by Edward Lee
you are sacrificing the pale white intruder to the holy windigo of the forest.
here is our sacrifice!
hear our prayer, we beseech thee!
the few men left alive are systematically beheaded and dismembered. you stoop to dig out beating hearts with your flimsy trade-trowels, and squeeze the still-hot blood out of the meaty chambers, to drink. penises and scrotums are shorn out of groins. you use the scrotums for tobacco pouches, and after each raid you add a penis to the catgut war-necklace around your throat. your necklace, in fact, hosts more penises than any other member of the tribe. nearly one hundred.
the pregnant women are saved for last. you slice the milk-swollen breasts off a screaming pale thing whose belly is stretched pin-prick tight with child.
you sacrifice the gleaming child.
And wake up.
To see the two pallid-gray figures leaning over you. Faceless. Eyeless. One tall, one short.
They are both pointing at you.
***
A psychic ex-girlfriend who doesn’t love him anymore told him in bed one night that she dreamed a strange man was in the room, leaning over. The man was showing her snapshots of a dead person.
“But it wasn’t really a person,” she queerly stated.
“What do you mean?”
“It was half a person. A woman, I think—everything from the waist up, like she’d been cut in half.”
“Hmm. Strange.”
“She was walking on her hands. She was walking on her hands...through a jungle.”
***
And then there was always Aunt Annabelle. I woke up one night to a slow creaking. A rocking chair.
But there was no rocking chair in my room, there never had been. But here was Aunt Annabelle nonetheless, rocking away– creak-creak-creak —dead less than two days, and still shiny from mortician’s makeup and formalin-based embalming fluid.
I could smell it.
“Aunt Annabelle?” I asked, leaning up in bed.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said.
“But you’re—”
“I know.”
With an eerie quickness, she stood up, and, yes, pointed at me...
“Do you remember Brad?” she asked, and was gone.
(-brad-)
Dougie and the fat kid were loping home from Summerset Elementary, down Shetland Lane. The fat kid was pissed because the day before, that asshole Donnie What’shisname had beaten him up, and he ran home crying. Thank God, he’d been alone then. No one had seen him cry.
A ways ahead of them, they could recognize the exclusive, wavering gait of Brad, toting his clumsy bookbag. Dougie and the fat kid were mad at Brad because he squealed on them to Miss Wendell, for throwing paper airplanes, so Dougie and the fat kid had to take notes home to their parents. Not good.
“Let’s mess with Brad,” Dougie enthused.
Anger burns in the fat kid’s face. Not so much that Brad had gotten him in trouble but because that asshole Donnie What’shisname had made him cry yesterday.
“Okay,” the fat kid agreed.
Brad walked funny, like a wooden marionette strung to the fingers of a drunk puppeteer.
Brad was crippled.
Dougie ran up from behind, like a Stuka descending, and snatched Brad’s bookbag from his palsied hand. They jogged circles around Brad, right there on the corner of the fat kid’s house. Brad wailed, almost fell...
Dougie and the fat kid were really laughing it up, tossing the bookbag back and forth over Brad’s head. Brad’s face puffed, the brink of tears, as he reached feebly at each toss.
“How do you like that, Brad?” Dougie laughed. “We’re not giving it back. We’re gonna throw it in the creek!”
“No!” Brad wailed.
“Come on!” the fat kid implored. “Let’s really do it! Let’s chuck it in the creek!” Then the fat kid paused a moment.
“Let’s get him crying!”
Brad moved back and forth with all the finesse of a crab out of water, and he started crying forthwith. Dougie and the fat kid loved it!
A car came down the street, so they flung the bookbag over Brad’s head and let it skitter across the asphalt. Brad, walking as though he had cinderblocks tied to his feet, picked it up and teetered home. Crying.
“See ya tomorrow, Baby Brad!” Dougie shouted.
“Yeah!” gusted the fat kid. “ Cry baby!”
***
“Yeah, Aunt Annabelle,” I whispered to the empty room, in tears. “I remember Brad.”
(-haiku-)
You live alone. You
dial your number by mistake
and someone answers.
(-sergeant sand-)
“It tastes kind of like pork, when you cook it right. You grind it up and fry it, but always grind up some fat and wild onion with it. Shit, when you’re in the bush, and you’re starving...
“You’ll eat.”
***
When I was in the Army, I was stationed in Ansbach, West Germany. This was back in the days when there was still an East and West. I was a tank gunner. Man, I could pick fucking cherries at 4000 meters. Ba-BOOM! The Army did a great job of turning high-school punks into homicidal machines—man, I still see HEAT and SABOT reticles in my head sometimes when I close my eyes, drawing a 105mm bead on a T-72. “Aim for the turret ring,” my platoon leader always harped. “Then hit them with a HEP and spall the commie motherfuckers.” HEP means High Explosive Plastic. What this round does is it impacts the side of the enemy turret, covers the turret with plastic explosive, then drives a delayed primer into the shit. Makes everything on the inside turret wall break off and cut the crew to ribbons at a velocity of about 1,200 feet per second. Popping caps, we called it, and these were big caps. I was such an asshole. I thought I wanted to kill Russians for my fucked-up country.
Truth is, they would’ve killed me first.
Anyway, there was a guy in my barrack named Sergeant Sand. That’s right, Sand, like the shit at the beach. He was in The Nam. 11-Echo, tanker. Hell on fuckin’ wheels, man. You put ‘em up, we churn ‘em up. We eat napalm for breakfast and piss transmission fluid. Grease our fuckin’ treads with your 16-year-old girlfriends, man, and your mamas too, and your daddies. Hey, Ivan, where you wanna be buried after I pop your victor with enough HEAT to fill a fucking bathtub, huh? Roast Toasties, that’s what we’ll make ya. We’ll rock your fuckin’ commie world, man, oh man!
Anyway, this guy Sand, I thought he was cool. I worshiped the guy. At 19, I thought that if I could be like anyone in the world, it would be Sergeant Sand. A one-man brass-ball battalion. A walking, talking world of fuckin’ hurt.
He’s dead now, or at least that’s what I heard. He got TDY’d back to Fort Knox to train on the new M1A1’s that came out in ‘82, 1500hp turbine engines, full main-gun stable. Turned out to be a piece of shit till they upgraded them to A-deuces. Anyway, I heard Sand got in bar fight one night in one of the “wet” counties of Kentucky, and got himself shot in the belly by some ‘neck who thought Sand was putting the make on his wife. Knowing Sand, it was probably true. Oh, and it was a black guy did the job, which was karmic because Sand was an inveterate racist. But that’s all beside the point.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, this guy Sand, he’d put cigarettes out on his tongue, then smile, then swallow. Killed Charlie Comm, lots of them, and had Polaroids to prove it. Said he’d get antsy if a week went by and he didn’t kill anyone. In The Nam the 11-Echoes’d drive M60 straight series, and they’d roll through the jungle with severed heads on stakes sticking out of their bustle racks. Said he’d throw the Vietnamese kids moisture-activated fire pellets ‘cos they’d pop ‘em in their mouths thinking the shit was candy. Said he did a stint as a prison guard at Manheim, killed a guy who bit him on their way to transport, whapped the guy in the head so many times with his billy the guy’s brains started coming out his ears. Sand had a German girlfriend who said her father was a gate guard for the SD at Belsen. “She c
an stand on her head and then lean over and go down on herself,” Sand bragged, and it was true; I saw the Polaroids. “She’s turned on by me ‘cos I’ve killed guys,” Sand claimed. “She used to be a whore at The Wall in Nurnberg, she’d do gang-bangs for forty marks per G.I.” Sand said she could swallow twelve-inch knockwursts whole. Didn’t believe it till he showed me the Polaroids.
Back to the story. This guy Sand, I used to party with him. We’d drink these big bottles of Hofbrau, room temperature. For some reason when you’re in Germany, the beer doesn’t have to be cold. And, anyway, Sand’s got this foot locker under his rack, and I ask him what’s in it.
“You don’t wanna know,” he says. “You ain’t got the belly for it.”
“Come on, Sarge,” I drunkenly plead. “What’cha got in that box?”
Sand gets up then. Looks at me with a face like it was carved out of rock. And he slides that locker out from under his rack and opens ‘er up.
First thing he showed me was a bone. I dunno, two feet long or thereabouts. I looked at it real hard, but I was drunk, see? Took me a while to realize it was a human femur. Said he’d party in Saigon with the 176th MP’s and these Navy SOG guys and Aussie Special Forces, they’d get a bunch of hookers together and pay them to eat shit. Didn’t believe him till he showed me the Polaroids.
Pulled a jar out of the locker, had a baby’s hand in it.
Pulled a leather bag out of the locker, full of human teeth.
Pulled out a crinkly wallet, made of skin.
Pulled out another bag full of scalps.
“Tell me a story, Sarge,” I asked.
“Me and this guy named Winslow, we were on the same crew, he was TC, I was gunner. We didn’t have SABOT in those days, we carried lots of HEAT and HEP, and BEEHIVE in the ready rack, and we also kept a few Willy Peter’s around in case we had a gook bunker to paste. So we’re on a road march one day real close to the safe end of Highway 13 and we blow our neutral safety switch, which, as you know, the fuckin’ PAC won’t run without. So we dial up maintenance on the AN and ask for help, figure those chuckheads’ll dispatch a recovery vehicle which we were hoping. Those chuckheads would probably deadline the victor and we’d get to go back to the firebase and knock the bottom out of some whores’ asses. Anyway, engineering batt says they’ve got an M88 on the way but it won’t be there till morning, so we got a lot of time to kill and we’re sittin’ right smack-dab in the middle of some hot bush. So tell me what we did, kid.”
“Set up a defensive perimeter?”
“Right. Draw the range card, line up the landmarks, haul on the cammie net, all that happy horseshit. And we’re sitting there all day with our M-3’s out, waiting to deal some serious lead poisoning to any dink who thinks he’s gotta pair big enough to fuck with us, but nothing happens. So it gets dark, and we know we’re shit for brains if we don’t set up a hot line, so me and Winslow set up the Claymores around the site. You know how to lay Claymores, right?”
“Sure, Sarge. You kidding?” FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY, you think. “Can do it with my eyes closed.”
“So anyway, we lay a hot line out. Most guys, they wouldn’t bother, too much trouble, you know, but those guys are the chuckheads who always catch the MAC flight back to the World in a body bag. So me and Winslow, we sit in that hot bush all night hoping to get into the shit, and let me tell ya, you go out on a field problem in The Nam jungle for 20 days or so, and your OD’s will rot right on your body, you pull your cock out to piss in the weeds and it stinks worse than a couple of dead Charlie Comm cooking in the bush for a few days, and bugs? Man, they had bugs over there that’d carry your mom away. Slugs with teeth, and fuckin’ red fire ants big as your thumb. Lotta these ARVN guys were double agents; they’d walk off grid coordinates and wire ‘em back to the VC arty crews. So we’d stake the fuckers naked to the ground, pour some sugar water on ‘em, and, brother, those ants’d be eating their skin off in less time than it takes you to wipe your ass. They’d spin like tops, tell us anything we wanted to know, then we’d leave ‘em there. And I swear they had spiders as big as fucking golf balls, and when those fuckers bit ya you were in the infirmary for a week.”
But I’d heard all this shit before, from lots of guys. I wanted to hear about the hot line. “Come on, Sarge. Don’t pull my dick.”
Sand smiled, he knew. “Anyway, it was me and Winslow sitting up on watch. We had these two other guys on our victor, two niggers, Solkie and Buck—and I swear , the guy’s name was Buck! But those two ‘gers were cooping in the turret.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said eagerly, “so it’s you and Winslow on fire watch, waiting for the shit.”
“Right. And we’re sitting there with cocked M-3’s, Winslow on the back deck, me on the front slope, dreaming about the World, about all the pussy we’re gonna bust wide open, and how we’re gonna drink enough beer to fill a fuckin’ fuel gore, and then one of the Claymores gets tripped, like about 11 o’clock on the range card, and me and Winslow just about shit our OD’s, ‘cos you know what a Claymore sounds like going off. And we go check it out and find what it was that tripped the wire, some gook girl, probably 12 or so—dunno, maybe she was a sapper, or maybe just some kid prowling around, and what the Claymore did to her, she was like right on top of it when she tripped the fucker. Anyway, that Claymore cut this pan-face chick right in half...”
I was repulsed, yet simultaneously fascinated. Imagery, man. I’ve always been intrigued by imagery. And this was some image.
A girl cut in half.
“The two Jodys pop hatch, they’re shit-scared,” Sand went on. “They think it’s Giap and the entire North Vietnamese Army coming down on their asses or something, or like maybe the fly boys off loaded a daisy-cutter by mistake, but we told ‘em it was nothing, just a boar tripped the wire, so they go back down in the turret to coop. And me and Winslow are standing there with our M-3’s, looking down at this mess. When I say this chick was cut in half, I mean like everything from the sternum up was lying face down in a puddle about ten yards away, arms out like a ref signaling a touchdown, and everything from the sternum down was laying right there at our feet.”
Sergeant Sand paused then, cracked open another Hofbrau, lit a butt. Was this the end of the story?
“Well...yeah?” I asked, flummoxed. “What happened then?”
“We took turns fucking the lower half of the corpse,” Sand said, and swigged his beer.
I stared at him, mortified.
No, no, I thought.
I didn’t believe him.
Until he showed me the Polaroids.
***
Yeah. Back then I thought Sergeant Sand was cool. I wanted to be Sergeant Sand.
God forgive me.
(-the ushers-)
It is a fear-driven thing, these demented visions, these demonian ghosts born of the abyss in his own mind.
He often considers that he may be insane, or worse: premonitory.
Sometimes a week will go by and he’ll dream of baseball scores and they’re always right the next day. Sometimes he dreams of a beautiful Asian woman whispering numbers into his ear. One day she whispers “five three three four,” and the next day he gets a freelance check for $5334. One day she whispers “one-five-one” and later his agent calls to report a three-book sale, and the time on the clock reads 1:51 p.m. One day she whispers “three-one-four,” and then that night at work he responds to a gunshot call which turns out to be a suicide, but the address on the house is 314.
He’s prone to absolutely ludicrous dreams, often involving cruise ships and conventions in preposterous places and grocery stores full of sex fantasies and bakeries full of french crullers and apple twists. He dreams of tidal waves and sinking ships and seafood markets, of lost loves and loves never to be asserted, all in the most unseemly locations. One time he dreams of an old woman who turns into a rotisserie chicken. For fuck’s sake.
In late-November, he fell asleep on the Rte. 6 bus back from Chinatown–another bus cra
shed on the same route at the same time, killing several passengers—and dreamed about a girl he really likes a lot but never had the balls to tell her. Then the Asian woman’s face appeared in the dream and whispered “She will hate you on Monday, she will hate you on Monday,” and a week later–on a Monday–the girl he likes hates him.
Sometimes he knows when his friends will sell a story or a book.
Sometimes he sees auras.
***
That nutty girl he’d picked up in the bar that night. She’d said something else, hadn’t she?
“If you create something in your mind, and if you think about it hard enough, you can make it real.”
He thinks now of golems crafted of clay with his own hands. The maker destroyed by what he makes.
***
He gives them a scene in all of his books. The ushers.
It seems appropriate. After all, he’s a horror novelist.
Pug faces on stout, corded necks. Flesh the feel and hue of riverbed clay, pit-nostrils and chisel slits for eyes. They are bulldog-like in a sense, with limbs of bloated, bundled muscles, squab hands, and sausage-fat fingers with talons on the end.
They are malefactors, adjuncts, myrmidons.
There’s a black moon in a red sky, a veil, horrid and vast, refulgent with luminous fog, and a lake of steaming excrement. From fissures in the black rock, the pitiable naked horde is expulsed. A great black grackle flies overhead, its black-marble eyes gazing down in reverent delight. The horde is a mass of screaming bodies, terror incarnate, living chaos.
And from the steaming lake, the ushers arise to bull into the horde amid suboctave chuckles, their fat hands at once twisting arms and legs quickly out of sockets, wrenching heads off flexing necks, yanking whole spinal columns out of stretched open mouths. Fire gushes in the distance, greasy black smoke pours from cracks and rabbets in the vale’s stone face. The smell in the air is so sweet: boiling excrement, human fat cooking over crackling flames. The ushers travail, complacent in their servitude—honored in the call of their duties. Stout, stiffened pinkies calmly squash eyeballs in howling faces. Skin is flensed from bare backs as easily as wall paper being peeled, ears, noses, lips, and fingers are bitten off and nibbled as tidbits. Talons swipe to lay open bellies, misshapen fists are thrust into rectums through which innards are extricated like tissue paper from a gift box. The ushers grunt and chuckle, plodding on, popping heads with malformed feet, inhaling blood, holding faces steadfastly down to drown in the tarn of bubbling shit whence they came.