My name is Henry Tollcar and I’ve got snake venom in my blood.  Growing up, I never knew where it came from.  My mother and her family, they’re all uncontaminated, law abiding citizens.  That side of the family’s got clean fingernails and clean teeth through and through.  But me, I’m not cut from the same cloth.  I was born feet first with my eyes open.  The midwife told my mother to keep a close eye on me.  She said I’d be trouble.

My father…well, my father came and went.  I’ve seen him around, but there isn’t anything to talk about.  We share the same height, approximately, but that’s about it.  Other than that, he’s thin and slippery.  He’s a fast talker, a mover, a shaker, a get the hell out of dodge kind of person.  From what I hear, there’s nothing to admire about my father.  From the sharp hair, all the way down his spineless back, it’s all tainted.

Aside from my biological father, there isn’t much to go by on that side of the family tree.  His mother, my grandmother, was too old and hunched to be of any danger.  I know she wore her thin gray hair in a braid, but that’s about all I know.  The rest of my father’s family was always kept at a distance.  The Tollcar’s were full of pickpockets and crooks.  There wasn’t a straight nose in the bunch.  If they weren’t in jail or on their way to jail, they were fighting, swindling, cursing, creeping, and living with packs of people who shared the same behaviors.

Now here I am, a young man with half a history.  I’ve been painted in dark colors since I got out of grammar school.  My first grade teacher was the first to see it.  She wouldn’t have me in her class.  Couldn’t bear to look at me.  Said it was something in my eyes.  She said she knew I was up to no good, but never had any evidence to back it up.  That’s the first time I remember being hated off of intuition alone.

Unexplained distrust has been in my cards ever since.  Peers, priests, every teacher for every subject – they all smelled it, but not one of them could handle the diagnosis.  I’ll admit I helped them along in their thinking.  Once I knew where someone stood, I was quick to wiggle my way out of the situation.  I’ve never been the type to stand around and get pissed on.  I’d rather disappear, cut class, find a back door or a window to crawl out of. 

There was a lot of time spent outdoors growing up.  Train yards and abandoned houses make the best places for someone who doesn’t want to be bothered.  Not too many people asked why in those parts.  I was a recluse for good reasons, but it put a pin in my poor mother’s heart.  She tried her best to defend me.  She knew I wasn’t what people thought I was.  Maybe she saw it too, but she wasn’t so quick to charge me on it.

About a year ago, I couldn’t take it anymore.  I was tired of running.  All my scrambling and sidestepping had me feeling like my father’s son.  That was the last thing I wanted – to be slime.  I started looking for answers.  Hard answers.  I wanted names.  Names and faces to compare with my own mug.  I wanted to know what everyone was seeing in my eyes.

First I found my father’s brother.  Out of the bunch, he was the most moderate of the scum.  I could tell he’d been running from the way his ears were always pinned back.  He was hanging on by a thread, just like the patches on the elbows of his coat.  There was a certain type of tired dug into his cheekbones, a tired that only comes from trauma or fear.  Frank was his name.  He didn’t give me much information, but he did set me up to meet his sister.  That would be my aunt.

My aunt was a tarantula.  Frank had me meet her late in the evening in an old room that leaned steeply to one side.  I knew she was a spider straight away.  I could see her fangs.  I smelled the poison on her breath.  Frank got out of there as quick as he could say hello.  After that, I had no choice but to keep going after what I was looking for. 

She smoked a misshapen cigarette and coughed awfully after every drag.  I knew all those extra legs were wiggling under her sweater.  I knew if I showed any sign of weakness, I’d end up with a kitchen knife in my guts.   Sweating in that dim room, I said a little prayer.  I prayed that my arachnid aunt wouldn’t recognize what everyone else saw in my eyes.

Whatever it was, she noticed it.  She reached out and touched my face.  Her hands were damp and spiny.  The nails were sharp.  The way she said my name was too familiar.  She knew me before I ever walked in that door.

Over a pot of tea, she gave me everything I was looking for.  It all boiled down to her grandfather.  The criminality, the crookedness, the venom – my great grandfather was the point of origin.  She described him with a far off passion in her eyes.  Half a smile on her dirty teeth.  A tall man with long, gangly fingers.  Dirty of course.  She said he never owned a shirt without a stain on it.  He was the lowest of the thieves.  Stealing from churches, friends, family – he’d steal the sheets off the beds at an orphanage if he could squeeze through the window fast enough.

Then she said he had a face like mine, especially in the eyes.  Being in the same room with this woman, knowing she was my aunt, and seeing the pleasure she took in passing on these horror stories made it feel like maggots were crawling up my pant legs.  On top of being a lifelong crook, she told me that my great grandfather was a killer.  “Henry the Blade” is what they called him.

He wound up getting pinched after eight or nine gruesome murders.  By the time the police got to him, they said he was out of his mind.  His eyes were sunken so far in his head that they thought he’d gouged them out of his own skull.  They put him in the gibbet.  That’s a metal cage where they hung murderers in those days.  Sometimes they kill you first and then put you on display.  Other times, they leave you to die of dehydration or hypothermia.  They hang the gibbet in the center of the city to send a message to other would-be criminals.

Rumor has it, my great grandfather lasted two weeks in that gibbet.  Each day he shriveled away more and more until he was just sticks and eyes.  Survived on rain water, licked up from the rusted metal frame.  For two weeks he hung above the city, tormenting anyone who dared walk beneath him.  When he finally croaked, the birds picked him clean. 

Before I left that dark room, my aunt leaned over and put her sharp claws into my shoulder.  She started to whisper and then she let out a giggle that could spoil soup.  She told me she knew where they kept the gibbet.  She told me my great grandfather’s skull was still in there.

I told her I didn’t need to see it.  It was already in my blood.