What greeted him in the mirror caused him to gasp, clench the edge of the sink.
The face that stared back was tight and shiny, red, scalded. His eyebrows were gone, his hairline scorched. His lashes, too, were gone, melted. His eyelids were red, puffy, filled with fluid.
His chest, his arms were burned, deep enough to make his skin feel stiff, drawn. The hairs on his chest, under his arms were gone as well, as neatly as if he’d shaved them. Burns trailed further down to his stomach, his groin, his thighs…
Corey gasped, not in shock, but in feeling…all of this new skin, all of this exposed skin brought with it overwhelming sensation. Over the pain, there was an almost euphoric sense of feeling, as if for the first time.
He felt the edge of the countertop press his legs, the shivery coolness of the porcelain sink, the stir of the air conditioner…all of them, all at once, and it was almost too much.
Trembling, hands shaking, he fumbled open the medicine cabinet, raked across its contents, sending them spilling into the sink, clattering onto the tile floor. He found a tube of burn ointment, twitched its cap open, squirted a thick dollop of it into his palms.
She pressed into him from behind, and the contact, the silken warmth of her body conforming to his, made his eyes roll back in his head, his hands clench on the sink and the tube of ointment.
It was as if someone had pressed a bare electric wire to his spine.
“What are you doing?”
He thought of the woman, the one with the flaming necklace, how she had raised her head to the ceiling, her eyes white with rapture as the fire burned her skin, burrowed a groove in her flesh.
“The burns…got to put something on them,” he gasped, pushing her away. Cool air flooded the space between them, making every remaining hair on his body stand on end.
“Why?”
Corey took a deep breath.
Was she kidding?
He turned to face her, was not surprised to see that she, too, was covered in red, scalded skin. Some of her hair was singed, her eyebrows. There were raised, red burns across her breasts, the flat of her stomach.
“We burned each other. Here, let me…”
Amy looked at him sadly, slapped his hand away, spattering the blob of ointment against the wall.
“No!” she said. “That’s what we do…who we are. I’m not going to cover all the new skin we’ve burned off. It lets me feel so much more. It lets me feel you.”
She stepped closer, put her palm against his red chest.
“Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel me?”
He could feel her, the coolness of her palm, the moisture. The enlivened nerves of his new skin seemed to triple, quadruple the normal feeling of it, sent it slamming into his brain in a rush, a sensation that threatened to incapacitate him.
Corey took her hand gently, pulled it from him, held it. He saw the pads of her fingertips, the wrinkled moist palm, all red, all burnt. He thought again of the couple they’d seen at the warehouse, entwined, enrobed in sensuous, living fire. But then he remembered how they looked after–the seared flesh, twisting scars, melted skin.
“Look at us,” he croaked, through blistered and cracked lips, through lungs that felt sere. “We’ll burn each other to death.”
“No,” she said, beginning to cry, trying to get close to him, to touch his skin with hers. “No, don’t think of it like that. Think of it like we’re burning away the loneliness, burning away the empty evenings, the lonely nights. We’re not burning to death…we’re burning to life. A new life together.”
Corey looked at her, and despite his love for her, all he could see were the burns, the angry flesh, the swelling. All he could think of was the pain, the fluids rushing in beneath the appalled flesh, flushing away dead cells, trying to heal that which had been hurt.
“No,” he said. “It’s too much…I can’t do this…”
She cried harder, her breath hitching, tears trailing down her cheeks, across her naked breasts. “You said you would…give as much as you needed to…this time.”
Corey wanted to reach out, to hold her, to tell her that he loved her. But he saw his own hands, shriveled, burnt, and drew them back.
“Not this way.”
She looked away. “I should have known…this is just like last time.”
“Jesus Christ! You’re asking too much of me. Too much!”
She stepped away, let him pass.
They did not touch.
Corey sat on the edge of her bed, put on his clothes slowly. As he drew them over his skin, each movement was a symphony of sensation. His breathing quickened, his pulse became erratic, thready.
When he was dressed, he turned to her, standing still, silent in the bathroom doorway, limned by its colorless light.
She said nothing, and her face was in shadow, but Corey heard her sobs.
“I can’t do this anymore. I won’t cry for you anymore.” She sniffled. “This is it.”
Within the darkness of her face, a small flame appeared, centered on her right eye.
It flared there, intensely bright, as violet as her eye.
Just as quickly, it went out.
He heard her gasp.
He heard a small pop!
He heard something drip to the tile floor…plipplipplip.
He was horribly sure that it wasn’t her tears falling. But he could think of nothing to say, to do.
So he turned and left, silently, carried away on the scent of violets, of burning flesh…
* * *
Months passed, Amy disappeared, quit her job, left her apartment. No new employer noted, no forwarding address left. And for a while, that was fine with Corey.
…for a while.
He went back to long days at work, longer nights at home, eating alone, sleeping alone.
Numb.
Old skin had grown over the new, insulated him again from feeling anything.
Numb.
Until he thought about The Immolation Scene. That’s what it was called on the jewel box for the movie soundtrack CD. The name fit, so Corey took it, used it for her group.
The Immolation Scene.
He watched the movie on his DVD player over and over, because that scene came the closest to showing how it actually felt.
Or maybe how he wanted it to feel…
In the movie, the antagonist (or was he the protagonist here?) sprawled atop the dark beach–injured, defeated, a river of magma flowing past him like a hot line of hate; a sky of lurid, blackened clouds boiling overhead. Fire all around him, in the air, the ground, the river…
When his body erupted into flames, though, those flames came from without, Corey thought, not from within, like his own fire.
Corey always believed that his fire was something else, something different…a wick tapping into some deeper fuel, a fuel that burned only the grace from him. He could relax, not worry about it consuming him; not worry about losing himself in it.
But that man there on the screen? It didn’t just consume him, it changed him, altered his soul as he lay on that black sand beach. You knew because the movies were made out of order; you already knew, going in, what the fire did to him, what it made of him.
He had thought all of this then, but now…well, now he knew better…since he met her…lost her…again.
Now he paid more attention to the fact that the character in the movie had also let the flames make of him what they would.
And for what?
For hate.
She had asked him to do the same, but for love. And he had resisted that, misinterpreted it.
Just as that character had.
You’re not willing to let yourself feel anything.
If someone’s willing to do it for hate, he told himself, you should be willing to do it for love.
Corey thought about that as he watched a tiny bloom sputter atop the pores of his left arm, let it roll down to his hands, crawl up his fingers. The fire was white hot, radiated heat in great
pulses that he could feel on his cheeks.
He had never let the fire get far enough for that, though…
…not even for her.
Numb.
No more…
He let the fire go, to make what it would of him.
To make him feel.
And he did…the heat grew until it sent tendrils of pain down his hand, into his arm. He smelled the ash, the charring skin, the cooking meat.
First one, then another of his fingers fell to the floor, sloughing embers like cigar stubs.
Corey fell to the floor, too, on his knees, weeping, feeling…feeling it all…
He had to find her.
He had to tell her that he felt, show her how he felt.
* * *
Glass…shattered glass.
Corey stoops to pick up a piece that sparkles in the swirling lights, the twitching firelight. It has melted its way into the soft asphalt at his feet, like a small meteor hurtled to earth, and he must pry it from the gummy material.
How many more of these warehouse fires will I have to visit before I find her?
He needs to find her; he knows that now.
He needs to tell her, he understands that now.
It isn’t sharp, jagged like shattered glass should be. Its edges are blunted, blackened. It is as smooth as a pebble worn by water.
The size of a quarter, it is egg-shaped, perhaps a broken piece of something larger, probably a window in the building that is completely engulfed. Corey turns it in his hands, his hands smudged by the black ash that slicks its surface, and thinks that it looks familiar.
He is close…so close now…
As he rubs the ash aside, Corey sees a flash of color within the glass. Perhaps the window bore a painted sign, the name of a lawyer or the logo of some pharmaceutical firm.
But it’s not that…it’s not a piece of a window or a cocktail glass. He realizes this as he holds it in the ash-smudged palm of his ruined hand. It pulses with deep purple light, the color of violets…
Amy’s eye.
His heart lurches, his hand bursts into white-hot flame. He feels it scorch his palm, melt the glass fragment to slag, which drips to the pavement between his remaining fingers, plipplipplip, like the original that this glass one had replaced months ago.
Another tear, shed for him.
She wants him to find her.
He is close…so close now…
He feels it.
He feels everything.
John F.D. Taff has more than 70 stories in publication in markets such as Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, One Buck Horror and Big Pulp. He’s also been published in anthologies such as Hot Blood: Fear the Fever, Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, Shock Rock II, Best New Vampire Tales, Best New Werewolf Tales and Horror for Good. Four of his shorts have been selected as honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror over the years. Recent sales have been to Dark Visions Vol. 1, Ominous Realities, Postscripts to Darkness, Shades of Blue & Gray, Edge of Sundown, and Beware the Dark. Taff’s first collection of short stories, Little Deaths, has been well reviewed, made it to the Stoker Reading List and managed to crack the Top 100 Paid Kindle at Amazon. His latest novel, The Bell Witch, is available now, and a thriller, Kill/Off, will be out this fall. Follow him online at www.johnfdtaff.com and on Twitter @johnfdtaff.
-A Body at Rest
by Lorne Dixon
(THREE)
The mattress spring poked up through the cushion like the tip of an antler, a minor annoyance all but lost inside the constant pain. Nelson stared at the ceiling with salt-crusted eyes and counted the tiles. Thirty-six. The same as his age, not counting the six months he’d spent curled on a hospital bed after the accident. How could he count that lost time? Not in days or nights, that was for sure, not in the timeless void of this endless, droning nightmare.
A year later, most nights were like this, hours on end staring up, wishing sleep would come, knowing it wouldn’t. These sleepless nights were somehow even more tiring than the day. Not that there was much difference, except every few days when his brother Mark would visit and force him to eat from whatever takeout bag he’d brought. The bedsores didn’t really bother him anymore.
Tiny black flies hung from the ceiling. Count them, multiply by six, and that would give him the number of tiny legs scampering overhead. His ears perked up, trying to hear the impossibly soft landing of their feet on the thirty-six tiles. He wondered how close he needed to be to hear their footfalls. And what it would sound like if one were to crawl inside his ear.
Now, that was no way to find sleep.
And his body needed rest.
Perhaps chasing the trail of an imagined spider, Nelson reached up from beneath the sheets and scratched his itching eyebrow. The moment his fingernail scraped skin, an image flashed inside his mind–him, lying in bed with Em, both naked, his body still intact, legs continuing down to feet instead of bulbous stumps. Em, still alive, sleeping with her head on his chest, her tangled hair not clotted with blood or broken glass or fragments of skull.
Nelson glanced at the alarm clock on the bedside table, on her side, past his wheelchair, far enough away for the numbers to blur. His eyeglasses rested on the table, lenses magnifying the LED numerals into a long red streak. He thought of blood on upholstery and Em’s broken body propped up by a loop of flat cord–her safety belt, though it might as well have been a noose.
On their wedding day, Em had trembled as she took her steps down the aisle, a flowing cloud of summer blonde hair trailing behind in lieu of a lace train. Her mother told the wedding party she hadn’t cut it since grade school. At night, drifting to sleep, he would weave his hand through it, silk strands running through his fingers…
…On the edge of the road, screaming, trying to sit up in the stretcher with his mangled legs, watching with eyes that can’t close, watching the emergency crew trying to pry Em’s body out of the wreckage. They struggle to free a thick rope of hair from a twisted section of dashboard. Finally, they use bolt cutters.
Mark and the best man at his wedding had to hold him up at her funeral so he could see her in the casket. With short hair, she could have been anyone. She should have been anyone–anyone but Em.
A month into his coma an infection took his legs.
Now the bank wanted to take the house.
Let them, he thought. The house, the wedding gown in its box under the bed, the scrapbooks full of smiling photos, the old copies of People magazine in the bathroom, ceiling spiders, take all of it.
Maybe the bankers could do better with his life than he’d managed.
The sound of a key rattling in the front door drew his attention. He lifted his head off the pillow and glanced out the open door into the hall. “Mark?”
It was too late for a visit from Mark, he had to wake at five in the morning for his commute, and Becky and the twins were–
“Mark? That you, man?”
Nelson heard the front door open and close.
Louder, “Mark–”
Clapping footsteps shambled through the kitchen and into the hall, something trotting on all fours. Without his glasses, there was only murky darkness beyond the doorway. Nelson dragged himself to the edge of the bed and reached for his wheelchair’s armrests.
The galloping footsteps got louder–and closer.
The intruder paused. Its front hooves tapped against the bedroom’s hardwood floor.
The deer in his doorway was a large six-point buck.
The deer in his headlights had been a large six-point buck.
Nelson screamed as he swung himself into the chair.
The deer shook its head and snorted.
(TWO)
The band were thumping and murmuring out a melody as dark and low as a snarling dog. It was a morbid sort of backwoods shoe-gazing bluegrass that could turn the recitation of a lover’s sonnet into a suicide note.
Few places could have been as depressing a spot for a rendezvous with your newlywed bride. Afte
r a long workday on the factory line, this was the last thing he needed.
“Darling,” Em said in a high English falsetto, “I’ve brought you your coat.”
Dropping into the bar stool next to him, she crossed her legs. Nelson’s eyes scanned a little higher, to the frill edge of her skirt. She caught him looking and slapped at his shoulder. Her eyes were playful and mischievous, the eyes of a kitten toying with a dangling string.
“You look exhausted, wanna go?” she said.
“And miss out on all this?” He waved his hands toward the barroom. There were a handful of patrons with heads down, eyes fixated on newspapers and shot glasses, and a couple of desperate-looking divorcees sipping beer and watching the door. “Okay, let’s go.”
Em checked the steel chopsticks that held up her hair, bounced off the stool, and extended her hand. He took it, as he had on their wedding day, kissed it, and let her lead him out of the bar.
Outside, Nelson pulled on her hand and she swung back into his arms. They kissed, eyes closed, both giggling as their lips parted. She whispered in his ear, “You want me to drive? You don’t look like you’ll make it.”
“No,” he said.
She opened her eyes and winked. “We could just sleep in the backseat, like back in high school.”
He leaned in to kiss her again.
“Was there something wrong with the service?”
They broke away from each other and turned toward the voice. The bartender, a tightly wound ball of muscle in a sleeveless tee shirt and a pair of paint-splashed blue jeans, stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. A faded set of antlers were silk-screened on his shirt, along with the bar’s name, The Yearling’s Den.
Straightening up, Nelson said, “No. Everything was–”
“Yeah, well,” the bartender interrupted, “there’s a thing called tipping. I never seen either of you before–I’d be sure to remember her–”
Em glanced at Nelson.
He said, “Hey, there’s no need–”
“Damn right. There’s no need for people like you to come around here and not pay out what’s due.” The bartender took a step forward. His breath told the story, and Jim Beam was the storyteller. “Maybe you’d like to settle up now?”
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