Cannibal Corpse, M/C

When I got my voice out, it was broken and airless: “Okay, Mr. Chaney, okay. I’ve had about enough of your shit for one day. You wanna blow smoke up somebody’s ass, it won’t be mine. Now, why don’t you turn around and put your hands flat on the hood of the car there. Assume the position, because I figure you know it.”

The Skeleton Man started laughing…at least laughter came out of his mouth. It never touched the rest of his face, though. That was still hard and cruel and hideous. The laughter was high and scraping and almost hysterical. “Now, you know you can’t put the cuffs on me, Little Injun. You damn well know you can’t any more than you can draw down the moon and put it in your back pocket or knit yourself a set of breeches from the fog that comes in off the river. Shall we be sensible? Shall we sit like old friends and talk of Crabeater Creek?”

The sweat was rolling down my face. There was a smell coming off Chaney and it reminded me of things long buried that had been exhumed. “Who the hell are you?”

Chaney the Skeleton Man lit a cigarette, only no flame ever touched it…it just flared up. Smoke rolled from his nostrils. “I’m Chaney. Already told you that. Oh, tomorrow I might be Smith or Blake or Lupez or Snarnov, but right now I’m Chaney. Fair enough, Little Injun?”

I could feel the shotgun in my hands, feel my finger putting pressure on the trigger. “What’re you doing here?”

“You already know why I’m here. I’m Chaney and I’ve come to do some business, that’s all. Next week, next month it’ll be a different town and a different name.”

Chaney stepped forward and I put the shotgun on him, had every intention of killing him. I had dreamed of doing it for many years. Only I couldn’t seem to pull the trigger. And Chaney knew that. He grinned, his pink eyes filled with motion like ripples in a fleshy pond.

“Now, Little Injun. Look what I have here. Look what is in mine hand.”

It was a book. One of those huge antique books, a folio like the Gutenberg Bible. A massive leather-bound tome thicker than a Manhattan phonebook. It was well-worn, the iron hasp rusting. I knew what it was: The Book of Hell. This is where the names of the dead were written, the names of the souls the Skeleton Man reaped. He cracked it open and held it out to me. The pages fluttered in the breeze. About two-thirds of the way through the book they stopped and my eyes locked on a single page. There were the names. The names of all the families that had been exterminated in Crabeater Creek written in a spidery precise hand using a faded brown ink that looked like old blood. I saw the names of Jim Fastwind and his family. Shayla Hawk. Skip Darling, his wife, and children. Lona Whitebird. They were all there, as were the names of my mother and father, my brothers and my kid sister. My name was there, too. In fact, it had been underlined three times.

By this time, the Skeleton Man’s grin was immense and ghoulish, an autopsy grin, a leering death rictus of long white teeth, the grin of a hungry corpse. His breath was like hot sulfur. “Now we understand each other, Little Injun, do we not?”

I was sweating and shaking, something inside my head, maybe my free will, melting and going to taffy. “Don’t you move or I swear to God I’ll kill you!” I was still pretending things were not what I knew them to be. Chaney was just some perp, some low-life criminal scum and me, Sergeant Frank Feathers, why I was going to run him in and put him behind bars. That’s how much I was deluding myself. But it was fear, friend. I was negotiating from a position of fear. “Put your hands up or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I will!”

“God has nothing to do with this,” said Chaney, still grinning. The Cheshire Cat? Certainly. But maybe more like the Cheshire Cat after starving a week in a grave and then showing up scratching at Alice’s window after midnight, grave-dirt falling from his whiskers, that horrible appetite on full display in the form of a toothy charnel grin. “And you will not kill me because I cannot be killed. I, who am the cosmic lord of death! I, the dark lord of gallows and graveyards, gibbets and—”

“SHUT UP!” I screamed at him. “SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THAT FILTH! I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE OF YOUR DIRTY ROTTEN FUCKING FILTH! YOU PESTILENCE! YOU SORE! YOU CANCER!”

I brought the riot gun up at that moment, my hands shaking wildly as I tried to jerk the trigger. But it was no good, simply no good. I did not have the strength or the will. Tears began to roll down my cheeks and I saw in Chaney’s face the images of my mother and father, my brothers and little sister, Jim Fastwind and Shayla Hawk and the lunatic giggling face of Skip Darling.

“I know all about you, Frank Feathers,” said the Skeleton Man.

“You don’t!”

“Ah, Little Injun, but I do. Your daddy was Jim and your mother was Clarice. I knew them well, as did I your brothers and your sister Darlene because I gutted them and I nailed them to the ceiling, did I not? I danced in the moonlight wearing the bowels of your baby sister! I chewed her from cunt to throat! Yummy, yummy, hot in my tummy!” He laughed with a sound like breaking glass. “But I know more, much more! You had a kid brother that went stillborn in the womb. When you were seven years old you got bit by a spider and contracted blood poisoning and nearly died. You had another sister named Amanda that was run down by a car when you were but five years old. You played baseball and you got your first handjob from a squaw named Leslie when you were thirteen. You were in the Army and you knocked up a girl in Germany, only you never did meet your son. What a shame. And not six years back your wife died of cancer. Now wasn’t that a sad business? She was in a coma for two weeks beforehand and when she finally came out of it, she was so doped up on morphine she thought you were her Aunt Maurine. Remember, Little Injun? Remember how you held her hand when they shut her life support off? The digital displays slowly dropping as she passed into death? The way her hand felt small and greasy in your own like the flesh of a mushroom and how you cried as she passed from this life and—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

The Skeleton Man just laughed, laughed with that same high and hysterical sound, just beside himself and quite possibly out of his mind. And at that moment, I was not sure about anything. Not sure if this was even happening or that, if it was, if Chaney was even a man. Yes, he had two arms and two legs, one head, all the standard equipment, but there was something terribly off about him. He was like some cardboard cut-out, something one-dimensional lacking any true depth or substance. Not really a human being as such, but the reflection of one, a shade, a grim caricature of a man. I had the disquieting notion that if Chaney turned sideways, he would cease to exist altogether. That if I was able to actually pull the trigger of the riot gun, Chaney would not die from the blast, would not even be wounded…he would simply dissipate like a cloud of smoke, atoms scattered, waiting to be organized into Chaney the Skeleton Man all over again.

I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping Chaney would not be there when I opened them. But he was. He was there, all right, and he was no longer smiling. He was just staring with those pink, steaming eyes. “Put the gun in your mouth, Little Injun,” he said.

I tried to jerk the trigger again, but it was no good. Something was inside my head, something dark and diabolic, something eating my mind up one bite at a time and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do but feel my willpower being shredded and ingested. I was just a passenger, a marionette waiting to be worked.

“Do as you are told, Little Injun.”

So I did. I slid that oily, black-tasting barrel into my mouth and as much as the idea was abhorrent to who and what I was, I saw escape. I saw a way out. I saw release from the clutches of the thing that held me and that release was pure, it was sweet to taste. I frantically tried to pull the trigger but my fingers were no good, they would not obey.

“Soon enough, Little Injun, soon enough.”

The riot gun fell from my hands and clattered into the street. I was defeated and fatigued. I was drained. I was broken. I noticed then what so many had noticed before: that the Skeleton Man cast no shadow. Not that that bit of information was any real surprise: things like him never cast shadows.

Something released me at that moment and I ran.

I ran out of pure animal fear. I ran through fields and thickets, I splashed through streams, I struggled in the mud of bogs…and all the while, the Skeleton Man followed. He did not walk or run, he drifted six inches off the ground, telling me how he had killed my family and speaking in their voices and telling me how, when the time came, I would die, too.

Then he was gone and I was alone, sore and scratched from twigs scraping my face, my uniform filthy with dirt and pond mud and pickers. I think I made up some crazy story about chasing some guy, something the other cops could understand, and it was that night I found something in my pocket, something he had given me.