Salt Snake and Other Bloody Cuts

  Jeff Silkstone, the man, wanted only to run from this madness.

  The beast wanted blood. It wanted: Fight.

  The muscles bunched around his shoulders, neck. His veins showed against the tightening skin. Sharp teeth thrust from his lips. Then the growing muscle weight in his upper torso dragged him down until he was virtually on all fours.

  An old man was first. He was clubbing with his walking stick and squealing indignantly and incoherently when Jeff leapt and snapped his neck with one bite.

  Then he was in the middle of a battling mass of arms and clubs. People lunged forward. He snapped, shearing off limbs, tearing away faces.

  But still they came.

  Stomaching his way through the mob came a middle aged man wearing a VOTE CONSERVATIVE rosette on the lapel of his jacket. In the crush it had pulled loose and now hung upside down. The man was fat—resoundingly obese; his jowls wobbled and his stomach was an enormous bulge like an over-inflated balloon over which some jokester had stretched a pale blue shirt. The wet flapping mouth was open and his piggy eyes flashed with unreasoning hatred. As he reached out two podgy hands Jeff Silkstone jabbed with one razor claw. The man’s belly split open from rib cage to groin. Instantly, a torrent of intestine poured out like a sackful of snakes liberated at last.

  The guts still slipped out with little slopping farting sounds as he reeled back into the crowd, trying in vain to close up the cruel split with his fat red hands.

  Savage cries thickened the air. They—London—wanted Jeff Silverstone dead, the last of his kind, regardless of the cost.

  A red BMW careered through the crowd like a torpedo to hit him in the back. The driver, crazed with a primordial blood—lust, reversed, then charged again. This time Jeff was ready.

  His clenched fist exploded the windscreen. He snatched out the screeching stockbroker then used his body to hammer the car to scrap.

  No sooner had he backed from the wrecked BMW when he heard a warbling screech from behind. He spun round to see the fat Conservative attack again: this time with his pale rubbery intestine spilling down his legs from the gaping wound in his stomach. Pink foam frothed from his flabby mouth as he tried to wind the gut around Jeff’s neck and garrot him with it. Four centimetres from Jeff’s face quivered the ferocious face and insane eyes, the fat man’s mouth clamping open and shut like he wanted to bite Jeff’s nose; or maybe kiss him with those slippery foam spattered lips.

  The fat man had managed to wind his gut three times round Jeff Silkstone’s neck by the time Jeff could twist his head down and chew through the intestine that was as thick as beef sausage.

  As Jeff chewed he tasted the man’s lunch: oysters, champagne, and over-cooked over-spiced steak all mixed with coffee-coloured bile that burnt his tongue.

  Gagging, he chewed harder. The gut parted, then with a tremendous push Jeff hurled the fat man over the heads of the mob. He flew through the air like an unravelling toilet roll thrown onto a soccer pitch, the intestines streaming out in a bloody ribbon that grew longer and longer until the fat man impacted against the plate glass window of a butcher’s shop, shattering it and bouncing down heavily amongst the oven ready chickens and barbecue spare ribs.

  To Jeff Silkstone, it became a dream where he was more observer rather than participant. The beast side of him fought and maimed and killed until dusk.

  Subtly, the mob’s tactics changed. No longer was it a frenzied attack.

  By the hundred they simply pressed forward—crowding closer and closer.

  He trampled, bit and clawed, but they still ambled forward like stupid cattle.

  Underfoot his feet slithered on a mash of blood, tattered spleens and a thick, steaming rug of intestine.

  Now he didn’t savage the people, he just hurled them back so that their sheer numbers wouldn’t overwhelm him.

  If I slip, God, if I slip, thought the Jeff Silkstone mind frantically now.

  Eventually, the bodies rose in a wall around him.

  It grew higher and higher until it was as if he stood at the bottom of a crater with a barrier of interwoven limbs—and faces. Faces that watched him with that surprised fixed look that the dead wear.

  It can’t go on any longer.

  But it did.

  Old men would scramble labouriously up and over the mound only to fall down the other side, cracking their skulls on the road. There they lay twitching at his feet and he would have to scoop them up and hurl them onto the steaming meat wall. On… On… On…

  Now a priest, then a shopkeeper, a waiter. Two men in cricket jerseys.

  Blood… Blood… He was so tired.

  Then three women belly flopped from the mound like drunken divers. Wearily he picked them up and tossed away the bodies, striving to keep a space clear around him.

  At last it happened. He slipped.

  They must have been waiting for it. Instantly two dozen men and women flopped down on top of him.

  He struggled.

  He couldn’t rise.

  More and more climbed the fifteen foot crater wall and dropped down.

  He struggled, choking. Their massed weight was enormous.

  For another hour it went on until in the middle of the road a heap of bodies rose as high as the streetlights.

  Presently, the streetlights flickered on. They illuminated a lake beside the mound. It was thick, black, the consistency of tar. Only a shimmer of crimson about it indicated that it ever had been blood. In the congealing liquid, the remains of the Nazarene Sports & Social Cricket Club flopped about like crippled seals.

  And beneath the steaming mountain of flesh, crushed, broken, beaten—defeated—lay the body of the last Barnsley werewolf.

  Sacrifice

  They caught the fell walker on Manshead Moor. It may have been their numbers, or the fact they carried bronze swords and axes that he didn’t utter so much as a sound.

  The man, early thirties, tall, wearing jeans and a Greenpeace sweatshirt allowed them to take his rucksack. He seemed hypnotised by the dozen or so bronze swords pointed at him by these rough-looking warriors, the blades reflecting the brilliant summer sun.

  Without speaking two men held his arms behind his back while a third bound the man’s wrists with electric flex, the calloused hands expertly twisting and looping the flex until he was bound tight. Then they led him down a moorland path, and down to a village in a secluded valley.

  The houses, typical to that area of the Yorkshire Pennines, were built of stone beneath roofs of weathered tile. Nothing special. It could have been a village anywhere: A butcher’s; a tiny post office with a bright red post box set in the asphalt pavement. In a gap between two houses somebody in a desperate attempt to be quaint had built a wishing well. It looked bloody awful. At the end of the main street stood a redbrick pub. That had one of those fibre-glass elephants in the beer garden where kids could climb up through its belly, crawl out of its mouth and slide down a long pink tongue to the ground.

  Yes. Everything normal. Everything profoundly bloody normal, thought the man. Apart from one thing. Twenty men had surrounded him on the moor—and taken him captive. For what? For the first time the man broke his stunned silence.

  “What’s all this then?” He sounded nervous. “Ah… Some kind of carnival?”

  No-one spoke. As they reached the village the men pushed the blades of their swords into the broad leather belts they all wore. Apart from their belts their clothing was that of an average farm labourer.

  “I know.” The man forced a weak laugh. “I have to pay a ransom. That’s it, isn’t it? A new mini bus for the school? Church roof? Something like that, isn’t it?”

  Again none of the stone-faced men spoke. He looked round at them his scared eyes widening.

  “That’s what it is, isn’t it? A fete, a carnival?” A pleading note had crept into his voice.

  They lead him into the village and to a small cottage with a doorway so low even a small man would have to stoop to enter. A man in his fifties—th
e leader of the warriors?— tapped respectfully on the door, then quickly stood back.

  The prisoner peered into the open doorway not knowing what to expect. Then he saw a shape moving in the gloomy interior. Something humped, moving with a weird slowness.

  He held his breath. Was it some kind of animal? A joke? For chrissakes it had to be a joke. A man dressed as an animal with a large paper-maché head.

  The assembled men waited patiently as if they expected some important dignitary.

  At last the humped thing came to the doorway, its watery eyes blinking in the sunlight.

  The bound man took a step backward, a reflex action.

  It was awful.

  He saw it was a woman, just flesh and blood, but nature had taken the woman’s fetal cells while still in her mother’s womb, stirred them like a child mixing different fizzy drinks at random and then stood back to let humankind taste the result.

  And it was a sour creation.

  A distorted head tapering to a point; heavy jaw overlapping the wrong way; the banana yellow teeth looking like tombstones after an earthquake—slanting every way imaginable.

  But the most striking thing about this tortured, twisted face.

  The eyes.

  Oh, Jesus, the eyes…

  They were unforgettable: Watering, squinting beneath a set of eyebrows that looked as thick and as black as moustaches. But by God there was intelligence burning there. They possessed a penetrating shrewdness that made you believe she could read your mind.

  Walking with a slow rolling gait she approached the man and looked him up and down. Those two shrewd eyes devouring every clue his clothes and expression revealed.

  “Frightened?” she asked in a surprisingly soft voice.

  He said nothing. Only swallowed—with difficulty.

  She nodded. “You have every reason to be.” She looked him up and down again. “Seems healthy.” She shot him a penetrating look. “You homosexual?”

  He tried to speak in a stammering way but she silenced him with a wave of her twisted hand. “No. You’re wearing a wedding ring. Not conclusive proof of course, but we’ll have to trust our instincts. It wouldn’t do if you were infected. That wouldn’t do at all. Now.” She held out that twisted hand. “Wallet, Donald.”

  A younger man obediently plucked a wallet from the back pocket of the man’s Levis and handed it to the malformed woman.

  “John Edward Wainwright,” she read in a voice that oozed a quiet authority. “Address, 31 Hampole Way, Doncaster. Credit cards. Receipt for one colour television, portable. Blood donor card—ah, good sign, a very good sign Mr. Wainwright. You must be a healthy young bull if they want your blood.”

  Then for the first time she laughed. A strange sighing sound like a very old person trying to catch their breath.

  She checked the contents of the wallet thoroughly, missing nothing—raffle tickets, video library membership card and a card at the very back. “Ah, next of kin,” read the woman, “Dawn Wainwright Your wife?”

  He nodded mutely, wishing someone would slacken the flex that had now started to bite into his wrists.

  The woman looked closely at Wainwright. “Any children?” Again he just gave the slightest shake of the head.

  “Ah… A pity. Don’t you realise that through your children you are immortal? Your descendants will carry your genes through eternity.” For a moment those sharp eyes became almost dreamy. “In five or ten generations, sometime when you are less than dust a little boy of your blood will be born who would have your black hair, with that same curling fringe; he’d look like you, talk like you, have the same habits and dream the same dreams.”

  “Atavism.” The word came automatically to Wainwright’s dry lips.

  The woman nodded. “Atavism. The recurrence in human beings of hereditary characteristics…” She shook her head. “A pity… A pity…”

  Wainwright’s eyes, enlarged with fear, stared at the woman. “What are you going to do with me?”

  She watched him, weighing him up, then nodded. She had reached a decision.

  “This has gone far enough,” Wainwright was saying. “It’s gone too far. Let me go.” He looked about him quickly. “Let me go now and I promise I’ll tell no-one. It’s just a joke—right? Let me go… Oh, come on let me go. Please. Just untie me and I’ll just walk away—just go—please. No-one has to know any—”

  “He’ll do,” said the woman nodding again. She’d not listened to a word Wainwright has said. That gargoyle face twisted into a wet-lipped smile. “He’ll do very nicely indeed.”

  The leader of the warriors coughed deferentially before speaking. “Do you want him taking up there now, Mam?”

  Mam?

  Mam! This mis-shapen creature had borne children! Wainwright’s stomach bucked into his throat at the thought of anyone making… damnit, actually making love to the woman, caressing those loose swinging breasts, whispering tender words into the wrinkled ear that hung on the side of her head like a malformed sea shell. Jesus Christ…

  She nodded. “Take him. Then get ready for tonight.” A man pulled Wainwright by the elbow.

  The creature stopped in the doorway. “And make sure you don’t lose him. This is the important one.”

  They took Wainwright along the deserted street. He saw the village had an impoverished look stamped across it. Okay, the streets were swept clean, the place was tidy but the houses needed money spending on them. The windows and doors were neatly painted but beneath the bright colours the frames were clearly rotting, some panes had long since cracked. The few cars in the village were old models—all immaculately polished—but now they were being eaten alive by rust.

  On they went. By a parked van: it bore the slogan BRAITHWAITES—QUALITY BUTCHERS SINCE 1923; by the pub with the elephant with its eight foot long tongue, by more cottages all with immaculate net curtains that were as white as freshly fallen snow. And then out of the village entirely.

  Moments later they arrived at a field of rough grass that had been recently cut short, leaving it a dull yellow. Here and there stood a few dim-looking sheep that watched the strange group with blank looks. The sheepish eyes saw a group of men tie another man to a solitary oak tree in the middle of the field. There they left him.

  The sheep chewed the short grass while contemplating the dazed-looking man. He did nothing. He didn’t struggle, shout. Nothing. He just gazed at the men walking back to the village with a dim-looking expression that matched their own.

  The tree’s shadow had lengthened by an hour by the time Wainwright saw any movement in the village.

  Then it all happened at once.

  They came.

  In a weird procession. Men, women, children.

  And leading them, the twisted and humped living gargoyle of a woman. They had changed their clothes. Women and children in Sunday best. Men in the suits they wore for weddings and funerals.

  It was what they carried that cast them weird.

  They bore long poles, some as high as twenty feet, even washing-line clothes props had been pressed into service. From the top of some poles swung little cages containing pigeons; one pole carried the head of a sheep, probably one of the cousins of the sheep now watching the approaching procession with such impassive expressions on their boney faces.

  The most troubling poles carried things that Wainwright could not identify. From some flapped brown leathery sheets the size of pillowcases, from others small cushions made out of wrinkled skin.

  As they approached Wainwright could the men’s faces were daubed with swirling purple and crimson lines. They again carried the bronze swords and daggers, while bound around their arms were bands of fox fur. This combined with neatly pressed trousers and carefully shined shoes looked downright ludicrous.

  Or it should. Except there was something profoundly sinister about it all. The villagers’ solemn faces, the gargoyle woman dressed in a billowing dress the colour of peaches.

  All in all, there were about two hund
red of them. They gathered in a crescent in front of him. The woman ambled forward accompanied by the… there was no other word for it, chief, the man in his fifties who had the bearing of a Borough councillor—a little power and a large ego.

  “Mr. Wainwright.” said the chief in a strong Yorkshire accent, “you’ve been picked today in order to help the village of Owston-in-Elmet. That’s where we live and where our families have lived for longer than anyone knows.”

  Christ, it was as if the man was making a speech to open a village fair!

  “This has gone far enough,” shouted Wainwright. The flex was cutting the circulation to his fingers, his legs ached, he felt sick; he would be sick if this farce didn’t end soon.

  The woman said softly, “You will be helping us in a deeper and more profound way than you could have ever dreamed possible.”

  “Bugger that!” cried Wainwright. “Bugger you! You’re all flaming barmy. Let me go.”

  “Mr. Wainwright you—”

  “Shut up you ugly cow! I said, let me bloody-well go or they’ll hmmph…”

  Without a word the chief had stepped forward and driven his muscular fist into Wainwright’s mouth. Something snapped in his bottom jaw, his lips went numb and a sharp pain stabbed back into his neck.

  “In future, lad. Yer keep yer trap shut. Alright?”

  Shocked, Wainwright looked down to see blood and saliva dribbling down the front of his Greenpeace sweatshirt.

  The villagers continued their weird pantomime. It seemed to be some elabourate ritual. Something like small dark biscuits were passed round on white china plates, verses of poetry that made no sense were recited by adults and children alike. Men broke sticks and threw them into the tree. Those that stuck in the branches were applauded; those that stuck on the highest branches were applauded furiously. The ritual went on and on until the sun rested on the horizon.

  At that moment the sound of tractor engines cracked open the still evening air. Three tractors pulling trailers turned into the field. Piled high on the trailers mounds of dry branches shivered and shook as the tractor bounded across the grass.

  Then it all became so obvious.