Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“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.