House of Skin

by Jonathan Janz

  Annabel fell against the base of the window, the splintered glass bloodying her arms. David stepped forward just as a brittle thump sounded from the ground below. The sound of voices came, the sounds of people gathering around the dead woman, children screaming, thudding footsteps on the stairs behind them. Ignoring his bleeding wife, David dashed to the window and leaned out. Myles felt the door swing open behind him and men were rushing by, jostling him as he stared at Annabel sitting on the floor. He felt absolutely nothing, nothing for Maria as he heard the voices below confirm she was dead, nothing for his brother who leaned now on the broken stained glass, the shards piercing his palms, his broad shoulders wracked with sobs. Nothing for himself.

  But looking at the slender woman sitting bloodied against the windowsill, whose terrible laughter now rose above the shrieking of the guests, he finally felt something, and what he felt was fear. Fear of her, and fear of what they’d let into their home.

  Chapter Twelve

  By six o’clock he’d killed a pint of whiskey, ridden the riding mower around the yard for an hour in no particular pattern before running out of gas and taking a nap under an elm tree. Then, he ate half a bag of pretzels by way of supper and read eighty more pages of Ghost Story. Once, a robin lighted on the grass a few feet from where he sat, but when he tossed a pretzel in its direction, it uttered a snobbish chirp and fluttered away.

  The novel cheered him. That, at least, was a pursuit worthy of his time. While he killed brain cells with drink he could keep the ones that remained entertained. Switching over to beer, he carried the book and a small red cooler he’d filled with ice and a six-pack of Budweiser to the back porch for an evening of cheap entertainment. Studying the author’s picture inside the back cover, the bald dome and intelligent eyes, Paul wondered how a guy learned to write that well. Not by pickling his brain with alcohol and stewing in self-pity, a voice inside his head answered.

  “Piss off,” he said aloud.

  May was a good month to read outdoors, he thought. The lilac bushes near the veranda breathed their sweet breath, which mixed together amiably with the aroma of freshly cut grass. Inhaling deeply, he reached inside the screen door and flipped on the back porch light. The weather was just cool enough to keep the bugs from flitting and buzzing about his ears, and just warm enough to make a long-sleeved shirt unnecessary. Settling himself in the yellow lawn chair, he cracked open a beer, sipped it and read.

  A bit later, he refilled the cooler.

  The beer lasted until ten thirty. He was good and drunk, but he still had wits enough about him to move about the house. As he always did when he drank a lot, he entertained crazy notions. Calling Emily up and asking her to marry him. Driving back to Memphis to tell his father what he really thought of him. Jogging into town to raise hell at a local honkytonk. It was early yet—the idea wasn’t all that bad. He could walk there, or better yet, hop on the riding mower and get there by eleven or eleven-thirty. There’d still be time to shoot a game of pool or sweet talk some local gal. The latter was probably out of the question though. He could smell his own breath—a rank mixture of cream cheese and beer—and in his stained tee shirt and tattered blue jeans he looked like he should be sleeping at the train yard.

  What to do then? He wasn’t particularly hungry, and he knew if he slept now he’d awaken too early. Mornings were best slept through.

  He caught a glimpse of the woods through the parlor window.

  Lovely, dark and deep, he thought, remembering a poem he’d read in high school. The forest was a mystery, a dark lady yearning to be explored.

  Just one stop before he embarked.

  The ballroom flared into brilliance, the twin chandeliers showering their lunar glow over the black and white tiles. Paul made a revolution around the large room, just avoiding the rich vermilion sofas, the brocade chairs, which sat around the dance floor like torpid spectators.

  Stopping at the bar—marveling again that he owned it, as well as the sprawling ballroom reflected in its long strip of mirror—he fished out another pint of whiskey and crammed it into his pocket. Pushing away from the bar, he executed a spin and a leap and was proud when he stuck the landing. His shoes squeaked as he leaned and stumbled through the ballroom and the sounds of his crazy dance grew louder until their feverishness brought him to a listing stop, palms planted on knees, mouth dry and panting.

  The sounds continued around him. Scraping, insistent.

  It was the rats, of course. The place was acrawl with the verminous fiends though he’d yet to spot a single one. A deep, body-rocking shudder gripped him. The little bastards. If their aim was to chase him from the house, they were going to succeed. His skin throbbing and cold, he shivered as he heel-toed it down the hallway and out the front door.

  The night air was a welcome warmth in contrast to the chill of the house. His jeans were a necessary evil, for how else could he carry the pint? His shirt, however, was dead skin to be shed. He left it lying in the gravel as he set off through the grass, carrying him to the forest’s edge, to the inky mouth of the trail. Passing through, he thought again of Robert Frost, how Paul had it better than the guy in the poem. He had no promises to keep, no horse to water, no obligations to fulfill. He was free to haunt this hollow, to extend his naked arms and feel the cool new leaves kiss his fingertips, nuzzle his palms. He loved it all, the towering sycamores, the underbrush that hid what lived in the forest, though he could neither see nor hear any life save what was green and silent. An idea came to him then and branching off in a direction he and the sheriff had not taken, Paul clamped the neck of the bottle sticking out of his jeans and lifted it out, relishing the warm way the glass slithered up his thigh.

  He was amused to find he was sexually aroused, both emotionally—as he always was when he drank—and physically, as he could almost never be when the alcohol had taken the verve from his loins.

  He grasped the bottle like a baton and took off running down the trail. He was heading for a fall, he knew. Not only was he chronically inactive and apt to faint from exertion, but the forest was dark as hell. At any moment a root could upend him, snare his foot and give his ankle a savage twist. As he ran, chest burning, he pictured himself tripping and diving headlong into a tree trunk, or toppling end over end and snapping his backbone at the bottom of some rocky gorge.

  Perhaps that’s what happened to Ted Brand, he thought. The lawyer had gotten into Uncle Myles’s stash and gone for a jog in the woods. Why, he could happen upon the corpse at any minute. Bloated and rotting, squirrels or rabbits nesting in his hollowed out gut. Rats feasting on his eyes.

  That made him stop and rest against a tree. He hated the rats, hated the way they’d chased him from his home.

  However, if it weren’t for them, for their alien rustling, he’d never have discovered this new path in the woods. He leaned against a sycamore tree, its smooth curvy length filling the space between his shoulder blades, and sliding down, he unscrewed the cap and sipped. Seated on the forest floor, he rested his forearms on his knees, closed his eyes and felt the back of his head thump against the tree. His breathing slowed, his chest rising and falling softly.

  He awoke to the sound of something scurrying behind him. Sucking in breath, he shoved away from the tree and peered beyond it, straining his eyes in the darkness to find what had awakened him.

  How long had he been out?

  Backpedaling, he craned his head to look at the sky.

  There were no stars, no moon to orient him. He wondered vaguely if he’d lost the pint before he realized he still grasped it.

  The scuttling came again, sending him farther from the tree. He threw skittish glances over his shoulder at the unseen menace. When he’d gone what he hoped was a safe distance from the source of the noises, he pivoted and faced the place where he’d rested. Nothing but the lone tree stood out on the black tapestry.

  A breeze rustled through the hollow, chilling his skin, making him glance over his shoulder. He turned back to the s
ycamore tree and stopped, breath catching in his throat.

  He turned again and couldn’t believe what he saw.

  The graveyard filled the large oval clearing before him, its stone markers aged and standing at tired angles.

  His feet carried him into the clearing, his eyes adjusting now to the blackness of the night. He peered about the graveyard, calculating his distance from home. The documents estimated Watermere’s total acreage at well over a thousand. A territory that large surely encompassed this place, secluded as it was. No wonder he and the sheriff hadn’t happened upon it. Barlow might not even know of its existence.

  He wondered if anyone did. For the cemetery was overgrown, abandoned. Its markers were haphazardly arranged, some broken or cracked, others lying in the grass, swallowed up by weeds and time. A plump rabbit bounded toward him before veering off toward the engulfing forest. Some large black bird, a crow probably, sat perched on a faded ivory cross but didn’t stir as he edged past.

  Strange and varied were the gravestones. They ranged from puny rectangular slabs that lay flush with the weedy ground to elaborately carved sepulchers. Celtic crosses wrapped in marble ivy. A staring skull, its mouth full of teeth that themselves looked like tombstones. An open book with unreadable text adorned one cracked marker, the placement of the fissure injuring the carved book’s spine. Paul gasped with delight upon spotting a tall, cubic stone cut to resemble a grandfather clock, replete with pendulum and a moon clock face. The hour and minute hands were permanently fixed at twelve o’clock.

  He moved toward the back of the clearing. From the darkness a large marker emerged, the shadow of its burnished granite surface seeming to creep across the forest floor toward him. As he edged closer, he became aware of the silence. No bird twittered, no unseen menace shambled.

  Face twisting with disappointment, he realized he wasn’t the only living person who knew of the graveyard’s existence.

  Because for one thing, this stone was newer than the rest. No more than fifteen or twenty years old, he estimated. Yet there were more reasons than this to guess that others knew of the stone, this place. Where there should have been a name and an epitaph, there were instead deep, ugly gouges. A hammer and chisel and God knew what other tools had ravaged the marker so that its entire face was a nightmare of scars and trenches. The words WHORE and DEVIL were spray-painted in red. Near the bottom of the tombstone, the blood red letters, dripped and smeared, delivered the coup de gras: BURN IN HELL.

  Stunned at the disrespect, he wondered what the occupant of the grave had done to incur such enmity. Scrunch his eyes though he might, he couldn’t tell what the name was, nor what designs or sentiments had adorned the marker before the vandals had afflicted it. Sighing, Paul sat at the foot of the stone and nipped at the pint. Setting the bottle in his lap, he reclined on his palms and noted the strange feel of the ground. Unlike the surrounding area, the earth here was barren. No blade of grass grew, no weed sprouted. It was as though whoever had assaulted the tombstone had also sought to kill all the grass on the surface above the coffin. The charred-looking earth wasn’t precisely rectangular, but it was clearly confined to the area above where the body would have been planted.

  Musing on this peculiarity, he drank.

  The alcohol warmed him, electrified his flesh, and again he felt the hot tingle of sexual desire. His whole body thrummed with the heat, with visions of tongues and breasts and smooth open legs.

  He frowned.

  It was strange. He’d been sure the tombstone had been raped of all its carvings, but now that he observed it from this perspective, its imposing girth towering over him like some god or goddess, he saw there was indeed one design which had partially escaped the tip of the chisel and the insult of the spray paint. One florid wing, half of an angelic face, a tiny bare foot.

  A cherub. A sweet, guileless creature of heaven.

  Paul’s eyes widened.

  He rose, caressed the cherub’s wing with the tip of his index finger, and inched away from the gravestone, eyes fixed on the childlike face. His breath quickening, he turned and moved with increasingly longer strides through the stones and weeds. As he reached the mouth of the trail his steps accelerated to a trot and then to a sprint. He moved as he hadn’t in years, his arms pumping, legs a blur, his sneakers pounding down the forest trail. His body maneuvered through darkness, through myriad twists and angles, over crests, through dales, and soon he exploded out of the forest mouth, his pumping limbs compelling him across the silent yard and through the front door. He flew through the ballroom and took the curved stairway in four leaping strides. Past the library, beyond the bedrooms, into the lightless den. Without bothering with the desk lamp his fingers began to fly over the typewriter keys and within moments his hand shot out and slid in another blank sheet and with hardly a pause his fingers drummed again, sweat pouring from his matted air.

  His typing continued long into the night. Sated, the sounds from the walls ceased.

  Paul awoke.

  And wished he hadn’t.

  The hangover was colossal. He felt like crawling across the room, opening the window and tumbling out. Problem was, he didn’t even know what room he was in. He didn’t dare open his eyes—if they hurt this badly when they were shut, how awful would the pain be if he exposed them to daylight? For a crazy moment, he wondered if he’d really gone through with his idea of the night before, driven the lawn mower into town and found some local dive. If so, he was probably in jail now. The air roiling in his mouth was close, dank, like the air of a jail cell. He ventured to open his eyes; what he saw did not reassure him.

  Near his face was a wall. It seemed made of wood, like a coffin.

  He realized he lay on a floor rather than a bed, and that the floor, too, was made of wood. His whole body screamed in protest as glacial chills passed through it, simultaneously chattering his teeth and broiling him with hot waves of nausea. God, let me puke soon, he thought. If I don’t throw up I might die of alcohol poisoning or bubonic plague or some other wretched affliction.

  On his back as he was, he found he could turn his head with some effort. Straining, he lifted his head and stared down at his toes. It was lighter down there. He began to sit up but had to stop when his forehead knocked a glancing blow against a hard surface. Whimpering, rubbing his aching head, he rolled over onto his stomach and pushed backward toward the light. He rose to his knees and realized why he’d thought of a coffin. He’d passed out and slept under the large mahogany desk.

  Letting out a queasy breath, he braced himself on the edge of the desk and pushed to his feet. The fetid slime coating his mouth tasted like spoiled milk. He was about to make a dash for the bathroom and the cool porcelain toilet when something on the desk drew his attention.

  His fingertips brushed the stack of pages. At a glance he estimated there were two hundred or more, neatly stacked, sitting in the center of the desk next to the typewriter. Beside that, a small snatch of lined notebook paper. Paul lifted the handwritten pages, thumbed through the small pile. Written in florid cursive, words filled the notebook, and even in the dim light filtering through the blinds, he could see the writing was not his own.

  Setting aside the handwritten pages for a moment, Paul spied the chair a few feet away and rolled it to the desk. Forgetting the sick way his stomach growled and bubbled, forgetting the nausea tickling at his gorge, he sat and read.

  THE MONKEY KILLER.

  Under that, A NOVEL BY PAUL CARVER.

  Pulse pounding, he lifted parts of the stack, amazed to see that the whole thing was full of typewritten words. He paused on a page about halfway through, expecting to find gibberish—“All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy” perhaps—when he instead discovered that the writing was varied and formatted exactly as a story should be. He searched again and found passages of description, snatches of dialogue.

  Paul chewed a thumbnail.

  It couldn’t be.

  Dumbfounded, he looked again at the tit
le page, set it aside, and began to read.

  The sun was hot on Angela’s shoulders, so she went to the pump for some water. Mrs. England was on the playground scolding a group of pupils who had crossed the lane to pick daisies. Angela heard her teacher now: “How dare you venture past the set boundaries? You should know better Carol Ledford, your father being the constable and all. You will all be in for a paddling if you do that again, and I mean it.”

  And on and on and on.

  Angela let her lips touch the cool surface of the pump, the water flowing down her chin, dripping onto her white shoes.

  She hated her white shoes. And her white dress and her stupid yellow hair ribbon. Her mother insisted on dressing her like a doll. Maybe her mother had not been allowed to play with dolls as a little girl so she had to make her daughter look like one.

  She was tired of being a doll. A little princess. It was dreadfully boring. She wanted to be like Carol Ledford, who was a year older. Carol would never allow her mother to dress her in this silly garb. Carol got to wear pants and never wore yellow hair ribbons.

  She heard the sounds of a kickball game starting up. Mrs. England getting everyone organized, the kids laughing at her but still minding.

  Angela sighed. How she longed to get dirty, to stand in line with the other kids and boot the rubber ball high into the air, sailing red and lovely in the shiny spring sunlight. She was about to round the corner to sit on the bench and watch the game, as she always did, when something caught her attention near the woods.

  It was the old kickball, the one that had got punctured by a rock last month.

  Angela approached it and bent to pick it up.

  She stopped, smiled mischievously.

  Straightening, she reached out with her right foot instead and dragged the red ball back toward her, away from the woods. She was careful about it because just beyond the tree line, the woods dropped off into a steep ravine, and if the ball went down there she would not be able to retrieve it.