Welcome to
Carnage House

– this is your trigger warning

Anthropophagy on Ice

by Anna Rose Greenberg

CHRISTIAN HAD TO change his name when he became an abomination in God’s light, so now he went by Tom. He probably should have changed it earlier, since some of the things he’d done were sure as hell not very Christian of him, but he tried not to think about that too much.

It was his own damn fault that he became a ghoul. He shouldn’t have been eating people. He shouldn’t have been eating people for a number of reasons, but they tasted good, so that was that.

After a few minor nibblings that did nothing to assuage his hunger, Tom had decided to go all Armin Mewes, because in addition to tasting good, cannibalism was sexy. So he tracked down a consenting meal, which wasn’t terribly hard as a surprising number of people wanted to be devoured by a reasonably good-looking man, and they began their toothsome courtship.

It turned out that Tom had incredible bite strength, and his meal decided pretty fast that cannibalism wasn’t fun. Once Tom tasted blood though, he wasn’t turning back. He tore out her throat with his teeth and didn’t bother waiting until the inevitable bleed-out before he started feasting.

Fingers were his favorite. He could snap the bones and then suck the flesh and skin off, nice and tidy. It was so considerate of God to give most people ten of them. (Tom was still pretty religious back then, somehow.) He didn’t enjoy toes, and stomachs were too acidic. Intestines were hit or miss. He liked the heart, kidneys, and liver, but he avoided the brain because he didn’t want to get kuru. He liked the good cuts of meat, too, of course—that’s what he really came for. He didn’t bother cooking it. Flesh was so good raw, and he didn’t want to risk messing it up. He couldn’t light a barbeque to save his life.

He killed a few more people, but then the police started catching on, so he stopped, and they couldn’t find him.

The hunger didn’t leave him, and a few weeks after his last real meal, he found a new outlet. His friend’s sister died, and Tom went to her funeral. The body… even masked by the odor of cloying flowers, it smelled so good. It made his mouth water. That night, before the burial, he broke into the mortuary, found her, and took a big bite. The tender putrefaction was cut by numbing embalming fluids. All the tension had left the meat, and overall it was simply exquisite.

The experience was even worth his friend crying on his shoulder for hours the next day, telling Tom over and over again about how someone had “defiled” her sister’s body.

Tom started grave robbing regularly.

The changes were subtle at first: He could see in the dark, which he passed off as acclimation to late nights. He grew much stronger, which he thought made sense since it was a lot of work digging up graves. His fingernails began growing quickly and claw-like, which he couldn’t really explain other than fingernails just did that sometimes.

He had a harder time explaining his lengthening arms and fingers, his sharpening teeth, and his nose not turning into a snout exactly, but definitely becoming reminiscent of one in the right light.

There was simply no avoiding it… he was a ghoul.

***

Tom started out in Denver, but once he began his transformation he had to move. Explaining the changes that came over his body was too hard, and at his age puberty wasn’t an excuse. He had done hospitality work in a Denver hotel, and somehow, miraculously, the lodge in some backward ski town high up in the Rockies was looking to hire, sight unseen.

Tom left most of his possessions behind, hopped into his car, and drove until the roads became almost indistinguishable from the mountains on which they wound. The air grew thin, even by his born-and-bred Colorado standards, and he breathed hard as he passed the town sign. Dawn Air: Taste the Sunrise.

It sounded like a soda slogan, and Tom snorted.

Now this might have seemed like a poor choice of location for someone who feasts on the dead, for how many dead could there be in a town of eleven hundred? Tom had a plan. During the winter he would have no problems—this was a ski town, and skiers died in accidents all the time. During the summer he had a car, and he’d go into bigger cities and scavenge as needed. While not ideal, he’d be able to keep out of trouble, and he wasn’t sure what would happen to someone like him if he got into trouble.

He pulled up in front of the lodge, parked, and entered the large wooden structure that tried for a cozy interior but mostly ended up feeling dim and cramped. A gaunt, mustached man behind the front desk lazily read a book, Miracle in the Andes. As Tom approached, he put the book down and stood at attention.

“Are you Tom?” he asked before Tom had a chance to introduce himself. The man was giving Tom a side-eye that clearly said, You’re an ugly fellow, aren’t you?

Tom cringed and nodded. He had filed down his fingernails and practiced smiling without showing any of his pointed teeth, but he certainly didn’t look entirely human. It was a bit of a sore spot for Tom.

The man smiled. “It’s such a relief to have you. Our last hospitality agent decided she wanted less snow and better wages. I’m Edgar, by the way—I own this lodge along with my wife, Shelley. Let me show you around.”

The Dawn Air Ski Lodge and Lodging did exactly what it promised, combining the best of a mid-range hotel and above-average ski lodge into one package. An enormous fireplace dominated the common area. The equipment storage spaces were tidy and clean. An indoor swimming pool and several hot tubs evoked warmer climes. A sauna completed the picture, the cherry on top.

Shelley met them by the sauna.

Tom smelled her before he saw her, a putrid odor that would be mildly unpleasant to a human nose. But to him, her strong aroma was as tantalizing as a pie on a windowsill.

He turned around quickly and offered her a closed-mouth smile, remembering not to show his teeth.

She sat in a wheelchair, white-gloved hands resting on the armrests, a white blanket draped over her lap, hiding her legs. A Band-Aid covered the bridge of her nose.

“You must be Tom,” Shelley said with a welcoming smile.

“Guilty as charged,” replied Tom, trying not to stare.

“Was the trip okay? You came from Denver, am I correct?”

“That’s right. Drive wasn’t too bad. I got snow tires already but didn’t end up needing them.”

“Good, good… Tell me one fun fact about yourself.”

Tom panicked, his mind blank except for his assorted illegal activities, but he finally managed to think of something that wouldn’t incriminate him. “I was in a punk band when I was a kid. It was called Punch the Dentist. Technically it was Punch the Dentist, Break His Teeth, See How He Likes It, but that didn’t fit on anything, so we shortened it.”

Shelley nodded. “Sounds terrible. Now I’ll tell you something, since that’s only fair. I do not feel pain. At all. While that may sound fun, it is a curse. I bump into things without realizing it and injure myself, sometimes badly. I tell you because I know you’re wondering what’s wrong with me, and I don’t like to be the subject of mysteries. Edgar, have you shown Tom his room yet?”

Tom’s room was completely adequate and utterly uninteresting, quaint down to the framed picture of the snowy mountains hanging above the bed. Meals would be provided, not that Tom wanted or needed them. Wages, as Edgar had implied, were below market rate, but as long as Tom had a place to live and enough money for gas he was set. Most material things didn’t interest him very much anymore. He just wanted meat.

Here’s how the meat situation worked:

Tom did not have to eat every day, and usually he did not. He needed to eat at least once per fortnight, and if he went a full two weeks between meals, he had to eat a lot: at least two thirds of the consumable body of an average man (yes marrow, no bones), or three fourths of an average woman. If he ate more frequently, he could eat less. If he ate every day, he could get by on about a forearm’s worth of meat, or half a liver, or the equivalent. That is why, to tide him over, he had a man confined in the trunk of his car when he arrived at the lodge. He preferred his meat slightly less fresh these days, but he would make do while he acclimated to his new situation.

***

“Why don’t you go see the town, get a look around? It’s still early in the season, so we’re not very busy, as you might have guessed,” Edgar said.

“Okay,” Tom replied. He made sure his car was secured (chances were decent that he had a frozen meal in the trunk) and walked into town.

Nothing distinguished Dawn Air from any other mountain ski town. Shops with frosted awnings sold souvenirs and trinkets. Every block had at least two coffee shops.

No one stared at Tom, but he did get a few glances. He wore a coat a few sizes too big to hide his twisted anatomy, but he couldn’t change his face.

Looking in the window of a high-end ski shop, he pictured himself skiing down a mountain in search of human carrion. He looked ridiculous, even in his imagination. Luckily, if he ran on all fours his hands and feet acted like snowshoes, and he could cover ground quickly even on icy terrain, so such nonsense was unnecessary.

Tom shrugged and continued on his way. He noted a small hospital tucked out of the way, situated, he guessed, so that no one would have to think about potential injuries or worse while having a good time. He’d be getting a lot of his meals there, most likely.

He did not explore the ski slopes right away. Something about them seemed…somehow unpleasant. Like the snow was not merely frozen water, but rather the back of some colossal sleeping ghost who would awaken one day and shroud the world in winter. Or maybe it was a winding sheet (Tom knew a lot about winding sheets; they soaked up a lot of corpse juice, which he resented) wrapped around a rotting, inedible giant, which would melt into putrefaction when spring came.

Tom was right to worry, it turned out, but to say why would put the main course before the appetizer.

***

Tom quickly got the hang of the lodge. It wasn’t much different from the hotel where he had worked before, and he was good with people, more or less. Edgar and Shelley treated him with kindness and by Tom’s estimation, they thought he was doing a good job. Shelley did have a tendency to lurk, watching him as he stoked the fire or checked guests in or out.

Tom had, however, miscalculated how many people got seriously injured on the slopes, and had misjudged the hospital’s security. Since bodies and the near-dead were airlifted away, it was hard for Tom to get at them. He wouldn’t starve—he could always kill someone, or drive into another town for a bite—but the situation was less than ideal. While not an immediate concern since his frozen meal had lasted a while, he would have to address the problem in the very near future.

***

“…and so, the slope you want is up ski lift number four,” Tom finished, trying to convince a novice skier to try the triple black diamond slope. If no one was going to accidentally die on the mountain, he’d have to accelerate the process.

“Cool! Sounds good!” the skier exclaimed before walking off.

The next person to approach the front desk was a woman in dressy clothes holding a notebook. “Excuse me,” she said. “Do you think you could tell me a little bit about the town’s history?”

“Well sure,” Tom replied, smiling his non-toothy smile. Edgar had trained him in the town’s history, the little there was of it. “The Morley family founded Dawn Air on Mount Erysichthon in 1955. They built the lodge, and the town sprang up around it. Before that, the land was empty—there are no traces of any settlements. Not much else to tell.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as weird?” the woman asked.

“No… Should it?”

“Let’s start with this: Do you know why the Morleys sold the lodge?”

“No,” Tom said. He was starting to suspect the woman already knew the answers to her questions, and was mostly interested in dumping a bunch of craziness on him.

“Two of their children disappeared. Not a trace could be found. When dogs were released they immediately ran back to their handlers, whimpering.”

“Oh my,” Tom said. He didn’t care.

“And the mountain has shrunk eight inches since it was first surveyed,” the woman continued.

Tom did not understand the significance of this and gave the woman a quizzical look.

“That’s unusual,” she went on when Tom didn’t respond. “What I’m getting at is, I’m here to investigate. Where can I get ski lessons?” She hugged her notebook to her chest and looked out the window toward the mountain.

Tom smiled (no teeth) and handed her a brochure.

***

He was about to give up and go out of town to raid a graveyard when the storm hit. It roared in out of nowhere, the sleeping ghost having a nightmare, the rotting giant riddled with worms, and sloughed three-and-a-half feet of snow onto Dawn Air. Leaving was impossible, even with snow tires.

At first, Tom only had time to deal with the panicked guests trapped at the lodge. For people who whined constantly about wanting fresh snow, they sure went out of their minds when they got some. The lodge had plenty of supplies, he assured them, so they wouldn’t go hungry. But I will, he thought with a grumbling stomach.

Shelley had been looking for him. “Tom, there you are!” She wheeled over, and Tom noticed that her white gloves were stained red. Her scent almost sent him over the edge…the sweet rot of her. He was so hungry.

“Do you have a minute?” she asked.

“I guess,” he replied, simultaneously attempting and failing to placate a guest with a coupon for hot chocolate.

“Edgar can handle the front desk for a little while… Hang on.” Shelley wheeled off.

Edgar appeared a few minutes later. “Shelley says you know how to fix heaters. The one in our room isn’t working and we don’t want to sleep in the lobby with the fire. If you could fix it up, we’d much appreciate it.”

“Sure,” Tom said. He had no idea how to fix a heater and didn’t know why Shelley believed he could.

He followed Shelley to the quarters she shared with Edgar. The suite looked a lot like Tom’s, just a little bigger, and a little nicer. Blackout curtains covered the windows. It was cold enough that Tom could see his breath.

“You know I don’t know how to fix the heater, right?” Tom asked. He was too hungry to care about what Shelley actually wanted, but thought it easiest just to go with the flow.

“Tom, this is hard to say, but I’m going to try my best. I’ve seen how you look at me. You don’t stare at me like I’m something shameful, something that needs to be kept behind closed doors. But it’s more than that. The way you look at me… I feel desired. I haven’t felt desired in a long, long time.”

She was misreading Tom, but he liked where this was going.

“Really? A tasty thing like you?” Tom had been a charmer back in the day but hadn’t tried flirting since his transformation.

Shelley hoisted herself from the wheelchair to the bed, the blanket falling from her knees. Tom sucked in air between his teeth. Her legs were rotten, mottled with gangrene. He could barely hold himself back. It had been almost a fortnight after all, and he was starving.

“Let’s cut the small talk. Your eyes say enough. Take off your clothes and come here.” She removed her shirt and bra, revealing festering wounds on her torso.

“Desire is strongest in the dark,” Tom said, and flipped off the light. He could see perfectly well, but Shelley wouldn’t be able to make out his ghoulish body. He grinned, revealing his sharp teeth.

“I like the lights on, but this time you can choose,” Shelley said, having pulled off her gloves, revealing moldering fingers in worse shape than her legs.

Tom shed his clothes and joined Shelley on the bed. He made no effort to mask his excitement. Cannibalism was sexy after all, and while he wasn’t into necrophilia, the promise of living, rotting flesh intimated an entirely new sensation.

“I can’t feel pain, but I can still feel pleasure,” Shelley said. “I think it would be pleasurable to feel pain, but it’s impossible for me to know that.”

“Let’s not worry about pain,” Tom said. “In fact, I think we should stop talking now.”

He kissed her.

She leaned heavily into him, twining the fingers of one hand into his hair.

He bit off her tongue.

She felt nothing, noticed nothing even as the hot blood dripped down her skin.

He gently pushed her back on the bed, running his long fingers down her neck, down her chest, down her stomach.

She caressed his face, sticking three fingers into his mouth. Sucking the gangrenous flesh from the bone, enraptured by the flavor, he groaned, savoring the combination of living and dead meat.

He placed her legs on his shoulders. She made a delighted noise. Tom wasn’t sure if she was trying to talk or not, but it didn’t matter. He ate her out, leaving a mangled mess in his wake. She cried out, spasming.

He put her legs down, and she spread them wider. He grinned.

Nothing was as good as rotten meat, but this was close.

***

Afterwards, he leaned over her, whispering in her ear, “Thank you… This has been fun.” He clamped a hand over her mouth and bit through her jugular, greedily drinking the blood that spurted forth.

He had wanted to savor the meat, but had instead wolfed it down, reveling in the gangrene, in the contrast between firmness and decay. He consumed almost everything, and when he was finished and his sense of time returned, he reeled back in panic.

They would catch him for sure. And when they did, he would be torn limb from limb, burned at the stake, given to a zoo, something dreadful. He had to leave, now.

Quickly throwing on his clothes, Tom crept to the lobby, peering around the corner. He was covered in blood, and if anyone saw him he was done for. Edgar sat behind the front desk, talking to an unhappy looking couple. Tom crept past, hugging the wall. No one noticed him. When he reached the door, he ran outside.

His car wouldn’t start. Popping the hood, he peered at the engine (not that he knew how to fix it). Predictably, he couldn’t make heads or tails of its innards. He clearly wasn’t easily getting off the mountain. He had no idea how to hotwire a car, so stealing one was out. He certainly couldn’t walk to the next town, and cabs didn’t come out this far. Never mind the snow.

Someone grabbed his arm, and he spun around, hissing. The woman who had wanted to tell him all about Dawn Air’s history stood there… but she was changed. Pale as ice, the only color she had left was the blood seeping out of a massive bite mark in her side. Tom didn’t know what could leave a bite like that.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “There’s a little Dawn Air party and we could really use your help.”

“Refilling the ice box,” Tom lied, trying to will normalcy into his voice.

“Now is not the time for that. Some people have come a very long way to see you,” said the historian. She dragged him back inside.

Edgar was still talking with the couple at the front desk, but now their noses were black with frostbite.

Tom tried to yank his arm free, but the historian had a rigor mortis grip.

A girl approached, entering the lobby, dragging a suitcase. Tom had only ever seen her in death, but it was unmistakably her—his first corpse. She looked doll-like. Caked with makeup, her skin’s sickly pallor resembled china. Her limbs moved stiffly, the broken bones replaced by metal rods… She had been lightly tapped by an eighteen-wheeler.

“Are you still hungry?” she whispered, and suddenly she was rotting away, the makeup flaking, flesh sloughing away from metal rods. Before long, she was nothing but cracked bones and metal on the floor.

Tom stared at the pile, acutely aware of the pounding of his own heart. A low whining noise sounded in his head along with a rhythmic gnashing of teeth.

A second figure approached, ringing the small bell next to Edgar, who appeared not to notice what was happening. Tom recognized his first meal, his first kill.

“Look at you now… You were so hot when we met,” she said, her voice a gurgle. “I wanted to eat you up… Though I guess that’s what you did to me. What are you now, even? Are you listening to me? You didn’t then… I screamed for you to stop and you tore my throat out. That’s not consent, Christian.” How long it had been since he’d heard his given name—Christian—his name before he became Tom, before he became this. He opened his mouth to respond but she began to vanish, piece by piece, until nothing remained but gnawed bones.

Tom put a hand to his head. The whining and gnashing grew louder, and his mouth felt dry, as dry as bone dust. His old name had hit him like a blow to the temples. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. He would wake up in his bed and find, to his relief, Tom relegated to a nightmare, that ghouls weren’t real, and that he was a vegetarian.

“Are you okay?” a distant voice asked.

Tom glanced up. Edgar, whose nose no longer bore the signs of frostbite, was finishing up with the couple. Nobody else was there.

After the couple left to return to their room, Edgar gave Tom his side-eye. “What is that on your shirt? Is that oil? Is the heater working now?”

“I’m fine…just a bad piece of beef,” Tom said and grinned, forgetting to hide his teeth.

Edgar screamed.

It wasn’t necessarily Tom’s teeth by themselves that frightened people. Seeing them simply tied the rest of the picture together. Yes, he had unusually long arms and fingers—some people do. His face was a little funny—maybe he got into too many fights when he was younger. His yellow eyes? Jaundice—he should get that looked at. But when the sharp teeth came into view, his arms became impossibly proportioned, his face snout-like, his eyes predatory. Now, he stood before Edgar covered in blood. He was, in a word, a monster.

Stripped of his mask, Tom took off running, moving on all fours for added speed. Behind him, voices rose to a crescendo. He knew the head start would buy him only a short window before a hunting party was on his tail.

With nowhere else to go, he raced up the mountain, slipping into the trees on the edge of the slopes.

About a third of the way up, he found the body of the woman who had been looking into Dawn Air’s history, the one who had led to his unmasking. The bite mark was gone, but her neck had broken when she crashed into a tree.

The same woman stood behind a boulder, waiting for him. Tom glanced down the slope. He could still see her body, her head cocked at an unnatural angle above the broken neck. He looked back to the figure standing in front of him. Undoubtedly, the same person.

“Uh,” Tom said, less than eloquently.

“Come with me,” the historian beckoned.

“No thanks.” Tom’s eyes darted between the woman in front of him and the body on the slope. He shouldn’t stand around here too long—the angry mob was surely mobilizing.

The historian frowned. Something pushed out from under her skin, sharp protrusions that squirmed like maggots.

Tom froze, his eyes locked on the transformation taking place before him.

The historian’s skin burst open, and a thing stepped forth from the wreckage. It resembled a wolf…but inside out. Four-inch teeth studded its viscera. It howled with a sound like gargling yogurt, radiating the overpowering smell of rotting saffron.

“Come with me,” the beast said, and this time Tom felt he had little choice—he was a scavenger, and this was an apex predator.

“Why is this happening to me?” Tom whispered to himself. Forcing himself to put one freezing foot in front of the other, he approached the wolf.

“You resisted the Slavering Ones, so they gave you a little push,” the wolf said. “Your destiny is on these slopes. You were brought here for a reason.”

“What reason? What possible reason? What are the Slavering Ones?”

The wolf ignored his first two questions. “The Slavering Ones feed on hunger—they cannot be satiated. The more they consume the hungrier they get. When everything is hunger, and there is nothing left to eat, they will eat time and space. Only in nothingness will they find fulfillment.”

Tom sat down in the snow. This was much too much. He didn’t believe in ancient hungering beings, though until a few minutes ago he hadn’t believed in inside-out wolves either, and a few years before that he certainly hadn’t believed in ghouls.

The wolf picked him up with its mouth, clamping down where Tom’s neck met his back, and carried him in the manner of a mother to a cub. Its flesh molded itself around Tom, and its myriad teeth cut into him. He didn’t resist. What was the point? If he died here, he died here, and the wolf would probably eat him. If he were still religious, still Christian, he might believe he was bound for Hell. But Hell was here, on this mountain, so he was probably going somewhere far worse.

The wolf brought him to a hidden cave. “Wait here, in the Pantry,” it said. “They’ll come for you when you’re good and ready… You won’t see them, but they’ll come.”

Tom didn’t like the sound of that one bit. With renewed resolve, he began to struggle and thrash. His blows sank into the wolf’s body, its flesh squelching. It didn’t even seem to notice. It placed him on the ground of the cave and took a step back, guarding the entrance.

The cave wasn’t very large, about big enough for Tom to lie down, but it was dry and considerably warmer than the outside. He’d had enough of the cold. Maybe he’d go to Arizona. Things rotted faster there anyway.

Apparently done with him, the wolf melted into the snow.

Tom blinked a few times. The last hour must have been a cold-induced hallucination. It couldn’t be real. He had run up the slope in a mad frenzy, found his way to this cave on his own. The cuts on the back of his neck could be explained—scrapes, perhaps from the frozen branches of trees.

As he took a step toward the cave entrance, preparing to make his escape, distant laughter sounded, and a quake shook the mountain. An avalanche swept down the slopes, burying all in its path. It blocked the entrance to Tom’s cave, trapping him inside.

He let out a cry and tried to move some of the rocks and snow. He was able to poke holes so that he could breathe, but the rest was much too tightly packed. He was well and truly stuck, and nobody was going to come and help him.

Tom hit his head against the wall, screamed and clawed at the debris until he was hoarse and his hands bled.

***

He sat on the ground, head in his hands. On the cave floor in front of him was the dead historian’s book, the one she must have slipped into his pocket when he wasn’t paying attention. Its pages were covered with bare-bones handwriting:

They were born from the protruding ribs of hunger, just as Eve was born from Adam. At first they wildly consumed knowledge, but that was not enough. When they knew everything there was to know, they sank their teeth into the physical plane. As they chewed, their memories were caught in their jaws, and so they lost the knowledge they consumed, lost their names and their purposes.

***

Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, Tom revisited the book innumerable times. He wished he hadn’t fed right before he was trapped—he could go two weeks between meals without any serious consequences. But as the days ticked by, marked by the slivers of light he could see through the rocks that confined him, he grew from hungry, to ravenous, to starving. Eventually he could take no more.

Tom had always been partial to fingers, and when he tentatively bit into his left pinky, it tasted better than he could have imagined. He gnawed it to the bone, then forced himself to stop. He might still get out of here.

But soon, reality set in. Only one act remained, and he set about it with gusto.

He started with his legs. As a ghoul, he was extremely flexible, and could reach most of his torso and abdomen without any trouble. The pain was almost as exquisite as the meat. If he had known how satisfying autocannibalism could be, he might have taken a bite or two out of himself years ago.

Once nothing but bones remained below the waist, he started on his internal organs. When he ate his heart he felt he had consumed his own soul, and knew himself better than he ever had before. He ate his arms, savoring the remaining fingers. After he swallowed his tongue and lips, he couldn’t get at the rest of his head, which was fine because he didn’t want to get kuru, and he was dead anyway.


About the Story:
I needed a story with which to traumatize my friends and family, who have all been very encouraging of my horror endeavors thus far. Therefore, Anthropophagy on Ice was born.