Chapter 42 - The Charnel Pit part 8

I lay as if dead while the Blood repaired my injuries. After a while, the monkeys my maker had brought for me to feed on emerged from their fear-induced catatonia and began, tentatively, to explore the cavern. They circled the dark chamber, poking into all the nooks and crannies, investigating the stiff carcasses of the dead Neanderthals with nervous little hoots. They endeavored to climb the walls and remove themselves from the charnel pit but the inclination of the slick surface defeated each attempt. Finally, exhausted, one of the apes removed itself to the far side of the room and hunkered down. It picked anxiously at its ass, blinking its big brown eyes. The other, restless, sauntered in my direction. It did not know that I was not quite as dead as the rest of the dead men in the chamber. The instant it ventured too near to my body, my armed flashed out as if it had a will of its own. Before the beast had even a chance to cry out, I had snapped its neck and opened its veins with my fangs.

Its companion howled, eyes bulging, lips curling back from its teeth, and then it began to leap and scrabble at the wall in a panic.

I drained the beast, then threw the limp carcass aside. "Sorry little fellow," I panted, struggling to sit up. I wiped the blood from my lips with the back of my arm and eyed the other monkey hungrily. "Hello," I said with a titter. The blood I had just ingested was making me giddy.

The second monkey looked back over its shoulder, its fearful expression pitifully human, and then it began to spring at the wall again.

I dragged myself toward him, all shining eyes and blood-dripping fangs. "Come here, little guy," I cooed. "I won't hurt you."

What a horror I must have looked, hauling myself over the Neanderthals' corpses! The panicked ape leapt and shrieked, hair standing on end. I licked my lips, drooling in hunger, giggling as I writhed across the floor on my belly.

"Come here. Come here, little fellow!"

Even the meekest of animals will attack when they're cornered, and that is exactly what my fourth victim did. As I drew near, the monkey quit trying to scramble up the wall. The beast wheeled around and charged at me without warning, howling ferociously and baring its blunt yellow canines. It galloped at me, pounding its knuckles on the ground as it came, and then it sprang.

I seized the animal by the throat in mid-air and sank my teeth into its neck.

Ah, the blood!

That warm flush! That rush of vitality!

I tossed the final monkey away and basked in the fleeting glow of satiation. For a moment I felt warm and bright, as if I were bathing in summer sunshine. The pain had abated. I felt strong and fine, my senses exquisitely sharp, my thoughts clear and quick. I held my hands up and watched the wounds on them healing over and fading from sight. For a moment they were ruddy and healthy-looking. Mortal. Human. My entire body was tingling with good health. I fell onto my back and laughed, looking up at the entrance of the cave. It did not seem so far away now. Perhaps, when I had mended some more, I would attempt to leap out of there as I'd seen my maker do. I couldn't do it yet. My legs were still shattered. But when they healed…!

Dawn came on cat's paws, slowly filling the charnel pit with pastel light. As I had not healed enough to attempt escape, I decided to search the bodies of the Fat Hands before the light grew bright enough to pain me. Surely one of the Fat Hands had been tossed down here still clutching a knife or some tool I might use as a weapon against my captor. Perhaps one of my maker's victims, trapped down here as I was trapped, had secreted a blade on his person. Or perhaps I could fashion a weapon myself, using the materials lying about the cave. I had killed the little one with a dirk to the heart. Perhaps his master could be destroyed the same way. I need only find a weapon or a piece of stone sharp enough to pierce his strange white skin.

The Neanderthals were stiff and frozen to one another. Their flesh, when I pulled them apart to search their bodies, made the most hideous crackling sounds, but I persisted.

I recognized some, though their faces were disfigured by horror and pain. Most had terrible wounds to their necks—like Fodar and my tribesman Tetch. Others had been decapitated like my father. A few had wounds at their wrists or inner thighs. The motive behind the mutilations was no longer a mystery. I knew now first hand the desires that moved the Foul Ones to such extreme acts of violence. My own appetite was stirring again. I was just glad the light was still low and I did not have to examine their faces too closely. They were too pitiable. Too grotesque. And the sight of their injuries, especially the ones to the throat, made me salivate helplessly. I kept picturing myself biting them, drinking their blood. The fantasies filled me with self-loathing but I could not help myself.

I moved haltingly, stopping from time to time when the pain was too much to bear. I had not fully healed from the previous night's battle. There were places where my stone-like skin was still broken open. And my legs… my legs were the worst of the lot. My legs looked like bloody rags, and trailed behind me just as limply. Broken bones, I discovered, mended at a much slower rate than flesh wounds. I could still feel jagged pieces of bone stabbing into the surrounding tissue when I moved my legs.

But I was healing. I was healing at a stupendous rate. I could feel the Blood working to repair my internal injuries. My fractured ribs snapped back with a sound like cracking knuckles. I was frisking the body of a Fat Hand I used to gossip with at the river—a chubby fellow named Alb—when the dent in my forehead filled back out to its natural dimensions. I clutched my head like a man with a migraine as the pieces of my skull slotted back together all at once. It felt like someone had hammered a stake into my head.

It was almost magical, the restoration of my physical injuries. It would have filled me with wonder if it were not so damned painful. And where my wounds had healed completely, the skin was smooth and unblemished, as if I'd never been injured at all. I think the saying is "smooth as a baby's butt." I still bore the scars I had received before my transformation, but the injuries I sustained after I received the demon blood healed without a sign they had ever been. Despite its terrible alienness, my new skin was quite beautiful. Lustrous. Perfect.

Yet as I healed, my hunger for blood grew stronger and stronger. By midmorning, I found myself returning to the bodies of the monkeys to see if I could drain any more nourishment from them. I brought their throats to my mouth and sucked on the wounds, but it was like sucking on stones. I had drained them dry, and the taste of their cold flesh was foul beyond tolerance.

I resumed my search, hungry and frustrated.

I had to crawl into direct sunlight to continue picking through the mounds of dead Fat Hands. The light felt strange on my new white skin-- too hot, too penetrating. It stung my eyes and made them weep a tacky, tar-like substance. This substance was much like the terrible black ejaculate the Foul One had made me swallow, and mixed in with the black, like marbles of fat in meat, were streaks of red blood. I wiped my bloody tears from my cheeks and then licked the teardrops from my fingers, closing my eyes at the little zaps of pleasure.

Exhaustion was settling over me like a shroud. I wanted to retreat into a dark corner and curl into a ball. I found myself slipping in and out of consciousness and pinched myself on the cheeks to bring me back to wakefulness.

No rest! I scolded myself. Not until you've found a weapon!

Ignoring the pain, the hunger, the exhaustion, I continued on. My eyes felt raw and sore, as it they'd been scored by sand. My skin throbbed from its exposure to the light like a mild sunburn. Now I knew why the little one had been so hesitant to step into the light when we confronted it at Gray Stone. The sunlight hurt!

As the day progressed, I realized I had not passed waste from my body since the Foul One transformed me into this blood-craving thing. It had been two days and I had not made water or emptied my bowels once. When I realized I no longer needed to shit or piss, I did seek out a shadowy alcove and mourned quietly for my lost humanity for a little while.

I know it seems like a petty thing. Regardless, I mourned. Like death, elimination is universal to all men. We are not guaranteed happiness, health or children, but all men die and all men shit. Often they shit at the same time they die. It is a trivial thing perhaps, but the fact that I had ceased to eliminate was just more proof that I had lost my humanity, that I had become something monstrous and unnatural.

Mourning gave way to anger, and I resumed my search for a weapon.

As I sorted through the bodies, the disk of bright sunshine that slanted down from the opening of the pit crawled inexorably across the chamber and slithered up the wall. As it climbed the wall, the light dimmed from a cheery gold hue to a sullen red. Soon it would be night, and the Foul One would return with it. I was running out of time!

At last, under a tangle of putrefying limbs, I unearthed a fine stone knife. It was a big weapon. The blade, made of obsidian, was nearly eight inches long, with a four inch braided leather handle. The blade was knapped to a fine, deadly edge. I tested it on the ball of my thumb and my skin parted like water. I started to suck the wound, but it healed almost instantly.

"Yes," I whispered to myself. "Yes, this will do just fine. Thank you, ancestors! Thank you!"

Grinning, holding the weapon against my body to conceal it, I huddled against a wall and contemplated strategies.

I ran through every possible scenario I could imagine. Finally, I came to the conclusion that my best chance of success lied with trickery. My maker was stronger, faster and more brutal than me—or so I believed at the time. I had no hope of overpowering him with the injuries I had sustained. My enemy's only weakness, as far as I could tell, was his intellect. He was arrogant, hot-tempered and overly confident of his abilities. His violent disposition betrayed a lack of imagination. Those were all weaknesses I could exploit.

So I will be clever, I thought. I will outwit my foe.

But how?

I tried to devise some brilliant deception, some way to catch my adversary off guard, but I did not have much to work with—a knife, a pit, several dozen dead Neanderthals. Oh, and four monkey carcasses! Also, I was all but crippled. My legs no longer looked like tattered rags but they were not much better than that. I could barely hobble around a few steps, and if I twisted more than a couple of centimeters to the left or right, my back convulsed in agony, paralyzing me for an instant. To make matters even more hopeless, my thirst for blood was clamoring in my belly. The hunger was making me anxious and distractible. I jumped at every sound, thinking my maker had returned. How could I come up with a decent plan when all I could think about was drinking blood? I couldn't get it out of my head!

Just think, Gon, I said to myself. Try to concentrate!

I replayed our last two battles in my mind, looking for some flaw in his fighting style. It was hard to concentrate as the hunger kept interrupting my thoughts but I pressed stubbornly on. I watched myself leap at him, saw how he grabbed my wrists and threw me. And then an idea struck me! I imagined how I might deceive him, and the image of it in my mind was both brilliant and bizarre … and potentially deadly for my father's killer!

I searched through the tangled corpses until I located a pair of arms that were roughly the same size and shape as my own. With a grimace of disgust, I used the knife to saw through the flesh at the elbows. The arms were frozen stiff, and I had to disjoint the bones to get them loose, but I finally prevailed.

I prayed to the spirit of the Fat Hand whose body I was desecrating. "Forgive me, brother. I mean no disrespect."

The last thing I needed was a perturbed spirit mucking up my plans!

I had no clothing in which to hide the knife or the two arms, so I sought a patch of deep shadow and curled my body into a ball. I concealed the severed arms between my belly and the wall, and then I shut my eyes and awaited my maker.

Help me strike down my foe, ancestors, I prayed. Cloud his eyes so that he does not see his doom. Guide my blade so that it stills his cursed heart.

Or let him finish me and be done with it.

Clutching the blade to my breast, I waited.

And waited.

Evening deepened into night but my maker did not return. I did not sleep, yet I dared not move, for I knew that he could come swooping down at any moment like some great bird of prey. He would come, thinking to torment me further... yes... thinking to break my spirit or seduce me with another meal of blood, but I would be waiting for him. I would spring at him when he came close and drive my blade into his heart. I would kill him as I had killed the little beast he'd kept as a pet.

Once again, the sky clouded over and snow fell through the opening of the charnel pit, sawing and spinning down the stone throat of the cavern to light upon the tangled mounds of all the murdered Fat Hands. The snowflakes drifted down in darkness for there was no moon this night. Yet despite the lack of light, I found that I could see them. I could see the snowflakes spiraling down. I could even hear them when they alighted-- a very tiny sound, like a baby's dreaming sigh. My eyes seemed to be growing more and more sensitive. My other senses, too. Hearing. Touch. Taste. Smell. The snowflakes had a wonderful smell! Much more pleasing than all the dead bodies lying around me.

I wondered if my eyes were gleaming in the dark like my maker's eyes gleamed.

I watched a snowflake settle on my arm and waited for it to melt.

It did not.

I was not even warm enough to melt a single snowflake! More proof that I had become a creature of the spirit world. I was as cold and lifeless as the bodies underneath me. A dead thing. Inhuman.

The snow collected on my body throughout the night. Still my maker did not return. By morning, I was a white drift curled against the wall.

I waited.

More snow fell.

It felt good to be covered in that blanket of ice. It was comforting. To be enshrouded. Alone. A cold white child in an icy womb. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to sink into a light doze. My dreams, when they came, were strange and disjointed. I dreamed of flying through the treetops and catching small animals to feed on. I dreamed that I had returned to my family, and that I was a man again, soft and warm and alive. I dreamed I was a saber-tooth cat, stalking my prey through a grassy green meadow, and when I leapt upon my victim, he wheeled around in horror and it was me.

I slept most of the day, waiting to kill the monster that had corrupted me. I slept and I dreamed and I healed. The snow finally quit and the daylight not long after.

I sensed movement above. I heard a cloak whipping in the air, the thump of two booted feet landing lightly nearby.

My thoughts quickened and my fingers tightened on the handle of the knife I held to my chest.

My maker had finally returned!

"Rise, little one, and attend to your master," he called out, his voice hatefully cheery. "I know you are hungry. Rise and see what feast I've brought you tonight!"