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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Kindling
A "Vorare" Story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

As the first light of dawn crept beneath the door, Gordon sat up in the still-made motel bed. The shadow of his would-be ? enemy, he supposed, remained embedded in the cheap wooden door.

"It's not murder if you don't intend to do it," he said to the shadow. "But if I'd seen you come in the result would have been the same. Do you answer questions if I ask them?"

"It cannot, O my host," said his wound.

"What if I draw it lips with my blood? Couldn't it answer my questions then?"

"No. It is gone; body and soul alike, and can speak no longer."

"Damn," said Gordon, and turned his attention away from the dark form on the door. He went into the cramped bathroom and placed the used bar of soap on the ledge of the sink, then held the wound above it.

"I want to turn this into a razor," he said. "Can we do that, the way you turned the leaves to money?"

He felt the tightness at the corners of the wound, the tug of a smile that he could not truly see or understand. "As you like," replied the wound, and in a hot gush of blood the soap melted away, sculpting itself beneath the red rain into an old-fashioned straight razor, the kind barbers had used in the days before disease and deficiencies turned them from favor.

As before, the blood itself was sucked back up into the wound. It was still a strange sensation, but no longer one which turned Gordon's flesh to crawling. He nodded and picked the razor up by the handle, as clean as if it had come straight from a factory.

He splashed warm water onto his face, working it into the beard left by months of privation and negligence. Without shaving cream or soap to work from, he grasped a handful of hair and sawed at it with the straight razor, always away from his face, tossing the clumps of wiry detritus into the wastebasket at his feet. Once the length of the beard was gone, he repeated the process of wetting his face, brought the razor just beneath his right eye, set the edge to his cheekbone and scraped just a half-inch down.

The pain of shaving with neither cream nor soap brought small, hot tears to the corners of his eyes, but he squinted and blinked them away before starting again. After three minutes of effort, he found the pain bearable, and after five he no longer noticed the screaming of his skin, the fierce tugs upon the roots of his hair. His wound remained curiously silent until the moment Gordon accidentally drew blood upon his neck.

He put his hand to the new injury, and his fingers came away in a bright red slickness. He brought the wound in his arm into the mirror and smiled at their reflections. "Tell me something. If I keep cutting, do I get more of your advice?"

"Oh no, my gentle host," whispered the wound. "I am alone in this world, you and I, together and alone, and never to be parted. There will be no small cousins to pester you with their petty concerns and childish squabbles. Besides, you would not care to cut yourself so often, would you?"

"I could probably get used to it," said Gordon in a voice that was hardly his own.

"Yet you would not care to," said the wound, in a voice smooth yet firm. "Any more than I would care for you to bring yourself to such harm, and it would grant you no greater power or authority to appear covered in nicks and scratches than it would to hurl yourself before a wild beast."

Gordon turned his attention back to his beard, remaining silent for a few moments longer. "What would grant me greater power and authority?"

"What else, O host of man? One exercises one's mind and becomes wise, one exercises one's body and waxes strong, one uses one's power..."

"To grow more powerful," Gordon said. The small tugs at the corners of the wound were repeated, yet it remained silent.

The silence stretched out until the shaving job was finished. Gordon took his time, running over difficult patches more than once until his face was once more clear and clean, running the water into his cupped hands and splashing the blood away from nicks and cuts, rinsing the small, sparse hairs down the drain. Then he looked into the mirror again, slowly turning from side to side as if no detail of his features could escape his notice.

"I killed a man last night."

"You defended yourself."

"That doesn't matter. It's the first time I've killed a man, and I didn't even see it happen." His voice was soft, but still held a different timbre than ever before. "I decided not to be a killer at that farmhouse in the woods - not the Farm, the other one. I decided not to be a killer when George turned on me, when Sylvie stretched her neck out for me. It's the only thing I've actually chosen for myself since that Christmas meal, the only line I've drawn."

He thought a moment longer. "That, and the decision to kill myself. And you took that decision away from me. Just like you took this one."

"I have saved you twice, and twice again, and three times more than that, O my noble host," said the wound. "Have I not proven that your interests are my own?"

"You've proven that there's something you want, or need, me alive for," said Gordon. "That's hardly the same, but it'll have to do for now. The point is that the last things I tried to hold onto, the last lines I drew to separate myself from the Ghouls ? they're gone. I've killed a man and I've lived on human flesh. I've slit my wrists and I've kept walking.

"Everything I've done since that day, I've done to try to return my life to some kind of normalcy. I've done it thinking I could go back one day, walk back into the world and leave this entire horror show behind me. I've been playing along with you thinking I'd be able to get rid of you one day and either die quietly or live normally. But now I've killed a man.

"There's no normal left for me."

Gordon turned from the mirror and turned out the bathroom light, walking back into the motel room with the straight razor tucked into his back pocket. He went to the nightstand and took the inevitable bible from its drawer, tossing it casually onto the bed.

"Understand that? Even when I've been out of my head, talking to road kill and moons and empty wind and stars, I've still been acting rationally underneath it all. I haven't been running away from a single god-damn thing. I've been running toward a chance to live in a rational universe, or to die alone and quietly in the woods with nobody ever the wiser.

"That's done now.

"Rational has gotten me into a stolen motel room with a talking slit in my arm, a straight razor in my pocket, and a Hiroshima shadow on the inside of the door guarded by what's either my own heart's blood or something I can't begin to understand. You've been trying to sweet-talk me from the start into letting you make the decisions, and you've nearly had me more than once.

"I've killed a man. Even if I left everything else that happened behind, that makes sure that there's no turning back to who I was. You brought me back from the dead, but nothing's going to bring me back from taking somebody else's life."

"That man sought to harm you," said the voice, and Gordon noted a new tone in the voice, no longer unctuously sweet or quietly menacing. "Does that not make all the difference?"

"To the law, maybe. To some good people? Sure. You've got cops and soldiers killing to defend themselves every day all over the world, and I guess they sleep fine most nights. But even if everyone has it in them, not everyone can just shrug it off. I always heard it'd change someone and I think I heard right. I'm not the man I was yesterday."

"Then who are you?"

"Right now? I'm blank, and it doesn't much matter." He held the wound above the bible. "You said the dead man had a truck parked outside. I want to turn this book into a set of keys that'll start her up."

The wound was silent a moment. "Too specific?" Gordon asked, "or too soon after the razor? What are the limits I'm working with here?"

"We do not deal in limits," replied the wound. "We remove them."

The first drop of blood struck the deep blue cover of the bible, and soon enough the cover ran red with blood.

Story and image by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2007