Tim Curran - Cannibal Corpse, M/C

The Mad Hatter cut the ropes and Boyle fell into the tub, the bag coming off his head. His skull had pretty much come apart now. Plates of bone with tufts of hair sprouting from them were connected only by gristle. The tub was red with blood. The Hatter turned on the faucet, splashed some water around, helped clean it up a bit.

“Okay,” he said. “Tweedledee.”

Dirty Mary took a cleaver and started chopping through Boyle’s left ankle. Did so, and set the foot aside. The Mad Hatter took the hacksaw and, lining up his cut with the gash made by the knife, started sawing through the neck. As he sawed he said, “Don’t worry, John. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

Slaughter stood there with a butcher knife in his hand. His face was bloodless, his legs like putty.

“Grab a wing,” Dirty Mary laughed. “Plenty for everyone.”

The Mad Hatter was watching him now through the slits of his pink eyes. Slaughter did not look at those eyes, not for long, because whenever he did they began to run like pink tallow, flowing from the puckered sockets in rivers of pink slime.

Licking his sticky lips, Slaughter sucked in a breath, took one of Boyle’s hands and started cutting through the wrist. His guts throbbed in his throat and an itching madness tickled at his brain. Like cutting through a chicken leg, except it was so very fleshy.

“You have trouble with the bones and cartilage, asshole, use the bone snips,” Dirty Mary instructed, working Boyle’s left leg free. The pale globes of her tattooed breasts were speckled red. “Just cut and twist his hand. It’ll pop.”

“Now you know,” said the Mad Hatter, “why a raven is like a writing-desk.”

When Slaughter came out of that he was still in the park, crawling madly in ever-widening circles as his brain told him to just go with it, just ride it out because in its unreality was its very reality. Dirty Mary was his oracle that had become mixed up with the 158 Crew and a book from his childhood. He knew better than to reason it out. He knew that something was coming, whether revelation or stark insanity or perhaps both, he could not know.

You make everything so difficult, John.

Dirty Mary again, fondling herself.

You make no sense, he told her.

I make all the sense in the world. Pay attention now: why is a raven like a writing-desk? C’mon, John, answer the riddle. If you don’t I’ll toss you down the rabbit hole.

Slaughter’s mind was very clear and sharpened, it turned back upon itself, seeking and probing, opening doors that had long been closed. It looked in the dusty back corridors of his brain, found something. A place. Like some wellspring of childhood terrors opening before him and he knew it was where Black Hat had come from.

A city.

It was a city.

Yes, a city of the dead and the damned, those unliving and those undead and those that were never really born. A blasted urban gutter of nightmare.

The city was a shrouded, evil place of cyclopean buildings and crumbling streets that were mazes leading everywhere and nowhere. There were rivers and stagnant pools of refuse and broken bodies. The shadows had textures, physical presence; colors had odors; the ground heaved tears and flame; the sky rained blood and filth. There were great empty spaces, blackened and blasted, dismembered bodies spread in every direction as if some terrible battle had taken place there. The lanes were flanked with crucified children and adults impaled on stakes and set aflame. The flickering illumination intended to guide strangers to valleys of punishment they were better off not seeing. And everywhere, the hot, nauseating stench of cremated flesh and the cries of the damned.

It was Hell.

Maybe not literally, but something very much like Hell.

And this is where his tripping brain had dumped him, marooned him: the city with no name.

There was no time here or no sense of the same. Slaughter ran through black mists, from one street to the next, feeling something behind him. Something or someone. Always following. Footsteps coming through the darkness, slow and methodical and stalking. They were patient and relentless. No matter how far he ran, they only edged in closer and closer. Now and again, he’d see a face peering from the shadows. The face of Black Hat. Always watching, always waiting.

Slaughter kept running, passing through the rotting thoroughfares of the deserted city, looking for somewhere to hide or someone with warm blood in their veins to help him. But there was nothing and nobody. Just the breath of ghosts and the whisper of shadows.

So he stopped, a wild and raging voice in his brain asking: why the hell are you running anyway? This is what you came to see.

That was true.

Now nothing was following him. He stood there in a black wind of gritty crematorium ash and bone dust, thinking, trying to make sense of it all and knowing it was senseless but maybe not entirely.

This is the place you found when you went down the rabbit hole, he understood. This was it. A killing ground, or maybe the place where killing was born, the epicenter of violent death. Yes, that was it. That made perfect sense to his tripping/soaring mind.

He looked around.

He knew this was a place to fear. But he had not come here to be afraid, he had to learn, to, to know.

“Knowledge is the razor that slits your throat,” a voice said.

Slaughter turned and there was Black Hat, his white face almost luminous, his dead salmon eyes bright. “John Slaughter,” he said. “My favored son. What dealings we have had through the years! What heights we reached together! But our work is not yet done. Listen: there was once a king who killed indiscriminately. He had himself a wife, did this king. She was low and crude, a slatternly Judy was she. The king grew tired of her so he stuffed her like a tripe with bushels, pecks, and pipkins of loathing, falsehood, steaming servings of excrement. When his fatted calf was quite full, near to bursting, he offered her up to the soldiers of a dark kingdom, mercenaries and throat-slitters, gut-stabbers and belly-eaters, seed-spillers and blood hands. They ate of her and found her pleasing. The king, at any time, could have saved his fair wench, she of the hungry holes, his whore-bride fishwife, his vixen ogress. But he found amusement in her undoing and laughed did he as the soldiers filled themselves with her. Only at her moment of greatest defilement and violation did he step in and take the lives of the soldiers. But then it was too late, kind sir: for the clay, once cold, was not to be molded by mortal hands and the skein, once unwound, was not to be threaded by guilty fingers. Eh? Do you see, John?”

“You’re talking about Dirty Mary. How I could have saved her.”

“Excellent! There is meat between yon ears, not just dull gray sludge but pink dreaming meat!” said Black Hat. “Perhaps there was a parable in that story after all. I cannot tell you the how of the why and the how of the how but I can show you the ending of the game, the scene upon which the final curtain draws…”

Slaughter blinked and before him stretched an endless bone field where the skeletal remains of men, women, and children were intermixed with the bones of animals and rubble and refuse as if an immense graveyard had vomited up its dead and a city had been shattered to dust and fragments. Yes, an ossuary. An urban graveyard. He saw a few blackened buildings standing in the distance but everything else was rubble and bones and a blowing dust of desertion and a choking charnel smoke boiling into the sky.