The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [81]
He was a pervert ― I would take him to a comestitorium.
"We were sent to Paducah," said the little dead man huddled on the bench. "Something there was wanted by Silver-scales stirps back in Cui-ui. They chose fisheaters for the journey."
He shivered, hunched even smaller in the tight, curtained confines of the comestitorium stall. We shared the space, he and I, a tiny hard bench with a little hinged shelf, hung with heavy curtains designed to block both smell and sound.
Some acts, like eating and murder, are best committed alone.
"I have been Above," I said, surprising myself with a twinge of sympathy. "The world of the map is.challenging."
"Inside a little truck alone among ourselves it was not so bad," he admitted, looking up at me. "Until we stopped to ea ― " He caught his words.
"You learn fast." An easy lie. He was a fool.
"Ooze is not unknown in Cui-ui."
"The rest of the world takes a different view than we do here of certain bodily functions," I said, "but I am of a progressive bent, and traveled besides. You have nothing more to fear for your words."
"Just my life," the fisheater said, hunching tighter. "A clown attacked us in the parking lot of Denny's, killed two of my fellows, then dropped me down here. As I fell I thought I would die, wondered why I already hadn't. Then I bounced through nets and webbing, which finally stopped my fall. It took a while, but I struggled through that tangled mess to the streets. You know the rest." He paused, then shivered. "I just want to go home."
No wonder those Fine-Icers wanted to kill him at the Seats of Ease, I thought. His story reeks of their negligence. No one should have escaped the capture nets unobserved. "Tell me more about this clown."
"He was terrible, pale and fat, and he moved like an eel. Teeth like one, too."
"Did he say anything?"
The little dead man actually smiled there, his teeth gleaming slightly in the dark of the booth. "'Aaaarrgh,' mostly. But he said it a lot. Until he threw me down this hole. As he did it, he yelled, 'Tell the Lizard I'm coming.'"
"Hmm." My left hand drifted to the hilt of the Blade Sinister. This would be the time to kill my visitor, and sluice the resultant mess through the cloaca in the floor of our comestitorial stall.
But why would a clown threaten our Lizard? The greatest monster of our Stygian depths, within whose jaws we all dwell, the Lizard of Ooze is older than the rocks around it and more terrible than the fires of the sun.
His story bore further investigation. As a result, it bought him some more life. "We must go to the Gillikins," I announced.
"Does this mean I live?" Hope crept into the little dead man's voice.
"Doubtful," I said. "The Gillikins are the stirps charged with propitiating the depths." The same depths in which we Shadows hunted monsters. We of Ooze are ever practical, ready to rely on one solution when another fails.
He gathered his little food box and followed me.
In my grandfather's time an itinerant window dresser found his way to Ooze from the Cities of the Map. Such a thing is rare but not unknown, though Ooze gets fewer visits than more accessible Dark Towns. Being somewhat more persuasive of the value of his life than most outsiders, he was interrogated by the West Witches in lieu of being killed, then lived among the Gillikin priests for a while. Finally he made a spirit journey to see the Lizard, from which he never returned to us.
Our names, though, have come back to us from above in other books and stories. Grandfather always held that somehow this mouthy little man with a talent for words had talked his way past even our greatest guardian-monster and on into the outside world.
I have