a second and then sunk back down; a torn condom slid down its flesh and spilt into the expanding puddle of oil at its base; a lost, broken and gouged teaspoon surfaced briefly at the top of its spilt bubble-body, and then sank back down into the churning flesh. We drew more light from another streetlamp, dragging it down close, fascinated by this strange, inhuman stench-splat growing upon the street, the size of a small car, the size of a large car, the size of a small truck . . .
Its flesh, if you could call it such, was held together by friction and hair. Not hair of its own, we realised, but human hair, webbed and matted and foul, spun over every part of it like a net, sometimes in thick dirty clusters, sometimes in sticky strands of every colour. It rose up in front of us, liquid fat flowing off and then rising from within, a constantly moving fountain of grease and oil; and now it was almost as wide as the street. And the smell! Its stink knocked us backwards, made our eyes water and our head spin. Now it was almost a storey high, a great wobbling blancmange, and the oil spilling off it had rolled almost as far as my feet, running down the gutters and then filling the centre of the street.
I stared up at it, and it seemed to look back at us, a sort of head-bubble twisting at the summit of its rolling form. There was a good reason why the magicians of the city feared the saturate: the grease-monster, the oil-devil, the demon of fat poured down the drain, of tallow and cookery grime, of burnt-up crispy bits and congealed animal liquids poured down the plughole. It was disgusting, foul, vile, an abomination and, just perhaps, a bit beautiful. Life is magic, and this thing of fat and tallow was so clearly alive.
Alive, and not a little angry.
We laughed, not because there was anything funny, but to have seen this sight. Then we tossed the stolen neon back to its tubes, and retreated a few paces from the bubbling oil at our feet. I threw my satchel to one side and looked for the nearest likely weapons.
And the saturate was shaking itself now, sending splatters of grease and dried fat onto the walls, pulling itself out of the drains with one last great shloooop and rolling forwards in its own liquid.
I looked round at the window of the chippy, threw my arm and my will at it and shattered the glass with a thought. Reaching past, I found the warm, familiar hum of gas in the mains: heat and fire to burn the fat. I dragged at it, pulling faster than I had planned, sucking out the smell and rippling it upon the air until the street was a mirage of twisted neon and competing stenches. Adrenalin kept us moving, backing away from the advancing tide of yellow-brown oil dribbling over the pavement and the tower of fat rippling in its wake.
My plan was easy; so very easy. We were going to burn it.
I spun the gas around me, let it fill and hiss and shimmer against the flesh of the rolling white saturate-slug. I pushed a tendril of it up towards the pink tube of a neon light - all I needed was a spark, just one and that would be it, so long saturate, goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation . . .
. . . and someone muttered, “OhJesusohGod.”
I looked around and saw what I should have seen before: a woman, standing with her back pressed against the wall of a cobbler’s shop, handbag draped in the crook of her elbow, high-heeled shoes and pasty face, staring up at the saturate with the frozen terror of a squirrel in front of a cement truck. There was oil around her feet, staining her shoes, sliding along the pavement like meltwater over sand.
For a moment, just a moment, holding on to the gas, the spark, woven tight into the palm of our hand, we thought about doing it anyway.
Then I crushed out the spark, let go of the gas, let it spill upwards from the street and roll in thick smelly shimmers towards the open air, stopped the spillage from the chip shop and turned my attention towards the woman. She was only a few yards from the main body of the saturate as it rumbled at slug’s-crawl down