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E. B. Hoight

The December Featured Story is by

E. B. Hoight

Please feel free to email E. B. at: ebhoight@outlook.com

EB Hoight

SKULL COLLECTOR
by E. B. Hoight

The howls from the crowd outside seemed distant now. Marrow’s fingers clutched the brass candle holder as he walked slowly down the corridor. Candlelight illuminated his passage, banishing darkness to every object under candlelight’s sway.

He regarded the portraits that were crowding the walls of his apartment above his novelty shop. One by one, the patriarchy of his bloodline materialized in the light. Stoic faces peered out from oil canvases. His namesake existed all around him, in regal dress, the arms of Marrow men resting atop the unmistakable form of skulls beneath. The poses were identical, the varying states of attire the only marker discerning one generation from the next.

Continuing down the corridor, Marrow watched as each portrait faded into nothingness, as had his tradition and soon his very bloodline. The Marrows were dying off. Maybe tonight was his turn to die.

Glancing from the portraits to the myriad of shadows, he made out the space on the wall left for his own portrait. Now it was just an empty place on the wall.

He stopped in front of a mirror, and beheld the dark and crooked form of what the townspeople had always assumed of him, a hunched ghoul that roamed the night, stealing the heads of the innocent as they slept. Marrow pointed the candle forward and the form disintegrated. He walked on.

Eventually the portraits gave way to bare mahogany walls. And as if the floorboard’s creaks and groans could not warn enough, Marrow rested his hand on the clawed door handle and shuddered at what lay waiting on the other side.

He contemplated the reasons why the townspeople were coming to kill him.

He remembered the day he had stood in front of the taxidermist, trying to make the man understand his love for skulls. “Perhaps it’s the bulge of the frontal bone, or the zygomatic sloping into the mandible, its grin culling the secrets of the dead. Or the expanse of the parietal…how it armors the skull down to the occipital.”

Marrow motioned his spindly fingers to the skull resting atop the glass display case and continued, “Only a fellow practitioner would appreciate such things. This one is from an unfortunate young man.”

His posture bent, Marrow hoisted the skull in the air and peered into its sockets. The skull was narrow, much like he knew his own to be. He caressed it, stroking its bleached surface. “They say a skull maintains the spirit of its bearer. Why, you can almost feel his energy.” Marrow turned it in his hand, as if it too were looking at the man across from him. “Do you see?”

“I do see,” the guest replied. A taxidermist by trade, the man sat upright, his hands resting on the glass case containing skulls within. “I see that you’re a damn vulture, picking at the bones of the dead!”

He stood abruptly and removed his glasses, folded and then stuffed them in the pocket by his lapel. “This has nothing to do with taxidermy.”

“I never said it did,” Marrow replied.

“Am I next?” the man said with a sneer and pointed to the case. “Will I one day be staring out from this glass case? How do you come to acquire them? Go on, tell me! The public deserves an explanation!”

“Sir, although the collecting of new skulls from the world has been outlawed, the possession of skulls that have previously been collected is still legal.”

“I have a good mind to report you to the police!”

Marrow stared in genuine shock. “Report me? For an art that is pure and legal and has been done by my family for generations?”

“Pure?” the man snorted. “Maybe you’re not aware, Mr. Marrow, but we no longer live in the dark ages! The days of superstition are over—as is our time together. I will not do business with a necromancer!”

He stormed past Marrow and out of the shop. The bell jingled maddeningly as the man marched into the street and stopped at the crowd that had gathered there. He nodded vigorously and then snapped to attention before walking on.

Marrow looked from the gathering throng and stared into the skull’s orbitals for a long time. “It has never been only business to me. I love you,” he finally whispered to the bony grin nestled in his palm.

Not long after, the crowds started to gather daily in front of his shop. “Marrow’s Novelties & Antiquities” became a place scorned by the townspeople, and so the threats began.

*****

The door yawned inward. Faint candlelight from a chiffonier filled the chamber. Before him, his wife was seated on a grungy bed. Her once golden hair, now lackluster, framed the haggard face beneath.

She was no more than thirty years old but looked that and twenty years besides. Her white dress, laced and frilled and much too formal for daily wear suggested a special occasion, or perhaps an appointment with the grave.

As Marrow stood there, envisioning her in casket’s stead, his eyes wandered to the marionette cradled in her arms.

Marrow staggered forward. It was no marionette. In her arms she held their son.

Deathly thin, the young man’s wheezing breaths forced the accordion-like rhythm of his ribs. Almost seventeen years old, six months prior he had been robust and virile but now looked no more than a malnourished child. His eyes glowed lifeless and nocturnal in their sockets, and his cheeks looked so sharp they might pierce his face. His head lolled to one side.

“Dad,” Marrow’s son croaked, reaching for him, his outstretched arm swaying pendulously as if on strings.

“Leave,” Marrow hissed to his wife.

His wife uncoiled herself from her weeping son. Then she rose from the bed and hurried to where Marrow stood “We could leave. We could leave during the night and be free of the curse forever.”

Marrow held the candlestick steady and frowned. “What are you saying?”

“Do you hear them?” she replied, pointing to the doorway. “The people are coming for you. They’ll take me too. They want to kill us and condemn our house because they think what you’re doing is evil.” She stood straighter, her voice steadying as she regained her senses. “Soon there won’t be a Marrow left!”

Marrow bent over and whispered to her, “I’ll forgive these words.”

“Dead people don’t have the capacity to forgive! We will soon be dead!” she wept, her mouth twisting in despair. “We will be dead from this curse, as dead as our future unless we leave!” she swooned hysterically. “Must it be this way?”

Marrow looked to the corridor, to the silhouette of portraits amid the darkness, and then back to his wife. “It must.”

Taking the candlestick from his hand, she ran through the doorway, a moaning specter fleeing into the shrinking glow of candlelight.

Marrow sat on the bed and took his son in his arms. “Please don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”

Shaking with fever, the son managed a boney embrace. A blanket covered him up to his legs. His shirt hung from his chest, his sternum bulging underneath like knuckles through skin. “I’m sorry,” he told his father, his breathing raspy, the remaining strands of hair matted to his clammy forehead.

“Sorry? For what?” Marrow hushed, and began rocking him. “You have no reason to apologize.”

“But what will we do? How will we survive?”

“Our family has always found a way,” Marrow said simply, his voice soft and comforting. “There have always been times of adversity and we Marrows have always found a way.”

“But the curse,” the seventeen-year-old said, holding up his cadaverous hand, “as if by design…”

“Yes, as if by design,” Marrow said. “A curse born the day they outlawed our trade but spared our tradition. I can never go out there to collect new skulls from the world ever again.”

“Listen to them riot outside.” And for an instant the young man managed a macabre smile. “I’m sick. I am dying. But the people out there don’t care.”

“The townspeople will never appreciate our art.”

“I’ve failed you!” The young man cried, and reached past his father and pointed to the darkened corridor. “I will never have a portrait there,” he sobbed, his voice gurgling into a scream. “I will never honor our name!”

Marrow lifted his son’s chin and looked into the hollows of his eyes. “Now, now, that’s not true. You will find honor with me,” he whispered, his spindly fingers caressing his son’s scalp. “In fact, soon you will be just right.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E. B. Hoight was born in Washington D.C. He has written four novels, and has had works of fiction published such as: “Doppelganger,” “Missed Call,” “These Four Blank Pages,” “Mourning Gulls,” “Sanctity Among Us,” and “A Time of Slaughter” to name a few. E. B. Hoight resides in Pennsylvania.