We never caught the name of the furry, haggard stranger that brought us all our doom. It was never our way, you see, to sit in judgment of folks who came in to slake their thirst or have a meal. On occasion there might be a rain soaked tourist who would be left to peek about in vain for someone to challenge at the dartboards, but that was the extent to which the local crowd would display our tribal scorn for outsiders.
The Broken Shield was the only other place you could go for a draft and a plate of chips or a nice meat pie, and even if we rarely gave warm and welcoming greetings to the itinerant souls who would drop in to escape the rain and mud or just the fatigue of the road, it was not that we were cruel or even exclusive. It was simply that those of us who could be called locals were not there for fun and play as a rule, but to have our own beers and to set a spell after a day at the mine or in the fields. It was, for us, a place of rest and calm and commiseration. There were times when someone would show with a fiddle and rouse us all to our traditional songs, but such occasions were rare, and came only about the quarters of the year just as a rule. Mainly we drank, and kept our peace, and warmed ourselves before finding our ways home.
The haggard man was one of the campers, a tourist, and you could tell by the color of the dirt on his boots which part of the woods he'd pitched his site, and by the smell he brought with him; the smoke of cedar and the moss of the northern face of our mountain. This made him an intrepid soul, as that region was thick and dark and had never been harvested or cleared, nor to anyone's recollection even thoroughly explored past a few tens of meters in from the banks of the narrow river that flowed through its base. He was, therefore, in the area to pan the creeks, or perhaps just to find solitude, which was certainly a thing one would find if wandering there.
We gave him his space, and he was served promptly. Focused on his meal, he barely glanced up at fellow patrons, and only once excused himself from his table to visit the toilet, after which he finished his drink, and another, and if that had been the end of it we may all have long since forgotten him; another wandering soul to be added to the myriad of disregarded anonymous customers.
We had all seen him in his discomfort from the start, with what seemed a tic, or perhaps a rash, which had him scratching at himself under his clothes, and waving and slapping at his beard, and though there may have been an inward smile or even a grunt or two, mocking his twitching demeanor, we all knew there were things in that weedy wood that could cause such a malaise, from poison oaks to the pollens of a thousand varieties, pricks and barbs and insects which might have found their way under his coat and hat. Nothing to do for it but a thorough cleansing. A day of laundry and a moderating bath. We had each of us stumbled into some such discomfort at some point, and as such there was some small amount of sympathy in us, though for the most part he'd been disregarded and gone ignored for most of his visit.
Old Reese, though, damn his mischief, chose to catch this man on his way out, and invite him to another round, most likely to bait him into buying a few more beyond it. We might have had a chance if the stranger had made it out the door, itching and scratching his way back to his camp or whichever new destination suited him. It may be so that he'd have found his way to that bath and cleansed himself and found relief, but he stayed to drink another pint and then another and soon was drawn to the boards, perhaps just to convey some normality, to prove to himself or to us that he was not ill nor afflicted.
It was in that light, the sidewise reflected illumination of the boards that I myself first spotted the mites (or what I can only call mites, for I have no understanding of their nature) as they drifted about, seeming to disconnect themselves from his person, to float about his head and float away in the air or fall back to cling to his sweater or his beard. He continued to slap at them and take swings between stopping to scratch at them, but they seem to willfully dodge his swipes, which if they happened to end in a pat upon his person would result in a veritable plume of them, mixed in with the common dust and hair and plant matter he had collected during his time in the wood.
I did not move in for a closer examination, for lack of interest at the time, though even had I been curious I would have steered clear on general principal. I am rarely the picture of hygiene when visiting the Broken Shield, it being a stopover of habit between the factory I managed at the time and my bed and bath on the street behind the tavern, but if a slap on my back might raise a plume of black carbon dust and metal shavings, it would never contain a miasma of living things.
So Reese and the stranger played darts, and there were more rounds called for, and for a while this grubby outsider seemed only to be a quirky and unclean fellow with no other remarkable characteristics. I was about to conclude my evening, having been made a little more anxious to knock my own dirt and sweat off by my brief experience with the severity of the camper's cloak of dusty infestation, when he seized. He had gone from uncomfortable to fidgety to spastic, and Reese later reported that he had begun to mumble and mutter to himself, speaking obscenities under his breath and blurting them through the mange of his beard in purblind jolts of swatting and scratching.
Now he was on the floor, and every muscle of every limb jerked and bucked as he began to curse and swear, in undecipherable vocalizations which seemed directed at himself, Old Reese or no-one at all. The man tore at his coat and pulled at his sweater and clawed at himself, drawing blood from the skin beneath, which we that witnessed came to see had endured such abuse before.
Untrained in medicine, and anyway not inclined to get involved, I held back while Reese fumbled about in a drunken attempt to help without taking any coherent action, and others of the regular cadre mucked about in whatever ways they felt appropriate. Debbie the bar back made the phone call that brought EMT's. John Phelps, who'd been in the army, moved to provide some gentle restraint, to keep the fellow from bashing himself against corners or tearing greater chunks from his flesh with darts or the shards of a beer glass that had fallen in the first moments of the fit.
It took perhaps a half hour for the ambulance to make it up from town, during which time more than a few cleared out from the Broken Shield, just too uncomfortable and too unable to help to warrant the suffering of this man's tragedy. I and a few others stayed to watch as his unrelenting torment increased in its amplitude and severity without interruption. John and Old Reese managed to keep the man from tearing his own eyes from his skull, and prevented a good deal of his efforts to skin himself in front of us, but took a few cuts and bruises for their trouble. By the end they had between them enough blood on their hands and clothes to lend horrific authenticity to the looks of terror and bewilderment on their faces as they grappled with the unceasing tremors and spasms of this already unrepresentable stranger who by now had soiled and defiled himself and any who had come to close to escape his body's depraved revolution against him.
When at last the professionals hauled the shrieking, weeping man away, and Deb and I had done our best to offer up towels and clean garb for the heroes of the evening, we tidied up the mess and filth in silence, unable even to laugh or cry at what we had just seen. A bottle was opened, and the taps ran freely for the half dozen of us that remained to bring our tavern back to order, but without a word of discussion on the matter we knew that there was no balm for what we had witnessed, and though I stayed to see Deb off, we were all soon enough on our way home, once the blood and filth were gone and the towels used in the task were sealed in plastic bags and buried in the dumpsters out back.
