The Demon’s Cantos
Part 2
Byron’s Grandmother sat across from him, knitting peaceably. Of a sudden, she looked up, as if she’d just noticed Byron sitting across from her, and she smiled that mischievous smile of hers.
“Now, look at you Byron.” She said as she placed the two knitting needles on her lap. “All those hours practicing your reading served you real good, didn’t it?”
Byron looked around the room and found that he could not bring it into focus, no matter how hard he tried. “Where are we?”
Nan looked down in her lap and her knowing smile turned inward. “No time to go into that baby.” Then she locked eyes with Byron and her face became serious, almost stony. “You’ve got a lot of reading to do ‘fore the Undoer comes.”
Byron was surpised by how quickly he’d gotten used to not understanding anything. “Undoer?” he asked, not really expecting an answer.
As he looked at her, the image of Nan began to fade around the edges, and then get all fuzzy in the middle, as if she were being viewed through thicker and thicker panes of glass.
“Find the Preceptor. He’s waiting for you baby, at ole Blackbeard’s grave.”
Byron blinked. “Blackbeard?” He said, or thought, or thought he said. Nan dissolved into a haze before him, like disturbed ink in water. Byron could feel the pull of something, dragging him, or at least some ephemeral part of him, back towards somewhere.
As Byron felt himself leaving the strange place, he caught a fleeting glimpse in the far distance. Something approached, appearing to him as a far off object appears over the heat blurred horizon at sea. The hint of a shape, the suggestion of a form, the intimation of a face. Two burning eyes of sunfire seered his mind and where they burned, a message:
Surrender, Cantor, and be unmade
With a gasp Byron came to on his kitchen floor. Hovering over him Korbius’s bulbous eye was less than a foot away from his face, two of the demonlord’s sloppy tentacles taking turns gently slapping at Byron’s cheeks. Where the undulant flesh touched they left a slick of slime.
The sight startled Byron and he screamed again. Korbius let out another high pitched squeal and raced back into Byron’s now sopping wet wood cabinets.
Master, although I fear it may cause you harm, if you truly wish it, I shall mate with you.
Byron pushed himself up onto his elbows, his whole upper body slick with Korbius’s ooze, and stared, flabbergasted, at the single giant eye looking back at him from under his kitchen sink. “What!?”
You’re mating call, Master. It is like ten thousand needles to my ear, but if my master so demands it…
Byron cut off the giant octopus. “I don’t want to mate with you!” He yelled.
The relief was visible in Korbius’s single humongous eye.
Oh, thank you Master. Thank you.
Korbius sent out a single olive branch of a tentacle from a cabinet several cabinets away from the one from which his central eye peered out. The tentacle touched submissively at the tip of Byron’s shoe.
Byron just stared at the appendage for a second, feeling even more totally lost than before he’d passed out. Frustrated, he kicked it away and struggled to get to his feet, slipping and sliding in the horrible mess of cephalopodic slime, as Korbius looked on helplessly. For a few seconds Byron’s feet slid and squeaked ridiculously in the muck, like some vaudeville slapstick act. At last he was able to stabilize himself against the back of one of the old wooden chairs around the small dinette table.
Finally on his feet, Byron looked around the room and took silent stock. What had been his Nan’s neat and tidy kitchen only a few minutes ago now looked like an explosion at the Jello factory. The refrigerator had toppled over, sending glass bottles, milk and juices, splattering onto the floor, where they swirled together with the half inch layer of whatever the hell it was that Korbius continued to exude from his skin. Every one of Nan’s old plates and glasses were broken and her pots were flung everywhere, including several embedded into the sheet-rock walls.
To top it all off, Byron watched as Korbius reached up and around, turned on the kitchen sink, slithered through the cabinets, removed the sink’s U-bend with a tentacle, and positioned his large eye under the free flowing water, which then poured into the room.
In the middle of all the chaos, seemingly undamaged, even untouched, almost as if it were protected somehow, Nan’s book lay waiting, glowing intensely, as if it was eager to share its secrets.
From inside the cabinet, his eye wide under the stream of warm tap water, all of which subsequently streamed down his gelatinous flesh and onto Nan’s kitchen floor, Korbius chimed in unhelpfully.
What now Master Byron?
Byron stood over the chaos and realized his primary concern – his worry that Nan would be upset – was entirely baseless. Nan is dead Byron reminded himself. This wasn’t Nan’s kitchen anymore. He was alone now and this house, this kitchen, all that broken glass and ceramic, even that damned book – all of it was his. Nan was gone, and with the passing of each insane minute, her departure that felt more like an abandonment.
Byron looked down at his ooze saturated clothes. He began to run his right hand through his hair, a nervous tick of his, but stopped midway, lowering the hand to his side in disgust, the fingers absolutely covered in strings of Korbius’s cold jelly.
Looking like he’d just fought his way out of the belly of man sized flan, totally deadpan and drained beyond belief, Byron carefully walked out of the room, his feet slipping here and there on the slick linoleum.
“I need a shower.” He muttered, and left without another word.
In Byron’s absence Korbius’s central mass shrunk in relief. He set about closing all the cabinet doors with his tentacles and continuing his own peaceful shower under Byrons broken sink. Korbius was about to close the final cabinet door when his giant eye caught a glimpse of the Demon’s Cantos glowing in the ooze. Korbius felt the tome was altogether too close for comfort, and so he picked up a pot with a tentacle and used the pot to push the book as far away from him as he could.
That done, Korbius, Demonlord of the Octopodiae shut the final cabinet door, ensconced himself in calming darkness, and cursed his awful luck.
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