Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  What surprises me isn’t that he becomes stronger, but that in some perverse way, I do, too. If I’m corrupted and deadened by his assaults, he too is ensnared. You can’t fight a skinwalker, he told me, but I have every intention to try.

  I enter his yard in the evening via the unlocked front gate, find him sprawled in his garden, sated and snoring, a muscular old man with a bull’s bulging shoulders and a pale, lolling cock, a bandanna knotted around his thick neck where an old wound still might seep. Around him, a ring of corpse dust protects him should his enemies, living or dead, come to call.

  I hesitate at this boundary, knowing the cost, but when his body reacts to my scent and grows hard, I step inside the circle of crushed and cursed bones. My entry animates the gray powder and causes it to billow in thick, poisonous ropes that sandpaper my nostrils and blister my skin. It kindles a craving for blood in a part of my brain so ancient I thought it went extinct with the trilobites. A cannibalistic hunger to devour and destroy surges through me as I stand over the sleeping old man and aim the gun. The trigger is too unwieldy to squeeze, so after two or three tries, I use my tongue, which is surprisingly pliant and strong. The bullet plows a crater out the back of his head big enough to punch my fist through, which I contemplate doing, except I don’t have a fist anymore. The scaled talons aren’t practical for using a gun, but work well for scooping out eyeballs.

  You were always my favorite, he says, but I figure this to be shock. I’ve never killed anybody before, much less a close relative.

  As I leave the courtyard, the corpse dust clings to my misshapen feet and swirls like incense beneath my tough, plated groin. It gifts me with a visual magnitude spanning eons, as well as an unnatural tolerance for the depraved, and it unveils a few extra circles of Hell, a rutting ground for all things bestial stretching back to the Pleistocene. The Minotaur, reborn from the flesh of his former host, looms before me, resplendent in gore.

  I belong in this wasteland, and so does he, but first there is carnage to revel in.

  The town of Gallup awaits us.

  On my four legs, I follow him there.

  Lucy Taylor is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Safety of Unknown Cities, Spree, Saving Souls, Nailed and ten other horror/suspense novels and collections. Her most recent work includes the short story collection Fatal Journeys and the novelette “A Respite for the Dead.” Recent publications include the short story “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” and “Wingless Beasts” in Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 7, and “Blessed Be the Bound” in Nightmare magazine.

  Taylor lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a land full of mystery, romance and the macabre.

  Ezra crept around the corner of the Duxom County Drugstore and peeked out at the sparse traffic on Dixon Street. A couple of pick-ups sputtered by, their beds stacked high with feed, and an old crone piloted her Edsel at ten miles per hour, but that was about the extent of it. The boy did not worry about his father catching him in town—the man never came to town on any day apart from Saturday, when he picked up supplies for the coming week—yet there remained the terrifying prospect of some busybody mentioning Ezra’s appearance in an off-handed way.

  Saw your boy about this last Thursday, Isaiah. Stalking ‘round like a criminal, he was.

  For the sake of meaningless small talk, Ezra would end up on the business end of a powerful whupping.

  He scanned Dixon Street again, narrowing his eyes and studying every face, every detail. He thought back to a line from one of the detective stories in the contraband pulp magazine he kept stashed under his mattress: The coast is clear! Ezra scrambled around the corner to the sidewalk and rushed into the drugstore.

  A tiny silver bell chimed when the glass door swung open. Heads turned. The boy felt like a gigantic spotlight had just been turned on him. Jake Snell stood behind the counter in his crinkled paper hat, wiping out a sundae glass with a rag. He raised an eyebrow at Ezra, a silent question on his face the boy could not decipher. A jukebox at the back wall cranked out a 45 and laid it on the turntable. A second later the drugstore came alive with the sound of a colored man’s voice and a pounding rhythm to back it up—a curious juxtaposition with the WHITES ONLY sign posted in the window. Ezra winced. Being in the presence of the Devil’s music wasn’t helping his anxiety much.

  “You need something, boy?” Jake Snell asked. “Looking for somebody?”

  A curly mass of golden brown locks spun in the last booth by the window, and Ezra’s eyes locked with Annabelle Dell’s. The girl smiled, giving a wave with one hand while clutching her milkshake with the other. She sucked on the red-and-white straw, swallowed and said, “Ezra, over here.”

  Jake Snell smiled and nodded, went back to wiping out the glasses.

  Ezra grinned nervously and crossed the tiled floor, overly conscious of the clacking noise his heels made with every step.

  Annabelle flashed a toothy smile as Ezra slid into the booth across from her.

  “I’ve never heard music like this before,” he squeaked.

  “It’s the Moonglows,” she explained.

  Ezra didn’t understand, but he didn’t let on about it. He just knitted his brow and shook his head like he’d known all along.

  “You want a milkshake or something?”

  Sweat beaded at his hairline. He was not supposed to have things like that—pops and candy and sweet milk drinks. The suggestion compounded his mounting terror.

  “No, thanks,” he answered. “I didn’t come here for that.”

  “What else do you come to a drugstore for?” she asked, regarding him quizzically.

  “Why, I came for you.”

  Annabelle blushed. Ezra did, too.

  * * *

  Duxom was one of Arkansas’ largest counties, with one of the smallest populations. Nestled into the state’s thickly wooded northwest corner, the county seat—also called Duxom—boasted only four hundred and thirty souls, give or take. Some lived in town, or close to it. Many more resided in old family homes much further out, built on plots claimed by ancestors who came when Arkansas was the Western Frontier. One such property was deeded to Isaiah Durfee, the grandson of the plot’s first claimant.

  Someday, it would be passed on to Ezra and his brother—the house, the family cemetery, the little tannery out back, everything.

  He sat alone on an oak stump and studied the wooden grave markers that sprawled out before him, fifteen in all. The closest belonged to Peter Durfee, Ezra’s great-grandfather, the first to come across from Scotland and establish himself in Duxom. The marker was made of cherry wood and shaped like a cross. Behind this resting place the remaining fourteen spread out like an upside-down pyramid. Among those in the very last row was Ezra’s mother and infant sister. There was no more room in that row now, not since Mama succumbed to the cancer. The next Durfee to die would have to begin a new one.

  Probably Papa. Then either Ezra himself or his brother, Jonah. The Durfees were running a little thin.

  It was well past time that Jonah got himself hitched, though there hadn’t been any suitable girls around. Papa was getting downright apoplectic about it. In another couple of years, it would be Ezra’s turn to face that pressure. He wrinkled his nose, thinking about getting hooked up with some girl and putting a baby in her, another load for another grave in the ground.

  He didn’t much cotton to the idea.

  Behind him, last fall’s dry leaves crunched under encroaching footsteps. Ezra pursed his chapped lips and spun around on the stump to see Annabelle emerging from the woods. A yellow picnic basket dangled from her left hand, and she held up a bouquet of wildflowers in her right.

  “Purple milkweed,” she cooed with enthusiasm. “Never seen them around here before.”

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of flowers ‘round here,” Ezra said authoritatively. “Papa says it’s God’s country.”

  “It sure is pretty,” Annabelle agreed. “I was like to get lost in the woods, but I guess I
might not have minded so much, pretty as it is.”

  Ezra stood and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He eyed the basket, wondering hungrily about its contents.

  “Ham sandwiches,” she said. “And lemon pops to wash them down.”

  Ezra frowned, disappointment washing over him.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “I don’t know if I like it, but I can’t eat it,” he said. “We don’t eat pork. It has split hooves that are completely cloven and it don’t bring up its cud.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s in the Bible.”

  Annabelle crooked her mouth up to one side and furrowed her brow. The sunlight came through the tall boughs in luminous shafts that dappled her curls.

  Ezra felt his heart punching his ribs from the inside.

  “There’s victuals in the house, though,” he said. “Maybe enough for us both.”

  He raised his eyebrows and waited while she thought it over. Annabelle shrugged her shoulders, set the picnic basket on the stump and smiled.

  “All right. I expect that’s okay.”

  Ezra offered his hand, which Annabelle accepted. Hand in hand they walked down the hill to the old house below.

  * * *

  The house looked large from the outside, at least larger than most of the outlying homes, but the rooms inside seemed small and cramped. Ezra asked her to take a seat on the worn settee in the front room, which coughed up a cloud of dust when her weight sank into it. He went away to the kitchen, leaving the girl alone with a cramped room full of knickknacks to keep her company.

  A clock ticked on the wall, drawing her eyes to the cast iron pickaninny grinning down from the wall beside it. The grotesque, ink-black face leered at her through smiling eyes, and she realized that its gaping, red mouth was a bottle opener. She averted her eyes, vaguely ill at ease with the ugly ornament, and turned her attention to the finished oak bookstand by the fireplace.

  Worn and deeply scored in numerous places, the bookstand stood a good three feet or more, a massive book spread open on top. Annabelle glanced around the room and noticed that there were no other books in sight, only the enormous one on such lofty display.

  Likely a Bible, she thought, recalling Ezra’s discomfited regard for the Good Book.

  Her people had a family Bible, too—just about everybody did—though theirs rested on the bookshelf in the den between Spade Cooley’s Western Swing Song Folio and The Encyclopedia of World History, rather than the museum-like exhibition Ezra’s kinfolks afforded the Holy Writ. And it certainly wasn’t half as big as the yellowing behemoth that so fascinated Annabelle at that moment.

  She rose from the dusty settee and shuffled over to the bookstand, glancing over her shoulder to see if Ezra was coming back yet. She thought that silly, feeling nervous that she might get caught looking at a Bible. A smile crept across her pink face as she leaned over the crinkly old pages.

  It was opened to Ezekiel.

  One particular passage was traced over with pencil, darkening and thickening the letters.

  And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.

  “Huh,” she said, puzzling over the cryptic, ancient words.

  “That’s Papa’s Bible.”

  Annabelle gasped and pivoted on her heel. Ezra stood in between rooms, a shiny red apple in each hand.

  “All I could find,” he apologized, passing an apple to her. “Funny, since Papa don’t go to town ‘til Saturday.”

  Annabelle said, “Thank you.”

  “Older n’ dirt,” Ezra said, his mouth full of chewed fruit. “Older n’ the Civil War, even.”

  “I bet it’s valuable,” she offered, gently running her fingertips down the page. The paper felt brittle, dry.

  “Might could be,” he said. “It’s worth a lot to Papa. My great-granddaddy made it, you know. Not just the cover, though he made that, too. I mean the whole book; he wrote it down and everything.”

  “Gee,” Annabelle said, gawping at the finely crafted lettering. “He must have been awful religious.”

  “I’ll say. I guess he was sort of like a prophet.”

  “A prophet?”

  “Sure,” Ezra said, “like in the Bible days. Smote sinners and all that stuff.”

  Annabelle mouthed the word: smote.

  “You remember Elijah,” he explained. “Killed all them false priests, the priests of Baal. Well, great-granddaddy Peter found sort of a false church, too, right here in Duxom. Papa says they called themselves Christians, but they was preaching the wrong words, twisting up scripture and all.”

  Annabelle bit into her apple, her eyes trained on Ezra as he recounted the story. Juice squirted from the fruit’s inner flesh, spraying her cheek.

  “I guess there was this fellow up in Kansas about the same time, name of John Brown. Story was that John Brown smote sinners with a broadsword on account of they was slavers. Great-granddaddy used a ploughshare.”

  “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares,” Annabelle recited, recalling the prophecy of Ezra’s father’s namesake.

  “That’s right,” Ezra said, nodding. “Except he done it the other way ‘round. He took up his ploughshare and made a sword of it.”

  “And he…killed them?”

  “That’s what Papa says. Two dozen of them, right in their wicked old church.”

  Annabelle swallowed hard.

  “Goodness,” she whispered.

  “The way I recollect the story, great-granddaddy’d just about finished writing down his Bible,” Ezra said, striding over to the bookstand. He caressed the delicate pages and gingerly closed the book.

  The wrinkled amber cover fascinated Annabelle for its starkness—no words scarred the leather, only stitching.

  “As for the priest of Baal—that’s what Papa always called him—old great-granddaddy cut off his skin and used it to bind this here Bible. We’ve had it in the family ever since, and that was a hundred years ago.”

  Annabelle’s stomach lurched. Her eyes moved down to the apple in her hand, settling upon a wide brown spot marring the white flesh. Her gorge rose in her throat.

  Ezra’s lips spread across his face, a mischievous smile.

  “You wanna see something?” he asked.

  Annabelle regarded him guardedly.

  “Come on.”

  * * *

  Above an immaculately made bed in a small, severe-looking bedroom, the ploughshare hung from a hook in the wall. Its wooden handle was cracked and rotting, its dull blade crusted with rust. Annabelle wondered if some of it was old blood, too.

  Upon the decayed remnant of the handle, a legend was branded into the wood: Isaiah 5:25.

  “Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people,” Ezra said, noticing Annabelle’s focus on the legend. “And he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.”

  “Does your Papa make you remember all those passages?”

  “I study a lot,” he said. “That’s how come I don’t go to school. They don’t teach what’s really important. That’s what Papa says, anyhow.”

  Annabelle kept her eyes on the corroded old ploughshare, at its position of prominence in the stark room. Little else embellished the space apart from a framed photograph on the nightstand of a handsome woman, and a simple, unadorned cross that hung on the opposite wall. She presumed the woman to be Ezra’s mother. He’d told her she died in the spring. But even she did not receive the distinction given to the old prophet’s ploughshare-turned-sword.

  She found it gruesome, yet vaguely exciting, like something out of an H. Rider Haggard story. She was somewhat surprised to discover how little the grisly artifact bothered her. In an odd sort of way, it served t
o further endear her to the reticent boy by her side. He came from a colorful family background and had stories to tell. Annabelle, conversely, came from boring old Duxom stock. Her father was a sharecropper.

  “Ezra,” she said softly after a while. “My school’s putting on a dance in a few weeks. A sock hop—do you know what that is?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, it’s just a regular dance, except you gotta take off your shoes so as to not ruin the gymnasium floor.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “There’ll be lots of nice kids there,” she went on, “and punch and cookies, that sort of thing. I already asked my mother if it was all right, and I’d sorta like you to take me.”

  “Take you?”

  “To the dance, silly.”

  Ezra narrowed his eyes and scrunched up his face. He had met Annabelle only two weeks before, during one of his unsanctioned escapes into town, but he’d already taken a profound liking to her. She was forthright and charming and kind, and her startling prettiness only helped. Other boys promenaded for her attention, but Annabelle said she preferred Ezra’s shyness, his gentle demeanor.

  Some boys will paw at a girl, she’d told him to his marked wonder. I’m glad you don’t think I’m that kind.

  He did not know what kind she meant, but Ezra was glad, too.

  “You don’t have to, of course,” Annabelle squeaked, her eyes a bit shiny.

  “No, no,” he protested. “I’d like that. I really would.”

  The girl sighed and smiled sweetly. She reached for Ezra’s hand, squeezed it, and touched her soft, pink lips to his cheek.

  He felt a mild tremor work its way up his spine.

  * * *

  Jonah wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and exhaled noisily. He’d been hauling logs and hefting the axe over them for the better part of an hour, yet Ezra was nowhere to be seen. The boy was shirking his chores.

  “He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand, Ezra,” Jonah grumbled.