On a Summers Day

It was the height of summer, the sky was a brilliant, breathtaking blue, the sort of blue that reaches up and DEMANDS your attention. The distant, merry laughter of children filtered through the air, mingled with the birdsong and the drone of busy bees. The world was bursting, overflowing with warmth, life, happiness.

And then the screams started.

Down a little way from the bees, just around the bend from the children, there was a droning. Not the almost musical buzz of the bees, no, this was the heavy, bloated droning of fat blowflies, their brilliant blue back sparkling in the sunlight like morbid jewels. The black with flashing blue tide crawled, buzzed, and swarmed over the ground and a single tree.

The first scream disturbed a few, not many, but enough for their meal to be seen.

A puddle of thick, black as tar blood on the bright green, rich, vibrant grass. More crimson black smears marred the smoothe wood of the tree, splatters and painted strips. But that wasn't what drew the scream, the second one, not of fright like the first, but of horror, of a deep abiding disgust.

Oddly enough, apart from that single, thick puddle, the grass is clean. And it is only the one tree, smeared, specked and caked with the sludgy, viscous, crimson black blood in the small thatch, the rest are clean, pristine, unmarked.

But the source of the blood, concealed beneath those heavy, hungry, shifting black bodies, the lone figure hanging from the branches, bloated in the heat, almost bursting, like some obscene fruit begging to be plucked, that is what drew the second horrified scream that shattered the shocked silence following the first.

For, it wasn't just hanging, covered with droning flies, bloated, tied by the ankles, no, that would be bad enough. But it -- not a man, not a woman, not a child but a dead, bloated buzzing thing -- had been skinned.

(Warning for those of tender stomaches, it gets graphic.)

The head was featureless, eyes gouged out, or rather, surgically removed from the orbits and yanked free. The nose removed, lips likewise, ears, scalp, then each slender strip of flesh carved from the face, leaving a morbid mockery of a skull, blood caked and writhing with flies. Oddly, morbidly, the tongue and throat were left intact, the skinning starting at the collarbones. The arms stripped of flesh as well as skin, bones visible, connected by gleaming sinew and tendon. The ribcage glittering, gleaming through the flies and the thick, black blood. The stomach retained the muscle, holding the bloating of swollen organs within, but the pelvis glimmered. A dark grey rope slithered out, wrapped painstakingly, almost lovingly, around the bones. The legs were simply skinned, simply used as they retained the meat, the flesh, but linked together with steel rods bent around the bones. Just the merest scrap of skin at the edges of the rods give the hint that maybe, just maybe, the victim wasn't dead when impaled ...or worse.

A third scream, high, wild, piteous came from the child, an innocent who went searching for the ball, the peircing, poignant scream of encroaching madness. Because dangling there, bloated, skinned, mutilated, the dead writhing with a mimicry of life, induced by the walking, crawling, buzzing black tide searching beneath the flesh, it seemed to reach for the child, reach with those skinned, fleshless arms.

A fourth scream came, hard on the heels of the third, ringing louder, higher, madness shattering. And as the child screamed, the body swinging, buzzing, bloated, flies taking their crimson black meal, the corpse screamed too.