Voracious

by ALICE HENDERSON

  “Did this friend help you find another weapon?”

  Noah shook his head. “No. He disappeared right after that and was killed before he could help me further. I vowed to take up his quest, but spiraled ever downward. Eventually I found a piece of the special metal, though, and had a knife made out of it.”

  Madeline considered for a minute, then said, “Is it the same knife that’s in your pack?”

  Noah raised his eyebrows. “Going through my things?”

  “I needed to look at the map.”

  “Ah. Yes, it’s the same knife.”

  Madeline resisted the urge to tell him she’d felt how old and important it was when she’d touched it.

  “I thought once I had the knife, I’d just find him and kill him. But it was far more complicated than that. I don’t think he has an inherent human form. He can look like anyone he’s eaten. Anyone at all. I realized that the hard way when a stranger attacked me in an alley in Cardiff. The creature had taken on another appearance, but I didn’t realize it until then. He’d been stalking me not only because I was a witness, but because he had been unable to eat Anna, and he wanted revenge. I slashed him with the knife, but only shallowly. He flew into a rage, twisting and screaming. He tore out of the alley and into the streets.

  “For a long time after that I didn’t know where he’d gone. He covers his trail well. But little clues, like accounts of people with exceptional talent gone missing or murdered gave me his whereabouts.

  “And so I’ve been hunting him. Across four continents, for over two hundred years, it’s all I’ve done.”

  He sighed and put his head back in his hands.

  Madeline just stared at him, not knowing what to say. Finally she asked, “But how are you still alive?”

  Noah stayed silent for several moments, then he looked up at her, his eyes tired and bloodshot.

  “The blood,” he said. “Over time I noticed … changes. I was able to see in the dark. I rarely needed to eat. I was more energetic and started noticing that I was aging quite well. Then I realized it was a little too well. Fifty years went by. On those rare occasions when I returned home, I saw that my friends had gotten wrinkles and grown stiff, and I still looked the same. Then they started to die of old age. And I still looked twenty-four. Later, when I was very emotional, when feeling anger or”—he looked at her—“passion, I began to change physically. The more time goes by, the more I change, the more abilities I gain.” Noah fell silent.

  “What abilities?” The tremble returned within her.

  “The power to heal quickly. To see in the dark. To not need much sleep. To change small parts of my appearance, like growing claws. I’m not nearly as powerful as the creature, but I’ve been learning as I go.” He paused. “The usual things won’t kill me anymore. I found that out through accidents that have happened over the years. I was hit by a train once. And while it didn’t kill me, it took me weeks to heal completely. Still, mere weeks after having my body pulverized isn’t bad.

  “I began to get completely absorbed with it. I didn’t have to fear death anymore and became obsessed with that fact. I even tried to kill myself in a few different ways, just to see if it would work. It never did. But I’ve longed to die a few times over these last centuries. I just didn’t want the responsibility anymore. I just couldn’t keep on hunting him fruitlessly, year after year.”

  They sat together for several long moments.

  “What is he?” Madeline asked at last.

  Noah shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s either completely nonhuman, a creature all his own, or he’s a man like me—a man who was attacked by the same kind of creature, a long, long time ago.”

  “Why long ago?”

  “Because what you’ve seen me do—the claws, the eyes—has taken me two hundred years to develop. At first I couldn’t even do that. I’d try to grow claws, and instead freakish things would happen. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to undo them for a while. Like once I grew fingernails in my leg, and another time a finger sprouted out of my stomach. It was excruciating learning how to control the power, and I still know next to nothing. I think if I’d gotten a larger dose of his blood, I might have more power and be able to control it better, like him. He can shape-shift, adopt the features of other people, change his flesh to metal. If he was ever a man, he was so thousands of years ago.” He paused. “But there’s something else that makes me think he’s nonhuman.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He eats people. Has a terrible appetite for them. But I don’t feel anything like that. This change that’s happening—it isn’t bringing with it a desire to eat human flesh. And maybe that’s because I was human to begin with but he wasn’t.”

  “Or maybe,” Madeline added, “it’s because that change hasn’t happened to you yet.”

  “Don’t say that!” he snapped. “I’ll never be like him.”

  She was taken aback. “I’m sorry,” she said after a pause. “I didn’t mean it like that … I know you never would have …” She thought of Noah cradling his love in his arms as she slipped away, and immediately regretted what she’d said.

  “Whatever he was to begin with, creature or human, he was evil. I’m sure of that. And I’m not like that.”

  “I didn’t think you were, Noah. I know you’re not. You saved me, remember?”

  He closed his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so defensive. It’s just … I’ve asked myself that same question so many times. ‘Am I going to turn out like him?’ I have to tell myself no. And I have to keep believing it.”

  Madeline looked at him intently. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him … to be aging and not know how he’d turn out, if he’d become a beast, to lose someone so special and live hundreds of years without her. “I’m sorry for what you went through,” she said, and the words felt inconsequential in the face of such loss. But she could understand what it was like to be different, to be a social freak. And Noah was hiding it from her, just like she had hidden her own ability. But now he’d been honest with her. And maybe she should return the favor. “Noah,” she said, after they’d been quiet for a long time. “I lied before when I said I didn’t have any exceptional talents.”

  He looked at her with surprise. “You did?”

  She looked down. “Yes. It’s just that I came out here to get away from it … the negative attention, the imposed segregation. I just wanted to be normal.” She sighed, thinking about the traumatic experiences of the last two days. “It hasn’t been terribly successful.”

  Noah arched his eyebrows with curiosity, watching her expectantly.

  She was silent for a moment, thinking how best to tell him.

  Finally he urged, “What exceptional talents do you have?”

  “Well … give me your watch.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t say anything about it; just hand it to me.”

  “Okay.” He began unbuckling it, and Madeline took in its physical characteristics. It was a digital watch with a green nylon band. He handed it to her, and she opened that door in her mind, letting the images flow. As each one came, she told Noah what she saw.

  “You bought this watch in Missoula, Montana,” she told him. “It was a hot day, and you’d really wanted a watch with a built-in altimeter, but it was too expensive. After you bought this watch, you drank coffee in a little café called Cool Beans. Once you thought you’d lost the watch, but it turned out that you’d just left it in the net pocket inside your tent. The next time you pitched the tent, there it was.” She was quiet for a moment, still holding on to the watch. “Oh, and there’s something else … your grandfather …”

  Noah’s face went white.

  “That’s why you were so upset about losing the watch. You thought, ‘Can’t I have a watch without losing it?’ Your grandfather had given you a pocket watch, and you lost it. Just last year. You held on to it for two hundred years, and now it’s gone. And you resent yourself for it.” Sh
e paused. “It’s in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. You stopped to drink tea with an older woman, a relative, no, a descendent of your family. You left your pocket watch on her side table. She’s still got it. You just have to call her.”

  Noah just stared at her. She handed the watch back. He didn’t put it back on, just held it with wonder as if it contained magic itself. Then he said, “Madeline, that’s amazing! How did you know all that?” He sat back and stared at her in astonishment.

  “It’s a talent I’ve had for as long as I can remember. I get images, feelings, from anything I touch. I can tell who touched it last, what they were thinking about at the time, where they were, sometimes even where they were planning to go next.”

  “It’s amazing!” Then with a thoughtful look, he added, “Up on the mountain, when I pulled you free of the driftwood, you murmured things about a house in Vienna. I thought it was strange at the time. But now I understand.” Then: “So my pocket watch is really in Scottsbluff?”

  Madeline nodded, then had to laugh, a tired laugh. “It’s nice to have someone react positively to this. I’m not very … popular where I come from.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, my parents noticed that I had this ‘gift’ when I was really little. My dad came home one night with a bottle of wine for my mom, telling her he’d had to work late. I was sitting at the kitchen table, and when he set the bottle down, I touched it. Instantly I got an image of him kissing this other woman. They’d bought the wine together but had a fight, so he came home. I was only six. I described it there on the spot. I didn’t know how it would tear my family apart. My mom was so hurt. It’s the first time I remember her crying. They got divorced shortly after that and took turns taking care of me. But I could tell both were spooked by me. They didn’t want me to touch their personal possessions. Some nights they’d fight about me, how they felt like they had no privacy around me. They hid my ability, told me never to reveal it to anyone. But it was a tough thing to hide. Back then I couldn’t control it well, couldn’t shut it off. Eventually word got around. I stopped getting invited places. People didn’t like the idea of me being in their houses, touching counters, fridge handles, whatever, and getting flashes of things that were personal.

  “I had to teach myself to control it, to block out images when I didn’t want them. I didn’t want everyone’s life to be an open book. I didn’t want to know their sordid affairs or private longings. I hated it.

  “But they never seemed to get that. I hate going into town, like when I need to go the grocery store. My town is so small that everyone knows who I am. They don’t want to touch me when they hand me change. Checkers will suddenly close lanes if they see me waiting.

  “Only one friend stuck around. Ellie.” She looked down at her lap, the pain still unendurable. “But even that changed when I was fourteen.” She couldn’t bring herself to finish. She’d barely even talked about this with George, the only person she confided in back home. Putting it into words was just too difficult.

  “What happened when you were fourteen?” Noah asked at last.

  She looked off toward the window, reluctant to answer his question. “A couple years before that, there was a rash of killings in Montana. All the victims were men in their thirties and forties, who were killed while in the outdoors, generally while hunting or fishing. The victims were … flayed. Flayed alive, the police realized after autopsies had been performed. And all the murders happened on the night before a new moon.”

  “Hey … I remember this!” Noah said suddenly. “There was a media frenzy! The press dubbed the murderer the Sickle Moon Killer. Didn’t he also—”

  Madeline nodded; her hands gone clammy. “Yes. He would eat skin from his victims, then regurgitate it. It was a ritual to separate himself from his abusive father. He killed men similar to his father, then ate them, making the men ‘blood of his blood,’ as he described later in an interview. Then he threw them up to forever divorce himself from those men, in essence rejecting his father on a deeply emotional and biological level.

  “The police had no leads. They staked out some likely places, recreation areas, popular fishing sites, things like that, but they never caught anyone. Then suddenly the killings stopped. Police thought something may have happened to the killer, that he himself was killed or put in jail on some other charge. Two years went by.

  “But neither was the case. The killer was just reestablishing himself in a new town. A man named Sam MacCready moved in down the street from us, and everyone thought he was pretty nice and quiet, but he gave me the creeps.

  “Ellie and I used to go out to this spot near an old dam and hang out and talk. It was one of the few places we could get privacy in that town. We’d go for long hikes and talk about everything under the sun. Our parents. Boys. We both shared a passion for wildlife watching and nature.” Madeline paused, the memory of her friend alive. “She never judged me or was reluctant around me. Never treated me like a pariah. She even defended me at times.”

  She stopped talking, wanting to linger in that warm area of good memories, of her stalwart companion. She didn’t want to finish. Finishing meant killing Ellie all over again.

  “And what happened?”

  Madeline bit her lip. “On one of these hikes, Ellie dropped her bracelet. Her grandmother had left it to her, and Ellie was really attached to it. We backtracked, doing a bit of bushwacking. We’d been eating some huckleberries along the way and had stepped off the trail a number of times. She got ahead of me, went out of sight, hurrying because we didn’t have much time before dark.” Her voice trailed off.

  As Madeline told the story, her mind left the room and the little cabin in Glacier National Park. It moved, tentatively at first, back to that day by the river. Then it rushed, tumbling, crashing back to those memories still so fresh. She felt the weight of the grief, the sheer, shocking power of those images, and soon was no longer in the cabin with Noah at all.

  She was back at the North Cascade River, in those last few minutes with Ellie.

  Madeline was sure Ellie had lost her bracelet while picking berries. She stopped at a huckleberry bush they’d spent a lot of time at while Ellie moved farther up the trail to look near a thimbleberry bush. As Madeline bent over, searching the ground, a gleam of metal caught her eye. It flashed in the sunlight, some four feet from the path. Madeline walked to it, sure it was the bracelet. But instead she found a knife, recently dropped. The blade was clean, no dirt or sign of lengthy exposure to the elements. She stooped and picked it up, and images rushed into her.

  Sam MacCready torturing a man, making slices in his skin and peeling it off like sheets.

  The victim screaming as MacCready bent forward for more flesh.

  The victim lifeless, cast to one side, wet muscles gleaming in the sunlight, the skin completely gone.

  MacCready picking up a handful of skin and pushing it into his mouth, stifling the gag reflex and swallowing, the sweet sensation of the act momentarily overpowering the anguish of his life.

  Then vomiting up the skin, MacCready thinking of his father and his cruel eyes, the sting of the old man’s hand across his cheek, the pain of his father’s fingers digging into his skin as he hurled insults at his little boy.

  Euphoria sweeping through him as he looked at the pieces of regurgitated flesh, a ritual to purge himself from his overbearing father and save other sons from their own oppressors.

  Madeline threw the knife aside as she fell forward, landing hard on her knees in the dirt. She tried to separate her own mind from MacCready’s, but for a long and horrible moment they were one. She forced her eyes to close and tried to dispel the images. But they were too strong, as if she’d been there with him, reveling in his crimes, eating the flesh of his victims.

  She stood up, the forest swimming back into view. And before her stood MacCready, his face contorted in fear. He held Ellie in front of him, a knife to her throat. Tears streamed down her face.

  MacCready looked
down at the knife Madeline had thrown aside, then back up to her face. “You’re that girl from town,” he said, and Madeline felt the weight of his statement hit her like a punch. “What did you see?’

  She shook her head. Ellie started shaking uncontrollably. Madeline noticed then that Ellie had blood on her hands, knees, part of her shirt. MacCready was covered with it.

  She tried to formulate a plan, some kind of escape, but her mind was numb. She didn’t know how she could wrestle the knife away from him, but there was no way in hell she was going to let him take Ellie. In a rush of anger, she ran straight at him. He jumped back in surprise, and Ellie twisted free.

  They ran, crashing through the underbrush with MacCready close behind. In a few moments they hit the river trail, taking off at full speed with Ellie in the lead. Madeline could hear her friend’s ragged breath, their footsteps muffled by the blanket of fallen pine needles.

  As they rounded a large boulder, a flash of movement streaked down from above. MacCready landed violently on top of Ellie, and she went down hard. Madeline barely stopped short of colliding with them. She darted around MacCready, who struggled to regain his balance. Madeline had almost reached her friend’s side when she realized Ellie wasn’t moving. She lay on the riverbank, her head against a rock and a stream of blood trickling onto the sand. MacCready leapt toward Madeline, and she dodged out of the way. As he turned, he clumsily bumped Ellie’s side, rolling her into the river.

  As the current took Ellie’s body, Madeline ran downstream and dove in, muscles instantly robbed of warmth. MacCready followed, hitting the water at the same time she did. Coarse hands grabbed her in the icy water and shoved her head under. The roar of the river grew louder as they tumbled through a rapid, Madeline’s shoulder hitting a submerged boulder. The jarring bump tore her out of MacCready’s grip. She gasped for air and kept swimming, searching for Ellie.

  Struggling to keep her head above water, she didn’t see Ellie at all. Instead, the cement of the old dam loomed up before her, a barricade across the river. Rocketing fast toward the wall, she put her feet out first and collided with the cement, doubling over and hitting her head on the dam. Gripping the stone with fingers gone numb, she pulled herself out, fighting the rush of the water. Ellie was still nowhere in sight, and Madeline hoped desperately she’d climbed out farther upriver. She stood there for a few tense moments, not sure if she should run back to town for help or keep watching for her in the water.