Skin (Night Fall ™)

by Richard Reece

  Text copyright © 2010 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.

  Web site address: www.lernerbooks.com

  Jasper, Rick, 1948–

  Skin / by Rick Jasper.

  p. cm. — (Night fall)

  ISBN 978–0–7613–6143–5 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  [1. Horror stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J32Sk 2010

  [Fic]—dc222010002351

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1—BP—7/15/10

  eISBN: 978-0-7613-6546-4 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2940-6 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2939-0 (mobi)

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there

  wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before

  —Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

  1

  Mom buried her face in People while we waited in the examining room for the doctor. The nurse had seemed nice, if a little frustrated, when she was taking my temperature. She took it twice. Then she frowned at the thermometer and scribbled something down.

  There was a shuffle in the hall, a pause, then a knock. The doctor came in, holding out his hand. “Hello, I’m Dr. Farmer.”

  Dr. Zach Farmer was younger than I’d expected. He was looking at me intently, the way doctors do. I could tell he was wondering about my sweater. It was the warmest thing I could find, a wool cardigan Mom’s last boyfriend had left at the house nine months ago. I’m sure it looked out of place. It was early fall, but the weather was still like summer.

  Mom jumped up. “Good morning, doctor, I’m Lucille. I’m Nick’s mother. I hope this won’t take a long time.” She was dying for a cigarette—it’d been half an hour since the last one. She was crazy jittery.

  The doctor’s eyes did something for a split second—annoyance? Then he was back to professional. “I hope so too, Mrs. Barry.

  “Tell me about your skin, Nick. How long since it got serious?”

  Mom broke in, “I keep telling that boy—sugar, chocolate, pizza . . . . What does he expect? Now the zits are out of control, and we have to go to the doctor! Teenagers!”

  I thought about disappearing.

  “Well,” the doctor said, “acne is different for every person, and the connection with diet hasn’t ever really been proven.” Then, turning to me, “So the good news, Nick, is that this isn’t your fault.”

  Mom retreated to her chair and her magazine. Score one for the doc.

  “So when did this start?”

  “Two weeks ago, maybe three.”

  “Does it come and go? Get worse and then get better?”

  “No, it started, and it’s just gotten worse.”

  “Do you play any sports, Nick? Any hard exercise?”

  Mom rolled her eyes. OK, Mom, I thought, I’m a nerd. I read. Books. Deal with it.

  I answered the question. “No.”

  “OK.” He looked at his notes. “I see you’re allergic to cats.”

  Mom again. “Not till a few weeks ago. Now it’s more like the cat’s allergic to Nick. Toby won’t go near him. When Nick comes close, he hisses.”

  “You aren’t taking any medications?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you feel different, physically, since your skin broke out?”

  “I feel cold.”

  “Chills? Shivering?”

  “Cold. Like winter.”

  “I noticed the sweater. Do you feel cold today?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, let’s take a look at your skin. Are you breaking out anywhere besides your face? Your chest, back, or shoulders? Usually bad acne spreads around the upper body.”

  “No.”

  He turned a bright light on my face, and I closed my eyes. For a moment he held my chin, where there were two large, oozing pimples. He felt my forehead.

  “Hmmm. Your skin does feel cold. Have you been popping or scratching any of these?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “OK, let’s look at your ears.” He quickly checked my ears, nose, and throat. “Now I’m going to listen to your heart and lungs. Could you unbutton your sweater?

  “Take a deep breath. Breathe out. Another breath—”

  He sounded puzzled. “Have you been having any

  breathing problems? A cough? Wheezing?”

  I shook my head.

  “OK.” He moved the stethoscope. “Deep breath again . . . . OK, hold your breath for a moment . . . .”

  He stopped again and frowned. Then he saw me watching him. I probably looked worried.

  “It’s all right,” he said, like he was trying to reassure both of us. “You are breathing. It’s just not a sound I’ve heard before. Here—” He handed me the stethoscope. “Listen for yourself.”

  I put the discs to my ears, not sure what to expect. What I heard made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It sounded like people. People screaming.

  2

  My name is Nick Barry, and I’m invisible. At least I was until now. I live with my mom, who mostly doesn’t see me, unless I cause a problem for her.

  By “problem,” I mean anything that would force her to pay any extra attention to me. As she often points out, her life is hard enough without me making it harder.

  My father left when I was a baby. Mom says that she didn’t know him for long. He was handsome and smart and wanted to do something with his life. He tried community college twice, but, the way my mom tells it, he spent too much time at the local casinos instead of the local library.

  Mom works two jobs. During the week, she’s an assistant manager at Monica’s Gift Emporium. On weekends she cleans offices. When she comes home, all she wants is a steaming hot bubble bath, a fresh pack of smokes, and whatever is on the Lifetime channel. She’s tired, and God forbid that something unexpected should mess up her routine. Something like me missing the bus home from school, or needing homework supplies, or the trouble I’m telling about here.

  I’m a freshman at Bridgewater High School, and I’ve been pretty much invisible there as well. BHS is even bigger than Bridgewater Middle School. I went there three years without making a close friend or even having the same teacher twice. The popular kids, the ones who run for student council, are always giving speeches about getting involved in after-school activities. But those things mean “extra” meetings and fees, and “parental involvement is encouraged.” Mom would freak.

  I’m not whining. Being invisible isn’t all bad. As long as I keep up with my schoolwork and do my chores, my time is my own. Since I was little I’ve been free to explore the town of Bridgewater and the big woods on the outskirts, near where I live.

  In English class last year we could get extra credit for memorizing a poem. The one I learned had this line: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Now I think of that whenever I’m walking there. It sounds strange, but you can almost hear the quiet on the outskirts. Old paths, overgrown with brush and thorns, wind up and down steep hills. Black rocks, some of them taller than I am, seem to grow right out of the ground. And everywhere, running in random directions, are old, crumbling walls made of flat, gray stones.

  And there’s the place I cal
l the well. It’s a stone wall like the others, but it’s built in a circle about six feet across. I don’t know whether it really is—or was—a well. But there’s water at the bottom. I’ve dropped pebbles in and heard them splash. There’s something peaceful and eerie about that place. Sometimes I’ll take a book and spend hours there. That’s where I was sitting one night, around dusk, the first time the coldness came over me. Not a shivery, goose-bumpy cold, but a cold like ice living in my bones.

  Later, I was sitting by that same well when I decided to ask Mom if we could see a doctor about my skin. For two weeks I’d been hoping it would clear up on its own. I’d used my lunch money to buy some zit cream at the drugstore. I followed all the directions, but it just got worse. And everything I could find online said the same thing: If it doesn’t work, see your doctor.

  After all my years of being invisible, kids at school were starting to notice me. Passing them in the hall, I’d notice them staring. Once a group of girls who thought I couldn’t hear them whispered, “Eeuww!”

  I waited till Mom was relaxed in front of the TV. Then I waited for a commercial.

  “Mom, my skin’s breaking out really bad.”

  She continued looking at the screen. “You’re a teenager, Nick. You get pimples. Keep your face clean, watch what you eat.”

  “I’ve been doing that, and it’s not helping. I think I need to see a doctor.”

  A deep sigh. “A doctor for pimples? He’ll tell you the same thing I just said and charge me for it. What’s he going to do, send you to the zit hospital?”

  “Mom, look at me!”

  “It’s been a hard day, Nick. I just want to . . .”

  “Please, look at me!”

  And she did. And her eyes got a little wider, like those kids I passed in the hall. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “No, but it’s getting worse.”

  Another sigh. I was officially a problem. “OK. I don’t know how we’ll afford it, but I’ll make an appointment. I’ll use my lunch hour.”

  And that’s how I wound up at the doctor’s. That’s how I wound up hearing a strange noise coming from my own body. A noise that sounded like people trapped in a very crowded part of hell.

  3

  The doctor was watching me. “Pretty weird,

  huh?”

  “Uh huh.” I gave him back his stethoscope.

  “But no trouble breathing?”

  “No.”

  “OK. Just to be sure, we’re going to do a chest X-ray.”

  Mom hadn’t seemed to be paying attention. Now you could have heard her groan across the hall. “Doctor, we have to pay for this! I don’t have insurance. Nick has pimples! You can see that without an X-ray!”

  “We just need to do a couple of tests to make sure Nick doesn’t have any problems besides his complexion. A lot of our patients have limited funds. We won’t charge you more than you can afford.”

  “I’ll meet you at the car, Mom,” I said, giving her a “go away” look.

  She sighed and headed up the hall, digging in her purse for cigarettes.

  The nurse came in and took blood from my right arm. I had to go down the hall and pee in a cup. When I came back, the doctor and the nurse were discussing my case.

  She: “I know it’s impossible, but that’s what it said.”

  He: “Take it again, OK? Maybe it wasn’t in long enough.”

  She: “It beeped.”

  The doctor looked at me. “Nick, this is Cindy. She’s going to take your temperature one more time. Then we’ll get that X-ray.”

  Three minutes later he was back. “It was the same, doctor,” Cindy said. “95.8.”

  The doctor frowned. “Wow. Well, Nick, you said you were cold, right?”

  I nodded.

  “All the time?”

  “Sometimes.” I thought about that day in the woods. “It comes and goes.”

  He motioned me to follow him, and we went through a door that said “Radiology.” He told me to take off my sweater and shirt. The nurse sat me on a high chair next to a panel on the wall and put a lead apron on my lap.

  “OK,” the doctor said. “Press your chest against that panel in front of you. Take a deep breath and hold it.”

  A quick buzzing sound and it was over. They told me I could put my clothes back on. I was just putting an arm in my shirt when the doctor said, “Wait a minute, Nick.” He was looking at my chest. “Looks like you’ve got a little rash or something.”

  It was something. Not so much a rash as a line of faint scratch marks. I would have thought Toby made them—he often scratches a little when I pet him—but Toby hadn’t come near me in weeks. The funny thing was that the scratch marks looked almost like writing.

  “Do you ever scratch yourself?” the doctor asked.

  “You mean like cutting? No way.”

  He felt the surface of the scratches and shrugged. They were faint. The writing thing was probably my imagination.

  “All right, you can get dressed,” he said.

  Then Cindy appeared with a regular camera. “The blemishes on your face are probably acne, Nick,” the doctor said. “But they’re a little different from what I usually see. I’m going to send some photos to a friend who’s an expert in dermatology, or skin diseases. We’ll see what he says. We’ll have results of your tests in a week or so. I’m sending you with some samples of a cream for your face. Here’s my card. If things don’t get better in three days, call me.”

  It was Thursday. In three days, things would definitely not be better.

  4

  I grabbed my gut and doubled over when the fist hit my stomach. At the same time, someone was grabbing me, trying to force me to the ground. People were shouting. I punched out blindly with my right fist and heard a yelp as something crunched under my knuckles. Then the whistle was blowing, and the weight on my back suddenly wasn’t there.

  “Knock it off!” a voice screamed. “Stay where you are and don’t move!”

  I opened my eyes. There was blood on my hand and the front of my shirt. Coach Tyree had a headlock on Stevie Furman, who was blowing bubbles of blood and snot from his nose. Jack Stenson, all two hundred pounds of him, stood off to the side, glaring at me. Cowering to the side, looking like he was trying not to cry, was Eric Timothy.

  “Get up, Barry!” Coach yelled. “Everybody! You’re all seeing Blackstreet! Now!”

  The fight had started with Eric. That it was a fight, and not just another chance for Jack to torment the “girly boy,” was probably my fault.

  I’m not friends with Eric. I’m not really friends with anyone. But Jack Stenson is a disease. He’s been a bully since kindergarten. Now he seems to have chosen torturing the weak as a career.

  Eric, in this case, fit the role of “the weak.” Thin, blond, and hyper. He wasn’t much of a student, except in music. He played violin every year at the school holiday concert. I’m no judge, but I’d heard adults say he was very, very good. Eric stuttered a little, but he was OK to talk to if you wanted to talk about Mozart or Bach or Beethoven. He kind of lit up then. It made you happy to see that, because the rest of his life didn’t look that great.

  Stenson can smell guys like Eric the way a shark can smell blood. It was at the end of gym class when I saw Stenson jacking Eric up against a locker. I should have ignored it. Everyone else did. But when I heard the stuff he was saying, and saw Eric look helplessly in my direction, I couldn’t just do nothing.

  Right by Stenson, as always, was his slave, Stevie Furman (rhymes with vermin). Little Stevie had as many victim qualities as Eric, but he’d sold out. He saved himself by going over to the dark side.

  I set my books down and spoke to Stenson. “What’s up, Jack? Eric do something to you?”

  “What’s it to you, pizza-face?” Stenson sneered and put Eric down. “You his boyfriend?”

  Stevie giggled.

  I tried a different approach. I got between Stenson and Eric and said, “Eric, let’s go. We’ve go
t class.”

  That’s when I got the stomach shot from Jack, and Stevie jumped in to help.

  5

  In Assistant Principal Blackstreet’s office, we all stood awaiting our sentences. Roger “Butch” Blackstreet was big, around six-foot-five. He had a head like a bucket, almost no neck, and hands the size of dinner plates. He was also a town legend. He came from an old family, and he’d been Bridgewater High’s greatest football player ever. There were still trophies in the school display case with his name on them. He’d been a Marine in Vietnam and won some medals too. He had started at Bridgewater in the seventies as a gym teacher and, of course, football coach.

  He was also famous for his temper, which seemed to get worse as he got older. His players feared him. Three years ago at the homecoming game, he really lost it. His assistants had to hold him back from attacking a player who’d missed a tackle. After that, some parents threatened to sue the school if he wasn’t fired as coach. So he was moved into administration. His job was mostly handling discipline problems—including his own. Word was, he still took anger-management classes.

  Coach Tyree briefed him on the incident.

  “I hope you men are proud of yourselves!” Blackstreet began.

  I looked around and saw no men, and no one who seemed to be proud. Stenson was thinking about revenge. Stevie was thinking about his nose. I was thinking about how this would upset Mom. Eric was probably thinking about Mozart. We all knew what would happen.

  “This kind of behavior is a disgrace to Bridgewater High,” he said. “As of this minute, I’m suspending you all for a week.”

  Nobody said anything, but Blackstreet stared us down, as if expecting a challenge. “Your parents will be contacted. Making up your class work will be up to you.”