CHAPTER TEN

 

 

Samuel finished the final bites of his most recent Taste Subject. It was exquisite, a rare delicacy.

The final piece was always heartbreaking to him. He knew he would have to fast between Subjects for a few weeks if he wanted to reach pure Consumption Enlightenment, but his willpower was weak. So he had started the tradition of saving and freezing a sliver acquired during Layer One. Always a slice from where the buttock meets the thigh, so ripe with fat and flavor. Fried before it could thaw, just enough so the frost evaporated, then seasoned with turmeric and sea salt. A pity there was no more left in his freezer. He wished he had not only saved this small piece for tonight’s meeting, but also another morsel he could have enjoyed in private. Tasting and Eating had never been much of a social activity for him, not like it was to some Eaters. It was in solitude he found his true religion.

As he swallowed the last bite, he could see the torment in the eyes of each of the four pledges that sat before him. He could not have—would not have—shared a single taste with any of them. Not yet. They were not worthy. He took a toothpick to the stalagmites and stalactites in his mouth and picked out some short strands of black, wiry hair that had not cooked out of the meat.

“Tell us more about the Layers, Master Angelghoul sir. Please,” one of the pledges begged. Rudy. A grotesquely obese middle-aged man with a nose like a beefsteak tomato ravaged by rot and a bald spot on his head that looked like it was creating its own natural tonsure. He had all the makings of a fine lackey. Unfortunately, Rudy was wearing the same tattered clothes he wore to every meeting. Samuel could smell him from across the room.

Samuel took a sip from his bottle of seltzer water. He normally loathed talking so much, but had to make an exception so he could increase his ranks once again. He was dressed down for the meeting. His mohawk was washed, dried and pulled back into an awkward ponytail. The group met in the neutral space of his living room, still somewhat filthy, but far away from the areas of his home that were littered with punk rock garb. He needed to act professional. It was going to be a long night.

“Well,” Samuel began, “the consistency of Layers varies somewhat between Taste Subjects, but over the years I’ve come up with an overview of how they usually play out.”

Samuel Haines had earned the honorable nickname of The Angelghoul just five short years ago at age twenty-five. His meals of fresh flesh were divine-derived, part of a quest that was not merely a matter of dabbling in taboos, but a yearning to reach a spiritual zenith. The meat of the willing elevated him to a meditative state in which he gained a greater understanding of both himself and the world around him. To an outsider, the processes of Tasting and Eating might appear violent, but to Samuel it was perfect peace.

“Layer One is like licking a salty Fudgsicle bubbled in the sun.” He saw Judith taking notes already, the same as she had done during the other meetings she had attended over the past few weeks. Judith’s appearance was jarring amongst the other pledges. All business, her hair in a bun so tight it gave her a facelift that made her ageless. She seemed to write faster than he could speak.

“Layer Two is copper-ridden, like a mouth full of wet pennies.” He looked directly at the youngest and newest member of their group, a Hawaiian boy. His name was Kai, and he had a shocked expression glued to his face that seemed to intensify every few minutes. Samuel already knew Kai wouldn’t last through a respectable poker game, much less the journey they were on this evening. He had seen his type before. Doing this on a dare to impress his friends, acting as if the whole thing was just some big silly joke, not realizing he was getting himself into something much more raw than he could have imagined. This boy did not realize the sacrifice that Tasting and Eating entailed, what it took to reach Consumption Enlightenment. Samuel’s soul had lost its way, so the solution was to absorb the souls of others to feel whole again.

At least temporarily.

“Layer Three can be gristly and chewy at times, but is good with curry and lentils.”

“So this is like the Eucharist, then,” said Charlie, a thirty-something, bearded redhead who looked like a pirate that had yet to earn his patch and peg leg. His interruption was no question. He seemed certain he was correct.

“No,” Samuel replied, trying to maintain his composure despite Charlie’s condescending tone. “Catholic transubstantiation is nothing more than a fraud. Why settle for tasteless, stale bread when legitimate sacramental flesh can be had for a price?” He paused for a moment to let it soak in. “Did you get that, Judith?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied without so much as removing her eyes from her notepad.

When Samuel had first connected with his original group of Eaters, they were unorganized, sloppy. His intelligence and his dedication to the cause had quickly made him a figurehead, they his loyal followers, and soon they became little more than peons. His pious approach to mastication methods, combined with his atrophied appearance, had made it simple for him to advance in rank all those years ago, and for the other lowly Eaters of Sweetville to bestow his special name upon him. Samuel accepted the term of endearment with stoic glee. Once he officially became The Angelghoul, he would watch from the sidelines as they did his dealings for him, and he reaped the majority of the benefits.

Samuel had not always found himself in such a respected position in life. It had taken great work to achieve this status, a status that had waned once his wings had failed to grow and his group had lost faith in his leadership, but one he knew would once again flourish. He was well aware the new group he’d assembled was a pack of misfits, but that was also what made them so appealing. They craved his guidance and carried none of the old baggage. They believed in him, or were at least on the faithful path.

His original Eaters had once thought him to be a Christ-like figure—an ironic assumption. Little had they known the lovely, long brown locks and bushy beard he wore at the time were actually inspired by Jim Morrison. A far cry from his current appearance, it was a look that had worked well during his days as Sweetville East High School’s junior custodian, where no one cared to see his face or know his name.

The students at Sweetville East had been near negligible to Samuel, nothing more than snacks in training—he had already been researching his spiritual quest at the time. After a year of uneventful employment, he fell under the scrutiny of the school’s administration. Students of both genders had reported that Samuel often spent too much time lingering in the restrooms when they were clearly occupied and his cleaning was already complete. The police became marginally interested in the case, but there were no concrete crimes to pin on him. Samuel pleaded that he was only trying to perform the duties of his job, that he was wearing headphones and was unaware there were children relieving themselves in the stalls. Ultimately, he was forced to resign.

“And what about Layer Four?” Rudy asked. The fat little frog looked so eager, so hungry that Samuel wanted to shove his fist down his gullet, see how he liked the taste.

“Ah, the final Layer. Well, the feral dogs in the alley usually seem to enjoy it.”

“How do we know this isn’t a ruse?” Charlie asked. “That what you ate tonight wasn’t just something you picked up at the butcher shop?”

“You’re free to leave,” Samuel said, taking another sip of his seltzer. There was a skeptic in every crowd, and they always came around to become the most loyal slaves. “Or you can learn more about Tasting and Eating. Learn from someone who has failed, succeeded and become equally powerful from facing both ends. Do you want the opportunity to reach Consumption Enlightenment?”

Charlie stared at him, twitching with what was likely a mix of fear and anger. Samuel took that as an answer of yes.

He told them about his various unsuccessful Tasting and Eating attempts, those that occurred long before he had finally achieved the beginning stages of Consumption Enlightenment. As other Eaters had informed him when he was a budding beginner, such edification became obvious the moment it was reached. Samuel had been told it would move slowly through his mind with a direct line to his soul, and he was not lied to. Each failed attempt had been a grand learning experience, a baby step toward some semblance of nirvana. He had been a fast learner and was soon well educated in the art of Tasting.

The first of his failures seemed like it was meant to be a gleaming success. It involved one of the Junkie Creeps, a teenage girl named Sara. His Eaters had all been occupied with other business that night, and so he had met Sara by himself in an alley off of Third and Raven. She was looking to purchase some Sweet Candy instead of the standard H. The drug was still fairly fresh on the scene at the time and all of its flaws had not been rectified yet, but it was already exploding in popularity. Sara paid and popped a couple of pills on the spot. The effects at the time were dangerously immediate, and so she had invited him back to her squat a few blocks away for some fun.

Thankfully, the other Creeps in her clan were out somewhere being creepy, so Samuel and Sara had the whole top floor of the abandoned apartment building all to themselves. The dust on the walls might as well have been part of the décor. It was so thick he had wondered if it would have been possible to scoop out a spoonful and make some tea. Sara’s bed was a ratty mattress that was more spring than cushion—covers and pillows not included. He had slept on worse, so he barely blinked at the temporary discomfort. He had avoided Sara’s sloppy kissing and crotch pawing advances with professional stealth and casually proposed the idea of partaking in some bite play. She thought it kinky, so Samuel decided to take advantage of the situation before she sobered up, if that would have even been possible for her at that point. A quick nibble at her nipple, just enough to draw a trickle of blood, and Samuel had been able to enter her psyche from that tiny taste. It was a revelation of hidden truths.

He discovered that, despite her street urchin façade, Sara secretly came from a life of privilege, a bratty rich girl cliché. She had rejected her brand new convertible Bimmer given to her by her parents for her sweet sixteen, her trust fund in progress, an enormous bedroom in her parents’ house in the Sweethills and her crispy clean laundry that magically appeared in her closet every third day, courtesy of Marta, the live-in housekeeper. She once had a face that could have been prominently featured in Vogue Italia, but she also had a brain that told her hanging out with the worst of the burnouts in Sweetville just to piss off Daddy was a grand idea. Win some, lose some.

Sara had donned the traditional blue Junkie Creep jumpsuit and never looked back at her pampered life, at least not in public. Clean, rosy, youthful cheeks soon resembled those of an aged chimney sweep, then began their descent into near-leprous pockmarks. Track marks had developed in the soft crevices of her elbow crooks, puckering, pustule-covered tattoos that she’d never rid herself of. Her flesh emitted a stench resembling carp left to rot on asphalt. Not particularly pleasurable in Samuel’s discerning opinion. A chemical imbalance, boredom and good ole honest American teen rebellion. Sara’s family likely never knew for certain why she felt the need to turn her back on such a cozy birthright. The destitute companions she ran with on the streets likely never knew her upbringing. They would have maimed, ravaged or killed for just a day’s worth of the comfort she had been born into.

He had moved further down Sara’s body and attempted one miniscule bite the size of a water chestnut on the back of her thigh, which made her squeal. He had been unsure why she reacted this way. His numbing agent, a gel with a sweet scent resembling a fruity car air freshener and a cool sensation like a slightly thawed ice pack, had been applied generously. His taste test had lasted a few seconds before he spat the chunk back out onto the floor. Palatal poison left as a snack for the rats and roaches. In her Candy-fueled haze, Sara had probably never noticed this new little defect on her body before it had the chance to heal, so it really didn’t matter much.

Samuel took another sip of seltzer. The bottle was almost empty. In his trip down memory lane, he had not noticed that Kai had fled from the meeting. Samuel was certain that would be the last time he’d see him. Judith was still scribbling away like a good student. Rudy’s mouth sat askew in dumb, perverse glee, and Charlie was enraptured, a soon-to-be true believer.

He went on to tell the brief tale of the second failed attempt, which had been with a flirty mannequin posed in the window of Modyrn Gyrlz. A plastic, flawless goddess. Samuel had been high on a three-day binge of Sweet Candy at the time and barely knew his own name, much less the difference between a human being and a fiberglass facsimile. He had taken a ravenous bite of the mannequin’s shoulder, chipped one of his incisors, torn open his lip and swallowed his treasure. He had bled all over the clearance rack and was promptly booted from the store by management. The fiberglass had seemingly gone down smoothly, but Samuel had shat blood for two days after. He had refused to go to the hospital and instead meditated, perhaps fallaciously attributing his quick healing to a growing ascendancy within his epidermal shell.

Then, the piéce de résistance.

Wangombe, a Kenyan man who had been out of work for three months and in desperate need of finding a way to support his wife and two daughters. Dr. Kast, who Samuel had only recently met at the time, had introduced the two of them, and to this very day, that ugly dwarf would not let him hear the end of it. Though Samuel still owed Kast for leading him to the wonders of the liquor of human ichor, he still loathed the little turd. How convenient for Kast to earn himself a 15 percent finder’s fee, too. Where had that sideshow reject gathered such nerve? Because of this, he had to pay Kast and the Taste Subject for their services. No real matter, though. It was only business, and he had to respect that to a degree. Samuel always had a surplus of cash to blow from peddling the potpourri of designer drugs that constantly crept into the city limits of Sweetville, so the extra payment was ultimately a non-issue.

He did, however, leave that part out of the story for fear the fledgling Eaters would lose any respect he had gained from them.

When Samuel had first met Wangombe, he was apprehensive about tasting a man rather than a woman. The sensation did not attract him as much, but he had not been very successful with female Tasting and Eating at that point, and he knew he needed to separate his sexuality from his blissful ascension into The Angelghoul. The desires of an almost-god knew no sexual preference. Divinity and carnality were mutually exclusive concepts.

Initially, Wangombe had allowed himself to offer only small pockets of Layer One, in less painful areas that could be bandaged easily without his wife discovering. Wangombe had worked in an injection molding factory and often sliced up his fingers on the harsh gears of the machinery, so Samuel stripped those to the bone over the course of a week. Wangombe had concocted a lie about picking up an odd job during that time, feeling confident that his family would never raise their eyebrows at his recent wounds. Or, at least by the time they began to notice something was wrong, it would have been too late.

Layer Two had been far more difficult—without plasma a man tends to grow weak. Samuel had made sure he had an economy size box of sugar cookies on hand to feed to his Subject after each serving, which, over time, resulted in a crisply saccharine taste to the blood. A pleasant bonus.

At Layer Three, Wangombe had received greater compensation up front, with the caveat that his family would be hunted down and harmed if he intended to keep the money and run or attempted to leave any sort of information that could trace the authorities back to Samuel or Kast. It was not uncommon for Taste Subjects to get the last-minute jitters, especially when approaching Layer Three, so there needed to be some sort of insurance policy.

Days later, it was time for Layer Four and there was nothing left of Wangombe after that, save a slew of Have You Seen Me? flyers sloppily wheat-pasted to random telephone poles and mailboxes along Quail Street.

It had been an acquired taste for Samuel, but a necessary one. It soon became an experience to relish. He had known then, deep down as he knew now, that angelic blood surged through his veins and he was beyond sick of his useless humanity. The more willing flesh he consumed, the closer he would come to true Consumption Enlightenment. He would earn his wretched wings, growing them from the cartilage absorbed into his bloodstream.

He grinned wide, making eye contact with each of his new Eaters, except for Judith, her pointed nose buried in her notepad. “I have compiled a distinct list of personal directives. I suggest you take them into consideration and highly recommend you all take notes, not just Miss Judith over there.”

Judith finally looked at him. He thought she might have been mildly offended, but her tight face was devoid of expression. He almost feared what she would look like with her hair let down, that her face would crumble like a mummy released from its tomb.

“The first directive,” Samuel continued, “is fairly simple: you must consume sacred flesh. You all know this already. The second: you must excrete the remnants of souls. Screaming spirit shits.”

Rudy chortled at this, but Samuel ignored it. That last thing he wanted to do was acknowledge and potentially encourage disruptive behavior.

“And the third,” he said. “You must be selective with Taste Subjects, based on levels of need, desperation and will.” Samuel believed he was relatively good at heart despite the foul reputation other Eaters often carried with them. It did not pay to be cruel. Fairness was a virtue. Like a true addict, he shed a tear each time he stole a taste, then wiped his eyes with hopeless pride and moved on to the next high.

None ever truly satisfied.

When no volunteers were readily available, the freshly dead had sufficed in a pinch. The scent of formaldehyde, the chill of autopsy tables and the visions of supine cadavers in the Swell Rest Mortuary had become a tad too familiar for Samuel’s liking. It was like dining at a restaurant in a foreign country: he might not have understood much of what was on the menu, but he ordered something regardless. Kincaid, the mortuary’s night watchman, was prone to looking the other way if his palms were greased well enough. He had even allowed Samuel to taste of him just once, on a trial basis. A nibble from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It had not proven beneficial to either party. However, occasional use of the crematorium was helpful in disguising some of the bland tastes. Between the flambéed flesh and the added dashes of cumin, cayenne pepper and poultry seasoning, the cadavers were often delectable. He had begun to understand the appeal of Sweeny Todd’s infamous meat pies, and wondered if he couldn’t open up his own lucrative business one day. However, the dead were empty Twinkie calories while the living were filet mignon. Both deserved their place in The Angelghoul’s balanced food pyramid, but it was clear which of the two choices would help those two small, malformed bumps between his shoulder blades grow more quickly and properly.

“Any questions?”

Samuel was not just working hard to earn his blessed wings, he was entitled to them.

“Good. I think you’ll all work out just fine.”