Christopher S. Wilson

Someone Got Eaten

Someone got eaten. It may have been Paulina, or it could have been Fitzjames, or perhaps it was Stanley. That rat bastard Stanley. It was probably him who got eaten. I can’t say for certain, but someone definitely got eaten here. Look at the bones. Look at the guts. I think that’s a skull over there, or pieces of one anyway. Someone got eaten here for sure. And most of them got eaten, too—there’s very little left.

What kind of animal would eat a whole person? All at once? And to leave their guts all over the sitting room like this? That might be a forehead in the Davenport. Why is the Davenport open? If you were eating someone, surely you wouldn’t have time to open the Davenport. What kind of animal eats someone and then opens the Davenport? Maybe it was snooping around while it was eating someone’s forehead and dropped it in the Davenport. Seems a plausible explanation, I think. It might be a forehead but it could also be an elbow.

It sure looks like someone got eaten. But who? This might be their shirt over here. See? It’s a blue shirt with tiny embroidered flowers on it. Probably Stanley, then. That rat bastard Stanley. He would get eaten. He really really would. He’s the first person you would expect to get eaten. There’s a lot of blood and viscera on the shirt, though. It might be a blouse, in which

case, Paulina definitely got eaten. Has anyone seen Paulina today? I haven’t seen Paulina since Sunday at polo. But she’s always running off with her boys to here and there and everywhere. You know what I mean. That’s how Paulina is. Never bring a boy home if Paulina is around. That’s your lesson today. She’ll take him for herself for certain, and ruin him!

Now this looks like a cufflink. See the mother-of-pearl inlay with the black enamel running around it? That’s just the sort of low-class cufflink Fitzjames wears. Someone should check with Fitzjames if he’s missing any cufflinks, if he’s alive, I mean, and not eaten. If it does turn out Fitzjames got eaten, someone should look in his vanity. He usually keeps his cufflinks in the top drawer of his vanity. I don’t see the other one. Perhaps whatever ate him also ate the other cufflink. That would be hard to swallow, don’t you think? Probably feel even worse coming out the other end. But we shouldn’t joke like that in times like these. It’s just my gallows

humor, I don’t mean anything by it. Someone got eaten and this is a serious moment. And there’s not a lot of Fitzjames left, either, if it even is Fitzjames all over the room. Has anyone talked to Fitzjames lately? I’m still not sure who this is.

Gosh it might have even been Berkenbosch. Wouldn’t that be utter madness? I can’t even muster all my imagination for such a thought. Of all people, Berkenbosch is the last you would expect to be eaten. This would be Berkenbosch’s blood, if he got eaten. It’s smeared all across the Victorian. This damn Victorian is completely ruined. Paulina will be so upset, unless she got eaten. This is her favorite duchesse brisée. I always thought it was ugly, the way it’s been overstuffed, and that horrid silvered cream damask silk, or whatever you call that ugly upholstery, but now it’s ruined anyway. And it’s not even Victorian, it’s Louis Quinze, but she always called it that and now I call it that. I feel bad about never correcting her if she’s been eaten. She might have said to the animal, “No! Don’t eat me on the Victorian!” but it was actually Louis Quinze. Perhaps it confused the animal. There’s just so much blood here. And the stuffing’s been ripped out, too. It came out easily, see here? That’s what happens when you hire a jackleg upholsterer like Vouvali. The man probably learned to upholster furniture from Richard Sears.

See how the blood is streaked here and here, and also over here? Then the blood streaks continue onto the Hamadan. The runner in the hall is also a Hamadan. The porters brought them back from Karachi—remember that adventure? One of my favorites, except that Karlotta gave us all scrumpox. Anyway, those streaks might be signs of a struggle. Whoever got eaten was fighting for their life to the bitter end. So maybe Berkenbosch. Or Fitzjames. Fitzjames had the strength for a fight like this. He was always so robust. Definitely not Stanley. Stanley’s not a fighter. The animal that did this would have eaten Stanley easily. Stanley is so strange he might have given himself to be eaten without even an argument. “Yes, you animal, I choose to be eaten, in fact I welcome it, frankly.” Can’t you just hear him saying that? Frankly this and frankly that. Everything is always frankly with him. We should just call him Frank if he’s going to do everything so frankly. “I am eaten, frankly!”

There is a lot of blood here. A lot a lot of blood. Still more blood over there. Do you think maybe two people got eaten? Someone definitely got eaten. There’s just so much blood, and a lot of little bones. It might be more than one person who got eaten. What sort of bone do you think this is? It must be from a hand or foot. Hands and feet have lots of little bones. Carpals and tarsals. I learned that from the health column in Popular Science. Someone discovered a new bone in the foot last year no one had ever described before. Can you believe that? A whole bone. Missed by every anatomy textbook for a thousand years. I wonder if this is the same kind of bone. Wouldn’t that be something? Anyway I can’t believe the animal would go to all the trouble of eating every bit of flesh off a foot and only leave this one little bone. Do you suppose it ate all the other bones? Maybe it was ravenously hungry. It must have been a huge thing to eat a whole person, or two people at that. If it ate Stanley and Paulina then who is going to wash the

wainscoting? It’s covered in blood again. Surely you don’t expect me to do it, with my back being how it is.

This is the second time someone got eaten. That seems so long ago now. Was it really only last year? It feels like more time has passed, maybe because we had so many kidnappings at Christmas. Who was it that got eaten last time? Oh yes, it was Horatio. Now I remember. He made the most wonderful beet and mutton soup. I miss his soup. He put little white beans in it, too. He made us a beet and mutton soup with little white beans and then he got eaten. Remember that? We only realized it was Horatio who got eaten when Paulina tried to make beet and mutton soup a week later and forgot the sage leaf. What a terrible soup. How could she have forgotten sage leaf, of all things? I nearly retched it up. But then we knew Horatio was the one who got eaten, from how bad the soup was. Poor Horatio, though. I felt terrible for not going to his puppet shows. And his widow was inconsolable about him being eaten. Particularly so, I’d say. Did we ever send her those flowers? I can’t remember. Stanley said he would do it but I bet he forgot. What do you think Horatio’s widow did with all his puppets? He had so many puppets. They were a bit too sexual for me but I know you liked them.

Goodness, look at this awful mess. There’s a human kidney under the Chesterfield and the animal wrapped a bowel around the Clarte. Whose bowel is this? It could be Fitzjames’s. That’s the sort of bowel Fitzjames would have. That’s the bowel of a guileless drunk. No guile and no canniness. There, I said it. A terrible drunk and an even worse lover. It feels good to admit it. And that’s a Le Verrier original, you know. It’s probably worthless now. Who’s going to buy a Clarte with a bowel wrapped around the lady’s legs? Does it even light up anymore? And we still don’t know whose bowel. If it’s Stanley’s bowel that Clarte is worth about as much

as a ringworm infection.

Really, though, I do hope it wasn’t Stanley who got eaten. I hate his guts but not so much he should be eaten. These might really be his guts on the sideboard but I don’t hate these guts like that. It might not be Stanley. But someone sure got eaten. Boy! I hope it wasn’t Fitzjames who got eaten, either. I would miss his stories. He had such wonderful stories from his year in Siam. He said he met Mata Hari there but I think he’s a bullshitter. Mata Hari never went to Siam. Why would she? Still, it’s such a wonderful story.

Can we rule out anyone who definitely did not get eaten? There’s me and there’s you, that’s two of us. Berkenbosch, Paulina, Fitzjames, and Stanley—any one of them may have been eaten. My God! You don’t suppose they all got eaten?! That would be the strangest thing to ever happen to this place, or any place, really. What are the chances the four of them got eaten all

together? That seems very very unlikely. They’re rarely all in the same room at once. Unless they were holding a seance, but then they would have invited me, wouldn’t they? They know I wouldn’t miss a good seance. We can’t rule out that they were holding a seance here, without me, and the animal, or animals, were summoned from the spirit realm. Or the animal was passing through the garden, already having leapt from the spirit realm into our realm, and was driven mad with hunger by their incantations, and ate them all. I haven’t seen any of them since yesterday morning. I was having therapy for my lumbago until very late, at Dr. Grob’s office—you know how thorough Dr. Grob is with the violet ray machine, it’s really a wondrous invention—so I couldn’t have eaten any of them. Unless you’re implying I am a werewolf and ate them last night in my sleep, and we know that’s not possible because I’m allergic to dogs.

There’s an interesting thought! If the animal were dog-like, and it was struggling with Berkenbosch, or Fitzjames, or someone else, Paulina maybe, while it tried to eat them—not Stanley because of his cowardice, of course—I would surely be sneezing a tempest by now, because it would have left fur scattered all over the divan near these guts. So the animal was likely reptilian, or humanoid. Or a jellyfish. Probably a creature from Venus or maybe Mars. That’s definitely possible. The distribution of bones and guts and blood is similar to when Horatio was eaten last year, so we can reasonably assume it was the same reptilian or humanoid animal from Venus or Mars maybe. That was in an article I saw in Popular Science, as well. They say there may be jellyfish-men living in the atmosphere on Venus. Whatever it was, it ate almost all of them.

There’s not much of them left, really—whoever it is that got eaten, I mean. Even their shoes are gone. Did you check behind the Byzantine? Check under the étagère, too. I’m always losing my shoes under the étagère. I already looked around the metropolitan. There are no shoes anywhere. Not a single one. Now isn’t that a strange thing to eat. Nearly as strange as eating a cufflink. But I suppose, if the animal were exceptionally hungry, ravenously so, a shoe would be tolerably appetizing—if it was calfskin and not patent leather. But I don’t wear such things. Paulina would. Did you ever notice her feet are uneven? Look at them next time you see her—if she wasn’t eaten, I mean—and tell me if you don’t agree how uneven they are. I’ve never seen feet so uneven.

What do we know so far? It wasn’t Stanley, because Stanley would have let himself be eaten, the rat bastard. There would be fewer indications of a struggle, maybe no blood or viscera at all. The thing would have swallowed him whole and he would have enjoyed it, quite frankly. And it likely wasn’t Berkenbosch because he’s the quickest of all of us—did you know he trained for the Olympics?—and he would have sprinted away before any sort of Venusian jellyfish could have grabbed him, unless it was actually a wild cheetah, but then again, a wild cheetah is small for a wild cat—I saw a drawing of one in Life standing beside a Hottentot—and it couldn’t have eaten a whole person in one meal, much less two. The neighbors might be keeping cheetahs, though. There’s no telling what those people are doing over there. And Horatio was eaten last year, so not him. Plus Karlotta being kidnapped so not her. She could be anywhere. The kidnappers just up and stopped calling. That leaves Paulina or Fitzjames. We have a cufflink, which Fitzjames may have simply dropped, and a blouse or shirt, too soaked in blood to identify. I’m nearly driven to bafflement by it.

Look at the girandole. My God. It’s absolutely soaked with blood. How did the animal even get the blood all the way up there? And so much of it? It must be some sort of acrobat. A mutilation acrobat. I’m even a little impressed. Very impressed, I’d say. I’m glad my room is on the third floor and not the second. You might consider moving off the second floor. The animal, if it comes back to eat another one of us, can probably reach your balcony. I saw Berkenbosch jump to the height of the balustrade, so a larger animal, one that was more nimble, could certainly jump to your balcony, and you’d be as good as eaten.

What’s that now? Something outside? Oh! Is that Paulina in the rose garden by the bronze of Apollo? Is she actually sitting in the Morris chairs? I’m so happy someone’s finally using them. They’ve been out there for months and no one would sit in them. But who is that holding her hand? He looks positively dizzy in love! Come over here, it’s a better view. Oh my goodness, if that isn’t Fitzjames! Where did he get that ridiculous Ulster coat? He looks like a damn coachman. Probably bullshitting her about Siam and Mata Hari, too. Surely he and Paulina aren’t in love. Paulina will ruin him. Did you know they are cousins? Not first cousins, mind you. But on his mother’s side, and her father’s. Her great-grandmother married the Earl of Luton, I believe. I probably shouldn’t have told you. Paulina knows but I don’t think Fitzjames knows. Please don’t tell him. Shame on Paulina if she’s fallen for her cousin. After all this time they’ve known one another, too. Well good riddance. I told you already he was a wretched, clumsy lover. Paulina has other suitors so he won’t last a day.

Do they not realize someone got eaten? Someone should tell them. I think you should tell them. You’re better at delivering bad news than I am, probably because of your limp. It’s a very disarming feature, really. Gosh, I’m certainly relieved Paulina and Fitzjames didn’t get eaten.

Oh my stars, but that means Berkenbosch did get eaten! My heavens above. Poor poor Berkenbosch. He must have put up a great battle against the animal, or the jellyfish, or whatever we’re calling it. Maybe a sea cucumber. That really would explain all the blood and the scattering of bones, all the way from here to the parlor. Oh dear, this was probably his footbone after all! I can’t bear to look at it any longer. Here, take it, take it from me. I’m feeling faint. I need to sit down. But where? Everything is covered in blood. It’s Berkenbosch’s blood. Poor poor Berkenbosch! His heft would have made quite a meal for the animal, at least. I hope it’s

happy. Berkenbosch nearly made the Olympic team and now he’s being digested.

Well, fetch the sponge and bucket. I’ll even help clean the wainscoting, if my lumbago will hold off for the afternoon, though really Paulina should do it. And go tell her and Fitzjames someone got eaten! Goodness gracious they should know. That’s now three of Paulina’s brothers to be eaten. Two here and the younger one in Switzerland, when we passed through Gimmelwald. She’ll be very upset. I tell you, she simply has the worst luck of any of us, and her feet are uneven. Here, take my handkerchief. She may cry, as well. And while you’re out there, tell Fitzjames to take off that ugly Ulster coat! He looks like a coachman!