leaves. They could go naked, camouflage themselves with the leaves, and crawl under the bushes, which would end behind the thick shroud of smoke. They went nude, and put on D’s camouflage. N crept under the bushes first, and then one by one, they followed him under. As they crawled through, they knew when they had passed over the smoke, as the leaves on the bush above them were a luminous purple. The veins within the leaves stood out as stark black textures.
They soon made it to the end of the bush. Clustered together, they peeked through the leaves.
They saw the missionaries and the creature, and watched them play the game. When they understood what was happening they were entertained. Happily, they watched the missionaries lose, not knowing what the creature’s victory prize was. Foolishly they believed that their disguise would remain unnoticed by the aged eye. They based their beliefs on the missionaries and not their supernatural opponent.
The creature knew however, that the missionaries were the greater fools that night. The orphans’ flesh, which they knowingly played, was inconsequential. All flesh eventually returns to the earth from where its first father grew, but the human soul survives forever. It was their own souls that the missionaries would lose.
V
The Consumption
The smoke had lifted, only ash surrounded the table now. The first beams of the rising sun tore through the jungle. According to the creature’s rules, this signalled the end of the game.
The final moves had been placed. The missionaries had now lost.
Swiftly, the creature’s mouth opened, all life inside the clearing felt it, because within it there was nothing but a void.
Intuitively the missionaries instantaneously jumped off their rock seats, but it was already too late.
It curled its body around the void and became a fleshy orange circlet with one eye on each side. Then the fleshy circlet twisted, its radius slightly decreased, as if it was attempting to asphyxiate the void within. The area around the missionaries warped into a circular blur. The missionaries themselves stretched. Their bodily organs collapsed from compression as they were stretched head-first into the void, leading to somewhere between death and the flowing veins of the circlet.
The flesh snapped the hole shut instantly, ending the effects of the vortex and instigating the monster’s new transformation, a corporeal one.
The orphans, exposed, naked and frozen with horror, watched on. Strands of orange flesh wrapped around blobs of white fat that were spewing out of nothingness around the table. The table soon collapsed under the weight of fat. Two claws, two feet on short stumps, and a small head, popped out of the orange fat.
It was as if a hideous naked new orange missionary had replaced the three old ones. Aware and ashamed by its new nakedness, it grabbed the now-oily tablecloth and draped it across its lower body. Plasma seeped through the cloth, and spoilt it completely.
The creature then grinned directly at the orphans, pleased with its new life, and a fresh meal nearby. Its gums shone red with oozing blood from its new disturbed gums.
Stunned, the orphans all stared back at it for a few moments, before they fled towards the clearing’s edge.
The creature smashed through the table, vaulted through the air and caught a child. It dangled I by one leg over its mouth, and then swallowed him whole.
It charged after little L, and caught him before his tiny legs reached the clearing’s edge. E, the bravest and strongest orphan, ran at it, he managed to manoeuvre L out of its grasp, and the two orphans fled the clearing together.
N was the first orphan to clamber up a tree, they all followed after him, and knocked some of each other down whilst doing so. The orphans that were knocked down quickly found other empty trees to occupy. Soon all twelve children were clinging to high branches of six trees, close together.
The creature was far too old for such a crude tactic, so it simply sat in the centre of the six trees they had climbed, and waited. Nightfall came, and the sleep they missed the night before began to pass over them. N signalled with his lips not to wake L, who was the first to drift off to sleep. None of the other three orphans in the tree attempted to grab him as he dropped off his branch. He fell down into the open jaws of creature.
B was the next to drop from a tree, and K soon followed.
After K fell, M and N were looked on at, by the remaining six desperate for guidance. However, M and N’s expressions read what they already hoped to happen. They hoped that after a certain amount of them were eaten, the creature would move on back to where it came from.
It stayed.
D fell; G followed.
Q and R dropped together.
Little L was in the same tree as N. L slipped away, N simply watched. O, on a lower branch of a different tree, looked upward at N. His respect for himself and the other orphans had fallen far lower than it had ever been for the missionaries.
M fell, and N smiled as the orphan he always saw as a traitor, passed through the mouth of the creature.
N finally dropped. He awakened instantly as the creature’s teeth tore open his small-sunburnt body. His remaining blood was quickly draining and being absorbed into the creature’s mouth. N’s mind began to drift away. He could see himself flying away free over the treetops. L was sitting on top of one and gave him a wave. He kept rising, and passed over the corrupted sun, never again would its poisoned light scar him, never again would he be sick or cry. He was now free from the torments below.
VI
The Last Boy
The creature left, and headed back towards the unexplored place it came.
O was still too scared to move. He fell into a deep sleep, but did not drop down.
In his mind, he could see the missionaries, on a small platform surrounded by purple flames. They addressed the flames as the King of Heaven, and begged not to be destroyed. The other orphans, now in shining knight armour, cheered around the flames. L hid behind a flowing turquoise dress he knew as the Queen of heaven. M appeared and tugged on the flowing dress and asked for mercy on their behalf. The Queen hummed, the flames reduced and gradually vanished.
A torrent of water washed the missionaries out of their judgement, into an endless ocean. They grew fish scales and transformed into three fish; they then became six fish; the six became hundreds; the hundreds became innumerable.
A colossal fort, in the centre of the ocean, regularly sucked up the fish through an oval shaped hatch. It had other countless doors, and aqueducts attached to it. O knew it to be the final Kingdom. For thousands of years, they were sucked through the fort, and seemingly dined upon. Like sand through an hourglass, the years flowed by in O’s mind. After being dined upon for what seemed to be five thousand years, the missionaries regained human form but with their former ugliness vanished.
They were finally allowed to enter the kingdom. Inside they entered a hall, its space undeterminable. A few feet in was a table that stretched beyond visibility, along its visible stretch were ceaseless plates filled with hot food. As they moved towards it, wooden chairs appeared on either side of the visible stretch. They took a seat each and sat down. Then the shiny knight orphans and all the saints they once preached of, appeared beside them. They dined with them, laughed, joked, ate and ate.
O wished he was sitting there also and looked for his seat, but then he woke up, still in the tree’s branches in the middle of the afternoon. His dream quickly forgotten, he, slowly, tried to climb down, but slipped and tumbled down into a dried-bush. He stood up, alone, scratched and starving; the last remaining resident of Orphans’ Clearing and Red-Brick Orphanage.
He dashed back inside the clearing, into the Orphanage itself and upstairs to the missionaries’ forbidden quarters. There he found a stash of raw-fish. In fear of the missionaries’ ghosts and the blood red shadows the sun cast into the narrow hall, he took the fish outside to cook. The night would eventually come, and he would prefer to be back inside the Orphanage for that. He then remembered his senseless dream.
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nbsp; The boy O, grew up to be a great game hunter. He lived in solitude in the old orphanage. The heads of the great beasts he had slain, mounted on the four walls around him, kept him company. He hunted throughout the jungles every day and occasionally at night, for the creature that had stolen his faith.
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