The Man With No Face
Jake Bible
Published by Samannah Media
All content copyright 2011 Jake Bible
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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The Man With No Face
“Gone rancid,” The Man With No Face said as he sniffed the jar of bear grease in his hand. “Just like me.”
He chuckled to himself as he sat naked upon his bedroll, a small campfire lighting the scrub brush and cacti surrounding him. The flames’ light flickered across the patchwork of leathers that made up his skin.
The Man puckered his withered lips and blew. He knew what tune he wanted to whistle, but his lips hadn’t cooperated for years. Nevertheless, he bobbed his head to the wispy sound as he applied liberal amounts of the bear grease onto his leathers.
As always, when greasing himself up, The Man’s mind wandered back to how he was forced to become what he was.
His memory was spotty, and there were incidents he’d intentionally blocked out, but he remembered the POW camp the Union Army forced him in.
And he remembered one Colonel Milton.
***
“Hold him down, boys!” Colonel Milton shouted when they came for The Man. “The strips need to be exact or the magic ain’t gonna work!”
“He’s squirrelly, sir,” Corporal Herschel McMannon complained. “Guy won’t cooperate.”
The Man’s head rocked to the side as Private Marcus Grimes slammed an axe handle into his cheek. The world spun and he struggled to keep focus, but the ringing in his skull was near deafening.
When he’d been back in his tent, ankle deep in mud and shit, he knew it was only a matter of time before they came for him. He’d watched man after man get yanked from the tent each night. None returned. He’d tried to fight, even gouging out a Yank’s eye with his thumb, but they overwhelmed him and dragged him through the muck to the room attached to the Colonel’s quarters.
Colonel Elias Milton was short, stout and meaner than anyone The Man had ever met. He’d watched the Colonel stomp on a puppy’s head, pushing it under the mud, until the thing died from sucking mud into its tiny lungs. He’d watched the Colonel do even worse to the Confederate soldiers under his “care”.
There’d been a rumor going around that the Colonel wasn’t what he’d seemed; that he was a man of the Devil. The Man had seen plenty of evil in his days, from slaves whipped until they died on the post, to the bloodbaths that were considered battles in the War Between the States. But, the Colonel was made of a different evil. An evil that stank and smoldered behind the man’s eyes.
“Start with his face,” Colonel Milton ordered. “Keep it intact this time, you imbeciles! I don’t want to go through this again. He’s the last one that can make this happen.”
The Man was dazed enough that he didn’t feel the first cuts, but once the skin was lifted from his skull, well, he felt that.
His screams were ignored, his pleading laughed at, and his misery mocked.
And then the true horror started.
Colonel Milton placed The Man’s face on his own, blood dripping down his neck and onto his blue uniform, as he recited an incantation he knew by heart. The many candles that lit the room suddenly dimmed and the temperature dropped a good twenty degrees in seconds.
Not that The Man noticed. He was too busy screaming as his skin was removed from his body, strip by strip. He was thankful when God showed him mercy and he slipped into unconsciousness.
***
The Man applied the bear grease to each and every inch of his body. He made sure he worked it in good to the lacing that held the leathers to his body and held them to each other. Dry laces pulled at the leathers and in turn pulled at the points they were anchored to his flesh and bone. He hated it when the laces pulled.
He kept his dry whistling up as he thought back on the prison camp.
***
When he came to, The Man With No Face found himself smothered in a pile of offal and corpses. It was a pile he’d been forced to walk past everyday for a year as he was held in the camp. He’d always wondered when it was to be his turn.
He was thankful to be alive, but as feeling came back into his body, he quickly wished he wasn’t. Every nerve was on fire as he dragged himself from the pile and into the cool, wet mud that covered every inch of the camp. Flashes of what had happened to him flew through his mind, but he pushed the images and feelings aside as he slowly crawled his way to the edge of the camp. Covered in muck, he was impossible to see in the moonless night and easily slipped through the fence.
Under the cover of thick rain clouds, The Man snagged an oil cloth that was abandoned just outside the fence line and wrapped it about his exposed body. Every step was excruciating, as the Colonel had insisted they take the skin from the soles of his feet also, but The Man pushed forward and was well away from the prison camp before the dawn light pierced the overcast sky.
***
With the grease applied, The Man With No Face slid his trousers back on and lay back on his bedroll as the fire died next to him. He wrapped himself in his duster and watched the stars twinkle in the desert night sky. In seconds he drifted off to sleep. A sleep that was never sound and always brought him to the one place he never wanted to remember.
***
It took The Man With No Face six weeks to make his way to his small farm in the mountains of North Carolina. When he stumbled onto the porch, a porch he had built with his own two hands, he made sure to kiss every single board and nail, praising God the entire time.
His communion was broken by the gasps of his wife and daughters as they came out to see what the noise was. The Man With No Face, various animal skins sticking to his festering flesh where he’d attempted to cover himself, cowered in the corner of the porch, his hands waving his stunned family away.
“Dear Lord!” his wife cried out when she saw the blue of his eyes. The very eyes that drew her to him when he first came courting. “Girls, it’s you father! Get some blankets and clean rags!” The girls, three of them, just stood there, their eyes glued to the abomination that their mother insisted was their father. “GO!”
They hurried inside and The Man could hear them pounding through the house as they gathered the things their mother kept calling for as she slowly inspected her suffering husband.
“We thought you were dead,” she cried. “We got a letter saying you’d died in some Union camp.”
“Can’t kill me,” The Man whispered. “Had to get back to you.”
His wife watched him closely, and while she shuddered at the sight of him, she didn’t hesitate when it was time to remove the rotting skins. The Man whimpered with every pull, but was too exhausted to scream. His wife tried to calm him by singing softly.
“Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,” she sang. “Old times they are not forgotten. Look away, look away…”
It took weeks for The Man to get his strength back. He slipped in and out of consciousness, his mind fevered with visions of Hell. His waking hours weren’t much better as his wife decided his body couldn’t be left exposed to the elements without skin. She came up with an ingenious way of sewing patches of thin leather together until every inch of him was covered.
When the day came for the final step of the process, the sewing of the leathers directly to his body, The Man, his wife, and his daughters prayed for an hour before they began the torturous ordeal. Three hours later it was done and The Man stood on his own two feet for the first time since his harried journey home.
The Man With No Face rested on his front porch and felt the breeze blow across his lips, the only part of him that wasn’t covered in leathers.
“Nice farm you got here,” the voice of Colonel Milton said as he and his men stepped from the tree line that ringed The Man’s farm house. “And what pretty girls, too.”
***
The Man came awake with a start, the sounds of his daughters’ screams echoing in his mind. He felt a tugging at his leg and opened his eyes to see two coyotes fighting over his right calf. In one motion he drew his Remington 1858, cocked it and fired. The first coyote’s head exploded in a spray of blood and grey fur. The second coyote fled instantly, its yelps getting quieter and quieter as it sprinted across the desert.