Food of the Gods

by Cassandra Khaw

  “Blood and meat is the oldest communion,” Demeter announces, tone inscrutable.

  “Waste not, want not,” Poseidon says. “Get to work.”

  IT’S EASIER WHEN you don’t think of them as people.

  We start with dismemberment, the team of kitchen staff and I, separating limbs from torsos, heads from shoulders. Legs and arms are divided from hands and feet, fingers and toes amputated, breaded, and fried to a crisp.

  Next: we skin the bodies, strip them down to the muscle. Ram-horned kitchen boys, now pared of glamour, scour the vast sheets of epidermis, plucking hair and draining abscesses, anything that might dilute texture and taste. After that, the skins are either cured, or baked, or fried as the individual sous chef desires.

  When it’s just bone and meat, unidentifiable from any other slab of raw muscle, we suspend the decapitated torsos from hooks in the freezer, drain out the blood into freshly scrubbed buckets. Then the carving knives come out.

  Just ingredients now: tripe and sirloin, drumstick and heart.

  I don’t waste anything. Not even the gallbladders, which I spice and saute, before slicing them thin and plating them with creamy globs of yoghurt. The small intestines are rinsed, over and over, until only the faintest stink of decomposition remains, then poured into the food processor with garlic, layers of caramelized onion, pepper, and a glazing of white wine. At some point, after they’ve been sewn up into their casings and left to smoke for weeks, we’ll turn them into proper andouille.

  Everything else, I play by ear, too dazed to consider the slaughter. Easier to be a function, easier to pretend that this is nothing but marrow and tissue, a carnivore banquet to salt, season, and stir-fry. No thinking about the why, or the who it’s from. That’s how I’ve always gotten along.

  I make bowls of pho, bake powdered calcium into bread, roast bone-in calves with nothing but sea salt and black pepper, a hint of thyme at the end. Nothing ostentatious, though, no feats of molecular gastronomy. I can’t manage that. Not today.

  “It makes no sense,” I slam the butcher’s knife on the cutting board, straightening. Around me, kitchen staff jump, stare, cat-eyed and eerily silent.

  “What doesn’t make sense...” A woman tiptoes closer, unguligrade feet making for a syncopated walk. She cocks her head about twelve degrees too far, a reptilian grin held up uncertainly, as though the purpose of the expression confused her to no end. “...sir?”

  “Everything.” I snap. “Nothing. I—”

  I’ve been at peace with being a coward. Heroism kills, after all. But there was just... something to Poseidon’s sneering dismissal. Or maybe it was losing everything I’ve loved, or becoming a political fugitive. Or both. Probably both. Probably all the events of the last six months, meeting up with the psychic repercussions of every bad decision I’ve ever made.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it’s my stomach disagreeing with personal responsibility.

  “Nothing,” I say again.

  The woman nods. Hunger, or some unfortunate circumstance of genetics, has cooked the softness from her face, laying bare an alien framework. The cheeks are built too high, the mouth—a teeth-riddled slit—pulled too close to the chin. A tail whips free from under her pinafore, a tuft of brown fur slaps against the counter and sways away.

  “What is your name?”

  I wipe my hands on my apron and smooth a hand over my skull. The buzzcut is beginning to grow out; I make a mental note to do something about it. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “What...” Like the old song goes, the words don’t come easy. The syllables sound unpracticed on her tongue, unnatural, like a parrot’s caricature of a conversation. “...is your name?”

  “Rupert. Obviously. I’m sure you’d been briefed.” Now the entire kitchen is listening to us, every pretense of decorum dropped along with their glamour. From the corner of my eyes, I see fur and coiling tails, scales arranged in rainbow gradients, and even stranger appendages.

  “What is your name?” she repeats, a frown creasing her eggshell brow.

  Oh. The texture of the air alters. Curiosity becomes airless anticipation, thick enough to fillet and grill. A prickle of fear travels my spine. That kind of name. I feel the collective lean in, hungry, but I’ll be damned before I give up something like that so easily. (Technically, I’m already damned, but that’s hardly relevant to the story, is it?)

  I flick a glance around me. The staff has me circled. Not exactly lynch-mob-in-waiting levels of surrounded, but definitely in the you’re-staying-right-here-buddy genus. Nothing to do but procrastinate. So I do. I wash up. I scrub down the knives, disinfect the cleaning board, whisk peeled fingernails into the bin. Under my breath, I reel off most of a warding spell—the last vocable, the trigger, I keep tied up in my throat—and feed the loop of sounds to Bob, who picks it up and repeats it in a droning subvocal circuit.

  The chanting does little to alleviate the pressure of the kitchen help’s scrutiny. I keep my eyes on the prize, though. Hygiene first, difficult answers later. Pot and pan are plunged into a hot storm of suds, even as the help eddies about me, clearly impatient. The ring of bodies spasms tighter, shoes and talons scuffing at the floor, tacit demand for acknowledgement. I reply by taking a rag to the counter. One of us will break, but it won’t be me.

  “Ach, can we give up on this standstill already? I don’t even know what the point in this fucking madness is. The dens are gonna close in a few hours, and I, for one, would like to cash in on the bloody prize.”

  At least, I think that’s what the voice said. The suet-thick brogue borders on impenetrable.

  Something leaps onto the tap, and I see hands—fingers fat, meaty, pink as raw chicken—close around the steel pipe, even as a tail dips into my field of vision. The entity continues: “Seriously, laddie, all the huldra wants is to know your real name. Not your human-name. You can’t lie to us. It’s obvious you’re not human. We can smell your kin on ya. All nine hundred and seventy-two o’em.”

  “Actually, there are only nine hundred tenants and believe me, I’d know if there were squatters in—” I wring out my sponge, make the mistake of looking up. “Aggwaghhhh.”

  Bright, sea-glass eyes glare at me. “Wot.”

  “Agggh.”

  “Bit of a rude one, ain’t cha?”

  “You’re a cat”—I pause, affirming the visceral reality of the next words—“with hands!”

  “I suppose I am!” The scraggly tom, banded in scars and black stripes, one ear chewed into a necrotic stub, lifts a wrist to daintily lick the back of his hand. “Ooohwee. Such wit you’ve got there. Wouldn’t know I was a cat with hands if you hadn’t told me the now. Now, what great revelation will you surprise us with next, laddie boy?”

  “What the fuck are you?”

  He hunkers down, hindquarters arched. The cat touches his forefingers together and grins like the devil on the dismount. “Like ye said. A cat with hands. I suppose it would have been nicer if I was the cat with hands, but we cannae have everything now, can we? Now. Like the nice huldra asked, what’s your name? Give us a bone, and we’ll give you the whole rack of lamb.”

  “Fine.”

  This won’t work. This can’t work. This had better damn well work. A smile in place, I let inspiration ricochet into a recitation of Bob’s true name, a polysyllabic maze of stridulations and guttural consonant clusters, like a cicada singing racist epitaphs. It’s a gamble, but if I’m right, they’ll take it at face value, what with Bob’s recent monopoly of the dermal real estate.

  Note to self: talk to Bob about said monopoly.

  I chew at my tongue, breath caged behind clenched molars. To my surprise, it does work: the group bobs in unison, hivemind in concert, and take up Bob’s name like a hymn. Only the cat is silent, grinning, body dangling off the tap by its plump pinkies.

  “Such a pretty name. Who’d thought that a dam’d be so kind to a wee runt like you? I’d almost think it belonged to someone else.”

  Hi
s expression turns sly, but I’ve played enough Big Two with Horse-face and Ox-head. He’ll need to try harder if he wants me to fold. “Don’t I know it.”

  The cat yowls a laugh. “I suppose it’s our turn then, eh? He showed us his, and we should show him ours.”

  A flush of power in the air replies, seismic, dizzying, sweet from mythos older than entire civilizations, and a rawer energy, static discharge tingling in the hairs on the back of my neck. Like being baptized in electrified gin. “Sounds good.”

  “Glad ya think so, but you...” The cat jumps onto the counter, head rotated one hundred and seventy-nine degrees, so that he’s staring at me upside down as he haunch-swings along the metallic surface, tail curled into a question. He pricks an ear—the healthy one, not the rotted stub—in the direction of the outside world. On cue, something roars, jangling metal and mammalian anguish, a ceaseless ululation that invokes the image of a machine being vivisected without anesthetic.

  “...are going to have to wait till later. The Body Train calls.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE BODY TRAIN, as it turns out, is both an actual train and a myth. According to the Cat, it is operated by the London Necropolis Railway, which was very much a real entity, but one which was interred along with the city’s plagues. This paradox has, naturally, done nothing to slow services. In fact, I’m told that the Necropolis Railway is considerably more reliable than any of the subterranean lines known to the general populace.

  “But does it play funky tunes?” I ask as the group promenades through the tunnels of Waterloo. Getting here has been an adventure unto itself. As far as I can tell, the process is as much ritual as it is movement: sixteen steps to the left, four to the right, open a door thrice, shut it twice. Ceaseless, senseless gestures that my companions—alfar, huldufólk, whatever the politically correct description might be—assure me are completely necessary.

  I wonder how many of them were responsible for keeping the dead at bay. For all that ghosts unsettle me, their absence worries me more. Since we began this journey, I’ve not seen a single apparition, not a wraith or a tremor of ectoplasm, nothing to suggest that this place once bred tragedy—which is, I guess, code for a place that once was alive.

  “Wot?” The Cat scrapes enthusiastically at the underside of his jaw. As a human, he’s less phantasmagorical, more standard-issue menacing, a wire-thin skinhead collared with equal amounts of gristle and fat. His face is a transcript of every fight he’s ever lost, scarred where it isn’t knife-marked with runes. The hands remain repulsive, yellow-nailed and gangrene-black, the fingertips swollen, soft.

  “Body train. Soul Train. Vehicles of mass melodies? The popular ’70s TV show? No?”

  “No.” The Cat wipes his knuckles over an eye and then laps obscenely at each bloated finger. “Don’t know if you realized, but I’m a cat. An unneutered tom, I might add. I got better things to be doin’ with my time.”

  Oh, that conjures imagery I’d rather not have suffered. I flinch from the thought of the Cat groping at a sleek little Persian, discolored fingers scrabbling in her fur, stroking her ears as he positions himself. “Like licking your asshole?”

  He yowls a discordant laugh. Three round-faced women, all blonde, all feigning adolescence, dart curious glances in our direction. The Cat tips an imaginary hat at them as we cross longitudes on the moving walkways, them going in one direction, us going in another, strangers in a nowhere place. One blows the Cat an unsteady kiss, before the trio burst into screeching laughter.

  The huldra—I call her Hilda, which isn’t her real name, but as close as I come to pronouncing the real thing—rolls her eyes and slouches an elbow over the handrail. Her seeming, freshly reinvented, now includes mile-long legs and pitch-dark hair, a waist small enough to trap between your fingers, a latex dress that barely skims propriety. Guilty spouses and hoodie-armored teens, skinny as alleycats, flash her yearning stares, but she ignores them. To be fair, I’d gawk too, but she’s shown me her hollow back, her graceful spine and the splines of wetly glistening rib.

  “Don’t play with your food,” she rumbles, voice too low for her elegant face.

  “Have a heart, ye black-hearted sow. Can’t a cat take what few pleasures he has left in life? The Greeks barely feed us scrap from their tables.”

  “That isn’t his problem to hear.” Hildra exposes unsettling dentition: baby teeth packed in flat rows, too many and much too small, all the more disconcerting for their roundedness. Supernatural anatomy is defined by spikiness, and any variation from the norm is, like all deviance, deeply alarming.

  “And who made you judge? Ain’t he one of us now?”

  Of the six in accompaniment, the huldra and the Cat seem most invested in my company. The others—a rusalka, a fox, a feldgeist, a man who proclaims himself to be the first Jack, or so sayeth the huldra—seem content to share in my cordial, nameless indifference.

  “I suppose,” the huldra drawls, eyes lidded. “You can answer his questions, if you like.”

  The Cat revolves his head like a demonic owl, skull rotated two hundred and seventy-five degrees. “You got any questions then, laddie?”

  “What are you?”

  The huldra laughs, a bark of wry, astringent pleasure. She loops a curl of charcoal hair around a long, long finger and gazes deep into the encroaching crepuscule. “What an excellent question.”

  The walkway ends, and we spill onto the platform, seven in a row. The rusalka and the feldgeist intertwine fingers, touch shoulders. The fox, one side of his head artfully shaved of crimson hair, exchanges a grin with a young mother, while Jack continues to loom in foreboding silence, a man out of his era. Fortunately, since it is London, land of endless theatre, no one questions the waist-coated giant in Victorian regalia.

  Even if his shadow is convulsing in desperate, soundless torment, nailed in place by a polished boot heel.

  “A thing like Jack is a good place to start, I suppose,” the Cat drawls, coming to stand beside the towering character. “Jack came from the nightmares of the Big Smoke, from all those stories of a man who could kill and nae be found. He was a fantasy that people brought alive. Like a god, but better, ’cause ye dinnae have to listen to anyone pray.”

  I examine the two, who could not appear more different, between the Cat’s industrial savagery and Jack’s urbanity. The killer stares at the two of us, head tipped just so, as though to say he is, at the very least, nominally intrigued by the lecture.

  “And you’re”—I give the Cat a once over—“an urban legend as well?”

  “Nah, mate. I’m a YouTube video.”

  “What?”

  Another train, orange-banded white like a coral snake, roars past. I fidget as it disgorges passengers and foetid air, halitosis and body odor mixing with the warm damp of the dark, soil and steel and scurrying things.

  “Well, I suppose that’s not fair,” the Cat muses, scratching at his jowls. “I’m more of a short film than a YouTube video. A man named Robert Morgan spun me out of his sister’s nightmare and then the Internet gave me some meat to my bones. And ever since then, I’ve been a real boy, sustained by page views and retweets, gorged on every ten-minute twitch of human horror.”

  His grin is ghastly. “Don’t look so surprised, now. I’m just like yer gods. Only hipper.”

  The thought of Yan Luo or Guan Yin participating in modern trends, trading phrases from MTV videos or donning hipster-glasses, elicits a strangled laugh. The Cat grins wider. “You heard it here first: churches are dead; YouTube and Snapchat and Facebook are the new houses of worship.”

  To my surprise, I find I have nothing to say to that.

  The platform empties. We continue to haunt our corner, waiting, no one speaking. The fox yawns and levels a bright, cold eye at me. Two more trains come and go, and then reality stutters. If Demeter had unstitched the natural world in a blaze of numinous authority, the Body Train simply steals between the seams, a maggot squirming through cuts in the skin.r />
  It doesn’t scream its arrival. It rumbles and growls, an exhausted beast of burden, shaking as it worms up to the platform. The carriages are metal and meat, strung together with cartilage, the windows membranous. A moment later, reality flickers again, and the grotesquery eases into something more palatable: oxidized steel, metallic rivets, clouded glass, a faint twinge of ammonia.

  For once, I don’t ask any stupid questions. This is clearly the ride we’ve been waiting for. I follow as the group piles through an orifice and scatters across the plump, velvet-tasselled seats. Before I can take my spot, the air fritzes. Fabric becomes skin, becomes sinew dyed an inoffensive periwinkle blue. Another heave of the air, and everything skews up, strobes to black.

  I spend the fraction of a heartbeat concerned I’d accidentally died. But normal comes back the way it left: quickly, without rhythm. By the time vision returns, it is mundanity all the way down. No overstuffed seats, no gilded tables, no sandalwood paneling on the walls, and no evidence of intestinal furnishing. Just regulation-compliant blandness: slightly grimy, typical of any piece of public transportation.

  The doors dilate. More commuters enter, and I glance to the Cat, who shrugs, leans back, ankle hooked over a knee. His reflection grins from the window.

  “They’re normal people.” The feldgeist has a little-girl voice, sweet and trembling and high.

  I glance over. This close, she’s almost ordinary, coltish and lanky, maybe seventeen at a stretch, but likely older. Blonde dreadlocks, woven with pearlescent beads, clatter as she fidgets and shifts, half-squatting on her seat.

  “I figured. What are they doing here, though?”