Thomas Sniegoski - In the House of the Wicked

“Have I changed that much, my love?” she asked in a wheezy, congested voice.

And to think she once made her fortune in fashion design.

Stearns was repulsed by what he saw. He stared at her bloated face, looking for some trace of the woman he had once lusted after hiding beneath layers of pale, sickly flesh.

“It has been too long, darling,” he finally said, watching as the rats crawled upon her chair and her person. She stroked them lovingly as they came within reach, and then he saw the oddest thing. As Daphene laid her hands upon them, the rodents became suddenly still, falling limply onto their sides.

“Even though we’ve been given more life than the average person, time still marches on at an alarming clip,” Daphene answered, brushing still bodies of rats from her expansive lap.

“And what have you been doing with that additional life?” Stearns asked, fighting to hide his revulsion.

“What haven’t I done?” she exclaimed with a laugh, causing her ample flesh to undulate. “I made the world my lover… I had whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. It was good for a time,” she said, gazing off into the distance. “Quite good. But then it all went wrong when the dreams started.”

She turned her glassy-eyed stare to Stearns.

“Do you know what I’m talking about, Algernon?”

He knew exactly what she meant: the memories of all those killed in Hiroshima coming to him when his mind was at rest, desperate to be claimed as his own. “The dreams,” he said, reaching down to swat a rat beginning its ascent up his trouser leg. “They can be quite…overpowering at times.”

“Yes,” Daphene agreed. “They can be, but once I adjusted to them…the hunger came.”

Just the mention of the word made every muscle in Stearns’ body contract painfully. He hid his body’s response with a casual cough.

“At first I had no idea what was happening, but then I realized that Deacon’s experiment that night had changed me. I hungered for the energies of living things.”

She continued to stare at him, petting rats two at a time, draining their life forces before moving on to the next.

Insatiable.

He could have sworn she was growing larger before his eyes.

“Which explains your little friends,” Stearns said, still in awe of the multitude of vermin that surrounded them.

“They breed very quickly, and are quite nutritious as far as life energies go,” she explained. “They’re also very easily manipulated with magick.”

The rats were climbing up, then dropping off, her body in droves now, their conversation obviously making her anxious-and hungry.

“What about you, Algernon?”

Stearns stared at her, pretending he didn’t know what she was getting at.

“Were you changed, too?” she asked, a trace of desperation in her voice.

Stearns finally nodded. “Yes, Daphene. Deacon’s damnable contraption changed all of us.”

She picked up a squirming rat and squeezed the life from it like the juice from a lemon.

“Have you talked with the others?” she asked.

He nodded and began to shuffle closer to the wheelchair, the rats at his feet shrieking with protest as he stepped on their tails.

“Robert and Eugene, yes. I tried to find Angus, but have had little success. You were quite difficult, too, but then you found me.”

He was standing behind her now. He took a deep breath, then placed his hands on her shoulders, gently massaging the soft, pliant flesh beneath the cotton dress. It felt disgusting, but it was necessary.

Daphene had stopped feeding.

“How long was it after you spoke to Eugene and Robert that they…they…?” She had problems with the next word.

“That they died?” Stearns asked, kneading the flesh of her shoulders, barely able to feel the tender muscle beneath the layers of fat. “Let’s not mince words, my dear. They were murdered.”

The rats suddenly became more agitated, snapping, hissing and biting any other that was close by.

“All right.” She swallowed noisily. “How long was it after you spoke to them that they were murdered?”

“Actually, I spoke to them just before they died.” Stearns knew that he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. He leaned close to his former lover’s ear and whispered, “Right before I killed them.”

The rats were going wild now, and Stearns actually felt a hint of tension through the flab. Daphene tried to turn her bulk in the chair, but he held her tightly, feeling the tiny mouths that had formed on the palms of his hands less than a year after being hooked up to Konrad Deacon’s machine eagerly opening and closing.

“What are you doing?” Daphene screamed.

“What I need to do.” He gripped her flesh all the tighter, allowing the mouths to take hold. “Nothing else was enough. It was like Chinese food; I’d always be hungry again in a matter of days.”

“Algernon, please,” Daphene begged. She was struggling to wheel herself away. The rats that continued to climb upon her body were biting at each other as well as at her.

Stearns held her fast, feasting on the unique life force of another cabal member.

“And then I started to think about all my good friends and what we’d been through together, and I became soooooooooooo hungry.”

Daphene thrashed but could not escape his grip as Stearns continued to feed, making his pain go away. Satisfying the hunger.

“Something deep inside told me that my friends were the answer, that they would be the ones to save me…to feed me… And it was right.”

He could feel the flesh beneath his hands starting to wither.

The rats were in a panic as Daphene lost her grip on their tiny minds. They darted this way and that, frantic to flee the basement.

His former lover no longer fought him. She leaned back in the wheelchair, her eyes now a milky white, looking up at him, begging him to stop before it was too late for her. But he would not. He had to take it all and leave nothing behind.

The mouths on his hands eagerly sucked at the remaining life stuff, hungrily taking in energy. She would be dead soon; he could feel its approach.

The cherry atop the sundae.

As her life ended, he saw her memories, staccato flashes of a life of privilege, magick, and decadence. A life leading to this one spectacular moment when it would all be given up.

For him.

And then it was over. That last bit of delicious life clinging to the shriveled carcass in his hands broke free of its mooring and flowed into the mouths of his hands and into his newly enlivened form.

Stearns shuddered with obscene pleasure, tossing his head back as he experienced the sensations of his revitalized body. It was like that morning in the Catskills all over again, when hundreds of thousands of people died to give him life.

To make him strong.

He released Daphene’s decaying remains, wisps of lingering life force, like smoke, trailing from her body to the sucking mouths still visible on his hands. The corpse pitched forward, tumbling from the chair to land upon the multitude of dead rats she had drained for sustenance.

His entire body hummed with life-with power. He looked at his hands, watching as the writhing mouths receded back into his flesh. Then he moved swiftly through the shadows and out of the building.

There was only one member of the cabal remaining, but Stearns had already set plans in motion for the future. Plans that, if carried out precisely, would sustain him long after the final cabalist had withered beneath his hands.

It was a changing world, and Algernon Stearns was starving to be part of it.

Remy returned to his room at the farthest end of the motor lodge with the clay skull beneath his arm, wrapped in his jacket.