The Blue Ribbon Carcass

• Chapter 1 The Sawdust and the Glass Eyes
• Chapter 2 The Annual Blue Ribbon
• Chapter 3 Stuffed and Mounted
• Chapter 4 A Late Entry
• Chapter 5 Beneath the Velvet Sheet
• Chapter 6 Unnatural Poses
• Chapter 7 The Judge’s Verdict
• Chapter 8 The Anatomical Anomaly
• Chapter 9 Whispers in the Exhibition Hall
• Chapter 10 Preserved Skins
• Chapter 11 Formaldehyde and Fear
• Chapter 12 The Crime Scene Beneath the Ribbon
• Chapter 13 Tracing the Needlework
• Chapter 14 The Master Craftsman
• Chapter 15 The Workshop on Blackwood Road
• Chapter 16 Two Legs, Not Four
• Chapter 17 The Collector’s Gallery
• Chapter 18 Dissecting the Evidence
• Chapter 19 Midnight at the Fairgrounds
• Chapter 20 The Pedigree of a Monster
• Chapter 21 A Pattern of Stitching
• Chapter 22 Cornered in the Barn
• Chapter 23 The Final Exhibit
• Chapter 24 Stripping Away the Illusion
• Chapter 25 The Grand Champion’s Fall
• Chapter 26 Ashes and Glass Eyes

August in Blackwood County had a way of baking the moisture right out of a man’s bones, leaving behind an ache that no amount of sweet tea could quite reach. The air inside the Agricultural Exhibition Hall was thick and heavy, saturated with a peculiar cocktail of scents that belonged exclusively to fair week: fried dough, cow manure, stale beer, roasted peanuts, and under it all, the sharp, pungent tang of borax, pine sawdust, and commercial hide tan.

Arthur Pendelton leaned over his workbench, a pair of brass calipers balanced delicately in his calloused fingers. The light in the back bay of the hall was poor, filtering through high, grimy windows that hadn't seen a rag since the previous summer’s demolition derby. He adjusted his magnifying visor, the plastic band pinching the bridge of his nose, and measured the distance between the tearduct and the nostril of a prime white-tailed buck mount.

"Two millimeters off on the left eye socket, Artie," a voice drawled from the next aisle over. "You leave him cross-eyed like that, and the kids are gonna think he died of confusion instead of a thirty-thirty."

Arthur didn't look up. He knew the voice. It belonged to Clem Watkins, a man who had been losing the Grand Champion ribbon in the Mammal Division to Arthur for six consecutive years. Clem was currently wrestling with a black bear cub mount that looked less like a wild beast of the forest and more like a rug that had been over-inflated with a bicycle pump.

"He isn't cross-eyed, Clem," Arthur said calmly, using a small hardwood tool to gently tuck a sliver of hide into the epoxy clay around the buck’s tear duct. "He’s looking slightly windward. It’s called anatomical posture. You’d know about it if your animals didn't all look like they were trying to remember where they parked their trucks."

Clem snorted, a sharp, wet sound that was promptly lost in the dull roar of the fairgrounds outside. A carnival crew was setting up the tilt-a-whirl three hundred yards away, the rhythmic clanking of steel pins and the diesel thrum of generators providing a steady bassline to the afternoon.

Arthur returned his focus to the glass eyes. They sat in a small blue velvet tray on the edge of his table, a dozen pairs of blown-glass spheres ranging from pale amber to deep obsidian. Selecting the right set was an art form unto itself. Go too light on a deer’s iris and you ended up with a demon; go too dark and the animal lost all life, turned into a lump of wet fur sitting on a polished wooden plaque.

The eyes Arthur had chosen for this year's main entry were imported from a specialty house in Munich. Hand-painted glass, accurate down to the tiny, microscopic striations in the iris that gave a live animal its depth of gaze. When the light caught them just right, you would swear the beast was breathing, just holding its breath until you looked away.

The Exhibition Hall was still half-empty, the long rows of plywood tables covered in butcher paper, waiting for the rest of the entries to be checked in. The taxidermy division was always relegated to the east wing, right between the champion squashes and the poultry barn. It was a location that carried certain atmospheric challenges. If the wind blew from the south, you got the ducks; if it blew from the west, you got the prize hogs. But taxidermist nostrils were notoriously hard to offend. Years of handling salted hides, brain-tanning compounds, and warm formaldehyde tended to burn out a man’s sensory delicate work early in his career.

Arthur wiped his brow with the back of his forearm. At sixty-two, he was a thick-set man with white hair cut close to the scalp and hands that bore the tiny, faded white scars of four decades spent working with scalpels, fleshing beams, and wire. He had spent thirty years as a game warden for the state before retiring to run his small shop on the edge of town. For Arthur, taxidermy wasn't about preserving a trophy for some hunter’s brag wall, though that paid the electric bill. It was about respect. It was about taking something that had ceased to move and catching it in a single, timeless freeze-frame of its absolute perfection.

"You seen the new fellow's setup?" Clem asked, leaning his elbows on the wooden partition between their booths. He held an oil rag in one hand and was absently wiping down the black glass nose of his swollen bear cub.

"Which new fellow?" Arthur asked, squinting as he secured the buck's left eyelid with a pair of fine-tipped dissecting pins. "We get three or four amateurs every year who think buying a kit off the internet makes them an artist. Usually wind up with raccoons that look like roadkill wrapped around a foam cylinder."

"No, not an amateur," Clem said, lowering his voice slightly and glancing around the barn. "Guy took the end booth down by the fire exit. Big wooden crate. Came in on a flatbed tractor-trailer this morning before the gates opened. Didn't bring it in piece by piece like the rest of us. Had a motorized pallet jack."

Arthur paused, his needle holding a thread of waxed nylon mid-air. "A pallet jack? For a mount?"

"Whole box was wrapped in black tarpaulin," Clem nodded, clearly enjoying having a piece of gossip before Arthur did. "Bound up with heavy nylon straps. The guy wouldn't even let the fair committee volunteers touch it. Old man Miller offered to help him hoist it onto the table, and the fella snapped at him like a junkyard dog. Told him if anybody touched the canvas before judging day on Thursday, he’d have the Sheriff down here for property damage."

Arthur pulled the knot tight on his thread and snickered softly. "Sounds like another out-of-towner with more money than sense. Some high-end big game hunter who paid ten grand to a studio in Denver to mount an elk or an antelope, trying to scoop up the local prize money."

"Maybe," Clem said thoughtfully, though his tone lacked conviction. "Only he didn't look like a high-end hunter. Didn't look like a taxidermist, neither. Hands were too clean. No stains, no cuts. Wore a dark suit in eighty-degree heat and didn't sweat a drop. Gave me the creeps, if you want the truth."

"You get the creeps when the bank teller changes her hair color, Clem," Arthur said, reaching for his blow-dryer to gently lift the guard hairs on his buck's neck. "It’s a county fair. Every oddball within fifty miles comes crawling out of the woods this week. Pay attention to your bear’s ears. They're lopsided."

Clem cursed softly under his breath and retreated back to his side of the partition, the dry scrape of his sanding block resuming a moment later.

Arthur flicked the switch on the blow-dryer, its warm hum filling the small space. He worked the air carefully over the brown skin, pulling the hair taut with a fine-toothed brass comb, watching the grain of the fur settle into place. This buck—a five-point buck he had found fresh on the side of Route 9 back in November—was his masterpiece. He’d spent three months just sculpting the underlying form out of high-density foam, altering the commercial mannequin to give the neck a slight, muscular twist, as if the animal had just heard the soft snap of a twig in the underbrush behind it.

To Arthur, the magic was always in the eyes and the muzzle. If you got the skin around the nostrils too tight, it looked like a plastic toy. If you didn't pack enough clay under the brow, the skull looked hollow. But when it was done right, when the wet-look sealant cured on the black leather of the nose and the glass pupils caught the sunlight, the creature transcended sawdust and foam. It became a memory made solid.

Around four in the afternoon, the heat inside the hall reached its peak. The fair board had installed two giant industrial fans at either end of the building, but all they succeeded in doing was blowing fine yellow sawdust across the freshly painted mounts and circulating the hot, stale stench of the poultry pens.

Arthur packed his tools into his battered wooden tackle box. He laid his scalpels out in order of size, wiped his clay-modeling spades with an oiled rag, and snapped the lid shut. He pulled a crisp white bedsheet from his canvas tote bag and draped it carefully over his white-tailed buck, tucking the edges under the carved oak base to keep the floating dust off the damp finish.

He stood up, stretching his lower back until his spine gave a series of dry, popping sounds. The aisle was filling up now as other local taxidermists arrived to drop off their entries. There was Miller with his usual array of mounted bass and walleye, their varnished scales glistening under the fluorescent strip lights. There was young Timmy Vance, proudly carrying a red fox catching a fake pheasant in its jaws—a bit melodramatic, Arthur thought, but the stitching on the paws was surprisingly neat for a nineteen-year-old.

As Arthur walked down the main center aisle toward the exit, his eyes naturally drifted toward the far corner of the room, down by the rusted red double doors of the fire escape.

Just as Clem had said, there was a massive shape sitting on a reinforced double-wide display table. It was entirely covered by a heavy, dark gray tarpaulin that reached all the way to the concrete floor. The outline under the canvas was strange, blocky, and tall—too tall for a deer, too narrow for a full-grown grizzly, and shaped with odd, jagged angles that didn't immediately suggest the soft curve of an animal's spine.

A small brass padlock secured the bottom hem of the tarpaulin to a steel eyelet screwed directly into the legs of the table. Sitting beside the table on a folding metal chair was a man.

Arthur slowed his pace.

The man was middle-aged, thin as a fence post, and wore a dark gray button-down shirt buttoned all the way to the collar, despite the sweltering heat that had every other man in the building down to their undershirts. His hair was black, slicked back with some heavy ointment that smelled faint of lavender and clove, completely masking the usual smells of the exhibition hall. His hands rested flat on his knees. They were long-fingered, pale, and perfectly smooth, the nails trimmed to sharp, neat points.

He didn't look like he was preparing a mount. He had no toolboxes, no spray bottles of finishing sheen, no brass combs or jars of clay. He simply sat there, watching the other competitors move back and forth with the motionless intensity of an owl on a fence post.

As Arthur drew near, the man’s eyes shifted. They were a pale, washed-out grey, almost colorless in the yellow glare of the overhead lights.

"Evening," Arthur said, pausing a few feet away out of habit. Taxidermists were generally a friendly bunch at the fair, even the competitive ones. It was a dying art, and those who still practiced it usually shared a brief nod of mutual respect for the hours spent scraping fat off cold hides.

The man didn't smile. His lips barely moved when he spoke, his voice thin and dry, like dry leaves scuttling across blacktop.

"Is the temperature control in this facility operational?" the man asked. He didn't introduce himself. He didn't offer a hand.

Arthur blinked, surprised by the precision of the question. "The air conditioning? Hell, son, this building was built in 1954. The only air conditioning we get is when somebody leaves the loading dock doors open."

The man’s brows twitched downward, a subtle crease appearing between his pale eyes. "The humidity is elevated. High moisture content degrades the integument. It causes expansion along the suture lines."

Arthur raised an eyebrow. Integument. Suture lines. Technical terms, sure, but spoken with the clinical coldness of a laboratory scientist rather than the greasy-handed pride of a craftsman.

"Well, if you're worried about your hide slipping, you should've used a better tanning oil," Arthur said, leaning his weight onto his left leg. "Most of us use a salt-acid bath followed by a good synthetic oil. Keeps the skin flexible even if it gets sticky in here."

"My preservation methods are complete," the stranger said coldly. "The tissue is entirely inert. I am merely concerned with the aesthetic presentation."

"Right," Arthur said slowly. He glanced at the massive canvas-covered box. Whatever was under there, it had a heavy, dead weight to it. The heavy oak table legs were visibly bowing under the center of the platform. "Must be something big under there. An exotic? You go hunting down in Texas on one of those game ranches?"

"It is an entry for the open division," the man replied flatly. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a pristine white card, and pinned it to the edge of the tarpaulin.

The card bore the official Blackwood County Fair entry stamp. In the space marked Category, someone had written Open Mammal / Specimen. In the space marked Exhibitor Name, it read simply: V. Karst.

"Well, Mr. Karst," Arthur said, holding out a hand out of sheer habit, "I’m Arthur Pendelton. Chief steward for the division this year. If you need any help settling in, or if you need an extra set of hands to lift that canvas when judging starts on Thursday morning, just let me know."

The man named Karst looked down at Arthur’s extended hand. He didn't take it. His eyes lingered on the white scars across Arthur’s knuckles, then slowly drifted back up to Arthur’s face.

"I do not require assistance," Karst said. "And the cover will remain in place until the judges are present. Those are the rules printed on the entry form. Section four, paragraph two. Displays may remain covered until formal evaluation begins."

"Technically, yes," Arthur said, dropping his hand back to his side, his friendly demeanor cooling slightly. "Though most folks like to let their work air out a bit. Helps get the travel smell out."

"It does not have a travel smell," Karst said.

Arthur stared at the man for a long second. Up close, under the sharp scent of lavender and clove, there was another smell coming from the corner of the floor near the dark tarpaulin. It wasn't the sweet, heavy smell of rot—Arthur knew that smell better than most men alive. It wasn't the sharp smell of commercial tanning solutions either. It was something older, something dry and dusty, like opening a trunk full of wool blankets that had been locked in an attic for fifty years. But beneath that dry dustiness, there was a faint, metallic undertone. It smelled like wet copper coins.

"Suit yourself," Arthur said, taking a step back. "Judging starts at nine sharp on Thursday. Don't be late. Old Judge Higgins doesn't like waiting, and he’ll dock you ten points off the bat if he has to stand around while you untie your padlocks."

Karst didn't reply. He simply shifted his gaze back toward the main aisle, his pale eyes completely vacant, resuming his silent guard over the heavy gray mound on the table.

Arthur shook his head, picked up his tackle box, and headed for the double doors that led out into the blinding August sun.

Outside, the fair was coming to life in earnest. The smell of frying funnel cakes drifted over from the mid-way, mingling with the screech of children riding the Ferris wheel and the bellowing of prize bulls in the livestock barns. The sky overhead was a hard, pale blue, bleached of color by the heat.

Arthur walked toward his old blue pickup truck parked in the grass lot behind the exhibition hall. He threw his tackle box into the bed, pulled a red bandanna from his pocket, and wiped his sweaty neck.

For some reason, he couldn't get the stranger’s pale eyes out of his mind. Nor could he shake the memory of that strange, copper smell lingering under the dark canvas.

He looked back at the sprawling wooden barn of the Agricultural Exhibition Hall. The corrugated tin roof glittered in the harsh sun like a sheet of molten lead. Inside that dark, hot room, hundreds of glass eyes were staring out into the dim light—foxes, deer, bears, wildcats, all of them fixed in their permanent, artificial poses, waiting for a blue ribbon that would prove they looked just like they were still alive.

Arthur opened his truck door, the hot vinyl seat burning through his denim jeans as he sat down. He pulled his key from his pocket, but before turning the ignition, he looked back at his hands.

The scars were there, sharp and clean, earned from decades of cutting away the soft, perishable parts of a creature to leave only the shell behind. He had skinned thousands of animals in his life. He knew how the muscles attached to the bone; he knew the thickness of the hide over the ribs; he knew how the tendons lay in the leg like tight violin strings. He knew what belonged under skin, and he knew what didn't.

He turned the key, the engine roaring to life with a cloud of gray exhaust, and pulled out of the dust-choked lot, telling himself that Karst was just another eccentric craftsman with a big mouth and a heavy box.

But as he drove down the dirt road toward Blackwood Road, the silence of the countryside felt a little heavier than usual, and the dust settling in his rearview mirror looked unnervingly like fresh pine sawdust.

Wednesday morning dawned hot and heavy, carrying the sour, lingering tang of burnt funnel cake grease and damp straw across the Blackwood County fairgrounds. By six o'clock, the sun was a flat copper disk rising behind the grandstands, casting long, bruised shadows through the high windows of the Agricultural Exhibition Hall.

Arthur Pendelton arrived early, his old Ford motor idling with a slow, mechanical cough as he parked beside the dumpster behind the poultry pens. He carried a fresh thermos of black coffee in one hand and a wooden crate of touch-up tools in the other. In Blackwood County, the Grand Champion Blue Ribbon was not merely a piece of satin backed by a ten-dollar brass buckle. It was six hundred dollars in cash, a featured half-page photo in the Blackwood Gazette, and twelve months of indisputable bragging rights that could make or break a taxidermist's winter commercial business.

For six consecutive years, Arthur’s name had been engraved on the walnut plaque hanging above the fair board's main desk. To the casual observer, it was a harmless local rivalry, but in the close-knit, hyper-critical community of commercial hide-mounters, that ribbon was a holy relic. A winning mount brought in high