The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  There is no answer. She is reluctant to enter, so she examines the books crammed into the bookshelf beside the door. Her unease is increased by the titles she reads on the spines. Wells has a collection of paperbacks on the occult and true crime. There are also how-to books on magic, hypnosis, and the manipulation of people.

  At the sound of footsteps, she glances up. Wells is back, wearing black leather gloves. In his left hand he holds an electric kettle with steam pouring from the spout.

  “Would you like tea?” he asks. His tone is gracious and unruffled as if everything is normal.

  Sam lunges towards the door but pain halts her movement. She twists around and watches in astonishment as the skin on the back of her bare legs peels open as if she has been shot. In fact, she has been burned—Wells dashed boiling water from the kettle onto her skin. Blood rises to the surface of her wounds. She reaches for the door again, but Wells throws the kettle down and tackles her, pitching her onto the floor. He rolls her onto her back; his arms are wires holding her in place. She struggles but is no match for him. He shoves his gloved hand into her mouth.

  “If you make noise, I’m going to get a knife from the kitchen, cut you into little pieces, and put you out with the garbage.”

  His calm tone frightens Sam more than the threat. He can control who witnesses the storm in his head. Horror whistles through her body. She feels dumb. This man is going to kill her, and it’s her fault for coming into his lair.

  He takes his hand out of her mouth and pats the cavities of her armpits, her belly, and her thighs. “Just tell me who you really are, who you work for,” he croons.

  “I told you. My name is Sam. I don’t work for anyone. I used to wash dishes at a restaurant in Montreal.”

  “You think you’re so smart. Sam has long blonde hair.” Tugging the short hair above Sam’s right ear, Wells bends Sam’s head sideways like a doll. “Did you think I wasn’t going to ask Mark what you looked like? I’m nobody’s fool.”

  Sam tries to think. Maybe he won’t hurt her. Is he just afraid she wants to harm him? Her body doesn’t believe it. She tries to speak but is out of breath because she’s hyperventilating. She squeaks, “Check my wallet. There’s my ID. Mark got me confused with a friend of mine.”

  Wells sucks on his lips as if he is considering her explanation. Then he unclips her wallet from the chain she is wearing and studies her identification. As he tosses her wallet onto the floor, her credit card slides out. “Could be a clever forgery.”

  Sam is fucked. He is going to kill her. “Did you kill my sister?”

  “No, that bitch pulled a revolver on me. But I was smarter with you, I made sure you didn’t have a gun.” He hits her cheek, then backhands the other.

  Ripple of pain in her jaw. She swallows. She can’t overpower him so her mind runs through other programs: make him talk, figure out what he wants, try and give it to him. “Why did my sister pull a gun on you?”

  “Because she was a terrorist under command of her Arab boyfriend. She was no patriot; she was a stateless nomad helping him get rich. Filthy rich. Her boyfriend brokered the deal with Iraq for the Hells Angels. They’re clannish; they only deal with their own. But you know all about that, don’t you?”

  “Chloe broke up with her boyfriend.” If Sam enters into his fantasy, can she get him to believe her?

  He runs his gloved hand over her scalp. “She was tricky. She did everything he said. She was like all Muslim women, obedient. She did his bidding, just like I’m going to make you do mine.” He reaches into his pocket to take out a lighter, and Sam stops thinking. He holds the flame from the lighter under her chin the way a person might hold a buttercup. She can feel the heat and her skin tingles. He lets the flame climb upwards. At first she feels nothing, then agony. Wells leans over and blows air on her face. “Fire is a chemical reaction that needs three ingredients for it to occur. Do you know what they are?”

  Sam gulps. Knowledge from a high-school chemistry class floods into her head. Oxygen, the air she is struggling to breathe. Heat, which is created by friction—a spark will do. Fuel, which is anything combustible: wood, paper, her. She smells singed flesh. Hers. She remembers to scream, and he jams his hand back into her mouth. She gags. Being afraid of what will come next is worse than the pain. Being bent to another’s will is the worst of all. Some part of her disappears, leaving behind a rind of rage and fear and shame. She has never felt so many things so thickly. She holds up her hands to make him stop, and he takes his knuckles out of her mouth.

  “There’s no video,” she says. She touches her chin, and her fingers come away dotted with blood.

  “It’s in a safe place,” he replies.

  liar. Bastard. Psycho.

  His lower body anchors her in place while he manoeuvres sideways to get at his briefcase. At the sound of a snap, she twists her head around. The briefcase has been popped open, revealing a blowtorch. He picks it up, raises it over her head as if he is going to hit her with it, then lowers it so it is level with her eyes. The torch is shaped like a gun with a brass tube, a metal handle, and a trigger. He is going to weld her, braze her, melt her skin away.

  “It’s a gas torch.” His breath on her face inflames her burned chin. “It uses pure oxygen instead of air to create a higher temperature flame. I can make you tell me the truth.” He stares at her with his tongue poking between his lips as if he can barely contain it in his mouth. Beneath his pants, his penis twitches against her crotch. He might rape her. Rape happens to lots of women—guess it’s her turn. After all, she gripped her sister’s dangerous life. Sam realizes she holds two contradictory beliefs wound together like an Ouroboros: she will never be harmed and she deserves to be harmed.

  He lifts the strap of her tank top, and she wrenches herself away from him. She kicks her leg against his bookshelf, and books collide onto the floor, falling on them. His grasp loosens, and she slides out from under him. The torch rolls from his hand onto the floor. Picking up the torch, Sam throws it at a front window. Glass cracks, shatters onto the floor.

  “Bitch,” he screams and dashes over to the window.

  Before he can turn and catch her, Sam kicks books out of her way and opens the door. He runs back, breathing hard, and grabs at her. She whirls around and punches the door closed against his hand, and then bolts down the stairs. When she hits the street, she looks over her shoulder. He’s jogging after her.

  Screaming for help, she enters a corner store. Around her people’s mouths move like goldfish nuzzling the glass of an aquarium. She ignores them and heads to the back of the store. Wells doesn’t follow her inside. Instead he stands in front of the window looking at her. She paces back and forth in front of the fridge, dodging out of the way of patrons taking out cartons of milk and bottles of beer. An Asian man working at the counter stares at her for a moment before turning back to serve the line of customers. After a little while, Sam walks up to him and asks if she can use the phone.

  He squints. “What for?”

  She’s not sure. Should she ask him to dial 911? But she doesn’t require an ambulance and might have to pay for emergency services. “I need to call a cab.”

  He flaps his hand in the direction of the door. “Go outside.”

  She swallows. Stares out the window. Notices Wells has disappeared. But what if she sees him? Her mind repeats her fear like a chorus: what if I see him?

  She follows a group of young men out of the store. Tucks herself beside the door so she can get back inside if she needs to. A customer entering the store blasts his annoyance at her while she looks around. Where has Wells gone? Not seeing him, wondering if he’s preparing a trap for her, is almost as frightening as having him chase her. Cabs amble by and her hand lifts. One slows down to double-park in front of the store. As Sam dashes over to the vehicle, Wells’s face flits through her peripheral vision. Turning her head, she sees him standing at the entrance of his apartment, watching her. She bangs into the open door of the cab, nearly falling, b
ut manages to climb into the back seat. Through a glass partition, she gives the driver the coordinates of her hotel. He nods but doesn’t seem to be paying attention. As he speeds past other cars and turns down streets without bothering to signal, he carries on hostile dialogues with the other drivers, even going so far as to invent their responses. Mental illness is everywhere.

  As the cab crosses the Brooklyn Bridge, Sam wonders if she should tell the driver to take her to a police station. But what would she tell the police? She went into the house of a strange man she just met who claimed to be a former employee of the CIA? They would lock her in a psych ward. Blaming her burns on aliens would be easier—at least that way, she could join a support group. She laughs but feels a spasm of tears swelling beneath her mirth. She wants to go home. Shit Wells has her wallet. She has no money. She has money in her bank account, of course, but her debit card is gone.

  She knocks on the window behind the driver’s neck. When he stops at the next light, he slides the glass open.

  “I’m sorry, but I have no money. Someone stole my wallet.”

  The cab balks. While cars whiz around them honking their horns, the cab driver gets out in the middle of the street and opens her door. He spits on the ground. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  The cab driver has dumped Sam in Manhattan. She asks a woman who looks like a college student for a subway token. The woman’s face constricts. Reluctantly, she draws out a token. Sam looks down and sees her leg is bleeding.

  When she gets to her hotel room, she discovers someone has slipped a manila envelope under the door of her room. She picks the envelope up from the floor and sets it on the night table. Then she opens the mini-bar and takes out a bottle of whisky. Retrieving a glass from the bathroom, she pours herself some of the whisky, then leaves her room to collect ice from the machine down the hall. Dropping some of the ice into her drink, she gulps it down. She doesn’t want to get drunk; she just wants to feel less scared.

  She goes into the bathroom to clean her burns as best as she can. Wrapping up the remaining ice into a T-shirt, she gets into bed and places the compress under her legs. Then she opens the envelope and reads the contents of the fax she ordered. The cubes in her drink snap and crackle.

  The first paragraph of the police report is euphemistic. The decedent was observed unresponsive inside room 211 of the Chelsea Hotel on 222 West Twenty-Third Street on a date almost exactly five years earlier. Chloe was found dressed in brown corduroy pants and a black T-shirt. Her clothes were wet with blood. Wet—meaning liquid in enough quantity to dye clothes. Sam hobbles to her feet and runs to the toilet. She retches but nothing comes up.

  She leaves the bathroom. Picks the report up from the floor and tears it in half with shaking hands. What is she trying to prove? She doesn’t know anything about science or forensics. She can’t argue that the trajectory of the bullet makes a finding of suicide impossible. Standing over a trash can, she rips the pages into smaller and smaller pieces. For reasons she can’t explain, she doesn’t want anyone else to see the report. When she finishes tearing it up, she sits on the edge of the bed and dials Romey’s cell. Still no answer. Sam hangs up. What is she going to do? She has no way of paying for the hotel. She doesn’t want to call her father. She has too much pride, and he will blame her. Sam already feels like what happened is her fault, which is more than enough for her. Lying back on the bed, she starts to bawl. Her nose runs, but she doesn’t bother to get a tissue. Tears pool into her earlobes.

  Someone bangs against the wall, yelling, “Shut up in there.”

  She stops wailing, breathes from her stomach the way some earth muffin once taught her. When she is a little calmer, she remembers her passport is in the glove compartment of the car—she will be able to get through the border. She goes through the pockets of all of her clothes and manages to find a twenty dollar American bill and a Canadian ten. Gas money. After stuffing her clothes into her knapsack, she retrieves her hair gel and toothbrush from the bathroom. She calls Romey again, this time at home. When her voice mail finishes playing, Sam leaves a message. “Hi Romey, this is Sam. I’m in New York, but I’m leaving for Montreal tonight. I’m not doing too well. Some guy tried to kill me this afternoon. I’m not trying to get you to feel sorry for me. I just had to tell someone. I really don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”

  She hauls her knapsack onto her back and leaves the hotel. Getting into the car, she drives away as fast as she can. Wells has her wallet, but worse he has taken the Ecdysis Conspiracy away from her and the possibility for heroics it gave her. Is he the one who sent her the postcard? He and Mark seem to have the greatest investment in the conspiracy, except how would they have known about Sam’s existence? How did they track her down? Of course one can find a lot of information on the Internet, but, if that’s the case, the note could just as equally be random, sent by a conspiracy buff who wound facts, data, and speculation into a narrative. Who knows? Does she care? Not really. Caring is beyond her. She isn’t angry or depressed, or at least not as she has ever experienced it. She is empty, a chant breathed out of someone else’s mouth.

  Around dawn, after Sam passes the border into Canada, she stops at one of the gas stations designed for truckers, parks the car, and sleeps for what winds up being ten hours. Her burns throb, waking her at intervals, so she is conscious of her dreams. She is a snake. She slithers through a desert, a place where heat offers no comfort, light administers no clarity, and stillness provides no peace. The desolation doesn’t matter; she is just a snake. A predator, except suddenly she is prey. Something is after her. Something with holes in its face, light and dust where there should be eyes. She tries to run but has no legs. All she has to get away is the movement of her flesh.

  When she wakes up, her fear diminishes only to be replaced by more fear. Some guy tried to kill her. While trying to find out what happened to Chloe, Sam almost died. She touches the back of her leg, feels a crust of skin and blood.

  She remembers reading that one of the Boston Strangler’s victims answered the door by saying, “How do I know you’re not the Boston Strangler?” Going into Well’s apartment was so fucking stupid. But all along Sam has been stupid. Only now has she stitched enough information together to answer the question of how her sister died. The Ecdysis Conspiracy is real—it just isn’t what Sam thought it was. Chloe’s Ecdysis Conspiracy is “fuck you” and “pay attention to me.” The only question Sam has left is: who was in on it?

  Around mid-afternoon Sam arrives in Montreal, drives over to St. Laurent Boulevard, and parks half a block away from the entrance to Omar’s escort agency. She is going to make Omar tell her once and for all what he has been hiding. The problem is he doesn’t think he owes Sam shit. She has no moves left but settles for what worked in her first meeting with him: ambush.

  She doesn’t want to be blocked from his office by his receptionist, so she decides to wait for him to leave the building. Anxiety has cannibalized her hunger, but she wishes she could get a coffee. Unfortunately, her money was spent on gas. Would Romey give Sam a loan until she gets another bank card? Maybe. If Sam can find her.

  The sun swims through the windshield, heating up the black upholstery covering the front seats. Afternoon merges into evening. Sam listens to the radio, flipping the dial, stopping frequently at McGill University’s radio station. A show comes on in which a man insists the CIA were involved in the Gulf War on the side of Iraq while his female partner scoffs—Scully and Mulder decking it out.

  He says, “This is real. It was reported in mainstream magazines like Forbes and The New York Times. A bank in the United States gave five billion dollars to Iraq during the Gulf War. The government blamed it on rogue operators, who were later prosecuted, but the media and Federal Reserve officials claimed the government was lying because it wouldn’t be possible for a bank to do a transaction of that size to a foreign government in the Middle East without government knowledge. The CIA had to have authorized the loan.”

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nbsp; The coincidence of this news item with the recent events in Sam’s life is odd, but she doesn’t care. She is so over the Gulf War.

  Just as rush hour is ending, Omar strolls down the stairs of his building accompanied by a mannequin wearing a span-dex dress barely covering her ass. He chivalrously opens the passenger door of his car for his escort, then walks around and gets into the driver’s seat. Not bothering to gear up gradually, he roars onto a main boulevard.

  Sam tails them. Yesterday she was the quarry, today she is the hunter. This morning she was on the run; now she is chasing someone. She likes the feeling. I’m in control, she whispers. She is lying. She has never been so out of control.

  Because she is being careful not to be seen by him, she almost misses Omar’s turn off onto a highway. But he’s tooling around in his chrome car, so she spots him. Surveillance of the image-conscious is not too difficult. Sam wonders if he watches gangster movies. Probably. After all, she watches movies straight people make about lesbians.

  She tries to keep behind Omar by about four cars, but the perilous driving style of commuters keeps dumping her further away from him. After ten minutes of being convinced she will lose him, she tracks him off an exit onto another major street. A red light allows her to tag him again, and she follows him up another street, where he drives into a motel parking lot. By ducking into a gas station, she manages to wheel around and double back while he is parking his car. She parks the rental car just outside the lobby, even though she could get towed or get a ticket. But, compared to her reckless plan, such concerns are minor. She gets out of the car and surveys the motel, a line of grim, grey bunkers with a solitary front door and no back patio. The dwellings wind in a C-shape along a slope overlooking a snarl of highways. There are no neon signs boasting pools or luxury rooms or even colour televisions. Everything about the place is temporary, a means to an end.