“It’s crocodile skin, difficult to work with but highly rewarding. It’s incredibly thick and tricky to stitch, has to be done by hand. Do you know what this is?” He moved my hand to a white trim. My ignorance embarrassed me.
“The pelt of an Arctic Wolf, so soft! The wolf itself does not keep it so well.”
“What about this?” He smirked. This new material was rubbery, cold, like the sticky seats of the car. I winced as specks of blood welled on my fingertips.
He chuckled. “You will learn little lamb. You like animals, don’t you. We can make such beautiful things from their gifts, nothing should ever go to waste. Would you like to learn?”
I paused, overwhelmed by my sudden lesson.
“You’re not stupid,” he said, grabbing me again by the chin. “So, choose. You understand better than most the cycle of creation and destruction. The farm taught you things, didn’t it? Nature is as brutal as she is beautiful.” He paused thoughtfully, moving closer. “Sentimentality is a curse that animals do not suffer.”
He released his grip and I nodded complicity to save face. Some kind of agreement had been struck.
At first I wondered if he’d force himself upon me; my Uncle and cousins had taught me well what man and beast desired most. But he never approached. He was only concerned with his work. As my trust grew, so did my lust. I was a woman now, with churning hormones and smoldering dreams, and we spent long nights alone in our candlelit studio. I grew possessive.
I wanted to impress him, show him what a seamstress and artist I had become through his instruction. If the sculpting of flesh was the only way to do that then I vowed to surpass all his expectations. As well as skinning and cleaning the creatures that shifty men in blacked out vans delivered weekly, I began to preserve and bleach their bones, creating sculptures of delicate complexity. From a sparrow I made a tiny crescent moon, fixed to a pin he could wear on his lapel. From a horse’s jawbone I carved a knife handle engraved with hieroglyphs from his most treasured book. When I had time to spare I practiced taxidermy, fashioning exotic chimera to present as gifts. With a paltry remark he might acknowledge my needlework or comment on the plausibility of the synthesis, yet I knew he was pleased as the shop filled with my experiments and even the customers remarked on my art. He would smile obliquely when asked if they were his and my pride swelled at the suggestion.
My training passed with the dizzy swiftness of a blossoming romance. I devoured books about evolution and discovered tomes exploring the rituals of zoolatry. We skinned and preserved all kinds of species and I watched him turn each into extravagant attire to be draped on human forms. He was an artist and a perfectionist, suturing skin into glorious amalgams. Clients came from all over the globe to buy his hybrid couture, and price was never a concern.
We had special customers too, ones who didn’t seek our garments and mostly came at night. These fidgety bundles, barely preened and unable to articulate above grunts and nods, would wait until the shop was empty before being lead through a trap door to the ‘fitting rooms’ in the basement. Some emerged, eyes bright and skin glowing after a few hours, some after a number of days. Some I never saw leave.
I was never forbidden to enter the basement yet I was never invited either. In the early days I was eager not to displease, but of course it wasn’t long before I found myself locking the shop and pulling back the heavy bulk of the trapdoor. He’d been down there for longer than usual, almost three days, with a drip of a woman not much older than myself. What kept him from our work for so long? I stared below, there was no sign of him or anyone else.
A phosphorous glow poured from the opening and I squinted in its caustic light. A long narrow corridor stretched to either side and the air down there was thick and hot. It smelt of sweat and shit, the same dank musk as the farm pens. Static shivered through the air, fondling the hairs on my scalp and my arms. A humid waft brushed my cheeks and on it travelled the groans of bovine beasts. I froze. My guts twisted, my senses pricked. Other muffled noises came from the corridor. Scratches, slaps, the sloshing of fluid. Cracking and panting and spontaneous laughter rose in soft crescendos before fading back into muffled whimpering. My temples throbbed, matching some unseen pendulum, and I moved down the steps, pulling the trapdoor closed behind me.
I walked for what could have been a mile on a floor lined with cracked stones and broken mosaics. The ground sloped up, as if I was climbing to the top of a hill, yet I never seemed to reach a peak or start descending. Tiny doors lined the corridor, the same pointed circle painted in a rusty brown above every one. They were so small that even I would have to crawl through them, with padlocks bigger than my hands.
The slapping and sucking intensified and a garish yellow light leaked from their tiny keyholes. Sometimes a frame would lurch as I passed, as if someone was throwing their weight against it from inside. I stopped, studying a pinkish fluid leaking under one threshold. The puddle smelt of brine and bleach and hissed quietly as it slid. I tried to peek through the keyhole, no bigger than my fingernail, but it was futile. A wet smack preceded a shuddering groan, then something like water spattering on a metal roof fell for minutes. Something gurgled, like water flowing down a drain. Who was in there, and was he inside too? Was he bathing that woman in the same way he had bathed me? Pride smoldered white hot.
“So you have found your way to the Emporium, little lamb?” he purred whilst exiting a door down the hall.
I stammered, and could summon no words, my jealousy hanging like a dead weight from my neck.
“You needed to know what was happening down here. A natural response. I was wondering how long it would take you.” He smiled, putting a key in his pocket and wiping his hands on a lace handkerchief. “And you’re ready now.” Holding out his hand he lifted me from the floor. “This is the Flesh Emporium, where the most exciting parts of our work happens.” For the first time since we’d met he took my arm like an equal and we strolled down the corridor as if walking through a park.
“Down here we cater to fantasies more juicy than vanity. We let explorers run wild, let them learn that boundaries are much more amenable than reason allows. Skin is malleable, a semi-permeable membrane, resilient. It stretches, absorbs, regrows, it can be refashioned. Flesh is a canvas at best. Would you like to see?” He paused at a door. I nodded, not wanting to show my unease. I bent down, ready to enter, then instantly backed away.
A skinless person, a woman or man, had been stripped to their muscle and was cradled in the grip of a hovering creature. Still alive, their eyes were wide and their mouth gasped madly for breath. Their skin hung just behind them, not torn or damaged, obviously carefully removed, and their body lay glistening like a newborn in its clutch. Arachnid arms of white jointed bone protruded from the creature’s mass and it picked decisively at their flesh, humming scales of insectoid trills from a mouth jumbled with fangs. The thing had no eyes, and an exposed spine extending into a disjointed tail that thrashed from side to side. It dribbled in delight as it pulled the person apart, gelatinous salvia trickling from mandibles that burnt holes into the body, which twitched in response. Both victim and inflictor were absorbed in the work.
“When we use pain creatively we awaken sides of ourselves long since denied. Humans are gifted in destruction, yet they rarely use it to evolve. They slaughter indiscriminately, they rape what sustains them, they feast on all things and yet it does not enrich them. You understand, don’t you, little lamb? You know how order is birthed from chaos. Look in here …”
He opened another door to my left and beckoned me forward. Inside, what looked like immense starfish were stuck to the walls, transparent spines on their backs filling with blood, like ticks. They pumped and ground their bodies obscenely and I noticed human shapes underneath. Hands and feet stuck out at all angles, fingertips flexing with each undulation.
“Are they eating them?” I whispered.
“Sometimes. If they want. It depends on what else there is to offer. These creatures
have needs, they don’t always desire the same thing. Some people come here to wear the flesh of others, to leave refined, reformed and redesigned. Some wish to be garments for the Old Ones; I treat them in the same way I treat our animal friends upstairs. Some simply beg to be obliterated, pushed to the edges of madness and then crushed into stardust. I open doors to those who delight in doing just that. Everything is consensual, everyone has a choice.” He paused, watching me closely, as if waiting for a response.
“What do you choose, little lamb?”
I turned away as one of the twitching hands fell to the floor, shriveled and bloodless, leaving only a twisted stump of a wrist. My trembling voice disgusted me.
“I don’t know.”
“You have a gift, deep within you. A knowledge that far outweighs these dabblers. We are one, under the skin, the creators and the destroyers. You know this.”
Electricity crackled in my sinuses and nausea swelled.
“I need to breathe,” I mumbled.
“Do you? I’m not sure if you do. Let it happen,” he soothed. “You are its Mistress, its lover. It’s only energy, pure energy, waiting to be birthed into the world. We are One.”
I bit my lip, trying to startle myself back to full awareness, but blackness closed in and my body went limp.
I awoke on the stone floor of a windowless room, the coolness of the rock soothed my throbbing head and I remained still for a long time. Sitting up, I saw shapes scrawled all over the walls, a tiny door closed in the corner. I was inside a chamber.
He sat in the corner on a low wooden stool, removing his jacket and waistcoat, folding them neatly in a pile on the floor. Then he stood, removing his trousers and shoes until obsidian skin was all I could see. I’d dreamt of this for so long, yet now I felt like a child, timid and trembling, exposed and unsure.
He began to speak, his usual honeyed tones replaced by a cloying rasp. He sounded like he was drowning. I concentrated harder as guttural growls rose from his chest, felt blood rush to my groin. I trusted it instinctively, the rhythm of this visceral language, and as he flared with a blaze like uncorrupted starlight I could do nothing but draw closer to the flame.
The air smelled of wet soil and copper and his flesh began to simmer, slick and reflective. He gripped my mouth, nails embedding into my gums, lifting me up to his full height. As his incantation swelled the pores of the atmosphere yawned open, dripping jade secretions onto the floor, and our gazes locked as a spinning void of space rippled between us. I saw my fragile form, dangling jagged-boned and fretful, through his eyes. I was a weakened shell, a mess of shivering meat, brutalized and subliminally bruised by the shocks I had endured. This body was deformed, owned by its fear, bent and broken into intolerable angles and if it must be destined to perish then I welcomed destruction by his hand.
Thin black fissures formed on his face, splitting down his forehead and up the slope of his chin. Two more trailed across his cheeks until six met in the center of his nose, then the whole façade split apart. Writhing triangles of rubbery flesh wriggled free as his head became a star covered in puckered suction cups, a blinding light pouring from a cat’s eye slit in its center.
He moved my hand to the center of his chest, digging my fingernails into the tissue and ripping it away. He wanted to be stripped. I pulled the skin from his sternum, tearing his torso too, freeing the squirming innards eager to be released. My fingers slashed and grasped, growing slippery from his fluids until his new shape writhed around us, a mandala of twisting tendrils with tiny hooks at each end. They whipped and whirled against me, flaying skin from my bones. Now we were entangled, a mesh of limbs and meat. Everything shuddered ice cold.
Pain as pervasive as I’d ever known sharpened me into a lightning rod. I’d never felt so alive as I did in that second, weightless and naked in his monstrous grip. My body, a crossbow of agony, fired arrows into the dark heart of oblivion. Tentacles surged seeking secret crevices, tugging clumps of gristle systematically from my innards, jagged hunks of raw emotion that I’d let fester and cling to my organs. Guilt, shame, doubt, hesitance, jealousy, fear—he pulled them all from my body and tossed them like scraps to the void.
I saw us in that room, a conjoined mass of matter churning in a spherical cocoon. I saw all the rooms, saw the thrusting, slipping, dripping things feasting on each other and roving through the labyrinth of a dark communal mind. We all saw it, felt it all. Our minds hooked into a consciousness only versed in pain and obliteration.
I saw that night. Saw my Uncle’s pelvis stabbing and jabbing and pushing its way into me. Semen and blood and fear in my mouth and the searing pain of a thousand similar conquests reverberating up my spine. Faces blurred and smeared indistinct until She appeared, enveloping all attention.
I saw her birth. A white hot spear shooting from my body, blazing from my third eye to my neck down my back and exploding from the void of my crotch. She was a hulk of clotted hurt, staggering forwards to the source of her pain, an eyeless wound of a face split open revealing row upon row of bloody, shattered teeth. With harpy claws she tore at her hair, capillary networks fanning like wings from her back. She hurled my Uncle’s body against the floor, impaling him with a tongue suddenly stretched into a spike. Then she screamed, a vile gargling shriek that spat hunks of meat onto his petrified face. My voice, her voice, giving form to every wretched thing that ever suffered without consent. His flesh flew away from the impact of her sorrow and the farm became a maelstrom of ripping, twisting, unforgiving energy. Everything flew apart: the barn, the cows, the dogs, the pigs, my Uncle, my cousins. Me. Everything exploded with the sincerity of her pain.
I felt his body judder from the weight of her presence. Now every ounce of will he had was forced into me. I shattered like a nebula, spewing razor shards of light across the Universe. Every string of my psyche and all the dark communes sang that we were one.
We were One.
We
Are
One
It took a long time to rebuild myself after he left me in that room. Not as long as the first time, I’m sure, but then it’s hard to recall. At first my awareness hung in a sentient mist, fused gently to every particle of air around it and nothing more.
There was a strange satisfaction to that state, light and clean, holding nothing but the weight of air and moisture. I suppose it was inevitable that my ego would prevail, that the idea of my own importance would infiltrate space and I’d start to flourish. The simplicity couldn’t last; evolution is an obstinate beast. At the farm I’d believed it was over, that I’d finally found a sanctuary in the stillness, away from the nightmare life I’d known. But something had murmured me back together then, and this time I murmured to myself, willing that kernel of being to dream of a deeper purpose, something slipping past my consciousness as fluid and persuasive as the tide.
I nurtured my seed, focused on the multiplying of cells, and knitted myself slowly whole with the needle of my will. Since my initiation I remembered much more than my mortal self ever could and I’d lots of time to recall in that suspended loop. The more I remembered the denser I became until disparate particles starting bumping together, creating the friction and warmth needed to condense. I became a puddle, a plasma pool of poetic potential, and from this embryonic water, mixed with our blood, I pulled myself up, forcing bones to calcify and organs to grow. My heart began to pump, and I developed, curled in a bud of becoming, held in the palm of the Old Ones.
I remembered what They remembered, I dreamt their bloody dreams. I saw the apocalyptic ends of a thousand worlds and felt them, rebuilding and rejuvenating in their fathomless nests. How many times had they risen from their slumber? Resurrected from eons of sleep to crown the world’s madness. The desperate soul of Nature summoned them time and time again and they rose to vanquish her foes, lest she break under their demands. They had ripped the world asunder, drowned it in floods, feasted on its children, scorched it with flaming rocks. Afterwards, it was forced to grow agai
n, and they retreated, to observe from the tattered edges of reality. Gaia’s shadow, her lovers, harbingers of the New Dawn.
Now I know with absolute certainty that when the time comes I will be there, open hearted and wide as the sky, as their Priestess and their Guide and an Architect of the Flesh. I will pluck up the fragments discarded in their wake, lick the wounds of the broken, and teach them the wonder of destruction. New humanity will be my masterpiece, my most inspired work of art.
Without the skin, we are One.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
“Mother’s Nature” is a twisted coming of age, a tale of physical and mental dissolution and transcendence through the eyes of an unnamed girl. Discovered by an exotic stranger her innate talents are cultivated by an eccentric tutorage in sculpture, fashion and taxidermy. Under his watchful gaze she transitions between a child, woman and artist, unaware that a deeper shift is taking place. As her empowerment swells, sex, death and sanity conjoin, proving that reality is only skin deep and revealing Nature’s true face.
The story is influenced in parts by the Lovecraft Mythos and the works of Caitlin R. Kiernan, obliterating the duality of good and evil and reveling in the joy of monstrous desire. It was written in Autumn/Winter 2015 in Manchester and Morocco and first appeared in Martian Migraine Press’s Cthulhusattvas—Tales of the Black Gnosis, May 2016. It was as much of a rite of passage for its author as it was for the character herself.
THE CONTRACT
PAOLO DI ORAZIO
From The Monster, The Bad And The Ugly
Editor: Jodi Renée Lester
Publisher: Kipple Officina Libraria
______
I dreamt of that hair again.
The worst nightmare was to fall asleep fearing that the vision was going to haunt me, devouring my heart and brain.
And so it was, yet again.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Page 5