Troody and the Ghast

This short story is set in the Legends of the Known Arc universe. If you enjoy it, please share! Also, drop me a note and let me know what you thought.

When eight-year-old Gertrood Littlefeather is left waiting outside a tense courtroom, she doesn’t expect to meet a real Ghast — one of humanity’s oldest enemies.

I met a Ghast today.

Dad was away, and my usual sitter Hann had a doctor’s appointment, so Mom had to take me to the courthouse with her.

The courthouse was a big stone building. We went inside and she put me on a big stone bench in a big stone hallway between two of the big stone pillars and told me, no matter what, that I was to stay on the bench and not get up for any reason, any reason at all, until she came for me. She told me not to talk to anybody, to just sit quietly.

I asked for her komnic so that I could play Jullop Beans but she said, no, she’d need it. She gave me a bottle of water and a snackbox and a book to read. A stupid kids book. She kissed me on the head and smiled, but she’d been mumbling all morning, and I knew she wasn’t in a good mood. Big things were happening at the courthouse today, and she certainly hadn’t planned to bring me with her.

Mom looked back twice before she went through the tall metal doors into the courtroom, once to smile and give me a little wave, and then again just before the doors closed behind her, when she thought I wasn’t looking. That time she wasn’t smiling. She looked sad, and scared, which scared me.

I don’t ever cry. Well, that’s not exactly true. I hardly ever cry. I didn’t cry then, although I thought about it. Maybe I cried a little inside my head, but nobody could see it on my face.

I opened the book and held it in my lap and stared at it like I was reading, only I didn’t read it. I just stared at it. Maybe if all the strangers hurrying up and down the big stone hallway thought I was reading a book, they wouldn’t stop to bother me. People reading books in public places are practically invisible. Nobody ever got killed or kidnapped or anything while they were reading a book. Not ever. Just try to remember the last time you saw somebody in public sitting quietly, reading. Bet you can’t, because they were invisible.

But I was only pretending to read, which, now that I think about it, meant I actually wasn’t safe.

Without looking up from the pages, I listened. The hall was gigantic and echoey, filled with footsteps and doors opening and closing and people whispering. Even when the people whispered, which they all did, the echoes made their whispers scary. They were all in a hurry. Nobody was smiling. I didn’t look up; I could just tell that nobody was smiling. I could tell by the way they walked, and the way they whispered. Nobody who walks fast and whispers is ever happy.

Mom told me not to worry, that she was only here to talk to a judge about some bad people and the bad things they were doing, but I’m not stupid. Mom is a troublemaker. At least, that’s what Dad always says. He’s usually laughing when he says it, but sometimes I see him wince, and sometimes at night, like last night when they thought I was asleep, I hear them arguing:

Dad: You can’t do this. Promise me you won’t do this.

Mom: I have to. If I don’t, then who will?

Dad: There’s a reason nobody is willing to represent them. The local Consenti, and even the Father Regis, supports the relocation of their villages.

Mom: Of course they do. The Church technically owns their whole planet. They stand to make a fortune in corporate tithes if the core mines are allowed to open.

Dad: But it’s hopeless. How do you expect—

Mom: It’s not hopeless! Gods damn it, it’s not! There are a lot of people trying to protect the forests and seas of Colladum, and even more who are sympathetic to the indigenous population. If we can convince them to speak with one voice—

Dad: But it’s the Church. You can’t go against them.

Mom: Why not? Even the Consentis are afraid of public opinion.

Dad: Consentis aren’t afraid of anything.

Mom: That’s where you’re wrong. If I can get the news media to pay attention and get the word out about what’s happening on Colladum, the masses will respond.

Dad: Gemma, think about what you’re saying. You can’t afford to make enemies in the Regia Curia. Those guys are powerful. Things… happen to people who oppose them.

I usually don’t understand what they’re talking about, but last night I heard the fear in Dad’s voice, which scared me, and I heard the determination in Mom’s voice, which also scared me but also made me feel a little proud.

I wasn’t so proud sitting on the big stone bench. My feet didn’t reach the floor and I was starting to get hungry and all I wanted was for Mom to come out of that courtroom and take me home.

One set of the echoey footsteps was getting slower as it approached. I swallowed and tried not to breathe too fast. The footsteps stopped. I didn’t look up from my book, but I could tell when somebody sat down on the big stone bench just across the big stone hallway, facing me.

I really stared at the book. After a while I realized that I should probably turn the page every once in a while so as not to look suspicious. I mean, who just sits and stares at the same page forever? Only a weirdo would do that.

I started to hyperventilate a little. That means I was breathing too fast. I get dizzy sometimes when I hyperventilate. I do it when I’m really scared, but also when I’m really excited.

Don’t hyperventilate, Trood, Dad is always saying to me. He thinks it’s funny, but it’s not. I looked it up on Mom’s komnic. It’s a real thing. It causes the brain to get drunk on too much oxygen. Dad says I’m excitable. He says I get it from Mom.

I tried to imagine Dad sitting next to me. He’d probably be poking me in the ribs and pointing out the people in their fancy clothes as they walk down the big stone corridor. He’d be whispering funny things about them to make me laugh. He says my laugh is like sunshine sparkling through raindrops. I told him once that the sun never shines when it rains, but then he made me look up rainbows on the wiki and I had to admit I was wrong. Turns out that sometimes it rains and it’s sunny, all at the same time. And that’s when magic happens, according to Dad.

Thinking of Dad calmed me down a little. I put the book down on the stone bench next to me. Without looking away from it, I reached for the snackbox. The paper crinkled, and the noise scared me, and I jumped a little and bumped my water bottle.

That was a huge mistake.

The metal water bottle fell to the stone floor and made the loudest crashing noise ever in the history of the whole universe that echoed all the way down to both ends of the corridor and then reflected and echoed again and again. I squeezed my eyes shut but then I could hear the bottle rolling and rolling across the big stone hallway, bumping loudly across the uneven stones, and the sound lasted forever and ever…

Then it stopped.

I cracked open one eye and squeaked a glance across the hall. My water bottle had stopped rolling because there was a boot on it. The boot belonged to the stranger sitting across the hall. I stared at the boot, afraid to open my eyes any wider. I was a weird boot. Funny looking.

The boot lifted, and then a hand came down to pick up the bottle.

No, not a hand.

A claw.

I slammed my eye shut and I stopped hyperventilating. I was too scared to breathe at all.

I didn’t move.

The stranger with the claw spoke. In a whisper, like everyone else. It was a weird whisper, though.

Not human.

“Excuse me, little larva, but you dropped your bottle.”

I didn’t move. A long time passed, and I started to feel weird and then I remembered I wasn’t breathing, so I took a breath as silently as I could, without moving a muscle.

Then, strangely, the most unexpected noise ever.

My water bottle was rolling again, across the hall.

Toward me.

It bumped against my foot.

I gasped.

“It’s okay. You can pick it up,” the stranger whispered.

I cracked open one eye again, just enough to see the bottle next to my shoe. It looked normal.

I took a deep breath, opened my eyes. And looked up at the stranger.

I closed my eyes again, but I didn’t scream. I mean, I might have let out a little mousy squeak, but it wasn’t loud enough to echo.

The stranger across the hall was a Ghast.

A real, live Ghast.

“Thank you,” I whispered quickly, because everybody knows you’d better be nice to a Ghast.

Ghasts eat people. Humans, like me. At least they used to, back when the Ghast and the Earthlings were at war.

But that was a long time ago. They don’t eat people anymore.

Do they?

I opened one eye.

It was looking at me. I could tell it was looking at me because one of its two slimy eyepods was pointed straight at me.

I opened my other eye.

It extended its second eyepod.

We stared at each other with both our eyes.

“Aren’t you going to pick up your water?” it whispered.

I swallowed and picked up my water bottle.

“Thank you,” I said again.

“Why are you alone? A larva should never be left alone.”

“I’m not alone,” I whispered.

It rotated one of its eyepods to scan the hallway.

“Where is your clan mother?”

I swallowed and pointed to the closed doors of the courtroom.

It made a funny wave of its eyes.

“I see.”

I swallowed again and worked up my courage.

“What’s your name?”

“My name is Bin’Dreik,” it said.

“You’re a Ghast,” I said.

“You are very observant,” it said.

“Are you a girl or a boy?” I asked.

“I am neither,” it said. “But you may call me a she.”

I thought about that for a minute.

“Do you eat… people?”

“I have never eaten a human. But some of my grandmothers did, back in olden times. I hear humans are delicious.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. I sat for a long time. A policeman walked by. He looked at the Ghast, then at me.

“Are you okay?” the policeman asked me.

“I’m fine.” I said.

“Are you alone?”

“No, my mother is in there,” I said, and pointed at the big doors.

The policeman looked at the doors and then back at me. “Is your mother Gemma Littlefeather?”

I nodded.

“Thought so. You look just like her.” The policeman looked sad and let out a sigh. “Your mom is a nice lady. Let me know if you need anything.” He looked at the Ghast. “Is this thing bothering you?”

“No, she’s nice, too,” I said.

The policeman grimaced. He turned to the Ghast and said, “I’m watching you. Keep your filthy claws to yourself.”

“Of course,” said the Ghast.

The policeman grimaced again, but he walked away.

The Ghast wiggled her eyepods at the policeman’s back. This made me giggle.

“Are you afraid of me?” she asked.

“A little bit,” I said.

“Ah, don’t be. A Ghast would never hurt a larva. Not even a human larva.”

“I’m not a larva. I’m a kid.”

She made a laughing sound, except that instead of coming from her mouth, it came from tiny little air holes all over her body.

“What’s your name,” she asked.

“Troody Littlefeather. It’s short for Gertrood.”

“It is my pleasure to meet you, Troody Littlefeather.” She dipped an eyepod toward my book. “What are you reading?”

“I wasn’t really reading,” I confided. I explained my theory about how nobody ever got killed or kidnapped or hurt or anything while they were reading a book.

“Hmm,” she said. “You may be correct. I will make a note of that.”

I nodded knowingly. She nodded back at me. She pointed toward my snack.

“Are you going to eat that?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“What is it?”

“It’s a schlith sandwich with chips. And a pickle.”

“Very nice. What’s a pickle?”

I opened the snackbox and held up the pickle. “Want some?” I offered.

The Ghast made a weird motion with her eyestalks. She stood up. She was really tall. I wasn’t expecting her to cross the hall and sit next to me, but that’s what she did. She was scary for a minute but she sat all the way at the other end of the big stone bench, a long way away.

She held her arm out. It was very long. Her hands were big and bony, too.

“I will try some… pickle,” she said. “Just a small piece.”

“You smell weird,” I said. “Do all Ghasts smell like you?”

“Humans smell… weird… to us Ghasts, too,” she said.

“Like, do we smell… bad?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Do I smell bad?”

She made a sniffing sound through all the tiny little holes in her crusty skin.

“You smell just fine,” she said. “Mostly, I smell that pickle.”

I broke the pickle in half and handed her a piece. She used the two biggest claw fingers on her hand to take it from me. She was very careful.

I held up my half of the pickle and took a bite. She put her half up to her mouth. Instead of a regular mouth with lips and teeth and a tongue, she had two sets of pointy fangs and a bunch of weird and gross little finger-thingies inside the hole behind the fangs.

My half of the pickle was crunchy. I love pickles. Dad says I’m a pickle monster.

The Ghast crunched on her half of the pickle.

“Interesting,” she said.

“Do you like it?”

“I like it very much,” she said.

I guess that made her a pickle monster, too. An actual pickle monster. A monster who likes pickles. I wished Dad were here. He’d love this.

A noise came from behind the courtroom doors, like all of a sudden the people inside were all shouting at each other. Everybody walking and whispering in the hallway stopped walking and whispering and looked toward the doors. There were two policemen guarding the doors. One of them was the same man who’d talked to me earlier. He looked in my direction. I waved at him. He smiled back at me, but then he frowned. Maybe it was because he saw the Ghast sitting next to me. Or maybe it was because of the shouting people inside the courtroom.

The Ghast was looking at the doors, too, with both her eyepods. She flicked her eyepods down and they disappeared into little holes in her head, then they popped back up. Was that how Ghasts blinked?

All of a sudden the doors to the courtroom opened. One of the two tall doors slammed into the wall, and the policeman on that side had to jump out of the way.

A man ran out, followed by more policeman. He was screaming something. The policemen all jumped on him. They all fell, right in the middle of the hallway. The man was fighting the policemen.

“Justice for the innocent!” the man screamed. “End the hegemony of the Church!”

The man broke free and started running down the hallway. Toward me.

The Ghast stood up and stepped into the man’s path. The man saw her and stopped dead in his tracks. His face went white. One of the policemen hit the man and he stopped screaming. He fell to the ground and moaned. The other policemen all jumped on him again and pinned him to the floor. One of them put cuffs on his hands.

I realized that I’d stopped breathing again. I gasped a breath.

Somebody yelled, “Troody!”

It was Mom. She was running through the courtroom doorway towards me.

She saw the Ghast standing in front of me, and she stopped, too.

“Troody!”

I ran past the Ghast to Mom. She picked me up. She never picked me up because I was too heavy and Mom is a small woman, but that time she did it anyway.

“Are you okay?” She was asking me, but she was looking at the Ghast.

“I’m okay. Who is that man? Why is he yelling?”

She relaxed a little. “He’s a protester. He’s loud, but he won’t hurt anybody.”

“He’s scary,” I said. The police were escorting him away. He was struggling and still shouting.

“Justice for the innocent!”

Mom put me down. I held her hand. She turned to the Ghast.

“Bin’Dreik. So nice to see you again.”

“I am honored, as always,” said the Ghast.

“I was hoping you’d make it this morning,” Mom said.

“I was delayed by security. They are not accustomed to my kind here. They had to contact my embassy to verify my credentials. It took all morning. By then they’d sealed the courtroom.”

“I’m so sorry.”

The Ghast did a little shrug. “It would be the same for you on my homeworld. There, it is Earthlings who are the monsters.”

Mom made a little bow. She looked down at me and squeezed my hand. “You met my daughter?”

“I did,” said the Ghast. “She is very kind and brave. She shared her snack with me.”

Mom gave me an unbelieving look.

“She likes pickles,” I said.

Mom turned to the Ghast.

“It’s true,” the Ghast said. “Quite delicious.”

The policemen with the screaming man had pulled him through some doors at the end of the big stone hallway, but I could still hear him screaming.

Mom looked at me. “I’m sorry Trood. I’m calling my friend Geen to come pick you up. I should have done that in the first place. I didn’t think it would take this long.”

“Are you kidding me, Mom? This place is cool.” I pointed to the Ghast. “Plus, I got to meet a Ghast!”

Mom laughed. “Yes, you did. Still, I’m calling Geen.” Mom turned to the Ghast. “This was supposed to be a preliminary hearing, but the defendants just dropped an evidence bomb on us. Your testimony as an expert is more important than ever.”

“It’s why I am here,” said the Ghast.

“Did you bring the relic?” Mom asked.

The Ghast patted a small lump in the wrap that covered her waist.

Mom looked relieved. “Good. Come back inside with me. Are you okay with addressing the judges directly?”

“I am.”

Mom looked uncomfortable.

“They will want to see the relic.”

“I know. I am prepared.”

Mom nodded. Then she grinned. “They aren’t expecting a Ghast, you know.”

“Nobody ever expects a Ghast,” the Ghast said.

“We’re starting again, Counselor Littlefeather,” said the policeman from the courtroom door.

Mom squeezed my hand. “Troody, will you be okay for just a few more minutes? It won’t take Geen very long to get here.”

I pulled my hand away, even though I didn’t really want to. “I’m good, Mom. Really.”

Mom smiled, then got a naughty look. She turned to the Ghast.

“Do the thing for Trood,” Mom said. “Like you did for me.”

The Ghast looked around. “The thing? Here? Are you sure?”

Mom nodded. She squeezed my hand even harder, and whispered, “Watch this. Don’t be scared.”

The Ghast inhaled through all her little breathy-holes.

Then, boom! Before I could move or say anything, the Ghast changed. Her whole chest and shoulders exploded into a million little pointy blades as long and shiny as kitchen knives. Her eyestalks dropped into their little holes and her whole head hinged open at the back. Great big yellow lumps, like balloons, swelled from the sides of her neck. The fangs and the gross little finger thingies in her mouth-hole opened wider than I would have though possible and deep in her throat I could see rows and rows of great big pointy shark’s teeth.

Then, boom, as fast as she’d changed, she changed back.

I swallowed. Hard.

“Wow,” I squeaked.

“Do that in the courtroom if the opposing counsel tries to interrupt you,” Mom said to the Ghast. “Their lead is an asshole.”

“I will not,” said the Ghast.

Mom laughed. “Too bad.” She leaned down to me. “We have to go. I’m calling Geen right now. Will you be okay for ten more minutes?”

I looked around at all the strangers in the hallway. All their fast walking and all their whispers had stopped. They were all standing still, frozen, all staring at me, Mom, but mostly the Ghast.

“Don’t worry, Mom. I don’t think anybody will ever mess with me again,” I said.

Troody and the Ghast

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Patrick Cumby