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John Boyd should have died months ago. Sprawled limply in the false brotherhood of his comrades' bodies as the enemy stamped and swore around the camp and spat thick ropes of phlegm at the ground in front of his face. It had been so easy just to lie down - the only easy thing, indeed, amongst so many hard ones - but it had proved terribly difficult to be dead. They had thrown him carelessly in a puddle - god knows of what, for there'd been no rain for days - leaving him wallowing belly down in a swamp of soft, stinking mud. He had landed with one of his legs crooked awkwardly under him and he had dared not draw attention to himself by straightening it, though as the minutes dragged on the joint of his knee filled with fire and the muscles began to twitch in reflexive protest. On top of him had lain that red, wet, ruin of a boy, dropped carelessly as Boyd had been, from whose shattered cavern of a face oozed a relentless, almost miraculous stream of blood, undiminished by a heart that was as still and clammy as the rest of him. Boyd thought he knew him, although there was precious little left to recognize, just something about the color of his hair perhaps, or the way it was parted.
One of the man's hands had been squashed into the small of his back and lay curled against his coat like a crushed spider, twitching in occasional spasm. Tap tap tap. Like the dead man was trying to tell him something.
Close your mouth.
And all the time his blood had had come spilling downwards, soaking the man's hair and beard and saturating the dangling gold braid of his uniform until it finally fell, dripping in slow spatters onto Boyd’s face. Like rain onto a window pane. Tap tap tap.
Close your mouth.
Like many of the corpses about them the man had soiled himself in death. Boyd had too, with less excuse. For months afterward, on the rare occasions he was warm enough he would fancy the smell came steaming off him, having been rubbed into him too thoroughly for washing to remove. If he didn't scrub the potatoes well enough he could even taste it, in the earth.
Strange, how the smell and taste would stay with him, but not the man's name. He should at least have remembered his name. He should have died back then, in the shit and the mud and spared himself this pain.
The trap squeezed them a little closer. Ives groaned and twisted and then, horribly, writhed upwards with his hips. Boyd’s whole body had grown numb and cold, so that he could barely feel the broad smile of the gin in his back, but he felt that slow grind, somehow, though he’d no strength to angle himself away from it. His mouth was full of blood. That was cold too.
Martha’s slow footsteps, walking away, were the hammering of so many coffin nails.
It was okay. This should already have happened.
Boyd let his cheek fall against Ives's shoulder, making Ives laugh, then cough. A weak, bubbling cough. His hips moved again and again there was that flicker of slow heat amongst the cold. Ives’s blood was spattered on Boyd's cheek. His stomach lurched and blood bubbled over his own lips.
Close your mouth.
Ives smiled. His pupils were dilated with the nearness of death, eyes black and blank as a shark. He turned his head to lap up the blood from Boyd’s chin. His tongue left a stripe of warmth behind it.
Close your mouth.
It wasn’t a kiss. Ives pushed his way between Boyd’s slackened lips and suckled the blood from his tongue. The gin trap smiled its iron smile and bit a little deeper. Ives coughed again, and suddenly Boyd’s mouth was full of something, warm and thick and salty and he was swallowing, swallowing, swallowing.
There was enough of him left to feel it when the trap was pulled apart with a disappointed metallic groan, but not enough to protest. Not even enough to look at Ives’s body as he was lifted up and away from it, to be certain that it was a body, emptied of it’s terrible inhabitant.
He was carried from warm air to cold, and then to warm again. A brief glitter of stars, of floorboards, a chipped mural of smiling maternal face, crowned in gold. A man cursed, the words wobbling in and out of sensibility. And then finally, he was laid down, into a soft, black, nothing and the stars and curses all frayed away into it, till it was just him and the nothingness and very far away, a gentle clanging, as of a ladle against as stew pot.
* * *
Boyd awoke with the dawn. He knew without looking that Ives was awake too, though he did look of course, squinting through the dimness.
It had been night when they’d been found and it was barely light now. He was awake for no better reason than pointless, irritating habit. He lay, trying to forget the pain in his back. Across the room Ives was stretched out on a bed the mirror of his own, still as a dead man, though Boyd could hear his breathing and see what little light there was reflecting off his wide open eyes.
They were left alone till noon, when General Slauson brought them two bowls of stew and checked their bandages. It must have been him who’d carried them inside. Boyd was not a small man and yet he remembered being borne effortlessly across the icy yard as if he weighed no more that a child.
Another Wendigo then. Even if he had killed Ives, his plan would have been a failure. Ives was eating the stew with his fingers. Boyd picked at it, pretending.
Close your mouth.
When he had finished Ives stood, rolling his shoulders experimentally. Boyd tried to do the same and slithered to the floor in a miserable, aching heap. The General had to help him back in, chuckling genially. There were drops of gravy on his snow white shirt and shreds of something unidentifiable between his teeth.
Boyd lay helpless as a beached fish as Ives dressed himself. Ives’s back was a ruined mass of thick scabs still, but he was up and walking. He left with Slauson and Boyd could hear them talking in the next room, hear them laughing even. What story was Ives telling him? Would he cast himself as the hero or the victim? And what would Boyd be? He strained to hear, even put one foot to the ground but his whole body shook so ominously when he tried to put any weight on it that he had to abandon any idea of eavesdropping and trust in Ives not to tell a tale that would hang him.
Trust in Ives. Boyd groaned and tried to pretend he couldn’t smell the cooling bowl of stew beside him, or feel the fearsome itching of his gnawed muscles trying to fit themselves back together. He fell asleep, finally, to the sound of Ives’s laughter.
The laughter followed him into his dreams. It seemed that he woke to Ives standing in the room, in the full splendor of his uniform, laughing at him, and with the laughter came great clots and gobs of scarlet blood that clung stickily to the smart blue coat or fell and splattered on the rough planks of the floor. Boyd found himself, somehow, slithering about in them, naked, belly full of splinters, lapping them up, whilst Ives laughed harder and harder so that the blood came thicker and fell on Boyd in impossible, glutinous sheets.
It was a relief to wake that afternoon to an empty room and quiet house, though someone must have been in because the stew bowl had been taken away and his bandages replaced with fresh ones. Boyd shuddered, imagining Ives pulling his insensate body this way and that, probing at the wounds on his back. His tongue was sore and when he examined it in the shaving mirror he found two or three thin splinters of wood in it.
* * *
A storm blew in that night, a screaming, freakish thing with fat blobs of snow and crooked spears of lighting cutting across the sky. Boyd stayed cuddled up to one of the little windows and stared out into the whirling black chaos. He could hear Ives moving about behind him, getting ready for bed; the thump of his boots as he flung them to the floor and the more sedate rustle of clothing being taken off and neatly folded.
Eventually he came to stand behind Boyd and look out with him, padding barefoot over the icy floor as quietly and carelessly as a cat. His presence made the hairs on the back of Boyd’s neck stand up. He kept his gaze on the storm, pretending calm, but ready to whirl and fight in a moment, even with his wounds still wrapping about his torso like red chains.
But Ives simply put a hand on his shoulder. Boyd twitched, as if a fly had landed on him.
“What did you tell General Slauson this morning?” he asked, wondering even as he did so why he was bothering. Ives could lie to him as easily as he had to the General. Ives clearly though much the same, for he just stood and stared out at the storm, or perhaps at Boyd’s reflection, trapped like an insect in amber. His fingers felt warm through Boyd’s shirt.
“You should get to bed before the cold starts coming in,” Ives said, eventually, as if he hadn’t even heard Boyd speak. His eyes, reflected in the black glass of the window, were steady and sympathetic.
Boyd closed his eyes until the hand was lifted and he heard Ives turn and head towards the bunks. The cold was coming in through every crack and chink at the window and his body was one great, freezing, exhausted ache. But he stayed where he was for another hour, until he was sure Ives was asleep, before he took his advice and went to bed himself.
* * *
The storm didn’t truly stop for a week but it did lighten into a steady, depressing sleet that turned the landscape into a treacherous miracle of sparkling ice in the night and a nightmare of mud during the day.
In the middle of it a young man came and battered his fists on the gate, begging for shelter. Boyd had been sleeping and lay in bed listening grimly as he was welcomed in and offered clothes and whisky. He was pathetically, ignorantly grateful, his voice high and trembly with youth. Boyd pulled the blankets over his head.
By the time he had cursed himself into action it was too late. The stew pot bubbled merrily. The General, who lingered on and on – because of the storm, he claimed – prowled about it, smelling the steam and grabbing fitfully at his belly.
When it was ready Slauson ate it almost boiling, in great, scalding mouthfuls, gravy slopping over his beard and uniform. Ives was more restrained. He lingered over his bowlful, expression faintly puzzled. He even left a little, which the General licked clean when he hoped no one was looking.
Boyd made only a pretense of eating the bowl Ives bought to him. It smelled very rich and the meat looked delicate as veal; the smell made his belly stick to his ribs with want. It had been three days since he had eaten anything but bread, if you chose not to count what had happened in that bear trap. Boyd chose not to count it, anyway. He could smell the meat through the door when he tried to fall asleep that night. Worse still, he could smell Ives when he came in later, not the thick, animal reek of an unwashed man but something soft and tender, smokily fragrant. If he’d been a beast and not a man he would have risen and gnawed on the leather of Ives’s boots like a dog. He fell asleep at last with the pad of his own thumb between his teeth.
He awoke to Ives’s tongue in his mouth. He screamed, but Ives swallowed it with the ease he swallowed everything and besides, there was only the General to hear it and Ives would have told him something, some lie, so he knew not to come. Instead he thrust a hand under the hem of Ives’s nightgown, groping for the raw scabs left by the trap. Infuriatingly they felt almost healed but he dug his fingernails into the pink, pitted flesh with all the force he could and felt the new skin stretch and tear and Ives’s back grow slippery.
Ives laughed, guttural and crackly, like a rattlesnake and bit him. Boyd bit back, from reflex at first. Ives’s teeth were carving into his lips and gums and tongue and the pain was horribly, invasively intimate, he would have done anything, violent or humiliating, if only he could make it stop. But then his mouth was filling with Ives’s blood as well as his own and all at once the pain became something else entirely.
Then it went away. All of it. His mouth was simply a warm, hot wetness, the jagged mess of his back melted into foam and even the old, old pain that had started that day when he lay in the mud and played at corpses was scooped out of him, leaving nothing in its place. His fingers had sunk into Ives’s back to the first knuckle. He felt something flutter in the small of his own back, like a spider, like morse code.
Close your mouth.
He awoke the next morning, slowly, easily, like he hadn’t woken in years. Ives was nowhere to be seen. Boyd brought a cautious finger to his lips, then prodded at his gums. They were not even sore. It was like the whole thing had been a dream, and maybe Boyd could have dismissed it as one if, when he had reached round to check the wounds on his back, those had not been gone as well.
* * *
It was a quiet day. The storm pressed against the windows, bleakly insistent. Slauson lounged about with his feet up on Toffler’s piano, feigning interest in one of Hart’s books, but really just waiting for enough time to pass for him to make another trip to the stew pot. Over the last couple of days his face had taken on a florid, swollen look, the skin as thick and red as fresh beef. Ives watched him, benevolently enough when their eyes met, but primitive as a wolf when Slauson dropped his gaze to make another pretense at the book.
Boyd sat and ate the stew with them that evening, wondering a little at himself. He hadn’t truly eaten in four days, it was only natural his control should break a little. Perhaps any man’s would have. But he had fought like a dog to escape this, tried to martyr himself into the bargain and now here he was, slurping down some poor sod with his potatoes.
He thought of how the boy had sounded through the door, very young and trusting and waited for disgust at himself to close his throat but the mouthful slid down smoothly, as did the one after.
Ives watched him eat with same benevolence he’d watched the General. Boyd wondered if his look changed when his eyes were on his plate like it had when the General’s were on his book. He looked up, sharply, hoping to catch Ives at it. Ives stared back at him, and smiled.
Boyd looked away and concentrated on his food. It was a little insipid somehow, as if it hadn’t been salted enough and he was still hungry when the last of it was finished.
In the middle of the night Ives crawled into bed with him. Boyd lay very still, as he would have done if he’d woken to find a snake in his bedroll. The damp boards creaked in protest under their combined weight.
“Get off.” he whispered. Ives put an arm over him.
“Why?” Ives asked, teeth very close to Boyd’s ear. His breath smelled metallic. Boyd considered.
Because I hate you. Because I tried to kill you. You stabbed me. You ate my friends.
Toffler, Knox, George, he tried to summon them up; their voices, their habits, the little things they had done for him. The memories, when he dragged them up, were empty, except he remembered how they’d smelled with terrible clarity and could translate that smell, in his mind, to a taste his tongue regretted never getting to know.
He’d been quiet too long. It was already Ives’s victory. His arm tightened around Boyd like an iron band. And Boyd didn’t fight, although he could have done, because he liked it, because he was comfortable with a rare comfort. If only he hadn’t been so hungry, his mouth filling with water and his stomach tucking up against his ribs.
You eat a man and take something from him and are the stronger for it. That was the rule. He’d felt it when that dead soldier’s blood had come dripping into his mouth and he’d risen up a patriot. Felt it again as he nibbled on Reich’s brawny thighs. But what happens if the man you ate lived and ate you in return and you ate and he ate and healed only to eat again?
He’d drunk Ives’s blood – or at least, he’d drunk whatever it was that came out of a man when you squeezed him like an orange – and now perhaps there was a little of Ives coiled within him like a snake, looking out of his eyes, hungry with an amoral hunger. And Ives? Ives who had sucked the blood and drool from his mouth, whose teeth had ground into his gums until the bone beneath them had begun to splinter like firewood?
His breath was soft and repellent on the back of Boyd’s neck. Boyd refused to turn and look at him, worried he’d see a little of himself looking back.
* * *
The storm blew itself out finally and the General was gone. Gone, not left, of course. Boyd stood in the open doorway and stared out at the fresh snow in the yard, with no mark of footprints on it. The horse was still in the stable. Ives had come to him in the night with iron breath.
The slab of meat on the cutting board was flabbily anonymous. If he’d wanted to, he could have pretended Ives had killed a pig. Thoughtful of him, but a wasted consideration because Boyd reached inside of him for the part that should have cared and instead found something that was cold and carefree and Ives-ish.
You eat a man and take something from him. What had been taken? And what sat, starving, in its place?
“What do you think happens when a Wendigo eats a Wendigo?” He asked, looking down at his plate. The meat had great streaks of soft fat running through it, that melted on his tongue. His entire body thrilled to the taste, as it had not to the flesh of that boy. The small of his back prickled with an insistent, cold itch.
“How do you mean?”
“A man eats a man and becomes a Wendigo. What does a Wendigo become when he eats another Wendigo?”
Ives frowned. He was cruel, not stupid. Boyd watched his face turn inward as he ran over the problem in his mind, tasting it. A cruel man, who had held him in the night and made breakfast for them both.
“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” he said at last. His words were genial but Boyd could read the worry in him as easily as he would have known it in himself. It was not like Ives to turn his back to a problem. Ives plotted and schemed and overcame. It was like Boyd though.
* * *
The General was a big man. He lasted them a week. Towards the end they gave up the civil fiction of carrots and potatoes and finally even of cooking, cutting off thin, greasy strips from the carcass and eating them with nothing but a little salt.
Just as they were scraping away at the last of him a party of travelers came through, well-fed, prosperous ones with stout, glossy horses drawing the wagons. Most of them left again after a couple of days recuperation, save for one who slipped on the icy steps and fell, snapping his neck.
Boyd had felt Ives getting up in the night and had watched him through the window, pouring water on them, breath smoking in the freezing air. He could have gotten up himself and brushed the water away, or put down grit. But instead he lay snugged in the blankets, saying nothing as Ives got back into bed beside him and slept until the thump and the wailing of the man’s family woke him and he had to spring up and pretend to be shocked.
They slept together every night now.
The man, once butchered, was a disappointment. They sprinkled him with spices from their precious little store of them and roasted him with fat chunks of root vegetables. Ives carved off wafer thin pieces and salted and fried them like bacon. Boyd glazed the ham of his thighs with honey that he’d found in General Slauson’s saddlebags. They ate and ate and went hungry to their shared bed.
“I suppose we’re finding out,” Boyd mused, sitting on the end of the bed and waiting for Ives to undress.
Ives looked over at him. He was in great shape, despite their hunger; skin smooth and soft as a peach and hair more gold than blonde. Boyd wondered if he’d improved in the same way and felt, from the way Ives was looking at him, that he must have.
“Finding what out?” Ives asked, indifferently, folding his jacket over the back of a chair with luxuriant slowness, knowing they were looking at each other, and liking it.
You ate my friends, Boyd reminded himself, but felt only regret at not getting to eat them too. They had buried Hart, at his insistence. What a waste. All that fine meat going to the cold, ungenerous earth.
“What happens when a Wendigo eats another Wendigo.” He clarified, as Ives undid the buttons on his shirt.
“Well, I’ve never felt better,” Ives grinned at him, with his familiar, shark grin. “You’ve never looked better. I don’t see the harm.” He picked up a straight razor from the table, as if he meant to shave but he made no movement for lather, or water.
Boyd stiffened and put a precautionary hand in front of his throat, which made Ives laugh. The razor winked a silvery wink at him as Ives slid out a pink tongue and dragged it slowly along the blade. Blood spattered onto his unshaven chin and the greasy collar of his shirt.
Boyd could see their future, all at once, not a road to be walked but a tight spiral downwards, a spinning futile circle. One day soon they’d have no more in common with a man than they did with a pig, or a goat. A cannibalistic species of two. He had wondered, when he could bring himself to think about it, why creatures like himself and Ives weren’t more common. Now he knew.
Boyd had an uncle who’d done rather well for himself, bought a large house in the civilized East and married a woman who never worked and who wore emeralds as big and clear as spoonfuls of mint jelly. Boyd had danced with his step-daughter, a pretty girl with snaking black ringlets.
“Come and see me,” the uncle had said, “If you ever get tired of the army.”
He could get up right now and put on warm clothes, take the General’s good horse and ride until he was clear from the mountains, and the snow and Ives. He could stay at inns with feather beds, make friends he would not harm, flirt with the step-daughter. Sit at his uncle’s table and eat crisp green salad with lobster shredded in it. He didn’t think Ives would stop him, not this new Ives, with Boyd’s gentle blood whimpering in his belly. He could go home.
Ives sat next to him on the bed, jaws slimy with blood, the razor still in his hand. He ran a thumb over Boyd’s lips.
“You’re the only thing in the world worth eating, the only thing left with any taste in it.”
Boyd looked away, out the window, trying to see the world outside but it had grown too dark and the glass was opaque as a mirror, showing only their own reflections and the blood drooling in glinting strings from Ives’s chin. Boyd’s own mouth was full of water and when he met his own glass gaze, he didn’t know it.
“I love you.” Ives insisted.
His other hand ran down Boyd’s back, warm through the linen of his nightshirt, smoothing away that cold, forgotten touch perpetually trying to tap a warning into his spine.
Close your mouth. Close your mouth.