Voracious (7 page)

Trevor jerked away from Ebersol and nervously looked around the cabin. “Shhh! Keep your voice down. We still don’t even know if everyone is going to react the way Lelani did. That was one isolated incident. All we know is that Star Mourning is really hungry. We don’t know for a fact that she’s going to start eating people. We could be blowing all of this out of proportion. Models are fucking crazy anyway. I’m sure Lelani had a lot of problems before I treated her. Maybe the cannibalism thing was an accident.”

“An accident? How do you figure that?”

“Maybe she was just being opportunistic. She got into a fight with her fiancé, things got physical, and Lelani killed him by accident. Then she ate him because he was there, and she was hungry, and he was already dead.”

Trevor could see Dr. Ebersol considering it. It was obvious this scenario hadn’t entered his mind before and he wanted to believe it. Trevor wanted to believe it too.

“Maybe all we have to do is meet with my other clients and tell them they are going to have to eat a lot more than normal, and that’s the end of it. Maybe prescribe some type of high-calorie protein shake or something to eat between meals?”

“I suppose. We’ll see soon if Lelani was just an isolated incident.”

Below them, water gave way to land. San Diego, California came into view, a vast expanse of lights. They would be landing in LA soon. Trevor would be taking a car to the home of Alexis Mourning, and Dr. Ebersol would be continuing on to Austin, Texas.

Neither had a clue how bad the day would end. They had no idea what they were getting into. Not the slightest idea.

10 

“I brought you some food, dear. Oh my God!”

The tray of cold cuts, crackers, and pâté spilled from Alexis Mourning’s hands, and a scream tore from her throat. Her daughter was sitting on the edge of the bed, cannibalizing her own hand. Her three middle fingers had been completely removed. The naked phalanges stuck out of Star’s mouth as she gnawed at them, probing them for the last morsels of flesh before moving on to her thumb.

“Stop!” Alexis shouted.

Star let out a wounded cry and then scampered over to the pile of spilled food smeared onto the polished mahogany floor. Star scooped up the pâté and shoved the entire quarter-pound slice into her mouth, chewing quickly and swallowing. She grabbed a fistful of crackers in one hand, cold cuts in the hand she’d almost chewed off, sat on the floor-clearly oblivious to her mother’s presence-and devoured all of it. She continued to moan like a wounded dog while shoveling food into her mouth. A torrent of tears streamed from her crimson-rimmed eyes.

“What’s wrong, Star? You’re scaring me.”

“I’m so hungry. I feel like I’m dying. I need more food,” her daughter cried between bites.

Alexis remembered what the doctor told her about giving her daughter as much to eat as she wanted, but everything she’d ever learned about being a woman rebelled against the idea of letting her daughter glut herself.

“That-that’s not enough food? You don’t want to get fat again, do you?”

It was a ridiculous question. In the last four hours, Star Mourning had lost another twenty pounds. She now had the body her mother had always dreamt of. The jiggle was gone from her belly. It was now totally flat and even a bit concave. Her hips were almost completely gone; just enough remained now to give her a slight curve and emphasize the slenderness of her waist. The dimpled cellulose that had been clustered around her ass and thighs had melted away, leaving stretch-marked skin that hung loosely from her atrophied muscles. A few weeks in the gym was all her daughter would need to tighten up those muscles, and any of the skilled surgeons at the Aphrodite Clinic could easily correct the loose skin and stretch marks, Alexis thought. She smiled appreciatively at her daughter, admiring her increasingly emaciated appearance, heedless of the gleam of insanity sparkling in the young girl’s eyes, and forgetting the fact that she’d walked in on the child feasting on her own fingers. All that mattered to Alexis was that her daughter was finally skinny.

“I’m starving!”

Star scrambled to her feet and rushed past her mother, heading for the kitchen and the locked refrigerator. She leapt up onto a chair in the parlor and snatched the heavy drapes down from the window. She pulled the curtain rod free from the thick satin drapes while still running toward the kitchen in full sprint. Gripping the thick, wrought-iron curtain rod in both hands, Star took a swing at the lock on the refrigerator, gouging the stainless steel. She swung several more times before the lock finally gave way.

Her mother entered the kitchen behind her just as Star opened the refrigerator and began pulling food off the shelves and scarfing it down. Alexis stood a safe distance away, terrified for the first time that her daughter might be losing her mind. She pulled out her cell phone and tried once more to phone the doctor.

Dr. Trevor Adams didn’t answer his phone.
He must still be on the plane
, she thought. In desperation, Alexis phoned her psychiatrist.

“Dr. Linder? This is Alexis. I need your help.” Her voice choked and she let out a strangled sob.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

Alexis cleared her throat and wiped away an unexpected sprinkle of tears.

“I think my daughter’s going crazy.”

“Star? What’s wrong with her? Is it her weight again?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Kind of. She keeps eating. She lost a bunch of weight since we came back from the clinic, but she’s eating everything in sight! She bit me and then she ate her own fingers when I wouldn’t give her any food.”

“She-did you say she ate her own fingers?”

Alexis sobbed again. She covered her mouth with her hand and wept.

“Oh, God. Oh, God!”

“Alexis? Alexis? Are you all right? Did you say your daughter ate her own fingers?”

“Yes! She ate them down to the bone! Three of them! She’s raiding the refrigerator right now! What’s wrong with her?”

“I-I don’t know. Maybe it’s some extreme type of binge-eating disorder coupled with dermatophagia. Has she ever eaten her own skin before to your knowledge?”

“No. I’d never allow such a horrible thing. What’s dermatophagia?”

“The eating of one’s own skin. It can be symptoms of a number of different things, but rarely is it caused by hunger. Stress is a major cause. Many victims feel stress and picking and eating their own skin is a form of self-soothing. Self-image issues are another of the main causes. They may pick their skin in the hopes of correcting some perceived irregularity in their complexion, though they invariably end up making themselves look worse. Skin-picking may also provide needed stimulation for the nervous system when someone is bored or under-stimulated.”

“You didn’t hear me. She didn’t just chew on her skin. She ate her own damn fingers and she did it because she was hungry! What the hell is wrong with her?”

There was a pause. She heard the doctor clear his throat.

“Self-cannibalism, autosarcophagy, is pretty rare. I’ve never encountered a true case of it myself, though I have read about it. A Chilean artist named Marco Evaristti held a dinner party for a few of his close friends back in 1996 and served a pasta dish with meatballs made from beef and his own belly fat extracted during a liposuction treatment. He claimed he did it as an artistic statement. That may or may not have been the symptom of a mental disorder. That same year, a deathrow inmate in Texas pulled out his eye and ate it. There was a pretty famous case of vorarephilia when a German man, Bernd Jürgen Brande, cut off and ate his own cooked penis before being killed and eaten by Armin Meiwes, the ‘Rotenburg Cannibal’, who also ate some of Brande’s cooked penis.”

Alexis gasped.

“That’s disgusting! Why the hell are you telling me all this? I need you to come over and take care of my little girl.”

“If she’s hurting herself, the best place for her is probably a hospital or a mental facility. Now, I can suggest a few places-“

“A nuthouse! You want me to put my little girl in an insane asylum?” Alexis asked with an exaggerated, theatrical tone of outrage.

“Not an asylum. A place where she can rest and be looked after where she won’t be able to hurt herself.”

“I-I don’t know. Do you really think that’s the right thing to do?”

“I think it’s what’s best for her.”

11 

Wednesday, 9:35 a.m.

Brian was hungry. He was already on his way to the restaurant, and there was plenty of food there, but he almost felt like he wouldn’t make it. In addition to his growling stomach and his rapidly shrinking waistline, he felt a deep existential dread. He literally felt like he would be dead within minutes if he didn’t eat something right now.

Brian had never wanted the treatment in the first place. It had been a birthday present from his wife. Going to the gym, taking up kickboxing, and running had all been working, but she had wanted to surprise him with something guaranteed to get the job done faster. He’d been ambiguous about the idea from the start.

“The doctors at the clinic say it’s a permanent weight-loss solution. One treatment and you’re guaranteed to drop as much as fifty pounds a day! That’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“Sounds dangerous. Has it been tested? Are you sure it’s approved?”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t approved in America yet. It’s a brand-new treatment, but this is one of the most famous and exclusive cosmetic surgery and weight-loss clinics in the world. They have all the best doctors, and they use the latest medical procedures. Their clients are billionaires, movie stars, and rock stars.”

“Sounds expensive. How much does it cost?” he asked, and then braced himself for the answer. His worst fears of financial extravagance fell short of the reality.

“It was fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand! You spent fifty thousand of my money on this?”

“Our money. We’re married, remember? What’s yours is mine. And I did it for you. This way, you won’t have to spend so much time at the gym, and you can spend more time with me!”

She’d been ecstatic. Brian sucked down his anger as much as he could. He made a pretty good living, well into the six figures, but he was not exactly wealthy. Fifty thousand was more than half their savings and it had taken him six years to save up that much. Now that he was married, it would probably take twice that long to build it back up.

He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths before speaking. He knew he had to phrase his words carefully. “But I like going to the gym, and I was saving that money for a house.”

“We still have enough for a house. You only need to put down 20 percent. Houses aren’t that expensive, unless you were planning on buying a mansion. I bought it for you. You’re going. That’s it. I already paid for the plane tickets and everything anyway. We can turn it into a mini-vacation. You’ll be happy we did this. You’ll see.”

She’d been right. He was happy. They had a blast in Cancun, lounging on the beach and drinking the most powerful margaritas on the planet, deep-sea fishing, visiting Mayan ruins, swimming with the dolphins. Even the treatment hadn’t been bad. It was just one little intramuscular injection.

“That’s it?” Brian asked the doctor, still holding the cotton swab to the injection site on his thigh.

The young doctor, who looked like he’d just graduated from college, smiled and nodded. “Yup. That’s it. You need to spend the night here just to make sure it took. If not, we’ll try again in the morning.”

“How will you know if it took?” Brian asked.

“We’ll weigh you in the morning. On average, someone your size can fluctuate between five and seven pounds between the evening after eating all day and after sleeping for eight hours. We’ll be looking for something more dramatic than that. At least a twenty pound loss.”

“Twenty pounds? In one night?” Brian scoffed.

“At least.”

Dr. Trevor Adams held Brian’s gaze without the slightest hint of humor. He affected an air of supreme self-assurance.

Brian instantly disliked the man.
Cocky little prick
.

The next morning, Brian woke thirty pounds lighter and ravenously hungry.

“The hunger is normal. Your metabolism is on hyper-drive. Take advantage of it. Eat whatever you like. We have the best chefs on the island here at the clinic. You don’t have to worry about watching what you eat ever again.”

By the time Brian left the island, he was a hundred pounds lighter. He had to admit, he looked great, but the hunger just seemed to get worse the more weight he lost. He wondered what would happen when there was no more fat left for his body to consume. There was no way someone could continue to burn a hundred thousand calories a day. You would have to eat nonstop to feed such a metabolism. As a chef, he knew the highest-calorie foods. They were some of his favorites. But even if he ate every fried, sugary, buttery food he could think of, dripping in gravy with a creamy dessert to follow, he’d never be able to eat that many calories.

The restaurant was only five miles away on Third Street. In normal traffic, he would have been there in ten minutes. But rush-hour traffic had slowed to a crawl.

“Fuck! Come on! Move!”

The fire in his belly had increased. Brian felt like he could feel his body eating itself, turning fat and muscle into adenosine triphosphate and incinerating it. The pants he was wearing had just been purchased yesterday when he realized his entire wardrobe no longer fit. In fewer than twenty-four hours, he’d gone down two more sizes, and his new pants were now sagging off him. He was wasting away.

He was almost to the Oltorf exit, just two exits away from Third Street, but he didn’t think he could make it. There was an Indian/Texas fusion restaurant on Oltorf he’d always wanted to try. He jerked the wheel to the right onto the shoulder and headed toward the nearest exit. He never saw the police cruiser racing down the shoulder, never even felt the impact.