Ring Shout(34)

“Oh, Maryse! You have quite the imagination! Bring your family back? That’s what you’ve been thinking our offer is? Hoping for it? We can’t bring your family back.” His mirth cuts off and he turns cold serious. “They dead and gone. Forever.”

His words wound like I didn’t know words could, tearing into the deepest part of me. I feel my cheeks heat in shame. He’s right. I had been hoping for it, yearning it, even as I struggled and fought not to take it. I wanted a thing like that to at least be possible. To know there was the chance.

“No, Maryse, you misunderstood our meaning,” Butcher Clyde goes on. “You see, we’re not asking you to switch sides. We’re offering to come over to you.”

I blink, his words chasing everything out my head. “What?”

He stares intently with those gray eyes. “Be our champion, Maryse. Lead our armies. Give your people the one thing they lack—”

“Hate?” I cut in.

“Power,” he corrects, voice now intense. “What I told you all along. You bring us their righteous justified hate, and we will grant you power—enough to never need fear anyone again. Power enough to protect yourselves and defeat your foes, to make them cower and tremble before you in true fear. Power to avenge all those wrongs. Power over life and death, yours and your enemies!”

I stare, speechless. There it is—the offer. One I never saw coming.

“What about them?” I gesture to the gathered Klans.

“They already served their purpose.”

“And this Grand Cyclops? She fine with you switching sides?”

His grin returns. “Who’s grand plan do you think this is?”

“I came here to stop her. From coming to this world!”

“Stop her?” He laughs again. “But, Maryse, she’s already here!”

I follow as he sweeps an arm to the crowd of Klans, at first not understanding. Then I see it again, the wrongness in all those faces. As if answering a summons, one in the front steps forward, looking up with a blank gaze as rain streams lines down his face. Then he starts to shaking, his whole body convulsing—before he collapses.

I hear Chef curse beside me, but my eyes are on that Klan, or what used to be him. His white robes lay there on the wet ground, and from inside slithers out what looks like raw, bloody flesh without no shape or form. Like his body been turned inside out. It crawls across the wet stone just as another Klan steps forward and does the same, then another, and another, and—

“What you do to them?” I ask, holding my belly from heaving.

“Why, we only gave them the sustenance they craved. This they did to themselves all too willingly. Like I told you already, they’re just meat to us.”

Meat. What he was feeding them in his shop. The living flesh.

“She’s already inside them,” he boasts. “They swallowed her up, fed her on their hate. Now she comes to claim her due.”

I watch as the oozing mounds of flesh slither their way to the burning cross. They reach up, wrapping about the flaming timber, sending up an awful stink that burns my nose. In moments they all over it, one atop the next, until the heat of that undying hellfire fuses them to the wood and each other. Looks like a giant hand is sculpting them, piling that flesh onto a skeleton like clay, pulling and shaping it into something with long fleshy limbs, a torso extending across the ground, and curving body, growing taller and bigger by the moment. The Klans that come to join now don’t even collapse no more. They just walk into the wall of living flesh and get sucked in whole. I can see them in there, bodies dissolving, so all that’s left is their faces, mouths wide as if they screaming—screaming forever. When it finally stops, I bend my neck to stare up at the monstrosity born this night, rain pelting my face like the heavens weeping.

The Grand Cyclops don’t look like nothing I ever seen. It reminds me of a long, coiling snake. But it got arms too, thick trunks that split into curling and writhing tentacles. The whole of her is made of people, their flesh now bound to her service, her vessel into this world. All along that awful body mouths open to let out a shriek of birth and triumph that shakes me to my bones.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Butcher Clyde asks, face like he caught the ghost.

The mouths on the Grand Cyclops all open and shriek again. No, not just shrieking. Talking, in an ungodly chorus.

We come to claim what is ours. This world. Bring forth our champion. Let us see!

“She wants to meet you, Maryse!”

Just as he says it the Grand Cyclops lowers her neck, until the stump where a head should be is bent just above me. A hundred eyes open up in her rippling flesh, every last one all too human. They squirm through her body like tadpoles swimming through muck, until they reach the stump, pooling into one big mass and focusing on me.

Behold the one who will accept our gift—our blessings.

The Grand Cyclops spreads out her arms, those writhing tentacles enveloping me within. Little nubs like human fingers break out along their length, and I can feel them sticky and wet sliding across my clothes and skin—touching, feeling, sizing me up. If a giant centipede with man hands hadn’t done near the same to me a night previous, pretty sure I might have passed out then and there.

Yes! Oh yes! This one carries the anger of her people. Pure yet untapped. We could do much with this. We could do much for you!