Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  Mrs. McCormick dragged two spider costumes from her closet. She and a date, Neil claimed, had gone as “Daddy and Mommy Longlegs” to a party last year. “She lost that boyfriend around the same time,” he said. “Sometimes she can’t handle anything. But she’s my mom.”

  We mascaraed circles around our eyes and thumbed black blobs across our mouths. Before we left the house, Neil gave me three yellow pills. “Swallow these.” The box in his hand read DOZ-AWAY. I wasn’t sure if that meant we’d grow sleepy or stay perky, but the box’s cover pictured a pair of wide-awake eyes.

  By that point I would have done anything Neil told me. I popped the pills in my mouth, swallowing without water.

  Neil handed me the telephone beside his bed. He told me to call my parents and claim his mom would be escorting us. When I lied to Mom, it didn’t feel so scandalous. “I’ll take Kurt around the neighborhood without you, then,” she said. “Call back when you want me to drive over and get you. Don’t stay out too late, and remember what I told you about those perverts who prey on kids on Halloween.” She laughed nervously. I thought of her stories of razor blades wedged into apples, stories that never ceased to thrill me.

  Two hours came and went. We wandered around Hutchinson as spiders, our extra four legs bobbing at our sides. The rows of our eyes gleamed from our headpieces. The shadows we cast gave me the creeps, so we shied away from streetlights. Neil hissed when doors opened. One wrinkly lady touched my nose with a counterfeit black fingernail. She asked, “Aren’t you two a little old for this?” Still, our shopping bags filled to the top. I stomped a Granny Smith into mush on the sidewalk. No hidden razor.

  Neil traded his Bit-O-Honeys for anything I had with peanuts. “I’m allergic to nuts,” I said. That was a lie, but I wanted to make him happy.

  At Twenty-third and Adams, a group of seven kids walked toward us. I recognized the younger ones from school under their guises of pirate, fat lady, and something that resembled a beaver. “Hey, it’s you-know-who from school,” Neil said, and pointed to a green dragon in the crowd’s center.

  I couldn’t tell who it was. “It’s that retardo,” Neil told me. He was right. Even under the tied-on snout and green pointy ears, I could make out Stephen Zepherelli.

  “Hey,” Neil said. Their heads turned. “Hey, snotnoses, where’re your parents?”

  The beaver-thing pointed west. “Back there,” it said. The words garbled behind its fake buck teeth.

  Zepherelli smiled. The dragon snout shifted on his face. He carried a plastic pumpkin, chock-full with candy. “Let’s kidnap him,” Neil said to me.

  I’d witnessed Neil’s damage to Robert P. and Alastair. Now, some dire section of my brain longed to find out what twisted things Neil could do to this nimrod, this Stephen Zepherelli. Neil checked the sidewalk for adults. When none materialized, he grabbed the kid’s left hand. “He’s supposed to come with us,” Neil said to the rest of the trick-or-treaters. “His mom said so. She doesn’t want him out too late.”

  Zepherelli whined at first, but Neil said we were leading him to a house that was giving away “enough candy for three thousand starving kids.” Zepherelli didn’t seem to mind the kidnapping after that. We stood on each side of him, gripped his scrawny wrists, and pulled him along. Mahogany-colored leaves spun around our rushing feet. “Slow down,” he said at one point. We just moved faster. He stopped once to retrieve a handful of candy corn from his plastic pumpkin, and once to find a Zero candy bar. His painted-on dragon’s teeth shone under street lamps, as white as piano keys.

  We arrived at Neil’s. “Is this the house with the candy?” Zepherelli asked. He rummaged through his pumpkin, making room.

  “Good guess.”

  Neil’s mom snoozed on the living room couch. Nearly every light in the house had been left on. Neil pushed Zepherelli toward me. “Hold this little bastard while I’m gone.” He trotted from room to room, flicking switches. In seconds, darkness had lowered around us. Neil slid aside a record by a band called Bow Wow Wow and slipped another LP on the turntable. Scary sound effects drifted through the house at a volume soft enough to keep his mom sleeping. On the record, a cat hissed, chains rattled, crazed banshees wailed.

  “Neat,” Zepherelli said. His snout showed a smudge of white chocolate from the Zero. He nibbled the tip from a piece of candy corn.

  I heard Neil pissing. I suddenly felt embarrassed, standing there with our victim. Neil returned, carrying a flashlight and a paper sack. He opened the latter. Inside were firecrackers and bottle rockets. “Left over from Fourth of July,” Neil said. He winked. “Let’s take him out behind the house.”

  The McCormick backyard consisted of overgrown weeds, an apricot tree, and a dilapidated slippery slide-swing set. Behind the swings was a cement-filled hole someone had once meant for a cellar. We walked toward it. The rotten apricot odor permeated the autumn air. Stars glittered in the sky. Down the block, kids yelled “trick or treat” from a doorstep.

  Neil pushed Zepherelli toward the stretch of cement. “Lie on your back,” he said.

  The yellow pills had done something to me. My skin tingled like I’d taken a bath in ice. I was a hundred percent awake, and prepared for anything. I adjusted a loose arm and stood above the victim; Neil spilled the bag’s contents onto the cement. “Bottle rockets,” the dragon said, as if they were hundred-dollar bills. I could smell Zepherelli’s breath, even over all those apricots.

  Neil told him to shut up. He pulled off the dragon’s snout. The string snapped against Zepherelli’s face. “Ouch.”

  I watched as Neil took three bottle rockets and placed their wooden ends in Zepherelli’s mouth. He pinched Zepherelli’s lips shut. He moved briskly, as if he’d done it all a thousand times. Then he straddled the kid. I remembered that seance, Robert P.’s still face. Stephen Zepherelli’s resembled it. It looked drugged, almost as if it really were hypnotized. It didn’t register any emotion. Its cheeks had been smeared with green makeup. Its eyes were cold and blank, not unlike the peeled grapes we had passed around during the inane Haunted Hall setup at school that day. “These are the dead man’s eyes,” Miss Timmons had told us in her best Vincent Price voice.

  “Keep these in your mouth,” Neil instructed the LD boy. “Do what we say, or we’ll kill you.” I thought of Charles and Caril Ann. Neil’s extra eyes caught the moonlight and sparkled.

  From the effects record inside the house, a girl screamed, a monstrous voice laughed. Neil turned to me, smiling. “Matches are in the bottom of the sack,” he said. “Hand them over.”

  I fished out a book of matches. The cover showed a beaming woman’s face over a steamy piece of pie and the words “Eat at McGillicuddy’s.” I tossed the matches to Neil. “Be careful,” I said. I tried not to sound scared. “Someone could see the fireworks.” I still thought this was all a big joke.

  “Tonight is just another holiday,” Neil said. “No one’s going to care.” He lit the first match. The flame turned Zepherelli’s face a weird orange. In the glow, the rockets jutted from his lips like sticks of spaghetti. His eyes were huge. He squirmed a little, and I sat on his legs. I felt as though we were offering a sacrifice to some special god.

  Zepherelli didn’t spit the rockets out. He made a noise that could have been “Don’t” or “Stop.”

  Neil touched the match to the fuses. One, two, three. He shielded me with one of his real arms. We skittered back like crabs. I held my breath as tiny sputters of fire trailed up the fuses and entered the rockets. Zepherelli didn’t budge. He was paralyzed. The bottle rockets zoomed from his head, made perfect arcs over the McCormick home, and exploded in feeble gold bursts.

  The following silence seemed to last hours. I expected sirens to wail toward the house, but nothing happened. Finally, Neil and I snuck toward Zepherelli. “Shine the flashlight on him,” Neil said.

  The oval of light landed on our victim’s face. For a second, I almost laughed. Zepherelli resembled the villain in a cartoon after the bomb goes
off. The explosives’ dust covered his dragon snout, his cheeks, his chin. His eyes had widened farther, and they darted here and there, as if he’d been blinded. We leaned in closer. Zepherelli licked his lips and winced. Then I saw what we’d done. It wasn’t funny at all. His mouth was bleeding. Little red splinters stuck through Zepherelli’s lips, jammed there from the wooden rocket sticks. Bubbles of blood dotted the lips.

  The victim’s eyes kept widening. I remembered thinking blood beautiful when Neil had punched Alastair. Now, from Zepherelli, it looked horrible, poisonous. I turned away.

  Zepherelli made a mewling noise, softer than a kitten’s. My heart felt like a hand curling into a fist. He whimpered again, and the fist clenched. “Neil,” I said. “He’s going to tattle on us. We’re going to get it.” I wondered if my parents would discover what we’d done. For the first time, I wanted to slap Neil.

  A look spread across Neil’s face, one I’d never seen there. He bit his bottom lip, and his eyes glassed over. Then he shook his head. The glassiness left his eyes. “No,” he said. “He won’t tell. There’s things we can do.” He spoke as if Zepherelli weren’t lying beside us. “We’ll get him on our side. Help me.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I gripped the flashlight until my palm hurt. Neil wiped dust from Zepherelli’s cheek. When their skins touched, Zepherelli trembled and sighed. Neil said, “Shhh,” like a mother comforting a baby. His left hand remained on the kid’s face. His right moved from Zepherelli’s chest, down his stomach, and started untying the sweatpants dyed green for Halloween. He squirmed a finger inside, then his entire hand.

  “When I was little,” Neil said, “a man used to do this to me.” He spoke toward the empty air, as if his words were the lines of a play he’d just memorized. He pulled the front of Zepherelli’s pants down. The kid’s dick stuck straight out. I swung the flashlight beam across it.

  “Sometimes I wanted to tell everyone what was going on. Then he’d do this to me again, and I knew how badly he really wanted it. He did it to some other kids, but I knew they didn’t matter as much to him, I was the only one whose photo he kept in his wallet. Every time he’d do it he’d roll up a five-dollar bill, brand-new so I could even hear it snap, and he’d slip it into the back pocket of my jeans or my baseball pants or whatever. It was like getting an allowance. I knew how much it meant to him, in a way, and after a while, it kept going further and further. There was no way I could tattle on him. I looked forward to it, for a while it was every week that summer, before the baseball games. It was great, he was waiting there, for me, like that was all he ever wanted.”

  Neil’s voice sounded lower, older. It wasn’t spouting nasty words or giggling between sentences. Then Neil shut up and leaned beside Zepherelli.

  Neil buried his head in the kid’s crotch. The dick disappeared in Neil’s mouth. I watched the spider arms bob as Neil hovered over him. I slid back. The flashlight flipped from my hand. Its column of white illuminated the apricot tree’s branches. Up there, a squirrel or something equally small and insignificant was scampering around. Already-dead fruit tumbled to the ground.

  Stephen Zepherelli moaned. His breathing deepened. He didn’t sound scared anymore.

  The shadow of Neil’s head lifted. “That feels nice, right?” The shadow moved back down, and I heard noises that sounded like a vampire sucking blood from a neck. I wanted to cry. I tried to fold myself into my dream of Charles and Caril Ann, those teenage fugitives. What would the blond murderess do in this situation, I wondered. Neil and I were nothing like them. I heard another chorus of “trick or treat”s, this time closer than before, maybe right there on the McCormicks’ doorstep. I thought of Neil’s mom, sleeping through it all. Where had she been when the man from Neil’s past had put his mouth on her son like this?

  I lay on my back until the noises stopped. Neil retied Zepherelli’s sweat bottoms and handed him the dragon snout. “It’s okay.”

  When Zepherelli stood, his eyes had resumed their normal luster. He was drooling. A comma-shaped trickle of blood had dried on his mouth. I got up, carefully pulled a splinter from his upper lip, and dabbed the blood with my black sleeve.

  Neil patted the kid’s butt like a coach. “I’ll walk him home,” Neil said. He smiled at me, but he was looking over my shoulder, not at my face.

  We tiptoed through the McCormick house. In Neil’s bedroom, I could see his tousled sheets, his schoolbooks, his baseball trophies. The scary record had ended, but the needle was stuck on the final groove. “Scratch, scratch, scratch,” Zepherelli said. I faked a laugh.

  Neil’s mother was still sleeping. She snored louder than my father. I shone the flashlight on the bookshelves above her, making out titles like Monsters and Madmen, Ghoulish and Ghastly, All the Worst Ways to Die. Only days ago, I’d wanted to read those. Now I didn’t care.

  “I know the direction home,” Stephen Zepherelli told Neil. He seemed anxious to lead the way. “I can show you where to go.”

  We left the house. The cool air smelled like mosquito repellent, barbecue sauce, harmless little fires. When the air hit my face, I ripped my headpiece off. A single beady spider’s eye fell to the sidewalk. I bent to get it. In the weak street light, that eye stared back at me. I saw my reflection in its black glass. Instead of picking it up, I stood and ground it beneath my shoe.

  “See you later, Stephen,” I said. It was the first time I’d said his name, and my voice cracked on the word. “And you too, Neil. Tomorrow.”

  And I knew I would see him tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Neil had shown a part of himself I knew he’d shown no one else. I reckoned I had asked for it. Now I was bound to him.

  Neil led Zepherelli down the block. I watched them shuffle through the dead leaves, moving farther away, until the shadows swallowed them up..

  five

  DEBORAH LACKEY

  My brother spent most of his time alone, and sometimes I wondered if my mother and I were his only friends. No one accompanied Brian on his walks home from school. He never went to parties or special school functions like the homecoming dance or Christmas formal. When he did venture from the house, it was to attend the latest program at the Hutchinson Cosmosphere, a conglomerated space museum and planetarium, which I found boring. Still, I often joined him, driving him into Hutchinson to see whatever space film happened to be showing.

  Although I never mentioned it, I felt sorry for Brian. One night, I’d picked up the telephone to hear teenagers giggling. “Is The Nightmare home?” one voice mocked. “Zit patrol,” another said. “We make house calls.” Laughter, click, a dial tone.

  Brian still performed his nightly practice of trudging to the roof. I’d given that up long ago, and by then my father had stopped as well, preferring instead to drive away in his truck after fights. Even the ragged rooftop chair was gone. But night after night, about an hour after sunset, Brian would climb the ladder, binoculars bouncing from the strap around his neck.

  I wouldn’t be around to watch his ritual much longer. I’d graduated, and Christmas 1987 marked my final week in Kansas. The night before the holiday, I sat in front of the antique mirror at my bedroom window and decided to procrastinate packing. I looked outside. The crisp combination of the moon and the back porch’s light allowed the normally obscure surroundings of our house to slide into focus. A group of rabbits, their fur thickened to adapt to winter, scampered around the evergreen trees that flanked our driveway.

  For the first time, I wondered if I would miss Kansas. After eighteen years in Little River, I’d grown to despise it. My friend Breeze still lived in town, but she was already preoccupied with her husband and son. My other friends had all left for college, but chances were they’d return. I was certain of one thing: I didn’t want to stay here all my life.

  I heard Brian above me, stomping to the roof. I remained at the window. In seconds his shadow cast its freakish proportion across our lawn. I could tell he was wearing his down coat, mittens, a stocking cap peake
d with a fluffy ball, even the bulky earphones that pounded out his favorite spacey computerized music. This was Brian’s private time, his brand of monasticism, and watching him filled me with both embarrassment and guilt, as if I were viewing him in the shower: He lay on his back on the pebbled shingles, one leg crossed over the other, lazily twirling a foot in the air.

  Then his shadow lifted the binoculars to his face. Instead of spying on Little River, he lifted his head and peered toward the moon and stars. He scanned the night sky for something, some inviting slant to his life, excitement he couldn’t get in the house below.

  I missed him already.

  Before bedtime, Brian left the roof and reentered the house, where the rest of us were waiting. According to ritual, my family spent Christmas Eve by gathering in the living room to open one gift each. Brian slumped next to me at the base of the tree, his stocking cap still on. My mother sat in one half of the love seat, hunched over, her face close to ours, not wanting to miss a single detail. Across the room, my father leaned back in the rocker, pulling handfuls of popcorn from a silver bowl. The Christmas lights flashed from the window that overlooked Little River. From our hill, we could see the entire town, lit in reds and blues and greens like the cobbled surface of a fruitcake.

  As with every year, my father went first. I chose a gift for him, avoiding the package that said TO GEORGE FROM M, trying to decide between gifts from Brian and me: the tackle box, the Old Spice aftershave, or the key chain. I settled on the key chain and handed it over. He ripped the paper in one motion and dropped it to the carpet. “NFL,” he said, thumbing the gold emblem. “That’s neat.” He only used words like that at times like these.

  “I’m next,” Brian said. He selected a package. “From your sis,” he read. Smiling penguins ice-skated across the wrapping paper, treble clefs and quarter notes trailing from their beaks. Inside was a hardback book, the type of gift that appeared most on the lists he’d slipped into my mother’s purse and under my bedroom door. He held the book for my parents to see: Loch Ness: New Theories Explained.