My grandmother would tell me a story. In her girlhood in Mexico, along the outskirts of Guadalajara, her father would bar the doors and keep the windows tightly shut at night. Now, this might not, of course, seem altogether odd, but merely cautious. That is if not for the peculiar effigy he hung high atop the wall. A human figure, out of corn husks, about ten or twelve inches in height with a red ribbon tied around its waist.

She would often ask him about it to understand the meaning, y'know? But he'd never speak about it, but continued this curious practice night after night. Until at length, she persisted, and he, at last, relented.

"Years past, I worked on this plantation. There I met a strange man who never spoke a word. He would always do his work quietly, always by himself, never with nobody. But he had a weird air about him, for sure, never smiled, never even blinked.

And one day, best I can remember, he tripped on a tool of some sort, which gave him a long gash, pretty bad one too, across his left arm. I know, I saw it. But he just stood right back up, and in an instant, he just tore some unbleached cotton from his clothes, wrapped it around his wound, got right back to work.

But it was unreal, y'know? There was no red stain, not a drop of blood on the cotton. It was just like there wasn't any blood to bleed through.

And, of course, workers get to talkin'. And pretty soon he was a common topic. Well, after awhile, lots of strange things got to happenin'. First some of the mules went missin', we didn't think much of it at first, horse and cattle thieves being all to common. Boss man posted some folks to stand guard, but nobody ever saw no one come in. Not after long, boss man fired them, thought they were just slackin' off, I guess.

But then workers started disappearin' and that didn't sit right with nobody. We figured there must be a panther, a man-eater on the loose. Well, there was this one young kid, Alvarez, seventeen, sixteen maybe, good hard worker. He was the first to see it.

He had been workin' late, way after everybody else had gone and left, he was in the stable tendin' to the horses. Well, he tell us, he says, he had nearly done finished when there was the sound of something movin', slidin' across the tall grass. Well, he picks up a hoe, and just as he suspected, out comes this big long rattle snake.

Fearing for the horses, he was about to race out from the shadows to strike it dead, but stopped himself. See, as the snake slithered across the ground it began to change. He says it twisted and wriggled like it had been injured. And then it did something else, something no one would have ever imagined, it split wide open, and out comes this big trail of blood.

But above all was the smell, he says, rancid, sickening, like a dead calf left two days in the sun. The scent, he says, why, it was almost unbearable. And then the pool bubbled, and something, and something else, it moved. The blood it rose, somehow, it rose. And the blood started to take shape. It was unclear at first, but then started to take the form of a man.

Alvarez says when the blood settled, it was just as much a man as anyone else. But unlike any he had ever saw. He says his fingers terminated in long sharp points, like thick cactus needles. And his eyes, they were, well, they were just like a snake's eyes!

He was strange. But oddly, there was something else, something about him that seemed familiar to Alvarez.

Alvarez didn't know what to do next. He dared not make a sound. He did only what one could do. He watched from the shadows.

Alvarez watched the man, or the thing, as it slowly stepped towards the animal. The horse jumped and bucked wildly as if it could already sense the stranger's intention.

Slowly at first the stranger walked but then suddenly sprang without a sign of warning. The horse screamed as the stranger bit into the animal, runnin' his teeth into it drawin' blood. Alvarez watched as the wild man tore chunks out of it, chunks of flesh and hair, while makin' long gashes into the animal with his finger-like claws.

Alvarez thought he vomit for sure if not for the fear of being discovered.

It wasn't long before its screams stopped, and the horse was silenced, and even less before the demon, this man of blood, screamed in its stead, a scream that was something far more animal than human.

Alvarez was noticeably shaken when tellin' his story. We didn't want to keep pressing him on details but we had to, y'know? We had to know.

Reluctantly, Alvarez, he says, after the thing had reduced the animal into some unrecognizable form. Alvarez saw something else. He noticed something, something that shook him.

Alvarez starred baffled and afraid, as the stranger's features crumbled until its body was reduced back into the same puddle of blood along the ground. The horse, or what was left of it, sank into the pool disappearin' in seconds. The puddle of blood shifted again and rose to now take the form of a hawk, flyin' out-of-sight, vanishin' into the night sky.

Well, everybody got quiet after Alvarez ended the story.

But like he said, Alvarez, he saw something, something about it, the thing, or whatever it was. Alvarez saw it that night as clear as day.

A long gash along his left arm.

It was the man, the man from before, the man who wouldn't bleed."

And that was exactly as my grandmother had told me. I asked her if anyone ever saw him again. My grandmother shook her head. Her father didn't make that clear. But my grandmother knew enough to know when to stop asking questions. The effigies she understood, the little corn-husk people, were for protection.

However, she did add, on quiet nights, on nights out in the desert, you could hear 'em. You could hear the stranger, screaming, shrieking into the night. And, always after you heard it, there would come the bodies. The bodies of animals, of his slaughters strewn across the desert floor the very next day.

— END —






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