Pet Peeve
Copyright 2006 by Mary Harris
He sat back on his stool, and popped another finger in his mouth. Crunch, crunch, crrrrunch. Mmmmmm. The Creeper loved fingers, almost as much as he enjoyed toes. Then again, hearts were pretty damn tasty.
Such a shame his prey was so limited. But that was changing. Every time he awoke, there were more and more.
In earlier times he'd been forced to search far and wide to find anyone suitable, and would sometimes have to settle for one, maybe two if he was lucky. He killed many more, of course, just to satisfy his boredom, but they were barely edible, and good only for a laugh. He preserved their stupid expressions just so he could see the look of imbecilic dismay for ages to come. The torture... that he reserved for his meals.
They deserve what they get, he mused. Being partially eviscerated, or trimmed of their limbs, then sewn back up to suffer the hours until they finally died. Oh yes, a quick death is too good for them.
Occasionally it was unavoidable, and they died instantly, relatively painlessly, but he did his best to cause them agony before he dispached them; failing that, to terrify the shit out of them, sometimes literally. He sniggered, recalling the soiled trousers of many victims. They're so easy to scare, it's almost too much fun.
He didn't know how he knew which were the best ones to eat, other than their smell. Why they should smell different, the gods only knew, but by some stroke of fate, they did, and he took full advantage. He was sometimes rewarded with the foul droppings of their possesions; they only served to prove his choice correct. Diaries, journals, cheap notebooks filled with scrawled gibberish. Illiterate scum... death was too good for them.
He picked gristle from between his teeth with a cracked fingernail, flicked it over his shoulder. A few more candles wouldn't be amiss, and then he could settle in for the evening with a novel in which he was currently engrossed. These silly little humans did on occasion turn out some fine tales, worthy to occupy the long hours of his time... when he wasn't otherwise engaged in slaughtering them, that is.
He remembered every single thing he read, gods how he wished it weren't so.
For hundreds of years he had been reading their bold scribblings, their ink-drunk bravado. One in a thousand was worth reading twice; mostly it was just so mundane it made him want to tear his own eyeballs out. As civilization curdled around him, though, the widespread literacy of the population spawned a horror worse than himself: bad writing.
At first he thought it was an abberation that would soon consume itself in the fires of literary hell, but no, it had to grow exponentially worse as the years went by. The ease with which publishers could churn out their questionable products grew every decade, and so did the amount of drivel, mixed in as millers once cut their flour with ground-up stone. Inedible, unreadable, it was all the same. And it set his teeth on edge.
He had been very pleased to take his vengence out on those who were responsible. They hadn't been pleased, he thought with a smirk. Useless philistines.
As time wore on, he found that the only ones who appeased his appetite were the instigators of the literary insults: the hacks, the dabblers, the authors of crude fiction so nauseating it made him ill. And the worst of the lot, the ones who were geniuses of tale-telling up to a certain point, at which they abandonded their gift and ruined perfectly good stories.
He could be sustained by any of the pathetic little humans, but he could only be fully satisfied by consuming the loathsome scribblers. And now that they were legion, he had the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet at his disposal.
Oh yes, he thought with a slimy leer, vengence is sweet.
the End
Pet Peeve Copyright 2006 by Mary Harris [aka redplanetes]
~plagarists will be flayed alive~
redplanet@trinidadusa.net
