The Chickwi

THE TRUE STORY OF THE FRIDAY NIGHT MORNING GHOUL
THE CHICKWI - A FIEND MOST FOWL

Every so often something happens to a man which changes his life completely. It is always different for every man. For some it is an event filled with joy, rapturous joy; perhaps the moment he falls in love with the woman or man of his dreams, the moment which sets his heart alight and he becomes a new man and usually a better one. For others it is a grave event, deadly grave; the death of a peer or a loved one, a death whose effect is to embitter his heart and turn a cowl over it; forever turning happiness from its door. For others yet the event may manifest itself in monotony; perhaps a decade of dull, tedious and ordinary routine which eventually saps the man of life and turns him to reclusion. The one life-changing event may take numerous forms but there is always one event. One simple yet fateful turn of occasion that makes a man what he is. So very few of us look back later and try to find what that event was. So few ever know what it was that caused their developmental Big Bang. But I do look back. And I do know. So what am I? What was my event?

Every morning I wake with the familiar craving for nicotine, a peculiar enough thing which has for some time caused me to stir in the morning. I have been smoking quite heavily for over a decade after all. But no, neither smoking nor my cravings were what would change me. But that is where my story starts…

It was almost half-past seven on that fateful Friday morning. My fingers were the first thing I felt that day; I woke to find them shaking nervously. Every other morning I wake up with a similar feeling, and there is only one remedy. I knew the symptoms to be connected to severe nicotine deprivation. The only way I have been able to treat this infliction is by inhalation of the smoke produced when tobacco is burnt. There is a commercially available product which allows one to self-administer this treatment and I knew a place where I could make just such a purchase. So I finally roused and dressed. I gathered a handful of coins and headed outside.

I opened the front door and began to look around. It had been raining the night before, quite heavily if the pools of water were anything to judge by. And in my experience, they were something to judge by. The sun was shining brightly. It had just risen above the level of the trees at the house next door. Mostly deneno trees, but some beach almond and another tree which bore wee red berries. I don’t know what kind of berries they are but I’ve always called them kangaroo berries. The sun was already warm and was beginning to heat up the concrete slab which constituted the porch at the house. The leaves of the breadfruit tree were causing shadows to dance across the concrete and it was their flickering movement which drew my eyes to glance upon something for which I knew no name.

Sitting at the edge of the concrete was an unspeakable, abominable creature. It stood around four feet high and smelt like what I can still only describe as fetid cheese melted over a rancid steak and smothered with honeyed dung. The smell was causing my eyes to run and my nose to bleed. A small parcel of milk which was sitting on the breakfast table outside was already curdled and looked much like cottage cheese. The creature was composed of the most fearsome parts of some fearsome animals. It had the body of a kiwi with all its short ruffled feathers and barely existent tail. Atop an owl’s neck sat a chicken-like head, ghastly in every way; from its horrifying scaled crown to its vile yellow eyelids which looked to be carven of dried pus. Its face ended with a long curving beak similar to that of many water birds. A forked tongue darted in and out of its vile beak and effected its hellish warble as it continued to sing. The hideous image was propped up from the earth on long legs which terminated in some eagle-esque talons. I noticed that each claw had what appeared to be breast-skin beneath them and knew instantly that this hell-beast had spent its evening ravaging young women. Blacker than a black man’s cape the fiend sat there. The ghoul had its wings slightly extended and what I saw upon them sent the fear of the devil coursing through my veins. It was kind to a chicken wing in every way but for it appeared to have only five feathers in it. These five feathers were certainly instruments of death. They were each at least a foot long and tapered to a fine point; the way the light played on them I could see that each feather was as deadly as an assassin’s blade. They seemed to glisten in the morning sun’s rays with what appeared to be blood. The terror, as if not already overwhelming, was about to get a lot worse.

I walked in a sneaking fashion past the beast, hoping to escape without it seeing me. Btu what I saw was beyond the limits of my reckoning. I knew what I was seeing but my god-fearing soul forced me not to understand it. Sadly, my well-developed reason was still to much in control and I knew what I saw and my reasoning confirmed my deepest fears. At the feet of the ghoul was a prostrate infant, still dressed in its nappy. Its innocent little arms were crossed across its chest and from its mouth hung its lifeless tongue. The sight of the dead child didn’t disturb my hardened soul but something else did. The ghoul was signing a hellish, wicked song the tune of which was sinful in itself, the meaning I’m sure was malevolent. What I saw was the little cherub’s soul and spirit rising, wafting from its flesh, escaping from the mouth. It floated above the body momentarily as if trying to re-enter and continue the life it had not yet even come to understand. But the ghoul began to enter some kind of blood-curdling coda in its song and the child’s spirit grew elongated and drifted more rapidly towards the ghouls darting tongue. I knew then that the song being sung by the ghoul was an ancient dirge used by demons to summon the souls of the living. ‘Yes, of course!’ I remember myself thinking. And I knew that I was witnessing the child’s soul consumption by the awful, god-forsaken beast.

So taken aback was I by the ghoul and its song that I emitted an appalled utterance of ‘Blaah!’ when I smelt and espied it. This was my worst mistake. The hideous monster reared its ugly head and turned it towards me. The cracked yellow pus around its eyelids separated as it opened up its eye. When the lid was fully open I saw that the eyeball was in every way reminiscent of a cooked trout’s eye which had been fried in salt, garlic, ginger, lemongrass and olive oil. It was truly grotesque and the only thing distinguishing it from a fish’s eye was the whirlpool which appeared to be spiraling within it.

The creature began darting its tongue towards me and broke into a new tune, similar to Stravinsky’s ‘L’Histoire du Soldat’. I felt my knees weaken, and my heart began to stab me with pains I knew to be related to coronary failure. I felt my soul separate from my flesh and begin to wriggle its way through my mouth. Through my soul’s eyes I could see my body begin to drop. With whatever control I had left of my soul I forced my hands to come up to my ears and block them with an index finger in each. The sound was dulled long enough for my soul to rejoin my flesh and bring me to a stand. I set off running, checking over my shoulder intermittently to see if the ghoul was following me. The first few times I checked behind me I noticed the ghoul was shivering in a ferocious fashion, its quivering feathers throwing blood all over my car. The next time I looked back it was gone. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked all around me. The ghoul was gone. It had somehow disappeared.

I walked back, cautiously, to where I had seen it. Gone was the ghoul, its infantile prey and the blood it had sprayed everywhere. Gone was the odour, the air of terror and the horrible warbling song that pulled souls from their flesh.

Of course, recounting this story to others later that day they thought I was crazy. They told me I had seen nothing more peculiar than a strange bird, a sick chicken, an ugly waterfowl, a pixie. I had not seen any of these things. I had seen a ghoul. I had stained my trousers in terror, chilled my blood in fear, ran with the fear of the devil. I had lost all innocence, lost it to the ghoul. My childhood was eaten with the infant’s soul that I had seen. My hopes and dreams were consumed like the breasts whose skin still festered under the ghoul’s claws. My strength, my pride; both broken and replaced with terror. The need to smoke cigarettes had taken a happy, proud man and reduced him to a quivering, sniveling git.

And so now, years later, I can step backwards along the path of my life, trying to find out what happened to me. All men can do this. The difference is I found what has made me the man I am today. Not love. Not death. Not tedium. But terror. Pure terror. Here I am, an old an broken man. My emaciated frame is hunched over my desk as I write this. My mottled skin is almost transparent and one can see the veins pumping the meaningless life around my body, cruelly depriving me the comfort of death. For years now I have sat in this same room, locked inside – a prisoner of my own terror. My contact with the world outside these four walls is limited to a weekly knock on the door and the glimpse of a hand as it slides my tray of food through the hatch. I pray for the day when my heart finally gives in and ends this torture. All I have wanted in my life is to erase the memory of that heinous ghoul whose odious acts I had witnessed. Instead, God, in all his mercy, has chosen to leave me hear to rot in my terror; a victim of his carelessness. Had not that beast escaped his wrath I would be the happy man I thought I was destined to be. I would have seen my children born and grow; have let them bury their happy and beloved father. Instead, I sit here rotting in a padded room, praying the Lord brings me to Him long before the ghoul comes back to rent my soul from my flesh as he had failed to do so long ago. I know that once he tasted my spirit he would be back for it, as the skunk-bear haunts its prey for years once it has tasted the quarry’s blood. Until such time as God shows His mercy upon me, or the ghoul comes back to claim his meal, here I wait. Wasting away, terrified, forgotten…