When I was a mere
toddler, my
great-uncle used to tell me
stories about "
Rawhead and Bloodybones", two "
terrible bugbears" (as Webster so ably and
succinctly puts it) who raised
hell back in
the old country. Great-Uncle Jack never really described their
appearance to me; he just told tales about the
terrible twosome eating
priests and
children and
villages, while letting me invent their appearances for myself.
Rawhead never bothered me much--I kept picturing some guy with a
ball of
uncooked hamburger for a head. This was about two decades before "
Aqua Teen Hunger Force", and the
Meatwad character hasn't made the
memory of Rawhead any more
terrifying. (Come to think of it,
Clive Barker wrote a story years ago about Rawhead called "
Rawhead Rex", but again, it didn't scare me much at all)
("ANYWAY!" groans the audience. Fine, fine...)Bloodybones, on the other
hand, was another matter entirely. In my mind, Bloodybones was a
skeleton, with all the
flesh on its body freshly torn off, leaving only
clumps of
skin, lots of
blood, and two crystal-
blue eyes sitting in the
sockets. In my
nightmares, Bloodybones'
bones were even
scored with
jagged claw marks, which was not the kind of
detail you'd want a
kid to come up with. You'd expect a skeleton to
dance around to jaunty
xylophone music, wouldn't you? No, in my
dreams, Bloodybones walked
slowly, even
mournfully, up the stairs to my room, dripping blood all over the
stairway. He'd walk into my room, sit at the foot of my
bed, and
whisper, "
Someday, you'll be like me."
And then I'd always
wake up.
Great-Uncle Jack died on a
hunting trip when I was 15. The
rangers said they thought he had a
heart attack one night, then got eaten by a pack of wandering
coyotes or
wild dogs who found his body. They identified him by his
dental records. My Great-Aunt Ellen decided she wanted him
cremated, and no one in the family ever even saw what his body looked like.
But I've always known.