Josiah had fallen numbly asleep. It was well past midnight, pushing toward dawn. The crickets in their summer millions had lulled him to sleep with their racket, even as he read—no mumbled reluctantly—from God’s book. He had not known he had fallen asleep until he heard the thunderclap of the holy book hit the beaten earth with a great thud.

The crickets stopped their racket for a moment as Josiah scrambled to retrieve the Bible in the dim lamp light that had so strained his eyes. He was not greeted by the cloud of sawdust one would expect on this dust-covered ground. For the blood of Joshua and the sweat of bloody-handed Patriarch Paul had dampened the shed floor.

‘The Penitent Ground has drunk its fill boys!’

Those cruel words still echoed in his soul, words that only Joshua and Josiah had heard when old cruel, hatchet-faced Patriarch Solomon of Nazareth had finally beaten the nameless murderer of Nazareth dead with his nine-tailed cat. The boys had stood just beyond the shed ready to dispose of the blood as old deaf Mourn Harvester disposed of the body in the sinner’s well. But here on this cruel night there was no wicked voice to torment him in the name of God, just the barely audible whimper of Joshua Hound, his broken friend; maimed for life for stepping on the grass that his very own torturer strode across blithely upon the completion of the vile duty of his office.

Josiah was rising with the Bible as the crickets took to song again. Before his legs straightened he heard Joshua whimper, “Friend, my only friend, my block hauling partner—no more blocks for me…”

“Joshua, how are you?”

“Wishing I was dead most like. Please, do not endanger yourself. Read! Read from the holy book that Patriarch Daniel uses to wipe his Swill-soaked penis!”

That last defiant croak was frightening, and struck a cord of dread down deep in his belly. In a state of fright now, fright that Beast Paul would return and punish them both, Josiah opened a page at random and began to read, “Drink from it, All of you, For this is my blood…”

His mind seemed to catch fire at the base of his skull, bringing on a keen nausea. He felt dizzy and wished to spew, but his belly was entirely empty. The fire in the base of his skull spread like flame all about his body until his feet and hands were as if on fire.

The flaming sensation then immediately abated. Now, from foot, to hand, to jaw and neck, to the pit of his vast hollow belly—more empty it felt than it had ever been—there was an ache. There was an ache in his penis as well as it rose and turned hard within his trousers, like , well, like it did when he touched himself and had plunged himself into the pit of sinful guilt last Flagellation Eve!

His whole-body ache then intensified until it was a whole-body hunger, as if every individual fiber wished to be fed. He had never felt such a sensation and—strangely, he reveled in it!

The impulse echoed in his mind like a thought unbidden, and he found himself licking the blood and sweat from the leather cover of the great Bible, sour and oily as it was from twenty years of holding by many a hand.

Joshua giggled like a girl, “You are blaspheming funny Friend. I don’t feel right, don’t feeeee…”

He closed the book reflexively even as he realized the sin he was committing by licking it—Sin, sin! Is it written as a sin in here? Where is it written, ‘Do not lick the book?’”

His mind was on fire up to his eyes now, overcome by the deep fibrous hunger that suffused his being. And he saw him there hanging dead, a smile on his face. His one and only friend, Joshua Hound, hung dead from the stocks and he knew it.

In a blind rage Josiah Chowning, bastard son of a sinner, and ward of Samara, in the care of David Chowning, threw the Holy Book of Samara, the Word of God, into the blood-soaked sawdust and earth at his feet—and the hunger remained, indeed intensified. He wanted to root into the ground for Joshua’s blood, to lick what dripped from his poor bare feet into the crimson mud beneath them!

“Bastard Chowning!” boomed the heavy grating voice of Patriarch Paul.

Josiah turned to face his abuser, God’s Dirty Hand, with, with…without fear.

Oddly enough his all consuming hunger had abolished any of his normally fearful regard for this beast called Paul. He stood defiantly and glared up into the broad heavy-boned face of a cruel man, a foot taller than he, and twice his weight.

“Chowning, you dare throw the Bible into the dirt as you dare kill my penitent?”

The great hands clenched together as the big man stepped forward and loomed for the stranglehold. Josiah felt only his hunger, and the indignity of the Beast claiming that he had killed his friend and that the book that had decreed his torment did not belong in the muck!

“Don’t accuse me Beast Paul. You killed him. Here he hangs by your hand!”

His words though, having formed as thoughts and begun the process of conversion into human language, into the English spoken by God’s Chosen People, emerged as the sibilant sound of some vicious spitting snake. And snake he felt as he slithered forward with his bare witness’ feet through the muck to glare the more sharply up at his accuser. The hiss seemed to shock Paul even more then Josiah.

Josiah saw unmistakably that a tooth, bloody root and all stuck between the large man’s eyes. The fear in his eyes turned to anger as he plucked the object from his forehead, looked at it, and then growled, “You want a dentist bastard? I’ll be your dentist!”

Josiah stepped back and felt something loosen in his mouth, a tooth from the back row. And his tongue seemed uniquely flexible, like two little fingers, just grabbing the tooth of its own accord. As the large man loomed closer with outstretched hands Josiah said, “Blind you beast!”

Again, no word issued from his mouth, rather a hiss, and a tooth shot from his coiled tongue, a tongue that extended from his mouth some bit, and darted to the big man’s face, nicking his cheek. Beast Paul now came on him in a rage and gathered him up in his arms, wrapping his hands around Josiah’s neck and beginning to squeeze and wrench.

They locked eyes and the man’s rage slowly tired to fear as Josiah’s neck coiled like a massive serpent’s body, roiling muscularly in his grasp, impervious to his Beast hands.

Josiah brought his hands up to the big man’s wrists and latched on. He was unable to pry the big hands from his neck. They both, as a means of checking on the progress of their mortal struggle he supposed, looked down at the locked hands. What they saw sickened them both, for Josiah’s veins popped raised and black from his arms.

“Fiend from Hell!” Patriarch Paul roared as he heaved Josiah from his feet.

Josiah saw by the look in Paul’s eyes and deduced from the knowledge he had of the Penance Shed, that Paul meant to impale him on the yoke hook on the beam behind him.

Josiah yelled, “No!”

The yell never materialized, rather came as a long seething hiss as Josiah hooked his heels behind the big man’s thighs.

No sooner had Josiah wished to have his hands free then he felt the muscles in his upper back, behind his shoulder blades, knot and quiver with effort. Paul continued to heft him and twist his hips to unlatch the heels hooked behind his thighs and Josiah released his grip on the man’s left hand and covered his mouth. In his mind echoed the thoughts, not of a youth, not of a man, not of a musketeer even; but of a hunter, Silence the prey. It squeaks, it squirms, silence it!

His hand covered the mouth that had just roared so accusingly. His other hand maintained its hold. Then his third hand—how convenient this is—emerged vine-like from behind his left shoulder and wound about the other hand. As it whirled small hollow-mouthed spikes in their thousands sprung from the end of the thumb-thick appendage and wrapped the large muscular arm in a blood-draining embrace. For the needles filled with red, and the pale skin of the vine-like arm became flush, black veins rising on the surface.

He felt a nourishing rush of energized life pumping into his upper back, and rushing up his spine. Countless images of emergence, grace and sublimity in primordial extra-human form, crowded his expanding mind—and his mind felt a thirsty hunger!

He turned cool eyes away from the draining arm and regarded the terrified eyes of his prey in a detached manner. His mind regarded the vibrant hate-filled beast absently, You must not die yet. I yet thirst. You smell so alive with wrong. Beat, strong heart in your breast, beat! Beat for me—feed me!

The eyes of the prey grew wide with realization as if it had heard his thoughts or had somehow divined its own fate.

His raging thirst was barely slacked and he needed to feed. No sooner had this occurred to him than the realization that he had a fourth vine-like arm came to him as it slithered gracefully and with spiked beauty toward the neck of the prey. His hands, now strong, clung to the strong forelimbs of the writhing beast as his fourth arm, sunk it’s hollow many-toothed end into the pale sweaty neck and began to drain the beast.

One last look of horror overcame the large creature before it swooned. Josiah pulled it on top of him, so that even after the heart gave out gravity would pour its vital essence into his feeding arms. He noticed in an idle moment as the thing’s weight came to bear on him, that his incisors were a might longer, and slender, resting as they did just below his lower lip, curving back somewhat. As the beast flopped on to him it occurred to Josiah that his jaw was double-hinged and he opened his mouth so that it encompassed the entire sweaty neck. His fourth arm released as did his third, both winding underneath the limp left arm to burrow beneath the ribcage with the many sawing teeth of their perfectly round mouths.

The mouths of his third and fourth arms now grasped the trembling heart of the beast with their lips, not their rending teeth, and pumped, forced the thing to pump! Even as the big sweaty beast died upon him he pumped the last of it’s blood up into the neck, where it was diverted by suction into his mouth proper. His hollow fangs whistled and then gurgled and his mouth filled, his tongue bathed in the nectar of this primordial feast.

With a sudden fright he woke from his ennui and hurled the limp thing from him, it’s big slack body crashing through a beam and causing the shelter to lean. He rose with a start onto all sixes and hurdled toward the wall of this livestock pen, scaled the dead wood with the scraping of nails, claws and teeth. He stopped at the top to regard a guardian breed of livestock, which quivered before his gaze and dropped its stinking ferrous rod. He then leaped out over the grass below, as far as his legs would take him.

As he picked up speed and tore across the meadow a slow thunderous crack let loose behind him and he was stung, stung hard, stung true, above his right knee. He did not slacken his pace, but bounded the harder. He would be fine so long as he made the shadows of the forest depths before the sun which he could already smell behind him breached the rim of the hunting ground, which his prey certainly knew by another less appropriate name.

Continued in Savage Samara: Hemavore #4

First draft, written and posted between 5:48 and 8:45 am, 9/1/13