by Mat Johnson
“Eat up, big boy. You eat as much as you deserve, honey,” he cooed, his free hand still holding the camera, which he’d somehow recovered before fleeing, to record the revenge for posterity.
And it was not just the Tekelians who were taken with the Karvels’ supper. Since being awarded a bottle of the painter’s private stock, Arthur Pym had made himself scarce and was nowhere near the tainted food in question. Nathaniel, for his part, was all over it. I watched as Nathaniel kept staring at the food while it was served to his masters, his eyes watering as much as his mouth when Angela paused from her serving duties to slap the dinner from his thieving hands. The Tekelians, thinking the servile wench was affirming Tekelian dominance by not allowing the human to eat, just laughed at this display, a congested snorting sound I was sure would make Nathaniel lose his appetite further.
Mr. Sausage Nose, for his part, showed no sign he would ever be satiated. He barely bothered to use his hands, vacuuming the food on his plate nearly as fast as I managed to replenish it. Regardless of his enormous intake, and the amount of food I saw the rest of the creatures seated on the roof consume as well, none of the beasts showed any sign of succumbing to the trap we’d set for them. Admittedly, I knew hardly anything about poisons and their effects, or the creatures’ alien physiognomy, but after forty-five minutes of gluttony, there was nary a burp to be heard. Not even a cough. The creatures, besides an occasional shout and slap to the head of one of my human compatriots for perceived sloth, showed no negative signs at all. They were joyous. And they were horrid. The laughing and the fangs and those horrible white gums holding the yellow teeth in their mouths. But never a healthier bunch have I seen. Even the children, the poor children, the ones who had eaten our offering, showed no signs of slowing, and it was to these canaries that I looked for the first symptoms to develop. We had fed them nearly every bit of poison we could, I knew. Any more and the food would have turned blue from its active ingredient.
“It’s just time for dessert, then. Get the pudding, Christopher. But this time, extra sprinkles,” Mrs. Karvel said, sidling up next to me.
“But they’ve already eaten a ton of poison and it doesn’t seem to be working,” I said, forcing a smile and talking openly in front of the snagglenosed monster because he had no comprehension of my words’ meanings.
“Extra sprinkles,” Mrs. Karvel gleefully insisted. “All the sprinkles we’ve got left.”
I would have preferred to take this journey on my own, of course, but it seemed Mr. Sausage Nose must have remembered that I, too, was his property and followed me with his eyes when he saw me walking toward the exit door. Ignoring Jeffree’s attempt at a menacing gaze,† the beast jumped up from his seat. It was like watching a willow tree walking, the hulk’s robes blowing in the wind, revealing the outline of monstrous proportions. That beast wanted into the BioDome, which he made clear by refusing to let me close the door behind me. He wanted to see everything, and clearly felt ownership of everything he could see. Worse, when one of the pale children noticed our interaction, the child wormed its way into the entrance as well, and Mr. Sausage Nose just let it, patting the boyish mini-monster on the head as it passed him.
Regardless of the fact that I barely knew the species, I could see the awe in which the monster held the room we entered off the roof. Considering that he had never seen a building not made of ice, I have no idea what he made of the metals and plastics. Exotic bones, he probably thought. This wonderment only grew when we entered the outer hallway of the dome, where the ceiling soars to a cathedral majesty and Karvel stored several of his many treasures. Even still, none of this could in any way prepare the two creatures for the vision of Karvel’s utopia itself. Looking at the beasts’ faces in those moments of our arrival, I was struck by the difference between witnessing the improbable and witnessing the impossible. I don’t believe these creatures had ever seen the color green before. There was no natural occurrence of it on their section of the continent, there was no reason they should have. And yet it was such a fundamental thing, this color of life. And I would not have believed it was so alien to them if I hadn’t seen their reaction with my own eyes. They stood still, in utter wonderment. They stood and looked out into the vast arena not just because of its improbable size but also because they had never seen anything like this. Assuming they had the same access to the color spectrum as we did, and that evolution hadn’t left them unable to see beyond whiteness, they must have been overwhelmed by the sudden engagement of a dormant part of their brains. And what can be said of that ceiling? Even though they surely knew the sky it represented, still they had to be awed by this human interpretation of the heavens. It was visible how much the scene moved them, and not just in their faces and eyes but in their very spines. I could see their shivers, even under their robes. As I watched them take in the vastness of it all, I began to see the shivers increasing, nearly to the point of convulsion. It was the heat. It was exactly the same reaction Augustus had had on entry to the BioDome earlier. Understanding what was affecting him, that there was no way he could handle this temperature for too long, the horrible beast looked at me and made motions to his mouth, chomping his disgusting jowls in a pantomime that left no hideous detail to the imagination.
“AAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!” he finished with, throwing his head back and showing his fangs impatiently.
Aargh indeed. The child, perhaps sensing that the stream held cooling liquid, ran toward its banks with the universal glee of youth and laid its head straight down. Leaning in to lap up the Kool-Aid contents timidly, like a fawn. Moving away from the child and toward Karvel’s deck, Sausage Nose kept a heavy hand on my shoulder, leaning down on it either to brace himself as he adjusted to walking on grass or to keep me from getting too far away from him. The creature didn’t release me until I led him directly to the many cooking pans that still lay forlorn across the dinner table. Before I could even offer these remains, he was all over them, forgoing hands and lifting the pans directly to his mouth to scrape them with his dry alabaster tongue.
“More food,” I said, pointing off toward the freezer. There lay the trays of pudding, each one having been boiled with the remainder of the rat bait for a definitive conclusion, in case the main course dosage failed to do its job. “I’m going to get more poison, to kill you,” I added, offering the most servile of smiles before slowly moving away. Despite my physical caution, I still almost had a glass baking pan thrown at my head by the monster and probably would have if at the last minute the brute had not noticed the morsels of Betty Crocker’s classic bread turkey stuffing stuck to the sides of it.
Augustus. It was not until just then, when I looked directly at the freezer door, that I realized my favorite Tekelian was still locked inside. Not wanting his presence to be revealed, not wanting our most recent guests to have an emotional reaction to this probable traitor, I barely opened the door before going through. And Augustus was still there, lying facedown in the back amid a few half-eaten Pillsbury crescent rolls. I was first struck by the smell. You would think that the frozen air would delete some of this stench, but no. The little storage room was putrid with Augustus’s stank, which was so much more rank than usual. Soon I could see why: fecal liquid emerging from the midsection of his robes poured into a puddle around his limp body. It was even whiter than his hair; if it wasn’t for the stank odor, I would’ve thought it was yogurt.
“Augustus? You’ve shit yourself,” I called to him, first in a whisper and then repeated with increasing volume with each unanswered entreaty. Getting as close as my nose would allow, I reached out for his shoulder. What I held in my hand was hard, and it was not that muscle had miraculously appeared since the last time I had touched my ally. I wanted to convince myself otherwise, but I knew what I would find even before I turned Augustus over and saw his face and those pale eyes staring open and lifeless toward the empty pudding pans he’d managed to consume. Augustus, my friend, was gone. That damn pudding. Augustus was my responsibility, and I’
d failed him. But at the moment there was no time for self-flagellation. Only revenge and survival. And sadly, there was this one horrible positive that emerged in the back of my mind: the poison did work on them. It was only a matter of time or dosage.
I would have stayed hidden in that freezer if I could have. Just waited it out till the poison did its job and freed me from the Tekelian oppression. But an easy exit was not to be. The greedy monster outside beckoned, and within minutes he was throwing pots and pans at the freezer door as a sort of remote control, summoning me out again. Out of respect to our friendship, I closed Augustus’s eyes with my fingers and kept them shut by placing a bag of frozen peas over them. Careful not to step in his disgusting bodily fluids, I wrapped the shroud around his rigor-mortis-stricken corpse before gathering up as many pudding pans as I could carry at once and walked out to meet my impatient guest once again.
“You’re going to love this. It’s guaranteed to kill you,” I said and smiled on my arrival. The trays went down with a thunk before Sausage Nose, and despite the fact that he already looked ill, the shaking hands and sweating pale face evident, there was a clear expression of joy that he was going to indulge further in his unintentional suicide. Maybe it was my anger at the death of my friend or the simple bravado that comes from exhaustion, but before he could even dig into the first serving tray, I did something reckless. Slapping his marble hands playfully, I said, “No, no, no. It’s not quite done yet.” Reaching for the last box of Black Flag industrial-strength rat and vermin poison, I took a handful of those blue pellets into my palm and then, as if I truly was dropping rainbow sprinkles onto chocolate ice cream, I let them fall over the upper surface of the pudding in question. And they looked beautiful there. The monster gazed up at me, gazed at the box of poison that I had in my hand, saw the illustration of the rat there, and smiled. And then he started gorging.
The monster was so engrossed in his final meal that he didn’t notice much else, thinking little of anything but himself and his dessert. I was more considerate. Standing before the creature where he had come to lean against a stool, I thought of the Tekelian child. Looking to the stream that flowed not more than thirty yards beyond, I could see the kid remained on its belly, head at the syrupy stream still. The child, who must have been very thirsty, was so close to the water that at times its head disappeared below the surface, the food-coloring blue covering the back of its gray hair. It was an odd, overindulgent way of sucking in the blue sugar water, and it was this strange technique that led me to walk slowly off the porch toward the back. I was not more than ten yards closer when I realized the youth’s head was not simply bobbing happily atop the surface of the “water” but was bobbing in it with an up-and-down rhythm that matched that of the slight, pump-enhanced current. I knew that unless the Tekelians had some yet unseen, amazing amphibious ability to breathe underwater, this poor young thing was dead.
The smaller physiognomy, of course. The poison had done its job long before the colossal man killer behind me could even faint. I was never a particularly good liar.‡ Unsure and alarmed, I made the obvious mistake of freezing immediately, staring back to the deck where the gnarled-nosed gourmet clanked his head in the pans. No sooner did the creature catch my eye than I was exposed. Clearly, the beast could read my body language; my pause was the most easily decoded of mammalian reactions, I’m sure the average seal would react the same way. His mouth covered in wet brown, he darted his head to look beyond me to his young charge. Those crisp, ice blue eyes saw the scene and quickly recognized the horror for what it was.
Mr. Sausage Nose didn’t bother with the deck’s stairs, instead grabbing the railing with one hand and launching out into the air as if he could sustain that flight. For a moment there, as he hung above me, he seemed impossibly powerful and graceful, and I knew that, regardless of how much poison he had eaten, my death must be destined to arrive before his did. When he landed, though, stumbling to a stop, I could already see that his invulnerability had left him, that he was diminished. Lurching forward, exposing an awkwardness I had never seen among these creatures, Sausage Nose still managed to get to the small corpse in less time than the fastest human could have. Watching him drag the delicate, now limp body from its sugar-water grave, for the moment, I was overcome with more grief and empathy than fear. Or maybe it was that by this point the fear had become so commonplace in my system that it no longer had the impact it should. Regardless, I couldn’t deny the enormity of what we had done. No creature should have to know the loss of its young. Not even a worm. Not even an evil worm. But when the monster looked up to me, fixed me with those ice blue eyes and gave another scream, this sound beyond the range I knew any man was capable of, my knack for overwhelming fear returned, along with two other things: the enraged beast and his full attention.
It must have been shock that stopped me from running away immediately. I stood there staring at him, meeting his eyes as he tenderly laid the young victim down. Then the monster let out another roar equal to the first one. That was enough to get me moving. After he screamed, the creature grabbed his waist and bent over himself, vomiting violently right on the corpse. Looking over my shoulder as I struggled to run away, I saw him heave again and perfectly white bile spewed past his fangs, covering everything in front of him with a hellishly chunky chowder.
I took off. With every essence of my being, I ran.§ Loopy and off balance, Sausage Nose stumbled behind me as I attempted to get beyond him. Despite his sickness, he was moving so fast that on his first attempt to grab me he gave my side a good knock before hurtling past on his own momentum. Slamming into a boulder to my left, he hit it hard, headfirst. If this had been an actual boulder and not simply a hollow stereo speaker covered in papier-mâché rock, it might have actually knocked him out instead of just pissing him further off.
The house, I thought. Run to the house. This was the only coherent thought I could fix on. At least it seemed rational at the time, as if all I needed to do would be to lock behind me the door on my three-fifths homestead and all my troubles could be that easily kept out. Garth was in there brooding, and I screamed his name as I ran, as if he could help me in any conceivable way. Having been used to this minute commute, I knew exactly which rocks to jump on to cross the saccharine stream. This minor knowledge was in my favor, because the beast had to pause when he came to the water behind me.‖ As I kept moving with every muscle I could manage for the effort, I saw that the monster paced along the bank, back and forth like a great cat stuck in a cage, stopping only to vomit once more. I couldn’t have been twenty yards from the cottage when I turned back to see that Sausage Nose was actually walking away, winded! A sense of relief—mild, but there nonetheless—flashed over me when I realized that this would not be my end, that my life might be spared. It was a feeling I needed and clung to, but it was ripped away when I realized that the monster was merely setting up his runway. Pivoting, robes spinning as he did, the creature ran with speed that made him almost a blur to my widening eyes. In one robust, two-legged spring, the white one jumped across a dozen yards of the stream in a single bound. And it couldn’t have taken him more than three steps to reach me.
I was gripped by my neck and lifted from the ground. He held me up before him and stared at me. I doubt those eyes had ever reflected so much hatred. The creature’s bile reeked, I could smell it through his nose. And then another roar came, and I was covered in the unnatural coolness of his putrid breath, bathed in specks of his vomit and spittle. It was nearly impossible to get fresh air, caught as I was in his exhaust, and when it was over I realized his grip had made breathing impossible anyway. “Guwk,” I said to him. It was not the most eloquent final word, but it was all I could manage. There was a sound after that, dead and hollow like a pumpkin being kicked, I had no idea where it came from.
“Guwk,” the Tekelian said back to me. And then, in a moment of vertigo I first attributed to my losing consciousness, the beast dropped me and fell on top of me. The weight was im
possibly heavy, but I could already feel that it was a limp weight, devoid of all flex. Pushing desperately out from beneath him, I saw the metal tooth of the gardening hoe planted halfway into the creature’s skull. And beyond that, my friend Garth Frierson standing in his work clothes, covered in dirt, staring down.
“Well, dog,” Garth said, his gaze fixed anxiously on his own lethal handiwork. “That Negro island you keep talking about is sounding better and better to me.”
* The left hand being used for toilet duties, unlike in the West, where we are willing to get both hands dirty to get the job done.
† This was no longer that powerful, given he had only one eye to do it with.
‡ A question not of willing but of able.
§ For years I’ve had the common anxiety dream of running away from danger without being able to distance myself. In Thomas Karvel’s heaven, even my dreams came true.
‖ For a creature used to the extreme cold of this polar climate, getting wet was probably the most sacred of taboos.
SAUSAGE Nose didn’t even have the chance to grow colder before Garth and I devised a scheme to get the hell out of there. Our planning didn’t take long. We didn’t really have many options to consider. There was no negotiating with the monsters now. Even if the two beasts who had just died did so only because of the heat, how could we feign innocence at this point? How could we even stall for time? Soon the Tekelian Army above us would be wondering why its prominent citizen hadn’t reemerged.
Our plan: we’d get the rest of the crew and the Karvels off the roof, then turn up the boiler as high as it would go. Then, while all of them were occupied with their pudding, we would sneak out the back, take the snowmobiles, supplies, and sailboat. And then we would sail to Tsalal!
