"We did bring you some other gifts," Nagi said."We need your help with them.Samples.We need to know the composition of these chemicals, asides from the human substrate."
The spiracles on Gurg's face opened and closed, and his neck swiveled, snake-like, over to Nagi.
"How kind of you," he said."What is the occasion?"
"Forensics work," Eddie said."A human died.Real messy.At least, we think it was a human.They melted before they took ten steps."
"Could be normal decomposition," Gurg said."Nothing my palate would need to discern."
"The human was alive this morning," Eddie said."His friend confirmed with the authorities that she heard from him the night before.There's no way that level of decomp could happen in that short of a period."
"Unless," Gurg said, hissing."Open the snackbox, Nagi, I'm starving."
"Patience," Nagi said."I'll feed these to you one by one.But you should also know that I managed to expose myself to some of the effluvia.It burned right through my flesh."
"Ooooh, that's what that smell was," Gurg heaved."Let me have a taste, Nagi."
"Can you isolate the caustic substance in this?"
"I can isolate anything from everything," Gurg said, voice salacious."I can tell you if a rat pissed in a vat of peanut butter, if a human was allergic to latex, and if a vampire drank deep of someone they ought not to.There ain't a flavor I can't isolate and reproduce, no odor rank enough for me to not identify.Y'all know this.Now are you going to offer yourself up to me, Nagi, or are you gonna sit there and keep giving me a case of the blue-balls?"
"Patience," Nagi said.
Gurg drew himself up.Hands and arms bulged from his sides, fleshy extrusions sticky with webbed skin.
"You talk to me of patience?"Gurg bellowed.I gasped in.It smelled like stomach acid."I have been down here, isolated, left alone from all of creation, with only my brothers and sisters from my birth swamp here to keep me company.I could feed freely in the old days, and now all you do is come and give me scraps?You feed me now, Nagi, and I won't rise up out of this water and swallow all three of you alive!"
"We can always leave," Eddie said.
There was a tense moment, for a second or two, and a great flickering of expression on Gurg's face, before it collapsed again.
"Fine," he said."Have it your way.I have been less than a gentleman, and it's nice to have company for a change.At your leisure, Nagi.May as well have a bit of a talk and chatter while we're at it.I can have my assistant make you some tea.Got a special recipe.Grown from my own trees right here in my own swamp."
"Finally," Nagi said."I was beginning to think you'd lost all sense of propriety."
There was yetanother chamber we walked through, with a phonograph and a tea table set up in one part of the room.Gurg had withdrawn deep into the water, and with a shaking of the foundation beneath us, he raised himself again, this time much smaller, much more diminutive, rising up and extruding a bit of himself and his face that looked very much the size of Eddie.He sat, legs crossed, like a gentleman, while the rest of him dangled in the water.
He sat at the head of the table.I sat opposite him.Eddie and Nagi sat on either side.Some scampering furry thing came in and poured us some scalding hot tea.I tried not to look at the slimy window near me.The eyeball on a stick was there again, unblinkingly staring at me.
"Some music?"Gurg asked."I've got some Loretta Lynn.I was always very partial to her."
"That would be lovely," Nagi said, consummate house guest.
The furry monkey thing turned on the record player.I snuck another peek.The eye was still there.
"Ignore him," Gurg said."That's my dumb fool of a brother.Never could talk to women, even when he was, well, different than now.He'd stand back and stutter, slack-jawed.Now he just peeps 'em."
"What is he?"I asked.
"My flesh and blood," Gurg said."Don't we all have family we'd rather not talk about?"
He had a point…
"I come from the bayou," Gurg said."We all was born like you, once upon a time.Then something came down, washed from the reactor, maybe.Or maybe it was a chemical left over from the war.Maybe even, as I suspect, an angry woman I did wrong.However it happened, we went for a dip, and became what you see.Creatures of the brackish water.Of course, my current form gives me a benefit that the old me never had."
"A starter," Nagi said."Stacey, perhaps you'd better look away."
A glimmer of a knife, a squirt of blood, and the clattering of bone on porcelain.Nagi hissed, controlling his breathing, and then offered up the finger on the plate, passing it reverentially over.
