Behind it, the familiar was motionless. It made tools of shadows and silence, keeping dark and quiet stitched to it as the giant tracked its false trail. The little familiar sent fibres into the ground, to pipework inches below. It connected to the plastic with tentacles quickly as thick as viscera, made the pipe a limb and organ, shoving and snapping it a foot below its crouching opponent. It drove the ragged end up out of the earth, its plastic jags spurs. It ground it into the controlling mass of the old familiar, into the dead centre of meat, and as the wounded thing tried to pull itself free, the guileful young familiar sucked through the broken tube.
It ballooned cavities in itself, gaping vacuums at the ends of its new pipe intestine. The suction pinioned its enemy, and tore chunks of bloody matter from it. The familiar drew them through the buried duct, up into its own body. Like a glutton it swigged them.
The trapped old one tried to raise itself but its wood and metal limbs had no purchase. It could not pull itself free, and the pipe was too braced in earth to tear away. It tried to thread its own veins into the tubing and vie for it, to make its own oesophagus and drink down its attacker, but the vessels of the young familiar riddled the plastic, and the dying thing could not push them aside, and with all the tissue it had lost to the usurper, they were now equal in mass, and now the newcomer was bigger, and now bigger still.
Tissue passed in fat pellets into the swelling young familiar sitting anchored by impromptu guts. Venting grave little breaths, the ancient one shrivelled and broke apart, sucked into a plughole. The cobweb of its veins dried up from all its borrowed limbs and members, and they disaggregated, nothing but hubcaps again, and butcher’s remnants, a dead television, tools, mechanical debris, all brittled and sucked clean of life. The limbs were arranged around clean ground, from which jagged a shard of piping.
All the next day, the familiar lay still. When it moved, after dark, it limped though it replaced its broken limbs: it was damaged internally, it ached with every step it took, or if it oozed or crawled. All but a few of its eyes were gone, and for nights it was too weak to catch and use any animals to fix that. It took none of its opponent’s tools, except one of the human jaws that had been pincers. It was not a trophy, but something to consider.
It metabolised much of the flesh-matter it had ingested, burnt it away (and the older familiar’s memories, of self-constitution on Victorian slag-heaps, troubled it like indigestion). But it was still severely bloated.
It pierced its distended body with broken glass to let out pressure, but all that oozed out of it was its new self.
The familiar still grew. It had been enlarging ever since it emerged from the canal. With its painful victory came a sudden increase in its size, but it knew it would have reached that mass anyway.
Its enemy’s trails were drying up. The familiar felt interest at that, rather than triumph. It lay for days in a car-wrecking yard, using new tools, building itself a new shape, listening to the men and the clatter of machines, feeling its energy and attention grow, but slowly. That was where it was when the witch found it.
An old lady came before it. In the noon heat the familiar sat loose as a doll. Over the warehouse and office roofs, it could hear church bells. The old lady stepped into its view and it looked up at her.
She was glowing, with more, it seemed, than the light behind her. Her skin was burning. She looked incomplete. She was at the edge of something. The familiar did not recognise her but it remembered her.
She caught its eye and nodded forcefully, moved out of sight. The familiar was tired.
“There you are.”
Wearily the familiar raised its head again. The witch stood before it.
“Wondered where you got to. Buggering off like that.”
In the long silence the familiar looked the man up and down. It remembered him, too.
“Need you to get back to things. Job to finish.”
The familiar’s interest wandered. It picked at a stone, looked down at it, sent out veins and made it a nail. It forgot the man was there, until his voice surprised it.
“Could feel you all the time, you know.” The witch laughed without pleasure. “How we found you, isn’t it?” Glanced back at the woman out of the familiar’s sight. “Like following me nose. Me gut.”
Sun baked them all.
“Looking well.”
The familiar watched him. It was inquisitive. It felt things. The witch moved back. There was a purr of summer insects. The woman was at the edge of the clearing of cars.
“Looking well,” the witch said again.
The familiar had made itself the shape of a man. Its flesh centre was several stone of spread-out muscle.
Its feet were boulders again, its hands bones on bricks. It would stand eight feet tall. There was too much stuff in it and on it to itemise. On its head were books, grafted in spine-first, their pages constantly riffling as if in wind. Blood vessels saturated their pages, and engorged to let out heat. The books sweated. The familiar’s dog eyes focused on the witch, then the gently cooking wrecks.
“Oh Jesus.”
The witch was staring at the bottom of the familiar’s face, half pointing.
“Oh Jesus what you do? ”
The familiar opened and closed the man-jaw it had taken from its opponent and made its own mouth. It grinned with third-hand teeth.
“What you fucking do Jesus Christ. Oh shit man. Oh no.”
The familiar cooled itself with its page-hair.
“You got to come back. We need you again.” Pointing vaguely at the woman, who was motionless and still shining. “Ain’t done. She ain’t finished. You got to come back.
“I can’t do it on my own. Ain’t got it. She ain’t paying me no more. She’s fucking ruining me. ” That last he screamed in anger directed backwards, but the woman did not flinch. She reached out her hand to the familiar, waved a clutch of mouldering dead snakes. “Come back,” said the witch.
The familiar noticed the man again and remembered him. It smiled.
The man waited. “Come back, ” he said. “Got to come back, fucking back. ” He was crying. The familiar was fascinated. “Come back. ” The witch tore off his shirt. “You been growing. You been fucking growing you won’t stop, and I can’t do nothing without you now and you’re killing me.”
The woman with the snakes glowed. The familiar could see her through the witch’s chest. The man’s body was faded away in random holes. There was no blood. Two handspans of sternum, inches of belly, slivers of arm-meat all faded to nothing, as if the flesh had given up existing. Entropic wounds. The familiar looked in interest at the gaps. He saw into the witch’s stomach, where hoops of gut ended where they met the hole, where the spine became hard to notice and did not exist for a space of several vertebrae. The man took off his trousers. His thighs were punctuated by the voids, his scrotum gone.
“You got to come back,” he whispered. “I can’t do nothing without you, and you’re killing me. Bring me back.”
The familiar touched itself. It pointed at the man with a chicken-bone finger, and smiled again.
“Come back, ” the witch said. “She wants you; I need you. You fucking have to come back. Have to help me.” He stood cruciform. The sun shone through the cavities in him, breaking up his shadow with light.