400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “And you are?” said the reedy voice from that terrible, reeking mouth.

  Hugh would have staggered back, but the King of the Mbe’lmbe put a shoulder hard to the back of his thigh and pushed him forward. But without abandoning him, for the King held hard to Hugh’s hand and thrust it up as if for that gumball eye’s consideration.

  “He is your successor,” stated the King.

  “I need none.”

  “Master, your time has ended. All who know you know this for the truth. Pass on the work that was passed to you.”

  “What I have learned, cannot be passed along. I need no apprentice, and I have no heir.”

  “But this is he! There is none worthier! None so pure! None so sweet!”

  “Sweet, you say?” The gumball eye, looking as if it had been worn by repeated sucking, spun toward him. “You…boy…you do look familiar.”

  “As well he should.”

  “Still, he means nothing to me. Why do you say I should know him, eh?”

  The top-hatted figure of the old Master thrust forward to catch at Hugh’s collar and cuffs, muttering all the while: “…is sugar…is life…” The fingers, he noticed, were sticky with honey and butter and chocolate. The white beard was stained with chocolate; bright red dabs of jam gleamed at the corners of the awful mouth. Louder now, the muttering, and closer in his ear: “Life is sugar and sugar is life.” The fingers roamed his body, feeling his ribs, “You need fattening up. You need sweets. Nice sweets. You need this.”

  Hugh blinked. Beneath his nose, a bar of chocolate appeared as if from the thin man’s sleeves. He started to take it, but the King hauled down his arm by the elbow, with a whispered, “No!”

  The thin man laughed down at the little King. “What do you fear? That he will eat and never want to leave?”

  “You know that is not what I fear!”

  The white face leaned closer to Hugh again, bent down like a jack in the box on a wobbling spring. “Go ahead…take a bite…”

  The chocolate so close, beneath his nose, smelled delectable. Only the King’s fear held him back. There was something here he did not understand. He clamped his jaws shut and shook his head.

  “Well, then…save it for later…” The long white fingers drifted toward his pockets, pulling them open ever so slightly, dropping the chocolate bar in, patting the pocket to make sure it was safely ensconced.

  And then, “What’s this?”

  The hand retracted, sticky fingers pinching the bound journal he’d carried with him all this way. “What…where did you find this?”

  The brown King looked mystified, as baffled as the old white man.

  The old gent opened the book to the page with its golden marker, and his lips began to move. Hugh thought he was reading the journal entry there, but in fact his eyes were not upon the page. He plucked out the golden bookmark and his eyes grew watery and distant. He turned his gaze to the handwritten pages, and flicked his eyes over several lines. His lips trembled. He looked up at Hugh, then gazed with growing rage at the King of the Mbe’lmbe. His rotten teeth gnashed; flecks of spittle sprayed from his foaming mouth. He tore the top hat from his head and hurled it down upon the floor.

  “Why show me this?” he began to scream. “Why cast me back upon that shore?”

  “I…I…it was a mistake,” the King began. “Please, Master…”

  “After all I have done for you? Wretched imp! Is this how you show gratitude? Sacre sucre! I have come too far to be tripped up here!”

  “Master! Master, you are forgetting what you put in place! Let me help you remember!”

  Hugh found his arm gripped ever more firmly by the King.

  “Remember, Master? Remember?”

  Looking down, he caught the glimmer of a knife in the King’s hand.

  How quickly it had appeared! Where had it come from, and why?

  He struggled to move away—so sharp! But the Mbe’lmbe held him tight.

  “Do not be afraid,” said the little King soothingly. He found himself unable to resist. He wanted to trust the King. He saw his small white hand held almost tenderly in that much smaller brown one. He clenched his hand into a fist, but the King deftly uncurled his pinky finger and held it so it stuck straight out.

  With a sharp swift slice, he lopped off Hugh’s fingertip.

  Hugh bit his lip. He did not cry out, both because he feared to show fear before the hungry gumball eye, and because he felt no pain.

  The King of the Mbe’lmbe stepped forward with Hugh’s fingertip extended. Hugh looked at that and not his hand. He saw a round pink stub with a soft moonshell of fingernail, still quivering, still unaware it was no longer part of him.

  The old Master took the offering and held it up to the fierce oven light, regarding it from all sides, uncertain. He gave the little King a most curious questioning look, to which the King responded with a firm nod.

  The old man licked his lips with a dry grey tongue, then popped Hugh’s fingertip into his mouth.

  Hugh gasped as if feeling the old man’s rotten teeth in his flesh.

  The old Master shut his eyes. He bit down once, and Hugh heard a brittle crunching. He bit down twice, and Hugh heard the juices squirting. The Master’s eyes opened, rapt and delirious, delighted, a broad smile spreading over his face, transforming it in an instant into the face of very old and wizened child.

  “My God!” he crowed. He rolled his eyes.

  “I tried to tell you, Master,” said the King.

  The old man rushed toward Hugh and caught him up beneath his arms—caught him and threw him high into the air. He felt the furnace breathing over him, felt it might gape and swallow him whole.

  “Yes, that taste, that wonderful taste…it comes back to me! Oh, sweet victory! Oh, ecstatic sweetness, sacre sucre! The taste of sunlight to the leaf! My boy, my dear boy, what a terrible misunderstanding! Oh happy day! Oh joy to you, joy to us all!”

  He set Hugh down, and patted him tenderly on the head. “But…do you not see, my boy?”

  He fluttered the golden bookmark, and on it Hugh saw scratches of writing, thin letters incised in the foil and glinting. The lines were short and broken, like lines of poetry, like something else. Like…like…

  “The recipe!”

  “For what?” Hugh asked.

  “When I first drew you from the oven, ah, so small…” He held his fingers to show a mere pinch of boy. “So pink! Yes, yes! Dusted in pink sugar, my marzipan boy…so warm and fresh and sweet, with the raspberry coursing through you. Why, I could have eaten you whole!”

  The old confectioner’s eyes gaped, bulged, oozed sugary tears, staring at something beyond.

  “Come with me, my boy. Come now…this way…while the mood is upon me, while change is in the air, quickly now, quickly!”

  Hugh realized, as the old man’s hands led him firmly along, that the glazed eye was fixed on the enormous oven. Above them burned an orange sun of flame, bright enough to have lit this and a hundred other underworlds; but that was the top of the chimney. At floor level, coming closer, was the door of the oven.

  “This way! This way! Right along here! Your heritage, my boy…your birthright, and your birthing place. Exactly as intended, yes, I remember it now. Exactly! You were to take this burden from me when I was too weary to carry it. You were to be raised at my side to continue my work, taught from my books, fed from my fingers… And look what time it is! We must be quick, lad, quick!”

  They paused at the gate of the immense furnace. Thick glass barely held back the volcanic fires within. Intense heat caused the oven door to bulge and blister toward them. The old confectioner reached out to twist a silver knob, and just like that the flames died down to nothing, and went out.

  “Here, lad, have no fear! It’s completely cool! Put your hand upon it!”

  Hugh put out his hand and touched the glass. The furnace roar was less than a whisper, and the heat had died down completely. The flame still burned somewhere in the heights,
but down here it was cool.

  “You will learn such secrets now, the mysteries of the oven will be yours…come up, come up!”

  The oven door drew up like the portcullis of a castle. He reached unbelieving into the cool interior, black walls speckled with grey, long racks that seemed to continue for miles back into darkness, the mouth of a spotless cave…

  And suddenly the hand in his back pushed firmly. He lost his balance, tipped and plunged. The King of the Mbe’lmbe shrieked and reached out for him, but they were both lost in that instant. Hugh fell hard on the spotless floor. As he felt the King’s hands on his arms, trying to pull him back, he heard the whirr of oiled hinges and the deafening boom of the oven door sealing shut.

  He rose and turned. The King lay weeping on the ground, crumpled by failure and betrayal. Hugh could see the old confectioner, a shadow beyond the tinted glass, something made of smoke. The old man raised his hand to the silver knob by the side of the oven door. Then the glass began to fill with light. It felt to Hugh as if the sun were rising at his back.

  He scarcely minded. It was a pleasant warmth, something familiar and almost comforting about it, as if he might melt away with a smile upon his face.

  But it was otherwise for the King of the Mbe’lmbe. Hugh only slowly realized what he was hearing, and what it meant.

  The little man was screaming.

  He turned and hammered his fist on the glass, making a rhythmic pounding to which the twisted figure beyond the glass seemed to dance an antic jig. He was certain he saw the top-hat tossed high into the air and caught again. The old man was dancing out there.

  “Please!” he cried. “Please help! Please, somebody, help him! ”

  His hands left sticky bubbles on the tempered glass. He could hear the sizzling of flesh behind him, then came a burning smell unlike any that oven had ever known or should have known. Flesh…

  Beyond the glowing pane, something greater moved. A spot of darkness swiftly expanded and swelled, glistening, gleaming, becoming immense. Against it, the small shape of the old confectioner stiffened, grew tense, began to back away. The old man retreated until he was pressed against the glass of the oven door, separated only by that thin hot sheet from Hugh’s clawing fingertips. The old man turned to the glass, his face directly opposite Hugh’s, but all unseeing, blind with fear. Then the old face went awash in blackness, smothered in it. A gluey brown wave drenched the glass, washing over it like a thick and sticky tide that eventually, reluctantly, subsided. In drawing back, it flailed decisively at the silver knob, and the flames abruptly died.

  The oven door hissed and opened slightly. Hugh stumbled forward, then stopped and turned back to find the King limping toward him, his hair singed and smoking, his skin a mass of developing blisters.

  Together they stared across the sticky waste.

  The floor was like the shore of a sea of molasses at low tide. A crumpled top hat floated in the middle of the flood. There was no other sign of the old confectioner.

  The doorway to the Sweteshoppe swung ajar, and slowly came to rest.

  The King croaked in an urgent hush: “My farewell to you, young master. The sugarbirds again will sing in the rafters, but I will not linger here to hear them. I will not allow myself to come to hate you as I grew to hate him. I have sung my death song already. I go to lay myself among my people.”

  The sadness of the King’s words overwhelmed him and Hugh began to weep. Great sugary tears rolled down his cheeks and he flicked them aside with his tongue, trying to take no pleasure in so doing. The King of the Mbe’lmbe, last of his kind, clasped his hand with finality, then turned and walked over the Sweteshoppe threshold. Within, a great darkness gleamed as if welcoming the King. Then the door shut and Hugh was alone.

  Absently, he put his severed finger in his mouth and began to suck.

  And sucking, tasted sugary sweetness, raspberry jam, a touch of caramel, and the almond softness of marzipan.

  Sugar.

  The stuff of life.

  The taste of sunlight to a leaf.

  If a mere man, with all his indigestible impurities, had whipped up such sweet life as he from scratch, then what might he, a boy of sugar, dream of making? What radiant creatures of unsullied sweetness might issue from that titanic oven and soar out to dust the world with powder from their wings?

  With visions overwhelming him almost to bursting, he realized he was nibbling the very slightest bit from his finger.

  He forced himself to stop, although it was difficult.

  No more! He must find other sources of nourishment. He must make himself last as long as possible.

  It would be a struggle, a constant temptation.

  After all, he was so incredibly sweet.

  * * *

  “Sweetmeats” copyright 2005 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2005.

  EVALUATION OF THE HANNEMOUTH BEQUEST

  (A.k.a. Hannemouth Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array)

  CAVEAT RE ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE:

  This report is provided for purposes of oral history only, as much of the evidence contained herein is purely anecdotal, and unverifiable at this point. Incomplete copies of insurance and expense reports relating to the loss of a company car were found in the files of IBM’s Northrop Account Liaison, dated mid-1970’s, however it is impossible ascertain whether the car might have been lost some ordinary way (either stolen or abandoned under awkward circumstances), or whether it came to harm as alleged in the documents. These notes were compiled from an informal oral history, namely the oft-recounted tales of Charles Messraunt, a colorful former employee of IBM who was eventually released from employment after increasingly common episodes of erratic behavior, poor mental health, and allegations of substance abuse. Messraunt’s official notes of the Hannemouth Bequest Self-Configurable Array are no longer to be found in any known record depository, if they were ever filed in the first place; and Messraunt himself faded from the historical record after several sightings as a street-person in the Northern California town of Garberville.

  THE RECORD:

  In approximately 1975, the Dean of a small private Northern California university made an informal request of Messraunt, who was temporarily stationed at the campus as an on-site contractor, training the staff in the use and maintenance of a new academic record-keeping system after having overseen its construction. The Dean requested Messraunt’s expertise in inspecting and evaluating a bequest that had been made to the university by a private donor, once a professor at the university, recently deceased. The bequeathed property was identified as the Hannemouth Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array, and Messraunt believed it to be some form of experimental computing device, undertaken at great expense by the late Professor Hannemouth, and developed entirely with private funding flowing from royalties from various of Hannemouth’s successful patents.

  The Dean’s request was apparently greeted warmly, although it must have been kept an informal matter, judging from the lack of contemporary records to support Messraunt’s claim that he proceeded with IBM’s express authorization. When Messraunt asked to see the device, he was told that it was too large to transport, but that a short trip would soon bring them to it. This was by no means unexpected, considering that the university’s state of the art records system, considered to be the very height of compact efficiency at the time, had required construction of a three-story building adjacent to the Academic Affairs building. Hannemouth’s array being somewhat older, and probably dedicated to more complex computing operations, would no doubt occupy a sizeable footprint.

  Several hours’ drive brought Messraunt to the gates of Hannemouth’s secluded estate in an old-growth redwood forest. A bulky keycard device gave him entry, and he soon found himself driving through what appeared to be an extensive if dilapidated campus, larger than the university itself. Hannemouth’s wealth and eccentricity were obvious at every turn, as was his apparently prolonged absence. For while th
e Dean had painted the old inventor as a solitary man, the grounds of his estate were lined with avenues of dormitories, as if this had once been a thriving community. An hour of driving about the complex left Messraunt feeling as if only a fraction of the place had been explored, but he was mindful of his duty, which was to give a cursory inspection of the device itself, and return with recommendations for further study, and in fact whether the university should accept the bequest or make other arrangements.

  With the aid of a poorly labeled map, Messraunt parked his car in what appeared to be a small staff parking lot near one of the more formidable buildings at the center of the complex. Stepping out of the car for the first time, he discovered the abandoned complex had the nature of an unkempt park, with squirrels everywhere, and the rooflines festering with crows. Messraunt had been provided with keys to the main building, and he soon found himself in an equally shabby lobby, where the destructive activities of rats were much in evidence. Unpromisingly, there was no electricity, and the elevators proved unworkable, which did not bode well for his ability to judge the Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array except in its most superficial aspect. (Imagine evaluating the performance of a modern personal computer with nothing to go by but the blank metal case.) His instructions led him to believe the seventh, topmost floor was his destination, and he made his way through dark stairwells clogged with rat droppings and crow feathers. Everywhere was the rustling of vermin. Messraunt wondered how long ago Professor Hannemouth had abandoned the device.

  The seventh floor, fortunately, was well-lit thanks to panoramic windows which gave a view of the entire campus complex. Several of the windows had been shattered by the elements, and a number of crows fled squawking from the room when he first entered. The carpets were stained from storm leakage, and Messraunt worried for the integrity of any sensitive device that had been stored under such conditions. But the view momentarily occupied him, and took his breath away, as he looked out on the campus held in its bowl of wooded hills. From here he was able to see the entire length of the avenues lined with the grey, almost featureless dormitory buildings—evocative of grim Soviet-style apartment blocks. In the distance, across a glittering river he had managed to miss in his cursory tour of the estate, he could see the cold smokestacks of a small physical plant which must have generated power and warmth for the campus and its erstwhile inhabitants. Messraunt faintly perceived some sort of pattern behind the layout of streets and buildings, but after the initial wonder at the sprawling vista faded, he found himself more concerned by the absence of anything he could identify as the Hannemouth Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array.