crayon sugarsweet and the spooky thing (the polished version)

this is the most horrifying story i've ever written. i know that you're supposed to say 'so far', but i don't think i'll ever write anything like it ever again. at least i hope not.

as mentioned previously, crayon sugarsweet is a character i invented for our daughter when she was small. i would make up adventures about crayon and her best friend, benji bean, for long car rides and bedtime stores.

this story isn't like those. it is the final crayon sugarsweet story, a way to say goodbye to two beloved characters who more or less wrote themselves for a long time.

i could say more, but i'm not going to. read it. you'll see.

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"Tell me,” said Crayon Sugarsweet, golden and glorious, barefoot and nine.

Benji Bean looked up at her from the tree branch below. Sugarsweet was fair and freshly ironed; Bean was tousled and dark, his jeans held together by holes. 

“There’s nothing to tell,” he lied. She knew, of course. They had been born on the same day, she in the morning and he that selfsame night. They lived side by side, inseparable since their first steps. How could she not know?

Crayon spun, hung head-down by the backs of her scabby knees, cat-green eyes on a level with his.

“I think it’s very sweet,” she said. “But I don’t need protecting.”

Protect you? thought Bean. Protect you?

With Crayon, you either gave in or got out of the way. Even the best teachers wilted before her relentless questions. You didn’t get between Crayon Sugarsweet and something she wanted to know. That was a rule of the universe, as far as Benji was concerned.

He was in love with her, of course, as much as that was possible at nine. How could he not be?

“It’s just a baby story,” he said. This, at least, was more or less true. He had heard the tale from Marcus DuPrey, who was only a second grader (even if he did talk like a grownup).

“How come everybody knows but me?”

The Bean shrugged. Crayon knew a lot of things... an amazing amount, really. But there were some things that Bean took for granted that still managed to elude her, as if she learned about life on Earth through a telescope, instead of by living it.

“Grownups don’t,” he said. “Only kids know.”

She rolled her eyes at him, swung back up, wiggled shiny pink toes in his face.

“Where did it come from? What’s it like?”

These were topics that Marcus himself had been unclear about. What was any monster like? Who knew where they came from? They were monsters. They came. That was just the way it was.

But that wasn’t good enough for Crayon Sugarsweet.

“Maybe it’s some kind of mutant,” she mused, picking at a toenail. She frowned. “Maybe it fell out of a higher dimension.”

Benji thought about that. He didn’t know what a hired mention was, but the thought of strange creatures falling out of one struck a chord. Years ago, during a particularly vivid dream, he had fallen out of - and under - his bed. When he woke, it took several moments to figure out why his bedroom ceiling was suddenly three inches above his head.

“I’m not going with you,” he said. 

“Going where?”

“Black River.”

“Ah.”

The river bisected PoHo, the town. It snaked from the northern farms past woods, open fields, residential canals and the city marina, where it emptied into the mighty Saint Clair River. At its widest, fat with spring rain, it was perhaps two hundred feet across. Contrary to its name, it was a deep, murky brown.

In times past it swallowed raw sewage from the homes that lined its banks, mercury-tainted water from the paper mill, fertilizer and insecticide runoff from the farms, plus occasional toxic waste from the chemical plants in Canada when it got backed up. No matter where you went in PoHo, you were never more than a mile from its coffee-colored coils.

Crayon jumped down.

“Then I’ll go by myself,” she said. She began to walk away, toward the river.

“You don’t know where…” He bit his tongue.

Crayon slowed, stopped. Turned her head to the side to look at him with those green eyes.

“No,” he said.

She turned all the way around, gave him her puppy dog look.

“No.”

Whining came next. Puppy at the door, crying to be let in, her lower lip a trembling shelf.

“I’m not going to change my mind, you know,” Benji whispered.

And then she said it.

“Tomato soup…”

This was the ultimate temptation: Lunch at the Sugarsweet house with Crayon’s float-around-the-room TV Mom and handsome, doting Dad. The complete opposite of the Bean home, where lunch was not so much served as scavenged.

Benji thought of his dad, moldering in his chair in the dark living room while his wife yammered and snacked, scratched and smoked, morning and night, like some bewitched she-goat.

“Milk…” Crayon purred.

Benji shook his head, closed his eyes, but still he heard.

“Oyster crackers…”

“I hate you.”

“I know.” She walked right up to him, looked him in the eye. “You’re invited even if you don’t tell me, okay?”

How could he fight that? He was nine, for Pete’s sake, and she was Crayon Sugarsweet.

He sighed. “We’ll need a really long stick.”

 

The place where the monster lived was a field along the river’s edge. Construction had not yet begun here, as it had along the canals that were closer to town. The field was wild, rank, and overgrown. Huge, buggy willows swayed their hair in the breeze. The grass here was head-high – higher, next to the cat-tails – and dry. With every step, clouds of grasshoppers exploded into the green heat.

“I never knew this was here,” said Crayon, frowning as she followed.

Bean shrugged. “Nobody goes here. There’s nothing here.” He thought about it. “I mean, nothing else.”

In the distance, a car horn sounded, but it was a long, long way off.

“Are we close?”

“You’ll know when we are.”

“Are you sure we didn’t…”

And then she saw the dog.

“Oh.”

It was… it used to be… a large dog, but there wasn’t much left. Ribs, a shriveled stick of foreleg, bared teeth, lolling tongue, one dull, mad eye. If expression was any indicator, it had died in agony.

“Whose dog?” she asked, with the quiet reserved for the presence of Death.

“TJ. You know him? He’s really good at kickball. He was walking it down here and the… the thing got it.”

“It killed his dog? What did he tell his parents?”

“He said the dog ran away.”

“Was he sad?” she said, bending down to look closer.

Benji shrugged. “I think it was his mom’s dog.”

“Hnh. You know what’s weird?” said Crayon.

“Everything?”

“No, really – look at it.”

Benji looked. Looked almost immediately away.

“Need a hint?” she prompted.

“No.”

“Bzzz.”

“Huh?”

“No flies. It’s summertime, and there aren’t any flies. No maggots, either, unless they’re… inside.”

“Nice thing to talk about before lunch.”

“Sorry.” She looked around. “When did it happen?”

“Last Saturday.”

Crayon sniffed the air. “There’s no smell, either. Why doesn’t the dog smell?”

“’Cause it’s got no nose?”

“Did I ever tell you you’re funny?”

“Only all the time.” Bean looked around nervously. “Can we go now?”

“No! No. I want to see it. Where is it?”

“Resting.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t like the sun. TJ said it mostly sleeps in the daytime.”

“Where?”

And then the wind turned, and the reek filled the world.

Millions of polliwogs, dead and rotting in a drought-stricken pond. Monstrous brown catfish left gasping on a dock in the July heat. The sickeningly sweet aroma of guts run-over rabbit guts ripening on the side of the road. Choking mushrooms crushed beneath your heel. It was all of these things and more.

Crayon turned into the wind and rushed into it. In a moment, Benji followed. How could he not?

They came to the run, and stopped.

It was a track of pushed-down grass that led from the brown water of the river to a hole in the embankment, a hole perhaps two feet across, fronted by gravel and then grass. The grass was crushed, as if a great weight had been dragged across it, and covered with a grey-black slime that bound it together like an inverted thatch hut.

The hole in the embankment was perfectly round, made of mud, perfectly smooth. Although the stench was everywhere, they could both tell that the hole was its source.

“How do we know it’s not just a muskrat hole?” said Crayon, including him with the ‘we’ even though she didn’t have to.

Bean stood alert, watching the water, watching the hole, listening to the grass, a stick twice his height clutched in his hands.

“Watch.”

Slowly and as quietly as the grass allowed, Bean crept up on the hole, holding the stick in two hands like a spear or a lance. He suddenly plunged the stick into the hole, drew it out, plunged it in again, wiggling it like mad.

Suddenly, the stick met resistance, then jerked powerfully out of Bean’s hands, into the darkness of the hole.

There came a sound from within, muffled, like a crying baby being attacked by bees.

Crayon moved behind Bean, staring over his shoulder into the hole. What came boiling out was quick and angry, flinging black, scythe-like limbs in front of it, spreading as it came out, until it was easily the size of a full-grown man.

And yet…

“Why can’t we see all of it at once?” she said, squinting, crouching behind him. There was a heavy stick on the ground, a broken branch, as long and thick as a baseball bat. She picked it up.

“I don’t know,” said Bean, ready to run. “Don’t look right at it too long. It gives you a headache.”

It paused, using whatever senses it had that did not require eyes, nose, or face, trembling with anger, and perhaps even fear.

Crayon raised the club over her head. Then, just as he turned to look at her, she brought it down as hard as she could on the top of Benji’s head.

Benji fell directly in front of the creature and lay still. The creature drew back as if startled, its – cilia? – rippling like stalks of grass in the wind.

Benji shuddered. A moment after that, his eyes opened. He looked at Crayon. A single drop of blood ran slowly down his forehead. It was dark, almost black. He blinked.

“I’m cold,” he said. He tried to sit up, but his limbs were useless and numb. “Help me up.”

Then he saw the creature. It very, very slowly settled down onto all of its… legs? It began to move in his direction, slowly, cautiously. Stalking.

“But if I do that,” said Crayon, frowning, “we’ll never know what it does. Don’t you want to know what happens?”

“No!” said Benji. “I want to go home.”

“I think it can hear you.”

“Help me!”

“Yep, it can definitely hear you.” She wrote this down in her notebook.

“Mom!” screamed Benji. “Mom! Help!”

“It seems pretty excited.”

Benji felt intense heat around his middle, and pressure. The pressure faded, and his belly and butt felt ice-cold. He had peed his pants and his legs wouldn’t move.

“Why won’t you help me?” he cried, quietly, face scrunched up, trying to look her directly in the eye. He could almost turn his head, but not enough.

“Your pants are wet,” she said, as if he didn’t know. “I think it can smell you.”

“Get my dad,” Benji begged. “Please get my dad.”

“He wouldn’t believe me. Even if he did, it would probably be over before he got here. And I’d miss everything.”

Benji could hear it now, scrabbling across the gravel, back and forth, feeling for him.

“You’re gonna get in trouble!” he shouted, desperate.

Crayon shook her head slowly. “Nobody knows I came here except you. You can’t tell anybody.”

Benji felt the thing touch his right foot. It clung, and his leg kicked at it, a reflex. It quickly wrapped itself around his shin and thigh and squeezed. Something like a million needles sank into Benji’s leg. They burned.

“Help!” he screamed.

“Maybe it will hurt less if you don’t fight,” said Crayon, her eyes glazed.

“Mom! Dad! Aaaahhh!”

It clung to Benji and climbed, throwing limbs or whatever they were across his belly and chest, grabbing his shoulders and pulling. It lifted him into a sitting position, though he pushed backward with all of his strength, fighting. He looked into its inky beak and screamed as it plunged into his face, slicing and swallowing, past skin, muscle, cartilage and bone.

Crayon watched everything, eyes wide, motionless and spellbound. She observed Benji’s legs and arms as they spasmed. The scream became a muffled moan, a gurgle, a hiss of wheezing breath.

Eventually, Benji’s body stopped moving, at least of its own accord. It was only then that Crayon tore her gaze away long enough to continue her notes: How its movements slowed when Benji stopped moving, how long it ate, the body parts that it seemed to favor, the methodical way that it consumed the corpse. It reminded Crayon of a praying mantis that she had once seen devour a grasshopper, except for all the blood.

Once finished with its meal, the thing excreted a large, almost gelatin mass. She wondered if the slick, black and white goo was digested Benji, or the waste of an earlier victim.

Most of Benji’s right leg remained, and roughly half of the other. Perhaps it would eat them later, when it became hungry again. Now, it seemed swollen and lethargic, slowly inch-worming its way back across grass, then the gravel, and then into its hole in the riverbank, trailing stinking fecal matter as it went. Crayon noted that there was a strong smell of ammonia, too, which she duly noted.

“I should have brought a camera,” she said to no one.

Ah, well. As Benji said – or used to say - there was always tomorrow.