positivelyBLEAK Grinning back into the abyss.

The Beast Speaks: I Want Your Skulls

Violence and the macabre ahead: con­sider your­self warned!

As some of you might know, res­i­dent madman (and my very fab­u­lous beau) S. McManbeast has been dishing out horror and trans­gres­sive fic­tion for a while now — and he’s been kind enough to draft up a short story just for PosBleak! So, for anyone feeling a touch burnt out from the explo­sion of mush and roman­ti­cism over the past hol­iday, here’s an exclu­sive sample of death & destruc­tion, just for you! — E.Bleak

Fickle Mortality

By Sean Malia “McManbeast” Thompson

You have no idea what it’s like, knowing you are going to die in an hour. Sixty short min­utes are now the only things that sep­a­rate you from the other side. From that country undis­cov­ered by the living; that inevitable end we all must face.

Guess that’s what the whole death row thing is about though.

If you ask me now, if I feel sorry for what I’ve done, then I’d have to tell you plainly that the answer is no. I’d do it all over again in a heart beat if I had the option.

I’d kill them all again. Over and over and over.

The court-​appointed psy­chol­o­gist described me as having an “extreme anti­so­cial per­son­ality dis­order with extreme vio­lent ten­den­cies.” But I’m let­ting you know now that I never stood out in a crowd. I never drew atten­tion to myself. I was just a reg­ular woman, the one you see in the con­ve­nience store and smile at politely. Who would have ever sus­pected what I was capable of?

All those people, those use­less, use­less people. But, I gave them a use.

I was an artist, you see. And my canvas of choice was the clean human skull.

I had quite a prof­itable store online, until the author­i­ties pieced every­thing together. Online, I simply stated that I bought the skulls from med­ical supply com­pa­nies. Those sim­ple­tons never sus­pected how far I was willing to go to express myself.

The chase was the best part. The thrill of the hunt. Stalking my prey, fig­uring out which of those pretty little things would allow me to express the deepest feel­ings in my soul, to expel them out into the ethos. All those beau­tiful mandibles, pari­etal and occip­ital lobes. The shape and the tex­ture of the hard, white inner frame work of us all.

A shame I’ll never get to see my col­lec­tion again. So mag­nif­i­cent, they all were. So col­orful. I had them arranged throughout my house. I lived alone. I cer­tainly never could have gotten away with what I did had I not had the soli­tude and dis­tance from any nosy neigh­bors. The closest house was a great many miles off from my residence.

My home was in a small, woodsy town in Connecticut. Rundolton, it was called. It soothed me, Rundolton. You really felt like a member of a com­mu­nity there. Naturally, I got all my sup­plies from out­side of Rundolton. From the big city of Hartford. That dirty, smelly city. Yuck.

Something my father used to say, though, “Just ’cause a man looks low class, doesn’t mean his soul isn’t high.” He was a very spir­i­tual man, my father. Most likely wouldn’t approve of my artist’s ways. More than the gen­er­a­tion gap and reli­gious dif­fer­ences, I’d imagine. But I killed him when I was fif­teen, so he’d never have the chance to hit me again. I never con­fessed to my father’s death, but since I’m off to be lethally injected soon, every­thing must be known.

I don’t believe in a god. My rea­soning is simple. If there was a god, how could he allow me to do what I did? But I believe in other things.

That base­ment came in handy. Best fea­ture of my house in “Rundy,” as the locals affec­tion­ately call it. It was gigantic. The man who first built it, back in 1915, was a car­penter. He designed the base­ment large so he could work on his projects. His name was Bob. Remember the first time I heard Bob’s last name, remember the way the fat lips of the real estate agent who sold me my home, sounded it out, looking all the world like a horse with peanut butter on his teeth. Gideon, he said to me, that warm day in the spring when I agreed to buy my dream house. Like the bibles.

Florida is just the pits. It’s so humid down here, and it’s always raining or swel­tering. I long for the cool breeze of a New England fall. It is October, and October in Tampa is muggy and gross.

The thought of the great artistic achieve­ments I accom­plished in that base­ment, they bring a smile to my weary face. Even in this hell hole of steel bars and chipped con­crete, they cannot con­fine my spirit.

It was dif­fi­cult work, believe me. Had to find that old bath tub. Had to find the acid. Had to lure the men, women, and chil­dren into my home. Wasn’t dif­fi­cult for me though. I’ve always been adored for my cooking. That, and my wom­anly ways.

So, for the men it was a smile and an offer of a home-​cooked meal. For the women it was slightly dif­ferent, but the home-​cooked meal was still involved. I was bound to get caught; I knew it from the first. But the thrill of it all, the sheer joy of watching their choking faces. The little girls and boys were the most fun. They were so fright­ened! Oh, I laughed and laughed as they died from my poi­soned mashed pota­toes. I wrote down the recipe, and I have a man from Montana posting it to his website.

I never wanted to have chil­dren. I knew that they wouldn’t fit into the grand design I’d carved for myself in child­hood. With all those lost pets. The first skull I’d ever painted was my neigh­bors’ cat’s. I was always a bright child. Knew that if you force fed a cat baker’s chocolate…

I buried its body, deep behind my old house over in Kintport, about a half hour from my cur­rent home in Rundolton. The home of my youth in Kintport was even more iso­lated and woodsy then my home in Rundy. I went back into the woods behind my house, one night when the moon was full in the late summer of my eleventh year. I used my daddy’s shovel to dig up the cat’s body. And I saw its pretty little bones, eaten away by mag­gots. I cleaned off the skull in my bathtub, late that night while my father was still asleep, or rather passed out from the drink. He’d always had a fond­ness for the spirits.

I dec­o­rated it with glitter and little plastic beads, and painted on it with oil paints. Green and blue and red and yellow lines all inter­con­nected with the pat­tern I’d made on the cat’s skull and hot-​glued on. I knew from then on my true pur­pose in life. What I could offer to the world.

Daddy never would have approved. That’s why, one night, I stabbed him forty-​six times with a kitchen knife. He got buried behind the house, pretty close to where I buried the cat. My mother had died in child­birth, so it was only me and the old man. His was the first human skull I painted. They say your first is your best, but I’d tend to dis­agree. I’d say the best was the last piece I worked on.

Gideon told me what to do. He told me the truth. I set up all the skulls just like he instructed. I’m going to be just like him. In fact, he was the one told me to kill my old man now that I think back on it.

He told me the number. I killed more then he even needed. He needed fif­teen. I killed twenty. I always was an overachiever.

I’m not afraid of death. Because Gideon taught me how to come back. All it took was fif­teen skulls and the gateway was opened. And I shall travel through that gateway and live on. Be born again, so to speak.

I never told them about the little boy. I needed a con­duit, some­thing cor­po­real, of flesh and bone. I needed a recruit, and found a willing can­di­date in a seven year old home­less child. His tiny black face shiv­ered on that cold day I picked him up out­side that mall in Hartford. I told him the truth on the ride. Explained that we were going to have to share a body. Silly child believed me.

I was never one for sharing.

Oh, it looks like its time for my last meal. I gave them my recipe, so with my fried chicken I’m having my recipe of mashed pota­toes, sans poison of course. They like me around here. I heard one of the guards talking down the hall. About how it’s a shame, them killing a girl just nine­teen years old. I’ve always felt that age is just a number though.

I can’t wait to start painting again.