by Kim Foster
He righted himself and charged at the yellow thing, but before he could kick it or hit, it sailed at him and whacked him hard on the head.
It hurt. He almost fell over.
“Ack!!...Get off me, get off me!”
The thing kept coming at him, swinging closer and closer each time he smacked it away. It was relentless. And it was wet, spewing blood and juices every time it hit him. Josie flailed at the thing, his arms were flying fast in the air, trying to hit the thing before it hit him again.
“Get off me!”
He fought harder, swinging his body faster and faster at the slimy thing.
Until he heard laughing. Emerald laughing.
Josie stopped long enough to see Emerald recording him on her iPhone and giggling. A dead chicken swung in deep circles close to his head. It was then that he realized he had been fighting a dead, bald chicken that had been tied by its feet, dangling from hooks in the ceiling. He looked around and saw dozens of them, and ducks and geese, all strung up, gutted and de-feathered. Guts and entrails had been piled into stinking buckets on the floor.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to vomit from the meat stench or the embarrassment of having fought a dead chicken and lost.
Emerald snapped her iPhone case closed, with a big satisfied smile.
“Smooth,” she said.
“What are you gonna do with that video?”
“Nothing.”
“C’mon, you gotta erase it…”
“I’m thinking school assembly, on the big screen, the whole school watching….”
“Okay, seriously...erase the video….”
"I'll definitely be the coolest girl in school if I show the kids this."
"Not funny, Emerald."
The two of them bickered and wound their way through the cooler, in and out between carcasses of meat hung from big iron hooks. The hooks were fastened to rods that traversed the ceiling of the cooler like a maze of highway. There were whole cows and fat pigs hanging from these hooks, the organs hollowed out of their bodies. The animals, stripped down to meat and muscle and bone.
There were also sheep like this and goats, all ready to be broken down into the kind of meat seen in shops, wrapped in plastic, sitting on Styrofoam.
But Josie had a feeling this meat would never make it into the actual supermarket, which he figured was in the room next door. This was for Bangkok, and no one else.
“Nothing here but meat…” Emerald said.
“Yeah, Trinket’s not here.”
They moved in and out of the hanging carcasses. It was a forest of meat, each side of beef or hanging sheep was a vine, a branch, and entanglement of bushes, a thicket they had to pass through. They noticed the carcasses swayed a bit as they moved. They swung in a sweet mish-mash of movement, that made them feel like they were treading through a swaying, under-water kelp forest.
It seemed like they had been walking through the meat endlessly. They seemed to be going far away and nowhere all at once.
“We have to find a door,” Josie said, "...a way to get into the market."
“There hasn’t been one.”
“Do you think we’re stuck?...Maybe this is a trap.”
Something didn’t feel right.
The blue lights above them flickered. Josie squinted, looked around. That's when he noticed it.
“The meat...Look at it.” Josie said, quietly.
He stopped dead, and held his arm out to keep Emerald from walking further.
And that’s when they saw the slight rocking of carcasses become a little stronger, like it wasn’t them pushing the meat around, but that the sides of beef had their own sway, like they might be alive.
“Ghost Meat,” the name blew into Josie’s brain, as if he had said it himself, but he knew it came from outside of him.
The Ghost Meat were part of Bangkok's minions. They fed him, they protected him. They sacrificed themselves for him, like members of a cult.
“Ghost Meat…” he told Emerald. “They belong to Bangkok.”
“We have to get out here,” Josie shouted, and they took off through the meat.
“There’s a door!” Emerald yelled back at Josie, “Just keep going straight.”
But straight was a hard thing to manage. The Ghost Meat swung harder, like angry clock pendulums, their hooks slid around on the rails, metal screaming on metal.
Emerald and Josie ran for the door. Josie reached for the handle. But before he could get a good grasp, a huge Ox carcass came sliding toward them. It was the size of two refrigerators stacked on top of one another. It was covered in a thick brown hide. It was headless, but the legs and hooves and tail were still attached and they flung around uselessly, like flapping tube socks.
The ox carcass was not one of the minions. Josie could see it was different. It could move great lengths. It had power and a mind of its own. The ox came whizzing at them fast and hard from across the room, just as if it were a bowling ball and they were the pins. They braced for the hit.
But it didn’t come.
The ox came to a crashing halt in front of them. It was so close Josie could see the blue river of veins in the meat, the sinews, the fat. He could smell the ox in his nostrils.
Josie and Emerald tried the door. They pulled on it furiously. But it wouldn’t budge.
The ox turned slowly.
They panicked. Josie banged on the door with his fists and Emerald screamed for someone to help, as if someone on the other side might let them in. Whatever this dead ox was, it meant them grave danger, and they knew it.
The ox carcass slowly turned so that the belly of the animal was right in front of them. Josie stopped pounding to look.
"Emerald..." he said, nudging her with his elbow.
She turned to look, her eyes wide and fearful.
The belly was carved out and something was living inside. No, not something. Someone. Josie recognized that someone immediately.
It was Ludivine Salt, and she was hanging, upside-down, like a bat, inside the belly of the ox carcass. Her eyes were closed. A smile played at her lips, an eerie smile, as if she knew what was in shop for them. Her skin was white, but weirdly white, like shimmering paste, so other-worldly. The tip of her nose was turning blue, and her cheeks shimmered as if they might be made of jelly.
Her eyes flung open.
“Looking for something, Urchins?” Josie remembered the voice, how it was tight and rigid and thin and mean.
She flung herself out of the carcass and blew toward them.
Her body was fluid and fluttered in the air as if it might be a fish, as if they were all underwater. Her dress was translucent, shining white, and yet it wasn’t a dress at all, it was a part of her body. Her hair, black as octopus ink, spread out around her head, the way hair floats in water. And Josie could see something else - she was losing her human form before their eyes.
"I'm hungry, Urchins," Ludivine said in a hollow voice.
She floated over to a shelf of cow, pig and goat heads and hovered there.
"Aren't you hungry, Josie Brown?"
Ludivine picked up one of the cow heads, turned it so that the skull was like a bowl and with one hand, dipped her fingers into the brains of the animal, and ate it, raw, licking the threads of brain matter off her fingers, like she was eating something delightful. She scooped her hand in again and again, scraping the sides with her fingers, and shoving whatever she could find, in heaps and clumps, into her mouth. She did this until she got every last bit and finally, plucked all of it into her mouth.
"Ssssshlurp!"
Emerald nearly threw up watching Ludivine suck up the coils of the brain, as if she were sucking up a large Udon noodle.
"Sssssshlurp!"
"Eyeballs..." she said, moving on to the eyeballs.
Ludivine plucked one from the socket. It made a wet "thwucking" sound as it came out. She popped it into her mouth as if it were a bon-bon.
"My favorite," she said, chewing deeply and swallowi
ng with a great deal of ecstasy.
"Join me, Urchins!" she said, picking up a pig head and moving toward them with blinding speed. She was inches from them and thrust the head at Emerald and Josie.
"Eat! Eat, Josie Brown!" she screamed, her voice angry and taunting.
Josie and Emerald took off running. Josie ran behind a tub full of entrails and bloated stomachs and great tubes of intestines. He popped his head up and looked for Emerald. She was diving behind a crate of what he thought looked like amputated cow hooves.
He knew it was a mistake not to stay together. They were both vulnerable now.
“Oh you naughty, naughty Urchins,” she cooed at them.
"You can't hide from Ludivine."
And then her voice changed, it fluttered and erupted in a sharp, garbled howl, like she was screaming underwater. She raised her arms in the air, and Josie was reminded of the swishing, jellyfish tentacles in his dreams. Ludivine chanted something Josie found both horrifying and familiar, some ancient fish language, something he felt on his skin, rushing through every cell in his body.
He hunched down trying to make himself small, trying to stay out of her way, but Ludivine spotted him. There was no getting away from her. No matter where she was in the room, she was following him, playing with him.
Then, Josie noticed the tub in front of him, loaded with entrails.
They were alive. As if her chanting had awakened them – disemboweled intestines with a mind of their own.
They slithered like serpents. They twined around each other, and made their way out of the box. They moved around Josie's neck, down around his chest and looped around his legs.
A part of him wanted to run, to fight back, but most of him wanted to watch Ludivine, her squalling chanting, her miraculously blue, undulating, gelatin arms.
He was riveted to her.
Ludivine moved through the Meat Ghosts, patting them lovingly as if they were her babies, and they kicked and convulsed under her touch. Jose noticed she did not touch the ground. She swam through the air.
“Oh, there you are, little Urchin,” she said sweetly, finding Josie behind the tub.
“Come now,” she cooed.
"Aren't you hungry?"
And he was, he realized, violently so.
Ludivine presented him with a pigs head, held upside down.
"C'mon," she said, coyly, "you know you want to..."
Josie felt one of Ludivine' tentacles caress his cheek. It was the caress of a mother. Tender. Nearly sweet. He fell into it.
Then, his head went dark and sad and blank. His eyes went glassy and rolled back in his head. His body was limp, like his bones had turned to bendy willow branches. He knew only that he had hunger, that his hunger was eating at him from the inside out, that he needed to eat, that there was a glorious, fat pigs head right there in front of him.
The intestines, on cue, loosened up around him, and he flung himself out of their grasp and went straight for the head. He pushed his hands into the head of the pig and ate the little lobes of its brains, the muscles on its face, the sweet meat of the cheeks and then, both he and Ludivine, as if they knew what the other was thinking, reached for an eye ball and plopped it in their mouths and then chewed as if it were the most delicious thing they had ever tasted.
Emerald, from behind her box of hooves, was disgusted.
She watched Josie and Ludivine cackle like witches after they had swallowed. The two of them tore into the snout as if it were a hunk of crusty bread.
Obviously, Josie was under a spell of some kind. Emerald was pretty sure drastic measures were required. She looked around. That's when she saw a heavy iron chain, connected to a meat hook, sitting on the rail above her.
"Josie….over here!” she screamed and waved her hands over her head.
Ludivine turned her face to Emerald. Pieces of brain hung from her lips. She hissed at Emerald. A gush of wet jelly frothed out of her mouth. She lifted the skull to her mouth and drained it the way someone might slurp the last of the broth from a deep bowl.
“Give me your hand, Urchin," she turned to Josie, and three neon green tentacles slid like worms toward him.
"There is more feeding to do, Urchin," she said, in her watery voice.
"You are one of us, Josie Brown."
The tentacles slipped around his hands, binding him hard. But Emerald noticed, he did not try to fight. He was staring at Ludivine, completely hers.
“Hey snorkel face, let’s go fishing.” Emerald yelled.
She hopped up on the crate of hooves, and jumped in the air, grabbed the steel chain and pulled it down with the whole weight of her body. It came crashing into a heavy pile around her. Emerald grabbed the chain and the hook behind it, and hurled it into the air at Ludivine.
The hook hit her squarely in the belly, puncturing something deeply gelatinous, so that translucent liquid started spewing out of her, like a water fountain.
“Aaaaaaah, you wretched Urchin….You’ll pay for this!” Ludivine dropped Josie’s hand and wailed as she spun wildly, and totally off-kilter through the room, like a balloon whose air was being released.
Whatever that hook had done to Ludivine it set off the Meat Ghosts. They were enraged. They flailed and thrashed hard on their hooks, as if they too had been wounded, as if they could feel what Ludivine felt.
Emerald knew that they wouldn’t have much time. She dashed between the flailing meat as if it were a mediaeval gauntlet, and found Josie unconscious. She knelt beside him, opened her pack and pulled out smelling salts, something her father always had on him, in case someone passed out on one of his deep sea research vessels.
She put the vial under Josie’s nose.
“Breath. C’mon. Breath.” she held his head and whispered, searching the room for Ludivine who had disappeared, but could come back at any time.
“Aaach….hmrrmph.” Josie mumbled as he came to, to the strong and repugnant smell of ammonia.
“What the hell?...Oh man, that stuff is gross.”
“We don’t have time, Josie. We have to go. NOW.”
"Wait. I have this weird taste in my mouth..." Josie said, wiping some thick goo off his face.
"No?...You think?" Emerald said sarcastically.
Emerald put her pack back on and helped him to his feet. He was woozy, like someone had stepped on his brain, but he immediately saw that the room had changed. There was a something hugely sinister here. The Meat Ghosts were thrashing wildly, their legs and hooves jumping and spasming.
And the sounds…
The bucket of heads had come to life. The sheep’s faces bleated out some kind of twisted message, the pigs snouts snuffling and snorting at some invisible target, the cows mooing and screaming the name “Bangkok” as if they were being dragged into slaughter. The crate of amputated hooves stamped furiously.
The fluorescent lights popped and sputtered. The ceiling groaned from the pull of the Meat Ghosts slamming about. He thought maybe the whole building would come down on top of them.
Emerald grabbed Josie’s hand and they moved in and out of the thrashing carcasses.
“The door...I see the door,” Emerald yelled to Josie as a Meat Ghost slammed into her knocking her back and forth between two other Meat Ghosts.
Josie was fully back now, his mind clear.
They grabbed the door again and Josie knew they had been here before and never made it out. There was a chance they wouldn’t make it this time. Josie grabbed the handle and pulled. This time the door seemed unlocked, it had give, but it also felt like someone or something was holding it from the other side.
Josie pulled hard. Nothing. Emerald grabbed her crow bar out of her pack and started working the bar into the crack between the door and the frame.
The door gave a little.
“I think we can jam it open.” Emerald said.
“Okay, you jam, I’ll pull….On three...One, Two….”
“Urchins, where are you going?” The voice, Ludivine’s was hi
gh and taut and screechy.
Emerald dropped her crow bar. It went skittering onto the floor.
"Not a good time to be a klutz!" Josie shouted at her.
Ludivine was hovering over them or at least they thought it was Ludivine. Her voice was the same, but all of her had changed. She had grown immensely, maybe three or four times her usual size and she was no longer human. She was translucent. They could see through her. She floated and undulated, as if they were all underwater. Her eyes were empty, blue holes.
She had become...a jelly fish.
“Bangkok, come back from the sea….” Ludivine raised her jellyfish head to the sky, as if praying to some great God.
“The Urchins are here."
Emerald searched for her crow bar on the floor. Found it and worked it into the crack of the door. Josie yanked on the handle. He knew they had seconds, not minutes before Ludivine would do something ugly and awful to them.
Ludivine seemed please to see them scrambling so hard. An ugly, evil grin played at her jelly lips. The wound that had been caused by the meat hook seemed healed now. She was at full power.
“One, two. three….Pull!” They pulled as hard as they could. The door buckled.
“One, two….three! The door moved a bit.
“I will let you go, Josie….” shrilled Ludivine.
“You are one of us,” and a long thin tentacle came flitting out at Josie, stroking his cheek.
Get off me!” he shouted at her and slapped away the tentacle.
“....But the girl is fish food.” Ludivine hovered over Emerald.
“Don’t listen to her….Try it again,” he sputtered to Emerald.
They pulled in unison and the door broke in the middle.
“Its coming….again!”
“Bangkok will think you’re a fine treat…” The jellyfish sneered at Emerald, and caressed her cheek with a slimy wet tentacle, like an angry snake slipping through her hair and across her face.
Ludivine stuck out her serpent tongue and licked her tentacle.
”Tasty, just like your MOTHER. Bangkok so enjoyed nibbling at her s-s-s-s-s-succulent bones!”