Witness the Leatherman

• The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 4: The Speech of the Dead
• The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 5: Of Onyx and Organs

John hoisted shovel over his right shoulder like a rifle. "This don't seem like a bright idea." He might have preferred a weapon to a shovel, which was more reason that David had denied him one. The world felt less safe than half a year ago. Everyone sensed it, but it was a jinx to say as much. Nothing but the storms and the earthquake could account for this unease. Not even, he thought to himself, the task before them.

"Hush your mouth," rasped David. "You've made your opinion known. If you don't want the money..." He left the sentence to linger in the air; no need to finish it because who wouldn't want easy money? The coat had sold to the Eden Musee for a small fortune, though they'd as quickly labeled it the mantle of a maniac killer. What wouldn't they pay for the man himself, though, granted, post-mortem and a few months overripe? At the very least, his bones had to be worth a few dollars.

"The newspapers say that he had an underground den, full of Oriental riches," said John, tripping over his own feet to keep David's stride. "Why don't we find one of those instead of digging up Ol' Leathery?"

David turned on his heels, his weathered eyes narrowing. It seemed in the sliver of moon that his face was all wrinkles. "Tell me you don't believe a word of that twaddle."

"Well, the newspapers said, didn't they?" he stammered. "That he's got gold and jade and... and there is some philosopher down there, brought back from the dead, acting like his butler. They couldn't say if it weren't true, isn't that right?"

"Anything to move papers to halfwits." He continued his trudge through the woods to the cemetery. "If the Leatherman had such extravagant riches, he wouldn't have been a tramp, now would he? Staying in rock shacks and caves in the middle of winter? You think he wouldn't have been living the high life?"

John didn't need newspapers to know David was right. As a boy, John's teacher had selected him to leave school early and bring the Leatherman food. People said that you could set your watch by the vagrant's rounds. His uncle once joked that you were sure to smell him before you saw him. A Rockefeller would not fall to such humble odor, that was certain.

John had only taken the honor of bringing the Leatherman food the once because he never coveted it again. The Leatherman appeared as massive and fearsome as a bear, his musk far worse. When young John had passed him a loaf of crusty bread and some cold, cooked meat wrapped in paper, the Leatherman gave a clearing of throat that seemed as likely a growl. There was no word of thanks. Gossip was the Leatherman didn't have a tongue. John didn't know if that meant the organ or a native language.

Keeping David's quick pace, eager to get the night finished and money in his pocket, John tried to remember the Leatherman's face. There was only weatherworn skin and a wiry beard in his mind, but no expression he let himself recall-no humanity to the eyes.

John was not eager to see that face again, after months consumed by death. That was the task to which he had sworn himself. He was not a brave man, but he kept his word, even when it entailed unearthing the body of the only nightmare he had ever known.

John did not need the money -- least not enough to be trudging through an Ossining night -- and so could not wholly blame his presence on necessity. This was an act of greed and, he warranted, weak will. David had asked him to come, and he took this for a trust that he wished to meet.

The grave was some feet from the road. He could not expect many carriages or horses by the Sparta Cemetery.

It was a cooler May than it had any right to be. He heard the peepers beginning their chorus, accompanied by early cicadas. Clad in black, looking little different from a pallbearer, their dirge filled him with an unspeakable agitation.

Something scampered out of the woods ahead of them. John must have made a sound as he was startled, for David laid a hand on his chest in warning. "A fox or some varmint. Don't be yellow."

There didn't seem a point in arguing that he wasn't or that anyone would have a right to be on a night like this. A gust blew up, cold and rich with the damp earth, blowing his hat free of his head.

David pointed his shovel at a stone some feet away. John did not ask but bridged the gap. There was no sense in holding back from the work. He knelt over the grave, brushing the marker with his fingers.

"Who is Jules Bourglay?" asked John, reading.

"I thought you was the expert on all things to do with the Leatherman?" David mocked, stabbing the blade of his shovel into the earth. "Don't you know his heartbreaking story about losing his lady love and wandering the earth as penance?"

John shook this notion off as though it were an insect. "That's not true," he said, meaning that it didn't fit with the image of the Leatherman to which he had grown attached. Leatherman was a mystery, fodder for tall tales like Daniel Boone or Paul Bunyan. A failed romance didn't fit that. It made the Leatherman too human, too soppy on the face of it. The Leatherman was meant to be unknown when it came down to it. People might speculate why he kept his circuit between the Connecticut and Hudson River Valley, but there was never an answer that satisfied.

"It's been a cold spring," said David, digging loose the first clod, guessing wrong what was on John's mind. "He'll have kept fine down there."

John followed suit, taking his place beside David, shoveling wordlessly. The only sound came from the night and their shovels, the former now quieter than the latter. It was as though all the creatures of the dark woods had fallen to voyeurism.

Sooner than John could have expected, the hole was so deep that they couldn't dig together. David took the first shift until his muscles ached too much to persist. There was no time limit to it, no moment when it would be his turn in the hole. He checked his pocket watch all the same, trying to spy its hands in the low light of the moon. He expected to keep alert, watching David digging, anticipating his turn, but he drowsed. In his half dreams, on the edge of proper sleep, he imagined the Leatherman, gruff, clad from hat to boots in roughhewn leather, a stubbed-out cigarette dangling from his lips. In these reveries, the Leatherman appeared concerned, almost pitying. Maybe this was a message from beyond the grave, telling him to abandon this blasphemy. John thought upon waking that he might prefer the haunting of a silent spook than the vexation that would come from David should he again express his reservations.

Hours later, the tip of John's shovel hit something hard, yet more yielding than the rocks. John crouched to clear it away, but the curious lightness filling him that comes only from standing on another man's coffin, like being caught too high on a rope when one knows the fall would be ruinous. John looked to David anyway, a puppyish blankness on his face.

"Well, hurry it up!" David barked.

It was only a few minutes more before they had the coffin dug up properly, but not exactly clean. John found himself in no rush to finish the exhuming. In this between moment, he had committed no sin greater than wasting a night on hard labor. Once the lid was open, he would have transgressed against law and God, no question.

He wasn't fond of the practical demands of stealing a corpse. David figured they could move the body, all limp weight, easily enough in his rucksack. It would be months of rot, barely arrested by the preservation of the pauper's coffin and internment. The idea of the money that he might get upon its selling eased the disgust and readied his muscles.

The lid was nailed shut, which he had expected. He and David tried to pry it free with the edge of their shovels. The quarters were cramped almost impossibly with the two of them in the hole. John conceded that they needed to hoist it above the ground to finish the work before dawn. With struggle, they looped ropes about the head and foot of the crude wooden box and heaved it up with more effort than must have been needed to bury him.

Something of the trial to bring the coffin into the moonlight struck him as odd. Then again, he didn't expect to make a practice of robbing graves if he could help it.

John pulled the lid free. He couldn't fathom the contents at first, nor could David, who lit a lantern and brought it close.

Empty. Well, empty of the body, that was certain. The air within smelled old, musty, but it did not smell of death. Nothing but the cloth within had decayed. As John brought the light close, he saw a few iron nails and bones he could not readily identify, though he wagered they came from a marmot or chicken. He rubbed his forearms, feeling his hair stand on end at the sight of this.

"We've been had," whispered David, his voice low with the fury of the spent night.

"Who would have taken him?" asked John, not expecting any answer but the wind.

David, it was plain, had no answer to give beyond reiterating that someone had beaten them to the deed. "Some mortician sold him off to a freak show, I'll bet. Who would have noticed, eh?"

The sky burned purple as the sun threatened to rise. John took the lead, saying they needed to bury the coffin again.

"I am not getting caught to bury some bones and nails!"

"You are," said John with wavering confidence, "if you don't want to be found out. You'll do it because the work needs doing."

"We didn't steal anything," he said, putting his hands on the coffin. "Nothing to steal, anyhow."

"We would have, though. Who is going to believe us innocents in this? Whoever stole the Leatherman first, they'd know." John didn't know why, but he feared whoever did this more than he feared the police. In the digging, he noticed no sign that they hadn't been the first since the burial to disturb this earth. But what was the other solution? That the Leatherman had never been buried, he supposed. Then what was the sense of the pageantry of this grave for a man who had no loved ones to complain about his treatment?

He bent to close the coffin, banging the nails back into place with the handle of his shovel. It was not a beautiful job, this resting place for their questions, but it didn't need to be anything but done. The way he saw it, no one would need to dig again in this spot under a dishonest headstone. Their sin could be hidden until Judgment Day, a joke between God and them.

David wanted to toss the vacant coffin back into the hole, but John knew this was too great a trespass. Empty or not, that box was meant to be the Leatherman's final resting place. It should go back to the ground with more reverence than they had removed it. His strength had waned with David's motivation, but they finally lowered it without much damaging it.

Replacing the earth that had covered the coffin was a more straightforward affair than the digging. Within a few hours, they'd covered the grave again. If anyone noticed their efforts in the dawn's light, they would have taken them for no worse than gravediggers finishing out an early burial. Beneath the crust of mud and pebbles, David had was almost unrecognizable, inhuman. That was disguise enough, for John could not find guilt to be had now that they had restored all. It was not a perfect recreation of what lay here twelve hours ago, but the Leatherman's grave would be beneath notice in a few days, after a rainstorm. What could the resting place of an itinerant pauper have to offer even the most fiendish of grave robbers, after all?

The night's work ended, though not as David would have had it, they parted ways with little more than exhausted grunts. There would come a time when they would talk over what they tried, would reconcile their ledgers. The thought of one of David's schemes to get rich, well outside the law, struck him as absurd now. No amount of money could be worth the stain on his soul.

John made it home. The morning light seemed harsher than any before. There was no one to take note of his nocturnal activities, nor anyone to comment on the piles of soiled clothes and muddy boots he left in his wake in the journey between front door and bed.

He lost consciousness seconds after his head hit the bed, barely adventuring beneath the sheets. He did not want for dreams but did not have the energy to pray against them. Given all he'd done in the night, he could only hope God could ignore him.

If too tired to dream, did that make the vision before him a nightmare?

The odor peeled open his eyes, the smell of weathered leather, a body that had seen no cause for hygiene in decades, humanity bereft of the need for social niceties. In some atavistic part of his brain, he knew this is what his species would have been outside the domestication of towns and cities. This wild man kept his peace only out of necessity, one not blessed to dwell indoors.

The scent startled him, but he did not believe the sight until he heard the creaking of the suit. He knew the sound the way one knows the intricacies of one's fears. He had listened to this sound as a child and carried it with him every night since.

The Leatherman took another scraping step toward John's bed. John heard the thud of it on the floorboards, more weight than he thought a ghost could have. But the Leatherman died, of that he was sure. The papers had said as much, had said his suit had been sold off, yet here he was.

The same papers who said the Leatherman was rich beyond measure...

John shut his eyes, as much to banish the figure before him as to quiet his mind. He could feel the gravity of the Leatherman in the room with him, his musk a creature in its own right.

According to those deceitful papers, how did the Leatherman die? Something about his jaw, he thought. Frostbite or cancer, but something that did the Leatherman in. He'd escaped from the hospital, that he remembered. People had found his body in one of his rock shacks in the woods. That must all have been lies. Then what of the grave? What had he desecrated if the Leatherman could find him here?

"I'm sorry," John begged when he dared to open his eyes and saw the Leatherman remained, clasping his sheets in his fists as though they could protect him. "I meant no harm to you. I didn't. How can the living much harm the dead?"

The Leatherman cleared his throat, though he said nothing beyond this low, gruff moan.

In the daylight seeping under the door, he could see the shovel behind his caked clothing. The idea of using this as a weapon flashed like lightning, gone almost before he could have it. The Leatherman would never let him get that far.

"I gave you food once. When I was a boy," he said weakly, grasping at anything that might save his soul, a childhood and begrudging kindness that must have been forgotten now. "Meat and bread in Chappaqua. You remember?"

The Leatherman stepped toward him, getting a better look at his face. He gave something not unlike a nod, though John couldn't hope this familiarity might be enough. So many had given him food, had appeased him as a local curiosity over the decades, for the Leatherman to remember his one fearful act.

"What are you going to do to me?" he asked because the question needed asking. The dread of not knowing his fate seemed like prolonging the inevitable.

The Leatherman looked at him with an expression John couldn't at first read in the dimness, the shadow of his hat brim obscuring his features. John settled on pity. This was worse than anger.

Witness, John heard, but he knew the Leatherman had not spoken. All the same, the demand was plain.

He begged, near a whine, "Don't make me see this."

Witness, he heard again. He bunched the sheets to his face, his eyes closed to the point of pain.

WITNESS. In fear, John's eyes shot open to the dread sight. Once he began to see, there was no way to look away.

The Leatherman removed his hat. His matted hair fell away in clumps, dropping unregarded to the ground. The dim light of the room caught a gleam on his head. John couldn't decipher whether this was the shine of his skull or that of a moist and bare scalp.

Next, he yanked off the boots, each sewn asymmetrically of the remnants of other shoes. When the Leatherman laid his unshod feet onto the floor, there came a sound like fat in a frying pan or a downpour on the roof. He placed the hat with delicacy upon the boots.

John's whimpers grew to a whine with each breath, but he couldn't turn away from the spectacle before him.

The coat sagged off the Leatherman's shoulders. Something in John's mind screamed that he needed to break the spell, but he could not obey. He had sinned. This was his penance.

Beneath the coat was nothing. Not flesh or bones but vacancy as though the coat took itself off. Once it was off, the Leatherman vanished, but John felt his presence all the stronger.

Witness.

He felt crowded without a focal point for his terror. "Lord God, no. I won't touch the coat. You can kill me 'fore I'll touch it."

The voice was not asking. The coat shuddered toward him, animated by some unseen force that shaped it with the guile of a wolf. It pounced on his legs beneath the sheets, its heat from its previous owner seeping through the weft of the blankets.

John rolled out of bed in a fumbling defense, a mad escape from the forty pounds of hungry leather. He thought at first that a rat had broken his fall. Too late, he realized that the hat squeezed at his shoulders with a child's insistence.

A spasm wracked his body, trying to shake it off, but the leather dug into his skin.

The hat flensed off a circle of his skin, the torn free flesh melding with the brim to become more leather. The hat became suppler, less ragged. John's ears pounded with a million steps he had not taken, though dirt and rock, snow and ice.

Despair sought to rip from John's lips. All he could manage were a few strained grunts, such as he had heard in his every nightmare.

He tried to slough off the coat but could feel as though it were his skin, his fingers gripping the rough hide.

As the hat burrowed into the meat of his brain, he understood this suit was not a curse but a burden. He tried another agonized scream that only came out as a grunt. It had never been the Leatherman wearing the suit -- the one drinking up his gushing blood -- but the other way around.

It was time to visit David so he would not walk alone. The circuit needed walking. The work needed doing.