Knot the Noose
By
Clint Smith
I’m on the cliff now—the same remote outcrop Josh and I visited our first week in Negril. The climbing rope has been clumsily wound around my neck. The principle tall-thing in the ragged robe (I count three, but there are noises in the nearby forest) is limping toward Josh. This grayblue, pre-storm ceiling accentuates the shadowed vascularity of the tropical vegetation and the tall-things’ lineaments: grey, flaking skin inadequately imitating the texture of leprous, reptilian flesh.
What will surely take you a few minutes to hear is simply a synaptic strike: just a mental-spasm, really. A last-ditch panic-plea.
Josh can’t scream: a strip of black duct tape over his mouth, but I can hear those panic-smothered bursts. My mouth, for whatever reason, is not covered, and all I can produce is a stammered series of word-chokes.
Despite your suspicion, this is not a hallucination. More likely (it occurs to me from a distant gut-suspicion) this may be a consequence of some supernatural transgression involving our smuggling-collusion to obtain a sacred strain of Jamaican Landraces. I assure you, the rope is very real. Josh’s nose bleed is very real. My feelings for Cassy are real. Consciousness is this lightless cave, I hope you can retrieve the echoes from this blackness in which I now exist…
#
Earlier, Josh and I had been by the pool outside the resort. For the past year-and-a-half, our
impermanent residence (so we’d been told) had been a run-down condo on the northend of the parish; but the walking-distance resort tolerated our presence, mostly to remain equanimous with our vindictive supervisors. Basically, our bosses’ attitudes: Don’t fuck with our boys and we won’t fuck with you. All this meant for us, really, was threadbare protection and a few free drinks.
It had been a typical morning. We phoned a rep from Rendon’s ring (Josh’s turn this time), submitting our coded update. While Josh was occupied, I made a separate call on the laptop (also private). Requisite for the job, Rendon had always been paranoid; but his behavior had grown jittery in the past few months since our involvement with the obscure variety of Landraces.
A few years before that (before this, I suppose), a chance meeting on Spring Break led to another meeting, then a flight, then an indefinite stay in Negril—your classic Felix Culpa.
“Keep hunting,” Rendon says. Making progress, I regularly report. No worries, Josh repeats.
A pair of things continued to surprise me during my time here in Jamaica: the enduring, clandestine correspondences between Cassy and I; and the fact that Josh had apparently suspected nothing about the relationship between his former fiancée and myself.
Josh and I’d grown up together, but had not grown close until college, particularly as the things which suture our culture’s flimsy social structure began to slough away. I enjoyed thinking that Josh and I were tough like that: we saw the end of high school coming, and we’d already spent years pre-adjusting to transition.
Which is how we wound up here, acting as proxies as we negotiate movement of a rare strain of Landraces.
Kissed by a tepid hangover, the burrowing music and commotion from the nearby pool had me bobbing in and out of a drowse. I felt a chill-sting against my forearm and shuddered, scowled, sat up rigid.
Josh, reclined next to me on a lounge chair, offered a frosted bottle of beer, its exterior weeping with condensation. “Trick or treat, bitch.”
I wiped my forearm and returned my friend’s grin. “The hell are you talking about?”
“It’s October thirty-first, man,” Josh handed me one of his two beers from the walk-up bar.
Time had sluiced—days, months included. Was it really almost November? I clinked my bottle against Josh’s. “Cheers, man.”
Off toward the west, a low-creeping cluster of dark clouds were edging the horizon. I said nothing of it. Storms emerged and disappeared in tantrums, temporarily interrupting our ambient paradise.
“Had a dream last night,” said Josh.
“Oh yeah?” I looked over, waiting for a punchline. “Was it entertaining?”
But Josh wasn’t smiling, he was inspecting his beer, running a thumb across the exterior’s tears. “I was up in Evanston, at night, out by that big cemetery that skirts the lake.” He was talking about Calvary Cemetery, but I didn’t interrupt. “I was trying to get through the gate, just running up and down the sidewalk trying to get in there. I just—I just remember being desperate to get in. Like, once I was safe inside the gate people could find me, you know?” I did not. “And there were these…things…coming out of the lake.” He looked out across the pool, I watched him idly scanning the reclining banks of bikini-clad sunbathers, ticking his attention to the nearby forest. “These people were walking out of the water, just clawing up over the rocks. And I knew it was too late. I just gave up…just sat down on the sidewalk.”
Josh laughed then, a sort of clunk-choke sound. “And then only one of the figures came into the light—that sort of sickish-blue light from the streetlamps” (Mercury-vapor lights, I wanted to assist). “And it was you, man—except”—he chuckled—“you were wearing this ridiculous Dracula outfit, like just fucking…campy.” He shook his head after taking a drink. “You were soaking wet…had those plastic teeth in your mouth and like a”—with his fingers, he made a V gesture on his forehead.
“A widow’s peak?”
Josh looked at me, smiling, almost—I thought then—verifying I wasn’t wearing garish whitewash make-up. “Yeah.” We finished our beers; Josh waved at the bartender over by the cabana. “But you know the worst part?”
I considered this for a second, dread-assuming he might say that one of the other lurching figures was Cassy.
She’d been the one who’d pushed (I suppose the “push” was literal when she’d pressed the buzzer in the downstairs lobby, her crackling voice coming over the speaker), and I’d discovered an enticing equilibrium when I complied, both truly and figuratively, with pushing back). Of course I insisted she come up, assuming something (good) had happened between her and Josh, and that he would be in tow. She was alone.
I grew attached to that like-pole repellence the first night in my apartment over two years ago: the push-pull effect of what we were doing. Of what we were not only still doing to Josh, but the manner, though inconsistent, in which we’d continued to carry on our depraved liaisons.
“The worst part?” I said, clearing my throat and submitting the obvious: “That you couldn’t see the other people?”
Josh was wincing against the sun, quirking his gaze at the forest. “No. It was that we’d worn those goofy-ass costumes as kids. And I had this feeling like…I missed that—like we’d never be able to—”
A flicker of saccharine sentimentality, of a sort of loss, tickled my midsection before I swiped it away. I tolerated the silence a few seconds longer. “Never be able to what?”
He shrugged. House music lightly thumped around us. A sheepish laugh. “Nothing.”
That Josh was struggling to create a thoughtful moment amid our extended parlay as drug-smuggling intermediaries, I was a little embarrassed for him. Still, I tried to keep things casual, jocular. “Sounds like you’ve been sneaking too many tokes from Rendon’s inventory.” Josh stared ahead, said nothing. I recalibrated. “Listen, man. You can’t live in the past, it’ll only make you—”
“The hell is that?”
I frowned, first looking at Josh then tracing his eyeline to some vague place in the forest. “The hell is what?”
He inched forward, raising a finger. “That, man.”
Though I saw nothing, my automatic thought was that we’d not seen it coming—“it” being some unknown confluence where a rival ring would move on us. I slipped my hand into my backpack, just to nudge my thumb against my gun.
And then Josh was on his feet, moving faster than both my mouth and my legs, striding toward the far end of the pool where the property bordered the forest. “Josh,” I hissed, “wait.” It didn’t matter that I left my gun in the bag, all that mattered was that I was following him, not wanting to make a scene. A paltry substitute, I still had a hefty gravity knife clipped to the waistband of my shorts.
He didn’t hesitate as he hustled down the grassy slope which leveled off at woods; there was another root-covered slope here, more severe. I called for Josh to slow down but he never turned. I was very close to catching up when he edged through the ropy verdure.
I looked over my shoulder, appraising how we must appear to the other guests. No one seemed to care. Josh was half-obscured by some broad-leaf vegetation; I heard him say, “Here, man—help me…”
Half-turning, half-distracted, I reached out for Josh’s hand. Instantly: the slick, bone-grip texture of what I’d clutched sober-seized me. Wide-eyed, I saw that, instead of my friend’s hand, I was holding some sort of sinewy claw. Quivering out of my paralysis, I was summoning an expletive when another sharp-nailed limb pistoned of out the foliage, snuffing out everything.
#
I come crashing awake, lying on my side, the tall-things surrounding me like repulsive pillars.
One of them is shoving Josh closer to the cliff.
I scream things—incomprehensible cousins of No. The one with its reptile talon on Josh’s shoulder jerks a look at me, its iguana waddle of loose flesh under its neck wagging as it cants its head. An obscenely slender appendage extends toward the tape on Josh’s mouth, peeling it away.
Josh gasps. “What the fuck is happening, Luke?”
The principle tall-thing stares at me: febrile human eyes set in sick-iguana sockets. All I can manage is a croak. I have just enough time to assess the set-up: the climbing rope is knotted around Josh’s throat, and I follow its length down to an unspooled coil on the rocky ground, notice it running toward me—that its opposite end is connected to my neck.
My opportunity—to speak, to act—has passed. The tall-thing shoves Josh off the cliff. My friend’s face in that last instant: it’s something I can’t adequately express. All eyes and sorrow and awareness of onrushing nothing.
With Josh’s descent, the rope is zipping across the ground. I have no time. I make two moves which temporarily save me: I wind my forearm around the segment before me and scramble to brace my sneaker against a cluster of rocks.
The slack catches with a taut hum and I’m being dragged, Josh’s weight hauling me within a few yards of the cliff’s lip. Wincing, I swivel. My hip catches on…
I gamble a free hand into my waistband and flick open the gravity knife, swiping the blade over the rope and in a few seconds the tension’s released. Josh’s anguished echoes Doppler down and fade, replaced by my own panting. I blink at the cobalt-curds of the sky, maybe drift for a few minutes. I’m conscious of the tall-things lingering, observing with sentinel disinterest; I adjust the grip on my knife. I’ll go for their soft spots as fast as--
I hear the ticking, punctured wheezing and realize it’s coming from near my feet, near the cliff. I wrench myself up just in time to see the quaking hand rise over the ledge and latch onto my ankle; the force of the pull is insistent, tremendous. My calves are over the verge when Josh’s gray face emerges, rills of blood leaking from his nose, ears, eyes. The blunt shards of his shattered teeth twinkle in the cave of his grimace. He uses my legs to climb me. Josh brings a broken hand up, its fingers puckering the front of my t-shirt. And then, with its urging, the weight is simply too much to bear.
Clint Smith is the author of the collection Ghouljaw and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2014), and the novella, When It’s Time For Dead Things to Die (Unnerving Press, 2019). His sophomore collection, The Skeleton Melodies was released in 2020 by Hippocampus Press. “The Skeleton Melodies…is an excellent second collection,” wrote Ellen Datlow in The Best Horror of The Year, Volume Thirteen. “While Smith sometimes uses pulp tropes, his writing is so good that the stories aren’t pulpy at all. A real achievement.”
Of late, his work has appeared in Rebecca Rowland's Bram Stoker Award-nominated American Cannibal anthology (Maenad Press), Looming Low, Vol. II (Dim Shores), and Vastarien: A Literary Journal, Vol. 4 (Grimscribe Press). A chef and Honors Graduate from Le Cordon Bleu, Clint lives in Indiana, just outside Deacon's Creek.
By
Clint Smith
I’m on the cliff now—the same remote outcrop Josh and I visited our first week in Negril. The climbing rope has been clumsily wound around my neck. The principle tall-thing in the ragged robe (I count three, but there are noises in the nearby forest) is limping toward Josh. This grayblue, pre-storm ceiling accentuates the shadowed vascularity of the tropical vegetation and the tall-things’ lineaments: grey, flaking skin inadequately imitating the texture of leprous, reptilian flesh.
What will surely take you a few minutes to hear is simply a synaptic strike: just a mental-spasm, really. A last-ditch panic-plea.
Josh can’t scream: a strip of black duct tape over his mouth, but I can hear those panic-smothered bursts. My mouth, for whatever reason, is not covered, and all I can produce is a stammered series of word-chokes.
Despite your suspicion, this is not a hallucination. More likely (it occurs to me from a distant gut-suspicion) this may be a consequence of some supernatural transgression involving our smuggling-collusion to obtain a sacred strain of Jamaican Landraces. I assure you, the rope is very real. Josh’s nose bleed is very real. My feelings for Cassy are real. Consciousness is this lightless cave, I hope you can retrieve the echoes from this blackness in which I now exist…
#
Earlier, Josh and I had been by the pool outside the resort. For the past year-and-a-half, our
impermanent residence (so we’d been told) had been a run-down condo on the northend of the parish; but the walking-distance resort tolerated our presence, mostly to remain equanimous with our vindictive supervisors. Basically, our bosses’ attitudes: Don’t fuck with our boys and we won’t fuck with you. All this meant for us, really, was threadbare protection and a few free drinks.
It had been a typical morning. We phoned a rep from Rendon’s ring (Josh’s turn this time), submitting our coded update. While Josh was occupied, I made a separate call on the laptop (also private). Requisite for the job, Rendon had always been paranoid; but his behavior had grown jittery in the past few months since our involvement with the obscure variety of Landraces.
A few years before that (before this, I suppose), a chance meeting on Spring Break led to another meeting, then a flight, then an indefinite stay in Negril—your classic Felix Culpa.
“Keep hunting,” Rendon says. Making progress, I regularly report. No worries, Josh repeats.
A pair of things continued to surprise me during my time here in Jamaica: the enduring, clandestine correspondences between Cassy and I; and the fact that Josh had apparently suspected nothing about the relationship between his former fiancée and myself.
Josh and I’d grown up together, but had not grown close until college, particularly as the things which suture our culture’s flimsy social structure began to slough away. I enjoyed thinking that Josh and I were tough like that: we saw the end of high school coming, and we’d already spent years pre-adjusting to transition.
Which is how we wound up here, acting as proxies as we negotiate movement of a rare strain of Landraces.
Kissed by a tepid hangover, the burrowing music and commotion from the nearby pool had me bobbing in and out of a drowse. I felt a chill-sting against my forearm and shuddered, scowled, sat up rigid.
Josh, reclined next to me on a lounge chair, offered a frosted bottle of beer, its exterior weeping with condensation. “Trick or treat, bitch.”
I wiped my forearm and returned my friend’s grin. “The hell are you talking about?”
“It’s October thirty-first, man,” Josh handed me one of his two beers from the walk-up bar.
Time had sluiced—days, months included. Was it really almost November? I clinked my bottle against Josh’s. “Cheers, man.”
Off toward the west, a low-creeping cluster of dark clouds were edging the horizon. I said nothing of it. Storms emerged and disappeared in tantrums, temporarily interrupting our ambient paradise.
“Had a dream last night,” said Josh.
“Oh yeah?” I looked over, waiting for a punchline. “Was it entertaining?”
But Josh wasn’t smiling, he was inspecting his beer, running a thumb across the exterior’s tears. “I was up in Evanston, at night, out by that big cemetery that skirts the lake.” He was talking about Calvary Cemetery, but I didn’t interrupt. “I was trying to get through the gate, just running up and down the sidewalk trying to get in there. I just—I just remember being desperate to get in. Like, once I was safe inside the gate people could find me, you know?” I did not. “And there were these…things…coming out of the lake.” He looked out across the pool, I watched him idly scanning the reclining banks of bikini-clad sunbathers, ticking his attention to the nearby forest. “These people were walking out of the water, just clawing up over the rocks. And I knew it was too late. I just gave up…just sat down on the sidewalk.”
Josh laughed then, a sort of clunk-choke sound. “And then only one of the figures came into the light—that sort of sickish-blue light from the streetlamps” (Mercury-vapor lights, I wanted to assist). “And it was you, man—except”—he chuckled—“you were wearing this ridiculous Dracula outfit, like just fucking…campy.” He shook his head after taking a drink. “You were soaking wet…had those plastic teeth in your mouth and like a”—with his fingers, he made a V gesture on his forehead.
“A widow’s peak?”
Josh looked at me, smiling, almost—I thought then—verifying I wasn’t wearing garish whitewash make-up. “Yeah.” We finished our beers; Josh waved at the bartender over by the cabana. “But you know the worst part?”
I considered this for a second, dread-assuming he might say that one of the other lurching figures was Cassy.
She’d been the one who’d pushed (I suppose the “push” was literal when she’d pressed the buzzer in the downstairs lobby, her crackling voice coming over the speaker), and I’d discovered an enticing equilibrium when I complied, both truly and figuratively, with pushing back). Of course I insisted she come up, assuming something (good) had happened between her and Josh, and that he would be in tow. She was alone.
I grew attached to that like-pole repellence the first night in my apartment over two years ago: the push-pull effect of what we were doing. Of what we were not only still doing to Josh, but the manner, though inconsistent, in which we’d continued to carry on our depraved liaisons.
“The worst part?” I said, clearing my throat and submitting the obvious: “That you couldn’t see the other people?”
Josh was wincing against the sun, quirking his gaze at the forest. “No. It was that we’d worn those goofy-ass costumes as kids. And I had this feeling like…I missed that—like we’d never be able to—”
A flicker of saccharine sentimentality, of a sort of loss, tickled my midsection before I swiped it away. I tolerated the silence a few seconds longer. “Never be able to what?”
He shrugged. House music lightly thumped around us. A sheepish laugh. “Nothing.”
That Josh was struggling to create a thoughtful moment amid our extended parlay as drug-smuggling intermediaries, I was a little embarrassed for him. Still, I tried to keep things casual, jocular. “Sounds like you’ve been sneaking too many tokes from Rendon’s inventory.” Josh stared ahead, said nothing. I recalibrated. “Listen, man. You can’t live in the past, it’ll only make you—”
“The hell is that?”
I frowned, first looking at Josh then tracing his eyeline to some vague place in the forest. “The hell is what?”
He inched forward, raising a finger. “That, man.”
Though I saw nothing, my automatic thought was that we’d not seen it coming—“it” being some unknown confluence where a rival ring would move on us. I slipped my hand into my backpack, just to nudge my thumb against my gun.
And then Josh was on his feet, moving faster than both my mouth and my legs, striding toward the far end of the pool where the property bordered the forest. “Josh,” I hissed, “wait.” It didn’t matter that I left my gun in the bag, all that mattered was that I was following him, not wanting to make a scene. A paltry substitute, I still had a hefty gravity knife clipped to the waistband of my shorts.
He didn’t hesitate as he hustled down the grassy slope which leveled off at woods; there was another root-covered slope here, more severe. I called for Josh to slow down but he never turned. I was very close to catching up when he edged through the ropy verdure.
I looked over my shoulder, appraising how we must appear to the other guests. No one seemed to care. Josh was half-obscured by some broad-leaf vegetation; I heard him say, “Here, man—help me…”
Half-turning, half-distracted, I reached out for Josh’s hand. Instantly: the slick, bone-grip texture of what I’d clutched sober-seized me. Wide-eyed, I saw that, instead of my friend’s hand, I was holding some sort of sinewy claw. Quivering out of my paralysis, I was summoning an expletive when another sharp-nailed limb pistoned of out the foliage, snuffing out everything.
#
I come crashing awake, lying on my side, the tall-things surrounding me like repulsive pillars.
One of them is shoving Josh closer to the cliff.
I scream things—incomprehensible cousins of No. The one with its reptile talon on Josh’s shoulder jerks a look at me, its iguana waddle of loose flesh under its neck wagging as it cants its head. An obscenely slender appendage extends toward the tape on Josh’s mouth, peeling it away.
Josh gasps. “What the fuck is happening, Luke?”
The principle tall-thing stares at me: febrile human eyes set in sick-iguana sockets. All I can manage is a croak. I have just enough time to assess the set-up: the climbing rope is knotted around Josh’s throat, and I follow its length down to an unspooled coil on the rocky ground, notice it running toward me—that its opposite end is connected to my neck.
My opportunity—to speak, to act—has passed. The tall-thing shoves Josh off the cliff. My friend’s face in that last instant: it’s something I can’t adequately express. All eyes and sorrow and awareness of onrushing nothing.
With Josh’s descent, the rope is zipping across the ground. I have no time. I make two moves which temporarily save me: I wind my forearm around the segment before me and scramble to brace my sneaker against a cluster of rocks.
The slack catches with a taut hum and I’m being dragged, Josh’s weight hauling me within a few yards of the cliff’s lip. Wincing, I swivel. My hip catches on…
I gamble a free hand into my waistband and flick open the gravity knife, swiping the blade over the rope and in a few seconds the tension’s released. Josh’s anguished echoes Doppler down and fade, replaced by my own panting. I blink at the cobalt-curds of the sky, maybe drift for a few minutes. I’m conscious of the tall-things lingering, observing with sentinel disinterest; I adjust the grip on my knife. I’ll go for their soft spots as fast as--
I hear the ticking, punctured wheezing and realize it’s coming from near my feet, near the cliff. I wrench myself up just in time to see the quaking hand rise over the ledge and latch onto my ankle; the force of the pull is insistent, tremendous. My calves are over the verge when Josh’s gray face emerges, rills of blood leaking from his nose, ears, eyes. The blunt shards of his shattered teeth twinkle in the cave of his grimace. He uses my legs to climb me. Josh brings a broken hand up, its fingers puckering the front of my t-shirt. And then, with its urging, the weight is simply too much to bear.
Clint Smith is the author of the collection Ghouljaw and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2014), and the novella, When It’s Time For Dead Things to Die (Unnerving Press, 2019). His sophomore collection, The Skeleton Melodies was released in 2020 by Hippocampus Press. “The Skeleton Melodies…is an excellent second collection,” wrote Ellen Datlow in The Best Horror of The Year, Volume Thirteen. “While Smith sometimes uses pulp tropes, his writing is so good that the stories aren’t pulpy at all. A real achievement.”
Of late, his work has appeared in Rebecca Rowland's Bram Stoker Award-nominated American Cannibal anthology (Maenad Press), Looming Low, Vol. II (Dim Shores), and Vastarien: A Literary Journal, Vol. 4 (Grimscribe Press). A chef and Honors Graduate from Le Cordon Bleu, Clint lives in Indiana, just outside Deacon's Creek.
