Shesepankh/The Greatest Movie Alive!

♦ Thomas Beard ♦

Maybe it was real dark outside, or maybe he was a helluva lot more drunk than he thought, but the Chevy driver could have sworn he saw a man in a three piece suit dragging that elk away.

It was roadkill, definitely not the work of a hunter—the man wasn’t dressed like one, and he was a city man anyway, the Chevy driver could tell.

The driver had stopped in the middle of the road, since no one was behind him that late at night. The darkness poured out from between the trees, flanking him on either side. He got out of the car, shutting the door as softly as he could behind him. As he made his way down the blacktop, he wanted to call out. 

“Sir?” he yelled, but only in his head. The silence got caught in his throat, only broken by the scuff of gravel, like someone dragging a body.

Somebody humming.

The Chevy driver slowly got closer to the woods. He was middle aged and weighed more than he’d have liked, so stealth wasn’t exactly his strong suit, but he managed to be as quiet as he could.

A twig snapped.

The driver whirled around but it wasn’t him—it was Mr. City, as he’d dubbed the man in the suit. He could see Mr. City through the trees, humming as he dragged the elk on to the high rocks around a nearby river. There was a red pickup truck parked downwind, and Mr. City seemed to be humming in some other language; the driver wondered if this was some sort of pagan thing, blood for Zeus or whatever, and if he should just leave it alone. 

Too bad it was right then that he tripped and fell face first through the trees, crashing onto the dirt where he was very, very visible.

When he got his head out of the mud, the first thing he saw was Mr. City looking up at him.

The driver remembered that night without words, just sound. Some animal roaring like a free river in the background, Mr. City smiling at him, the elk head in his hands.

Mr. City said something he couldn’t hear. He got up, probably looking like a bit of a weirdo himself. His plan was just to apologize and get straight out of there, but—but he couldn’t hear his own thoughts. It was just pure quiet.

He didn’t hear the words that came out of his own mouth, nor what Mr. City said before putting the elk head over his own, revealing that he’d hollowed it out. But the driver read Mr. City’s lips: Four legs in the morning, right?

The driver didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but Mr. City–Mr. Elk Head, really, threw back his head and laughed and laughed—silently, of course. Then he looked back down at the driver.

The driver saw the blood dripping down Mr. Elk Head’s nice suit, staining the black brown, the white rose. The animal’s hollowed out eyes were crying red, and Mr. City reached out to touch him, and how was he supposed to know that this wasn’t real, that Mr. City was some big time movie star, that everybody on set had mistaken him for an actor, even though he hadn’t said a single goddamn line? 

But at that moment, he knew, he just knew that something had gone wrong, more than it had already. 

The next few moments passed like a blur, but then the he was on the ground and Mr. Elk Head was below him and so many movie crew people were running through the trees it was almost comical, and the one sound he heard, like a bullet on a rainy day, was a loud, dirty SNAP.

He looked down at Mr. Elk Head.

Or maybe just Elk would have been better. Because he didn’t look human anymore. His arms were both bent backwards, legs spun around the knees, human teeth growing out of Elk mouth.

The driver stood up, numbly letting the other actors wash around him as Elk Head got up very, very slowly. But no one paid attention to that, how he hunched backwards, not forwards, how his neck seemed too loose. As the security team held him down, he saw Elk Head run—no, run was was the wrong word, it was jump—he jumped backwards, head still facing the driver as he took great bounding leaps backwards, legs and arms so twisted they just spun like twigs on strings, until Elk Head disappeared into the forest forever.

The blood was pounding without a sound through the driver’s brain, warping the memory as the guards held him down, yelled at him, and as sound flooded back to the world, he heard the words in his head, over and over:

Four legs in the morning four legs in the morning four legs in the morning

and he wondered how long it would be ‘till dawn.