by Mike Allen
Lenahan’s arm gapes to the elbow. He flexes the meat of his contorted forearm. This is not…easy, he grunts, and something bulges through the gap in the curtain of his flesh. It’s a face pushed out as if birthed, Denise’s face, her pink lips parted as if in hesitation before asking a question. Squeezed out from between his unbuttoned skin, her face bows, an empty mask, eyeholes dark. Eyeless because the eyes regarding you from Lenahan’s sweat-sheened visage are not just like her eyes, they are her eyes.
Her mouth is moving, a fish drawing in water. He raises his arm, brings her lips to yours.
* * *
Your lips close with hers. She is almost fourteen. You are eighteen.
You and she are in your room downstairs. Even though your parents are traveling across the country, you have the door pulled shut, the curtains drawn. The radio chatters and croons, you don’t know what’s playing, you’re not paying attention. She’s lying on the rug, her overalls undone, pulled down to her hips, her T-shirt pushed up past her bra, looking up at you. You’re a head taller, about fifty pounds heavier, poised over her like you’re doing a push up. Staring into her eyes, like staring at yourself in an adoring mirror. You tell yourself that’s what you see, adoration, that she could never be frightened of you, terrified of making you angry, terrified of what you’re going to do.
On your bedroom wall hangs a poster of lions in the veldt. The lions are flickering, watching. The bed in your room is not a bed at all, it shimmers in a turmoil of beads and discs and suns and skulls. She stiffens as you push up her bra.
Lenahan again. He straightens his arm, withdrawing the face inside himself like a snail into a shell.
As you sit stunned he takes your gun away, sets it gingerly on the drawing table. He takes your hand, eyes full of sympathy, different eyes now, maybe his own, maybe Willett’s, maybe someone else’s. He whispers something soothing as he guides your hand toward the chest. You have no fight in you. Both of you know why you really came, not because you loved her so but because you feared, you feared the revelation of a secret you kept even from yourself. But there’s nothing to fear now, Lenahan knows, has known, has wanted to meet you all along.
Gold rhomboids practically leap from the bin onto your fingers, but Lenahan isn’t content to wait, he forces you to your knees, shoves your right arm in to the shoulder. You feel something like static, like a jet of water, like a mosquito swarm, then you feel nothing, your arm is numb. He pulls you back, and your arm, like his, sports an array of buttons. A seam runs up the inside, a row of green irises with black pupil insets. He runs a finger along them, they pop like snaps, lift apart like the eyes that line a scallop shell.
When I tried her on, he says, I saw what you did.
He’s pushing his arm inside yours.
The memory. How she stayed petrified, silent, as your fingers pushed inside her.
His fingers, inside yours, wearing your hand like a glove as you relive the memory.
Your knees have jellified. There’s hot pain behind your eyes, sticky tears on your cheeks. To your utter shame, there’s a stirring in your groin, your cock flutters as you relive what you did to her, and are yourself violated.
Lenahan chuckles, his belly pressed against your back, his right arm inside yours, his fingers inside yours.
He used his free hand with the confidence of long practice, unfastening your tainted arm from your shoulder. He will keep what he wants of you for himself, as he did with Willett, keep the parts of you that remember Denise. The rest, he will dispose of how he pleases.
You can’t allow that. You can’t let Lenahan parcel you.
You go slack. He repositions himself awkwardly, reaching for the buttons on the underside of your arm to finish his theft, as you lunge for the gun on the drawing table.
He grunts and tries to pull you down, but you’ve twisted to your feet. You feel the sickening stretch where he’s loosened your arm and stuffed his inside, but the buttons don’t pull free. He’s on his feet now too, pulling at you as you pull away, the two of you orbiting each other in grotesque conjoined dance.
He grabs your collar with his left hand, jerks you toward him, tries to get behind you again. You let him pull you closer, but he doesn’t see you have the gun till you’ve jabbed it under his chin. He tries to grab your wrist but you’re sweat-slick and quicker, pull the trigger one two three, sharp hammer strikes, flares that burn bright spots in your vision.
But the struggle doesn’t stop. Now he has your wrist, tries to pull your fingers open.
Adrenaline clears your head, you see the holes punctured in him, frayed edges like shooting through sackcloth, no blood, something like light but not fluttering out through them, causing your balance to sway, your stomach to heave.
His eyes, green again. He’s using her to look at you, using her eyes that brim with hurt and ache with questions never asked as he tries again to pry the gun from you.
You squeeze again. One of your niece’s eyes goes dark. When he cries out, it’s with her voice.
Rage and fear and years of pent-up shame fuel your own scream. You shove at him, push at him, but neither of you can escape the other. He stumbles, the backs of his knees hit the lip of the bin and his free arm flails. Then you throw your weight against him. He topples, you push and he sits in the carved chest. The living buttons swarm up his thighs and belly. You drop the gun into the seething shiny mass of baubles and grip him by shoving your fingers into the holes under his chin. You feel fibers tear and then your hand is inside the sack of his head.
Images gush into your brain, hundreds upon hundreds, flash memories of men, women, boys, girls captured at the moment Lenahan introduced them to his terrible buttons, shoving in their hands, their feet, their heads, to open them like boots, gloves, hats, coats and expose the twisted, vulnerable things of spirit inside. But what rises topmost is an image of Denise, and you do to him what he did to her, push him down full body until his head and shoulders are submerged, bury him in his own sick magic.
You’re still entangled with him, your face just inches from the sparkling swarm. Numbness spreads along your jaw as the buttons attach.
You jerk back, then scream as Lenahan’s head and shoulders re-emerge.
Every follicle of hair is now a loose thread jutting out from a buttonhole. Huge black stars have replaced his eyes, his mouth sealed shut with a ragged line of skulls, his nostrils plugged with ornate blue knobs. Tiny transparent disks line the ridges of his nose and brows and cheekbones, hooks fasten the folds of his neck. His head could be opened a thousand different ways.
His struggles cease. He smells, not of flesh but vinyl and lacquer. Slowly, painstakingly, you start to extract your hand from him and his hand from you. There’s a weird pressure inside your arm that lessens and disappears as you finally pull free.
Now you see his skin is patchwork, a grid delineated by the buttons, every piece a different shade. Who could tell what skin first was his?
Hundreds of alien memories have faded from your mind before you can pinpoint a point of origin.
He pushed her in, your niece, all the way under, withdrew a button-studded mannequin and undid her from head to foot, pulled her on and possessed her in total in a way you could never do, though something dark and shriveled in you tried. And when he learned about you, what you did, how you destroyed her, he wanted that for himself too, set things in motion to lay claim on the moment of her undoing.
A noise in the darkness. You look up.
There, between rugs hanging like tapestries in a hall of nightmares. Lenahan’s short, strange assistant has returned. She stares at you with wide-set amphibian eyes beneath a too-broad forehead, above a too-small mouth, as rough and patchworked as the creature you’ve just murdered.
Her eyes deep and wet as cavern pools meet yours for a long time. She simply nods.
And now you know how you will see your beloved niece again.
You start at Lenahan’s forehead and work your way down, head to foot, p
repare to try him on, see how the seams of a monster fit. You’re sure they’ll fit well, snug and comfortable as a tailored suit.
It’s the only skin you deserve to wear.
THE BLESSED DAYS
Bryan woke that morning drenched in blood from toe to scalp, just as he had every morning for two and a half years.
But this time, scraps of images swirled in his fogged brain, a hurricane rush of faces, a sense of squirming, worms under pressure—dreaming . He could remember the dream. His heart started to pound. He had to tell Dr. Patel about his breakthrough.
He groped for the towel dispenser, wiped off his hands, his feet, and sat up. The plastic sheet covering his body crackled as he peeled it away from his blood-sticky skin.
Beside him, Regina stirred.
He’d almost forgotten she was there. He turned, afraid he’d woken her, but no: she was still sound asleep. She fidgeted, eyes moving under their lids, perhaps in muted reaction to a dream of her own, one she’d never remember.
She lay naked between plastic sheets just as he had, slats of moonlight groping through the blinds to stripe her contours, long curvy torso and short legs—and at that moment, the Blessings touched her. Her flesh turned ink black beneath the sheet as blood welled from every pore of her skin. When she finally woke she would be covered head to toe, just as he was.
Bryan felt no revulsion, only sorrow. Every human on the planet endured this now, whenever they slept, whenever they woke.
For the longest time, Bryan had resisted that word, Blessings, whenever he spoke of the bloody awakenings. Amazing, how fast the word caught on once it started happening, once every single human on the planet would rouse from sleep to find every inch of skin slick with blood.
Infernal logic reinforced it—bless derived from old English roots that meant mark with blood—but Bryan knew it was just euphemism, a way to render the grotesque palatable. He had resisted until prolonged exposure to the usage made him unable to define the phenomenon with any other word.
In the shower, watching the blood sluice down the drain, snippets from his dream returned, resonating with the pink swirl of water. He had made progress last night. He had to call Dr. Patel, as soon as the hour was reasonable.
He wiped condensation from the mirror and met his reflection’s eyes. Behind his temples, the sides of his bare head bulged. He knew his skull’s proportions were wrong for a shaved head, and envied other men whose looks were enhanced by baldness. But he had no choice. The Blessings rendered a full head of hair utterly impractical. Even some women had caved, though most had adopted tricks to keep their treasured coifs sanitary. Regina was one who climbed out of bed at ungodly hours to scour the blood from her roots. This was how Bryan knew it was too early to call the professor without having to glance at a clock.
He resolved to use the time for an early morning jog, donned sweats and shoes and snuck out. Halfway up the stairs to the parking lot, he stopped short. A derelict lay curled in fetal position on the landing. If it weren’t for the wet rasp of the man’s breathing, Bryan might have thought him dead.
Unwashed for weeks, the accumulated residue from the Blessings masked the man’s features in a gruesome black crust. As Bryan stepped around him, the bum’s eyes opened, twin ovals of bloodshot pink in the scab of his face.
* * *
On the first day of the Blessings, billions woke up screaming.
Every human on the planet had emerged from sleep looking as if they’d crawled from a blood-filled tub. This happened to newborns and elderly, tribesmen and movie stars, prisoners and dictators, soldiers and presidents.
On that morning, two and a half years ago, Bryan jerked awake as Regina shrieked in his ear.
He and Regina first met at the fitness club downtown. He worked as a reporter for the smaller of the city’s two metro papers; she worked at a bank branch only a block away. At their first conversation he had felt a fierce attraction to her—dark hair with exotic blond streaks; green almond eyes; quirky lopsided grin; a head shorter than him but not at all short on curves. He found everything she said fascinating, and she appreciated, and reciprocated.
Within two weeks they became intimate. At four weeks out—the night before the Blessings—they were still in the giddy exploratory stages. Her olive skin fascinated him; it tasted oddly sour and salty; he wasn’t sure if he liked the flavor but took every opportunity to re-evaluate the taste.
They fell asleep on her sofa that night, limbs tangled together, neither the least bit concerned about personal space.
She woke first, and screamed at the sight of his blood-covered face.
He had practically leapt from the sofa, and seeing her dripping with abattoir residue, revulsion struck ahead of thought and he shoved her away, so that she fell onto the glass coffee table—which shattered beneath her.
Miraculously, she wasn’t cut, although at first it had been impossible to tell. Once they were clean, once it became clear the blood came from neither of them, once the television news showed them that something had gone wrong not just in Regina’s living room but all over the world, then their panic changed, and to each other they could be civil, even tender. He apologized repeatedly, and she told him she accepted.
But seeing each other, feeling each other’s skin that way overwhelmed their fledgling attraction, almost severed it. Neither wanted to touch the other, not then, not for weeks, not for months.
* * *
That morning, Bryan’s profession had meant that he couldn’t stay home, couldn’t recover from his freak-out. He had to get to his cubicle, man the phones, conduct interviews, shove aside his own confusion and despair and charge ahead, write something to help the paper’s readership make sense of things, or at least understand they weren’t alone. He had endured this before, when the twin towers collapsed, and closer to home, when a crazed gunman killed thirty innocent young students at Bryan’s alma mater.
But this was worse, far worse.
Too agitated to stay put in his chair, he hadn’t noticed the blinker for new voicemail till after he finished his first interview: an insincere message of all-is-under-control from the city’s audibly frightened director of public safety.
The voicemail came from Sukhraj Patel, sleep specialist, his odd friend of more than five years.
“It happens in your sleep, Bryan. And only in your sleep. You have to come down and see what we recorded. You have to get here!” The usually imperturbable professor so rushed his Indian bass-baritone that Bryan couldn’t make out many of the words. And he had no time then to replay it. His editors were determined to print a special edition by noon, and it was proving damn near impossible to reach anyone by landline.
The phenomenon started in the Americas, and news of it traveled the world with the dawn. It wasn’t until a few days later that sufficient information pooled to show the Blessings truly began everywhere on the planet at once.
In San Francisco at 2 AM, a security guard woke from a forbidden nap and raised his red, glistening hands to the light above his desk. His befuddled mind gradually registered that his entire uniform had soaked dark.
In Brasília at 8 AM, a boy who had spent the night sleeping beneath cardboard under a bridge scrambled out of his refuge, holding out his blood-covered arms and crying “Murdu! Murdu!”
In Kabul at 2:30 PM, a young mother singing a lullaby over her baby’s crib stopped with a shriek of horror, as red beads welled from every pore of her sleeping daughter’s skin.
Five days later, in Sukhraj Patel’s office, Bryan watched a video on the professor’s paper-flat computer monitor. The footage was of himself, lying face up in a laboratory bed, electrodes pasted to his shaved scalp. He watched himself drift off to sleep. Watched the blood well up. Watched as he endured what everyone endured every time they slept.
Because the Blessings didn’t stop with that first day. They never stopped.
* * *
Bryan and Patel met over their common interest in dreams. For Patel, they we
re a subject of research; for Bryan, a lifelong battleground.
Cursed since infancy with an overactive imagination, Bryan’s dreams spiraled into terror in the wake of a handful of Poe stories read aloud by his third-grade teacher. None of his classmates seemed fazed by “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but the stories left Bryan deeply disturbed, unlocked nightmares, even night terrors: mist leaking from the light fixture above his bed that gelled into an eyeless old man; spidery legs long as tree branches that groped from closet shadows; dark dream-alleys where he ran from people tugged by puppet strings formed from their own arteries and veins.
