Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“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.