Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  There was no name for a pain like this, but Cathy lay back and continued to hold the blowtorch between her legs until her brain shut itself down. The blowtorch dropped to the floor. The snow fell. Cathy twitched and shuddered, her eyes half-open, only the whites showing. She dreamed that she was dead, and in a way she was because her brain refused to allow her to wake up.

  * * *

  It was the second day of June when Nurse Wing came into Robin’s room at the Bridgeport Hospital. He had undergone his third operation to remove the keloids on his face and to rebuild his nose, but he was still wearing his transparent facial orthosis. The sun was shining and white cumulus clouds were hurrying northeastward, as if they were panicking.

  “Robin, I have a visitor for you,” said Nurse Wing.

  Robin was sitting in a chair by the window, wearing a thick maroon robe. His bandaged wrists peeked out of his sleeves. The time to fit him with prosthetic hands would come later, when his burns had completely healed.

  “Really? I’m not expecting anybody, am I?” Robin had caught something in the tone of Nurse Wing’s voice. Usually, when his sister or one of his friends came to visit him, she sounded cheerful and upbeat. Not now, though. She sounded almost as if she were trying to give him a warning.

  Before Nurse Wing could say any more, the door behind her opened wider and a young woman walked in. He didn’t recognise her at first because her face was completely covered by a flesh-colored mask, made out of the same material as pressure bandages. She could have been a giant doll. She was wearing a flowery summer frock in red and blue and yellow, but her legs were also covered by flesh-colored pressure bandages, and she was pushing a walker.

  Nurse Wing attempted a smile and said, “I’ll leave you two together then. Call me, Robin, if you need me.”

  She left the room and closed the door behind her. The doll-like young woman stood unmoving for a few seconds, and then she pushed her walker up to Robin. Before she could say anything, he realized who she was. It was the perfume she was wearing, the same perfume that he had given Cathy the week before the accident.

  “Cathy? You are Cathy, aren’t you?”

  The doll-like woman nodded.

  “Holy Christ, Cathy, what’s happened to you? Did you get involved in another wreck?”

  Cathy sat down in the chair next to him. “No,” she said in a strangely hollow voice, as if she were speaking through a megaphone. “Nothing like that.”

  “Then what? What’s happened to your face?”

  “I did it myself, Robin. I did it for you. Well, that’s not really true. I did it for us.”

  “I don’t understand, Cathy, You did what for us?”

  “You said you didn’t want to see me again because you were going to turn out to be a monster, and I was pretty.”

  “I know,” Robin said. “I know I did. But I only wanted to be fair to you. You shouldn't have to spend the rest of your life with a gargoyle like me when you could snap your fingers and have any man who takes your fancy.”

  “That’s why I did it. I love you, Robin. You and me, we’re soul mates. Now we’re more than that. Now we look like each other, too.”

  With that, she reached behind her pressure-mask and unfastened it. She bent her head forward, carefully eased it away from her face and then looked up at Robin, her brown eyes bright, her lips smiling.

  Robin couldn’t speak. He simply stared at her in revulsion. Her brown eyes may have been bright, and her lips might have been smiling, but there was nothing but two triangular caverns where her nose had been, and she had no ears. She looked like a ghastly parody of Lon Chaney playing The Phantom of the Opera.

  “That’s not all,” she said, and she eased herself up so that she could lift her dress and show him the purple braided scars between her legs. “No other man is going to want me now, Robin, so you don’t have to worry about me. We can be together forever.”

  Robin said, “Cathy, pull your dress back down. And, please, put your mask back on.”

  “Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you pleased I did this? I still have a whole lot of surgery to go through. But they’re treating me here at Bridgeport, too. I come here two or three times a week, so we can see each other all the time.”

  “What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”

  “I did it for you, Robin. I thought you’d be pleased. You are pleased, aren’t you?”

  “Cathy, just because I look like this doesn’t mean that I want a partner who looks like this. I might be a freak myself, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be attracted to another freak.”

  Cathy’s eyes filled with tears. “What are you saying? You’re not saying that I shouldn’t have done this? Robin, I did it for you!”

  Robin closed his eyes for a moment. While he did so, Cathy replaced her pressure-mask and fastened it. When he opened his eyes he said, “I’m going to have to be truthful with you, Cathy. What you’ve done to yourself, I think you must be psychotic. You look inhuman, and that’s the kindest thing I can say. Don’t blame me for it.”

  He reached across and pressed the bell beside his bed. After a few moments, Nurse Wing came in.

  “I think visiting time’s over,” Robin said. “I don’t know what to say to you, Cathy. I’m totally shocked.”

  Nurse Wing walked over and helped Cathy to stand up. Cathy’s shoulders were quaking with grief, although she wasn’t audibly sobbing.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you now, Cathy,” Robin said. “All I can do is wish you the best of luck, and say that I’m very, very sorry for you.”

  “So there’s no chance at all?” Cathy asked in a choked voice.

  Robin shook his head and lifted one of his bandaged stumps towards Nurse Wing. “Me and Megan, we’ve become really close. She’s been taking care of burn patients all of her life, and they don’t put her off. And I have to say that she’s beautiful, like you used to be.”

  * * *

  Holly was waiting for Cathy in the reception area. She didn’t say a word as they walked out into the windy afternoon and across the parking lot to Holly’s car. She could guess what had happened, and she didn’t want to say, “I told you so.”

  They were speeding back to Fairfield on the turnpike when Cathy said, “Well. It seems like I have only two choices now. I could join a circus. Step right up! Come and see the noseless, earless, unfuckable woman.”

  “Oh, Cathy. What’s the other choice?”

  Cathy sat quite still for a while with her hands in her lap. Then she unbuckled her seat belt, opened the car door and threw herself sideways out of the car and onto the road. She bounced, and bounced again, her arms and legs flying, and then she was hit by a huge Mack truck and disappeared from sight.

  Later, when the police and the ambulance had arrived, Holly went over to the truck driver, who was sitting on the steel divider in the middle of the road, still badly shaken.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Holly told him.

  The truck driver shook his head. “Never seen nothing like it. Your car door come flying open, and do you know? It was like the angel of the Lord plucked her out of there, in person.”

  Graham Masterton is a British horror author. Originally an editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, his first novel, The Manitou, was released in 1976 and was adapted into a film of the same name. Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Masterton was also the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in Europe and the USA. Buried, the latest book in his Katie Maguire crime series, was released in December 2015.

  Masterton’s novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels, he has wri
tten a number of sex instruction books, including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed and Wild Sex for New Lover.

  Masterton currently lives in Surrey, England.

  The red door behind him rattled.

  It didn’t bother John Ratchett. In fact, he welcomed it. It reminded him of better days. He sat at the kitchen table reading his paper. The radio was tuned to BBC 4, and the long-loved voices and laughter of the studio audience soothed him.

  "Tonight, we promise you a nail-biting contest, which will be followed by a nose-picking contest."

  Old friends.

  He finished the sports section and had moved on to the crossword when he remembered to look up at the clock.

  The last crossing is late again. Mr. Phillips will have words to say.

  He’d gone as far as laying down his pencil and pushing his chair back from the table when he remembered. He sat back with a heavy sigh.

  At ten thirty he finally gave up on the crossword, folded the paper neatly and made two cups of hot chocolate. He left one on the kitchen table as he headed for the stairs and bed.

  There you go darling. Careful with it, it’s hot.

  From the bottom of the stairs he could still hear the rattle of the old door, but by the time he got to the bedroom, all was silent.

  Too quiet.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and sipped at the hot chocolate. It tasted bitter tonight. He placed it on the bedside table and lay back against the too-soft pillow. He knew Bettie would be annoyed with him for not removing his clothes first, but he was tired all the way through to his bones.

  I’m getting too old for this.

  He lay there for a long time, staring at the shadows that waltzed across the ceiling, listening for the ferry whistle.

  * * *

  In the morning, the red door rattled again as he went to the fridge for milk. A flake of paint fell off to join a small pile of others at the foot of the door. He’d thought, several times over the years, that he should give it a fresh coat.

  But Bettie wouldn’t like it.

  Bettie liked things to stay the same from one day to the next, an even keel and a steady ship.

  Everything in its place and everything to the timetable.

  John tried hard not to disappoint her, even long after she’d passed on.

  There, now you’ve done it you old fool. You’ve remembered again.

  He closed the fridge door quietly and went through to the front of the house. The living room—the parlor, as Bettie called it—was to his left, but he hadn’t been in there for years. That was Bettie’s domain, and woe betide anyone who trespassed.

  His daily paper lay on the floor inside the main door, but he didn’t feel up to bending down for it just yet. Not before his constitutional.

  He left the paper on the floor, fetched his coat and went outside. Not for the first time he considered getting a dog, a companion that he could share his walks with.

  But Bettie wouldn’t like that. Dogs have hairs, and hairs mean mess. Bettie wouldn’t like mess.

  It was a warm, sunny day. He took his time, enjoying the morning as only a man who realizes he may not have many left can. His mind wandered in long-past days, but his legs knew the way, taking him along paths ingrained by many years of repetition. The morning check had become almost a religious ritual. More than that, it had become a necessity, ever since the Jones boy and his gang had discovered the pier office block.

  He walked through the town slowly. No one spoke to him, but that wasn’t unusual. Most of the people he’d ever known were long since gone, and the young don’t talk much to the old outside their immediate family. It reminds them too much of their own mortality.

  Some of us don’t need reminding.

  The old ferry point on the pier was near as dead as his friends were. The passage of time wasn’t treating it kindly. Ivy ran rampant along what was left of the walls. The windows were boarded shut, and the old doors were covered in the vilest graffiti. He’d long since given up trying to maintain the exterior—that was the domain of the local youth.

  I’m glad Bettie isn’t here to see what things have come to.

  The interiors, where his memories were stored, that was another matter.

  He went along to the night watchman’s office first. Weeds flowered where cargo trolleys had once ran, and the old rails were rusted and crumbling atop timbers that had become rotten and ravaged by the weather. John kept the office in working order, just in case. There was always a slim chance of a reversal. He just hoped he’d live long enough to see it.

  The door to the office lay partly open.

  John’s heart sank.

  Not again.

  Something scuffed inside then went quiet.

  “The little buggers,” John muttered, then clamped a hand over his mouth. Bettie never stood for any swearing.

  Something scuffed again, and a child giggled.

  “No more warnings,” he said loudly. “You’re in trouble now.”

  He climbed the short steps into the office. He wondered what it would be this time. Over the past year he’d found empty bottles of beer, magazines that he’d never be able to talk to Bettie about and, on one occasion, a perfect spiral of human shit right in the middle of the floor. He’d reported it to the authorities of course, but nothing was ever done, and he’d often hear the Jones gang laughing at him behind the walls as he did the rounds. Sometimes they threw things at him—eggs, tomatoes and even stones.

  He bore it. Bettie would never allow him to take his anger out on children.

  You would have made a great mother Bettie.

  They’d never had any children of their own. It hadn’t been for want of trying. The old bed in the room above the ticket office had seen plenty of action in those years. But when the bridge was built, and the ferry was closed down, all they had to take with them when they left were their memories and the old red door from the ticket office, as a memento.

  Bettie’s father hadn’t let them put it in the front of his house, but when John installed it at the back of the kitchen, Bettie thanked him and pecked him on the cheek.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “We’ll see it every day to remind us of the way we were.”

  When the old man died, John had broached the subject of the door again, but Bettie proved true to form.

  “Father was right. The front of the house is what everyone sees, but the important things go on round the back. It’s in its rightful place,” she said, and would hear no more.

  * * *

  He came out of his reverie standing in his kitchen in front of the red door with no idea how he’d got back from the dockside. By the angle of light from the back window, he knew it was already mid-afternoon.

  I’m getting too old for this.

  More and more he’d become lost in the past, reliving happier times.

  I miss you Bettie.

  He made a pot of tea, letting it steep for a while, just the way she liked it. When it was ready he sat at the table reading his paper, the radio once again tuned to the BBC. The long-loved voices and laughter of the studio audience washed over him.

  The paper was full of the usual bad news. The world was going to hell.

  You wouldn’t like it Bettie.

  The crossword was more difficult than usual and he welcomed the diversion it supplied. He lost track of time for a while. He only looked up once, not really expecting the last ferry but unable to break the old habit.

  The red door rattled behind him.

  Maybe I’ll just fix the hinges. Bettie wouldn’t mind me doing that.

  Then it did something new. It squeaked.

  A cold chill hit the back of John’s neck and ruffled the paper in front of him on the table. He turned, half-expecting to see a figure standing in the doorway. Sometimes visitors came straight to the rear door, knowing that he spent most of his time in the kitchen.

  But there was no one there. He pushed himself up out of the chair, fighting against new stiffness in hi
s back. The door lay open by a good six inches. A faint light—orange and flickering slightly—showed from beyond.

  That’s not right.

  The handle was cold in his hot palm as he pulled the door further open and stepped out onto a foggy pier.

  That’s not right at all.

  He looked left and right. The pier was empty, a slight fog hanging down at sea level.

  A tannoy rang out, tinny and echoing, but he recognized Mr. Phillips’s voice, even after all these years.

  “The ferry approaching is the nine-thirty from Kyle.”

  The long remembered peep-peep of a steam whistle sounded in the distance. A few yards along the pier, the handle of the waiting room door squealed and started to turn.

  He almost threw himself back into the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind him. He stood there for a long time, just listening to his heart thump in his ears, struggling with each breath, terrified that, at any moment, he’d hear a ferry pull in to a platform just outside—outside in the back garden. But once his heart slowed, he noticed that all was quiet and still.

  As he stepped away from the door, it rattled again, just once.

  He went to the cupboard and took down the whisky. Years ago, he’d convinced Bettie to buy some “for medicinal reasons.” The last time it had been opened was the night of her funeral, and he had to wipe a thick layer of oily dust from around the cap before untwisting it. He poured a large measure into his teacup and swallowed it without tasting. The fire, as it hit his belly, reminded him that he was still alive.

  He stood there, looking at the door.

  On the radio they were playing “Mornington Crescent” and cackling loudly. Suddenly the voices sounded just a bit too forced, too mechanical, like a tannoy on an impossible pier on an equally impossible shore this far up the hill out of town. He played with the tuning until he found a wash of innocuous music. It was only then that he could start to settle and begin to try to make sense of what had happened.