House of Skin (31 page)

“He’s worked very long and very hard for what’s going to happen next. And he doesn’t want you messing it up. Your appearance here, at this time, is very bad.”

“What
is
going to happen next?”

Cherry regained her composure. Gone was the sincerity, gone was the humanity, the concern. Her eyes had gone flat and predatory now. They were cold and reptilian. “He’s near and before long he’ll come for you.”

“You’d better leave.”

“Save yourself, Lisa. It’s not too late.”

Cherry left and Lisa wanted to cry, but tears were beyond her now.

* * *

That night, for Lisa, there was no sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw him, she saw her personal bogeyman drifting in for a kiss. She could feel his swollen lips pressing against her own, the tongue jutting from his crooked mouth as it licked her face.

Sleep was something she’d always taken for granted, like reality. But when one is shattered, the other stands no possibility of survival. She was sitting in her hotel room, trembling, wondering if even now Dr. Blood-and-Bones was calculating some fresh mode of portal that would carry him into her sanctuary for the love so long denied. Given time, she felt certain he would find a way to her. He was nothing if not patient, if not infinitely clever. He’d been sucked into the abyss some twenty years before and now, according to his little notebook, he had solved the riddle of escape. He could come and go as he pleased, all through the operation of some alien mathematical theorem. And that was no doubt why he wanted the book so badly: those cryptic symbols and configurations were the key. Without them, his door was either permanently open or he was trapped in this sphere of existence. Perhaps both.

Mirrors now made her uneasy. She could barely stand being near one, always fearing a stitched and seamed hand might reach out for her.

But, despite this, her thoughts were centered on the book.

She’d considered more than once of bringing the book and its mysteries to some mathematician or theorist and letting them have a look. Chances were, it would take them time to divine its operations and variables. And to what end? To place dangerous, forbidden knowledge in the hands of misguided intellectuals who might sever the fabric of reality or of time itself? No. The book had to be destroyed. But not until William Zero was exiled back into the Territories.

Reading entries and pouring over the computations with her own limited knowledge of differential equations, she was struck by the fact that there was nothing supernatural whatsoever involved here. Hadn’t she once read that certain spells and conjurations of witchcraft bore an unsettling resemblance to certain operations of theoretical physics? Zero kept referring to the Territories as a world between worlds and that got her to thinking that it was perhaps a loop in time and space between dimensions—this one and the next. Thusly, there was nothing supernatural about any of it. Zero had spent his last twenty years in some quarter where the physical laws of the third dimension were negligible to some degree. This loop, as it were, was probably a neutral ground between dimensions, a place ruled by laws of both dimensions and neither. But none of this set about explaining why pain and perversion were the norm there. Unless it was because it was peopled by individuals like Zero and a host of unfortunates brought for amusement. But it did make her speculate as to what the true origin of Christian hell was.

She was probably making a mistake by not bringing Fenn in on this. But in doing so, other less palatable matters would have to be brought up, such as her affair—if you could call it that—with Zero. She’d never discussed it with anyone and she really doubted that she could even now.

She was keeping the book hidden in her bureau, wrapped in pillow cases. It was degenerating rapidly as it was bound in some type of skin she took to be human. Already, this skin was drying out, loosing its original greasy texture and beginning to flake. The pages were becoming brittle, the edges beginning to crumble. If only it would last until she’d divined its secrets.

For the moment there was nothing to do but wait and think. Time was slipping away and each moment, she knew, Zero was plotting against her, devising some new route to his heart’s desire—her and the book. If she wasn’t careful, he’d get both.

Towards dawn, a rain began to fall and Lisa curled in bed shivering, and shedding some tears of her own.

The world seemed out of control.

I didn’t go seeking the Territories, they sought me.

The Sisters had been watching me, or so they said, studying my craft, taking great pains to observe the development of my art. I suppose others have sought out the Sisters, desperate men bored of the limitations of their world. I was not one of these. My world offered endless pleasure and experimentation. I was content with it.

But a man in my particular line of work has a short span of creativity. The police are everywhere, digging, probing, searching, and their informants mass in the shadows, always watching. It would have only been a matter of time before they would have found me and dragged me away to some prison or asylum. I knew this. When the Sisters made their offer, how could I not accept? They were giving me complete escape. No one could follow. They were taking me to a plane of existence where a man with my particular passions would be revered as a god, they said. Although there was a hint of truth in this, it was mostly a lie. And I found out soon enough how clever they were, how effortlessly they had deceived me, a child led into a dark lane with the promise of forbidden sweets. And I went, lamb to slaughter.

As I languished in that zone of dread between worlds, I spent a great deal of time dreaming. And what did I dream of? I dreamed not of my wife or son, or the world I left behind, but of Lisa. I remembered the two of us together and her infatuation with me and my own infatuation with her young and ripe body. I never grew tired of fantasizing about our times together. The act took on a new and vital urgency with her. This had little to do with taking her maidenhead on our first encounter, there was more involved here. Perhaps it was her age, her youth, her willingness to shrug off the complacent attitudes of her parents and engage in the forbidden fruits of desire.

I often wondered what sort of woman she had become. Even had I remained in that city, events would have necessitated that I move on. I would never have experienced the bliss of her blossoming into a woman of experience and texture. And had that avenue been open to me, no doubt I would have bored of her and she of me.

Such are the politics of life.

Before the Sisters came into my life, my plans were to push on to another sphere of influence. The world was full of cities to be conquered. I had planned on devoting my life to these dominations of sorts. But that all changed when I was taken away.

It seemed that ages passed while I was tormented and tortured. The Sisters
told me it was my period of initiation and as such, it would pass. Regardless, it lingered for what seemed years if not centuries. But there is no time in that place, no limitations, no restraints. When I was told of what waited for me on the other side, it was too late to turn back. I envisioned being broken on racks and languishing in the stock. Perhaps, if they were especially creative, I decided they’d have me drawn and quartered or endure Caligula’s Death of a Thousand Cuts.

I overlooked their primary creativity.

But let me start at the beginning. The physical transposition from this universe to the next required preparation. No one may make the journey as a whole; you must be broken down and reassembled on the other side. It is a grisly experience.

After I was divorced of my skin—an agony beyond agony—I was dissected with infinite slowness, disassembled completely. My nerve networking was stripped free and secured to stiff boards with pins. Each anatomical system—vascular, muscular, lymphatic, and so on—were removed in due course and displayed in the same fashion until there were only bones and then these were separated and spread over tables sticky with the fluids of my victims. As I had done to others, it was now done to me. Yet, through it all, I lived, I experienced the agony, the inhumanity, the desecration of my being. My eyes, secured by hooks, watched and, divorced of their ducts, were robbed even of tears.

My cries, my pleading, my endless suffering was ignored. The Sisters, I think, believed that they were bestowing a great honor on me. Once I was completely broken down and taken apart
,
they brought me over to the other side. I remember little of it beyond screaming black spheres and crawling oblong shapes. During the passage, I blacked out. When I woke again, I was in what resembled a nineteenth century dissection room. I came to call it the House of Pain. An anatomy theater.

It was only the beginning.

Assisted by other sadists and surgeons of lore and legend, boundlessly amused by my mechanics, the games increased in intensity. I was refitted and sewn back up, only to be dismembered and stripped of my biology a dozen times. Eons seemed to pass while I waited in extremis to be fitted together again like a lunatic’s puzzle. Soon, they grew bored and left me to move on to fresh conquests.

Finally, I was free to roam my new world at will. I traveled for years and never found an end to the Territories. I passed through urban graveyards and villages of despair. I learned to live in a place where there was only darkness and polluted mists and agony.

I learned that death didn’t exist here. I encountered dozens who’d hung themselves, cut off limbs, slashed their own throats, carved free their entrails, all in hopes of escape.

But suicide was impossible in this place. Getting out is much harder than getting in. It was a great playground of the damned, but without victims to
torment it was altogether boring. There was nothing to despoil, no innocent flesh to violate, no bodies to desecrate. For a creative individual, it was dull.

The cities were shrouded, evil places of cyclopean buildings and crumbling streets that were mazes leading everywhere and nowhere. There were rivers and stagnant pools of refuse and broken bodies. The shadows had textures, a physical presence; colors had odors; the ground heaved tears and flame; the sky rained blood and filth. There were no limitations here as the Sisters had promised. Every depravity and perversity mankind had flirted with through the ages was available and many never imagined. There were great empty spaces, blackened and blasted, dismembered bodies spread in every direction as if some terrible battle had taken place. The lanes were flanked with crucified children and adults impaled on stakes and set aflame. The flickering illumination intended to guide strangers to valleys of punishment they were better off not seeing. And everywhere, the hot, nauseating stench of cremated flesh and the cries of the damned.

I wondered if I was in hell. But I met no Devil, no grand master that lorded over this zoo of atrocity. I learned things slowly. Just bits of gossip gathered from faceless prostitutes and weeping clergymen and bored sadists. In arenas where the young and the old were set aflame, broken, mutilated, dismembered and staked to the muddy ground, I heard more. In medieval torture yards and gallows and gibbets, I was told there was a way out. A system of mathematical logic that could rend the seal of eternity and release one into the realm they’d been snatched from. If this system was mastered, one could come and go as it pleased them.

It took time, but I was patient. I copied arcane symbols and alien equations from the walls of black alleys and the floors of crypts. I found answers carved into tombstone and flesh alike. I wrote it all down. I showed them to intellectuals and nobles on the guillotine. I found answers and fitted them into a coherent pattern.

It took time, but I had nothing else at my disposal.

And always, I dreamed of Lisa as I plodded through the human carnage and jagged shadows. I was no longer human as such; more a thing of lust and depravity as those that had imprisoned me in the chasm. Yet, I clung to whatever vestige of sanity that still remained and I dreamed of Lisa. I sometimes could feel her dreaming of me.

It was then that I began to think of what I might do once the puzzle was solved and freedom was at my disposal. I would need to bring innocents back with me. I would need playthings.

That’s when I realized only one plaything would do.

I needed Lisa.

I had to seek out my lover.

The storm had abated by the next afternoon. Lisa slept perhaps four or five hours and it was enough. She woke around eleven and told the front desk to keep holding her calls. Fenn was probably going mad and sooner or later he would just flash his badge and demand to be brought to her room. It wasn’t something she looked forward to.

She showered quickly and threw herself together and left the building via the back entrance. If he was going to come, then she just wouldn’t be there. Better to hide out until she could think this all through. She caught a cab to the Financial District and took lunch at a Greek restaurant, losing herself in the spring lamb for a time. She ate and drank wine and did not think. Above all, she did not think.

But eventually it had to come to an end. She went back to the hotel around three and Fenn was waiting in the lobby. She supposed he would’ve waited weeks if that’s what it would’ve taken.

He rode up to her suite with her on the elevator, not saying anything, not knowing whether to smile or frown and deciding on the latter. They went in and sat on the sofa and she made them drinks.

“You wanna tell me about it,” he said. “Or should we just sit here and pretend we don’t know one another.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Really?”

She nodded and drew away when he touched her hand.

“You’ve been acting odd ever since that night in the house,” he said to her flatly. “Something happened and I want to know what.”