Author note: The short story that follows is a horror of roughly 2400 words, finished in March of this year. It has sat in storage since then in proper submission format, just in case I ever developed the requisite gumption to send it some place. Thus far I have not, so here it is instead. I’m a bad judge of whether it’s ultimately worth a shit or not, but it holds an important distinction in my life regardless: it’s the first piece of fiction I’ve been able to finish since the pandemic began and everything in life went topsy-turvy. Publishing it here is a step toward putting those years behind me, so much as can be done, and getting back to the creative life I dropped somewhere along the way.
Debts are owed to my departed friend Todd, the seafaring works of Melville, Richard Chase’s Grandfather Tales and its folk yarns of old Scratch, and Michael Stanley’s 1985 film Attack of the Beast Creatures (inspiration really does spring from the strangest of places). Thanks are also due to my wife, who served as editor through the drafting process and has at least as much time invested in this as I do. Her patience for my prose is commendable and my writing would be senseless without her. Well, more senseless.
I hope you find something to enjoy in this, and that maybe it makes you feel bad in a genre-appropriate sense. Whatever the case, thank you for reading. I promise the introduction will be shorter next time.
Here’s to better things.
~~~
So long as I be fed
~~~
He was cold, and he was hungry. By God, he was hungry.
They’d run out of things to burn more than a month ago and had since passed their nights in a desolate and misty gloom, and though his eyes failed him in that darkness he could feel the fog which ever enveloped them. It nipped at his exposed toes and fingertips, taunted his parched flesh, and left his fraying slacks in a perpetual state of waxen tackiness. The time he could not tell, but he knew that morning was well off yet. He’d slept short and fraught and ill, and doubted that he would sleep again.
She was sleeping, and the other one as well, yonder in their earthen corner. He could hear them breathing, weak and shallow and harried. “I can’t sound much better,” he thought, scratching at his chest and feeling at his own ribs. The fat and sinew about them had perished bit by bit, day by day. He felt as though he were a stub of candle, aware as he was of his own progressive withering, and at the end of his brief and blackened wick danced but a sliver of blue-red ember. His exhaustion had become total. His humanity was near to snuffing. None of them, he thought, were long for this world.
But even in that mortal tiredness his hunger welled monstrous and implacable within him. What he wouldn’t give for a turtle’s egg or a mushroom or some sprig of herb. Even a worm, by God, culled from the same ruinous earth upon which he wallowed, would suffice.
But food there was none.
Aye, that island held no food–nor anything else–for him, nor for his companions, nor for anyone who might chance upon it. No fair hills rose from its black beaches of volcanic sand and pumice, and its barren interior sheltered naught but a few patches of lichenous gray scale. That, proving inedible, they had left to flourish as it might. It was a bedeviling place, an unholy place. No green thing grew upon it and it offered no succor to mortal things. As he sat in that impenetrable dark, ravenous and weary and disturbed, he wondered: On which of the seven days had God raised this abortion in its abject barrenness? And might instead this place be of the other’s making, diabolical and bespoke for just those few who, as he, had found it?
He counted back the days. Seven weeks, aye, perhaps two full months. “So long as that,” he thought, “since our ketch was beached upon this waste.” Four of them there’d been aboard, making for Boston from Charleston. He, the first mate, hired along with the captain to pilot the ship at the behest of her owners, who were to join them. They had cast off in fair weather and with no ill tidings, yet early the next morning, not far off Hatteras, they’d been overtaken by fog, and the ship had been caught in an inexplicable current. Their instruments failed them, and as well the wind, and from that moment by the Fates alone had their courses been charted.
On the evening of the third day of their estrangement they’d been grounded on bleached coral, and there before them, an inky blotch within the fog, lay that cursed island. None knew whence they had traveled to reach it, for the fog had not lifted since first it had appeared to them, and still it had not. The island could have been anywhere, yet it felt no place at all. Would that they had never ventured upon that nothingness. “Better to have been lost in the belly of the Atlantic,” he thought, “but by wisdom or chance or devilry, here were we cast away instead.”
Some they’d had of food, at first, dry stores for a week that they’d stretched some five times past that expiration. But then, their mouths were fewer than they might be. The captain had been felled on their first day beached, poisoned as he partook of the island’s only spring–a grim blessing that had left them three. Him they had buried in the rough middle of those wasted acres, near the spring that had spelled his doom, with a small piling of stones to mark the grave. In the days that followed they had searched well, and torn those dead acres asunder, but for their stores alone, the island was found wanting for all sustenance.
Of water they’d had more. The bottles had perished quickly, aye, but trickles then they pried from the laden air with some tarpaulins salvaged from the broken ketch. It was little, but it was reliable, and it had been enough. That water alone had seen them through the exhaustion of their stores and they were, each of them, grateful for it in kind.
But the days without food had grown too many, and his hunger was a mountain in his twisted guts. “What I’d give for a turnip, a moldy apple, or meat. By God, meat!”
He’d given no consideration to meat in a week or better, but in a flash it became his singular preoccupation. “Aye,” he thought, “a sliver of bemaggoted butcher’s refuse would be as prime steak to me now. What I would give…,” he thought again, his tongue lapping dry against his grubby teeth.
His home back in Charleston? “Aye, that.” His wife, perhaps grieving. His child as well. Already he could scarcely remember them… their names… his own name…
What of a finger? That could be arranged easily enough.
“Tsk, so little ambition.”
What of a hand, then? Nay an arm! “Aye!” But for a full belly those, too, he could offer gladly.
“My toes, too. And legs!” he thought with a strange exhilaration. “The devil whittle me to stumps just so long as I be fed!”
“…to stumps?” spoke the other.
“Another?”
The other continued:
“But of what good, really, stumps,” it said too clearly, “or to me, your arms and legs.”
“Aye,” he replied.
“Or your home, your woman, your child for that matter. Would you offer me the moon as well? None of them hold any purchase here.”
“Aye,” he said, in sad agreement.
There was a pause, and when the other continued it was in brighter spirits.
“But what about that?” it hissed. “Yes, that you do have.”
“Aye.”
“And you, stranded here and dispossessed and very near to your doom. Yet unknown to yourself, even now you cling to it. And I ask you: Of what use could that lowly scrap of essence be to you now?”
His addled mind held no rebuke. “Little enough, aye.”
“It is burden alone, now.”
“A burden? No, not a burden. I lived well and clean and with fair enough luck until now, and my few transgressions weigh as pebbles, not as stones. No, not a burden,” he repeated. “Still, you would have an arrangement?”
“Yes.” The other drew out the word, and there was a hunger of its own behind it.
“Then an arrangement you may have, but for a suitable price, only! This is no thing to be cheaply parted with.”
“No, no! A fair price you deserve. A fairer price yet shall you have.”
He nodded, and continued:
“Then listen you well. If I am to die on this island, let it be so. I’ll partake of that spring and be quick about it! But if I am to live on, by your strange grace, then let me at least be satisfied. I would be fed, and fed no mean pauper’s supper, aye. I’ll give not my soul just to suffer then mere scroungings. A feast I would have, such as this place has never seen–a feast such as will never be seen here again. Aye, to part with such as that I would have fine drink and finer company and meat, damn you, real meat.”
“And damned in kind. That’s your price?”
“Aye. That is my price.”
The words rang confidently in his mind, but fell from his dry lips in a hoarse and airy mumble. And even as he spoke his answer the other voice was gone.
Then came a pricking and a pain. He snapped from his deluded imaginings to find he had been biting at his nails. There at the tip of his index finger sat a wound, where his teeth had wandered and cut too true. He wrapped it in a scrap of cloth, and his taste was all salt and iron.
How long had he been lost to his own thoughts, he wondered, sucking at his finger. The first faint light of morning was settling upon that gloomy place, and bit by bit he could see. She there, and the other one too, they lay sleeping yet. And beyond them, in the distance yonder…
Eyes?
Indeed, it were eyes. Two of them. A pair of luminous pinpoints dead ahead of him, green-yellow like a cat’s, though squint as he might to what they belonged he could not tell. Whatever it was, it was there. Some mortal creature now walked this island where none, save themselves, were to be found.
And as he looked upon it there began a sound, a hiss, a word, musical and light upon the air. And at its beck he found himself moving, crawling, dragging himself on arm and knee, towards those brilliant eyes. She and the other one, their frail breathing receded at pace behind him. Soon the foggy stillness about him was broken only by the sound of his own flesh, scrabbling ’cross sand and pumice, and by that beguiling and alien word.
At length all fell to darkness. A cave, perhaps, or some other pit. On and on he crawled, ever deeper into that dark, until his forearms were skinned and bloody and his slacks fell to tattered shreds. And the eyes, they grew. Not in size, but in number. Two pairs, then three, then a dozen and more. There seemed a thousand unblinking stares, all dead ahead, and he soldiered onward to the purpose of the word.
Then the sound was halted. He ceased his somnambulic progress, and found himself in the presence of many small things. He could see them ill but they were small things, aye, no more than a foot tall. A goodly number stood about him in a rough circle, and though to him they might be hidden he knew that many more yet stood beyond them. They spoke in halting and unintelligible gurgles and smiled, or he supposed they smiled, exposing several rows of diminutive and well-honed teeth. Their form suggested newborn children, to which they were comparable in form and size. But these creatures were lithe and stood well enough on their two legs, and were far older, he felt, than he. They wore no clothing, no jewelry, no ornaments of any kind, and their eyes were piercing and feral and bright.
In earlier times he might have been frightened, but the word had soothed him to subhumanity. His potential for fright was a past and fallen thing, lost among the other trivialities of his former self. His present was a void of hunger and weariness, and no humanity any longer dwelled there.
Towards that void one of the small things now stepped, and then a tankard was in his hand. It was crude and small and cast of heavy iron. With it he scooped from a basin that was set before him and from it then he drank. Shortly another small thing approached, and carried with it a bundle of small morsels. One of these it placed upon his lips–Meat! Such meat, indeed, as he had never tasted. It was sickly and sour and suffused with the brine of the sea, but sweet and oily and fat was it also, and he was a long time chewing upon it. When at last he had swallowed it, and followed it with strong drink, another was placed upon his lips, and thus for long hours he feasted. The things about him gurgled in their strange voices and grew excitable and danced, until the day fell to gloom again above them.
Then the food was exhausted and the tankard emptied, and the small things turned from him and slipped back from whence they came. He fell upon his back, full and warm and content, and for the first night in many he lapsed into a dreaming sleep. In his dreams there was no fog, and a moon rose above the island that was so full and yellow that it blotted the lesser stars from the sky. Fell moonbeams lit upon those few acres of black sand and volcanic slag and he saw himself there, fattened and round and with eyes that blazed with moonlight.
When he woke he found the fog had indeed been lifted. For the first time the full brilliance of dawn was upon him and his island. He looked to the sea and saw naught but rippling gray and breakers of white foam and an uncertain haziness of horizon. And in the warm providence of that morning nothing of the dream could he recall, save for that resplendent yellow moonshine and the gnashing of his own teeth.
And thus he found himself, belly full and distended, and naked save for the tatter of elastic at his waist. Somewhere close a spring bubbled, casting its foul waters out in a narrow channel towards the sea. At his feet lay a small tankard, caked in rust and earth and cast in ageless iron. Beyond it was an upturned grave. And to his side they lay, she and the other one both, now dead and scattered and derelict.
His thoughts were few as he stooped for the tankard and began heaping earth back into the grave, to cover the denuded bone there. When that job was done, and the captain laid again to rest, he set to digging two others, and what remained of his mind began to wander:
To small things, now vanished. To a price fairly paid.
And even as he went about his works he began to feel it again within himself, subtle and embryonic and growing:
Hunger.
~~~
