Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Hadn’t she suffered enough? Hadn’t she begged gods both black and white, pagan and Christian and wholly indifferent for a few crusts of bread? For food for the mouths of her children and clothes for their backs? Yes, Little Injun, she had. But being a squaw she was born to suffer for the word squaw is but French trapper slang for cunt. Did you know that, Little Injun? Now you do. For the hole of woman is the mouth of hell and the vanity that spawns Armageddon.” He lowered himself down until his face was six inches from my own and I could smell the hot, cremating stench of his breath which was carrion in moldering boxes and sewers clogged with black filth, excrement, tomatoes rotting black and babies swollen blue. “I took special pains with your mother. I had to rape her, Little Injun. For she was guilty of bringing you squalling little redskin brats into the world in the first place. So she had to be punished for that seething hungry hole of hers, sucking life and spewing babes…and as God is my witness—for he must be, mustn’t he?—I punished her and jabbed my frozen member into her until she screamed, until black arterial blood ran from her mouth, until she knew the torments of the damned and she renounced her false gods and swore allegiance to me. And then, and only then, did I let her take me in her mouth where I gave her a squirt of something that turned her tongue to pulp and burned a hole in her throat.” He laughed again and it sounded like babies flayed.

“Now take my hand, you squirming grub,” he ordered me.

And I almost did. But when I looked again there was no hand and there was no Skeleton Man. Just the sound of his laughter and two glowing pink eyes shrinking into the shadows where they winked out like dying stars.

I ran outside into the night.

I knocked on door after door after door, but there was no answer so I stopped knocking and invited myself in and in house after house after house it was the same: carcasses hanging upside down, slit open, gouged and rent, feet nailed to beams above. In the house of my friend Jim Fastwind, the corpses were moving. They were swaying back and forth like they were dancing to some sort of rhythm. Their mouths were opening and closing and they were all saying the same thing: my name. It was the Skeleton Man and I knew it was the Skeleton Man. He had done this. All of it.

Then he was beside me again. He didn’t ask for my hand, he took it. His hand was so cold it burned my own. He dragged me outside and across the way, into the house of Macey Flowers who’d just had a baby. Macey and her father were hanging upside down, of course, saying things to me in the voice of my mother. But I would not listen. It was blasphemy and I would not listen.

In the back bedroom, Macey’s baby boy was squirming beneath a dirty blanket, bawling for his mother whose love he’d never know again. I looked down at the child, afraid of what I might see, but it was only a tear-streaked face red with exertion and frustration and fear.

“Let’s play a game, Little Injun.”

I just stared at the child. I wanted to pick it up, hold it against me and make it feel better, but the Skeleton Man would not allow it and I knew it. When I tried to move, my arms were rubber. Dead, senseless limbs.

The Skeleton Man held a deck of tarot cards in his hand and they were well-worn. I remember that much. “We’ll cut for the little porker, shall we? A gentleman’s wager for I am a gentleman and you with your heathen red blood must surely understand pride.”

My hand was working suddenly and I drew a card from the deck without even thinking about what it was I was doing. The card I drew was the Fool and the card the Skeleton Man drew was Death. “Ha! You’ve lost, Little Injun! For Death trumps all!”

I wanted to run, but he wouldn’t let me. He made me watch what he did then. “Death, so sayeth the Lord of Graveyards!” He pointed a finger at the baby and it no longer moved. Its eyes were wide and glazed, drool running from its pink blossom of a mouth. Then it began to go green, it bloated up like it was filling with gas and then it made a sound like violent farting and maggots poured from it in squirming rivers.

“Do you favor the hand of Death, Little Injun?”

But I could not speak. It was only the will of the Skeleton Man that kept me standing, kept my eyes open.

“Tut,” he said. “I see that you do not.” Then he dug the nails of his left thumb and forefinger into one of the holes in his white face and pulled out a wriggling red worm. A resurrection worm of the sort that would fall from the sky much later on. It came out with a sound like a thread pulled through a button hole. He dropped it onto the dead baby and it swam into the foaming white sea of maggots. “Born again, so sayeth the Maker and Unmaker, breathe my plump little chavy, smile out at us from the charnel!”

The baby moved. It reached out its gas-distended fingers at me, making a crying, hungry sound as graveworms fountained from its mouth. “Hold it, Little Injun. Pick it up and love it. Press the sweet baby against your cheek. Breathe warmth into the little grub. But beware, I say, of its sharp little milk teeth.”

But I could not touch it and he did not make me. It wasn’t mercy; it was amusement. He pointed his finger at the baby and it seized up. “Back to the earth, sayeth my voice!” The baby not only seized up, but blackened and fell into itself with a crackling sound like melted plastic or dry cellophane. Then it burst open, cracking apart like an egg and there was nothing but maggots inside, shining and white, then a blackness of oily carrion beetles.

“As I did unto your family, I have done unto that squalling brat,” the Skeleton Man said to me with a whispering, windy voice. “And as I have done unto them so I have done unto the village of the Crabeater and certainly to Shayla Hawk who I made beg for death before I gutted her like a fish.”

I screamed and ran out of there, tripping down the stairs and crawling through the grass and that’s when I saw the town was burning. The fire was racing up the road and house after house went up in flames. I ran with the heat at my back and made it outside Crabeater Creek, winded and seared and blackened with smoke, but I made it. I watched the town burn flat.

They said a propane leak had started it all. Bullshit, of course. But nobody dug any deeper into it and that was that. I ended up in the mission school and some years later I became a tribal cop after I got out of the Army. Some twenty years after the inferno that took Crabeater Creek, I was out on patrol. In Crow Hill one afternoon, I saw the car: that black car, the Roadrunner.

I told myself it wasn’t so as you would tell yourself it wasn’t so.

But I knew it was the one, that same flat black monster with tinted windows that had crawled from the sixties. I slowed and saw there was a man leaning up against it. He waved. He was dressed in black. That white face. Those awful eyes. It was Chaney. It was the Skeleton Man. Again, I told myself it wasn’t so as I pulled the patrol car up behind that Road Runner. But something had already gone bad inside me, something went cold and my guts pulled down deep.

I had a mad desire to stomp on the accelerator and drive off, run while I still could but instead I pulled to a stop and grabbed the riot gun, clicked the safety off.

I stepped out, my belly filled with poison now. “Who the hell are you, Slick?”

The man in black just grinned and his teeth were long and narrow like those of something that fed on dead things. He was tall and thin. All over his white hands were names, dozens and dozens of names written in tiny, flowing letters.

“I said, what’s your name?”

“Chaney,” he said. “Chaney. Just like last time, Little Injun. How fare you, my heathen savage?”

There was an accent to his voice but I couldn’t place it. He had an accent in Crabeater Creek that night, too. It sounded European, I thought. Regardless, in Crow Hill that day the voice was raspy and raw like he had been gargling with powdered glass. His face was skullish, set with lots of hollows and draws, the lips thin as a paper cut, the flesh nothing but poorly mended scar tissue like he had used lye as a facial scrub sometime in the past. But it was the eyes lording over all this that found and held me…they were flesh-pink, bubblegum pink, and glossy, completely without whites. The eyes of an unborn reptile.

“Long has it been since we met, Little Injun.”

“Shut your mouth,” I said. “Tell me who you are and where you are from.”

He laughed. “I think you know who I am and perhaps what I am. But I enjoy games. So let us play, you and I. Now, you know I’m not from these parts. I just come and go like a…well, like a bad storm or a disease wind. I do my thing, as it were, I sow and reap, and then I just push on. My name is Chaney. At least today it is. I plan on causing trouble tonight and having a bit of a lark. How’s that set with you, Little Injun? About the time this village wakes from its nightmare and comes to its senses, I’ll be on my way. Another dark story for another dark and rainy night, hmm?”

I had no spit in my mouth. My throat had constricted down to a pinhole and I was having trouble breathing.