Husk

by Dave Zeltserman

  ‘You didn’t work Monday,’ he said. ‘That’s forty-one dollars and sixty-seven cents I took out. Twenty dollars more for the weekly rental fee for the apron, and forty-eight dollars for broken dishes.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you’d charge me for wearing one of your aprons. And I didn’t break any dishes.’

  ‘Aprons ain’t cheap, and you dishwashers are always wearing ’em out. Twenty bucks is a standard charge.’ He clamped his mouth shut as if he were losing patience with me, but then added, ‘And dishes were broken.’

  He turned away as if we were done and nothing else I had to say mattered. As I stared at him, a redness glazed my vision. Maybe if it weren’t for the cravings my vision wouldn’t have reddened like that, but still it was galling to have one of them so brazenly cheat me. A murderous rage filled me so completely that I was choking with it, and my vision dissolved into redness. I could hear my breath echoing inside me, sounding like the heavy panting that might come out of a wild beast. I fought to keep my true self from being revealed and, just as importantly, to stay anchored where I stood and not allow myself to move even an inch. Because if I moved, I’d have killed him. Much later I understood it would’ve been much worse than simply killing him – the cravings would have driven me to savagery. But my thoughts were all jumbled at that time, and all I knew was that I needed to keep myself frozen in place because I couldn’t allow myself to kill him there and then. If I did, I’d lose Jill for certain. I was already worrying that my battle against the cravings was turning out to be utterly futile – that time was quickly running out and, no matter what, I was going to lose her because of the cravings. But even though I had little hope left, I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  Fortunately, Chris walked away without saying another word to me. If I’d heard his voice again, I don’t think I would’ve been able to stop myself. Eventually, the redness faded and the roaring in my head quietened, and I was able to leave the restaurant without killing anyone.

  At first, I wandered aimlessly, and even though I was fairly certain I was keeping my real self masked, the people walking about were perceptive enough to give me a wide berth. Once my thinking’d become clearer (at least, as clear as the cravings would allow), I sat down on a doorstep, buried my face in my hands, and tried to decide what to do next. I’d promised myself that I would leave Jill before there was a danger of my letting the cravings hurt her – and I knew I was getting perilously close to not being able to trust myself with any of them, not even Jill.

  I fell into a deeper despair then. It didn’t seem possible any longer that I’d ever find that thick-jawed man. Or if I somehow did, I would discover that he wasn’t one of my kind and had no secret to reveal to me. It seemed the only option I had left was to give up and accept that living with them was madness. I’d seen vans on the streets that I could steal and had enough money to buy burlap sacks and rope. I started planning which of them I’d bring back with me to my clan. Jill’s ex-boyfriend would fill up the first sack, Chris would fill up the next one, and I’d make sure to save a sack for that surly market clerk I encountered. As I sat there in my misery, I contrived a story I could tell the elders and decided there was a chance they’d believe it. But as I settled on all this, I felt as if my heart was being shredded. The thought of never seeing Jill again became something too painful to bear, and I started weeping.

  The weeping lasted for several minutes before I was able to shake myself out of my despair. I came to a decision then. It wasn’t time yet to give up. The cravings hadn’t yet taken full control. I still had The Cultured Cannibal to investigate and, if needed, a whole night to search for the thick-jawed man who I had to hope was of my kind. If I had no cure for the cravings by Sunday, I’d still be left with one full day with Jill before having to leave her. Or maybe I’d even be able to stay a couple of additional days before the cravings made things too dangerous.

  I dried my eyes with my sleeve and got to my feet. I had a restaurant to visit.

  The Cultured Cannibal didn’t open until six o’clock, but they had a menu posted outside that showed the food they offered, such as tripe, bone marrow, pig’s head, lamb belly, and different steaks (both raw and cooked). One item on the menu caught my eye: CANNIBAL STEW. Was it possible that when people of my kind ordered this dish, they would be given the meat they sorely needed? At $95 it was the most expensive food they offered. Considering how Chris was cheating me, after paying for the meal I’d have little left over from what I made each week, so I’d be condemned to work as a dishwasher for the rest of my life. But that wouldn’t matter. As long as I had a way to keep the cravings from driving me mad, I’d gladly scrub pots each day if that enabled me to be with Jill.

  I knocked loudly and after a short while a very thin woman answered the door. There was a grotesque gauntness to her face that was exaggerated by the blood-red color her lips were painted. The black dress she wore reached only halfway to her knees, revealing how thin her legs were – like the toothpicks I took each day from Chris’s restaurant. She gave me an inquisitive look, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’d like to work here as a dishwasher,’ I said.

  She showed no immediate reaction to my request, and for several seconds stared at me with such an utterly blank expression that I wondered whether she’d heard me. I was trying to decide whether I needed to repeat myself when she told me to wait where I was and closed the door on me.

  It didn’t matter that she wasn’t one of my kind. If the fantastical thought that I had turned out to be true, although most of the people working there could be them, the cook would have to be one of my kind … unless he was kept ignorant of what type of meat was used in their cannibal stew. That was possible. But I reckoned there would have to be at least one of my kind working at The Cultured Cannibal, so he could spot others of my kind who ate there and know which stew to serve – unless, of course, they didn’t care and served the stew to anyone, figuring that those who weren’t my kind would never know what they were eating.

  I was still sorting these thoughts out in my mind (and because of the cravings, they were far more jumbled than how I’m writing them now) when the thin woman in the black dress opened the door again. She told me they didn’t need a dishwasher right now, but I could fill out an application form if I cared to. I told her I would do that and followed her into the restaurant, where she had me sit near the entrance.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said in the same monotone that she’d used earlier.

  I wanted to explore the kitchen and see if the cook or anyone else was one of my kind – or better still, sneak a taste of the stew if it was simmering in a pot. But for now I decided it would be best to stay seated and continue my charade. That way I wouldn’t attract undue attention or the police, and I might spot other of the restaurant’s workers. It took several minutes before the woman reappeared with an application form, but all this time she remained the only person I’d seen in the restaurant.

  ‘Your cannibal stew is very expensive,’ I said. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Rare and exotic meats.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘A secret.’

  She said this with such an enigmatic expression that I wasn’t sure whether she knew the answer. It was possible – even likely, if the stew was what I hoped it was – that she didn’t know what kind of meat was used. I glanced quickly at the application form. I wasn’t going to fill it out. There were too many questions I didn’t have an answer for, such as a phone number to contact me. Even if I’d known Jill’s phone number and had answers for the other questions, and even if they paid far more than my current dishwashing job, I wouldn’t have filled it out, for the simple reason I wouldn’t want Jill questioning why I was trying to get work at (for her) such an odd-sounding restaurant.

  ‘Can I try a small taste of your cannibal stew?’ I asked.

  She didn’t bother to answer me, not even to shake her head.

  ‘I’d like to eat here tonight,�
�� I said.

  ‘Reservations are required. We’re currently booked through the end of the year.’

  I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to think, though the cravings were making it difficult to do so.

  ‘I’d like to order the cannibal stew to take with me,’ I said, remembering that restaurants sometimes offer that service.

  Her expression turned more enigmatic as she stared at me for a long moment before telling me they didn’t do that. ‘Our chef requires the food to be eaten only at the table, so that it is enjoyed at the correct cooking temperature and properly presented. We don’t do takeout, nor do we let diners leave with food. Are you planning to fill out that application?’

  I debated in my mind whether to take some of the stew by force. But even though the cravings were clouding my judgment, I knew that would be a bad idea, possibly even a disastrous one.

  ‘I’ll fill it out at home and return with it soon,’ I said. ‘Who’s the owner of this restaurant?’

  She smiled, if you could call the way her lips barely turned upwards a smile. ‘We keep that a mystery.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  At a subconscious level I knew it was after one in the morning when I pounded on the door. I knew that because I must’ve passed a clock, and for whatever reason that piece of information had stuck in my mind. At the time, I don’t think I was aware of this or much else. I was being blindly driven by the cravings, just as a wild beast might be driven by bloodlust, and it wasn’t until later, after the cravings became dormant, that I was able to piece together the events of that night and make sense of what happened.

  As I walked aimlessly for hours through Brooklyn, my night of wandering and searching had become a blur, with long stretches of time skipping by. If I’d passed the thick-jawed man, I don’t think I’d even have noticed. Early on that evening, I had stopped marking off streets on my map, and my walking had become haphazard, or at least it seemed so. I must’ve left East Flatbush hours ago, as I suddenly found myself at the back door of the restaurant where I sold Sergei my van and was pounding on it. If anyone had asked me what I was doing there, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate an answer, assuming I was able to understand the question.

  Coming from the other side of the door was some cursing in a language I didn’t recognize, or perhaps the person was yelling something at me. This was another fact I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time; it was something I only understood later, once I’d pieced together what had happened. When the door began to open inward, I jerked it toward me then pushed into it with all my brute strength. A dull thud sounded as it hit the skull of the same blond man who had answered the door the other time. He collapsed backwards on to the floor, and as I rushed into the room I stomped on his face.

  There was more shouting from inside the restaurant, and I moved toward it. Later, when I tried to reconstruct in my mind what had happened, because of the mad frenzy brought on by the cravings I couldn’t tell whether the shouting had been in English or in another language. Either way, whatever was shouted I couldn’t say. As I moved into the kitchen from the back room, Sergei was entering the kitchen from an opposite hallway. As our eyes locked, his face became a swirl of violence and he moved swiftly toward me. He held a gun, and as he swung it up to aim at me, I jumped at him with all the ferocity of a kill-crazy catamount. The speed and power of my jump surprised him. The look that flooded his eyes was one of the few things I was easily able to remember afterwards.

  I knocked him to the floor and grabbed his gun hand while, with my other hand, I groped for his throat. He was trying to wrench his gun hand free so he could shoot me. I pulled it toward me and sank my teeth into his wrist. He would’ve howled if my other hand hadn’t been squeezing his windpipe. When he dropped the gun, I sank my teeth in deeper, severing a vein. Even though I nearly had him choked to death, he somehow bellowed out his anguish. Soon after that he went limp, but I didn’t release my teeth from his wrist until I noticed a shadow moving toward me. Or maybe I only sensed it. Whichever it was, I ducked in time for the meat cleaver to miss my head.

  I rolled over, and spun around as I came to my feet. When the meat cleaver was pulled back to deliver another blow, I sprang forward and blocked the arm, swinging it while driving my shoulder hard into the man’s chest. A dull ‘Oomph …’ sound came out of him, and he stumbled backwards and tripped over Sergei’s body. The back of his head bounced off the floor, the blow dazing him so he put up little fight as I grabbed the cleaver from him. Before he could do much of anything else, I sank the cleaver deep into his throat.

  Again, all of this I was able to reconstruct in my mind once I was able to think clearly, though while it was happening it was only a mad red-hazed blur. I know I resorted to savagery then, because once the cravings began to subside and I was able to think clearly, I realized that I’d been lapping up, like a dog, the blood pooling from the deep wound I had carved out of his throat.

  I stumbled to my feet. The fever that had been burning up my brain was gone. In its place a coolness filled my head, and my thinking once again became clear, no longer the jumbled mess it had been only minutes earlier. The cravings had let go of me. In my mind’s eye, I again pictured them as hundreds of little worms. But no longer hungry and agitated ones. Now, they were fat and satiated as they crawled drunkenly out of my brain and bones and muscles so that they could disappear to wherever they went when they slept.

  I looked around at the carnage I was responsible for, and slowly understood where I was and what I had done. A weak groan came from the back room. When I investigated it, I found the blond man still alive, and struggling to get to his feet even though his forehead was dented from where the door had struck him and his mouth and nose had caved in from my stomping on him. He tried pleading with me, but his words came out as gurgling sounds because of the damage done to him. As he feebly tried to fight me off, I took hold of his jaw and the top of his head, and with a twist of my shoulder broke his neck.

  I went back to the kitchen and surveyed the scene. For the first time in almost a week the cravings were completely gone, replaced by a most welcome stillness. I realized that the blood I’d drunk had satisfied the cravings every bit as much as their meat ever had, maybe even more so, although that might’ve only been because of the large amount of blood I’d lapped up, compared to the small amount of meat that’s in a serving of one of my clan’s stews. I knew that the cravings had brought me to this place and driven me to my savagery. I also accepted that I had little control over it. Still, the thought of what I’d done sickened me.

  I have little doubt that if any of them ever witnessed our slaughtering ritual, they would see it as the height of barbarism and savagery. For us, however, the ritual is critically important for two reasons. First, it reinforces the idea that they serve only one purpose. And second, since the ritual must be performed precisely according to tradition before we can make use of their flesh, it keeps us from resorting to the kind of savagery I had committed that night. If any of my kind had witnessed what I did, they would have been ashamed.

  I held my breath for a long moment so I could listen for any others of them that might’ve been hiding in the restaurant, but I didn’t hear anything. After washing the blood off my hands and taking off my shoes, I crept through the restaurant and searched each room before looking into the dining area. Normally, if any others of them had been there, I would’ve smelled them, but with the taste of blood so thick in my throat I didn’t trust that ability now. I looked through each room thoroughly, checking closets and other hiding places. When I opened any of the doors or needed to touch anything, I used a rag I’d taken from the kitchen. I did this for the same reason I took off my bloody shoes: I knew from the forensics article I’d read that they’d be able to identify me from my fingerprints and match my shoes to any bloody shoe prints I left. If the police later arrested me, I didn’t want them to be able to tie me to these murders, for the simple reason that I would never want Jill to know tha
t I’d committed such savagery.

  Once I’d satisfied myself there was no one else in the restaurant, I went back to the kitchen and used the meat cleaver to cut pieces from Sergei and the other man where I might’ve left teeth marks or saliva, and I fed this into the sink’s waste-disposal unit, which was powerful enough to grind a chunk of wrist bone to nothing. I did this for the same reason I didn’t want to leave fingerprints or footprints – so the police wouldn’t be able to identify me from teeth marks and saliva. With that taken care of, I stripped off my bloody clothes and washed the blood from my face, arms, and legs, then rinsed it off my rubber shoes. Before heading off to Brooklyn earlier, I’d almost gone back to Jill’s apartment so I could switch to my work boots. It was fortunate I hadn’t. Because if I had, my work boots would now have been stained red with blood and would have had to’ve been thrown out.

  I found a plastic bag and, after emptying my pockets, put my bloody clothes in it. As with the restaurant where I worked, this kitchen had a closet holding cleaning supplies, so I was able to mop away the bloody shoe prints I’d left in the kitchen before taking off my shoes. Then, for good measure, I mopped up the rest of the blood (there was a lot of it) in an attempt to hide any evidence indicating that I had drunk any of it. After I was done, I rolled Sergei on to his side so I could take his wallet from his back pocket. It was as thick as the other time I’d seen it. I counted more than $6,000 and added the money to my own wallet. I now had more than enough money to pay the cook for a birth certificate and social security number, and grimly noted that I’d also found a way to keep the cravings satisfied.

  When searching the restaurant, I’d found some spare clothing, which had most likely belonged to Sergei, in an office. I first stopped in the bathroom so I could check myself in the mirror and wash off any of the blood I might’ve missed. It turned out I had a good amount of it in my hair. After that, I went back to the office so I could put on the clothes. The pants were short on me and loose around my middle, and the shirt likewise ill-fitting, but I decided they would make do until I could return to Jill’s apartment. I went back to the kitchen so I could retrieve my wallet, and after consulting my map I put that in my back pocket too. I next wiped my fingerprints off anything I might’ve touched, then picked up the plastic bag containing my soiled clothing and left through the back door.