The Scrimshaw Man

By Darrel Bird

Paul Jean Cramer, abused and neglected, has never known a day of happiness. A demon latches itself onto him as he leaves home, and hits the open road. Other human predators go after him, and his tortured mind does what it knows to do, and he strikes back before any more abuse can take place.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Darrel Bird
• Release date: Mar 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301914593

Darrel Bird

Darrel Bird has written and published 47 short stories. He attended Bakersfield college, and is an avid motorcyclist.

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The Scrimshaw Man

Written by Darrel Bird

Copyright March, 2013 by Darrel Bird

Smashwords Edition

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Through the trees and the graveyard slinks, I know not what.

It has a name that I can’t remember because I completely forgot.

Part one

Paul Jean Cramer was grown before he grew up. By the age of eight, he had smoked his first cigarette, and by the age of eight, his aunt had taught him about the birds and the bees. The only problem with that was that he was still too young to do what she wanted him to do, so she buttoned him up and went home as sexually frustrated as when she had arrived there, but it had done its scrimshaw work on his impressionable young mind.

He had met the Scrimshaw man, even before there was a Scrimshaw man, clacking along down an unknown road on the outskirts of an unknown town, extruded from the warped mind of the snockered writer who lived down the road from Mr. Phelps.

Mr. Phelps, the man who lived with his wife and two little girls just past the Cross Roads store, was an old sailor who gave Paul a knife with the scrimshaw of a schooner neatly carved into the ornate ivory handle. Mr. Phelps was always carving things in trees, on his front door, and on his barn. He carved strange symbols, like schooners and whales, and everywhere you looked, some oddity greeted you before you came into his yard.

Paul prized that knife, and he made a leather sheath for the eight-inch blade. Soon after that, Mr. Phelps killed his whole family and boiled them in a big vat in his front yard. Even after the law put him to death, he kept appearing here and there. Several people swore they had seen him prowling around the graveyard where the town’s folk had buried what remained of his family.