Lily and the Octopus(58)
“Go ahead and take my arm. I’ve got seven more.”
Yes, but where? I don’t understand how he looks like a man. I don’t understand the depths of his dishonesty. He punches me in the nose, and as I fly backward he rips the bottle from his flesh and smashes it into pieces on the ground.
I stumble, but I don’t fall. I can feel blood spill from my nose and the pain in my face is indescribable. I lower my center of gravity and go for the tackle. I’ve never been in a fight. Not like this. Not with a single-minded determination to cause catastrophic harm. To end life. To kill. Before I even know it’s happening, I’m charging at him with maximum speed.
We crash into a wall of shelving and both slump to the ground. One of the upright beams cracks, sending books and dust and nautical maps raining down upon us. I get in one good punch and I poke at his eyes with my thumbs, hoping to crush them. To blind him like he blinded Lily. Suddenly, I notice the whoosh of flames behind me. The lantern! I dropped it when I careened backward, and now the curtains are on fire. A small fishbowl falls from the shelf and lands on the octopus’s arm, spilling water and a single goldfish onto the floorboards. I look at the fish flopping helplessly, gasping. It immediately flops toward the safe space in the bow.
A flash of recognition. Lily warned me. Goldie is a fish.
“Goldie?” The golden retriever was a lure, a trick. One of the octopus’s fish companions taking dog form to lull Lily and me into a false sense of security. Everyone trusts a man with a dog. The octopus stomps his boot down on the goldfish, smearing its guts on the floor. I grimace. His first kill tonight.
Hopefully his last.
The octopus’s good arm, the one in the puddle of fishbowl water, starts to twitch and twinge and transform. Before I can even get off him, it’s the arm of an octopus, slimy and purple and long. It curls around me like a python, choking me, its suction cups sticking to my skin. Part man, part octopus, he squeezes so tightly it’s unbearable, and the cabin begins to darken. I claw and thrash at the sludgy, toadlike arm, but I can’t loosen his powerful grip, and as my vision starts to narrow and fade all I can think of is failure.
Lily appears through the smoke, charging forth with a rope in her mouth. At the end of it is tied a noose. Whether she has tied it, or it was waiting to hang us, I do not know. She shoves the rope in my hand, and as the octopus-man lifts his head, I reach behind me and slip it around his neck. Lily grabs the rope and pulls. She’s low to the ground, her back haunches raised slightly, her teeth exposed. I’ve seen her in this pose dozens of times as we’ve played with her rope chew. I know how strong she can be.
With one last great effort, I swing completely around and jam my foot under the octopus’s chin, pushing his jaw in the direction opposite Lily’s pulling. The noose tightens further and his grip on my neck becomes tenuous.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” I yell to Lily, wrestling the octopus arm from around my neck.
The noose now tight, Lily lets go of the rope long enough to chomp down on the wound from the bottle. She gets a mouthful of flesh and shakes her head violently until it tears. I’ve seen her do this, too, with stuffed toys—grip their bodies, shaking them savagely to snap their necks. It’s always a little unnerving, the instinct bred within her to kill. But now I cheer. The octopus lets go of me and swats her away and she flies across the room with a chunk of his still-human arm. I lunge for the rope and pull tightly again, and his face turns a deeper shade of purple. Both arms flail and strike at whatever they can, as the flames in the back of the cabin encroach.
Lily slides to a stop under the table, two of its legs already on fire. “Lily, look out!” Lily turns to see the flames and scrambles out from underneath the table just as it collapses on one end. Sparks fly, igniting some cushions. The cabin is choking us rapidly with smoke.
I pull the octopus by the rope around his neck. There are three steps up to the deck. He pulls at the rope with his octopus arm, slithering the tip underneath to give himself just enough slack to breathe. Lily chomps down on his Achilles tendon and he writhes with pain. I yank the rope hard up the stairs, me dragging the octopus-man, the octopus-man dragging Lily.
“Say good-bye to this world, you sonofabitch.”
“GLRZHKZZZT,” gargles the octopus, struggling for air.
There’s an ax strapped just underneath the gunwale, and before I can process the decision to free it I’m already wielding it in my hand. I wrap the noose around my left hand and bring the ax down with all my might, grunting a murderous yowl. The octopus rolls on his side and I bury the blade deep into the deck.
“Lily!” I need both hands to free the ax, so Lily takes up the slack. She pulls at the rope, wrapping it around a cleat bolted to the deck. I pull at the ax, wiggling it free of its vise. Lily runs back around the octopus and pulls at his pant leg, again tightening the noose. I raise the ax again, taking aim at his one octopus arm. This time the blade connects, severing the arm with a deafening squish.
The octopus screams in pain.
He kicks Lily, who sails into the bulwark. There is just enough slack in the rope for him to scramble to his feet as I struggle to free the ax from the deck. Lily, stunned, shakes herself upright. The octopus limps starboard and turns back to look at us one last time.
“Be seeing you, governor,” he says. Just as I free the ax, he calmly tosses himself off the side.
Lily barks and we both rush to the edge, expecting to see him hanging from his broken neck. Instead, he gasps and spits and chokes, hanging from the rope, his legs submerged in water below the knee. The ocean bubbles around him as he thrashes, and he’s engulfed in a cloud of purple smoke. We can just make out his two legs becoming four, then five, then six. His upper body loosens as he fully retakes octopus form, and the last thing we see is his look of spite and hatred as he again becomes an invertebrate, slipping out of his noose.