Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  And attack they do, again and again, wave after wave of them trundling forward across the bodies of their cousins. I blast and burn, vaporise and hack, shoot and freeze. The suit enables my victory, but it does not come without cost. One foot is trapped beneath a pile of corpses, and their blood is toxic and acidic, eating through the advanced materials and exostructure to melt away three toes and half of my foot. The suit keeps the pain at bay and seals the damage as best it can.

  Beyond, I see the tree gathering its defences. The saplings are delicate, thin things, and where once there were thousands I now see only a dozen remaining. They plant themselves around the tree––the amazing, wondrous tree, as high as the sky and constantly moving, gathering knowledge, seeding it for the future. Its roots fill the world—they are the world—and if the attackers had succeeded, then another existence would have blinked away to nothing in this endless universe.

  At last the fight is won. I work my way up the hillside, exhausted and in shock from my injuries. The suit is glitching.

  Three blind mice, it says, constantly starting a lullaby that it can never finish.

  See how they—

  See how they—

  I reach the tree at last. The saplings let me by because in me they recognise their saviour. But just as I reach out my hand to touch the tree's bark, and open my mouth to tell it how I feel—

  * * *

  Mum went to buy a takeaway. She loved having me home from university. This was my third time since I'd left, and she said she always liked a takeaway on the first night. Meant she had more time to talk to me without having to be busy in the kitchen.

  Dad would have gone, but he'd had a couple of drinks. "He's lost," she'd told me on the way home from the station. "Ever since you left. Just…lost."

  "All right, Dad?" I asked. I dropped onto the sofa, fluffing up a couple of cushions and propping them behind my back. The sofa was almost as old as me.

  "Suppose," he said. "You?"

  "I'm good," I said. I wasn't. I was lost, too. It wasn't something I could tell Mum because everything she'd ever done, everything she'd been through, had been to make things right for me. After all of that, how could I possibly tell her things were wrong?

  The first time I'd come home, I'd expected that being there would make things better. It hadn't.

  The second time had been a trial, a tense time filled with explosive outbursts from my father and the familiar silence from my mother.

  This third time was the last. After this, I was leaving for a long time. All I had to do was find a way of telling her.

  "What're you watching?"

  "Some shit."

  I watched TV with him. He was right, it was some shit about arguing families, one of those soap operas that people seemed to watch in search of an escape. It seemed painfully familiar. A man screamed. A woman shouted. A knife was brandished, a son slept with a sister, a husband went missing.

  A man raised his hand. A woman cowered. I caught the flicker of a smirk on my father's face.

  "You fuck," I said. I reached across and snatched the TV remote from him, clicking it off. Silence settled across the room. "You complete fuck."

  "What'd you say to me?” He turned and looked at me like I was a child, and it was the same way he'd always looked at me. Looking through me, as if I was barely there at all. He'd never recognised that I'd grown up, got older, turned from a snivelling kid into a young man. I wasn't sure what he saw when he looked at me, but I was only glad it wasn't himself.

  "I hate you," I said. And I smiled. Those three words seemed to pour from my whole body, lightening it almost to the point that I floated up out of the sofa. They freed possibilities that had, until now, been weighed down with masses I could not identify or dare touch. I'd felt the hate for so long, but actually saying it felt something like growing up.

  "You little—"

  "I'm not little!" I stood, towering over my father where he sat crumpled in his armchair. His arms were tensed, readying to push himself upright.

  "Ungrateful shit," he said, standing, sneering, flexing his hands. I could smell the alcohol wafting off him, seeping through his pores and clogging them with hate, the opposite to what I had just experienced.

  "I'm very grateful," I said. "To Mum, for everything she's done for me. For everything she's had to put up with, from you. All she's been through with you, you weak, pathetic bully."

  He laughed. Once, loud, like a cough. "Great! So you go to university to study some crap that'll get you nowhere. More fucking books to read. More fucking shit to take in and drown yourself with. Where will that get you, eh? Queer. Fucking queer, are you?"

  "Why would I tell you? You don't count for anything in my life."

  His fists were clenching again. I heard his knuckles cracking, and I knew for sure that if he came at me, he'd beat me, because that's the sort of person he was. I'd never had a fight in my life, not in real life, at least. In my dreams I had saved whole worlds.

  He'd beat me down, but I would win by facing up to him. The first time ever. It felt foolish and brave, but there was no going back now.

  "If you hurt her again, I'll kill you," I said.

  His eyes went wide. Shock punched him. He took one step forward.

  The front door opened. "It's bucketing down out there!" Mum called. The scent of Indian food followed her in, and I smiled at her through the living room door. She paused for a second. But seeing me smiling set her smile in place too, and she moved through to the kitchen. "Come and help me dish up?" she called.

  I knew she was asking me. He'd never demean himself by helping her in the kitchen. He had too much important stuff to do.

  "I mean it," I said, quieter, stepping in so close that he could smell my breath. "In your sleep, when you're drunk, I'll stick a knife in your eye.” I stepped away and threw the remote control at him. It struck his cheek and fell into his chair.

  As I walked along the hallway, I heard the TV clicking back on. A woman shouted at a man. A man growled back.

  "Okay, son?"

  "Yes, Mum," I said. I kissed her cheek and fetched plates from the cupboard.

  * * *

  I walk through the jungle, searching for the beast, but there is no beast to be found.

  The trees are tall and stretch up out of sight, heavy mist obscuring their canopies. The heat is immense, the life here abundant and rich. Spiders the size of my hand eat small mammals, birds of prey swoop down and pluck the spiders from branches, flying lizards larger than me drift through the mist and pierce the birds with serrated tongues. Life circles, and I am cautious, but I know the way. I have lived here for a long time, and my body is well adapted to this environment. I belong here.

  Every now and then I pause and listen. I hear no bellows of the beast. But that's not all I'm searching for. I seek also the song of the blessed one, the giver of life who had made all this and still exists within it. She's here somewhere, I know. The beast hunts her, but, already, I am starting to wonder.

  I have been searching for a long time, but I carry no weapons. That surprises me because it's so unusual. It's almost as if…

  Around every corner there are new wonders. Sometimes these wonders are brutal and harsh because that's how life is. Sometimes they are purely beautiful. Weaponless, I cannot recall whether I have cast the weapons aside because they are bloodied and used, or simply because they are no longer required.

  Flowing like life through the jungle, time will tell.

  Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the thriller The Hunt, and other recent releases include The Silence and Alien: Out of the Shadows. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award®, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. Future books include The Rage War (an Alien/Predator trilogy) and the Relics trilogy from Titan.r />
  A movie of his story “Pay the Ghost,” starring Nicolas Cage, was released in 2015, and several other projects are in development, including his novel The Silence and his scripts My Haunted House and Playtime (with Stephen Volk).

  A few weeks after my sister Lina disappeared, I shouldered my backpack and headed out to a ghost town in the desert, looking for a taste of oblivion.

  My preferred place to get shit-faced was the crumbled-down ruin of Blileytown, a flyspeck on maps of the 1890s that was once a thriving New Mexican coal mining community. Today, all that remains are the remnants of a chapel and a lonely windmill. I hitched a ride out of Gallup with some affable Indians who shared a joint and warned me of the danger for a woman out here alone. They dropped me off at the crossroads, and I hiked another half mile through the deep maroon dusk along a barely visible, rutted track.

  Most of the night that followed is a mishmash of skewed recollection and haywire dreams, a smear of honey and shit on the back of my tongue that I can’t seem to scrape off. Near sunset, I arrived at the tumbled-down church of San Felipe, whose tiny, walled graveyard provided some shelter from the clamorous wind. Cactuses clawed at the twilight, and a small tribe of tumbleweeds piled inside the courtyard like a collection of severed heads. I hunkered down with my back to the wall and my feet on a splintery cross. I unpacked my works to the cries of coyotes dismembering a kill, and shot up with skag I’d bought from my dealer, and sometimes fuck buddy, Orlando.

  He hadn’t lied about it being good shit. Everything mellowed and merged. For a moment, the world seemed surreally pristine, like the scenes on the souvenir beer mugs in the gift shop at the Fire Rock Casino. I flopped onto my back and watched a fat, flirtatious moon perform a splendid fandango behind silken clouds, and I began dreaming the most erotic and terrible dream. I was as high as the Big Dipper and swoony on liquid legs. I twirled out of the graveyard and went traipsing about willy-nilly, meandering among the piñons and creosote bushes in dizzy loops and zigzags, embracing the creaking windmill like we were old chums, calling out to my sister and praying to God that Mami was wrong, that the skinwalker called the Minotaur hadn’t gone off with her soul.

  Lina didn’t answer and neither did God, which didn’t surprise me, so I played kickball with the tumbleweed heads and watched a leggy tarantula, resplendent in reddish-brown fur, size me up from its dark hidey-hole. I yahooed to the nude, shameless moon, and the moon leered right back as I whipped off my t-shirt and draped it over the wing of an owl soaring past. The night wind hardened my nipples while stray stars swarmed in my hair, and I swanned around, sighing with bare-breasted glee, aglow in the solace of utter aloneness until I stumbled upon the remains of a dead woman, her bones bare on the moon-dappled sand.

  Predators had shredded her clothing and scattered her bones, but cloth clung to some stray ropes of tendon and black hair tufted her bug-ridden scalp. She’d worn a white bra, and a chipped tooth gleamed at the side of her skull.

  The bones were helter-skelter, most of them half-buried. In a trance, I picked over them carefully, like a shopper selecting a cutlet for dinner. I decided to pocket a finger bone so that I could later prove to myself the dead woman wasn’t just a dream.

  While I was bone-picking, the moon tiptoed away behind furrows of cloud. A meteor derailed from its arc and slammed under my ear, and ten shades of scarlet clawed inside my skull. I became legless, an amputee floating in warm, summer air, while tarantulas erupted out of the earth and pattered over my skin, seeking the warm crannies and niches where their kind likes to nest. When I screamed, they crammed themselves into my mouth. I tasted blood and heard a low, throaty bark. A naked man with a bull’s head loomed over me, rampant and gleaming with sweat. I dug my nails into the meat of his shoulders and tried to tear off the mask until I realized it grew from his chest. My skin started to ripple with horror and awe and peeled off in long swathes that he draped over his back like a shawl, and we flew through the sky like two sorcerers, my mind all in tatters, my sanity strewn.

  I woke up in the graveyard with my pack under my head and my works at my side, as if I’d slept there all night. I felt woozy and sickened, the way the dead woman must have felt as feral teeth stripped off her clothes and rent her flesh. My stomach heaved, and I rolled over as everything in me came up.

  Well, not everything. Not the feelings of dread and despair or the pain banging around in my body like a drunk trying to find his way out of a strange house in the dark. My feet throbbed, my tongue bled where I’d bitten it, and even the tiny, deep places where my soul goes to hide felt like my drug-addled romp through the desert had scoured and defiled them.

  When I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I found I was still clutching the bone that I thought I had dreamed, and I rolled over again and vomited horror and bile into the dirt by the crosses.

  Now I can’t get the sensations of that lurid dream out of my body, and a craving for poison much worse than drugs has thrust its way into my flesh. I feel reckless and starved; my brain swarms with some awful contagion. Sometimes I think the dream never ended, that it smothered me that night in its musky embrace, and I’ve been dreaming it ever since.

  * * *

  Rumors of a skinwalker preying on girls started back in ‘09, when a trucker making a late run on the 491 between Shiprock and Gallup claimed he encountered a creature who was half-human, half-bull. He said it suddenly appeared by the driver’s side window and kept pace even when he accelerated, glaring in at him with obsidian eyes in a bull’s shaggy, horned head, but that when he looked down, it had the torso and legs of a man.

  A few weeks later, Mami’s old boyfriend, the potter Alphonso Nez, was coming back from an art show in Farmington when his pickup broke down. He was aiming a flashlight under the hood when he heard something approach and saw a beast with blood-tipped horns and a man’s powerful physique emerge from the brush. Alphonso locked himself in the truck as the creature circled the vehicle for half an hour before it finally disappeared. Over time, his account of the incident became more elaborate. He said the monster resembled the Minotaur of Greek myth, a description that was repeated often enough that later, when two teenaged girls from Shiprock vanished, and a woman from Teec Nos Pos disappeared after her car ran out of gas, people said the Minotaur was responsible. More women went missing over the years, but it was usually under dubious circumstances. Girls entangled in bad marriages or in trouble with the law, girls with good reason to run.

  Not Lina, though. She had a job at the El Rancho Hotel and was planning to start college in Albuquerque. She was doing fine until the moth frenzy took her.

  * * *

  “Oh, help me! He has me!” Lina is panting and thrashing when I rush into her room, awakened by the creaking of bedsprings and the thump of her head striking the backboard each time she bounces her hips. Her eyes roll, her tongue flicks back and forth, and she yelps like a dog caught in barbed wire.

  “Who is it?” I look around wildly, half-expecting an intruder to leap from the closet or the hallway.

  “Oh God, he’s here!” She flings back the sheet. Her nightgown is twisted and bunched at her waist, and her knees are bent, exposing slick, maroon folds. I feel heat surge to my cheeks. For a moment, I consider waking up Mami, who snores contentedly in the other room, but I don’t want her to see Lina like this.

  Her good daughter.

  I cover her up and fetch my last bottle of Mad Dog, but she shoves it away in disgust. Her eyes blaze and her body shivers, like a doomed moth fluttering near the flames. “Alcohol won’t help! Don’t you understand? He has me! He’s inside me!”

  “Don’t talk crazy. You’re having a nightmare,” I say, but I can’t stand to stay there and go out into the hall where, unnerved, I chug down the bottle in a few scalding gulps. The alcohol dulls my disgust. I tell myself what Lina says isn’t possible, that not even a skinwalker can rape a woman with sorcery.

  Still, it takes all my courage to go back into her room.

 
; She’s spent now, vacant-eyed and exhausted. In the dim light, I’m shocked by the jut of her cheekbones, which poke up defiantly, no longer obscured by the layers of fat that always softened her face. Her once plump, rounded belly is now a sunken, stretched bowl.

  She whimpers, “No, don’t,” but her hand slides down as her buttocks lift off the bed and she begins a slow, grotesque grinding.

  I crack her across the face, grab her shoulders and try to shake her out of the trance. Rage flares in her face. A surge of energy seethes from her skin into mine. Pain scalds my fingers, flenses my forearms and chews into my wrists. My skin blazes an ugly, flayed red, and for a moment the wall I sag against is the only thing holding me up.

  “Stop it! You’re dreaming,” I hiss, but I have no faith in my own words, and I don’t try to touch her again.

  Unable to watch her contortions, I stare out the window, beyond the portal and the adobe wall, out where the gate to the courtyard blew off in a windstorm last winter and never got fixed. With nothing blocking the view, the desert unfurls like a black throat gobbling down an obscene spill of stars. Alongside the gap where the gate once stood now swarms an unnatural convergence of shadows. In places they are as thick as the beams supporting the portal, in others gauzy as mist. Something massive hunches there in brute stillness. My blood goes a degree or two colder.

  The next morning I find Lina sprawled under a clump of piñons a half mile from the house, her nightgown ripped, her feet bloody. Gently I lead her home, bathe her and put her to bed.

  “Who’s doing this? Tell me!”

  She doesn’t answer, but her face glows with a terrible radiance, like she’s died and been reborn into some glorious hell. “I want him,” she whispers, without meeting my eyes.