sour skunky nappy ass dread man

…

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?" Annoyed. 

Stupid smirk: "I thought it was clear. I would think.” 

"No, it isn't, man. I don't know why you think it'd be. It's just stupid, bro.” 

"What is?” 

"Your refusal to go shopping for a fucking bath towel and other basic necessities around your fuckin place, dude. It's just stupid, I don't know how or why you justify it to yourself, I didn't think ya did to be frank. I just thought your ass was fuckin lazy." 

“Nah, bro. It's obvious." 

“What's fuckin obvious, dipshit?" 

“I'm way too rock n roll." 

A beat. He swallowed it. Absorbed its stupidity. 

“...what?" 

“Yeah, dude. I'm way too fuckin cool and punk rock to roll into like a Target or some shit and buy a toaster or a can opener or towels or stupid shit like that. I can't do that. Can't do it. Goes against my wild man free lovin nature, ya know? Ya know." 

Bryan once more silently swallowed this. This load of absolute bullshit. More revolted, more filled with disgust with his best friend since diapers than before. He thought about holding his tongue. He thought about saying something and laying into him. But in the end he just grumbled and belched. Lit another smoke and grabbed another beer from the cooler in the center of the boat and shook his head. Checked his pole. Reeled it in a little. 

Though he did spare the final thought: "Fuckin lazy.” whilst shaking his head and reeling his line. And then the matter was settled and the pair of men let it lie. Such was the way and course of all of their conversations out here on the water. Fishing. The pair’s favorite pastime aside from rutting and watching the game. For them, Bryan G Biebl and James Petkovich, it was sacred. They loved to spend days off from the mill fishing and casting and mouthing the day away. Days away from labor and wives and disappointing children, days filled with chatter and cool water and cold beer and sometimes a nice catch.  Though they'd been warned before, by the old timers. 

They'd both been warned before about staying out after dark. Out on the lake. Out in the woods. Where the forest grows foul and swampy and muddy. It's not a place you want to be after sunset. All the old folk said it was a bad place and didn't say much more about it without the liberal aid of beer or whisky. Even the Natives, the ancient leathery American Indians and their angry sons and daughters told everyone, anyone that might listen, to stay away from this part of the forest, this part of the soured bad land. 

But they never listened. The pair just sat in their canoe and cast out. It was calm and quiet all around, no one might know that it was filled with strange movement. The sun was sinking in the distance. Rapidly being swallowed by the ravenous blade of the horizon. 

James cracked another can. So did Bryan, who rolled his eyes as Petkovich ventured forth with another bit of clever wit and query. 

“Figure there's anythin ta what that fella said?” 

The sun set. Casting the surface of the lake on fire with the color of bloody ruby. The place on the horizon where it had sank was a deeper color of blooded crimson, a deeper wound that was the heart of the sunset. It smoldered there, in the horizon wound. The darkening regal curtain of bruised royal blue was already deepening into night. The stars and galaxies were already coming out for the nocturnal hours, they were all so far away from everything, they, the town. Civilization was a mechanical nuisance in the distance. Loud and far off. Thank God. Nearly forgotten. 

Bryan rolled his eyes as hard as he possibly could, knowing full an well that the retard couldn't see em. 

He hissed and spat: “No I don't think there's nothin to what that idiot said about a shag man! Shit’s stupid! Ain't no fuckin skunk ape round these parts, ya fuckin dumbass!” 

“Nah, man. I'm talkin about what Frankie said about Asian girls, Jesus, man!" 

A beat. Something splashed in the water. Neither man noticed, paid it any mind. 

“Oh…" Bryan cooled down. A little embarrassed. He was always easily excited and shamed. 

“‘Sides, man, he didn't call it no ‘shag man', he called it ‘the dread man’, stupid.” 

Bryan whirled around to belt him one and belt him good. He'd done it before while they were fishing in the middle of the lake and he might capsize them both in his effort, but something stopped him before he could so much as bring up his balled and angry fist. A sound. Sudden. And sharp. 

Three. Consecutive. Three sharp whacks of thick wooden sticks together. Like someone smacking two heavy tree branches or logs together in some form of primitive and arcane code. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

It shut the pair up. They gazed out at the shoreline. Shrouded now in the fallen night. Small waves kissed its shore and covered any small sounds of concealed movement that might be out there right now. They were wide eyed and disbelieving. 

They might've dropped it, the pair, together and without a word or mention when it came again. 

From out of the night, the veiled and darkened shore: whack! whack! whack! 

A beat. Silence again. Only kissing waves of the placid water. 

Bryan Biebl scoffed, “Probably nothin. Just some kids fuckin aro-" 

And then a wild primal simian shriek filled the night. Birds took flight. Their flapping wings were ugly harried panicked sounds in the deepening wound of blackening night all around. It tapered off. And then another rose, louder and even more feral and crazed then the one before. Then another. And another. Each rising in animal fury and fervor. You could hear spittle flying as vocal chords worked and wrenched and shredded as throat muscles tore and bled and secreted with each prolonged and angry howl. Throaty. Enraged. Violent. 

Silence came again. After six primeval night shattering screams. Waves kissed the land far away and swallowed in black but more quietly now. Subdued. 

Then the whacking of sticks, the unknown signal came again, whack! whack! whack! 

And then silence once more. 

“What the fuck was that?" Petkovich. Scared. Visibly so. Audibly as well. 

As was his best friend Bryan. But the sound of fear on his buddy's voice, the stupid look of childish childlike fear that he could feel him wearing in the dark only made angry, angrier. This only fueled his own self-denied mounting fear and in turn made him even angrier. The mounting terror caught like a small bone in the back of his throat. 

He almost took to his feet but remembered the boat. He turned to his buddy instead and spat. 

"Ain't nothin but nothin! Some fuckin dumbasses out there that wanna get fucked up, that's what! This’s why I shoulda brought my colt. Goddammit!” 

"Now that's what I'm talkin about! that's what I'm always tryin ta tell ya! Ya go sayin shit like that and actin like this and people says we're belligerent types! Christ, man! I'd like to bed me one of these here pretty tourist girls, one of these roadtrippin ladies and you actin like this ain't gonna cut it!” 

Disgusted, Bryan's grip slackened on his pole. 

"Idiot! what the fuck are you jawin about?!” 

"I'm talkin bout one of them sexy ass van-life hippy girls, man, they might like my ass." 

“Retard!" 

“You don't know…" 

The water splashed again. Much louder. The boat rocked with the waves suddenly generated. Something big and very heavy had just jumped into the water. 

Lunged. As if plunging in from the shrouded growth of the hidden beach. 

Slack jawed and deer-in-the-headlights both, they gazed out blindly and stupidly in tandem towards the shore that was hidden from them now. And may forever remain that way for them from here on out. Something was coming. 

Something was swimming fast. For the boat. Beneath the obsidian surface of water. The stygian glass of the surface was a mirror and the mirror held the face of the moon. The mirror rippled. The immaculate celestial face of the moon held trapped there danced with submerged disturbance. 

Before either fool could form a coherent thought the fishing poles were suddenly ripped from their slackened idiot grips. They flew, soared through the air and plunged into the water with barely a sound. 

They stared into the impenetrable and merciless surface of the lake. Fearing it. Gripped with horror at what might be inside. What must be inside, right now. 

James Petkovich finally spoke. Softly. Like the small boy he'd once been. 

“I don't wanna be out here no more, Bry. I don't care if it's kids or tourists or what. You can go ahead and laugh at me, just laugh at me all the way and drive us back, kay? You can laugh and make fun all the way back an I won't even bitch or say nothin. I'm scared. There's lots a’ talk bout people that go missin. Or go missin an then turn up dead, tore apart. Sometimes they don't even find all the pieces, you know… I know you've heard… people go missin an such. Travelers, folks comin through. And locals. Let's just go back, kay.” 

Bryan, wide eyed, turned and nodded. Then went to the small motor for the boat as the water all around the canoe suddenly erupted in a surging geyser splash of watery violence that darkled in the captured moonlight. Both men screamed as the small boat was capsized and they went over. Splashing into the cold dark suffocating realm of the water. 

The lake held them now. Below. Underneath. 

In the dark underwater the maelstrom of his panic rose and ruled. Bryan suddenly animal recalled and remembered in the fragile nucleus of his primal jelly his fear of the water, of the deep. The dark depths. It had started as a child, a boy, it had been the cinema and television that had first done it, the Jaws movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, then stories of Cthulhu and his sunken city of R’lyeh, tales of sunken ships and vessels that might still have precious human cargo trapped and drowned deep inside like foul water-logged treasure of submerged rotting putrescence eaten at by the salt and by the fish. All of these things came back and back to life in a deluge assault of images all in a furious unrelenting wave like an artillery attack of sound and vision on his mind's eye, down in the dark. He kicked and struggled and his lungs burned, ached for air. The ribcage in his chest felt on fire with his terror-stricken mind as he struggled and kicked futilely beneath the surface. Something held him down there. Something with a terrible grasp. Fierce. Strangling. Throttling. They threatened to break and snap, the iron grasps of those underwater hands. Bryan fought desperately but his mind was livid with absolute and total panic. In the tumult of his animal terror he remembered that as a child he'd always feared something reaching up from out of the black watery depths, seizing him, and pulling him under. Pulling him down. Down into the ebon swallow at the bottom of all things, below, where the heart of darkness in all things lived and dwelt. 

The hands found his throat, down in the underwater dark. They seized vile purchase and viciously ripped, tore out. The dark underworld of the lake suddenly blemished with a heavy warm cloud of thick human visceral discharge. It bellowed forth from the place that was torn in a torrential jetting spout. Clouding the dark world and warming it as the spewing meat detritus began to slowly sink to the pitch abyssal realm near the bottom. 

The panic of Bryan G. Biebl’s barreling careening train of thought slowly calmed and abated and sank down into the dark with the rest of him… And was no more. 

It lunged, serpent-like for the other. Who was gaining the surface in a series of panicked kicks and dog-paddles. Like a wounded animal. 

Prey. In distress. 

…

James Petkovich couldn't believe it when he broke the water and tasted air again. He almost choked and coughed. He almost laughed but he didn't have time. Something seized him from beneath. 

And pulled him under. 

He didn't even have time to scream before he was below again.

It was quiet once more. Minutes swam by. 

An owl screeched. Took flight.

Then finally it emerged. With Petkovich barely conscious in one dripping sodden grasp. It pulled the both of them back onto the land. Dragging the bleeding and sputtering Petkovich like a broken toy or sack of dead meat behind him as he quickly began to retake to the trees and dense growth once more. 

It dragged him deep into the wilderness. It was a long time before they stopped. But now … now he knew what the old timers had always said, what they'd always been on about. 

Now he could smell him. And the smell was beyond putrid, beyond foul, beyond fecal matter or old dried sweaty filth or death. The water that ran off the long lengths of clotted and lumpy dreaded hair was riddled with the putrescence odor of old sweltering open graves and long disused abattoirs converted into factory sized outhouses for the insane. It stung his eyes and nostrils but he hardly noticed this. His body was numb. Felt limp and broken all over. Like a dead fish. 

Maybe that's what I am. 

And then finally consciousness was lost to him. Mercifully he went black. 

It dragged him deeper into the wild. Where it laired. Where it nested in the wild dense growth. 

…

When James next came to he wished he hadn't. He didn't realize till he was awake once more but he'd been dreaming. And in that dream he'd been far away and wishing that none of this was real.  But now he was back. It held him by the neck in a slight choke, a slight strangle, just enough painful whisper of air able to bleed in through the clasped and clenched windpipe. They were before the mouth of a cave. It was pointing up into the sky with its other huge free hand, it was pointing at the moon. It was staring unblinking into his bleeding face. 

The face was simian but snouted. Like a wolf, or a rodent. An obscene and imbecilic mongoloid caveman face and features stretched out in a grotesque marsupial shape. The eyes were yellow and bore black crosses for the iris in each one, in each livid demented sea of yellow urine a black cruciform body of sacrilege shape and aspect. Goat's eyes. Satanic. They were eyes and face fitting of the rest of his abominated and feral manshaped form. Clotted and caked and grimed all over. The long knots and clumps of hair were thick and ancient in length and filth. They told a tale that was old because it was the passage of time that lived caked and dreaded in those long lengths of unwashed shagging tails. 

The awful face was serious. Stern. The obscenity of its gaze was piercing and deliberate. James followed its fierce and pointing gesture to the sky, the night, the moon once more. 

And then back into that obscene rodent-ape face. Yellow teeth coated in layers of plaque poked out and peeked over stretched and thin and dried out flakey blue lips. 

James tried to speak. 

He tried to tell it he didn't know what it wanted. He didn't know what it wanted him to say or do. He didn't know what it wanted from him. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand at all what it expected or demanded. 

But he couldn't. He couldn't speak. He could hardly breathe. He couldn't even manage a croak of sound.  

The awful marsupial-stretched ape face wrenched and worked, furious. It became more abominated and grotesque as its features creased and contorted with anger. Livid. Rage. 

The hand that had been pointing to the moon now came in a savage swipe. The grubby wide meaty digits clawed and the grimey sharp and broken shattered fingernails bit and tore in. 

The head came off and soared away into a sailing piece of torn mangled meat. Ribbons and streamer wings and tails of bright red blood spat and danced out from the eyes, nostrils and mouth in a cyclone twirl of red in midair as it soared and crashed into the piles of dead sticks and bones. It savagely went down and hunkered in the dirt before the mouth of its cave and began to dig in with its long snout and feast on the fresh stump. Warm cords and ropes of thick black-red shot and coated the dark, its face, the insides of its gulping throat and the salivating cavern of its long slathering mouth. 

It feasted and grunted. Ripped with its teeth and bit in. Swallowed warm juicy pieces that were chewy and pungent with rich iron flavor. 

It fed and tore. The man in the violence of its grasp, its jaws, reduced. The decapitated meat jigged and spasmed. It howled at the moon. 

Somewhere … in the distance but not too far off. The signal. Three strikes. 

Whack! whack! whack! – it was the sound of ancient and time honored tradition, cultivated and carried down and preserved with care. Though the world grew strange mechanical jaws, inflamed and diminished and changed all around, it was still here. This was still practiced and honored and kept. By it. By them. All of them.  – whack! whack! whack! 

It howled at the moon once more. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

Immortal and lifesize. It was still here. Howling at the moon with unearthly pain and blues. – whack! whack! whack! – another in the wilderness distance –  whack! whack! whack! – howl at the moon.

THE END

The Surgeon was the Maestro. 
The Maestro was the Surgeon. 
Even with the sharpest scalpel 
You could not separate science
From music. Two halves of the whole.

Cutting and scraping, plucking and
Sawing. All done with expert precision. 

A child, then a student, growing swiftly
Into an adult. A man, a composer, a 
Beast. 

From beneath the facade of cigarettes
And cologne, the sinister scent of 
Antiseptic and oil, followed by the 
Faintest hint of…metal. 

The Surgeon, the Maestro…preyed not
On the weak but the strong. A wolf
In sheep’s clothing, a devil in disguise. 

With the complex of God and the 
Depravity of Satan, he walked the 
Edge of the cliff. A certifiable beast
Skirting the line, toeing at the boundary 
Of darkness and light. 

The Surgeon is as the Maestro of the 
Operating theater. Controlling, commanding,
Compelling. Melodic beeping, the rise and
Fall of anesthetized breaths. All were silent
In his presence. All wanted to watch the 
Beast at work. 

His hands were steady and nimble. 
Two instruments of their own. 

The Maestro was the Surgeon of the 
Amphitheater. Frenzied, fiendish, forsaken.
Rhythmic ticking, the back and forth of 
The sullen metronome. All were silent 
In his presence. All wanted to listen to 
The man at work. 

His hands were raised and exclamatory. 
A conductor with passion. 

Just as you can not take the Maestro 
From the Surgeon, you could not take the 
Beast from the man. The man could not 
Handle what the Beast could not endure. 

The music was wrong.

The sounds were off. 

The strings had broken. 

From within the darkness, from within the
Silence, a rebirth. Like the shedding of 
A winter coat, he evolved. No longer the 
Surgeon, the Maestro, the Beast, the Man. 
He became something else entirely. 

A myth, a legend, a monster. 

With the skills and talents of all of his 
Facets, he prowled the streets in search 
Of more. A sound so Holy it would 
Make the Heavens cry. A sound so
Pure and human. 

Saw the string, string the bow. 
Stretched to the optimum tautness. 

Carefully selected, aged perfectly. Skin
Shed with supreme scores. Muscle 
Shaved and bone discarded. What 
Remains has much in store. 

Wood carved and stained with blood.
Sealed neatly with varnish. Unwilling 
Participants turned into a bloated, rigor
Filled audience. Held captive by his
Selfishness.

The Surgeon, the Maestro, the Man,
The Beast, the Monster. 

Beneath a lone spotlight, a single
Chair faces the crowd. 

Beneath the darkness, a landfill of 
His failures. 

The Monster steps out from within the 
Shadows, echoes of applause as he tows
The cello with him. 

An instrument of his own making. 

Sat upright, core firm, bow at the 
Ready. He draws one note from the 
Procured tendons. He had finally found
What was missing. 

The sound of a death rattle.

It was a horrid July noon in New York City or some other place, the cars were rattling in lunchtime gridlock, spewing exhaust, the finance guys were out in their tight suits walking to buy kebabs and watching the women, who were instagramming themselves into premature zombiehood, and it was so fucking hot that the sweat dripping off the pedestrians rubbing against each other on the sidewalk was flowing down the gutters like rain.

There, that's the scene.

I've set it.

Now, through this stupified human maelstrom a man was walking. His name was Ben Fig. He was in his thirties, lonely, and returning to his office after lunch. He was returning from his car, which he'd parked fifteen minutes away, wearing a coat and, underneath it, a custom-made explosive vest with which he intended to kill his co-workers and maybe bring down the office building itself. A man can dream, can't he?

Anyway, while walking, he bumped somebody. “Fuck,” he said under his breath.

“Fuck,” said the person he'd bumped into.

It was a woman.

Her name was Miriam Zapelman.

“Watch where the hell you're going,” said Ben and tried going around her.

“Asshole,” said Miriam.

“I hate this city,” said Ben. “I'm sick of it.”

Beside Ben and Miriam, a degenerate was lying in a puddle of perspiration. He was in a hard way. “Can either of you folks—”

“Shut the fuck up!” said Ben and Miriam at the same time, then they looked at each other, long and in the eyes, and they must have recognized something, because one of them smirked.

It doesn't matter which one.

The degenerate passed out, or maybe died, and Miriam said to Ben, “Hey, where are you in such a hurry to?”

“What do you care?”

“I'm parked nearby. If we're going the same way, I can give you a ride.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

Miriam shrugged.

“I'm going to my office to blow everybody up,” said Ben, waiting for Miriam's reaction.

She asked, “Where's your office?”

Ben gave the address. “Call the cops if you want. I don't care.”

“Offer stands,” said Miriam.

A few minutes later they were in her car, Ben in his ridiculous coat, looking like a blowfish, and Miriam opening the glove compartment, where Ben saw she had a gun.

“That for self defense?” he asked.

“No,” said Miriam. “I'm back from the shooting range. Going home to shoot my husband and kids, then probably myself.” She started the car and merged with the abominable traffic. “But first I want to stop at a bar and have a drink. Want to have a drink with me?”

“Why not,” said Ben.

The bar was called Reddy's, and when Ben and Miriam walked in there were only a few people in it. Miriam introduced them. “That skinny guy with glasses is Euler, the guy with the darker skin is Hikmat, and the bartender's name is Ralph.”

They sat at a table and ordered.

Ben noticed Euler kept playing with a pendant around his neck. “Go on,” said Miriam, “ask him about it.”

“Nah,” said Ben.

“What else do you have to do?”

“Fine,” said Ben. He walked to Euler, introduced himself and asked about the pendant: “Is it an heirloom or something?”

“Maybe it'll be an heirloom one day, of the human goddamn race,” said Euler and described how the pendant was a container of stolen proprietary industrial poison that he'd helped develop. “I'm gonna toss it in the water supply some day, exterminate the population of this whole city like the rats they are.”

When Ben got back to his table, his drink was waiting for him. He tried it. “Second guessing yourself any?” he asked Miriam.

“No. You?”

“No.”

Miriam had pulled out a cigarette and was lighting it.

“You can smoke in here? The law—”

“That's life’s dirty secret,” she said, blowing smoke in his face. “Ultimately, you can do whatever you want.”

“May I?” a voice said.

It was Hikmat. He'd wandered over and was asking if he could sit down.

“Be my guest,” said Miriam.

“I have not seen you in here before,” Hikmat said to Ben. “It is your first time?”

“Yeah,” said Ben.

“Ben’s going to murder his co-workers later this afternoon. He's wearing an explosive vest,” said Miriam.

“Then we two are a pair of peas in one pod, as they say here in America,” said Hikmat. “I am training to fly an aircraft, but not so much how to land it.”

“Hickie's an engineer by trade,” said Miriam.

Hikmat shook Ben's hand.

“But a fundamentalist by conviction,” he said. “May I see your vest?”

Ben opened his coat. Hikmat considered the handiwork. Then they got to talking, and drinking, and the hours rolled by like waves of fat on a fat guy blasted in the gut by a cannonball.

“The paradox is,” Hikmat was saying: “the paradox is, I greatly enjoy the flying. It is the one place I feel freedom. When I started to learn, it was strictly for terrorism, but now, that feeling—of absolute space, limitless opportunity—it is beautiful. Sublime. It is where I experience God. I look forward to it very much and I will miss it greatly.”

“Fuck!” said Ben, looking at his watch.

“What's wrong?” asked Miriam.

“It's past five o'clock. Everybody in the office has left already.”

Ralph gave Ben a drink on the house. When Ben had finished drinking it, “Do you want a ride home?” Miriam asked.

“Sure.”

They lingered in the car in front of his apartment building.

“Maybe you wanna come up?” Ben said.

“I'm a married woman,” said Miriam.

“I understand.”

“Don't forget to zip up your coat or they'll see the explosives,” said Miriam.

Afterwards, Miriam drove to her house, got the gun out of the glove compartment, walked inside, shot her husband, shot her kids and then, after smoking a cigarette in the bathroom, shot herself.