Jul. 9, 2009 - Chapter 5
Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, It is true. I, Phileas Tambov, have completed TWO Chapters of Six Feet Under, and now for your reading enjoyment, here is Chapter 5.
*WARNING*
The content which is to be displayed is extremely graphic. If there are young children reading this right now please take them away before continuing. Reader Discretion is advised.
Chapter 5
Dr. Silas Gehrig pulled along the sled he’d used for fifteen years along the ice. It had been a good day of ice fishing and he wanted to get back to his wife and show her the tremendous catch. He had been able to catch fifteen fish of all sizes, and knowing how much his wife loved a good fish he wanted to hurry home as fast as he could.
“Won’t she be happy?” he said to himself as he slowed up, exhaling into his hands to warm them.
Silas was also happy, not only because he had been so successful, but also because he prided himself on the sharpness of his spud bar. It had helped him carve out some of the holes he required for this expedition, and so he gazed longingly at it for a while before beginning to pull his sled again. The canyon that held the lake was becoming darker, and why not? It was in fact five thirty and darkness was creeping over fast; though this was no serious change. It had been overcast and cloudy all day, only once did the sun peek through the clouds.
At the age of forty-seven one might think that Silas was too old to ice fish or for that matter teach in colleges. He was indeed ready to retire. But after all, what is a man to do if he can’t ice fish? Or enjoy outdoor recreation for that matter. There were a lot of things that he was doing that most of the American Public thought he couldn’t.
“Shows what they know,” he thought to himself, “ah well Silas you old coot, maybe you are getting too old for this.”
He smiled and continued pulling the sled along behind himself. The biting wind stung his face and his lips became numb. Not that Silas cared. He knew that a hot meal was on at home, and he wasn’t going to miss out on it. Well, maybe he could. A devilish smile broke out across his face again; the things that he thought about when he wasn’t teaching. The temperature seemed to drop again, and Silas brought out his pocket thermometer that read the exact temperature of the air in seconds once it adjusted.
The reading on the thermometer shocked him. He was speechless for a few seconds and then regained his composure.
“Negative thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit?!” he exclaimed, “That can’t be right, maybe I need to get this thing calibrated.”
He paid no heed to the thermometer and trudged on. Closer to the edge of the canyon that led to a small tributary there was snow beginning to pile up. The sloshing of wet snow echoed across the walls of the canyon, giving Silas an eerie feeling. The path became visible ahead. Silas was grateful, but he was getting tired fast.
Silas trudged up the sloped path and sighed to himself. The very thought that the thermometer had been right gave him the chills; but somehow he attributed that to the cold of the December evening. The crunch of the snow echoed lightly off the canyon walls, and he marveled at the effects of sound. How one minute they could be certain, crisp and clear, and the next become muffled and so distorted one might think their hearing was going. Silas chuckled at the thought and pressed on, stopping a little ways up. He was sure his car wasn’t this far up the path. He looked behind him to see a man walking up. Then he stopped.
“Probably just another fisherman.” He said to himself, shaking the feeling that this person might not be a very stand up person.
The cold forced Silas to move on, feet numb, hands numb, almost every part of his body was numb. The crunch, crunch, crunch of the snow continued, louder this time. Not sure of why this man was following him, Silas picked the pace up even more. Even this increase of pace didn’t seem to help. From the sounds of the crunching snow behind him, the man was picking up his pace as well, and he was holding on the line that Silas was on. When Silas stopped again, the man stopped.
“Can I help you sir?” Silas asked, “Are you lost?”
Silas heard a chuckle from below, and wasn’t sure what to do. The chuckle turned into a hearty laugh, and a nervous smile spread across his face.
“Oh you can help me,” the shadowy figure said, “just like you helped yourself, to that next door neighbor of yours.”
The blood dropped from Silas’ face. How could this man know about that? His vocal chords couldn’t function. He couldn’t utter a sound to even remotely ask how this man knew. Silas made his legs work and he began to move across the path, hoping to reach his car. There was a bend in the canyon where the walls came close together, only big enough for one sled. Stumbling in the snow, Silas tripped over a thick root growing out of the ground that hadn’t gotten snow covered and he went headlong into the snow bank on his right.
The footsteps behind him kept pace and then stopped as they were just a few feet behind him. Silas’ heart was in his throat. He couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, he couldn’t even blink. Slowly he stood up and then turned around. The man behind him wasn’t what he expected to see. He had on a gruesome mask, blood red, with what looked like tears coming down from the many holes and slits in it. Silas backed up, but then he soon found he was met by the canyon wall.
“Please, please don’t hurt me!” he pleaded, “I’ll give you anything you want! Money, my fishing gear! Just don’t hurt me!”
An evil cackle resonated from the mask. That laugh was not a reassuring thing for Silas. Fear had never gripped his entire body like this in his whole life.
“You think I want your money? Please, if I wanted your money,” the masked man said, getting up close to Silas, whispering it in his ear, “I would just take it. I’m here…” the man paused, looking both directions, “for your soul.”
This made Silas laugh. Now he knew it was a joke. The man began to laugh as well, good and heartily. They both laughed until the echo of the canyon was paralleling their own laughter.
“Ahahaha. That’s a good joke. Are you going to the parking lot as well?” Silas asked as he picked up the rope that was attached to his sled.
He fully expected the man to take off that gruesome mask and then chat with him. But he did no such thing. He didn’t even speak. The fear slowly crept back up into Silas’ body, seizing his every joint. In a flash the man grabbed the Spud Bar he so prized. Silas felt himself being lifted off of the ground, but he couldn’t see what was holding him. Suddenly he was thrown backwards into the canyon wall, pain thrashing through his every nerve.
The spud bar came hurdling out of nowhere, slicing into his left shoulder, pinning him to the canyon wall. No one can do that! Silas let go a scream that would have waken the dead. The man in the mask walked forward and stood under him, cackling like a maniac.
“WHO ARE YOU!?” Silas screamed through the pain.
“Who wants to know?” the man asked with a jeer, “I’m your worst nightmare.”
The pain and the fear that wracked his body made him convulse like nothing else. His own blood was freezing to his skin as it dripped down his back. It was like nothing Silas had ever encountered before.
Silas questioned the man again, this time in a cowering, faint voice, “What do you want from me?!”
“I told you,” the man said, his voice dripping with malice, “your soul.”
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SOUL!” Silas screamed in defiance.
“Oh there is,” the man said, flipping a ten inch buck knife in his hand, “there is.”
As if in slow motion Silas watched the man flip the knife around to the handle, and then raising his arm the man plunged it into his leg, dragging the serrated blade downward, very slowly. The pain was so intense Silas could not hold in his scream. The man cackled insanely as he continued pulling the blade all the way down to Silas’ calf, almost to the ball of his foot. Fresh blood oozed from the wound, like honey from a freshly pulled cone in the hive.
The loss of blood began to make Silas light-headed, and he incoherently began to babble and plead for his life.
“Please,” he said, “let me live, I’ll give you anything you want, do anything you want! Just let me live.”
“Let you live?” the man sneered, “A pathetic little pig like you? You’ve always got what you wanted; one of the most beautiful women on the planet, a prestigious job, a very fat salary. Even your little next door neighbor bends to your every whim. And yet you deny the existence of a soul? You are just what I thought you were. A coward; a coward who doesn’t even want to face death! You toy with everything and everyone around you, as if you were God! How does it feel now?”
Just then the man ripped the knife out of his side. The cascade of the blood poured onto the snow. It made a sloshing sound that almost made Silas want to throw up.
“The pain I cause you now, doesn’t even compare to what you’ll face in the next life.” The man said, foreboding tone on his lips.
“THERE IS NO NEXT LIFE!” Silas screamed at him, every fiber in his body wanting to refute this man and what he was saying, “We live, we die AND THAT’S ALL!”
The man began to cackle for a moment, growing louder every laugh that resounded from behind the mask, “THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK! Deep down, you know that I am right.”
The man caressed the tip of Silas’ right index finger with the tip of the knife, and then without warning the blade plunged beneath the nail and then emerged half-way down from the last knuckle, separating flesh from bone. The man held up Silas’ hand, and the flesh that was now no-longer attached to his finger. The smell of the blood and the sight of his own bone showing was enough to make him faint, even have a heart attack. That’s what he begged for silently, but it was not to be. Hot tears began to fall from his face, turning to ice before they even hit the ground.
The salty tears rolled down the path, going into the darkness. Silas loathed every minute he was pinned to the wall, each new sensation of pain becoming worse than the last. All he wanted was for it to be over. He could feel heat beginning to engulf his body, and at first he was glad. But the heat intensified, and he wasn’t sure what was happening. It was all so strange. Silas began to smell sulfur, and then the heat began to rise again.
“This, this isn’t possible,” Silas said in a very weak and drained voice.
“Oh yes, yes it is.” The man whispered in his ear, “It is perfectly possible!”
The man backed up and grabbed something that Silas couldn’t make out, “Tell Satan Red Sam says hi.”
A ball of fire engulfed Silas as he screamed in protest. What seemed like hours passed as his flesh roasted, and the smell made him hungry, and then sick as he realized what he was thinking. A tunnel of fire opened before him, and before he could do anything, he was sucked down it, never to return.
One day later…
The county sheriff, Earl Duluth pulled up beside the empty car. He had gotten the call early that morning about two bodies they found in the canyon that lead to the lake. Well, actually what someone had said was that there was one body in the canyon, and one dead on the middle of the ice. Earl knew this wasn’t an ordinary call, and so he walked down the canyon. There, the caller, a male in his early thirties, dark red hair, brown eyes about six feet tall stood staring at the dead body before him.
“I found him like this,” the man said as Earl walked up beside him, “Stuck to the wall and burned.
“Where’s the other body,” Earl said, not really phased by the burnt body hanging by a spud bar.
“There.” The man pointed in the direction where the body was, and he walked behind the sheriff as they went down to look.
“I don’t really know what happened, I came out here to fish and I saw the dead body on the wall. I couldn’t take the sight and I was going to go and throw up, over near the bush at the top of the hill? When I saw this body.” He pointed to the corpse that lay on the edge of the ice.
It was dismembered in two parts, but there was no blood around it at all. In fact, the muscle where the torso and legs should have been connected was light pink, not red.
“That’s odd,” Earl said, “Well, I guess I’ll right this up and have the boys down at the morgue come by and take care of it. What’s your name son? So I can get it on record.
“Sam,” the man said, “Just Sam.”
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