The Cannibals of Candyland Read online

  “You can speak?” Franklin asks.

  “Of course I can speak,” says the candy man. “I am a man, am I not?”

  “Not exactly,” Franklin says.

  “We are not that much different from you,” he says.

  The creature holds in his wound as he speaks. His cracked candy coating crumbles between his fingers.

  “What are you people?” Franklin asks.

  “What do you think we are?” says the man. “We are candy people.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “We come from the same place as you,” says the candy man. “My people were once human like you, but we evolved differently. We evolved into candy people.”

  “How can somebody evolve into candy?” Franklin asks, lowering his gun. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Just as spiders evolved to produce webs to catch flies, just as cheetahs evolved to run faster to catch antelope, just as lantern fish evolved to produce lights that attract smaller fish to their mouths, we evolved into candy people so that it would be easier for us to catch our prey: children. Our ancestors were a community of cannibals, who used to lure children with candy. After several generations, our young ones were born with candy growing from their hands. Eventually they were born with candy skin. It is the way of evolution.”

  Franklin doesn’t know if he can believe him. He wonders if he is just a normal man wearing a costume made of candy. He wonders if they are just a community of insane cannibals, who created an underground environment to look like it was made of candy. It would make much more sense to him than evolution.

  “That kind of evolution takes a very long time,” Franklin says. “Millions of years.”

  “Not in our case, it seems,” the man says.

  Franklin lets out a puff of air.

  “But how do you know English?” Franklin says. “How do you know about lantern fish and cheetahs?”

  The candy man coughs a laugh. “As I said, our people were once humans. They spoke English. They had books. We learned from these books. We are an educated people.”

  “You are monsters,” Franklin says.

  “We are no more monsters than you are,” says the man.

  “You eat children,” Franklin says.

  The candy man shrugs.

  “Well, yes,” he says. “They are delicious.”

  Franklin spits at him. “You evil piece of—-”

  As Franklin raises his gun to the creature’s head, the candy man lunges at him. The gun goes off, but the bullet misses. The candy man stabs him with his rootbeer-flavored fingernails. Although made of candy, the fingernails are as strong as glass and as sharp as knives. Franklin cries out. He points his gun at the candy man’s stomach and fires twice, throwing the creature back.

  The candy man shrieks. He raises his claws and goes for Franklin’s throat, but Franklin gets him first. He fires three bullets into the creature’s head at point blank range. A fleshy human brain explodes out of the candy skull in blubbery chunks. The creature falls back. The blue swirl in his lollipop eyes goes white.

  Franklin falls into the marshmallow flowers, holding his stomach. He looks around to see if any other candy people are in the area. The gunshots would surely attract attention. He’s out of bullets. The rest of the bullets are hidden in his apartment. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do if other candy people show up. His cane sword is his only defense.

  He decides to act quickly. Even though his insides feel like they’ve been shredded into pulp, he drags the corpse of the candy man across the meadow. He is much heavier than a normal human. Franklin can tell the candy coating adds another 53.7 pounds.

  He winces as he drags the body and cries out whenever he slips in a puddle of caramel or vanilla frosting. Then he hears pounding footsteps coming towards him from the other side of the hill. He pulls harder, but it only makes him lose his balance against the terrain and fall down more frequently. The gun slips out of his pocket, but he decides to leave it. He doesn’t need it anymore. All he needs is to get out of there alive and bring this body to the police.

  The noises that are coming closer no longer sound like footsteps to Franklin. They are more like thumping sounds, like somebody is dribbling a dozen basketballs at once.

  Franklin sees a group of multi-colored blobs the size of beach balls bouncing over the hill towards him. They are cherry, orange, lemon, lime, and grape balls of living gummy candy. Though they have no limbs, the candies each have a single eye in the center of their bodies and large mouths.

  Franklin doesn’t know what to make of them. He is more surprised than afraid. Just to be on the safe side, Franklin moves quickly away from the gummy blobs, pulling the body with all his strength. But the creatures follow him. They catch up and swarm him, bouncing up and down around, circling him like little gummy sharks.

  The blobs block his path and force him to stop. He smacks at one of them with his cane, but it just comes right back. He smacks another one, but it catches the cane in its mouth and won’t let go. Franklin swings the little blob through the air, but it is stuck to the cane like a leech, making slurping noises.

  An orange blob wraps its mouth around the candy man’s foot and bites it off. The creature doesn’t actually have any teeth, but it is still somehow able to suck the foot off of the candy man’s leg with ease. The gummy creature is transparent, so Franklin can see the candy man’s foot inside of the blob as it bounces around.

  The rest of the blobs attack. They bounce in and take bites out of the dead candy man’s flesh and bounce out. They do not attack Franklin, so he assumes they are only after the corpse. Half of the body is absorbed into the bellies of the blobs within minutes. Franklin knows this isn’t good. If he doesn’t get the body back home nobody will believe his story.

  He jerks his cane with all his strength, sending the blob attached to the handle across the meadow. Then he smacks at any creature that comes close to the body. He knocks some of them back, but there are just too many of them. For every one he knocks away, three more come in from behind and take bites out of the corpse. Franklin pulls the sword out of the cane and stabs one of them with it, but the blob doesn’t die. The hole seals itself up right away and the creature suffers no damage, not even pain.

  Franklin knows that he can’t give up, so he continues fighting them. He tries cutting the blobs in half, or stabbing them in their eyes, but they just reform themselves and continue their attack. Then the blobs stop going after just the corpse, and start going after Franklin. When he notices this, Franklin drops the body and backs away. Half of the blobs stay with the body, the other half come after him.

  Within moments, the gummy blobs gobble up the rest of the corpse and Franklin finds himself surrounded again by the bouncing creatures. He chaotically thrashes his cane at the swarm and hits a lemon blob so hard that it knocks the cane out of his hand. Then the blobs charge in at him. He leaps over a cherry blob and runs for a giant candy cane growing out of the earth. Before they can take a piece out of him, he climbs up the candy pole to safety.

  The blobs stay at the foot of the candy cane for an hour, bouncing hungrily up and down at him. Franklin sweats. At first, the moisture causes the candy cane to become sticky, which makes it easier for him to hold. But he sweats more and the candy cane becomes slick. He slides down the candy pole, and quickly climbs back up, only to slide down again. It takes only a few minutes before he loses his grip and falls into the swarm of gummy predators.

  As he hits the ground, a blob jumps onto Franklin’s chest. It is a fat purple blob that drools grape-flavored saliva as it opens its wide smiling mouth around Franklin’s head. There is a cracking sound and the grape blob is thrown off of Franklin’s chest and flies twenty-one feet into the air.

  Lifting himself up, Franklin sees that someone has come to his rescue. A woman with a long red licorice whip flips through the air and lands on a chocolate malt ball nearby. She whips at the gummy blobs, sending them flying in all directions. T
he blobs scatter. The sound of the cracking whip seems to frighten them. They aren’t sensitive to pain, they are sensitive to noise. His rescuer just has to crack the whip a few more times and the rest of the gummy blobs flee into the lollipop forest.

  Franklin looks at the woman. It is a candy woman. She walks towards him with red and white striped legs, her red vine whip thrown over her shoulder, and a big smile on her face. When she rubs her fingers through her cotton candy hair, Franklin recognizes her. She is the woman from his childhood. The one that murdered his brother and sisters. The one that ruined his life.

  He goes for his cane sword on the ground, but when he comes up she is already standing in front of him, smiling at him.

  “Are you cinnamon?” the candy woman says to Franklin. Her voice sounds like that of a cartoon elf. “I love cinnamon.”

  She smells him and rubs her hand along his red suit. “Or are you candy apple?”

  Franklin backs away from her. She smiles at his shyness and he becomes paralyzed at the sight of her razor-sharp teeth. She steps closer to him. The smell of artificial strawberry fills his nostrils. It intoxicates him even more than it did when he was a child. His eyes drift into a state of bliss. She smells him again and her face becomes confused.

  “I don’t smell candy apple or cinnamon or anything,” she says. “What’s your name?”

  He wants to cut her in half with his cane sword while she is off guard, but finds himself responding to her question.

  “Franklin,” he says, stepping closer towards her.

  “What kind of candy is that?” she asks.

  “It’s not a candy, it’s my name,” he says.

  “You mean you weren’t named after a type of candy?” she says. “I thought everyone was named after candy.”

  “No,” Franklin says.

  “Huh…” she says, leaning her hand on her glossy hip. “Well, my name is Jujube, but you can call me Jujy.”

  The candy woman steps around Franklin and examines him.

  “Hey, your brain is showing,” she says to him when she walks behind him.

  “I know,” Franklin says.

  She pokes at his brain a little, but stops once Franklin shakes her fingers away.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  As Franklin sways in the drunken delight, Jujy licks him on the shoulder.

  “Your candy-coating doesn’t have any flavor at all!” she cries.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Wait a minute…” she says.

  Jujy leans her white taffy face into Franklin’s. He looks into her pink eyes.

  “You’re not made of candy, are you?” she says. “You’re one of those grownup children!”

  Franklin steps away from her as her eyes grow wide. She steps towards him as he steps back, so that the distance between them remains the same.

  “I’ve never tasted one of you before,” she says, licking her red gummy lips at him.

  In his intoxicated state, Franklin doesn’t push her away as she wraps her arms around him and bites into the side of his neck. While his blood leaks down her sugar-white neck, he breathes in so much of her strawberry fragrance that his mind rolls into a soft, comfortable, dream.

  When Franklin awakes, he finds himself hanging from a cookie ceiling, his wrists tied together with black licorice as strong as leather. His mind is still cloudy. His vision smeared. Focusing his eyes on something moving on the floor. It is white and fluffy. When his eyes clear, he recognizes it as some kind of animal. It is a puppy made of marshmallow. The puppy is attacking a large bright red jawbreaker like it’s a tennis ball.

  Franklin examines the rest of the room. The walls all seem to be made of chocolate chip cookie dough that was baked into bricks. The carpet is furry brown sugar. The windows, made of thin hard candy, look like multi-colored stained glass. In the corner of the room, there is a bright yellow bed with pink flower patterns. Franklin isn’t sure what it is made of but it looks more rubbery than it does soft. His red cane is on the far end of the room, leaning against the wall. He wishes it was within arm’s reach.

  Through the doorway in front of him, he sees the candy woman sitting at a table made of chocolate-covered wafers. She is holding a human leg in her hands and ripping chunks of meat off with her teeth. As she chews the raw flesh, she looks up and notices Franklin awake. She stares at him with her cold strawberry soda eyes, blood dribbling down her white chin.

  With her mouth full, she says, “Your meat is not as tender as a child’s.”

  Then she swallows and takes another bite.

  Franklin looks down and discovers that his right leg is missing. There is a peppermint wood saw on the floor covered in blood. In his sleep, she had sawed off his leg and cauterized it with hot caramel sauce. Examining himself closer, he finds other chunks of meat hae been taken out of him. They are just small bites, like the one on his neck. All of his wounds are filled with hot caramel sauce. The strawberry fragrance fills the room, numbing his senses to the pain.

  “What have you done…” Franklin says.

  She swallows her food and wipes blood from her gummy lips.

  “I’ve saved you,” she says.

  Franklin looks at his cane nearby. If only he could reach it he would have a weapon.

  “My leg…” Franklin cries.

  She lifts his leg to him, as if she thought he was asking to see it. Half of the meat is gone. Franklin can see the exposed muscles and tendons. The limb doesn’t look familiar to him anymore. It looks like a piece of roadkill that the woman is eating raw. The only thing that Franklin recognizes is the apple-red pant leg covering the bottom of the limb like a burrito wrapper.

  “It’s a little too chewy,” she says, picking at a piece of meat between her teeth. “And I don’t like all the hair.”

  “Then why…” Franklin can’t complete a full sentence.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” she says, acting very defensive all of a sudden. “It tastes really good! I don’t think it’s gross or anything. I was just comparing the differences between your meat and children meat. Your meat is still good… just different.”

  Her taffy cheeks blush into cinnamon redness. Then she awkwardly takes a large bite of his leg and acts as if it is the most delicious thing she has ever tasted, moaning and smiling at the flavor. Franklin opens his mouth to say something but no words come out. He just watches as she eats his flesh.

  When she finishes eating, and there are only his bones left on the table, she rubs her swollen rainbow-swirled belly at him.

  “That was delicious,” she says to him, but Franklin can tell that she really wishes she had stopped eating his leg halfway through.

  As she disposes his bones in a waxy garbage can, there is a pounding on the door.

  “Pixie sticks!” she cries and runs into the bedroom with Franklin.

  She hushes him, cuts him down with one of her fingernails, and stuffs him in the bed, under the covers.

  “If they find you they will cut you up and feed you to the lemon hogs,” she says.

  She cuffs a lime brace around his neck, chaining him to the bedpost. After she tosses the covers over his head, kicks the saw under the bed, turns out the light, and shuts the bedroom door, she yells through her cookie walls at her visitor.

  “Who comes here?”

  “Jujube,” says a man’s voice. “Open now. We must speak.”

  The man’s voice is deep and gurgling, like his throat is filled with bubbles.

  Franklin, lying in the dark, hears the front door open.

  “I do not want you here, Licorice,” she says to her visitor.

  The man lets himself in.

  Franklin crawls to the edge of the bed. The mattress smells like banana and has the texture of chewed gum. He peeks his eyes out from under the rubbery sheets and realizes the bedroom door has been left open a crack.

  “Float is missing,” the candy man says. “We think he’s dead. The passage to the upper world is filled with blood. We think a hum
an did it.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jujy says.

  The candy man paces the room and Franklin is able to get a good look at him through the cracked door. The man has black hard candy skin from top to bottom. He wears sweet tart jewelry and a tootsie roll hat. He seems to have no hair on his head, but he has a goatee made of cocoa butter.

  “Not only that,” Licorice continues, “but we think his murderer is down here somewhere. We found a human weapon by the soda pond.”

  “It is forbidden to bring human items into our world,” Jujy says.

  “That’s why I believe a human brought it down here,” Licorice says. “We also trapped some wild gum-goblins that had meat in their bellies. If the meat is that of a human then we will be able to relax, but once it is examined I believe we will discover that the meat belongs to Float. It is likely that the human killed Float and his body was then eaten by the gum-goblins. The human might still be down here somewhere.”

  “If there were a human down here he would have gone back to the surface by now,” Jujy says.

  “Not necessarily,” Licorice says. “It is possible that

  someone found him and took him home with them.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” Jujy tries to laugh.

  “I only know one person who would,” he says. “You.”

  “Me?”

  “If anyone would do such a thing it would be you,” Licorice says. “You were always the troublemaker when we were kids. You never liked to follow the rules. You always liked to visit the human world just because you thought it was fun.”

  “I was a kid then,” Jujy says.

  Franklin sees her nervously looking at him through the door, then looking back at Licorice.

  “I would never hide a human in my home,” she says.

  “Do you mind if I search it, then?” Licorice says.

  “No, you can’t,” she says, stepping in front of the bedroom door.

  Franklin crawls out of the covers and reaches for his cane. Because of his clouded mind, he isn’t able to be as careful or as quiet as he intended. When he touches the handle of the cane, it bounces off of his fingers, slides down the wall, and makes a loud clang as it hits a chocolate chip.