The Charcoal Man

  by Fred Zackel

     She was trembling, wide-eyed, and she needed him to hold her close.

        He came to her in a dream.

     “The rough man,” she called him. “The rumpled man. The raggedy man. No, none of those are right.”

     “But it’s an r sound.”

      “And he’s gray and charcoal and smudged and blurry, like a charcoal drawing. Like seen through a telescope at night. Blurry figure of a man. All wrapped in heavy winter clothes. A muffler around his neck covers the bottom part of his mouth. But I know he’s grinning. He’s got his eyes on me and there’s no one else in this world he is looking at. I am the only thing he sees and the only thing he wants. His mouth is all teeth, and he is grinning, and it’s covered by this woolly muffler and sweeps up behind his head and covers like, like a hood or a shawl. And it’s all one piece, his coat and his baggy pants and his muffler and the dirty charcoal and gray shadowy. . . .”

    “What does he want?”

     “He wants to touch my skin. My creamy skin. That’s what he is thinking. The very words he is thinking. He wants to touch my sides, not even an embrace, or a hug, and just rub his dark charcoal hand along my waist on either side of me. He wants to touch my skin. I can hear his thoughts. He wants to touch my skin, and I want to let him.”

     “He doesn’t repulse you?”

     “No, no. He should. But I am mesmerized. I would let him.”

      “What happens then? When he touches you?”

     “I go away with him. I go willingly because he touched my skin.”

     “And where does he take you?”

     “Into the shadows. Into his shadows. Into the dark and I never come back.”

     “Is he death?”

     She puzzled over that.

     “What is he wearing?”

     “Like two thick overcoats, one atop the other. A pair of heavy overcoats. They make him look squat, bulkier than he might be. They make him look wider than he really is. I think. I hope. I can’t see them distinctly, clearly, but he has them buttoned almost to the top button. He might be wearing an old-fashioned hat, or it might be the peak of a hood flattened out, I can’t tell.”

     “Where does he come from?”

     “Nowhere good. Nowhere people should be. Nowhere people can live and breathe. . . .”

     “How does he get through from there to here?”

     “He comes when we’re dreaming. Or almost awake. When we sit sidesaddle between waking and dreaming.”

     “But he is a nightmare?”

     “Oh, yes!”

     “How old is he?”

     “He is old. In his fifties, his sixties. Or maybe that’s just how he wants me to see him. Maybe he is so much older than that. Maybe he is camouflaged, and he is younger, in his thirties.”

     “But you can’t see him clearly, distinctly.”

     “He’s like in a dark gray mist, a grungy charcoal gray mist. He is part of the mist, and the mist is part of him. It oozes all around him.”

     “Emanates from him?”

     “He is the source of it, yes.”

     “Is he a phantom?”

     “He has . . . texture. Like cloth. Fabric. Ashes piled together, smashed together, like a book you find afterwards in a fire. Sometimes parts of him are white as old cigar smoke. But mostly? The color of the grave . . . that’s what he is!”

     “Where does he come from?”

     “The charcoal man?” She shrugged, confused, still disturbed. “The charcoal man. And he is swirling, or the world around him, behind him is swirling. Not fast, but very slowly, gently even, corkscrewing behind him, and he is at the center, and he is stirring the cloud, the mist himself, so I don’t get spooked.”

     “And he wants you.”

     “If he gets me, he kills us both.”

     “Us . . . both?”

     She grinned. A very wicked grin. All teeth. Glittering and gleaming like the carving knife she rammed up under his ribs.

Fred Zackel has published more than a hundred stories, poems & essays and a dozen or so novels. Most all of his writings are on Kindle or the web.