Half World (19 page)

Fumiko instinctively clawed at the thick skin of glue that covered her nose and mouth.

Mr. Glueskin whipped back his tongue like a chameleon, and Fumiko was yanked from the shelter of the piano to be dropped at his feet.

He slowly began lowering his jaw, sagging, yawning wider and wider, his head disappearing, until all that was left was a gaping open maw.

Noise faded to a distant roar while ever so slowly, birds flapped, as people toppled beneath dark swarms. As if a broken projector were playing an old-fashioned film, the world around Melanie seemed to stutter like a series of stills, movements strobing, the seconds between realities frozen.

Melanie located calm.

Her eyes swept over her surroundings. Broken glass from the window.

Glass would not sever the elastic bonds that smothered her mother. The bottle. No. Mr. Glueskin would just re-form. He had no skull to shatter.

Waving her eel arms about her head, a woman ducked with excruciating slowness, falling toward Melanie.

Melanie slow-motioned sideways, to avoid being knocked over, and her foot stuck to something sticky in the carpet. She lifted her foot and the blob of glue stretched like freshly chewed gum.

Like gum . . .

The world accelerated, with the thudding rush of wings, screeching party guests, Fumiko inexorably dragged into Mr. Glueskin's cavernous mouth.

Melanie spun around. She grabbed the neck of the champagne bottle and tossed it to the side. She snatched the bucket of ice and melted water. She leapt over the quivering bodies of fallen birds, sidestepped people being pecked to pieces. She planted her feet in the threads of the carpet and dashed the contents of the bucket onto Mr. Glueskin's tongue.

WITH A BEAUTIFUL
crinkling crystalline sound, half of Mr. Glueskin's distended tongue grew stiff and solid. Though it was still attached to the back of his soft mouth, he could no longer control its motion. The weight of Fumiko, still attached to the gluey chameleon tip, pulled his numbed tongue to the floor. Fumiko, flopped onto her side, desperately tore at the skin of glue that still covered her face.

Mr. Glueskin's features seeped back into place, his white eyes rolling wildly, rage and frustration stretching his face monstrous. Unable to control his frozen tongue, he began creeping his mouth forward, toward and around his frozen flesh, like a constrictor rippling its body around its prey. He inched his maw toward Fumiko, whose struggles were growing weaker.

Jade Rat spat out the ligaments of someone's detached eye. It tumbled on the carpet until it came to rest against a dead crow. “Yes!” Jade Rat cried jubilantly. “Ice!”

Melanie snatched up a second bucket, a third, and threw the contents onto the tip of Mr. Glueskin's tongue and further down his throat with a great rattling splash. As the cold spread, he slowly lost all elasticity, the flexible bonds growing stiff, hard, until his face was frozen into an enraged mask.

Fumiko twisted and Mr. Glueskin's tongue broke off with a snap, a third of the way down, like a dry branch breaking off a tree.

The stump of frozen tongue fell into pieces. They looked like irregular chunks of firm white cheese upon the carpet of black feathers.

Belatedly, Melanie's heart began to pound triple time. She gently pulled the hardened glue from her mother's face and it came off like plaster of paris. She tossed the mask aside.

Melanie stroked the sweaty strands of hair away from her mother's face.

Silent.

Then, her mother began to cough and cough.

Everyone was still. Birds, party guests, beasts, and monsters. They stared at the tableau, shocked into paralysis.

Mr. Glueskin had been disabled.

By a girl with buckets of ice.

Melanie helped her mother into a sitting position and gently rubbed her back. When she could breathe evenly, she helped her mother rise to her feet. Her hands were trembling.

Melanie said nothing. She threw her arms around her mother and held her, hard. She could feel her mother's heart pounding against her.

Fumiko slowly lowered her head to rest upon her daughter's shoulder.

Jade Rat shrieked.

Melanie jerked. Caught sight of her small friend.

A clot of tongue, slowly melting, was trying to stretch back toward Mr. Glueskin's mouth. It looked like a white leech, inching its way to its master. The rat had clamped her teeth into the lump even as it strained to worm away, the rodent digging her four paws into the threads of the carpet.

All of the scattered pieces of tongue were melting, and they were trying to inch their way back toward the stump that still remained frozen within Mr. Glueskin's mouth.

Mr. Glueskin wriggled his loosening eyebrows. He waggled them like he was an old-fashioned comedian. “Ghhhhheeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuuu!” he groaned, his voice deeper than a fog-horn.

Not enough! Melanie's heart stuttered. It wasn't enough.

No one stopped her as she dashed to the kitchen.

She flung open the freezer and found large plastic bags of ice. She grabbed all three of them as well as an empty ice bucket as she ran back to the thawing Mr. Glueskin. Melanie ripped open one bag and clasped several handfuls, dropping them into the empty bucket.

The lumps of melted tongue slimed toward Mr. Glueskin's open mouth like homing slugs. Melanie snatched them all off the ground and plunged them into the bucket of ice. Instantly hardened by the temperature, they became inert.

Mr. Glueskin was thawing, his neck gaining mobility, and he turned toward her. His stump of tongue began to protrude, like a slow gray slug. He began to smile.

Melanie dug her thumbnail into another plastic bag and tore it open. Loose cubes tumbled to the carpet. She grabbed a handful from the open bag and shoved the rough ice into Mr. Glueskin's open mouth.

The bottom half of his face locked with the cold.

Mr. Glueskin's eyes seethed with hate, but Melanie stuffed the remainders of the bag into his hardened maw.

“Good thinking,” Jade Rat sighed with relief. “Now get a knife.”

Melanie jerked with shock. Then resumed pouring the ice in a circle around Mr. Glueskin's feet. Her face twisting with distaste, she pulled his collar away from his neck to drop ice cubes down the front of his shirt until he was completely surrounded and filled with ice. “No,” Melanie said slowly. “We can't kill him.”

Mr. Glueskin was solid. Even his eyes had ceased moving. He looked like a poorly made sculpture for a parking lot carnival.

“Why not?” Jade Rat panted. Her sides heaved with exhaustion and she was scarcely bigger than a shrew. “He would have done the same to you, even worse. If we let him live he's going to come after you again. We have to end it now.”

Melanie poured ice into his large rubber boots, then, wrinkling her face with great disgust, let the frozen cubes rattle down his waistband. The plastic bags were empty. Mr. Glueskin was completely frozen.

Until all the cubes melted.

How long would it take?

Melanie looked up.

Everyone was looking at her. The party guests who had remained to fight the crows. The birds that were still alive. The starfish-child's face was exposed, her mouth hanging open with wonder and awe. The woman with the eel arms stared at her from the carpet, the black sinuous skin of her limbs writhing with confusion. The bird-headed man's beak
snick
ed with agitation.

In the stillness, Melanie could hear the
click, clack
of dry bones trying to pull themselves together again.

Her mother. Coming toward them from the kitchen. The shards of her mirror dress glinted like a stream, some of the larger pieces reflecting, for microseconds, the carnage around them: dead twisted crows, empty eye sockets, mounds of feathers, and pools of black blood.

Fumiko moved like a sleepwalker, a meat cleaver held high above her head. Her dark eyes were blank, dead, the splotches of blood upon her cheeks black and inky.

Melanie's heart clenched hard into stone.

What had her mother become?

Fumiko stopped beside Mr. Glueskin. Expressionless, wordless, she let the weight of the meat cleaver fall toward the back of his exposed and frozen neck.

“No!” Melanie, ducking between them, caught Fumiko's wrists with her hands.

Fumiko did not respond. She did not fight her daughter, but she seemed to be caught in a sleepwalker's motion. She continued to press down, as if the steely blade were being pulled toward Mr. Glueskin's vulnerable neck.

“No, Mother!” Melanie cried out. “We must not do this thing!”

“How will we stop him, then?” Jade Rat said hoarsely. Melanie could scarcely hear her voice. The rat sounded so weak, but Melanie dared not look at her. She could feel her arms beginning to quiver as her mother bore downward.

“He will melt. Then he will begin again,” Jade Rat whispered. “We must cut him into pieces and scatter them throughout this Realm. Bury the pieces deep. Anything.”

Something clicked inside Melanie's mind. “That's just it!” Melanie cried. “It doesn't matter if we destroy him. The cycle will repeat, even though we've done this horrific thing. He will start back at the beginning of his cycle, no matter how far we've scattered his body. It's not his body that has to be broken. It's the cycle!”

A silence rang.

Like a deep bell, like circular ripples expanding in a pool of water. In the distance they heard a mournful mewing. The sound was muffled, and they strained their ears to pinpoint the source of the sound.

A cat, perhaps, in the neighboring suite?

The mewling was slowly growing louder.

A
crinkle, crinkle
of sound, of something brittle beginning to break.

The floor lurched, the ceiling swaying, and Melanie staggered with sudden vertigo. People, creatures cried out with fear, threw themselves to the floor on all fours for greater stability.

Fumiko's grip slipped and the heavy cleaver fell, fell, ever so slowly as Melanie stared with horrified eyes, the great silver blade spinning a slow three hundred and sixty degrees to embed, blade first, sinking a few inches into Mr. Glueskin's head.

Mr. Glueskin's body tottered, and it was enough. He began to tip backward like a falling statue. He landed on the carpet with a soft thud, lolling a little from side to side, as solid as stone, until he came to a rest.

They stared at his frozen form, the cleaver stuck in his head.

It was so horrible. It looked almost comic.

Melanie was simultaneously swamped by nausea and hilarity.

A loud
crack
split the air, as loud as cleaving alabaster, and they all gasped, leaping backward.

As if something under great pressure had finally been breached, Mr. Glueskin split from his head downward, his clothes parting, to expose a white, bloodless vertical seam in his abdomen.

The mewling cries grew louder, rasping with urgency.

They leaned in close to see. . . .

A wet
crack!
Mr. Glueskin, hard as a peach pit, split wide open to reveal a tender center.

A great wind roared about Melanie's head, whipping her hair, and she staggered against her mother's body. Just as suddenly the air stilled. The perpetual reek of vinegar had disappeared. A baby cried, loud and healthy.

They stared, shocked, speechless, at Mr. Glueskin. His hardened white body had cracked in two. He had no entrails or bones; he was solid white all the way through. And in splitting he had exposed a small baby. Pale, faintly pink and luminescent, the infant seemed furiously alive, kicking the air with his tiny heels, tiny hands squeezed into tight fists. A moist, sweet fragrance of rising bread. . . .

JADE RAT STOOD
upright on her haunches, her tiny paws crossed upon her chest. Her voice was small, but she spoke clearly with reverence and profound completion.

The tiny rat wavered for a microsecond, then with a barely audible click, she fell back to the carpet, an amulet once more.

The infant's cries were growing stronger. Mr. Glueskin's guests shuffled nervously backward, muttering among themselves.

Melanie glanced anxiously at their human and inhuman faces. Was the prophecy complete? Had the Realms been reunited?

Were she and her mother free to return home?

The baby continued squalling, and Fumiko shook her head. The noise seemed to rouse her and she frowned, as if waking from the depths of someone else's dream. She raised her head and caught sight of her daughter.

“Melanie?” she asked, her voice tinted with alarm, surprise. “Melanie?”

Melanie's face lit up, like a flower facing the sun.

Fumiko raised a trembling hand to cup her daughter's jaw.

Melanie closed her eyes and hot tears trickled down to pool inside her mother's palm.

“This is wrong,” a creature hissed.

“Mr. Glueskin will blame us when he comes back!” a second voice grunted.

“We must do something,” someone hoarsely urged.

The bird-headed man clacked his predatory beak. “In his cycle, he was killed by his father while his mother was trying to birth him. That's the cycle that formed him. That's the cycle that he stretched. He was the first who understood that we could change, stretch, reshape our Half Lives.”

The eel-armed woman nodded her lovely head. Her dark eyes gleamed with feeling. “He was trapped, as a baby, almost born, but always dying. But over hundreds and hundreds of years, he built upon his knowledge. Until the victim became the killer!”