Jack Rollins

They melted his eyes with coals.

I can still hear the sizzling pops his corneas made, bursting as the glowing rocks liquified his eyeballs. The sweet, putrid stench of burning flesh and his agonized screams will likely haunt my nightmares forever.

An innocent man. A red-haired guitarist from West Virginia who sang and danced at town festivals and private dinner parties. Rotund with a round flat nose some said looked like a button. Unfortunately, he arrived in Virginia during the worst cold snap in North American history.

Hundreds, if not thousands of people died in that cruel winter. Them, and hundreds of thousands of pigs, sheep, chicken and cows. Some who didn't expire from extreme cold exposure were doomed to die later of starvation. On the day they killed him, at least six feet of clean snow lay under a Neptune sky. They sent children to shovel out a space for him to die in.

The man hadn't lived in Virginia for a full year when the snows hit. A stranger, whom the Puritans later accused of singing devil songs to their women and children, made the perfect scapegoat for the town's recent tragedies. His demon hair only made him easier to sacrifice.

His screams went on forever, until one of the townsmen ended his suffering by thrusting a sharpened branch into his gaping mouth. His teeth severed the branch at a burl, making it look like a tobacco pipe. They left the body until Spring, covered in wintry frost.