House of Skin (22 page)

It was a night of revelations.

I picked up a prostitute and her name was Rachael, I believe. Not that it mattered. I can’t seem to recall if she was beautiful or not. I took her back to the house. Most of my work was done there now. I was tiring of the brewery. She asked me why I lived in such a barren and cold place. I don’t remember my answer, only the question posed by those soft, unknowing lips. It seems to haunt me still.

I had few worries then. Even the fact that Soames knew everything didn’t bother me. That worm didn’t have the courage to go to the police.

I was one with myself, my universe.

I took her up to the attic, to my workshop of sorts. She didn’t seem to notice the stains on the floor or the heavy, salty smell of death in the air. And I didn’t let her go into the next room to see the tapestry of skins. She saw only the money I’d promised her. She saw nothing else, wanted nothing else. Even my instruments gleaming from their hooks on the wall didn’t deter her. How sweet she was. She lay on the floor, on a blanket I had provided. She couldn’t have known how I appreciated her sacrifice as she closed her eyes. She could never know of the pleasure she gave me selflessly, the pain she forced upon my dreaming brain. She could never know of the torment that twists in an artist’s soul and that she was my only possible mode of release.

I slit her throat and she died quietly enough.

I got down to work with little hesitation, peeling her skin back in the accepted manner. It was very painstaking work to do alone, but Stadtler and Grimes had no stomach for it. I was close, I was very close and I knew it. It took me hours to peel her hide free. When I was done, I tacked it to the walls with the others.

There was no time to stop and smell the roses, such as they were. I started in with the knives, creativity flowing from my impassioned fingertips. As I exposed muscle, nerve ganglia, and internals, I was pushed to new and fevered heights. I plucked her eyes free, then her tongue. I worked diligently, possessed by my own irresistible need to destroy and then create.

It was more exciting working alone, I found, without Stadtler and Grimes around to complicate things. They were gone now, each to his own reward.

It was about this time, as I neared completion, that the revelation came unbidden. I didn’t ask for it; it arrived and nothing could have been the same again.

The light bulb overhead dimmed and then exploded with blinding brilliance, casting a sickly glow over everything. And though fragments of the bulb rained
over me, the filament continued to burn of its own volition.

I heard something like a great and awful sigh and there was a hot blast of stinking wind. For just a moment I heard the sound of crying, of mourning, of animals lapping at wounds. That and something like glass breaking underfoot. Then nothing but a heavy, unnatural stillness. I was stopped, scalpel in hand, waiting for something.

I had arranged dozens of mirrors on the walls. Not for any particular reason other than vanity. I liked to watch myself work, really. And it was in one of these mirrors that I now saw the face.

It was pressed to the glass like that of a child peering through a window.

With a minimum of effort, she stepped free.

I didn’t know who she was or what she wanted, not entirely. She was hideously fat, naked, her rolling skin slicked with oil or sweat that seemed to bubble from suckering pores like blowholes. Her breasts were huge and heaving, standing full and firm, desirous of lips to ply their swollen nipples. Droplets of gray sour milk dripped from them. The stench was appalling.

I believe I hit the floor. My legs went right out from beneath me. I tried to speak, but all that came out was gibberish, mindless gibberish.

“Pretty,” she said, staring at the near-dissected woman on the floor. “How very, very pretty.”

It struck me that she wasn’t so much fat as exaggerated, everything enlarged and ripened and horribly distorted
…
like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Even the chasm between her legs was an impossible, wet cavity that could have swallowed a man whole. She stood there, her entire body breathing, expanding and deflating like some grotesque, fleshy balloon.

When she was inflated, she was bulbous and swollen; when she deflated, she became a bag of membranous flesh with an exaggerated, profuse architecture of bone beneath—knobs and rungs, crevices and chasms, spirals and ribbed protrusions and what looked like the teeth of gears. All of it was in motion, some grim interface of tissue and machine. Grinding and whirring sounds came from her as did slopping and gushing noises. She was like some swollen, intricate biomechanical device. A machine devouring flesh or flesh devouring machine, or perhaps both dissolving into some nameless hybrid.

“You are an artist,” she said, fixing me with a look of starvation I’ d only seen in the eyes of hungry children in destitute countries. “You are a maker and unmaker, a creator and destroyer.”

I nearly screamed with horror. Her voice had a moist, slopping sound that reminded me of fish being gutted.

She began to inflate again into a swollen, rubbery-lipped thing with a great slobbering mouth licked by a dozen red tongues like fattened, peristaltic blood
worms. Her eyes—glossy pink scabs—sank away into the sea of flab. She held out one machined-looking hand, the digits plump and scalloped, the nails long and black-green like her lips, the color of insect blood.

“You do us honor. A great and timeless honor.”

She took a heavy step forward and I saw that she had been pulled apart at some time in the past and hastily reassembled. The workmanship was crude, unskilled. She had the look of a puzzle fitted together by an impatient, angry child, pieces forced into place when they wouldn’t fit smoothly. And when she moved, it was insanity.

It was then I noticed that she was not alone.

Oh no, there was another just behind her that floated just off the floor, rising and falling like a hot air balloon. How to describe what I saw? A great, heaving mass like a distended sack made of blackened, slime-greased hides stitched and sewn together into a common whole. At the top, there was a head
…
or something like a head. It was laying on the left shoulder as if the neck that held it was broken. It had a bleeding, puckered mouth like a sea lamprey and hair like rotting marshweed that was red and crawling like blood-fattened worms.

It had no legs that I saw, just a few strands of coiling tissue. Fingers of gray gas steamed from it. One long, rawboned yellow arm hung from a scarified socket, the fingers being the black talons of a beast. It breathed in the manner of the other, swelling and deflating. Each time it expanded, seams of crude catgut stitching popped open and I saw red meat pulsing forth and what I thought was a face
…
no, two faces, two bloated white conjoined faces budding from a single growth. They looked like they were splitting apart through some crazy binary fission. It was like the thing was giving birth to them.

“Who are you?” I asked when my voice finally came, though I knew who they were. They were the things I had read of in books: Haggis Sardonicus and Haggis Umbilicus.

It was then I noticed that an umbilical connected them as if the floating thing was the woman’s sister, something that never quite came to term in the womb. They both had the look of carcasses that had been dissected and stitched back up.

“We are the Sisters,” the first said. “We can take you away from all this.”

“Where?”

“To a place far but near. A place where an artist such as yourself would be appreciated, revered.”

I wanted to go. This was my goal from the very first. “Tell me of it.”

She did, but she insisted I finish my work. She gasped and shuddered with orgasms as I cut and sorted through the whore, dissecting her with trembling fingers. Her sister pulsated with glee.

“Come,” she said when I was finished.

“We leave now?”

“Yes, oh yes,” she told me. “But you can’t make the trip without preparation. You cannot go in your present state. You must be unmade.”

As I had prepared corpses for them, they now prepared me. As I screamed, they peeled my hide free. But it was only the beginning.

“A fisherman found them,” Detective Moore explained. “He was out for some kingfish and he hooked this instead. When the uniforms got down here, they found the second one.”

They were standing on the banks near Candlestick Point Pier. A cool mist was drizzling from a sky the color of dirty cotton, a chill breeze coming in off the bay. Fenn could feel it deep in his bones and beyond. He shivered.

“Fuck of a day for this,” Moore went on. “Looks like Eddy was a busy boy last night. There’s no end to this shit.”

Fenn nodded. He stooped down next to the first corpse and pulled back the plastic sheet that had been draped over it. It was a woman, they knew that much, and only because Eddy hadn’t gashed up her sex. Beyond that, it was hard to tell. She had been peeled and ritually dissected as usual. Her skin was missing along with most major organs. Whether he had tossed her off the pier or not was anybody’s guess. The coroner figured she’d been in the water since last night and the fish had wasted no time nibbling on her.

“How’s a guy supposed to sleep at night after looking at this butchery?” Moore wanted to know. “How the hell can you ever let your kids leave the house without wondering if you’ll see ’em again?” He shook his head and stalked off, chewing antacid tablets.

Fenn could say nothing. There was no longer anything left in him. He’d spent what cold comfort he’d had on himself, there was nothing to give. Nothing at all but a black knowledge that Eddy Zero was only just beginning.

“We’ve got to get a handle on this,” he told Gaines. “The bodies are piling up like cordwood and we’re sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”

“Everybody’s doing their best, Jim. You know that.”

“It’s not enough.”

And it wasn’t. They had a name, a face, but they still couldn’t find Eddy.

Fenn walked up the bank, a stink of dead fish and industrial waste in his nostrils. Roget was finishing his cursory examination of the second body. It had been skinned, too, opened from crotch to throat, a great deal of the anatomy cut free and placed in bleeding piles next to the body. Fenn looked away. The carved, skullish face was leering up at him with empty sockets.

“The same?” he asked.

Roget shook his head. “Not exactly. Your boy removed the entire reproductive system this time. Clean job. He’d have made quite a surgeon.”

“It runs in the family.”

A car pulled up in the distance and he saw Lisa step out. She was wearing a brown leather skirt and blazer, dark stockings embroidered with leaves. Her hair was pulled back in a braid, her glasses on. The other men watched her legs as she came forward and so did Fenn. In his mind, he pictured the two of them fucking like dogs in the backseat of his car.

He went to meet her.

“Don’t bother,” he said, going up to her and looking hopeless. “There’s nothing to see.”

She touched his hand. “Let me look anyway.”

He wanted to say no, but he couldn’t. Just gazing into her face took his breath away and he knew he’d give her his soul if she but asked. Sometimes, like now, her beauty frightened him. It was so cold, like river ice. Cold and emotionless.

“I’ll be all right,” she assured him.

They toured the bodies and she looked, unmoved, at them. Then she broke free of his hand and stalked away.

“Everybody done here?” Fenn called out.

No one said anything; a few CSI techs nodded, pale and beaten wrecks.

“Then let’s clean this mess up.”

He followed Lisa back to her car. She sat behind the wheel, her face colorless, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel.

“You okay?”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said honestly.

Her door opened and she did as she promised.

Fenn wished it were that easy for him. Murder scenes gave him a bad feeling inside, but he was never disturbed the way he figured he should have been. And sometimes that worried him. It was as if he’d waded through corpses in another life, become immune to the carnage, and was unable to feel anything.

* * *

They weren’t hungry again that night.

They spent the evening in Lisa’s hotel room, before the blaring TV set, making love and saying very little. When they got back from the shore, Lisa took a bath and Fenn drank three gin and tonics, courtesy of room service. Everything seemed to be out of the question but getting drunk. He’d never felt so hopeless in all his born days. He hadn’t told Lisa about Spider’s body being missing or the theft of the obscure objects from his flat. He would eventually, he knew, to get her opinion on it all. But later. The last thing he wanted was to talk about any of that. It only made him feel that much more helpless.

When Lisa finished her bath, she came out in a robe and gave him a massage. It felt good, releasing the day’s tensions and igniting new ones. They made love orally and drank wine from room service. As they grew more intoxicated, they became more adventurous and began pouring the wine on each other and sucking it free. Fenn wasn’t sure how it came about, but he ended up cuffing her to the bed and fucking her from behind. Afterwards, they slept.

Later, as they lay naked and sticky with wine, Lisa said, “You might as well tell me what’s on your mind.”

“You really want to know?”

“We’re in this together,” she told him. “Tell me.”

He did. And felt somewhat relieved in the telling. He proceeded in an almost soothing tone about Spider’s body and theft from his apartment. As he grew more calm, she seemed to slowly fill with anxiety and dread, almost as if she had drawn it from him.

“This is all so insane,” she said. “I never thought—”