A Strange Kind of Hunger | FIRST DRAFT

Twisted Teeth

The first thing Jonathan sees when he wakes is red. Blood, his fuzzy mind thinks; it takes a while for his eyes to parse out each blurred shade, cataloging them until the picture slides into place. Not blood, but Robert's hair, loose and slightly curled.

As more and more of his awareness returns, Jonathan realises he's lying on a bed; there are no lumps, no corpses hidden under the mattress, just soft sheets that smell vaguely of whiskey, of something coppery, something lingering he supposes must be blood. Robert is sat beside him, reading, humming a quietly soothing tune. It feels like time has noticed a mistake and backpedaled to their student days, when everything was tinted with the same rose-wine hue — and somehow Jonathan wishes that's really true.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," Robert says, closing his book and taking off his glasses. "You had me scared for a moment."

"How long—" Jonathan tries to speak, and finds his mouth is sticky with thirst. Before he can get his sentence out, Robert offers him a glass of water, supporting his head so he can drink. Only then can he form the words properly. "How long have I been unconscious?"

"Around fifteen minutes? Your body is very tired; I expect it realised you weren't going to rest of your own accord anytime soon and took things into its own hands."

"As if my body has its own thoughts. It's just flesh. A prison for my mind." Jonathan still feels slightly dreamy, caught between sleeping and waking.

"That's unusually philosophical for eleven o'clock in the morning, even for you," Robert says dryly. "If I were you, I'd save my breath for resting."

"But you're not me," says Jonathan, pushing himself up on his elbows. He instantly regrets it; the world lurches forward, dizzying flashes of colour surging across his vision in a burst of pain. Falling back against the pillows, he releases a hissing sigh of frustration, full of a contempt towards his own weakness that he can't quite put into words. "You don't have a life in your hands."

Just saying those words makes him think of Jesse, at the mercy of murderers. It makes him half-cringe, the thought of what happened to the girl. The thought that there's nothing standing in the way of the same thing happening again: some other lamb tempted into the wolf's den by kind words and pretty smiles, only to find the only smile waiting for them is full of teeth. Full of blood, eventually, by the time the wolf finishes his work.

"Whatever you feel like you owe Jesse, you don't," says Robert, and Jonathan can tell he's trying to be the voice of reason. It's deliciously ironic, when he thinks of the man who used to sit on the edge of a balcony, just for the feeling of flirting with death. "You need to rest."

"You're not the boss of me," Jonathan yawns, realizing, of course, that Robert is right, and feeling like a petulant child. Sleep is not tempting, but alluring — a siren's song snaking around his head, boring its way into his ears. Almost irresistible as he snuggles deeper into the blankets, leaden eyelids beginniIng to slide shut.

In the moment before sleep takes him, he sees the clearing. He sees a body, and he sees an inky black stain slithering from under it, seeping into the ground below. It isn't the girl. The hair is too short, soft-spun brown even in half-lit twilight. The frame is too emaciated, too sickness-eaten, and too unequivocally male - but the eyes are still missing. Still gaping, gasping holes. Jesse Goodwin without his gentle, melted-caramel eyes is Jesse Goodwin stripped of his quiet laugh, of the furrow in his brow as he reads. Stripped of his smile, mouth filled instead with a bouquet of maggots. Jesse Goodwin without his eyes is too terrible a sight to imagine.

For the second time in as many days, Jonathan is absolutely sure Jesse is dead. His mind's eye leaves the face, not bearing to gaze into those soulless eyes any longer, and finds what he's been expecting to see all along. The gash. The rend that rips from sternum to navel, an exact replica of what he saw on the girl. Empty, cleaned out flesh peeks from inside: a hollow cavity where a beating heart and heaving lungs once rested. The final nail in the coffin, the crucial piece of evidence that passes an irrevocable sentence. Death.