Blood Drop Sun

Atop the Ebright Azimuth, the highest point in Delaware, the same place where the lightning bugs hung in the air, Crane Curren and his girlfriend Melanie Biscoff sat with certainty. He wore a Kente cloth t-shirt, black jeans and sneakers. Melanie donned an orange summer dress that looked like marmalade and blue flats. As the sun set, they just knew that something felt unsettling in their bones. They could look down the road and see what it was.

“You’re sure?” Melanie asked, quaking.

Curren looked at her with hard eyes. “I know it.”

“We’ve gotta be sure. And we gotta call the cops.”

“We’ll call them, but first, let’s come up with how he got there,” Curren suggested.

“He took some wood and nails and just—-” Melanie wondered.

“Obviously, babe.”

“Is it obvious? Someone must have done it. He couldn’t have done it himself.” The couple peered down the hill. A chill in the damp summer night bit into their skin.

“I think he did,” Curren replied. “How long and why didn’t anyone see him?”

“Is it because he’s all the way down there with his solitude?” Melanie asked.

Curren rose to his feet. He shielded his eyes from the blood drop sun.

“He just looks so torn at being tormented and pleasant at the same time like he’s been there for days….” Melanie remarked, also shielding her eyes.

“We should go down there,” he ventured.

“No, we’ve gotta call nine-one-one.”

“And disturb a neighbor with this find?! We’ve gotta keep this to ourselves at least for the night.”

This late hour in 1993 with the August wind warm and tinged with spice, the couple surveyed the land under the Ebright Azimuth. No one else busied themselves around the place. No cars anywhere. No runners or bicyclists soaking up the last bits of daylight.

Curren turned to Melanie. “We’ll call them…but this is for us. This is ours.”

“This is a man….” Melanie muttered. She then cleared her throat. “This is a man!”

“Yes, that is apparent. No one’s here. This is a strange thing. This is what we live for in our youth. We’ll be twenty in a year. Let us grieve not at the fortune of our distress.”

“I know. But this man is totally…was totally…a living entity with the powers of breath inside.”

“Don’t feel that way,” Curren admonished. “We get to know the truth of what happened with our wonderment. Let us invent.”

The sun retired finally and the street lamps looked like giant glowworms. Their bicycles, entangled, reflected in the infancy of the night. They walked away from them. They felt it to be more honorable to walk towards the site than to cycle.

“Okay,” Melanie whispered. Her voice remained with a bit of a trembling. “He saw his mother with another man and cried and found the only thing he could do was….”

“Don’t say it. I know what happened. His business went under. He had just made the last payment on the loan and the company collapsed.”

“No. That’s not what happened.” They ambled with funerary form now. “He witnessed the darkness of the occult and men who rose against him to claim the ransom of his soul.”

Curren stopped. He looked at Melanie’s blue eyes. They now looked as silver as fenders. Her flesh seemed whiter and her frame slimmer in the light. He almost disappeared with his dagwood skin. Though brownish, without light he appeared as an apparition of ghoulish potential.

“What if he did all of this himself? What if he just figured that life was too much because he lost the lottery?”

Melanie’s eyebrows furrowed. They resumed their gait. Each step produced more dust and the air seemed to grow uglier with every movement. Thick with the scent of decay and rotten leaves, they moved even closer, tossing tales of this discovery.

“I know!” Melanie exclaimed. Curren made a gesture showing that she should keep the volume of her voice lower. He looked at her and they kept walking. They moved closer, still. The smell became fierce. Only the odor of meat set out for days could compare.

Curren and Melanie held hands as they inched closer. The small light making slivers on their find made them shiver. The night heat could not contend but intensified the awful aroma. Then the wind chilled again and brought the stench to their nostrils. Melanie reached to touch the man.

“No!” Curren slapped her hand away.

“The cops would be all over you. It’s bad enough we’re so close. I want to be back at Ebright Azimuth but we’re here.”

The man’s arms stretched skyward with nails shot through his hands on a post. His feet had been nailed as well. They bowed their heads in solemnity. He had been naked save for a piece of cloth around his groin. Blood dripped down and pooled at the bottom of the post.

“Now, we must go,” Curren announced with cold apprehension. Then a red light licked from above where they had been.

“Alright, let’s see it. You two come on up here,” Officer Truex Bowson called. His white neck bulged from his color like a piece of insulation packed in plastic.

Curren and Melanie walked with their hands up. “Walk slowly to the light, now. The both of you.” Bowson flashed the beam in their faces as they slowly approached him. They lurched towards the officer with even trepidation. They almost crept. Bowson peered at them when they came within arms length of the lawman.

“What’s down there?” He flashed his light on the corpse on the post.

“Jesus Christ!” He shrieked.

“Close…” Curren said. Bowson turned to the teenagers. “You two, sit in the car. Do it!”

Both of them bounded into the cruiser.

Bowson opened the door and reached for his radio.

“This is squad car Bravo 87. We have a fatality at the bottom of the Ebright Azimuth hill. Calling for backup.” Bowson then turned to the couple.

“Look, you’re not in any trouble…yet. We’re just going to sit tight and work on what’s down there. What were you two doing?”

Curren and Melanie shrugged.

Bowson breathed with exasperation. “Somebody better start telling? How old are you two?”

They provided their ages.

Another squad car parked next to Bowson’s.

Lieutenant Jacob Bruitt came over to the other car.

“What do we have, Tru’?”

“It looks like a decaying corpse. I’m starting to get whiffs of it right now.”

“I better call forensics. What’s with the two in the back?”

“I was going to take them in for questioning,” Bowson replied.

Bruitt looked like he had gum lodged in his teeth. “That seems about right. I'll finish up here.”

“Copy.” Bowson turned to Curren and Melanie. “We’re going to go down to the station and ask you some things. We’ll call your parents. Everything'll be fine. Okay?”

Both of them looked out the window with a slight grin and gestured soft nods.

Bruitt took his flash light and moved towards the post. Bowson drove off to the police station. They arrived. The light seemed sterile and Sherri Cussler, the desk clerk, handed Bowson a piece of paper. He turned to the teens when the doors closed.

“Don’t worry, you’re not under arrest. You should know that since I didn’t cuff you. Please just sit down on this bench.”

Melanie’s knees met together and formed an “A.” Curren sat with his arms folded.

“He was ours for a while. Not a soul even knew about him,” Curren mused.

“Now, he’s in the hands of the law,” Melanie responded.

“We shall see what’s going to come of all this….” Curren looked at a crack in the ceiling and saw Bowson step towards them. Another officer named Wade Koppelman led Melanie in an opposite direction than her boyfriend.

“You’re both persons of interest now and you’re going to talk to these detectives,” Bowson grasped Curren’s arm. Curren looked back at Melanie. In adjacent rooms, they saw a cheeseburger and a can of soda on a desk. A pack of cigarettes and a lighter and an ash tray lay right next to the food and drink. The light seemed to glow yellow and emitted a metallic, humming sound. The door closed. Detective Gunnar Penderson watched Curren’s body language and the fact that he had maintained excellent posture. He possessed a sure face as if he had just dominated a test yet the teacher had not graded it.

“You hungry? Thirsty? You smoke?”

“No, no, and not anymore.”

The same table had been set up for Melanie.

Detective Brenda Vull looked at her. Melanie’s arms remained folded.

“If you don’t want to talk, I can’t make you. I just want to understand how you were at the highest point in the state and saw the vic from that vantage point,” Vull described. “When did you first see the victim?”

Melanie unfolded her arms. “We saw something….”

Vull edged closer to Melanie. “Yes. Yes. What was it?”

“We could vaguely see the image of a man….”

In the other room, Curren spoke. “We were just near the radio tower with our bikes….”

“Don’t worry about them," Lieutenant Bruitt added them to his car. “Go on.”

Then, Curren stood.

“Whoa, where are you going?”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m just standing.”

“Okay, so what happened?”

Melanie looked straight in Detective Vull’s eyes. “And that’s when we smelled him and knew he was dead. Then the cops showed up.”

“You have no ties to him, this…Deely Collus?”

Back in the other interrogation room, Curren kept talking.

“We just saw him there. His arms stretched into an ‘I’ shape above his head.”

A knock came to the door. Penderson rose and answered it. Curren never touched the provisions.

Mr. Mendell Curren and Mrs. Katherine Biscoff arrived at the station. Clearly distraught, both of them rushed to their respective offspring.

“Everything’s okay,” Curren reassured.

“What were you two doing?” Mrs. Biscoff’s worry lines broadcast on her forehead. She cupped her daughter’s face.

“They’re free to go,” Detective Bowson intoned. “Just sign these forms, please.”

“Without a lawyer? You two are adults so I guess that’s why they didn’t see fit for us to know right away. I get a call at work saying my son is in an interrogation room?!” Mr. Curren signed the papers furiously. Katherine signed with just as much passion and rage. They slammed the pens down in unison and took hold of their respective young adults and walked out of the doors. In both cars there never seemed to be a dearth of silence. Until….

“You’re too old for this, Mel’. You took a year off from going to college. I don’t want you with that Curren boy again,” Katherine related finally.

In the other car, Mr. Curren muttered to himself. “Criminal investigation…calling me…what were you thinking?”

Curren took a beat. He finally blurted out, “Jesus Christ.”

“That’s all you have to say? When we get home, I’m going to tell your mother. We’re going to have to atone for all of this.”

Katherine’s iciness continued with Melanie in the front passenger seat. Again, she stated, “Your father’s going to know about this and he’s going to not be as happy as I.” Melanie shrugged.

Mr. Curren commanded, “You get in that house and do what you must.”

“I’ve gotta go to work, Dad,” Curren countered.

His father weighed the words that just whizzed past him. It was true. He had pizzas to deliver. Curren took out his bicycle and affixed the metal frame that carried the pies.

“Alright. You go to work. But don’t think this is over, young man. We’re just getting started.”

Katherine led her daughter into the house. A chocolate cake sat on the kitchen table. The mother and daughter sat down to eat.

Katherine almost turned into Detective Vull. “What were you doing up there with the Curren boy?”

“We were just enjoying the summer twilight. Before it got dark, all we could see was this figure. He looked emaciated and it looked like nobody had touched him for days.”

Katherine took a bite of the cake.

Curren got back on his pizza route after checking in at the shop. He noticed that a TV had been switched on and the cooks all stared at the screen.

The announcer, Knightly Hatfield looked into the camera and mentioned, “A grisly scene uncovered by two teenagers this evening revealed a man identified as Deely Collus, strung up on a post in a column position. While there is no word as to how long the man had been on the post, authorities have identified the teen adults who discovered him just below the Ebright Azimuth.”

The pictures of Curren and Melanie flashed across the screen. The kitchen staff all turned around just as the young man made his first delivery for the night.