Teeth of Beasts (Skinners)

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  The preacher lowered his hand and stepped forward. He reminded Henry of his grandpa. His grandfather was nice, but brittle.

  “See outside the window? See what a beautiful sky the Lord has given to us this fine day? See the green grass?”

  “Yes,” Henry sighed.

  “This is the last time you will be seeing it as you are now. When you are deemed worthy to leave this place, my work will be done and you will see that grass again. You will look upon those hills with clean eyes and you will thank God for this chance to have your spirit purged before you are cast into the fiery pit for all eternity. Wouldn’t you rather serve your penance here than in eternal hellfire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course you would.” With that, the preacher nodded to one of the big fellows, who then took hold of the top of Henry’s head and twisted it sharply away from the window.

  Henry’s first reaction came as naturally to him as pulling in his next breath. But before he could sink his fingers into the man’s throat, the chains around his wrists were pulled taut and one of the other fellows prodded him with a thorny club that drew more of Henry’s ire than blood. That was merely a prelude to the boot that thumped between his legs. He tried to stand up but couldn’t make it halfway before crumpling over. Piss dribbled out of him like boiling water, and blood flowed freely from the welts left behind by the clubs.

  “You see what your violence brings?” the old man asked as he shook his head and walked to the open door. “You will see the error of your ways soon enough, for you shall have nothing else to distract you.”

  As Henry was dragged the rest of the way down that hall, frantic eyes stared at him through small rectangular holes cut into the other doors. Henry’s cell was open and waiting for him. It was square just like the rest and set at the old man’s eye level.

  Except for a copper pot in one corner, the room was empty. Even though Henry could see no windows, it was fairly well lit thanks to a small, oval-shape that had been cut into the ceiling, which allowed a fair amount of sunlight to trickle in. The hole was surrounded with more words that Henry couldn’t read, and so were the walls.

  Looking up at the ceiling as if he was on the verge of tears, the preacher clasped his hands and smiled as if he was peeking beneath a woman’s lifted skirts. “That is the eye of our Lord,” he said.

  Henry looked at the old man and then back to the ceiling. “It’s just a hole.”

  “So says a sinner. The eye of our Lord is always open, always looking down upon you. It is your salvation just as it is your only light. If there is good in you, He will see it.”

  Settling into a corner so his back was against the wall facing the door, Henry winced. “I suppose.”

  “Cherish the words around you,” the preacher said as he ran his fingertip along some of the symbols near the door. “They will keep you from sinning again.”

  Henry felt a pulse roll out of the wall and press him into his corner. A dank, musty odor drifted through the room and felt as if it was curling in on him like a fist. When the preacher finished his tracing, he nodded to the big fellows and backed out of the room. The chains were taken from Henry’s wrists and the guards left without a fuss.

  Once the door was shut, Henry Bartlett had nothing in his world but a moldy piss pot to fill and the eye of the Lord to watch over him.

  Three years later Henry had settled into his routines even better than he’d settled into the corner of his room.

  Twice a week his pot was emptied.

  When he was brought out of his room, his head was covered by a sack cinched shut by a leather strap around his neck so he couldn’t see the other residents. A few screams could be heard at night, but it was hard to tell which came from other mouths and which were simply churning within the shadows.

  The words on his wall hurt when Henry touched them, so he figured they were filled with the same hellfire as the preacher’s sermons. Those lectures, filled with more words about the evil in Henry’s soul and the hard work needed to purge it, rolled off of him like the rainwater that trickled in through the hole in his ceiling.

  Outside his room, Henry tried to peek through a loose stitch in the bag covering his head. If he wasn’t sneaky about it, rough hands snapped his head to one side and shoved his chin down against his chest. One time, he tried to bite the man who did it to him. There had been a crippling blow delivered to the small of his back, followed by a kindly voice that informed him, “You will see nothing but the words of salvation and the eye of our Lord.”

  If he behaved himself while he was in a room that smelled like food, Henry was allowed to roll up the bottom of the bag just enough to get some oatmeal into his mouth. He saw nothing but a few shadows while he ate. Heard nothing apart from the muttering and chewing of the folks around him. Felt nothing but the lead weight of the peculiar writing on the walls and the greasy filth that stuck to the bottom of his feet.

  More than anything, Henry wanted to go for one of his walks. Whenever he strayed too far from his assigned path, the big fellows would come with their sharpened sticks to force him back to his room. He got flustered during his first month at the reformatory and pulled off one of those men’s arms. The wooden clubs had rained down upon his head until he heard a loud snap inside his neck. He could barely lift his chin for a while after that.

  The old preacher came to check on him, and so did Jonah. It was one of the few times Henry laid eyes on the fellow with the beard who’d kept the others from hanging him as a murderer. But Jonah didn’t have any kind words for him. He did, however, seem mighty amused by the crackle of broken bones scraping against each other as Henry’s head swung loosely at the end of his neck.

  After he’d acted up again, Henry was dumped into his room and wasn’t allowed out of it again. His food was brought to him and shoved through the hole in his door. The meals tasted rotten and smelled like they had been pulled up from the bottom of a mossy lake. He ate what was fed to him and got one of the big fellows’ fingers as well. Jonah came along later to put a different bag on his head and tightened the belt until he went to sleep. When he woke up, he heard a voice that was clearer than the rest.

  “You can hear me,” it said.

  Henry snapped his head up and smiled beneath the burlap sack. Putrid slime dribbled from his mouth and his breath felt like a wave of flame upon his ravaged throat when he muttered, “Yes. I hear you.”

  “Be quiet in there,” one of the big fellows outside demanded.

  Henry couldn’t see the guard, but he’d long ago become accustomed to the fact that they were always watching. When he strained to turn toward that other voice, Henry reflexively kept his chin pressed against his chest. “Can you hear me, God?” he asked.

  “Of course I can hear you,” the soothing voice replied. “You are the only one worth listening to.”

  Trying not to let the Lord know how confused he was, Henry replied, “God is good.”

  “And you are too…Henry.”

  That last word brushed through Henry’s ear like velvety fingers stretching through his mind; warm and itchy.

  He caught a hint of light through the rough material of the sack. After the door was pulled open, a thick hand clamped down upon his head, sending a painful crunch through his neck.

  “Eyes and head down,” the guard said.

  “But I hear God talking to me.”

  Henry was knocked face-first to the floor so another familiar voice could reach the large ears flattened against his skull.

  “Blasphemy!” the preacher said. “You know better than that! Be silent and reflect upon the harm you’ve inflicted.”

  The belt was taken off and the bag peeled away. Henry sat in his corner with his head tucked against his chest and turned to one side. It hurt too badly to lift it, so he let it hang. The churning in his belly grew stronger, but the only other food he got after that night was damp, salty bread.

  Insects skittered across his floor. They pinched his toes and chewed at the
small of his back, but that didn’t bother him anymore. He had a friend other than Jonah, so he let the ants skitter among the roots of his coarse fur and waited for his next conversation with God.

  Ten years later Henry still couldn’t read all those words on his wall. But the one thing he knew for certain was that the preacher had been right. The Lord looked down on him all the time. No matter how much Henry wanted to look up into that eye, his crooked neck wouldn’t allow it.

  That’s when Henry Bartlett knew he was never going to be forgiven.

  He would never clear the stench of his own filth from his nose.

  The mites would never stop crawling through his hair.

  He would never be able to eat something besides oatmeal, bread, or the occasional bit of stolen meat.

  He would never be let out of that room.

  It took a lot of strain, but he finally managed to look up to the unblinking eye of the Lord to feel some of the strength the preacher had always gone on about.

  One day, God told him to dig.

  Henry crawled to the door with his head cast down and his legs only moving below the knees so as not to agitate the lice infesting his groin. Settling next to the door, he scraped at the same spot he’d started on a few years ago, using nails that had hardened to jagged, calcified implements. His eyes narrowed to intense slits as he pulled at the wood and scraped against stone. His head wobbled and the voices rushed through his mind. Every splinter he pulled away brought him one step closer to freedom. Every bit of pain slicing through his hands spurred him on and chased away the need to sleep.

  “You’re doing well, Henry,” God whispered. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Uh…me too. I mean me for you…”

  “I know what you mean to say, Henry. I can read it upon your heart.”

  “Thank—”

  “Bless you,” God purred. “And keep digging.”

  The Lord’s eye was casting a dark red light into the room by the time someone approached the door. Reflexively backing into his corner, Henry saw a new set of eyes look in through the little window of his door.

  “Back up or you’ll be hurt,” the unfamiliar man said in a thick accent. His face took on an angry hue and he asked, “You been damaging Lancroft property again? You were told what would ’appen if you bloodied up another door.”

  Henry knew what he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “He will obey you,” God told him. “Place the words into his mind.”

  It wasn’t easy, but Henry did his best to keep his thoughts together when he said, “Open the door.”

  “Shut yer hole!” the guard said.

  “Think the words,” God urged.

  So Henry thought, “Open the…open…door…open…open door…” Despite Henry’s trouble, the guard twitched in a way that revealed he was hearing the voices too. To keep the words straight in his head, Henry packed them into an orderly strand. “Open…thedoor. Openthedooropenthedooropenthedoor!”

  As soon as the door moved, he charged forward. He reached out with clawed, desperate hands and grabbed for the first piece of meat he could grasp. Since his shoes had been taken away months ago to teach him the value of keeping his piss pot upright, his toes were free to dig into the cracks of his floor and steady himself when he pulled the guard down. The other man felt no bigger or stronger than the child who had hidden in that root cellar.

  “Someone get this animal offa me!” the guard shouted as he slammed his club upon Henry’s back.

  Heavy footsteps stomped down the hall, but they didn’t arrive quickly enough to keep the guard’s blood from being spilled. More men came, and they brought their sharpened sticks with them, but they all seemed to get smaller as Henry’s muscles swelled and the Lord screamed inside his head to finish what he’d started.

  Henry’s fingernails tore through one guard’s uniform before shredding the flesh of another. Bones splintered easily in his grasp until he finally got to the tender meat he craved. After being stabbed and cut by those sharp sticks, he was forced away from the guards and back into his corner.

  The lumps within Henry’s chest rustled impatiently. They wriggled and clawed at his insides to keep him going as he gnawed on the dark, tender meat of the guard’s heart. When that was gone, he chewed on one of the fingers that had become lodged in his fur after being torn from its hand. A nub of bone lay wedged in his throat. The ears, he saved for later.

  As Henry became too tired to push against the weight of the symbols upon his wall, he swore he could feel himself shrinking down. Shriveled tendons in his neck had pulled away from his collarbone. With those rubbery chains broken, his head rolled freely upon his shoulders, flopping from side to side as his arms snaked around his twisted body. Perhaps he was wasting away like the preacher had told him he would. Before he fell asleep, a friendly bearded face peeked in at him through the hole in his door.

  “How did you get that guard to open the door?” Jonah asked.

  God insisted that he not tell, so Henry didn’t say a word.

  Jonah smiled knowingly, as if he shared a secret with his favorite patient. “You tricked him some way, didn’t you?”

  Henry turned away from the door. “I didn’t trick nobody, mister.”

  “We’ll be seeing plenty more of each other, my friend. You might as well start calling me Dr. Lancroft.”

  Chapter 1

  Eastbound I-94 south of St. Cloud, Minnesota

  Present day

  Times were rough.

  At least, that was the sentiment that stuck with Cole after his brief trip to Seattle. He’d been anxious to take care of some professional business after a nice long road trip in a rental car that came equipped with better air-conditioning than his old apartment. It was supposed to be a time for him to hang his arm out the window, feel the summer wind blow through the dark crop of hair stretching from a scalp that was normally buzzed to within an inch of its life, and listen to some music. Before getting too far away from Chicago, he’d stopped to purchase a new GPS so he could make the trip without having to rely on old-fashioned maps. There was a GPS function in his phone, but dropping some cash in an electronics store was another form of comfort to go along with the rest of the trip. After a few hours of fiddling with the options, he settled upon the voice of a British woman to tell him when to turn and which side of the road to shoot for.

  Along the way, he’d slept in hotels that offered the barest essentials, ate his complimentary breakfasts, stocked up on gas station candy and spicy beef jerky, and had a generally perfect trip to the West Coast. Not long after his arrival at the offices of Digital Dreamers, Cole heard those dreaded three words.

  “Times are tough,” Jason Sorrenson had told him.

  Cole’s ears were still ringing from the constant flow of wind past his face when he’d been given that little tidbit. “I know times are rough,” he’d said. “At least I didn’t have to sell a kidney to afford the gas to get here.”

  “You drove all the way from Chicago?”

  “Yeah, it was nice.”

  Instead of wearing his standard-issue Mariners cap, Jason had finally conceded to the fact that he and his hair were parting ways. Like many amicable separations, the man was left feeling beaten and somewhat ashamed. Most of the people in the building were clad in anything from T-shirts to light sweaters, but Jason was dressed to fit his role as their boss. His white shirt was starched, buttoned, and crisp. Slacks were freshly pressed and suspenders were straight out of a catalogue that must have fallen behind a sofa eight years ago.

  “I wish you would have let me know you were driving all the way out here,” Jason said.

  Cole glanced at the small group of programmers leaving a large break room on their way to the newly refurbished room marked ART AND LEVEL DESIGN. All four of the sun-deprived professionals wore Digital Dreamers badges, smelled of cigarette smoke, and couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of college. “I did tell you I was coming,” he said. �
�Remember my e-mail?”

  “You’ve sent a lot of e-mails, Cole. You’ve also made a lot of promises, but I’ve learned to take them all with a grain of salt.”

  “Well, that’s why I came out in person. I wanted to run some new ideas past you, go over some ground rules, and define some terms for a new contract.”

  Jason’s eyebrows flicked up as he mused, “Define some terms? That sounds official.”

  “It is.”

  “Are you moving back to Seattle?”

  “No. I thought I’d—”

  “Then I can’t use you,” Jason interrupted while digging a tissue from his pocket and wiping his nose.

  Cole stood in the wide hallway until another group of new faces ambled past him. When he looked around this time, he spotted fresh paint on walls adorned with awards that were won since he’d left, pictures of teams he’d never met, and sketches from games he didn’t recognize. “You can’t…what?”

  Rather than ask Cole to follow him, Jason simply led him into the break room. A set of double doors opened into a space that would have been Cole’s favorite hangout if he was still in high school. Rows of arcade cabinets lined the walls on either side. The farthest wall played host to vending machines offering snacks ranging from the “diabetic nightmare” end of the spectrum all the way down to “brantastic.” Fridges, microwave ovens, and a soda machine filled the rest of the perimeter. The rest of the space was cluttered with tables and chairs. Forget high school. He wouldn’t have minded spending time there now.

  Jason walked straight through the break room and out a glass door that led to a fenced-in courtyard populated by an ironic mix of smokers and people who wanted fresh air between work sessions. Blowing his nose and then tossing the tissue into a trash can, he mumbled, “Probably getting that damn virus that’s hitting the rest of the country.”

  “You mean the Mud Flu? Yeah, that one sounds like the Black Plague of our generation. What’s it give you? The sniffles? Some crap in your throat? Big deal.”