“Exercising?”
“Yeah, I should probably do some of that myself, right? Mom’s nurse, though, she thinks Glen is exercising too much.”
“Too much?”
“Maybe I’ll send you the pamphlets.” He laughed like it was a shared joke, then said, “It’s hard to explain. Hey, I’m in the guest room, with that old pull-out couch we slept in last time. I didn’t bother to pull it out, since it’s just me. Makes it easier.” The guest room was actually his old bedroom; in the intervening years, it served as storage for furniture and decorations that no longer matched the rest of the house. A plywood bookcase stood next to the door, its sheves bowed under the weight of Readers Digest Condensed Books. Several rejected paintings leaned against the lowest shelves, including the ballerina print he’d always disliked. The sofa-bed had red corduroy cushions, reason enough to banish it from its original spot in the den, but it was also hideously uncomfortable. The tables on either side were different heights: one a parsons table made of brown plastic; the other a scuffed box-shape, the wood painted a milk-crate blue. The phone on the blue table was a classic bell push-button from AT&T days, the size of a shoebox and equally as functional. The parsons table was home to the land-line he used now—a one-piece disposable phone, like those provided in hospital rooms. The coiled cord tangled over itself. If you touched the mouthpiece the wrong way, you’d accidently hang up.
“Where were you when I called this morning?”
Lauren paused before responding. “The store. You know.”
They had stock descriptions for the different places they shopped: “Corner Market,” they’d say, or “the Safeway on Pine.” He wondered why she didn’t specify.
“Like I said earlier, things are a bit weird here. Mom’s, you know, as sick as Glen told me. I guess she’s in good spirits, considering. She kind of goes in and out, though—not always fully alert.”
“Really?” Lauren didn’t convey the kind of sympathy he might have expected from her. Her voice was neutral, almost distracted, as if she watched television or clicked at computer solitaire instead of listening. Curtis closed his eyes, tried to picture how she’d look as she spoke—to help decipher her tone, of course, but also because he missed her. Instead, he found himself picturing his mother’s face, those dry, thin lips barely moving as another person’s voice gasped from her diseased lungs.
“Strangest thing she said was a reference to some entity she called the ‘Fleshless Man.’ A hallucination from the drugs, I guess, and a dose of paranoia along with it.” This ominous detail would be enough to startle Lauren into full attention. When he’d mentioned that name to Glen earlier, his brother’s eyes had widened in surprise, a genuine but brief register of alarm—until he recovered himself and pretended merely to be puzzled. “Creepy name, isn’t it? Almost like it referred to a real person. Someone or some thing who could actually get into the house because, get this, because she said the Fleshless Man, he—”…and here the phone connection made a quick hiccup into a reverb effect, as will sometimes happen, where you’re talking and then hear a brief echo of your own voice, slightly distorted on the bounce-back, as if the listener or some stranger begins completing your thought before you’ve finished uttering it… “—wants to kill her.”
If Lauren responded immediately, her words were lost in the reverb. He waited, exhaled into the mouthpiece, and heard that breath and its echo through the phone’s speaker.
Curtis switched the receiver to his other ear and strained to listen. As he repositioned the phone against his face, he inadvertently pressed the mouthpiece against his cheek, clicking the disconnect button.
“Are you there?” he said to Lauren. “Are you there?”
Then there was that awkward business while he waited to call her back—in case she tried to call him at the same time. When he eventually pressed redial, he got sent directly to her voice mail.
-12-
That night in the room of obsolete furniture, Curtis lay on an uncomfortable couch and struggled towards sleep. The morbid atmosphere of his childhood home once again infected his dreams.
It called to the Fleshless Man.
Sometime in the deep dream, the doorbell rang. Although not her usual time, this was the agreed-upon signal that their mother’s nurse has entered the house. Like his brother, Curtis trusted Lillian. She cared for their mother. She would do what was best.
He heard footsteps on the stairwell leading up from the entry hall. The nurse’s heavy tread was steady and confident. She had walked this path to their mother’s room so many times, she could do it in her sleep.
Behind her another set of footsteps followed, an imperfect echo. Those footsteps were unsteady and awkward, like a man trying to walk on stilts.
Nurse Lillian reached the top floor landing, and her heavy feet fell more quietly on the hallway rug. The carpet fibers absorbed the extra footsteps behind her, replaced by a new sound: an occasional scrape against the wall, like a bored child dragging a dry twig across the slats of a neighbor’s fence.
The nurse passed the room of obsolete furniture, where Curtis had left the door ajar. He heard the breath of her exertion as she continued down the hallway to his mother’s room. Curtis wondered if he should rouse himself to go question her, but reminded himself that a nurse knew how to treat her patient. A nurse knew how to end pain.
Then, in his old bedroom, the scrape of tree bark against the open door. A stumble along the old rug, the nub of stilts sliding through shag tendrils.
He dreamed about pretending to sleep. If there were something in the room with him, he knew he did not want to see it. His eyelids tightened.
In the discomfort of an unfamiliar room, Curtis had pushed the pillow aside. His head lay directly against the sofa cushion. He could feel the texture of it against his face, ridges of corduroy scoring red lines into his cheek.
A gust of warm air drifted over the other side of his face. Curtis had never dreamed of smells before, that he could recall, yet that warm air carried the worst odors he could imagine: the institutional reek of a hospital wing where people died unattended, wallowing in their own filth; the sour stink of withered age and lost hopes wafting over the rotted gums of a toothless mouth.
Another warm gust, curious and greedy, bending nearer to his face. Then a rattle and slurp, followed by a plash onto his cheek—a wet raindrop, yet thick as syrup, slow and sticky as it rolled toward the corner of his mouth.
Curtis tightened his lips, froze the muscles on his face. His eyes remained closed. If he twitched or gagged, if he jolted himself awake or acknowledged the entity’s presence in any way, he knew something terrible would happen.
A bitter, fetid moisture dragged along his lower lip. Another wet dollop fell hot onto his cheek.
“Not here.” Nurse Lillian’s gentle whisper was a stark contrast to her usual bellow. She’d entered the room without making a sound. Curtis heard a slight scuffle and rustle, the gentle coaxing as an owner tugs at her dog’s leash. “That’s right. This way.”
He knew what it was. It was some awful manifestation of terminal disease, the oppressive atmosphere of the sick room, all the horrible thoughts and fears and smells he expected to confront in the world of his mother’s final days. Death at home could be equally as horrible as death in an institution.
Curtis allowed Nurse Lillian to lead this thing towards his mother. He allowed her, because she was leading it away from him.
He waited a long while before he raised a shaking hand to his face, wiped at his cheek and along his lower lip. He jumped from the couch and closed the door. Then he put his ear against it.
“I’ve brought someone to meet you,” Lillian said.
His mother’s voice wouldn’t carry as well down the hallway, so he couldn’t tell if she responded.
“I’ve told you so much about him already,” the nurse continued. “I thought you sh
ould see him before you die. Isn’t that right?”
And as much as she was his mother’s nurse, she was Glen’s too. She also knew what was best for Glen. What was best for the whole family.
Life is for the living.
“It’s time,” the nurse said. Then, coaxing: “Go ahead.”
He wondered if his mother had the luxury of closing her eyes tightly—as he had moments before, when he trembled like a coward in the creature’s terrible presence.
His ear against the door grew warm. A blush of shame, a residue of that foul breath from the Fleshless Man.
In his dream, he hated himself anew. This is his mother: the woman he struggled with for most of his life, certainly, but they’d started to make peace. He had convinced himself that he could love her—so easy, since she was dying, and the effort needn’t be sustained for very long. But now he realized he was selfish and afraid. He was incapable of love.
And that awareness was enough. A dream, unlike life, can go backwards, start over.
He’s on the couch, eyes tight and pretending sleep. An awful presence hovers over him. It breathes and drools. He’s even more afraid of it now, if that’s possible, but he is determined to have a heroic moment. He will open his eyes and fight—knowing that he will likely lose, but that the creature will take him instead of his mother.
He opens his eyes in the dark room. In the dark, empty room.
Perhaps there is still time. The door is ajar. He hears muffled footsteps at the end of the hall, and the scrape of bony, inhuman hands against the walls.
He rushes out of the room. In the distance, Nurse Lillian turns toward his mother’s room.
Behind her, the Fleshless Man stands tall and more horrible than Curtis could have imagined. The creature is a skeleton coated in dried muscle. Polyps hang all over him like gray drippings off a cheap hamburger patty. His yellowed fingernails curl in long impossible spirals, scraping against the walls as he tries to maintain balance. The creature’s legs skitter awkwardly, like legs pulled off a spider, each movement near death yet twitching with the full energy of life.
How could Lillian bring something this hideous into their home?
He doesn’t want to get closer, but Curtis finds himself running at it. The Fleshless Man teeters, arms reaching for balance, and his head turns to the side.
God no, he thinks. I don’t want to see its face.
Yet Curtis is closer now, and the dream has played another trick. It is not the Fleshless Man who walks behind the nurse. It is his brother.
Glen’s face turns, and his whole body turns. There’s skin on this awful skeleton now, but not as much as there should be. In the area usually concealed by a shirt, strange thin tendrils of fat hang like worms off Glen’s bare torso. He looks at Curtis, pinches one of these tendrils at the root and pulls until it bursts away, as simple as popping a pimple. He flicks it to the ground. “What you wanted,” Glen says. “What everyone wanted.” He pulls another tendril, but this one doesn’t burst as easily. He drags it down like a zipper, and a chunk of flesh sloughs away and drops wet onto the carpet. “Not much longer.”
“Don’t pick at it,” Nurse Lillian says. “Come in here. It’s time.”
And Glen steps into their mother’s bedroom.
Curtis shakes off his revulsion and follows.
The room is bright. Instead of the chemicals and decay, it smells of rosewater. Nurse Lillian stands over his mother’s bed. His brother is gone, and the Fleshless Man is gone, too.
Mom’s tired eyes blink to adjust to the overhead light.
“I’ve brought someone to meet you,” Lillian says. “I’ve told you so much about him already. I thought you should see him before you die. Isn’t that right?”
And she points at Curtis.
-13-
When he woke the next morning, Curtis realized he had fallen asleep in the chair at his mother’s bedside. Sleepwalking was rare for him—a habit he dreamed about more often than he practiced. But here he was, with no recollection of coming here.
His mother sat propped up in bed, as if she anticipated company. Her eyes were wide, her mouth twisted in a grimace of surprise and agony.
She died that way, sometime during the night.
She didn’t die alone. Curtis knew she’d seen the Fleshless Man during her final moments.
He was less certain about how the Fleshless Man came into existence. Perhaps Glen created him—a goal of health neglected for most of his life, then run toward, unreachable, yet he ran past it and kept going, hurrying as if chased by his own illness toward the wrong kind of finish line. Or the other brother who ran to the opposite coast, leaving a shriveled part of him behind in the house where it would fester and rot—and then would welcome back his grown self, embrace him, corrupt him.
In the Fleshless Man, she would have seen both her children. She would recognize her husband as well, her children now at a similar age to his when he passed away. The Fleshless Man had spoken with their voices.
And in her own voice, too. The disease had eaten at her from the inside, changing her perception of the world and allowing the Fleshless Man to enter it.
And possibly he was born from the sick storytelling mind of a perverse nurse—a campfire nightmare told in the precise situation where the fancy could take hold and gain a physical presence. Or, since that story actually sprang from Curtis’s own absurd dream, it would be better for him to believe in a nurse’s sense of mercy, twisted past the Hippocratic Oath into some cruel manifestation of assisted death.
The most likely explanation was that all these influences converged in this house of dying. They mixed together like ingredients in a cancer drug—various poisons targeted in reaction to disease, but hurting the healthy cells at the same time.
Curtis had played some small part in her death. He would have to accept that. But it would be better for his brother’s health—emotionally and physically—if Glen never realized the full truth. Curtis stood from the chair and leaned close to his mother’s terrified face. He placed his thumb and forefinger over her dead eyelids and gently pushed them closed. He then rubbed at the corners of her mouth, attempting to massage the grimace into a neutral line. His fingers ached as he moved them, and Curtis realized he must have clenched his fists in frustration while he slept. The skin of his mother’s lips seemed to crackle at his touch. His fingertips felt sticky, and he noticed a faint offensive smell that he couldn’t quite identify.
Finally, he’d adjusted her the way he wanted. Looks like she’s finally at peace, he would say.
He slid the medicine bottles aside to read the time on the bedside clock. 6:58. The red light shone atop the monitor/speaker. If he spoke loudly, Glen would hear. Come to Mom’s room. Now. It’s important. Then he would call Lauren, tell her to make flight arrangements.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. A key twisted in the front lock, and heavy footsteps sounded from the foyer. It was Monday morning, and the nurse came earlier on weekdays. He was glad: Lillian could help with the paperwork or logistics or legal issues that these circumstances required. More importantly, she could also help Curtis to counsel and comfort his brother once he learned the news.
Lillian’s footsteps reached the staircase and headed up. Another set of footsteps joined her. Glen must have finished on the elliptical machine, and he’d met her at the door. His steps were weak from the exertion, an odd stumble behind her as if he teetered off-balance, ready to collapse. The anorexia was getting to be a serious problem. They’d need to find some time to talk about it, once the funeral was over.
Norman Prentiss won the 2010 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for his first book, Invisible Fences. Previously he won a Stoker in the Short Fiction category for “In the Porches of My Ears,” which originally appeared in Postscripts 18. Other publications include the novella The Fleshless Man, a mini-collect
ion Four Legs in the Morning, a chapter in the round-robin novella The Crane House: A Halloween Story, The Narrator (with Michael McBride), and anthology appearances in Four Zombies, Four Halloweens, Dark Fusions, All-American Horror of the 21st Century, Blood Lite 3, Zombies vs. Robots: This Means War, Horror Drive-In: An All-Night Short Story Marathon, Black Static, Commutability, Damned Nation, Tales from the Gorezone, Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and four editions of the Shivers anthology series. His poetry has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, Baltimore’s City Paper, and A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock.
Visit him online at www.normanprentiss.com.
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Cemetery Dance Publications Digital Edition 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58767-484-6
The Fleshless Man
Copyright © 2013 Norman Prentiss
Cover by Elder Lemon Design
Book design by Robert Morrish
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Fleshless Man - Norman Prentiss Page 6