Decyphered

Instead he came to clap my back and escort me along—smart I suppose he didn’t want me behind him—but this proximity roiled the hunger. Like a thunderclap, in the half-second before his palm could land, his body was muscles was tendons was ligaments was meat packaged around what I wanted how it thrummed through his blood through his brain in his spine in his marrow and maybe it wasn’t great vintage but hey hey hey hey hey hey it was something. I’d take it.

I shoved him away, he stumbled some steps into a cushion of wheat.

The aftermath of that adrenalin burst left me panting, eyes wide, fingers curled. As the rush of my heartbeat faded away again I straightened myself and smoothed my neck.

“Do you have kids?” This was a random question after that show of violence, but if he had a family inside that house I didn’t want to put myself near them.

The abruptness of this question, more than the abruptness of the shove, seemed to disturb the man. His pupils jittered on me like the unsteady eye of a needle.

“Sorry,” I said, in one of those remarkable instances where it was actually warranted.

“For aeons we may face the trials of our adversary,” he began a prayer of mourning, which steadied him to stand. “Come, come," he ushered.

I tramped through the divots left by his footfalls, up to his house. He had a small garden outside with sage bushes, and a scraggly orange tree whose thinner branches bobbed with the landings and departures of finches. A long bench lined with a woollen blanket faced out to the field. Between the warm sun, the birdsong, the breeze, and the flowers, I wondered how much time this farmer must spend, dreaming.

He welcomed me inside and offered me indoor sandals. Upon the table where he told me to sit was a white hemp tablecloth, embroidered with calligraphed red patterns of the catechism. While he fetched a little tin teapot from the table and began boiling water in the adjacent kitchen, I wondered if his wife might have sewn the symbols on the tablecloth.

Only the tinking of cups and spoons in the next room broke the quiet. Nobody else was here to remark on my visit, though a bustle of crude straw dolls smiled on the windowsill. I suspected the man lived alone now, but hadn’t always. Maybe his children were grown.

The man returned with two cups of tea like amber, each transpiring steam. His was thyme and the one offered to me was sage. The difference meant he had recognized me as a casualty of weirding.

He sat down, sipped his tea, gestured for me to do the same.

Well, you know, I’m not entirely stupid to etiquette. I wasn’t meaning to insult the guy, and the mojo of the tea wasn’t telling me to go away (or at least it smelled more of citrus than battery acid), but, I don’t know, I just didn’t take the tea.

He reached out again to me, leaning his belly over the table, as if trying to scoop me from quicksand.

But, yeah...

“Stay here,” he stood, pointing in accusation at the cup before me. Like I’d be sealed to this seat until I finished it. “I will get someone to help you.”

That’s a nice thought, but it’s too late.

Anyway what a grim use of the word ‘help’? Right? Haha.

As he stood in the doorframe, he pointed sternly at the tea again. Like each jab of his finger was casting a little spell. Stay here, stay here, yeah...

I glanced up to convey that his ritual had worked, signing that contract I suppose, but I’d discounted that I would have witch-eye.

It occurred that this farmer had once forgotten to buy his wife tea cakes, and this this was nothing enormous, it bothered him to think his random negligence had let this grain of happiness slip now that she was deceased. Crazy, right? To think about something like that—how much of a saint do you have to be?

Seriously, wonderful man...

When I cancelled that dream, the man gripped the doorframe with a white-knuckled hand and his eyes bulged out like a bullfrog’s. His free hand, clenched over his chest, soon trembled to make another sign of Czjeir.

He probably glimpsed the hunger, and it probably tossed him about a bit. I bowed my head, and he was gone.

So, well, I guess I had to wait.

Maybe this isn’t obvious because I wasn’t sprinting off down the gradient, but I was famished through this whole encounter. All these sentimental things that caught my attention, like the bench and the tablecloth and the dolls, I was also considering eating to strangle the Hunger. Except, well. Have you ever chewed on the handle of say a hairbrush because you’re hungry and it’s there? To trick yourself that maybe you’re eating something? It would be like that. Pointless.

Anyway now that the farmer was absent the urge to ravage his dear possessions like a brainless pest magnified considerably. As I twiddled the edge of the tablecloth, I imagined myself submitting to those motions, as though hallucinating them would substitute for doing them.

It sort of worked and sort of didn’t. Like, it worked in that I was thinking too much to be moving, but also I was thinking about doing it and that worsened the urge.

So I shifted in the chair, set my elbow on its back, and crossed my legs, considering more of the man’s little home. We could call this an exercise in ‘empty distraction’ but genuinely, the differences between this residence and mine did interest me.

For instance. The entire floorplan of this house could fit in my living room, but it was more intimately decorated and purposefully furnished. Take the drawers, chairs, or cabinets, say—all had the rough-hewn look of a home craft, but were varnished, carved, and fit inside the rooms as if actually measured for them. Nobody had ever once bragged that these only cost so-many tichyan, even though they assuredly did only cost so-many tichyan, since that of all things was not what made them important.

I guess, it was just things like that. So I’d wonder, why this? Why that? Where’s that from? And think there might possibly be a passionate answer, instead of more weeping that I’d found something else wrong.

The tea had stopped rising steam. Though it appealed to my appetite about as much as a mound of soot, the rich amber colour intrigued me. Perhaps just one sip? But then when the farmer returned he would see I had taken it, and probably smile and maybe be proud at such a show of vitality. Yeah guy, what a service. As if he knew anything.

Another scream echoed distantly.

I stood from the table. With the edge of the countertop digging across my hip, I peered out the kitchen window. The wheat field outside swayed easily on.

A third scream pealed. I turned—though it sounded distant still, I thought it might be in the house with me. It would be like some trick of projection from the pit of a canyon, where the nearer sounds echoed to nothing, and the farther sounds surged in close.

Like, was someone dying?

I traced my thumb over my nails, staring down at my palm. Slid my tongue over my teeth, glanced away, thinking. Um, if I wasn’t aggrandizing, and my speculation was maybe, correct...

A baby shrieked an inch from my ear.

“Tchha!” I yelled, and my back banged against the wall. My feet scrambled against the floor to push me further away from the source of the noise, but that was already fruitless.

Into my skull there swooped a chorus of screamers. Their banshee nails raked down my meninges as if scrabbling at a stone cliff. These efforts only grated down their fingers, but they would not stop until free of the substance in which they were half-submerged, a boiling ocean of pitch. Then they would see the monarch of this circle, scream, scramble, and scream, before that lupine behemoth romped to them and lashed its claws down their backs.

They would keen like dying animals, then. Through their agony, though, I did recognize the voices – there were still few enough that I could differentiate them. Particularly, one was Tjan’s.

You know, Tjan Veydikasyi, who I had killed, and eaten. My rear end slid to the floor.

I plunged my hand into my stomach as if to excise the screams, excavating through disembowelled guts, but only scraped through to the gristle of my spine.

This didn’t hurt, by the way.

I withdrew my hand, licked it automatically, and interrupted myself by slamming my fist to the wall. The whole building rattled.

What I had speculated, and what Tjan’s voice supported, was that the people I had killed were perhaps not properly dead. Of course, it could be a hallucination of conscience that my victims would assert themselves to me as screams, and hence these could be only metaphorical ghosts, but given that I had in actuality consumed their souls, and that the Hunger itself was situated inside me also, was the possibility of these being genuinely outsourced voices not feasible?

Then what had happened to the transmigration process. Would the souls rot? These questions crossed my mind hazily. But that I could even ask them was awful. If I had actually interrupted transmigration, and maybe thrown some unlucky souls into unconscionable straits, could I please panic properly about it? You know?

My conscience whipped me for this thought. Why should I deserve silence? To defile the process of death would make me an unjustifiable blight, and that aside those were still some properly abominable murders I committed. These people had friends, families, and societal worth. Moreover, they were in pain. Was that not enough to move me, without active censure?

My mind flicked to the nexus at the end of that gradient, which tugged at me still.

So, I needed to kill myself.

I jammed my thumb into my throat. I don’t know why I thought this would work, given my stomach already laid open, but even as my nail punctured my windpipe, and blood clogged down to choke me, nothing really happened.

Like, I didn’t need to breathe, or anything.

Interesting. Okay. My body had been doing irregular things. I smoothed my throat, traced down my stomach, and the flesh in both places mended. The aspect of volition in these motions suggested I had some control. Perhaps there was some specific point, which operated this power, that I needed to hit.

So maybe it was my heart. Maybe it was my face. Maybe I needed to just, shred myself into chunks, something, whatever the trick was. The plight of the screamers had by now spread beyond my skull. It reverberated through every cell, each one a vessel of that scene with the pitch.

I drew my nails down my arm slowly. This did hurt.

My hands slumped to my sides.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

Nothing happened.

I drew my hands in prayer. “U-um, please kill me.”

Nothing answered.

I stared down. My nausea upon noticing the stains down my front inspired me. I shoved two fingers in my mouth to coax myself to emesis. I retched not at all and just snapped off my fingers.

Failure, failure, failure. All I’d accomplished was a stain over the farmer’s walls and floor, and myself too I suppose. But the screams raking at me insisted that to be still was to be evil, akin to passing a beggar, or ignoring a man struggling to pull himself from a river. And what better compass did I have? Huh? What was I going to do by my own devices. Guess. Heartless. Incompetent. Worthless. Oh God save us aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

The castigation shuddered through every inch of me. The more I listened, the louder it got. I’m not sure whether to call it masochism, but for how punishing a wall of death-wails is, especially ones shivering through your flesh, it was kind of nice to be so overwhelmed that I actually felt sorry.

So I had to something. But what? Oh anything! Anything? Anything! No I’m sorry that’s not what I mean what I mean is what do you want me to do? A N Y T H I N G. Anything, anything, really? So what you really mean is that you don’t know? Listen I can do plenty of anything, I can give you all the anything you want, it doesn’t turn any of that anything into something. I won’t enjoy it, you’ll still be in pain. Do you want me to start chucking darts at balloons oh OF COURSE YES. SORRY I DIDN’T MOVE TO TRY QUICKER.

HAVE YOU TRIED THIS? HAVE YOU TRIED THIS? HAVE YOU TRIED THIS? HAVE YOU TRIED THIS? WELL THEN WHY ARE YOU GIVING UP?

WELL NO ACTUALLY I HAVEN’T TRIED THAT. BECAUSE I DON’T THINK IT WILL WORK. BUT YOU NEVER KNOW UNLESS YOU TRY HAHAHAHAHA YEAH SURE WHY NOT YOU NEVER KNOW EXCEPT YOU WITH YOUR FUN IDEA NUGGET YOU’VE CRACKED THE CODE AND OH OOPS WAS THAT A BUST TOO WELL WHO ON EARTH COULD HAVE PREDIC

Yeah anyway. I made a big mess on the floor.

I rose out of the pile and saw the aftermath of that episode spattered across the room. Bloody constellations had set into the tablecloth, and the windows and the floorboards. I was firstly a moron for obeying the screamers like that, though I could still only barely maintain the presence of mind not to, and secondly I was a menace who ruined a nice farmer’s home and didn’t deserve to exist or live.

I sat on the chair, surveying it all. Some had even hit the ceiling.

There was nothing to gain from regarding the screamers. Nothing. Still, my body thrummed with their wailing, and the overbearing pressure of it tempted me to snap and try a second round of enthusiastic self-mutilation. If I could just figure out what mechanism had originally silenced them—

—khaHAAAAAH!! My conscience pounced jubilantly. You want to shut up the screamers! You want to ignore them and leave them to suffer!

Ugh, this... well, no, n-not re—

OH REALLY OH REALLY LIKELY STORY. That’s just the breaks of murder, Mephi! And as the only good part of you, this is my job, to put some account on your bullshit and otherwise put you in the ground!

I had just tried, rather vigorously actually, to do that exact second thing. My methods hadn’t worked, so—

Try again! Try harder!

—so I needed a moment to plan how I might do such a thing properly. For that I would appreciate a reprieve because it was hard to think much over all the fuCKING SCREAMING—

Oh you can plan all you want but we know you’ll never do anything.

—and all this self-flagellation achieved was a delay, protracting the victims’ suffering—

Right right. So what!

—alright I didn’t actually have a conscience, I just hated myself a lot.

I rested my temple in my palm. My body trembled like a bomb in the short seconds before an explosion, and I couldn’t swallow my misgivings about the screamers without gagging and choking on them. With my thumb-nail I scraped a bead of blood off the tablecloth before it could set, and licked it up.

It tasted like nothing. Still, I found I could preoccupy my mind into blankness with the vague work of cleaning the tablecloth. The Hunger, which I’d actually been distracted from, lumbered back into my thoughts and whined with the suggestion that I get on all fours and lick the floor clean too.

Fucking thing.

But could I argue? It would work to clean up the mess. My counterpoint was that it was degrading? It’d be degrading, not to say horrifying, for the farmer to mop up this slaughterhouse too.

I planted each hand to frame a smirch on the wall, and leaned in. But I couldn’t. I fell back onto my haunches and retched into my wrist. To save this fundamentally unviable plan, I rubbed my palm on the wall, and lapped the blood from that. A smear still stared from the brick.

Behind and below me was a carpet of gore. In turning to consider it, I felt my feeble compromise in navigating this dilemma even more pathetic than allowing the hunger to lug my tongue directly over the unclean surfaces. If I fancied myself so much better, I ought get a pail, soap, and water.

In the man’s kitchen, I found a basin, but no taps. His water came from an external pump, which I spotted in the backyard past the kitchen’s rear door. That wonderful, bright blue day unfurled before me, and I shuffled back like a mouse.

As though divided by a line of salt, I could not cross the threshold outside.

If I crossed, the gradient would catch me and ferry me off. It would violate the farmer’s ritual, not to say expedite the hunger’s next murder, which I suppose was the more important factor. I’m not sure why I’d come to regard this building as a safehouse, given the presence or absence of walls shouldn’t cloister me from the pull, but apparently I had.

I closed the door and turned away.

Seated again at the table, in a room sullied red by my mess, I hugged my elbows.

And, you know, it makes me want to shred myself, saying this...

...but, for just that once, I truly could not wait for someone calling themselves ‘help’ to arrive.