House of Skin (9 page)

It brought Spider no end of amusement to think of them and the reasons they pinned on the crime. They were idiots as all lawmakers and freedom takers were. They saw nothing but the most obvious.

Spider checked the time. Before long he had to meet Eddy and begin the night’s work. It was time to get ready. He pulled out his battered leather case of knives and examined them one by one. He sharpened their blades and polished them with oil and a soft cloth. You could always tell the level of a craftsman by how he cared for his tools. And Spider’s were gleaming.

He dressed before a full-length mirror, choosing the proper leathers and denims. It was important to look your best. When he took another life this night, he wanted said victim to realize that he or she wasn’t merely dealing with some drug-crazed maniac. He wanted them to know they were being killed by a professional, a specialist. He wanted them to die knowing their great sacrifice was appreciated. That they were not some mere victim of blood-lust, but part of a greater good, a key to a door. It was the least he could do.

It meant a lot to him that they died knowing these things.

For he was a specialist, as was Eddy. Two experts plying a trade in the grand tradition of their criminal forbears.

He brushed his long hair and greased it just so, knotting it into seven braids. Seven, because he thought even numbers brought bad luck. He intertwined beads into the braids, using a system of color separation he’d read of in a book on necromancy.

When he was done, he was quite pleased. He was dressed to kill and wasn’t that somehow fitting?

He went into his little kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There were few things inside. A couple bottles of imported German beer. Some celery and other assorted vegetables, tainted brown and rotting for the most part. Some herbs and flowers carefully wrapped in cellophane and a few bottles of murky liquid, all of which, he discovered in his studies, were useful in resurrecting the dead. He hadn’t gotten around to trying them out yet. Next to a jar of graveyard dirt, there was something wrapped in bloodied tissues. He took this out and examined it. It was the left kidney of the woman they’d dispatched the night before.

He dropped it in a pan along with some lemon butter and pearl onions and fried it up. It wasn’t bad, mind you, a tad bitter, but not terrible by any means. Not quite as sweet or succulent as he’d hoped for. But taste wasn’t the thing here. Jack the Ripper had claimed in a note he’d done the same thing and it was Spider’s belief that the Ripper had gotten into the Territories, so it was worth a shot.

When he was through eating, he washed up his dishes and drank one of the beers. Then he started putting on his make-up. Nothing extravagant, of course, no reason to stand out when you were a night-stalker. Just an even base of clown white and some dark grease on the lips and around the eyes. It gave him the unpleasant look of a wraith.

He liked it.

He gathered up his bag of instruments and some black raincoats for Eddy and he to wear during the messy parts. He left his flat and started down the street, whistling a tune. It was good for a man to have work, he thought, a purpose in life. His father had said that to him once and, dammit, if the old pedophilic cross-dresser wasn’t right after all.

Spider wasn’t without his worries. He was concerned about the police. If they were to catch on to who was offing the citizens of their fair city, all hell would break lose. They’d lock Eddy and he away for eternity, as they had with other visionaries. And the thought of that made him feel ill. He couldn’t let it happen. They had to unlock the seal of the Territories long before then and slip into that more insightful realm.

He didn’t care to dwell on such things.

For tonight, the city belonged to the night-stalkers. Tonight they would strip, cut, and bleed another and somewhere, he hoped, the Madonnas were watching over them, readying them for membership in the most exclusive club in all of reality … or out of it.

He walked on, whistling a merry tune.

He, too, was readying himself.

Unlike Spider, he hadn’t been sleeping all day. Sleep was something that was evading him a little more each passing day. He couldn’t rest. The Shadows wouldn’t let him. They kept after him hour after hour, pouring out their excesses to him. Weeping of their damned souls and failed existences. They were becoming more and more bothersome by the hour.

Each time he closed his eyes, they started screaming or laughing or crying, telling him of their needs, their wants, their anxieties. He almost cursed the day he’d taken Cassandra into that damn house. The only way he could keep them at bay was to open all the drapes in his little apartment and let the light chase them into the corners. And even there, they wept like mourning widows.

He knew who they were now, at any rate. Just nasty bits of earthbound souls. What was left after the good and righteous parts of them fled to Heaven or wherever it is they went. Left behind was the greed and vice and lust and hatred. All the bad things. He supposed the Shadows were his inheritance … being that his father had killed their physical bodies and left them to rot in that decaying house.

And as such, he figured he should care for them as best he could.

It gave him someone to talk with when he was alone. And he liked to watch them clinging to the walls or pooling on the floor like oil. If it wasn’t for the bickering amongst them or the constant whining, he might’ve actually liked them.

“I have work to do tonight,” he told them. “Please don’t be a nuisance.”

They slithered over the floor and wound around his legs like bothersome cats.

He stepped free and put on his black overcoat. He wore dark jeans and a simple brown long-sleeved shirt beneath. He combed his long dark hair and slipped on his sunglasses. He was ready. Unlike Spider, he dressed simply. He wanted only to be unremarkable in every way. It was important considering the nature of the work to be done.

He left his apartment and went out onto the street. He walked and no one paid him any mind, just another lost soul in the city. He avoided streetlights. He didn’t want his shadow cast against the facade of a building, in case someone were to see. It would draw undue attention being that he cast not only his own shadow, but a vast, tumbling heap of others hissing at his side.

Dear Eddy,

I’m still after you, so don’t get any ideas you’re off the hook.

True love never dies, my darling. Mine burns ever stronger.

There are things I have to say and I’m afraid I’ll have to tell them to you of all people.

Ready?

I want to tell you about my father. Not my real father who died of pneumonia when I was an infant, but the man my mother married when I was six or seven years old. The man I thought was an angel sent from heaven to guide us and protect us, but was in reality a beast merely biding its time, just waiting to show its teeth and fangs. I want to tell you the truth, not the lies I manufactured for pure hearts. Only the truth.

I loved my stepfather. Please never doubt that. When I was a little girl I loved everything about him. A girl’s father (surrogate father in my lamentable case) is her first love and she compares every other man she meets against him. He was a cop. When I was ten or eleven, he was terminated by the department. I didn’t know why at the time. But I found out later by eavesdropping on conversations between my mother and aunts. He was terminated for his part in a pornography ring. I never learned the particulars. I didn’t want to know them.

That was when my dream of him was shattered as the ideal parent. It only fell apart further, of course, as the years passed. He’d seemed like a good man before then. He was always kind to mother and my younger brother. He always came home bearing gifts and smiles and laughter. We adored him. None of us—not even mother, I think—really knew the beast he truly was deep down.

By the time I was thirteen, my image of him had fallen to memory. Yet, even though I knew he was little better than a common criminal, I still maintained a somewhat idealized view of him. Old habits are hard to break. Why mother stayed with him after that awful pornography business, I’ll never know. Especially since she knew much of it concerned children. Love is blind, I guess.

I had never gotten over the shock of that affair. Much as I wanted to believe he was reformed, I had my doubts. I took to following him as he left for work each evening. He must’ve known, because he usually managed to lose me more than once, abandoning me in one bad neighborhood after the other—which in itself should give you an idea of the sort of man he REALLY was. Mother said he worked for a newspaper, but she never named which one. Maybe she even believed this. I don’t know.

On the eve of my fourteenth birthday, the revelation occurred.

He thought I was sleeping at a friend’s, while in reality I was hiding out waiting for him. I followed him to his place of work. It turned out to be an old, decaying warehouse off of Market. At least that’s what it looked like from the outside. I slipped in there and discovered a very complex business taking place. It had nothing to do with newspapers. Oh, there were makeshift offices set up and people manning phones and desks. It was the scantily clad men and women moving about that raised my suspicions. Most of the men were in their twenties, I thought. The oldest of the women were about the same ages, the youngest no older than I.

I was looking around, being careless, I suppose, when I was caught.

“Hey, kid,” a man said. He was obscenely fat and lecherous-looking.

I was terrified, but I did my best not to show it. “Yeah?” I said.

“You lookin’ for Donny?” he asked, his eyes drinking me in.

I told him I was.

He put his hand on my ass and directed me up a set of stairs. I pretended to like him pawing me, but in reality I wanted to vomit. He left me at the stairs and went about his business.

I was curious by this time, so I went up.

Have you ever been in a movie studio? Well, neither have I. The place I found myself in was a sex factory. Oh, there were sets—torture chambers and dungeons—and cameras and recording equipment, but it was no studio as such. I was looking at things someone my age should never have been exposed to. Yes, I saw it all. And I think this was what destroyed my young mind. This is what pulled the carpet of innocence from beneath me. Not what followed, but this.

I was so shocked by it all. I felt guilty and dirty and damaged beyond repair. I remember backing away, not looking where I was going and not even knowing until I was already there. It was the voices of rage from the film crew that slapped me back into reality
…
and what reality? I had stumbled onto a live set where they were shooting a B & D film. The eyes of the director and actors were upon me. But they kept filming as someone shoved me out of the way before I stepped into the shot. A girl of my own age was lying on a bed. Her hands were bound, her legs spread wide. A woman in a leather mask was simultaneously whipping her with a leather thong and sliding a strap-on dildo in and out of her ass.

I ran out of there, half out of my mind.

That night, I heard my “father” come home. I expected the worst and I wasn’t disappointed. He slipped into my room. He looked like a stranger.

“Don’t pretend you’re sleeping,” he said.

I opened my eyes.

“Have you told anyone what you saw?”

I shook my head. Words were beyond me.

“They like you down there,” he said. “They want to see more of you.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Business is business.”

To prove this pearl of wisdom, he raped me, then and there, with my mother sleeping only a few doors away. I had been a virgin up until that point. He raped me nightly for weeks. But that was nothing compared to what came next.

I became a star.

Yours,

Cherry

“Spider? You around? I want to talk to you.”

Gulliver listened. Beyond the door there was silence, an awful, heavy silence that got under his skin.

“Spider?”

With a badly shaking hand, Gulliver let himself in. Despite that seedy neighborhood of violent homeless people and drug addicts, Spider never locked the door. He was always open to visitors, regardless of their reasons and inclinations. Gulliver had once asked him if he wasn’t worried about being robbed or killed, and Spider said, quite matter-of-factly, “Let them come; getting out won’t be as easy as getting in.”

He went in and was immediately struck by the stench. It was horrid. He had never smelled anything quite like it before, it was positively vile. Something had been cooked, but what? In his mind he pictured soufflés of blood and human hair, meat pies bubbling with gut cheese and creamy marrow.

He searched about and found no one. This was the point in a movie, he supposed, where a character would begin looting through the occupant’s personal effects. And as he did so, the occupant would return. But Gulliver would have none of that. He was leaving now.

He had come to seek out Eddy, to keep Spider’s filthy fingers off of him … but he knew in his heart and the deep recesses of his poetic soul that he was too late. Much, much too late.

He went back outside and the alley was still deserted. He breathed a welcome sigh of relief, brushing a dew of sweat from his brow. He started walking home, but just a few blocks away he caught sight of a slouched, almost bestial-looking figure. It was Spider. There could be no doubt. Even in that part of the city with its ready compliment of the eccentric, the disenfranchised, and the demented, Spider stuck out like a severed thumb. He was decked out in his leathers—comic book Goth chic—his hair braided and beaded, a leather case in one fist, something like a sheet of folded black vinyl in the other. If ever there had been a man … or something manlike … on a mission, it was certainly Spider.