The Devil's Workshop

When his food came, the wench had to pull over another table to make enough room for all the plates and bowls. She asked him if he wanted anything else, and he could see the smirk hiding behind her smile. He wanted to leap up and take a scalpel to the corners of her mouth, peel back her cheeks, and expose the ugliness within, but instead he smiled back at her and said, “No, thank you. This will do.” And watched as she walked away with a sway in her hips. He had money and she was advertising her like of it.

He took a bite of kidney pie. Delicious. It was too hot and it burned his tongue and made the roof of his mouth sore, but he ignored the pain and took a sniff of the blood sausage. That turned out to be cool and sliced wafer-thin. His mouth was still sore and so he ate it carefully, and it was perfectly spiced.

He took a deep draught of ale, wiped his hand on his sleeve — or, more precisely, Elizabeth’s sleeve — and took a look around the room. Many of the people there were watching him, but they quickly looked away when his gaze fell on them. One woman didn’t look away. Her hand was on another man’s elbow and she was pressed close against him, but when he looked at her, she raised her eyebrows and he licked his lips. She was his for the taking.

He wondered about the meaty organs grinding and churning inside her. He knew how beautiful they must be, glistening and wet.

And he looked away at the glob of pork on the plate in front of him, encased in fat, cold and dead and salty. And he ate it.

There was more than he could hold. He had not eaten, really eaten, in a year, and his stomach had shrunk. A few bites of this and that, and there was no room left in him. He turned his gaze inward and wondered at his own organs, wondered how well they were digesting the food he had just eaten. Wondered whether he should chew more thoroughly or whether he had done the job.

He did not look at the women again, but stood and walked out of the pub and away.

He hoped someone would finish his food. He hated to waste anything, but he clearly no longer had the appetite he’d once possessed.

42

Day!”

He was dreaming about a time when he was nine or ten years old, fording a brook in Devon with his trousers rolled up past his ankles…

“Walter! Can you hear me?”

There was someone with him, another boy standing in the water, but the sun was behind him and the boy was a rainbow halo blur that was talking, shouting at him…

“Walter, did he hurt you?”