As he reached the mouth of the cave, he realized that he hadn’t seen the split in the road where Crab had left him. The other path was gone now.
He walked briskly into the mountain, through the corridor. This would not be his last time inside Fermona’s cave. Not at all. He would have to come back once more. Three times in here, with the torchlight and the musty floors and the smell of simmering human bones. Three times was too many. He took one of the seeds out of his small leather pouch and pocketed it.
She was sitting on her pile, filing her nails. Ben could see the sloughed-off bits snowing down to the floor. The cauldron bubbled. Her eyebrows went up at the sight of Ben. As she stood, her mammoth shadow swept over the chamber like a storm system.
“Oh really,” she said. “You again?”
“I need you to do me a favor,” Ben told her.
“A favor? HA! Bring back my livestock and then I’ll do you a favor, you poacher.”
“I won’t do that, but I will make a trade.”
“What is it that you need from me?”
“Some of that stew you made.”
“Ooh, you wanna try it now!”
“No. I don’t want to try it. I need it.”
“Well, I need it, too. You’ve left my cupboards bare.”
“I don’t need much.”
She crossed her arms and tapped her enormous foot, considering it. “Very well.”
She bounded deep into her dungeon and returned with a clay pot the size of a steamer trunk. She set it before Ben, and then grabbed a ladle the size of a shovel from the cauldron and began dumping the stew into the massive pot. The curry powder in the stew smelled good, which frightened him.
“I don’t suppose you have a smaller vessel for it,” Ben said.
“Oh, the pot gives it flavor. You store humans in it long enough, and it seasons the clay. That’s the secret.”
“I didn’t need to know that.”
“Don’t be such a prude about it.”
Ben took a pickle jar out of his bag and dumped the pickles into the bonfire, then held the jar out for her.
“That’s all you need? A pint?” Fermona asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She let a couple of drops from the ladle fall into the pickle jar, spattering Ben’s hand and burning him.
“Sorry,” she said. She seemed to mean it. “Let me get a towel to . . .”
“It’s fine,” Ben said curtly. He added a couple of drops of the schnapps to the jar. Three ingredients down, two to go.
“Hey!” she said. “You’re messing with the flavor profiles.”
“It’s not for me.”
“Where’s that crab you were hanging out with? Your little accomplice.”
“He had to go ahead.”
“Where?”
“Back home to Maryland, where my family lives.”
She licked her lips. “More humans? Are they nice and fat and fleshy and well confined?”
“Don’t get any ideas.”
“You owe me more food. Why, this cauldron will only last me the month! And what then? I’ll have to go down the mountain and cook up old parts. You know how long it takes to get those parts tender? You said you were here to make a trade. You better produce something.”
He dug into his backpack and held out a can of tomatoes. Fermona stomped her foot and fumed at him.
“I gave you those from my pile, you little weasel!”
Meat. It needs to be meat. Ben panicked and scoured through the bag as the giant grew more impatient and angry. Suddenly, he spotted one of the old packages of hot dogs he found at Annie Derrickson’s campsite. He held it up for Fermona.
“What are those?” she asked.
“You ever eaten cow?”
“I have not.”
“These are sausages made from cow,” Ben told her. “They’re very good. I eat them myself.”
“If it’s not people, I don’t want it.”
“You know what? I don’t think you’ve ever tried any food that wasn’t people.”
“I have so!”
“Okay. What was it then?”
She paused for a moment, thinking. “Well, the stew has coconut milk in it.”
“That doesn’t count. I don’t even think you like eating people all that much. You said it yourself: They’re hairy.”
“I’m not eating your weird cow tubes, dear. They don’t look natural.”
He held out the pack. “They’re hair free. Just try expanding your palate for once. I have children who are picky eaters, like you. And we don’t make them eat anything they don’t want to. But we do ask that they at least try a bite before they say no. Just one bite.”
“Just one, eh? These better not be poisoned.”
“They’re not. I mean, they have nitrates in them, which aren’t great but . . . You know what? I’ve probably said too much. They’re fine.”
“And you promise you won’t come back here with that stupid gun of yours?”
“I swear it,” he lied.
She grabbed the package.
“Take the plastic off first,” he told her.
She ripped open the little package of franks with her fingernail and the water inside dripped onto her foot.
“Ew! There’s water in this!”
“I’m sorry about that. Hot dogs are always packaged with a bit of water.”
“These are made of dog?”
“That’s just an expression.”
She tried one. A second later, the whole package was gone. She held her hand out. “More.”
“Oh, you like them?”
“More. More more more.”
“I have more in my bag.”
“Then gimme the bag,” she said.
“I’m keeping the bag.”
“I want the bag.”
“Stay where you are.”
“Bossing me around in my own cave? I won’t have it!”
She started walking toward Ben. He quickly reached into his pocket. When he slammed the seed on the ground, he saw a tranquilizer gun with a note taped to it.
SHOOT YOURSELF.
Fermona closed in.
“I’ve been too nice to you. I think I’ll take your magic food bag, and then eat you anyway.”
Ben grabbed the tranquilizer gun, turned it on himself, and aimed it at the meaty part of his thigh. Fermona was so baffled that she paused for a moment.
“Hey, what are you doing with that?”
He squeezed the trigger and the dart from the gun hissed into his leg, stinging him. Now he doubled over and grasped at his thigh as the skin around the puncture wound began to swell. Suddenly, he felt full, like he had just swallowed a hippo. His fingers began to elongate. The hair on his head unspooled, as if released from a kite reel. He could feel his arteries dilating, his limbs growing thick and long. The swelling on his thigh metastasized throughout his body, as if an army of wasps had descended upon him and stung every square inch of his body. His liver swelled. His head swelled. His genitals swelled. He grew and grew and grew until the floor beneath him had shrunk down considerably.
When he stood back up, he was twenty-six feet tall, his clothing and his bag growing with him. Fermona stared at him in wonder.
“Goodness gracious!” she cried.
“I think I’m still shorter than you,” Ben said, dazed.
“HA!”
There was no more time to recover from the shock of his transformation. He dug into his bag and took out the real gun, now large enough to mount on a battleship.
Fermona backed away. “This has all been a terrible misunderstanding. . . .”
“I’ll give you the hot dogs, but I need to rummage through that big pile of yours in return.”
“Only if you promise
to never come back here. Do you promise?”
Now, Ben wasn’t much of a liar. He had neither the creativity nor the energy to lie. He didn’t even like playing pranks, because keeping the lie up wore him down so quickly. Tony Watts could lie his face off, especially when he had to tell the police that no, he had never provoked that dog. Ben wasn’t skilled enough to lie like that.
But that was before all this, before the path kidnapped and coarsened him. Much easier to lie in a world that doesn’t seem real to begin with. Maybe Crab was wrong. Maybe his path won’t be exactly the same as yours. Maybe you never have to come back here. Yeah, that’s it. That’s not out of the realm of possibility.
“I promise,” he told her.
“Good. Now make with the cow tubes.”
Ben grabbed the second hot dog package from his bag and tossed it at Fermona’s feet. They were the size of logs now. She clapped her hands in joy, like a child.
“Take anything you want,” she said, “and then go away.”
Ben knelt down by the pile and rooted around, grabbing more packaged food that the giant had ignored, along with bags of sand and iodized salt, now as small to him as beanbags. As he scavenged, Fermona guzzled some extra stew from the clay pot. He could hear her smacking her lips, moaning with satisfaction, spitting out the occasional stray bone. He was nearly ready to retch on her carpet again when she stopped feasting and called out, “I’m finished!”
He turned around. Fermona was wiping the sides of her mouth with a dress strap.
“You missed out on a good batch,” she said.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
He grabbed two torches off the wall and snuffed them out.
“Hey!” she cried. “I only said you could take from the pile.”
“You said I could take anything I wanted. I want these.”
“Bah! You’ll clean me out of house and home if I let you. Just like a giant to think he can do whatever he pleases.”
“I’m finished. I swear.”
“Then get out.”
“One more question . . .”
“Going back on your word already, eh?”
“Have you ever heard of a creature named Voris?”
That caught her by surprise. “Where did you learn that name?”
“From a book. Do you know him?”
“In the dungeons,” she said, “some of the people I’ve found, they would say that name—Voris—over and over again. Didn’t mean a thing to me. It meant quite a bit to them, though. But then I would eat them and they wouldn’t cry about it anymore.”
“So you don’t know who Voris is?”
“Nope. But I bet you get to find out. Oh, that’s gonna be so fun. I almost wanna come with you, to see your face when it happens.”
“But you won’t.”
“No, I won’t. I’m precisely where I should be. Maybe you’ll find a place like this for yourself one day.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe this Voris will kill you and rip your guts out. You just never know!”
“Yes, thank you for that, Fermona. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye! See you never.”
He slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned back down the mountain tunnel. Back to the castle, on a path that would return to this very mountain again one day.
But first, Voris awaited him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE CASTLE
He walked between the split-rail fences, his new size making the journey considerably shorter this time. The horses looked like squirrels beneath him. The ground itself felt bouncier. No wonder Fermona was always in such a cheery mood. Being a giant felt fantastic.
The house never materialized again, allowing Ben to push his family out of his mind, if only for a moment. Pining and yearning would do nothing for him now. He would have to be like a reporter dropped into a war zone, in a place to observe it, but not of it. Maybe he could keep it together if he was clinical about his plight, if he acted as if he elected to be there for a work assignment. Be at a remove. Be analytical, distant, unemotional. Keep yourself busy and the burden of time eases.
But thinking clinically wasn’t going to be easy for him. The shock waves were wearing off, the dread laid bare. There were so many years left to go, the mere thought of them heavier than pure lead. He ruminated on the final, terrified utterances of Fermona’s victims, some of them crying out the name of the creature up in the castle ahead. Maybe they were also lost on this path and Voris was the fate that awaited them. Maybe Voris is the Producer and this path feeds him his victims. “Eyes are pitch black, save for the pupils, which Voris can use to shine a light bright enough to burn through virtually any living being.”
As he got closer to the castle, Ben smelled something faintly metallic. One of the tiny, wild horses came galloping over and gazed at him from behind the fence, a trail of blood running down its chin. He reached into his bag and pawed his gun.
He bypassed the stallion and hurried to the foot of the winding, arched road leading up to the blackened castle. Between the rocky cliff edge where he stood and the massive castle gate was a moat sitting a hundred feet below. It ran blood-red, as did the nearby pond. A bevy of purple swans cruised through the moat, the blood dampening their feathers and slicking them black. The air reeked of iron. Ben hiked his bag higher up onto his shoulder and began the hard trek up the walkway, stopping in the middle to sit and rest, letting his legs dangle off the rocky arch. The purple swans passed under the arch and dove into the blood, emerging again and turning rust brown. Up ahead, the walkway came to an end at a large gap, with a raised heavy wooden drawbridge blocking the castle entrance on the other side.
Ben buried his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes hard, as if he had shards of glass stuck in his irises. His body was altered now. In a few years, he would find himself in another altered form, perhaps with many transformations to be experienced in between. There was no guarantee he would, at the end of this, revert back to his normal size, his normal proportions, his normal self. Maybe there was a wheel of fate with a cutout of his stupid head pasted to the center, with all his possible new body types crudely marked all around it, and someone Up There was spinning it at random intervals just for the pleasure of watching Ben grapple with becoming a giant, a crab, a centaur, a dishwasher, a loaf of bread. Nothing about this land was permanent, not even him.
The only concrete thing he had was his memory. He dug into the backpack and grabbed the legal pad and pen, which had grown with his bag and his body and remained perfectly usable. He tried to sketch his family, going from the memory of the photo from his phone. He could see it clearly in his mind: the table at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Flora’s purple fleece jacket, Teresa awkwardly rubbing her wedding band.
But he couldn’t draw it. Teresa was the artist. In her limited spare time, she would paint wonderful things: vivid landscapes; chestnut horses with shimmering, muscular coats; harrowing self-portraits. She knew all about light and shadow. She could see the composition of things that Ben couldn’t. He drew like a kindergartner who’d been asked to sketch a murder suspect. The more detailed he tried to be, the worse the portrait looked. Hilariously so. Flora would have made fun of this most recent attempt relentlessly. She would have looked over his shoulder and, with characteristic bluntness, told him, “You are not good at drawing, Dad.”
He laughed. He could forge memories like this now. He could put himself back in his house and daydream about Teresa and the children and make those daydreams feel like real remnants of his past. This kind of daydream was the precise opposite of life before the path, when he would sit at home with the kids losing their minds and imagine fly-fishing alone in some fucking river somewhere. All the fantasizing was reversed now. The most mundane things seemed so remote and foreign.
Ben crumpled up the paper and tossed it off the bridge. Just before
it hit the standing blood, another crow (or the same one?) swooped in and grabbed it. He wadded up another sheet from the pad and chucked it at the bird, but missed.
The castle gate beckoned. He came to the considerable gap between the end of the rock bridge and the narrow ledge under the gate and looked down into the stillness of the moat below. God only knew what happened to you if you fell into that pool of chum. Is that where the Jellies were? Or the things with the mouths?
He leaned over the span and pressed his hands against the castle wall. It was an awkward position. If he stepped clean over to the ledge, he’d have no room to pull the drawbridge down without his gigantic body getting in the way. So he dug his thick right hand into the top of the drawbridge, braced against the wall with his other hand, and then ripped the bridge back down toward his feet, regaining his balance at the edge of the span as the chains went taut and the bridge slammed down onto the end of the walkway in front of him, just narrowly missing his toes.
Past the drawbridge lay not a stone chamber, but a set of glass double doors, each eight feet high. The windows were tinted, so Ben couldn’t see inside. Yellow stickers that said CAUTION: AUTOMATIC DOORS were plastered on both sides. They looked like hotel doors.
Ben was just about to step onto the drawbridge when suddenly the chains holding it began to creak and moan. The bolts keeping the right chain fast to the stone castle wall came flying out, and the chain smashed down onto the wooden bridge with a heavy THUD, splintering the wood and sending bits and pieces of it down into the blood moat below. Soon, the entire bridge began to crumble and fall, heavy shards of oak plunging down and smashing the bevy of purple swans. The part of the bridge spanning the gap was all but gone now, the swan bodies floating on the surface of the plasma. All that was left was the small ledge in front of the automatic double doors.
Inside his bag was the extra-large can of whole peeled tomatoes that Fermona had initially rejected. Ben took out the can—the label boasted that the tomatoes contained “extra lycopene”—and squeezed it into his mouth, like he was drinking from a juice box. Then he tossed the can into the moat, took ten steps back, and ran toward the expanse separating the arch and the castle gate, jumping as far as he could.