Sluvercrum

Before we start, I want you to do something for me. I just need you to say out loud, ‘Sluvercrum, you are nothing to me.’ That’s it, pretty simple. You can say it from wherever you are sitting or lying; no need to look in a mirror, unless you want to for dramatic effect.

So, the local legend goes that if you say those words—make sure you say them—you’ll awaken the wrath of Sluvercrum and he will come for you and rip out your guts.

Ridiculous, I know, but some people—and I mean people in America, not just backward nations where they believe anything—some people actually believe it’s real: that now you’ve said those words, Sluvercrum is coming for you. It may take him a while. He’s not bound by time and motion in the same way as you and me, but he does still have to get from A to B. But he will get to you. According to the legend, he is now on his way, running through forests, fields, housing estates, skulking through the shadows, remaining unseen, moving too fast to be spotted even if it’s broad daylight.

Oh, and he can be in more than one place at a time, so don’t take comfort from the fact that hundreds of other people may have said the words at roughly the same time as you. He’s coming for you. Or he would be if the legend was true. But it isn’t, obviously, so it’s fine to say them. It’s just a tale that people in the towns near where I live tell.

Be honest, who hasn’t said the words yet? Are you scared that Sluvercrum will actually turn up at your home? Surely you’re not afraid of some local bogeyman. You don’t even know who or what Sluvercrum is—only that he’s said to find you and rip you open. Other than that, he might be a good guy.

He’s not. He’s pure evil. Think of the most unrelenting serial killer from the most full-on slasher movie, and you’re nowhere close. Plus he’s not human. Not anymore.

This is how the legend goes:

Albert Sluvercrum—yes, it’s a weird name, but he was a weird guy—lived in a small town in New York State. He was about twenty when he first spotted Angelica Wilson coming out of the hardware store on Main Street. She was a beautiful young woman. You can imagine her how you like, whatever you find beautiful. Albert felt an instant attraction, however pointless that might be. It was pointless because Albert was ugly, and I mean properly ugly. He was grossly overweight, skin covered in sores where he couldn’t properly clean between the folds, and his face resembled a sponge cake that had sunk in the middle. Plus, as I’ve said, he was weird. Today people would probably use the term ‘socially awkward,’ but he was actually stranger than that.

If anyone addressed Albert when he wasn’t in the mood for chatting, he’d bark at them like a dog. Sometimes just a sharp yap, but at other times it would be a vicious sound, and he would push his angry, red face right up close to the other person’s. People rarely engaged Albert in conversation for this reason. That and the rumour that he’d eaten his own mother.

Albert didn’t have the best start in life. His mother, Stella, had lived in a house on the outskirts of town, a good couple of miles from any other house, in a wooded area close to the highway. It had been her parents’ house before hers, and she had inherited it when they’d tragically died in their fifties. I think it was a car crash.

Stella was an odd one too. She was also very anti-social until she’d had a few glasses of home-made wine; then she would sometimes take herself off out to one of the dive bars, often walking all the way in bare feet so as not to scuff her shoes. Once there, she would enjoy more drinks and have fun, sometimes fun of a sexual nature. And why not? She was young, single, and relatively pretty.

When she found out she was pregnant with Albert, Stella didn’t tell a soul. This was in the days when it was still very frowned upon to have a child out of wedlock. Stella’s reputation wasn’t great as it was; she didn’t want an illegitimate child to tarnish it even further. She kept drinking, but stayed at home. She took in laundry for a living, and was able to carry on doing that without being seen too much in town. She had her groceries delivered and always made sure her stomach was covered when she had to open her door to anyone.

She drank so much in those months it made her sick, mentally and physically, but Albert wasn’t to be flushed out with alcohol.

Stella gave birth on her own, in the bathroom of her house, screaming in agony for hours until Albert finally dragged himself, also screaming, into the world.

Stella continued to keep him a secret until, when he was four years old, she dropped dead of a brain haemorrhage, or heart attack, something fatal.

Legend has it that when Albert was found, he was sitting on top of his mother, eating her intestines, pulling them from her stomach where he’d cut a hole with a carving knife. He had blood all around his face, and bits of his mother’s insides stuck all over his emaciated little body.

No-one seems to know where Albert spent the years between eating his mother and returning to the house where he’d been born. But that’s where he was living when he saw Angelica.

You can probably see where this is going. Albert developed a massive crush on Angelica and one day, probably after drinking some hooch made from his late mother’s recipe, he made a pass at her. I believe the incident happened at a gas station just along the road from Albert’s house. He’d been stumbling past on an errand of some kind and spotted her, filling her car. You can imagine how clumsy his approach would have been how repulsed the beautiful Angelica would have felt at this lumbering creature grabbing at her and telling her she meant everything to him. It was more than he’d said to anyone in years.

If the legend is to be believed, Angelica managed to push him away and in response to all his declarations, said, ‘Sluvercrum, you are nothing to me.’

Albert was deeply hurt. The only other woman he’d loved had been his mother. As he sloped back to his house, he remembered her lying on the kitchen floor and he, aged four, feeling starving and having an overwhelming urge to cut his mother’s stomach open and eat her from the inside out. He now had an urge to do exactly the same to Angelica.

And he did.

How he managed to scale the wall of her smart little house and break into her bedroom is unknown. He was still human then, so it would have been a physical feat, particularly for someone of his size. But it’s almost certain that just before she saw him leering down at her, knife raised, Angelica would have heard his wet, rasping breaths as he recovered from the exertion of getting to her, and have smelt the odour of weeks' worth of sweat and God knows what else.

When Angelica’s body was discovered, no-one had any doubt who the killer must be. Who else would cut open a woman and eat half her insides? Like some scene from a Gothic horror, a group of locals took the law into their own hands and headed to Albert’s house with cans of gasoline and matches. They blocked all the possible exits and set it ablaze. The police arrived just too late to stop them, and I’m not sure they would have done if they’d arrived in time.

Albert was seen careening around the kitchen, engulfed in fire, screeching like a banshee. And that night he became something like that mythical creature. Something inhuman. Something talked about late at night by groups of kids wanting to terrify each other.

Some forty years or more after all this happened, I was one of those kids. My friends and I dared ourselves to say the words, ‘Sluvercrum, you are nothing to me.’ And nothing happened, at first.

Then gradually, one by one, my friends were killed off, their insides ripped out and, apparently eaten by their murderer. Girls and boys were slain alike. I was the last. No-one believed it was Sluvercrum committing the murders. If he’d ever been real, he’d been dead for decades. They thought it was a mad local inspired by the legend. As I’ve mentioned, we did live close to the town where Sluvercrum was supposed to have died, which is probably why his name was still whispered in our schools and colleges.

When he came for me, I was ready, or as ready as a thirteen-year-old kid can be when a hideous, malevolent spirit comes crawling across his bedroom floor at night, wheezing and gurgling, wet hands slapping on the wooden floor. I tried not to look at him as I said the words I had been rehearsing since the first of my friends was killed.

‘Let me live, and I will spread the legend of Sluvercrum way beyond these towns, way beyond this state. Everything has changed since you died. You can be far more than a local legend. I can take you global. Think of all those innards you could feast upon.’

Sluvercrum obviously wasn’t as stupid as the legend made out, because he listened to my proposal, and he accepted it. In his dead, blood-clogged voice, he said:

‘You have five years, and if you haven’t done what you’ve promised, I’ll come for you.’

That was four years ago. It took a while to write everything down in a way that appealed to the market I was trying to reach. I had several failed attempts where editors told me my style was too juvenile.

It’s great that the story is finally out there, that I won’t be getting another night-time visit from Sluvercrum. I don’t have to think of him making his way towards me, black eyes fixed straight ahead, nothing stopping his progress. Those wet, rattling breaths as he gets close, the slap of his sweat-drenched hands on the floor…No, Sluvercrum won’t be eating my insides any time soon.

How about you? Did you say the words?