You know what, the taste isn’t that bad.
I chomp down as hard as I can. His tentacle is already halfway down my throat, so the part my teeth bite into is meaty and resistant and coiled, but once I break his slimy flesh and dig in, it tears into strings under my incisors. He screams and his other tentacles twitch, allowing me to pull my hands free so I can hold the one in my mouth and really give it a good bite, feeling my teeth hit my teeth, and then I pull the wriggling thing out of my throat and slap him with it. It’s a foot long and alive and moving and covered with my blood and his blood, and I whip him in his stupid face with it.
“Leave me alone!”
His severed tentacle bleeds dark red on the dining-hall floor. His other tentacles seethe against one another like they’re getting mixed signals from his brain. I realize I’ve never seen him hurt before. He stares at his new stump in disbelief, and I get it: he’s a coward. He did what he did with swords and guns because he could never fight with his bare hands, or his tentacles, and he got his position of power because he needed it, because he was useless otherwise. I see all this as he turns and runs out of the dining hall, stumbling on seven legs.
“Welcome to Camp Washiska Lake, motherfucker!”
102
“PERRY, YOU DID IT!” ADA RUNS UP TO ME. “Are you okay?”
I drop the tentacle and move my jaw around and pat my Adam’s apple. “I feel a bit violated, but I’ll be all right.”
“Fool!” we hear outside. Ophisa turns his titanic body. The princess leaps off his neck to confront Tendrile in the parking lot. “Go back in there! Kill them all!”
“I can’t, mistress. Look what he did to me!”
She wraps a tentacle of her own around his stump to examine it. She seems genuinely concerned about his welfare. She speaks quietly to him—comfortingly—and then kisses him, hard, on the lips, pressing into his body while their tentacles commingle.
“Ew,” I say.
“No kidding,” Ada says. Mortin and Sam join us. We all watch, flabbergasted, as the princess walks Officer Tendrile across the parking lot toward the trees.
“Did you know?”
“We knew they were working together,” Mortin says. “We tracked Tendrile on the Boggolove cruise raft and found him with Ophisa and the princess, outside Upekki. All the hequets who were missing from the town? They were feeding them—live—to the monster. But we didn’t know they were … lovers.”
Ophisa lumbers after the couple on his huge barbed legs.
“No!” the princess orders. “You, my pet! You must kill them! Find your way into that structure! Make them die … like food.”
“Yessss,” says Ophisa. As Tendrile and the princess disappear into the woods, he turns to charge.
103
“BACK UNDER THE TABLE!” SAM SUGGESTS, but before we can get there, Ophisa roars and spits a great glob of venomous fluid through the broken door. Mortin shoves Sam aside. Ada and I dive to the ground. The spittle hits one of the table legs. It bubbles and steams. The table collapses.
“Stay down!” Mortin says. Ophisa swings his tail through the door, obliterating it. Then he swings again through the maw of the building to send stacks of chairs flying; I interlock my hands over the back of my skull and hear a scream and a dense whap. I look up: a chair caught Sam in the mouth. He wipes his wrist against his lips and leaves a dark streak. He stares at me like this is my fault. I have to admit it is.
“Come and play with me, Mini Pecker!” Ophisa calls. “I can sssee what you want with your blue-haired friend. I will help you. I ssseee how you want her partsss....”
“Don’t listen to him, Ada! I don’t think about you that way!” How is he getting into my head?
He can see into the thoughts of anyone he turns his hundred-and-ten-eye gaze on.
Ophisa shoves his mouth through the door and unleashes a spray of fluid. It lands on my legs and eats through my jeans, burning my flesh where the dog-head bit me, eating ragged holes into my skin. I scream and flick the goop off and wipe my leg on the floor. I have small bloody craters on my calves. The pain is so huge that I laugh at it.
“Leave me, guys! Save yourselves!”
“Not a chance,” Ada says. She pulls me back toward the kitchen. Ophisa paces outside like he’s trying to figure out a way in. Even with the door destroyed, he’s too big, and carpet bombing us with phlegm will only get him so far.
“How do we kill that thing?” Sam asks. We huddle against the kitchen door. Outside, Ophisa stands still. We all watch for clues to his behavior. He swings his head—with a great mound of acidic goop on it—toward one of his front legs. He brushes his fangs against the leg where it meets his body. It sizzles and steams and snaps off. His body lurches forward, on five legs now instead of six.
“What’s he doing?”
Mortin gulps. “Figuring out a way in.”
He repeats the process with his second front leg, sizzling it into the parking lot. When it falls, though, and he lurches forward, he catches himself—with a new front leg in place of his old one. The new leg is segmented and barbed like the original, but only a few feet long.
“Regeneration? Are you kidding me?”
“He’s making smaller limbs,” Ada says. “With two-foot limbs, he can crawl right in.”
“That’s not fair!”
“To the kitchen! Hurry!” Sam pushes open the swinging door, and we all tumble in and flip on the lights.
104
STOVES. REFRIGERATORS. GIANT COOLERS running under cutting boards. The kitchen has been put away with great care. Pots and pans hang over electric ranges. Boxes that say GOVERNMENT CHEESE are stacked in the far corner, next to an industrial-sized canister of bleach. On one side of the room, a conveyor belt leads to a huge stainless steel dish-washing machine labeled HOBART.
“Why are we in here?” I ask.
“There!” Sam points to a magnetic strip above one of the stoves. A set of knives hangs from it, in a spectrum from the smallest paring knife to the largest meat cleaver.
“I’m okay,” Ada says, holding up her remaining knitting needle.
“Like that’ll do any good,” Mortin says. He takes a meat cleaver.
“It might. Leave me alone.”
“I call chef’s knife,” Sam says, grabbing a ten-inch blade. It works for him. I picture Peter Powers, fifteenth-level barbarian, swinging it in the snow.
“We’ll wait here”—I stand by the kitchen entrance—“and get him as he comes in. What do we aim for, anyway?”
“Eyes. Try to destroy all the eyes you can. What are you using for a weapon?”
I pull off my backpack and fill it with knives—everything left on the magnetic strip. Steak knives, bread knives, barbecue forks … I’m turning my backpack into an instrument of death. “You came in the nick of time,” I tell Ada. “How’d you know we were in trouble?”
“Mortin felt you.”
“How?”
“In my heart,” Mortin says. “I felt my heart jump and I knew my correspondent was in danger.”
I blinked. “I’m your correspondent?”
“Perry. I was giving you credit! You didn’t figure it out?”
“Yeah,” Sam says, “I don’t even know how this all works and I figured that part out.”
“But, I—Mortin—you’re old!”
“Smoking pebbles makes you old. I’ve been coming here on my own time and doing it for years. I was born the same day as you.”
“But I asked you point-blank if you were my correspondent!”
“So?”
“You told me no! You lied!”
“Some people think that life is about lying all the time, and some think it’s about being truthful all the time, but really it’s a very mundane matter of knowing when to do which.”
“You lied and you had me paralyzed!”
“Would you two shut up?” Sam asks. “Two Perrys. What a nightmare.”
Of course, it makes sense. Mortin and Leidan correspo
nd to me and Jake. Which reminds me: “What happened to Leidan?”
“Don’t worry about him,” Mortin says, but he himself looks worried. I wonder if Leidan started drinking again, and what that means for Jake’s drinking. Connections are coming into focus. Mortin had been covering up a black eye since I met him … and I was hit in the eye by Ryu. Mortin quit smoking pebbles … and I quit playing Creatures & Caverns.
“I’m not really sure how to do this,” I say. “Pleased to meet you, correspondent.” I stick out my hand.
“You do it like this,” Mortin says. He hugs me and wraps his tail around my head. “Pleased to meet you too.”
I retake my position at the door.
“Why did your heart jump?” Ada asks quietly. “If Mortin’s jumped, yours must have.”
“I almost kissed Anna.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“C’mon.”
“C’mon what?”
“C’mon, you know.”
“Pretend I don’t. Tell me. Humor me.”
“I didn’t kiss her because I was thinking of you.”
Ada smiles. “No kidding. Were you thinking of me as a mystical creature from another world, or a cool girl who can cook fish?”
“Both,” I say. Then, without asking, like I’m supposed to, I lean in and kiss her. Ideally it would be a slow kiss, I know, with a romantic buildup, but Ada and I don’t have that kind of relationship—we tend to always be in mortal danger. So it’s a quick, scared, excited, flying leap of a kiss, my lips dashing to hers and pressing against them with nothing and everything to lose. I get her upper lip between my upper and lower lips and hold her like that, not opening my mouth, just feeling how soft she is, knowing that now, if I die, I’ll have a beautiful memory instead of a burning regret. I drink her in through my closed lips.
“Peregrine!” She pulls back, shocked, but she can’t hide her smile. “Listen!”
Tables and chairs crash outside. Clicking footsteps get louder on the linoleum.
“Boymeat! I sssmell your dessire, sssuckling!”
105
OPHISA’S FAST, BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH. As soon as his head appears in the doorway—as big as my chest and dripping eye venom—we all attack. I swing my backpack at him; Sam stabs him; Ada jabs her needle at his neck; Mortin hacks him with his meat cleaver.
Fail!
Sam’s knife tears into Ophisa’s mouth and rips off a hunk of flesh, but then promptly dissolves. Ada’s knitting needle can’t break his scaly neck hide. Mortin’s cleaver slices off a crop of eyes, but then Mortin drops it. My backpack turns out to be the best choice—it doesn’t do much as a weapon, but it acts as a buffer during Ophisa’s counterattack, when he knocks into us, trying to smear acid on us with his fangs the way he did his own legs. The bag sizzles on the floor as we’re thrown across the room—inside its eaten-away main pocket, the cover of the Other Normal Edition disintegrates. Ada lands on one of the stoves; Sam hits a fridge; Mortin hits the wall under the empty magnetic knife strip. I find myself next to the HOBART machine. I see a red switch underneath the conveyor belt and press it. I may not play Creatures & Caverns anymore, but that book was awesome, and I am pissed. Maybe the machine will confuse the monster.
An electronic roar starts up. The HOBART is as long as the room, full of jets of water and chunking metal. The conveyor belt leading to it starts rolling; inside, rows of brushes go after plates that aren’t there.
“He’s coming!” Mortin yells.
Beside the doorway, to either side of Ophisa’s swaying neck, cracks spread and paint chips flutter to the ground. He’s pressing his massive body against the walls, pushing his way into the kitchen.
“Hello, meatymeats!”
With a terrific crash of wood and plaster, he busts in. Dust rains over him. He works his fangs around one another. Steam from the HOBART starts to obscure him, but not before he spots the clump of eyeballs that Mortin lopped off him. He bends down and eats them.
We’re trapped.
106
OPHISA’S LEGS ARE ONE FOURTH THE size they were outside, but his body is still huge. He dominates the room like a giant scorpion. He has his pick of us. He turns to Sam and disdainfully spits a small sizzle at his shoulder. “I sssupposse I’ll try the darkmeat first.”
“Sam!”
Ophisa raises one of his front legs. The plating on it is fresh and pink, unlike the rest of his body, which the kitchen light reveals to be freckled, swampy green. He jabs down—and sticks Sam in the thigh.
“Aaaaagh!” Sam grabs his leg. Ophisa digs in, pumping fluid through a translucent vein and into Sam’s body. Sam’s thigh swells. Just today, in nature studies, we learned that many arthropods paralyze their prey with neurotoxins before eating them alive.
“Somebody, distract him!”
“Hey!” Ada jumps on a stove, dancing between the burners. She waves her arms above her head. “Hey, ugly!” Ophisa turns from Sam and pulls his leg out of Sam’s. Sam slumps over, eyes open and unblinking.
“Would you like to be violated by my fangsss, wench?”
I look at Ada.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t want that at all—”
Ophisa dives toward her. She vaults over his festoon of eyes and lands with her feet pointed like daggers into the top of his head. She screams as acid touches her toes, but Ophisa gets it worse. His face hits the stove—and Ada has turned it on.
Four electric burners crackle at once. A dozen eyes blow off Ophisa’s head, spraying pungent white fluid on the walls and ceiling. A pupil lands next to me—a flat iridescent disc. Ada rolls into a corner and moans as she wipes her feet off with a rag that subsequently steams up and disintegrates.
“Mortin! Knives!” I hook my finger into my backpack and slide it across the floor to him. Inside, the book shielded a bunch of knives from getting eaten by acid. I suddenly have an idea. “Throw these in HOBART!”
“What?”
“The dishwasher!”
He pours the knives into the rumbling, clanking machine. I climb onto the conveyor belt. The acid pits in my legs make it so I can hardly stand. The room is getting hot and smells like death. I only have one chance.
“Here! Ophisa! Try me, I’m delicious!”
“Mini Pecker? You dare to taunt me?” He’s hurt. He turns his singed head my way. I see his burned eyeballs and hanging fangs. I almost feel sorry for him, but then I see Sam, dead to the world in front of a fridge, and I don’t feel sorry at all.
Ophisa swings his tail at me. It arcs through the room, knocking aside pots and pitchers. It’s so massive that it sends wind in front of it. The spikes at the end are like something from a dinosaur, and I absurdly recall which one—stegosaurus—as I dive off the conveyor belt....
And Ophisa’s tail plunges into HOBART.
“Yes!”
He hisses and clicks. Now he’s arranged like a giant C—body at the front of the kitchen, tail stuck in the machine, head swaying back and forth, spitting wildly as he’s pulled backward.
“Cheat! Traitor! Boymeat waste!”
“Help me stuff him in here!” I push at the base of his massive tail. Mortin joins me from the other side; Ada comes over despite her injured feet and adds to the effort. Inside HOBART, jets of water toss around the knives. Ophisa’s neck might be impervious to knitting needles, but the knives do a good job on his tail, making him shut up (finally) and start screaming, a shrill, desperate keen that splits the steamy room.
“Almost got it! It’s just like sex! Shove him in there!”
“This isn’t like sex!” Ada yells. “If you’re ever having sex and you think, ‘Wow, this is like with Ophisa,’ that’s bad sex!”
We push together. Ophisa’s tail fills the machine. He tries to swing his head at us, but his body is in the way. He tries to spit at us, but he seems to be running out of poison—it has burned off on the stove or dripped to the ground, usel
ess.
“Make sure his legs get in!” I hoist the backmost one. It’s like picking up a giant chicken leg. I see the huge vein for delivering poison and the tender joints where the leg regenerated. I heave it onto my back and, with Ada’s help, shove it into HOBART. “Clear back!” Ophisa’s tail and leg catch inside the machinery. His flesh rends as the conveyor belt hiccups.
“Mortin! Bleach!”
Mortin uncaps the huge bottle and pours it into the intake pipe. Ophisa convulses and shrieks and waves his head through the kitchen, crashing into chrome cabinets, hanging utensils, and tubs of oatmeal. Ada has stuffed a second leg into the dishwasher, so now he’s fully stuck, the conveyor belt churning him in, knives and bleach assaulting him.
The chrome shell of the dishwasher bends outward. Clang! It distends to accommodate something inside. “Yes!” It happens on the other side. “It’s his legs! He’s getting injured and regenerating!”
Clang! The new legs that spring from Ophisa’s body surge out against the metal but have nowhere to go. As they grow, they get damaged by bleach, so his body tries to make more, but those get damaged too, keeping the cycle moving … he’s metastasizing limbs. At this rate, he’ll end up firmly trapped in the machine, and we’ll all get out of here—
I remember Sam. He’s still by the fridge, paralyzed or dead. Ophisa slides his dazed head across the kitchen at him. His complicated mouthparts gyrate hungrily in the air. I reach Sam and put my arm under his shoulder. I try to lift him; he’s a lot heavier than he looks. Ophisa’s nightmare head—charred and wet and hissing—lunges toward us. His mouth, which I finally see under all the eyes and teeth, is open wide, revealing a straight red gullet. I feel like I can see all the way through to another world. There’s no way to move Sam in time. I hold up my hands in a hopeless defense—
And Ophisa’s head jerks forward and crashes to the ground.
The fangs close on his rotten mouth. His body stiffens up. His remaining eyes stare at nothing. His head lies like the stamen of a flower. I look at Mortin and Ada. They have taken one of his regenerating legs, poking out of HOBART, and steered its barb into a seam in his body. The leg jabbed him with his own poison. The metal shell of the dishwasher clangs outward. His legs are still growing in there. Mortin shuts off the conveyor belt.