by Hiromi Goto
“Now I’m really cross with youuuuuuuuuuu,” a voice cried out playfully.
Completely mad.
Ilanna’s voice, but changed. Deeper, resonant, as if she’d grown enormous. Vibrating with rage.
Gee’s heart was a panicked bird. How could she have broken free? He had nothing left to fight her with.
“Haste!” White Cat snarled.
Gee grabbed Cracker’s hand. They broke into a staggering run, the pounding of their footsteps terrible, painful, reverberating through their fragile bodies.
“All this exercise has made me hungry,” Ilanna called. Her voice, drawing nearer, trembled with glee. “Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm. I wouldn’t mind starting with a bit of CRACKER!”
White Cat yowled with triumph. They watched as he leapt into the air and disappeared.
“He’s found it!” Gee gasped. “This way!”
They plunged into something transparent, at once viscous and opaque. As if they leapt into a wall of water and disappeared. The city bulged and pulled them in.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sound overwhelmed them. Screeching, grinding of rusty metal. Cabs careening, clip-clopping horses, the creak of wooden wheels over wretched cobblestones. White neon lights flickered, punctuating the dusk. The distant blast of improvised explosive devices, the crunch, crunch of mortar, the wail of an old-fashioned siren. Somewhere high above them the wind whistled with the heavy beat of enormous wings.
Hooooonnnnnk! Headlights pinned them, paralyzed, in the middle of the street. They stared as the driver repeatedly pressed on the horn.
“Idiots!” White Cat hissed from above.
They looked up as one.
The opulent lights of the Mirages Hotel glowed behind the cat, who sat waiting for them at the top of the semi-circular stairs. As if cued, a fountain began spouting behind him, a cascade of light and water. A tinny orchestral recording surged.
White Cat narrowed his eyes with pleasure, enjoying the dramatic display for a brief moment before he leapt toward the hotel entrance. They ran after him.
Gee gasped when they spilled through the circular door. He couldn’t help being overwhelmed by the opulence—the brilliant chandeliers in high-arched ceilings, the gleaming expanse of marble floors, the centrepiece of black and white flowers as large as a city bus. Employees stood at attention, numerous bellboys and attendants. The check-in counter glittered as if encrusted with jewels. In a spacious lounge area where drinks were served several guests stood or sat in easy chairs, waiting for someone to join them.
Gee shook his head. It all looked so normal…. Not filled with monsters as it had been for Melanie.
Fear pressed upon him from behind. He looked over his shoulder. Ilanna had not yet reached the city.
“White Cat,” Gee whispered. “Didn’t The Book of the Realms describe this lobby as a goblin market?”
“That was in Melanie’s time,” White Cat stated. “But since the Three Realms were reunited, many have gone on to Spirit. This is a less frightful place now. But ’ware! Danger is still everywhere. Quickly now. To the elevators.”
“Keep your head down,” Gee reminded Cracker, linking his skinny child arm around her elbow.
They walked across the great lobby as casually as possible. Gee couldn’t help double-taking when a chicken with lady’s legs darted past. But for the most part, the guests were Half Worlders trapped in their trauma cycle. Their eyes drifted past them as if they weren’t there.
Gee glanced back at the revolving doors once more.
“Oh!”
He’d almost run into her. A whippet stood upright on her two hind legs, dressed in high heels and a bikini. Her spine was horribly arched backward to compensate for the bulging mound of her rib cage, and she tottered precariously upon five-inch high heels. “What is that gorgeous aroma?” The dog snuffled compulsively as her tail swung a frantic beat. Her excitement was so great she trickled urine.
“Delightful! It reminds me of something … it’s on the tip of my tongue!”
A few of the guests began drawing closer. A cloven hoof trod upon Gee’s foot and he staggered.
Their glittering eyes with strangely formed pupils, like those of goats and chameleons. Some of them had snouts and beaks. Nostrils quivered, inhaling, sucking in deep their odours.
Cracker had her head low as if she were avoiding demented paparazzi.
“Ohhhh, sweet mother of god,” an older woman groaned. “She smells so gooood. She smells of Life!” A monitor’s tongue flicked out from between her human lips to taste the flavour in the air.
“Life!” the creatures cried. “Life! Give us Life!”
Gee, so much smaller, could only catch glimpses of White Cat through the gathering crowd. The cat had reached the elevators that were raised higher than the lobby. Standing on his hind legs, propping one paw against the frame of the doors, White Cat reached out with his other paw, a single claw extended, to press the call button.
As one of the two cars began to descend the cat glared impatiently at Gee and Cracker. “Hurry!” he mouthed, his whiskers pointed in their direction as they tried to squeeze their way through the small crowd.
Cracker was yanked away from Gee’s side. She didn’t even have time to cry out.
“Oh!” Gee gasped. He was jostled farther and farther as the crowd circled around Cracker. He reached out, trying to force his way back to her side, but the crush of their scaly bodies, their bulging forms—he couldn’t break through. And he had little strength remaining.
“Mine! All mine!” voices cried.
“Give us a piece.”
“I got here first! I need it the most!”
Cracker would be torn to pieces…. Too small, powerless, Gee was lost inside the press of bodies. He jumped up and down like a little child. He could see nothing. There was nothing he could do. Shame twisted inside his chest.
A large man, his torso naked, like a faun, only his two legs—they were the thick stubby limbs of an elephant…. His eyes whirled, as if intoxicated. Finding Gee in his way, he knocked him aside as if he were a doll.
Gee fell face forward onto the cold marble floor. Someone stepped on the middle of his back, forcing out all of the air. The high heel punched a hole into his lung. Gee screamed.
Pain. Pain as he’d never known it. Why now? When he hadn’t felt it before? His lung burned. Whistling. Whining. He would be trampled to death. And it hurt. It hurt so very much. To death….
The Half Worlders were after Cracker because she smelled good. She smelled of Life. But they had let White Cat pass. He was made of stone. And Gee? What was he that they passed him by?
I am not alive…. Gee moaned.
No! It couldn’t be. But the truth of the knowledge refused to fade. Not alive, as Cracker lived….
The woman tried to dislodge her shoe from the middle of Gee’s back by giving it a little shake. Gee screamed again.
Desperate to reach the beguiling aroma, she abandoned her footwear.
He could feel his slow heartbeat throbbing around the heel that pierced his back. It hurt so much. Things only hurt if you’re alive! Gee railed.
Cracker cried out.
No! What was happening to her—
A boot kicked the side of Gee’s head. White light exploded behind his eyelids. He could scarcely breathe. “Someone,” Gee mouthed, his lips moving against the cold polish of the floor. “Please, someone help.”
Cold, slickness gently twined around Gee’s ankles. The gelid length moved lovingly across his skin and a rush of shivers trickled down his spine. In a daze, he began smiling, because it felt so nice—
He was yanked upward into the air. The jolt of his own weight and gravity wrenched his ankles and neck. He gagged, simultaneously biting his tongue.
Gee dangled upside down, a metre above the heads of the tallest creatures crowding around Cracker. He swayed slowly, his T-shirt bunched around his neck and armpits. He twisted from side to side to catch sight of what had saved him fr
om being trampled. His movements dislodged the shoe that was stuck in his back and it fell to the floor with a clatter.
Gee sucked his breath. The pain, whistling in and out. He could feel wetness sliding down his back. Cracker. What was happening to Cracker?
He began twisting frantically. The thing holding him gave him a little shake. A warning.
Gee stopped moving. Still upside down, he was slowly turned around.
It took a moment to recognize Ilanna’s inverted smile, but when her eel tongue darted, Gee couldn’t keep a small sound from escaping his lips. What she had become….
Her legs … her smooth, pale human legs, they’d melded together and grown thicker, longer, into the body of an enormous white sinuous eel. Muscular and thick, a vestigial crease remained, the seam running down the entire length to the tip of her tail. Like Nu Wa…. It was her long tapered tail that held him aloft.
Gee’s eyes widened. It wasn’t just her legs … her body stretched, long and sinewed, all the way up to her head. She no longer had a neck or shoulders or a human torso; the only part of her that remained human was her head.
“Maybe I should thank you,” Ilanna hissed. “Your betrayal tipped me into a most transformative rage and loathing. I have reshaped my destiny. As you once did. And now I no longer need you.” Feigning sorrow, she widened her beautiful seal eyes and her voice wobbled. “I really wish it didn’t have to end like this between us. But you’ve betrayed me in the worst way possible. And I’ve simply outgrown you.” She slicked her tail even farther along his legs, past his ankles, so that her tail bound him all the way from his knees to his toes.
Gee slowly swayed back and forth.
The din below him sounded far away as pressure grew inside his head. He could feel his eyes beginning to bulge against the sockets.
Gee closed his eyelids. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t done anything to deserve all these terrible things. But they still happened … whether you deserved it or not. And did anyone truly deserve it? He had no answers.
“To be human,” Gee mouthed. “Or not….” He almost laughed. How he’d hated Hamlet, the sniveller, when they’d studied the play with Ms. Park….
He opened his eyes.
Ilanna’s face was mere inches away from his own, Gee’s eyes parallel to her quivering lips. They parted, and her eel tongue slowly began slipping out, the waft of the winter seas a blast of brine and icy death.
And her teeth. Jagged, glinting and so many. She smiled broadly and pulled him closer even as she slowly turned him around. Her cold breath hitting the wet on his back. She pressed her mouth against his bleeding wound, and began to suck.
Gee screamed with pain.
From a great distance, he could hear Cracker’s muffled shouts. White Cat’s cursing.
“We could have been friends,” Ilanna whispered moistly. She spun him around so that he faced her once more.
His black blood was smeared around her pale lips. Gee fought his revulsion.
“We could have been lovers. I would have been your mommy, your older sister. Your teacher, your torturer and your saviour….” Ilanna whispered. “I would have been everything for you.”
“You offered so much,” Gee rasped. His smile was sad. Resolute. “But it was an offer I will never accept.”
Ilanna’s eyes narrowed into slits. The tail that bound half the length of Gee’s legs squeezed so tight that his white glueflesh shot out in streaks.
Now! Gee thought.
“Karuuuuuu!” Cracker’s voice rang out, as pure as a bell.
Gee pinched off his flesh at his knees, leaving Ilanna holding the amputated remains. He began to plummet. Gee shot his two palms upward. They splatted upon Ilanna’s face, and even as she reared back, he willed his palms to spread, thin, elastic, to encase her entire head.
Trapped in a web of skin, Ilanna reared desperately, stretching even more glueskin away from Gee’s body. He was still stuck to her, and he hadn’t the strength to pinch off his arms so that he could fall away. Before nothing of him was left….
Ilanna writhed and weaved in her struggle for air, each movement pulling more matter away from Gee’s body.
I’m like pull taffy, Gee almost giggled, as a wave of hysteria washed over him. He shook his head. Stop it! I have to pinch free from her, he thought desperately. He was so weak. Yet gravity continued to work on what remained of his body, and Gee stretched and sank to the ground. He was caught in the folds of his overlarge T-shirt, his arms stretched as thin as string, his mass so depleted he was scarcely larger than an infant….
Dazed, Gee stared up at the chandeliered ceiling. The ornate mouldings were so pretty, he thought. Very soon, someone would step on him, crush him, and he would just be a large wad of gum sullying the beautiful marble floor. At least he hadn’t succumbed.
He had not!
Relief, pride, even sorrow—a small human ember deep inside.
Ilanna, looming high above him. Without hands or eels to assist her, she couldn’t tear away the asphyxiating skin of glue. She thrashed back and forth, stretching Gee’s string arms even thinner into threads. Her thick muscular tail began banging the ground, knocking over the hotel guests, in her desperation for air. Tables tipping, chairs flying, the shatter of crystal smashing. The sounds of Ilanna’s choking gurgle horrible and pitiful. She reared, whipped her body in the opposite direction, and the thread of Gee’s arms finally snapped. Free.
He could not even crawl.
Ilanna began to sway in a giant circle.
“I’m sorry, Popo,” Gee whispered. “I tried my best….”
“Pathetic,” a snide voice growled.
Gee weakly turned his head.
A paw smacked him, hard, on the nose. A burst of white light bloomed behind his closed eyes. Gee shook his head sluggishly and blinked, trying to focus.
White Cat loomed over him, his malevolent eyes filled with spite. The cat hadn’t even used his claws. Look at that, Gee thought sluggishly. I’ve lost so much of myself that I’m no bigger than a cat.
“Gather your wits!” White Cat demanded. “Reshape your legs at the very least! Idiot!”
Gee stared down at his body. His legs ended at his knees. The cat was right. He had to make an effort…. His head fell back onto the floor.
Ilanna, smothering beneath the skin of glue, began weaving back and forth dangerously.
“The things I’m forced to do,” White Cat muttered. He placed his forepaws on Gee’s side and began to knead.
“Don’t help me,” Gee cried, “help Cracker!”
“Cracker doesn’t need my help!” White Cat seethed. “She’s rather adept at having her best interests met. Not unlike a cat,” he said begrudgingly. “But you are a different matter!” He treadled the boy across the floor as if rolling a log.
White Cat rolled him so quickly that Gee grew dizzy. Yet he clung to one thought: Cracker was okay? “Wait!” he cried. “Stop!” He wanted to see. Where had the crowd gone? What was happening?
“Haste, not waste,” White Cat muttered. “If you have energy enough to bellow, reshape your legs!”
Gee gritted his teeth, and tried to stretch, s-t-r-e-t-c-h, the glueskin farther down his legs, but the dizziness overwhelmed him. “You have to stop,” he pleaded. “I can’t—”
He thudded against something so hard that his teeth clacked, barely missing his tongue.
“Oops,” White Cat said, having rolled him into the first stair by the elevator entrance. He didn’t sound very sorry.
Ilanna’s monstrous body stiffened above him. Rigid, a gargantuan eel statue. Gee couldn’t look away. She teetered so very slowly that he felt as if he could catch her somehow—and then crashed to the ground with an impact so great that the floor shuddered. She’d landed a hair’s breadth away from where he’d been lying moments before.
Gee stared, paralyzed by the near miss. He would have been crushed beneath her. “Thank you, White Cat.” His voice trembled.
Ilanna’s long, thick,
muscular eel body twitched with the final throes of her Half Death…. The slick white gleam of her skin began to fade and the taut muscles to slacken.
The glueskin Gee had used to cover her head was still intact. It lay flat upon her beautiful features. A thin mask. He had killed her.
Once, she’d been a human. A girl. An infant born in the Realm of Flesh…. A human who’d been betrayed by the ones she loved the most. To end up in Half World. To suffer. And he had killed her.
Gee turned his head to the side and retched. A thin wad of white glue bobbed from his quavering lips. He spat and spat. Wiped his mouth against his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ilanna,” Gee whispered. His eyes burned. Please. He had to get out of this place. He wanted to go home.
“Pah!” White Cat batted Gee’s head with his paw. “Ready yourself!”
Gee squeezed his eyes shut, hard, to rid himself of the last of the dizziness.
“Oooooh,” the crowd sighed. “Ohhhhhhh.”
Something was glowing, a warm and beautiful colour in the dim and monstrous world. Moving, the reflections of orange light flicked around the walls and the great ornate ceiling.
Orange, Gee thought wonderingly. Ohhh….
“So pretty,” the crowd cried, staring upward, transfixed.
A hinotama, the size of a human heart, flared like an orb of firelight. It bobbed weightlessly above the guests’ heads, weaving, diving playfully. The orange-yellow glow was vibrant in the grey Realm, and the creatures and monsters, the maimed and the suffering, raised their hands, trying to touch the brilliant orb as it wafted just beyond their reach. Bewitched, they seemed to have forgotten what they’d been doing….
As they chased after the beguiling light, Cracker was left behind.
Flee now, Karu’s Spirit urged. Leave this Realm. Live your life fully as you are meant to.
Karu. He’d come back. Gee stared, his mouth fallen open, as the flame-orange hinotama floated above the heads of the Half Worlders.
“Catch it!” the creatures cried. “So beautiful, the light….”