20 - Ia! Ia!

They say you never forget your first, and that was certainly true for Mr. Riggs.

He had cooked many girls over the years. He knew the number to be at least in the high hundreds, and probably even into the thousands, but no feast of girlflesh had ever again quite reached the level of sheer pleasure and enjoyment that he had experienced cooking and eating his first, his student, Elizabeth, all that time ago.

Granted, it was now much easier to cook a girl than it had been, back then. He simply went to the store and bought one, of whichever variety he wished. There was no more need for stealth or clever skulduggery, which Mr. Riggs thought was actually something of a shame. The lengths he had needed to go to, to acquire Elizabeth without raising undue suspicions about himself, had genuinely added to his ultimate enjoyment of her.

The amount of time that had passed, along with the large number of girls he had cooked, were actually why he was standing where he was now, doing what he was doing.

It had, in fact, been well over half a century since he had eaten his first girl, and Mr. Riggs had grown old.

Very old.

His increasingly advancing age was why he had dedicated the last two decades or so of his life to searching for a cure to the age old problem of age itself. And, incredibly, he had found one. He had actually found several, in fact, each one more improbable than the last.

Eating the flesh of a mermaid would work, apparently, which was probably why the things had evidently gone very, very extinct thousands of years before. One had to keep eating the flesh, every day, continuously, in order to keep dodging the reaper's old scythe.

A philosopher's stone would also do the trick, it was said by many sources. Unfortunately, every such stone was used up, dead and dry, and there was no known way of creating a new one, or of even recharging the existing ones, despite the countless experiments aimed at doing so performed over the course of history.

The only sure way, which was generally considered absolutely reliable by historical sources, was to be brought back to life, by a mortal enemy, no less, using an extremely complex, very detailed, and sinfully dark ritual.

The location was very important, as well. Only a very few, very old, ritual sites would work, and most were either destroyed or very difficult to access. Thankfully for Mr. Riggs, one such location, the only one in the northern Americas, in fact, happened to be within a mere several hundred miles of his home. Getting there would have been tough, as there were no roads nor trails within miles of the place, had helicopters not been invented more than a hundred years before. A simple, and surprisingly cheap, charter of one was all it had taken to arrive at the site when Mr. Riggs needed to be there.

The one who performed the ritual of rebirth was absolutely required to be the one who had murdered the one being reborn, as well. Of course, it didn't count if someone killed you just to revive you with the ritual. How could a killing be a murder if the killer intended to just bring the slain one back to life minutes or hours later? Thankfully, Mr. Riggs had never intended anything but death and consumption for Elizabeth, despite his uncertainty at the very end, and he thought that his act would fulfill that requirement nicely.

Of course, learning that there was a ritual to bring people back to life was the easy part. Actually finding that ritual had been very difficult indeed. One couldn't simply search for A copy of the ritual, unfortunately, because one had to find THE copy, for there was, and always had been, only one. It resided within a book, bound in human skin, (which wasn't actually all that remarkable, these days, come to think of it) written by a madman, who had resided in what is now called the Arabian peninsula, well over a millennia ago.

Mr. Riggs had that book, on loan, from a very nice Argentinian gentleman who had been kind enough to lend it to the aging, former chemistry teacher, once the man learned of the quest he was on. The Argentinian had even been generous enough to point out certain substitutions and shortcuts that would ease the burden of conducting the ritual, which he knew intimately, for he was actually one who had performed it himself, some centuries prior.

Taking his new friend's advice, Mr. Riggs had begun gathering the components for the ritual, a very time consuming, costly, and difficult process. The first was relatively easy: the bones of the one to be resurrected, at least the majority of them, anyway. Mr. Riggs, the sentimentalist that he was, had indeed saved Elizabeth's bones, even going so far as to retrieve the scraps from the parts of her he had gifted out.

The second was several dozen hearts, fresh, cut from the chests of virgins. Children wouldn't do, either. It had been discovered, several times over even, that apparently only the hearts of adult virgin sacrifices would work. This requirement, too, had not been difficult to fulfill. It was much easier in the modern world than it had been in the past. Farm raised girls hardly ever even saw a man, these days, before they found themselves on sale and standing in a market's meat aisle. Mr. Riggs had even received a bulk discount when he'd bought the lot of them, much to the relief of his savings account.

After the first two, the many more ingredients for the ritual grew increasingly bizarre and difficult to acquire. The nearly full troy pound of gold had been the most expensive, followed closely by the small sections of rhino horn and elephant tusk also needed. The horn and tusk probably wouldn't have been so expensive if the animals they originated from hadn't been extinct for several decades by now.

Probably the most difficult to locate had been the three fungi required. The death cap, the destroying angel, and the fly agaric. Finding all three mushrooms, during the short time they were ripe, which lasted only days or hours, within the set, limited time frame the ritual worked in, had been exceedingly difficult. The only way he had managed it was to bring along most of the meat girls he was going to sacrifice in the ritual, using them to scour large areas of damp forest and meadow, which they thought was great fun, until they finally managed to collect all three. The three mushrooms were actually substitutions for fertile crescent fungi that were now quite impossible to find, apparently, and were some of the shortcuts the Argentinian had suggested.

The last ingredient had also been fairly difficult to produce: a small silver chalice full of the essence of life. This was commonly misunderstood to be blood, but the Argentinian had told him that it was actually one of two things: breast milk if the one performing the ritual was a woman, or semen if the one performing the ritual was a man. It couldn't be just any breast milk or semen, either, it had to come from the performer themselves. For a man of his age, it was remarkable that Mr. Riggs could still produce any at all, but he managed, with the help of a freezer and the occasional mouth of a slave girl, to fill the little cup up as much as he could over the course of several months.

Finally, with all the necessary ingredients gathered, Mr. Riggs had traveled to the ritual site to perform the ceremony. Elizabeth's bones had been arranged in the center, ordered piece to piece as they had been when they had still resided inside of her body. Circled around the dis-articulated skeleton were the various other esoteric ingredients, with the bars of gold arranged above the skull and Mr. Riggs' thawed out semen at its tiny toe bones. Finally circling all were the fresh and bloody virgin hearts.

Thankfully, the meatgirls themselves had helped Mr. Riggs with that last part, as he was feeble enough now that hacking open several dozen rib cages to get at the still beating hearts within would have proven quite a chore indeed. He had actually only needed to cut the very last heart out himself, the bloodied girl very kindly holding herself quite still for his weak and shaking hands.

Everything in order and prepared, Mr. Riggs doused the final light, plunging the ritual site into complete darkness. The ritual could only be performed on the night of the new moon, and no artificial lighting could be permitted to shine upon either the components or the performer.

The aging, former chemistry teacher stood and disrobed himself, shivering in the chill air. Elizabeth's bones and the ritual ingredients were before him, and the large, tangled pile of heartless sacrifices lay behind him. Inhaling as deeply as he could, he prepared for the chant.

The chant was in no known language, and had to be performed flawlessly, from memory alone, for the ritual to work. Even just pronouncing many of the words was difficult, as if the sounds that formed them hadn't been intended for human throats and vocal cords. Mr. Riggs knew the whole thing by heart, and had practiced it many, many times in preparation for this night.

He shouted out the chant, as deeply and loudly as he could, into the blackness of the night. As he did, fel light began to gather and shine among the ritual components. It started with the hearts, which began beating, frenetically, once again, glowing brighter with each beat. The light spread from them, as if oozing down a wall, to the next layer of ingredients, which began shining in turn.

What the words Mr. Riggs continued to bellow into the sky meant, no one knew. He could be appealing to the God of Abraham, or to Lucifer, or to Shiva, or Odin, or Coyote, or who knew what other being of power. He could even just be reciting some old madman's morning to do list, for all he could tell. It didn't really matter to him what the words meant, it only mattered what they could do, if spoken correctly and at the right time and place.

That time was now, and that place was here, and Mr. Riggs pronounced every word perfectly, even though it felt like his throat was tearing as he did so. The deeper he got into the chant, the brighter the ingredients glowed. Eventually, just before the chant ended, the bones at the center of the ritual started to gleam too.

As the unearthly light shimmered dimly from the old skeleton, the other ingredients all started melting. The gold, the three mushrooms, the beating hearts, everything. Even the little chalice that held a bit of Mr. Riggs himself melted, silver and all, into the growing puddle of liquid surrounding the bones. As Mr. Riggs finished the chant, screaming out the final few words as loudly as he could, the puddle snapped to the bones. The way the liquid suddenly clung to the skeleton resembled what a glass of water shattering might look like if played in reverse.

The liquid gathered up the spread bones as it moved, lifting and positioning them and itself into the perfect outline of a human form. The form, liquid and bones both, glowed even brighter for a moment, so brilliantly that Mr. Riggs had to throw up his arm to shield his eyes, lest, he felt, he be blinded.

Suddenly, the glow ceased, instantaneously. Mr. Riggs stood in the darkness once more, old, naked, and trembling, with his breath held, listening hard.

Before him, from near ground level, he heard a shuddering, gasping inhalation, then several wheezing, gurgling, groaning sounds, as if someone who had not spoken in years was attempting to do so again for the first time. Finally, after another few moments, a voice, which Mr. Riggs had not heard in over half a century, asked a question.

"Mr.. Mr. Riggs?"

Mr. Riggs grinned to himself. He knew he had succeeded, but he had to check the identity of the being in front of him, just to be sure. The Argentinian had warned him that, if done incorrectly, things other than the intended target of the ritual could be brought forth. Terrible things.

"Who are you?" he rasped, throat still aching after the abuses it endured during the chant.

"Mr. Riggs, is.. is that you?" the voice said, confusion evident within its tone. "It's me, Elizabeth. Who else would it be?"

Who else indeed, Mr. Riggs thought to himself.

"What is the last thing you remember?" he asked.

"Umm.. You had just put me into the oven. It was pretty hot. It felt hotter than usual, actually." came the answer.

"Do you know what year it is?" Mr. Riggs asked of the voice.

There was silence for a few moments, then the voice spoke.

"Uh, it was two thousand sixteen, when you put me in the oven, but that doesn't seem right, for some reason.." the voice responded, trailing off and growing more confused.

"Where have you been?" he asked, curiously.

"What.. What do you mean?" came the uncertain reply.

"Between the time you last remember, in the oven, and now, here, where were you?" Mr. Riggs asked, again.

More silence.

"I.. I don't.." the voice started to say, then hesitated.

"No where?" it answered finally, questioningly.

Mr. Riggs kindled a light. The little globe he tossed into the air stayed there, shining brightly, lighting up the entire area for dozens of yards. The future, thankfully, had much better options for illuminating a dark night than simple flashlights.

"Welcome back, Elizabeth." Mr. Riggs said, smiling down at the gloriously nude form of his breathtakingly beautiful former student.

"Mr. Riggs!" Elizabeth exclaimed from the ground, as she looked up at him in horror. "What happened to you?"

There was one final way to attain eternal youth, immortality. It was, naturally, by eating the flesh, raw or cooked, of someone who was, themselves, already immortal. The effects didn't last long, of course, but, most fortunately, immortals heal quickly, completely, and from just about anything.

Mr. Riggs bent over, his old back and joints aching, to give Elizabeth his hand to help her stand up, still smiling happily down at her.

"My dear, I will tell you all about it." Mr. Riggs said.

"But first, let's get a bite to eat."

End End