Longing

Chapter Six

Kendo and Melanie weaved, ducked and dodged their way through the crowd of walking fish, paint goblins with buckets strapped to their heads, gremlins and dragons. They passed the hut "with anger issues" who was currently shaking off the excess ash from when it exploded and rushed over to the one next door: a humble looking hut whose ceiling made of peacock feathers had been almost completely picked dry by tiny orange parasitic flies.

Melanie grimaced at the swarm of flies above the door and Kendo nudged her inside. Grivgas was there, huge eye settled in the center of a dripping oozy body. Grivgas sank into five chairs in the far right corner where a waiter with pointed ears and gray spiky fur for hair who looked otherwise human in his diamond-white tuxedo bowed and sauntered off toward the back room, gold tray topped with animal skins balanced on his fingertips.

"Don't touch the tables," Kendo told Melanie with a look on his face like he was about to puke. She innocently looked down and saw why he was making that disgusted face. Some of the round golden tables had mouths and nipped at the chairs, while others were tarnished and being eaten from the inside by maggot-shaped things with too many legs that squirted their blood-filled clear eggs into whatever was left of the metal. Melanie tensed and shivered closer to Kendo, putting as much space between herself and the tables as was possible. One of the mismatched chrome chairs hopped closer to an infested table and bounced on top of it. The table spewed green puss that smelled of melting tar as it collapsed and the back of the chair molded into a mouth with an evil grin. Melanie turned away before she could see what the chair would do next, but she heard something that sounded like a shaking can of needles and deep, throaty laughter and horrible, vivid swallowing noises from behind her.

Kendo's pink hair stuck up on the back of his neck and Melanie focused with tunnel-vision on Grivgas, marching like she was on a mission over to the sagging monster.

"Grivgas," Melanie demanded, "Why did you take my mother." Any and all fear was gone now.

"M'melanie," said Grivgas, "How did you, a human, get to Creature's Court?"

"Don't change the subject!" Melanie screamed, and the entire hut full of monsters fell silent. The waiter was almost halfway back to the table, carrying on his golden tray three more dead ferrets when he stopped what he was doing along with everyone else to witness Melanie's spectacle. "You bought yourself enough time making me get all the way out here, wherever the hell this is, for you to back out on your explanation!" Melanie narrowed her eyes and Grivgas actually slunk backward, intimidated. "Tell. Me. Now."

Kendo had never seen Melanie like this. She was starting to scare him too, not to mention a few of the smaller creatures that buzzed in circles on the opposite side of the hut, yellow and green pixies with batwings and fangs whose expressions were gaping and cowardly. He watched in his peripheral vision some of the chairs scoot backward by themselves and another table collapse into a heap of soulless debris.

Grivgas groaned and it was loud enough to thunder around the room. "It is my duty to clear the roadways of the dead," Grivgas told Melanie, "Your mother died on the road; it is and always will be my job to remove the corpses that die in traffic. I have had this duty since the days of horseback travel, since beaten paths first existed for man."

"Oh yeah?" Melanie shrilled, "Well you haven't been doing a good job of it! I see road kill practically every day on the highway! Where are you then, huh? That can't possibly be the only reason! And we humans have our own way of dealing with accidents on the road that have nothing to do with fucking monsters like you!"

"Melanie!" Kendo yelled over her. Grivgas' eye was narrowing in that pool of a body and the rest of the creatures were developing a communal sinister glare, directed straight at Melanie. "That's enough," Kendo said, feeling out of breath from the utter foreboding in his gut. He was sweating, skin prickling as if spiders made of ice were crawling all over him.