The Silenced Tale, стр. 22
Elgar sits on a kitchen stool as Juan moves deftly around him. He takes a moment to reflect on how his life has gotten to the surreal point where his assistant knows his kitchen better than he does.
“So, you did go back to the bar after?” Elgar asks as Juan chops almonds (almonds?) for the stew.
“I did. It would have been totes rude to do a runner, boss. Ghosting is tres passe.”
“O-kay,” Elgar says, not certain he knows what “ghosting” is outside of what he does to dead characters who still need to communicate vital information to his leads.
“And I’m glad I did,” Juan continues, tilting his head just so, a sort of self-conscious little smirk rising against the corners of his lips, and . . . oh, he’s smitten. Elgar thinks it’s adorable, though he has no idea if that’s the sort of thing he’s allowed to say to a gay guy. “He told me later that he didn’t realize I was way into reading, and he hadn’t wanted to admit that he was a big fantasy nerd and put me off, and bam! There we go. Dream Man city. Of course, I didn’t tell him who my boss was—NDA, natch—but he’s super into the fact that I know a real live writer in the flesh.”
Elgar chuckles. “Well, that’s not creepy.”
Juan laughs. “I’ll keep home and work separated. No worries.”
“Thanks.” Elgar yawns and paws at his eyes. Naps always make him groggier. He doesn’t know why he bothers with them. “I’m making coffee.”
“Boss . . .”
Elgar levers himself off the stool and lumbers toward the pantry. “I know. It’s after four. But I’m gonna fall asleep in your stew otherwise. And then how will we review the merchandising contracts after?”
“Fine,” Juan grumbles. “But no sugar.”
“Fine,” Elgar says back. He pulls open the pantry door.
Something wet and warm plops onto his foot, and he jerks back, startled. For a second, he assumes it’s cat vomit, but it’s too red, and Linux had grown out of puking in fun places for Elgar to find a few years ago. “Eugh!”
He shakes the slimy glob off his toes, and it splatters against the open door.
“What’s wrong—oh god!” Juan yelps.
Juan seizes his shoulders, and hauls Elgar backward. Elgar is too shocked to do anything but let him. Not that he wanted to stay next to . . . to . . . whatever that is in front of him.
The pantry, the whole inside of the pantry, is absolutely dripping with wet, red globs of flesh. Whip-thin, humid green vines weave between the slats of the shelves, the brown and green branches twisted around the wire as if the plant has grown there. There’s too much foliage near the floor for Elgar to catch a glimpse of whether or not it had—which, of course, it can’t have done, because there’s no way any vine could have grown this big, this fast, without water and sunlight, in the five or six hours it’s been since he’d last gone into his pantry for a package of microwave popcorn.
And that doesn’t explain the . . . the . . . reek.
The whole kitchen stinks like a slaughterhouse, offal and blood mixed in a barnyard odor that clings like oil to the back of his throat. He coughs, trying to dislodge it, and covers his mouth and nose with the cuff of his cardigan.
The meat hangs from the branches in glistening strips, like rotten, hellish fruit. The flesh is red, globbed with the whitish-yellow honeycomb of fat and organs, and the skin on the underside is pale, and nearly hairless.
It looks . . . human. Panic squeezes Elgar’s lungs, and for some absurd reason, all he can think of is Maddie—the waitress with the eyes that shouldn’t be green; Lucy Piper, filleted by Bootknife; a world that he had created, whose magic systems are too perfect, and a villain who wanted his Author dead. The world around Elgar’s head spins sharply and dips to the left, and he stumbles back, grips the counter hard. He can’t breathe.
“What the actual fuck?” Juan hisses, his cell phone already in his hand. “Hello? Yes, I’d like to—Jesus, boss, don’t get closer!—sorry, I’d like to report a . . . a break-in? I don’t know, a violent crime? A threat? It looks like some serious black magic shit, okay? Someone jammed the closet full of dead stuff! I don’t know, the skin is pink-ish, there’s blood everywhere . . . yeah!” Juan gives Elgar’s address, and then says, “Ten minutes, thank you.” He disconnects the call, shoves his phone into his back pocket, and comes over to where Elgar still stands, propped against the counter. “Come on, boss. Let’s go into the living room.”
Juan tugs on Elgar’s shoulder, and Elgar lets his assistant back him out into the living room, eyes still glued to the mess in the pantry, dull horror creeping up his spine. The smell of raw meat and curdling blood is strong, stuck to the inside of his nose like paint fumes and pennies. He’s torn between the twin urges to scream and puke, and clamps his teeth down hard on the tip of his tongue to keep from doing either.
“Where’s Linux?” It’s the first thing Elgar can manage to grind out around the bile lumping in the hollow of his throat. Juan shoves him down into the sofa and swears.
“I’ll look for him, boss.”
“Do you think—?”
“I’ll look for him,” Juan repeats with a bit more force, clearly trying to reassure himself as much as his employer.
Juan rushes upstairs, and Elgar pretends not to hear it when Juan slams the bathroom door and turns on the water