Rosie’s feet were shackled, and her hands cuffed. Criminally insane was the label they used when speaking of her in the news and the court system. They kept her head shaved so she wouldn’t tear her hair out. She cut herself despite the precautions and barriers they attempted. If self-mutilation had been the worst of it, no one would have minded.
When she began killing people and sewing pieces of their skin to hers, it became a problem.
Rosie didn’t speak. She stopped using words the day Daddy strangled Mom to death in front of the girls because she was a cheating whore. He went to jail, but only lasted a year before his cellmate stabbed him over a pack of Marlboros. The Rubios had been America’s darlings for a period but soon became anathema. They were an embarrassment the public. Their prior fawning fans ignored them.
Grandma raised the girls the best she was able until Rosie left home at eighteen and disappeared. No one saw her all those years, until the police came to Hazel’s door.
Hazel sat in the hard metal chair across from her sister. She tried but failed to ignore the newest carvings in Rosie’s hands and forearms. SISTER SISTER SISTER. Rosie smiled at her when she noticed Hazel locking in on the skin art.
“Why do you do this, Rosie?” Hazel asked. Investigators, therapists, and judges asked as well. Rosie never answered.
Rosie pushed her right hand against Hazel’s left. Hazel winced and pulled away. “Stop already. We’re not connected anymore. You need to accept that. Stop trying to compensate.” Compensate was the word used by one of the jail psychiatrists. He explained that Rosie had never gotten over the pain of losing her sister, and soon after both her parents.
The murders, the taking of skin, were ways of sewing her sister back onto her so she wouldn’t feel so alone. He made it sound sad and elegant. A pinnacle of pathos and irony. To Hazel, Rosie was a monster, a murderer who cared not at all about her victims. She used their bodies to soothe a sickness inside of her.
“Do you even know why you did it?” Hazel stared at her sister, trying to unearth a glimpse of the shy, shattered little girl she’d once shared a body with. Instead she saw eyes that darted back and forth, and exposed skin tormented with the word SISTER on every square inch.
Rosie shrugged.
She had yet not confessed, and refused a lawyer. She’d been in limbo for almost a year, withdrawing more into herself with each week that passed. The police found body parts and skin patches in her apartment in a freezer. She’d also sewn them onto her own skin, patches to cover the scars that marked where Hazel was once connected. There was no question of guilt. They didn’t need her confession to convict. The trial was next month, and it was understood that she would be found guilty and sentenced to life in this prison for the criminally insane.
But there were the victims to think of. And many unanswered questions the police hoped Hazel could coerce her sister into answering.
Rosie never protested the arrest. She spent her days rocking back and forth and humming Greensleeves, her childhood song. She never spoke after Mom’s murder but she hummed. Endlessly.
Nightly in the jail cell she sang to herself and carved SISTER into her skin.
“The people whose lives you took, they need closure. If you sign a confession, it will help those families,” Hazel said.
Rosie smiled and hummed. She shook her head. No.
“Just help me here, Rosie, please. The verdict and sentencing won’t change regardless. We just need to know. Were there others? Besides the ones in your freezer and your apartment, were there others?”
No answer from Rosie. The chain rattled as she drew her hands to her mouth and gnawed on her flesh.
“Stop it!” Hazel reached out and yanked her sister’s hands down to the table.
“Were there others? They police identified eight people. Were there more?”
Rosie smiled. She made a sign for sister.
All the bodies were of young women in their twenties. Before Rosie was incarcerated, she looked sweet and normal: a friendly mute girl who posted online that she needed a tutor to help her to speak again. Hazel cursed the Internet and the foolish naiveté of young girls.
Based on the decomposition, the police estimated the deaths happened within a two-month period. A two-month spree to make human skin grafts to replace her missing Siamese twin.
“What happened all those years before, Rosie? Were there others?”
When the girls were ten years old, Rosie grabbed Hazel’s hand and led her into the barn on Grandma’s farm. “Be right back,” Rosie gestured as she darted behind a wall of hay. When she emerged, she wore a sleeve of tan fur balanced on her right arm. She smiled broadly. “Sister,” she signed.
It was Mabel’s fur, the family German Shepherd. Hazel never tattled, only reprimanded Rosie and told her to never, ever do that again. “We’ll always be close, you and me,” Hazel had explained. She held her hand. “See, we’re connected.”
Hazel cursed herself now. She should have done something then. She should have told Grandma.
“Were there others, Rosie?”
Rosie smiled at her. She nodded. Hazel looked up at the camera mounted on the wall, hoping whoever was watching from the other side saw that.
“Others you took skin from?”
Rosie nodded.
“How many?”
Rosie pointed to the words on her body. She pointed to one SISTER mark and held up a finger for one, then two, then three.
Hazel’s heart sped up, her face flushed. “Rosie, look at me. Every time you’ve carved SISTER on your body, someone died for that?”
Rosie smiled, hummed Greensleeves.
The door behind Hazel swung open, and the lead detective on the case walked in. He shared a look with Hazel and then helped her rise. He must have known walking would be difficult after hearing the revelation. He took her arm and led her out without a word. She leaned against the wall outside of the room and closed her eyes, just for a moment to catch her breath, to block out the horrific image of all that death carved into her sister’s body.
Still she heard the humming. Greensleeves.
She opened her eyes and found herself attached to Rosie. Impossibly still seven years old, under the crisp white sheets in the operating room.
“You girls rest. I’ll be back in a little while to start the anesthesia,” a doctor said.
Hazel looked to her side and thanked God when she saw a tray of instruments. She reached with all her might to the edge of the tall metal table. Slowly she managed to pull it toward her. Her small fingers wrapped around what felt like a slim cold pen, and she grabbed it. Rosie’s eyes were closed, and she was humming.
Hazel held the scalpel just so and moved stealthily toward her sister’s young innocent neck.
END
Molting
by Robert Essig
Robert Essig began writing as a result of his fascination with everything horror -- books, magazines, movies, etc. He is the author of the novels PEOPLE OF THE ETHEREAL REALM and THROUGH THE IN BETWEEN, HELL AWAITS.
He has published over 40 short stories and two novellas. Robert lives in Southern California with his wife and son.
Check out his recent work and future projects at robertessig.blogspot.com.
Her voice cut through the room like the edge of a razor blade. “Don’t look at me.”
Carter didn’t know how to respond or even what to think. His girlfriend had been secluded to her room for almost two weeks. At first he thought she was in pain, but later realized that her suffering spawned from within, which wasn’t anything new. She carried a lot of grief and pain inside and was reluctant to talk about it.
“I’m not looking at you, Amy.”
“Just don’t. I don’t think you should be here.”
“Why? What’s going on? Why won’t you tell me anything?”
“Don’t worry about it?”
“What do you mean don’t worry about it? I haven’t seen you in weeks. What’s wrong? I don’t underst
and. Did you hurt yourself or something?”
Amy didn’t respond. She sat in bed beneath a makeshift canopy of sheets and airy curtains that did little to mask the unpleasant musky odor lingering in the room. It should have smelled of perfume and cigarettes. If you were in there too long you got to thinking there was an earthworm farm under the bed.
“No. Please go. I should be all right soon.”
Carter sighed. “Is this some kind of botanical healing or something? You really got to tell me what the fuck is going on. I’ve been worrying about you like crazy and you tell me nothing. Just kick me out of your apartment like I’m burdening you.”
“It’s a treatment. I can’t tell you what kind, but it takes time. I just can’t have you seeing me like this.” After a pause she added, “I’ll call you.”
Carter left her apartment as confused if not more so than he had been since this whole mystery of her seclusion began. He didn’t know what to make of it. He thought they were going good and strong and then this. What bothered him the most was that she seemed to have some kind of trust issue.
As he drove away he thought about the prospect of dumping Amy. How much longer could he mope around, waiting for her to call? How much sympathy could he show to a woman who was pushing him away every time he made an attempt at getting close?
And then there was Hailey, the new hire at work. It was his responsibility to train her at the register, which could be quite trying at a busy movie theater. She was cute too. Maybe not as striking as Amy, but a good looker and came without all the baggage.
What did he think he could do, fix Amy?
* * *
It had been all kinds of hell for two weeks now, sitting in her room under a crude tent stretched over her bed like a tourist trying to spare themselves the torment of nighttime insects in the Congo.
But it was all going to be worth it. Carter would see. He would like the results.
Just a few more days.
Or so she hoped.
About three weeks ago Amy had taken a secret trip to a healer deep in the hills of one of San Diego’s local Indian reservations. A small reservation without an eyesore of a casino sprouting from their unfertile government issued land. These were a people who had been living in a small trailer park on a fixed income that bought enough booze and food to make for an easy living, and they were close enough to the nearby Sycuan tribe to share their hospitality. Amy couldn’t remember the name of the diminutive tribe. Most of them had left for a better life in greater San Diego, but some had remained, and not all of them had fallen victim to alcohol abuse and laziness.
The tribe had a real life old school medicine man who lived in a cave in the mountains. Amy had heard about him from her friend Gina, a descendent of the tribe who had elected to go to college in the city, which was where they had met several years ago. Gina said he was widely known on the reservations. It wasn’t that her fellow Native Americans didn’t use practical healing, but that they would seek out the help of the medicine man when modern medical practices couldn’t heal.
Amy had seen a lot of doctors about her depression. She’d been on a laundry list of medications over the years, some them causing her to gain weight, others resulting in a psychotic reaction, and some that put her into a zombie state. Nothing worked and the depression persisted. Her doctor began this irritating habit of sighing when she would tell him that her latest meds weren’t working. Made her feel real good, those sighs.
Made her feel like he was throwing meds at her to see what would stick, and she couldn’t take it any longer. Her last medication had a name her pharmacist had difficulty with, and the stuff turned her into her Queen Bitch Supreme.
It was stuffy under the canopy, but she had no reason to venture far. Just to use the restroom or get something from the kitchen. Her nightstand was well stocked with water and crackers, though she hadn’t had an appetite. It was a good thing Amy lived alone. She didn’t want anyone to see her in this condition, especially Carter.
She didn’t like the treatment from the start, but convinced herself that the results would be worth the suffering and the changes to her body. Anything would be worth removing the mental turmoil she’d dealt with all her life.
If there was one thing her deadbeat parents gave her, it was a set of genes fit for a supermodel. Her metabolism was such that she could eat just about anything she liked and never gain a pound. In high school she was called the Walking Stick, but when she did started putting on a few pounds it all went to her ass and tits, and the way she filled a mini skirt and V-neck top would cause a ninety year old man with erectile dysfunction to pop a tent.
Aside from her shapely body it was her skin she was so proud of. She had never dealt with the anxiety of acne and her features were perfectly symmetrical, which, on its own, was probably more of an anomaly than one would think. Amy didn’t need makeup, but wore it every day. The way men looked at her, how could she not wear makeup?
She was afraid. She tried hard not to show it, but if she were honest with herself she would admit that she was having second thoughts. She’d used facial masks and even a skin peel, but her current state was disgusting, and it did nothing to better her already diminutive self-value. The one thing she held dear, the one thing she could lean on were her looks, her skin.
One of the side effects of the medicine which the medicine man had given her was skin irritation. A week ago her skin had become so dry and itchy that she had to put on more lotion than usual. As the days went on, her skin dried out and eventually became flaky, which, for Amy, was the epitome of disgusting.
She examined her arm, crispy like fried chicken skin. When she moved she could hear her skin crunch softly, but not enough to break. It itched like hell, but when she scratched, it tore easily, in some cases damaging the soft flesh beneath, which in turn created scabbing.
Amy couldn’t win.
She was beginning to wonder if it was worth it. The powder mixture she had been given was supposed to eliminate her depression. The medicine man told her that the powder was to be mixed with water and taken all in one drink, which turned out to be excruciating. Stuff tasted like sulfur and ammonia. She almost puked it right up, and that would have been tragic, because it had cost her a pretty penny.
Amy, lying in bed, closed her eyes as tears rolled down her flaking face. If this was the cure for her depression, maybe it was better to be depressed.
* * *
When the phone rings at three in the morning it’s never good.
Carter answered like he was three feet under a bog of sludge. When he heard Amy’s voice his eyes shot open.
“What’s wrong?”
She told him to come over to her apartment right away. She was crying. Could hardly speak she was so distraught.
Carter jumped out of bed.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
It took him thirty by the time he dressed and grabbed a cup of instant coffee. The door was locked, but he had a key. Inside the house had a smell that he knew but couldn’t place. It wasn’t Amy.
In her room a series of white sheets concealed a crying woman. Carter had mixed emotions about this. He was sure he loved Amy, but was afraid that this was all a charade. He knew she struggled with depression, but wasn’t sure he could develop a serious relationship with someone who regressed like this. He had tried to tell her that everyone gets depressed, that it’s a part of life. She told him he was callous and broke down in tears and all he knew was to comfort her, but really he didn’t understand chronic depression. Fact was it made him feel depressed sometimes to be in her presence. That shit was catching.
“Carter, is that you?”
Who else, he wanted to say, but wisely decided to nix the wise-ass commentary.
“Yeah, it’s me. What’s wrong? You sound awful.”
“I think I’m dying.”
That was the last thing he expected to hear, though he shouldn’t have put it past her. If there was one thing she did well, it
was over-dramatizing just about everything.
“You’re not dying, Amy.”
“How would you know?”
“How would I know? You won’t even let me see you anymore. Just sit in here like you got a fucking disease.”
“Maybe I do.”
Carter had about enough of this shit. He’d been thinking about Hailey a lot since the last time he saw Amy. There was so much to like about Hailey. She was bubbly and outgoing. Always had a smile and seemed to like him, and not just in a friendly way. Amy on the other hand...
Carter grabbed the white sheet, and as he did so he knew what he was doing was wrong. It was going to cause a blowout of an argument and dammit he didn’t care anymore. This was it. Let her call him callous, let her tell him he was a piece of shit. He couldn’t take it anymore. He and Amy were finished.
What Carter saw after he pulled the sheet away, yanking out the tiny tacks and pins that fixed it to the popcorn ceiling, made him feel as if someone sucker punched him in the gut and then kicked him in the jimmy.
The thing--yes, thing!--sitting upright in bed hardly resembled Amy except for maybe its shape, which resembled a walking stick more than ever. Even worse was the coating on her skin like bark that more or less reminded him of dried dates or roasted pigskin.
She sat there naked and trembling, hands to either side clutching tufts of black hair. Her eyes yearned, distant and frightened. She didn’t say anything, just stared.
There were raw patches on the side of her head where the hair had been pulled from. There was something terrible on the side of her face. It was dark in comparison to her almost translucent dried flesh. That small patch of skin reminded Cater of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. There was so much to take in, too much for him to focus on any one detriment of her affliction.
“What the hell happened to you? What...?”
“I didn’t want you to see me like this, you know, ‘cause I don’t look pretty right now, but I want you to look at something.” Her voice quivered. “I’m scared, Carter.”
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 27