Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  “Just destroy him and be done with it,” Platt said. Even now his words were bloodless.

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “Even with these broken eyes I can see he’s just some guy dressed up to scare people.”

  Holt drew his twin automatics. He looked at Platt and the little boy, could see the desire on their faces, knew that others would pay the price if he let them go. They’d made their choices, and they didn’t care who suffered to fulfill their desires. But he knew their temptations, too. He’d been in their place himself, not so long ago.

  Tristram Holt gripped the pistols tighter and hesitated.

  The Corpse pulled the triggers.

  The shreds of the hell-born contracts had vanished even before the two bodies hit the floor, neat little bullet holes in the centers of their foreheads. The darkness dissipated more slowly. It retreated to the corners of the room to watch as the Corpse closed up the safe. He left the original contract in place. Ellid had no need of the revised publicity clauses now, and Soupy Fitzroy would claim to have spotted the Corpse casing the house before wisely abandoning the job. The last of the darkness lingered, teasing strands that wound around the Corpse’s arm as he reached down to cut off Bramwell Platt’s right hand—a gift for Doctor Grimm to use in rebuilding Mister Crump. The good doctor would have to find the other parts on his own. The Corpse had had enough of stolen eyes for a lifetime.

  Before he left the shabby little house in Cicero, the crime-fighter withdrew a silver tube from his jacket and poured maggots onto his victims—the mark of the Corpse. This time, though, they also marked a grave, the true final resting place of Tristram Holt.

  In the instant before they died, both Platt and little Andy, even with his broken vision, had recognized that their assassin was not the former assistant district attorney. The dead man’s visage and the ragged clothes—the bloody, bullet-torn jacket and the tattered cloak that fluttered like torn wings—were no longer just a disguise. And no matter what face he might pretend to hide behind now, it would not be Tristram Holt but the Corpse who stalked the streets of Chicago, bringing doom to the lawless and the damned.

  James Lowder has worked extensively on both sides of the editorial blotter. As a writer his publications include the bestselling, widely translated dark fantasy novels Prince of Lies and Knight of the Black Rose, short fiction for such anthologies as Shadows Over Baker Street and Sojourn: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction, and comic book scripts for DC, Image, Moonstone and Desperado.

  As an editor he’s directed novel lines or series for both large and small publishing houses, and has helmed more than a dozen critically acclaimed anthologies, including Madness on the Orient Express, Hobby Games: The 100 Best, and the Books of Flesh zombie trilogy. His work has received five Origins Awards and an ENnie Award, and he has been a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award®.

  So Big Joe wants me to write my confession. The fucked-up things I did and why I did them. I wonder how I’m supposed to disappear if his scheme works.

  He thinks he’s marching to Calvary. I say he’s throwing himself at the mercy of thugs in a Dashiell Hammett novel made into a movie by Quentin Tarantino. Maybe we’re both right.

  In case he fails, I draw this:

  The letters, TSMYWLGFHPC, taken from the statement, ITISMYWILLTOGETOUTOFTHISPLACE, rearranged to form a sigil, a symbol expressing my wish to escape.

  Just to be safe, I’ll add this:

  Power to conjure weapons.

  And this:

  Superhuman strength.

  Sigils are like search terms for the Google of the subconscious. The subconscious thinks in signs and images, so the terms must be scrambled to be understood.

  The problem is how to activate the sigils, how to hit the SEARCH button. Maybe—because I’m rooting for Big Joe and because I’m terrified of Chuck and his murder monkeys—my desire will be strong enough.

  So far Google is not telling me how to get out of this madhouse.

  Enough. Time to write.

  Wait.

  ITISMYWILLTOTELLTHISINSTREAMOFCONSCIOUSNESS.

  My hand is cramping and I’ve got a lot to confess.

  * * *

  I can write with my mind now. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but it feels nice talking inside my head and pretending you hear me.

  So much time is spent like this, daydreaming through our mouths in front of people. You and I are at a party, slightly drunk, and I’m telling you my life story to fill the unknowable space between us.

  There is nothing worse than the unsaid, which is why we got drunk in the first place: to make it easier to speak over it, through it. I call this unsaid negative space. Negative space is how all stories begin, from a sense of urgency.

  So even though I’m coughing up blood and smell like a Hell’s Angels jacket, I’m going to tell my life story calmly and let Google ponder how to free me.

  My story starts with Angie.

  My wife.

  We met at a bar through a mutual friend. She told me she was a fashion editor’s assistant but wished she could be an artist. She thought it a cruel joke to be given large hands—“E.T. hands,” she called them—and no faculty for teasing shapes from raw stuff. She thought I was an artist because I was broke and meditated on artsy topics like negative space—how little I knew then. She tended to date artists. Before me, she’d never married one.

  Angie was Maria Panera, the redo. I met Maria in seventh grade. We went to different schools but shared the same bus stop. After a few weeks I convinced her to see a movie with me. An hour into the movie I was still in the lobby, adjusting my tie and rehearsing what to say if she finally appeared. Conan the Destroyer is not only an awful film, it reminds me of being stood up by a ravishing, dark-haired, twelve-year-old girl.

  Soon after that, a classmate named Alex Gilroy started dating Maria. He spread a rumor—not true, it turned out—that she told him I was a scumbag. One day I stalked Alex on my bike and knocked him out with a rock I stole from an old lady’s garden. He never knew what hit him. When he came to school the next day he had stitches on the back of his head. “I fought off a homeless man who beat me with a hammer,” he told everybody. He milked his yarn for weeks. The penance for my perfect crime was a tic under my right eye that bothered me off and on for a year.

  My point with these anecdotes is that Angie showed up for the movie. She let me be a winner in my revised adolescent love story. Angie called herself The Hot Mess Express. She looked like a pint-sized supermodel and gulped down Moscow Mules and sangrias like Gatorade, but she supported me and let me lie in bed next to her. I would walk behind her just so I could catch up to her and imagine she was meeting me. I even made her watch Conan the Destroyer.

  Jesus, Big Joe, what the hell are they doing to you?

  Where was I?

  The morgue.

  With a police officer at my side, I looked at my dead wife under a sheet. It was like being in an episode of CSI, only I didn’t know my lines. I just stared at her face, and when the finality of that vision sank in I wanted to kiss her, deeply. Taste the cold, chocolaty-marshmallow flavor of our kiss the night we became engaged. Holding her hand instead, I felt a pang in my groin for the Angie I would never touch again. My only consolation—a false one, maybe—was that she did not appear to have suffered.

  For weeks I brooded over the things left unsaid between us because some hit-and-run driver let her die in a ditch.

  After I got the autopsy results, I drew this sigil:

  ITISMYWILLTOCATCHWHODIDTHIS.

  Because whoever struck Angie had killed twice.

  * * *

  I know the exact moment I fell in love with her. It was when she told me her dream job would be to bottle-feed baby gorillas in a wildlife preserve. “Baby gorillas equal magic,” she said. In her heart, Angie was a magician, not an artist.

  She learned about sigils from a tattoo artist she’d dated. On her left arm was a sigil for Azazel. “He was an angel
who taught people to make cosmetics and weapons,” she said. “As a result, God cast him out of Heaven. Yet God made things so that some of His children can only survive by using cosmetics as weapons. Now these,” she pointed at the symbols on her right arm, “stand for love, bliss and comfort. With those three gifts no one would ever need to deceive or harm another living being. Azazel would have to find something else to teach us.”

  It was like having “Shadow” tattooed on one side and “Light” on the other. A kind of meta-sigil expressing her dual nature. Unfortunately, Angie powered her sigils with alcohol.

  When Angie was drunk she saw baby gorillas everywhere, and her love ignited a flame in her chest. A fire that didn’t burn but purified, touching every cell in her body. It became too big to hold, so she gave it to the trees and the earth and the flowers and the animals. As it grew, she gave it also to the wind and the rain and the oceans and the moon and the sun and the stars. After fifteen drinks she would go wandering, feeling one with the sidewalk and the weeds and the side of the road where she would pass out or throw up or both. Even her liver radiated loving heat, cleansed by her release from the Toltec dream of Hell, a nine-to-five merry-go-round of powder and rouge. “No one loves me unless I’m drunk,” she told me.

  Having recovered her from so many random places, I’ve earned the right to be snarky.

  I loved Angie because she never gave up searching for magic. It just had to come with a label. When the label wasn’t on a bottle she found it elsewhere. During her sober periods she ordered shoes online.

  It wasn’t until after the autopsy that I connected my wife with my biological mother. Thinking about the secret Angie had carried inside her, I imagined my own experience in the womb.

  My fetal instinct wants to comfort the one who sustains me. Sensing I’ve somehow caused her distress, I form an all-consuming urge to help the one on whom so much depends. I feel an event build between us. We’re going to create something wonderful together, a light show kicking off a Great Adventure. The light show goes off as expected, but my partner vanishes in the afterimage. Suddenly, I’m stranded in a world of alien food and expedited touch.

  I’m left with a mystery. What happened to the person I lived inside, my partner in the Great Adventure? But new faces fill the days, those of my new family. I acquire a name, a role, an identity. I develop a narrative of where I came from. I learn the words to give comfort but forget who originally needed it. Over time my hormones dream new partners into place: Who becomes Maria. Maria becomes Angie. Beautiful, booze-enchanted Angie.

  Angie becomes Mom the redo.

  Like my mother, so much remained a mystery. Why hadn’t Angie told me she was five weeks pregnant?

  She had let me argue with her about a man she’d been texting. She had chewed me out for looking at her phone. All the while, there was magic inside her, ruined because she drove off, got soused and wandered around an old logging road at two in the morning.

  After the autopsy her sister emailed me. She hoped I wouldn’t tell many people about the pregnancy. It would spare the family a lot of questions. I agreed because I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. I was angry at Angie for telling her sister she was pregnant, but not me. She’d had a week to tell me. Her period ran like clockwork.

  As if to bring Angie back with her own magic, I drank heavily. I kept a fifth of Jack at my desk. I let a casual porn habit become an obsession with finding Angie redoes on the Internet. Angie hated porn.

  One day, while looking for tax receipts, she found some printouts—relics from my early web-surfing days—in an unmarked folder. Grainy headshots of haggard women bubble-wrapped in sperm. I’d forgotten about them until she thrust the stack at me.

  “Take a good look,” she said. “Is this what you want? Is this what you see when you touch me?”

  Though the images seemed vile in Angie’s hands, many were screen captures of videos no different from those I watched on her laptop. Rather than mourn Angie I clicked on her, chasing her electric spirit across the Internet, seeking her in the dark, sweaty corridors of bandwidth. During those lonely séances it never occurred to me that I might come in contact with something other than a webcam girl with Angie’s face. But one morning the power went out and the monitor became a black mirror. There I was, dead-eyed, soulless, a serial killer staring back from the negative space of my addiction.

  From then on that face haunted me behind my web browser, Dorian Gray’s portrait in the age of YouPorn. He was the search history I couldn’t erase, my unfiltered selfie that summed up who I was becoming as I consumed my wife’s look-alikes, the grimacing successors of my porn printouts.

  My friend Olin told me to stop wallowing. “You’ve got to focus, man. The story. Stick to your story.” But I couldn’t. I’d lost the urgency. I’d written 20,000 words of a novel about a sex-hungry coven and made Angie the head witch. It seemed so trivial now.

  I quit writing. I even quit porn-surfing and made the couch my home.

  Olin visited less and less. A cyber-expert for the NSA, he had bigger things to do besides listen to me blame myself for arguing with Angie and launching her on another bender.

  When he saw me, I was either liquored up and weepy or in deep communion with my television—my portal into the world of Big Joe.

  * * *

  Sometimes I watched Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice on my writing breaks. The plots were always the same. An innocent person is convicted of murder. A friend or relative convinces attorney Joe Durrenmatt—“Big Joe,” as his staff calls him—to defend the accused in court. Big Joe sniffs around, forms a theory about the killer. He doesn’t tell police but exposes the murderer on the witness stand during cross-examination.

  Then Angie died, and the show filled a void in me. Those formulaic stories gave me the justice I needed. They took the raw, unsaid stuff of my dead marriage and sculpted it into an image of infallibility and order. When Big Joe unmasked a murderer, it was like watching God hurl a lightning bolt at an idol. His black eyes and sepulchral voice forced even the toughest criminals to tell the truth.

  Big Joe equaled magic. But unlike Angie’s baby gorillas, I didn’t require a gallon of liquor to find him.

  When I saw the series was available on my Internet streaming media service, I powered through all nine seasons. Then I watched them all over again. I watched Big Joe gain weight, lose weight, gain more weight. I watched him change styles, from flannel suit to leisure suit. I watched him put away criminal after criminal, imagining each as the scumbag who killed Angie.

  In the black-and-white world of Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice, everything that needed to be said was said, and everyone who needed to be caught was caught.

  I wanted to be there.

  For a moment, I was.

  At first I thought my TV was crapping out. The picture warped as if reflected in a funhouse mirror. Pieces of Big Joe separated and fused into other people and objects. The rearranged patterns formed animated abstractions, as if the ghost of Picasso were deconstructing Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice. The swirling geometry sucked the room into my TV screen, like a mouth drawing in a huge breath. Sound and speech from both sides of reality tumbled into the suctioning spiral. Finally, everything around me bled into an immense funnel and my fingers elongated, stretching toward the opening like a parody of Angie’s in a psychedelic cartoon.

  Then the chaos blinked, and a room materialized in black and white.

  “Tell me.”

  I wanted to tell Big Joe how I knocked out Alex Gilroy in seventh grade.

  Instead, I gaped at him in silence.

  I was still gaping when I snapped back to reality in my living room.

  “Tell me how I can help you,” he said, to a woman sitting where I had been moments before.

  After that night, I couldn’t enjoy Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice.

  A TV show couldn’t compete with my fleeting experience. I felt like I’d been there, sitting at a desk with Big Joe
. How had it happened?

  Then, after a few weeks, it hit me. Maybe the TV images were a sigil. I’d stared at them for so long that my brain got tired of interpreting them. Because I wanted it so badly, “It is my will to live in the world of Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice” started a Google search in my subconscious.

  My subconscious transported me into an imaginary realm based on the TV show.

  Could it send me back again? Could I lose myself in an illusion, like the people in The Matrix?

  Maybe if I pulled another marathon, I thought, a longer one, I could break down the mental barriers that stood between me and the Joe Durrenmatrix.

  So I did. I watched twenty-nine hours of Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice.

  For a moment, I worried that my TV really was crapping out.

  Only for a moment.

  * * *

  So I’m talking to myself, even if you hear me. You are me. All this is in my mind.

  And if you think I don’t know about Pleasantville, the movie where Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon get caught in a 1950s sitcom via a magical remote control and transform the repressed, black-and-white town of the same name into a place of desire and color, you’re wrong.

  But this isn’t Pleasantville.

  It’s the Joe Durrenmatrix.

  I know I’m dreaming. I know my subconscious has constructed this simulation of a TV show to work out a personal problem. I know it’s only my mind that traps me here, intent on teaching me something about myself, something profound and rooted in the nature of suffering.

  All this could have been avoided if I’d allowed myself to grieve for my dead wife.