Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“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.

Chapter Twenty

“And what was that?” Slaughter asked him.

Feathers poked the fire with his stick. He took another cigarette from Slaughter and snapped off the filter, lit it, blew smoke from his nose. He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a card. A tarot card. It was The Devil. On his throne, Satan sat with bat’s wings outstretched, one hairy arm lifted as if in greeting. The card was well-worn, greasy, yellowing.

Slaughter reached out to take it from him, but Feathers pulled it away, shaking his head. “No, I don’t think you should touch it, son. I think it carries a black juju of sorts on it.”

“A curse?”

Feathers shrugged. “Something like that. Something intended for me and only for me. I don’t think you need any of this bad rubbing off on you. Maybe there’s no power in this thing but I believe that there is. It’s from the Skeleton Man’s pack and when he comes to collect it, he’ll collect me, too.”

A fetish object. Slaughter had heard of such things. A juju could be both good luck or bad luck, and in this case it was definitely the latter. Like some kind of engraved invitation that would carry Feathers through the gates of Hell.

“But you still haven’t told me how you knew those things,” Slaughter said. “How you knew his name was Chaney or what happened in that house. How did you know those things?”

“I told you I knew ‘em same way you’ll know ‘em.”

“And how’s that?”

“By going on a vision quest.”

Slaughter just looked at him. The story Feathers had just told was weird, gruesome, and more than a little unnerving, but he wasn’t sure if he believed it or not. Feathers seemed to be honest and his words had a ring of truth to them…but a vision quest? That was mysticism and Slaughter had very little patience with things mystical and unseen, things divinatory and spiritual. He was by nature an existential kind of guy that believed in what he could see and touch and know to be true through his five senses. Other than that…he was skeptical. Yet, Black Hat had showed himself in that video at the compound and he had crept into Slaughter’s dreams. Maybe that didn’t mean much, maybe there was nothing truly flesh-and-blood about any of that, but Slaughter had a nasty feeling about it all.

“And how do I go on a vision quest?”

Feathers smiled. He put the tarot card back in his pocket. From the other pocket he took out a little packet of tinfoil and unwrapped it. Inside, there were three little dried slices of cactus about the size of coins. Peyote buttons. Slaughter had seen them before. He had tripped his brains out on the stuff once and was discovered naked in a field the next day.

“Buttons? The bad seed?”

“Sure, it’s the only way.”

“Go on a trip?”

“See your destiny.”

Slaughter smiled, thinking about it. Black Hat aside, he was out here to get that bio out of the fortress and maybe kick some Cannibal Corpse ass in the process. This was business. He was on a mission and he needed to hook back up with the Disciples. Did he really want to go scrambling his brains at this point? The answer to that was no , obviously, but as he looked into Frank Feathers’ eyes he saw something in them—an integrity, a complete honesty, a certainty that was nearly mystical in and of itself. Slaughter could plainly see that the man wasn’t playing with him. He really believed a trip on the button express could unlock secrets and unveil mysteries, open doors of perception long closed and provide an acuity, a bird’s eye view of things, that would be forever denied him unless he let the peyote wake up his sleeping brain and notch his mind up to complete consciousness.