November 21, 2017

PodCastle 497: Six Jobs

53 minutes

* Author : Tim Pratt

* Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

Six Jobs

By Tim Pratt

1. Exterminator’s Helper

I was eleven when a little man with watery eyes who blinked and sniffed all the time shuffled into my classroom, moving carefully, not brushing up against any desks or people. My teacher stood frozen with her hand pointed at a map of Africa, and the kids all around me were unnaturally still, too, stuck in whatever moment they’d been caught in when time stopped: note-passing, nose-picking, empty-space-gazing.

I held my breath at first, hoping this strange person in the gray suit looking at a scrap of paper in his hand wouldn’t realize I was still conscious, still capable of movement. I didn’t know what he was, or what was happening, but I’d read a lot of books and seen a lot of shows about fairies and monsters and magic, and being in the middle of a story like that was so scary I was afraid I’d wet myself.

He squinted around, peered in my direction, and bustled over. “You’re . . .” A glance at the paper. “Makayla?”

“Kayla,” I whispered.

A brisk nod. “Never saw the point of nicknames, but whatever makes you happy. I’m Sigmund. I need your help. Actually, all your friends and . . . so on . . . here at school need your help.” He rubbed at his nose and sniffled more. I wondered if he had a cold. “It’s not quite a save-the-world thing, but you can save this little part of your world. Won’t that be, um, fun?”

Some adults love kids, and some don’t like them, but some just seem confused by us and don’t know how to talk to us at all: Sigmund was the last kind. I shrank away from him and shook my head, but I didn’t cry. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“That’s okay. I haven’t told you yet. Maybe you won’t have to do anything. First I have to give you a little test.”

Even back then, I really liked tests. I was one of the only kids who got excited about pop quizzes. I perked right up.

He reached into his jacket and drew out a clear glass jar, like a baby food container, and held it up six inches from my face. Something inside the jar buzzed and writhed and made terrible muffled squealing noises: it seemed sort of like a wasp crossed with a spider, except it was endlessly turning itself inside out, wetly gleaming, and I retched and turned my head away.

“I take it from your pukey noises that you see something in here?”

I nodded.

“Ah ha. The jar looks empty to me. I had to take it on as associate’s word that there was anything inside here at all. What you’re looking at is, hmm, a sort of parasite . . . do you know what a parasite is?”

“Like . . . a worm that lives inside you and eats the food you eat?”

“Very like!” He beamed, and I was (then and always) enough of a good student to feel a flush of pride. “This parasite likes to cling to people, but it doesn’t eat food, it eats . . . bad thoughts. Except it also creates bad thoughts — it makes the people it clings to think hateful things, and sometimes they do hateful things, and, well.” He put the jar away. “That one I showed you is just a baby. Come on. We’re after a bigger one.”

“I don’t — ”

He shook his head. “It’s okay, you don’t have to do anything except look, and see, and point, okay? I can’t see the little monsters, but you can. I know there’s one somewhere in the school, but I can’t narrow down my search any more than that. This time-lock won’t last long, it’s big magic, sucking up a lot of resources, but it’s too late for a real-time operation.

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