This week’s prompt was: Write a story in which a character is missing all or part of a limb, or gets all or part of a limb removed.

The ungue brachium rex

The rented Toyota bounced down the well-rutted dirt road with the reckless abandon enjoyed only by those who buy the full insurance.  Winding and flanked by a nearly impenetrable wall of pine and maple trees, the road had somehow remained clear despite one-hundred and fifty years of neglect.  The recent rain—with promise of more to come—scrawled the recent passage of four-wheel-drive vehicles across the wagon ruts of the 19^th Century.

“Jesus, Marco!” Victor growled as he braced himself between the ceiling hand grip and the parking brake.  “I’m as excited as you are but we aren’t going to see it at all if you kill us before we get there.”

“Dude, you need to relax,” Marco said in his best Vin Diesel.  “I got this.”

“This isn’t The Fast and the Furious!” Victor shouted.  “I’m going to be sick, with all this bouncing around.”

“Sure it’s not just your shirt?” Marco asked.  Victor gave him a withering look from within his green and yellow Hawaiian shirt.  “That’s what it’s doing to me.”

A smaller road, nearly a trail, split from the winding track and Marco tried to fishtail the Toyota into it, nearly went head-on into a tree, and then slid to a halt.  After a brief fist fight so inept they would have been stuffed into lockers back in high school, Marco drove at a more sedate speed to the trail’s conclusion.  Breaking from the trees, the site opened up before them surrounded by drop trailers and tents, vehicles, port-a-johns, and the various effluvia of an archeological dig.  As Marco pulled off to one side, he noticed the crumbling remains of a once well-laid rock wall: now covered with moss and the sort of creeping vines more commonly associated with Florida than Georgia, the wall peeking through the undergrowth must once have enclosed a plantation house of considerable size.

“There she is!” Victor said, swatting Marco’s arm and leaping from the car before it had come to a halt.

“There she is,” Marco echoed, though his eyes followed not the approaching woman in jeans but traced the pyramidal lines of the huge tent underneath which the project’s excavation was protected from the rain.

“Victor, Marco, I’m glad you made it today,” Dr. Heather Lund said as she walked through the scattered boxes and digging gear.  “Another day and you may not have been allowed back here.”

Victor forced himself to match her pace, wiping his hands as surreptitiously as he could on his trousers.  “Why’s that?” he asked.

Another car came tearing down the trail and slid to an impatient stop before Heather could answer, a green car with “Sheriff” sweeping from wheel-well to wheel-well in reflective white paint.  The driver jerked so hard on the parking brake that the car shook.  Slamming the car door and stalking across the muddy ground, his tightly clenched jaw and fatless body, trim and hard in its starched uniform, almost captivated the eye enough for an observer to miss the odd feature so unexpected in a cop: he was missing his right arm, the empty sleeve was pinned cuff to epaulet.

“Ms Lund,” the Sheriff barked.  “You do realize this is an active crime scene.”

“Sheriff Bryant,” she said.  “Quite.”

“I’ve allowed you and your team to continue your dig out here but I thought I made it clear about people coming and going,” Sheriff Bryant said, hand on hip, leaning forward at the waist so he could talk directly into Heather’s face.

“No one has left the site, Sheriff,” she said.  The Sheriff pointed to Marco and Victor.  “They just got here,” she said.  “I called them a couple days ago and forgot they were on their way out.”

“What’s going on?” Marco asked Heather, trying not to stare at the Sheriff’s missing arm.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on here, son,” the Sheriff said.  “One person has been found dead and two others are missing.”

“Heather?” Victor said, turning to her.

“No one you knew,” she said gently.  “Members of my team, though.”

“I’m so sorry,” Victor said, hesitantly gripping her shoulder.

“Thanks,” she said.  “Raul went missing the day we found the ungue brachium rex.  The next day, Cynthia.”

“And this morning, Mr. Dickson,” the Sheriff said.  “Which is why I said no one was to leave or enter the scene.”

“I don’t see the problem here,” Heather said.  “They were on a plane from Nigeria until this morning.  They didn’t do it.”

“Well I do hope they enjoy sleeping in their car,” the Sheriff said.  “Because no one’s leaving this site until I’ve found the guilty party.  You understand, boys?”

“If there really is an ungue brachium rex in the ground here,” Marco said.  “You couldn’t drag us away.”  From the look on the grizzled sheriff’s face, Marco was a little unsure if that were true, one armed or not.

“What’s this in the ground?” the Sheriff said, shaking his head uncomprehendingly.  “Some kind of dinosaur?”

“Come on,” Heather laughed.  “You’ve got to see it to believe it.  And I’m sure the boys are raring to go.”  As the four walked toward the enormous tent, she continued, partly over her shoulder: “As I told you the other day, we’re here looking for the remains of the Brickson plantation.  But three days ago, one of our techs digging in the southwest quadrant unearthed human remains.  It was a little disappointing at first, as we are searching for the rumored secret library of Albert Nathaniel Brickson, the plantation’s last owner.  A skeleton probably indicates that we are too far to one side of the property and may have discovered the family burial plot.”  She shrugged before going on.  “Could be; we’ll see.  But as the tech brushed away the soil, he found that the skeleton’s right arm was not human.”

The Sheriff stopped in his tracks; the others took a few more steps and then turned to look back.  “Whoa now,” the Sheriff said quietly.  “What exactly are you talking about?”

“Come and see,” a voice called from within the pit a few feet beyond Heather.

The four surrounded the furthest corner of the dig site, looking down the tiered, red-clay depression at the sandy soiled floor where an archeological technician stood before a partially exposed human skeleton.  The tech was in coveralls, the filth of which seemed worn with as much pride as his grey whiskers.  He brandished a long-handled paint brush, waving it at the human remains.

“There he is,” Henry the tech said.  “Or at least I’m going to go ahead and guess our new friend is a he.  The splay of those hips is a bit narrow for a woman.”

“That’s not the only thing that designates him as male,” Marco said, tearing off his leather jacket and dropping it behind him.  “May I?” he asked before climbing over the edge.

“Whoa!” a half-dozen people shouted at once.

“Hold on there, boy,” Sheriff Bryant said, taking Marco by the scruff and dragging him up.  “I’m going to need to hear a little more about you, first.  And about, uh, this here.”

“Easy, Marco,” Heather said, putting a hand on his chest, restraining a laugh.  “No way are you going to go stamping around my site with those cowboy boots.”

“Come on,” Marco pleaded incredulously.  “Who else here has ever even seen an ungue brachium rex?  Vic and I have been studying them for three years!”

“And I still ain’t heard word one about what it is you think you got here?” Sheriff Bryant said.

“You see the right arm, sir?” Victor stuttered, uncomfortable with the similarity between the man’s loss and the skeleton’s deformity.  “How the bones of the upper arm are somewhat elongated and lead to a four-fingered hand?  The hand isn’t shaped like a human hand; the bone structure is completely different.”

“Right, it’s a freaking claw,” Marco added.  “The forearm is also structured more like that of a large cat or even a lizard rather than a human.”

“Well how do you know that it wasn’t just sorta dropped in there afterward?” Sheriff Bryant asked, wiping his forehead.

“Of course, of course, that’s what we’ve all thought at one time,” Marco said genially, taking the Sheriff by the shoulder and pointing at the skeleton, speaking faster and faster.  “But see the wrist bones, how they marry up perfectly to the ulna, the forearm bone.  If you compare wear patterns on each of the metacarpals—the small bones that make up the wrist and upper hand—you’ll see that they are indeed from the same organism.  If it’s a hoax, it’s a hell of a good one because the huckster would have had to file each bone to make it look like they’d all been in the same organism for the sixty some years of its life, if I’m guessing his lifespan correctly.”

“That was our guess, too,” Henry said.  “And it would have taken a hell of a determined huckster, too!  We needed a backhoe to get through the first three feet of red clay you have down here: red as blood and hard as stone.”

“No, no way,” Sheriff Bryant said, pulling away from Marco’s hand.  “No way a human could grow a paw like that.”

“More like claw,” Victor said.  “Which is where the name comes from: ungue brachium rex.  Claw-armed King.  You see, all of the specimens we’ve found have come from West Africa.  And in each of the cases, they belonged to tribal leaders.”

“Why in the hell is it here, then?” Sheriff Bryant asked.

“That’s why I called in the boys,” Heather said.

A voice called for the Sheriff from the treeline to the right of the dig, behind Sheriff Bryant.  He turned to see one of his deputies running through the clutter of the site, hands holding his pistol belt still as he ran.

“Cletus, what is it?” the Sheriff shouted.

Breathless but excited, and visibly scared, Deputy Cletus said, “We found, we found Cynthia Gorman.  She’s dead.  Strung up in the trees and cut to pieces, just like Mr. Sanchez.”

“Show me,” Sheriff Bryant said.  He ran a few steps and then skidded to a halt and turned, pointing a finger at Heather.  “Ms Lund, you might as well have your people start packing up.  This site is closed as of now.”

“That’s Dr. Lund and the hell it is!” she said, stepping between Marco and Victor and striding to the red-faced sheriff.

“I’m not asking you,” Sheriff Bryant began, “I’m telling you and—”

“This is State land,” she shouted over him.  “I have permission from the State to conduct this archeological dig and I’m not leaving here until a State Judge issues a warrant to that effect.”

“People are dying here!” he shouted.

“I know they are!” she shouted back.  “My people!”  Taking a few breaths, she pointed back at the ungue brachium rex and said, “But clearly this is a find of monumental importance and every single person here—including those who’ve died—know exactly what we’re risking our lives for.”

“For nothing is what,” Sheriff Bryant said, hand on hip.  “You need to clear your people out of here, Dr. Lund.  All this here archeology will still be lying around when you get back—after I’ve caught whatever psycho is killing off your people.”

“That’s just the point, Sheriff,” she said.  “We’ve already removed the red-clay layer of earth.  That red-clay, pain in the ass that it is, has kept everything beneath it dry and protected from the air.  The red-clay has acted like an airtight container, preserving everything beneath it for us to find.  Now that we’ve taken off the cap, the air is going to find its way down to whatever is under there and a hundred and fifty years of decay is going to catch up to it if we don’t get it out and into a humidity-controlled environment.  Time is of the essence.”

“Even if it costs you your life,” Sheriff Bryant said.

“Sheriff!” Deputy Cletus called in the distance.

“This is not over,” Sheriff Bryant said, pointing his finger an inch from Heather’s face.  He turned and ran off into the darkness of the trees, his sixty some years unnoticeable in his stride and speed.

Turning back to her friends, Heather found Marco and Victor grinning to each other and biting back laughter.  “What?” she said, smiling in spite of herself and feeling bad about it, knowing one of her people was hanging mutilated in the trees less than a mile from camp.

“Same old Heather,” Marco said.  “I had flashbacks of Arkham when you started yelling at that cop.”

“Shut up,” she said, rolling her eyes and walking back to the edge of the dig.

“Arkham?” Henry asked.  “Did you go to school together?”

“Yeah,” Victor said.  “We all went to Miskatonic University together.”

“Then how come you’re not doctors, too?” Henry said, grinning through his beard, always ready to nettle a PhD candidate.

“Because our genius has yet to be recognized,” Marco said.

“Because they chose one of the most difficult mysteries in anthropology, ethnography, and biology to explain for their dissertations,” Heather said.  “The ungue brachium rex.  A human with a four-fingered claw.”

“And freakish weird arm,” Marco added with a grunt as he dropped to a sitting position and began to wrestle off his cowboy boots.  “Can’t forget the monkey arm.”

“How could I?” Heather said.

“Are you okay?” Victor said, walking up and putting a hand on her shoulder.  Again.

“I’m good, Vic,” she said, glancing at the hand and smiling as he snatched it away as if burned.

“So she was hell with the cops back in Arkham, Massachusetts, eh?” Henry asked.  “I believe it.”

“Had to be,” she said.  “They had these archaic public drunkenness laws and this one,” she said, hitching a thumb at Victor, “couldn’t go two beers without singing the aria from Madam Butterfly.  Getting him home from a bar was always public drunkenness.”

“That’s so not, at all, even, you know,” Victor stuttered.

“Dude, it was,” Marco said and slipped barefooted into the dig.

Squatting and withdrawing a pen flashlight from his jeans pocket, Marco began examining the ungue brachium rex.  The skeleton was still half buried even after three days of digging it out.  Because of the fragile nature of the find, the dirt encasing the bones had to be brushed away to avoid damage.  The skeleton was not lying flat: the right arm and hand were higher than the head and left side of the body, as if the body had fallen against something or slid into a crevice.  It also explained how Heather knew it was their sort of work first thing.

“Magnificent,” Marco breathed.  “Dude, get down here.”

“I’m just going to get my bag from the car,” Victor said.  To Heather he asked, “Is there a place I can change?”

“Dude, quite sissy-assing around and get down here!” Marco said.

Victor shot a venomous glance at Marco before silently storming off to their car.  Marco and Henry exchanged head shakes.

“Oh, leave him alone, you big bully,” Heather laughed.

“You’re one to talk,” Marco said.

“So what’s with this thing?” Henry asked.  “You said all the other examples are in West Africa?  Kind of funny one turning up here.”

“But not impossible,” Marco said.  “Merely extraordinary.  And completely awesome.  We’ve never found one this well preserved.  He’s our bog-man.”

“And he has a claw hand,” Henry said.  “How’s that possible?”

“We don’t know, really,” Marco said.  He stood up and switched off his flashlight.  “It’s like this—”

“Ms Lund,” Sheriff Bryant called as he came striding back to the site, Deputy Cletus in tow.

“Mr. Bryant,” she said spinning around to face him.  That stopped him in his tracks.  Again.

“Dr. Lund,” he growled.  “My deepest apologies.  I can’t imagine how terrible it must be to have your education overlooked—when your people are being killed left and right!”

She turned her back on him, crossing her arms, and addressed Marco.  “You were saying?”

“I, uh, right,” Marco said as he watched the sheriff’s face go from red to purple over Heather’s shoulder.  “So it’s like this: we have been trying to find out how a mutation like this could exist.  We started with the theory that it was genetic and hoped to find enough tissue somewhere to be able to gene type one of the specimens.  Thing is, though, as we explored more and more of the West African coast, we found more and more lore on these guys.  They have a lot of different names there, depending on which peoples and cultures, and which time periods, you’re talking to or about.  But one thing struck us as always the same: in every case, the guy with the claw was always the leader.”

“Right, and,” Victor said, walking up in a spotless set of overalls and a bandana around his head.  “And, get this, when a tribe with one of these claw-handed guys was conquered, the leader of the conquering tribe would either develop the mutation or his first son would.”

“Folklore,” Sheriff Bryant said.  “Poppycock!  And we don’t have time for poppycock right now, son.  Dr. Lund: time to pack up and get out of here.  I won’t ask you again.”

She turned on him so fast, Victor jumped back a step.  “You won’t be ordering anyone if you lay a hand on me or any of my people.  You want me out of here: fine—get a court order!  Until then, we continue to work.  You arrest me or any of my people and you’ll go from presiding over this county to picking up trash along its one highway so fast you’ll think it was push from the hand of god.”

Bryant looked as if he was on the verge of hitting her.

“Dude, her uncle’s a US Senator,” Marco said, grinning from the hole.  “And yeah, she’s always been like this.”

“Cletus,” Sheriff Bryant spat through clenched teeth.  “Go into town, wake up the mayor, get him to help you contact Judge Hathaway—and get me a court order to throw these people the hell out of my county!”

Cletus yes sir’ed and ran for his car.

Bryant and Heather stared daggers at each other as the others watched, captivated, until the rain that had been falling like mist near a fountain suddenly opened up into an outright downpour.  Both the sheriff and the ethnographer jumped under the enormous tent.  Huddled together around the strange human skeleton, an uncomfortable silence took them all around the shoulders.  Sheriff Bryant seemed unable to look either Heather in the eye or directly at the ungue brachium rex.  Finally he shot a finger at Victor, who recoiled as if pushed even from across the hole, and addressed him.

“Well, it looks like I’m stuck here for a bit,” Bryant said.  “So tell me about this here skeleton.  How you figure a West African skeleton come to a Georgia forest?”

“Well, I, that is, it’s sort of,” Victor fumbled from word to word.

“The slave trade, dude,” Marco said.  To Victor, he said: “You bring the camera?”

“That’s not possible,” Bryant said under his breath.

“Sure it is,” Marco said.  “We found records of another ungue brachium rex in Haiti, though not the remains.  It’s possible that one made it up here.”

“But I thought you said the mutation was only transmitted from leader to leader,” Henry said.

“What’s this now?” Bryant demanded.

“Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s right,” Marco said.  “Listen, it’s kind of strange and that’s why it’s worth studying.  The mutation doesn’t seem to be genetic.  If you have two tribes—right?—Tribe A and Tribe B, and Tribe A has a ungue brachium rex as the leader and then Tribe B conquers Tribe A, Tribe B’s leader—or more likely his son—will develop the mutation.”

“But here’s where it get’s weird,” Vic said, scrambling into the hole.  “You see, we thought that it was probably because Tribe B’s leader would have taken Tribe A’s wife as his own after the conquering, right?  And so it would be a genetic mutation carried by the mother.”

“But nothing doing,” Marco said.  “We found out how the tribes in the area worked and while it is true that the conquered leader’s wife might be taken by the conqueror, he would have had to have had a son before either becoming leader or before his people would have trusted him to lead a war party.  Sign of virility, bro.”

“So when the first son of the conquering leader developed the mutation,” Victor continued, “he was either the product of the leader and a wife not related to an ungue brachium rex or he had already been born before the ungue brachium rex had been conquered!”

“So what the hell?” Henry said.  “How’d it get passed on?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Marco said.  “I mean, don’t get me wrong: tribal lore may just be flat out incorrect.  But it could be that the mutation is passed from leader to leader not via genetics but via another organic vector.”

“An organic what?” Bryant asked.

“A vector,” Victor said.  “Like it could be a disease deliberately administered because they thought it was good juju.  Or the side effect of a poisonous plant or a drug.”

“And that’s when we found out about the Vodun connection,” Marco said.

Gunshots rang out in the distance.  Sheriff Bryant grabbed his radio mic off his shirt and began calling for a report as he ran toward the gun fire.  The others stayed put as shots exploded in more rapid succession and then as suddenly as they started, stopped.

An hour passed under the tent, the rain drumming on the canvas as if accompanying a wild circling dance.  Occasionally another burst of gunfire would explode through the wall of rain followed by nothing but the endless drumming.  Marco and Victor measured and photographed the skeleton, comparing the structure of the claw to what they’d recorded in Africa.  With Henry’s help, they also continued the work of unearthing what still remained below ground.  At the end of an hour, Deputy Cletus’s car returned.

With umbrella in hand, Cletus went around to the passenger side door and retrieved someone before joining Heather at the hole’s edge.  Out of the dark, droning night, the deputy guided a silver-haired woman.  She stepped beside Heather and suddenly began to shake violently, a hand covering her mouth and her eyes trying desperately to close.  She turned her head one way and then the other, trembling with the effort not to look down at the skeleton.

“Are you alright?” Heather asked the silver-haired woman, looking first at her and then up at the deputy.

“This here is Mrs. Bryant,” Cletus said.  “Sheriff around?”

“He’s,” Heather began but worried about how much she should say in front of the obviously distressed wife.  “He’s in the woods.”

“Right,” Cletus said before using his radio to call for the Sheriff.

Mrs. Bryant wept as she looked down into the hole, finally kneeling at the edge with Heather’s arm around her shoulders.  Marco and Victor silently conferred with one another, trying to decide if they should move aside to let her see or cover the skeleton that seemed to disturb the woman so.

“Mrs. Bryant,” Heather asked gently, “what’s wrong?”

“Has anyone else been killed?” the older woman asked in reply.

“I don’t know,” Heather said.  “I haven’t heard of any more casualties.  I’m sure your husband is fine.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Bryant said sadly.  “He’s safe.”

“He’s on his way back now,” Cletus said.

“All this digging and fuss, just to find these bones?” Mrs. Bryant asked.

“Well, no,” Heather said.  “Actually we were looking for a library that was rumored to exist under the plantation mansion that once stood here.”

“What?  Why?” Mrs. Bryant asked, confused.

“The last patriarch of the Brickson family was said to have been interested in the occult,” Heather said.  “I found correspondence with a distant relative of Albert Nathaniel Brickson, in England, that seems to imply Albert kept a secret library in which he had a copy of a book called Unaussprechlichen Kulten by von Junzt.”

“May?” a voice called from the impenetrable rain.  “May, what are you doing out here?”  A moment later, Sheriff Bryant stepped sopping out of the storm and to his wife’s side.  He laid his shaking hand on her shoulder and she looked up.  “You shouldn’t have come.”

“I had Cletus bring me,” she said.  “Is it true, Will?  Has—”

“That’s enough now,” the Sheriff interrupted.  Over his shoulder, he shouted out into the rain: “Deputy Perkins!  Come up here, son.  Listen, get all the men together and round up everybody on this site.”

“No, you can’t do that!” Heather shouted, standing up.

“Then, put’em all in that trailer there,” the sheriff said, taking no notice of Heather.  “Just pack’em in and then guard the building.  Nobody—nobody!—go around the back, you hear?  Just stay at the corners and keep your eyes peeled.  And no shooting!  No shooting, just call me if you see anything.  Get.”

“You can’t do this, Sheriff,” Heather repeated, shouting over Mrs. Bryant’s head.

“I’m done debating with you, Dr. Lund,” he said.

“We’ll see what the governor thinks of your high-handed behavior,” she said, drawing her cell phone out of her pocket as if drawing a gun.

“You go on and call whoever you like,” the Sheriff said.  “I’m an elected official and no one puts me in or takes me out of office except the people of this great county.”

In a voice near to despair, Mrs. Bryant said, “And a Bryant has held that office for nearly three hundred years.”

“What?” Heather asked, forgetting the number she was pretending to dial.

“That’s right, doctor,” Sheriff Bryant spat.  “Since before Georgia was a State.  No, Cletus, you can leave these few people here to me.  Go on with the others.”

For a few minutes punctuated by cursing and quarrelling, the archeological staff, with the exception of Henry and Heather, were rounded up and pushed into one trailer.  Deputies stood in the pouring rain at the trailer’s corners, flashlights struggling to press farther than a few feet into the dark, drenching night.

“What was all that shooting about?” Marco finally asked, shivering in the red water that ran into the hole and under his bare feet.

Mrs. Bryant looked up at her husband in a panic.

“Never you mind, boy,” the Sheriff said.  “Deputies thought they were seeing things.  Never hit nothing.”

Mrs. Bryant stood up, looked the Sheriff in the eye, and slowly said, “They know something about what’s going on here.  What is it?”

“They think they know quite a lot,” the Sheriff said.  “But they don’t know a damn thing.”

“Bryant,” Heather said.  “Bryant, Bryant, Bryant.  Your people have been in Georgia for three-hundred years?  Always named Bryant?”

Mrs. Bryant swung around toward Heather, recoiling into her husband, who held her firmly, cupping his hand over her mouth.

“Whoa, shit, dude!” Marco said, scrambling up the opposite wall of the dig hole.

Victor looked between the faces, uncomprehending but all the more frightened for it.  Sheriff Bryant held Heather’s gaze for a long minute and then slowly slid his hand from his sobbing wife’s mouth, down to his holster.  When the sound of the unbuckling restraining strap snapped through the drumming rain to Mrs. Bryant’s ears, she spun back around and hugged the Sheriff’s arm to his body.

“No, Will!” she shouted into his chest.  “No, no, no.  That’s what he’s thinking, too.”

“What’s going on?” Victor asked.

“If I look into the photographic record of this county,” Heather said, “am I going to find every Sheriff Bryant for as far back as the records go is missing his right arm?”

Mrs. Bryant’s tears shut off as if at a tap.

“It’s a disease,” Sheriff Bryant said.  “Everybody round here knows about it.  Born deformed and if not removed at birth it’ll fester.  Usually only afflicts the first born son.  It’s medical.”

Heather nodded slowly.  “Mrs. Bryant?” she said.  “Mrs. Bryant, do you have a son?”

The older woman began to wail.  Despite the streaming moisture running down the Sheriff’s face from his time in the rain, his tears were obvious as they glistened in the light of the dig site’s lamps.

“His name’s Seymour,” the Sheriff whispered hoarsely.

“And he was born with a claw hand?” Marco asked.

“No, no he was perfect,” Mrs. Bryant cried.  “Perfect and beautiful.”

“Just he couldn’t ever unclench his right hand,” Sheriff Bryant said.  “It had always been said it was a disease and that the hand had to come off.  My father and his father and his on back farther than anybody remembered, we all had our arms taken off when we was born.  But May, she, that is—”

“I couldn’t let him do it,” Mrs. Bryant wept.  “I couldn’t let them mutilate my beautiful little boy.  He was just a baby, Will!”

“I know, May,” the Sheriff said and kissed the top of her head.  “And I started to wonder why, in this day and age, if there was a disease, we didn’t just cure the damn thing and be done.  But the doctor in Atlanta said there wasn’t nothing wrong except for the clenching; and he didn’t know what was causing that.  He said to keep an eye on it and keep it clean.  We done that and there was nothing ever wrong with Seymour.”

A scream hammered the side of the trailer in which the staff had been imprisoned.  Shots shouted at the darkness as one deputy backed away, firing wildly.  Sheriff Bryant called for the deputy to cease fire and raced for the corner where the scream had erupted.  At first he kept shouting for the deputies to hold their fire, then he called out, “Seymour!”

“Mrs. Bryant,” Marco said.  The woman stared after her husband, her hands tearing at one another.  “Mrs. Bryant!”

Heather took the older woman by the shoulders and shook her until she looked up.  Heather nodded for Marco to continue.

“Mrs. Bryant,” he said, “your husband said Seymour was fine.  That changed, didn’t it?”

She shook her head, slowly, as she tried to see around Heather.

“Mrs. Bryant,” Marco said again.  “We heard a lot of stories, we read a lot of first-hand accounts, and even spoke with Vodun Priests who can trace their ancestry back a thousand years.  There’s something about the ungue brachium rex, regardless of generation or tribe.  Something that makes all the tribes around them eventually join in league against them.  The ungue brachium rex are savage leaders!  Blood thirsty, never at peace, always attacking their neighbors.  That’s the reason we have so much data on the mutation traveling from one leader’s bloodline to another: eventually, after so many years of an ungue brachium rex leading his tribe in the slaughter and pillaging of his neighbors, they bind together to overthrow him.  But it never ends there, of course, because then the mutation passes to the conqueror.  And then the cycle starts again with the next ungue brachium rex.”

“Poppycock, I said!” Sheriff Bryant shouted as he charged out of the rain and grabbed Marco by the collar.  “There’s no such thing.  You’re talking magic and folklore and such things don’t exist.  Whatever that is,” he said, pointing at skeleton, “and whatever affliction my family suffers, it has nothing to do with magic and even less to do with a West African myth.  Do we look African?”

“One of your ancestors believed in magic, Sheriff,” Heather said calmly.  “Albert Nathaniel Brickson.  He believed so much that he spent what remained of your family fortune to obtain a book so rare that people have died in the attempt to find one.  One of our own professors back at Miskatonic University even lost his life over a copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten—and Albert probably ruined himself to obtain one, too.  I always wondered, why was he so fascinated, this country gentleman forefather of yours?  If this is his skeleton at our feet, I think we now know.  He was looking for a way to break the curse.”

“There’s no curse!” Sheriff Bryant shouted.  “And we don’t share no bloodline with any unique brake rex or whatever you called it.  We ain’t African!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Marco said, pulling his shirt free from the terrifying grip of the Sheriff’s one hand.  “This ancestor of yours was a slave holder, wasn’t he?”  The Sheriff looked at him but said nothing.  Marco turned to the pale and swaying Mrs. Bryant.  “Right?  Slave owner?”  The woman nodded and would have fallen if Heather hadn’t steadied her.  “Well there it is.  Somewhere in your family’s brutal past, one of your relatives bought a slave woman who had been the wife of an ungue brachium rex.  Since your slave-owning relative was, in effect, the leader, he contracted the curse—he became a ungue brachium rex!”

“Sheriff!” someone cried from the other side of the trailer.  Shots fired and a scream that broke into a roar prefaced a disintegrating gurgle.  Around the corner, a deputy fell, deep red gashes muddy in the falling rain.  Still alive, the deputy tried to retreat on his elbows but from the shadow of the trailer, an arm swept out and snapped three enormous claws into the deputy’s chest.  He screamed in terror and pain as the hideous arm drew his body out of sight.

“No, Seymour, let him be!” Sheriff Bryant shouted.

“Why?” his wife screamed.  “Why are you doing this, baby?”

“His temper has been growing out of control for months, hasn’t it?” Marco demanded, swinging the Sheriff around and taking him by the collar.  “Hasn’t it!”

“There was no reason for it,” the Sheriff mumbled.  “I thought maybe he was on the drugs.”

“There is a reason,” Victor said from where he crouched in the hole, eyes wildly searching the red edge of his bastion.  “The rage of the ungue brachium rex starts on the last leader’s sixtieth birthday.”

Mrs. Bryant fainted into Heather’s arms.

“It was the day after my last birthday that he began seeing red all the time,” Sheriff Bryant said and heaved a sob.

The trailer suddenly shook so violently that the people inside cried out in alarm.

“Isn’t there no way to cure him?” Sheriff Bryant demanded, pleaded.

Marco released him and shook his head.  “I don’t know,” he said calmly.  “Maybe if he lost the arm, the claw, its effect would pass.”

“No one would believe it was his arm that made him kill these people,” the Sheriff said sadly.  “And no way I can mutilate my son and then send him to prison.

A tearing sound followed by screaming erupted from the trailer.

“Sheriff!” Heather shouted.  “Order your men to shoot!  You have to stop him, son or no.  You can’t let those people die.”

The Sheriff shook his head slowly as he walked out from under the tent and toward the bloody corner of the trailer where his son’s arm had been seen.  “Son!  Son, this your daddy talking,” he cried.  “Can you hear me?  I’ll let you into the trailer, let you at those people.  Just come around this way.”

Marco looked at the others for one moment and then dashed out into the rain.  A foot from the Sheriff, he was tackled to the ground from behind.  He struggled in the grip—visions of a huge clawed hand severing his windpipe, eviscerating his gut, slashing his life away flooded his mind—trying to roll onto his back and get his feet between himself and who held him.  It was Heather.  Taking him under the arms, she dragged and then lifted him, moving back toward the tent.

“We can’t let him do it,” Marco shouted, struggling to get free.

“We’re not,” she said and pointed at the Sheriff.

“That’s right, son, this way,” the Sheriff said as he looked around the corner.  “I got the key to the door.”

Marco could barely see through so much rain but the sheen of metal finally reflected enough light to burn through his doubts.  With his other side turned toward his son, Sheriff Bryant was slowly drawing his pistol.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said.

With morning came an end to the rain and the rising of the sun, but no illumination of what had truly happened.  The State Police were called out and an investigation launched.  Though the archeologists of the dig declared some fantastic things to the detective in charge, the murders surrounding the excavation of the old Brickson plantation were attributed to the deranged son of the local sheriff.  His deformed hand was declared a birth defect and his insanity the possible result of a lifetime of mockery.  The term ungue brachium rex never found its way into the official record.

I hope you enjoyed reading this short story.  I also have a few novels published through Amazon’s Kindle Store, the newest being The Parnell Affair.  Thematically, not very similar to the above but hopefully a good read, too; it’s a political thriller about a betrayed spy, a relentless journalist, and the hidden truth behind a President’s demand for war.  Don’t have a Kindle?  No problem: Amazon provides free apps to view all of the great—and inexpensive—Kindle content on your phone, PC, or Mac, here.  Thanks and happy reading!