Bloody Banquet

  Bloody Banquet

  By Leod Fitz

  Copyright 2017 Leod D. Fitz

  Chapter 1

  Any butcher can tell you that different meat taken from the same animal can vary wildly in price. The same carcass, once it has been separated into its appropriate cuts, will be prepared in any number of different ways, for people from any number of different social tiers.

  Why? Because human palates are sensitive enough to distinguish between the unique toughness, fat content, and flavor of the well-used muscles in the shoulders and hips, versus the more marbled tissue of, say, the tenderloin. The palate of a ghoul is about a hundred times more sophisticated than that of a human, so when we eat a meal, we can detect a lot more than just how much the muscle worked. We’re not just eating some food; we’re savoring a story.

  If I somehow found a way to transcribe the heart I was gnawing on at the moment, I would have my hands on a real tear jerker. The protagonist was a woman who had lived fast and hard, and died young. She was athletic, probably into running or bicycling. She’d gotten into drugs for a while, then gotten clean early in her twenties. She’d contracted a couple of STDs over the years, and I was pretty sure she’d been pregnant once or twice, albeit briefly. Oh, and while she was mostly healthy when it came to her food choices, she had a bit of a weakness for pork.

  And she’d spent the last few years of her life as a blood donor to some neckbiters, which had, in due course, brought her to my table.

  A story of a life. It was incomplete, of course. There was no way to know if she had preferred reading books or watching movies, and I couldn’t tell how many friends she’d had, or guessed her favorite color. Still, most humans would be shocked at how much I could tell from my meal.

  I continued chewing, looking for more telltale flavors in the epic saga of one corpse, while simultaneously cleaning and prepping another dead body for her upcoming funeral.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  The voice, female and unfamiliar, was too close for comfort. My hearing is much sharper than a human’s, and normally I would have known as soon as anyone entered the building, but with Percy on duty upstairs, I'd assumed it was safe for me to play some music while I worked.

  I estimated my uninvited visitor was at the top of the stairs, meaning she’d just passed the closed door with the 'employees only' sign on it. She was probably about forty-five seconds away from seeing something she couldn't unsee. And that was assuming she used that slow, half-guilty approach most people have when they find themselves somewhere they’re not supposed to be.

  I cursed my incompetent, borderline useless assistant, swallowed the rest of the heart in a single gulp, and threw myself into hiding all the dirty little secrets I currently had lying about my workspace.

  It would have been faster and easier to step outside and block her approach, but if she had some reason to want to see the prep room, I wouldn’t be able to rush back in and clean the place up.

  First up was the body I wasn't supposed to have. The neckbiters had dropped two corpses off a few days ago, and since I hadn’t had any reason to rush, I’d been devouring the remains a little each day.

  One was tucked away in a drawer and was unlikely to be uncovered by anyone not actively seeking him out.

  The other was lying on a gurney, her chest cavity wide open, and most of her organs already consumed. She’d likely gotten involved in the vampire world on an entirely voluntary basis, but there was always a chance that somebody somewhere was looking for her. The last thing I needed was for an interloper to match one of my corpses with a photograph on a milk carton or something they'd seen on TV.

  I grabbed the gurney and rushed it into my walk in cooler, careful not to let the entrails spill out.

  That reminded me: I whipped my tongue out of my mouth and wiped a few bits of carcass off. Ghouls are not, by our nature, the tidiest of eaters. I raised my hands to my mouth and licked away the telltale stains from my fingers.

  Thankfully, my tongue is probably one of the most effective cleaning tools in the world. If I could figure out how to manufacture a synthetic equivalent, I’d start a dishrag company and retire a wealthy man.

  What else? I swept a couple of tumors that I had been saving for later into a coffee can and shoved that into the back of a cabinet. The cooler I’d been filling with viscera got closed and kicked out of sight, under my desk.

  The footsteps, still hesitant, were almost at the bottom of the staircase. What had I forgotten? I scanned the room and I swore under my breath. I leaped over the gurney that held the body I'd been prepping, landed silently on the cement floor on all fours, then forced myself to stand up straight as I pulled on my pants, shirt, and jacket.

  Working nude isn't typical for me, but I'd spent an inordinate time around humans, recently, which meant an inordinate amount of time standing in that awkward, human stance, speaking like a human, moving like a human. It took its toll, and since I was finally in a place where I could be myself, I'd gone to the extreme in an attempt to, as people say, 'decompress.'

  “Excuse me?” she called out from just outside my door.

  I shoved my feet into my sneakers and my tinted glasses up in front of my oversized eyes just as my intruder pushed her way into the room.

  “Oh! Oh I'm so sorry!” She held a pile of files up to block her view of the naked body I had been working on.

  An eyelash over five feet tall, probably less than a hundred pounds, she had the frazzled hair and mismatched clothes of someone who did far too much work for far too little money.

  “What are... you're not supposed to be down here!” I put an edge of reprimand in my voice as I shut off my blaring music and moved quickly for the door. “This area is for staff only.”

  She hesitated for a moment, probably weighing the impropriety of remaining in the room against the importance of her quest. “Oh, yes! Yes, I can see that! And I'm so sorry… I'm looking for a Mr. Walter Keppler?”

  I pulled the woman back into the hallway by her elbow, shutting the door firmly behind us.

  “Well, you've found me, but in the future, I'd recommend calling first.”

  “I am sorry about that, I just happened to be in the neighborhood. Um, is there somewhere we could talk?”

  I sighed. “Funeral arrangements should be discussed with my assistant, Percy. Frankly, he should have caught you when you came in.”

  The fact that Percy hadn't been doing his job didn't surprise me much, but it did worry me a little. His pastimes have a way of coming back to bite me in the ass.

  “I didn't see anyone up there. Maybe he was in the bathroom.”

  Maybe.

  “Anyhow, I didn't come here about funeral arrangements,” the woman continued. “I really do need to speak to you, Mr. Keppler. It won't take long.” She glanced at her watch. “I don't have enough time for it to take long. I'm already late.”

  I hesitated, taking a quick sniff as I did. Like most of my kind, I rely more on sounds and smells than on sight.

  She smelled of office work and desperation. Plenty of sweat, mostly from long hours, but there were hints of anger sweat, too. And copier ink. There were traces of mold, mildew and asbestos on her, not enough that it represented the majority of her time, but she'd been in some buildings that should have been torn down or renovated years ago.

  “What exactly is this regarding, ma'am?”

  “Do you know a girl... a young woman, actually, by the name of Patricia Courning?”

  I blinked at the woman. A young woman? Was she looking for somebody who’d gone missing? Usually people like that turned up in the city morgue, not a private mortuary. “I don't think so. Why?”

  “I was afraid of that. It seems that you've touched her life in some way,
and, strange as it may sound, you might just be the only person she trusts.”

  It's rare that I speak without thinking, but this particular statement was simply too farfetched for me to control myself. “That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

  The woman blinked at me.

  I cleared my throat. “Sorry, what I mean to say is...” I searched for several seconds but couldn't think of anything more appropriate. “Let me show you to my office,” I said at last.

  The woman allowed me to guide her back up the stairs, juggling her files and an oversized purse.

  “Oh, I forgot to introduce myself,” she blurted as we reached the top. “I'm Samantha Neil.” She pulled a business card out of her bag and shoved it at me.

  I took the card and glanced at it before shoving it into my pocket. The woman was a social worker. What a social worker wanted from me I couldn't even begin to guess. What I did know was that I wanted as little as possible to do with anyone remotely attached to the government.

  “Uh-huh.” I continued down the hallway and around a corner. Due to the peculiarities of the building which I had converted into a mortuary, my office was not only a floor up from the prep room where I spent most of my time, but on the far end of the building as well.

  “Anyway, as I said, I'm here about Patricia.”

  “Still don't know who that is.”

  Samantha cleared her throat, hurrying to keep up with me. I'm not especially tall, but I'm a fast walker when I'm in a mood, and having someone burst into my prep room like that put me in a mood.

  “Yes, that's what I'm trying to--”

  I held up a hand, stopping her for a moment. We reached the end of the hall and I ushered the woman into my office, a small, dark, cement walled room dominated by filing cabinets and a desk. There was barely enough space for the two of us to sit across from each other. That was fine with me. I didn't deal with the customers, and I kind of preferred for the people I did meet with to feel a little uncomfortable.

  I cleared my throat. “All right. So, some girl....”

  “Patricia.”

  “Sure.”

  Samantha flipped through her files as she spoke. “This is all a little difficult, normally I talk with family members, but Patricia doesn't seem to have any. Or if she did, her mother managed to sever the ties thoroughly enough that I can't find them. An interesting woman, her mother. Very abusive. Very controlling.”

  A girl with a controlling, abusive mother. A knot formed in my intestines, a premonition that this conversation was about to take an unfortunate turn.

  Samantha pulled out a file and opened it, showing me a picture of a teenaged girl with bright blonde hair and a black eye.

  “Fuck.”

  “So you do recognize her?”

  I did. I'd met her several times, and each time she tried to kill me.

  No, that wasn't accurate. The first few times she'd tried to kill me, but during our final encounter she'd watched her mother try to kill me.

  Then she'd watched me bite her mother’s head off. Literally.

  “We've bumped into each other once or twice.”

  “Right.” Samantha hesitated, then sighed. “Look, Mr. Keppler, at any given point in time I have between thirty and forty-five open cases. That's thirty to forty-five children whose lives have basically gone to shit, if you'll excuse my candor. I do the best I can, but most of the time I'm using band aids on gangrene.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  She waved off my sentiment. “I'm not asking for sympathy; I just need you to understand that I have to prioritize my time. I’ve got a lot of boys and girls under my supervision who have very real problems, so when I get a seventeen-year-old girl whose mother decided to skip town a few months before her daughter is technically an adult, I'm going to do my best for her, but I'm going to do it as fast as I can.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Samantha cleared her throat. “Let me break this down: Patricia is going to reach the age of majority in a little more than seven months. When she does, she's got a small house that's mostly paid off, her mother's old car, which probably won't last too much longer, but is, at least, hers, free and clear, and a bank account that her mother appears to have left behind when she disappeared.”

  “Oh.” I furrowed my brow. “I would've expected it to be a lot harder for her to inherit everything with her mother having disappeared instead of, say, turning up dead.”

  “Usually it is. Thankfully, for all the woman's failings, she was thorough when she set up her living will. Anyhow, the point is, Patricia is not what I would call a priority case. But I do have certain concerns. Ignoring her massively underwhelming education, the girl hasn't got the foggiest idea how to live in the real world. She doesn't know how to cook or clean or balance a checkbook. She's never had a job or been encouraged to think about a career. She manages to be both amazingly paranoid, and exceptionally gullible.”

  “As much as I hate to interrupt, what exactly does all of this have to do with me?”

  “A few days ago, Patricia and I had a rather illuminating conversation, and, while there is a limit to how much I can share, the long and short of it is that she's been used quite a bit in her life. It seems as though every relationship she's been in has been based on someone getting something out of her. In fact, when pressed, the only person she could name who she didn't think wanted to get something out of her was you.”

  “That's... interesting.” In point of fact, I had wanted something from her. I'd wanted her to leave me alone, which is basically what I want from everyone.

  “That isn't to say that she likes you, exactly. Apparently, you and her mother had some kind of conflict?”

  Samantha stared at me in askance, and I stared back, stone-faced.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “Patricia seems to feel that she owes it to her mother to hate you, but it's a halfhearted hatred at best.”

  “Oh, good, she half-hates me. And what, exactly, do you think I can do for this girl who only half-hates me?”

  “Essentially, Mr. Keppler, she needs a friend.”

  “May I recommend Facebook?”

  Samantha forced a pained smile. “Hilarious.”

  “Or maybe high school?”

  “High school isn't going well for her at the moment.” Samantha tapped the photo. “You may have noticed the black eye?”

  “I was curious about that. As I recall, she was quite capable of handling herself. I wouldn't have expected her to lose to a few grade school bullies.”

  “Actually, that black eye is from when the police picked her up. And I wouldn't say she lost that fight. The long and short of it is, she isn't very good at handling conflict. She isn't skilled at verbal confrontations, but she's very good at fights. She's been in high school all of two months and she's on the verge of being expelled. She would have been expelled except for… complications. And, since I'm being frank anyway, between her social problems and her abysmal grades, I'm guessing that she's going to drop out first chance she gets.”

  “Oh.” I bit my lip, trying to wait the appropriate length of time before diverting the conversation back to its original track. “The point I was trying to make is that a mortuary owner twice her age may not be the best person to set this 'Patricia' up on a play date with.” Actually, I was only about ten years older than her, but ghouls tend to age poorly, and most people I met assumed I was in my mid to late thirties. “Aren't you concerned that I might be a... a... oh, hell, I don't know, some kind of child molester?”

  She grimaced. “The child molesters I worry about aren’t interested in seventeen year olds.”

  I raised an eyebrow. She flushed a bright pink. That was probably the kind of thing that a social worker could get in trouble for saying.

  “I mean…” she backtracked, obviously flustered, “I told you, you’re the only person she could name who didn’t seem to want something out of her. Maybe it’s all a ploy; maybe you’re looking to take advantage of her b
y fooling her into thinking you don’t want anything from her. Maybe you’re a very skilled sociopath. It’s impossible to be certain, that’s something I learned early on in this job. I play the odds, and right now I’ve got you on one hand who might be looking to take advantage of her, everyone else she knows from her old life, who apparently did take advantage of her, and on a third hand, all of the new people in her life who she doesn’t get along with at all. Look, as I've said, Patricia's case isn't my highest priority. I'd like to see things go well for the girl, I really would, but I've only got so many hours in the week. Basically, I just wanted to let you know that there's a girl out there who could use a hand, and you could be that hand. If you decide you'd be willing to help, you have my card, give me a call and I'll try to set something up. If you don't, then you don't. I've done my part.”

  “I see.” I patted the pocket I'd put her card in. “Well then, I'll either call you, or I won't.”

  Samantha nodded and stood up, almost bumping into the door as she turned to leave. “It was good meeting you, Mr. Keppler, I'll show myself out.”

  “Right.” I remained seated as I listened to her exit the building and drive away. I had no intention of making that call. I owed the girl nothing, and the fact that she'd seen me in any sort of positive light after our encounters was both incredibly depressing, and strong evidence that she needed to be medicated.

  What I did need to deal with was the apparent absence of my assistant.

  I headed into the lobby and took a sniff. He'd been gone for at least fifteen minutes, but less than half an hour. I'd noticed his car out front as I'd walked the social worker to my office, so he was probably on the premises.

  While I can't hear everything that goes on in my building, if Percy wanted real privacy, the best place for it was out back, next to the loading bay. Due to the natural geography of the area, the loading dock opened to the building's basement, which meant that it was in a deeply slanted area out back. An area hidden from view of the passing roadway and with lots of sound-muffling walls. Very convenient when I have to take deliveries of corpses that officially didn't exist. It also put the thickest wall in the building between me and Percy.