He dubbed himself the Rat King when he foresaw the rodents crawling on his corpse, weaving in and out of his garments like a sensation, like a disease. Now he waits for them down in the ornate sewer home he fashioned. It is a fickle thing, the premo...
It has been put off long enough, he has waited, idled on, looked the other way, but there is nothing else to do. He has run out of options. It is time to see Gobbes.
The chair creaks as it leans back and the veins in his hand are blue and bulging against the wrinkled skin. Not the prettiest sight perhaps, but it is sight all the same and the clearer and truer Slyv's sight, the better. Wandering down rows of black, he finds the door.
Inside, with a back hunched by the pressure of time and gravity, sits Gobbes. The shiny, spotless head is crooked in an uncomfortable manner and shifts from side to side with a viselike crack of bones.
The large and luminous eyes, neither black nor blue but something in between, will be the first things identified, too large and strange to be otherwise. Then it might be the hooked nose, sweeping to the left, that catches the eye, or the thin line of a mouth perpetually cranked downwards. Then it will be the gnarled ears that stick out in equally different directions, only retaining the similar quality of the sharp ends. The feeble chin will be last, tucked way behind all these dominant features.
And then the six arms appear.
"Gobbes!" Slyv's cane hits the floor with a gnawing sound, a grit that grinds into the dusty floor and soaks in the particles with every stretch of wood. That neck cranks and twists, snapping as the head rolls back, the sagging flesh shifting over the mottled skull like a red cap on a young girl's head.
"Wanker!" he says, either meaning to insult Slyv or just exploit the vulgarity of the English language.
"Gobbes—"
"Merry— Marry— Murry— Murk!"
"I need to discuss—"
"Wobbly-bits!"
"It is vital that we—"
"Nut clusters!" he announces to no one in particular as one spindling arm sweeps across the back in an unnatural manner, the crease in his elbow inverted as his fingers crawl in a spidery shape up the wooden shelf.
Gobbes is a peculiar thing. Odder than any real species one might cross in the crevices of the world. Slyv supposes that the real reason for Gobbes' abnormality is not in the extra arms that adorn him—though that does not help—but his state, or lack thereof, of mind. A while back a few puffed-up peacocks imagined a servant with six arms rather than two would be more efficient as long as one could stand the sight of them. It was easy to find a few extra pairs of arms and a body—the difficult part was getting them to all stick. Gobbes was the only thing to make it out of that alive. Not completely sane, but alive.
"That's very nice, Gobbes," he says impatiently, "but I need you to—"
"Not very nice! Not very nice at all!" he cackles. "Be damned! Be damned! Everyone damned!"
"You can damn all us some other time—"
"Aaaaaaaaaaah, but he cannot!" A finger, bent and jerking, points to the ceiling above. "'Toil away at the mine, Gobbes, work, work, work, till your eyes bleed blue, can't leave, can't leave! Must find what's mine, Gobbes. Must find what's mine!' Yes, yes, he is, he is quite strange, most strange... " And those owl-like eyes pop back, not looking so crazed as they fasten on Slyv. "What are you doing here?"
What is he doing here? His leg shakes and he shifts its weight, uncertain what exactly to say.
"He is losing control," Slyv replies eventually, settling on the truth. For once.
The twitching limbs quiet, the four words slowly drifting behind the shiny skull. The physical mass unwinds itself until he is only an old man, hunched over a book: one hand holds the pages still while the other five hang loosely at his side.
"'S to be expected," Gobbes murmurs noncommittally, though there is a soft hint of sadness in the words. "Madness, madness."
"What do you propose we do?"
"Ahck, scemo, what do I know?" And he plays the part of the wearied gaffer so precisely: Slyv knows he's only pulling from what few references he has left of human interaction.
"I supposed you might understand his symptoms and provide a diagnosis." His own knobby fingers drum across the rounded tip of his cane, the soft wood soothing. "Maybe suggest a tonic, or something."
"Diagnose!" Flurries reach a climax: the charade slips and the character is gone. "D—diag—! What words have you whispered to me in these dark days, phantom? Oh, I see you: I see what you are! Specter!"
"The King needs you to tell—"
"Fly away! Bother me no more with your lying eyes. I will not tell you my secrets, for they are many and you want them. I will not!"
Ten feet fold in a second and Slyv's hands clutch at the collar of his shirt, lifting the heaving pile of old bones as he rattles Gobbes again.
"What do you think will happen to you when the king dies, Gobbes?" Slyv hisses. "Do you think someone will still come and leave food on the floor next to the door flap? Do you think they will let you stay in here, clutching at your precious books?"
"I—"
"I need a solution, Gobbes! We need a solution. Do you understand?" The hands jerk upward, causing the head to snap back and eyes to peer from behind the crooked nose. The black slab of mouth is open: it pinches shut as it forms a word: Yes.
"I'll come back tomorrow," he says gruffly, dropping Gobbes' bundled body. The neatly placed stones beneath his ears rattle as the cane wobbles away.
Slyv halts at the door.
"And next time be a little more conspicuous when you escape."
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Candlelight flickers in the grooves of weathered rocks that climb high up to the dark pit of the ceiling. A heavy click echoes in the air: the inoculation of a sharp point pounding into the dust like a knife to the cutting board, ringing from behind and flowing into the finite space before her. Those peach fingers, like a juicy tart, travel across the surface, tracing unseen lines along the patterned texture.
Flower.
Captivating.
Such strange words, but did she know them? How odd should the utterance of them bring the chill of unfamiliarity but also the soft loosening of the tongue, almost as if it too had once let those fragments of expression tumble off its surface? Yes, they felt familiar. They felt—
Something shoots up her arm, a frigid thrill that aches in the pressure now put on it.
"You are needed." Rasping words spoken from the dark as she is pulled back, fingers drifting aimlessly out, seeking the ends of her thoughts.
