Teeth of Beasts

Prologue

Hunger clawed at Henry Bartlett’s gut like a wild animal scratching at his innards. He didn’t have the aptitude for a job and his hands were growing too shaky to be any good with a hunting rifle. Having spent most of his years keeping away from loud noises and the men who made them, Henry hung his head low and allowed his stringy light brown hair to cover his sunken face. He pulled his arms tight against his torso in a way that made him look more like a paltry collection of twigs covered in wet parchment than a man in shabby clothes. Somehow, his bony legs supported his weight and the crooked ridge of his spine kept him upright.

After scraping together what money he could, the thin, twitchy man found his way to the Easter Lake Saloon and calmed his nerves with whiskey that tasted like the bottom of a rusty bathtub. He silenced the growl in his belly with a bowl of greasy soup. The saloon was always noisy and filled with more shadows than the flickering lanterns could repel. Some of them were only inky stains upon the wall, but others lived, walked, and watched from the darkness. A few of the shadows were cast by men who stank of blood that had dried onto the clubs hanging from their belts. Henry could see the scars upon the stalkers’ hands as they lifted dented mugs to their lips. Bleating everything from boastful songs to blasphemous insults from drunken mouths, the locals didn’t pay any mind to the new arrivals. When one of the shadowy men approached Henry’s table before all the soup had been drained from his bowl, the locals were given a different kind of show.

Henry sank his teeth into the man’s wrist while the rest of the bloody men surrounded his chair. Only one was brave enough to step forward without drawing his weapon. His kind face was covered by long gray whiskers. Henry tried to have a word with him, but was dragged away by the others as the entire saloon laughed and hollered at the spectacle. Once outside, he felt his bones twist beneath his skin and something sharp push through his gums. The men spread out and forced him into a stable. Scents of horseflesh, manure, and hay mixed with the creaking of wood and the wet patter of blood dripping from the men’s hands onto the floorboards. As the men encircled Henry, they jabbed at him with clubs that had sprouted into long knives and pitchforks. Before long the one with the beard strode into the stable carrying a net that had been treated with some kind of foul-smelling tonic.

Henry grabbed a pitchfork that was poked into his side and bit into the face of the man wielding it. Everything after that was a rush of blood, movement, and pain. There was a brief moment when he was entangled within the net, but he scraped at the ground to crawl beneath the strange ropes. Once he made it into the fresh air, Henry ran until the settlement was well behind him. The shadowy men were gone when he returned. Even the remains of the one with the pitchfork had been scraped off the stable floor and hidden away.

The incident was ruled a drunken brawl that several of the saloon patrons declared had been started by Henry. He was jailed and served his time huddled in the back of a filthy cage, trying to avoid his foul-smelling cell mates. Upon his release, he tried not to think about the cravings that made him scratch at his own skin and grind his teeth until they cracked and splintered into jagged spikes. He took walks every night, breathing fresh air while choking on the desire to pull the clothes from his back just to feel the warm spray of blood cover his skin.

He’d never learned a trade, but had picked up a knack for climbing in through other folks’ windows and helping himself to a few poorly guarded trinkets, which provided him with enough money to take back to the saloon. Within moments after walking through the tavern’s familiar doors, he spotted a pair of women sitting at a table near the back of the room.

“Evenin’, misses,” Henry said as he lifted his chin and put on a shaky smile to try and mask the new hunger clawing at his belly.

Their dresses might have been frayed and tattered, but both of them were filled out quite nicely. Ample breasts swayed as the sweet-smelling females shifted in their chairs. Painted smiles grew beneath world-weary eyes as they looked Henry up and down. One of the women had hair flowing freely over her shoulders that was as bright and golden as Henry’s had once been when he was a child. The other’s was much longer, black as coal, and loosely bound by faded ribbons.

“What have we here?” the golden-haired one asked. “I’m Shalyn and this is Tricia. Want to buy us a drink?”

The dark-haired whore leaned forward to reach between Henry’s legs. “Or would you rather buy something else? You carrying something for me in there?”

Henry swallowed and dug out what little money he’d stolen during one of his most recent walks. “This is what I got.”

After taking Henry’s stock in the blink of an eye, Tricia shrugged and said, “That’d be enough for one of us. You can get us both for a bit more.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

Shalyn placed her hand upon her body and rubbed suggestively. “I give my word it’ll be worth it.”

As her promise rolled through Henry’s ears, he swore he could feel their hands rubbing against his bare skin and lingering beneath his clothes in the spots where his blood was running the warmest. Before he could question the ghostly touches, his money was gone and Tricia was leading him away. She dragged him out through the back door and took him into an alcove between the saloon and a row of out-houses. After pulling down his britches just enough to get her hand inside and between his legs, she put on a lurid smile and vigorously worked him. Henry leaned back and waited for the craving in his belly to subside.

Before too long, it did.

“There now,” she said as she stood up and wiped her hands upon her skirt. “You liked that?”

“Yes.”

“It only gets better if my friend comes along.”

“Really?” Henry asked.

She nodded with the certainty of a fisherman whose hook was sunk in deep. “Better than you could imagine.”

Henry closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine, but could only feel the craving gnaw at him with freshly sharpened fangs. After letting out a hard breath, he asked, “How much for the both of you?”

When whispering the sum into his ear, she made sure to brush her lips against his skin. She lingered for a few moments, allowing her hair to brush against the side of Henry’s face, and then turned away. “You know where to find us.”

“But…that’s a lot of money.”

“It’ll be worth it,” Tricia promised with a backward wave.

The twitch of the woman’s hips caught Henry’s eye. The sway of her arm reminded him of a broken doll. The plump curves of her breasts called to him like tender meat already falling off the bone. When he pressed his fingers to his nose, he could still smell the sweat from her shoulders.

Henry’s breath caught in his throat, so he shook his head as if to snap it loose from his neck. The tingling she’d put into him was still working through his legs, and he had no doubt that both women could give him things to dream about for years to come. But he didn’t have enough money. He didn’t even have enough to buy the whiskey that usually got him through the hard times. As the cravings rumbled inside of him, he went for another walk.

The wind felt good against his face. The ground was solid and comforting. It didn’t take long for him to catch a scent that led him to a shack built within a stone’s throw of the lake on the edge of town. Henry couldn’t find an open window, so he scraped at the door until it came away from its hinges. The house was quiet enough to be empty, but there were others inside who stank of anxious perspiration. He could hear them whimpering to each other as they tried to hide in a root cellar beneath the kitchen floor. There was no money or valuables to be found, so he sniffed around the kitchen for something to eat. A few strips of venison still dangled from his mouth when he turned toward the scrape of old boots upon the floor.

“Get out of here!” a tall man in long underwear shouted as he stomped in from another room. The man put on a stern face, but was tussled after having been roused from his bed by the intruder. Angry eyes sighted along the top of the shotgun in his hands.

Giving in to his craving, Henry drove his shoulder into the man’s midsection and rammed him into a nearby table. The shotgun went off, but the only thing Henry felt was a thump against his chest as his feet scraped against the floor and his muzzle was buried into the gaping maw of the man’s savaged throat. The cravings were subsiding, but he kept pulling flesh from bone even after the man had stopped trying to defend himself. When he looked up, Henry could hear petrified sobs coming from beneath the kitchen floor. Scents of dried spices and preserves drifted up from that space, mingling with an aroma that was just as tempting as the sweat that had trickled so beautifully along the back of Tricia’s neck.

Henry pulled at the floor with his bare hands to reveal a woman and small child huddled against each other, surrounded by shelves of dusty jars. Spittle dripped from his lips to land upon the child’s brow as he peered down at them. Their screams were loud enough to sail across the lake as Henry jumped into the root cellar and turned it into a grave.

He was sleeping on a woodpile behind the third house he’d visited that night when the shadowy men found him. They surrounded Henry and knocked him senseless before the one with the beard showed up. Their net smelled different than the last time, and when they tossed it over him, every bit of strength was sapped from his body. He fought back using teeth that were crusted in blood, but the men’s weapons burned like lantern oil that had been dumped into his wound and touched by a match.

“How many did you kill, boy?” the man with the beard asked.

Covering his face with both hands, Henry squealed, “I didn’t mean to! I was hungry, is all. I was hungry. Just hungry. Just hungry.”

The man studied him with cold eyes and a face that didn’t show the first hint of fear. “Do you know what you are?” he asked.

“Bartlett’s my name. Henry Bartlett.”

“That’s who. I want to know what.”

Before he could try to put together an answer, Henry’s nervous stomach kicked up its contents, filling his mouth with the taste of meat that was stringier than beef and sweeter than venison.

One of the other men pressed a sharp wooden blade to his throat and snarled, “He’s a damn monster and he killed Avery. What else do we need to know? I say we finish him off and hang his hide from my barn.”

The bearded man pulled the other one aside and spoke to him in a harsh whisper that Henry could hear perfectly well, no matter how much the other man tried to cover it up. “We already did our worst and that thing still got away. Have you men even hunted a Full Blood? It ain’t like those devil hounds we tracked through the plains or the leeches we burned out of Fort Griffin.”

“You’re supposed to be the one with the answers, Jonah. Do you have one now or did we come all this way just to toss a net around this son of a bitch?”

When Henry caught the bearded one looking back at him, he quickly averted his eyes and scraped at the spot where the ground met the net. This time, however, his hands didn’t have the strength to make a proper trench.

“We don’t have the tools needed to kill a Full Blood,” Jonah said.

“Then who does?”

“Nobody in these parts. Maybe nobody in this country.”

“Damn it all to hell,” the third man bellowed as he pounded Henry on the side of the head with an angry kick.

“Stop it!” Jonah snapped. “Leave him be. Just because we don’t have the tools now don’t mean we can’t make some. And since this one here doesn’t seem fully grown yet, he may be the best test subject we could ever ask for.”

“To hell with your doctorin’,” the second man growled. “If we can’t kill it, we can weigh it down and drop it in the lake. This net of yours seems good enough to do the job.”

“No,” Jonah said sternly. “We’re taking him back to the reformatory. Help me load him into the wagon.”

Henry spent the next several days in an even smaller cage, jostling in the back of a wagon while chewing at the rusted iron shackles clamped around his wrists and ankles. When he was finally unloaded, he thought he would be meeting his Maker. Instead, he was introduced to a place called Lancroft Reformatory. The walls of the big house up front smelled like clean mountain rock, and the mortar holding the second building together reeked of sulfur and strange metals. When he saw Lancroft’s tall walls and ornate doors for the first time, Henry thought a picture from a storybook had somehow come to life. The closer he got to the castle, the more he thought he’d been granted a reprieve by the Almighty himself.

He was dragged through Lancroft’s doors by two of the men carrying sharp, magical sticks while Jonah strode ahead and quickly disappeared within another room. Inside, the temple walls were sandy and smooth. There were words chiseled into them that Henry couldn’t read, and when he reached out to touch one with a cautiously extended fingertip, a skinny old fossil of a man in a black preacher’s robe slapped his wrist.

“Hands to yourself, please,” the preacher scolded. “Do not disgrace the Good Word with your sinner’s touch.”

That talk didn’t bother Henry much, since he’d heard plenty of it when he went to Sunday mass with his pa. The big fellows shoved him with hands that weren’t quite as scarred as Jonah’s, or they sometimes pulled him by the chains attached to his arms and legs. If he looked to one side for too long, he got a quick swat on the back of his head.

“Eyes forward, please,” the old man behind him chirped.

His room was one of many off the short hallway in the southern wing. The doors were a lot thicker than the ones in that house with the root cellar beneath the kitchen. The floor was a whole lot sturdier too. Of all the doors along that hallway, only one of them was open.

“This where I gonna live?” Henry asked.

The old man tapped one of the big fellow’s shoulders, which brought the whole group to a stop. “See out there?”

Henry saw the preacher’s callused hand from the corner of his eye. When he looked in the direction the old man was pointing, he winced in expectation of another swat. The blow didn’t come, so Henry took a longer look. “I see the window,” he said.

The preacher lowered his hand and stepped forward. He reminded Henry of his grandpa. His grandfather was nice, but brittle.

“See outside the window? See what a beautiful sky the Lord has given to us this fine day? See the green grass?”

“Yes,” Henry sighed.

“This is the last time you will be seeing it as you are now. When you are deemed worthy to leave this place, my work will be done and you will see that grass again. You will look upon those hills with clean eyes and you will thank God for this chance to have your spirit purged before you are cast into the fiery pit for all eternity. Wouldn’t you rather serve your penance here than in eternal hellfire?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you would.” With that, the preacher nodded to one of the big fellows, who then took hold of the top of Henry’s head and twisted it sharply away from the window.

Henry’s first reaction came as naturally to him as pulling in his next breath. But before he could sink his fingers into the man’s throat, the chains around his wrists were pulled taut and one of the other fellows prodded him with a thorny club that drew more of Henry’s ire than blood. That was merely a prelude to the boot that thumped between his legs. He tried to stand up but couldn’t make it halfway before crumpling over. Piss dribbled out of him like boiling water, and blood flowed freely from the welts left behind by the clubs.

“You see what your violence brings?” the old man asked as he shook his head and walked to the open door. “You will see the error of your ways soon enough, for you shall have nothing else to distract you.”

As Henry was dragged the rest of the way down that hall, frantic eyes stared at him through small rectangular holes cut into the other doors. Henry’s cell was open and waiting for him. It was square just like the rest and set at the old man’s eye level.

Except for a copper pot in one corner, the room was empty. Even though Henry could see no windows, it was fairly well lit thanks to a small, oval-shape that had been cut into the ceiling, which allowed a fair amount of sunlight to trickle in. The hole was surrounded with more words that Henry couldn’t read, and so were the walls.

Looking up at the ceiling as if he was on the verge of tears, the preacher clasped his hands and smiled as if he was peeking beneath a woman’s lifted skirts. “That is the eye of our Lord,” he said.

Henry looked at the old man and then back to the ceiling. “It’s just a hole.”

“So says a sinner. The eye of our Lord is always open, always looking down upon you. It is your salvation just as it is your only light. If there is good in you, He will see it.”

Settling into a corner so his back was against the wall facing the door, Henry winced. “I suppose.”

“Cherish the words around you,” the preacher said as he ran his fingertip along some of the symbols near the door. “They will keep you from sinning again.”

Henry felt a pulse roll out of the wall and press him into his corner. A dank, musty odor drifted through the room and felt as if it was curling in on him like a fist. When the preacher finished his tracing, he nodded to the big fellows and backed out of the room. The chains were taken from Henry’s wrists and the guards left without a fuss.

Once the door was shut, Henry Bartlett had nothing in his world but a moldy piss pot to fill and the eye of the Lord to watch over him.

Three years later Henry had settled into his routines even better than he’d settled into the corner of his room.

Twice a week his pot was emptied.

When he was brought out of his room, his head was covered by a sack cinched shut by a leather strap around his neck so he couldn’t see the other residents. A few screams could be heard at night, but it was hard to tell which came from other mouths and which were simply churning within the shadows.

The words on his wall hurt when Henry touched them, so he figured they were filled with the same hellfire as the preacher’s sermons. Those lectures, filled with more words about the evil in Henry’s soul and the hard work needed to purge it, rolled off of him like the rainwater that trickled in through the hole in his ceiling.

Outside his room, Henry tried to peek through a loose stitch in the bag covering his head. If he wasn’t sneaky about it, rough hands snapped his head to one side and shoved his chin down against his chest. One time, he tried to bite the man who did it to him. There had been a crippling blow delivered to the small of his back, followed by a kindly voice that informed him, “You will see nothing but the words of salvation and the eye of our Lord.”

If he behaved himself while he was in a room that smelled like food, Henry was allowed to roll up the bottom of the bag just enough to get some oatmeal into his mouth. He saw nothing but a few shadows while he ate. Heard nothing apart from the muttering and chewing of the folks around him. Felt nothing but the lead weight of the peculiar writing on the walls and the greasy filth that stuck to the bottom of his feet.

More than anything, Henry wanted to go for one of his walks. Whenever he strayed too far from his assigned path, the big fellows would come with their sharpened sticks to force him back to his room. He got flustered during his first month at the reformatory and pulled off one of those men’s arms. The wooden clubs had rained down upon his head until he heard a loud snap inside his neck. He could barely lift his chin for a while after that.

The old preacher came to check on him, and so did Jonah. It was one of the few times Henry laid eyes on the fellow with the beard who’d kept the others from hanging him as a murderer. But Jonah didn’t have any kind words for him. He did, however, seem mighty amused by the crackle of broken bones scraping against each other as Henry’s head swung loosely at the end of his neck.

After he’d acted up again, Henry was dumped into his room and wasn’t allowed out of it again. His food was brought to him and shoved through the hole in his door. The meals tasted rotten and smelled like they had been pulled up from the bottom of a mossy lake. He ate what was fed to him and got one of the big fellows’ fingers as well. Jonah came along later to put a different bag on his head and tightened the belt until he went to sleep. When he woke up, he heard a voice that was clearer than the rest.

“You can hear me,” it said.

Henry snapped his head up and smiled beneath the burlap sack. Putrid slime dribbled from his mouth and his breath felt like a wave of flame upon his ravaged throat when he muttered, “Yes. I hear you.”

“Be quiet in there,” one of the big fellows outside demanded.

Henry couldn’t see the guard, but he’d long ago become accustomed to the fact that they were always watching. When he strained to turn toward that other voice, Henry reflexively kept his chin pressed against his chest. “Can you hear me, God?” he asked.

“Of course I can hear you,” the soothing voice replied. “You are the only one worth listening to.”

Trying not to let the Lord know how confused he was, Henry replied, “God is good.”

“And you are too…Henry.”

That last word brushed through Henry’s ear like velvety fingers stretching through his mind; warm and itchy.

He caught a hint of light through the rough material of the sack. After the door was pulled open, a thick hand clamped down upon his head, sending a painful crunch through his neck.

“Eyes and head down,” the guard said.

“But I hear God talking to me.”

Henry was knocked face-first to the floor so another familiar voice could reach the large ears flattened against his skull.

“Blasphemy!” the preacher said. “You know better than that! Be silent and reflect upon the harm you’ve inflicted.”

The belt was taken off and the bag peeled away. Henry sat in his corner with his head tucked against his chest and turned to one side. It hurt too badly to lift it, so he let it hang. The churning in his belly grew stronger, but the only other food he got after that night was damp, salty bread.

Insects skittered across his floor. They pinched his toes and chewed at the small of his back, but that didn’t bother him anymore. He had a friend other than Jonah, so he let the ants skitter among the roots of his coarse fur and waited for his next conversation with God.

Ten years later Henry still couldn’t read all those words on his wall. But the one thing he knew for certain was that the preacher had been right. The Lord looked down on him all the time. No matter how much Henry wanted to look up into that eye, his crooked neck wouldn’t allow it.

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.”