"Imp" by Joseph Bonnett
IMP
by Joseph Bonnett
Amanda deposited her amputated tongue into the fleshy looking centre of the large plant. It was somewhat like an oversized sunflower, but the inner disk florets were stricken with veiny red streaks among a putrid yellow, and the outer petals were so dark they were almost black, and as the plant devoured the roughly butchered chunk of tongue the petals seemed to stretch and curl and pull the meat in like spider’s legs encapsulating a fly. A wet gurgling sound rung out as the pores in the flower opened and chewed and consumed.
“Good, good,” said the small dark figure lurking under a nearby cluster of mother spleenwort ferns. “There is only so much blood they can drink before they tire of it, and the real hunger takes over. You could keep feeding them from those small gashes in your arms, but they will want more eventually. It’s a shame you don’t have a better knife; it’s going to be very tricky to remove your fingers and toes with that little blade.”
Amanda spat out a bloody wet grunt as she closed her pocketknife. Even with her tongue intact she had been rendered a trauma-stricken mess incapable of conversation. Forty-eight hours lost in the depths of the Waitakere ranges will do that. The dehydration, the hunger, and the fatigue will do that. And the strange little three-foot man-thing in the dark, an impish little fucker, just a black mass in the night, blending into the forest surroundings and hissing vulgar instructions…the Imp, will certainly do that too.
Amanda watched the blood drip from her chin onto the forest floor. The vines snapped at it, and it soaked into the dirt.
“Look,” said the Imp, “they have accepted your gift and are ready to help again, help show you the way home.”
Hundreds of the flesh-eating flowers that had miraculously started popping up everywhere since Amanda lost her way, simultaneously bent their stems and grandiloquently pointed their demonically floral heads in the same direction, guiding Amanda deeper into the dark forest. Traces of moon cut through the gaps in the canopy, but it was otherwise so dark that Amanda could barely see the way the flesh flowers directed. The Imp raised a small bony hand, and an unusually incandescent flame flickered from the end of his left index finger. “Let me help,” it said.
They trudged on, the Imp in front and Amanda dragging her defeated feet behind. The Imp giggled and occasionally disappeared into the dark leaving her standing and swaying in the pitch black until it popped out again, from behind, or above, hanging from branches like a demented monkey.
“This way you stupid flesh sack,” it cackled.
Amanda sobbed and prayed again that her husband was still looking for her, that maybe a search and rescue crew was on the trail. She hoped that when she had woken in their tent two days earlier and he was gone, that maybe he had just wandered off to piss and gotten disorientated; but that he was on it now; coming to save her.
They came to a small clearing that gave brief respite from the dense trees and cross vines that blocked the paths like immovable webs, and forced them to defer, and go around and add additional hours on tired legs. The flesh flowers dropped. All at once they went flaccid and flopped down. Amanda quickly lost all sense of direction and fell to her knees in exhaustion.
“Time for another one, another levy” the Imp said. “Make it a juicy one…what are you thinking?”
Amanda pulled out the knife, flicked the bloodied blade out and held it across her left pinkie finger, waiting for the Imps verdict.
“Hmm, on hindsight, that just won’t do,” the Imp said, ‘hardly any meat, barely fit for a dog, let alone our esteemed hosts, who seem particularly hungry today.”
She slowly moved the knife up to her forearm.
“Uh-uh, too grisly,” it said.
She dragged the blade all the way up to her shoulder and across the upper half of her body, leaving little cuts in the fabric of her jacket, but the Imp just shook its head in disapproval. When she ran it down her stomach and stopped with the blade between her legs the Imp let out a little squeal.
“Fantastic, with a gesture like that they will show you all the way home, I’m sure.”
A garden of flesh flowers suddenly popped up around her, as if they had been waiting, submerged in the dirt, and when they finished slurping their roughly hacked meal, all the flowers came together again to lead the way as beacons. Amanda and the Imp followed, but the trees got denser and stalled their progress. Amanda lost her blood, and her resolve, and she dropped to the rotten forest floor, crumpled on slimy roots.
A morepork cried in the night, on its hunt for small creatures, and all the forest around her groaned. The Imp pulled up close to Amanda, its putrid breath swarming over her face like sulphuric rotten garbage, and it whispered, “You have one more chance, one more opportunity for a sacrifice so big and so generous that they have no choice but to grant you your wish and get you home. Amanda rolled over, gave up, and stared at the sky, quite defeated. A rustling sound grew nearer, something big, and as the six-foot-tall flesh flower, some sort of queen of the floral beasts, edged its way up over her body and wrapped its wet tendrils around her face, the moon disappeared to her, and the sound of the forest faded as it drained her neck dry.
“Sorry dear,” the Imp said, “not to be this time I guess, but your skin and bones will make a fantastic additional room for my house. Just off the side of the living room, in fact I will sew you on to your husband’s skin, reunited after all.”