Teeth of Beasts (Skinners)

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.

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