Snatching up the tongs and hurrying out of the shack, Heinrich stood panting in the snow. Setting off into the wood, he did not notice that the feverish sweat coursing off him hissed instead of freezing when it dropped onto the ground, nor did he realize his vision was better in the dark wood than it ever had been in the sunny fields of his home. The pain in his sides came in waves but he followed the stream with purpose, almost smelling their stink, almost seeing their snow-shrouded footprints.
Eventually he left the stream, the spoiled-milk stink of witchcraft growing stronger until he picked his way through the underbrush into a small clearing. In the center of it lay a patch of disturbed earth where the snow did not fall, although it lay heaped up to Heinrich’s knees everywhere else. Digging in the frozen dirt with the tongs, he saw something shining in what early light penetrated the icy bower. Holding the pelt at the end of the tongs, he marched back through the woods, for the first time reflecting on his superior senses and the impossible nature of the last day’s events.
The sun crept farther up as he found his way back to her shack, only a finger of smoke rising from his destination. Stepping over the dead rat by the door he went inside, calling out to the witch. She weakly raised her hand from the floor, two shadowy bulges nursing at her chest.
Approaching the prone woman, even in his madness he could not control his nausea. After he had expelled what few turnips his belly held, he again stared at the abominations. They were brown and slick, easily twice the size of normal babies, and they chewed rather than suckled on her flabby breasts, milk mingling with blood on the wet floor.
Heinrich snatched a log from beside the fire but before he could act she bellowed at him, “Leave them be! I’ve done the same to their siblings, leave them be!”
Curious despite his revulsion, Heinrich tossed the wood onto the hearth. Through her agony she continued to instruct him: “Give them the sack hanging above you, it’ll take them off me long enough. Long enough!”
Heinrich shakily took down the satchel, and she shrieked, “Tear it open! Spread them on the floor!”
Following her instructions, he opened the bag and dumped out its contents. Hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny teeth scattered on the slimy stones, and the two newborns turned from their meal. Crawling off her, they began rolling in the loose teeth, and while Heinrich watched the small white pegs sank into the surface of their skin, forming new snapping mouths on chests and legs, arms and backs.
“Follow the road through the mountains,” she gasped, her gory chest spewing blood, milk, and loose skin. “But do not follow them to the city, for men will burn you alive. Shun even the smallest hamlet, stay to the wilds and journey southeast past the dwellings of men, into the desert. Farther than those ruins that men call holy, where fools battle for stones and dirt until the world ends, always south! That is where you will catch them, in the desert of dead kings.”
“Are they-” Heinrich swallowed, seeing the babes’ faces were umber skulls, impenetrable pits where eyes should rest. “What are they?”
“Homunculi to inspire envy in all others, my own addition to an ancient recipe.” She motioned to a bound pile of parchment, which the illiterate yeoman did not recognize as a text. “A gift from a traveler, long gone. One is Magnus, the other Brennen! But hurry, they return to me!”
True enough, the baby-shaped monstrosities crawled to her feet, their numerous maws snatching out chunks of meat and skin, blood dampening Heinrich’s knees where he knelt beside her head. She wailed and he shivered, averting his eyes. Her hands pawed at his face, her voice ragged as she urgently went on.
“They will serve you well, if you do as I say, but hurry.” Her eyes were rolling wildly, her grimacing mouth struggling to form words. “Oh my love, my charcoal-man, my Magnus! It was yours first and always, purest and first, and all this for you, I’ll bear it! They’ll pay for your murder, over and over!”
Heinrich raised the tongs to offer the pelt, hoping to slow their feast, but again she wailed, “No! Not yet! They need it or they’ll melt away in rain, but not yet! First my ears, then my eyes, then my nose, and that split in twain! My heart! Half a heart, last!”
“What?!” Heinrich squeezed her hand with his. “What do you mean?”
“One each,” she gurgled, her young moving up her thighs, “one ear each, to hear your commands, and so in Hell I can hear the Grossbarts scream. One eye each, to hunt their quarry, and so I can see the Grossbarts die. Half a nose, to smell them out and inhale the last breath breathed by Grossbart lungs. Half a heart to live, to live despite all wounds! My tongue-” But her instructions turned to a scream as they devoured the region whence they had so freshly birthed.
“Your tongue?” Heinrich said to himself but she ended her scream and resumed her frantic orders.
“My tongue,” blood bubbled out around it, “my tongue. Tongue.”
“Cut in half, so each might speak! Yes?”
She either tried to laugh or to moan, the gurgling making it impossible to say which. “No. My tongue. You eat. Or. They’ll eat. You. Alive.”
They were spread across her chest and stomach, their mouths chewing in tandem. With unsteady hands Heinrich set the tongs and pelt on a chair and drew his dagger. He sliced off her ears, bloodying his hands. When he held them out a skeletal face snapped near his fingers, but inspiration took hold and, maneuvering around the side, he pressed the gruesome flap of flesh against the side of its head. The muddy surface sank in and the ear stuck fast, Heinrich hastening to give its brother the other ear.
They had almost reached her previously skinned sternum, and Heinrich plunged in his dagger to steal her heart before they could. Entrails wound into their prodigious orifices while he dug past her collarbone, the mix of fever and confusion cheating his act of its deserved horror. Sinking his finger into the muscle, he cut it free just as teeth dug into his wrist. Slapping the creature off him, he left a handprint on its exposed but malleable skull.
Dropping the heart, he carved off her small nose and plucked out her eyes, taking their stringy moorings with them. They were almost to her throat, the crunching of bones drawing his eyes to her lower body. Nothing remained, not even a speck of marrow, and he saw their hands now seemed firmer, more defined. He nearly popped the first eye sliding it into place, and the clay socket tightened around his fingers. The yellow eye dilated and focused on him as he gave one to its twin, and it stretched out a palm split by a snarling maw.
The nose proved difficult but after nicking his fingers and shaving flecks of skin away he managed to split it through the septum, a nostril on each side. These he attached quickly as they moved away, each going down one of her arms. Tearing through her heart, he approached the first, unsure where to place it in the nest of feeding mouths. Moving behind it, he saw an unoccupied space between two enormous sets of teeth, her devoured bones forming jaws even as he watched, allowing it to chew harder and faster. When he pressed his hand toward its back the clay split to reveal a small cave, into which he thrust the hunk of meat. The back closed around his fist but he yanked it out, seeing the heart began to beat and bleed in its new home.
The second had no such vacant area, its entire back snapping and snarling, tongues of mud staining the shiny teeth. Desperately he moved to its front, the last of her fingers disappearing into the mouth on its face. He placed the heart in its stomach, gibbering maws in place of breasts thwarting any effort to place it higher. This scrap also began beating, and the two smaller mouths faded back into the surface, the teeth migrating to form a mouth protecting the heart in its belly. Heinrich fell back, relieved to be done.
They had finished the arms and both scuttled toward the head when Heinrich realized he had forgotten something. Kicking it away, he scooped it up and went for her mouth. They were making for his legs, hundreds of teeth chattering intently as they neared further meat. He cut her tongue free and dropped the bloody lump just as the mouths found his feet.
The chorus of grunts the babes made as they fought over the head made him light-headed, and dropping the dagger he snatched the tongs. He backed toward the door as her skull cracked open, and bit into her tongue. It squirmed in his mouth and he gagged and coughed, the appendage wriggling through his fingers. Crouching to retrieve it, he saw the abominations stand and walk toward him, dozens of smiling mouths turned in his direction. He jumped away and tripped over the stoop, falling outside into the slush.
Standing and backing away, he chewed the writhing tongue, the flesh attempting to squirm up his throat even as he swallowed. The children followed him out into the morning light, each now grown as tall as his waist. One spotted the rat carcass and scooped it up but the other advanced on Heinrich. He shoved the rest of the tongue into his mouth and choked on it, trying to force it down. The child-thing leaped at him and with a swallow he fell backward, holding up his hands and screaming.
“Stop!”
To his amazement, they did. The monstrosity had landed on his chest but rather than chewing the mouths remained shut, its solitary eye blinking innocently at him. The other ran on all fours to its brother, nuzzling its soft skull against Heinrich’s chin.
He scrambled to his feet, knocking the one on his chest to the ground. Its mouths opened and began bawling in union, its eye filling with tears. He saw the indentation of his hand on its cheek and pity consumed him; he knew at once this must be Brennen and the other Magnus. Retrieving the tongs, he picked the shimmering pelt out of the mud and offered it to them. They fell upon it instantly, growling and snarling as each tried to wrestle it from his brother.
The hide tore in half and Heinrich witnessed their final transformation. Steam rose from them as the pelt came alive and adhered to their bodies, the boys rolling in the snow and wailing from every mouth. Heinrich noticed Magnus’s face had acquired two more round little eyes from the dead rat, although they had grown significantly larger in the boy’s face. One was set in the appropriate socket, the other bulging out in place of a second nostril. The strange skin spread over their clay flesh, and their myriad tongues turned pink and wet as they frothed and spit. Their limbs lengthened and twisted, pudgy hands now furry claws, knees snapping backward and feet lengthening.
The boys wailed even when they had ceased smoking and twisting, and Heinrich knelt between them, stroking their coats. Unlike those who had worn the pelt in earlier ages neither had fully abandoned his human shape, but neither did they retain a singularly human appearance.
Magnus’s black fur covered every bit except the mouths peppering his small body, and while his legs were distinctly rodent-like he managed to stand and walk like a man. His third eye glistened with snot dribbling from his disfigured shard of a nose. In place of his left hand he wielded the giant snout of a rat, its nose snuffling, its growl emanating from every maw save the proper one.
Brennen’s coat shone brown and red and white and every other color his twin lacked. Under his bristly hair the handprint on his face remained, finger-sized grooves sunk in over his empty eye socket and where the other nostril would be on a natural creature. His legs were less bowed than Magnus’s but his arms and hands bulged with muscle, his long fingers sprouting hooked brown talons.
Heinrich took his boys into his arms until they stopped mewling, whispering his devotion to them. They horrified him, but not as much as he horrified himself, and with the marked difference that they were innocent. Their growling brought a smile to his lips and tears to his puffy eyes.
In fairness to his memory, the Heinrich who left the valley the next morning bore little resemblance, save the physical, to the yeoman who had shared his hearth with his plow horse on rainy nights before building the barn. Despair had yielded to optimistic loathing, an abiding conviction that they would locate the Grossbarts and enact their vengeance. Even when the wind cut and the snow swirled they were warm in the burrows Brennen dug, the twins tightly wedged in the blankets with their arms and legs wrapped around Heinrich, tickling him with countless kisses from uncounted mouths.
