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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Long Hunger Moon
A "Vorare" Story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

"Turn your face away," he sobbed into the snow. "Turn your face, turn away from me. Don't look ? don't look, don't learn, don't know."

Gordon lay broken in the snow, deep within a forest. He had fled from the apartment and city like an animal, as a hunted man-eater would flee the site of its first taste of human flesh ere rifle and blade were lifted against it, fled from the light and sound of civilization into the wild in search of safety or death ? whichever he would overtake first. Long, shallow scratches covered his face and arms where the window-glass had shattered about him.

He no longer thought. Thought was the province of men, not of beasts. But had he still been a man in his own broken mind, still capable of thought and reason, he would find himself grappling with other questions. How had he escaped a broken leg, or worse, leaping from the third floor of a city building? How had a window shattered by his own flesh and bone left him with no more than these superficial scratches? How many days had he been running, running north into the forests left between towns through day and night, stopping neither to drink or ...

He would not think of eating.

Eating was the forbidden root of his evil, the root which had passed from earth to womb to age to plate to his steaming guts ... God, passed to the pool at the feet of Saint Raymond, to the very foundation of that holy ground. He would not think of eating. He would not think of food or fruit or firm, fine flesh, torn between sharp white teeth, muscle and tendon, fiber and flavor and food.

"Don't look," he cried again, and turned his face to the sky. Still she watched ? hanging bright and heavy, her full and unblinking form showing no sign of mercy, no thought of tender care. The moon would not turn its face from him. She knew her course, the course set by God in the beginning of all time, and she did not deviate.

The trees about him, tall and strong and giving no shelter from the wind. They knew their course. They would grow and leaf and turn and die, to come again in the days of Spring. They knew the course set by God, and they would not deviate.

Man. Man deviated. Civilization deviated. Had the ghoul not said that civilization was the key? Man alone stepped from the path set down, man alone rebelled, fell, was brought low by knowledge and his righteous punishment. The beasts of wood and wild did not deviate. They took their paths and knew their lives.

He would be a man no longer.

"Don't look," he pleaded with the too-full sky. His life had been spent in the company of men, in the hearts of damned civilization, beneath a bare and black night sky lit only by the fires of the city. Here among the naked trees the starlight and moonlight kept him from the blessed darkness, the cover of deepest night which alone could shelter his sin.

Shelter. He had survived without shelter for a week, and longer. Had he known ? had he the sense of man ? he would have questioned. No food. No shelter. Not even a coat to keep the cold from flesh and bone, and yet the beast which had been Gordon Velander felt none of the sting of a north woods winter.

January had passed as he raced through the snow. Flight, pure and simple ? flight from all that he had done, all unwittingly, flight from the traps of flesh and fear. Flesh. Flesh. It was flesh which had brought him low. Flesh shared by man and beast. He would escape the flesh, transcend the flesh. He would become as a saint in the wilderness ... the image calmed him, slowed his breathing. The Saints. Had they not overcome sin? Had they not wrestled it, brought it low through their own denial of the selfsame flesh?

"Yes, yes, and yes," he whispered, lips kissing the bridal veil of snow which lay across the earth. The saints had escaped, taken to the wilderness, fled the fleshpots and stews of civilization. Flesh-pots. Stews. The cities. The hearts of men, rich and beating with the blood he heard now through his own temples ...

He was moving again, pushing through knee-deep snow, the blood in his body keeping time with the motion, keeping time with the hearts of men, the pierced hearts of the saints, hearts pierced, pierced flesh, flesh denied, mortified, forbidden, apart from the company of men, alone within the world, bestial, savage, holy alone and alight with a new fire, fired by passions, passion denied, borne aloft and on high, high as the moon, the moon in her steady course defined by God, God, my God, what have I become, where have I betrayed, betrayed by flesh and blood and the hunger to be denied, denied, denied ...

The moon was a sliver now as he stumbled again. He had fallen ? had done so often before and yet now the cold and bridal hands of snow which cradled his face were red, and the moon which had looked down upon him now stared up from the snow, dark and black and sightless alongside his own eye, set in a circle of white fur beneath the brown and tawny coat of the sky.

No. No moon. An eye, a muzzle, flesh, a deer. Dead in the snow at the side of a country road. Gordon took in the broken body before him.

The blood was minor ? had come frothing from the muzzle, not from any open wound. Internal injuries, perhaps, from the car which had struck it in the night. The bloody muzzle lay slack and open when the dead tongue began to curl in upon itself.

"I hungered," said the corpse. "I hungered under the moon."

"You're dead," said Gordon.

"I hungered for the return of spring. I hungered for a renewal. I hungered for the tender leaves ? for the delicate and youthful branches. I hungered in the beneath the longest and deadliest of moons."

"You're a deer."

"I was driven by my hunger." The lips were still, frozen and stuck to the snow where they rested, Yet the tongue continued to squirm obscenely between the black and bloodied lips. "I hungered to become something greater, something more. More full, more flesh, more life. I was driven from my shelter by my hunger, and the moon called me to the road, and the slaughterhouse moon shone brightly on my death."

"You're roadkill," said Gordon, voice cracking and hoarse from a month of racing sobs, yet flat and dull. He made no move to stand, stretched in the snow along the uncanny, lifeless body. "You shouldn't speak to me."

"Have you escaped the Hunger? Are you sated, beneath the light of the eyeless, killing moon? Or will you take up a knife to carve for your hunger? Will you take what you wish from my side, my sinew, my lights, my soul?"

"I have no knife. I have no hunger. You have no soul."

"My lights ? my lights within, rich and steaming in life, cold and mealy in the moon's death grip."

"Stop."

"They are saved from the maggot and blowfly, here in the killing cold. Warm me in your fevered fires."

"Stop. Please."

"Warm my lights with the light of your eyes and the fires of your people's preparations."

"Please stop. You shouldn't speak to me."

"Caress my flesh with yours. Bring me within you. Take me inside you, rich and steaming. Listen to my heart. Listen to your hunger."

"Your heart is stopped and my hunger is dead."

"Are you sated beneath the lights of the hunger moon? Listen. Listen to my heart."

He heard, and tore his glassy eyes from the now-still tongue which lay across the heavy crimson snow. It was no heartbeat ? they killed its engine, and the sound ceased. The van, red as the snow, pulled off the slick black road.

Four men stepped from the rear doors, dressed in the green and brown and bright orange of deer hunters. Each carried a rifle in his heavy hands, each wore a hood and a full-face mask to keep the bitter cold from their faces.

They looked well-fed to Gordon, fat and serious and full of flesh. "Go back," he croaked. "Stay away from us. Leave."

A muffled whistle escaped from one of the men. "Look at him. Not even blue around the lips yet."

"Perfect. How long since he ate?"

"A month and two days, unless he's been cheating."

"We'd have heard something by now. He doesn't look like he's in a subtle way to be cheating, and news would have gotten out by now even from a little town."

"True." The men began fanning out in a semicircle, rifles cradled in the crooks of their arms.

"Don't look," whispered Gordon into the ear of the doe. "You're safe. You're past their reach. Tell God it was an accident. I never meant to. Talk to him for me. Promise me," he whispered, bringing one heavy arm up to cradle the body's long and broken neck. "Promise me."

The foremost hunter pushed back his hood and pulled his warming mask aside.

"We'll tell him, Gordon. But, I generally find he's not much for listening."

Mike raised the rifle, and fired.

Story by Ivan Ewert, copyright 2006
Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, copyright 2006