The Feeding

Part 3: Feed

The townsfolk met the stranger in the town square at eight o'clock sharp. Jeb kept a mindful carefulness to melt into the center of the crowd instead of the front; if the stranger saw him leading the people on more than one occasion, he might start to wonder if something was up. The trick was to keep pretending to be his friend at the same time.

Jeb made his way over to the stranger, who was testing the cylinder of his sixgun by snapping it open, spinning it twice, and jerking it back with a click and a flick of his wrist. Jeb knew the purpose of the test; if the cylinder squeaked or rattled upon being spun, it was unoiled and needed to be taken out and cleaned before being used. The gun was silent as the grave. Jeb breathed a silent sigh of relief that the scraps of food they had seasoned him with had not been discovered.

"Are you ready, son?"

The stranger spun the cylinder one last time, holstered it again, and nodded. With the addition of his hat back on his head, he looked much older than when Jeb had seen him drunk. With the sheriff's star at his breast, a proud sign of leadership obscuring its evil twin beneath, the stranger probably looked and felt mean enough to take on five George Holloways with room for dinner afterwards. Jeb was more than happy to let him keep thinking that.

"See that big ol' brick building, right down the street? That's the town hall. Holloway took it over after he arrived, 'cause it looks out on the whole land for miles around. Never leaves it, just sits up on the second floor sending telegrams and making dirty money while his little gatling gun stays pointed on the door. Ain't nobody's brave enough to go in and try and knock him off, but if you go up all quiet-like, and take out his men before they take out you, you just might pull it off."

"Alright. Now, you get everyone to stand back a bit, y'hear? I won't be no hero if lovely Betsy over there is still here when the bullets start to fly," said the stranger. He tipped Betsy a wink, and Jeb tried to force a jovial smile to his face, though on the inside he was bubbling with a sudden acidic envy that made him queasy. Looking back later, he realized how lucky they'd all been for the stranger having been too smitten to inquire just how Jeb knew exactly where Holloway would be in the town hall; Jeb had made up the whole thing on the spot.

"Sure thing, friend. Just do this town and its fine folks proud, and in our eyes you'll do no wrong. Give Holloway what's coming to him, and then some, alright?"

"I'll do more than that. I'm going to fill this bastard with so much lead he'll get dragged right on down back to hell."

And try to write us when you get there yourself, Jeb thought savagely, but of course he didn't say that aloud. Instead he clapped the stranger on the back one last time, adjusted the sheriff star to catch the dwindling light, and stepped back to join the rest of the town. Together they watched the stranger, men and women he had known for his entire life with their eyes trained hungrily on the cowboy's back. The stranger turned slightly, as if to say one last thing to them, perhaps to Betsy, but apparently thought better of it, for he squared his shoulders, unslung his guns, and began to walk towards town hall without looking back. The people had gone deathly silent. Far off in the distance, a lost coyote cried to the rising moon. Jeb had been a part of the Feeding ritual for thirty-nine years, exactly as long as the Vast One had taken up residence in their humble little town, but the holiness and finality of the whole thing always amazed him. As if the entire world had stopped its spinning for one second, just to see what would come next.

It was only when the stranger reached the brick steps leading to the large wooden entrance doors when the chanting was allowed to start. It was the voluptuous Ms. Oakley, who ran that stuffy little women's clothing shop on the west end of town that always smelled like perfume and roses, who began it, speaking the ancient words so quietly that they were lost on the wind to any who weren't listening for them. Soon the chant was taken up by others, a hundred pairs of dry lips whispering in a tongue taught to them by a god, or at least, what they took to be a god when it had descended from the starry heavens. Jeb had done the chant hundreds, if not thousands, of times throughout his life, from the moment the Vast One had breathed the language down his throat up until now, but he would never understand what it meant, never. It simply wasn't his place as an frail, insignificant man to understand something of that magnitude. All he knew for sure was that whenever he spoke the words, his tongue and mouth would begin to heat up and itch, as if crammed full with a thousand invisible fire ants. This was true power in its rawest form, or as close as humans would ever come to such a thing.

All together, the chant had begun to take on a noticeable hum on the previously still air, and the stranger slowed slightly in his gait, looking around as if confused. Jeb knew he should be worried, but he wasn't. Better anyway for the stranger to notice a faint buzzing in his ear rather than the pentagram in his right breast pocket, which, Jeb knew, was just beginning to heat up like a cooked fish. Much better, indeed.

The chanting continued, rising to a fever speed and almost audible pitch. Jeb wiped sweat from his brow and moustache as the stranger mounted the steps, holstered his guns for a brief moment, and reached for the twin ornate door handles. The second his fingers touched the ironwork, the chanting stopped all at once. Jeb felt the last syllable hover on his tongue, then fade away with the magic it possessed. Now the only sound in the town was an eerie desert wind that tickled the shutters and chilled his bones despite the heavy deerskin jacket he had on. Every eye was trained on the stranger as he grasped the handles and threw open the doors.

All that greeted him was impenetrable darkness. Clutching his guns, the stranger took a hesitant step inside, then retreated. When he turned back to the crowd, his face was, for once, very readable beneath his hat. It shone with childish fear.

"It's cold," he said. "Why–-"

The last sentence the stranger ever uttered was rudely cut short when a billowing black essence snaked out from between the open doors and wrapped itself around his waist. Jeb could have rightly called it a tentacle, like a squid or octopus might possess, but then again, squid and octopi do not tend to have little wisps of black vapor trailing like thin chains from their many appendages. It was an essence in the most primal meaning of the word, and Jeb saw fit to call it that until someone else found a better term for what was wrapped around the stranger's waist and holding him a few inches above the ground; so far, the closest they could come up with was the Vast One. It seemed to take the poor fellow an impossible amount of time to see the creature, and when he finally did, he emitted a shrill, piercing shriek that rang and echoed in Jeb's ears minutes after it had stopped. He wouldn't have been surprised if a few dead souls down at the cemetery had risen from their graves just to ask what in the hell all the fuss was about. He really didn't see what the stranger was going so god-awfully crazy over; the whole business would be over in a few more seconds.
And how right he was. Another appendage detached itself from the squirming blackness of the town hall interior and wrapped itself firmly around the stranger's upper chest and neck, reducing his screams to dull squeaks. The chanting had started up again, but Jeb was content to simply watch this time. The stranger managed to twist around, one last vain attempt at escaping his fate, and for a split second his terrified eyes locked with Jeb's. Then the Vast One ripped him in half.

Surprisingly, there was no blood. That, like most anything that got too close to town hall, was sucked up and dispersed throughout the Vast One's inner recesses before it could hit the ground--or them. Jeb watched the stranger's limp form get swallowed up by the darkness, first his legs, then the torso. Really faceless now, ain'tcha? He wondered if the big silver sixguns would take an extra long time to digest before the next Feeding rolled around. He doubted it.

Looking around, Jeb saw the crowd beginning to disperse, talking with one another as they went. Some people went back to their shops, some to their beds and homes above those shops, and most headed for the saloon. Off to a long night of heavy drinking and laughter in honor of another successful Feeding ceremony. In honor of looking the Almighty in the face and not bursting into flames, hurrah, hurrah.

Jeb had his own way of celebrating. Taking Betsy by the hand, he began the short walk back to his room above the saloon, back to a long night with his lover while the blessing of the Feeding rested over their bedpost. Tomorrow, normal work would start up again around the town; people would return to their jobs, children would go back to school, and they would begin to lie in wait for next month's ceremony. Tomorrow. Tonight, however, the whole township could stand aglow with dark energy and power.

And back in the town hall, the Vast One slept, its belly full of tarnished sixgun cylinders and crushed dreams.