It’s Tuesday and we all know by now that means we’re gonna see what some shapeshifters are up to! Today we’re back on the bandersnatch wagon, who you’ll recall is preparing a mating ritual.
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The Shape of Family
Part Ten – Visceral
by Rick Cook Jr
The creature known as the bandersnatch stared at the girl, the twin, the mirror. She was unconscious, would be until the ritual began. The other had escaped too easily. This one would not survive the birth of his brood, and it was up to him to decide which of his children received the final offering of their mother.
Which could prove him or herself in the opening moments? He relished the thought.
And yet he was not done. There were other ingredients necessary, and he had only days to prepare. He left the girl in his den, wondering if the other might come back.
He flitted among the darkened wood, a specter of smoke and oil as he searched. He came to the road and followed the path until he spotted some likely prey. He shadowed their progress for a moment, realized that they were looking for tracks, and stayed in smoke for a time, listened in.
“Harbor, why are we looking for a runaway?”
“Not a runaway, Nichols. A traitor, kidnapper.”
“All the same,” the soldier whined, “we’re scouts and patrolmen, not elite soldiers.”
“Today we’re whatever Captain Claymonte demands. And she wants us to find a traitor.”
The soldier sighed but nodded. “Why’d he kidnap the girl, do you think?”
The girl. They weren’t talking about him, surely.
“I don’t know and I don’t care. All I really care about is getting this woman off our backs and out of our woods. She’s already in town snooping, and Father Mason did what he could to direct her elsewhere.”
“And yet here we are.”
“I don’t like it, soldier.”
He’d heard enough.
He came out of the forest in a whirl of teeth and fangs, choosing a form both hardy and swift, dragon in name. The soldiers scattered before his furious wings and he slaughtered them. It took some time, of course, and they tried to mount up and fight back, but their spears and swords couldn’t pierce his new scaled hide. At least not easily. Some tried to flee.
They were up and down the road, some wounded, most dead. Those alive cried in pain and fear but he ignored them. They were disarmed and harmless. He fed on one of the dead, and discovered a symbol on a necklace. His symbol.
And couldn’t stop his reptilian grin. In death these fools would serve as they never had in life.
He found three still alive and scooped them all up in his smoke and oil form, whisked them away back to his lair, where he bound them and cared for their wounds enough to keep them alive.
He checked on the girl and found her still unconscious. Three would be enough for this first brood. That would make four minds for the enrichment of his children. To give them intelligence on par with the pathetic humans. And then they’d grow and become smarter, more cunning, than humans ever hoped to become.
He slinked back to his soldiers, taking the form of the priest he’d used to pervert their minds once upon a time. When one of them saw him he gasped. The one in charge.
“Father Enole! We thought you’d left us, abandoned us. Quick, there’s a creature down here and he is mighty vicious. There’s a dagger in my belt, cut us free.”
But the creature only knelt in front of the man. He remembered him now, vaguely. “Poor man, running to and fro, trying to please a false god.”
“I don’t understand, Father. Cut our bonds!” Specialist Harbor hissed. When the creature only leered, his expression changed to suspicion. “Father Enole?”
“You weren’t the first cult I attempted, you know.” He stroked the man’s cheek and Harbor cringed away. “The first did not appreciate the cult of the grave. Their constitutions were weak, their love for their children too strong.”
“What are you saying, Father?”
He ignored the man. “I live in the ground, we always have. But humans cannot, and though they were promised eternal life, immortality, even just happiness, none could be twisted. None would follow my decrees. I came so close with your little hamlet. A god of the sun.”
“His light shines upon us,” Harbor quoted, recited. “Lights the darkest corners of the earth, lifts up those as sunlight lifts the flower.”
The creature grinned. “I was proud of that one. It obviously stuck, but you were so spineless. You have a child, don’t you, Harbor?”
The man shook his head, still mumbling under his breath the string of litanies for the sun cult.
“I could never keep you all straight. And it doesn’t matter now. Desperation brought me into the daylight. And you are all so weak that it is a wonder my kind have ever been in danger to yours.”
“Your kind?” the man stammered.
“Oh, you still think I am human?” He let himself shift into smoke and oil, envelop the man and choke him before releasing him to gasp for fresh air. He reformed into Father Enole. “I am so much more than some paltry cultist.”
“We served you, Father,” the man choked. “We did everything you asked.”
“You did only what suited your conscience,” he spat. “There is no conscience when it comes to survival, and I ran out of time.”
The man’s eyes flickered to behind where the creature stood, and he shifted into smoke and oil just as a sword pierced the place his chest would have been moments before, going into the Specialist’s chest and wedging in between the ribs as the man spluttered and coughed up blood, eyes wide in shock.
The creature morphed into a many-legged spider, tackled the man who had come into his den. Knocked him unconscious without quite meaning to.
Behind the man, his mirror. No, she was bare above the waist, wrapped in a blanket. The other. The creature grinned.
“So you’ve come back to me, mirror?”
And the girl screamed.
The creature known as the bandersnatch was going to need more bodies, more minds for his children to feast upon.
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Come on back next week to discover what’s happened to Sadie, to Claire and the rest of her Winged Riders!
Panning For Clouds 