Free Future Lovecraft by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Anthony Boulanger, Paula R. Stiles Page A

feel. Then I could join the service, again. Of course, I could live pretty well on 56 years of back pay, as well.
    They sent me to Tarsis Hospital on Mars. Within a week, I knew three things: 1. Therapy consisted of producing the “right” answers to an AI’s endless questions—a job even a moral moron could fake. 2. Their pills—which they gave me in great, multicoloured fistfuls—had no effect on me. 3. I couldn’t eat the food they provided. I wasn’t hungry or in need. I’d grown a thick layer of fat on the Fulton . I vomited up the first few meals and then I asked if I could take my meals in private. Understandingly, they agreed. I kept the food until it was moldy—then I could at least bear to eat it. But it didn’t satisfy. Something was missing.
    As my therapy progressed, I was allowed the freedom of the city. A small congregation followed the teaching of the blessed Zoroaster and placed their dead in a Tower of Silence, to be devoured by genetically engineered buzzards. I visited the Tower by the light of the double moons to cut hunks of flesh from the Zoroastrian dead. I couldn’t eat them there in the thin Martian atmosphere, but carried the slices back in my total environment suit to the domed city. Needless to say, I shot all the pseudo-buzzards. Who needs competition?
    The hospital had a huge library. I read endlessly about cannibalism and ghouls. Certain Arabic texts were helpful. I wasn’t alone. There was little biology—no clear information to aid me in my survival. What were my vulnerabilities? What were my strengths? If I wrote a manual for future ghouls—who would publish it?
    One legend touched me more than the others. It turned me as I have never been turned before. Certain Amerindians spoke of the Wendigo.
    A party of hunters becomes lost in the snow. They find a cave. Eventually, they must kill one another for survival. One of the party loses his disgust at eating long pig. He warns the other survivor(s), “You must go. I am a Wendigo.” They flee in pious terror. The rogue warrior lives on, becoming like a wild beast—long of tooth and claw. Eventually, the tribe destroys this raider with many arrows.
    Other legends said that the Wendigo was Ithaqua the Wind Walker, a terrible god of storms and ice. This being could only be bought off with human sacrifice. They would lead the wretches deep into the snowy forest and leave them there to freeze. The remains were found miles away. Fiery, cold eyes could be seen among the trees, the true spirit of deep space—of pure Hunger as a ball of mind-wrenchingly- cold fire. Iä Ithaqua!
    There was no attempt to match the legends of Arab ghouls and Canadian cannibals with whatever lived in my soul, but I felt they were connected.
    I began to use makeup to cover the dull grey of my complexion. Bright light—a blessedly rare commodity in the domed cities of Mars—discomforted me greatly. I thought I might have a mutated form of pellagra, a disease that causes its victims to desire blood, but decided I suffered from a deeper spiritual change. Unlike most spacefarers, I had no mystical side, no prayer, no meditations—I had an emptiness inside where the Cold Hungry One could live. It ate my soul in the Great Dark and now, it would eat everything. I was happy. I finally had a purpose.
    I had no social life, but my warders felt that was because I was a man of the last century—I simply had no one to talk to. Would that my estrangement from humankind were so simple! I began to stalk the streets at night, but I knew this was only a temporary solution. My killings didn’t fit in their computer yet, but as the problem expanded from computer to computer, my research would be discovered.
    I visited the Tower of Silence, having noted the death of a Parsi merchant in the weekly data. As I sliced into his corpulent paunch, I knew I was not alone. I looked up.Far away—to the west—I saw two carmine stars where no stars should be. A red haze swirled about