Marcus Pelegrimas - Teeth of Beasts

That’s when Henry Bartlett knew he was never going to be forgiven.

He would never clear the stench of his own filth from his nose.

The mites would never stop crawling through his hair.

He would never be able to eat something besides oatmeal, bread, or the occasional bit of stolen meat.

He would never be let out of that room.

It took a lot of strain, but he finally managed to look up to the unblinking eye of the Lord to feel some of the strength the preacher had always gone on about.

One day, God told him to dig.

Henry crawled to the door with his head cast down and his legs only moving below the knees so as not to agitate the lice infesting his groin. Settling next to the door, he scraped at the same spot he’d started on a few years ago, using nails that had hardened to jagged, calcified implements. His eyes narrowed to intense slits as he pulled at the wood and scraped against stone. His head wobbled and the voices rushed through his mind. Every splinter he pulled away brought him one step closer to freedom. Every bit of pain slicing through his hands spurred him on and chased away the need to sleep.

“You’re doing well, Henry,” God whispered. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Uh…me too. I mean me for you…”

“I know what you mean to say, Henry. I can read it upon your heart.”

“Thank—”

“Bless you,” God purred. “And keep digging.”

The Lord’s eye was casting a dark red light into the room by the time someone approached the door. Reflexively backing into his corner, Henry saw a new set of eyes look in through the little window of his door.

“Back up or you’ll be hurt,” the unfamiliar man said in a thick accent. His face took on an angry hue and he asked, “You been damaging Lancroft property again? You were told what would ’appen if you bloodied up another door.”

Henry knew what he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

“He will obey you,” God told him. “Place the words into his mind.”

It wasn’t easy, but Henry did his best to keep his thoughts together when he said, “Open the door.”

“Shut yer hole!” the guard said.

“Think the words,” God urged.

So Henry thought, “Open the…open…door…open…open door…” Despite Henry’s trouble, the guard twitched in a way that revealed he was hearing the voices too. To keep the words straight in his head, Henry packed them into an orderly strand. “Open…thedoor. Openthedooropenthedooropenthedoor!”

As soon as the door moved, he charged forward. He reached out with clawed, desperate hands and grabbed for the first piece of meat he could grasp. Since his shoes had been taken away months ago to teach him the value of keeping his piss pot upright, his toes were free to dig into the cracks of his floor and steady himself when he pulled the guard down. The other man felt no bigger or stronger than the child who had hidden in that root cellar.

“Someone get this animal offa me!” the guard shouted as he slammed his club upon Henry’s back.

Heavy footsteps stomped down the hall, but they didn’t arrive quickly enough to keep the guard’s blood from being spilled. More men came, and they brought their sharpened sticks with them, but they all seemed to get smaller as Henry’s muscles swelled and the Lord screamed inside his head to finish what he’d started.

Henry’s fingernails tore through one guard’s uniform before shredding the flesh of another. Bones splintered easily in his grasp until he finally got to the tender meat he craved. After being stabbed and cut by those sharp sticks, he was forced away from the guards and back into his corner.

The lumps within Henry’s chest rustled impatiently. They wriggled and clawed at his insides to keep him going as he gnawed on the dark, tender meat of the guard’s heart. When that was gone, he chewed on one of the fingers that had become lodged in his fur after being torn from its hand. A nub of bone lay wedged in his throat. The ears, he saved for later.

As Henry became too tired to push against the weight of the symbols upon his wall, he swore he could feel himself shrinking down. Shriveled tendons in his neck had pulled away from his collarbone. With those rubbery chains broken, his head rolled freely upon his shoulders, flopping from side to side as his arms snaked around his twisted body. Perhaps he was wasting away like the preacher had told him he would. Before he fell asleep, a friendly bearded face peeked in at him through the hole in his door.

“How did you get that guard to open the door?” Jonah asked.

God insisted that he not tell, so Henry didn’t say a word.

Jonah smiled knowingly, as if he shared a secret with his favorite patient. “You tricked him some way, didn’t you?”

Henry turned away from the door. “I didn’t trick nobody, mister.”

“We’ll be seeing plenty more of each other, my friend. You might as well start calling me Dr. Lancroft.”

Times were rough.

At least, that was the sentiment that stuck with Cole after his brief trip to Seattle. He’d been anxious to take care of some professional business after a nice long road trip in a rental car that came equipped with better air-conditioning than his old apartment. It was supposed to be a time for him to hang his arm out the window, feel the summer wind blow through the dark crop of hair stretching from a scalp that was normally buzzed to within an inch of its life, and listen to some music. Before getting too far away from Chicago, he’d stopped to purchase a new GPS so he could make the trip without having to rely on old-fashioned maps. There was a GPS function in his phone, but dropping some cash in an electronics store was another form of comfort to go along with the rest of the trip. After a few hours of fiddling with the options, he settled upon the voice of a British woman to tell him when to turn and which side of the road to shoot for.

Along the way, he’d slept in hotels that offered the barest essentials, ate his complimentary breakfasts, stocked up on gas station candy and spicy beef jerky, and had a generally perfect trip to the West Coast. Not long after his arrival at the offices of Digital Dreamers, Cole heard those dreaded three words.

“Times are tough,” Jason Sorrenson had told him.

Cole’s ears were still ringing from the constant flow of wind past his face when he’d been given that little tidbit. “I know times are rough,” he’d said. “At least I didn’t have to sell a kidney to afford the gas to get here.”

“You drove all the way from Chicago?”

“Yeah, it was nice.”

Instead of wearing his standard-issue Mariners cap, Jason had finally conceded to the fact that he and his hair were parting ways. Like many amicable separations, the man was left feeling beaten and somewhat ashamed. Most of the people in the building were clad in anything from T-shirts to light sweaters, but Jason was dressed to fit his role as their boss. His white shirt was starched, buttoned, and crisp. Slacks were freshly pressed and suspenders were straight out of a catalogue that must have fallen behind a sofa eight years ago.

“I wish you would have let me know you were driving all the way out here,” Jason said.

Cole glanced at the small group of programmers leaving a large break room on their way to the newly refurbished room marked ART AND LEVEL DESIGN. All four of the sun-deprived professionals wore Digital Dreamers badges, smelled of cigarette smoke, and couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of college. “I did tell you I was coming,” he said. “Remember my e-mail?”