House of Skin (11 page)

Gulliver fell to his knees before their swinging masses, a pagan at the feet of his bleeding, slit gods.

“And what do we have here?” Eddy said, not surprised somehow. “Gulliver of all things.”

He couldn’t look at them.

“The little fuck has been spying on us.”

“Have you?” Eddy asked. “Have you been watching us, Gully?”

Spider unzipped his case of knives. “Shall I carve him?”

Gulliver glared up at them, his eyes swimming in their sockets. He was as near madness as anyone Eddy had ever seen.

“I think you’ve made a grave error here,” Eddy told him. “This isn’t something we want anyone to know about. Not just yet.”

Gulliver stared at him, unblinking. “Butchers,” he managed.

“Let’s kill him,” Spider said.

Eddy shook his head, a man with a problem on his hands. He didn’t look dangerous really, just confused. “What to do,” he mused.

“If we let the little faggot go,” Spider said, “he’ll run to the police like the fairy he is. You know that as well as I do. We have no choice.”

“Would you do that to us?” Eddy asked of him. “Would you betray us like that, Gully?”

“Course he would. Dirty queen would love to ruin everything,” said Spider. “Let’s quarter him.”

Gulliver was waiting to die and under the circumstances, it seemed the best he could aspire to. There was a black voice of madness in his head, buzzing like insects, offering him a solemn and eternal peace. It didn’t seem so bad. If he was crazy, maybe he wouldn’t feel the blades when they spilled his life and peeled back his skin.

And then he heard something. A wet sound like dogs lapping at water bowls, like bones pulled through a meaty matrix of flesh. It had to be in his head … yet, Spider and Eddy seemed distracted, nervous even. They’d heard it, too. Was it the police? A last minute reprieve? Such things only happened in the movies. He was going to die and that was fact. His death would be bloody and painful. He could only hope that Eddy would take his life quickly so Spider wouldn’t prolong the suffering.

But, for now, they weren’t paying any attention to him. They stood fixed, rigid, confused even as he was. The air suddenly seemed different, heavier, busier, thrumming with impurity. It crackled with static electricity. It was cool and thick in his lungs, the air of a meat locker. And still that awful lapping sound, louder, louder, a huge and determined sound, that grisly moist ripping. The building seemed to tremble around them, dust pounding from the beams overhead, the floor uneasy with sluggish waves.

What in the hell is this?

And then he saw, just as Eddy and Spider saw.

She
was causing the noises, the disturbances, the woman who wandered out of the darkness, out of a gossamer film of dirty light like some imperfection on the face of a mirror.

Something like a prayer of thanks fell from Gulliver’s trembling lips. Here was help … or maybe something far worse.

The woman stopped just at the perimeter of the light. And what a woman. She was bloated without being actually fat. Her female proportions—hips, legs, breasts, cunt, belly—distended and heaving. She was totally naked and totally beyond shame. She reminded him of a women from museum paintings: heavy, bovine, flesh piled on in abundance. A renaissance women, out of place and time, from a period when large, voluptuous women were highly sought. She licked her lips with an obscene tongue, moonlight shining in her blood-greased tresses.

Gulliver screamed. There was no drama or forethought: the scream came ripping out of his guts and up his throat with a shrilling, broken sound.

It got the attention of the woman immediately. She came in his direction, something like white steam blowing out of the immense, sucking pores set into her pallid, metallic gray flesh. She left a snotty trail of something like afterbirth behind her that crept and rustled like the train of a bridal gown. She expanded like a puffer fish … face, lips, limbs, genitalia swelling grotesquely like someone undergoing anaphylactic shock … then deflated into some gaunt, mechanistic bone sculpture with glittering cherry pits for eyes. Her skin was like an elastic membrane through which dozens of plum-sized doll faces were trying to push.

“Pretty,” she said. “How very, very pretty.”

Gulliver pissed himself, thinking she was talking about him.

But she wasn’t talking about him, but the sacrifices hanging there, the skins affixed to the wall.

“They’ve come,” Spider said in a voice of reverence. He looked to be quite near religious ecstasy. He fell to his knees.
“Oh, dear Christ, they’ve come
…
”

“Jesus,” Eddy said. “The Sisters of Filth.”

They?
Gulliver thought.
They?

Oh yes,
they.
He saw it now. She had not come alone but with some freakish thing that was attached to her by a snaking, fleshy umbilical … like some conjoined twin that had never truly separated. A boneless horror steaming with gray gas, swelling and fluttering, pulsing and throbbing.

Gulliver couldn’t help himself: he screamed.

The other was a gas-inflated bladder that drifted three feet off the ground, a raggedy collection of leathery crow skirts formed of multiple blackened hides stitched together, the sutures of which randomly split as it expanded and deflated with its own clotted, phlegmy breathing … if breathing it was. Beneath them, he caught glimpses of a writhing mass of red meat. Tendrils of pulsating, bloody tissue kept trying to escape the confining stitchwork only to be sucked back in like ribbons of snot. It had no legs, only one yellow and scabrous arm dangling from the pelts and a skullish head with a white, seamed face like a puckered, waterlogged corpse. Each time it breathed, the mouth suctioned open and threads of pus trembled in the air with a sewer stink that made him want to throw up. Maybe it knew this, for it fixed him with its one remaining eye … a serous-yellow orb that looked much like a veined, fertilized ovum.

Gulliver felt his mind drawing into some black chasm within his skull. This was a fucking nightmare. He was hallucinating, he was tripping out of his mind. He had to be. And yet, he felt the minds of those things touch him and he knew they had names—the swollen one was
Haggis Sardonicus
and the conjoined one was
Haggis Umbilicus.
They were sisters.

“You’ve pleased us,” said Haggis Sardonicus, her voice like the coo of a dove. “You’ve honored us.”

She spoke for both of them, for her sister was incapable of speech as such.

Spider looked helpless, impotent next to them. He asked: “You are the Sisters?” His voice was eager.

“You flatter us, sir.”

“And you’ve come to let us into the Territories?”

Sardonicus giggled like a little girl. “He is wise, sister. He knows.”

Umbilicus rustled her agreement.

Gulliver was shaking so badly he could not string any words together.

“We want to go,” Eddy said. “Into the Territories.”

“In time, little one” Sardonicus said. “In time. We have to be sure. You can understand that, can’t you? Only so many are allowed in every generation. We have to select initiates very carefully.”

Gulliver swallowed down bile. She smelled like rotting orchids and black earth. Which was almost pleasant in comparison to the raw, hot stench of rotting fish that blew off her sister.

Eddy looked uneasy. He took a step back.

“And your names?” the woman asked.

“I’m Spider and this is Eddy Zero.”

“Zero?” she said. “Zero?”

“The Doctor’s son.”

Haggis Sardonicus nodded and seemed pleased by this. She grinned like a wolf with a fresh kill, a foul sweat exuding from her pores. Her sister expanded and deflated rapidly. “Just as lovely as your father, too. What a rare treat.”

“And when can we go? How—”

“In time. When we see more of your artistry. Only then. Our club is quite exclusive.”

Spider seemed happy.

“For now, maybe you’ll leave that one in our care,” she said, licking her stout, swollen lips. “My sister fancies him.”

Gulliver felt a wild, irrational fear slam into him. He’d take the knives first, he’d use them on himself before he let that horror touch him. He began to crawl away even as Eddy and Spider blocked his path. That would have been it and he knew it. It would have ended right there … but there came an interruption.

“Hey!” a voice called out as a flashlight beam panned the room. “What’s going on here? What are you people …
oh dear God
…
”

He was a night watchman of some sort or maybe a member of a neighborhood vigilance committee. No matter, because Sister Haggis Umbilicus went right at him. Her stink washed over Gulliver and it was the reek of split carcasses boiling with fly larva upon a battlefield. The old man screamed once and she had him. Her hair writhed like hookworms, her puckered mouth howled, and she unzipped herself, opening like some monstrous black hood, sucking him into the whirlwind meatstorm of her anatomy where he screamed but once before his brain pulped like a soft pear in his skull and his eyes were plucked from their sockets by slimy optic stems and his bones were literally sucked from his skin. He was pulled apart, slit and smashed and turned inside out. He became part of Haggis Umbilicus. She closed back up like a clamshell and he was gone.

Gulliver seized the only chance given him.

He was on his feet and running before Eddy and Spider could hope to stop him. He was out the door and in the night air, the stench, the sickness behind him. If anyone followed, he never turned to see, he knew only escape and that’s all he needed to know.

He slipped through the gate and pounded up the street, heading away from the brewery and those gruesome hell-witches and their pawns. He was alive, but his mind, he feared, would never be the same again.

The Society had their guinea pig now.

She was a teen-age prostitute named Gina. She came to the house and they all had drinks. Hers was drugged. She fell into a deep sleep and woke naked and chained in an upstairs room. There were no windows, only a single light bulb of low illumination for amusement. It was turned on and off at irregular intervals. The walls of her little prison were adorned with mirrors in which she could study her own descent into darkness. One mirror—a small, unimpressive oval—was a two-way glass through which her destruction could be observed by members of the Society.

It was perfect.

Zero decided it would take some time to break her sufficiently. Months, perhaps. And in that time, she would be alone, completely alone in those intervals of irregular dark.

They had their fear victim now and it was time to move onto new things as solitude softened her a bit. Stadtler wasn’t entirely happy with any of it, but he went along with it. Like a good SS trooper, he told himself he was only following orders, those of the Society … or Zero, because they were basically the same thing.

Although Grimes and Stadtler only came to the House of Mirrors for their weekly meetings, Zero was there much more often. To study his books, he said, or to throw a bit of meat to their captive.

One meeting night, Grimes was late.

“I have an interesting theory I’m playing about with,” Zero told Stadtler. “Want to hear it?”

Stadtler gulped his drink. “Why not?”

Zero began, “Say you take two individuals of the same physical type. Twins of a sort, identical, but not related in blood. You place each in a room like the one our Gina occupies. You break each down. You ask the first to tell his life story in minute detail, leaving nothing out—his life, his loves, his history, his occupation in great detail. At first he refuses, of course. But when you starve him long enough, he’ll comply. Oh yes, he’ll talk, he’ll tell all. And by this time, of course, he’s nearly mad, so he’ll do anything. He spends days telling you his life. And you record it.” Zero paused, lighting a cigarette. His eyes were blazing. “Now, you break down the second man far beyond what the first man endured. You destroy him as we plan with our little Gina. You drag him down to a point where he remembers not who he is or was. You transform him into a psychological infant. Then, over a series of weeks and months, you leave him in complete darkness with nothing to amuse his vacant mind save for the recording of the other man’s life which you play over and over again. Night and day. While he’s awake, while he’s asleep. It’s the only information he receives, the only external stimulus. After months of this, what do you have?”

Stadtler shrugged. “A crazy man with no memories tortured by the recording.”

“Maybe. But maybe you have a duplicate of the first man.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it? Remember, your second man has no memories, no knowledge of self, only a burning desire as we all have to be someone, to have an identity. His basal psyche adopts the first man’s life in order to give itself a sense of worth, of identity.”

“But his other life is still there. Regardless of how you fuck his head up, something might trigger him to remember.”

“Possibly. But you forget that his subconscious remembers the terror associated with his former life, it buries it deep, it wants no part of it. It adopts the new life because there’s freedom hanging in the balance and because it has nothing else.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“It’s certainly possible, particularly with the added leverage of certain psychotropic drugs.”

“The idea is … well, horrible.”

Zero ignored that, moral and ethical platitudes having no place in his research, as he called it. “And if you were to take it further,” he said, “if you were to place this second man in a prolonged drug-induced hypnotic trance while the recording played and then take him out of it once there was no doubt he had become the first man, he again would remember nothing. But you could plant a suggestion in his mind, a word that would trigger his artificial memory. He would simply be a man coming out of amnesia, his true life buried forever.”

Stadtler finished his drink. “That’s all and fine, but who would you do it to? You’d have to have two men that were nearly twins.”