Arthur

By Catherine Werkmeister

 

The leaves don’t turn colors anymore, Arthur thought as he stepped onto the wet October pavement. When he was a child in the sweet, syrupy hills of Vermont, he remembered fall as an explosion of color, fire racing through the treetops, shuddering in the wind that rolled down from the mountains. Now the leaves just die, shrivel up and turn a sickly brown and blow aimlessly in the exhaust from a cab. Maybe the trees were different in the city. Arthur didn’t care enough to find out.

Arthur walked past 7 other coffee shops on his way to Racehorse Espresso. He didn’t even bother to look inside them. The walk wasn’t too bad, all things considered. There was a brisk wind, but the sky was clear and blue, and Arthur had a feeling when his alarm went off at 6:30 AM on the dot, the same as it always did, that today was going to be an unusually good day for him. The feeling was compounded when he walked through the door of Racehorse Espresso, greeted by the cheerful tinkling of a bell, and saw the dark-haired boy behind the counter.

Arthur stepped into line behind a young woman. She had a baby in her arms, and a boy of about 6 or 7 running laps around her legs. On his next pass, he stepped directly onto the toe of Arthur’s patent leather shoe. The child winced, obviously expecting a scolding, and mumbled an apology. Arthur chuckled, and said, “It’s quite alright. No harm done, I’m sure.” He smiled reassuringly, but the boy suddenly turned white as a sheet, and began to cling to his mother’s leg. He stared determinedly at the tiled floor until his mother left the counter. Children certainly were strange, Arthur reflected.

He was shaken out of his thoughts quickly when the dark-haired boy approached the register, a soft smile on his face. Arthur felt whatever tension he had been holding melt right out of him with just a glance into those warm, dark eyes. The boy’s name was Koji, and he had been working as a barista at the Racehorse for almost 8 months now. He was 25, a recent college graduate with a bachelors in Film Studies. He had presumably taken the barista job to help make rent while he was trying to get his first project off the ground. He had grown up in a small town in Virginia, and had a younger sister who was still in high school. He was also, in Arthur’s opinion, a beautiful specimen of a human being.

“Good morning, sir,” Koji said in that voice of his that was like honey, smooth and rich. “Welcome to Racehorse Espresso. How can I help you?”

Arthur mustered a thin-lipped smile, hiding his trembling hands behind his back. “Good morning to you, too. I’ll take a small black coffee and a blueberry scone, heated, if you can, please.”

Koji nodded, ringing the order up on the old-fashioned cash register. “And a name for your order, sir?”

“Paul.” Arthur replied.

“Alright,” Koji chirped after Arthur had paid, in cash, like he always did. “Your order will be ready in just a couple of minutes.”

Arthur nodded, stepping away from the counter to stand next to the wall and watch Koji work. The steam had turned his cheeks a sweet, boyish pink, and his hair had started to curl from the heat. Arthur licked his lips.

“Paul,” the girl at the pick-up counter called, and Arthur was so intently focused on his Koji that he almost didn’t hear her. He took the cup from her with perhaps too much force. He had been hoping that maybe Koji would be the one to hand him his drink, that maybe Arthur could have touched the tip of his finger to Koji’s own and pretended it was an accident, as he sometimes did if he was feeling bold. “Thank you,” he snapped, and the girl’s cheerful smile faltered. Arthur just couldn’t bring himself to feel remorseful.

Arthur drank the coffee and ate the scone on his way to work. The coffee was pleasantly hot, and as he drank it Koji’s eyes suddenly came to mind. Arthur chewed at his lip. As he stepped through the sleek, automatic doors of the accounting firm he worked at, he spotted his reflection in the glass. His lip was torn open, and he had bled onto his shirt.

Arthur tsked. This was a bit of a nuisance. He wrapped his jacket a little tighter around himself and pulled his lip into his mouth. He tried to smile at the woman in the elevator, but it was a difficult task with a bloody mouth. His attempt seemed to make the woman feel uncomfortable, and she hurried out of the elevator as soon as she could. Arthur stepped off the elevator once it reached his floor, and made his way to his desk before anyone noticed him. He always kept a stick of stain remover in his drawer, and was glad for it now as he grabbed it and slipped into the men’s room to clean himself up.

Luckily the blood was still fresh, and it came out quite easily once he began to rub at it. Arthur licked his bloody lip, and felt his mouth water at the sharp, metallic tang. Something seemed to stir in his belly, then, but he pushed it down. Later, he thought, not now. The thing acquiesced, settling back down again, and Arthur returned to his desk to start the work day.

No matter what else you said about him, Arthur was good with numbers. He knew he was. He was only 30, and yet here he was with a high-paying job at one of the most prestigious accounting firms this side of the country. It was something he took significant pride in. Numbers had always been simple to him. They never changed their minds, or got their feelings hurt, or talked about you behind your back, or screamed at you and beat you until you were bloody. Arthur liked that about them.

Work went quickly that day, which Arthur was grateful for. He took his lunch break at his desk, going over the work he’d done in the morning while shoveling cold duck liver into his mouth from a plastic tupperware. His coworkers at neighboring desks all got up, practically simultaneously, to go to the copier room. Arthur smiled to himself.

When five o’clock finally rolled around, Arthur packed up his things and left the firm. His coworkers were chatting amiably as they got ready to leave, but conversation ceased whenever he grew close to them. This was the way Arthur liked it. He had nothing to talk about with these sorts of people. He walked home in the rapidly cooling autumn air, jacket buttoned tightly against his chest. By the time he reached his apartment building the sky had begun to change colors, red and yellow fading to a deep purple at the edge of the horizon. Arthur loved sunsets. Even if the leaves had gotten duller with time, the evening sky still burned the same way as it had years ago.

Arthur kept the lights in his apartment off as he started on dinner for himself. There was still enough light filtering in through the windows to see by, and besides, Arthur needed to let his eyes adjust to the dark if he was going to go out that night. A cramp in his stomach just then made him grimace. He was so hungry all of a sudden. He pushed the slab of beef around in the pan, and the sound of it sizzling made him shudder. It was almost done, anyways. Just another minute or so. Arthur liked his meat rare.

After dinner, it had grown dark enough for Arthur to go for his nightly walk. He washed the plate and pan methodically, slipped a different coat and a different pair of shoes on, and left the apartment building through the back entrance. Normally he would take a more roundabout route, strolling through parks and quiet neighborhoods before making his way to his destination, but tonight was not one of those nights. Arthur was feeling restless in a way he rarely felt, like something was crawling underneath his skin, nipping at his nerve endings. The thing in his stomach was like a magnet, tugging him towards his opposite pole.

Arthur kept his head down as he walked to Koji’s building. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled uncomfortably every time he met another person’s eyes, and made him feel sick and strange. When he finally reached Koji’s street, he was shuddering nearly uncontrollably. He just needed to see him. He had to see his Koji. Then everything would be alright.

The light was on behind the window to Koji’s living room, and the blinds hadn’t been drawn. Koji was sitting on his couch, the blue one Arthur had seen him hauling up the steps with some friends one night a couple months earlier. He was alone. The television was on, and the colors danced across Koji’s sweet, round face. He was eating something. Probably one of those microwavable dinners he always bought from the convenience store across the street. The one Arthur was standing in front of right now. Arthur watched as he brought the fork to his parted lips, pink and supple, watched as his throat bobbed when he swallowed.

A low groan tore itself from Arthur’s throat. He was panting now, breathing so heavily he was beginning to see spots. The thing in his stomach jerked and writhed, claws scraping against the muscle, and Arthur doubled over. This was bad. He should have known better than to come see Koji like this, when he was hungry. A drop of something wet landed on his shoe. When had he started drooling?

He stumbled away from the building, forcing his shaking legs to carry him down the street as his traitorous mouth slobbered at the thought of Koji, his Koji, so sweet and soft. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t do that to him. What sort of monster would he be if he hurt Koji like that?

He ran until he didn’t know where he was anymore, until the streets became a labyrinth of dark windows and broken glass. The smell of sweat reached Arthur’s nostrils, stinking and sour. He turned his head. There was a homeless man lying in an alley perpendicular to the sidewalk Arthur was on. He was asleep on a mat of cardboard, with a ragged blanket pulled over his skinny body. Arthur’s mouth watered perversely.

The thing in his stomach felt Arthur pause, and it wailed with desire into the night. Arthur felt it clamber up his throat, into his mouth and over the ridges of his teeth, a familiar bitter taste accompanying it. He couldn’t control his limbs now, but Arthur wasn’t scared of the feeling anymore. The first few times, sure, but now he just surrendered to it, letting the thing wash over his whole body, covering him in an opaque black sludge that blurred and distorted his vision. The homeless man couldn’t do more than let out a single strangled gasp when the thing put Arthur’s hands around his neck. Arthur was glad for that. He hated it when they screamed.

Although Arthur’s vision was obscured, his hearing was clear as day, and he winced at the cacophony of ripping flesh and cracking bone that followed, for what might have been less than 15 minutes, but felt like a week or more to Arthur, trapped as he was within the creature’s body. As the sounds of carnage faded, Arthur became aware of a quieter noise, but no less sickening. The smacking of lips, small grunts of pleasure as blood and offal slid down the thing’s gullet. If Arthur could have vomited during these moments, he surely would have. Instead, all he could do was close his eyes and try his hardest to block out what his senses were relaying to him.

Finally, when the creature had eaten its fill, it began to retract, sliding back into his open mouth. Arthur gagged on the bitter taste as it snuck down his throat to settle in the lonely corner of his digestive tract it had claimed as its home. It had left a smear of blood around the corner of Arthur’s mouth. He rubbed at it with a hand, and found it already drying. Luckily, the streets were quite deserted this time of night, so he was able to slip away from the scene without being spotted, hiding his bloodstained mouth and hands in his coat. He didn’t look at what was left of the body. He never did.

By the time Arthur made it back to his apartment, it was nearly three in the morning. He went through the back entrance again, weariness starting to eat away at his bones and drag at his eyelids. After sloughing off his coat by the door, he crossed to the bathroom and flicked on the light. His face was pale as death, skin drawn tightly across the pointed cheekbones. The blood around his mouth had turned the color of rust. His stomach was distended slightly, making him look ill and bloated. He stared at himself for a long time, sunken eyes gazing back at him, the color of disturbed water. When his knees began to shake with exhaustion, he turned on the faucet and watched flecks of dried blood swirl hypnotically down and around the drain.

The glowing numbers on his alarm clock read 3:46 when Arthur clambered under the covers, stripped to his underwear and socks. He considered calling in sick the next day, but remembered that he had already called in sick three times the month prior. He would just have to suck it up, then. It wouldn’t do to arouse any suspicion that there was something wrong with him. At least now the thing in his stomach would be satisfied for a while.

Although, Arthur thought groggily as sleep began to slow the mechanics of his mind, the creature seemed to be getting hungrier with each passing year. A full feeding only lasted a month or so now, where it had once sated the thing’s hunger for half a year. Arthur shivered. This was something to be thought about in the daytime, with cool fall light filtering through the curtains, not in the night, when the stench of blood still clung to the undersides of Arthur’s fingernails. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed himself over the ledge of consciousness, ignoring the sick purring coming from the depths of his stomach, the sound of a predator lulling itself to sleep.

 

 

 

Catherine’s Bio:

My name is Catherine Werkmeister, and I am from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Despite being an Ecology major in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, I also have a passion for fiction writing, particularly genres like horror and science fiction. I hope to continue writing creatively even as I pursue a career in the sciences!