He was a Human Ostrich. There must be a more proper term for it, the pastor presumed, but that was the carny-given nickname that Thacker had used as well. Like an ostrich, Thacker, who was not a particularly stout man, could eat most anything—coins, keys, silverware (including knives), jewelry, shoes, buttons, bones, stones, glass, rope, hooves, once even the Celtic cross off the tavern wall—and he regularly performed such feats of extraordinary ingestion to the perverse amusement of the citizenry.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Pastor? You look awful pale.”
“No, Mister Mavensmith,” Higgsby admitted. “I am most definitely not all right.”
Thacker had been thoroughly self-serving and self-aggrandizing, exuding enough brash confidence to humble the holiest of men. Truth be told, Pastor Higgsby had disliked the man from their first introduction—he caught him plucking crocus blooms from the rectory garden—and only grew to detest him more and more with each encounter thereafter. Thacker was not a churchgoer, declaring with haughty irreverence that Sunday was his day of rest (though Higgsby had never seen him doing much of anything the other days of the week either). He was a glutton, a lush, a boor, a hedonist, a heathen. And now, even in death, he further orchestrated his spiritual degeneracy and designated the islanders his accomplices.
The crime—and surely it must be illegal—they were about to partake in was the partaking of Professor Cornelius Thacker himself. Within twelve hours of the will reading the residents of Edessa were to prepare, cook, and consume the deceased. If they complied with this, the sum of his fortune would be divided up amongst them.
The professor had been very shrewd indeed in his postmortem plans. For one, the short duration he allotted for the islanders to decide allowed no opportunity for any law-abiding dissenters to report the obscenity to the mainland constabulary. For another, Thacker appealed not only to the citizens’ greed, but also to their ingrained goodness. “If you care for each other as much as I hope you cared for me,” his will read, “I know you deserving folks will use the resources from my estate to help one another attain the rapturousness and righteousness God wants you all to have.”
It was this blasphemy that had driven Pastor Higgsby out of the meeting hall. Recalling every deviant, diabolical word of it, he left Mavensmith to his pipe and returned to the rectory.
*****
Higgsby prayed for hours. He prayed for strength for himself. He prayed for counsel from the Lord. He prayed for redemption of the islanders, his flock.
The pastor could not figure out where he had failed them. Since his appointment to the island’s parish thirty years ago, every resident of Edessa (excluding Thacker) attended his sermons religiously. They all believed him when he pronounced he could guide them onto God’s path and into the Kingdom of Heaven. They had faith that he could illuminate the Lord’s words so they would see His light. They listened to him, they learned from him, they let him tend to their very souls. And in less than a day all that would be shunted aside to yield to the whims of their false idol.
Pastor Higgsby felt forsaken. Hurt. Defeated.
No! He would not surrender! He realized he was being tested. God was always testing the devout. Higgsby likened it to the quality check of a life-saving device.
He vowed he would save them.
The pastor marched over to Vernon’s Tavern. Brown ivy clung tenaciously to its exterior. Inside, most everything creaked—the floors, the tables, the chairs—but these were seldom heard above the din of rowdy drinkers. Many of the islanders were gathered there now, quaffing ales and wines, some already quite soused.
Higgsby asked Oakley, the barkeep, about the status of the sordid affair: Patsy Dunkirk, the town doctor and undertaker, had butchered the professor’s body. The pub’s proprietors Chip Klausen and his one-armed wife Bethilda had sliced, seasoned, and seared the meat, and at that very moment were simmering it—him—in their largest cast-iron pot in the kitchen. Thacker was being made into a stew, his favorite dish.
Pastor Higgsby could smell it.
He stepped up onto a pinewood chair and called for everyone’s attention.
“I implore you, my brothers and sisters of the Lord Our Father, do not defile yourselves by committing this wicked act!”
“Gettin’ sloshed,” said Ewan Mavensmith, “seems a right tribute to pay to one’s passing.”
“I don’t mean the imbibing. I mean… the dining.”
“But it is the Professor’s last wish!” somebody yelled from the rear, somewhere by the mounted boar’s head.
“It is a sin!”
“Is it?”
“Yes, Horace,” who was sitting closest to the pastor, “cannibalism is a sin.” Higgsby was astounded he had to point this out, even to one as dull-witted as Horace.
“Didn’t the Apostles eat Christ’s flesh ’n’ drink his blood ’n’ whatnot?” remarked Chip Klausen, taking a respite from cooking the evening’s main course.
“That was symbolic! And completely different!”
“Ah. ’Cause Jesus were still livin’,” said Zena Worley, the town midwife.
“Pardon?” replied the pastor.
“Jesus could give His consent bein’ alive and all. It made it more legal-like.”
“The Professor gave us consent in his will,” somebody else chimed in.
Everyone nodded and drank, as if that settled everything.
“That’s not it!” Higgsby shouted. “Nobody actually ate His flesh or drank His blood because that is a sin.”
“Then why the hell did He even bring it up then?” Chip asked. “Seems a weird bit to be chattin’ about over supper.”
The pastor took a deep breath. “We’re digressing. I am telling you, as the one who has ministered your church for thirty years, that consuming human flesh is a very, very, very grievous transgression in the eyes of God. Each and every one of you, as Christians sworn to uphold the Gospel’s principles, you must abstain from going through with this… atrocity.”
“But tell us, where exactly in the Good Book does it say cannibalism is wrong?”
“Thacker’s a Godless man!” Higgsby blurted. “And we are blessed to be rid of him!”
The room fell silent.
The pastor’s eyes darted from stony face to stony face. They all stared at him, judging him. Higgsby knew he’d misspoke. One does not speak ill of the dead, even if one is a man of the cloth. Especially then, perhaps.
Ewan Mavensmith spoke on behalf of them all. “We can respect your opinion, Pastor, if you can respect ours.”
Higgsby stepped down from the chair and steadied his hands on a table. He averted his eyes from the crowd.
“No. I cannot.”
“Then maybe it be best if you kept to yourself today, ’til our offense to your sensibilities is done with. And I think we can all promise, out of respect to you, this day’ll never be mentioned in your company again.”
Everybody nodded. Resigned, the pastor nodded as well and turned to free himself from that den of iniquity.
“See you Sunday, Pastor,” Mavensmith said, quite pleasant.
Higgsby paused at the door, palpitating, his back to his congregation.
“Aye,” somebody else said. “We all will.”
The pastor left.
*****
It was getting dark, and the moon glowed faintly though the swelling clouds like a dying lantern. There was a whiff of brimstone on the breeze. Or perhaps that was just the pastor’s imagination.
Higgsby scarcely recognized them now. Mavensmith, Oakley, Patsy, and the others sullying their precious souls at Vernon’s. People he had known for decades. Some he had even baptized! They appeared sinister in the tavern’s lamplight, with shadowy eyes and crooked grins. They had all been bewitched by the Devil, Higgsby concluded. A Devil who went by the name of Thacker.
Only upon reaching the crossroad on his way to his parish did the pastor remember he was not the only one who had retreated from Thacker’s will reading. Lania Cox ha
d bailed from the hall before Higgsby had even sprung from his seat.
Miss Cox was a pretty, fair-haired maiden of twenty-two who in all her years had never missed a service of the pastor’s, even after both her parents had perished from pneumonia. She always sat in the front pew in her simple white dress, listening to Higgsby’s every word, the Holy Book open in her lap (though she seldom looked away from his pulpit). Lania loved the Lord and was plainly enamored with Pastor Higgsby, the Lord’s vessel. She often baked him honey tarts.
At least she would be saved!
He needed to see her, to commune with her, to let her know she was not alone.
Lania answered her door in a simple black dress. Her eyes were red and rheumy. She threw her arms around the pastor’s waist and hugged him for a long while, her face buried in his chest. She trembled.
“Are you alright, Lania?”
She gazed up at him and said in a cracked voice, “He’s gone.”
Higgsby looked down at her, bemused. “Pardon, dear?”
“Poor Cornelius.”
“Thacker? You are upset about Thacker?”
Lania nodded and sniffled. She was mourning him!
“I’m so grateful you’re here, Pastor. I must confess something.”
Lania invited Higgsby inside her thatched cottage. It had only two rooms, a spacious living area consisting of the kitchen, dinette, and parlor, and a single bedroom in the rear. A portrait of Christ hung on the wall above the stove. Lania kept the place tidy and scented with roses and cloves. Higgsby noticed the dining table had been set for two.
Lania wrung her hands and paced the length of the table.
“What do you want to tell me, Lania?”
She eased herself into a dining chair, in front of one of the place settings. “Last night I made him his rabbit and potato stew.” She stared down at the unused plate, gilt rimmed, painted with floral flourishes. “I made sure everything was perfect… I think he was going to ask me to marry him.”
Pastor Higgsby could hardly articulate the revelation. “You… and Thacker… you were…”
“We were in love.” She began sobbing again.
Higgsby made no move to comfort her. He yearned to flee, to pretend this was all a delusion, or damn it all if he could not.
And then he glimpsed the gold through the gloom.
The pastor filled the empty chair opposite Lania. “I understand that you had harbored affections for Mister Thacker,” he said. “But that was not your fault. Your feelings were the product of temptation. Thacker could tempt a turtle out of its shell.” (To eat it, Higgsby thought wryly.) He smiled at her. “It was not love, Lania. It was lust. Lust for companionship. Lust for sweet nothings. Lust for another’s touch. I know how terribly lonely you must have been, you poor girl. How lonely you may be now. But you still have the Lord. And me.”
She had not really been listening. Her mind was elsewhere.
“Lania?”
“My womb,” she finally said, “bears our fruit.”
“You… you’re pregnant?”
She nodded. “Near five months. Cornelius was so happy. So excited.” Lania gasped. “You don’t think that’s what caused his heart attack?”
“I… don’t… know…” The house suddenly felt much warmer to Higgsby. He felt woozy.
Lania sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. It was God’s will. But I will honor his memory by raising our child to be as kind and gentle and good as he was.”
The words reverberated in Higgsby’s mind: “raising our child.” Thacker’s child. A child that would no doubt also be nurtured by the misguided people of Edessa Island. A child Lania would want the pastor to christen. A child borne of the Devil.
Her eyes drifted to the stove, and she smiled dreamily to herself.
“After the delivery I shall sup on the afterbirth. Cornelius told me they do that in China… for good luck I think… And it’s very nourishing. I’m thinking of a nice shepherd’s pie—”
Higgsby had stopped listening. A tempest whirled and crashed in his skull. He stood and stumbled out the door, staggered down the pebbled path, and shambled across the soggy fields toward the bluffs. Here the night swallowed everything: the town, the trees, his own hands. He could not even see the sea.
He could still hear them. The wind carried the merry sounds of fiddles and flutes and drums, of drunken laughing and drunken singing. The island had embraced the profane spirit of the occasion. The meal was underway.
His flock was feasting.
Pastor Higgsby had lost them all.
He peered over the cliff edge, at the surf-swept rocks he knew to be far below, and wondered if God would forgive him.
THE MORTALITY MACHINE
“Come, Lilah! It’s ready!”
When Lilah entered her husband’s workroom he was still tinkering with the machine.
“You said it was ready an hour ago, dear.”
“Well, it’s definitely ready now, hon.”
We’ll see, she thought.
The machine didn’t look like much. Just a big steel box with lots of switches and dials and gauges and this weird antenna thing on top that resembled a Whirly Pop. Todd had told her it was made of five different rare metals. She didn’t recall the names of any of them, but then her memory wasn’t what it used to be.
No doubt about it, her husband was a genius. Before he retired Todd had been an astrophysicist and before that a bunch of other scientific job titles she hardly understood. She didn’t understand what he had invented now, only that he was building it for the both of them.
“Won’t you come have dinner?”
“Dinner? No time for that. This is too important!”
Lilah sighed in disappointment. She’d cooked them a delicious leg of lamb. She always enjoyed having dinner with Todd out on their veranda, with its spectacular view of the sunset behind the mountains. There was a time he wouldn’t miss it for the world. Now his world was all about that darned machine.
When the cancer had spread into his bones, the doctors gave Todd only six to nine months to live. He’d bested that prognosis by a year. He attributed it to keeping busy, an idle mind being the surest route to a body’s surrender. Still, he was so much thinner now. Weaker.
“Please, dear. It’ll get cold.”
“No time, Lilah!”
Lilah hated when he barked at her, a far more common occurrence since he’d gotten sick. They had recently celebrated their 45th—or was it their 46th?—wedding anniversary, but spent most of that day in separate rooms instead of dining out or going dancing or making love as they had in years prior. She couldn’t contain her resentment.
“Why is that silly thing always more important than spending time with your wife?”
Todd turned to her, his face at first manic but quickly melting.
“I’ve told you why, hon. Many times… Don’t you remember?”
Lilah, a trifle embarrassed, shook her head.
“That’s alright. I can explain it again.” His tone was heartfelt and patient. “We’ve talked about out-of-body experiences, right? That’s when a person’s so-called soul or spirit, when they’re in an altered state of consciousness such as in a deep trance, separates from the body and drifts uninhibited through any spatial dimension. This device allows us to channel our psychic energies to consciously control this astral travel. Since we’ll have no tangible form or substance, we’ll possess absolute freedom of movement.”
Lilah nodded and smiled. Her husband could tell it was beyond her.
“Once we exit our bodies, physical deterioration will no longer be a concern to us. Death is no longer a factor. We can elude it.”
“We wouldn’t die?”
“Exactly! And we can be together forever.”
“That would be cheating death then?”
“Not cheating. Revising the rules.”
“We’d be ghosts?”
“We’ll be living on a different plane of existence.”
&
nbsp; “But what happens to our bodies?”
“They become irrelevant. They won’t house our consciousness anymore.”
“But… they’ll still be alive.” The notion disturbed her.
“Well yes, they’ll carry on their metabolic functions until they naturally break down. But our bodies are really nothing but shells. We, the vital part of us that makes us who we are, won’t be with them to further suffer the ravages of aging, to become victims of mortality. By departing this material world, we become immortal.”
Lilah was not an especially religious woman, yet what her husband proposed did seem some sort of blasphemy. Playing God, she believed the phrase was.
“So… we’d be cheating death then?”
Todd gazed at her, teary-eyed. “We’ll be together forever. Everything like it was before. Won’t that be marvelous?”
Lilah nodded slowly. She wondered what time the sun set today.
“You’re working so hard, dear. You must have worked up a hunger. Why don’t we eat, enjoy this lovely Spring evening? That machine will still be there when you get back to it.”
“We’re ready, Lilah. Why wait?”
“Please, Todd.”
“Let me do one more test run to check the pineal flux calibrations. Give me fifteen minutes, thirty at most. Then we’ll eat. And after dinner we can go together. You’ll love it. You’ll see.”
Todd was like a child on Christmas morning, Lilah thought, with a brand new toy he needed to play with this very instant. Nothing else mattered. Despite her exasperation, Lilah didn’t want to begrudge her husband any satisfaction over his accomplishment. Of course he was excited. She supposed she could entertain his whims for a half hour.
“Fine,” she said. “If it’ll make you happy, take it out for a spin.”
Lilah watched her husband prepare himself for his otherworldly jaunt. After he verified all the machine’s settings were correct, Todd climbed into the nearest of the two beds he had placed next to it. He fitted a swim cap on his head that had a bunch of wires leading from it into the machine. In his hand he grasped a remote control.
Everyone Is a Moon Page 5
