Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

He backed out of the room, no longer feeling quite so relaxed.

  “Eat this,” a voice said behind him.

  He turned just in time to see the Jones boy swing a baseball bat towards his head.

  * * *

  When he came back to himself, he was in the kitchen, staring at the red door. He had blood on his hands and a gash above his right eye. He’d been dripping on the floor and there was a spreading crimson puddle at his feet.

  Sorry Bettie.

  He felt light-headed and groggy. He remembered nothing but the sight of the boy’s grin and the swoosh of the bat as it came towards him.

  I need to tell those policemen.

  But before that he had to clean up, first the floor, then himself.

  It took a while, and when he finished he was surprised to see that the sun was going down. He made tea, put on the radio and sat at the table. He tried to read, but his eyes refused to focus on the text, showing him only black specks and daubs on a sheet of white.

  He switched his attention to the radio, but the usual laughter was absent. The announcer was deadly serious.

  “Tonight, police have launched a search for three young boys—”

  He rose and switched the radio off.

  Don’t want Bettie getting upset.

  The red door started to swing open as he turned back to his chair. The orange light flickered outside.

  He was about to move towards it when there was a pounding at his front door.

  “Police, Mr. Ratchett. Open up please. We need to talk to you.”

  Oh no. Bettie wouldn’t like that. She wouldn’t like that at all.

  He stepped out onto the pier.

  The tannoy rang out, tinny and echoing. Mr. Phillips’s voice came loud and clear.

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

  He heard the thwup of the approaching paddles and the mournful whistle announcing the ferry’s arrival. A few yards along the pier, the handle of the waiting room door squealed and turned. John’s breath steamed in front of his face. The waiting room door swung open, a yellow light spilling a long rectangular outline on the platform.

  The ferry will be here soon.

  John stepped forward so that he was standing in the light from the waiting room.

  Inside, something shuffled.

  The thwup of the paddle-steamer got closer.

  “Please stand well clear of the edge,” Phillips’s voice said loudly.

  Something shuffled again. There was a scrape.

  Four figures moved forward, faces deep in shadow, bodies little more than silhouettes. The larger person in the center came forward first, the three smaller figures following meekly behind.

  Suddenly, John couldn’t breathe.

  The paddle noise grew so loud he could hardly hear. The pier trembled at his feet. He stepped aside as the figures came out of the waiting room. The pier filled with steam and fog as the ferry pulled in to the dock, so much so that the figures became even more vague and indistinct.

  He heard a shout in the distance from the front door of his house.

  “Mr. Ratchett, if you don’t open this door we’ll have to break it down.”

  Bettie wouldn’t like that at all.

  He turned towards the red door. He was stopped by a voice whispering his name.

  John.

  That was all she said. That was all she had to say.

  Bettie?

  He turned.

  She was there, smiling, holding out a hand towards him. Behind her, three children hugged at her coattails. The largest peered around her and smiled. He’d seen that grin before somewhere but couldn’t quite remember where.

  She makes a great mother.

  Back in the house the front door crashed open and wood splintered.

  “Mr. Ratchett. Where are the boys?”

  Even from the pier, John heard the thudding of feet on the stairs. He knew he should be concerned, but his mind was focused on the figure in front of him.

  “Bettie? Is it really you?”

  Her voice came as a whisper from far away, as thin as the smoke that surrounded her.

  Come on John. We’re taking a little boat trip. The whole family.

  The noise from back in the house was getting louder. There were crashes as furniture was thrown aside and shouts of frustration.

  But Bettie didn’t seem to mind.

  And if Bettie doesn’t mind, then neither do I.

  A figure stood at the far end of the pier. He was wreathed in smoke, but John recognized the tall hat and long coat. He waved, and the harbormaster raised a hand and waved back. Suddenly he didn’t look quite like the man that John remembered. But who else could it be?

  All aboard!

  Mr. Phillips wasn’t one to wait for stragglers. Bettie shooed the children aboard up the short gangway and waited until John took her arm. Together they stepped up onto the gently swaying deck of the ferry. John immediately felt at home. Bettie put her arm around him and stood, cuddled close beside him, with the three children standing straight-backed and quiet to one side.

  A family outing. That sounds nice.

  The ferry pulled out of the dock and John caught a last glimpse into the kitchen.

  The young policemen ran into the room.

  The red door swung gently closed.

  William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada. Around 1991, and after being given a push by his new wife, he began submitting stories to a number of UK small press magazines. Meikle now has twenty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work has appeared in a number of professional anthologies and magazines. His novel, The Hole, rose to the Top 20 of the Amazon Horror chart.

  Meikle chooses to write mainly at the pulpy end of the market, populating his stories with monsters, myths, men who like a drink and smoke, and more monsters.

  He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he plays guitar, drinks beer and dreams of fortune and glory. He writes to escape. He hasn’t managed it yet, but he’s working on it.

  -1-

  I had not seen Aubrey Debrunner since I was a kid, and for me, being a kid was a long time ago. When I finally saw him again after four decades, I couldn’t help being repulsed by the memory of his missing eyes—those empty sockets and flaccid lids—and my abhorrence when I saw what he had placed inside those gaping holes, or my terror when he whispered “Now I can see you,” as he had done once before so long ago.

  -2-

  Aubrey and I grew up in Kitchissippi, a town in Canada’s Ottawa Valley. While we lived on the same street, it’s not like I really wanted him around. As a kid, he was tolerated, much like the ass-end of winter in February, or clouds of black flies in June.

  Some of us were military brats whose fathers worked at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa and some of us were “civvies,” but we all lived together in the same small town and attended the same public school.

  Kitchissippi no longer exists. A lot of bad shit went down there in the seventies, and by 1981 it was a ghost town. I’m sure there’s a good story in the bitter decline of what I will always think of as my boyhood home, but that’s not my story to tell.

  I want to tell you about Aubrey.

  -3-

  Aubrey was the kid we all ragged on. Make no mistake, my friends and I were losers. We were kids who were singled out for minor differences in a typically homogeneous Canadian town that remained, right up to the end, almost exclusively the domain of white Protestants and Catholics. There was the fat kid, the kid who had seizures and the kid whose parents were raging, street-fighting drunks. There was the kid whose divorced mom dated too many different guys, the kid whose motorcycle-riding dad was turned into a red smear on Highway 7 and the kid whose little sister died in a fire. And then there was me, the one with red hair, nerdy glasses and a wild imagination that made him blurt out weird shit at the most inappropriate times.


  We were all about the same age and attended all the same classes for years. We called ourselves the Group of Seven. We had stolen the name for our gang from a bunch of Canadian artists who painted landscapes so bleak you wanted to cry or kill yourself for just looking at them. Aubrey wasn’t one of the Seven.

  He may have had certain advantages, but he was a coddled only child who couldn’t do anything risky. He couldn’t swim in the Petawawa River, or slide down the steep sandy hill near Boyd’s Pond on sheets of cardboard, or skate on a frozen creek in winter, or even help the rest of us build tree forts in summer, the latter being arguably the grandest of traditions among Kitchissippi children. He was susceptible to colds and infections that either kept him out of school or required that he fire down handfuls of antibiotics like the rest of us gobbled up Maltesers. Among the other kids, the Group of Seven were near the bottom of the social ladder, and Aubrey was a rung below us.

  And then there was that damned name his parents had burdened him with. Aubrey. Holy whistling Jesus, could it get any worse than that?

  Aubrey’s family had a really nice house on the west side of Kitchissippi, nicer than anything the rest of us knew living in rented apartments or PMQs, and I recall him saying both his father and mother were artists who worked all over the Ottawa Valley, including at the National Gallery and the Museum of Man. That got a lot of weird looks from the other eleven- and twelve-year-old kids who heard this, kids whose dads were mechanics or worked on loading docks, whose mothers were housewives.

  His parents were a different breed, and they treated Aubrey differently. That made him seem different to the rest of us. Hell, they might as well have painted a target on his back.

  Aubrey was pale and slim and ripe for being shit on, yet he kept hanging around, no matter how much grief we gave him. I guess you had to give him points for that.

  I remember Aubrey showing up to school one day with big sunglasses. He had a note allowing him to wear them in class. That was in September of 1976, and we were all starting the sixth grade. Aubrey looked like an albino Roy Orbison in those shades. After a few weeks of creeping along the halls with his eyes hidden behind tinted plastic lenses, Aubrey began leaving school early. It was said that he was getting headaches all the time, bad headaches.

  The few times Aubrey showed up at school in October were unsettling. He was horribly pale; his veins showed through his skin as if someone had drawn on him with a blue marker. It was just before Halloween when we realized Aubrey was losing his hair, and he looked so wretched that our Group of Seven felt bad making him the target of our teasing or the butt of our jokes.

  Somebody, it may have been Mark, asked Aubrey what was going on with him and Aubrey said he was getting chemotherapy and radiation, which instantly filled us with dread since we knew—thanks to the movies—that radiation either melted you like a death ray or mutated you into a giant monster.

  Horrific stories started making the rounds, stories about Aubrey losing his eyes. It was said he had cancer, that he had tumors on both of his optic nerves and that the doctors would soon have to surgically remove them, along with his perfectly healthy eyes.

  That remains one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard.

  When I was young, kids weren’t as sophisticated as they are today. Our knowledge base and playing fields were narrower. We didn’t have cable TV or the Internet, smart phones or Xboxes. We didn’t have the entire world at our fingertips. What we had was reruns, the public library and endless woods; the truths and the lies our parents told us to enlighten and protect us; the utter bullshit our older siblings fed us just to screw with our heads; and the grapevine of communal childhood information that was part mythology and part hearsay, all of it distorted by the lenses of wonder, inexperience, fantasy and fear.

  We weren’t exposed to everything the world had to offer back then. We had no idea how apocalyptically messed up some people were, and for that I have always been grateful. There’s a lot of good in the world and a lot of ugliness. I was spared most of the ugliness, and I spent my childhood simply being a kid.

  And that’s why I thought the stories about Aubrey had to be true.

  I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I had a knack for making stuff up even at that age. Long before I ever put pen to paper, I began telling poorly crafted stories that were completely uninhibited flights of fancy, but cancerous tumors of the optic nerves? No kid I knew could have imagined something like that back then. It was too ghastly to be anything but real.

  When you were a military brat you got used to kids disappearing. Fathers got transferred and sometimes families had to pull up stakes on short notice. You got used to packing and moving, saying goodbye to old friends and making new ones. I have friends now that have spent their entire lives in the same town, and to me that seems strange.

  A week before my family left Kitchissippi, Aubrey disappeared. And I welcomed both events.

  It was in the spring of 1977, and my dad had been posted to Chilliwack, out in BC. The upside was I was leaving Kitchissippi. The downside was that I had to say goodbye to my friends. But that was just as well as my friends were disappearing in the worst way imaginable. They were being murdered. And I think it was Aubrey who was killing them.

  After Keith and Lorne died, Aubrey’s parents left town. One day they were there and the next they were gone, but not before they had their own son committed to an asylum, the Leander Meade Convalescent Home and Sanatorium, Renfrew County's notorious mental hospital north of Kitchissippi.

  That aging facility, constructed at the same time as Canada’s Parliament buildings, using the same Ottawa Valley sandstone, was troubled from the start. Once a wellspring of terrifying stories whispered among the children of Kitchissippi, Miramichi and Petawawa, the vacant hospital is now a shuttered Gothic curiosity, its sculpted towers and arched windows slowly being swallowed by the dark outgrowth of Algonquin Provincial Park.

  After one too many scandals involving inexplicable operational expenditures, rumors of sexual abuse and purported accidental deaths—not to mention acquisition of the notorious and unflattering sobriquet La Maison Sombre—the institution was shuttered a few years after Aubrey’s arrival.

  Where Aubrey went once the asylum was shut down, or what he had endured while he was there, no one knew. During the turmoil of the hospital’s dénouement in the winter of 1979, a brief, bleak note on his release was inscribed in a register of patients. It read simply that he was “turned out.”

  -4-

  Like many people my age, I recently began using Facebook to recall and share memories of the past, reconnect with old friends from high school and college through pages set up to commemorate a specific time and place, or to host groups for military brats. When I received an invitation to join a group called Remembering Kitchissippi, I was surprised that anyone wanted to recall that town, and amazed that anyone found me.

  I had been living in northern Alberta the last few years, in Fort McMurray. I never stayed in one place very long. From British Columbia to Newfoundland there are thousands of men who share my name, John MacDonald. It’s a name than comes with a certain amount of anonymity. And while I do make a very public living writing, I publish everything under a pseudonym. Yet someone had connected this John MacDonald, me, with a place two thousand miles away and forty years gone, knowing that the full-bearded, ponytailed man living now was the fresh-faced boy who lived then.

  The creator of the Facebook group used an alias: Perseus Jones.

  I had read a lot of Greek mythology as a kid, and for a moment the ancient tales of Perseus seemed to have some significance, but it eluded me and I let the thought go.

  Access to the page was granted quickly, and I soon saw some familiar names. Kent was out in BC. Eddie was in Halifax. Mark was in Montreal. Darren was in Toronto. All that remained of the Group of Seven. We chatted on Facebook for months and played with schedules until we realized we could all meet during the first week of August. We choose Miramichi as grou
nd zero; it was the closest town to the now empty houses, deserted businesses and overgrown lots of Kitchissippi.

  -5-

  When we finally got together in the restaurant of the Best Western, it was surreal. I could see the boys in the faces of the men around the table, people I had not seen in forty years. We all had greying or thinning hair, too many wrinkles, and for some of us, too many extra pounds.

  We shot the shit for a while, tossing each other the highlights of our lives, getting to know who was married, who had kids, who had a nice house or a job worth bragging about. We had all been close as kids, but too much time had passed. We had moved too far apart. I didn’t care much about the full lives being shared with me, but I did care about what I thought of as the real reason we were here.

  “Time to fess up,” I said. “Which one of you is Perseus Jones?”

  Blank stares all around.

  “It’s not me, so it had to be one of you.”

  “It isn’t me,” Darren said. He had been chubby as a kid and still carried a lot of extra weight. His round, ruddy face was the most youthful at the table. He had five little girls and a wife who was still slim and gorgeous. Go figure the odds on that one.

  “Me either,” Eddie said as he sipped a Canada Dry club soda and muffled a belch with a fist. His parents were drunks who had trashed their own home a dozen times over in fantastic brawls, and now he was a high school counselor. Seeing the club soda in his hand, I wondered if he had inherited the family genes.

  “Sure as fuck wasn’t me,” Mark said. He had been a small kid with a sweet face, and rumor had it that his mom had been an easy lay—a lush, a tramp, a harlot. All the old epithets came back to me as I looked at Mark. Now he was all sinew and callous, one of those wiry guys that can be so dangerous in a fight. He taught advanced self-defense classes. When we had met he smiled and shook my hand, squeezing hard, and I had noticed a raw hostility in his eyes that saddened me. He’d been a nice kid. Now he looked like a bastard.