House of Skin (2 page)

It has a special place here.

It moves without check, in places where the living and dead mingle. Where the insane and the sane wear the same brooding faces. It lives in the dreamscapes where men deflower a thousand lovers, their children, and ultimately themselves. Where women mate and kill and destroy everything but their own vanity.

And sometimes death visits the same houses and buildings and thoroughfares that these same men and women call their own. This time it chose an old and crumbling house of filthy brick and here it looked for answers.

The aura of decay and depravity and human suffering was nearly overwhelming. Droplets of rain entered through the sagging, patched roof and fell into the attic. The air was pungent with the stink of rotting plaster and mice-gnawed wallpaper, the windows grimy, the floors uneven, and the walls bowed.

Death had heard things about this place, tales of madness and horror. Stories of unspeakable atrocities and blatant perversities committed behind these graying, powdery walls. So it came, hungry to learn more, looking for something, anything to call its own in this lifeless place that was untenanted by even rats or spiders or termites or silverfish.

Within the walls, reality and unreality were evenly balanced, like light and shadow at twilight or madness and sanity in the mind of a desperate man.

There are places death goes.

I know these places, for they are mine.

The house stood high above the others on the street, set on a lurching hill covered with stunted grasses and denuded trees. Its neighbors crowded in to either side, dwarfed by the rambling, gothic monolith. It was desolate and weathered a uniform gray. Black turrets and crooked spires jutted from its sagging roof into a sky of rolling, moon-washed clouds.

Eddy stood before it, head bowed.

If houses had voices, then this one was calling to him. It went far beyond what he’d heard of the place—those were tales, true maybe, but just tales and this was reality. He didn’t go in alone. He took Cassandra along. She had a hunger for heroin and sexual excess. She was a whore and a junkie and that’s why he loved her. Like him, she was not whole. She was damaged and he understood damaged.

Holding hands, Cassandra and Eddy went in.

He wasn’t sure what he expected. Perhaps a rush of demon wind; a rattling chandelier; clanking chains or ghostly laughter. None of these things were in evidence. Instead, there was singular neutrality suspended in the air like a flat and distant memory. To some, it would have been nothing— merely a feeling of desolation and destitution common to all old and empty houses; but to the truly sensitive, it was a huge and morose sound, a scream of nothingness, a chorus from the void.

Eddy heard it and stopped dead in his tracks, a feeling of elation and rumbling confusion in his head.

“Why so many mirrors?” Cassandra said.

Eddy shrugged. He wondered this himself. There were mirrors of every size and shape crowding the walls. Many were broken, many were not. All were covered in grime and dust.

He cocked his head as if he were listening.

“What is it?” Cassandra asked. She was used to his sensing things that she could not.

“Did you hear it?”

She shook her head.

He thought as much. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t as disturbed as all those doctors said, hearing the things he did. But no, there was a rhyme and reason for everything and the sounds and voices he heard also fit into that pattern. All he had to do was make sense of it all, fit together the puzzle.

He and Cassandra had been together for six weeks now and he supposed it was the longest he’d ever spent with one woman. But she wasn’t like the others. She understood why he had to find his father even if, at times, he didn’t.

She gladly, willingly traveled from city to city with him, through ghetto and slum and desperation, as he searched, listened for the faint psychic echo that would lead him to the man who’d fathered him. Their travels had brought them here, to a desolate and shunned section at the edge of the Excelsior District. To this house in particular. A house his father had once called his own.

They moved quietly from room to room as Eddy smoked and listened to the wall of indecipherable noise he encountered everywhere. Close, so very close. They went upstairs and the noise thinned.

Cassandra was nervous. Was she, too, beginning to feel something? Or was it just her imagination toying with her? She decided it was probably neither and nothing that a syringe couldn’t fix up.

* * *

“Anything?” she said after a time. She was beginning to sweat.

“He’s been here,” Eddy said in a breathless voice.

“Recently?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes were bright and expectant. She was shaking and wiping her nose almost continually.

Eddy turned to her, stroking her cheek. “You don’t look well. Do you need a little something?”

Cassandra nodded. “Yes, just a little.”

He slipped a plastic bag into her hand. “Take as much as you like. Only go downstairs and do it. I need to be alone.”

She thanked him and left.

Eddy listened to the thud of her feet on the stairs until she was gone.

Then he fell to his knees. He was alone in this crowded room. He had to think, to make sense of it all, to keep in mind that he was the catalyst here and without him, nothing would or could happen. He stared off through the dust and grime and tried to empty his mind, tried to let the quiet noise of the voices fill his head.

Just let it happen, he told himself.

But it wasn’t that easy.

He kept seeing his father in his mind. The man he remembered from boyhood, a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who rarely spoke. A man who spent his days locked in a room full of books, his nights out on the streets practicing his art. William Zero considered himself an artist, they said, and his canvas was the human body. His admirers were few. It took a special mind to appreciate what he did to human flesh with his knives. Yet, an artist he was. And his son, Eddy, never saw him as anything else.

He’d been gone twenty years now. Twenty years in which his son’s only contact with him was through yellowing articles his mother had clipped methodically from newspapers. Articles she had clipped and pasted into a scrap book. It was her hope, Eddy supposed, that by rubbing his face in his father’s crimes he would be saved from the same life of derangement and violent delusion. But it hadn’t worked. He never saw his father as the bogeyman she’d hoped, but as a complex individual he could never hope to understand, but wanted to.

A man he spent his teens and twenties fantasizing about.

A man he wanted to meet.

A man he needed to become if he ever hoped to find him.

Eddy stood and leaned against the wall. It was here, he knew that much, that special psychic odor he needed. His father’s trail began here. But where? Where was the clue he needed to begin the hunt?

Think, he told himself, think.

Just let it come to you.

And what happened then, he wasn’t sure. Thoughts cavorted through his mind, meaningless little ditties that were flat and lifeless. His respiration increased, his heart hammered in his chest, his blood flowed with a rushing din that was like thunder.

My God, what is this?

But questions weren’t to be answered. He’d come seeking truths and now, in ways known only to the house itself, those truths were coming. It was like the delicate fabric of reality itself was beginning to open up, slit by razored fingers, insane, whispered secrets pouring forth. Everything he needed to know, or at least a good deal of it, was filling the air around him. His head was raging with a high, discordant buzzing. It was only a matter of deciphering it. The answers were here, all around him. The answers to what his father was and where he’d gone.

The ceiling seemed to be coming down on him … something dark as oil was seeping from it in a swirling, fighting cloud of blackness. And it was alive with squirming, worming, wanting life and it had secrets to tell.

And Eddy was listening.

He saw his father as a boy plucking the wings from insects. There were well over a dozen in a cardboard box on his knees. He was attempting to reattach them as if his fingers were blessed with impossible surgical gifts. But no, they wouldn’t go back on. He was angry. He dumped the box out and squashed the pitiful things under his shoe. He was angry that he couldn’t take them apart and then put them back together.

Eddy was grinning.

And here was another scene planted in his head. His father as a young man stooped over a corpse in an anatomy lab, picking and prodding at it with a knife, willing it to do something. Trying to breathe life into it, to make it overcome its cold simplicity.

Now here were answers, indications of the man and how he’d finally chosen his life’s calling. But it was all so purposely vague, so terribly ambiguous. Eddy needed more to go on.

The shadows were gathering around him now, whispering in his ears, taunting him, teasing him, telling him things he couldn’t understand, didn’t want to know, but had to. He could feel pressure against him, an avalanche of being, of need, of want, of love, of hate. Oh yes, he was the catalyst here. They’d been waiting for him, waiting for this moment of moments and now it had come. They danced and played and clutched and clawed at him, these shadows that were not shadows at all. They had him now and if he was sorry he’d come, it was far too late. The darkness became a black, greased womb, a palpitating orifice that opened wide and spilled a flood of crawling, creeping things that swarmed over him: lice and maggots, rats and pale crabs, undulant leeches and blind squirming roaches. They covered him, buried him, encased him, physical representations of the shifting shadows themselves. He felt them feed in through his ears, his mouth, his nose, his ass, crowding in him, showing him the sights and sounds of broken lives and pain without end. He tried to speak, but they were in his throat, black and mulling, suffocating him with their ideas, their dreams. He tried to think, but they flooded his brain, pushing his thoughts aside, forcing their needs and wants and desires on him.

He was helpless.

They pulled him from the room, dragging him over the cold and dusty floor, peeling his clothing free, screaming in his ears, kissing his will away. They made him creep about, a naked and deranged thing. They led him to the attic door and pushed him through, up the dirty stairs and into the vaultlike space above where … where—

Where he could finally see what they were so desperate to show him.

Skins.

Yes, the multitude patchwork of skins tacked to the sloping walls like grim tapestries—the graying pelts of men and women, of dogs and cats and rats and even apes. All of them peeled free in a single sheet from their respective anatomies with the utmost surgical precision by a man who was a highly skilled dissector, a skinner of no little talent, who fitted them all into a great puzzlework of hides upon the walls. A gruesome work of art. Eddy stared around him at skins with faces and scalps, even fingers and toes completely intact.

It was his father’s work. Here were the membranes of all his victims and the animals he had experimented upon before them. Each had been meticulously divorced of their skin, what lay beneath dissected and reduced to basal anatomy—skeletal systems, nervous systems, vascular systems. It was the work of a diabolical genius, some had said after the house was entered by the police, a demented medico, an insane surgeon … but they hadn’t understood the purpose, the technique, the ritual.

Eddy blinked his eyes and it was all gone.

His father’s workshop was just a series of dusty attic rooms and alcoves now. There was nothing left but a single antique mirror whose surface was thick with grime. The shadows had shown him what he wanted to see, hinted at the dark path he must soon follow.

He licked his lips, tried to swallow. “I don’t understand,” he managed. “What does it mean … what …”

They all seemed to rage in his head at once, screaming and shrieking. Not only the voices of men and women, but the whimpering of dogs and the pained mewling of cats, the squeal of rats and the shrilling of vivisected apes. It filled his head in a cacophony of noise.

Yet, through it all, he heard the voice coming up the stairs.

“Eddy?”

He couldn’t hope to answer.

“Eddy? What are you doing up there?”

Cassandra. Jesus, he shouldn’t have brought her! This place was too dangerous, too alive, too undead for her. She could never understand this. The touch of the shadows would drive her insane.

There was a jolt of electricity in them, a raw and pungent stink of ozone and he knew they wanted her just as his father had wanted them. He knew that he was the vessel with which they would get her.

His brain rioting with their lust and rage and insanity, he crawled down the steps until he lay gasping in the dust of the second floor, trying to breathe, trying to reason, trying to do anything but what he was doing: curled-up mindlessly in a fetal position, his thighs wet with his own piss and his mouth tasting of his own vomit.

Cassandra, Cassandra
…

This was all his doing. Maybe he brought her here on purpose and not by accident, knowing, somehow, that an innocent would be needed. Her blood and life would be needed. Maybe this vague psychic trail he’d been following had demanded it. And now the trail ended here and in ending would only begin anew.

But what were these shadows that knew so much of his father as if they’d been witness to his every action, his every misdeed? They were more than shadows, more than bits of enfolding ghosting darkness, they were his victims. The parts of them that could never leave this plane. The anger, the shock, the need, the wanting of life, of living, the shattered minds and residual hate of the human condition. Yes, they were all around him and they wanted much more. If he wanted to know what path his father had taken, then they were the only ones who could show him, because they knew, they had to know. And the price of their services wouldn’t be cheap, for only the negativity of what they’d once been was left behind in these cloying shadows. They were killers now, deranged and hateful bloodsuckers and soul-eaters. Sadists and perverts and abusers. A roll call of the damned.