“Not until you listen to me,” he said. “I did it-I did that-” His look fell on Mrs. Graves’ face. “I cut them up, stored them, the dead. I needed to. We’re out of food, Tamsen. There’s not all that much. They’re all going to kick the bucket. They would have as of now if not for me. I saved them all, y’see, Mrs. Donner. This is on the grounds that a’ me your little girls are as yet alive.”
“I don’t comprehend.”
“They wouldn’t do it all alone,” he said grittily. “They’d never consent to it. It’s unnatural. It ain’t right. In any case, it’s the best way to live. They must eat something. We as a whole do. They simply don’t have any desire to need to realize where it’s from. They keep to within, so they don’t need to see it. Try not to need to trust it.” His eyes sparkled, like he was excited with the game plan, and his own courage.
She knew what he was talking about. She wished she wasn’t sure what he implied, that she didn’t need to envision its reality.
He was taking care of the dead to the living. Human tissue. What’s more they didn’t have any idea.
“My little girls. What’s more Elitha, and Leanne . . .”
“They’re all alive, similar to I said. However Elitha’s debilitated. She may be the close to go.” His eyes advanced toward the heap of bodies once more, and she understood with one more rush of repugnance and repulsiveness that he was at that point envisioning cutting up Elitha’s body, devouring it, taking care of it to the others. She was dazed with it; her stomach held in torment.
“I been keeping the animals under control,” he clarified then, at that point. “Leaving pieces and pieces for them. Barely enough so they won’t come sniffing around excessively near camp. I got everything apportioned and allotted.” She reviewed with abrupt clearness how, even barely out of Illinois, different men had as of now cautioned against playing a game of cards with Keseberg. He didn’t simply cheat, they said-he retained each hand that was played.
“I realize we can make it a month,” he continued, “however we actually got something like six or two months before the passes clear to the point of pulling the rest of us out. We’ll need to lose somewhere around one more.”
He let go of her and moved up his sleeve. Indeed, even in the haziness, she could see overflowing red injuries, paw scratches, wounds, indentations.
“Whatever them animals got, it don’t hurt me. They can’t taint me. I’m protected. That is the reason it’s dependent upon me. It’s simply dependent upon me.”
She had quit crying.
She had begun to tune in, with a spooky kind of quiet, to what he was talking about.
“Perhaps it takes one evil presence to ward the others off.” He stopped. His eyes flickered with tears now. “Lucifer had been a holy messenger first. I generally recollected that.”
HE’D FIRST TASTED HUMAN FLESH back in Illinois, gained from a vanished uncle while prospecting out west. He’d fostered a preference for it. A want it, truly, however he’d held the desire under wraps, was repulsed by it even as the craving blossomed. He observed that the flavor of human blood never satisfied him, yet made the requirement for it much more grounded.
Tamsen swam up to his words through a sort of haze. Had he taken her out? Had she fallen and hit her head? Or on the other hand had her awareness got away for a period? It didn’t make any difference. She was once again at the lodge now, without recollecting how she arrived. Her rifle was no more. Almost certainly he had taken it. She was sitting in the snow and posting like a wrecked doll, and Lewis Keseberg hunkered close to her, watching her intently like he was stressed over her wellbeing.
“I thought you resembled me for some time,” he said. “I found out about you back in Springfield. How you attracted Doc Williams into your bed, them different fellas, as well. I said, there’s a lady who knows what she needs and isn’t reluctant to follow it.”
“I’m nothing similar to you,” she said. Her mouth was brimming with the flavor of iron.
“You’re more similar to me than you might suspect. We take what we need, you and I. We do what we need to do.” He grinned at her, yet he was off-base. Nobody realized that what she had needed for such a long time that the needing had severed her in two had made her unfit to adore, practically incapable to feel.
Nobody realized who had first held her heart, and never released it.
Not even Jory.
For how is it that she could perceive her own sibling that it had forever been him?
“No,” she said now. “I don’t take what I need. Dislike you by any means. Everything-all that I have at any point done has been for other people. Has been so my youngsters can be protected. Furthermore I’ll demonstrate it to you.”
“What are you talking about?” Keseberg inquired.
“I will help you,” she said.
SHE REMAINED IN HIS CABIN. Assuming she left, in the event that she saw her girls one final time, she realized she may lose her purpose. That it may break her. So she made him guarantee never to let them know that he had seen her. Never to talk about what occurred straightaway.