The Theory Of Big and Small: II

He had a clear, cunning gaze, and with it he raked her up and down in a comically obvious fashion.
“Nice.” He licked his lips.
She turned to go.
“Aww, come one!” He was whining. “You can’t possibly think that I could do anything to you?”
She blustered. It was all really too bizarre. “That wasn’t…….” They stared hard at one another.
“I’m a prick.”
She put her hands on her hips.
The dog was barking now in the dark recesses of the house. Sara looked fearfully off into them.
“He’s found something.” The boy gazed at her, more curious now. “Probably a huge spider. Or a nest of them because I have heard a lot of scratching back there”, he added thoughtfully.

Sara grabbed her handbag. The huge arms came up reflexively, with some effort. “I’m just kidding. But my brother tells me this kind of stuff all the time. He’s trying,” the cunning look was back, “to keep me out of the kitchen.”

“I doubt you could make it through the door,” Sara said before she could stop herself.
The boy laughed. It was a high-pitched sound, rippling like an electrical charge through every globule of his ample padding. “Good one…..now, can you help me up or what?”

Mollified she stood her ground. There was still the sound of barking from somewhere. Bertie didn’t sound like he was in trouble, but she had no idea what to do.
“How….?”
A large arm came up towards her, fingers wiggling.
“I’m Nate. Pleased to meet ya.”
She took his hand gingerly, trying not to lose her balance into the part of the floor that had become him.
“Sara.”
He eyed her appraisingly. “I think you’re strong enough.”
“For what?”
He pointed to a steel pole that was bolted to the ceiling and the floor. It was three feet distant, next to an enormous, ancient couch.
“I need to get to that.”
The couch was sagging in the middle, fabric and foam stretched into a bowed imprint of the shape on the floor. It looked like but for the floor it would have thinned down the middle into two halves and given up the ghost.
He lay there watching.

She moved closer to study the steel apparatus, which seemed to reveal itself as more than just a simple bar. It looked like something from a torture dungeon, with a lot of leather straps and strange pulley mechanisms.
Nate clunked a gigantic cast on the floor.
“Oh!”
“Yes, I have a broken leg.” He grunted. “You didn’t think that I was on this floor because I’m humongously fat do you?”
He waved away her answer and it as then Sara noticed the rings. Knuckle dusters. Big square jewels in shades of citrine, emerald and ruby. His fingers had grown around them like unstoppable fungus. He would die in them, she thought. They were never coming off.
He clunked his cast again.
She was aware with blushing rapidity that his legs were now splayed and the muumuu had ridden up to his upper thighs. “I……”
Bertie started to bark in earnest again and she could hear thumping and thrashing from the kitchen.
“I have to…..” she gestured toward the darkness.

There was a tremendous crash and with a Herculean strength belying his size, a growling Bertie barreled back through the swinging door furiously shaking an object between his teeth.
Sara felt a splash of wet on her cheek and went to put her hand to her face before she realized that Bertie was gnashing a huge rat and the wriggling thing was squealing and spraying blood everywhere.

She was screaming a high pitched keen of operatic proportion before she identified the source of the sound as her own but was powerless to stop it. Bertie took it as encouragement and began to dance all around the available floor space chomping and flipping the bloody thing in the air.

“Mabel!” came a louder cry from the floor and Nate’s legs scissored together with the speed of an enraged mother cow and caught Sara by the ankles. As she went down she heard distant, futile sobbing and the sound of Bertie still scrabbling to hold on to his prize.

With an superhuman roar, Nate rolled over and the floor reverberated. Spoke to Sara who was at sea, lost in the pandemonium. She heaved herself up, pushing as far away as she could from the granite of flesh, the opening grave, the blood. Somewhere her shoe.

The boy was sobbing inconsolably.

“Mabel...", he moaned, looking only at his clenched fists. His rings. Bertie was behind him, stopped for a second, more because the thing in his mouth had stopped fighting. Sara scrambled to her feet, heaving. With indignation.

“My guinea pig!” he cried out helplessly. He was staring now at Bertie who’d trotted around to show off her grisly prize. She saw that it was indeed a furry white and brown object in the dog’s mouth. It looked completely terrified and very much close to death. Rivulets of blood were coming out of the belly wounds her dog had inflicted and its tiny pink paws were jerking in spasms of pain.

“Oh, god….” Sara sank to her knees. Huge tears rolled unchecked down Nate’s face, mixing on the floor with the blood.

Bertie sat. The guinea pig went limp.

“I’m so, so very sorry…..”

Bertie grinned and Mabel fell with an unceremonious thud to the floor.