Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

And he laughed. Oh, how he laughed. But you have never heard such laughter, my friend. There was no joy or mirth in it. It was the sound of agony and cruel suffering, starvation and suicide, scraping blackness and minds imploding with raw insanity. “Little Injun! How dare you speaketh unto thou! But I do not lie, my little red heathen, my little wagon-burner, my quaint little red savage: Darlene took it. She begged for it and I took her. Before I opened her, I raped her and she died screaming, begging for more! Oh, how she twisted, how she writhed, how she foamed with blood and squealed a fine hellsong, plump squealing piggy!”

I shouted something at him and he roared with laughter again. I covered my ears because I would not listen and he grinned and it was the grin of something dead pulled from a lake. I felt things in my ears. Crawling things biting my hands, so I pulled them away and they were red with blood from the bites of hundreds of spiders that were pouring from my ears…black widows, I think. Black, round, shiny bodies, skittering needle legs.

“When I speak, you will listen. My words you will hear…do you understand, Little Injun?”

“NO!” I cried.

“Then let’s spin another tale. If you won’t listen I’ll crawl inside your head. Would you like that? Would you like me to live in your skull and scream at you all day long and on through the night?” He saw that the idea of such a thing scared me and knew without a doubt that he had my undivided attention. “Your mother, the poor squaw. 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.