with her nails, she would rip out the inside of his throat with her teeth.

  The roaring grew louder, and the party guests looked about wildly, searching for t
he source.

  The roaring was not inside Melanie’s head—it was all around them, vast, thunderous, and awful.

  The great wall-sized window crashed, shattered, splinters flying, screams and hooting laughter, the shards slicing into exposed skin, fur, scales, the roar swelling, a hurricane of sound, pouring, streaming into the room. Black, blackness, crows. Hundreds upon hundreds of crows, they buffeted the air, the whistling of beating wings, dark missiles swooping, swirling, pecking, scratching.

  Melanie was tossed from Mr. Glueskin’s tongue as an oddly shaped bird plunged to attack his eyes.

  Melanie, on all fours, heart pounding, gazed upward.

  Perched atop the large black diving crow was a tiny rat, her four long front teeth bared, clinging fiercely to pawfuls of feathers.

  A joy-filled smile broke Melanie’s face. “Yah!” she shouted hoarsely. She jumped and shook both fists in the air. “Yahhhh!”

  Five birds had landed atop Mr. Glueskin’s head and were pecking at his eyes, tearing at his ears, and stabbing his cheeks.

  Swarms mobbed the party guests, some of them fleeing with arms windmilling around their skulls, others trying to duck low and crawling upon the carpet. The bird-headed man in the faux fur shorts clacked his sharp beak, snicking a leg off a crow. It screamed before spiraling to the ground. The bird-headed man trampled it beneath his coarse bare feet.

  Crows plucked individual bones off the bone people until they finally crumpled like stacks of wooden sticks. The starfish-child had pulled her many arms inward to cover her tender face, her bumpy, hard exterior a protective armor.

  Fumiko crouched beneath the piano. Face blank, she plucked shards of glass from her pale cheeks, dark spots of blood dotting her skin, spreading.

  Snap! Snap! Snap!The air cracked, and crows dropped, fell, as if they had been shot.

  Mr. Glueskin wielded his tongue like a whip, flicking the tapered tip faster than the eye could follow, even as he netted the birds around his head with a fine skin of glue shed from his palms.

  Crack! The largest crow fell like a stone, and Jade Rat leapt from its perch upon its shoulders and landed on the carpet. The rat dodged as a man toppled sideways, the swarm of crows attacking his death badge, a wound in his stomach. They pulled and yanked at his entrails.

  Melanie could see a clear path between her and the piano. She pelted through. Something stabbed, hot and red, into the bottom of her foot.

  Glass. The fragments from the shattered window. It lay in an outward-spreading arc from the open frame, a cold wind beginning to keen, and far, far below the honking of distant cars, the spiral wail of sirens, the braying of donkeys and snarling dogs, screaming.

  Teeth gritted, Melanie pulled out the long sliver of glass that was embedded in her heel. Luckily it had not gone through a softer area of her foot. It would have pierced her like a nail. Her rich red blood shone bright, almost glowing, in the black-and-white world. Melanie stared at the half circle of broken glass that surrounded her mother, stared down at her now-bare feet. Her mother wore shoes; she could walk through. Melanie stretched out her hand slowly, palm upward, as she would to a small, troubled child. “Come with me,” she said gently. “It’s time to go.”

  Fumiko looked at her with wide, blank eyes. The dark spots of blood on her cheeks looked like smeared ink. She slowly gazed upon the melee in the room. The whirring rush of hundreds of wings, the yelps and screeching of people fleeing from the birds, feathers drifting down like black ashes. Fumiko slowly reached out for her daughter’s hand.

  Mr. Glueskin roared. “Mine!” he screamed. Cracking, snapping, the sounds were percussive as he took out crows three, four at a time, forcing his way toward them. “Mine! Mine! MINE!”

  “We have to go,” Melanie said more firmly, keeping the desperation out of her voice. She held her mother’s gaze and even managed a smile. “It will be okay.”

  Something hopeful seemed to slowly bloom in her mother’s eyes. For the first time since she had seen her in Half World, something of the mother she knew was returning.

  White glue splatted upon Fumiko’s face, engulfing her features, her head snapping back with the impact.

  Melanie screamed.

  Fumiko instinctively clawed at the thick skin of glue that covered her nose and mouth.

  Mr. Glueskin whipped back his tongue like a chameleon, and Fumiko was yanked from the shelter of the piano to be dropped at his feet.

  He slowly began lowering his jaw, sagging, yawning wider and wider, his head disappearing, until all that was left was a gaping open maw.

  Noise faded to a distant roar while ever so slowly, birds flapped, as people toppled beneath dark swarms. As if a broken projector were playing an old-fashioned film, the world around Melanie seemed to stutter like a series of stills, movements strobing, the seconds between realities frozen.

  Melanie located calm.

  Her eyes swept over her surroundings. Broken glass from the window.

  Glass would not sever the elastic bonds that smothered her mother. The bottle. No. Mr. Glueskin would just re-form. He had no skull to shatter.

  Waving her eel arms about her head, a woman ducked with excruciating slowness, falling toward Melanie.

  Melanie slow-motioned sideways, to avoid being knocked over, and her foot stuck to something sticky in the carpet. She lifted her foot and the blob of glue stretched like freshly chewed gum.

  Like gum . . .

  The world accelerated, with the thudding rush of wings, screeching party guests, Fumiko inexorably dragged into Mr. Glueskin’s cavernous mouth.

  Melanie spun around. She grabbed the neck of the champagne bottle and tossed it to the side. She snatched the bucket of ice and melted water. She leapt over the quivering bodies of fallen birds, sidestepped people being pecked to pieces. She planted her feet in the threads of the carpet and dashed the contents of the bucket onto Mr. Glueskin’s tongue.

  SIXTEEN

  WITH A BEAUTIFUL crinkling crystalline sound, half of Mr. Glueskin’s distended tongue grew stiff and solid. Though it was still attached to the back of his soft mouth, he could no longer control its motion. The weight of Fumiko, still attached to the gluey chameleon tip, pulled his numbed tongue to the floor. Fumiko, flopped onto her side, desperately tore at the skin of glue that still covered her face.

  Mr. Glueskin’s features seeped back into place, his white eyes rolling wildly, rage and frustration stretching his face monstrous. Unable to control his frozen tongue, he began creeping his mouth forward, toward and around his frozen flesh, like a constrictor rippling its body around its prey. He inched his maw toward Fumiko, whose struggles were growing weaker.

  Jade Rat spat out the ligaments of someone’s detached eye. It tumbled on the carpet until it came to rest against a dead crow. “Yes!” Jade Rat cried jubilantly. “Ice!”

  Melanie snatched up a second bucket, a third, and threw the contents onto the tip of Mr. Glueskin’s tongue and further down his throat with a great rattling splash. As the cold spread, he slowly lost all elasticity, the flexible bonds growing stiff, hard, until his face was frozen into an enraged mask.

  Fumiko twisted and Mr. Glueskin’s tongue broke off with a snap, a third of the way down, like a dry branch breaking off a tree.

  The stump of frozen tongue fell into pieces. They looked like irregular chunks of firm white cheese upon the carpet of black feathers.

  Belatedly, Melanie’s heart began to pound triple time. She gently pulled the hardened glue from her mother’s face and it came off like plaster of paris. She tossed the mask aside.

  Melanie stroked the sweaty strands of hair away from her mother’s face.

  Silent.

  Then, her mother began to cough and cough.

  Everyone was still. Birds, party guests, beasts, and monsters. They stared at the tableau, shocked into paralysis.

  Mr. Glueskin had been disabled.

  By a girl with buckets of ice.

  Melanie helped her mother into a sitting posit
ion and gently rubbed her back. When she could breathe evenly, she helped her mother rise to her feet. Her hands were trembling.

  Melanie said nothing. She threw her arms around her mother and held her, hard. She could feel her mother’s heart pounding against her.

  Fumiko slowly lowered her head to rest upon her daughter’s shoulder.

  Jade Rat shrieked.

  Melanie jerked. Caught sight of her small friend.

  A clot of tongue, slowly melting, was trying to stretch back toward Mr. Glueskin’s mouth. It looked like a white leech, inching its way to its master. The rat had clamped her teeth into the lump even as it strained to worm away, the rodent digging her four paws into the threads of the carpet.

  All of the scattered pieces of tongue were melting, and they were trying to inch their way back toward the stump that still remained frozen within Mr. Glueskin’s mouth.

  Mr. Glueskin wriggled his loosening eyebrows. He waggled them like he was an old-fashioned comedian. “Ghhhhheeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuuu!” he groaned, his voice deeper than a fog-horn.

  Not enough! Melanie’s heart stuttered. It wasn’t enough.

  No one stopped her as she dashed to the kitchen.

  She flung open the freezer and found large plastic bags of ice. She grabbed all three of them as well as an empty ice bucket as she ran back to the thawing Mr. Glueskin. Melanie ripped open one bag and clasped several handfuls, dropping them into the empty bucket.

  The lumps of melted tongue slimed toward Mr. Glueskin’s open mouth like homing slugs. Melanie snatched them all off the ground and plunged them into the bucket of ice. Instantly hardened by the temperature, they became inert.

  Mr. Glueskin was thawing, his neck gaining mobility, and he turned toward her. His stump of tongue began to protrude, like a slow gray slug. He began to smile.

  Melanie dug her thumbnail into another plastic bag and tore it open. Loose cubes tumbled to the carpet. She grabbed a handful from the open bag and shoved the rough ice into Mr. Glueskin’s open mouth.

  The bottom half of his face locked with the cold.

  Mr. Glueskin’s eyes seethed with hate, but Melanie stuffed the remainders of the bag into his hardened maw.