by T. A. Pratt
Bradley cocked his head. “Better let him go see.”
Rondeau climbed off his lap, and Porter half-launched himself and half-fell out of the chair, then scurried into the bedroom. He didn’t see Dell, but there was a... thing... by the bed, some kind of monstrous ape with leathery skin and curling talons, wearing some of Porter’s clothes, but its head was gone—no, wait, there it was, over by the wall: a massive thing with a huge single eye and two slits for a nose and a mouth filled by row after row of triangular teeth.
Porter lurched across the room, into the master bath, and vomited into the toilet.
“They revert back to their normal form when they die,” Bradley said.
After wiping his mouth on a hand towel, Porter said, “What is that thing?”
“Your boyfriend was one of the anthropophagi. People-eaters. Herodotus called them androphagi, but ‘andro’ means ‘male’ and ‘anthro’ means ‘human’ and I don’t want to be sexist. They eat people of all persuasions and biologies.”
Rondeau wandered into the bedroom and leaned against a wall. “Shakespeare wrote about the anthropophagi, but he confused them with the Blemmyes, a totally unrelated and mostly quite nice race of headless humanoids—anyway, that doesn’t matter. You’re saved. Hurray.”
The black fog was beginning to burn off, but the mental landscape it revealed was mostly one of shock, albeit with a bedrock of rage and outrage underneath . “Dell... was... that... thing... was... Dell?”
“Yeah. You’re coming out of it.” Bradley sat on the edge of the bed. “The anthropophagi are parasites on a societal level. They find a human victim, eat a piece of them, and then transform to physically resemble that person. There’s something in their saliva—”
“An enzyme,” Rondeau said. “It’s gotta be an enzyme. Or maybe it’s a pheromone. Or a protein.”
“—something that lets them control your mind, sort of—it makes you suggestible and obedient, anyway. Like a love spell. Sometimes the anthropophagi take over a person’s life, go full imposter, but mostly they just extract all the cash they can, finish eating their victim, and move on. Sometimes they travel in groups and eat a whole family, but I guess this one was solo.”
Rondeau nodded. “We heard a rumor there were anthropophagi in the city. Bradley’s a psychic, and he can sense when people’s minds are getting effed with, so we just drove around until he got a whiff, and then we homed in on you. Good thing we found you at the mall. You got out of this situation with nothing but a lost finger and a pissed-off girlfriend.”
“And ruined credit,” Bradley pointed out.
“Not ruined,” Rondeau said. “I bet the cash is still around here somewhere, and you can return a bunch of the stuff you bought. Anyway, you’re alive. It’s a Christmas miracle. The body of the anthropophage should decompose quickly—they don’t leave corpses for long. Wait a little while and you can just pull the body apart like a roast chicken, put the pieces in garbage bags and toss ‘em down the chute.”
Porter stared at his bandaged hand. His memories were starting to reassemble themselves, and he bared his teeth and hissed. “He ate my little finger!”
Bradley shrugged. “They usually eat something non-essential first. Pinkie finger, maybe a toe. When they take on your form, they mimic any injuries you have, so the first bite isn’t usually a big one.”
Porter slumped down. He didn’t want to believe any of this, and in fact it was all quite unbelievable, but that didn’t matter, because it was all real and actual and irrefutable. “Thank you for saving me. For cutting off its head.”
“Not a problem. They aren’t that strong—they don’t need to be. Apart from the claws and teeth they aren’t that formidable, and anyway, I’m impervious to harm. Best kind of immortality.”
Porter held up his throbbing hand. “I wouldn’t mind a little invincibility. Where do I sign up?”
“Sorry, I can’t help you there. It was a gift from a god.”
“A curse, actually,” Rondeau said.
“Yeah,” Bradley agreed. “Actually.”
“How is living forever a curse?”
“Immortality is great now,” Rondeau said. “But wait a few trillion years, when we’re floating around in space after the heat death of the universe, bored out of our minds, and ask us again.”
Porter shuddered. “That’s horrible.”
“We’re hoping to find another universe before then,” Bradley said. “We’ve still got a little time to figure out our exit strategy.”
Rondeua clapped his hands. “Okay! Christmas is saved! We’re going drinking. Good luck patching things up with your partner.”
“Wait,” Porter said. “Dell... that thing, the anthro whatever... it told me we had plans for Christmas Day.”
“I’m thinking those plans are canceled,” Bradley said. “Being decapitated is a good excuse to skip brunch.”
“No,” Porter said. “You don’t understand. Dell said his whole family was coming to visit. Here. For lunch.” He paused. “I should have thought it was strange when he didn’t ask me to buy any groceries, huh?”
Bradley and Rondeau stared at Porter, then exchanged glances. “Hell,” Rondeau said. “I guess we’re staying the night. What kind of liquor do you have here?”
Bradley came back late in the morning with a bulging paper sack and began brewing a sticky, foul-smelling concoction.
Rondeau scowled at him as Bradley worked over the stove. “I can’t believe you found a hellerune apothecary that fast.”
He shrugged. “An oracle gave me directions.”
“Yeah, but why was she even open on Christmas morning?”
“I’m pretty sure the proprietor predates Christianity. Can I get a spoon, Porter?”
He nodded mutely and offered a wooden spoon.
“Ah, no, better to use metal. This stuff might eat the wood.” The kitchen smelled like industrial chemicals and sick sheep.
Porter found a serving spoon instead and handed it over. He was feeling almost like himself, having slept for two hours, and eaten some toast, and changed his bandage, though looking at his maimed hand made his stomach do flips. He’d gotten off light, sure, but it wasn’t all that light. He’d composed half a dozen texts to Kendra in his head but hadn’t sent any yet. He didn’t want to write anything that might make her rush over, and put herself in danger. Better to see if he survived to the afternoon first. Then he could try to repair his relationship. And his credit.
At least they had a plan. It was a horrible and dangerous plan, but Porter was the kind of person who made lists and followed them, the kind of person who did all his holiday shopping well in advance, the kind of person who had his taxes done by January 2nd. Any plan at all was a comfort to him.
“She told me it’s done brewing when it reaches a tarry consistency.” Bradey lifted the spoon, and the black ichor dripped from it like molasses. “Good enough?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never made a deadly poison before.” Rondeau sighed. “I realize we can’t trust your invincibility to get the job done, with that many anthropophagi they might hold you down and tie you up something, but I still say we could have used some of my contacts and gotten some shotguns and grenades and shit, and handled Christmas dinner that way.”
“Not without destroying Porter’s apartment and bringing the cops down on us. This way will be nice and quiet. Peaceful.”
“Peaceful for you.” Rondeau looked at Porter. “You sure you’ve got this? Ready to do your part?”
Porter nodded. They’d offered to let him leave, saying they’d take care of things somehow, but he felt so stupid, so used, so partially eaten, that he wanted to participate in the defeat of Dell’s clan. “I think so. If I mess up, I’ll die, right? You two won’t. Just me. So I’m motivated to succeed.”
Rondeau gave him a thumbs-up. “That’s the spirit. The Christmas spirit, even.”
“I think the Christmas spirit is a spirit of giving, not poisoning,” Bradley said.
“You celebrate your way, and I’ll celebrate mine.”
“We’re motivated, too,” Bradley said. “Don’t worry. Maybe we wouldn’t die, but we would have to run away, and that would be embarrassing. We have professional pride.”
“Professional immortals?” Porter asked.
“To be honest, we’re still adjusting to that part,” Rondeau said. “But Bradley was an actor and I owned a night club so we were professional at something anyway.”
They’d tidied up the apartment pretty well, and disposed of the remains of Dell, which had turned into a sort of gross brown slurry and ruined the carpet. So much for Porter’s security deposit. They put a throw rug over the mess for appearances. Dell had set the dining room table that morning. No plates. Just forks, and knives. Mainly knives.
Bradley tipped the contents of the pot into a funnel and filled a flask, then handed it to Rondeau. “You should probably throw the flask out after this.”
“I like that flask. It’s monogrammed.”
“They aren’t even your initials.”
“They’re the initials of the guy I won it from in a card game, but still, it’s fancy.”
“I’ll get you a new flask for your birthday. We should get ready.” Bradley patted Porter on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.” He paused. “Probably. If you keep your shit together. Remember what we told you.” Rondeau and Bradley slipped out of the kitchen to get their parts ready.
Porter sat in the living room, willing himself to be calm, running through the plan over and over, caressing it like a set of worry beads. At a few minutes past noon, someone knocked sharply at the door. Porter took a deep breath, composed himself, and answered.
Five people, or things that looked like people, stood in the hallway, though they didn’t look much like a family. An old Korean man with a bandage over his ear. A heart-stoppingly gorgeous redhead who favored one foot. An elegant black couple with matching bandages on their hands. A pudgy white teenager with no visible sign of injury, which was somehow more disturbing.
The redhead said something in a guttural, inhuman language, but Bradley had prepared Porter for that eventuality: “Shh,” he said. “English only. The walls are thin and the neighbors are nosy.”
“Better safe,” she agreed. Porter stepped aside and ushered them in.
“Blessings of the flesh be upon you,” Porter said, just like his immortal friends had told him to.
“May your mouth overflow with blood,” the teenager said, and the others murmured the same.
“Where’s the meat?” The old man poked Porter in the side. “Looks a little stringy.”
Porter cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I got peckish last night and ate too much of him. Hit an artery, and he bled out.”
The black woman crossed her arms. “Dell, you invited us to dine. You’re the one wanted to host. We could have done it. I swear, your inability to control your appetites is going to be the death of you.”
“Don’t worry, I made it right,” Porter said. “I ordered Chinese take-out, and kept the delivery boy.”
The redhead snorted, and the others chuckled.
“He’ll be missed eventually,” Porter said. “But we can eat now, and then clear out.”
“It’s nicer to eat fresh meat, I suppose,” the redhead said. “Shall we?” She stripped off her clothes, and the others followed suit. Porter was prepared for that, too: the anthropophagi preferred to feed naked, apparently, so they wouldn’t mess up their stolen clothes. He kept his eyes averted as he shed his own garments.
The anthropophagi and the human filed into the dining room. Rondeau was on his back on top of the long table (Porter’s nicest family heirloom), dressed in nothing but flannel boxers, bound and gagged with scarves. He tried to thrash free, but more scarves and torn-up bedsheets bound him to the table. Porter took the spot nearest the kitchen door and picked up a steak knife. “Well,” he said. “Dig in.”
The anthropophagi didn’t hesitate. They fell upon Rondeau like hyenas on a struggling wildebeest, a couple of them not even bothering with knives—just leaning over and taking bites. When they tore into Rondeau’s flesh, they lost their human shapes: their faces elongated, and their jaws opened impossibly wide.
Porter had worried they’d notice his failure to join in, but they were so intent on their meal, they paid him no attention. He squeezed his eyes shut and backed away, but even so, the sounds were horrible, all crunching and snuffling and slurping—
“Did you drug this meat?” a voice growled. “To sedate it, or something? It’s... there’s....” The voice trailed off, and someone howled. Rough hands grabbed Porter and yanked him almost off his feet.
He looked around wildly, but Bradley was the one who’d grabbed him, dragging him back into the kitchen. One of the anthropophagi staggered into the room after them, fully inhuman now. It stared at Porter and Bradley for a moment, swaying, its single eye oozing blood. “Sorry,” Bradley said. “That figgy pudding has quite a kick, huh?”
The anthropophage growled, lifted its talons, and then vomited a torrent of what looked and smelled like raw sewage at their feet before pitching over face-first into the mess.
More muffled thumps followed from the dining room. Bradley patted Porter on the shoulder and ducked out. He returned a moment later, smiling. “The hellerune came through. Anthropophagi are very resistant to toxins, given their, uh, varied diet, and I wasn’t sure even the fancy monster-killing poison we fed Rondeau would work.”
“What was plan B, if the poison failed?” Porter closed his eyes again. That was better. He could still smell things, but still, it was better.
“Plan B? That would be me running in there with a couple of kitchen knives and hoping for the best.”
“Is Rondeau....”
“Dead? I mean, not really, but sort of. He’s a mess. Give him a minute. There was a lot of opium mixed in with that poison, it should have kept it from hurting too bad—”
“It hurt plenty bad.”
Porter opened his eyes. Rondeau walked into the kitchen, shirtless, buckling his red pants. “I’d rather not be the guest of honor at a feast like that again. But look at me. Apart from the horrible psychological trauma, I’m good as new. Regeneration rules.”
“It was useful in this case, anyway,” Bradley said. “What with me being so inedible.”
“Is that all?” Porter said. “They’re all gone? No relatives will drop in later?”
“That’s the only group we knew about in the area, and we asked around,” Bradley said. “I think you’re in the clear.”
“Clear? I don’t... there are monsters. Immortals. Magic. Gods, apparently. Things I never knew existed.”
“Try drinking to forget,” Rondeau said. “That’s what I do.”
“Monsters and magic are rare, anyhow,” Bradley said. “You’ll probably never encounter either one again, unless you go looking.”
“Don’t go looking,” Rondeau said.
“I... yeah, no. I don’t plan to.”
Bradley gave him a sympathetic smile. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Porter? You’re still running a big deficit. Rondeau and I will clean everything up.”
“Wait. What? We will?”
“Thank you.” Porter tried to think of more to say, and couldn’t. “Merry Christmas,” he said at last.
“It hasn’t been so far,” Rondeau said. “But it can only get better from this point, right?”
Porter stumbled down the hall to bed. When he woke up, it was nearly dark. He padded out to the dining room, and found a neat pile of all the things he’d bought for Dell, next to a stack of cash, on his table. There were no corpses anywhere, though a faint sewage smell lingered.
There was a small ribbon-wrapped package under his little Christmas tree, and it contained a white stone jar. A scrawled note inside said, I picked this up from the apothecary too. Eat a really big meal, smear this unguent on your stump, and you should grow a new finger in a day or two. Sorry we c
an’t fix anything else.
Beneath that, in different handwriting: Call your girlfriend and tell her you were super drunk, and had the holiday blues, and someone drugged your eggnog, and also you had the flu, and feverish delirium, and you’re sorry. It’s Christmas. Maybe she’ll understand.
And in the first handwriting again: Give her some of those presents you bought for the monster, too. Can’t hurt.
Porter dropped down into his chair. His stomach rumbled. Eat a big meal. Yes. Okay. That was step one of the new plan for the rest of his life. He opened up an app on his phone to order from his favorite Chinese restaurant.
In defiance of his customary habits and historical preference, he ordered exclusively from the vegetarian side of the menu.
Ghostreaper, or, Life After Revenge
Chaos witch Elsie Jarrow ascended and became a trickster god in the novel Queen of Nothing. You got a sense of how she passes the time in “The Four Horsepersons of the Eucatastrophe.” Here’s another time she amused herself.
I sat behind the wheel in my closed garage, with my car’s motor running. I’d used duct tape to attach one end of a garden hose to the exhaust pipe, and the other end of the hose ran in through the crack at the top of the passenger-side window, pumping sweet poison into the interior. I took a last swig from the bottle between my knees, the liquor burning its familiar path down my throat. I closed my eyes and waited for a sleep that would be forever untroubled by bad dreams—for the final closing of the unbalanced account of my life—when something tapped against the glass beside my left ear.
I lifted my head from my contemplation of the steering wheel and saw a pretty thirty-something red-haired woman crouched down, smiling, on the other side of the window glass. She held something in her hand—like a broom handle, but off-white and weirdly textured. I rolled down the window, my head full of dizzy clouds.
“Don’t die,” she said. Her breath smelled of cherries and honey and, faintly, blood-rare steak.
“Ah.” The exhaust I’d inhaled so far gave my perceptions a muffled, cotton-swaddled quality. “I... what do you mean? What should I do instead?” I expected her to say “Live,” I guess, that most simplemindedly optimistic imperative.
