The Skull Thief

The Skull Thief

The following is taken from the laptop of local author Sebastian Doyle. Found dead the morning of Friday 1^st December, 2017.  The following has been released by public demand. They will be longer any further communications with the Doyle estate.

We ask that the public please respect the wishes of the diseased family. We now consider the mystery behind Sebastian Doyle’s death now closed with the release of this document as we now consider this to be a full confession of the events of that occurred in 1992 and his eventual death in 2018.

Transcription as Follows

I was only a boy in 1992.  My mother had long given up on keeping track of me and I was free to run wild in my neighbourhood.  Whenever I would come home I would have a look of guilt.  I was sure there was something I’d done wrong.  Looking back you realise how trivial it all was.  How petty theft didn’t take you to prison, or how breaking windows in abandon buildings were almost a right of passage.

Not far from where I lobbed stones through pane windows in abandoned streets I had a moment of bravery and I decided to explore by crawling through a broken window.  I peeked inside.  There was nothing but the smell of dust and stone with a stagnant taste that smelt of dead construction.

As I turned back to look at the night sky; black and blue, the clouds formed an ocean up there, swallowing the moon with every passing by with a large gulp. And in that swallow there was a long silence as the world became that much darker.

As I finally stepped inside I noticed how odd the factory seemed.  It was baron and void of machinery. There was nothing but an occasional light spinning through the cracks of the walls from the hanging moon. 

The smell became repugnant. I could not tell what it was but it filled my lungs and mouth like a poison my body was soon to reject.   Before I knew what was going on I vomited across the inside walls and the smell was not made better. I wrapped my jumper over my mouth and held my breath for what must have been the longest I had ever held my breath.

I used a large flashlight and shone it across the blanks canvass of the factory floor.  To this day I can’t tell you what I was looking for, and you can call it luck, be it bad or good, but that flashlight, the same one that was bigger than my wrist to my elbow dropped to the floor.  If it was not for my clumsiness I may never have discovered him.

The torch had rolled and thudded.  There was no clank, or consistent thud of an object falling through stairs. But a quiet halt.  It wasn’t sure it was even human at first glance but I knew it was dead.  I thought it was a vagrant looking for shelter, starving and cold and dying right here in the middle of winter, trying to keep his last morsel of breath just clinging to life as we all would. 

His skull was hanging limp, his neck a matchstick.  As I tapped it with the backend of my torch the head rolled from its body, dancing on the wooden floors like a die.   With a possessed hand I lunged and grabbed the skull from the floor. I buried it into a backpack and with vomit foaming in my mouth I exited the factory.  Buried in a vacuum of sky and guilt with no way out.

The skull with its hanging flash stared at me as I opened my backpack.  With the sky as dull as the darkness behind closed eyes and the backpack just as black starting into that skulls eyes was no different to what starting in oblivion must be.  I was scared, terrified, exhilarated.  I had stolen the most precious thing I could from a person. Their own skull.

What thoughts raced through their mind? What was life through their eyes? What had they tasted? Did they smell something I had never smelled? Listened to something I had never heard?

I buried it away and creaked upon my bedroom window. The crack had let the gust of air pour through the night leaving my bedroom numb and cold.  But I was not.  My face was red with adrenaline and my heart was beating like it never had.  I thought what I could do with it, should I clean off its decay and mount it in my room? I placed the book and stored it underneath my bed and locked it out of sight. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to revisit the skull. 

I can still remember the rot in my fingers as if the rot was moss and that moss clambered onto my fingers like spawn.  I slept as the moss coated my dreams. That first night I dreamt the floorboards rotted away.  But as they rotted I didn’t sink to the room below. I hovered in darkness as if it was just an empty fire-pit and my bed the joint of lamb.  The rot from the floorboards took life and floated up from the darkness twisting like vines over the legs of the bed and climbing their way up the posts, lingering at the bottom of the mattress.  They dug themselves deep as if fingers clenching into my skin like an angry lover.  As they sucked into my feet I woke.  I had stolen a skull I thought, not a man’s head.  Perhaps the madness would end soon.

The rain hit the windowpanes heavily the following day the air of rain on the grassy moors seeped through the windows and created an aura of damp.  In my memory there were blotches of light and dark. Nothing was lit. I cannot tell you if this was how things truly were or my memories eschewing with my dreams.  But the walls were longer, narrower, the wallpaper a shade of dark grey. I entered by own bedroom as if climbing into a cave buried in a cliff upon the coast.  There was the sound of roaring oceans but no sea from it to roar. I pulled the skull from underneath my bed.  And there it was.  A face that smiled.  It was a glimpse of the man before he had died. As if the thunderstorm I found myself in allowed me to see the mans face in a clap of thunder, and in as soon as the sound left so had his face.  But it was there.

What had I expected to see? Who I had I expected this man to be? He was younger than I expected.  A young man.  He had facial fair his beard was not heavy or long, as though he had just been capable of growing it.  His eyes had a spec of yellow in a hazel circle.  His hair was scruffy, and one of his teeth black.  But what I remember most was his look of innocence.   And it tore deep into my gut as if his look was a cold sharp knife.

His face melted in my hands and what was left was a skull.  I watched as the flesh clung on to its skull as if it refused to let go of his face. As that one remaining morsel of limp tissue was anything he once was. There was no eye, no nose, no mouth, barely a face at all just hollow eyes and broken teeth. A grimace of a smile that wanted to do more than smile it wanted to frown. But his lack of life held his frown away, his lack of ability to hold on to his flesh…. I found it pathetic. Yes I suppose we’re all pathetic in that way our shared inability to hold on to our flesh, or anything at all.  In my rage I threw the skull into wall.  The pathetic man who couldn’t keep himself alive.  Could shatter his left remains of the earth away in the fibres of my carpet.

Alas in my madness. And it was a lack of sanity that drove me to plummet that mans head into the wall.  It what ultimately became my unraveling. As I only chipped a fragment of the skull and the rest remained intact, with hollow eyes and a beatless heart.

I scrambled across the floor like a mutt and clambered on to his boney face wrapping my fingers into the cracks and crevasses.  My heart felt like it had burst inside my chest and my lungs being operated by machines.  I begged its forgiveness but it laughed.  I tried to throw it out of my window but my wrists gave way.  The skull would fall from my hands and grimace at me from the floor.  ‘What do you want from me?’ I yelled.  We were in a room of our own.  My voice carried far as the tip of my nose.  ‘Yes, yes, I see. I see. You want to show me death.’ The skull laughed.

The mania died and there was peace for the shortest while.  I became myself again. But the skull laid dormant underneath my bed.  Waiting for me to drag it out once more. Tempted me to return it to its grave.  But I knew it wouldn’t let me. I knew, that it wanted me to live with what I had done.  I had removed a part of him, and so he was to return the favour by removing a part of me, my last ruminants of my sanity.

My room felt more to be his and it pushed me out whenever I entered as if I force was holding me back. Whenever I stayed in the room too long it was as thought my flesh was as dead as his. I can still feel the muscle fall from my arm as if it was slow cooked meat from the bone.

The line between dream and reality no longer existed for I was at the whim to the skull underneath the bed.  I was a skeleton spoke without speaking. It called me to it as my hands were bones and the skin on my face was green and falling apart.   I had become the face of death while his was the locker to despair and in its container was a key to escape the torment I had found myself in.

Even now the itch remains under my skin.  The crawl of hundreds of small black spiders traversing in the skin of my arms their black bodies climbing like running moles through my pours, into my chest and through my eyes and down my throat.   I still see the black liquid vomit when I close my eyes.

I woke up on my bed dosed in sweat and fever. I was uncertain how true all of this had been.  Apparently I had been out for weeks.  I pulled my hand underneath the mattress looking for the skull.  There was nothing.  I must have imagined the thing. It was obviously the fever. 

And that was the story I believed for so many years.  Recently, I revisited my old room. I pulled out my old bed and cleared the old debris.  Old childhood books and useless tat that had gathered dust throughout the years coated the floor.  But then I could see the carpet pulled up from the floor and underneath that was a broken floorboard.  I pulled my hand through and I could feel it.  With a single touch the nameless man’s face appeared to me like an old friends, his scruffy hair, his black tooth, and his eyes with that spec of yellow in a hazel circle. The look of innocence stabbed me deeper.

I pulled it up and once again stored it into my backpack.   The weather outside froze into me like the looks of the nameless man but I knew what I had to do. I paid a visit to an old abandoned factory. 

It was untouched.  And in the same place was the man’s body.  I lifted it from its resting place and stored in as carefully in my backpack with his skull.  I stepped outside.  The factory overlooked an old canal.  I borrowed a shovel from the factory and began to dig.  Finally putting the nameless man at rest his body fully intact. 

As a laid the final lot of dirt over the grave I dug the shovel deep into the soil to act as a monolith. It was all I could do.  I went into the factory and laid where the nameless man once sat and typed.  I typed what you read here.  And what I felt the man had done to deserve this.  And how I could truly forgive myself for separating his spirit for so long. 

I’m not a carpenter. In my life I’ve only ever been gift with cutting words but I feel I made a solid attempt at my guillotine.  Where a window had broken a shard of heavy glass precariously loams overhead.  I plan on knocking the glass to glide down my neck and decapitate me. Perhaps then my penance will be paid.  

I FAILED

The guillotine failed.  It severed the back of my neck and now I am profusely bleeding out, my neck limp.  The pain is insufferable.  I thought to write down my last moments of pain.  To be here I needed to pull my head away from the glass. Shattering it further into the depths of my skin.  In truth I hoped my attempt to push myself out of the guillotine would severe my life entirely.  But luckily, the warmth has began to leave my body. I will rest here, my lifeless body, my limp neck, and hopefully I will be discovered for my skull to be removed and one day maybe even treasured.