Between 1882 and 1968, there was an estimated 4500 lynchings that occurred in the United States, predominantly black. Some other folks got caught up in the way. Here and there. Throughout that time, it was so commonplace that these mother fuckers gathered around and had picnics and took pictures. They made them into postcards. If shit hadn’t changed, there would be blond haired girls on TikTok dancing with them swinging from the trees. The dancing wouldn’t be as good. It was that prevalent, that much of a party? I think they were partying more than 4500 of them in eighty years. Everyone knows you shave a little off or stack some on depending on what you’re selling.
My name is Darius Long, a journalist, and I’m on my way to Manspell. There’s a lot of stories about Manspell. The town is commonly referred to as Mansell. It was called Mansell until people just started changing its name on the map. The people within the town still call it Mansell. A lot of the people going in and out of Manspell call it Mansell. The truckers and the bikers, the drug smugglers. They call it Mansell. Any “P” that’s to appear on any sign disappears or is painted over.
There were many lynchings that went on all over the south, and Manspell saw plenty of them. That cloud hangs over them to this day, but 15 years ago, another cloud collided with it creating a hurricane of sadness and despair, leaving little cyclones here and there that strike without warning and leaving massive amounts of collateral damage. To date, that collateral damage amounted to about twenty-one dead. When eleven of those twenty-one began to show signs of being murdered in a similar fashion or at least leaving behind the same parts with their bodies stripped of all flesh and muscle and their internal organs vacuumed from the vessel leaving only their head with lips, hair, and skin pulled tightly around the skull. Eyeballs seemingly sucked out. Faces cemented in unimaginable pain.
With those sort of killings, the FBI was on their way, so the Manspell police were under a lot of pressure to come up with a story. They did more than that. They came up with a culprit. The man’s name was Jemarcus Jones. Jemarcus Jones was forty years old and a hundred and ten pounds with various diseases and a disabiliating drug habit, but he deboned these people and removed the organs. How did they know? They found him with one of the missing person’s id inside a tattered shitty wallet when they grabbed him trying to take a lawn mower left out in front of a shop overnight.
Sheriff Datsun held Jones under questioning for twenty hours when Jones confessed and most of the recognizable portions Jones’ confession seems to occur around the last hour. The rest is muddled if even there. They don’t have high tech gadgets in Manspell, but they sure managed to get all of Jones’ confession. Might as well have had RZA on that shit because it was clear as day. Eight hours later, before the Feds could get to town, Jones was found hanging from a noose made of sheets in his cell. Forty-five hundred lynchings in eighty years.
When I walked into the Mansell diner, I was met with one unified stare. You would have thought I walked into an orgy with the way they all looked like they just got caught. It wasn’t the color of my skin. There was another black man there. He just about handed me over his bus tub like I might take over so he could go smoke. It wasn’t the color of my skin that warranted that collective “what are you doing here” look. No, it’s that I was an other. Outside of their pocket where certain things never happened or at least happened a lot slower. I was the type they saw on the tv they had never seen before, or at least in a long time. I was the type that had questions, and that’s the last type they want to see in Manspell.
I ditched the diner pretty quickly and decided I might have a little more luck with the bar at the edge of town. Knowing it could go the other way real quick, I decided to roll the dice. Seeing that it was one in the afternoon, I figured I would avoid the sea of drunk rednecks and risk encountering that one incredibly drunk redneck you might find in a trash bar right around noon. The kind that’s there at the door waiting for them to unlock it.
The bartender was a shaggy, disheveled and nervous white guy, around his mid-twenties, and the way he looked over his shoulder suggested he might be someone with information. Information he might be willing to share since he doesn’t look like he’s having too good of a time here either. He seemed overly relieved to conversate as if he had been stuck on a deserted island. No one to talk to. He came to Manspell to be with his aunt while she died because no one else would. They were all too busy. Now, he was worried if he wouldn’t be killed before he left. They don’t like people seeing too much of Manspell and leaving to tell about it.
“There’s a house down at the end of Bridge Street where they all go to get high. I think it’s meth, but they all seem to do it there, so maybe it’s crack? Like a crackhouse? Not going to lie, one night, I was intrigued and almost went, but something told me not to do it. I mean, I’ve never done crack and if I was going to do it, I would want it to be with someone I trust. Don’t want someone to crack me over the skull while I’m high. That’s a pun.”
He informed me that his aunt had, “in his words,” finally died so he was leaving in three hours. “I hate to not give a two weeks notice, but I think someone might kill me if I do,” he said with a nervous smile. I quietly wished him a safe journey and headed towards the door. “Just so you know, there’s another bar on the even further edge of town. They don’t open until ten because the clientele don’t like to advertise that they’re there.”
The bar was a gay bar called The Cottontail, a gaybar in the middle of Klu Kluxi Stan. The owners most likely paid a heavy price for protection. Protection in the gangland manner of speaking, of course. I strolled in about eleven attempting to look as much like a traveler as I could, but a couple of people had already heard about me. “You’re the Vice reporter that came to the diner they were talking about,” exclaimed the incredibly fabulous Georgia.
I informed her that I only briefly worked for Vice before heading to the bar to ask Greg what he knew about the house at the end of Bridge Street. “That’s something I don’t mess around with. Besides a couple glasses of wine every three hours, I try to keep my nose clean. That’s something you should ask Mallory about. She’ll be here around midnight to let it all hang out. She’s cis like you so you two will hit it off in a place like this.”
Ten after twelve rolled around and Greg was introducing me to Mallory. He was right. We did hit it off. She asked me about all the dangerous things I’ve done as a reporter and I regaled her in my exploits. Eventually, I got down to brass tax and asked her about the house at the end of Bridge Street. Her mouth opened wide in exasperation. “You work fast,” she said flirtatiously. “I’ll take you there,” she said lowering her eyes and jawline into a devilish grin. I wasn’t the one working fast. Mallory was the one looking for a hookup, just not the romantic kind.
Mallory was a shapeshifter. Under certain lighting, she was a youthful twenty-something, but under other harsher lights, the hard living was beginning to catch up to her. I suppose that’s what some would consider a transitional period. Either way, that bleach blond hair wasn’t hiding who she truly was: a young girl with a slightly rebellious streak most likely caused by a ridiculously repressed environment. Although she would never tell you as much, Mallory was ready to burn the patriarchy to the ground.
When we arrived to Bridge Street, I was surprised to learn that it didn’t get its name from having a bridge but that a majority of what actually existed of paved road was underneath a highway. Although no one had set up shop, there were plenty of fresh metaphorical fires burning down in the gutter. Cheap burners, milk crates, and mildewing blankets strewn about the cracked cement. Its fractures spider-webbing in every direction as to infect the whole surface.
There was only one house on Bridge Street. The House at the End of Bridge Street. Only one patch of grass for cars to park on. Only one light on Bridge Street and flickered. How could it not flicker? But when it wasn’t flickering, it was bright and illuminated that white house in all its decay. Roof shedding shingles like dead skin. The House at the End of Bridge Street.
We made our way up the shaky railings onto the porch where we were greeted by a man Mallory referred to as Maximus. Not a nickname, but an inside joke. “How’s it hanging, Mal?” She just grinned and half-whispered, “not enough.” Maximus took a long, hard look at me. Harder and longer than I would have liked. “Who’s your friend?” he asked. She just grabbed his hand, leaned in, and smiled the flirtiest grin she could muster with a mouthful of garbage teeth. “A fellow truth-seeker!” she said with the sort of glee reserved for cult members in white robes and pristine Nike sneakers. “Go ahead,” Maximus permitted.
We made our way through a dingy hallway decorated with bad oil paintings of sunflowers, but still the mere presence of sunflowers seemed to liven the place up. Except for the sunflower at the end of the hallway right before that door. That sunflower was too orange and seemed to be sucking fibers from the fabric of my clothes. I’m sure if that I were to stand in front of it long enough, it would strip all fabric from my body leaving me buck naked. If I were to stand there even longer than that, it would leave me stripped of all my flesh, muscle, and organ leaving me skeleton bare. If i were to stand there even longer than that, it would surely suck all of the bones and dry hair off of me leaving nothing but a humble narrator.
“He’s down here,” Mallory interrupted my gaze into the sunflower, nodding her head towards the doorway at the end of the hallway. A thunderous groan rattled the door apparently issuing an invitation, or at least as what I could tell by the response on Mallory’s now rapidly sagging flesh. Her tiny, seemingly shrunken hand turned the knob, opened the door, and revealed the long wooden stairwell into the descent below.
“YOu first,” she said, holding up her phone to check her makeup.
I jumped ahead. I was ready to meet this drug kingpin of rural Arkansas, consequences be damned. One step after the other, the groans grew louder, resonating with the hum of a thousand skeletal skyscrapers. At one point down my descent, I could feel my bones grow athritic to the point of immobility and then suddenly disperse in a burst of youthful spryness. The whole time, Mallory seemingly went through a rehearsed monologue directed towards the men sitting at the bottom of the stairs.
“I bring you this feast so that I might prosper. I bring you this feast so that I might feast. I bring you this beast so that I might no longer feel the aches of time decrease. I bring you this feast so that I might linger in the most utmost radiant way, defying the effects of time and gravity, lingering before decay.”
The hypnogogic rhythm and booze drove me down the stairs, but what resided in the depths of the attic of the House at the End of Bridge Street shook me from the waking dream. There were no gangsters, no bikers in wife beaters, or cartel enforcers. What wobbled in front of me was a mass of saggy boulders forming the battered, aging face of a vaudeville comedian pooling up from the dirt floor below. Defying all spatial logic, its gray sagging visage eclipsing the Dubai skyline. He opened his gaping maw to reveal a tongue adorned with screaming eyes.
That tongue wrapped not around me, but around Mallory. The Old Man seemed grateful as that octopic tongue wrapped around her entire body. She screamed and pleaded, but The Old Man obviously couldn’t even recognize suffering as he slurped her between his jaws. “Oh, that’s damn good,” he muttered impolitely with his mouth full of meat. The slurping and sucking noises filled the whole damn space, thankfully drowning out the screams. Soon, he was done and he belched Mallory back out, or as far as I could tell it was Mallory. Nothing but her face left wrapped around her skull. Everything else had been sucked dry, and he was still licking his lips. “She could have used a little ole Creole seasoning.”
I ran up the stairs, down the hallway, and stopped right at the front door where I was greeted by Maximus. He looked dazed with a crooked smile. “Fuck,” he muttered staring at me with big bulging eyes. “What are you doing here?” he asked incredulously. “You’re not supposed to be here. Mallory should be standing there where you are.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I said as I backed away from this wide-eyed redneck freak. “That’s just how it works. Two go down and one come up. We don’t get high if Cykotomas down there don’t get dinner. Right now, you’re trying your hardest to be a buzzkill, but I know what to do. You stay right there and I’m going to go get my shotgun. I shoot you, drag you down to the end of the road, and throw her below you. I said I caught you in the act of doing it. No one cares because, at the end of the day, you’re you and I’m me. So, just hang tight, alright?”
I nodded and as soon as he left, I crashed through the wooden spring door on the porch. Down the stairs, I ran towards the end of the street as fast as I could, sudden shotgun blasts in the ever-growing distance. Once I was to the car, I turned around to see Maximus holding his head wallowing on the ground. Mallory wasn’t supposed to be dead. He wasn’t supposed to have missed. He was obviously having a pretty bad night.
That night, I made as much distance between myself and Mansell, Arkansas as I could. I never went and got my things from the motel. I just booked it. The sun had rose and I was halfway to Montgomery when I got the phone call. Didn’t pick it up, and just let it go straight to voicemail. It was a call from Sheriff Datsun. It went a little something like this:
“When you get this call, I’ll already be dead. Don’t ask how. We’re dealing with forces greater than you and I both, but I’ll tell you a little story. Years ago, my town was under attack. Meth, pills, crack. Everything you could have thought of was available to the people of Manspell, and I knew that this wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for a certain criminal element residing on the outskirts of town. I couldn’t just arrest them for being who they were. Those days were long gone, and the thing about drugs is that they take a long time to kill their host. No telling how many more people they’ll infect before they go down themselves. I was contemplating this one night underneath my favorite oak tree when the answer suddenly appeared. A weird magical book named the Grimmr Evangelium. I took it home and began flipping through its pages. That’s where I found the invocation spell for a being known as Cykotomas, an old world god who would reward its followers with an unparalleled euphoria as long as they gave him the appropriate sacrament. Last night, my daughter Mallory was that sacrament. I never intended for her to get wrapped up in all this. She was a good kid, and somewhere along the way, I just lost a hold of her. There’s only one spell you can use to get rid of Cykotomas and it calls for the person who invoked him to sacrifice himself. That’s the most I can do for Mallory now. As for you, they’ll probably pin it all on you, stranger. I doubt this call will be much help.”
He was right. Whenever I attempted to play the message for anyone else, it was just a short message of a couple bleeps and bloops. Just one word can even be distinguished from the digital noise: Cykotomas. They tell me the voice sounds a lot like a female, but I can’t hear what the lawyer heard. I only hear Sheriff Datsun’s confession. One of Datsun’s deputies, and now interim Sheriff, Sheriff Blake Wheatley found Datsun hanging from his favorite oak tree, nothing but dripping bones and a contorted face of terror wrapped around his skull. I heard it on good authority that the house at the end of Bridge Street sunk into the ground leaving only a crater. Some of Mansell’s derelicts still gather around there at night singing hymns to their forgotten god.
As for me, I’m a wanted man, the primary suspect in the investigation of the murder of a Sheriff and his daughter. Some of the local papers have given me the moniker The Skin Man. I’ve managed to avoid capture with the help of various underground occult organizations. None of whom I knew existed before all of this. With any luck, I’ll be able to make it to a place on the equator where I can grow back my dreads and attempt to clear my name. Until then, this is The Skin Man signing out.