Eight Ways by Mary E. Lowd

Blake had heard octopuses were smart, but it was hard to believe, looking at the blurring mass of muscle. He scooped the hand net into the cold water of the storage cell, like a plastic tub set into the deck of his small fishing boat. Tentacles writhed in a squirming reddish brown mass below. He couldn’t even make out a single individual creature in there. Just limbs. Squishy, slippery limbs.

A tentacle wrapped around his wrist, kissing his skin in the funny way of a vacuum sucking against your palm. He tried to shake it off, but another tentacle reached up and looped around his wrist, a little higher than the other. Suddenly, he noticed a pair of eyes looking up at him — Halloween orange with black bars for irises, much like a goat’s. There was a mark between the eyes; a jagged scar. He’d seen that scar before.

“Look at all the good it did you to escape.” Blake laughed. “Ornery little morsel. Right back into the frying pan for you.”

The scarred octopus was the only one that had ever escaped from the kitchen at Eight Ways, by squirting water at Dave, the head chef, and then slipping its way across the tile floor, over the counter, and out an open window.

This time, the scarred octopus was prepared and had friends. Tentacles kept wrapping around Blake’s arm, sucking and releasing, using their sucker discs to climb higher and higher. Up his arm, to his shoulder. Blake shook his arm and scoffed at the stupid creatures, more amused than scared. Then their beaks, tiny sharp mouths hidden between their arms, started nipping him. The pain was like needles — thick needles stabbing and grinding.

Blake opened his mouth to scream, but tentacles stuffed their way inside, slurping down the back of his throat and wrenching his jaw wider and wider until it cracked.

As the boat docked, Dave watched through the panoramic windows of the Eight Ways kitchen. He and Katarina were almost done closing the place up for the night. All they needed was the delivery of fresh octopi for tomorrow.

Blake lurched his way out of the boat, a silhouette against the coastal town’s lights reflecting on the water in Van Gogh-like smears.

“What the hell?” Dave said, wondering why Blake wasn’t carrying a tub full of delectable fresh octopi with him after deboarding. “He’s coming back empty handed?”

“That’s not Blake…” Katarina whispered. She’d only been working at Eight Ways a few months. But she could see that the silhouette wasn’t moving right. Not like Blake. Not like a person at all.

“What do you mean?”

It was a clear night, and they’d been able to see the fishing boat’s lights for the whole hour Blake had been out at sea, pulling up the clay pot traps. No other boats had come near.

The silhouette lurched toward them, making its way down the pier.

Katarina put down the knives she’d been sharpening and backed away from the windows.

“You’re being weird, get back to work,” Dave said. He went to open the dockside kitchen door. “Hey, Blake,” he called out. “Where are my blue plate special darlings?”

The only sound, beyond the lapping of the waves, was a squelching and rattling as Blake approached. When the light from the windows hit him, he was reddish brown and squirming all over, like something had torn off his skin, leaving only the muscles beneath. But the muscles writhed too much, and in places, the bones shone through. White and clean.

A few more steps forward, and Dave recognized the lumpy shapes of octopus bodies, stretched over Blake’s skeleton, nestling inside his ribs where his heart and lungs should be. Their tentacles worked together, wrapping around the bones and moving them like a marionette’s sticks, replacing the flesh and muscle they’d already eaten. Strange eyes peered out from his pelvis, from his shoulder, his legs. Everywhere tentacles writhed and alien eyes stared.

The octopus with the scar between its orange eyes had wrapped itself around Blake’s skull and operated his broken jawbone, as if pantomiming silent laughter. Inside the skeletal mouth rested a smaller octopus — daffodil yellow with brilliant blue rings. Deadly poisonous.

Dave started to back away, but too late, too slow. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, so he didn’t run or struggle, even as the writhing mass of tentacles reached out to him with both of the skeleton’s arms, grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him close, and kissed his face with a poisoned bite.

Dave fell to the floor, spasming and shaking. He’d be dead in minutes. Another skeleton, dressed in useless flesh, waiting to be cleaned.

Katarina choked back a sob, hiding behind the farthest counter. She watched as the skeleton filled with octopuses rambled through the room, rattling and squelching, bending in ways a human skeleton shouldn’t. It ran sucker disc covered tentacles over every surface, touching everything it could. She held her breath when the lurching figure came near her, waiting until her head pounded and her lungs burned, before gasping for air.

The octopuses didn’t see her with their strange eyes. They dragged Dave, still quaking from the poison, with them when they went. Back to the sea.

Katarina cried, shaking as if she’d been poisoned by the blue ring octopus’s bite herself. She fell asleep — too scared to move, too scared to stay conscious — curled up against the hard wood of the counter, and dreamed about the octopuses coming back, filling Dave’s skeleton as well as Blake’s. Gathering more and more skeletons until they built an army. She woke to the bright glare of morning light, bouncing off the sea.

All around her, like tiny pearls, tiny seeds, everywhere the octopus creature had touched… Eggs clung to all of the surfaces, and as the sunlight shone through their milky membranes, she saw the tiny orbs filled with miniscule fetal tentacles waving inside.

—

Mary E. Lowd is a prolific science-fiction and furry writer in Oregon. She’s had more than 180 short stories and a half dozen novels published, always with more on the way. Her work has won numerous awards, and she’s been nominated for the Ursa Major Awards more than any other individual. She is also the founder and editor of Zooscape. Learn more at marylowd.com or read more stories at deepskyanchor.com.