Bessie
“Ki-yah!”
A wooden katana slammed on the desk in front of Darius. He jolted upright. His starchy white oxford button-up chafed his beige, hairy neck. Darius brought his two fingers up to his collar, with the intent to pull it loose, but stopped, afraid to draw more attention to himself.
“Ki-yah!” The katana hit the table again. Gerald, his boss, stood before him, panting. He wore a bandana, like someone that thought the Cobra Kai were the good guys from The Karate Kid. Gerald was basically a kid himself. Twenty-three or twenty-four. His oversized, gray suit hung limply around him. A bead of sweat managed to breach his headband. “Darius, do you know why my dad put me in here?”
He rested the wooden katana on his desk and looked at the office aquarium, the only constructive contribution he’d made thusfar. Weak lights shone through its crystalline interior, revealing an artistic collection of fake coral and ocean fauna, and one singular clownfish.
“It was to install discipline, Darius.” He turned around abruptly, and thrust each arm at his side as if to become a human pine cone. He turned his bandana around, looked Darius straight in the eyes, and yanked at one side of the cloth shouting, “Discipline!”
The bandana came off leaving a large red mark. He blinked tears away and rubbed his reddened forehead. “Darius, what do you need from me today? I’m quite busy, as you can see.”
Darius leaned over and pushed the bundle of files on Gerald’s desk, a bit closer to him. “Today we’re discussing the promotion package, uh, sir.”
Gerald regained some composure. He swiveled the chair back towards Darius. And raised his eyebrows at the thick promotion package. He eased it open with a hand damp with sweat. “Well, Darius, I can see that you’ve done quite... a superb job this year.”
Darius had meticulously prepared this promotion package, getting quotes and figures from the other members of the office. He’d been working here for three years with no promotion, and this, he had decided, was his final attempt. He’d either get the promotion or he’d quit right here on the spot. He gulped.
Darius heard a sloshing. To the left of Gerald’s desk was a clear Tupperware container. A crab skittering to and fro inside. Gerald reached his hand out to gingerly grab and then vigorously shake the container. The small crab curled up its legs in whatever the crustacean form of a fetal position must be.
Gerald gave a gleeful smile.
“So, Darius, you know the firm’s financial situation.” He lifted up the Tupperware, inspecting it from below and then carefully carried it to the aquarium. “Your performance has been good. Yes, of course, right?”
He gingerly peeled off the lid. “The firm’s performance, well, Darius, due to my father’s undisciplined actions at the top, has not been as stellar.”
With the swift finality of an executioner’s ax, he dumped the crab out. It floated lazily to the bottom, next to a fireman figurine, ax aloft, ready to break open a chest of some forgotten pirate’s booty.
“But... we couldn’t overlook a stellar performance, could we? Darius, I want to give you a promotion. Ki-yah!”
He turned around and hit the air in front of him with a fist. Darius’s heart was thrumming. He smiled and tried to act unstartled, giving a small laugh.
The crab righted itself. Was it finally at the end of its journey? Its migration from seafloor to net, to boat, to bucket, to pet store, to Tupperware, to home. It explored the aquarium, its little claws clicking.
“You are going to be, ki-yah, ki-yah!” He struck in front of him two more times. “Senior head associate. No, head senior associate.”
Darius frowned. He had been a senior associate for the past three years. Was a head associate some new title? “Uh, great. Okay, yeah. So what’s the new package? Uh, any new benefits?” He reached to flip to the end of the promotion package, where Darius had expounded upon the pay ranges of various positions at the firm.
Gerald put his hand down on the packet. He leapt into the swivel chair. It gave a poof as it caught his small frame. “Well, Darius...” He propped both of his feet onto the desk. Darius noted he didn’t avoid his promotion package.
“Yes, uh, about that, uh, this position carries a lot of new responsibility. It’s instrumental to the success of the firm. Right, but, uh, Darius, I only got an extra $50K that I can spend on the entire department, and well, honestly... I’ve already given it to somebody else.”
Darius could only hear his heartbeat. For some reason, he wasn’t looking at Gerald anymore. Thump, thump, thump, thump, pounded his chest. He was looking at the crab. He knew what was coming. The crab did not.
It poked at various stones and fake fauna, until it came to an unusually shaped rock, larger and plainer than the rest. It poked at it with curiosity. The rock trembled.
Gerald looked back. “Oh, there she goes. Good girl!...” He stood up and tapped the glass. Dong, dong, dong! “Bessie, Bessie….”
The only person up for promotion under Gerald was him. He’d already talked to the other employees. No one got a bonus. No one got a raise. So where did the $50K go? Gerald... Darius thought.
The rock was not a rock. It was an octopus. Its eight strong arms grabbed the crab. Its beak made crunching noises Darius could hear from across the room. The crab was no more. “Ki-yah!” Gerald punched the air in front of him.
“So Darius, Senior Head Associate, it’s a lot of responsibility. So I want you to get up out there and do your best. Next year, I am certain there are going to be big things, like huge things for you here.”
Gerald sat down and looked at Darius. He fidgeted. Darius didn’t move. Darius normally would have gotten up, and left Gerald to play Minesweeper or read manga or whatever he did in his corner office. But Darius had to say something.
He had built a flowchart, mapped out every option, followed the chart in his head, and it led to a simple utterance, just two words. He could even choose, “I’m out. I quit. Fuck you.”
Darius opened his mouth to talk. All he had to do was say them.
Armageddon
“Hey, I brought sushi.” Darius fumbled with the door handle, holding a damp bag of fish.
“God dammit!”
He heard someone jumping in the kitchen, and the sound of a soft material hitting a hard one. “Sonali?”
“Oh, hey Darius. Hey, get over here.” Sonali scampered out of the kitchen.
She was wearing an oversized Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt and short shorts. Though, Darius couldn’t visually verify the shorts. She dragged him into the kitchen. There was a strong odor of their previous weekend’s seafood boil. Phil had scored 10 pounds of tilapia, crawfish, crab, lobster and squid. Dealer’s choice of proportion. It was 90% squid. The pots were piled high. Still dripping what Darius thought was a queasy pink liquid.
Sonali pointed with her hand bearing a wad of unopened bills and missed appointment letters towards what Darius could almost describe as a tarantula. “Jesus Christ!” Darius flinched, almost dropping his sushi.
“Darius, you’re taller than me and you’re a guy. So…” She handed him the bills with an impish grin. Darius sighed and looked up at the spider. It seemed menacing. He swore it was almost the length of his index finger, but he noticed something else. The flies that had continually buzzed and supped in their unclean kitchen were no longer buzzing. In fact, it was only the spider that supped.
“I don’t know, Sonali. I mean, maybe he’s protecting us?”
“Darius, it’s a giant fucking spider. Swat him while I stand five feet back in case he jumps at your neck.”
Sonali had a mane of uncombed black hair. With a few tamed brown highlights and untamed gray strands. She had wide-set dark eyes and a long smile. Something like a Cheshire cat. But on her face, it had none of the grim dark fantasy, and instead gave her aquiline nose and dark eyes a friendly set.
He thought of his meeting with Gerald. He thought of words he had known so long, but never said. He sighed, his shoulders slumping, and readied himself to swat the spider.
“Darius.” Sonali cocked her head to the right. “That’s right. Today was your big day!”
Darius smiled with all mouth and no eyes. “Yeah, I got promoted.”
“Hey,” Sonali wrapped both of her arms around his thin shoulders and collarbone. He felt her small breasts through her shirt and blushed.
“Yeah, it just didn’t come with any raise.”
“Darius, that’s not a promotion. That’s, like, malfeasance. It’s like abuse.”
Darius dragged his feet into the living room and fell onto the couch. The Matrix was playing and Neo was being excoriated by his boss. “Yeah, I know.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Sonali gave him a look that was part lion, part mother. She strode behind the couch and opened up Phil’s room without knocking.
Darius knew Phil from about a year ago. His firm hired Phil as an in-person strategy consultant for a grand total of two days, until they realized 90% of his resume was falsified. The portions that were not falsified were the font. That was only stolen.
Sonali knew Phil from when he tried to recruit her to be the maître d’ at a new club that he neither financed, architected nor established any concrete plans for, except for that the maître d’ would be topless, and the name would be Amuse Douche, tapas and shower themed of course.
She came out of Phil’s room with a briefcase that looked pilfered out of the gilded age, but not in such a way that it retained its luster. It looked like a time traveler went to the 1920s, stole a briefcase, deposited it in the 1800s, and let it rattle around the country for 200 years before it wound up in their apartment.
She flipped both latches and turned it around to face Darius. “I don’t say this lightly, but tonight you and me are getting high.”
Darius saw in front of him an apothecary’s wet dream. Except the labels on the bottles of the various herbs were not wolf’s bane and hibiscus, but Bush Kush and Mauve Monkey Balls. “Sonali, look, I don’t...”
“Darius, lighten up.” He watched her long thin fingers carefully pry out a jar labeled Armageddon. Her hands, like a practiced surgeon, dipped into the jar with a small ladle and poured the contents across a piece of paper.
Darius always liked looking at her neck. Something about the way that the sinew connected. The lines not straight but not fully curved, like a hyperbola. Like the view you’d see when looking up under a canopy of trees.
He knew the words he longed to say, he just couldn’t say them.
There was a conspicuous bottle on the far left of the briefcase labeled Red. Darius pulled it out from the inlay. A small note dropped. Underneath the bottle was a rubber band and a syringe.
“Whoa there, cowboy.” Sonali finished rolling the first joint. “Here.” She stuck it out to him with her two fingers. Darius almost wanted her lips to light it up first.
He narrowed his eyes. “Sonali, I need to lighten up.” Sonali retracted the weed and watched him. He looked at the empty syringe on the table in front of him. The instructions were simple. “One cc, mellow. Two cc, tripping. Four cc, ballzz.”
He inserted the syringe into the bottle and pulled out four cc of red liquid. He pushed until small amounts dribbled from the top of the syringe. He tapped it two times.
Sonali’s mouth was open, but neither of them spoke.
Darius rolled up his sleeve, tightened the rubber band around his upper arm. He saw a large blue vein pulse and lowered the syringe towards the vein. He could see his heartbeat. Expanding, expanding, expanding, expanding.
Sonali took out a set of Temple Nightclub matches and lit up Armageddon in a few puffs. She took a deep drag and blew smoke into Darius’ face. “Hey.” Darius held the syringe above his vein, “Do you love me?” She asked.
Expand, expand. Expand, expand.
Knock, knock. Knock, knock.
Someone was at the door.
Sashimi
Darius cracked opened the door and peeped out. There was a tall man with pale, almost gray skin and sleeked back hair. He wore a suit, but not in a posh, business-like way. Darius thought he looked like a sweaty, pin-striped, frat bro 10 years post hoc.
The man’s swollen eyes caught Darius, “Hey, I gotta an interesting offer.” A bit of water dribbled out of his mouth. One of his hands sloshed against the door and started to push it open.
“Hey, uh...”
Sonali was giggling. “Darius, that’s Bruce, it’s totally fine.”
“Oh.” Darius opened the door. The man’s shoes squelched as he strode into the apartment. Darius couldn’t help but notice he was dripping. Had it been raining outside?
“So, you wanna have fun tonight?” The man’s hands were firmly placed in his damp trouser pockets. He smiled. His mouth widened and opened to seemingly implausible states. Underneath the stretched lips was an immense row of pearly whites. Spiked and interlocking.
“Uh, Bruce, we’re kinda busy.” Sonali was giggling and rolling back and forth. Darius saw Armageddon was no more.
“She looks like she wants to have fun. Come on, buddy. Let’s go to the club.” Darius felt the inertia kick in once again. He didn’t know Bruce, but Sonali had gone clubbing plenty. Maybe it would be fun? And then Bruce gave another one of his grins. And Darius saw meat, not steak or chorizo, but raw meat hanging off one of the man’s many teeth.
“Actually, Bruce… I think we’re okay.” Darius stuck his hand out, a friendly gesture of, “It was nice meeting you, but I think it’s time for you to get the fuck out of my house.”
“Darius... Oh, do you wanna hear something really funny?” Darius looked at Sonali, who was still cackling on the ground. “I don’t know who the hell this guy is.” She rolled back on her back, laughing.
Darius instinctively jumped back. Bruce’s hand left his pocket and sought to grab him. But Darius noticed something quite un-hand-like about it. Well, quite a few un-hand-like qualities. There were no nails. No knuckles. No thumbs. No fingers. Actually, quite nothing hand-like about it at all. Bruce had fins.
Darius stumbled backwards. And the shark person bark-roared. His eyes pushed towards the side of his head, and his jaw distended. Rows and rows of dagger-like teeth, stringy with cloth and bangles, blood and sinew, chomped and bit in front of Darius’s face.
Darius grabbed the pot used for the seafood boil and brought it between them. The teeth bit into the pot and gave a deep grating wail. The fins slapped on either side of Darius’s thin arms as he pushed the shark person back. The pot crumpled in the man’s jaws and Darius snatched his hand out before the metal was engulfed.
He heard the sound of a car being turned into a cube as Bruce swallowed the pot whole, and rushed at Darius again. Darius reached behind him, the kitchen knife! He yanked and pulled out a spatula in front of the shark. Fuck.
Bruce chomped it away with one bite and opened his grizzly maw. And then blood.
An ax now protruded from the back of Bruce’s head. He dropped to his knees and fell onto the platter of sushi. Sonali held the other end of the ax. She was giggling. “Darius, it’s sashimi,” she pointed at the shark person.
Extradition
“Dudes, what the fuck?” The bathroom door opened. Phil was 6’4”, around 260 pounds of jiggling confidence. His hair was tied in a ponytail, brown with blonde highlights, and his face was constantly on the verge of being sunburned, giving him an almost aged, ageless look. Depending on the angle, he looked anywhere from 25 to 40.
He wore canvas khaki cargo pants, and carried a utility knife in his back pocket. Darius remembered Phil would take out the knife and ask strangers to slash his slash-resistant sections of pants, until one feisty 16-year-old tried stabbing him instead.
At this moment, his pants were down.
“Phil, put your pants on.” Darius was suddenly dropped into a quantum of normalcy. How many times had he seen Phil’s unantiseptic hands squeezing his heart polka-dotted underwear back into his pants?
“Dudes,” Phil pointed. And Darius shook back into reality, or whatever the fuck they were in now. Sonali was still cackling on the floor.
Darius looked down. His collar, seemingly starched to impregnability, was finally brought low. Bruce’s teeth ripped into it, speckling it with blood. “Jesus, Jesus.”
Darius fumbled in his pockets, brought out his cell, and dialed 911, before Phil, one hand still holding up his pants, toilet paper streaming from the bathroom along with the odor that would have accompanied the reason why Sonali or Darius hadn’t seen or heard Phil for the past 30 minutes, swatted it out of his hands. “What the fuck?”
“Darius, dude, calm down.”
“Phil, we have to call the Pentagon, the CIA, the fucking Men in Black. Look at this.” He pointed down at where the shark person had been, and saw Chaco, their upstairs neighbor, an ax gruesomely protruding from the back of his head. Chaco’s face planted delicately between a Rainbow and a Philadelphia roll.
“Dudes, it’s okay, I know a guy. He can get you out of the country.”
“Phil, this was a fucking shark.”
“Yeah, dude, I saw it. It was a shark, and then it kinda like Animorphed into Chaco.” Phil buttoned his pants and nudged the body with his foot. “Huh. You know, people kinda look smaller when they’re dead.”
Sonali got up on all fours and pointed at Chaco. “Hey Phil. Sashimi. Get it?”
Phil clicked his tongue. “Mm, more like beef tartare. Uh, okay, so dudes, here’s what I’m thinking. New identity. Extradition, probably somewhere kinda warm. You know, a good party scene. I’ve heard Brazil is nice. You guys are probably gonna have to be brother and sister. Like, adopted I guess, uh...”
“Phil.” Darius grabbed on both sides of Phil’s shoulders. “You just saw a fucking shark person, right? This is some Artemis Fowl Lord of the Rings bullshit right here.”
Phil’s nose flared. “Is that my fucking Armageddon?” He turned his head and saw Sonali trying to stand, knees wobbling. “Goddamn it, Sonali. I told you this was for a special occasion.”
“Darius got promoted.”
“Whoa, dude.”
Darius sat down on the couch with a sigh. The Matrix was still playing. Morpheus was holding up a red pill and a blue pill to Neo. Thunk, thunk. Thunk, thunk. The ceiling above them coughed out dust.
“Dudes, that’s Chaco’s apartment.”
All three of them looked up.
Hentai
They stood outside the door. Sonali’s shirt bore a rainbow, now only shades of red. Phil’s shirt untucked itself, his belly protruding. Darius’s shirt hung from his thin shoulders, still tattered from his fish fight.
He looked back at them. Sonali was carrying the ax. He opened his mouth to ask, but decided against it.
“You open it.” Phil nudged Darius.
“Me?”
“Dude, you are the one that killed the shark person. You know, Chronicles of Riddick, like take what you kill.”
“Phil, we live in San Francisco. And Sonali did it…”
Sonali turned the knob. “Unlocked.” She spoke to herself as she entered. Phil and Darius looked at each other and hunched into the room.
It was dark. Darius smelled cellophane, fish food, socks and incense. The far wall was lined with the largest collection of anime dolls Darius ever saw. Sailor Moon, Utena, Lain, Evangelion, and Bebop, breasts meant for bouncing attached to stick thin mixes of poreless faces and multicolor hair. Smiling, bending, and peace signing.
A strobe of color caught Darius’s eye. Eight full screens of tentacular yuri, yaoi, and ahegoa blazed in the corner of the room.
“Dude, Chaco is hooked up. That season is only on prerelease in Japan.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Darius whispered.
“Dude and check this out.” Phil reached down and picked up a pamphlet from the ground and handed it to Darius.
In big inflated orange letters it exclaimed, “SF’s ONE AND ONLY OCTOPUS CULT. Don’t be a sucker for some other cult. Grab your closest three friends and lend us a hand or eight!“ Darius felt Sonali’s hands across his back, his heart raced a touch more. She leaned over him to get a closer look, chuckling at the puns.
Cricket-cricket, cricket-cricket.
“Hey don’t look.” Darius tried to peek over her shoulder, but she was holding the book and the flashlight tight. It was calm and cool. They were in the backyard tree house the night before Darius’s 10th birthday party.
Darius wanted to wait up until right before midnight so he could feel what it was like to have two digits instead of one. He wasn’t really sure what to expect, but he did expect big things.
“Scooch back,” Sonali elbowed him. She was three years older than he was and already knew what it felt like to have two digits. She even knew what it was like to be in middle school.
“The monster took one step up with his left foot and one step up with his right foot,” Sonali continued. Darius settled down and began to imagine the monster. He imagined it was big, even taller than grownups. And it was all jagged, big black spikes coming out of it.
“Tommy and Crysti let out a scream as the monster opened his mouth.”
“What happened next?” Darius couldn’t wait. Even though Sonali was only just taking a quick inhale.
“And then, they saw two lights and from the mirror, glowing versions of Tommy and Crysti stepped out just in time! The monster reeled back…” Sonali looked over at Darius, but he was pensive all of a sudden, “Hey, you okay? This is normally your favorite part.”
“I was just thinking what would happen if they weren’t just in time what would happen if they were too late?”
Sonali smiled and pulled him closer, “The hero is always in time, otherwise how would you get a happily ever after?”
“Dudes, I’ve heard of this joint.”
Both Sonali and Darius looked up.
“Excuse me?” Darius bumbled. Sonali squinted at Phil like a newly formed enemy.
“I never said I’ve been there…,” Phil said, “And so what if I had. An exploration of self in my younger years. I was something of a young…”
“Shut up.” Darius stomped up to Phil, harmlessly pointing at the pamphlet. “So you know how to take us there?”
“Dude, it was a long time ago…”
“Guys” Sonali whispered.
“You’re saying you remember my social, but not the only octopus cult in SF!”
“Why would you use that as your password.”
“GUYS!” Sonali shouted.
She had their attention.
“What the fuck is that….”
Spiderman
A giant spider stood before them, big enough for a twelve-year-old to ride and terrify the bejesus out of even the most shōnen of anime protagonists. Its eight grotesque legs twitching back-and-forth. Its multifaceted eyes reflected gaping jaws of Darius, Phil and Sonali.
The spider had both the body of a spider, and a chubby pimpled human, both connected to a spider head. For a second Darius wondered what it would be like to have two throats and whether the creature had two stomachs and two asses as well. The human body wore a shirt, reading “Death”, and a pair of stained greasy sweatpants. Neither item covered a hairy protrusion of belly that folded over his waist.
Then the creature let out an “Ohoho” in a vibrato even a seasoned Wagnerite would love.
Ten legs stampeded in every direction as two hands snatched up the most prime of the anime dolls.
Phil and Darius both started sweating at the same time.
The Spider-Man thing lunged back on its hind legs. Its front four arachno legs scraped the air like daggers, while its two human legs feebly twitched and gyrated in a distinctly unpleasant motion.
Sonali brought the ax’s head down, missing the Spider-Man’s man parts by a hair’s breadth.
The beast lunged backwards, crying out, “Ohoho.” Sticky webbing shot from its rear abdomen against the far wall.
Darius dropped, bringing both of his thin arms above his head. “It’s launching a web attack.”
He closed his eyes and there was silence. He waited for the blow, the sticky mucus, the paralytic sting. Darius wondered whether his nose was long enough to stick out from the spider’s webbing so that he wouldn’t die of arachno silken asphyxiation.
He heard Phil’s voice beside him. “Dude, I think it just shat itself.”
Darius opened his eyes.
Sonali heaved back the ax with an audible grunt, raising it above her head like an executioner.
“I yield. I yield. Oho!” The Spider-Man sang out in a warbling falsetto. Its legs retracted inward and its small human body sat on the ground, arms locked around knees in the most disconcerting fetal position Darius had ever seen.
“Should I kill him?” Sonali looked from Darius to Phil with frenetic eyes, she was coming down from her high in the most terrifying way possible.
“Dude, wait a second.” Phil dropped into a squat. The tops of hairy cheeks now visible above the swell of his sweatpants. “Hey there, little dude. I see you like Death Note. Misa Misa, am I right?” Phil gave a pervy grin and stuck out one of his fat hands.
Darius got a closer look at the shirt. It squeezed too tightly against the Spider-Man’s man boobs. It did not just say “Death”, it said “Death Note”.
One of the human hands came out and gave a small clap against Phil’s. Phil grabbed the man hand and tried to pull the Spider-Man up, clearly unaware of the difference in weight.
“Ohoh, m’lady. Ohoh. And- your man servants.”
Sonali looked to Phil who motioned her to lower the ax. Its head thudded heavily into the wooden ground.
Phil gave a wide smile and whimsically bowed. He spun his hand above his head with enough vivacity as to tickle his hat’s feather if he had either. “Yes, indubitably my dude,” Phil winked to Darius, “I am sir Phil and this is lady Sonali and manservant Darius of the… lowlands. We come to seek your council.”
The Spider-Man raised himself from the floor, gave a small bow and brought his hand to his chest in a strained sort of salute, as if he were both holding an apple aloft while clutching it to his chest. “You may call me Ota-kun. Or Ota. At your service.”
“So, uh, Ota, my dude, you see any freaky fish people around?”
Ota made precise little movements with his large legs, that kept the noise of his giant frame to a minimum. He opened the blinds of his apartment that overlooked Eddy Street.
“Ohoho, the sinister Salmonids, the traitorous Tunoids, the harrowing… Halibuts!” He bowed low. “Yes, for some time, I’ve awaited your coming… Though not of your particular visage.” He scooped up a small figurine of Mikasa. “But yes, I know of their ilk.”
Sonali straightened up, her hand resting casually on the pommel of the ax. “Though our visage…” She looked at Phil, and he nodded his head, “May look… rough… our hearts are pure, and we accept this...”
She looked at Phil again, and he whispered “A quest, it’s a quest!”
“This quest… So like, what do we do?” Sonali asked.
“Oho, you must venture into the belly of the old city, where their altar’s worship is heard night after night. Indeed, it is the temple of the night.” Ota’s warbled voice threw in sibilance enough to snuff seven candles from sheer anticipation.
Darius paced back and forth. This was their only lead, and despite Ota’s form and hentai predilections, Darius felt Ota wouldn’t hurt a fly. “A temple… Well, there are a couple of churches in San Francisco. There’s, of course, Grace Cathedral, but they don’t worship each night. Perhaps a temple might mean a different place of worship. A synagogue perhaps, or perhaps one of the Shaolin temples in Chinatown.” Darius paced back and forth as Phil asked Ota for fish-related hentai recommendations.
“It’s Temple Nightclub. Jesus Christ, such a fucking nerd.” Sonali heaved on the ax. Its head was stuck deep in the wood. “It’s a temple, there’s worship each night. Ugh. Darius, give me a hand.”
Darius stopped biting his lips. He moved over to the ax and grasped it at the same time as Sonali.
He felt warm. All of a sudden, peaceful, calm. There was a low drumming, thum-thum, thum-thum.
Darius, though he wasn’t sure how he knew he was Darius, liked to dance to the beat. His tiny arms twitched up and down, like a T-Rex with Tourette’s. His legs were Boogie-woogieing.
The left leg popped out, boom, right leg popped out, boom. Oh, he was feeling in the mood. A deep red was all he saw, or thought he saw. But if he understood one thing, he was born, or maybe not yet born, to dance.
Suddenly he felt something strange. His sanctuary, his prison, was being pressed upon. He heard a voice, but it came from outside. In a deep low rumble, “Oooooooh eeeeee’s kiiiiiiiiiginnnnng.”
The sides of the sanctuary were being pressed down upon him. It was no longer boogie-woogie time, it was fighting time. A left kick, a right kick. He had to fight this oppression back. He would not be cowed. He was king. He was universe. The galaxy inside his mouth. Whatever a mouth and a galaxy were.
He was tired.
How long had he been dancing? Perhaps he had always been dancing. Perhaps. He was dancing on the grave of the universe. He fell asleep.
Thunk
The ax popped out of the floor. Darius tumbled back onto his butt. The other side of the ax was held an inch aloft from his Adam’s apple.
“Ha. Thanks.” Sonali said, giving a wide smile.
“Dudes, look at this.”
Phil had just opened a closet door with a full-length coffin poster on its front. On its back, it looked like an anime version of a 16-year-old girl wearing a bat bikini and fangs inside an open coffin. “Ohoh, she’s actually 500 years old.”
But to Darius’s surprise, it did not hold a series of eight limbed jumpsuits. Or maybe ten-limbed Darius guessed? It was stocked, wall-to-wall ceiling to floor with cosplay items.
“Ohoho, vestments for my champions!”
“Holy fucking shit.” Phil pulled out what looked like a bearskin rug.
“Chewbacca?” Darius asked.
“No, dude.” He flipped it the other way to reveal two Velcro flaps for covering, or maybe, uncovering the nipples. And the head of a stuffed animal elephant sewed onto the crotch. “That’s some custom furry con shit. What years Ota?”
“You mean, what years didn’t I go?” Ota’s index finger mimed pushing up a pair of glasses onto his hundred-eyed arachnoid face.
Sonali pulled out a firewoman’s costume that, while offering absolutely zero protection against flame and hazard, would certainly keep one cool in the event of a bonfire.
Phil dropped his pants and started to squeeze his heart polka-dotted boxered buttocks into the Chewbacca suit. Sonali carefully lowered the ax down and yanked her shirt over her ponytail.
“Guys, what the fuck are you doing?” Darius brought his hands up to cover his eyes, peeking between his fingers.
“Dude. They won’t let us in without a costume.”
Sonali sighed, “Darius, it’s Halloween.” She dropped her shorts.
Trick or Treat
Darius looked to his right. Phil seemed surprisingly comfortable in his custom Chewbacca costume. It was about two sizes too big, and his face was almost falling out of the mouth. But he seemed to be having fun opening and closing the Velcro patches that revealed more hair than nipple. To his left, Sonali adjusted her thin plastic fireman’s cap. She’d notched out the back with her ax to make room for her ponytail. The black and yellow jacket barely made it to her 12th rib, but the fire-skirt gave her quite some mobility.
Darius, on the other hand, picked a childhood favorite.
“You know, I haven’t dressed up since I was, like, 13.” Darius waved his arms like a ghost.
“Yeah, we can tell, Darius.”
“Seriously, how spooky am I?” He raised his hands. He was wearing what looked like a Scooby-Doo ghost outfit.
“You know, dude, I’m not sure about your costume. It might cause some...”
“Says the guy with a literal trunk between his legs.”
Sonali almost burst out laughing. She brought her hand to her mouth.
“Whatever, dude.”
“Okay. You nerds ready?” Sonali asked.
The whole team gave a nod. And Phil opened the door.
Both Sonali and Phil stepped into the hallway first, making a sharp right toward the elevator at the back of the apartment. Darius walked out one step before he stopped.
In front of him was a little girl wearing a white rabbit mask. Dark black voids formed the slant of her eyes and the bend of her mouth. She wore a pink petticoat with white lace and black hair in pigtails.
“Guys, do you see this?” Darius said.
The little girl silently held out a skull.
“I think it’s a... I think it’s a ghost.”
Phil and Sonali looked back.
“Dude, it’s a trick-or-treater.”
The top of the skull had been carved away to make an opening in the cranium. A thin wire was strung from either side.
“Guys, we live in the Tenderloin. I’ve never in my fucking life seen an unescorted 12-year-old girl trick-or-treating silently on the second floor of a locked apartment complex.”
“Darius, don’t curse.” Sonali walked towards the girl to pat her head but stopped an inch away when the girl hissed. To Darius, the eyeholes of the girl’s mask squinted. “Oh, it’s okay. Ota, do you have any candy?”
“Okay, okay, even if this were a real fucking little girl.”
“Darius!”
“Right, a real little girl. Why would we ask the creepy giant spider person for candy to give her?
“Darius!” Sonali looked back towards Ota’s door.
“What?”
And from behind them, Darius heard Ota’s voice. “Ohoho, I’ve heard worse.”
Darius saw Ota’s left arm from behind the door, reaching out with a soy sauce flavored Kit-Kat bar, its packaging etched on each surface with Katakana and Kanji. Darius could clearly see a giant spider leg twitching and bristling with hair.
“Jesus.”
“Darius!” Sonali was glaring at him. And Ota dropped the Kit-Kat bar into the skull the girl held, and she ran off in the other direction, giggling.
“Wait, are you fucking serious? There’s no exit over there, only the fire escape. This is a fucking pixie. Some like, Fey bullshit.”
Sonali scrunched up her face. “Darius, you’ve been watching too much Hentai.”
“Sonali, that’s not even what hentai means…”
Phil was holding open the elevator at the end of the hallway. “Dude, Ota’s got some killer recs if you’re looking.”
Darius shook his head and followed him into the elevator.
CTH’L’OCTO-CHAN
The night was cool. It had a burnt ozone smell. And the streets were clean for once. It not only rained yesterday, but the day before and the day before, for eight days straight.
“Dude, I don’t think it’s ever rained so much in SF.”
“They’re calling it rain-geddon.”
It was Halloween. The streets were filled with people. San Francisco usually so hollowed-out was chock-full of lightsabers, sexy witches, wands, sexy nurses, ray guns, sexy cats, and katanas.
As they turned the corner from their apartment, Darius almost ran head-first into a police officer. He looked at Darius for a moment, and then his eyes caught Sonali. Sonali still held the ax. Its sharp blade was gleaming in the moonlight, but not the glint of silver, the glint of red. Bruce’s blood had run down the head of the ax almost to its hilt, sticky, red, congealed.
The officer’s eyes narrowed.
“Excuse me, ma’am, I’m gonna have to place you under arrest.”
Without thinking, Darius grabbed Sonali’s arm to pull her across the street.
“Where are we going?”
Sonali was pulling Darius through a crowd. The dance floor thrummed with the music. Dum, dum, dum, dum. Lights strobed around them. Darius had to constantly remind himself of gravity as his neurotransmitters rolled and sloshed around his head.
They ran off the dance floor.
They were waiting in line for the restroom. Darius leaned his back against the wall and slouched. Sonali rested against him. He swore he felt her heartbeat. Or was that the bass? He craned his head close to her neck, no, her ear. He wanted to make sure she heard.
“Let’s get married.”
Sonali pushed him back against the wall. And looked up at him into his eyes. The lights flashed on and off. They seemed almost blinding. Like the headlights of a car.
And she pulled him. This time they were skipping the line. “Hey, what’s your problem?” “Go fuck yourself.” They marched into the bathroom. A stall had just opened, and they cut in front of the next man. She opened the door to pull them inside.
The officer yanked Darius and Sonali back. Zoom! A car just turned the corner and sped down the street. He could swear the driver had fins instead of arms.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s a joke, y’all.” Darius looked at the officer. He wore a pair of thick aviators in the dead of night. His T-shirt barely held its third button against his pecs and his blue short shorts barely held his cheeks.
“Jesus, hands off, Johnny law!” She threw her hands up. The officer shrugged and turned away.
Suddenly the night felt cold, like feet hitting asphalt after last call. The jingle of ice, sporadic laughter, shuffle of chairs, smiles, rejection, alcohol on warm breath, all replaced by a quiet night air. Darius remembered he had work tomorrow as the new senior head associate.
He should go back. Get some sleep. This was surely all just a dream. If he just closed his eyes, he’d wake up.
No. He had something to say before this night was over. Or he might never get the chance to say it again. A surreal feeling washed over him. He looked up and saw Phil and Sonali looking back, waiting.
He picked up his pace to catch up.
Sonali was only stopped by one more fake cop. He kept hearing people yelling, “Roll tide!” at Phil. And three people had flipped Darius the bird. Strange. Maybe he did something in a past life.
As they rounded the next corner, they saw a great line. Around blocks and blocks it twisted and curled. Its form like a great tentacle feeling its way around the city.
“So, dudes, how long have you been waiting?” Phil asked.
A woman in cat ears looked up. “We’ve been here an hour. The line hasn’t moved, like, a single foot.” Another woman, in identical cat ears, looked up from her phone.
“Yeah, and we are not even at the back of the line. Like there’s no way you guys can get in. Also,” she looked at Darius. “Not cool.”
Phil pulled Sonali and Darius away from the line and huddled, “Okay, dudes. We have to think of another plan…”
“Why don’t we just use his card?” Sonali held out a pink laminated card. At the top it said, Sharkperson Goshujin-sama. Its ID picture had a chibi version of an octopus with two of its eight tentacles raised. “Level two member of CTH’L’OCTO-CHAN. Ganbatte!”
“Wait, this is Bruce’s?”
“Who’s Bruce? I just took it off the shark guy person.”
“You’re brilliant.” Darius almost hugged her before he thought of the momentary lapses that followed when they touched. “But how are we going to pose as Sharkperson?”
A furry paw grabbed the card. Darius saw Phil pull the Chewbacca costume more tightly around him. “I have just the idea.”
Goshujin-sama
Market street thrummed with people like one great artery leading to the temple. Salesforce tower glowed, its animated spire simply read “Obey”. They followed the line twisting and turning maze-like around and across blocks. And they heard it before they saw it. The city seemed to beat. Thump, thump, thump. There was a deep red glow in the distance.
“That’s one hell of a party.” Sonali’s ax glinted red.
“You mean, that’s one party from hell, dude.”
Darius could feel it. That’s where they needed to be. The drumbeat, the heart of the city. As they approached the front of the line, the deep bass of the nightclub became Stentorian, like they were the eye of a hurricane. They had to shout to hear each other.
There were two lines. At the main line of the club stood a six-foot-eight man, shaved with a scar across his left eyebrow, a pin-striped gray suit jacket rested loosely on top of black jeans with a belt and a skull. At the right, a five-foot-four man with dreadlocks and overalls sat on a stool. The sign to his right said, “Goshujin-sama and Hime-sama only.”
Darius whispered in Sonali’s ear, “I think we should drop the ax.”
“What?”
“The ax. They’re not going to let an ax into a nightclub.”
“Darius, worry about your own costume.”
Phil swaggered up with confidence. Both Velcro flaps opened. From five feet away, he visibly took out his Goshujin-sama card and held it aloft as he took his final steps.
The bouncer rose from his stool and bowed ever so slightly. “Goshujin-sama, Hime-sama,” he said in a distinctly American accent, “Welcome on this most holiest of nights. May I see your card?” He looked at the name on the card, Sharkperson, and looked back up to Phil. His face hid fully behind the Chewbacca costume.
Phil stood at least one head above the bouncer, and the bouncer cocked his to the left. “Damn, I swore you were my height, Sharkperson.”
Sonali’s hand tightened across the haft of her ax. And Phil shrugged. The bouncer stared daggers. He looked towards the other larger man and then shot back a laugh that could be heard from the back of the line.
“Oh, you know I was just shitting you. You go on right in. Take this lovely lady with you. Oh, by the way, nasty costume. Love the bloody ax.”
Darius entered last, and he saw the bouncer’s eyes widen and mouth become slack. Darius tried to walk in, but the man’s arm shot out like a steel beam and prevented him from entering.
“Hey, I’m with, uh, I’m with Ph- with Sharkperson.”
“Dude, no way no KKK-dressed ass motherfucker is gonna get into my club.”
“What? This is a ghost.”
Sonali sighed and rolled her eyes. “I knew this would happen...”
Phil was making the Chewbacca noise and shaking his elephant head at the other bouncer, who was laughing. As the bouncer with dreads started to inhale, he kept gasping, one, two, three, and kept growing, bigger and bigger. Five-foot-four, five-eight, six-two, six-eight, seven-two. The man was a giant. “You take off that costume, motherfucker.”
“I’m a ghost.” Darius’s voice cracked. And he stood in stunned silence.
The man leveled his hand down onto Darius’s head. Darius thought the hand oddly reminiscent of a nutcracker and his skull oddly reminiscent of a nut.
Suddenly, Darius felt a weight lift as Sonali yanked off the Scooby-Doo ghost costume and threw it on the ground.
“He’s an idiot. Just ignore him.” She grabbed Darius’s arm and pulled him inside the temple.
Darius could feel his blood boiling. His heart thump-thump, thump-thump, racing, his blood pressure rising. “I’m the idiot?”
He looked at Sonali. They were so different now.
Darius had grown quite the paunch. Too many years of sitting at a computer as his day job, hobby, leisure time, and way to keep in touch. Sonali’s hips had widened. Her fashion had changed. A smattering of hair gone gray. Nose and ears ever so slightly bigger.
“What do you think, we’d put them in a retirement home? No. Either they’re coming here or I’m going to them.”
“Sonali, we’ve already made this decision. It’s our house. It’s not your parents’ house. Your parents had their own house. They made their own choices.”
“Yeah, and part of those choices were having me”
“Look-”
“I told you. They don’t need to move here. But if not, I’m moving in with them.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“That’s not going to happen? You think you own me? You have the right to control what I do? To boss me around?”
Boom-boom, boom-boom. Darius’ blood boiled. “I told you, we’ve already made the decision.” His hand pounded on the table. Boom-boom, boom-boom.
“You expect me to…?” His legs began to buckle. His arms gripped the table as he slouched down. Boom-boom, boom-boom. “Darius? Darius?” He fell. Sonali grabbed his arm, and the world went black.
Follow the White Rabbit
When Sonali let go, Darius realized he was an idiot. Yeah, Darius had been to clubs before. Once before. It had been a Wednesday night, 8:00 PM, and he had refused to drink. He stood, slightly bouncing, in a circle with eight other guys and one woman as a 60-year-old man, his balding scalp ever so slightly hid with a comb-over, pretended to dodge bullets like Neo in the center of a circle.
Darius couldn’t see more than a few feet on any side of him. Sweaty bodies jumped and lurched. He saw nipples, tongues, earlobes, shoulders, knees, backs lacquered with sweat. But upon ever so slight inspection, he saw fangs, flippers, fins and dorsals, and heard the barking of sea lions.
The floor was sticky and slick with brine, and the ceiling was covered in tentacles like capillaries, pulsing to the beat of the music.
Sonali and Phil stood pressed close. They were shouting. But Darius couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was too loud. His entire heart and body were part of the beat. He felt this strange urge to dance. He had to boogie-woogie. His legs began to move on their own.
Without his ghost costume, he only wore a raggedy white undershirt and a pair of white boxers. But that didn’t matter. It was time to dance.
He saw Sonali, her arms hooked around a man with the body of a lumberjack and the head of a sea bass.
Phil was damp with perspiration, with brine. His thick Chewbacca fur, now a wet, oily mess. Crustaceans began to crawl up his legs and arms as he began to rock his body back and forth, keeping his legs firmly attached to the ground.
Where was the music coming from? How could he stop? Darius looked back to where he thought the door was and saw the girl in the rabbit mask.
Somehow, in this throng of people, she stood alone. She had a circle of clear dance floor around her. No sole within six feet.
He had to reach her. He could barely move. No, he could move. He could dance.
He slammed his foot down. Just a single foot. Just a single toe inside her circle. And the whole scene changed. The music level dropped to a small thump-thump, thump-thump. He grabbed onto Phil by the hand, and pulled Sonali by the haft of her ax into the circle.
“What the fuck?” Sonali said. They could hear each other clearly.
They all looked towards the little girl.
The three of them stood within the quiet circle the young girl created. Sonali spat on the already briny floor of the temple. “Ugh, tastes like fish.” And Phil shook himself like a dog. Crustaceans and hermit crabs flew off his damp fur. He parted his Chewbacca locks.
Darius smiled at them and pointed at the girl, “Follow the white rabbit,” he smiled. Sonali looked at him vacantly and Phil squinted his eyes, “You know, from Lewis Carroll.” Their looks still blank, “The fucking Matrix.”
“Oh, right dude, Morpheus and shit. But what the fuck is that thing?” Phil pointed at the young girl.
“This is the girl.”
“No, it’s not. That was a trick or treater. This is like some sort of a magic thing. Like what’s that game you play? The Dungeons and…”
“Wait, now the girl is weird?”
“Well, I mean, what is she doing in a nightclub? What’s with this kind of like sound barrier, huh?” Phil stuck his head in and out of the circle.
“Yeah, Darius, it is a little strange.”
Darius rolled his eyes, “Are you fucking serious?”
“Darius, I mean, she is a little girl, maybe you should watch what you say.”
Darius inhaled and exhaled and brought his pinched fingers to his temples. “This is clearly a fey creature, like a magic creature that we aided by giving her a Kit Kat bar or whatever. She’s part of our quest. And now she’s here to save us, like in a magic mentor role in The Hero’s Journey or something like that.”
Phil and Sonali were clearly just waiting for Darius to finish. “Yeah, but how did she get here?”
“Wait.” Darius pointed at where the girl had been. “She was a 12-year-old, unaccompanied, trick-or-treating in the middle of the Tenderloin, and that was okay, but-”
“Guys,” Sonali brought one of her hands up in air quotes, “’Follow the white rabbit.’” She pointed in the direction the girl was walking.
They sloshed their way through the nightclub. Its denizens parted before the small girl like the Red Sea, only to collapse after she was six-feet distant.
Their soggy shoes, splashed and squished to the now gentle sound of the music. Darius looked towards Sonali’s rubbery fireman boots with a small hint of jealousy.
As they moved to the back of the club, they saw hulking fish people throw bins of what looked like chum down shafts next to a conspicuously clean elevator.
“Huh.”
“What?”
“I’ve never seen this before.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
Darius looked towards Phil and Sonali. “The elevator?”
“Well, dude, yeah. I guess I’ve also never seen a tentacle ceiling or giant fish people.”
“Wait, you’ve lived here for three years, and you’ve never been here once?” Sonali asked.
Darius quickly hit the elevator call button and the doors opened to a crisp white interior, sterile and clean. The little girl stood at the entrance. Her white rabbit mask stared unblinkingly.
Darius reached down to pat the girl on the head. And she let out a “Hisssss”. Her mask’s eyes almost narrowed to full slants. “Jesus, okay. Uh, well, you did great. And, um, not a touching person. Got it.”
Sonali grabbed Darius’s hand and pulled him into the elevator.
Beep-beep. Beep-beep.
Darius opened his eyes just a touch. He didn’t know where he was. But he was warm. The air smelled like cheap incense used to cover up the smells of alcohol and formaldehyde.
He tried to move. His legs were stiff and leaden and hurt to bend. His feet throbbed as if he spent one too many hours on the dance floor last night.
He lifted his hand. He felt it pull on tubes and wires.
“Dad?”
There was a young woman in front of him. She had brown skin and curly black hair cut just below her neck. “Dad. Hey. I came when I heard.” The woman gave a small choked sob. Who was she? She felt so familiar. Her name was on the tip of his tongue.
He opened his mouth, which felt dry, parched, but he had no desire to drink. A rattling noise came from deep within his lungs. He concentrated on the sounds, closed his eyes. “Dad. I should have stayed with you. I... Well, it doesn’t matter. We were having a bad time, me and Dan.
“You know, I was just thinking about that time that you took me to get those... What did you say they’re called? The chewy little octopus fritters on a stick.”
It was Sonali. She was growing up to be a fine woman. She was married, right? To...
Beep-beep. Beeeeeep.
Boss Fight
Darius heard the ding of the elevator door. He wasn’t really sure what he expected to see. Giant fish god, tentacle monster, or an army of piranha knights. This was the boss fight after all.
The elevator opened to an office. Men and women dressed in loose suits and pin skirts walked to and fro in quiet conversation, holding a mix of clipboards, manila folders, and Blackberry devices. Atop their necks were a variety of fish species.
“Dude, look, I found Nemo.” Phil pointed at the nearest fish woman, who gave them a sidelong glance and scurried down the hallway.
The three of them stepped out of the elevator into a school of business fish. Sonali braced her legs and white-knuckled the ax. Darius assumed a fighter’s stance, feeling a chill breeze waft up his boxers. Phil re-Velcroed his nipple patches. They waited for a long moment, but the business fish continued swimming around the wary trio.
“Uh, dude, I think they’re just ignoring us.”
Sonali grabbed one of the smaller fish men by the tie and yanked him towards them.
“Hey, who’s in charge here?”
“Uh, excuse me, this isn’t, uh, this is, uh… this isn’t protocol. “ He tried to move left and right to free himself from Sonali’s grip, but she held fast, holding the ax above his head. He didn’t seem to mind the ax. He gave it a single glance and then looked down at his watch. “Uh, sorry, I’ve got a 9:30 sharp call with the Singapore office. Uh, if you’ll excuse me, uh... You can just ping me...” He held up a badge that flapped on his lapel: Level one Mackerelperson Goshujin-sama.
“Dude, what the fuck?” Phil snapped his fingers in front of the young mackerel, as Mackerelperson brought his hand up to his tie and began to squeeze it over top his fishy face. Sonali rolled her eyes and let him go.
“Ugh, fucking corporates.”
“Guys, uh, look.” Darius pointed at a bulletin board. A couple of flyers and Post-It Notes. A small picture of an eel person holding the shoulders of his two twins at a soccer game. A notice reminding employees to use their VPNs when outside the office. “You wouldn’t want to swim in shark-infested waters. *This by no means has any reference or referral to shark people or their general demeanor. Shark people are a protected class under Section 704B of Oceana.”
Darius gestured at the calendar.
“Yeah. So companies generally have important events like board meetings listed. Ah, here we go.” He pointed at today. There were two separate events: a board meeting on level eight of SF HQ, and the SUMMONING OF THE GREAT OLD ONE CTH’L’OCTO-CHAN.
“And that seems ominous. Well, to level eight we go.” Darius looked to the other side of the elevator and found a detailed map of the area, with appropriate arrows directing the fish in case of fire.
“Dude.” Phil clapped Darius on the back with a soggy paw.
“Three years of climbing the corporate ladder.” He looked from Phil to Sonali, each giving him a meek smile. And then he lead the way through the office fishbowl.
They came to an elevator in the back. It had eight buttons and a card scanner. Phil punched level eight and the light flicked on and off.
“One second.” Darius scanned Sharkperson’s employee card and floor two lit up. Darius tried punching eight, but again it went dark, “Restricted access…”
“Okay. Darius, nice try,” Sonali hefted the ax down. “I think it’s my time to shine.”
“Wait.” Darius almost grabbed Sonali by the shoulder, but then reached his hand back. Sonali looked at him, perplexed. “Just wait please.”
Darius let the elevator door close, and it dropped them down to level two. The doors opened, and they waited inside.
“What are we doing...”
Phil amused himself by velcroing and un-velcroing his flaps.
“Just wait.”
They heard the patter of steps from the other fish people in the office, the buzz of fax machines, and pagers beeping. Darius swore it matched a rhythm, almost like a heartbeat, like a bump-bump, bump-bump. He looked at Sonali. The head of the ax lay on the ground. She leaned against the elevator wall. He had something to say to her. Was she experiencing the same flashes that he experienced?
“Sonali?”
She looked at him, surprised and expectant. “Yeah?”
“Well…”
Ding.
The doors closed. They saw a level four light up. They were going down.
The elevator door opened to a fish man and fish lady chatting. The fish man had a black and white fish head with wavy fins and vacant eyes. The fish lady seemed to be some sort of sea anemone. Darius was unsure how she both saw or talked.
For a moment, Darius put himself in their position. They were well-dressed, on their way from one business meeting to another. Darius had just heard the word “synergy” and “OKRs on schedule”. Elevator doors opened, and standing in front of them were three, not fish people, just people. One clearly in just his underwear. One dressed in a slutty fireman’s costume, with an honest to god bloodied ax. And one was dressed in a damp Chewbacca costume, with a stuffed animal elephant head stitched to the crotch.
Obviously no one wants to be out of line, but maybe, just maybe, this was enough to call building security.
The fish people paused momentarily before stepping in the elevator. They turned around, and Darius waited for them to extend their IDs. They were looking at him, obviously waiting for the same thing.
Sonali gripped the handle of the ax. They were alone in the elevator with fresh badges, all that needed to be done now was finish the deed. But Darius knew another way this could work.
“Oh, you can scan yours first.” He said with a smile.
They either had the choice, go out on a fin, call them out, step out of the tightly cordoned lines of propriety and procedure, or acquiesce and scan first.
The fish man took out his badge, level eight, and scanned the elevator. Ding. It started moving. Darius smiled. “Oh, we’re going to the same floor.”
The fish man grunted assent and began talking with the anemone woman again. “Q3 strategic planning objectives...”
Sonali loosened her grip on the ax and gave Darius a wide grin.
Fuck Aquaman
The door opened.
Level eight looked no different from level one or level two, with the exception that there were noticeably fewer fish people. The cubicles were replaced with spacious corner offices. Darius idly wondered what the view from these offices might be. They were deep underground now, at least 8 if not 10 stories.
Darius found the boardroom on the map and escorted Sonali and Phil there. Phil tried to yank a fire hydrant off the wall before Darius flipped the release hatch and Phil stumbled backwards with an improvised weapon.
As they stood outside the boardroom, Darius turned back to them. “Look, we’ve come this far without violence. Let’s go in and talk to them. We have no idea what is happening here, all right?”
“Fuck that.” Phil slammed his foot against the handle of the tinted glass door with a deafening thud. Shaking the door so much that the glass shattered to the ground.
“Shit, my foot,” Phil hobbled into the room, unleashing the nozzle of the fire extinguisher and screaming while spraying foam. “I have had it with these mother-f’ing fish in this mother-f’ing office!”
The foam gradually ran out, and Darius shook his head and entered the room.
Sonali looked at Phil. “Snakes on a plane?”
“Hell yeah, dude.”
The boardroom was full with mummified corpses. Each seat occupied, by gills, scutes, fins and barbels, grizzled fish people with shriveled scales covering piscine skulls. In the center of the table was a yellow document, with filigreed letterhead. Cult of the CTH’L’OCTO-CHAN, Incorporated.
“Huh, it’s a C-corp.” Darius said as he picked it up.
“What the fuck?” Sonali tapped on the back of one of the fish persons’ heads. It dislocated, rolled off the chair, and thudded on the ground.
“Let’s see. There seems to be three agenda items. Uh, the first of which is a measure on executive bonuses that passed with 9 votes, all ayes.
Okay. Uh, the second looks to be a renaming of the third-floor office community center. Um, yeah, looks like a consensus wasn’t reached. Plenty of notes on this one, actually.” Darius flips pages of the memo until he got to the back.
“Oh, uh, and the last one. Let’s see. The 100-year plan to resurrect the great octopus god, CTH’L’OCTO-CHAN. Looks like this one passed with a vote of 8 to 1 souls. Hmm, souls…”
There was a cough on one side of the boardroom. One of the shriveled figures began to move. His head and hands were covered with a deep mucus slime. His mouth cracked open, showing rows of teeth.
“It’s a Greenland shark… they can live for 300 years,” Darius said.
Sonali raised her ax.
Phil scoffed, “Nerd.”
“You must stop it.” His voice was cracked. His tongue grated across his lips like sandpaper.
“What are they doing? Um, Greenlandsharkperson.” Sonali grabbed the shark by his shoulders
“Ah yes, that was to be the name of the third floor office community center.”
“Wait, stop what?”
“You know,” Darius chimed in, ”Greenlandsharkperson office community center is a pretty long name. I mean, do you need to put the whole thing in front of the office?
“It’s a perfectly reasonable name. Greenlandsharkperson third floor office community center.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait. You already have an office named after you?”
“Of course,” Greenlandsharkperson began to cough, “Oh my gills.”
“Darius, seriously, this is not the time.”
“Sonali, he already has an office named after him. And he wants a second office named after him? In the same building? So people are going to have to refer to it as the Greenlandsharkperson Office Level Two.”
Greenlandsharkperson coughed blood onto the table.
“Darius, he’s about to tell us something very important, so if you could just shut your mouth...”
“Dude, Sonali, chill. Darius has a point. Like, it’s kinda dumb to have…”
“Oh, my fucking God.” She held the ax, inches away from the Greenlandsharkperson’s face. “Tell us, what happens if we don’t stop the great octo summon or whatever?”
“They want to fucking hyphenate the office name. Everyone’s fucking name.”
“Okay. Yeah, that’s even worse. I mean, I guess Greenlandsharkperson office level two is better than mantarayperson hyphen greenlandsharkperson hyphen aquamanperson...”
“Fuck Aquaman!” Greenlandsharkperson raised up a slimy middle finger and collapsed onto the table, dead.
“Darius.” Sonali didn’t turn to look at him.
“I mean, Sonali, we know Aquaman exists now, right? Like, that’s crazy.” Darius suddenly realized how absurd he sounded, and became quite conscious of the fact that he was wearing nothing, but his underwear.
“Darius, like five minutes ago, there was like one second where I thought you were cool. Just, like, one second.” Sonali scowled. “And now, our miraculous last fucking lead is dead.” She turned around and grabbed Darius by the shirt.
Crunch-crunch
Darius’ back slammed against the locker twice.
“Leave him be, Sonali.” Sonali was a full foot taller than Darius. He was already cringing, awaiting the blow to come. She held Darius by the front of his white polo shirt.
“Fucking nerd.”
“And what? We’re gonna leave this fucking peeping Tom here?”
The other girl laughed. “Leave him. This is the closest he’ll ever get,” she laughed. Darius peeked, his eyes open. Sonali was a high schooler. Darius barely in middle school. She stood, feet firmly planted beneath her, wearing compression shorts and a sports bra. Her arms taut with muscles and laced with bruises from playing field hockey.
“You like what you see?” She gave a sadistic smile.
“Uh, yeah.” Darius glanced away.
“Well, enjoy the view tonight.”
She threw Darius into the locker where she’d found him, slammed it shut, and then took one of the benches in the locker room and rammed it up against the outside of the locker. Darius pushed as hard as he could, but it didn’t budge. He was trapped. He banged on the door.
“They made me do it!”
“Goodnight…”
Darius’ heart raced. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, as Sonali left the locker room and switched off the light.
Chum
“Dudes, check this out.” Phil leaned down on the other side of the boardroom desk, and Sonali and Darius heard a creak and saw a hatch open on the other side. The smell of brine and meat, pork maybe, filled the room.
“Batten down the hatch?”
“Phil, you’re opening it.” Sonali giggled. Darius gave her a smile.
“Oh, yeah.” Phil scratched the back of his head.
From down below they could hear a rumble, thump-thump, thump-thump. It wasn’t as loud as it had been in the nightclub, but was deeper, bassier, and closer than it had ever been before. They were right on the cusp. The three of them went down the ladder.
Darius saw what could only be described as an industrialized kitchen. There was a low glow of lights. Brawny fish people in hard hats were carrying buckets of chum.
“What is that?”
Darius sniffed the air. He’d smelled dead fish before. Like rotten, two-week-old fish that you sometimes got on Monday or Tuesday when the restaurant was trying to get rid of its leftovers. But this was different.
There was the brine smell. The smell of salt and dirt and sweat, mixed and emulsified in tepid water. And there was another smell, almost like a smell that you’d get at a butcher. Not like a clean butchered animal, but a pig left split and hanging too many days in a cool, damp cellar.
They climbed down and down, passing level upon level.
Darius thought he heard the sound of club music. No, he definitely heard it. He paused on the ladder and looked around. There was an eerie red glow below. But to his right a 10-foot round platform lowered, filled with cat-eared dancers caught in the siren song.
“Dude. That’s the dance floor, like, the center dance floor.”
All of a sudden, the sides of the dance floor raised to what looked like a little pool, or, as Darius saw, a pot. Water started to fill. Darius could see the bottom glow as a great burner was lit below it.
And people kept dancing.
A lid, a great steal covering, lowered onto the pot. Just as it began to boil, Darius could hear the screams of the victims inside.
“The, uh, screaming.” An onlooking lobster person said to another.
“It’s just a reaction. Boss assured me they can’t feel a thing while they’re dancing.”
The top of the great pot was lifted, and revealed a boiling pot of chum.
“Let’s go”, Sonali said. They descended the ladder slowly, rhythmically, unintentionally moving to the beat of whatever lay below them. A dark, a red incandescent glow was the only thing that they saw. The pots of chum became less and less frequent.
Darius began to see that the walls of the temple, were covered in a mass of flesh. Pulsing to the beat.
Darius heard a splash, and Phil called up, “Dudes, careful down here. It’s, like, up to your waist.”
Darius dropped. Splosh. It was a combination of the salty brine and the smell of chum. Darius looked as his white underwear turned pink, soaking up the surrounding waters. Splosh. Sonali made it to the bottom. Darius thought he smelled one more thing, a faint odor of methane.
Phil, Sonali, and Darius began to walk, almost against their own volition, toward the sound of the beat.
Darius felt so tired. How long had it been? How far had they come? Bruce or shark person, Ota-kun, the girl in the white rabbit mask, the temple, the charnel house. It all seemed like a dream. How did it all begin?
It was both quiet and deafeningly loud. The beat of the place synchronized everyone’s heartbeats. Their steps, their breath, the rhythm of their soul seemed to meld with this great beat.
They were not just in the lair of this great old thing, they were in its belly.
Almost all the walls were lined with a thick, red biomass. Though Darius could see some of the original coverings. They were in some sort of service line that supplied San Francisco with power, water, sewage, and other utilities. Whatever this thing was, had been here for a very long time.
“Sonali, can I talk to you about something?”
It was hard to see anything in the darkness.
“Yeah, Darius, what’s up?” Sonali’s voice was reassuring. She sounded somber. Sad. Forlorn. Almost as if she knew what was going to happen. Almost as if she lost a friend.
“Have you been experiencing these, um, these visions?”
“Huh? No.” Sonali sounded disappointed.
“Dudes…” Darius bumped head first into Phil’s furry back. And then stopped. “It’s Jabba the Hutt.”
Tako Yaki
Darius looked over Phil’s shoulder and saw a great pit. Jagged objects lined the outsides of it. Chum slowly poured off the ledge into the mouth.
Before them was the great gaping maw of an octopus, feeding on thousands of bodies. Souls being lured into the temple this very night. Its tentacles reached upwards into the city. Eight great arms with thousands of smaller ones lacing the walls, the halls, the veins, the arteries of the city.
“Look, octopus balls.” Phil pointed down inside the maw, and Darius peered over the edge. There was flesh. The beast was not fully formed. Its organs and innards were covered and sloshing with briny chum as skin and sinew grew over them.
It wasn’t balls, it was the creature’s heart thump-thumping, thump-thumping. As big as two or three men across. Darius gulped and leaned backwards against the railing. “What are we supposed to do against this?”
Darius looked around. There’s always been something here. A sign, the next step. A girl with a mask, a Spider-Man. Something.
Phil unzipped the Chewbacca costume and pulled it off. His pale, squishy, hairy skin now had a sheen of pink from the blood and chum. His heart polkadotted underwear now just red. He slapped his back and began doing feeble toe touches.
“Phil, what are you doing...”
“If you can believe it or not, I used to be a champion diver.”
“Phil...”
“It’s not gay. I mean, the other guys were gay.”
“Phil, that’s not what I was talking about...”
Phil reached out for the ax. “If we’re going down, we’re going swinging.”
“Phil, as much as I find you playing the hero hot,” she looked him up and down, “despite all the other things. There’s no fucking way what residual skill you have left, 30 years after being on the JV diving team, would carry you to swan dive wielding an ax onto the creature’s heart, cleaving it in two like some sort of Mission Impossible bullshit.”
“Well, Sonali, what do you think we should do?”
“Just go back up. Let’s go up and tell the police.”
“Dude, the fact that we got down here is a goddamn miracle. If the police show up, this thing’s gonna wake up. Like this is a sophisticated... Well, somewhat sophisticated organization.”
Darius was leaning against the side of the service tunnel, not really listening. His hand drummed against the place he was sitting in a slightly hollow sound.
“Guys!”
Phil stood up as straight as possible, arching his back and putting his hands above his head as if doing a pindive. He sucked his stomach in until it protruded about five inches from his hips. “See? I still got it.”
Sonali stepped on one of his toes. “Ooh!” He let his stomach out and began hopping.
“Guys.”
“Fuck you Sonali”
“Fuck you.”
“GUYS!” Darius yelled.
Both of them looked back at him.
“This is a natural gas pipe right here.” He hit it. The place where he was sitting had a small chemical warning sign, extremely flammable.
“We crack this pipe, we let the methane pour in, and then in 10, 15, 20 minutes when this whole place fills up with gas, and it reaches up to those pots up there, kaboom.”
Darius gave a smile. The plan would work. Well, mostly he thought.
Phil’s eyes started to fill with tears. He ran over and hugged Darius and lifted him up. “Dude. I thought I was going to die down here. You are a fucking genius.”
Phil began to do squats in place, releasing some pent-up energy.
Sonali gave Darius a questioning look and began to open her mouth.
“Sonali, give me the ax. I’ll crack open one of the pipes. You guys go ahead and make sure the way is clear, because after I crack this thing open, we gotta go. All right?”
Phil began doing high knees.
Sonali held out the ax. “Darius... You’ll be right after us, right?”
“Yeah. Just, like, a couple of minutes or so. Just go on up ahead to the ladder. And wait for me there. Just remember, if you start smelling any methane, you gotta go. Okay?”
Sonali dropped the ax into his hands. It felt so heavy. Sonali had carried this weight all tonight.
“I...” Darius wanted to tell her something but thought better of it. Sonali looked at him and followed Phil down the tunnel.
Darius waited until they were no longer in view. He had left out one thing about bursting pipes. Anyone nearby the highly pressurized explosion had no chance of walking out alive.
He took the ax above his head, he swung down towards the pipe. Ta-ting. Ta-ting.
He worked meticulously. At first, nothing happened. The swings came down in rhythm. Slowly, a small dent began to appear. He kept hitting the dent, getting larger and larger.
Ta-ting. Ta-ting.
As he worked, his body began to sweat. The tension in his chest, the weight on his shoulders, was lost and replaced with a dull ache in his arms.
Ta-ting. Ta-ting.
“Darius?” Sonali stood next to him.
“What are you...”
“I told Phil that you’ve been hitting the wrong pipe. That the methane one is the one below. So I came back to tell you.”
“But.”
“He’s waiting at the ladder. Phil’s just honestly too dumb to get it.” She stood there staring at him. “It’s a suicide mission.”
“Yeah.” Darius nearly dropped the ax. “One of us…”
“No. Both of us.”
They stood there. In silence, but for the thump-thump thump-thump. He gave a sad smile and held out the ax. It was both their burden.
They both grabbed onto it, Sonali standing by his side. Both of them raised it up. And they both slammed it down on the pipe.
Darius stood out in front of his favorite food truck. Behind him was his old alma mater blasting a bum bum bum into the night.
It was their 25th reunion. And after 30 minutes of preening and posturing, Darius became tired. The person he wanted to meet was nowhere in sight.
So he went to his old favorite food truck, a Japanese-inspired tako truck that would hang out behind the university’s main building until midnight. Darius, of course, didn’t recognize the man that took his order. But he imagined it was the previous man’s son, Jira. So maybe something like Shira.
“Hey, stranger.” Darius looked to find Sonali to his right.
“Speak of the devil.”
“Oh I’m the devil now?”
“I didn’t see you in there.”
Sonali smiled. How many years had it been since he saw her smile.
She held up a finger, and Shira, or at least as Darius believed, took her order. “I’ll take whatever he’s having.” He gave a quiet, polite smile and nodded.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about us.”
“Oh, really?”
Darius turned to face her. She’d grown old. Her hair was frizzled and curly. Her hips and waist were tight against jeans two sizes larger than he had ever seen her in before. Her face sagged a bit, and small plumpness was extruded under her chin, giving her the slight look of a second jaw. There were wrinkles around her eyes as she smiled.
“So, what were you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about us, what could have been.”
Darius widened his eyes. “Like romantically? I knew you were never into me.”
“Ha, you never even asked.” Darius gave her a sidelong look. “But yeah, you were right. I always thought of you as a friend. I was actually thinking of all the other things that we could have been. You know?”
“Like what?”
“Like all the other types of relationships.”
Darius gave a slight chuckle, and for some reason felt his eyes wet with tears.
“You know, just imagine all the different combinations. Mother. Friends. Enemies. Divorcees. Co-workers. Nurse.”
“I like that last one.”
She punched his shoulder lightly, just like she’d done all those years ago.
“But you know, we couldn’t...”
“Why’s that?” Darius said. His voice almost cracking.
“Because you never asked. Because I never said no.” Sonali looked towards the clouds, “Well, that’s the thing. If we never asked each other, then we were stuck in this limbo. We could never move on.”
Shira peeked out of the truck “Two orders of tako yaki served up.”
Ding, ding.
Ta-ting, the ax hit the pipe and Darius and Sonali were thrown back and cushioned by the flesh of the great octopus against the walls.
Darius moaned. He heard Sonali, “Gah.” Darius looked down at some part of the pipe that impaled into his abdomen. His blood now made part of the brine. The air was heavy with the smell of methane. “Sonali. Sonali, oh.”
He looked to the left and saw Sonali lying on her side. But her left knee was bent in the wrong direction.
“Oh, god.”
“Darius? Darius?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t see.”
He reached out and grabbed her hand. He was shocked. They didn’t flash back. They were just here now. Darius suddenly felt a great weight come off his shoulders. “Sonali…”
“Yeah.”
“... I need to tell you something.”
“What is it, Darius?” Sonali gave a timid smile.
“Sonali. You know that question you asked me, that one you asked earlier tonight? The answer is yes.”
“What?”
“Sonali, I love you.” Sonali gave a warm, wide smile and squeezed his hand. Her eyes closed, crinkled in silence.
“I know.”