Husk

by Dave Zeltserman

  ‘When the cravings have wormed their way deep into your brain and bones and you’re ready to face the truth instead of this fantasy you’ve concocted, come back here. We’ll feed you and send you back to the New Hampshire wilderness.’

  None of them tried to stop me as I opened the door and stepped out of the garage bay into the night air. The elder had left the gate in the chain-link fence unlocked, and I fled through it. My blood was ice cold in my veins as I started running. I knew how fortunate I had been that they’d let me leave. Of course, the elder did so because he was convinced the cravings would send me back to him. Still, if this had been my own clan dealing with a stranger from a different clan who was planning what I was planning, they wouldn’t have let him run away.

  As I raced through the maze of streets, I began to understand why I’d turned down that meat. Because of how horrified Jill would have been if she ever learned that I’d cooked it in her kitchen. And even if she never learned about it, it would have been an act of betrayal. The money I took from Sergei would’ve been enough to rent a room with a kitchen and I could’ve cooked the meat there, but I finally quit lying to myself and accepted that if I did that I’d also be betraying Jill, who would have been equally horrified learning I’d done that. I couldn’t change the past, but I could vow to never touch that type of meat again, no matter how much I craved it. That way, I’d be as true to Jill as much as the cravings allowed. Which meant I also had to forget about The Cultured Cannibal, even if their stew was what I believed it was and though it was served on a plate in an expensive restaurant.

  The cravings were leaving me no good choices. The best I’d be able to do was to commit acts that would disgust Jill rather than horrify her. That was the best option I had.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I didn’t take the subway back to Queens. Instead, I ran a mile or so after I escaped from the secret maze of streets that kept the clan’s salvage yard well hidden, and then walked the rest of the way. It was daybreak by the time I got back to Jill’s apartment, but the night air and the hours of walking helped me think.

  Even though sunlight was brightening the room and the cravings had become more agitated (most likely angry at me for not taking the offered meat), I lay down on the couch and quickly fell asleep, dozing until noon. When I awoke, I sat up and held my head in my hands. The cravings had gotten worse. My muscles throughout my body were achy, and my skull felt as if it was being squeezed in a vise. Even my eyes hurt. Like they were being pricked by pins. The cravings hadn’t taken full control yet, but they were punishing me nonetheless. As I sat rubbing circles hard along my temples, I didn’t see how I’d be able to wait until Wednesday to feed the cravings.

  I took out my cellphone, thinking I’d call Annabelle and see if we could meet that afternoon. When I turned it on, I saw she had sent me a photograph. In it, she must’ve been sitting in front of a full-length mirror because it appeared to be a photo of her reflection. She was naked, and had made her nose bleed. Blood was leaking from her nose and dripping down her chest and on to her ample belly. Along with the photograph, she included a message: ‘Are you sure you want to wait?’

  I stared at the photograph for a long minute, both repulsed and desirous. I wanted that blood badly, but that photograph also made me determined to postpone the sordid act as long as I possibly could. I would find a way to wait until Wednesday. I knew I needed to send her a reply and with trembling fingers tapped out ‘Anticipation!’, figuring she would enjoy that answer.

  I sat for a long moment and thought about buying myself a bottle of scotch to help with the cravings, but I knew whatever relief it provided would be temporary. Maybe only minutes. Somehow, I would find a way without scotch or wine to last three more days. I got up and started brewing a pot of coffee, thinking that several cups of coffee loaded with sugar might take the edge off the feeling that my brain was being squeezed.

  As soon as the coffee finished brewing I gulped down cup after cup, stirring in a dozen spoonfuls of sugar, then picked out a new book to read. This one wasn’t a novel, but one of Jill’s psychology books about the power of positive thinking. I’d seen the book on her shelves a week ago, and at the time had thumbed through it and dismissed it as nonsense, but now I decided to read it in the belief that it might have something to offer me.

  The book was short. Only two hundred pages. Four hours later I had finished reading it, and sat back and thought about what the book claimed and whether it could be true.

  According to the book, the mind is able to make symptoms of illnesses worse and can generate something called ‘psychosomatic disorders’. Furthermore, it can create physical illnesses where there are none, and can even cure diseases and be a powerful force for recovery. It also claimed that if you believe strongly enough that you’ll become healthy again, or even simply that you’ll soon feel better, then the mind could make that happen. What I found most interesting was something that the book called ‘mass hysteria’ – when a group of people suffer the same delusions, sometimes all of them appearing to show the same symptoms of an illness.

  I knew there were physiological differences between my kind and them. I knew this from our hair, our eyes, our scent, and our greater strength. I also knew it wasn’t anything psychosomatic that made me severely ill when I ate something made with cow’s milk or chicken eggs – since whenever that had happened, I’d been ignorant of the fact that what I was eating included any animal material until after I became sick. Our reaction to eating animal flesh or milk or eggs is real. It’s not something we’ve created in our minds. But was that true of the cravings? Could they be a type of mass hysteria that my kind had passed down for thousands of years to each succeeding generation?

  I’d always believed the cravings were physiological. That they were simply one of the differences between us and them. But what if that was not the case? What if the truth was more like what the psychology book described? That we suffer the cravings only because we believe we’re going to suffer them, and they are a form of mass hysteria spawned by the mind.

  Even as newborn babies, not only do we suckle milk from our mother’s breasts, but a fine paste made from our mother’s milk and their meat is spread on our gums. Our mothers even dip their fingers into the solution for us to further suckle. As infants, we’re eating their meat without ever realizing what it is, and this continues until we attend our first slaughtering ritual. Only then do we fully understand what it is we’ve been eating. Or so it is said. But that’s not really true. As small children, we see the burlap sacks carried into the sacred hall where the slaughtering rituals take place. Nobody tells us what’s in those sacks, but we still know, even though nobody ever says anything about it. We absorb like sponges what we hear from the elders and others. So even as small children, although nobody tells us what the meat is, we know what it is. That has to be why when we attend our first slaughtering ritual the practice seems normal and natural to us, and why when we see them before they’re slaughtered we think only of the single purpose they serve.

  Of course, the ritual and the words the elders chant during it drive home the message of how necessary it is to eat their flesh to stave off our cravings. But what if it isn’t purely a physiological need to eat what we do, but more that we’re conditioned to doing it? I know our physiological difference has us savoring this particular meat – but because of that, perhaps we have conditioned ourselves to believe we need to eat this type of meat to keep us from suffering from the cravings?

  I thought more about the dark time when my clan had gone three weeks without meat and in our madness slaughtered one of our own so we could carve the meat from his bones. Maybe the simmering stew made us so nauseous because we expected that to happen, and maybe that was why the clan members who ate that stew got as ill as they did as quickly as they did. When I think back of how the clan’s small children acted during this time, it didn’t seem as if the cravings had affected them anywhere near as severely as they did the rest of us. M
aybe that was because the children hadn’t yet fully succumbed to the mass hysteria that eventually affects all our kind, if that’s what it is. Maybe that is also why the cravings were ravaging me more after only a week than they did after three weeks back then – because I now believe more strongly in the cravings and how they affect us than I did when I was only thirteen.

  These thoughts left me stunned. As much as my kind savors the taste of their meat, what if it’s possible that we don’t actually need to eat it? What if the cravings were simply something we created in our minds?

  For the rest of the evening until Jill returned, I tried one of the exercises the psychology book spelled out, telling myself over and over again that the cravings weren’t real and that I felt fine. As the book suggested, I tried with all my ability to believe what I was telling myself. But when I stopped several hours later, I felt no better. If anything, I’d only made the cravings angrier.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘You look so stressed out. Are you worried about starting your new job?’

  Jill said this while we were eating our early morning meal together, concern showing in her eyes and lining her forehead. I’d prepared oatmeal with blackberries, but we could’ve been eating mud and I wouldn’t have known any different, given how the cravings were raging inside me. I lied and told her that that was what was weighing on me.

  ‘You’re going to do great today,’ Jill insisted. ‘I know it. You should know it too.’

  The cravings made it feel as if my brain was on fire. I could barely think straight. If I was worried about anything, it was whether I’d be able to keep myself from committing any savagery before I met up with Annabelle, which was going to have to be today after I finished work, even if I had to beg her.

  Last night after Jill returned from visiting her parents, I told her about the new work I’d be starting and we went to a nearby bar to celebrate. I drank two scotches. The first one dulled the cravings, but only for about a minute. The second had no effect. Later, when we returned to Jill’s apartment, she played more Mozart music, this time something called a symphony, and we sat together on the couch while she read and I tried to, although I couldn’t concentrate on the words because of how ferociously the cravings were digging into me. After Jill went to bed, I tried one of the other exercises from her book on positive thinking, this time imagining the cravings shrinking and dying within me. Whatever good it was supposed to do, the exercise failed miserably. Nothing changed. All I could hope for now was that I’d be kept busy enough with physical labor to survive the day, at least until I had my chance to meet up with Annabelle and satisfy these damnable cravings.

  When I arrived at the work address in Queens I’d been given, I could see that a chain-link fence had already been put up around the construction site and that a large hole had been dug out of the ground and lined with cement. I asked around for the man named Carl whom I was supposed to report to, and was taken to the same stumpy man with bulldog-like features who had tested me when I was first looking for home-building work. He looked at me impassively, handed me a hard hat, and told me that he was glad I’d been able to get my situation worked out.

  ‘You can see we’ve got the foundation ready,’ he said. ‘Next we’re putting up the frame, which means we first need to move the material from the trucks to the site.’ He whistled over one of the other workers, a lean and wiry man younger than me who had red hair peeking out from under his hard hat. ‘Gerard here will show you what to do.’

  I enjoyed the hard labor of building homes for my clan, but that wasn’t why I worked so furiously that morning moving materials and supplies to the site. The reason was simple. I was desperately trying to tire myself out, hoping that by doing so I wouldn’t notice the cravings so much as they dug deeper into me. It surprised me when Carl interrupted me by clapping my shoulder while I was pulling wood beams from one of the trucks.

  ‘Lunch time,’ he said, nodding approvingly. ‘So far you’re making me look like a genius hiring you. Charlie, you keep this up and we’ll be shaving a couple of days off the schedule.’

  ‘I don’t care for lunch. I’d like to keep working.’

  ‘You can’t. Shop rules. You need to take a full hour. I suggest you join the rest of crew. They like to go to a food truck a block over that’s got good steak sandwiches.’

  I wanted to argue the matter, but I stopped myself doing so. I knew that they are no different about their rules than my clan is about ours. I put my hard hat away where I was told to keep it when I wasn’t working, then checked my phone and saw that Annabelle still hadn’t responded to the message I had sent her asking if we could meet after I finished my work.

  I wasn’t going to join the rest of the crew. It would only make the cravings angrier to see them eating burnt cow flesh. I walked until I found a market where I could buy an apple and other fruit, and as I ate my meal I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to ignore the way the cravings were screeching at me.

  When I returned from my forced lunch break, I tried to work as furiously as during the morning, but we were now putting up the building’s frame and at times I found myself having to slow down because of the sluggish pace of the other workers. Later in the afternoon when this happened, I heard the cravings screaming words at me, demanding that I feed them now instead of waiting for Annabelle’s blood – that all I had to do was rip out that slow worker’s throat and there’d be plenty of blood, so I wouldn’t have to keep them waiting. I knew the cravings weren’t really screaming anything at me, that it was more that I was being driven to the edge of madness. But it was still a struggle to ignore them. I knew I had to feed them before I returned to Jill’s apartment. Either with Annabelle’s blood or someone else’s.

  Work ended at six. I wasn’t nearly tired enough and wanted to work more, but Carl told me that was it for the day, that I’d done more than enough already. The cravings were making too much noise in my head for me to argue. I left him to put my hard hat away, and as I turned to leave the construction site, one of them was standing in front of me, grinning widely. From his red hair I realized it was Gerard, the one who showed me what to do early that morning.

  ‘The machine!’ he said.

  I didn’t know whether it was because of the cravings muddling my thinking or because what he said made no sense, but I just stared at him without any idea what he meant. He laughed, which almost made me satisfy my cravings then and there.

  ‘You’re so damn intense!’ he said. ‘Damn, you’re like a machine, the way you just don’t stop out there. But Charlie, man, you got to learn to chill, or you’re going to make the rest of us look bad.’ He grinned at me again. ‘I got something in my car that can help you do some serious chilling. What do you say?’

  I didn’t know what he could mean by ‘chill’, other than that he had something which would make me feel cold, but I nodded anyway. Because I had to satisfy the cravings. It couldn’t wait. Annabelle had responded to my message, saying she was going to be stuck at work until late that night.

  The cravings had left me with barely enough wits to know that I couldn’t feed there. That I had to get him someplace more private. And so I followed him from the construction site to an alley where he kept his car. I didn’t attack him, though, once we got to that alley. Something he said while we walked together kept me from doing that. That what he had would help me relax. Would mellow my intensity.

  I joined him in his car, and he asked me to hand him a small box that was in his glove compartment. I did so, and he took a cigarette from it.

  ‘I don’t smoke cigarettes,’ I said.

  He winked at me, and he saved his life by what he said next. ‘This ain’t no cigarette. Swamp kush. Top quality. If this don’t relax you, nothing will.’

  He lit what looked like a thin, poorly rolled-up cigarette and inhaled deeply on it. The smoke he breathed out was sweeter and more pungent than the cigarette smoke the cook used to exhale. It also didn’t smell like poison. He handed me the joi
nt (which was what he later called it), and I breathed in the smoke, feeling its heat in my throat.

  He laughed at my effort. ‘You should’ve told me you’re smoking weed for the first time. Here’s what you do. Breathe the smoke deeper into your lungs and hold it for ten seconds before letting it out. Here, let me show you.’

  I handed him back the joint, and he demonstrated for me. When I tried it again, I held the smoke in and tried counting down from ten to zero in my head, but when I reached five I started coughing.

  ‘Next time you’ll do better,’ he promised, laughing again.

  He was right. The next two times I made it to zero. After my sixth drag (which was what he called inhaling on the joint), I noticed something peculiar. The cravings had stopped their screeching. By the time the joint had been reduced to a tiny stub, I didn’t even notice them.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The next morning at work I sought out Gerard and asked if he could sell me more of those joints.

  He made a signal for me to lower my voice. He looked around to see if anyone else was within listening distance. Then he stepped closer to me and in a guarded voice said, ‘Not so loud. Sure, you’re a good guy and it will be worth it to chip away some of your intensity so you’re not such a madman out there. I’ll sell you some at my own cost, and we’ll share one of those after work.’ He flashed me a grin. ‘You liked the way it chilled you, huh?’

  ‘It was a lifesaver,’ I said.

  What I said was true. I would’ve resorted to savagery if I hadn’t smoked that weed. After smoking with Gerard in his car I found myself free of the cravings for several hours, and when they came back they weren’t nearly as voracious as they had been earlier. Even now they weren’t as bad as they were the previous day. Although I could still imagine them boring into my skull and eating into my muscles, the pain was tolerable. They weren’t driving me to madness anymore. I could live like this if I had to. The problem was I didn’t know how long this relief would last or whether smoking another of those joints would help again, which was why I sent Annabelle a message telling her my plans had changed and I’d no longer be able to see her that night, but would like to keep our Wednesday rendezvous as planned. She sent me back a message calling me a tease, but that she’d be counting the minutes to our ‘bloody’ encounter.