Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [120]
Mr. Sausage Nose, for his part, showed no sign he would ever be satiated. He barely bothered to use his hands, vacuuming the food on his plate nearly as fast as I managed to replenish it. Regardless of his enormous intake, and the amount of food I saw the rest of the creatures seated on the roof consume as well, none of the beasts showed any sign of succumbing to the trap we’d set for them. Admittedly, I knew hardly anything about poisons and their effects, or the creatures’ alien physiognomy, but after forty-five minutes of gluttony, there was nary a burp to be heard. Not even a cough. The creatures, besides an occasional shout and slap to the head of one of my human compatriots for perceived sloth, showed no negative signs at all. They were joyous. And they were horrid. The laughing and the fangs and those horrible white gums holding the yellow teeth in their mouths. But never a healthier bunch have I seen. Even the children, the poor children, the ones who had eaten our offering, showed no signs of slowing, and it was to these canaries that I looked for the first symptoms to develop. We had fed them nearly every bit of poison we could, I knew. Any more and the food would have turned blue from its active ingredient.
“It’s just time for dessert, then. Get the pudding, Christopher. But this time, extra sprinkles,” Mrs. Karvel said, sidling up next to me.
“But they’ve already eaten a ton of poison and it doesn’t seem to be working,” I said, forcing a smile and talking openly in front of the snagglenosed monster because he had no comprehension of my words’ meanings.
“Extra sprinkles,” Mrs. Karvel gleefully insisted. “All the sprinkles we’ve got left.”
I would have preferred to take this journey on my own, of course, but it seemed Mr. Sausage Nose must have remembered that I, too, was his property and followed me with his eyes when he saw me walking toward the exit door. Ignoring Jeffree’s attempt at a menacing gaze,† the beast jumped up from his seat. It was like watching a willow tree walking, the hulk’s robes blowing in the wind, revealing the outline of monstrous proportions. That beast wanted into the BioDome, which he made clear by refusing to let me close the door behind me. He wanted to see everything, and clearly felt ownership of everything he could see. Worse, when one of the pale children noticed our interaction, the child wormed its way into the entrance as well, and Mr. Sausage Nose just let it, patting the boyish mini-monster on the head as it passed him.
Regardless of the fact that I barely knew the species, I could see the awe in which the monster held the room we entered off the roof. Considering that he had never seen a building not made of ice, I have no idea what he made of the metals and plastics. Exotic bones, he probably thought. This wonderment only grew when we entered the outer hallway of the dome, where the ceiling soars to a cathedral majesty and Karvel stored several of his many treasures. Even still, none of this could in any way prepare the two creatures for the vision of Karvel’s utopia itself. Looking at the beasts’ faces in those moments of our arrival, I was struck by the difference between witnessing the improbable and witnessing the impossible. I don’t believe these creatures had ever seen the color green before. There was no natural occurrence of it on their section of the continent, there was no reason they should have. And yet it was such a