by Ron Shiflet
“Tom, stop screaming,” Bob cried. The fingers flexed and closed his mouth. “Oh Father in Heaven, help us, save our souls...” he sobbed. Suddenly the bony hand flicked Bob’s head against the wood floor. He thudded into unconsciousness.
Morning came and Bob awoke to birds chirping. It’s still dark, he thought to himself, why do I hear the birds? Then the memory came. I’m in my sleeping bag. Some nightmare, he told himself. Birds outside; must be early morning. Still, Bob was uneasy. The dream last night was far too real. He slowly straightened in the bag, making sure his head didn’t pop free. He tentatively pulled the thick padding down from his head inch by inch, waiting for Tom to call out to him. The cover finally unveiled his left eye, which welcomed the morning light. Bob looked through the soft haze of dust particles floating in the streaks of early sunlight at the closed door toward the back of the kitchen. Damn, he thought. Some dream. I swore that door was open. “Hey, fool!” he yelled across the room, “We gotta get going to Daytona and the drinking and finding the girls.”
Suddenly feeling foolish, alive and brave again he sat up and looked over at Tom, confident the world was all right again. His rectum tightened as if someone had reached up and twisted his anus. “Gaa, Gaa, God!” hissed from his mouth between the vomit and gasping beyond his control. He pushed himself along the floor, away from the horror.
“Think! Think! Think! It can’t be!” he kept telling himself while watching Tom lying still, unmoving. The rib cage now encased Tom. The discolored cranium was over his head and remaining pieces of skull covered him in a grotesque jigsaw puzzle. Tom was imprisoned within a skeleton. The bony arms ran down exactly parallel to Tom’s, his hands held by the skeletal fingers in a vice-like grip. The skeleton’s legs wrapped like vines around its victim.
Thoughts exploded within Bob’s tortured mind. Am I still dreaming? Do something! Run! Help Tom! Overcome with horror he slowly staggered to his feet, his body soaked with a cold sweat. The doors were open. He realized he could run...or help Tom.
Gathering all his nerve, he stepped over to the skeleton and tugged on the lower arm bone. It didn’t budge, but the monstrosity that was Tom jerked an inch towards him.
“Bob!” Tom’s voice brought him back to reality. “Bob!”
He grabbed the skull and tried to push it apart. “Tom, hold on, I’ll get you loose!”
He pulled with all his strength against the skeleton, but nothing moved. Looking through the skeleton’s right orb into Tom’s terrified eye he asked, “What can I do, Tom?”
The mouth painfully moved beneath the bony jaw. “It’s constricting around me...draining me.”
The voice was barely audible; parched lips had somehow moved to make the sentence. Tom looked too pale, almost milky white. “Hold on, Tom, I’m going for help!’
Bob sprang up and tore out of the house and down the path. Splitch, splitch squelched out with each footstep as he raced over the soaked lawn and soggy dirt drive toward the frontage road. Nothing was in sight, so he turned toward the interstate, already out of breath from terror and exertion, but still running at gazelle-like speed. A blue Ford pickup turned from the intersection coming toward him. “Thank God! Thank God!” he wept. He stepped into the middle of the road frantically waving his arms. The elderly driver slowed, but as Bob approached the truck the old man sped up and left. Running after him, Bob cursed the driver. Almost to the intersection another car turned onto the frontage road. He waved his arms rapidly and stayed in the middle, refusing to give the green sedan room to go around.
The grey-haired lady blew her horn while Bob cried, “Please, lady! Oh God, please lady!” Tears streamed down his panicked face.
Finally the old woman cracked the window an inch. “Get out of the road, young man!” She screamed.
“Lady, take me to the police!” Bob replied.
“Get out of the road!”
It was too much. Bob began to beat on the hood, shouting, “Help me! Help me!”
The woman got out of her car and began to run, but Bob caught her before she cleared the rear bumper. He slapped the back of her head and knocked her to the ground. Terrified, the woman rolled on the ground, the right side of her face scraped and bloodied. “Don’t hurt me! I was only going to visit an elderly couple from my church.” She sat up and pulled her red sweater tightly around her body.
Bob scooped her up by one arm. “Take me to the damn sheriff, lady. I don’t know my way around here!” He threw the sobbing woman into the car and climbed into the passenger seat as she shakily put the key in the ignition.
“Drive as fast as you can, lady!” he ordered. She hesitated for a few seconds, whispering prayers between stifled sobs, then turned the ignition and began driving. The woman drove far under the speed limit despite his commands. She regained some of her nerve with the realization that Bob really was going to the police. Sarah Nesbitt had devoted her life to others, hadn’t her friends always complimented her charitable work, and now God was protecting her, giving her a way to get even with this awful boy. She purposefully drove even slower as she reveled in her fulfilling beliefs. “All you had to do was ask for a ride, young man. I’m a Christian lady, I would help anyone. You needn’t have gotten so agitated.”
The self-satisfied smirk on the woman’s face infuriated Bob. “Shut the hell up, lady! You wouldn’t help any damn person! You tried to leave me when I was begging you for help,” he snarled. “Drive faster!”
“Just one more minute, young man. You’ll get to the police and we’ll see what happens; you attacking me and swearing at me. I know Sheriff Delaney personally; he knows I help those in need. We’ll see, we’ll just see!”
She turned left and Bob saw the sheriff’s office “Thank God,” he muttered under his breath. He would have probably beaten the woman’s self-righteous face in if she said another word. He bolted from the car and began running for the office.
He heard the woman calling after him, “We’ll see about you hitting Mrs. Sarah Nesbitt! We’ll just see! Cursing and hitting a Christian woman, we’ll just see!”
He was through the doors in a second and yelled at the first deputy, “A skeleton’s eating my friend! It’s got my friend!”
Instantly Bob was stunned by the insanity of that sentence. The deputy jumped up and yelled, “Fred, help this guy and get him some water while I call Sheriff Delaney!”
Mrs. Nesbitt carefully entered the room, wiping away an appropriate amount of tears and whimpered, “Deputy Turner, arrest this animal. He struck me!”
The deputy ignored Mrs. Nesbitt and ran down the hall. Fred quickly stepped over and helped Bob into the waiting area, handing him some water. “I want this man arrested now,” the woman repeated over and over, but nobody listened.
In a few moments the deputy returned with Sheriff Delaney. Delaney had a bottle of Bacardi rum in his left hand. He took the glass of water and emptied half onto the floor, then refilled the glass with dark rum and handed it to Bob.
The sheriff turned and looked fiercely at the old witch. He remembered the woman’s bitter gossip after church services; her need to be infuriatingly proper and snobby. Delaney’s wife has always pleaded with him to be nice to the old hag. “Think of the good woman underneath,” his wife would say, “the one who delivers canned goods to the poor.”
Today, his wife lost. “Get the hell out of here, Mrs. Nesbitt! Fred, throw this old gal out on her ass. No, wait a moment. Where did you pick this boy up, Mrs. Nesbitt?”
“You don’t talk to me like that, Sheriff Delaney!”
“Throw her ass out, Fred!”
A stunned Mrs. Nesbitt was unceremoniously rushed out the door. Bob finished his drink, then followed Fred and the sheriff out front to the sheriff’s car. They climbed in and Sheriff Delaney said, “Hit the lights and siren. Tell two units to meet us on old Tyler road. Have one of them pick up Dr. Zeigler at the pathology lab. Just tell him it’s happened again; he’ll be at the hospital emergency exit when they swing through.�
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Bob sat completely dazed; everything had happened so fast. The rum had helped steady his hands but his thoughts were still racing. How did they know to go to the old Tyler road; how did they know what was going on? He looked up at the sheriff and asked, “You know?”
Delaney looked grim. “Skeleton ate your wife or friend or something? Yeah, we know. What happened?”
Bob related the events as quickly as possible. When he finished he repeated his question, “How did you know?”
“Happens every four or five years,” Delaney replied. “We usually don’t get on the scene until days later.”
The car swerved onto Old Tyler road, siren wailing. “Jesus, we’re back,” whispered Bob.
The cruiser made the last mile in under a minute and pulled into the dirt driveway with another car close behind. The house stood faded, silent and empty, like an evil temple in the wet grass. The officers jumped out of the cars with guns drawn and sprinted for each end of the house while the following cruiser sped to the right side of the house driving straight over the lawn until it bogged down in the soaked earth. Fred sprinted to the left side of the house and began shouting, “It’s coming out the back!”
They ran with Sheriff Delaney and after turning the corner Delaney joined Fred in emptying his revolver at the spectacle. Bob watched through thunderous crashes and puffs of powder-flavored blue smoke as the skeleton walked slowly down into the trees that fronted the long swampy area. “I think I hit it once,” Fred said as the bones blended into the limbs and Spanish moss.
The men walked onto the front porch and watched as the last cruiser flew up the drive.
Two deputies and a well-dressed man jumped out and hurried to the porch.
Sheriff Delaney greeted the deputies by name and turned to the other man. “We were a minute too late, Claude.” He gestured to Bob, “By the way this is...what is your name, son?”
“Bob Murray.”
Bob, this is Dr. Claude Zeigler. Claude, Bob spent the night with the damn thing. Came into the station about twenty minutes ago.” The lawman gestured wildly at the house. “We almost got it!”
The doctor regarded Bob intently with his cloudy grey eyes. “Who was with you?”
Bob sighed. “My roommate from college. We were hitching to Florida.”
“You know his people?”
“Yeah,” said Bob with a shrug of his shoulders. “I visited his home over Christmas break.”
“Damn, that’s too bad. We’re going to need a story to explain his disappearance.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“You’ve seen his body!” the doctor said tersely. “You know what I mean!”
Bob looked shocked. “He was alive and all right when I left him. I mean, he was alive, but the skeleton was around him.”
No one spoke for a moment, then everyone pushed through the door into the house. “Which room?” yelled Delaney.
Bob pointed ahead. “The kitchen.”
Dr. Zeigler was the first to enter. The remaining officers followed and stood waiting outside the doorway. Dr. Zeigler knelt and slowly ran his hands over an empty, wrinkled sack where Tom had been. The officers stood frozen like birds caught in a cobra’s hypnotic glare. They couldn’t take their eyes away from the doctor’s searching hands. Bob looked around and called, “Tom? Tom? Where are you?”
Zeigler’s head pivoted and his foggy eyes focused on Bob. “You don’t know? No. You don’t know this skin...” Bob glanced at the transfixed deputies and back to Dr. Zeigler as the dark truth came to him. “Bob...this bag of skin is your friend!”
He stood and the crumpled sack unfolded. The features, the hair, everything was there as Tom’s empty body stretched out. “This is all that’s left.” The room whirled; grey, black, green, flashing stars, white colors exploded before Bob’s unseeing eyes. He slumped into an officer’s arms.
Overhead was a cool dull fluorescence when Bob opened his eyes. He thought the nightmare was gone, but when he turned his head there sat Delaney and Dr. Zeigler. He closed his eyes again. “It was real, then?” he asked.
Dr. Zeigler rose and walked over to the bed. “Sorry, Bob. I thought you had seen more, knew more. We’ve made up a story to explain your disappearance. No one would believe the truth. The story is that you two were on the bridge crossing the Great Pee Dee River swamp. A truck came too close and you both jumped. You were taken by the river and your bodies never recovered. He shook his head sadly. ”You can’t imagine what a negative effect the story of the skeleton would have on the tourist industry.”
Dazed as he was, Bob suddenly realized he was strapped to the bed. He twisted and struggled, but felt too weak and drowsy to fight. Collapsing back onto the pillow, he asked his captors, “What was that...thing?”
Delaney joined the doctor at the bed. “No one knows for sure. Some say it was a Confederate captain who betrayed his men. We don’t know, only that these reports go back to the end of that war. We find two or three bodies every ten years or so; or more precisely, we find the skins. The thing apparently surrounds its victims and drains them, like a spider. We know we can hurt it. Eighty years ago it attacked some sleeping loggers and they managed to chop one of its legs off. But somehow, over the years, it grew the leg back. He looked down at his hands and shuddered. We know it’s out there...it stays in the river swamp where we can’t track it. Then, one day, a drunk, or an outsider like yourself, enters a lonely, abandoned place and meets this monster. It seems to like loners, to operate out of sight.”
Delaney held Bob still as Zeigler injected the boy with a powerful sedative. The drug began to work immediately. Bob drifted into a stupor, the sheriff’s final words beating into his mind. “Now you know as much as we do...you sleep now and we’ll question you more...later.”
Bob’s unconscious mind fell into a nightmare of bones and skeletons and bags of skin. Tomorrow he would find himself a ward of the state, committed by special order to the Florence County Asylum. There he would find fourteen other men and women who had survived a night with the skeleton.
SUCH A SWEET GIRL
MARK W. JOHNSON
An attractive thirty-two year old woman stepped off the bus in front of Lem’s General Mercantile, and into the nineteen fifties. At least, that is how Tara Lloyd always viewed Milderton. It seemed to be such a sweet little town, but not home, and she liked to do more than watch the grass grow on Friday nights.
Tara walked along the sleepy street, carrying a single piece of luggage by its shoulder strap, her curly blonde hair waving in the gentle breeze. She passed the barbershop, its candy cane pole still endlessly revolving. The one-room town hall was next, with several old men sitting on the porch, passing the time quietly.
“Morning,” one called to her.
“Morning,” she replied, never breaking her stride.
The people were all friendly, but nothing interesting ever happened here. Everything was just as Tara remembered from summer vacations. She could have described the overalls and checkered shirts worn by the men at the town hall without ever looking. She could have described every minute detail of Milderton without ever leaving Richmond, and nothing would have changed.
She saw a man who might have been forty walking, his Scottie running around his legs, yipping at him as it darted about. From a block away, she could not discern much about him, but it was someone that she did not recall. Maybe something had changed.
Another few minutes’ walk brought her to the white antebellum house that was her destination, where she slowly climbed the steps to the broad porch, then to the front door. Opening the screen door, she knocked softly, and the door opened momentarily. Facing her was a pudgy, balding man in his sixties who wore a broad smile.
“Tara,” he said. “Come in, come in.”
They hugged tightly, and tears came to her eyes.
“Daddy,” she whispered.
He brought her bag inside. “Your room is just as you left it.” Somehow, she was not surprised. “Why
don’t you freshen up, and we can sit and visit?”
Tara nodded, then went up the narrow stairs to the second story, a trek made longer by the high ceilings in the old house. Her old room really was exactly as she had left it, even with Teddy sitting between the pillows. As a little girl, Tara had always imagined all sorts of monsters living in the swamp, and wanted to be sure that Teddy could hide behind the pillows if he got scared while she was gone. She smiled to herself, an infrequent occurrence recently, then washed her face and joined her father downstairs.
He ushered her onto a couch covered in a faded blue and yellow print fabric. He sat in the adjacent chair, covered in the same fabric.
“Remember how you used to bounce on the couch?”
She patted the lifeless cushion in the middle. “Sure. It seemed a lot fluffier, then.”
“It was.” He winked at her, his eyes glistening in the light. “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen Milderton. What, twenty years?”
“Maybe a little longer.”
He nodded. “Your mother used to bring you.”
They had kept in touch by mail and telephone, and he had been to see her in Richmond on occasion, but it was not the same. He knew she had come only because she needed the security of family, and his ex-wife had passed away several years ago.
“I guess it’s been pretty tough. Do you want to talk about it?”
Tara sniffled away a tear. “Brian said he loved me. You remember, I told you we were getting married.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I waited for him at the courthouse, and he never showed up. He took his things and left town while I was waiting to be his wife.”
She was sobbing uncontrollably now. Her father moved to the sofa and put an arm around her.
“It’s okay. You’re with your family now, baby.”
They rocked back and forth on the sofa for what seemed an eternity, then Tara went upstairs for a nap. The bus had left Richmond at three in the morning, and she was exhausted.
