1
And that’s when I became a man. My name is Joshua, and I’ve grown to love this desert. All that happened a long time ago, before the new highway came in, before I moved permanently to Naga, Arizona, and before I began to understand my place in the world. I dropped out of college, went to live in that small town where Ely had dropped me, and a few years after wallowing in misery and guilt and alcohol, met my wife, lived my life. I got work as a writer and worked at a bookstore in town, but I didn’t last long in many jobs.
2
I went back, after I’d plunged the razor-sharp obsidian in that monster’s heart. After my legs healed. After some time had passed and I could face it again.
I wanted to examine it before destroying it. In size, it was four feet four inches tall, and while I didn’t weigh it, I can guess it was about sixty pounds. The gauze on its body—what kept its bones wrapped—was not what I had expected. I had assumed it was some kind of cloth, but, instead, it was fine, thin layers of human skin, torn into strips, wrapped around the bone of the creature. I held up one of its claws. Each talon was its own blade, and was razor-sharp.
I plucked the turquoise from its eyes, because I’d been reading about rituals by then. It could be blinded. It could be incapacitated.
The more I looked at it, the more I began to feel for it. What is it in human life that does it? That holds a monster in its arms and feels something like kinship—an instinct to care and protect? A demon, sleeping, in my arms, seemed vulnerable and in need, to me.
I placed it inside a leather-bound box lined with stone, closing Scratch up inside it, its coffin. If no one fed it again, if no one let it out, surely, it could just sleep forever.
And in sleeping, what damage could this thing do?
In the meantime, I began reading more about ancient ritual. I got odd jobs, and then, after my parents died, I inherited a lump sum of cash, and spent much of it on ordering books from around the world. I wanted to know more about this—the invisible world around us, the monsters, the gods, the creatures of legend. I wanted to understand this “it” until I began to see “it” as “him.”
One night, troubled by fears, I went out to the furthest mesa, and buried him deep, the way I’d bury something toxic, something that no man should ever touch, ever know.
But the cities and towns are growing. They’re taking over parts of the desert that had once been vast wastelands, miles of nothing.
Now suburban homes are being built on the mesa, and the bulldozers dig down deep to lay foundations and carve out swimming pools. Scorpions swarm as they’re sent from their nests. Rattlesnakes are killed by workmen who find them under nearly every rock.
I didn’t mark the place where I buried Scratch. I didn’t put a flag over it so I could see where it was.
I buried it to end it, to forget it, to put the demon somewhere it would never be found.
But I was wrong.
They’re digging all over that mesa. They’ll find him. They’ll bring him out. Maybe they already have.
The Flayer of Men will dance, and this time, I may not be able to stop it. I will try to understand Scratch. To try to keep him from doing what his nature compels him to do.
I may not have enough skin on me to keep that thing from running wild. There may not be enough obsidian blades to stop its beating heart.
They say a rainstorm’s on the way.