House of Skin

by Jonathan Janz

  Julia tried to crawl away, but his teeth held her, tearing, ripping at her leg. His hands fastened onto her sides and pulled her under him, but what she expected didn’t happen. He was not reaching between her legs or fumbling with his crotch.

  His hands were closing around her neck.

  She batted at them, certain he was weakening, all that morphine pulsing through his body, but his grip was unyielding. The basement went gray. His hands were releasing her then, but she could barely feel them, and though she knew her chance to get away from him had come, she knew she was too weak, too faint, to crawl out from under him.

  The last thing Julia thought before the gray tide pulled her under was how heavy Ted was, how hard it was to breath with his suffocating weight on top of her.

  The grandfather clock in the foyer was chiming for the tenth time when Paul got back to Watermere. He ambled over to the bar, slid a hand over the tired mahogany. He thought of the dirt paths he’d just walked, the vastness of the estate. How odd it seemed that Sheriff Barlow knew the forest so well, as though the place were his.

  As Paul stretched, his back popping dully, he thought of the sheriff’s broad frame, the man’s wise brown eyes.

  Barlow seemed convinced of his innocence, but that didn’t mean Paul was in the clear. The coldness of the night, the grotesque story, the woman he glimpsed in the window of the old Hargrove house, it was all catching up with him. His nerves were frayed.

  A drink would help soothe them.

  Sure it would, Emily’s voice spoke up. And it would lead to another, and another, and how many more until you wake up not knowing where you are or how you got there?

  Paul grimaced and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes to grind away the chiding voice. He moved to get a better view of the bar and felt his stomach flutter faintly at the many rows of bottles. Were Emily here now, she’d never let him drink without some form of remonstrance.

  But she isn’t here, is she?

  No, he thought and smiled. She isn’t.

  Bending, he selected the first bottle his fingers touched. He raised it and cocked an eyebrow.

  Whiskey.

  The glasses were on the shelf above the bottles. He chose one, used the inside of his shirt to wipe out the dust, and placed it on the bar with a pleasing clunk.

  Paul unscrewed the cap, poured himself half a glass and sipped. The whiskey carried a smoky aftertaste that compelled him to sip it again.

  All things considered, he thought as his insides responded to the heat, maybe allowing himself a minor transgression wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

  Julia opened her eyes. The dank air of the basement filled her nostrils.

  She had no idea what time it was. It could have been minutes or hours since she’d lost consciousness. She remembered Ted, their struggle, and felt his leaden body pressing down on her. His body odor rolled over her. It smelled sour and cruel just like his personality. Summoning what strength she had, she wriggled back and forth until his weight shifted to the side. Straining, she shoved against him and felt his torso slide just enough for her to inch her way out from under him. Disoriented and coughing, she pulled her pants up and thanked her stars he’d not violated her. He didn’t want to violate you, she reminded herself. He wanted to kill you.

  Her throat ached. Badly. She needed water.

  Julia staggered to the stairs and climbed them as swiftly as she could, hands on the wooden rails to brace her weary body as she made her way up. Her throat felt mangled. It was as though his hands were still there, squeezing, bruising, crushing her windpipe. She got to the kitchen and turned on the tap, but it was more than a minute before she could control her coughing enough to take a drink.

  God, she’d been sloppy. She had no idea how long the morphine lasted, nor did she have any idea how potent it still was. After sitting in her mother’s nursing cabinet all those years, it might have no more usefulness than a bottle of cough syrup. One thing was certain, though. There was no way Ted Brand would be unconscious long enough to give her safe passage. She’d have to tie him up again, get on a bus, then place an anonymous call once she was safely away. Maybe she’d make the call from Mexico if she could get there soon enough.

  Julia got her coughing under control, drank half a glass of water. It still burned going down, her throat a throbbing ache, but it calmed her nerves. She realized she was now doing what she should have done in the first place. Ted would be fine. People lived without food or water for a week before dying, she’d once heard. One more day wasn’t going to kill him.

  An anonymous call then. Julia descended the stairs.

  Flipping on the light at the base of the stairs, she stared down at where Brand’s body had been.

  Its absence, the blood-soaked but empty concrete inside the quadrangle of ropes, had scarcely registered when she heard a roar behind her. She whirled as Brand came at her from under the stairs, the carving knife raised above his head, his body impossibly large in the yellow glare of the basement light.

  She dodged away as he sliced down at her, the knife blade cleaving the air inches from her face. He cried out as his balance betrayed him and toppled him onto his side. She lunged across the basement to the workbench and scrabbled for a weapon. Her hand closed on a screwdriver, and brandishing it, she turned to see him get to his feet, still clutching the knife. He grinned murderously at her, his ruined face crusted with ant bites.

  Julia met his stare, tried to remember the things he’d called her. She was furious with herself for being so careless. She clenched the screwdriver handle.

  She was about to stick him with it when the knife came whooshing down at her. She hopped away as the blade descended. The knife chunked down on the wooden surface of the workbench, but Brand’s hand kept traveling downward, his still-clutching palm slicing itself on the edge of the blade until his hand slammed on wood. Brand screamed, jerked his hand away. Crimson bloomed in a neat line on his palm. As he stared at the welling blood, Julia pumped the screwdriver sideways and buried it to the hilt in his ribs. He uttered a shrill yelp of surprise, pawed at the screwdriver handle, and tried vainly to extract it.

  She no longer felt in control of herself, was shocked at her own ferocity. She knew there was no going back now. One of them would die down here. She swiped at him, and when her fingernails caught in his temple and cheek, she raked down with all her might, his skin peeling into pink curls as the nails harrowed his face.

  Howling with pain, Brand balled his good hand into a fist and caught her in the cheek with a haymaker. She landed on the floor, her vision graying.

  Still holding the screwdriver in his side, he used his free hand to yank the knife from the workbench. She pushed up from the floor and tried to parry the blow. It was too late. He swiped the knife backhand low and hard, the skin above her pubic hair erupting in fiery pain as the blade slashed her. She stumbled backward, felt herself going down again. Her head smacked the floor with a sick thud.

  Through her reeling vision she watched him advancing on her, and at once her mind’s eye saw him turning the tables, tying her in the ropes, cutting off her clothes, raping her, torturing her over a period of days, weeks. And as he advanced, knife raised, she saw in his eyes the confirmation of her fears. He was a fiend, had always been a fiend, but only now had the chance to let his madness express itself with complete abandon.

  He was almost upon her now. She rolled over, her vision clearing, and as she lay on the floor below this monstrous, screaming man, her eyes passed over the implements stored on the shelves under the workbench. The vise clamps. The coffee can full of nails. The broken post-hole diggers.

  The tree loppers.

  She looked at Brand. He was above her now, feet braced wide, carving knife gripped with both hands above his head, the screwdriver handle still jutting crazily out of his side.

  With a roar he brought down the knife, its shiny surface aimed at her throat. She leaned one way and shoved with all her might. Rolling, she watched h
is body strike the space she’d just vacated and heard the jagged protest of the knife tip snapping on the concrete.

  Julia seized the loppers.

  From under the workbench she turned and saw him stand. He peered about the basement for another weapon. He paused, his back straightening. He was looking at the wall a few yards in front of him. Julia followed his gaze and discovered the axe hanging there.

  Her breath caught.

  She had to reach him before he reached the axe. If not, she was done for.

  On elbows and knees, she shuffled across the dusty floor, the loppers clutched in her hands. She felt rivulets of blood soaking into her pants above her pubic hair, the fresh wound glacial and pulsing.

  He was almost to the axe.

  Frantic, she scuttled toward him, the wound in her abdomen protesting. He stopped and reached for the axe. His hands closed on its wooden handle.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  He turned and spotted her below him, and when he noticed the long wooden handles of the loppers his eyes danced with mirth. He grinned and lifted the axe. She thought of jabbing forward before the axe fell, of lopping off his genitals, but there was no time. The axe was already descending.

  She dove forward between his legs as the blade hit the concrete behind her. She rose to her knees and spun. She jabbed the loppers with all her might, felt them sink into the flesh of his back. He bellowed in agony and the axe clattered to the floor. He writhed, unable to free himself of the lopper blades buried in the muscles of his back. With a cry, she brought the handles together and squeezed. Brand’s cry rose and broke as the tree loppers crunched through his spine.

  Then he was tumbling forward, the loppers going with him.

  Lying there on his face, he hardly moved, a low keening gurgle the only sound coming from his mouth.

  Julia stood.

  She walked around his body, the lopper handles sticking straight up out of his back. She picked up the axe.

  “God help me,” she said, and brought it down on his head.

  Chapter Eight

  Paul awoke at a quarter of eight with a sense of anticipation he’d not felt in years.

  The time had come.

  Pencil in hand, notepad and coffee atop the mahogany desk where he sat with his eyes wide and his every nerve ending alive with possibility, he took a drink of coffee, and though it wasn’t very good—he suspected the Folgers can he’d discovered in the pantry was long past its prime—he could still feel it doing its work, surcharging him with energy, readying him for what he was about to do. He breathed deeply of the musty den and the fragrant spring air coming through the window, commingling scents that fused the best of both worlds, the realm of thought and the realm of nature.

  He exhaled, scooted under the desk.

  He stared at the paper.

  And wondered what to write.

  Julia walked to work in tears. She thought fleetingly of Watermere, of the new owner. Though both mind and body were numb, she was able to speculate about her new neighbor. She scanned her memory for the few details she could from her conversation with…

  (Ted Brand, his name was Ted Brand, the man you killed)

  …the lawyer, the fact that Paul Carver was in his thirties, had lived in Memphis until recently, and that he had a girlfriend, but no, they weren’t yet engaged. Julia tried to picture him, and in this she was moderately successful, the tears in her eyes that blurred her vision actually making it easier to focus on her inner sight, the man similar in build to Myles Carver, perhaps even possessed of similar features. She thought of Myles Carver’s handsome face, his piercing blue eyes. His insatiable libido.

  Which brought her back to Ted Brand.

  It fell on her like a leaden blanket: dead, the man was dead, and she was his killer. Julia choked back a sob. God, she hadn’t even recognized herself last night after showering off the blood.

  Murderer.

  The word sounded obscene.

  It was the way she felt after the adrenaline of the fight drained out of her and she was left to gawk at Ted Brand’s still, silent form on the basement floor. Seeing the ants crawling over him, biting his corpse, made her sick, sick at the sight and sick with herself, her shocking barbarity.

  Who was this person, she wondered now, who was capable of murder?

  What terrified her was how little she’d thought while doing it. It was another pair of hands lifting the axe. It was another woman, one without a conscience, who ended a man’s life.

  The sight of his body, the bloody back and shit-caked legs, hand sent her up the stairs to the shower, her whole body trembling wildly as she tried to deny what she’d done, tried to negate the act.

  Even after, staring in the mirror, her hands still sticky and her victim still dead, she couldn’t believe she’d killed him.

  At that point in the morning, and well into the day, she told herself if Sam Barlow paid her a visit, she’d tell him everything.

  Paul sat staring at the paper. On it were scrawled the words PIZZA, BEER and POPCORN.

  He tore off his grocery list and set it aside for later.

  He stared at the blank page, his mind flailing about for literary inspiration. What he needed to do—damn it—was come up with an idea. Most of what he’d read was horror, so he might as well start there. Problem was, all the good ideas were taken. That fucking Stephen King had used up half the ideas himself.

  Paul liked all kinds of stuff, so maybe it was best to eliminate the plots that had been done to death, the storylines that made him roll his eyes they were so familiar.

  Take vampires.

  There were some great vampire novels out there, but there were stinkers as well. Many that were supposedly great he just found boring. Anyway, what was the use in covering the same ground?

  Werewolves were old hat, too. Same with zombies, cannibals, ghost stories, demons, serial killers and flesh-eating cockroaches.

  So what did that leave?

  He stared at the blank sheet of paper, willing words to appear. Its bland white face gazed back at him as if he’d already bored the shit out of it. A good first line was all he needed. Come up with that, he’d be home free.

  He sniffed, face scrunching.

  The den smelled like fungus. That semeny, curdled salt smell he associated with the ravine behind his house growing up. He could open another window, but there was a wind today. It would flutter his papers, tickle his hair, generally distract him. What he needed was a change of scenery.

  Collecting his pencil and paper, Paul went down the hall to the library.

  At the library Julia pretended to go through the late returns, stared at the circulation desk computer.

  Wondered what to do about the dead guy in her basement.

  Not having slain a man before, she was unsure whether or not she’d done the right thing by leaving his body in the basement. Remembering her Poe, she considered how to get rid of the corpse. Walling him up was out of the question, as was chopping him into pieces and putting him under the floorboards.

  The thought came again, for the hundredth time that day: What’s wrong with you?

  How, she wondered, could she think like this, examine the different methods of discarding a corpse? Her hands were shaking again. She put them under the desk so no one would see.

  She sighed, wishing she’d never met Ted Brand. If she suffered through nightmares until she was eighty, so be it, but dammit, she wouldn’t give up her freedom or her life because of one mistake.

  Barlow was smart. He’d be thorough, she knew. It was only a matter of time before he came to question her. She had to focus.

  She could bury Brand’s body somewhere, but how to do that and make sure no one would find it? Weren’t there dogs trained to do just that? She imagined a German Shepherd sniffing through the forest, moving unerringly to wherever she’d tried to conceal the corpse.

  Of course, there was history between her and Sam Barlow, and that could only help her.

&nb
sp; Then again, maybe it wouldn’t.

  The thought was enough to tighten the skin around her eyes, set her imagination racing. What if the things he might or might not know made him more suspicious? What if the past came back to bite her?

  She was thinking this when Barlow appeared in front of her.

  “Hey, Julia,” the sheriff said and leaned over the desk. “How’s life?”

  Though she could feel her heart racing, his familiar manner lessened her anxiety a notch.

  “Not bad, Mr. Barlow. Just going through the stragglers.” Good, she thought. Her voice had come out even.

  “Am I one of them?” he asked, craning his head to look at her monitor. Though he didn’t have a chew in now, she could smell the Red Man on his breath. Like overripe apples. Normally the scent appealed to her, but now it made her feel closed in, like the walls were creeping nearer.

  Prison walls.

  She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, scrolling through the list of names, “it doesn’t look like it. You’ve got four more days before your books are due back.”

  Barlow smiled. “Good. I’m only done with half of them.”

  “Extra busy lately?”

  He paused. “Unfortunately, yes.” His face sobered.

  “Really?” she said, sitting back from the keyboard. “Has something happened?”

  The sheriff regarded his hat, which rested on the counter. As he did, Julia noted the gray hairs mixing in with the black, the age showing around Barlow’s tired eyes. Seeing these things, it wasn’t hard to forget he was in detective mode, was a regular guy and a good man, saddened by what he was doing, questioning her about a missing person.