House of Skin

by Jonathan Janz

  He felt her kick at him, aiming for his balls, but she was too weak and had a bad angle. She kicked the underside of his buttocks instead. He pulled the shovel away, raised one of his size fourteens and stomped her in the belly.

  Daryl grinned. The bitch deserved it. Raking him with those goddamn Freddy Krueger fingernails, dousing the back of his neck with scalding coffee. He touched his neck and grimaced. The raised blisters back there hurt like a motherfucker.

  She was curled up like a pillbug and retching. He dropped down next to her, cradled the back of her head. She writhed away, so he snatched a handful of her hair and drew her face to his. “It’s just you and me now,” he said. “No one’s gonna stop me from doing what I want, least of all you.”

  Crying now, she batted weakly at his face. He headbutted her, saw her dazed expression and felt his cock growing hard. With both hands he grabbed ahold of her long hair and kissed her. She struggled beneath him, but he only mashed his face harder, his tongue out and squirming to get between her closed lips. She bucked beneath him, battered his shoulders and neck, but he wouldn’t let go. He let one hand drop to her breasts, squeezing them, kneading, his other hand slide lower, down over her slick tummy and work its way under her waistband. She thrashed beneath him, and just when his fingertips found her pubic hair, he felt a screaming pain in his right ear, knew she’d sunk a fingernail in there, through his fucking eardrum.

  He yelped and rolled onto his back, his legs bicycling in the air, running through the agony. Daryl howled, felt tears stinging his cheeks.

  He remembered himself after a time and sat up, one hand holding in the ganglia oozing through his fingers.

  The bitch was crawling away.

  He scrambled over and grabbed the shovel. As he got to his feet he saw what bad shape she was in. She’d made it only a few feet from the garden. He followed her, but his balance threatened to betray him. The bitch and her goddamn fingernails had screwed up his equilibrium, but he still had the upper hand. He had to do it quick, before his spinning brain pitched him over onto the wet grass. He stood above her, feet straddling her back.

  Daryl lifted the shovel over his shoulder, brought it down hard, flat end clanging dully on her skull. Her body flopped on the grass, went still.

  He stared at her long shiny body, face down, curvy and limp and silhouetted by the moon.

  He wondered how he’d explain this to Sam.

  Knowing she was out for a while, maybe for good, but still wanting to keep an eye on her while he dug, he reached down and grabbed the waistband of her shorty shorts. He felt the silk of her panties on his fingertips, lifted, meaning for her body to come with it, but instead of lifting her off the ground, her shorts and underwear slid off her hips, revealing her beautiful round ass.

  He dropped her, panting. He stared at her glistening buttocks, pallid and full in the moonlight.

  He wiped his mouth. There would be time for that later, after he dug up Brand’s body. Not bothering to pull her shorts up, he lifted her feet and dragged her like that until she was lying next to the garden. He eyeballed her exposed rump, imagined how it would be, her out cold, him violating her however he chose, for hours. He could incorporate it into his story later on. How she’d called him, asked him to come out to her place. I knew it was wrong, Sam, but she was so pretty and so aggressive. It was after we’d already had sex that she confessed to me about Brand, thinking I wouldn’t tell on her. When I came out here to see if her story was true she attacked me with those scimitar nails of hers. She slashed my face and probably cost me my hearing in one ear. It was self-defense then, and even though I didn’t want to hurt her, I had to, to save myself and to get justice for Brand’s wife and kids.

  Laughing, Daryl thrust the shovel into the dirt.

  He dug, working leisurely at first, then feverishly when he realized she’d buried the lawyer down deep. By accident he tossed a shovelful of dirt on her back and shoulders. He watched how still she was, wondered for a moment if she’d died on him. Then he saw her ribs rising and falling and knew she was still alive even if her skull was busted. It didn’t matter, as long as she was alive when he took her. He threw another clump of dirt on her, this one thumping on her lower back, dirty crumbs of earth collecting in the crack of her ass. He leaned on the shovel, enjoying the sight. Bitch thought she was too good for him, what’d she think about herself now? Face down in the mud, dirt in her buttcrack, she wasn’t such a princess now, was she?

  He dug lower, four feet deep now, wondering why he hadn’t come to it yet. The ground was getting stony, sparks flicking up when he struck. Was it possible she’d fooled him, buried the body somewhere else? The blade struck something solid. Too solid, he thought. It felt like a big rock, but Brand’s body had been underground for a while now. Maybe it was petrified.

  Daryl chuckled, set the shovel aside and worked the rocky soil with his hands, scraping the earth away from the hard object beneath. Its surface was at least a foot wide. The lawyer’s torso, maybe? It was awfully flat for that.

  Steeling himself for the putrefied stench of rotting flesh, he felt around down there on all fours. He realized what he felt was only a stone. With the realization came the knowledge she had not buried the lawyer here after all, couldn’t have. The rock was too large for her to manage on her own. She couldn’t have pulled it up, put him under it, shoved it back again. Disappointed, he stood in the hole and put his hands on the lip of the opening to haul himself out.

  The shovel tip whistled down and crunched through his wrist. Too shocked to scream, he looked up at her, holding the shovel and standing at the edge of the hole. She jumped and landed with her bare heels on the edge of the shovel blade. Daryl bellowed as he watched the dirty steel sink into the ground, his wrist bone snapping in half, his hand severed, the blood already muddying the soil between wrist stump and shovel. He gripped his jetting wrist, held it before his eyes with his remaining hand. He grew faint at the sight of the gushing red fountain.

  He staggered back to the edge of the opening, saw the girl land in a crouch before him. In the hole with him she stood erect, brought the shovel up. Before he could lift his arms to ward off the blow, the blade was whizzing through the air, sideways, so that the sharp tip caught the side of his open mouth, sliced through the stretched skin, cleaved his lip on the other side as well. Blood gurgling, choking him, he sank to his knees and tumbled forward onto his belly. Waves of dizziness dulled the pain, but it was still there, awful, gigantic in his mouth and where his hand used to be.

  Losing consciousness, he flopped onto his back and gasped for breath. He glimpsed Julia above him, upside down and snarling. The shovel came down on his chest, puncturing his skin. She stood on it again, balancing as he batted at the blade. It disappeared into his chest, sank through his lungs, parted his vertebrae.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The thing about the eyes of the lady in the painting wasn’t the way they followed you about the room—which they did—but rather the way they absorbed you and dismissed you, turned you into an irrelevancy.

  Men are playthings to me, those eyes told him. What makes you any different?

  Paul couldn’t say why he spent so much of that week, the week after it fell apart with Julia, in the equatorial heat of the third-floor library where the central air’s reach never seemed to extend. It wasn’t to admire the painting; the woman above the fireplace was too striking to be lingered on.

  Maybe it had something to do with the way that gaze of hers, the one that prickled the nape of his neck even when his back was turned, spoke to him. You’re no more to me than these other men, the eyes said, but you’re no less either. There’s more in you than you know, Paul. I’ll bet you could show me a good time.

  It was both sick and strange, he knew, to think such thoughts about his great aunt, but because he’d never met her, he was able to rationalize away his instinctive revulsion, to forget the incestuous elements of his feelings for the woman and revel in the way she made him fe
el. Thinking of her, he was able to ignore the way the rustlings in the wall had ended.

  In the days since Julia left him—for good, it seemed—he’d grown stronger. His jogs had become daily affairs, and soon he was running twice a day and for greater distances. He’d converted a second story bedroom into a workout area, complete with equipment he’d had delivered from the local sporting goods store.

  Ten nights after Julia rejected him he dreamed of Annabel for the first time, and since that night he’d dreamed of nothing else. In his dreams he pursued her the way he’d pursued Julia through the yard the first night he’d seen her. But when the lightning flashed this time he could see it was the woman in the painting, her knowing eyes and confident grin. He gave chase, but with barely an effort she remained ahead of him.

  He grew closer to the woman each succeeding night, and her delays, when she’d turn and stare at him, were more frequent and sustained.

  Because he wanted his dreams undiluted by alcohol, he’d sworn off drinking, going cold turkey. He shocked himself by sticking to his resolution. He found he was able to run even farther each morning without the encumbrance of a hangover and that without the liquor in his system his body recovered more briskly from each run.

  One day in late July he diverged from his normal routine and took the route his nervousness had forbidden him from taking. After all, he told himself, he couldn’t stay away from the cemetery forever.

  He did not immediately go to the grave on the extreme edge of the clearing, instead moving up and down uneven rows, searching for names he could use for his characters. He’d gotten the idea shortly after Julia deserted him that he might, without the aid of whatever power had gripped him before, be able to write a novel of his own, one that would not cause editors to send him polite, slightly pitying responses.

  When he reached the large black tombstone, all he could do was stare.

  He was not surprised to find the grass above whatever body was entombed there sprouting in delicate tufts. He’d first come out here in May, and there might have been morning frosts at that time of year that could account for the blighted grass he’d seen. Now, the ground that had before been scorched and black was improving, though still a good deal less lush than the earth around it.

  What astonished him was how drunk he must have been that fateful May evening, for he now realized that the name on the marker was quite clear.

  The tall narrow letters read, ANNABEL CARVER

  And below, 1930-1988

  So this was, after all, his great aunt. The name fit the woman in the painting, so much so that he found himself whispering her name. He realized how quiet the forest had become, how the diesel symphony of the cicadas had subsided, the cawing of the blackbirds all but ceased.

  He looked down at the grave.

  There were no truculent messages, no red spray paint. He supposed they could have been washed away, though that didn’t make sense. The scars were still there, gouged into the granite surface of the marker.

  Yet staring at the gravestone now, he couldn’t believe he’d not seen it before.

  In a way he supposed it made sense. If he’d been so drunk that he couldn’t even read a mildly vandalized tombstone, it was no wonder he’d blacked out upon touching it. The possibility that it was really he who had written The Monkey Killer and not some emissary from beyond seemed perfectly reasonable to him now. Sure he’d been drunk, but weren’t there people who’d committed crimes when asleep? Was it really that improbable that his imagination had taken control once liberated by drink, had surmounted his self-doubt when it was too muddled to hinder him?

  He stood, feeling his muscles ripple in the hot, close air. He wished now he’d taken pictures of his former body, the one with two chins and puffy cheeks.

  He lay down in the patchy grass and watched the overhanging leaves stir in the weak summer breeze. He tried to imagine Julia’s face but could only see Annabel’s, the blue eyes replacing the green, the tawny skin draining of color.

  He closed his eyes and pictured Annabel turning toward him, beckoning him, allowing him to slide his hands over her sides, his tongue into her mouth. She laughed as he tore the thin shoulder straps of her white dress and he took a moment to look at the white pool of fabric around her feet. As she stood there naked his eyes traveled up her slim, powdery body, his hands caressing her legs, massaging her.

  Paul opened his eyes and sucked in air.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  It was one thing to find a woman in a piece of art attractive. It was another matter altogether to be so attracted to her that he could find no other outlet for his imagination than fantasizing at her gravesite. Feeling decidedly less suave than he’d felt moments earlier, he trotted out of the graveyard and through the forest, intent on outrunning his shame.

  The exertion and the heat did little to faze him, his breathing quick but measured as his long, loping strides brought him closer and closer to home. He was sure he was seeing things as he approached the mouth of the trail, for across the yard, near the garage, he was certain he perceived flashes of glass, glints of gold. Paul focused on his arms, pumping his elbows front-to-back as his feet whirred over the grass of the back lawn. He passed the place where he and Julia had spent that last enchanted evening.

  Then Paul saw the car. It was familiar to him, yet it wasn’t until he turned and beheld the woman sitting on the front porch that he realized the car was Emily’s.

  November, 1982

  “I want you to leave there.”

  Sam promised her on the phone he’d give it a rest, let ten minutes go by without telling her what an unwholesome place Watermere was, what a ruthless bastard she was working for and what a soulless bitch she was looking after. But his thoughts hovered over it like a stalled storm system, raining on their first date in a week.

  Barbara looked at him with a pained expression. Seeing her lovely face pinched that way made him ache. She could be anything in the world, but she had to be a nurse. Annabel’s nurse. Sam wished the insane woman would die and save them all the trouble.

  Last time Sam and Barbara had seen one another, he’d made a remark, something about the poetic justice of Annabel’s condition, her getting a venereal disease after using her body to screw up so many people’s lives. Barbara said it wasn’t her job to judge her patients, what they did to get sick was none of her business.

  That set him off because it was the same damn argument lawyers made, like they couldn’t help defending and getting guilty people off, using technicalities and lawyer-speak to prevent child molesters and rapists from getting what they deserved.

  “So you’re telling me,” he’d said, knowing they were headed for another blow-up, “that you’d condone saving the life of a serial killer even if you knew he was guilty?”

  “I’d do everything in my power to help him,” she said, defiant.

  “What if you knew the D.A. couldn’t get a conviction, that the only hope the public had—the families of the victims had—was for the slimeball to die on the operating table?”

  “I can’t believe you’d ask me a question like that.”

  “And I can’t believe you’d put some bullshit nurses’ code over doing the right thing.”

  That had sent her toward the door.

  Now here they were again, on the edge of the cliff, ready to tumble over, kicking and clawing each other all the way. He didn’t know how many more falls their relationship could take, and though he was bothered by her ethics, he loved her a hell of a lot more than he disagreed with her.

  Barbara was watching him, her expression saying he was a selfish jerk. It made him mad. What the hell, he thought. If wanting the woman he’d fallen in love with to stay away from that nest of vipers, to for chrissakes move in with him instead of living in this farmhouse in the middle of the forest, then yeah, he was selfish. He looked up at the plain white house, thought of the episode with Reverend Hargrove and his family, what Myles had done to Mrs. Hargrove.
/>
  He bit the inside of his mouth. “Look, I know you’re pretty pissed at me these days, and I know you’ve been putting in a lot of hours at your job. You’re doing your best to help that…woman, and I want you to know I respect your motives.”

  She laughed, bitterness changing her voice into something he didn’t recognize.

  He fought through it. “And if we disagree on some things, well, a man and a woman were never intended to agree on everything. And we agree about enough things to make up for the other.”

  The way she looked at him, she was listening. Which was a start. He struggled to find the words, to choose them with care, so he could maybe lead her back to him.

  “I love you. You know that. I changed my life around for you, and—”

  “I never asked you to do that.”

  “I know,” he said, trying not to show how hurt he was, “and I’m a grown man who’s responsible for the things I do. It’s just,” he paused, thinking. “It’s just the stuff I know about those people—though they don’t deserve to be called people—are so—”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” Her face, her voice, were suddenly fierce. “You talk about Myles and Annabel as though they were less than human, like you’ve never sinned or done anything you’re ashamed of. What makes you so vicious toward them?”

  Sam gaped at her. “What makes me so vicious? What do you think, I’ve made everything up? That everyone in town doesn’t hate them, isn’t scared to go out there because of the terrible things they’ve gotten away with? Barbara, those stories predate my arrival here, it’s not like I’m the one who made them up. They’re true. Those people are the worst kind of scum. They were responsible for the death of five children. Of too many men and women to count.”