The Cannibal

A piece of microfiction inspired by my playthrough of God's Teeth. 

He had been imagining the island: blue sky, white sand, the children in their togas, the masked priests and their knives and masks in the likeness of animals - invokers of an invisible power, priests of a hidden god. His mind often wandered there. He had never been, obviously. But he would try his best to construct it in his mind, always resembling something akin to a Greek isle - what he imagined a Greek isle would look like, informed by google images, by the half-a-dozen rewatches of Mama Mia! he indulged (endured) for the woman who would later become his wife when she was in college and he was just starting out flying helicopters. It might have been a nice place. Maybe. But he knew better. Blood rites happened there in service to the horrors he aids The Program in destroying, death was there, hate was there, the children were there too, mute and mutilated and serene, as was the cruelty that molded them. The children were there, and “It” was there with them.

“You ever eat one, Boyd?” The question jarred Boyd and brought him back from the daydream. The sun was setting across the water of the Chesapeake. He blinked and turned to the one who had addressed him, Sergeant Major Knotts, of Georgia. He sat with an amused grin on his face and a beer in his grip.

“Eat what now?” Boyd leaned forward in his chair. “Snakes.” replied Knotts. Boyd blinked, then leaned back and thought about it, as if he needed to. “No, no I can’t say I have. When did you eat snake?”, he said with a laugh.

“Okinawa, got shipped out there in ‘09, did this week long survival course out there in the sticks, no food, barely any gear. You were out there doing this wargame exercise - basically starving the whole time. Just you and twelve other guys in the pissing rain. We were going through this gorge and one of the guys nearly jumps out of his skin, he spotted this snake going across the water and up the rocks. I’ll never forget it, an Okinawan Habu, scary little fucker. I seen it going up the rock and I didn’t even think about it - I just let off with the buck knife and stabbed it through the head, most hardcore thing I ever done. Cooked it that night and ate it with the squad.”

“Does it really taste like chicken?”

“It did then. I was eating like, berries and nuts and whatever else we could scrounge for the two days before that, so eating cooked meat? It wasn’t seasoned or marinated or anything but I’m telling you, Boyd, it hit the right spot. The year they made me an E-9 a bunch of us had this big fancy dinner someone made for us - I don’t remember who or what for. But I remember eating like, pan-roasted duck and just thinking ‘This beats the snake, sure, but not by much’.”

Boyd laughed and made some passive remark, and the two men kept on with their socializing. Men from Sergeant Major Knotts’ battalion were receiving CBRN training at Indian Creek. Over that brief span of time the two men had become more or less acquainted with another. It was the last evening before they’d ship out. Headed West, California, Honolulu, then to India for Exercise Malabar 23, training with the Indians, Japanese, and Australians: naval maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, urban warfare exercises inland somewhere. He had daydreams of India too. No, not India. Myanmar, back when they called it “Burma” and the British ruled it. He found it in his research.

Charles Augustus Munro, Inspector General for the Imperial Indian Police stationed in British Burma, related in a letter to his sister Charlotte a strange occurrence in 1880. Officers under his supervision raided a village in the jungles of the modern-day Rakhine State suspected of supporting guerrilla activities. The village was easily pacified, but officers soon heard screaming from the outskirts of the village. Munro ran to investigate and found what he described as:

“a sight fit to incite the hardiest soul’s gorge into rebellion: an elderly woman harried by a swarming horde of mongooses, rodents which young Hector can attest are similar in form to our polecat-ferret. The beasts tore into and through the woman with a savagery unfit for description, dear sister, and my nightmares are nightly haunted by the image of my men futilely trying to rip the rabid pests from where they clung so tenaciously to the woman’s flesh. Her unbelievable demise and our futile attempts to forestall her fate were attended by a mute chorus of wide-eyed children, lined up on the floor of the hut and watching the attack as if they had paid to see one of the infamous cobra fights found in the less salubrious warrens of Arkady.”

The British could not elicit any response from the children. Prisoners from the village called the woman Ma Phae Wah, or “Yellow-Ribbon Woman.” They lived in fear of her and resigned sickly children to her care lest she visit her wrath on the village. The letter ends with a screed of colonialist complaints about local superstition, as many of Munro’s native officers soon “went hunting” and never returned.

He imagined the steaming jungles of India. He imagined Knotts and the men he trained with recreating that scene. It seemed strangely possible, almost anything seemed possible these days. He had a dream a few nights later, Knotts and his men picking through the brush and coming upon a heap of human remains, the skulls each having had the flesh gnawed and picked from them, and sitting atop the heap, Wayne Boyd, his mouth slick with blood, smacking at the limbless torsos and the defleshed heads with a hideous and ugly machete and laughing stupidly like a child playing with tub water.

Knotts flicks through channels with a remote, finally landing on a broadcast that makes him chuckle, he leans in, grinning. “What do you think of that clown?”, he asks, seemingly oblivious to Boyd white-knuckling his drink. “Thomas Young” stands at a podium and spews garbage, something about teachers indoctrinating the youth with “woke”. Boyd’s ears ring. He is back in the field, tossing the shrivelled remains of a stranger’s arm into the blaze of a burning barnhouse while the man mewls and screams like a child. He wipes the blood from his hands and casts the bloody hacksaw into the blaze. He sees “Thomas Young” climb into a box truck and drive away with the mute, horrified children. Three days later he reads that the box truck was found bobbing in the Chesapeake, and a rage unlike any he had ever known boils in his chest. Sitting in front of the television with Knotts, he contemplates letting it all loose. Telling Knotts the truth and seeing what face he makes. He’d have to tell him that for a time, he respected Young, when they were driving to King-Torino and he told him the box truck was a ruse, the children weren’t in it. It wasn’t that Search and Rescue didn’t find them because they couldn’t, the kids weren’t there in the first place. Given instead to random families and given a second chance. It was the wrong choice, he knew. It was one that ended up swallowing more lives and nearly getting everyone on the MASTICATE team killed. But he respected him for it. It was the just choice. The moral choice.

But it didn’t last. Young knew he was a puppet, a feeding organ of the hidden god. He relished it. He sought out violence. He fed on it. When he hurt another human being, he fed on the fear they’d feel in the brief moment when they knew what he was going to do. Boyd was sure of it. Who was he kidding? Boyd wouldn’t be the one atop the heap of the defiled dead, no, it’d be Young. In his tailored suit and red tie and eyepatch.

“He’s a cannibal in a tailored suit. Someone ought to fucking kill him”. Boyd hears himself say. Knotts turns and gives him a look. It’s subtle, but he can read it. “What the fuck” he’s thinking.

“I’m fucking around, sorry.”

“Nah, I don’t give a fuck. What’s your take?”

“Ah, well.” In the minutes following, Boyd was able to contrive a mundane reason for his disdain, with no silent kids, no chimeras, no Skoptsi, no Delta Green, no Pitzerelli, no MASTICATE. He derides Young for his belief in “pseudo-science bullshit”, as if he’s any saner.

That night, Boyd sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the red binder on his desk. His research. A colleague in the Program he met in Greenland during Operation WEATHERGLASS was kind enough to help him find some halfway reliable sources.

“In myths, Bast—or B’sst, Bastet, or Mau—was at first a more ferocious goddess than she is remembered today. She was hunter, predator, and defender. Her sister in the North, Sekhmet, bears similar characteristics, as do Sobek and Anubis. Bast and Sekhmet, the Eyes of Re, slew the water-serpent Apophis, a formless monstrosity of absolute evil and unnatural chaos. However, Bast’s protection was not without price. Her hunger for the blood of men was unquenchable, and priests were said to lull Bast to sleep by mixing her feast of blood with red wine. She hunted for the benefit of mankind even as she consumed it. The Black Rites of Bast began in southern Egypt in the late predynastic age, before 3000 BC. They were a codified regime of religious child abuse, sorcery, and torture. Priests of Bast enacted the “mysteries” of their cult on young orphans snatched from raided tribes or sold into slavery. Children were kept prelingual and carefully monitored to prolong their pain without reaching death. The victims’ animal pain called out to Bast. The goddess sent warriors called her “Teeth” to avenge the children. The Teeth followed the stench of sorcery and slaughtered the priests. The priests happily laid down their lives as sacrifices, offering their blood to “make drunk” their savior with the taint of magic so she might refrain from consuming the world. Scattered fragments of Al-Azif and other works trace these rites even farther back. To the mythical island-nation of Atlantis.”

He tries to imagine Atlantis. He sees Young, wielding the thin blade. He sees the children. He sees himself, crouching in the thickets.

They’ll be finding all of us in the jungle.