Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  The water was smooth at first, and the long pushing poles helped us get out in the deep part. When we got out there, we switched to Jim using the tiller, and me handling the sails, which is something we had added as of recent. They worked mighty good, if you didn’t shift wrong; and, of course, there had to be wind.

  It had been pretty still when we started out, and that had worried me, but before long, a light wind come up. It was just right, filling that canvas and pushing us along.

  It didn’t seem long before that line of dark in the water was a rise of dark, and then it was sure enough an island. Long and low and covered in fog, thick as the wool on a sheep’s ass.

  The raft started moving swift on account of it was caught up in a current, and before we knowed it, we was going through the fog and slamming up on the bank of Dread Island. We got out and used the docking rope to drag the raft on shore. It was a heavy rascal out of the water, and I thought I was gonna bust a gut. But we finally got it pulled up on solid ground.

  Right then, there wasn’t much to see that was worth seeing. The fog was heavy, but it was mostly around the island. On the island itself it was thin. Off to my right, I could see briars rising up about ten feet high, with dark thorns on them bigger than that nail I had tied around my neck. The tips of them were shiny in the moonlight, and the bit of fog that was off the water, twisted in between them like stripped wads of cotton. To the left, and in front of us, was some woods; it was as dark in there as the inside of a dog’s gut.

  “Well, here we is all ready for a rescue,” Jim said. “And we don’t even know they here anywhere. They may have done come and gone home. They could have come back while we was frying catfish and I was looking at my hairball.”

  I pointed to the mud gleaming in the moonlight, showed Jim there was a drag line in it.

  “That looks like the bottom of a boat,” I said.

  Jim squatted down and touched the ground with his fingers. “It sure do, Huck.”

  We followed the drag line until we come to a patch of limbs. I moved them back, and seen they had been cut and was thrown over the boat to hide it.

  “I figure this is their boat,” I said. “They’re exploring, Jim. They done hid the boat, and gone out there.”

  “Well, they didn’t hide it so good,” he said, “'cause it took us about the time it takes a duck to eat a June bug to find it.”

  We got a big cane knife off the raft, and Jim took that and cut down some limbs, and we covered the raft up with them. It wasn’t a better hiding place than Tom and Joe’s boat, but it made me feel better to do it.

  With Jim carrying the cane knife, and me with a lit lantern, we looked for sign of Tom and Joe. Finally, we seen some footprints on the ground. One was barefoot, and the other had on shoes. I figured Tom, who had been getting civilized too, would be the shoe wearer, and Joe would be the bare footer.

  Their sign led off in the woods. We followed in there after them. There was hardly any moon now, and even with me holding the lantern close to the ground, it wasn’t no time at all until we lost track of them.

  We kept going, and after a while we seen a big old clock on the ground. I held the lantern closer, seen it was inside a skeleton. The skeleton looked like it belonged to an alligator. Inside them alligator bones was human bones, all broke up, along with what was left of a hat with a feather in it, a boot, and a hook of the sort fits on a fella with his hand chopped off.

  It didn’t make no sense, but I quit thinking about, because I seen something move up ahead of us.

  I wasn’t sure what I had seen, but I can tell you this, it didn’t take but that little bit of a glance for me to know I didn’t like the looks of it.

  Jim said, “Holy dog turd, was that a man with a rabbit’s head?”

  I was glad he said that. I had seen the same darn shadowy thing, but was thinking my mind was making it up.

  Then we saw movement again, and that thing poked its head out from behind a tree. You could see the ears standing up in the shadows. I could see some big white buckteeth too.

  Jim called out, “You better come out from behind that tree, and show yourself good, or I’m gonna chop your big-eared head off with this cane knife.”

  That didn’t bring the thing out, but it did make it run. It tore off through them woods and underbrush like its tail was on fire. And it actually had a tail. A big cotton puff that I got a good look at, sticking out of the back of a pair of pants.

  I didn’t figure we ought to go after it. Our reason for being here was to find Tom and Joe and get ourselves back before the light come up. Besides, even if that thing was running, that didn’t give me an idea about chasing it down. I might not like it if I caught it.

  So, we was standing there, trying to figure if we was gonna shit or go blind, and that’s when we heard a whipping sound in the brush. Then we seen torches. It didn’t take no Daniel Boone to figure that it was someone beating the bushes, driving game in front of it. I reckoned the game would be none other than that thing we saw, so I grabbed Jim’s arm and tugged him back behind some trees, and I blowed out the light. We laid down on our bellies and watched as the torches got closer, and they was bright enough we could see what was carrying them.

  Their shadows come first, flickering in the torchlight. They was shaped something odd, and the way they fell on the ground, and bent around trees, made my skin crawl. But the shadows wasn’t nothing compared to what made them.

  Up front, carrying a torch, was a short fella wearing blue pants with rivets up the side, and he didn’t have on no shirt. His chest was covered in a red fur and he had some kind of pack strapped to his back. His head, well, it wasn’t no human head at all. It was the head of a fox. He was wearing a little folded hat with a feather in it. Not that he really needed that feather to get our attention. The fact that he was walking on his hind paws, with shoes on his feet, was plenty enough.

  With him was a huge bear, also on hind legs, and wearing red pants that come to the knees. He didn’t have no shoes on, but like the fox, he wasn’t without a hat. Had a big straw one like Tom Sawyer liked to wear. In his teeth was a long piece of some kind of weed or another. He was working it from one side of his mouth to the other. He was carrying a torch.

  The other four was clearly weasels, only bigger than any weasels I had ever seen. They didn’t have no pants on at all, nor shoes neither, but they was wearing some wool caps. Two of the weasels had torches, but the other two had long switch limbs they was using to beat the brush.

  But the thing that made me want to jump up and grab Jim and run back toward the raft, was this big nasty shape of a thing that was with them. It was black as sin. The torch it was carrying flickered over its body and made it shine like fresh licked licorice. It looked like a big baby, if a baby could be six foot tall and four foot wide. It was fat in the belly and legs. It waddled from side to side on flat, sticky feet that was picking up leaves and pine needles and dirt. It didn’t have no real face or body; all of it was made out of that sticky black mess. After awhile, it spit a stream that hit in the bushes heavy as a cow pissing on a flat rock. That stream of spit didn’t miss me and Jim by more than ten feet. Worse, that thing turned its head in our direction to do the spitting, and when it did, I could see it had teeth that looked like sugar cubes. Its eyes was as blood-red as two bullet wounds.

  I thought at first it saw us, but after it spit, it turned its head back the way it had been going, and just kept on keeping on; it and that fox and that bear and them weasels. The smell of its spit lingered behind, and it was like the stink of turpentine.

  After they was passed, me and Jim got up and started going back through the woods the way we had come, toward the raft. Seeing what we seen had made up our minds for us, and discussion about it wasn’t necessary, and I knowed better than to light the lantern again. We just went along and made the best of it in the darkness of the woods.

  As we was about to come out of the trees onto the beach, we seen something that froze us in our
tracks. Coming along the beach was more of them weasels. Some of them had torches, some of them had clubs, and they all had hats. I guess a weasel don’t care for pants, but dearly loves a hat. One of them was carrying a big, wet-looking bag.

  We slipped back behind some trees and watched them move along for a bit, but was disappointed to see them stop by the water. They was strung out in a long line, and the weasel with the bag moved in front of the line and the line sort of gathered around him in a horseshoe shape. The weasel put the bag on the ground, opened it, and took out something I couldn’t recognize at first. I squatted down so I could see better between their legs, and when I did, I caught my breath. They was passing a man’s battered head among them, and they was each sitting down and taking a bite of it, passing it to the next weasel, like they was sharing a big apple.

  Jim, who had squatted down beside me, said, “Oh, Huck, chile, look what they doing.”

  Not knowing what to do, we just stayed there, and then we heard that beating sound we had heard before. Off to our left was a whole batch of torches moving in our direction.

  “More of them,” Jim said.

  Silent, but as quick as we could, we started going away from them. They didn’t even know we was there, but they was driving us along like we was wild game ’cause they was looking for that rabbit, I figured.

  After a bit, we picked up our pace, because they was closing. As we went more quickly through the woods, two things happened. The woods got thicker and harder to move through, and whatever was behind us started coming faster. I reckoned that was because now they could hear us. It may not have been us they was looking for, but it was darn sure us they was chasing.

  It turned into a full-blowed run. I tossed the lantern aside, and we tore through them woods and vines and undergrowth as hard as we could go. Since we wasn’t trying to be sneaky about it, Jim was using that cane knife to cut through the hard parts; mostly we just pushed through it.

  Then an odd thing happened. We broke out of the woods and was standing on a cliff. Below us, pretty far down, was a big pool of water that the moon’s face seemed to be floating on. Across from the pool was more land, and way beyond that was some mountains that rose up so high the peaks looked close to the moon.

  I know. It don’t make no sense. That island ought not to have been that big. It didn’t fit the facts. Course, I reckon in a place where weasels and foxes and bears wear hats, and there’s a big ole thing made of a sticky, black mess that spits turpentine, you can expect the facts to have their problems.

  Behind us, them weasels was closing, waving torches, and yipping and barking like dogs.

  Jim looked at me, said, “We gonna have to jump, Huck. It’s all there is for it.”

  It was a good drop and wasn’t no way of knowing what was under that water, but I nodded, aimed for the floating moon and jumped.

  It was a quick drop, as it usually is when you step off nothing and fall. Me and Jim hit the water side by side and went under. The water was as cold as a dead man’s ass in winter. When we come up swimming and spitting, I lifted my head to look at where we had jumped from. At the edge of the cliff was now the pack of weasels, and they was pressed up together tighter than a cluster of chiggers, leaning over and looking down.

  One of them was dedicated, ’cause he jumped with his torch in his hand. He come down right in front of us in the water, went under, and when he come up he still had the torch, but of course it wasn’t lit. He swung it and hit Jim upside the head.

  Jim had lost the cane knife in the jump, so he didn’t have nothing to hit back with. He and the weasel just sort of floated there eyeing one another.

  There was a chittering sound from above, as all them weasels rallied their man on. The weasel cocked back the torch again, and swung at me. I couldn’t back pedal fast enough, and it caught me a glancing blow on the side of my head. It was a hard enough lick, that for a moment, I not only couldn’t swim, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a cow and a horse and a goat and a cotton sack. Right then, everything seemed pretty much the same to me.

  I slipped under, but the water, and me choking on it, brought me back. I clawed my way to the surface, and when I was sort of back to myself, I seen that Jim had the weasel by the neck with one hand, and had its torch arm in his other. The weasel was pretty good sized, but he wasn’t as big as Jim, and his neck wasn’t on his shoulders as good neither. The weasel had reached its free hand and got Jim’s throat and was trying to strangle him; he might as well have been trying to squeeze a tree to death. Jim’s fingers dug into the weasel’s throat, and there was a sound like someone trying to spit a pea through a tight rolled cigar, and then the next thing I knowed, the weasel was floating like a turd in a night jar.

  Above, the pack was still there, and a couple of them threw torches at us, but missed; they hissed out in the water. We swam to the other side, and crawled out. There was thick brush and woods there, and we staggered into it, with me stopping at the edge of the trees just long enough to yell something nasty to them weasels.

  The woods come up along a wall of dirt, and thinned, and there was a small cave in the dirt, and in the cave, sleeping on the floor, was that rabbit we had seen. I doubted it was really a rabbit back then, when we first seen it in the shadows, but after the fox and bear and weasels, and Mr. Sticky, it was hard to doubt anything.

  The moonlight was strong enough where the trees had thinned, that we could see the rabbit had white fur and wore a red vest and blue pants and no shoes. He had a pink nose and pink in his big ears, and he was sleeping. He heard us, and in a move so quick it was hard to see, he come awake and sprang to his feet. But we was in front of the cave, blocking the way out.

  “Oh, my,” he said.

  A rabbit speaking right good American was enough to startle both me and Jim. But as I said, this place was the sort of place where you come to expect anything other than a free boat ride home.

  Jim said slowly, “Why, I think I know who you are. Uncle Remus talked about you and your red vest. You Brer Rabbit.”

  The rabbit hung his head and sort of collapsed to the floor of the cave.

  “Brer Rabbit,” the rabbit said, “that would be me. Well, Fred actually, but when Uncle Remus was here, he knowed me by that name. I had a family once, but they was all eat up. There was Floppsy and Moppsy and Fred, and Alice and Fred Two and Fred Three, and then there was­­ Oh, I don’t even remember now, it’s been so long ago they was eaten up, or given to Cut Through You.”

  There was a roll of thunder, and rain started darting down on us. We went inside the cave with Brer Rabbit and watched lightning cut across the sky and slam into what looked like a sycamore tree.

  “Lightning,” Jim said, to no one in particular. “It don’t leave no shadow. You got a torch, it leaves a shadow. The sun makes a shadow on the ground of things it shines on. But lightning, it don’t leave no shadow.”

  “No,” Brer Rabbit said, looking up and out of the cave. “It don’t, and it never has. And here, on this island, when it starts to rain and the lightning flashes and hits the ground like that, it’s a warning. It means time is closing out. But what makes it bad is there’s something new now. Something really awful.”

  “The weasels, you mean,” Jim said.

  “No,” Brer Rabbit said. “Something much worse.”

  “Well,” Jim said, “them weasels is bad enough. We seen them eating a man’s head.”

  “Riverboat captain probably,” Brer Rabbit said. “Big ole steamboat got too close and got sucked in. And then there was the lady in the big, silver mosquito.”

  “Beg your pardon,” I said.

  “Well, it reminded me of a mosquito. I ain’t got no other way to explain it, so I won’t. But that head, it was probably all that remains of that captain. It could have been some of the others, but I reckon it was him. He had a fat head.”

  “How do you know all this?” I said.

  Brer Rabbit looked at me, pulled his paw from
behind his back, where he had been keeping it, and we saw he didn’t have a hand on the end of it. Course, he didn’t have a hand on the one showing neither. He had a kind of paw with fingers, which is the best I can describe it, but that other arm ended in a nubbin.

  The rabbit dropped his head then, let his arm fall to his side, like everything inside of him had turned to water and run out on the ground. “I know what happened ’cause I was there, and was gonna be one of the sacrifices. Would have been part of the whole thing had I not gnawed my paw off. It was the only way out. While I was doing it, it hurt like hell, but I kept thinking, rabbit meat, it ain’t so bad. Ain’t that a thing to think? It still hurts. I been running all night. But it ain’t no use. I am a shadow of my former self. Was a time when I was clever and smart, but these days I ain’t neither one. They gonna catch up with me now. I been outsmarting them for years, but everything done got its time, and I reckon mine has finally come. Brer Fox, he’s working up to the Big One, and tonight could be the night it all comes down in a bad way. If ole Cut Through You gets enough souls.

  “I’m so confused I feel turned around and pulled inside out,” I said.

  “I’m a might confused myself,” Jim said.

  The rain was really hammering now. The lightning was tearing at the sky and poking down hot yellow forks, hitting trees, catching them on fire. It got so there were so many burning, that the inside of our cave was lit up for a time like it was daylight.

  “This here rain,” Brer Rabbit said. “They don’t like it. Ain’t nobody likes it, ’cause that lightning can come down on your ass sure as it can on a tree. The Warning Rain we call it. Means that there ain’t much time before the next rain comes. The Soft Rain, and when it does, it’s that time. Time to go.”