Dusty Lashes

A horror collaboration

Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer on Pixabay

He’d been on the South Kaibab long enough for his brain to start doing that annoying thing where it narrates your life like you’re in a commercial for expensive socks. One foot, then the other. Gravel skated under his soles. The sun sat on the back of his neck like a heavy hand. Will wasn’t a “hiker.” Will was a guy who’d bought hiking poles because the reviews said they “save your knees,” and because holding them made him feel like a man with a plan instead of a man with a problem.

His phone had been dead for a while. His water was warm. His shirt clung at the small of his back like a wet apology. He told himself, “Turn around at Skeleton Point. Be smart. Be a person who doesn’t end up as a cautionary plaque with a laminated photo and a date range that makes strangers go, ‘Jesus’.”

Then he saw the ravens. They weren’t circling. They were posted up on a flat slab of rock just off the trail, like they’d taken a break and didn’t want company. Heads tilted, beaks parted. They looked like they were waiting for a punchline. Will slowed. His poles clicked softly. He followed their gaze.

At first he thought it was a dropped pack. Then he thought it was a weird-shaped rock. Then his stomach dropped into his boots. He felt a cold, oily slick of sweat break out under his arms. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t find the ‘off’ switch for his eyes. A head. A woman’s head lay in the shade of a boulder. Hair matted with grit. Sunburned skin. Dust stuck in her eyelashes. Her mouth hung slightly open. Her eyes were open.

Will stopped so hard his knees locked. Heat pulsed in his ears. The wind died, leaving a silence that felt like a physical weight on his shoulders. His brain tried to tidy it up. A movie prop. Some prank left by kids for the internet. Then the dust in her eyelashes shifted. Her eyelids dragged upward, slow and sticky. She looked at him. She blinked.

He stumbled backwards, his face a study in shock. All he could see was her head. There didn’t appear to be any body. How were her eyes open and blinking? Was it some sort of reflex? Involuntary muscle movements? Will felt nauseous. He was lost in the wilderness and didn’t know how to get back to the trail head.

A subtle shift in the sunlight briefly drew his attention away from the horror resting on the ground. He looked up and shivered. The previously clear sky had turned milky and overcast. Big threatening clouds were amassing to the north. At least he thought it was north. Now he really needed to get out of here. In addition to not having enough food and water, he also did not have any type of rain gear.

He looked back at his grisly find. She was smiling at him. It was the most unsettling thing he had ever seen. The corners of her dirty, dust covered lips were stretched far too wide, revealing a set of sinister gleaming teeth. Somewhere in the back of his overheated and hectic mind, he noted that her teeth seemed very clean and white, considering how unkempt and filthy her face and hair were.

“Forget all that!” his brain screamed. “Where is the rest of her fucking body?!”

The woods were completely silent. The fact finally seeped into Will’s consciousness. He turned around in a wild circle, his eyes straining to see what was around him. There was nothing except for the disembodied cranium with the rictus grin. A voice suddenly sounded in the static stillness. It took Will a minute, but he realized it was his own voice. It just wasn’t coming out of his mouth. It was coming out of the head. And it was singing.

“Trick or treat! Smell my feet! Give me something good to eat. Give it to me now, Will! Now, now, NOW!”

Will backed up so fast his heel slid on loose gravel and his left knee buckled. He windmilled one arm, caught himself with a pole, and stood there panting at the thing in the dirt like his body had outrun his brain and was waiting for instructions.
The head watched him. That smile stayed stretched too wide, but the singing stopped. For a second the silence was worse. It felt crowded. Like the canyon was leaning in.
Will swallowed. His throat clicked dry.

“Nope,” he said, because apparently that was what he had to offer this situation. “No. No, no, no.”

The head blinked once. Dust clung to her lashes. Then, the voice again, smaller this time, almost childlike.

“Whatcha doin?”

Will froze. Every bad movie he’d ever seen, every don’t-go-in-there idiot decision, every story about tourists doing dumb heroic stuff in dangerous places all lit up in his skull at once. But it was still a woman’s head. No body. No blood. No sense. But a woman. He took one step back. The head’s eyes widened and the grin vanished so fast it looked wiped off.

“Don’t leave me,” it said, and now it sounded scared. “Please. It hurts.”

His stomach turned hard.

“That’s not—” Will said, and his voice went thin on him. He swallowed and tried again, like a second attempt might make this a different world. “That’s not how—” Nothing came after it.

Off to the side, on their flat little lookout rock, the two ravens hopped once together, claws clicking stone. Will jerked toward the sound, then looked back at the head.
Wrong move. She was closer. Not a lot. Maybe six inches. But she had not been that close to his boot. Will stared, breath snagging high in his chest. He hadn’t seen her move. He would have seen her move. The head’s eyes flicked past him, up toward the boulder, and her smile came back slow.

“Oh,” she said in his voice, almost relieved. “There you are.”

Something shifted in the shade behind the rock. He didn’t want to look at what she was seeing. He knew there was no scenario that was going to be acceptable. But he also knew there was no way in hell he wasn’t going to look. He still had a survival instinct. Swallowing hard to force the lump in his throat down, he gasped for air and turned his head.

Immediately, he wished he had not. A headless body stood on top of the big boulder. It was very tall, over six feet. The way it towered above everything below made it appear at least seven or eight feet tall, in fact. Long arms hung at the body’s sides listlessly. After clocking its daunting height, Will’s reeling mind registered that it was also not the body of a woman. It didn’t even look like the body of a man. He didn’t know what it looked like exactly. It had two arms, two legs and an improbably long, thin torso. But the resemblance to a human figure ended there.

Part of Will’s brain quietly detached as he gazed wordlessly up at the thing. A whole deer carcass was draped around its shoulders. The front and back hooves dangled on either side of the body. A calm, dispassionate thought informed Will that as long as the legs of the deer were, they still did not reach all the way to the body’s hands. A faint scratchy scream began to echo in the back of his brain. It took a few seconds for him to realize he was the one screaming.

As if in unison with it, the ravens simultaneously screeched and lifted into the air, their jet black wings flapping. To Will’s complete dismay, they flew over to the head lying in the dirt and landed on top of the greasy, matted hair. And then, in one smooth, seemingly orchestrated movement, they sunk their claws into the scalp and picked up the head. Together, they flew up to the motionless, decapitated body and plunked the head right on top of the shoulders, like a Lego piece snapping into place.

The head sat there for a second like it was waiting for a signal. Then it turned.
The body still hadn’t moved. It stood with its long arms hanging loose, wearing the deer like a garment somebody forgot to take off. Will couldn’t stop looking at the hands. They had the shape of hands, but the fingers ran too long, ending in curved black points. She smiled down at him, higher now, comfortable in the new altitude, like being set back on had fixed her mood. Will tried to speak and got air. He swallowed. Tried again.

“Is that… your body?”

Her smile pinched, like he’d said something rude in a quiet restaurant.

“Oh no,” she said. “This thing? Certainly not.”

Heat sat in his mouth. The canyon air tasted metallic, like hot pennies. His brain went rummaging for a category that would let him file this away and keep walking. It came up with nothing but static.

“Where’s yours?” he said.

She blinked slow. Her lashes dragged.

“Gone,” she said, like she was talking about a missing sock. “This is what showed up.”

Will made a thin sound he didn’t recognize. The world slid an inch off its tracks and kept going.

“This has happened before,” he said, and hated how it came out gentle.

That lit something in her eyes. Interest. Relief. Like he’d finally joined the conversation.

“Sure,” she said. “Sometimes you get a good fit. Sometimes you get… whatever’s available.” She tipped her head and the deer legs swung a little, hooves ticking softly against the thing’s chest. “You take what you can get.”

Will stared up at her. A part of him wanted to argue. Like logic was a weapon. Like the right sentence would make the trail, the sky, the whole day snap back into place.
Then the body’s right hand lifted. It went to its own throat, fingers pressing the base of the neck, right where skin met whatever passed for collarbone. Will heard a soft click, like a latch finding home. The woman sighed.

“There,” she said. “That’s better.”

Her grotesque head suddenly seemed more animated, more alive than before. The dust covering her face looked like mottled skin now, and her eyes were wide open and focused on Will standing below her.

The wind picked up sharply, cold and bracing. Will glanced up at the sky and gasped at the sight of black thunderheads racing overhead. He took a step back, the poles dangling limply in his hands.

“I… I gotta go” he stammered. “There’s a storm coming.”

She grinned down at him. The points at the end of her fingers clicked together in anticipation. Will’s voice spoke out of her mouth.

“You can’t.”

Tears began streaming down Will’s face. The poles dropped onto the ground because his hands were shaking too much. Then his bladder emptied down his leg.

“WHY NOT?” he shouted into the rising wind, already knowing the answer.

The thing wearing a woman’s head jumped off the boulder in one fluid movement, landing inches from Will’s sweaty, tear-stained face. Together, the deer, the ravens and the creature stretched their snout, beaks and mouth unnaturally wide and shrieked in one echoing, unearthly voice…

“We’re hungry!”

The Horror of Miles Carnegie