1. Dem Bones are Dead Bones...

BOB SKELLINGTON’S REMAINS Part 1

He looked furtively behind him, but they were still there, the dark shapes of the men dressed as crows and cawing like only insanity can caw in a nightmare. In his nightmares, that is. A man can only know his own nocturnal terrors.

All around his the barely moonlight countryside was little more than a hotchpotch collection of shadows with barely a pinprick of light to alleviate the threat from the darkness. And he needed light. All sentient being need light.

The human crows cawed again, in unison, loud as a headache after a night of revelry and bad alcohol, and he struggled to sink into himself, but he still had a physical shape. They would see him, they would grab him and take him to the house of terror where white coated maniacs would insert needles behind his finger nails whilst mumbling homilies about only wanting to save him.

Bob, they would caw, drink this nectar and soar with the birds as you dream, for when you wake up all will be well…

“But I won’t wake up!” he screamed at the tortured night, and the crows prepared to pounce, black with the night shining our of their eyes and hooked beaks ready to tear at his flesh.

And he saw the cave.

A narrow slit of cave, not exactly natural but who when he is desperate necessarily needs natural, the sort that would offer refuge for eternity and a day if he wanted it to. He could go in there, squeeze in and lie so still there wouldn’t be a crow or a raven or a magpie who could reach him.

Beaks are so terrifying. So cruel. So vicious. Beaks are the weapon crafted by a sadistic god to destroy mankind, to tear, to rip, to squeeze life out of the already almost lifeless.

He squeezed into the darkness of the cave, and lay there.

Bob Skellington was safe. Bob Skellington would never fear again. The crows would fly away to their own far kingdom and leave Bob Skellington in peace. How he yearned for that peace. He’d barely known peace since his childhood, and his loving mother, when she died, had promised him eternal peace, and his father had taken him by his hair, his curly hair, and slung him out into the wilderness and the crows to die or survive. That’s how he remembered it.

They cawed his name.

You are one of us, they had cawed, we are lovers of the night. We are creatures of eternity. We are the beings that even the gods fear to gaze upon. We are the crows. The beasts of eternity, for when the sun dies we will still be here, when all the stars flicker out madmen learn what darkness really is, we will be on our satin thrones in nests of charcoal twigs…

And Bob Skellington became one of them.

He curled up in his slit-like cave, lay cosily on its concrete floor, stared out on the world through the entrance he had braved crawling and crawling and desperately crawling through, then closed his eyes and, blessed peace, knew no more.

Bob Skellington was one with his crows.

Until, that is, Farmer Crosby decided to refurbish the mobile home he and Mrs Crosby had lived in while they rebuilt the old cottage they knew would rise like a bricks and mortar phoenix and present them with the most perfect home surrounded by a garden with all manner of healthy herbs and fragrant blossoms filling their world the whole year round.

The mobile home was all right, especially after they had paid to have a skirt erected, blocking the space under it where winds might howl in a windy season. It was quite a menace, was that space, until it was blocked off, and sometimes the smell of rotting meat that emanated from somewhere between the central wheels was sickening. Rotting rubber, they told each other, and then, with the smart white plastic skirt, the stench was gone.

The cottage, when it was renewed, was as they had dreamed it would be: a farmer’s cottage with a farmer’s kitchen and a cosy farmer’s boudoir for pleasant farmer’s romances. And there were plenty of those, for Mrs Crosby was nothing if she wasn’t frisky.

The Crosby’s were, indeed, the perfect romantic pair and they moved out of their mobile home and left it on its concrete base to let to townsfolk who fancied a week or so in the country, and paid handsomely for it.

The Ballards were the last to enjoy that little paradise away from the city smells. They came that last summer and were the ones to discover there had always been a leak in the bathroom when the floor, wet for decades, decided, out of the blue, to break into several pieces, each one too small to make any sort of floor by themselves, and fall to the concrete ground beneath.

And it was Gorgeous Gloria who spotted the old bones resting down there when she all-but fell down to the concrete base, only inches below the bathroom’s missing floor, a skull that grinned insanely with rotting teeth and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles adorning its face and the strange mossy tangled remnants of a whiskery beard.

Gorgeous Gloria screamed and screamed and screamed, and then vomited.

Cedric Ballard, librarian from the big city and student of everything except the last mortal remains of anyone, dragged her away onto the grass outside, and vomited himself before demanding a refund and driving at top speed away from Farmer Crosby’s field, leaving a tangled mass of old bones to possible wonder what on Earth was going on: at least it might have had dry old bones the will to wonder anything.

There was one piece of good fortune. Rather than telephone for the police and report a dead body, causing all sorts of unwanted official visitors, Farmer Crosby knew there was a caravan in the next field, and in that caravan was a well respected police detective, and she would sort things out quietly. It was what she did, and everyone said she was good at it.

Detective Inspector Rosie Baur was enjoying a rare period of summer sun. She was clad as summery normal (for her) only in a truly tiny but exuberantly floral bikini. Her bronzed skin, ably assisted by a fifty percent genetic contribution from an African ancestry, was shining with the sort of beauty reserved by classical artists for angels.

And the very last thing she wanted was for Farmer Crosby to interrupt a wonderful contemplation of the perfection of the natural world when you take people out of it, with reports of death and despair coupled with the agonies of having to refund a city client.

But that is exactly what happened.

And why she did what he should have done and rang the police, even though she was one of them and rather suspected all would fall onto her own naked shoulders.

© Peter Rogerson 31.01.21