Short story
He was romping, never a care for the world. The more it tried to weigh, the easier he threw it off. His hair, that was the thing. And some other stuff. He padded, dazzling, white robe flashing, maned head thrusting, shoulders rolling, hips and knees loose, thighs rubbing together, shhch, shhch, shhch, kind of sensuous, into the bedroom and onto the emperor bed.
On his back, toasting in warmth, he let his gown fall open, and embraced gravity. Golden lights; in the sheen of soft polished glass, his reflection glowed back from the walls, golden too – and when he sucked in his stomach! Look at that ladies/not bad for a man of seventy/pretty good for a man of forty! On your knees!
He’d been abused (scorned, mocked, derided, protested, loathed, detested). A bloated, inflatable caricature had appeared overnight and bounced for almost a day – a day! – in front of his own windows. His face was a pig, a turd, an arse on international placards; even his name translated badly. People didn’t think he saw, but he did, and he could laugh at it, pathetic, sad, such levels of animosity, but who else put up with this? What hell-hole would fit these howling marchers? Anywhere else, they’d be in it. Crying like babies. Choking like dogs.
Still, the job had something. The vultures were pecking air around him, but he wasn’t dead. He could stamp, shout, swing, leave the blood-sucking kill-joys white with rage and silence. The fun he was having! War bad – send in the drones! Guns bad – more guns! Walls, blood, strength, soil, god, not that he believed, he didn’t believe anything, but hey, the crips, the tacos, mooslims, beggars, niggers, perverts, all the losers, animals, who’d shed a tear? And the hate and fear boiling up and the menace and rush of the crowds – crowds, baying for him; crowds swaying to him; full throat battle roars when he spread his arms, slammed to silence when he raised a finger – who’d have thought it would feel so good?
Well, he hadn’t. But he’d got it.
The screens pulsed. The burger wraps piled up. Tongues of old fat and sugar licked the air. He padded to the shower, returned, sank back into the Siberian goose feathers, flicked the channels to sharks and shooting. There was a knock on the door. A slavey knock. The boys who’d blustered through the panels had gone, taking defiant red-veined noses, oil-slick hair and eyes like old bodies with them. How he laughed inside when they pleaded. Some went quiet and respectful, trying to stay in control, that was funny too. Whatever. They were still working away for him, no getting away from him; deals, wheels, new allegiances, putting the barbed walls up, fragmenting whole continents, breaking and remaking the world. It spun under him, giddy; he could stretch out a finger tip and touch the desert; lift an eyebrow and influence the snow; bring sun; reign death; watch the money roll in. What a ride.
The knock again. He barked a no. Chasing after him. Contaminating his area. He was echoed by a yip.
Now he had a secret. Nothing else about his life – sex, lies, wives, failures, family, hair, make-up, shakedowns, gangsters, diet, germophobia, cowardice, decor, morals, dick – was a secret. But this was. Even though he did not yet know it in words, only knew it on a cellular level, this was due to be a secret. His spine iced, enlarged, filled his body. He stared. The thing on the floor stared back, and blinked.
It was about the size of a – what? He had nothing that size. A small coffee pot. A giant burger. One of its eyes bulged. The other squinted. Its ears went up and sideways, and then sagged. It was almost bald. The hair it had straggled in lumps, grey, oily and matted in places, like felt. It had three legs. One at the front. As he stared at it, it wobbled.
His foot was out to kick, but he caught it back. The thing looked diseased. It had fangs sticking out of a short, stubby snout. As he looked, it crouched. The puddle was huge. It lapped against the bed. It steamed.
The first pillow went straight through it. The second flumped against an oil of some naked French bathers. The remote smashed off a mirror. One of the screens instantly started spraying laughter, over some woman pretending to be him.
The button brought the maids running to a jam in the doorway, then through, willing, ready, but now he was starting to admit there was a problem. That pillow. And the fact that one of the maids – dumpy, wouldn’t do her – was treading through its head. There was a frozen moment. Then the skinny one, face rigid, stooped and picked up the wrapper from his last burger. She was standing in the steaming lake; her hand had to go straight through the dog’s – it had to be a fucking dog – ass to do it.
A low burbling from the bed. The maids rooted; swayed. Then, a cracked roar. It brought the guards racing in from the desperate dull corridor, guns out, hostile faces stitched over excitement and relief. The maids leapt towards each other before their knees gave way, hands shooting up like synchronised swimmers. Then, at the doorway, appeared the face of his deputy, his Second-in-Command. Working late, haunting the hallways, as usual.
“Is there a problem?” it said, hopefully.
He knew his enemies. His mouth closed. The thing scuttered under the bed, and he sprang off as if bounced, shouting to change his room, change his room, walking, buttocks clenched, at speed, out down the corridor. It was useless. He could feel it behind him, hear a kind of wheezy snuffle all the way.
It followed him everywhere. Into rooms, through doors, up in lifts, down in lifts, round and round his office, keeping a nose right behind his heels. No-one else could see it, that was the thing. It was unbelievable. He kept spinning, kicking at it, and every time it would stare at him, solidly, while his shoe just passed right through it. A tumour? He felt fine. Side effects from all the vitamins? Maybe, but could he ask? They’d already marked him down as mental. He kept his doctor close, like all his enemies, he’d been told that by his own daddy, but not that close. Never show weakness. Never retreat. Hell, he’d enjoyed it.
Snuffle snuffle snuffle. That was it. He would just ignore it. Rise above. He shrieked. The thing had stuck a rotting, nitrogen cold nose against his ankle.
That night he slept with his wife. He’d have tried anything. The thing stood beside the bed, bulging eye glinting over her increasingly hysterical objections. At her last mercurial screech it squatted, slowly, and, from behind, jetted out an arc, a broad, raking spray of brown; globules and chunks coruscating in a thin, murky fluid, and endless. As his wife grabbed the quilt, announcing her determination to sleep in the bath – and to lock the door, make no mistake – her bare brown pink-tipped feet sludged straight through it. One particularly thick patch bubbled up between her toes, and then the duvet dragged after her and he did start to vomit, beating her to the bathroom, reaching the john, bent double. The thing was already sitting there, looking expectant. As he staggered back, retching, it got up on the seat, somehow, balanced, fell in, and licked the bowl. Now, as it hopped out again, it was covered in undigested bits of burger and formless, nameless slime. Things were not getting better.
“Can you see it? Can’t you see it?”
His wife looked at him, swiping and kicking at the air, chin covered in puke, and smiled. A bony foot planted between his buttocks, and shoved him out. The door lock thunked behind him. He stood, like a bewildered bull, in the fecal room. The thing stood, proprietorially, beside him. Flecks of matter dropped off it.
He kept trying. For the nights he tried women, of course, ones he could reliably pin down without a shellacked nail being driven into his balls. There were many of them; paid, unpaid, glossy, desperate, three at a time, one after the other. The thing usually hid under the bed, which might have helped, except that it had started to stink.
Rolls, waves, torrents of corpse putridity surged around the mattresses – for he was moving from room to room, home to tower, hotel to hotel. Interestingly, if he could have been interested, the women always smelt it before he did. The sniffing would start, then the gagging, then they would yawn, horribly, and projectile vomit, usually over him, sometimes while he was on his hands and knees chucking and chundering himself. Perfume, Vicks, noseplugs, all had no effect.
His staff put this down to some new perversion, naturally, and discoursed knowledgeably on Roman vomitoriums, though they noticed the women, bursting wild-eyed and emptied from various bedrooms, seemed to be enjoying themselves even less than usual, and their boss not one whit.
The days were bad. “All right!” he’d say, rubbing his hands together, in a parody of his old self, as henchmen and ghouls and blobs and blondes waited round the table, eyes expectant, lips yearning to spit out waves of fulsome compliments. And then he’d whoop and leap in the manner of a March hare, and no-one would know that a putrid ear iced with slime had just rubbed casually down his soft, yielding shin. He took to wearing knee socks. It took to pissing on his shoes. Once it crawled up his arm and sat on his shoulder, reeking and evacuating, as he tried to announce some fanbase-friendly decision. “Lock them up! Lose the children! Lose the keys!” His cries grew wilder, but no-one seemed to notice, apart from the sudden twitches, the yells, the occasional flail at empty space. And the smell, of course, the smell.
It was spreading. His deputy had anosmia. Incapable of smelling anything. That figured. But the others started looking like walkers in a violent gale, regressing, when seated, to fractious schoolchildren, tipping their chairs further back, further back as he spoke, until one knocked himself out on the radiator. Workmen investigated drains, tore up, redecorated; useless. Rooms became thick with concrete dust, buckets of aftershave, deluges of scent; plants wilted; personal fans buzzed like miniature Messerschmitts around him. He’d almost got used to it, himself.
Back alone together, he still kept his shark screens blaring all night, until it began to howl. Glasses broke. His eardrums whopped, squealed, threatened to shatter too. It seemed, though, to like music, he found, flipping frantically through channels. An ear cocked, its howls diminished. They settled on classical, although being forced to listen to classical made him mad.
“Has your friend been taking care of herself?” said his doctor, looking stern. “Eating and so forth?”
Of course he had been eating, stuffing it in, distracting, burger after burger, but recently not so much. His skin was sagging in handfuls. His chest had shrunk.
“She” cunning, this “thinks it eats what she eats. It must be eating something, else how could it crap so much?”
“How indeed” the doctor commented, after this was put to him. Idly, he sprayed some more surgical spirit on the desk, casually bent down, surreptitiously inhaled from a small bottle, continued cordially with every atom of his chaotic being to loathe his client. It seemed to give him shape.
“I’d advise your friend” he said decisively
“Yes?”
“To see a doctor”.
“So he stinks” his deputy was saying, with some interest.
“It’s more than that. No-one can get near him. Fucking Lizardman, made him sit by a window, then left the room. They communicated via keyboards. He looks clean, no-one can say he doesn’t. But the smell”
“What’s it like?”
“Like a rotting cow in a hot yard after months of rain. Like writhing old fish guts left for years in a pool of sewage. Worse. I can’t describe it. There’s like an onion element too, and I don’t know what. It’s unbearable”
They were walking through the gardens, of course not unobserved; perhaps not overheard. Fireworks flared in the pale polluted night. It was Halloween.
Across the lawn, down in the mezzanine, the kitchen staff were telling the traditional ghost stories. One former inhabitant, for example, still lurked in the room which held his carved wooden bed; occasionally he would be seen drifting down the corridors, mildly spooking residents and guests.
“He never does anything” complained a maid.
They eyed the corner where the dark, austere figure of the senior housekeeper sat. Expectantly. She bent forward.
“The story is this” she said.
“The voters can’t smell him” the deputy was saying, thoughtfully.
“Not on screen they can’t” said the Head of Security darkly. “Next gig, we’ll have to put the podium maybe half a field away. Lay on some sprays. It’s getting stronger. I was just coming down the corridor; he must have been down there an hour before and I had to – excuse me”
He stopped to throw up decorously in a rose bed.
“You can’t impeach a man for stinking” the deputy noted.
The housekeeper was holding her audience.
“At first it is small, very small. And then, as it comes towards you, it gets bigger and bigger, and its mouth opens wider and wider and it gets closer and bigger and closer and bigger and then!”
“Yes?”
“End!” She slammed her wide spread hands together, with the crash of a mantrap.
“Aahh” sighed the staff with satisfaction.
Pooling shadows, scritching in corners, dead dry roaches sucked into vacuums. There were witches out there, thousands of them, spelling him. He’d seen the hashtag. Losers. People trying any old. Crazy crazy crazy. It was all crazy. His head wasn’t working right. Bring in the torturers; bring on the psychopaths – they did nothing for him. Nor could all the sycophantic cries, all the hate and fear in the world console him; too far away, unreal. His deputy was the only one who stayed close. How was that fair?
He’d returned to his old room, it made no difference. Shower after shower, removing invisible germs. Claws scrabbling at his toes, his hair, his nose. He’d stopped playing golf: it had started shitting in the holes. When he’d held his ball up, rare moment of victory, the stuff – warm, gluey, corrosive – dripped lusciously down the tender inside of his arm.
He was trudging instead, head down, around the course, when he saw it. It must have had noticed something in the long grass: its oozing stump of a tail was quivering. It pounced. A squeal. A flurry. The bloody head of a baby rabbit shot across the grass tips. It trotted back to him, licking its chops. He almost smiled. That night, as he lay on the pillow, he felt a small throb next to him, a tiny heart beat. His reflex hand stopped, continued through chilly space to the mattress. But a nose like a freezing shiv burrowed into his shoulder.
The next meeting – foreign somewhere, high power – they went in together. The reps of the world smelt them and recoiled. Rallied, gagging, stood over as he smirked up at them. Splatters shot out from the thing shifting round on his shoulder, liberally dousing those pseuds, bleeding hearters, power-mongers all. They’d lock, bomb, blast bear cubs, torture in a heartbeat, tear the earth too, if pushed.
And how he’d push. He had friends, good men, smart men. Leaders. Talented, well fed, killers with hands-on experience; knew what suited them; they’d take anything from the big man; had to, he was the biggest in the big league. He giggled, sneered, punched the air, left.
Euphoria still filled him as he swaggered back into the house. That was it, make it part of a team. He lay on the bed, appetite back, munching to the sounds of Mozart or some such thing. Plotting: an attack here, an invasion there; some wilderness bulldozed; plastic liberated; rights removed. Rights! Voices swelled in the background, lamented, rising. His chest shivered. His brain mulched. The bottle dropped slowly from his hand. They were all against him. He didn’t have a friend. He’d never had a friend. They’d hated him at school, just for throwing rocks at toddlers and having the best knives.
Wait, what? He didn’t think like this. He was the one. He was the number one. Always had been, always would. Kick them, kill them, hit right through them. That was him. Not this. Fucking music. His poor brain. Sometimes it hurt. It was sending him pictures. His second wife. His proper wife. What a beauty. She’d loved him. She’d said she loved him. Best sex ever. Wouldn’t hear a word against him, still wouldn’t talk. This one wouldn’t even hold his hand. Bitch! How did he get to this? That music! He’d take the howls. He stabbed at the control.
And there she was. Suddenly. It was incredible. Older. Some chat show, some slob fawning over her. How hot did she look? Talking about peace somewhere. Palestine? She cared, that was her shtick. She’d always cared; animals, people. Him. He knew he’d screwed up. Tried to stick with her. Then she was gone. It was something, not to hold on, when you wanted.
But he was older. He could get her back. Join in her causes. Yeah. Peace. Kids. Deprived rabbits, whatever. A new man. Healthy. Those were the days. His brain was waking, he could feel it; firing up.
He looked round. And there it wasn’t. Not there. Not under the duvet, not under the bed. No smell, no shit. Nothing! He was saved. He was saved. It was love, love had done it. Her love for him. His love for her. He gazed, entranced, at the screen, planning a call, a meeting, a beginning, eyes running over her face, her body, her long, wonderful, naked legs. Her leg.
It was there. Attached already, upright. Tongue hanging out, dripping. Flashing pink as it humped and drooled and humped and pumped at her, bulging-eyed, straining-haunched, panting, thrusting, matted hair shedding, shuddering, shuddering to an end. There were screams from the screen. The smell came back in a slap like a tsunami. It was over.
“No, Charles, no change” the deputy was saying to a CEO on the phone a week or so later. “Of course, he’s not as young as he was. Naturally we pray he bounces back. Yes, he seems very content to rely on me. No, just on me; for some reason he won’t see anyone else. Or was it the other way round? I rather think” and here the deputy paused for a thin smile “I rather think he gets up their noses”.
Some squawking from the other end.
“The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Yes indeed. Still, it’s an ill wind, and I fancy I’m perfectly competent. Too kind. Yes. I will of course inform you if anything changes. Not at all. My regards to you both”.
He replaced the receiver gently, tidied a few papers on the desk, made a note in a small black book. Plans and vested interests were vying for his attention, but his mind remained as firm and clear and simple as steel. Another small, righteous war beckoned. A larger, God-sanctioned crusade was approaching. Profits in the relevant industries continued to soar, demonstrating yet again the Bible truth: the rich were virtuous, blessed by God.
“Have mercy on the poor sinners” the deputy thought to himself most sincerely. The door to the office cracked open, and he frowned. Some unfortunate member of staff who had yet to learn who their boss was. He prepared, in no uncertain terms, to tell them.
Instead, at ankle height, appeared a small, white face. Then, a small white body. Blue eyes, slightly unfocussed, surveyed the room. The deputy stared. It was a kitten. A very young kitten; a tiny pure white puffball of a kitten, with a jaunty little tail, and paws like miniature moon boots. The deputy was not fond of cats, or any creature, but as it wobbled through the door, looking round the room with obvious interest, he could feel, despite himself, an almost childish grin spreading across his face.
“And who might you be?” he said.
The kitten paused in its attempt to bat away a mote of dust with a ridiculous front paw and, eyes crossing slightly, appeared to locate his voice.
“Come right on in, why don’t you” he found himself saying, rather more fondly than he’d intended.
The kitten seemed to consider the acres of carpet between them. Then, flicking its silly tail, it began to advance, slowly, uncertainly, taking a detour under the previous resident’s luxury sofa. Gilt and velvet, such terrible taste, thought the deputy. He’d ordered a sensible, upright version, in solid mahogany and tartan.
The kitten, clearly sharing his view, was viciously attacking a tassel. He clicked his tongue, and it stopped, yawned, displaying its pink mouth; its silver teeth. It was bigger than he thought, he realised, as it continued towards him, far too large to fit under a sofa, surely. Silver teeth? The closer it got, the bigger it seemed to get.
Good heavens, it was impossible. Now it was advancing on the desk. He stood, frozen, unable even to squeak. It was getting closer. Getting closer, getting larger. Closer. Larger. Closer. Larger.
Oh my God.
End
tabitha troughton 