He Feasts Forever Read online

  The kitchen walls seemed to swell, the thick stone throbbing with heat, the air thick as pudding.

  The boy stepped closer. ‘We were on the Eastern Road,’ he rasped. ‘Travelling to visit my uncle. We stopped to rest for the night and I left my mother, father and sister to find blackberries for our supper. They were my sister’s favourite. When I returned you were there.’

  Dedric’s stomach roiled, unsettled as the broth in that heavy pot. It felt as if the kitchen itself were pulling sweat from him and adding it to its own terrible swelter. For the first time in what he remembered of his life, Dedric didn’t want to be in that kitchen. He wanted to run, but, try as he might, he couldn’t look away from the boy.

  ‘You were there,’ the boy said. ‘You and the other monsters.’

  No.

  No.

  ‘You’d torn my father in two,’ the boy continued. ‘I found his legs, first. His shoes were missing along with his toes. My mother’s arms were threaded through the wagon wheels like ribbons and I found her head in the weeds. Her lips had been bitten away. My sister’s hair was strewn all around you and they were feeding you her flesh.’

  Dedric shook his head, but the memories punched through the heat of the kitchen. A carpet of blonde hair all around him like a golden road stretching in all directions. Pale hands, long fingers, clawlike and barely human. Monsters holding him down. Mordants. The word swam to the surface with such clarity, Dedric clutched his head. Mordants were prying his jaw wide, pressing that girl’s flesh into his mouth. And he didn’t want it. He didn’t want to be one of them. He didn’t want to be a monster, but Dedric could feel that girl’s gristle against his lips, could see her torso heaving sideways as they ripped her leg from her hip, muscle popping away from her thigh bone like broken twine. He remembered Hodge beside him too, full to bursting with human flesh and panting.

  ‘I tried to stop you,’ the boy whispered, so close Dedric could feel his breath like ice through the unbearable kitchen heat. ‘I tried to kill you, but your brother shot me. Like an animal, he shot me, and what did you do?’

  Dedric’s breath hitched. He glanced to the pot beside him, into the broth, at those bones that couldn’t possibly be a stag’s bones. Trembling, Dedric looked to the butcher’s block where he’d left the deer’s head and there, in its place, was the decapitated head of the young boy, cheeks sagging to rot, eyes bulging past their lids like half-peeled grapes, black and unblinking as the stag’s had been. Roasting in the hearth were a little boy’s legs, ankles dislocated, feet bent backward and dangling.

  Only now, Dedric saw the truth.

  The comforting heat of the Ghoul-King’s kitchen, all that familiar smoke, had dissolved like lifting fog. The room was suddenly, undeniably, frigid. The walls that had once felt as secure as an embrace were ruined and crumbling. The hearths, whose fires should have been glowing merrily, were nothing but piles of mud and twigs. The spits were nothing but broken wagon wheels and the rusted remnants of swords and, on every one of them, instead of ham hocks or fat chicken breasts, Dedric saw severed human arms and naked torsos, the ribs cracked and bowed towards the earth. On a chopping board, what were once carrots were now fingers, nail beds putrid, maggots squirming from cuticles. A basket of onions was now a pile of human hearts, lumped together and sticky. There were kidneys glazed with offal, carefully arranged atop a bed of flayed and spongey lungs. Tongues hung from a drying rack like squab and all around him was the stench of rotting meat, cloying and thick.

  Dedric’s pulse galloped into his throat. His mouth was dry. For a frantic moment, Dedric thought that if he could rid himself of that horrible, gheistly boy, slice him out of existence, the nightmare around him would disappear too. Dedric fumbled a rusted sword from one of the spits and slashed at the boy’s belly. His chest. His demented, smiling face. But with every stroke, the boy’s body parted and reformed as easily as a puff of steam.

  Dedric stumbled away from him, away from the hearth and the nightmarish feast all around him, his hands plastered over his mouth, his gut threatening to heave. The boy’s gheist smiled, smug and satisfied as he began to fade. He was as thin and insubstantial as a shadow as Dedric turned and fled.

  Dedric careened out of the kitchen and into the courtyard, trying to ignore the way his body felt somehow bigger than it should have. Were his hands ever quite so long? Was that metallic heat on the back of his tongue blood?

  The castle loomed above him, the towers now little more than a mountain of rubble heaving up from a burnt and barren landscape. Emerging from a crooked jumble of unearthed tree trunks was a mordant, and another and another, their bare skulls and hulking shoulders gleaming in the moonlight, their teeth dangling with flesh. Their eyes were hungry.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ one of them asked. Dedric knew that booming voice, though it was distorted and monstrous, as if the vocal cords had been shredded. It was Old Poldrake.

  Standing beside him was Milo, the slaughterer, his friend. Milo tipped his head, his clawed hand outstretched. ‘Are you all right, Dedric?’ he asked. ‘You don’t look well.’

  Dedric tripped over his own feet and scrambled away from them. Into the night, he fled, away from the castle and the kitchen, away from all those familiar things, their glamour stripped, away from the gheist of that boy and his dark, unblinking eyes.

  Dedric sprinted through the courtyard turned graveyard, dirge songs following him on the night-time air. He was halfway to the forest when Hodge appeared.

  ‘Little brother!’ Hodge’s face was distorted, pointed and pale, more monster than man. His quiver was empty. The gutted body of a woman was slumped over his shoulders, her mutilated neck swinging. Her wet hair roped over her face. Her belly gaped like an open, screaming mouth.

  Dedric choked back a groan. Spots blossomed over his eyes as he turned, sprinting away from his brother and the Ghoul-King’s castle. His kitchens. His home.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Hodge’s voice echoed behind him.

  Dedric did not turn back.

  It was nearly morning when Dedric reached the Eastern Road. The moon was small and descending. The road was an uneven ribbon of grey in the dimness. Exhausted, Dedric staggered onto it.

  He half expected someone – Hodge, Old Poldrake, or Milo – to follow him through the forest. Every time he lost his footing or stumbled, Dedric looked over his shoulder, terrified that he’d see their pale faces, twisted and only vaguely familiar, with those monstrously long jaws, and those sharp, dripping teeth.

  But nobody came.

  So Dedric continued on, fear driving him like a heavy whip. He was hungry. His legs began to wobble, but he pressed on, hugging the edges of the road, brambles snagging the hem of his cloak and thorns ripping at his already tattered clothes.

  The sky had just begun to brighten when a singular, golden light appeared on the road ahead of him. It crested the low, rolling hill, bobbing, buttery and wholesome, in the darkness. It took Dedric a moment to realise it was a lantern, swaying high atop a wagon. As it drew closer, he could hear wheels creaking, a horse’s shod feet and voices, meager and thin in the predawn hush.

  Human voices.

  Dedric’s first instinct was to run towards them, to scream for help, to beg somebody to take him farther from that terrible castle faster than his spent legs could carry him.

  But what if they didn’t believe him?

  What if they thought he was a monster too?

  Dedric tried to ignore the paleness of his own hands as he pulled his cowl tighter to hide his face. He tried not to think about the way his fingers, nails sharp and impossibly long, snagged the cloth as he sank into the cover of a thicket beside the road. Maybe he should have remained hidden and let them pass, but he had no place to go but that pile of broken stone and rotting flesh that he had believed was his home, and he couldn’t possibly go back there.

  He was c
old.

  And hungry.

  So very hungry.

  The wagon rattled closer and he could hear their voices more distinctly now. A man. A woman. At least two children. He could see them, their faces surfacing like dumplings in a stirred pot.

  And, oh.

  Oh, he could smell them. Their scent was like roasting meat drifting through the cool morning air, fresh and sweet as spring lambs, juicy as those tender, suckling pigs he had helped Milo skewer so very carefully two days before. Dedric’s stomach grumbled. His mouth watered and he stepped onto the road, his cowl low over his face.

  The horse startled, snorting as it tossed its head and danced away from Dedric.

  The driver cursed, snapping the reins taut and shouting, ‘Whoa!’ He squinted, trying to see Dedric in the dimness, his hand producing a dagger from his belt. ‘Who goes there?’

  The woman clasped a child to her. ‘We haven’t any gold!’

  Dedric cleared his throat. ‘I’m not going to rob you.’ His voice was rough and painfully uneven.

  Now that he was closer, he could see the family more clearly. The man’s forearms were as firm as mutton. The woman’s breasts were as smooth as boiled hare’s belly. A child peered down at him from her mother’s embrace, her cheeks as tender as slivers of fatted veal.

  Dedric swallowed heavily. ‘I need passage to the nearest town.’

  ‘We’re travelling to Mhurghast,’ the man said, shifting in his seat and exchanging an uneasy look with his wife, his hand tightening on the hilt of his dagger. ‘We’re not in the habit of letting strangers ride with us. At least not for free.’

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ Dedric said.

  The man reaffirmed his grip on the horse’s reins, readying to steer their cart well around him, to continue down the road, but Dedric stepped forward with more strength and speed than his exhausted body should have been capable of. He gripped the edge of the cart. The wood creaked beneath his hand.

  ‘I could work for my passage,’ Dedric said as he looked up at them. The lantern light flickered merrily as a hearth fire, basting their skin. Hunger curled through him like a fist and Dedric inhaled deeply. They smelled so good. So savoury. So deliciously sweet.

  The man looked down at him uncertainly. ‘What are you offering?’ he asked, his voice trembling.

  Dedric licked his lips and replied, very softly, ‘I’m an excellent cook.’

  About the Author

  Lora Gray lives and works in Northeast Ohio. Their fiction has appeared in various publications including Shimmer, The Dark and Flash Fiction Online. When they aren’t writing, Lora works as an illustrator, dance instructor and wrangler of a very smart cat named Cecil. ‘Crimson Snow’ is Lora’s first story for Black Library.

  An extract from Genevieve Undead.

  He had a name once, but hadn’t heard it spoken in years. Sometimes, it was hard to remember what it had been. Even he thought of himself as the Trapdoor Daemon. When they dared speak of him, that was what the company of the Vargr Breughel called their ghost.

  He had been haunting this building for years enough to know its secret by-ways. After springing the catch of the hidden trapdoor, he eased himself into Box Seven, first dangling by strong tentacles, then dropping the last inches to the familiar carpet. Tonight was the premiere of The Strange History of Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida, originally by the Kislevite dramatist V.I. Tiodorov, now adapted by the Vargr Breughel’s genius-in-residence, Detlef Sierck.

  The Trapdoor Daemon knew Tiodorov’s hoary melodrama from earlier translations, and wondered how Detlef would bring life back to it. He’d taken an interest in rehearsals, particularly in the progress of his protégée, Eva Savinien, but had deliberately refrained from seeing the piece all through until tonight. When the curtain came down on the fifth act, the ghost would decide whether to give the play his blessing or his curse.

  He was recognized as the permanent and non-paying licensee of Box Seven, and he was invoked whenever a production went well or ill. The success of A Farce of the Fog was laid to his approval of the comedy, and the disastrous series of accidents that plagued the never-premiered revival of Manfred von ­Diehl’s Strange Flower were also set at his door. Some had glimpsed him, and a good many more fancied they had. A theatre was not a proper theatre without a ghost. And there were always old stage-hands and character actors eager to pass on stories to frighten the little chorines and apprentices who passed through the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse.

  Even Detlef Sierck, actor-manager of the Vargr Breughel company, occasionally spoke with affection of him, and continued the custom of previous managements by having an offering placed in Box Seven on the first night of any production.

  Actually, for the ghost things were much improved since Detlef took over the house. When the theatre had been the Beloved of Shallya and specialised in underpatronised but uplifting religious dramas, the offerings had been of incense and a live kid. Now, reflecting an earthier, more popular approach, the offering took the form of a large trencher of meats and vegetables prepared by the skilled company chef, with a couple of bottles of Bretonnian wine thrown in.

  The Trapdoor Daemon wondered if Detlef instinctively understood his needs were far more those of a physical being than a disembodied spirit.

  Eating was difficult without hands, but the years had forced him to become used to his ruff of muscular appendages, and he was able to work the morsels up from the trencher towards the sucking, beaked hole of his mouth with something approaching dexterity. He had uncorked the first bottle with a quick constriction, and took frequent swigs at a vintage that must have been laid down around the year of his birth. He brushed away that thought – his former life seemed less real now than the fictions which paraded before him every evening – and settled his bulk into the nest of broken chairs and cushions adapted to his shape, awaiting the curtain. He sensed the excitement of the first night crowd and, from the darkness of Box Seven, saw the glitter of jewels and silks down below. A Detlef Sierck premiere was an occasion in Altdorf for the court to come out and parade.

  The Trapdoor Daemon understood the Emperor himself was not present – since his experience at the fortress of Drachenfels, Karl-Franz disliked the theatre in general and Detlef Sierck’s theatre in particular – but that Prince Luitpold was occupying the Imperial box. Many of the finest and foremost of the Empire would be in the house, as intent on being seen as on seeing the play. The critics were in their corner, quills bristling and inkpots ready. Wealthy merchants packed the stalls, looking up at the assembled courtiers and aristocrats in the circle who, in their turn, looked to the Imperial connections in the private boxes.

  A dignified explosion of clapping greeted the orchestra as Felix Hubermann, the conductor, led his musicians in the Imperial national anthem, ‘Hail to the House of the Second Wilhelm.’ The ghost resisted the impulse to flap his appendages together in a schlumphing approximation of applause. In the Imperial box, the future emperor appeared and graciously accepted the admiration of his future subjects. Prince Luitpold was a handsome boy on the point of becoming a handsome young man. His companion for the evening was handsome too, although the Trapdoor Daemon knew she was not young. Genevieve Dieudonné, dressed far more simply than the brocaded and lace-swathed Luitpold, appeared to be a girl of some sixteen summers, but it was well-known that Detlef Sierck’s mistress was actually in her six hundred and sixty-eighth year.

  A heroine of the Empire yet something of an embarrassment, she didn’t look entirely comfortable in the Imperial presence, and tried to keep in the shadows while the prince waved to the crowd. Across the auditorium, the ghost caught the sharp glint of red in her eyes, and wondered if her nightsight could pierce the darkness that sweated like squid’s ink from his pores. If the vampire girl saw him, she didn’t betray anything. She was probably too nervous of her position to pay any attention to him. Heroine or not, a vampire�
��s position in human society is precarious. Too many remembered the centuries Kislev suffered under Tsarina Kattarin.

  Also in the Prince’s party was Mornan Tybalt, grey-faced and self-made keeper of the Imperial counting house, and Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich, hard-hearted and forceful patron of the League of Karl-Franz, a to-the-death defender of aristocratic privilege. They were known to hate each other with a poisonous fervour, the upstart Tybalt having the temerity to believe that ability and intellect were more important qualifications for high office than breeding, lineage and a title, while the pure-blooded huntsman von Unheimlich maintained that all Tybalt’s policies had brought to the Empire was riot and upheaval. The Trapdoor Daemon fancied that neither the Chancellor nor the Graf would have much attention for the play, each fuming at the imperially-ordained need not to attempt physical violence upon the other in the course of the evening.

  The house settled, and the prince took his chair. It was time for the drama. The ghost adjusted his position, and fixed his attention on the opening curtains. Beyond the red velvet was darkness. Hubermann held a flute to his lips, and played a strange, high melody. Then the limelights flared, and the audience was transported to another century, another country.

  The action of Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida was set in pre-Kattarin Kislev, and concerned a humble cleric of Shallya who, under the influence of a magic potion, transforms into another person entirely, a prodigy of evil. In the first scene, Zhiekhill was debating good and evil with his philosopher brother, as the darkness gathered outside the temple, seeping in between the stately columns.

  It was easy to see what attracted Detlef Sierck, as adaptor and actor, to the Tiodorov story. The dual role was a challenge beyond anything the performer had done before. And the subject was an obvious development of the macabre vein that had been creeping lately into the playwright’s work. Even the comedy of A Farce of the Fog had found room for a throat-slitting imp and much talk of the hypocrisy of supposedly good men. Critics traced Detlef’s dark obsessions back to the famously interrupted premiere of his work Drachenfels, during which the actor had faced and bested not a stage monster but the Great Enchanter himself, Constant Drachenfels. Detlef had tackled that experience face-on in The Treachery of Oswald, in which he had taken the role of the possessed Laszlo Lowenstein, and now he was returning to the hurt inside him, nagging again at the themes of duality, treachery and the existence of a monstrous world underneath the ordinary.