He kisses me on the cheek, and I buckle him in. No evidence of the creature I saw this morning, he's the perfect little angel he's always been. We drive in silence, while he holds a toy car up to the window, pretending to be driving alongside us. Shame twists my insides, making me queasy. How could I have ever believed he wasn't my son?
Ryan flops down and watches cartoons for an hour before I tell him to go out back and play. I can't think with the sound of the TV, and I need to think, to hold on to the notion that everything I'd seen wasn't real. My gaze falls upon an opened bottle of red on the counter while prepping for dinner.
Wine before dinner? Why not?
When Dylan arrives home, he looks at me sitting at the table in front of an empty bottle of wine and a stained wineglass, and scowls in confusion. I realize I haven't greeted him like usual, and smile. It's much easier to force a smile after two glasses of wine. "Hi, honeybear. How was school?"
He cocks his head, unsure of me. Then he shrugs. "School was school. Where's Ryan?"
"Out back."
He sets his bag down on the floor, and heads past me to the backyard. I watch the boys through billowing curtains. They stand very close together near the shed, speaking to each other. Then, as if they'd been talking about me, they turn to the window.
I wave cheerily. It's easier to cover my increasing sense of panic now that I'm slightly drunk.
The boys turn to each other, confused. As if I'm the one acting strangely, and they've been perfectly normal. Perfectly themselves. Then they separate and throw the ball back and forth.
❚❚
BILL WATCHES ME floss through the bathroom mirror. I can tell he's been wanting to ask me about the wine all night, and I've been preparing myself for it.
"Are you all right?" he asks finally.
"Uh-huh," I say, running the dental pick between my incisors, putting too much force against the gums.
"It's just..." He hesitates, trying to think of the most delicate way to put it to avoid an argument. "You don't seem yourself today."
You don't seem yourself today either, honeybear.
"I'm fine. Maybe a little stressed. Job-hunting and all that."
Bill nods, seemingly understanding. He watches me a few seconds longer, then picks up his Robert Ludlum from the bedside table and opens it, settling into the pillows.
I spit a mouthful of blood into the sink. Looking at myself in the mirror, I stare until my eyes blur from dryness, until I can't hold them open any longer and involuntarily blink.
I look at the dental pick in my hand.
Eyeing Bill, I gently close then lock the door.
I return to the mirror, hold my left eye open with thumb and forefinger, and bring the sharp end of the pick toward it. I've never been able to touch my eyes. Can't even put in drops without blinking furiously like I've been splashed in the face with acid. Just watching someone else deal with their contact lenses makes me cringe.
The pick end blurs it's so close to my eyeball.
Ohgodohgodohgod--
The mint green plastic barely grazes the spongey lens of my eye and I blink it away hard. Feels like I've scratched the cornea, even though I know it wasn't enough pressure to injure me. Tears already streaming down my cheeks, I bend over the sink and splash warm water on my face. Blink blink blink away the pain.
All I wanted was to see the membrane. To see if I'm one of them.
Now I'm sure I'll never know.
❚❚
MORNING. I'VE BEEN awake all night. I look a mess. I feel like a train wreck. I laid there beside Bill watching him sleep while the sirens wailed and the raccoons rummaged. He didn't move all night, but his skin did. The tic I'd noticed the previous morning had spread, his whole face suddenly doing the jitterbug. That's what I'd thought for the first hour or so as I lay there in the semi-dark, our bedroom illuminated by the fingernail moon. Over time, I realized it wasn't his skin moving at all, nor was it nerves. It was something under the skin. The flesh moved in ripples and waves, as if parasites were living inside him. Or an alien presence had dressed itself in his skin.
It squirmed under his face, flesh rippling.
Tentatively, my own heart beating so hard I could hardly breathe, I laid my head on his chest and I couldn't hear his heart. There was no heart to hear. I couldn't feel it, pulsing below his ribs. But I felt the creature under his flesh move, like snakes in a burlap sack. A living thing in a dead body.
I wondered what might happen if Bill's skin could no longer contain the thing beneath. If it suddenly split open and peeled back while I laid there, revealing its true form, blood and extraterrestrial goo soaking into the good sheets.
After a while, I realized I could smell him. Not his usual scent. Not the sharp tang of man sweat under a light breezy cologne, and the flat smell of clean hair. He reeked of cloves, like how I imagine a mummy might smell, and the salty smell of mucous as he breathed in and out deeply through his nose, so cloying it made me gag and I had to turn away.
I laid there beside that awful thing all night, knowing I'd have to kiss it in the morning. Knowing the creatures wearing my boys' skin would scurry in once the sun was up, and expect me to hug them and tell them good morning. Bizarre, once-impossible thoughts circled my mind like sharks, terrifyingly plausible now.
I slipped out of bed as the sun rose so I wouldn't have to reenact our morning routine. After the night I had, I knew I couldn't have possibly dealt with it.
I drank a vodka and cranberry juice before they came shuffling downstairs wearing my family's pajamas over my family's skin, appearing bewildered and even a little upset, hair a mess. The vodka took the edge off, but I'm still jittery. Jumping at any sudden movement.
Somehow I manage to get breakfast made. Pancakes. Still their favorite, though I'm certain the things they've become are only eating to appear normal. To avoid detection, conflict. I'm watching the two smaller creatures eat, cutting up the food I've made into bite-sized chunks with their forks and spooning it into their toothy orifices. I'm frozen with the milk jug extended in my hand, and when the thing wearing Bill's skin asks me to pass the syrup, I snap out of it, but I still can't seem to make my hand pour the milk.
My limp hand quivers, milk splashing against the inside of the jug.
"Honeybear?" it says.
The two smaller creatures look up at me, forks poised before their opened mouth-holes. Their eyes nictitate, unblinking. The creature wearing my husband's skin cocks its head to the side and watches me, as if I'm the one who's abnormal.
I can't take any more of this. This can't be my life. Only yesterday I was reflecting on how perfect it was, and now...
Now. Have to act fast.
Instead of the syrup, I calmly pick up the knife. I don't even excuse myself as I stand with it clenched in a fist and leave the table. The things wearing Bill and the kids stare up at me with their mouths open, not sure how to react. It's not until I've bypassed the counter and left the kitchen that the Bill-creature's concern becomes evident. I hear his chair squawk as he gets up quickly to follow me, but by then I'm already running down the hall.
I'm in the en suite bathroom with the door locked when the creature raps gently on the door.
"Hon, what are you doing?"
I need to know.
"Honeybear, why did you bring that knife into the bathroom?"
I wonder, if I was one of them, would I even know it? Would I act any differently? Would I feel the same?
If my skin was a jacket, how could I be certain? If my insides squirmed, would I see it? Feel it?
He pounds on the door with his fist, but I know he's too cautious to break it down. I have time.
I need to know.
"I know what you are!" I shout at the door, moving in close to the mirror to study my reflection.
"What? Libby, what's wrong with you? What the hell are you talking about?
His fist on the door rattles the toothbrushes in their cup.
"Open the door!"
"Mom?" Dylan cries. "Mom, open the door!"
Ryan is weeping. I can picture the two of them, holding hands just outside the door. They sound so much like my family, but I know it's a trick. They're trying to lull me into a false sense of security, and when I open the door they'll spring their attack. They'll drag me back to their mothership or their underground lair to begin the change, to become one of them.
If I'm not already.
I grab my hair and pull it back, exposing my face to the naked white light of the vanity bulbs. I haven't looked at myself this closely in months, ever since I noticed the frown lines expanding between my eyebrows, and saw how large my pores looked in the makeup mirror. Aging is the least of my worries now.
I wonder if they age--the creatures? Do they mate? Procreate? Or do they just steal our bodies, using us like cuckoos use the nests of other birds?
I raise the knife to my face. Just below the scalp. This is where surgeons would cut me to erase the signs of having lived. Peel down the skin and sew it back together, tighter. The knife quivers in my hand, the edge of the blade resting against my forehead.
"Libby, open this goddamn door!"
It clatters against the jam. I've never heard Bill raise his voice like that before, and it startles me. I need to move fast. I need to finish this.
Cutting yourself deliberately takes much more force than you'd think. The first cut I make merely brings blood to the surface, leaving a raised pink welt that burns like a stinging swarm of bees. The second cut is deeper. The flesh blossoms open and blood trickles down my forehead, pain bursting in white stars before my eyes. The vodka I drank before preparing breakfast barely dulls it, but instead of making me stop, it's galvanizing. I cut deeper, dragging the blade, tracing an upside-down smile below my hairline, opening my flesh to the bone. I cry out in pain and frustration, finally allowing myself to grieve the loss of my family, blood spilling in rivers down my furrowed brow and into my wide, wet eyes. The creatures just outside the bathroom, faking tears, using Bill's fists to pound on the door.
"Lib!"
"Leave me alone, you freaks!" I scream at him, my face painted red like a woman warrior. The blood-drenched knife clatters into the sink, and I reach up with both hands to grasp the ragged edge of flesh I've carved. It feels like warm, raw chicken, but the mental image makes it no easier to pull apart flesh from bone. I watch my fingers peel my skin, the pain so far beyond anything I've experienced that I'm now mentally detached from it, as if I'm watching it being done to someone else's body, through someone else's eyes. This flesh is no longer mine. This body is merely a vessel. A husk.
The door frame splinters.
I watch Bill's shoulder smash against the door through the wide, angled crack. Behind him, I catch glimpses of the little ones, the boys who were once mine. Then the flap of skin falls over my eyes with a wet slap like a damp hood.
For a moment, I see nothing, blinded by flesh. Fingers peel away the darkness to bright white. The lids pull away from my eyes with a terrible sucking sound.
I can see.
In the mirror I see a woman, thirty-five years old, blonde hair. The beginnings of laugh lines and crow's feet obscured by a jagged, curved flap of glistening, angry red flesh draped over her nose. The eyes now perpetually widened in horror or fascination. The mouth open, smiling, whitened teeth stained pink as she laughs.
Glimpsing bone amid the raw meat of her forehead, she's unable to blink away the sight of her insides squirming as the door smashes inward and her husband stumbles in, his own eyes widening in revulsion, terror, stupefaction. The boys behind him, her boys, now screaming and huddling against each other.
Bill staggers back, a hand over his mouth. "Oh, dear God... Libby!"
A gauzy film draws over her eyes like curtains, moistening them. Nictitating.
I see the woman leave the mirror. She moves toward the creatures in the hall. No longer fearing them. She drops to one knee, and Bill and the children fall into her arms, weeping, afraid, relieved.
Creatures, like her, dressed in hand-me-down flesh.
"We are family," I say, and the body I wear hugs them tightly.
SHARP
A PARCEL TRUCK the color of dried blood crept through the neighborhood, the sunny suburban quiet pierced by the incessant ringing of its bell.
No children scurried from their houses to chase it down. The ring had more in common with a plague-cart driver's death knell than an ice cream truck's jaunty jingle, and this 1950 Ford Step-N-Serve with JERRY'S GRINDING SERVICE hand-lettered on the delivery door side provided no treats, only tricks.
Below the name, smaller block letters spelled out, KNIVES SCISSORS GARDEN TOOLS MOWER BLADES. Larger, and in the same font, the word SHARPENING caught a shard of sunlight, bright enough to stab the eyes of anyone unlucky enough to be caught looking. Every letter had peeled to the point of being nearly illegible. Metal corners bent up under rivets, jagged and rusted. Black smoke plumed from its exhaust and the holes in its sagging muffler. The interior smelled of oil and foul chemicals, the walls adorned with sharpened tools that rattled and swung from hooks.
This truck was a rolling machine of death. Fitting, considering the man who sat behind its wheel ringing the bell was the man the newspapers had taken to calling "The Ken Doll Killer."
A diminutive man, Jerry drove with wooden blocks attached to the pedals so his feet could reach them. They hadn't called him "Ken Doll" because he was handsome. His victims had all been tall, slim and blonde, resembling the impossible standard of beauty set by Ken's sometime girlfriend, Barbie.
Without witnesses to his crimes, the papers weren't aware of his ugliness, which coupled with his lack of height made him self-conscious. Being called a "Doll" by the local news organizations gave him stabbing pains in his stomach that wouldn't go away with antacids.
"Sharp," Jerry muttered to himself, and tugged on the weathered string, clanging his bell.
Jerry eased the truck around the corner onto Hayworth Street, where he often idled to eat his lunch before turning in the cul-de-sac and weaving his way through streets named after dead celebrities. As he drove toward the end of the street, a woman in a bright sundress hurried down the steps of her colonial home. A look of disquiet pinched her attractive features as her heels clicked and clacked toward the sidewalk on the cobblestone path. The same sun that brightened the remnants of Jerry's sign shimmered in her springy cornsilk hair.
Jerry's instincts for spotting women in distress being nearly preternatural, he'd seen her long before she reached the street. She hadn't needed to wave her arms to flag him down, but he appreciated the glimpse of her jostled breasts as he slowed his already crawling truck to a stop.
"Ma'am?" He caught her eye for the briefest of moments before averting his gaze to the dirty floor of the truck and the wooden blocks he hoped she wouldn't notice. Always, Jerry outwardly deferred to women, while within the darkened, twisted caverns of his mind he stood before them tall and naked and proud--a juggernaut.
"Oh, thank God you're here," the blonde woman all but gasped. In his glance, Jerry had seen milky white flesh draped over her fine angular frame, and wondered fleetingly what her bones would sound like hollowed out and hung from his porch as wind chimes. He imagined their music might sound like Heaven.
"Thank God, indeed." He gave her an unforced smile. "What can I help you with today?"
"It's my good knives." The pout was audible in her voice. "The blades are too dull to cut butter, and I'm having a guest for dinner!"
"Just let me get my tools," he said in a tone he'd hoped sounded reassuring.
Rummaging in the back, Jerry attempted to control his breathing. He'd never seen this woman on Hayworth Street before. She must have kept herself busy inside the house, or in the backyard, during the many times he'd lunched here. Wherever she'd been, he felt grateful for his good luck finding her here today.
With his equipment gathered up, an awful certainty struck him: the woman had gone
back inside and locked the door behind her, suddenly afraid of this small man with small fingers, small toes, and even smaller prick. Jerry hurried back out with his grinder, his breathing frantic again, only to find her still standing by the curb. The look of worry in her eyes became a strained smile when she saw his grinder: a hefty little thing with the look of a vacuum cleaner, the black grinding wheel cradled in its side like film on a projector.
"All set," he told her, leaping down onto the sidewalk, noticing as she lowered her chin to take in his small stature. Jerry didn't let it bother him. Now that he held his tools, he felt strong. When he got her in the house, his lack of height would not be an issue. When he stood over her prostrate body, breathing hard into the cleft of her bosom while hot, sticky blood oozed from her wounds, he would seem enormous.
"Follow me, please," she said, her sundress flipping up delightfully to reveal a muscular thigh as she turned on her heels. Jerry followed, taking small looks as her buttocks rose and fell, rose and fell like fleshy counterweights, well aware that anyone could be watching from their windows, wondering why the statuesque beauty next door would stoop to consort with such an ugly little man.
"That's quite an impressive tool you've got," the blonde woman said, peering over her shoulder. She might have caught his look at her sublime posterior had he not averted his gaze to the cobblestones.
Still, Jerry felt his cheeks grow red at the--possibly unintended?--double-entendre. "It was my f-father's," he choked out. His father had been the original Jerry, the man whose truck Jerry Jr. drove up and down nice, quiet residential streets like this one, day after day, in search of blades to sharpen. Jerry's father was long dead, as was his mother. She'd cut her wrists with the sharpest knife in the drawer when she'd learned, from the nice old lady next door, that her husband had been cheating on her with a tall, blonde woman named Sandra.
Another thing the papers got wrong: his victims weren't Barbies. They were Sandras.
"Sorry about the mess," this Sandra said as she opened the door.
"I-I'm sure it's fine," Jerry stammered, having focused most of his mental energy on stemming the flow of blood to his penis. However small his erection might be (and Sandra had made it plain how incredibly small it was), he didn't want the stubby protrusion alerting her to his intent before the woman let him into her home.
Video Nasties Page 24
