by Neil Gaiman
“Anyhow, it was deader’n Abel slain by Cain—I’ll swear to that, an’ these men here’ll back me up. You never seen a thing so dried out an’ wrinkled—nor so ugly, neither. Jesus Christ, it made me sick to look at it!—but it was my prize, an’ I swore it was goin’ to make me a rich man. Me an’ all my kin—” He choked up at that, and we none of us pressed him; we ran on, was all, with the rustling thud of our footfalls through the brush warning the whole forest of our approach, probably.
The dogs were still straining hard after the scent, when all of a sudden they stopped and gathered round something underfoot, down by a little stand of dwarf sumac. I thought it was a rock at first: I couldn’t see through the bodies of the hounds. It was Tibbs’ cry that made me realise what it might be—that, and the story Keith had told me not half-a-dozen hours previously, rattling round my mind the way it had been ever since.
Tibbs couldn’t pick it up, that roundish muddy thing the dogs had found. That was left to Horton Keith: he lifted it just a little, enough for one of the other men in the party to gasp and mutter “Jesse.” Tibbs repeated the name a few times to himself, while Keith replaced the thing the way he found it and straightened up off his haunches. Then Tibbs gave it out in a howl that made the dogs back off, cower on their bellies in the leaf-rot as if they’d been whipped. I swear that sound went all the way through me. I hear it still, when I think about that night. It’s bad, and I try not to do it too much, mostly because the next thing I think of is what I heard next—what we all heard, the sound that made us snap up our heads and turn in the direction of our otherworldly quarry.
You’ll probably remember that Keith had already taken a stab at describing that sound. If you go back and look what he said, you’ll see he compared it to the last trump, and all I can say is, standing out there in the middle of the forest, looking at each other in the lantern light, we all of us knew exactly what he meant. It turned my guts to water: I damn near screamed myself.
It was so close; that was the thing. Just by the clarity and lack of muffling you could tell it wasn’t far off—five, maybe ten score of paces on through the trees, somewhere just over the next ridge. Tibbs got his senses back soonest of us all, or maybe he was so far gone then that sense had nothing to do with it: he was off and running, aiming to close down those hundred yards or so and get to grips with whatever cut down his brothers and took a trophy to boot. The dogs almost tripped him up; they were cowering in the dirt still, and there was no budging them. He flung down the leash and left them there.
It was Keith started after him, of course. And once Keith had gone, I couldn’t not go myself. Then the rest of then followed on; all of which meant we were pretty strung out along the track. It may have saved Keith’s life, that arrangement.
I heard Tibbs up ahead, cursing and panting; then, I heard a strange sort of a whizzing noise. I once stood at a wharf watching a cargo ship being unloaded, and one of the hawsers broke on the winching gear. The noise it made as it lashed through the air; that was what I heard. Whip-crack, quick and abrupt; and then I didn’t hear Tibbs any more.
What I thought I heard was the sound of rain, pattering on the leaves and branches. I even felt a few drops of it on my face. Then one of the men in the rear caught up and shone his lantern up ahead. It lit first of all on Keith as he staggered back, hand to his mouth. Then, it lit on Tibbs.
At first it seemed like some sort of conjuror’s trick. He was staggering too, like a stage drunk, only there was something about his head… At first your brain refused to believe it. Your eyes saw it, but your brain reported back, no, it’s a man; men aren’t made that way. It’s a trick they do with mirrors; a slather of stage blood to dress it up, that’s all. Then, inevitably, Tibbs lost his balance and fell backwards. Once he was down it became easier to deal with, in one way—easier to look at and trust your own eyes, at any rate. At last, you could look at it and see what there was to be seen. Which was this: from the neck up, Tibbs’ head was gone.
I said you could look at it; not for long, though. Instead I turned to Keith, who was pressed back up against a tree trunk, still with his hand to his mouth. He saw me, and he tried to speak, shaking his head all the while, but he couldn’t find the words.
Then we both heard it together: a rustling in the branches above our head, the sound of something dropping. We both looked up at about the same time, and that was how I managed to spring back, and so avoid the thing hitting me smack on the crown of my head. It hit the ground good and hard, directly between the two of us: the soft mud underfoot took all the bounce off it, though. It rolled half of the way over, then stopped, so you couldn’t really see its features. There was no mistaking it, though, even in the shaky lantern-light; I’d been looking at the back of Tibbs’ head only a moment ago, hadn’t I?
A dreadful realisation dawned in Keith’s eyes, and he looked back up. Instinctively I followed suit. I guess we saw about the same thing, though Keith had the experience to help him evaluate it. It was like this:
The branches were close-meshed overhead, with hardly any night sky visible in between. What you could see was tinted a sickly sort of greenish hue: the way modern city streetlights will turn the night a fuzzy, smoky orange, and block out all the stars. Through the treetops, something was ascending. I’d be a liar if I said I could recognise it; there was just no way to tell, not with all those shaking, rustling branches in the way. All I got was a general impression of size and shape; enough for me to stand in front of that slab of coal in the courthouse basement the next day and say, yeah, it could have been; I guess. Keith was with me, and so far as he was concerned it was a deal more straightforward; but as I say, he had the benefit of prior acquaintance.
Up it went, up and up, till it broke clear of the canopy, and we had no way of knowing where to look. The sky gave one last unnatural throb of ghoulish green, as if it was turning itself inside out; and it was over. All that was left was the bloody carnage down below: Lamar Tibbs’ body, that we dragged between us back to the farmhouse, and the bodies of his brothers covered up with a tarpaulin. One entire generation of a family, wiped out in the course of a night.
What with the weeping and the wailing of the relatives, and the never-ending questions—most of them from that fat fool Kronke, who hadn’t even the guts to leave his damn automobile—that business up on Peck’s Ridge took us clear through dawn and into the afternoon of the next day to deal with. It stayed with us a good while longer than that, though; in fact, it’s never really gone away. Ask either of my wives, who will surely survive me through having gotten rid of me, as soon as was humanly possible. They’ll tell you how I used to come bolt upright in the middle of a nightmare, hands flailing desperately above my head, screaming at the ghosts of trees and branches, babbling about a sky gone wrong. Ask them how often it happened, and what good company I was in the days and weeks that followed. Yes, you could say it’s stayed with me, my three days down in Oram County.
∇
I knew Keith for a dozen more years in all: right up till the time he set off with the rest of the Collins Clarke archaeological party for the headwaters of the Amazon, and never came back. Missing, presumed dead, all fifteen men and their native bearers; nothing was ever found of them, no overflights could even spot their last camp. Keith was well into his sixties by then, but there was never any question that he’d be joining the expedition, once he’d heard the rumours—the ruins up above Iquitos on the Ucayali, the strange carvings of beasts no-one had ever seen before. He’d done his preparation in the library at Miskatonic with Clarke himself, cross-referencing the Indian tales with certain books and illustrations—and with that slab of coal from the Oram County courthouse, one-half of which had made its way into the cabinets of the University’s Restricted Collection. There was no stopping him: he was convinced he was on the right track at last. “But why put yourself in their way again?” I asked him. “With all you know; after all you’ve seen?” He never answered me straight out; there’s only h
is last telegram, sent from Manaus, which I like to think holds, if not an answer, then a pointer at least, to the man and to the nature of his quest.
Dear Fenwick (it said): Finally found someplace worse than Skagway. And they say there’s no such thing as progress. We set off tomorrow on our snipe hunt, not a moment too soon for all concerned. Wish you were here—on the strict understanding that we’re soon to be somewhere else. With all best wishes from the new frontier, Your friend, Horton Keith.
∇
The Crawling Sky
Joe R. Lansdale
(1)
WOOD TICK
Wood Tick wasn’t so much as town as it was a wide rip in the forest. The Reverend Jebediah Mercer rode in on ebony horse on a coolish autumn day beneath an overcast sky of humped up, slow-blowing, gun-metal-gray clouds; they seemed to crawl. It was his experience nothing good ever took place under a crawling sky. It was an omen, and he didn’t like omens, because, so far in his experience, none of them were good.
Before him, he saw a sad excuse for a town: A narrow clay road and a few buildings, not so much built up as tossed up, six altogether, three of them leaning South from Northern winds that had pushed them. One of them had had a fireplace of stone, but it had toppled, and no one had bothered to rebuild it. The stones lay scattered about like discarded cartridges. Grass, yellowed by time, had grown up through the stones, and even a small tree had sprouted between them. Where the fall of the fireplace had left a gap was a stretch of fabric, probably a slice of tent; it had been nailed up tight and it had turned dark from years of weather.
In the middle of the town there was a wagon with wooden bars set into it and a flat heavy roof. No horses. Its axel rested on the ground giving the wagon a tilt. Inside, leaning, the Reverend could see a man clutching at the bars, cursing at a half dozen young boys who looked likely to grow up to be ugly men, were throwing rocks at him. An old man was sitting on the precarious porch of one of the leaning buildings, whittling on a stick. A few other folks moved about, crossing the street with the enthusiasm of the ill, giving no mind to the boys or the man in the barred wagon.
Reverend Mercer got off his horse and walked it to a hitching post in front of the sagging porch and looked at the man who was whittling. The man had a goiter on the side of his neck and he had tied it off in a dirty sack that fastened under his jaw and to the top of his head and was fastened under his hat. The hat was wide and dropped shadow on his face. The face needed concealment. He had the kind of features that made you wince; one thing God could do was he could sure make ugly.
“Sir, may I ask you something?” the Reverend said to the whittling man.
“I reckon.”
“Why is that man in that cage?”
“That there is Wood Tick’s jail. All we got. We been meaning to build one, but we don’t have that much need for it. Folks do anything really wrong, we hang ’em.”
“What did he do?”
“He’s just half-witted.”
“That’s a crime?”
“If we want it to be. He’s always talkin’ this and that, and it gets old. He used to be all right, but he ain’t now. We don’t know what ails him. He’s got stories about haints and his wife done run off and he claims a haint got her.”
“Haints?”
“That’s right.”
Reverend Mercer turned his head toward the cage and the boys tossing rocks. They were flinging them in good and hard, and pretty accurate.
“Having rocks thrown at him can not be productive,” the Reverend said.
“Well, if God didn’t want him half-witted and the target of rocks, he’d have made him smarter and less directed to bullshit.”
“I am a man of God and I have to agree with you. God’s plan doesn’t seem to have a lot of sympathy in it. But humanity can do better. We could at least save this poor man from children throwing rocks.”
“Sheriff doesn’t think so.”
“And who is the sheriff.”
“That would be me. You ain’t gonna give me trouble are you?”
“I just think a man should not be put behind bars and have rocks thrown at him for being half-witted.”
“Yeah, well, you can take him with you, long as you don’t bring him back. Take him with you and I’ll let him out.”
The Reverend nodded. “I can do that. But, I need something to eat first. Any place for that?”
“You can go over to Miss Mary’s, which is a house about a mile down from the town, and you can hire her to fix you somethin’. But you better have a strong stomach.”
“Not much of a recommendation.”
“No, it’s not. I reckon I could fry you up some meat for a bit of coin, you ready to let go of it.”
“I have money.”
“Good. I don’t. I got some horse meat I can fix. It’s just on this side of being good enough to eat. Another hour, you might get poisoned by it.”
“Appetizing as that sounds, perhaps I should see Miss Mary.”
“She fixes soups from roots and wild plants and such. No matter what she fixes, it all tastes the same and it gives you the squirts. She ain’t much to look at neither, but she sells out herself, you want to buy some of that.”
“No. I am good. I will take the horse meat, long as I can watch you fry it.”
“All right. I’m just about through whittling.”
“Are you making something?”
“No. Just whittlin’.”
“So, what is there to get through with?”
“Why my pleasure, of course. I enjoy my whittlin’.”
∇
The old man who gave the Reverend his name as if he had given up a dark secret, was called Jud. Up close, Jud was even nastier looking than from the distance of the hitching post and the porch. He had pores wide enough and deep enough in his skin to keep pooled water and his nose had been broken so many times it moved from side to side when he talked. He was missing a lot teeth, and what he had were brown from tobacco and rot. His hands were dirty and his fingers were dirtier yet, and the Reverend couldn’t help but wonder what those fingers had poked into.
Inside, the place leaned and there were missing floor boards. A wooden stove was at the far end of the room, and a stove pipe wound out of it and went up through a gap in the roof that would let in rain, and had, because the stove was partially rusted. It rested heavy on the worn flooring. The floor sagged and it seemed to the Reverend that if it experienced one more rotted fiber, one more termite bite, the stove would crash through. Hanging on hooks on the wall there were slabs of horse meat covered in flies. Some of the meat looked a little green and there was a slick of mold over a lot of it.
“That the meat you’re talkin’ about?”
“Yep,” Jud said, scratching at his filthy goiter sack.
“It looks pretty green.”
“I said it was turnin’. Want it or not?”
“Might I cook it myself?”
“Still have to pay me.”
“How much?”
“Two bits.”
“Two bits, for rancid meat I cook myself.”
“It’s still two bits if I cook it.”
“You drive quite the bargain, Jud.”
“I pride myself on my dealin’.”
“Best you do not pride yourself on hygiene.”
“What’s that? That some kind of remark?”
Reverend Mercer pushed back his long black coat and showed the butts of his twin revolvers. “Sometimes a man can learn to like things he does not on most days care to endure.”
Jud checked out the revolvers. “You got a point there, Reverend. I was thinkin’ you was just a blabber mouth for God, but you tote them pistols like a man whose seen the elephant.”
“Seen the elephant I have. And all his children.”
∇
The Reverend brushed the flies away from the horse meat and found a bit of it that looked better than rest, used his pocket knife to cut it loose. He picked insects out of a greas
y pan and put the meat in it. He put some wood in the stove and lit it and got a fire going. In short time the meat was frying. He decided to cook it long and cook it through, burn it a bit. That way, maybe he wouldn’t die of stomach poisoning.
“You have anything else that might sweeten this deal?” the Reverend asked.
“It’s the horse meat or nothin’.”
“And in what commerce will you deal when it turns rancid, or runs out?”
“I’ve got a couple more old horses, and one old mule. Somebody will have to go.”
“Have you considered a garden?”
“My hand wasn’t meant to fit a hoe. It gets desperate, I’ll shoot a squirrel or a possum or a coon or some such. Dog ain’t bad you cook ’em good.”
“How many people reside in this town?”
“About forty, forty-one if you count Norville out there in the box. But, way things look, considerin’ our deal, he’ll be leavin’. Sides, he don’t live here direct anyway.”
“That number count in the kids?”
“Yeah, they all belong to Mary. They’re thirteen and on down to six years. Drops them like turds and don’t know for sure whose the daddy, though there’s one of them out there that looks a mite like me.”
“Bless his heart,” the Reverend said.
“Yeah, reckon that’s the truth. Couple of ’em have died over the years. One got kicked in the head by a horse and the other one got caught up in the river and drowned. Stupid little bastard should have learned to swim. There was an older girl, but she took up with Norville out there, and now she’s run off from him.”
∇
When the meat was as black as a pit and smoking like a rich man’s cigar, Reverend Mercer discovered there were no plates, and he ate it from the frying man, using his knife as a utensil. It was a rugged piece of meat to wrestle and it tasted like the ass end of a skunk. He ate just enough to knock the corners off his hunger, then gave it up.
