“The Incident With the Mismatched Man”
Charles
C. Cole
What follows is a heretofore
little-known supernatural disaster, an
explosion in an illegal mine being quietly carved out of the base of a sacred mountain
by prison labor.
Many had their bodies fragmented
by an intense percussive wave. Pieces,
those still identifiable, were collected and saved in a large, refrigerated
warehouse with the intent of later collating the remains into piles which best represented
individuals.
Though few realized it at
the time, the explosion had been due to a pressurized
pocket of trapped “proto-creation vapor,” PCV, being pierced by a pick. Except
for this incident, PCV has been only dreamt of, an extreme theoretical notion
of prehistorical forces in place on newly formed earth.
Limbs were saturated by
a potent mixture not seen on earth’s surface in hundreds
of thousands of years, thus imbued with raw life-energy in such a fashion that
they simply refused to die.
Instinctively, a leg found
another leg which found an arm and another arm
and a torso, all from different men. One hand was milky white with the long
soft fingers of a visiting administrator, while another hand was bruised and
rough, having been attached to one of the laborers. One leg was thick and short
while its companion was long and lean.
While the magic coursed
through them, these segments were able to reassemble
themselves into a single body, mismatched and awkward.
“I was the first,”
said Caleb Landry. “We immediately started loading
limbs like cord wood into these wagons we towed with golf carts. Squint, grab,
toss. Everything smelling like copper.
“The foreman took
a load and left me. I could see the hole in the wall
where something had burst into the tunnel. The walls were smooth and glittery.
I got dizzy and backed away, thinking maybe it was some kind of gas pocket.
“That’s when
I heard movement around a bend and saw light approaching. It
was pretty obvious this was not a victim in the ordinary sense. The ‘lantern as
a head’ might have been funny at a party, but it scared me. I think it kept approaching
because it wanted to get out of there as badly as I did.
“No eyes or ears,
it must have found me through vibrations in the rock,
from my screaming. I tried being still and quiet. It worked. It went wandering
by. I tossed some debris, giving the thing incentive to keep going.
“About then, the foreman
returned. He had a fresh shirt on, so I figured
he’d probably thrown up on the first one. He let out a yelp I can still hear
today. So, it headed right for him! He jumped out of the cart and double-timed
back the way he’d come, probably looking for a fresh pair of pants this time.
“I couldn’t
let it get to the surface. People see this headless zombie,
they’re gonna say the place is cursed. Many hard workers would lose their
livelihood, including me, such as it was. I honked the horn of the golf cart,
and company came calling.
“I figured the best
thing to do, as cruel as it sounds, was to draw it
into the pocket and then close the wall around it. It was that or torch the
thing to cinders, which I didn’t have the stomach for.
“I had a two-way radio.
I turned it on with the volume up full. It
crackled to life. I tossed it into the hole. The thing walked right to the edge
– and hesitated. Did it know it was a trap? Or was it just in awe of the gas
that had manufactured it?
“With all the muscle
I could muster, I shoved it in. It fell. The lantern
head crashed off its shoulders. While it was disoriented, I jumped in the golf
cart and rammed the already weakened wall, making a mess, but doing the trick.
“The agitated foreman
came back with reinforcements. ‘Where is it?’ he
asked. ‘Where it can’t bother anyone,’ I said. ‘Guess we’re gonna be a few
parts short,’ he said. ‘Guess we are,’ I said.
“Over the following
weeks, the replacement people heard rustling behind
the wall. I told them it was bats.”
#
Charlie lives in the Maine
woods and loves cats. He’s had over 30 pieces published in Black Petals, the
last being pre-COVID, in 2017.
