Tales of the Peculiar (illustrated)

The Splendid Cannibals

he peculiars in the village of Swampmuck lived very modestly. They were farmers, and though they didn’t own fancy things and lived in flimsy houses made of reeds, they were healthy and joyful and wanted for little. Food grew bountifully in their gardens, clean water ran in the streams, and even their humble homes seemed like luxuries because the weather in Swampmuck was so fair, and the villagers were so devoted to their work that many, after a long day of mucking, would simply lie down and sleep in their swamps.

Harvest was their favorite time of year. Working round the clock, they gathered the best weeds that had grown in the swamp that season, bundled them onto donkey carts, and drove their bounty to the market town of Chipping Whippet, a five days’ ride, to sell what they could. It was difficult work. The swampweed was rough and tore their hands. The donkeys were ill-tempered and apt to bite. The road to market was pitted with holes and plagued by thieves. There were often grievous accidents, such as when Farmer Pullman, in a fit of overzealous harvesting, accidentally scythed off his neighbor’s leg. The neighbor, Farmer Hayworth, was understandably upset, but the villagers were such agreeable people that all was soon forgiven. The money they earned at market was paltry but enough to buy necessities and some rations of goat-rump besides, and with that rare treat as their centerpiece they threw a raucous festival that went on for days.

That very year, just after the festival had ended and the villagers were about to return to their toil in the swamps, three visitors arrived. Swampmuck rarely had visitors of any kind, as it was not the sort of place people wanted to visit, and it had certainly never had visitors like these: two men and a lady dressed head to toe in lush brocaded silk, riding on the backs of three fine Arabian horses. But though the visitors were obviously rich, they looked emaciated and swayed weakly in their bejeweled saddles.

The villagers gathered around them curiously, marveling at their beautiful clothes and horses.

“Don’t get too close!” Farmer Sally warned. “They look as if they might be sick.”

“We’re on a journey to the coast of Meek,”^{1} explained one of the visitors, a man who seemed to be the only one strong enough to speak. “We were accosted by bandits some weeks ago and, though we were able to outrun them, we got badly lost. We’ve been turning circles ever since, looking for the old Roman Road.”

“You’re nowhere near the Roman Road,” said Farmer Sally.

“Or the coast of Meek,” said Farmer Pullman.

“How far is it?” the visitor asked.

“Six days’ ride,” answered Farmer Sally.

“We’ll never make it,” the man said darkly.

At that, the silk-robed lady slumped in her saddle and fell to the ground.

The villagers, moved to compassion despite their concerns about disease, brought the fallen lady and her companions into the nearest house. They were given water and made comfortable in beds of straw, and a dozen villagers crowded around them offering help.

“Give them space!” said Farmer Pullman. “They’re exhausted; they need rest!”

“No, they need a doctor!” said Farmer Sally.

“We aren’t sick,” the man said. “We’re hungry. Our supplies ran out over a week ago, and we haven’t had a bite to eat since then.”

Farmer Sally wondered why such wealthy people hadn’t simply bought food from fellow travelers on the road, but she was too polite to ask. Instead, she ordered some village boys to run and fetch bowls of swampweed soup and millet bread and what little goat-rump was left over from the festival—but when it was laid before the visitors, they turned the food away.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said the man, “but we can’t eat this.”

“I know it’s a humble spread,” said Farmer Sally, “and you’re probably used to feasts fit for kings, but it’s all we have.”

“It isn’t that,” the man said. “Grains, vegetables, animal meat—our bodies simply can’t process them. And if we force ourselves to eat, it will only make us weaker.”

The villagers were confused. “If you can’t eat grains, vegetables, or animals,” asked Farmer Pullman, “then what can you eat?”

“People,” the man replied.

Everyone in the small house took a step back from the visitors.

“You mean to tell us you’re . . . cannibals?” said Farmer Hayworth.

“By nature, not by choice,” the man replied. “But, yes.”

He went on to reassure the shocked villagers that they were civilized cannibals and never killed innocent people. They, and others like them, had worked out an arrangement with the king by which they agreed never to kidnap and eat people against their will, and in turn they were allowed to purchase, at terrific expense, the severed limbs of accident victims and the bodies of hanged criminals. This composed the entirety of their diet. They were now on their way to the coast of Meek because it was the place in Britain that boasted both the highest rate of accidents and the most deaths by hanging, and so food was relatively abundant—if not exactly plentiful.

Even though cannibals in those days were wealthy, they nearly always went hungry; firmly law-abiding, they were doomed to live lives of perpetual undernourishment, forever tormented by an appetite they could rarely satisfy. And it seemed that the cannibals who had arrived in Swampmuck, already starving and many days from Meek, were now doomed to die.

Having learned all this, the people of any other village, peculiar or otherwise, would have shrugged their shoulders and let the cannibals starve. But the Swampmuckians were compassionate almost to a fault, and so no one was surprised when Farmer Hayworth took a step forward, hobbling on crutches, and said, “It just so happens that I lost my leg in an accident a few days ago. I tossed it into the swamp, but I’m sure I could find it again, if the eels haven’t eaten it yet.”

The cannibals’ eyes brightened.

“You would do that?” the cannibal woman said, brushing long hair back from a skeletal cheek.

“I admit it feels a little strange,” Hayworth said, “but we can’t just let you die.”

The other villagers agreed. Hayworth hobbled to the swamp and found his leg, fought off the eels that were nibbling at it, and brought it to the cannibals on a platter.

One of the cannibal men handed Hayworth a purse of money.

“What’s this?” asked Hayworth.

“Payment,” the cannibal man said. “The same amount the king charges us.”

“I can’t accept this,” said Hayworth, but when he tried to return the purse, the cannibal put his hands behind his back and smiled.

“It’s only fair,” the cannibal said. “You’ve saved our lives!”

The villagers turned away politely as the cannibals began to eat. Farmer Hayworth opened the purse, looked inside, and turned a bit pale. It was more money than he’d ever seen in his life.

The cannibals spent the next few days eating and recovering their strength, and when they were finally ready to set off again for the coast of Meek—this time with good directions—the villagers all gathered to wish them good-bye. When the cannibals saw Farmer Hayworth, they noticed he was walking without the aid of crutches.

“I don’t understand!” said one of the cannibal men, astounded. “I thought we ate your leg!”

“You did!” said Hayworth. “But when the peculiars of Swampmuck lose their limbs, they grow them back again.”^{2}

The cannibal got a funny look on his face, seemed about to say more, then thought better of it. And he got on his horse and rode away with the others.

Weeks passed. Life in Swampmuck returned to normal for everyone but Farmer Hayworth. He was distracted, and during the day he could often be found leaning on his mucking stick, gazing out over the swamps. He was thinking about the purse of money, which he’d hidden in a hole. What should he do with it?

His friends all made suggestions.

“You could buy a wardrobe of beautiful clothes,” said Farmer Bettelheim.

“But what would I do with them?” Farmer Hayworth replied. “I work in the swamps all day; they would only get ruined.”

“You could buy a library of fine books,” suggested Farmer Hegel.

“But I can’t read,” replied Hayworth, “and neither can anyone in Swampmuck.”

Farmer Bachelard’s suggestion was silliest of all. “You should buy an elephant,” he said, “and use it to haul all your swampweed to market.”

“But it would eat all the swampweed before I could sell it!” said Hayworth, becoming exasperated. “If only I could do something about my house. The reeds do little to keep the wind out, and it gets drafty in the winter.”

“You could use the money to paper the walls,” said Farmer Anderson.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Farmer Sally piped up. “Just buy a new house!”

And that’s exactly what Hayworth did: he built a house made of wood, the first ever constructed in Swampmuck. It was small but sturdy and kept out the wind, and it even had a door that swung open and shut on hinges. Farmer Hayworth was very proud, and his house was the envy of the entire village.

Some days later, another group of visitors arrived. There were four of them, three men and a woman, and because they were dressed in fine clothes and rode on Arabian horses, the villagers knew right away who they were—law-abiding cannibals from the coast of Meek.^{3} These cannibals, however, did not appear to be starving.

Again the villagers gathered round to marvel at them. The cannibal woman, who wore a shirt spun with gold thread, pants buttoned with pearls, and boots trimmed with fox fur, said: “Friends of ours came to your village some weeks ago, and you showed them great kindness. Because we are not a people accustomed to kindness, we have come to thank you in person.”

And the cannibals got down from their horses and bowed to the villagers, then went about shaking the villagers’ hands. The villagers were amazed at the softness of the cannibals’ skin.

“One more thing before we go!” said the cannibal woman. “We heard you have a unique talent. Is it true you regrow lost limbs?”

The villagers told them it was true.

“In that case,” the woman said, “we have a modest proposal for you. The limbs we eat on the coast of Meek are rarely fresh, and we’re tired of rotten food. Would you sell us some of yours? We would pay handsomely, of course.”

She opened her saddlepack to reveal a wad of money and jewels. The villagers goggled at the money, but they felt uncertain and turned away to whisper amongst themselves.

“We can’t sell our limbs,” Farmer Pullman reasoned. “I need my legs for walking!”

“Then only sell your arms,” said Farmer Bachelard.

“But we need our arms for swamp-mucking!” said Farmer Hayworth.

“If we’re being paid for our arms, we won’t need to grow swampweed anymore,” said Farmer Anderson. “We hardly earn anything from farming, anyway.”

“It doesn’t seem right, selling ourselves that way,” said Farmer Hayworth.

“Easy for you to say!” said Farmer Bettelheim. “You’ve got a house made of wood!”

And so the villagers made a deal with the cannibals: those who were right-handed would sell their left arms, and those who were left-handed would sell their right arms, and they’d keep on selling them as they grew back. That way they’d have a steady source of income and would never again have to spend all day mucking or endure a difficult harvest. Everyone seemed pleased with the arrangement except Farmer Hayworth, who rather enjoyed swamp-mucking, and was sorry to see the village give up its traditional trade, even if it wasn’t very profitable compared to selling one’s limbs to cannibals.

But there was nothing Farmer Hayworth could do, and he watched helplessly as all his neighbors gave up farming, let their swamps go fallow, and hacked their arms off. (Their peculiarity was such that it didn’t hurt much, and the limbs came off rather easily, like a lizard’s tail.) They used the money they earned to buy food from the market at Chipping Whippet—goat-rump became a dish eaten daily rather than annually—and to build houses made of wood, like Farmer Hayworth’s. Everyone wanted a door that swung on hinges, of course. Then Farmer Pullman built a house with two floors, and soon everyone wanted a house with two floors. Then Farmer Sally built a house with two floors and a gabled roof, and soon everyone wanted houses with two floors and a gabled roof. Every time the villagers’ arms regrew and were hacked off and sold again, they would use the money to add to their houses. Finally the houses grew so big that there was hardly any room between them, and the village square, once wide and open, was reduced to a narrow alley.

Farmer Bachelard was the first one to hit upon a solution. He would buy a big plot of land on the outskirts of the village and build a new house there, even larger than his current one (which had, incidentally, three doors that swung on hinges, two floors, a gabled roof, and a porch). This was around the time when the villagers stopped going by “Farmer this” and “Farmer that” and started calling themselves “Mister this” and “Mrs. that,” because they were no longer farmers—except for Farmer Hayworth, who kept on mucking his swamp and refused to sell any more limbs to the cannibals. He liked his simple house just fine, he insisted, and didn’t even use it that much because he still enjoyed sleeping in his swamp after a hard day’s work. His friends thought him silly and old-fashioned, and stopped coming by to see him.

The once-humble village of Swampmuck expanded rapidly as villagers bought larger and larger tracts of land upon which they built larger and more ornate houses. To finance this, they began selling the cannibals both an arm and a leg (the leg always on the opposite side from the arm, to make balancing easier), and learned to get around on crutches. The cannibals, whose hunger and wealth both seemed inexhaustible, were very happy with this. Then Mister Pullman tore down his wooden house and replaced it with one made of brick, which touched off a race amongst the villagers to see who could build the grandest brick house. But Mister Bettelheim bested them all: he built a beautiful house made of honey-colored limestone, the sort of home only the richest merchants in Chipping Whippet lived in. He had afforded it by selling his arm and both of his legs.

“He’s gone too far!” complained Mrs. Sally over goat-rump sandwiches in the fancy new restaurant the village had built.

Her friends agreed.

“How does he plan to enjoy his three-floor house,” said Mrs. Wannamaker, “if he can’t even walk up the stairs?”

It was just at that moment that Mister Bettelheim came into the restaurant—carried by a burly man from the neighboring village. “I’ve hired a man to carry me up and down the stairs, and anywhere else I want to go,” he said proudly. “I don’t need legs!”

The ladies were astounded. But soon they had sold their legs, too, and all across the village brick houses were being torn down and replaced by giant houses made of limestone.

The cannibals, by this time, had abandoned the coast of Meek to live in the forest near Swampmuck. There was no point anymore in subsisting on a meager diet of hanged criminals and accident victims’ limbs when the villagers’ limbs were fresher, tastier, and more plentiful than anything available in Meek. Their forest homes were modest because they gave so much of their money to the villagers, but the cannibals were nevertheless content, much happier to live in huts with full bellies than to go hungry in mansions.

As the villagers and the cannibals came to depend on one another, the appetites of each continued to grow. The cannibals became fat. Having exhausted every recipe they had for arms and legs, they began to wonder what the villagers’ ears tasted like. But the villagers would not sell them their ears, because ears did not grow back. That is until Mister Bachelard, carried in the arms of his burly servant, paid a secret visit to the cannibals’ forest and asked them how much they’d be willing to pay. He’d still be able to hear without his ears, he reasoned, and though it would make him a bit ugly, the fine house of white marble he’d be able to construct with the proceeds would be beautiful enough to compensate. (Now, the financially astute among you may be asking: why didn’t Mister Bachelard just save up money from the ongoing sale of his arms and legs until he could afford a marble house? It’s because he couldn’t save money, because he’d taken out a very large loan from a bank in order to buy the land upon which his limestone house was built, and now he owed the bank an arm and a leg every month just to pay interest on the loan. So, he needed to sell his ears.)

The cannibals offered Mister Bachelard an exorbitant sum. Mister Bachelard snipped off his ears, happy to be rid of them, and replaced his limestone house with the marble home of his dreams. It was the most beautiful house in the village, and perhaps in all of Oddfordshire. Though the villagers of Swampmuck talked behind Bachelard’s back about how ugly he’d made himself and how foolish it was to sell ears that would never grow back, they all paid him visits and had their servants carry them through the marble rooms and up and down the marble staircases, and by the time they left, each was green with envy.

By this time, none of the villagers but Farmer Hayworth had legs, and very few had arms. For a while they all insisted on keeping one arm so that they could point at things and feed themselves, but then they realized that a servant could lift a spoon or a glass to their lips just as easily, and it was not much more trouble to say “fetch this for me” or “fetch that for me” than to point across a room at something. So arms became seen as needless luxuries, and the villagers, reduced to limbless torsos, would travel from place to place in silken sacks slung across their servants’ shoulders.

Ears soon went the way of arms. The villagers pretended they had not called Mister Bachelard ugly.

“He doesn’t look so bad,” said Mister Bettelheim.

“We could wear earmuffs,” suggested Mister Anderson.

And so their ears were snipped and sold, and marble houses were built. The village gained a reputation for its architectural beauty, and what had once been a backwater visited only by accident became a tourist destination. A hotel was built and several more restaurants. Goat-rump sandwiches were not even on the menu. The people of Swampmuck pretended they had never even heard of goat-rump sandwiches.

Tourists sometimes lingered near Farmer Hayworth’s modest, flat-roofed house of wood, curious about the contrast between his simple home and the palaces that surrounded it. He would explain that he preferred the simple life of a four-limbed swampweed farmer and show them around his patch of swamp. His was the last bit of swamp in Swampmuck, as all the others had been filled in with dirt to make room for houses.

The eyes of the country were on Swampmuck and its beautiful marble homes. The homes’ owners loved the attention but were desperate to stand out in some way, as every house was nearly identical. Each wanted to be known as the owner of the most beautiful house in Swampmuck, but they were already using their arms and legs every month just to pay interest on their enormous loans, and they had already sold their ears.

They began to approach the cannibals with new ideas.

“Would you loan me money with my nose as collateral?” asked Mrs. Sally.

“No,” the cannibals said, “but we would happily buy your nose outright.”

“But if I cut my nose off I’ll look like a monster!” she said.

“You could wear a scarf around your face,” they suggested.

Mrs. Sally refused, and from her sack she instructed her servant to take her home.

Next Mister Bettelheim came to see the cannibals.

“Would you buy my nephew?” he whispered, his servant pushing an eight-year-old boy before the cannibals.

“Absolutely not!” the cannibals replied, and gave the terrified boy a candy before sending him home.

Mrs. Sally returned a few days later. “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll sell you my nose.”

She had it replaced with a false one made of gold and, with the money she earned, built an enormous gold dome on top of her marble house.

You may have guessed where this is going. The whole village sold their noses and built gold domes and turrets and towers. Then they sold their eyes—just one each—and used the money to dig moats around their houses, which they filled with wine and exotic, drunken fish. They said that binocular vision was a luxury anyway and needed mainly for throwing and catching things which, lacking arms, they didn’t do anymore. And it only took one eye to appreciate the beauty of their homes.

Now, the cannibals were civilized and law-abiding, but they weren’t saints. They were living in huts in the forest and cooking their food over campfires while the villagers lived in manors and palaces, waited on by servants. So the cannibals moved into the villagers’ houses. There were so many rooms in the houses that it took the villagers some time to notice, but when they finally did, they were angry.

“We never said you could live with us!” the villagers said. “You’re dirty cannibals who eat human flesh! Go stay in the woods!”

“If you don’t let us live in your houses,” the cannibals replied, “we’ll stop buying your limbs and go back to Meek. Then you won’t be able to pay your loans and you’ll lose everything.”

The villagers didn’t know what to do. They didn’t want cannibals in their houses, but neither could they imagine going back to the way they used to live. In fact, things would be worse than before: not only would they be homeless, disfigured, and half blind, but they wouldn’t even have swamps to farm because they’d filled them all in. It was unthinkable.

Grudgingly, they let the cannibals stay. The cannibals spread out among all the houses in the village (except Farmer Hayworth’s—no one wanted to live in his crude wooden shack). They took the master suites and largest bedrooms and made the villagers move into their own guest rooms, some of which did not even have en-suite bathrooms! Mister Bachelard was forced to live in his chicken coop. Mister Anderson moved into his cellar. (It was very nice for a cellar, but still.)

The villagers complained incessantly about the new arrangement. (They still had tongues, after all.)

“Your cooking smells make me sick!” Mrs. Sally said to her cannibals.

“The tourists keep asking about you, and it’s embarrassing!” Mister Pullman shouted at his cannibals, startling them as they read quietly in the study.

“If you don’t move out, I’ll tell the authorities you’ve been kidnapping children and cooking them into quiches!” Mister Bettelheim threatened.

“One doesn’t cook a quiche, one bakes a quiche,” replied his cannibal, a cultivated Spaniard named Héctor.

“I don’t care!” shouted Mister Bettelheim, going quite red in the face.

After some weeks of this, Héctor decided he couldn’t take it anymore. He offered Mister Bettelheim every penny he had left on earth if he would just sell Héctor his tongue.

Mister Bettelheim did not reject the offer out of hand. He gave it careful thought and consideration. Without his tongue, he’d no longer be able to complain or make threats against Héctor. But with the money Héctor was promising, he could build a second house on his property and live there, away from Héctor, and he’d no longer have anything to complain about. And who else in the village would have not one but two golden-domed marble houses?

Now, if Mister Bettelheim had asked Farmer Hayworth’s advice, his old friend would have told him not to take the cannibal’s deal. If the smell of Héctor’s cooking bothers you, come and live with me, Hayworth would have offered. I have more than enough room in my house. But Mister Bettelheim had shunned Farmer Hayworth, as had the rest of the village, so he didn’t ask—and even if he had, Bettelheim was too proud, and would rather live without a tongue than in Hayworth’s sad little house.

So Bettelheim went to Héctor and said, “Okay.”

Héctor drew his carving knife, which was always sheathed at his side. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Bettelheim said, and stuck out his tongue.

Héctor did the deed. He stuffed Bettelheim’s mouth with cotton to stop the bleeding. He carried the tongue into the kitchen, fried it in truffle oil with a pinch of salt, and ate it. Then he took all the money he’d promised Bettelheim, gave it to Bettelheim’s servants, and dismissed them. Limbless, tongueless, and very angry, Bettelheim grunted and wiggled around on the floor. Héctor picked him up, carried him outside, and tied him to a stake in a shady part of the back garden. He watered and fed Bettelheim twice a day, and like a fruiting vine Bettelheim grew limbs for Héctor to eat. Héctor felt a little bad about it, but not too bad. Eventually he married a nice cannibal girl and together they raised a cannibal family, all fed by the peculiar man in the back garden.

Such was the fate of all the villagers—all but Farmer Hayworth, who kept his limbs and lived in his little house and farmed his swamp like he always had. He didn’t bother his new neighbors, and they didn’t bother him. He had everything he needed, and so did they.

And they lived happily ever after.