Like the other one he’d passed, there were bones scattered all around it. Some were human—femurs and ulnas, a couple of ribcages, a few jawless skulls—but most were animal bones. Big, staff-like leg bones that must have belonged to antelope and heavy trains of vertebrae and rib baskets that were probably from buffalo or cow. Above them, nailed to a crude wooden cross was another scarecrow…except, as Slaughter looked closer, he saw it was a weathered, wind-dried corpse, a brown-skinned mummy with jutting bones who’d been slit open, emptied, then stuffed with things and stitched back up. The suturing looked like it had been done with shoelaces, and was haphazard at best. The corpse was bursting open, spilling an eclectic and bizarre collection of items: feathers and dried sacks of weeds, tiny bones braided together with sinew and little blackened things that looked like mummified rodents and reptiles.
Somebody had splashed yellow paint on the framework in the form of symbols that were long and slender, triangular and wedge-shaped, oddly cuneiform like ancient Sumerian glyphs. Slaughter had seen them in books when he was in-stir.
And that was not only weird, but frightening to see out here on the dirty backside of North Dakota. It made him think about things he did not want to think about at all.
He hopped back on the hardtail and rolled down the road to Victoria and the closer he got, the more that stench of death came out at him in a thick, cloying mist of putrefaction. He was going to see something here that he would be better off
Then it changed.
Radically.
There was a wide open sort of grassy field dead center of the town that might have been called a village green in another day and age. There was a monument there, probably to war dead. An old cannon, a few peeling benches, a weed-choked fountain. And…corpses.
This is what made him bring the scoot to a stop.
The green was set with wooden poles upon which were mounted what appeared to be hundreds of corpses. And not old withered things, but fresh cadavers bloating with charnel gases, distended and rubbery with decay, eyes pecked out by birds, faces boiling with worms, throats bearded with corpse flies. Many of those faces, if not all, were contorted and disfigured, mouths yawning wide as if they had died screaming in considerable agony. And Slaughter did not doubt that. For the poles they were set upon were dark with blood and drainage and he had no doubt that these men, women, children had been speared on the poles eight feet in the air while they were still alive. That the poles were sharpened to lethal points there was no doubt, for several corpses had gone soft to the point where they became mucid and mushy, sliding down the shafts until the points jutted from their throats like snapped vertebrae.
Though the stink was black and rotten and nauseating, the air thick and moist with it, he stood there and stared, feeling the necessity to take it all in, to absorb it, to catalog and shelve it for future nightmares and long afternoons of yellow despair. For he would see this always. He would smell it and feel it and know it and remember it and forever it would rot inside of him, turning his core black with hate for the architect of this particular episode of massacre.
He realized at this point that he was not standing still at all, that he was tottering from one foot to the other like maybe that invasive and purely revolting corpse-gas had made him weak in the knee and funny in the head the way miners got once upon a time in the deep shafts when the air below thinned to a seam of poison.
The idea of it almost put Slaughter to his knees.
