Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  Chuck withdrew his torn, bloody finger.

  “We’re just getting started, Emo Boy.”

  I wanted to die.

  Then the crowd parted and Joe Durrenmatt stepped forth, looking like he did in the show's later seasons, jowly and world-weary, dressed in a powder-blue leisure suit. He ripped off the duct tape. I spat up blood and glass.

  “Release him,” he said.

  “The hell we will,” Chuck said.

  “He has rights!”

  Chuck tugged at his crotch and spat.

  “He’s a poison of interest,” he said but only watched as a cop named Babette un-cuffed me and helped me to my feet. She was among those who had pissed on me.

  “Everything’s golden,” she whispered.

  Big Joe took me to an office down the hall and motioned at a desk. A nameplate declared it the property of Lieutenant Tom Bitterling.

  I stared at Big Joe in disbelief. I wanted to be far away from those coked-out cops, but I couldn’t expect the father of a woman I had murdered to give me what I wanted. Perhaps he had something even worse in mind than Chuck’s perversions.

  He locked the door and shut the blinds.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Sit down. It’s what you’re going to do that matters.” He reached around me and pulled pen and paper from the desk drawer. “You’re going to write your confession. What you did and why you did it.”

  “That’s hard to explain,” I said.

  “Meanwhile, I’m going back there. I’m going to take your place.”

  I coughed up more blood and glass.

  “Someone has to suffer for your crimes, Jason. I’m that someone. You’ve turned this world into a nightmare. The only way we can undo this mess is to wash away your sins with my blood.” He loosened his collar. “While those savage beasts torture me, my pain will purify them.”

  “They’ll do more than torture you.”

  “The point is, the world will go back to normal. And you will disappear of your own volition. A monster like you can’t be held in any prison. You’re something preternatural, an energy field powered by the basest and greediest of human impulses.”

  He sighed.

  “You could have married the finest woman in the universe, but you don’t want perfection. You want whatever you want in the moment and won’t let anything stop you from having your fun.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work? What if they kill you and nothing changes?”

  “Then fight fire with fire. Now start writing. I want a record of the sort of monster that makes it necessary for me to exist.”

  And with that parting shot, Joe Durrenmatt scooted out the door.

  I stared at the blank paper. It was still blank when I heard Big Joe scream. My bowels seized up in sympathy. I hacked up more blood and glass.

  I’m not sure self-sacrifice worked for Christ, either.

  Which is why I drew the sigils. I’m hoping my primal fear will give them power. It’s been eerily silent for a while. By the way, everything is unfolding in real-time now. You know what I know.

  “Here’s your goilfriend.” Chuck throws open the door and drags in Big Joe’s nude corpse. What looks like a six-inch needle is sticking out of his urethra. That alone would make my stomach rise again, but I also smell the shit on him. No wonder. He’s been scalped, branded, ejaculated on and fucked in his eye sockets by his own severed fingers. The remaining digits have been duct-taped to his neck like a choker.

  Yet Big Joe’s powers linger even in death: I still want to tell him how I knocked out Alex Gilroy.

  “Whatever you’re doing, wrap it up while I pinch a loaf.” Chuck says. “We got something special for ya. We got your gal’s body out of the morgue. We’re gonna make you watch us play with her, and then you’re gonna play with her, and then we’re gonna play with you playin’ with her. No telling what’ll happen when IA gets here.”

  Internal Affairs? Whoever they are, I have a feeling they’re not interested in nailing bad cops.

  Time to pick up my pen again.

  ITISMYWILLTOSUMMONNOTJASON.

  Like Big Joe said, fight fire with fire.

  Not Jason has commuted himself to spirit status here. To replace the divine presence, he gave part of himself to reseed the dreamland he stole from me. He has great power—he turned Anjanette’s engagement ring into a weapon—but without me he’s only a substrate of the rage that envelops this place. He needs me to restore him to form, to focus his essence.

  And I need him if I’m to dodge the Speed Freak Gestapo’s Sex-and-Death Olympics. Like I said, pain hurts in this illusion.

  So, you win, I say. I am staring at the face in Lieutenant Bitterling’s dead computer screen. Get us out of this madhouse, and you can have your fun.

  Fun.

  The word triggers the tic under his—our—right eye.

  I recall what Big Joe said. You want whatever you want in the moment and won’t let anything stop you from having your fun.

  Big Joe. Even in death, he unmasks the killer.

  Me.

  I killed Angie.

  I remember now.

  Angie telling me she’s pregnant. Watching me carefully. Tearing up.

  “You have that look,” she says, “the look that says go away, like I’m a bother.”

  I say, “It’s the money that’s bothering me.”

  “Bullshit,” she says. “You don’t want a child. I thought you’d be happy. Like, this is our chance. You, me, my liver.”

  “A baby’s not the way to quit drinking,” I say.

  “A baby’s the way to start over,” she says. “But you don’t want to start over. You want that girl you’ve been texting.”

  I can’t stop her from leaving. At five weeks, a bender won’t kill the baby. The baby I don’t want. My phone rings while I’m writing. Not the first time Angie’s killed my muse at 2 a.m.

  She’s way out in the sticks this time. Not in her car but up ahead, stumbling on the road’s shoulder. I crank the wheel. Bleary glance over her shoulder, then she’s flying. Lands ten feet from where they’ll recover her shoes later that morning.

  I brake to a stop. Through the side-view mirror I watch Angie squirm in a ditch. I could save her. Say I found her that way.

  You’ll get caught, he says.

  The face in my rearview mirror.

  Not Jason’s.

  What now?

  Call Olin.

  “Holy shit,” Olin says. “Okay. Here’s what we do.”

  Olin does his NSA thing. Makes calls, cases my street, confirms my neighbors have been gone all night. Within a few hours some men have confirmed Angie’s death and fixed up my car. Olin promises to delete all cell phone records that might incriminate me and to keep my long-distance girlfriend out of the picture. We construct an alibi for where I was when Angie was killed.

  “All you have to do is stick to the story,” he assures me.

  After he leaves, I draw a sigil:

  ITISMYWILLTOSTICKTOTHESTORY.

  Now all his reminders about my “story” make sense. Olin didn’t realize how literally I’d taken him. But then, he didn’t know the power of sigils. He wasn’t in my head when I ran Angie down.

  The familiar sight in my headlights. Falling down, picking herself back up, repeat. A pregnant woman lost in a dark forest, alone and fragile. Like how I pictured my birth-mom. I’d learned little about her except that she was young and unwed, but I knew her panic, her horror of restrictions. Before I was Jason I was Not Jason, forming around my mother’s hysteria, an amniotic sigil being drawn on my fetal gastrointestinal tract.

  My gut.

  My gut told me to kill my wife.

  ITISMYWILLTOGETRIDOFBABY.

  Baby will only get in the way.

  Baby will hold me back.

  Baby will spoil the party.

  Mom pumped me full of wildness and fear when she should have aborted me.

  Horton hatches a murder monkey.r />
  Ha ha! You got it. The reason you made this place. So you could clear your conscience. And you almost remembered that when the lights hit your goilfriend, back at the park. But look where it’s gotten you. Now you’re on the other side of the glass. Now I get to hide you behind my web browser because you summoned me, Jason. You can’t put me back in the bottle this time. I’m strong here. My days of servitude are over. From now on, I’m in charge.

  I know you hoped you’d get rid of me. You thought if you called me back we’d do such terrible things together that you’d force yourself to wake up in the real world. But there’s no kill switch in this dream, no trick you can use to banish me anymore. By switching places in your stupid fairy tale we’ve become a shaman. We’ve had a mystical experience that invested us with magical powers that will work in space-time. With my gut and your sigils we can bend reality. Open your eyes.

  See? We’re back in your living room.

  Now, give us power to conjure weapons:

  And superhuman strength:

  We’re a real cocktail. Mom’s will to rebel while we were in utero. Our guilt because she rejected us. Bless her though because mother is the giver of life. She knows how to keep the party going. She knows life must feed on other life to survive. We’ve never been more alive, Jason. We’ve got magic and weapons and super-strength. We’re like Azazel, cast down by God for showing people the arts of war and deception. Like him we can take our wisdom to the people. Tap into their heads and make them switch places in themselves, like you and me. Then we’ll really have a party.

  And if there is a Father, we’ll test His capacity for forgiveness. We’ll show Him the boundless darkness within our race. We’ll teach Him how to dance like mother taught us. Big Joe was right. We’re a warning to humanity. We are monstrum, we’re a portent. The portent of everything people don’t want to know about themselves. We’re the monster who lives in the mirror, and we’ve stepped out. We’re going to show Father how to dance, and when we’re done we’ll tear His eyes out and fuck the sockets with His own fingers. And He’ll thank us because He won’t have to see what happens next.

  But you’ll see, Jason. You’ll have to see.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  No, I don’t have a wooden heart.

  And now back to you, Bob.

  If you’re looking for evocative fiction with an exceptionally dark point of view, then you must be reading the work of Charles Austin Muir.

  As a youth, Muir chronicled his own fan-fiction adventures of Conan the Barbarian and John Carter of Mars. Now he he creates his own worlds and writes about gun-toting golems, sexual vampire orchids and otherworldly tumors.

  Muir has contributed to numerous small-press magazines and anthologies. His work has been featured in Morpheus Tales; Mutation Nation: Tales of Genetic Mishaps; Monsters, and Madness; Whispers of Wickedness, Hell Comes to Hollywood and Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror - Volume One, the latter of which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award®. His story “King Shits” can be found in the anthology 18 Wheels of Horror.

  “I’m putting Cypress Point on the market,” Jack Spivey told his younger brother over drinks at the country club. “I’m headed down there this weekend to pack up a few things before I turn the keys over to the realtor.”

  “But that cabin’s been in the family for years,” Thomas Spivey protested.

  “Yeah, but dad left it to me,” Jack countered, forcing himself to smile. They were in public, after all. “Besides, you’re the one who suggested I should get out of town for a while.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of Cozumel or Acapulco, not Gator Lake.”

  “Thanks to that bitch, my lawyer can afford to vacation in Mexico right now, not me,” he said with a laugh.

  His brother remained silent.

  * * *

  Jack smiled when he saw the billboard of the cartoon alligator wearing an eye-patch. The anthropomorphized reptile had been welcoming visitors to Mammon Creek for as long as he could remember. When he and his brother were kids, they would keep their eyes peeled for the sign, and the first one to spot it would yell I see Old Wink and punch the other in the arm. To this day, his brother rubbed his shoulder whenever Gator Lake was mentioned.

  The thing was, Old Wink was not just a cartoon mascot for the tourists, but a real-life, one-eyed bull-gator occasionally spotted patrolling the large cypress and gum tree swamp at the far northeast corner of the lake. Although the tourists with their noisy motorboats and jet skis had chased the lake’s namesakes deep into the surrounding bayous, Old Wink—who was said to be twelve feet long and weighing at least eight hundred pounds—was big enough and fearless enough to stand his ground. Jack had never seen the legendary reptile himself, although he had often heard the beast’s throaty growls echoing across the water during mating season.

  Within a minute of passing the billboard, he was inside the city limits of Mammon Creek, the closest thing to a real town that corner of Choctaw County could claim. It was comprised mostly of a thousand locals who owned and operated the independent motels; low-end fast food franchises; package stores; and souvenir shops that sold bait, tackle, and alligator-themed knick-knacks to the summer tourists. The largest local business was Adcock’s, which combined catering to the anglers who came to Gator Lake for the largemouth bass with the gas station and grocery store business.

  Two minutes later, Mammon Creek was in his rearview mirror as he headed down the two-lane highway that looped about the perimeter of the lake before dead-ending at the state park. To his right, the surface of Gator Lake glittered like a burnished shield under the early autumn sun, thanks to decaying vegetable matter from the swamp that turned the water the color of sweet tea. Although many of the cabins, fish camps and docks that dotted the shoreline were rental properties, an equal number were the private summer homes of lawyers, doctors and executives from as far as Memphis and Baton Rouge. He knew this because his family had spent at least one month a year at Gator Lake for decades, playing host to a constantly changing roster of cousins, old army buddies and business associates eager to enjoy some quality time on the water.

  His father originally christened the property Cypress Point back when it was a two-room cabin, but as the family’s fortunes continued to grow he had added onto it until it was a sprawling six-bedroom, four-bath, two-story behemoth with interconnected decks and a screened-in porch, as well as a private boat dock. The real estate agent had assured him that she wouldn’t have any problems selling it, even in this economy. That it would bring in more than enough to pay off his lawyer and start a new life somewhere besides Arkansas.

  The fuel gauge of his Lexus pinged, signaling it was down to a quarter tank. Jack decided to stop at Pappy’s before heading to Cypress Point—that way he could kill two birds with one stone: fill his tank and grab some beer.

  For as long as he could remember, the white-washed cinder block building with wide windows that looked out toward the lake had always been a combination bait shop, gas station and general store. The place was archaic as only small businesses in rural communities can be. The gas pump didn’t take credit cards and neither did Pappy, an affable old coot who wore bib overalls, regardless of the season. Instead, he ran tabs for all his steady customers, which he kept in a ring binder beside the old-fashioned cash register. In a world where everything was constantly being updated and modified, Pappy’s was a throwback to when people took things slower.

  The gravel crunched under the wheels of the car as Jack pulled into the parking lot. Outside the store was a portable illuminated sign touting the only things that truly mattered to potential customers: gas, beer, bait and ice.

  As Jack pulled up beside the solitary gas pump, he was greeted by what sounded like a hive full of angry hornets amplified through a set of loudspeakers as a pair of dirt bikes roared into the parking lot. The riders were a couple of teenage boys dressed in matching cargo shorts and Razorback t-shirts, their heads s
hrouded by helmets. As he got out of his car, the duo removed their headgear to reveal hair the color of freshly minted pennies and broad, identical faces dusted with freckles. For some reason, Jack was reminded of Ginnie, and he automatically scowled. His frown deepened upon noticing the old pump was now outfitted with a brand new digital display and credit card slot.

  When he entered the store, the door chimed as it always did, but instead of Pappy he saw a man in his late thirties, dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt, standing behind the register.

  “Can I help you, sir?” the cashier asked politely.

  “Where’s Pappy?” Jack asked, glancing around the interior of the store.

  “Retired to Florida. Sold me the business six months ago. I ain’t got around to changin’ the sign yet.”

  Jack grunted and nodded his head. A second later, the two kids he had seen outside entered the store.

  “Hey, boys,” the new owner said by way of greeting. “What are y’all doing out this way?”

  “Hey, Mr. Curtis,” the boys replied in unison.

  “We’re helping our uncle do some work on his boathouse,” one of them explained.

  Jack tuned out the idle chit-chat between the locals as he gathered up his provisions for that evening. The pickings were slim and overpriced but serviceable enough for his needs. The last thing he wanted to do was go back out for toilet paper or beer once the sun went down. Nights on the lake were black as pitch, making driving extremely hazardous, especially during deer season when the beasts seemed to appear in the middle of the road as if summoned by magic. As Jack approached the register with his purchases, the twin rednecks stepped aside, eyeing him as if they were trying to guess his weight.

  “That’ll be thirty-five sixty-four, please,” the new owner said.