House of Skin

by Jonathan Janz

  As terrible as it was, she knew Ted could never leave her basement alive, and it was this thought more than anything that sent her to the kitchen sink to vomit.

  Paul’s head jerked up, his lungs sucking in frightened breath. He gripped the steering wheel, shook the sleep out of his head. Stifling a yawn, he checked the digital clock.

  2:14.

  He’d sue the pill makers. Who the hell heard of a guy falling asleep after a handful of caffeine pills?

  He thought of checking the map, though he knew he was nowhere near his destination. He’d be lucky to make Shadeland by dawn. What had possessed him to drive at night? In retrospect, didn’t it make far more sense to leave early in the morning and arrive in the afternoon?

  Too late now. He was already most of the way there and he wasn’t about to turn around. It occurred to him to pull over and catch some shut-eye, but that would be conceding defeat. He’d finish what he’d started if that meant driving all night.

  He jolted. He’d been dreaming again. Good lord, what was the matter with him? How long had he been out? Ten seconds? Thirty? He imagined himself cruising along at sixty-five miles per hour with his mouth open and his hands dozing on the wheel, a rolling missile careening toward whatever poor son of a bitch happened to be in the other lane.

  He had to keep awake. If stimulants couldn’t do it, maybe music would. He opened up the storage box under his armrest and plucked out his CD case. Most of what he had was either country or classical, and Paul trusted neither to keep him alert. Finally, he flipped to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. If that wouldn’t do it, nothing would. He thumbed in the disc and fast-forwarded to “Creeping Death.”

  Paul’s chin bobbed. The situation was growing dire. He checked the clock.

  2:26.

  He’d never make it there alive. Desperate, he rolled down the window and let the wind blast his greasy hair. It didn’t help. The fragrance of the pines bordering the road lulled him deeper into that soft, tranquil place. Paul whipped his head to stay awake. He’d never been this tired before. His fatigue was an undertow sucking him toward the comforting blue depths of sleep. His blood was suffused with caffeine, his ears assaulted by heavy metal, his skin pelted with frigid air; yet the combination of these things only underscored the futility of his resistance. Sleep, an inexorable crawling glacier, plowed through every barrier, freezing his blood and flattening his defenses. The road seemed a million miles wide. For as far as his dimming eyes could see there were no cars, no houses, nothing but a measureless wasteland spreading out in the darkness.

  A jarring thud and a high-pitched scream. Shocked into wakefulness, he threw a puzzled glance at the road, then at the clock.

  2:31.

  Had he been out the entire time? Surely the car couldn’t have steered itself for five minutes. For some reason, the sight of the overhead mirror made his stomach feel loose and quivery. He spotted nothing in the road behind him to confirm the sick fear backstroking in his belly, yet he wondered what he’d have seen had he checked the mirror immediately after the thud, the scream.

  The bile in his throat demanded he slow the car and turn around. Paul made a U-turn with hands he couldn’t feel.

  His racing thoughts conjured a hitchhiker’s limp body, bloodied and broken, balled into a lump in the middle of the highway. The Civic would arrive there just as another car pulled up and discovered what he’d done. The police report would show that Paul had veered onto the shoulder and clipped the man, sent his shattered body skittering end over end. His dream of beginning a new life as a writer with money in the bank and a large estate would be replaced by a decade in prison for manslaughter.

  His headlights splashed over a dark shape in the opposite lane. He glimpsed something large and motionless surrounded by two or three smaller moving shapes.

  Then he was closing his eyes and whispering thanks, for the large shape was a mother possum and the moving objects around her were her surviving children. Under normal circumstances he’d have felt terrible for orphaning these baby possums, but the sight of them now made him feel like opening a bottle of champagne.

  Delirious with adrenaline and relief, he pushed open the car door and moved toward the carcass. Swollen from her recent pregnancy, the mother’s stomach loomed white and large in the headlights’ glare. Scattered about her broken body lay four of her dead children. Three looked peaceful and intact, as though they’d lain down in the road for a moonlit nap. The fourth was torn in half, the two sections of its body connected only by a shiny string of intestine. The eye-watering scent of fecal matter enshrouded him. He shielded his nose with the side of his hand.

  Three more babies were crawling about in a daze. All three were slathered in a patina of blood, yet Paul couldn’t tell whether it belonged to them or their mother. The giant possum lay unmoving inside a spreading pool of blood. Sickened and fascinated by the mother’s enormous body, Paul sidled around to get a better look. He felt his gorge leap.

  Two little legs, besotted with blood, kicked and strained, flicking little droplets on the highway. A surviving baby possum was digging into its mother’s stomach. Transfixed, Paul watched the little blood-covered baby worm its way through cartilage and sinew as it tried to burrow inside the corpse.

  At first he didn’t want to credit the smacking sounds for what they were, yet the sounds and the frenetic twisting of the baby possum’s body could only be the little devil feasting on its dead mother. Buried as it was from the shoulders up, it was inching its way to the heart.

  Appalled by the burrowing cannibal and forgetting his revulsion, Paul endeavored to yank the baby out of its mother’s corpse. Try as he might to get a finger hold on the kicking feet or the twitching tail, the baby eluded him. He didn’t want to get too close, lest its crimson head appear and bite his finger. At this thought, he felt the mother’s body shift.

  Paul cried out and stumbled away as the mother’s face rose and snapped at his arm. He landed on his rump and stared at her in shock. She bared her teeth at him and hissed. Then, instead of batting away her feasting child, she lay back and appeared to rest. Soon, two more surviving babies were swarming over the dying mother and digging out scraps of flesh on which to feed. The smallest possum chewed on one of the mother’s teats and drank the blood that sluiced forth instead of milk.

  Paul looked down and found that his heels were resting in the pool of blood. He shivered and scrambled away. Then, hearing the sounds of lips smacking and voices chittering, he drew himself to his feet and scuttled back inside his car. As he drove away from the scene of the accident, he found that he was fully awake.

  Chapter Three

  When Paul came to an opening in the forest, he made out a wooden mailbox whose carved, ornate letters spelled out WATERMERE.

  Finally.

  He signaled despite being the only living soul for miles. When the Civic left the thick gravel and disappeared into the woods, its wheels aligning with the twin tire paths that doubled for a road, he felt an odd twinge of recognition. The hickories and oaks and maples leaned over the road like knights with swords drawn, admitting their king.

  And wasn’t that the truth? Unless the pictures the lawyers had sent him had been doctored in some way, Paul was about to take possession of a mansion. He chuckled, giddy with disbelief. He was a modern-day baron, a landed count.

  Bushes thwacked the Civic, reeling him back toward reality. He’d need to do something about the flora threatening to overtake the lane. He knew Myles had been an old man, but he still could have employed someone, a local kid maybe, to keep the road from going to seed.

  The woods opened up, and all he could do was stop the car and stare.

  Watermere was beautiful.

  He couldn’t believe that this sprawling Victorian home was his.

  As Paul pulled forward, he took it all in. Though majestic, the house needed work. He noted the way the porch awning sagged, the cracks in the brick façade, the dead ivy. He doubted the old man had spent much
time on upkeep in his twilight years. He studied the detached double garage up ahead and wondered whether either side was occupied.

  Paul stopped, threw the car into park. Getting out, he entered the side door of the garage. Flicking the switch, he saw it was empty. The closed air smelled vaguely of kerosene. He scanned the wall for the automatic door opener but couldn’t find one. Then, he spotted the rope attached to the garage door lying there on the floor. He crossed to it, bent and lifted.

  The garage door roared up on its tracks. It made a frightful racket, but something about the noise appealed to him, as though he were announcing his ownership of the house by startling it awake.

  Climbing back into the Civic, he shifted into gear and rolled into the stall. He cut the engine and got out, relishing the simple pleasure of housing his car in a garage. It was the first time, other than parking garages, he’d had the Civic indoors. He patted its roof fondly and went out.

  Paul stared up at the house. He’d never imagined he would live in such a place. In fact, he never thought he’d own a house period. His father always told him how silly it was to waste money on rent, but Paul feared ownership, as though purchasing a home in the city would somehow bind him to it for the rest of his life. It was admitting defeat to buy a home near his family, he reasoned, so he kept his crackerbox apartment. Now he understood the pride his father had talked about.

  He trotted toward the porch and mounted it in three strides. It winded him. He stood there panting, his belly drooping over his waistband.

  He resolved to get into better shape.

  Cupping his temples, he pushed his face close to the beveled door window and discerned a foyer made of checkered tile.

  A manila envelope lay at his feet. He picked it up and ripped the top open. Bypassing the papers crammed inside, his groping fingers found the key, pulled it out. Taking one more deep breath, he sighed and slid the key into the lock. A dull click sounded. He thumbed the steel button.

  Paul went in.

  Ted waited, his head pounding like a gong, for her to come down the stairs. He tried to call to her in a reasonable voice.

  It was difficult to muster.

  First of all, he was in a goddamn basement. He had to bellow just to be heard. Secondly, she’d positioned him on his stomach so every word he spoke seemed to peter out and die on the dirty cement floor. It was getting hard to breathe. His chest flat on the ground, his lungs pressed flat, he felt like a goddamned turtle. He’d waited long enough for her to come down here and loosen his bonds. Now he was through with the nice-guy approach.

  “If you don’t get your skinny ass down here right now to untie these ropes, I’m going to swear to the police that you tortured me. You’ll do a life sentence. Mark my words.” He continued that way, hurling every vile insult he could muster.

  The clanging in his brain was like black death. He couldn’t stand this much longer. He glanced again at his right hand, his left, tugged with both feet, but they wouldn’t budge. The ropes around his limbs were firm, unyielding. Their scabrous threads chafed like barbed wire. The iced tea coating his skin wasn’t painful but the cloying scent and clammy feel of it were terribly annoying. Like when his kids ate too much cotton candy and their goddamn faces became grime collectors, dirty human Band-Aids that insisted on following him around and soiling the legs of his pants.

  Brand’s fury grew.

  He knew he’d pissed her off but that didn’t give her the right to tie him to the floor. What the fuck kind of a freakshow was she?

  Light washed through the basement. He blinked to adjust his eyes. As he whipped his head around to take in his bearings he heard her feet padding down the stairs.

  She was barefoot. Resting his cheek on the dirty cement, he strained to make out the rest of her. A white sports bra and tiny black shorts. Where were the rest of her clothes? he wondered. Did she think she was going to play some weird S & M game with him? The time for all that was gone. All he wanted now was to get to the nearest police station. Now that the light was on, he could see the blood on his wrists where he’d cut himself pulling on the ropes. The scent of his own blood, like sheet metal slicked with rain, deepened his outrage. His Rolex was gone, he noted without surprise. She hadn’t commented on it when he showed it to her in the car, but the bitch had probably been eyeing it all evening.

  “Let me go,” he said.

  She gave no answer but her toes rubbed against one another. He watched them and felt his anger wax.

  “Why did you tie me up?”

  There was a feral edge to his voice he couldn’t disguise. Just as well, he thought. She needs to know how pissed you are. It’s fair warning for what’s going to happen to her the moment she lets you go.

  Ted grinned and thought how easy it would be to slaughter the bitch down here in the basement. He already had the rope marks on his wrists and ankles to prove she’d confined him. The jury would see he’d acted in self-defense, that the woman was a violent lunatic. In fact, if she stood a little closer to one of his hands he could seize her, put a vise-grip on her ankle that would make her squeal for mercy.

  And then?

  His grin shrank. If he managed to grab her, just where would that get him? Could he hold her there with one hand and force her to untie his bonds?

  He swallowed, unsure of what to do. Had she heard the things he’d screamed at her? He thought she probably had. Why else had her coming down here so closely coincided with the most outrageous of his insults, the accusations about blowjobs and goats?

  Whatever the case might be, he had to keep her down here, had to keep this woman from losing her temper again. He remembered her eyes just before she bashed him over the head with that damned stein. The indignity of it infuriated him—knocked unconscious with a beer stein. But he had to keep that rage dormant and work to win back the side of her with whom he’d spent most of the evening, the girl that had danced with him, kissed him.

  “Look,” he said as kindly as he could, “I’m sorry for the way I acted. I’m a married man and I should have been up front with you about that.”

  He waited to see if he’d made a dent. She stood silent.

  He spoke to her ankles because he couldn’t see any higher. “And if I hurt you I apologize. I’m also sorry about the things I’ve been yelling but you must understand that this is very uncomfortable. I’m in a lot of pain, Julia.”

  Was she going to let him lie here and talk to himself all night?

  “As you can see, my wrists are bleeding and that knock you gave me on the head probably gave me a concussion.” He became aware of a throbbing in his hip. “And I dare say you weren’t very gentle in bringing me down here. The fact is, I’m in trouble, Julia. I need medical attention.”

  He felt her kneel beside him and he craned his neck to look up at her. From the way she was crouching, her buttocks resting on her heels, he could see how defined she was. The muscles in her legs were long and slender and hard.

  She was holding a hypodermic needle.

  “What are you doing with that?” he asked, voice tightening.

  “I have to do this,” she said. Her voice trembled a little.

  He realized it was the first time she’d spoken since entering the basement. He wished she’d stayed quiet. Her fear, he realized, could be good or bad. Good if she could be frightened into letting him go. Bad if it made her irrational.

  Judging from the needle, his money was on the latter.

  “Julia, just let me up so we can talk about this.”

  “Please stay calm,” she said.

  “You’re joking, right? You knock me out and drag me down the stairs—hell, maybe even throw me down the stairs. You tie me to the floor.” His brow creased as he followed the ropes to where they connected—the stairway, two water pipes, the workbench fifteen feet away. He saw something gleaming on the edge of the workbench, some sort of large knife, and the fact that he couldn’t even hope to reach it made his teeth grind together.

  He felt hims
elf tottering precariously on the brink of panic. “Look, Julia. Don’t you think this has gone far enough? I know I offended you, but I’ve apologized for it and I think I’ve paid for it in spades.” He laughed a little hysterically. “Don’t you think I’ve endured enough crazy shit to learn my lesson?”

  “Please hold still,” she said, and he could tell by the intent sound of her voice that she was concentrating on finding a vein in his arm.

  “Can I at least ask what you’re putting in me?”

  “It’s safe.”

  “I fucking hope so, for chrissakes.” He shook his head. “‘It’s safe.’ How about you tell me just how the hell this is supposed to help me.”

  But the needle was already sinking into his arm, the silver tip piercing his vein as easily as it would a string of warm licorice.

  “Almost done,” she said and depressed the plunger. “This will give me time to think.” The milky fluid flushed into his open vein.

  He yanked his arm away and the hypo nodded in his flesh like a road sign swaying in a strong wind. He cursed her for as long as he could but soon the liquid reached his brain and the words lost their momentum, congealed in his mouth, and his head felt heavy even after he let it rest on the grimy cement.

  Chapter Four

  July, 1948

  The night of the first death, Myles Carver was trying to bed his brother’s wife. He stared at her through the French doors, the partygoers buzzing around him like gnats, his own date Maria tugging at the lapel of his best black jacket like a goddamned kid.

  “Myles,” she said. He smelled the sweet tang of wine on her breath, studied the large breasts peeking out of her dress, but those things did nothing for him.

  Annabel did.

  She was out there on the veranda, leaning forward so her rump stuck out, taunting him, the pale skin of her shoulders luminous in the night air.