Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Nothing good could come of a man like Chaney, she thought.

And she was right. For he was just a gnawed shell, an empty drum of giggling darkness and scratching midnight. He was no more human than a bag of cobras.

“Well, then,” Lona said. “I guess we have some papers to sign.”

She sat at the card table and opened a folder of documents. Chaney stood behind her and she could feel his shadow that was cold and blank. His own briefcase was open and she could see it held nothing but a hammer and a bag of long nails.

“All set to do some home improvement, I see.”

“Yes,” he breathed. “Oh yes.”

She turned to look at him, smelling his breath which was like thawing meat, and seeing that he was grinning. His teeth were long and overlapping like those of a crocodile. He had something in his hand. A six-inch blade sprung from it.

He handed it to her and although she shook her head, she took it in her hand and immediately began to shake and tremble.

“Use it,” he said. “There’s a good girl. Let us sign the pact.”

Still shaking her head, Lona sank the knife into her own throat. She fell to the floor, bleeding and moaning, trying to crawl for the door. She left a bloody trail behind her and died with her fingers gripping the knob. Whistling, Chaney took up his hammer and put a few nails in his mouth like carpenter. Then he lifted Lona up and nailed her to the wall, crucifying her. A nail in each wrist and one through each ankle. Then another through her throat just because it pleased him to do so.

He stared at her corpse for some time, knowing that a simple act of expiation was what was needed to get the ball rolling.

Wiping blood from his hands, he sat down at the table, humming, listening to the continual dripping of Lona’s corpse.

“And that is all I know about the man called Chaney. How I know you’ll soon learn. All I can say is that I learned it the same way you’ll learn answers to your own questions. Now, as I said, I was down with a violent fever for a week. More than a week…then, one hot night, I woke up with the most awful feeling of being watched. Of being stared at. I felt those eyes boring into me and nobody could convince me different. I remember being terrified, being filled with an irrational terror of the unknown only a child can truly know. So, despite the fear, I got up and went to the window. I saw a man standing in the road below. He was staring up at me. To this day I remember him only too well. He was the man in black, the Skeleton Man, and I knew this without question—a tall, narrow man, skeletal and grinning like a skull. He stood in the moonlight and he cast no shadow.

He beckoned to me and I felt rivers of cool-hot sweat course down my face. I shook and trembled. I tried to call out to someone but it was like my lips were sewn shut. What made it worse—if it could have been worse—was that I had been dreaming about him in my delirium. Ever since he walked off with my father and threw that look at me, drove me down into that rank pit of fevers, he had been in my dreams. Infesting them, you might say. The image of him had been growing in my head like a dark seed planted in the soil of my soul. I had not known this, not until afterwards, but it had been there, that face, that expression, that personality slowly eclipsing my own, growing in my head until it filled my skull, casting who I was into a pool of shadow from which it would never escape.

I finally managed to cry out.

But no one came to my rescue because there was no one left, you see. I cried out and down there, in the road, the Skeleton Man faded away. The last thing to go was the face. It was like a bright full moon burned into my retinas and I could see nothing else. Just that face. A face of darkness and light, a phosphorescent complexion that was pitted and sinister, teeth long and narrow and impossibly white. And eyes…oh yes, those eyes…those pink, pink eyes like glistening roe. Long after the face had faded, those eyes remained, shining and discarnate.

Though I was still pretty loopy from the fever, I made myself stand up straight. I made myself breathe in deep. I forced air into my lungs, oxygenating my blood, pushing the shadows out of my brain so I could see clearly, because I knew then that clarity had never been so important. I went to the door and that’s when I heard the first scream. It was quick and shrieking. Then there was another and another and another. All of them were quick. They left me reeling. I counted six of them and I knew they were the screams of my four brothers, my mother, and my sister Darlene.

I made myself go down the stairs.

I felt something behind me. Something following me. Even before I got downstairs I could smell the death: it was hot and meaty. It was a slaughterhouse down there. The floor was slick with fluids and entrails, the air tasted almost salty with fresh blood. I think I slipped on it and fell or maybe I blacked out for a few seconds. But when I opened my eyes I was laying right beneath them: the carcasses of my family. They were hanging upside down, nailed to the rafters above by the feet. Each of them had been opened crotch to throat and what had been inside was slopped over the floor. Their eyes were plucked out, their tongues yanked free, their throats cut, and as a final…depravity, the edges of their mouths had been slit upwards giving them each a bright red clownish grin.

They were dead.

My family had been butchered.

And into their backs a word had been branded. I think you know what word it is if you’ve been through Victoria so I won’t tell you even if I could read it.

Darlene, poor sweet little Darlene. She was on the floor by me, squeezed like her kitten…her guts steaming from her mouth.

Anyway, I could not scream. I had no air in my lungs. All that came out was a whistling expulsion of black air. And it was then that I became aware of a funny smell, a sharp stink like ozone that cut through the stench of death all around me: not subtle but searing and overpowering. Something in the corner by the woodstove shifted, rustled. A shadow rose like a balloon filling itself with air. There was someone there, some thing there. It was no optical illusion, a form was taking shape, something born of shadows, born of darkness. It filled out and I saw a man. He was dressed in black and his face was pale as moonlight, the complexion craggy and drawn. The eyes were pink and bright like pockets of pus.

“How fare you, little boy?” he said. “Does thee fare well?”

I wanted to leap at him and tear him into pieces but I knew I never could because he was a ghost. He had no more true solidity than mist. But I was young and hot-blooded so I jumped to my feet and ran at him. Even the pungent stink of open graves and corpse slime that came off him did not stop me. I went at him, swinging and clawing and he was like black smoke. My fists went right through him and he laughed at me until I fell at his feet, panting and sobbing and wailing.

“The little injun that could,” he said in that voice of whispering casket silk. “What spirit, what gumption, what guile.” He laughed again, then held out his hand to me. “Take it boy. Take what is offered.” The hand was like white rubber, shiny like wet neoprene. The fingers were white and slender and almost delicate. There were no nails at the ends of the fingers but thorny yellow claws. Flies were crawling over the back of the hand. “Take it, Little Injun, whilst I have patience. Your sister took it.”

I looked up at him and I knew I was dead. I knew he’d roast my soul in hell and cook my brains on a hot dog fork over the hottest fire in the nether regions, but I did not believe what he said. I had decided that he was the Devil or perhaps Death, or perhaps the very thing that had inspired those stories. Trembling and sobbing, I just looked up at him and hated with everything I had. “YOU LIE!” I told him “YOU ARE NOTHING BUT LIES!”