Free The Ministry of SUITs by Paul Gamble Page B

blocked the corridor and made it impossible for Jack or Grey to walk past him. From inside the squid face, two green eyes lit up and a beam of light emitted from them. Unlike ordinary light it didn’t travel in a straight line, but rather snaked out like translucent emerald lightning. The beams hit Jack and swirled around him. Jack could feel his body starting to glow. And for some reason he could sense it glowing the color green. Turning green wasn’t a pleasant experience. Jack really wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. He didn’t understand how frogs lived with the feeling.
    â€œGrey, this is making me feel very uncomfortable.”
    â€œYes, I think this has gone quite far enough. Cthulhu, stop it at once!” Grey snapped.
    Cthulhu turned his gaze away from Jack. The green beams ceased and Jack turned back to his more familiar pinkish color. Cthulhu spoke to Grey. However, it wasn’t any language that Jack recognized. In fact, it wasn’t even a sound that Jack recognized. The closest Jack could get to describing it was the sound of a fat man with a particularly bad head cold trying to eat raw oysters without chewing. As Cthulhu talked he grew animated and waved his hands around. Each finger seemed to have three or four knuckles that could move in different directions. At the end of each finger was a frighteningly sharp claw. Occasionally Cthulhu stretched and flapped his bat wings.
    Grey just shook his head. “Yes, Cthulhu, we were being impolite talking about you. But how else is the boy meant to learn?”
    Cthulhu made more oyster-slurping noises.
    â€œI appreciate that, but you have to understand that it’s also a breach of etiquette to use evil energy to make him go mad.”
    Cthulhu frothed some more, and a long tendril of saliva fell from his mouth.
    â€œNo! Banishing him to a dark dimension would be rude. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.”
    Cthulhu stared at Grey. After a few moments he folded his bat wings and let them carry on down the corridor. Jack could feel Cthulhu’s green eyes piercing his back.
    â€œDo I run the risk of being driven insane every time I come here?” he asked.
    â€œDon’t worry about Cthulhu; for a multidimensional manifestation of evil he’s very sensitive. Mind you, so would you be if you had the face of a squid.”
    â€œI suppose so,” said Jack.
    â€œI sometimes wonder if he perhaps had a more pleasant face … well, then maybe he wouldn’t want to destroy the world so badly.”
    â€œPerhaps,” said Jack, who was beginning to wonder if he really wanted to be part of an organization where madness and banishment to strange dimensions were serious risks when you were trying to get paperwork filed. Maybe he could seek some counseling for his curiosity instead of joining the Ministry.
    He felt slightly more reassured when he noticed a five-foot teddy bear walking along the corridor. It was a pleasant gold shade, and bits of its fur looked slightly worn, as if it had been well hugged over the years. “Maybe it would be better if Cthulhu looked like that,” he said to Grey.
    â€œThe Bear?” Grey tilted his head to one side. “Perhaps. Of course the Bear is even more dangerous than Cthulhu.”
    â€œWhat? That huggable lump of fur?” asked Jack.
    â€œHe’s the agent we send in when everyone else fails.” Grey shook his head. “When persuading the bad guys doesn’t work, when speaking to them nicely doesn’t produce results, when we can’t capture them … Well, then the Bear goes in to finish them off.”
    â€œYou’re telling me that that teddy bear is a killer?”
    â€œYou’d better believe it.”
    â€œThen why does he look like a teddy bear?”
    â€œBecause when you lean in for a hug with something that cute and adorable, the last thing you expect is that it’s going to rip your face