The Hanged Man, Thread 4

“McBrewder? What the fuck? Why do we have three cars here already?”

Jim fought back a stupid grin. He towered over the sergeant by at least a foot, but Manconi was one of those men who had absolutely no idea how ridiculous he seemed to others.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I’m taking orders from Sgt. Beedle.”

At the mention of Beedle’s name, Manconi rolled his eyes, crunched his teeth down on his cigarillo. “Beedle? Kee-rist! That rummy’s here? What’s the situation?”

Jim motioned to the fifth floor window with his head, preparing to explain to Manconi.

He did a double take, though, when he glimpsed something in the window.

His mouth fell open, and he looked from the sergeant to the tarp that lay on the ground and back to the window.

Manconi saw it, too, and his cigarillo drooped.

“What the fuck is that?”

Big Jim looked back up.

Framed perfectly in the window, which was now completely open, was the figure of a man. He appeared to be standing on the windowsill.

A rope cinched around his chest, dangled down to his legs and disappeared behind him.

Instead of picking the dead body up, Beedle and Frisella had opted, instead, to push the entire bed to the window, then upend the mattress, hoping to slide the body out the window like a dump truck disgorging its contents.

Jim realized that he and Manconi had looked up just as the two officers upstairs had lifted the mattress into place, just before the body tipped forward.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Manconi said. “The fucker’s gonna jump!”

Neither men moved, but their mouths fell open in unison, as if pulled by the same string.

The swollen body hung there in space for a second, its arms outstretched, its right leg crossed over its left at the knee, as if it had been sitting with its legs crossed.

Then, slowly, it pitched forward, not from the waist, but from the tips of its toes, like a diver falling forward into a long, slow arc that would bring him to knife cleanly into water.

The body’s feet didn’t leave the ledge until its head had reached nearly the same level. Now, the feet slipped away, too, and Jim saw the rope uncoiling behind it, snaking out from the darkness where the mattress had been, as if in a cartoon.

Beedle and Frisella had obviously lowered the mattress back to the bed and were now grabbing the rope to stop the body’s fall.

Jim watched the body gracefully dive headfirst toward the alley floor. Five stories is a fair distance, and something this unusual, when watched, seems to take a long time to fall.

The rope unfurled like an umbilicus until the body’s head reached the level of the top of the second floor. Then, with little warning, it snapped taut, actually lifted the body back up as if it were connected to a rubber band, to the top of the third floor.

Where an amazing and altogether unexpected thing happened.

The rope had slipped down the body, to about the level of its distended waist. When it had reached its length and pulled tight, the rope contracted around its midsection. But it was not up to being so roughly used.

Inside its loose and sloughing skin, it was little more than mush and bones and a rank miasma of gas.

The skin tore, gases escaped, and the body pulled into two parts. The waist and the legs parted from the upper body, which continued downward faster now, unencumbered by the rope.

There was a ripping sound as it parted, horribly wet and intimate in the alley. This was followed by a patter of what sounded like rain onto the tarp and the concrete of the alley, which was covered over by the impact of the upper half of the body as it struck the tarp.

Still neither Jim nor Manconi moved, and the body struck the pavement with a sound not too unlike an entire bathtub full of water. No, different than that. It was thicker, like a bucket of Jell-O upturned from the roof of a house and striking the ground.

Or it was unlike anything that Jim had ever heard before or ever would again.

Manconi, who was standing somewhat in front of Jim, winced as the body struck the ground, then turned to Jim.

His face was powder white, and there were gobbets of gore hanging from his dark hair, his little mustache, the entire front of his dark navy uniform. A long string of something grayish pink was dripping from the unlit tip of his cigarillo.

Jim also saw that the little man was shaking.

“You guys are fucking insane,” he said, his breath coming in short little pants. “Fucking insane. I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

He turned to his car, which was still running, climbed in and back erratically out of the alley.

Jim ran his hand down his own uniform and was relieved to find no slick spots. He looked at the tarp and saw a wet, glistening pile that was mostly unrecognizable. Streamers and spatters of it covered the tarp and spread out onto the alley like a bomb had exploded.

Looking up, he saw two things. First, he saw the trunk of the body still dangling from the rope, the legs hanging straight down now, the feet pointed out, rather than down, as if they actually stood on something.

Jim followed the rope up and saw the surprised faces of Beedle and Frisella staring back at him with eyes that were as wide as Jim felt his own were.

End thread #4.