Chris reads "Nobody Has Ever Seen The Knife Man" by Chris Cullari | Scared After Dark

[00:00:00] Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared After Dark, Bedtime Stories. I'm your host, Chris Colari, and this week, for the most sacred of all weeks, Halloween week, we're doing something a little bit different. To this point, I have been reading you stories in the public domain, published around the turn of the 20th century, so that we can put them wherever we want on the internet without anybody getting mad at us.

[00:00:27] The only other kind of story that I could put anywhere on the internet without anybody getting mad at me is a story that I wrote, and that is what I'm going to read to you tonight. A couple of months ago, I was hit with a burst of inspiration and sat down, and in about two days, wrote the short story that you are about to hear. It creeped me out as I wrote it, and it creeps me out every time I read it, so now hopefully it will creep you out as you listen to it.

[00:00:57] This is Nobody Has Ever Seen the Knife Man, by me, Chris Cullari. Nobody has ever seen the knife man, or at least, that's what they want you to think. Emerson Tripoli saw the knife man once in 1923, but no one will tell you that because they don't want you to know what happened to his throat.

[00:01:25] Kelly Barnes saw the knife man once in 1944, but no one will tell you that because they never found her head. Ginny Bristol Sorensen saw the knife man once in 1969, but no one will tell you that because they don't want to talk about how much a person can suffer before they feel nothing at all. Bennett Connell saw the knife man once in 1987. He was only 10 years old.

[00:01:52] I know this because Bennett was my best friend when his parents were found split nearly in two, head to toe, like hot dogs with clothes on. Everyone knew Bennett didn't do it. Everyone also knew he had seen whoever did. He nodded yes when the policemen asked him, and when the doctors asked him, and when I asked him a few months ago, just before he chewed off his own tongue and choked on it so no one would ever ask him again.

[00:02:19] He spent the last 39 years of his life in a very quiet room, in a very white facility, staring at a wall, more than happy to take the secret of what he saw that night to his grave. Nobody has ever seen the knife man, or at least that's what they want you to think. Because if people knew the knife man was real, no one would ever feel safe again. Not in public, not in their homes, not during the day, and certainly not at night.

[00:02:47] The world would sleep with the lights on, if they ever slept at all. Good people, kind people, even the people you might call brave, would lock their doors and hide under their covers and buy a gun, and in the end, it wouldn't matter. Not to the knife man. I know this because after Bennett died, my curiosity got the best of me. I couldn't stop thinking about the Connells. I had to understand why two nobodies on Nobody's Street were slaughtered like pigs in their own home.

[00:03:16] And to be honest, while I didn't end up baking a last meal out of my own mouth like poor Bennett, life hadn't turned out so hot for me. I'll spare you the details, but if it had been my parents carted down to the morgue that night? Who knows, maybe I'd be the President of the United States and not the moderator of r slash dab kings. POTUS doesn't have my kind of free time though. The kind you can waste by getting very, very high and thinking non-stop about the last moments of the Connells.

[00:03:45] Bennett was always such a nice kid. I wonder if someone made him watch. Somewhere in there, the not knowing started to piss me off. I was asking myself questions other people are usually paid to find answers to. So how come no one seemed to have any answers? That self-righteousness started to harden into something akin to purpose. And purpose wasn't something I'd ever felt before. I liked it. So I asked around.

[00:04:13] I made myself a presence in the lives of local reporters and retired cops and the twins who used to live on our street. One of them had triplets now. Kind of hard to believe, but life's like that sometimes. I drank a lot of coffees and asked a lot of questions, but no one wanted to talk about Bennett and his parents. Very sad stuff, they said. Best to leave it alone. Whether their ability to look the other way had anything to do with the fact that two of four officers on scene that night

[00:04:40] eventually put bullets through their brain pans, I couldn't say for sure. A real piece of work slipped me the autopsy reports, and I found it odd that one of those two suicides shot himself in the back of the head. Twice. I'd watched enough Unsolved Mysteries to know what this was starting to look like. A cover-up. But a cover-up of what? Why? Maybe, I told myself, maybe the Connells were involved in a drug ring.

[00:05:08] They could have been selling anything from their featureless ranch home on our boring street. Maybe, maybe they got in over their heads and the cops found out and they made a deal to stay alive, but they went back on the deal and maybe, oh, maybe it wasn't drugs at all. Maybe it was even darker. Maybe they were selling Bennett. Jesus, kid. Robert Stack droned from between the folds of his trench coat. No wonder they told you to leave it alone.

[00:05:33] The puzzle was missing too many pieces and the empty spaces were shaped like concentric circles of hell. Then Walt called. Walter Hurley was a 54-year-old sergeant the night Bennett's Aunt Ellen dialed 911. She was hysterical, cradling Bennett in her arms and wailing that something was wrong with her sister. Walt was the first one on the scene, unless you believe the rumors that he arrived to find some other dark suit wearing fucks already in charge.

[00:05:59] Maybe the Connells were CIA, tortured to death by their enemies. And he was a bastard, a mean drunk and a cheat, but he was also an unimpeachably fine crime stopper who closed cases the way people like me make mistakes over and over and over and over again. Everyone suspected Walt knew who did it. That was the story then, and it's the story now. Even if no one knows how the story started. They thought it was probably a bigwig or someone important or other,

[00:06:27] because if Sergeant Walter Hurley did know who split the Connells like Cord would, he never told a soul. But maybe after all these years, he'd be north of 80 years old. Regrets pile up at that age. Maybe he had something he wanted to get off his chest. Maybe whoever did it was dead by now, and he'd figure, what the hell, this kid smells like a basement, but he has kind eyes and deserves to know the truth. It was worth a shot. Problem was, as far as I could ever tell, Walter Hurley had retired

[00:06:57] and vanished off the face of the earth. Until one night, he called me. Heard you've been looking for the knife man, he said, which was not a thing I was doing. In fact, what I was doing the moment the call came through was pathetically texting Kelsey to come back. She never did. Kelsey was always smarter than me. The who, I said, or something like that? The knife man. Who is this? That's who did it, if you really want to know. Click. The line went dead.

[00:07:28] I must have looked lost when I walked into New Horizons Memory Care because someone asked me if I was lost. I explained that I'd googled their number. A man had called me from here in the middle of the night. They knew exactly what I was talking about. That was Mr. Hurley. Every once in a while, he gets out of his room and calls people he knew from before Father Time and Mother Nature tag-teamed his shit. They hear him apologizing a lot. I decided to try lying, the last thing Kelsey ever told me I was good at,

[00:07:57] and said that Mr. Hurley, Mr. Sergeant Walter Hurley, was literally my grandfather. How is he? A nurse guided me to my answer in a room that smelled like applesauce and bleach. Whatever Walter Hurley used to be, alcoholic cheat bastard or otherwise, had long since dribbled into his diapers. The pathetic figure left behind was slumped in a dinged-up wheelchair staring out the window. He glanced my way, but only to ask if I'd brought his milk. I turned to the nurse,

[00:08:26] who nodded and shuffled off. I assumed to get the milk, but maybe to kill himself, which is what I'd do if I worked here. It was nice to be left alone with Walter at the window, because I had lots of questions that were not for a grandfather. I wanted to know how he had heard I was looking for him. How'd he get my number? Did he remember me from way back when I was Bennett's neighbor? His answer was to call me a bum and ask for his milk again, which was not helpful at all. Look him in the eye and ask, said Robert Stack, like a cop.

[00:08:56] I cleared my throat and leaned forward. Who's the knife man? Somewhere deep in the slurry of Walter's dying neurons, a spark fired. I saw it flicker behind the milky cataracts that dulled his aimless eyes. Suddenly, he lurched out of his chair and slapped me hard. The fuck is wrong with you? He snarled. I wanted to ask him the same thing, but instead I said, fucking get off me and shoved him back into his rickety chariot. He looked small and scared,

[00:09:24] like a child trapped in a bad dream. I wanted to hit him again, but I didn't. You called me, man. He looked at me with the wild-eyed confusion of a man experiencing what little was left of his life through a layer of memories and dreams indistinguishable from his waking moments. I did? I told him, yes, last night he called me, but never mind, and got anxious to leave before someone figured out I wasn't really related to this man. He latched onto my wrist.

[00:09:53] His grip was still that of a bastard. I said his name? Knife Man. I only repeated it because I was confused. Walter froze. A primal fear seized his body like a caveman gazing into the face of an exploding star. Help! He screamed on shriveled lungs. No. Oh God, no. Help! Nurses came running in. He was still screaming when I left, and I'm told he never stopped. My purpose was curdling.

[00:10:24] I liked wondering, and I liked looking, and I liked being nosy, I guess, but dead ends just made me want to get high again, so I did for a few days. Did I tell you I stare out the window a lot? I like to see the people on the street and wonder if they're as sad as I am. It makes me feel better that it looks like most of them are. That is when I first saw the Knife Man. I smiled when I saw him in his brown suit and his mustard tie

[00:10:52] with the brilliant ketchup-colored pinstripes and a wide brim hat pulled low over his face. He held a cowhide briefcase in his hand and looked like a salesman waiting for a bus to Topeka, except buses to Topeka don't pick up passengers through the empty lot across the street from my apartment. I smiled anyway. But before that, I asked Filth Wizard, I'm not proud of the people I'm friends with, but they have ways of finding things out.

[00:11:19] When I have questions about how much to put on Penn State or Kelsey's new address or whatever, they get back to me pronto. I met Filth Wizard, a.k.a. Filthy D, a.k.a. The Wiz, back when I still bought ketamine through a message board. I don't do that anymore, obviously, because I'm not a dirtbag, but we still keep in touch, and he knows the craziest shit. Yo, you ever hear anything about a guy called Knife Man? No. I think he's maybe a hitman or something? LOL, sick.

[00:11:48] That was the last text I ever got from Filth Wizard. When Kelsey came to get her stuff, I was only half paying attention. Enough to notice she was wearing the Garfield earrings I got her for our anniversary last year, but not enough to think about how much I missed her. She asked why I was reading the newspaper, and I looked up from the newspaper I was reading and told her I forgot to fold her clothes, but they were clean and in the dryer. She looked at the boxes of newspapers strewn across the apartment and asked what the hell was going on.

[00:12:17] I didn't know what to say. The part of me that still loved her wanted her to think I was doing well and turning things around for real this time, but that meant I couldn't explain how I might be losing my mind. Ever since I saw the knife man in his brown suit and mustard tie with the brilliant ketchup pinstripes and his hat pulled low over his face, he was all I could think about. I needed to understand why the only place I could find his name mentioned on God's entire internet

[00:12:45] was an ancient Geocities website, creaking beneath the weight of flashing under-construction gifs and signs of schizophrenia. I needed to know why the last book Bennett's mom ever checked out at the library was The Lesser Key of Solomon and why she returned it with pages torn from the spine. I needed to buy every newspaper I could find on eBay from the year the Connells were killed to see if the knife man was mentioned in any of them for any reason. But none of those things sound like a guy with this shit together,

[00:13:15] so I said it's none of her fucking business. She said some mean shit, and I said some mean shit back, and she opened the door to leave like, this is it, last chance. I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hang on, and maybe she thought I was gonna give some grand speech about us and our future, but instead, I asked her if she'd ever heard of the knife man. I really wish I hadn't done that. When the cops came, they weren't nice about it. Kelsey was dead, and I was her ex,

[00:13:43] and they knew I'd been asking around about her address because my friends get back to me pronto, but apparently they don't know how to keep their mouths shut. I asked what happened, and the cops wouldn't say, but they didn't have to. The fat one still had flecks of vomit in the sagging corners of his lips, and the young one folded one hand over the other to keep it from shaking. I was sad. Mostly sad. Or scared, actually. I was mostly scared, shitless, because deep down, I was pretty sure I knew what happened to Kelsey. I knew it must have been horrible.

[00:14:13] She didn't deserve it, and it was my fault. The cops left a card in case I thought of anything else. I only had one thought, and I couldn't say it. I watched from the window as they left. When the car pulled away, the knife man was standing there. Only, he wasn't across the street anymore. He was much closer. He stood there for the rest of the day. He stood there until the sun went down.

[00:14:43] He stood there until the streetlights came on and bathed him in a sulfuric orange haze. When the knife man finally came to my door and knocked his two knocks, I thought about running. But where would I go? So I let him inside. And then we were sitting. I in my jeans and my hoodie, and he in his brown suit and his mustard tie with the brilliant ketchup-colored pinstripes. He was still wearing his dusty, wide-brim hat,

[00:15:12] the one that makes him look like a salesman. Maybe he was once, and that's why his cowhide case is filled with his wares. Not a week after Sergeant Hurley's slip of the tongue, I was gazing at an astonishing assortment of knives. Glittering, glistening knives, arranged in velvet slots, each one sharpened and polished with purpose. Thin ones, wide ones, curved ones, serrated ones, one with a handle made of yellow bone,

[00:15:42] one so narrow, it looked like a needle, all so sharp they looked like they could draw a rapturous geyser of gore from the air itself. I wondered which one he'd shown to Bennett's family. The knife man smiled at me without showing his teeth. I wondered if he planned to use the same one on me. I waited for him to choose to select the instrument of my debasement. Or was I to choose? I didn't understand.

[00:16:11] And then he spoke. Would you like to know more? And that is how I learned the truth about the knife man. We all see him. Every day. He's standing on the corner. He's walking past you on the street. He's looking in the window. He's watching and waiting for you to learn his name. And once you do, he will finally come into focus. He will emerge from the angry static of the universe

[00:16:41] that separates his world from ours. He'll knock on your door in his brown suit and mustard tie with the ketchup pinstripes. And you'll see his dusty wide brim hat. And you'll think he is a man. And you will let him inside. If you have nothing, he can fill the endless ache inside you with a joy and a purpose that cannot be described. All you have to do is share the good news. I started with the neighbors, knocking on doors, howling with ecstasy.

[00:17:11] Husbands and wives spoke to me as if I'd lost my mind. Some begged me to stop talking. I could not. I would not. I had to help them see. Their screams filled the block as their ticky tacky homes were painted in spectacular reds and pinks that are too brilliant to waste inside the body. When the police came, I told them everything. They even asked me to repeat myself. The knife man opened his case and removed their skin in perfect sheets.

[00:17:40] He hung it from the trees to tan like rawhide. Or maybe just for fun. And now I'm telling you. I'm telling everyone. Nobody has ever seen the knife man. But they will. We hope you enjoyed this Scared After Dark presentation of Nobody Has Ever Seen the Knife Man by Chris Collari. The very same Chris Colari who read it and did the music.

[00:18:07] Per usual, additional editing was done by Ed Vecola. We invite you to be on the lookout for more Scared After Dark readings throughout the spooky season. And perhaps beyond.