by Greg Chapman
“Okay, sure,” he said.
“Great—come on over.”
Thomas followed Stephanie into her apartment. It had a homely feel, with the simple wooden furniture and a collection of photos of happy faces on the walls. Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, he supposed—people he could only dream of knowing. In the corner was a stack of moving boxes, marked “kitchen” and “bathroom.” She sat on a stool near the bench and gestured around the room.
“I would have got a lot more unpacking done, but I’ve been on the phone all afternoon to one of my colleagues, at the hospital,” Stephanie said, before taking a tentative sip from her coffee. “Things have been a bit hectic. One of the cardiac surgeons didn’t show up for a scheduled surgery this morning.”
Thomas stared at her, and he felt the blood drain from his face. “Sorry?”
“Yeah, Dr Birmingham,” she said. “He’s a really nice guy. He wouldn’t just miss a surgery.”
Thomas nodded, careful not to show panic in his features. He knew there was nothing to connect him to the surgeon—apart from his skin suit, which should have almost blended in by now.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he muttered.
“Oh, I’m sure everything’s fine,” Stephanie said waving her concerns away. “His pager probably didn’t go off and he slept in or something.”
She walked over to Thomas, taking in the surrounds of her apartment. Thomas could almost feel the warmth from her body she was so close. He swallowed hard.
“So what do you think?” she said.
“It’s…nice.”
“Thanks,” she said, reaching out to touch him on his hand. “Oh, shit sorry!” She pulled her hand away and took a step back from him.
“What?” Thomas said, startled.
“I’m getting in your space.”
“No, it’s fine,” Thomas said. He’d barely noticed that she’d touched him, but the spot on his hand tingled. She was definitely leaving an impression on him, with the way she smiled and her glassy brown eyes. He watched her put the cup to her lips, admiring the way the tendons of her hand slid beneath the skin.
“So how long have you lived in the building?”
Thomas swallowed as memories of his birth inside the apartment slapped against his psyche. He remembered it all; how he emerged from nowhere as a screaming cold infant, all alone in the dark. How could he answer her question, when he didn’t even know how he came to be?
“I have to go!” he said, putting down the coffee and making for the door.
“What—why?” Stephanie said, her eyes wide in confusion.
“I…just have to go! I forgot I have to be somewhere—”
Stephanie reached his side and gripped his hand, gently, but decisively. “Please, don’t go. I’d like to get to know you, Thomas. You’ve been so nice to me since I moved in.”
She stepped closer, her breath like a warm breeze. She slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder. Thomas flinched, desperate to leave, desperate to stay. He watched her close her eyes and lean in to kiss him; wet and wonderful.
Heat flared across his body and he felt his cock harden. Gently, Stephanie pried his mouth open with her tongue. She rubbed his chest, her fingers pulling at his shirt buttons. Thomas grabbed her hands.
“It’s okay,” she told him.
Thomas moaned as Stephanie kissed him passionately, driving her tongue over his. She pulled at his clothes. Thomas didn’t feel embarrassed by his skin anymore, instead driven by the floral scent of her flesh, the taste of her lips.
In moments, their clothes were on the floor. Thomas displayed his naked form and apart from a few red blotches on his hips, his skin was perfect.
Smiling, she pulled him into her bedroom.
Their bodies were one.
Stephanie was astride Thomas, taking him on a rhythmic dance ignited by passion and desire. He caressed her alabaster skin repeatedly, feeling every curve on his fingertips.
Thomas felt the skin of his manhood and it took every ounce of his will not to devour her from the inside out. She turned over onto her back and clamped her legs around Thomas’ hips. He thrust into her and gazed into her eyes and over her wondrous skin.
As they reached the crescendo, Thomas saw something shift in Stephanie’s eyes, just for a second. Suddenly she dug her nails into his back, gouging out huge chunks of his flesh. Thomas screamed in pain, but sheer terror sent his cries even louder when she pushed handfuls of his flesh into her mouth.
Thomas awoke drenched in sweat, his skin burning with the desire for replenishment.
Stephanie’s side of the bed was cold, and Thomas struggled to recall if she’d even been there. He was naked, confusion and hunger fighting for supremacy in his head. He stood and pulled on his jeans and walked out into Stephanie’s living room.
Her front door was wide open.
Thomas stepped into the hall and found every other apartment door open too. The sight of every door shattered by extreme violence set Thomas’ pulse firing in his throat. There was blood all over the door of apartment 708.
Panting with fear, Thomas stumbled inside and followed the trail of blood. The television blared out a commercial for hair dye cream. On the floor before the television Thomas found the owner of the apartment, his body picked clean of flesh. He ran from one apartment to the next and found all of the occupants skinned alive. He ran to the next apartment and the next. A horrible thought crossed his mind:
Did I do this?
No, Thomas knew he wouldn’t be so stupid, it was the golden rule he lived by: don’t eat your neighbours!
Thomas’ head began to spin, and he found it difficult to stand. He fell heavily into the wall and slid to the ground, a bloody smear left on the floral print wallpaper. Alarmed, he felt his back. It was wet and dripping fresh blood.
“Hello lover,” a voice said behind him.
Thomas turned to find Stephanie, or something resembling her, standing naked outside the entrance to 708. Her skin was a patchwork of the hides of Thomas’ neighbours, her face a puzzle of stolen expressions. She licked blood from her fingers and smiled.
Jesus Christ—she…she ate them!
“I imagine you’re wondering what’s going on? What I’m doing? Surely, you must have figured out what I am by now?”
The only human he’d ever connected with wasn’t human at all. Thomas couldn’t believe it.
Unexpected laughter spat from Stephanie’s lips.
“I can almost see the cogs turning in your head! Shit I hope I haven’t made a mistake stealing your seed.”
“My…what?”
Stephanie stepped closer, her skin rippling under the surface. “I’ve been stalking you,” she explained. “I tracked your scent here to the city a few days ago. It was time for me to find a mate. I never expected to find one like you, though. I know we have to stay hidden, but you’re just so…methodical.”
She stepped towards him with the grace of a cat. Blood-soaked. Thomas pressed his wounded back further into the wall.
“I watched you kill that doctor on the train. No Flesher kills that way anymore. Still you got what you needed. Bit of a coincidence that he was from the hospital I’ve been staking out. I’ve been there for weeks, feeding off scraps from the burn unit. At least you lead me back to a smorgasbord.’
“You used me?”
“You thought you were the only one of our kind, didn’t you? Well, there are many Fleshers like us out there, Thomas, if you’d take the time to look. But it’s virtually impossible to get you to come out of your nest. God, it’s taken me days to spin to you that I was human—thankfully though we females can hold our skin longer!”
Thomas’ head spun again, and he wanted to retch. He was so weak—he hadn’t eaten in hours.
“Bit tired, are we?” Stephanie said. “You should try being pregnant. I’ve never had to eat so much in my life. Thankfully, there is enough on this floor to get me started.”
Thomas looked to her, pleading for
release. “Please, tell me what we are. Where we come from?”
“God, you and your questions! I’ve had enough of it. I’m taking this baby and leaving you for dead.”
Stephanie tried to walk past him, but he grabbed her arm. She hissed and slashed at him with her talons. They wrestled in the hall and he felt Stephanie’s claws digging into his skin. His hunger had weakened him, but instinctively he fought back, sinking his teeth deep into her shoulder. She shrieked, kicking Thomas away with impossible strength.
Stephanie’s skin tasted like iron with the texture of leather in his mouth. He sensed something coursing through her blood too—his seed and his skin—grown and regrown for decades. Thomas thought Flesher skin was foul, yet she greedily ate his own.
He tried to scramble to his feet, but Stephanie was long gone—along with his chance for answers and his desire for humanity. He tried to remember her the way she was, the sweet, playful Stephanie. But it was all a lie.
Thomas would never be deceived like that again, by anyone.
He fled the building then into the streets, but curiosity got the better of him. He lingered in the alleys among the shadows and watched the police arrive on the scene. Other residents ran about in a panic, horrified at the massacre within.
It wasn’t my doing. It was hers.
When the scene became overwhelming, he ran, walking the neighbourhoods until he was outside the city limits. He found an abandoned building and only ventured out at night. No more train trips. Only stalk the weak.
As he hid in the dark, he had a lot of time to think. Thomas realized that, despite her deceit, Stephanie, had rubbed off on him: she gave him something he’d lacked—identity. He always thought he was a freak of nature, but he wasn’t afraid of that anymore. He had embraced what he was and his routine, because after all, he was just a creature of habit.
But if he ever saw Stephanie or any more of his kind again—God help them.
2
After the deception—the revelation—the urge in Thomas had manifested itself, no longer as a hunger, but as the pure desire to kill, to hunt, to devour. The instinct was no longer physical, rather it was a dream that woke him every morning and haunted him day and night. The dream was always the same:
He was running through the streets of the city, from shadow to darkened shadow, his breath struggling to warm the frozen air. Around him, the city was still; cars like statues, the glass windows of the high-rise buildings, scrying mirrors, void with darkness. Yet, at all sides were people in their thousands, men, women and children of all kinds and creeds—tall or fat, thin or short, black or white. A sample of every human being he could ever want to taste, right at his fingertips.
His desire to feast upon them surged in his head and down through his chest into the cauldron that was his gut. Thomas moved to take a prize, a woman in her seventies. She must have only been about five feet tall, the hunch in her back contorting her spine like a fishing rod that had hooked a big catch. Her thinning grey curls sprouted from a maroon beret she had undoubtedly woven herself. She wore a matching shawl over her coat and gripped a walking stick tightly between her gnarled fingers.
To Thomas’ horror, when he approached, the old woman bared her teeth at him. She gripped his arm and thrust her jaw over it to tear into the flesh. With impossible strength, the woman pushed Thomas to the ground and straddled him. He screamed and fought back, biting the flesh of her face. Thomas swallowed the morsel down, the fullness of the skin sliding down his gullet.
The woman didn’t even scream—all she did was smile. The other people in the street began to close in, eager for their fair share. Thomas writhed to be free, but there were so many talons and teeth ripping and tearing at his skin. The sound of ravenous feeding, of flesh torn from bone, drowned out his shrieks of mercy. Before the dream burst with light Thomas watched his bones, shining white in the lamplight, become nothing but dust an instant later.
Thomas awoke in his new apartment, lying on bloodstained sheets, the darkness of his loft swarming about him like a billion ravenous scarab beetles. This is how he awoke every day now—since Stephanie had stripped away his flesh and revealed him as a monster.
He sat on the edge of the bed and winced as pain shot across his abdomen. He looked down and swore at the enormous fissure in the skin of his left love handle, a wound—a split in his façade. As if in recognition, his mind flooded with the urge. Slowly, he lifted himself from the bed and walked to the bathroom.
Of course, there were still the rituals to perform, but they had changed and not just for the sake of necessity. He studied his face in the mirror; lips cracked, cheeks and forehead peeling, his hairline receding—all the hallmarks of a Flesher who had neglected to feed. Yes, a Flesher—he remembered the name he’d been given, Flesher, carnivore, cannibal, Skin Eater, monster. He could see it in his eyes; eyes cracked with threads of blood, infused with that singular drive.
Thomas turned away from his reflection and reached for a long scalpel soaking in a blood-tainted Petri-dish on the washbasin. Removing the old, decaying flesh of his last meal was like second nature to him, like brushing one’s teeth. He took the blade and inserted it into his chest, just above the top of the sternum. There was no blood because the flesh he wore was now dead, a snakeskin. He drew the blade down to his navel, circumnavigating the protuberance before proceeding to his groin, where he paused. Switching the blade to his left hand, he made a long laceration on his right arm, from shoulder to wrist. Then he switched hands again and performed the same incision on the left appendage; then his legs, from the top of the thigh to the ankle. The last incision he made was on his face, from forehead down along the length of his nose, through his lips and chin to the throat.
He placed the blade back in the dish and with his bare hands, took hold of the skin of his arms and pulled with all his might. The flesh peeled away from his body with the slap of a wet bed sheet smacking in the wind, the strips of flesh hanging from his fingers like freshly glued wallpaper. Methodically, he pulled the old flesh from his legs and chest and abdomen. Then his face was all that remained. He peeled it apart as if he were opening a door that exposed his soul for all to see—red raw and glistening.
He turned back to the mirror and concentrated. This was all part of the mystery of who—and what he was—his gift, his curse. It had taken him many months to perfect, but he had learned how to cover up the rawness of his true body, albeit temporarily. He focused on his cheeks first and, before his eyes, the redness began to fade—to resemble a tone slightly more incarnadine. Then he stared at his nose, pale, but flesh all the same, began to surface their too. An hour of staring and concentration passed, and, in the end, he had a thin sheath of skin over his body that would protect him until he found his next meal.
Revived, he stepped out of the bathroom and into the interior of his loft. Nestled in the attic of an abandoned picture theatre and overlooking the city skyline, he’d acquired it from one of his meals, six weeks ago. Wood walls and floors, lacquered to a high gloss, tall Palladian arch windows, granting views of the street below and the apartment buildings astride it. Simple furniture: a four-poster bed, sofa, writing desk and a kitchenette; he rarely used any of them; they were simply a part of his assumed life among humans. They had been a part of the meal’s life, but they became a part of Thomas when he devoured him.
Thomas stood at the window and felt the rising sun stinging his thin skin. He had to feed to secure his skin. Thomas withdrew from the sun’s rays back to the gloom of his bedroom. He opened the doors of his walk-in wardrobe and examined its contents: racks of shirts and pants to the right, shoes to the left. Fashions he’d acquired over time—some from his occasional victims, others he’d stolen. He was always careful to space out his kills, choose the frail, the homeless and the wanderers. His feeding left no trace, he made sure of it. The urge made sure of it.
He took a shirt from the hanger and slipped it on, the fibres of polyester and cotton rousing a tingle in his epidermi
s. It felt good—like wearing a glove. As he chose a suit, charcoal grey, pinstriped red, he thought of the suit’s previous owner, the meal he’d had when he first fled the city—after Stephanie.
He recalled walking into the street outside and his eye following the light of the loft to the man in the window. How swift Thomas was; gaining quick access to the attic via the fire escape, climbing, clawing, shrouded in shadow. He bided his time and waited for the man to turn off the lights and retire to bed. Then, like a fox in a henhouse, he slipped inside, up the hall, to the bedroom where he found his prize, his meal, his new life. The ferocity and ingenuity of his attack that night surprised him, but it left him in no doubt that he had truly become a beast; hungry, ruthless and cunning—no longer shy about feeding on what was rightfully his.
During the transition, he took time to cover his tracks. He spent hours going through his victim’s belongings, phone and emails and contacting key people. Usually. All it took was a message about “getting away” or resigning from a job. He’d even left something akin to a suicide note once. When he fed, he took in not only part of the victim’s DNA, but their soul and mind as well. He knew their eccentricities, their mannerisms. By the time loved ones realized something was amiss, he had moved on. Always keep moving, he reminded himself. Always.
Dressed, Thomas went back to the window and considered the city. Towers of glass and concrete gleaming like forbidden jewels. People milling about like cattle, talking, laughing; slaves to the machine, oblivious to the horror that walked in their midst—the monster of their nightmares.
The herd moved as one, line after line, walking, striding and sometimes rushing to catch-up with time. Thomas was sitting in a café on Harrison Boulevard, watching the smorgasbord drift by, a great conveyer belt of meat. It was Friday, so there were many in the herd. He spied a man standing, waiting for the walk sign to chime while checking his watch. Thomas observed the grey flecks in his hair, the stubble on his chin, the cerulean blue of his eyes, set deep in the skin.