Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker

was a little hard to focus on his Merry Mollusk tonight. All he could really think about was the Anvil. And the faintly etched line across the hillside at Giant’s Marbles. Of course with the house tree and the watchbird spying on him, he couldn’t go poking around under his bed again. He did allow himself one quick glance, and spotted the same warped-looking blank region near the wall. When he went to bed, he lay about half an hour in the dark waiting for something to happen. And then he fell asleep.
    Frek’s dreams were so strange that when the noise woke him he wasn’t sure he was really awake. He’d been dreaming about his father, Dad talking to him and intensely nodding his Mohawk-crested head, and then he’d dreamed about a spiky glowing shape floating in the air with a smiling girl his age inside it, and then about his Merry Mollusk cuttlefish jabbering really fast, and then about a yellow peeker uvvy worming its feelers into his head.
    Here came the noise again, a twitter as of some animal. Frek listened with all his might. The house was dead silent. Another chirp came, followed by a hiss. Yellow light spread across Frek’s floor. Light from underneath his bed. Frek leaned over and, yes, the purple thing he’d seen that morning was visible again. He knew now that it was the Anvil.
    The Anvil was disk-shaped, like a big red blood cell, except it was purple. It was tipped up so that the flattish top faced Frek’s way. A bright triangle of yellow-orange light glowed in the top’s dimpled center. The triangle was a door with a thing coming out: a tiny form dark against the light, growing bigger, moving forward, its shape coming clear as it approached. It was a flattish lump with a cluster of arms or legs sticking out the front end. It had two shining eyes. Frek wasn’t scared. Surely the Anvil’s passenger was his friend. It had come all this way just to see him.
    The watchbird started squawking. The house tree turned the room lights on. Already the counselors in the yard were hollering. There wasn’t much time.
    The shape beneath Frek’s bed had grown into the form of—a cuttlefish, just as if it had read Frek’s mind. The cuttlefish gazed up at Frek with large, kind, wise eyes. The eyes were a pleasant shade of gold, with dark, wiggly pupils. The cuttlefish’s flesh was shaded in tints of green. “You’re the one,” said the cuttlefish in a low voice. “You’ll save the world.” The voice sounded human, manly, comforting. The cuttlefish stretched out one of his short sucker-arms and twined it around Frek’s hand, just like Frek had been teaching his toon to do. The creature’s touch was smooth and warm and—tingly.
    An instant later, Zhak and PhiPhi came charging into Frek’s room. The cuttlefish scooted awkwardly backward toward the Anvil, but Zhak caught hold of him. Zhak had a transparent glove on his hand, and as soon as he’d grabbed the space cuttlefish, the glove turned itself inside out and sealed the cosmic emissary in a clear bag. The alien was squealing and flailing about. He no longer sounded at all human. He bit his way out of the bag almost right away, using a large beak that had been hidden down in his tentacles. PhiPhi drew a light sword and carved the cuttlefish into five pieces. The pieces flopped around wildly and continued to scream, each piece screaming in a slightly different voice.
    News reports of the ongoing struggle were on the house tree walls; it was an emergency wake-up bulletin about the invasion, narrated by Suzy Q. Frek could hardly believe Suzy Q was talking about his room and broadcasting a realtime picture of him in his pajamas.
    PhiPhi and Zhak took the five bagged pieces of the cuttlefish outside, with Frek and his family tagging along. Down in the yard, two of the writhing chunks of mollusk flesh burst their bags and tried to crawl away. More counselors arrived and caught