The Worm in Every Heart

“Let down thy hair, my brother,” I suggested, “that I may feel its weight.”

Lightly, surely, I laid my claws on either side of Romesh Singh’s jaw and worked the muscles like hinges, pinching his lips open—and though I had hoped (if I could) to grant him a gentle exit, my hunger soon betrayed itself in their sharpness, rimming the corner of his mouth with blood.

He gasped, swallowing it.

“Be merciful to me,” he whispered. “As . . . he would be.”

Oh, loyal, loving, deluded man. A born victim, if ever there was one.

“Ah,” I said, gently. “But we are the same, he and I. So I cannot promise you what he would never give.”

A flash of moon, bisected, fell over us through the trees; the blood caught its light, sparking a hot copper flare of lust that made my own lips abruptly wet. To compensate, I licked his clean.

Our tongues touched.

This distracted him enough, hopefully, to make what followed only a brief (if, no doubt, rather unpleasant) surprise—as I suddenly forced the rest of my head through his mouth until his head cracked like a wishbone, rupturing his throat, making his face my collar, spraying teeth. Hugging him to me, into me, as I rooted for brains in the blind, red ruin of his skull.

I suppose I had foreseen—somewhat faintly, considering the Lieutenant’s continuing capacity for unpredictable behavior—that the sound of this process would draw Grammar back to the clearing. Not that it mattered much either way, at this point, though forgoing a prolonged chase (wearing Romesh Singh’s now-uninhabited skin, perhaps?) would certainly have saved me a little time. But just as the consumption of a long-desired object tends to erase whatever wait one may have had to put oneself through in order to attain it, so strategy must inevitably dim in appetite’s shadow. Blood filled my eyes; I drank deep, and gave myself up to ecstasy.

Presently, however, I felt Grammar’s blade graze the back of my neck—wing-sharp, a dragonfly’s delicate needle—and knew my plans had not been laid in vain.

Popping Romesh Singh’s remaining eye between my teeth (just in case, should intelligible conversation yet prove necessary), I turned—grinning—to show him his own face: Red from browline to Adam’s apple, chin slicked with fresh overflow. And a jolt passed between us, starburst-quick—not one of shock, so much, as of recognition. The Lieutenant’s prim British mouth crumpling like an insulted cat’s, ludicrous with embarrassed amazement, to find his unsought namesake’s pleasures were so very like his own.

The sword, however, did not waver.

I smiled at the sight—and swung Romesh Singh’s carcass like a dancing partner, dipping it towards him, as if offering him a bite.

“You must be hungry,” I said. “Please: Do not hesitate to indulge yourself.”

Grammar snarled again (his sole response in such circumstances, it seems) and stabbed me through the throat; I flexed, and sucked him further in, immersing him up to his armpit. For one endless moment, too paralytic even for struggle, he felt my internal organs stroke him seductively, and gagged. At which point I interrupted his train of nausea in mid-heave, just as gorge met gullet, and assured myself of his complete attention by thrusting my own arm (up to the elbow) inside his armpit—cracking ribs, perforating lung, expelling a warm rush of half-digested food from the lower esophagus, all in quest of that wildly-fluttering knot of muscle he called a heart.

Grammar coughed, and went rigid. His eyes turned up. But it was not my intention to let him die quite so quickly, now that we had finally met.

My fingers closed fast around left and right ventricles, pumping him awake. Saying, solicitously:

“Oh, no. Be so good as to not leave me just yet, Lieutenant.”

With an effort, Grammar forced his eyes to focus on me. A rictus pulled at his cheek. Words formed, along with a bright new bubble of blood.

“Do . . . your . . . worst,” he replied, carefully. “I . . . don’t care.”

I gave him a

wide, blank smile—and chanted, singsong:

“Don’t-care didn’t care. Don’t-care was wild. Don’t-care stole plum and pear, like any beggar’s child.”

Sucking him closer—the maw that had been me (and him as well, come to think of it) now covering almost all of him below the shoulder, sprouting a fine interior coat of teeth that pressed and teased, unable to resist sampling at the anticipated feast; here a shaven fingernail, there a beheaded nipple.

Looking down, I could see his genitals begin—all unnoticed, for once—to stiffen.

“But Don’t-care was made to care,” I continued, blithely. “Don’t-care was hung. Don’t-care was put in the pot, and boiled ‘til he was done.”

And I gave his heart another little squeeze, for emphasis.

Oh, yes, his Empire might well linger far into the next century. But he’d be going home much sooner—and not to London, either, where he might at least occasionally be able to buy someone to kill. Back to some dreary Suffolk estate, to take up the middle child’s portion, dazzling idiots behind the hay-wains with a fading grab-bag of exotic memories, doomed to forever wear the mask of respectability. To marry, to breed, to be buried and rot. And all in a dim, small place that no longer held anything but potential boredom for him, where no one would know to stiffen at his scent, or whisper his name in fear as he passed by.

Well, we were in the jungle now. And the law of the jungle is universally understood: Eat, or be eaten.