SSCS 02: Installment 28 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 28 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
“Here.” Gran-Tom held out one of those clawed hands now, one of the older, cracked tea-cups held in it. “Drink this to soothe your throat. I know now what the problem is, and I know what to do, but we have a lot of work to do to get you ready before the next moonrise. You’ll need the First, Second, and Third Hums all down perfectly.”
Warily, Mina switched hands on the muck-rake and took the cup. The tea tasted like oyster bells, because of course it did.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 28: 21.0610
***
So then, Mina and gran-Tom spent the next several hours standing in muck and singing to the pigs.
Gran-Tom did allow for small breaks – during which she tried to coax Mina to swallow ever-more mouthfuls of oyster-bell tea (it was actually better cold) – and so during one of these Mina managed to ask why gran-Tom was so confident now that she could teach Mina not just one but three of her Hums when Mina’s throat still felt like she’d been swigging glass instead of tea and she couldn’t remember a note of what they’d sung last night. The priestess’ answer was confident, but not in the least-bit reassuring: “Because here” – she gestured with a claw to the muck under their feet – “and now you won’t have a mostly-insane ancestor spirit trying to possess you the whole time.”
Considering that, and given this information, Mina was fairly sure her problems up until now had probably mostly involved a mostly-insane ancestor spirit actively possessing gran-Tom, the priestess’ matter-of-fact words chilled Mina straight down to her toes, and it was several long moments of not even breathing before she could force herself to nod, and raise her cup to her lips, and choke down another swallow of the fuzzy, musky oyster-bell tea. The Other One already had the power to force Mina’s body to follow its bidding – spoken or unspoken – and to steal away memories of the songs from her childhood. Would Mina even exist anymore if it was her body the Other One took up residence in?
So she just tried not to think about it after that. Just like she tried not to smell the pig-muck smell that was definitely, really going to be ground permanently into her clothes by the time they left, or to hear Bunsnort grunting along encouragingly behind her as though he could learn the Hums with her, too. (Bunsnort’s grunts were consistently flat, so that was both distracting and sort of sour-y jarring any time his notes crossed the ones from Mina and gran-Tom just wrong.)
But, Mina was at least able to pay attention to what gran-Tom was teaching without the strange sense of not-really-there-ness that was all she had from the songs of last night. And the Second and Third Hums had much less of the repetitive buzzing than the first one, so she was mostly not worried about being rattled apart by buzzy Hums. The Third Hum even, almost, sort of had a melody, if you put your ears in the right frame of mind, and Mina was almost managing to master that frame of mind, too.
Which was why it took her far too long to realize that she smelled roses.
By the time she did realize it, it was too late; one of gran-Tom’s tentacles was already wrapping itself around her throat.