“Nothing,” Jujy says. “Just my guest.”
“You have a guest?”
“He’s from the northern cave and needed a place to stay.”
Franklin falls onto the floor. He feels along the cookie wall in the dark, trying to find his cane.
“How long has he been here?” he asks.
“He just got here today,” she says.
“It seems funny that he arrives today of all days,” he says. “I think I better meet him.”
Licorice reaches for the door, but Jujy blocks his path.
“You can’t,” she says. “He’s sick.”
Franklin leaves the cane and crawls under the bed to hide.
“He has the cheese flu,” she says. “If you go in you’ll catch it.”
Licorice steps away from the door. “Cheese flu? So is he going to die?”
“I’m not sure,” she says.
“How long do you plan on keeping him here?” he asks.
“At least three days.”
“Three days?” Licorice yells. “He’s not taking you as his mate, is he?”
“No,” she says.
“He better not take you as his mate,” he says.
“I’m just helping him get better.”
Franklin hears footsteps as Licorice returns to the front door.
“I will return in three days,” Licorice says, “once he is well. But let me tell you this, Jujube, if you have lied to me in any way you will be sorry.”
“I am not lying,” she says.
“Of course you are not,” he says.
They say their goodbyes and the door closes. Neither Jujy nor Franklin make a sound until the candy man’s footsteps are too far away to hear.
The light turns on. From under the bed, Franklin watches Jujy’s stiff candy cane legs cross the room. If he had his cane sword, he would have been able to stab her in the feet, knock her down, and then slash her throat right there. But his cane is too far away. She kneels down and peeks at him with her dead doll face.
“He’s gone,” she says. “It would have been a waste if they fed all your meat to the lemon hogs.”
At this range, her strawberry aroma smoothes his senses so softly that he finds himself smiling at her.
At night, Jujy makes him a bed on the floor and then goes to sleep. He is still chained to her bedpost. Her snores sound like she’s blowing into a candy whistle.
Lying on gummy pillows and brown sugared blankets, it dawns on Franklin that he is sleeping in the same room as the monster that plagued his nightmares as a child. She’s the same monster that killed Laura, Hillary, and Andrew. She’s the same monster he has spent his entire life trying to find so that he could get his revenge.
He debates whether or not to kill the candy woman in her sleep. His cane is within reach. He could do it easily. Just stab her through an eye into the brain. But he’s not sure if he should kill her just yet. She is protecting him from the other candy people for some reason. Franklin believes she’s just hiding him like a dog would hide a bone. She obviously doesn’t like the taste of him, but perhaps she feels bad about wasting any kind of food. Franklin knows she will kill him eventually, but at least she wants to keep him alive at the moment. Without her protection he’s more likely to be killed by the other candy people. He wonders if it is worth taking the risk. Even if he dies, he’ll at least die satisfied.
His muscles are too loose and relaxed to do anything about it tonight. His eyes droop shut and his mind drifts. Before he falls asleep, the marshmallow puppy curls up next to him. It is soft and warm against his arm. It smells so delicious that he almost takes a bite out of it in his sleep.
Franklin awakes to incredible pain. He squeezes the stump where his leg should be. The candy woman is nowhere in sight. He can’t smell the strawberry fragrance. She’s gone. Now that her intoxicating pheromones are nowhere in the vicinity, Franklin is sobering up. His mind is clearing and his pain is gushing in. The pain is so great that he can’t even move. He screams and squeezes Jujy’s tootsie roll bedpost so hard that his fingers make indentions.
The marshmallow puppy cocks its head, and watches him with black jellybean eyes as he writhes on the floor.
The candy woman returns, carrying a large white bag over her shoulder like Santa Claus. Franklin breathes her fragrance as deep as he can to calm the pain as quickly as possible. She notices him vigorously inhaling her scent and it makes her blush. The pain doesn’t go away quickly enough. The fragrance just makes him dizzy at first. She sits down next to him on the floor and squeezes her toes in the air. Then she drops her bag between her candy cane legs and digs through it like Santa digging for presents.
Franklin is paralyzed at the sight of the bag. He knows what is inside of it. When Jujy pulls out a tiny hand, no bigger than a four-year-old’s, Franklin figures that she has just returned from a hunt. She’s killed a child and brought back the remains.
“Your teeth aren’t sharp enough to tear through the meat,” Jujy says. “I’ll do it for you.”
She rips a sliver of meat off of the tiny hand and stuffs it into Franklin’s mouth. Franklin doesn’t move. He is in shock. He pushes it out of his mouth with his tongue, but Jujy stuffs it back in with her long fingernail.
“You need your strength,” she says. “I’m going to save you.”
She pushes the meat so far back into his throat that he is forced to swallow it or choke. The meat is rough going down.
“That’s good,” she says.
He doesn’t move at all. She begins to chew up the meat for him and spit it into his mouth. But before she makes him swallow again he sees a face staring at him from inside of the bag, peeking out among the bloody pieces of flesh. It is the face of a dead four-year-old girl, staring at him blankly as he is force-fed skin from her knuckles.
For several hours, Franklin is in a daze from the strawberry drug, from the pain, and from the shock of seeing the dead girl’s face. He is only partially aware when Jujy connects a new leg to his stump.
The leg looks like that of a mannequin’s only it is red and made of hard candy. It smells like sour apple. In his daze, Franklin smiles at it.
“It matches my suit,” he says with a limp smile, a line of drool slipping from his lips.
Jujy pats him on the shoulder, happy that he approves.
He is surprised when he discovers that he can move the joints and toes of his new candy leg.
Franklin remains in a drunken state for a couple of days. Jujy cuts more body parts from him and replaces them with candy parts. She removes his left hand and gives him one made of marzipan. She skins his chest and pours hot melted green apple liquid onto him. When it cools, it hardens into candy skin like hers. She cuts slits into his good arm and inserts gumballs. Then she glazes it and coats it in cinnamon. She removes his eyebrows and all of his hair. She cuts off his cheeks and his nose, replacing them with green and white swirled lollipops. She leaves his brain exposed, but decorates it with sprinkles and candy buttons.
Jujy continues to force-feed him human flesh, but he is unsure whether it is the flesh of children or pieces of his own body. He decides he’d rather not know.
Franklin keeps asking her why she is doing all of this to him, but her reply is always: “I’m saving you.”
Jujy files Franklin’s teeth into sharp points as she goes to the bathroom in front of him. She does not have a bathroom. She uses a candy dish for a toilet. In the middle of sharpening his teeth, she just pulled the large dish out from the corner of the room to beneath her squatting legs and began to defecate in front of Franklin as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
