And he had no intention of doing that.
So he let her pass.
She went into the bathroom and he heard the toilet lid come up and he knew they wouldn’t see her for at least an hour.
“Well, at least she didn’t scream at us,” Sarah said.
“Sarah,” he said, “she was lying to us. You saw that, right?”
“But isn’t what she said possible? Bartleby has peed on the carpet before.”
“But not in her bed. He’s scared to death of her.”
“He’s not scared to death of our daughter.”
“Are you kidding? He won’t go near her, even with me in the room.”
“That’s not her fault.”
“But peeing in the bed is. Please tell me you see that? Our daughter just lied to us.”
* * *
A month later, with summer coming on, Thom was spending a lot more of his time in the backyard. He’d taken the little cash they had left over each month and planted a garden on the back patio. It was a pretty good one, too. Lots of herbs, tomatoes, zucchini – stuff they could eat.
The patio was looking good.
One Saturday morning he rose from another night of restless sleep and went down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.
Sarah was at the store, buying their weekly groceries.
Jacob was, as always, on the couch watching cartoons.
He couldn’t find Megan, though.
He walked around the house, calling her name, assuming she probably had those damn headphones on again—she couldn’t hear a train wreck with those things on—until he got to the kitchen.
Nobody had bothered to feed Bartleby, so he did.
That done, he put his coffee cup on the counter and turned his attention to the patio garden.
But he was immediately drawn to the shed.
There was smoke coming out of the roof.
He was a paramedic by training but a firefighter by nature, so he grabbed the fire extinguisher they kept in the pantry and ran for the backyard.
He threw open the door and saw Megan inside. She had a pile of Jacob’s G.I. Joe dolls laid out on one of Sarah’s cookie sheets, and they were burning.
She was smiling, happy as a lark, the lighter still in her hand.
“What in the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Stop it!” Megan said.
“No, what in the hell are you doing?”
“Stop it! Stop!”
Megan clapped her hands over her ears and ran from the shed.
“No, goddammit,” he yelled after her. “What are you doing?”
“Leave me alone!” Megan yelled, and ran inside.
Through the windows at the back of the house, Thom could see her work her way up the stairs and then to her bedroom, where she promptly slammed the door.
Done for the rest of the day.
The firefighter in him turned his attention back to the fire she’d started. Seven different dolls, burning pretty good.
He doused them with the extinguisher and left the heap of burnt plastic sitting on his workbench.
And when Sarah got home, they had words.
* * *
Thom hadn’t trusted Megan for a while, maybe a year.
The kid lied all the time.
Lied about stuff there was no reason to lie about, like wetting her bed and stuffing the blankets under the shed.
It made no sense.
But the bit with burning Jacob’s G.I. Joe dolls was the last straw.
“We are not leaving her alone with Jacob,” he told Sarah. “There’s no way. In fact, I don’t think we should leave her by herself at all.”
Sarah, her arms wrapped around her ribcage and her eyes full of tears, could only manage a nod.
That was their life for the next two weeks.
It was Hell.
Megan wouldn’t talk to them. Wouldn’t even scream at them. But every time she passed them in the hall or caught their eye from across the room, she glared at them, at Thom especially, like she hated him.
Hell, she totally did. She thought he was a pile of what Bartleby had left on the lawn.
That Saturday he got up a little after eight, went to the kitchen and poured himself some coffee. Sarah liked to do her weekly shopping early in the morning, to beat the crowds, and she’d taken Jacob with her. Megan was somewhere. He had no idea where.
And, of course, nobody had bothered to feed Bartleby, so he scooped out some food for him.
“Bartleby,” he said. “Come here, boy.”
Nothing.
Ordinarily, the dog came running just at the sound of the food getting scooped out.
“Bartleby!”
He checked the backyard, to see if maybe Megan had let him out to poop, but rather than see the dog, he saw Megan slip into the shed.
What the hell?
He opened the back door and called out to the girl. “Megan, have you seen Bartleby?”
No answer.
“Goddammit,” he muttered. He didn’t want to face the screaming, not another day of it. Then he kicked himself for being scared to talk to his own daughter. It shouldn’t be this way.
He went to the shed and pulled the door open.
Megan was standing at his workbench, her back to him.
She was dressed in old jeans and a dark t-shirt, and even as his mind was processing the strangeness of Megan dressed in something other than pajamas before noon, before breakfast even, he saw the blood on the workbench.
“Megan…?”
He took a step to one side and saw Bartleby’s headless body on the bench.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh, oh, oh.”
His stomach lurched and he felt the bile rise up in his throat. Rage didn’t even enter his mind. All he felt was shock. His legs were like water.
“What did you do?” he asked. “Bartleby…?”
Megan was standing next to the bench, her face utterly expressionless. No emotion. Stone cold.
And then, in an awful moment of clarity, he understood.
He understood his daughter.
He understood what she was. And what she could become.
He’d thrown words like psychopath around, but he’d never really believed them. Not really.
But it was worse than that, wasn’t it?
The high intelligence but poor performance in school. The excessive antisocial behavior. No guilt, no remorse. All the lies.
And now the bed wetting. The arson. And animal mutilation.
What did the cops call it? The MacDonald Triad.
He was raising the Devil.
“Baby, what did you do?”
Her expression never changed. Not even a flicker of humanity. Not even when she lashed out with the knife and caught him across the throat.
He gasped without sound.
A second later she was all over him, plunging the knife into him again and again.
The last thing he saw was his blood spattered on his daughter’s face.
* * *
Megan went to the garage and got the gas can.
It was heavy, and she had to lug it back to the shed with it balanced on her hip. She screwed off the cap and pulled out the nozzle thingy and poured the gas all over everything, the benches and the Christmas decorations and the dead dog and right on her Daddy’s face.
She was careful, though, to save just enough to splash the walls of the shed, inside and out, and then lit the whole thing ablaze.
It went up so fast.
Fire always made her happy.
Joe McKinney has his feet in several different worlds. In his day job, he has worked as a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a DWI Enforcement officer, a disaster mitigation specialist, a homicide detective, the director of the City of San Antonio’s 911 Call Center, and a patrol supervisor. He played college baseball for Trinity University, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in American History, and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in English Litera
ture from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was the manager of a Barnes & Noble for a while, where he indulged a lifelong obsession with books.
McKinney published his first novel, Dead City, in 2006, a book that has since been recognized as a seminal work in the horror genre, and one of the cornerstones of zombie literature. Since then, he has gone on to win two Bram Stoker Awards® and expanded his oeuvre to cover everything from true crime and writings on police procedure to science fiction to cooking and Texas history. The author of more than twenty books, he is a frequent guest at horror and mystery conventions.
McKinney and his wife Tina have two lovely daughters and make their home in a little town just outside of San Antonio, where he indulges his passion for cooking and makes what some consider to be the finest batch of chili in Texas.
“Oh would some power the gift give us,
To see ourselves as others see us!”
Robert Burns.
“You’re mad, do you know that?” laughed Cathy as the speedometer needle touched 80. “You’re totally, utterly, irredeemably crazy!”
“What do you mean, crazy? I’m not crazy, I’m just practical!” Robin shouted back over the buffeting of the slipstream. “Life is too damn short to go slow!”
They were driving north on Bedford Road toward Katonah. It was a bright day in early October, unseasonably warm, so Robin had put down the roof of his silver Mustang so that the wind would ruffle their hair. As they sped along, overtaking every other car on the highway, they left behind them a whirling cyclone of crimson and yellow leaves.
Robin was always frightening Cathy, which was one of the reasons she loved him so much. He was tall and sculpted and handsome, with brushed-up black hair, a strong jawline and sapphire-blue eyes that always looked as if he was finding life amusing. If they were eating outside on a restaurant balcony, he would jump up when the check was put in front of him and throw himself over the railings, regardless of how far down he might fall. If they were swimming in the Housatonic, he would climb up to the bridge and dive headfirst into the water, even though the river was dangerously shallow. He would challenge anybody who annoyed him—parking attendants, shop assistants, cops, other drivers. Cathy had never met anybody so fearless. He always seemed to be daring the world to stand up to him.
“We can stop at Willy Nick’s before we go to your sister’s,” Robin shouted. “I’m jonesing for some of their crab cakes!”
“Okay, but careful!” Cathy shouted back as Robin had to swerve to avoid an oncoming bus.
“Careful? What does that mean?” he asked.
Those were the last words he spoke as they neared the intersection with Parkway where a huge maroon truck pulled out across the road in front of them. He stood on the brakes, but they were driving twenty miles an hour too fast. The Mustang was nose-heavy and slid sideways with its tires screaming in a shrill operatic chorus.
Cathy clung to the door handle, and all she could see was trees and road signs rotating around her and then the huge white letters MOVING MAN INC. The Mustang slammed broadside into the truck with a deafening crash, although Cathy didn’t hear anything at all. Her door was flung open and she was thrown out onto the road, almost as if somebody had taken hold of her arm and forcibly yanked her out of the passenger seat. She tumbled over and over, grazing her shoulder and knocking her head hard against the concrete.
She lay on her back for a moment, shocked and concussed, staring up at the sky. She could hear a high singing noise in her ears. Then she heard a stentorian roaring sound, and a wave of heat rolled over her. She managed to turn over onto her side and prop herself up on one elbow. It was then that she saw the Mustang was burning fiercely, orange flames leaping up the side of the truck.
The driver and his mate were climbing down from their cab, two black men wearing maroon overalls. They tried to approach the Mustang, but the heat was too intense. They had to raise their arms to shield their faces and back away,
At first, Cathy couldn’t see Robin, and she thought that he must have managed to escape. Surely he had managed to jump out, in the same way that he jumped off balconies and bridges, but she didn’t see him anywhere. At that moment, though, the wind fanned the flames to one side, and she saw him still sitting in the driving seat, a scorched black figure with his brushed-up hair alight, frantically wrestling to free himself from the wreckage. His eyes were still white but circled with red. He looked more like a Halloween demon than a man who was being burned alive.
“Robin!” she screamed, or thought she screamed. She climbed to her feet and made her way unsteadily towards the blazing car, but as soon as she came within twenty feet of it she found that the heat was unbearable, hotter than an open oven, and like the men she couldn’t venture any closer.
Meanwhile, the truck’s driver had run to his cab and was now hurrying back swinging a large yellow fire extinguisher. While his mate was calling 911 on his cell phone, he unfastened the nozzle and started to spray the burning Mustang with foam. He sprayed Robin first, turning him instantly from a black demon into a struggling parody of a snowman. Flecks of white foam were whirled upwards by the heat and blown into the trees by the wind, where they clung like blossoms.
A station wagon stopped not far away, and a stocky man in a tan suede jacket ran up, carrying a smaller fire extinguisher. He and the truck driver gradually managed to subdue the flames, and at last they guttered out, although the tires were still smoldering, and so much acrid grey smoke was billowing from the upholstery that the Mustang was intermittently lost from sight.
Cathy cupped her hand over her nose and mouth and made her way into the smoke, as close to the car as she could, even though it was still far too hot for her to try and open the driver’s door.
Through streaming eyes she saw Robin sitting behind the steering wheel with his head bent forward, still clutching his seat belt buckle. His hair looked like a yard-broom that had been burned right down to the last few spiky bristles, and the skin on his hands and forearms had blackened and split so that scarlet flesh showed through.
The truck driver came up through the smoke behind her and laid one hand on her shoulder. “Ain’t nothing you can do for him, lady. I’m sorry. We’ve called for the paramedics and the police. You’d best take care of yourself, make sure you ain’t got no bones broken, nor done yourself any other kind of mischief. I saw you come flying out of that car and it was almost like the angel of the Lord reached down and hauled you out of there his self.”
Cathy nodded, too shocked to be able to say anything. She found it almost impossible to believe that this grotesque figure sitting in the car was actually Robin—the same Robin who had made love to her this morning, just as it was growing light. The same Robin with whom she had been laughing and joking only minutes ago. They were supposed to be going to Willy Nick’s and then to visit her sister Jeanette. How could this have happened? How could this incinerated effigy be him?
“Come on, lady, come away,” said the truck driver. “Like I say, there ain’t nothing you can do to help him now. Nothing that nobody can do for him, no how.”
Cathy was about to turn away when Robin lifted his head. His face was a ghastly mask, with rags of burned skin hanging from it, but he opened his red-rimmed eyes and stared at her.
“Cathy?” he croaked between cracked and bleeding lips. “Cathy, save me.”
* * *
It was early on a Friday morning in the second week of January when Cathy’s iPhone warbled. She was standing in the kitchen filling the kettle to make tea. It was still dark outside, and a light but steady snow was falling.
“Cathy? This is Megan.”
Megan was Nurse Megan Wing from the Burn Center at Bridgeport Hospital, where Robin had been taken after the crash, and where he had been undergoing specialized treatment ever since. She sounded emotional, and Cathy’s heart sank.
“What is it?” she asked. She could see her face reflected in the kitchen window, and she thought she looked like a ghost standin
g in the snowy yard outside, staring in at her herself. “What’s happened?”
“It’s good news, Cathy. Robin has come out of his coma. He opened his eyes for the first time about an hour ago, and he’s actually managed to say a few words. He asked where he was and he also asked where you were.”
“Oh my God, really?” Her eyes were instantly crowded with tears. “Is he still conscious now?”
“He’s under heavy sedation, of course, but he’s been drifting in and out. I’m sure that when you come over today, he’ll be able to speak to you. “
“I’ll come right now. It’s snowing some, but it doesn’t look too bad.”
“Just take it easy on the turnpike. I saw on the news that there was a pile-up at the Route 1 intersection.”
“Oh, you can bet I will. I’ve had enough car wrecks for one lifetime. Thank you, Megan. I’ll see you later.”
* * *
Cathy hurriedly dressed in her pink roll-neck sweater and jeans, then shrugged on her dark-brown duffel coat. She was sitting on the stairs, pulling on her UGG boots, when her cousin Holly came out of her bedroom door, yawning.
“You’re not going out already? It’s only ten after six. And look out there—it’s snowing!”
“The nurse at the Burns Center just called. Robin’s woken up. He opened his eyes and he actually spoke.”
“He’s awake?” Holly asked. “That’s amazing.” She made no effort to sound enthusiastic. They had argued about this over and over again. Even if Robin survived, Holly had insisted he would never again be the handsome, athletic daredevil that Cathy had fallen in love with. He had suffered over 70 percent burns, especially to his head and arms and upper body, which should have been more than enough to kill him. It would take years of intensive therapy for him to be able to perform the most rudimentary functions, such as feeding himself and bathing, and apart from that, he would be hideously scarred. Even Nurse Wing had warned Cathy that underneath the pressure mask that was protecting his face, he no longer had a nose or lips, and his ears had been burned off. Even the most skillful of reconstructive surgeons would not be able to give him his good looks back.
Peel Back the Skin Page 10
