Headhunter

by Tim Curran

  I got my first good look at the Devil That Hunts Heads.

  He or it was easily well-over seven feet in height and probably more like eight, thin where he should have been fat and fat where he should have been thin. Between patches of furry green and gray fungus you could see raw, red flesh and jutting rungs of bone, skin like birch bark hanging in flaps…but not a lot for he was wearing hides. Blackened human hides stitched together like some crazy quilt. They hung in scarves and blankets, bound together with sinew and wire and frayed rope. The Headhunter wasn’t particular with his hides, because I could see the flattened expanses of legs and arms and splayed fingers drooping from them.

  I clenched my teeth so I would not scream and felt my mind fall into itself. I may have passed out then, I’m not sure.

  When I woke up…if I did…there were fewer bodies in the pile with me.

  The Headhunter was still there, a pile of heads at his huge, misshapen feet which were wrapped in tanned skins like human moccasins. He/it snatched a head up like you or I would a softball, that leathery hand looking like some gigantic spider spreading its legs. The hand was set with abraded, corrugated flesh through which the bones could be plainly seen. The fingers were easily ten inches long with hooked black claws that long again. He dipped the head in the bucket and I smelled a stink of burning meat and singed hair. He held the head in that boiling brew and then pulled it out, the skin sliding from the face like candle wax. He tossed the skull towards the wall of the others, where it could be fitted in later.

  He turned then and looked in my direction.

  Something in my bowels went in a warm, surging flow down my thighs.

  The Headhunter wore a necklace of jawless skulls, some still pasted with mummified gray skin and scalps of flowing black hair. I saw its face but it was no face at all. It was a mask, it had to be a mask—stretched, sutured flesh set with bloated, pulpy pockets of insect larvae that worked at the meat below. It had no eyes, just black and festering holes punched into its Halloween mask and from one socket a fat, brown beetle crawled forth and in the other…a nest of glistening, busy red worms tangled up like a ball of yarn. It opened its mouth, exposing rows of yellow teeth like knitting needles. Black blood and slime poured forth in a stinking spray.

  Some primeval god of sacrifice, a bogeyman, a night-haunter, a cannibal and headhunter and ghoul. A collector of heads and hides, a shadow from some cleft veil of nightmares, the grand and noisome seed of all man’s fear of dark forests and lonely places.

  Trang had told me how to kill it.

  To cut off its head.

  But the idea was ludicrous.

  I laid there, knotted in that heap of cadavers while worms and insects crawled over my skin and nipped at me, as that pustulant stink got into my blood and brain and a white, buzzing noise consumed my thoughts and turned my mind to a soup of nothingness.

  The Headhunter continued to boil his heads.

  Not living, not dead, but a blight both biological and spiritual.

  *

  At some point during that godless, unholy night, it left the cave and so did I. I don’t remember any of that. It was only many years later via regressive hypnotic therapy that any of it was learned. You should’ve seen the look on the psychiatrist’s face when she played back the tapes for me.

  All I know for sure is that I escaped and was found by a Green Beret patrol that got me out of there. That much is on record. I was in a hospital in Da Nang for nearly a month after that. I came to my second week there. My memories, my true memories, start there. When I was released, I left Vietnam and never went back. And as the years past, I figured it had not really happened. I talked with other vets and when I gained their confidence, they told stories as wild as mine. Tropical fever. Hallucination. Drugs. Temporary insanity. We’ve all heard the same story again and again.

  I went to Vietnam to write stories and I found the biggest story of my life, but I could never write it. Irony.

  The war has been gone for many years now, but lately it’s as close as ever.

  You see, my hallucinations have found me again.

  It must’ve taken an awfully long time for the Headhunter to locate me, but it did. Nearly thirty years after the war. Two weeks ago, in fact. In the dead of night, I woke and smelled its horrible smell and saw its horrible shape pass my window. Since then I have moved every night and my savings are dwindling and people are searching for me because they think I’ve gone crazy and they’re right.

  They won’t know how crazy until they find my headless body in some cold water flat, surrounded by rats and terrified winos and see those gigantic muddy prints on the floor crawling with worms.

  But they won’t find my head.

  It’ll be on a stake in some remote, steaming jungle clearing far across the world, some stygian never-never land of ogres and trolls and headhunters.

  —The End—