The Cannibals of Candyland Page 5

  “What was that?” Licorice says.

  “Nothing,” Jujy says. “Just my guest.”

  “You have a guest?”

  “He’s from the northern cave and needed a place to stay.”

  Franklin falls onto the floor. He feels along the cookie wall in the dark, trying to find his cane.

  “How long has he been here?” he asks.

  “He just got here today,” she says.

  “It seems funny that he arrives today of all days,” he says. “I think I better meet him.”

  Licorice reaches for the door, but Jujy blocks his path.

  “You can’t,” she says. “He’s sick.”

  Franklin leaves the cane and crawls under the bed to hide.

  “He has the cheese flu,” she says. “If you go in you’ll catch it.”

  Licorice steps away from the door. “Cheese flu? So is he going to die?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says.

  “How long do you plan on keeping him here?” he asks.

  “At least three days.”

  “Three days?” Licorice yells. “He’s not taking you as his mate, is he?”

  “No,” she says.

  “He better not take you as his mate,” he says.

  “I’m just helping him get better.”

  Franklin hears footsteps as Licorice returns to the front door.

  “I will return in three days,” Licorice says, “once he is well. But let me tell you this, Jujube, if you have lied to me in any way you will be sorry.”

  “I am not lying,” she says.

  “Of course you are not,” he says.

  They say their goodbyes and the door closes. Neither Jujy nor Franklin make a sound until the candy man’s footsteps are too far away to hear.

  The light turns on. From under the bed, Franklin watches Jujy’s stiff candy cane legs cross the room. If he had his cane sword, he would have been able to stab her in the feet, knock her down, and then slash her throat right there. But his cane is too far away. She kneels down and peeks at him with her dead doll face.

  “He’s gone,” she says. “It would have been a waste if they fed all your meat to the lemon hogs.”

  At this range, her strawberry aroma smoothes his senses so softly that he finds himself smiling at her.

  At night, Jujy makes him a bed on the floor and then goes to sleep. He is still chained to her bedpost. Her snores sound like she’s blowing into a candy whistle.

  Lying on gummy pillows and brown sugared blankets, it dawns on Franklin that he is sleeping in the same room as the monster that plagued his nightmares as a child. She’s the same monster that killed Laura, Hillary, and Andrew. She’s the same monster he has spent his entire life trying to find so that he could get his revenge.

  He debates whether or not to kill the candy woman in her sleep. His cane is within reach. He could do it easily. Just stab her through an eye into the brain. But he’s not sure if he should kill her just yet. She is protecting him from the other candy people for some reason. Franklin believes she’s just hiding him like a dog would hide a bone. She obviously doesn’t like the taste of him, but perhaps she feels bad about wasting any kind of food. Franklin knows she will kill him eventually, but at least she wants to keep him alive at the moment. Without her protection he’s more likely to be killed by the other candy people. He wonders if it is worth taking the risk. Even if he dies, he’ll at least die satisfied.

  His muscles are too loose and relaxed to do anything about it tonight. His eyes droop shut and his mind drifts. Before he falls asleep, the marshmallow puppy curls up next to him. It is soft and warm against his arm. It smells so delicious that he almost takes a bite out of it in his sleep.

  Franklin awakes to incredible pain. He squeezes the stump where his leg should be. The candy woman is nowhere in sight. He can’t smell the strawberry fragrance. She’s gone. Now that her intoxicating pheromones are nowhere in the vicinity, Franklin is sobering up. His mind is clearing and his pain is gushing in. The pain is so great that he can’t even move. He screams and squeezes Jujy’s tootsie roll bedpost so hard that his fingers make indentions.

  The marshmallow puppy cocks its head, and watches him with black jellybean eyes as he writhes on the floor.

  The candy woman returns, carrying a large white bag over her shoulder like Santa Claus. Franklin breathes her fragrance as deep as he can to calm the pain as quickly as possible. She notices him vigorously inhaling her scent and it makes her blush. The pain doesn’t go away quickly enough. The fragrance just makes him dizzy at first. She sits down next to him on the floor and squeezes her toes in the air. Then she drops her bag between her candy cane legs and digs through it like Santa digging for presents.

  Franklin is paralyzed at the sight of the bag. He knows what is inside of it. When Jujy pulls out a tiny hand, no bigger than a four-year-old’s, Franklin figures that she has just returned from a hunt. She’s killed a child and brought back the remains.

  “Your teeth aren’t sharp enough to tear through the meat,” Jujy says. “I’ll do it for you.”

  She rips a sliver of meat off of the tiny hand and stuffs it into Franklin’s mouth. Franklin doesn’t move. He is in shock. He pushes it out of his mouth with his tongue, but Jujy stuffs it back in with her long fingernail.

  “You need your strength,” she says. “I’m going to save you.”

  She pushes the meat so far back into his throat that he is forced to swallow it or choke. The meat is rough going down.

  “That’s good,” she says.

  He doesn’t move at all. She begins to chew up the meat for him and spit it into his mouth. But before she makes him swallow again he sees a face staring at him from inside of the bag, peeking out among the bloody pieces of flesh. It is the face of a dead four-year-old girl, staring at him blankly as he is force-fed skin from her knuckles.

  For several hours, Franklin is in a daze from the strawberry drug, from the pain, and from the shock of seeing the dead girl’s face. He is only partially aware when Jujy connects a new leg to his stump.

  The leg looks like that of a mannequin’s only it is red and made of hard candy. It smells like sour apple. In his daze, Franklin smiles at it.

  “It matches my suit,” he says with a limp smile, a line of drool slipping from his lips.

  Jujy pats him on the shoulder, happy that he approves.

  He is surprised when he discovers that he can move the joints and toes of his new candy leg.

  Franklin remains in a drunken state for a couple of days. Jujy cuts more body parts from him and replaces them with candy parts. She removes his left hand and gives him one made of marzipan. She skins his chest and pours hot melted green apple liquid onto him. When it cools, it hardens into candy skin like hers. She cuts slits into his good arm and inserts gumballs. Then she glazes it and coats it in cinnamon. She removes his eyebrows and all of his hair. She cuts off his cheeks and his nose, replacing them with green and white swirled lollipops. She leaves his brain exposed, but decorates it with sprinkles and candy buttons.

  Jujy continues to force-feed him human flesh, but he is unsure whether it is the flesh of children or pieces of his own body. He decides he’d rather not know.

  Franklin keeps asking her why she is doing all of this to him, but her reply is always: “I’m saving you.”

  Jujy files Franklin’s teeth into sharp points as she goes to the bathroom in front of him. She does not have a bathroom. She uses a candy dish for a toilet. In the middle of sharpening his teeth, she just pulled the large dish out from the corner of the room to beneath her squatting legs and began to defecate in front of Franklin as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Blood dribbles out of Franklin’s mouth. Even though most of his senses are dulled, his stripped teeth are still intensely sensitive to the grinding stone against the nerves in his teeth. Even the air brushing through his teeth as he inhales causes his eyes to water.

  His senses are also not dulled to the i
ntense aroma of the candy woman’s shit piling into the candy dish like a coil of soft serve ice cream. The excrement is a swirl of pink and purple colors. It emits a very sweet and tangy smell, like Nerds watermelon-grape candy. Yet it also has a terrible stench within the sweet. A rancid infected wound smell that is far more foul than that of human feces.

  Franklin cringes at the aroma and tries to break away from her grip on his jaw, but his muscles are too weak. He tries to speak to complain to her, but only blood bubbles out of his mouth. When she is finished, she pulls out a roll of toilet paper-sized bubbletape and wipes her hard strawberry buttocks. But she only pushes the candy dish to the side, doesn’t even bother to put the lid back on the dish, so Franklin is forced to endure the smell through the duration of his teeth sharpening.

  Eventually, Franklin builds a tolerance to Jujy’s strawberry drug. It doesn’t affect him as much as it did. He is able to think more clearly.

  When Jujy tries to feed him the meat of a child, Franklin has the willpower to resist.

  “I won’t eat that,” he says with his new green gummy lips.

  “But I hunted it for you,” she says.

  “I can’t eat children,” he says. “It’s terrible.”

  “No, these are really good ones,” she says, looking in her bag for a good piece. “Just try a bite.”

  Franklin grabs her with his marzipan hand. “No, I mean it is a terrible thing to eat children. I won’t eat them.”

  “But what will you eat?” she asks.

  “Anything else,” he says. “Candy.”

  “It’s not healthy to eat just candy,” she says. “You need meat.”

  “I’d rather die than eat the meat of a child,” he says.

  Jujy looks at him with a confused frown, as if he’s offended her in some way. Franklin thinks that if anyone he should be the one who is offended. She digs through the pieces of flesh, looking for one that might be suitable for him, but Franklin just shakes his head at everything he is offered.

  Jujy returns with a new bag of food for Franklin. This time it is filled with candy instead of flesh. There is a mound of chocolate that looks as if she cut it out of the side of a hill. There are peanut butter taffy flowers. There are spicy ginger plants, jawbreaker rocks, and a dead marshmallow animal.

  The animal looks like some kind of rabbit or a squirrel. It’s not exactly either. Blood is leaking out of its white marshmallow fur.

  “There is meat inside of it,” Jujy tells him. “You can survive on these.”

  Franklin eats the chocolate and peanut butter taffy, but decides against the animal. The idea of bloody raw meat wrapped in marshmallow does not appeal to him. Jujy gives him an annoyed look when he doesn’t eat it, like there is something terribly wrong with him.

  “Why are you keeping me prisoner here?” Franklin asks.

  “You’re not my prisoner,” she says. “You are my guest.”

  “Then unchain me,” Franklin says, tugging on his neck brace.

  “It is for your own good,” she says.

  “Just like removing my body parts and replacing them with candy is for my own good?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says.

  Then she points at the marshmallow animal. “It is also for your own good if you eat that.”

  Franklin cringes when he looks down on the creature. Its swollen bloody tongue dangles out of its white fluffy mouth.

  “I can’t eat raw meat,” he says.

  “Raw?” she asks. “What is raw?”

  “Uncooked,” he says.

  “Like the way cookies are cooked?” she asks. “Cooked meat would be weird.”

  “That’s how humans eat meat.”

  “We use cooking to make our buildings and furniture. We don’t cook food. That would be gross.”

  “I thought you people read books about humans,” he says. “You should know humans cook their food.”

  “I never read books,” she says. “Reading is boring.”

  Then she smiles at Franklin and bites the marshmallow animal’s head off.

  Licorice returns to meet Jujy’s guest as he had promised.

  Most of Franklin’s skin is now coated in candy parts. He looks just like a candy man. He can’t believe he has become like one of the creatures he fears. His eyes are the only thing that appear to be human. Jujy gives him a pair of green candy sunglasses to cover them.

  He still wears his apple-red suit, but it has been saturated in sugar and artificial flavorings so that it appears to be candy clothes. He holds his cane in his hand, so that he can draw the sword in case of defense. Jujy doesn’t release him from his chain and collar. She ignores him when he tells her it might look suspicious.

  “Black Licorice,” Jujy announces as the candy man enters her home.

  She points at Franklin. “This is Sour Apple.”

  “Good to meet you, Apple,” he says in his deep bubbling voice. “I hope you are feeling better.”

  Licorice steps forward and shakes Franklin’s hand.

  “Yes,” Franklin says, holding the man’s hard black fingers in his soft marzipan palm.

  By the way the man squeezes his hand, Franklin can tell he is making sure the hand is made of candy.

  “You are from the northern cave?” he asks.

  “Yes, he is,” Jujy says.

  “I’m good friends with someone who recently moved here from the north cave,” Licorice says. “His name is Red Vine. Do you know him?”

  “Never heard of him,” Franklin says.

  “That’s funny you’ve never met given the number who live there,” he says. “How many of them are there, again? Twenty?”

  “A little more,” Franklin says, putting on his best bluffing poker face.

  “With such a small population, I would think that you would know everyone there. My buddy Red Vine says he knows everyone there. Perhaps you know him by his nickname, Razzleberry?”

  Franklin can tell what he’s trying to do. Even without his advanced brain, he would be able to see through this game he is playing.

  “Never heard of him,” Franklin says. “Are you sure he is from the north cave?”

  “I am positive,” he says. “Perhaps you know each other and don’t even know it. Maybe I should introduce you. Would you like that?”

  “There wouldn’t be any point,” Franklin says.

  “Why not?” says the candy man.

  “Because there’s no such person,” Franklin says. “I don’t see the point in meeting someone that doesn’t exist.”

  Black Licorice smiles.

  “You’re not as dim as Jujube,” he says. “No, you’re actually pretty smart. Almost as smart as a human.”

  “Smarter,” Franklin says.

  “Smarter?” Licorice laughs, and rubs Franklin’s shoulder. “I think I like you, Apple. You’ve got strength of character.”

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “I suspected you to be the human being who killed Float,” he says. “I see now that I was wrong.”

  “Jujy told me about this,” Franklin says. “You found meat within a gum-goblin. Did it turn out to be your friend’s or a human’s?”

  “Funny you should mention it,” he says. “The meat in the original gum-goblins we found was definitely from Float. But yesterday we found more gum-goblins containing meat. The meat from these turned out to be from a human. He found a human hand in one, a human leg bone in another, a collection of human skin in another.”

  “Sounds like the gum-goblins got him first,” Franklin says.

  “Yes, it appears so,” Licorice says.

  “I think you better get going,” Jujy tells Licorice.

  “But I’ve only just arrived, my love,” Licorice says.

  Licorice pushes her aside to continue his man-to-man discussion with Franklin.

  “So, Apple,” he says. “Now that you are all better, where will you be staying?”

  Jujy bursts between the two men.

  “He’s staying wit
h me,” Jujy says.

  “But it’s been three days,” Licorice says. “A male and a female cannot live together for more than three days unless they are mates.”

  Jujy lifts the collar on Franklin’s neck and shakes the chain. Licorice looks at the chain as if he hadn’t realized it before. His eyes scan the length of the chain all the way into the bedroom.

  “What?” Licorice’s black ball eyes curl at Jujy. “He’s your mate? You told me—”

  “I told you that he wasn’t claiming me as his mate,” Jujy says. “He’s not. I’m claiming him as my mate.”

  Franklin looks at her with just as surprised a face as Licorice.

  “But you knew I was going to claim you as my mate,” he says. “You knew about the plans I was making for our future.”

  “It’s too late,” Jujy says, a satisfied smile on her face. “I’ve already chained him to my bedpost.”

  Licorice pushes Franklin out of the way and peeks into the bedroom to make sure the chain is actually connected to the bedpost. Then he punches a hole in the cookie wall.

  “Females don’t claim their mates,” he says. “It is males who do the claiming.”

  “My mother claimed her mate,” she says. “There is no law against it.”

  “I will not allow it,” he says.

  “There is nothing you can do now,” she says. “You must leave.”

  “I will not allow it,” he says.

  “Leave,” she says, pointing at the door.

  Licorice bursts through the front door and turns back to give them both an evil glare.

  “This coupling will not last,” he says. “I promise you that.”

  After Licorice is gone, Jujy rubs her fingers through her pink hair and closes her eyelids. Franklin stares at the candy woman. Her eyelids are so white they look like eggshells when closed. He realizes that he isn’t afraid of her anymore. He still hates her. He still plans to kill her. But he isn’t afraid of her.