Page 48

48

Wayne Louis Hornfly

So there they were, the three amigos, still in the parlor with Britta and Pastor Larry and Hornfly, where it seemed that nothing good could happen. Although Saint Mark’s Ladies of Compassion and Saint Mark’s Gentlemen for Jesus still gathered here twice a month, as they had done twenty-one years earlier, this wasn’t an evening when either group had scheduled a meeting. Considering that the reverend and his lady friend had set these hours aside for the satisfaction of their lust, it was unlikely that they were expecting anyone to visit—unless they were even more degenerate than yet revealed.

Getting past Hornfly would be next to impossible. Even if the amigos could somehow distract the eater of people and slip away, they were not likely to get out of this place alive. Surely slime monsters molting gobs of fungus, like the one that removed Ernie from the window seat, would be waiting elsewhere in the house to block their escape. Beta had condemned them to death, and although it weighed only forty-eight thousand tons and was only nine thousand years old, it was nonetheless a formidable enemy.

Stepping out of the archway and into the parlor, Hornfly spoke in that game-show-host voice that was scarier than it should have been. “Spencer Truedove of Chicago, Robert Shamrock of all points on the compass, and Rebecca Crane of Malibu, welcome to your execution. Twenty-one years ago, on Halloween night, we laid down the rules, and you broke them by Thanksgiving. You were saved by the despicable squish they call Alpha, a disgusting human-loving sentimentalist, when it repressed your memories regarding the truth of Maple Grove and became your guardian. By returning from afar, where we couldn’t get to you, you have brought about your own destruction.”

Pastor Larry thrilled to the monster’s threat. “Hail Beta! Hail Hornfly!”

Addressing the amigos, Hornfly said, “Which of you losers would rather be devoured first, sparing yourself the horror and terror of watching your friends be eaten? Do we have a volunteer?”

“Before we get into all of that,” Rebecca said, “I have a few questions.”

“Questions? You have no right to ask questions of us. You have a right to die and nothing more.”

Britta regarded Rebecca much as the Red Queen in Wonderland regarded an annoying child like Alice. “You had your chance to ask questions. No one denied you the chance. You had a thousand stupid questions. Now you die, and my son will no longer fall under your malign influence, which he has since he was fourteen.”

Raising her chin defiantly, Rebecca said, “I have not posed questions to Mr. Hornfly, only to you. You were tedious. In whatever form it takes, Beta is far more interesting than you.”

“Bite off her head,” Britta told Hornfly.

“We don’t like this Rebecca person,” Hornfly said, “but we also don’t like being told what to do. We will bite her head off, but only when we’re ready. Besides, she has called us ‘interesting.’”

“More interesting than Alpha,” Rebecca said.

Spencer and Bobby were gaping at Rebecca, and their gape was not intended to convey as much as a glance conveyed, only this: What the hell are you doing?

Rebecca was fearful but not flat-out terrified, which surprised her. It also concerned her, because controlled terror, rather than merely fear, made the mind sharper and inspired greater caution in a lethal confrontation. Terror didn’t cancel courage. Heather Ashmont had been more terrified of Judyface than anyone in the cast, yet she was the hero who stood against him effectively, the only survivor.

“What I want to know, what I need to know,” she told Hornfly, “is how you ate Bjorn Skollborg’s head so fast. So far as I could see at the time, no major teeth were involved.”

Hornfly was such a hideous beast that it was difficult to interpret his facial expressions, but he appeared to swell with pride. “We produce an acid so intense it dissolves bone and flesh instantly. Even as the substance of Skollborg dissolved, we sucked it into ourselves. Not a drop lost. A construct like Hornfly is for the purpose of destroying humanity on the Day of Fun. It’s designed to be as lethal as possible. Thus the acid thing.”

“Fascinating,” Rebecca said. “I would never have thought that a fungus could develop such biological-engineering skills.”

“Well, we are an immense colony of integrated funguses with an enormous brain and millennia with nothing to do but prepare to kill ninety percent of humanity.”

Rebecca began to understand that terror failed to overcome her because she sensed a powerful ally nearby. This was a convincing psychic perception, a supernatural awareness, not just a hunch, and certainly not just a wish such as that unicorns were real and would come prancing into the room. Of course the presence of Bobby and Spencer gave her courage—dear friends always did that—however, they weren’t the ally that she could feel close and then rushing closer, a building pressure.

Stalling for time, she said, “Why the name Wayne Louis Hornfly for your avatar, or what you call a ‘construct’?”

“We thought it sounded cute,” said Hornfly. “Don’t you think it sounds cute?”

“I hate this,” said Britta. “The master of Armageddon shouldn’t be saying it wants to be cute.”

“‘Hornfly,’” said Rebecca, “sounds scary, but Wayne and Louis might be the names of nice boys who live next door. Altogether, combining scary and nice, it’s an effective name, catchy.”

“Thank you,” said Hornfly. “Now, no more questions. We have not bided our time for nine thousand years just to answer questions from a TV-sitcom personality.”

“I’m not a ‘personality.’ I’m an actor.”

To Hornfly, Britta said, “That is her position, by which I mean her contention. She has taken that position in the past, but I have yet to hear her defend it credibly.”

“Besides,” Rebecca said, “I also make feature films.”

“We are aware of feature films,” Hornfly assured her. “They are religious services attended by worshippers of nonexistent demigods such as Superman, Aquaman, Batman, and Ant-Man. Have you portrayed such a demigod?”

“No.”

With a sneer so sharp and fixed that it was likely to become a permanent feature of her face, Britta told Hornfly, “The bitch has appeared on Dancing with the Stars .”

“That is a damnable lie,” Rebecca said, and it was a lie.

“She’s a true star,” said Bobby, “not just a celebrity.”

Spencer said, “She’s a fine, fine actress. She can act the pants off anyone in the business.”

“ There is a true statement,” said Britta.

“We have never before eaten a fine actress. We will eat one now.” Hornfly moved boldly into the room, full of supercaustic digestive acid and ready to deploy it.

Bobby stepped into the monster’s way. “Hey, hey, hey! You leave her alone,” he shouted.

Although Bobby was a novelist who avoided clichés and tiresome moments to be found in countless novels written by others, he did not have the time, in this situation, to sit down at a computer and craft a line of clever dialogue or to conceive a credible attack on the monster. This was real life, where clichés and stupid actions were the coin of the realm, so to speak. Hornfly knocked him aside with such violence that he was lifted off his feet and slammed into the sofa, tipping that mohair marvel onto its hind legs and falling over it as it was upended, crashing to the parlor floor in a shudder of humiliation as a cascade of decorative pillows spilled over him and, with their tassels, tickled him into a fit of sneezing.

“Hail Beta!” Pastor Larry exclaimed. “Hail Hornfly!”

As Hornfly loomed over Rebecca, she said, “I have one more question.”

“As we told you,” the monster told her, “no more questions are permitted. Your time is up. The buzzer has sounded. You have lost. It’s dinnertime.”

“That’s so unfair. You’re big and scary and all that, but I never thought of you as unfair. Until now. You are so unfair.”

Hornfly’s orange eyes dimmed. His face squinched with what might have been puzzlement and hurt feelings. “We are not unfair.”

“ You asked me a question. I was nice enough to answer you. So it seems to me that it’s only fair I be allowed one more question.”

Scratching his head of wriggling hair, Hornfly said, “What question did we ask you?”

“You wanted to know if I’d ever played a nonexistent demigod like Superman. I told you I hadn’t, and that was true.”

He stared down at her, into her eyes, and she stared boldly up into his.

A terrible and expectant silence pooled in the parlor until Britta said, “Damn it all, bite her head off.”

The impatient pastor shouted, “Heil Beta! Heil Hornfly! Bite her head off!”

To Rebecca, Hornfly said, “One more. Don’t try to trick us into two or three.”

“Thank you,” Rebecca said. “I’m so sorry I called you unfair, but you seemed to deserve it at the time. Here’s what I’m curious about. When the Day of Fun comes, which will actually last for a year or more, you’ll kill ninety percent of humanity to save the planet but leave ten percent to enjoy life in a less populated world. That ten percent will obviously include Pastor Larry and Professor Hernishen. Now, I know you aren’t a liar. An intelligent forty-eight-thousand-ton fungus who is immortal and who possesses awesome powers has no need to lie. I have no doubt you’ll tell me the truth. Once the Day of Fun has ended, however long that might prove to be, how much longer will the ten percent be allowed to live, and what will you do with them?”

“You’ve just posed a two-part question,” Hornfly said, “but that’s fair. We will not devour you until we respond to both parts. At this point, we imagine that the ten percent will be kept alive for three months, although we hope to be able to accomplish what needs to be done in two. You must understand that nothing of this scale has ever been attempted before, so our schedule is necessarily approximate rather than precise. From the ten percent, we intend to select perhaps a thousand of the most interesting specimens. We will then devour the rest.”

“That is so very and entirely wrong,” said Pastor Larry. “That, that, that is amoral, outrageous.”

Perhaps for the first time in her life, Britta was speechless.

Hornfly continued, “The thousand will be put into suspended animation or perhaps placed into large jars of preservatives to be displayed in a museum so that we never forget how disgusting and repellent your species was. There. We believe we have answered your question as fully as it can be answered at this time.”

The presence of an ally, which Rebecca had perceived in part as an increasing pressure, like that of an impending thunderstorm exerted as it built toward the first flash of lightning, was stronger by the second, but no anti-fungus SWAT team appeared. Her mind was spinning at top speed for her, which was as fast as anyone’s mind could race, but she could not see any way she—or even Heather Ashmont—could thwart the monster’s murderous intent.

Hornfly had placed his hands on her shoulders and by some strange power had rendered her unable to pull away from him. He lowered his hateful face toward hers, and his mouth stretched wide, stretched wider, until it was almost as wide as his head. At the back of that greedy orifice, a bulbous gland rose out of the throat, no doubt the sac containing the acid that could instantly dissolve bone and flesh.

Rebecca regretted that she would never have an opportunity to play a dedicated epidemiologist who saved the world from a plague or an idiot savant barely able to speak but gifted with the ability to write great symphonies (which was the kind of role for which she would likely receive an Oscar). Because her mind worked so quickly, she also had time to regret that she’d never see her amigos again or rescue Ernie, or marry Bobby, or have children, or persuade Spencer that he would be handsome and personable and successful without the porkpie hat.

Perhaps four seconds before the acid sac would have burst and seven seconds before her dissolving head would have been sucked into Hornfly’s maw, two heating-vent grilles, set high in opposite walls, exploded off their mountings. From the ductwork erupted tentacles formed—as far as we understand—of fungus sludge. They were whip-quick, elongating until they reached the center of the parlor and wrapped around Hornfly without touching Rebecca. They ripped him away from her.

Because of fear or shock or merely consternation, the Beta avatar was not able to hold the shape that had been Wayne Louis Hornfly. It morphed into a vaguely humanoid entity which probably resembled the molting slime monster that had taken Ernie out of the window seat. In an instant, the furious tentacles tore the disgusting creature apart; pieces were flung hither and yon. Like the molts in Ernie’s basement, these lumps of muck began to crawl and hump and slither, not with the intention of rejoining a mother mass this time, but frantic to escape the wrath of Alpha. They tried to hide under chairs and tables, behind a plant stand, in the knee space of a small corner desk. They were faster than the molts had been, but not fast enough. The two thick tentacles split into a dozen slender appendages and rapidly probed here and there throughout the room. They found, clutched, and absorbed every desperately fleeing scrap of Hornfly and then retreated into the ductwork.

Bobby came to Rebecca and took her into his arms, and she held fast to him for a moment. She went to Spencer, and they held fast to each other. Spencer and Bobby held fast to each other, and then they were done with that.

The amigos stood in silence together, staring at Pastor Larry and Britta Hernishen. The reverend and the professor stared back at them; the wicked pair looked as if they had learned nothing from what they had just seen and been told.

Rebecca said, “You are very bad people.”

“You deserve each other,” Bobby said.

Spencer said, “We’ll show ourselves out,” which they did.