Still

by Charlee Jacob

  “I think I’ll be asleep the minute after my head hits the pillow…since I know I’m going to finally be able to tell what happened that night.”

  Nika drove off and Peter walked home. He’d turned off all the lights when leaving to go Nika’s a few minutes before. He just stood in the dark, not sure he’d have the strength to climb the stairs to the bedroom. Couldn’t he just sleep, curled up on the sofa?

  “Tomorrow,” he murmured to his moving tableau of victims. “I’ll go to the cops. Maybe this’ll heal you.”

  Something heavy struck the back of his head.

  As he went down and out, he heard a baby wailing in the strident night. Poor lost little thing, carried off by wolves. One two-legged wolf. Its sobs rebounded off invisible mountains, eclipsed in an unexalted journey’s end. Then it became still.

  ««—»»

  Peter could tell by the way he floated and by the smells around him that he was in a hospital. He’d been pumped about as full of pain medications as anybody could be without entering a coma.

  Yet if that’s what they were meant to do—kill the pain—the drugs failed miserably. He’d never hurt so much in his life. It was like being on fire.

  Nika came to stand beside his bed, another doctor on the other side of him.

  “You were attacked,” she said. Her words bounced around the room. They were visible and swam by in the middle of performing amazing sexual feats.

  Looking down, Peter saw thick bandages.

  “Whoever…” she was telling him, such an accoustic voice. The cloud of her hair was as red as a movie theater’s exit sign. “Whoever…”

  Why did she keep repeating it?

  She didn’t. Peter simply heard it in windy reverb, echoing in the bone canyon between his ears. “…stole the scrapbook.”

  “What?” he asked. But no sound came out of his mouth. His tongue was dry and his lips were locust wings.

  — | — | —

  PART THREE

  “Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die;

  What a death were it then to see God die?”

  —John Donne

  Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 22

  “When God is about to justify a man, he damns

  him. Whom he would make alive he must first kill.”

  —Martin Luther

  Dreaming, black and white mist. The victims slowly coming toward him. Even more ponderous than the cannibal corpses in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s original Dawn—not the new one where the corpses were so energized they seemed to have been pumped up on Zombie Viagra.

  There was Zane McFadden. Where was Rosaluna’s baby? The 1950s cop looked even sadder, if this was possible.

  And Peter knew. That part of himself was dead.

  Down to a single incarnation.

  They came very close. He feared them. He’d really fucked up. They must be dissapointed. They might even be pissed off.

  Wake up… Wake up… Wake up!

  ««—»»

  Reporters were everywhere, trying to sneak footage of The Skinned Man. Orderlies were caught taking bribes to let cameras into his intensive care room. Some freak journals even went far enough to sneak into the Beta home and steal some of his soiled clothes from the hamper, hoping part of the reputed horror show had rubbed off. What might be in those briefs, eh?

  Turned out it was Diane who’d found him. She’d decided in her charitable Christian way to give her husband one more chance. (She carried a tiny digital camera in her purse though. Just in case he was having sex with Veronika Noll when she came in. Needed all the dirt she could get for the divorce.)

  He was alone, having been placed on a sheet of plastic on the floor. At least she’d thought it was red plastic, like the colored kind of food wrap you could buy at the store. At first she didn’t even realize that was her husband there. Somebody had brought in a side of beef. Or Pete had carried in some poor dog that had been hit and horribly mangled by a car.

  (Later, when she thought about this, she thought it considerate of whoever the monster was, to have spared her carpet this way. There was good even in the worst, if you took the trouble to look for it.)

  Eventually she saw through the spatter and messed up hair to recognize his face—itself untouched. Other than this and his neck, Pete had been flayed from the shoulders down to the soles of his feet. Every square inch of animated atrocity had been cleanly stripped away, leaving a glistening raw mass beneath. She’d screamed for at least twenty minutes. Tim Warner eventually came from next door to see what was wrong. This was who called 911.

  The police queried Diane, Tim and Mrs. Gladly, as a care-flight helicopter packed the unconscious Peter Beta off to a hospital with a major trauma team. The cops discovered Pete’s office upstairs, its lock broken, contents within ransacked.

  Nika had shown up, coming home late.

  “No way she’s coming in here!” Diane shrilled.

  “Wait a second. Who would you be?” asked one of the cops.

  “I’m Dr. Noll…” Nika began.

  “Oh, she’s another neighbor,” Mrs. Gladly replied. “Lives right over there.”

  “I also happen to be Mr. Beta’s psychiatrist,” Nika added.

  “Oh, really…you’re his whore,” Diane insisted.

  “You’re his doctor?” the cop asked Nika, stepping between the two women.

  “Yes, I am,” Nika answered, opening her purse to produce her credentials.

  Diane sneered. “Get that from the Crackerjack School of Adultery?”

  The cop ignored Mrs. Beta to ask the neighbors, “Is that right? Do either of you know if she might have been Mr. Beta’s shrink?”

  Mrs. Gladly piped up, “Well, she’s treated me…”

  Then realized she’d just admitted to a possible social faux pas, considering Noll’s specialization. She swallowed whatever else she was prepared to say.

  “Good enough. Come on in, Doctor,” said the cop.

  “Don’t I have anything to say about this?” Diane screeched in outrage. “It’s my house!”

  The officer smiled tightly. “If this was a tupperware party, sure, Ma’m. But it isn’t. It’s a crime scene.”

  It was Nika who noticed the detective’s scrapbook happened to be missing from Pete’s office.

  Diane shuddered at the mention of it, glaring hard at Nika, as if the psychiatrist had posed for the cover in a beaver-shot with upside-down pentagrams painted on her breasts.

  “Figures you’d know about that filthy disgusting thing,” Diane snapped.

  “What scrapbook?” asked one of the officers, frowning. Not the one who’d let Nika in to begin with.

  “Full of photographs of murdered people. It’s unholy,” Mrs. Beta explained.

  Nika scoffed. “The man who put the book together was making a record of his unsolved cases. He was a homicide detective with the LAPD.”

  “It’s indecent,” Diane countered. “It’s depraved.”

  Out of Mrs. Beta’s earshot, the cop whispered to Nika, “It isn’t really weird, is it? I mean, I’ve got one of my own.”

  “It’s a perfectly reasonable activity for someone in an uncommonly stressful line of work, such as yours” she replied.

  He seemed relieved.

  She continued, “But what’s important is that the man who sold him the book tried only today to convince him to display his unusual body. He said Pete—uhm, Mr. Beta—could make a lot of money.”

  The cop took two steps closer to her. “Do you know this man’s name?”

  Nika paused, swallowed, thought of her lover in the hospital, with the skin which had driven her to sexual hysteria now shuffed off. Then she said, “Dunkel Friedhof. He owns a store called Staub’s. I don’t know the location.”

  The cops found the store padlocked and the German fled from his residence. He’d left no forwarding address.

  ««—»»

>   The head of the team trying to save Peter was a man called Premji Bhombal.

  Dr. Bhombal told him in a singsong voice, “You were most lucky, you see, Mr. Beta. If much more time had elapsed, you would have suffered massive loss of fluid and probable bacterial invasion. You would in all likelyhood have died from shock. And the person who did this to you was obviously most adept. No major blood vessels were compromised in any way. He drugged you. We found the needle mark here.”

  Dr. Bhombal touched the base of his own skull.

  “Lucky. Except I have no skin,” Peter commented, trying not to give into the overwhelming sense of horror. Maybe Diane could shriek nonstop for twenty minutes without taking a breather, but he couldn’t manage it nor did he care to try.

  (In his head, he couldn’t help—due no doubt to the massive amount of medications given him in initial treatment—seeing Dr. Bhombal in a spotless Nehru jacket, singing and dancing as he gave this little talk. Very Baliwood, gorgeous nurses in saris in the background with high-pitched little girls’ falsettos, “And the road leads to nowhere…and the castle stays the same…!”)

  Pete could just tell by the man’s manicure and Rolex that this treatment would be as high as the gross national product of some smaller nations. He was glad he’d only been fired by the Los Angelos School District the day before his attack. The way laws read, insurance couldn’t be cancelled until a former employee had been given a brief but reasonable amount of time to continue it by paying for it himself. At least, he hoped this was the law. Maybe that only applied to people who quit.

  “And this is the challenge,” Bhombal admitted. “It is not so different from losing a large amount of surface area to a serious burn. You do not yet have damaged nerves or necrotic tissue needing to be scraped. The subcutaneous layers are as good as might be expected, given they are not accustomed to being out there, as it were, on their own, you see. There is not enough of you left to use for skin grafts. We will need to devise another way. Do you have family?”

  “There’s only my mother. She isn’t in good health.”

  “So, we are without related candidates for donor skin.”

  “Does this mean I’m shit out of luck?”

  “No no. There are a few possibilities. A variety of artificial substitutes. And allograft material may come from cryopreserved cadavers. Xenografts from porcine skin…”

  Sui…..Sui…..Sui

  -cide-

  There was a roar inside Peter’s head. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hear anything else. He tried not to laugh out loud, hysterically at the mention of using pig skin. Not because of the notion of it turning him into a giant football, but because of the chainsaw buzz he couldn’t shake. It insinuated itself between the cymbals, drums and sitars the gorgeous nurses were dancing to.

  And using the skin of dead people. Wasn’t that what had been stolen from him? For what else had those pictures been?

  ««—»»

  Diane visited. She sat in a chair not too close to the bed. She couldn’t bring herself to look directly at him. She made stupid chitchat without waiting for him to reply to anything.

  “By the way, Mazuma’s transferring me to a branch in Florida.”

  He knew damned well she must have requested the relocation.

  Peter squeezed in, “What about the kids?

  “They’re excited,” she said. “We’ll pray for you.”

  “Will I ever see them again?”

  She did stare at him fully now, giving him such a pitying expression which suggested he probably wouldn’t live long enough for that to be an issue. Then she answered, “I have to see to their best interests. Horror stalks you rather relentlessly, it would seem.”

  She rose to leave, steeling herself to grant him a pecking kiss on his forehead—which she missed. He heard the light smacking noise but felt no contact.

  “Thanks, that was delicious,” he told her bitterly.

  She recoiled as if he’d slapped her. But apparently Diane wouldn’t be mean to this pitiful wreckage.

  “God has a plan,” she said simply. “What He punishes with one hand, He raises up with the other. You could try seeing this as a chance He’s blessed you with, one to begin a new life as a righteous man.”

  Peter chuckled but with no humor. “Is that what happened to me? God’s wrath? And using a Nazi baby butcher to bring it on!”

  Diane pursed her lips. “He may use evil against itself.”

  Nika stood in the doorway. “Please leave. You’re upsetting my patient.”

  Diane scoffed. “Does he turn you on this way also, Dr. Noll? Does it make you want to rip off his bandages? You’ll burn in hell.”

  Nika arched an eyebrow. “Let he—or she—who is without sin cast the first stone. Are you that perfect, you judgemental, holier-than-thou gash with a madonna complex?”

  Diane fumed. “I don’t have to take this.”

  Nika stepped away from the door. “No, you don’t. You can leave.”

  “Babylon bitch,” Diane hissed.

  Nika shrugged, unruffled. “Saint Cunt.”

  Diane Beta left, eyes blazing, swinging her bag at Nika’s head like it was a crusader’s sword. Nika ducked with a chuckle.

  Tears rolled down Pete’s cheeks. “I’ll never see my children again.”

  Nika went to his side. “Sure you will.”

  “She won’t let me. Besides, she’s taking them to Florida.”

  “You don’t have a job here anymore. When you’re able, follow her out there and take her to court for visitation.”

  “Like this?”

  “You won’t always be in that bed. Dr. Bhombal’s working on it. His team is one of the best in the world,” she assured him.

  “I’m officially a perv. The judge’ll be on her side,” Peter replied.

  She argued, “How do you figure? You haven’t harmed anyone. And no charges have been made to that effect. You have no criminal record. All you did was collect some scary movie stills. Now some of my other patients, they’re pervs. Let me tell you.”

  Peter’s face brightened. “So tell me.”

  She jokingly rolled her eyes. “Just an expression. I can’t, sweetie. Confidentiality and all that.”

  He pretended to sulk. “Big tease.”

  Then he caught a whiff of her perfume. Samsara, wasn’t it?

  “I wish I could make love to you,” he confided.

  Nika tilted her head. She held up one forefinger. Pause? She stepped out into the hall and spoke to a nurse. She returned, locked the door, and turned off the lights. The only illumination was a wink at the curtained window. She stripped, tied the ruby pendant by its ribbon to her red pubic pigtail. She swiveled, gyrated, swayed.

  “Watch the jewel. You can’t look away from it. Your eyes are growing heavy. You are getting sleepy. Imagine your dick is getting very, very hard.”

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 23

  “…these words came in a whisper, and yet

  painfully distinct, Have you seen it again?”

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Body Snatchers

  Morphine drip.

  Dreams.

  The victims were getting closer. They didn’t move fast, not in noticeably measurable feet but in neurons.

  Eventually they’d be on him.

  “Can’t you just get it over with?” he asked them. “‘Cause I don’t want to do this anymore. Sorry, Zane. You waited this long for me to be some avenging YOU. Maybe next rebirth.”

  Yet he still struggled to wake up…wake up.

  ««—»»

  One of the times Pete woke up, befogged, in those first few days, he found a bald man in a wheelchair gazing at him.

  “Hello, Mr. Beta,” said Clay McFadden. “I hope you don’t mind my coming to visit. I read in the newspaper…”

  His voice trailed off as he glanced, uncomfortable, around the room. Pete could tell hospitals depressed him. Not that they cheered too many folks up, but Cla
y almost seemed to be looking for something.

  Peter tried to smile. He barely knew the man yet the detective’s son was nice enough to think of him.

  “It’s good to see you,” Peter told him. “I haven’t had much in the way of visitors. I sleep most of the time. I’m grateful for the unconsciousness.”

  “I can understand that. Have they caught the man yet?”

  Peter shook his head, feeling the pillow shift beneath his skull. The movement of his neck with it caused shoulder muscles to feel as if they’d just been lowered into an acid bath. “No, sir. I doubt they will.”

  “He actually took…?” Clay began to ask but couldn’t bring himself to finish.

  Pete understood. Clay wasn’t being ghoulish. It was simply that the image of his father had been on the palm of the right hand.

  Clay visited often. Together they watched harmless t.v. Old reruns of HOGAN’S HEROES, I DREAM OF JEANNIE, GILLIGAN’S ISLAND. Always comedies. Nothing which might have unpleasant surprises for guys with too much emotional and physical baggage. Sometimes blissfully stupid was okay.

  (In his opium-derivative enhanced mind, Pete heard Frankenstein’s creature—the Karloff one from the Universal version—growl, “Dumb, good; dumb, friend!”)

  Clay would tell him about the exotic places he’d visited. The man had been everywhere in the world. Polio may have kept him in a wheelchair, but it hadn’t made a cripple out of him. Pete looked to this for inspiration.

  Peter wondered why McFadden never asked him about the scrapbook. He finally recalled that he’d never admitted he had it. He’d only ever said his friend bought it at the estate sale for Mrs. McFadden’s things.