Like Light for Flies

by Lee Thomas

  She decides he can’t be trusted. The thief is too eager. He hadn’t needed a bit of convincing to agree to this job, and as with all things that came too easy, Sylvia looks for an angle.

  She slides her hand down the side of her jacket and is reassured when her fingers trace over the outline of the handgun in the pocket.

  The shrill cry of Rossini’s drill startles her. Sylvia steps away from the window and crosses the den. Nervous, she lights a cigarette and stands by the door. She leans into the hall and is grateful to see the darkened corridor is empty.

  Still she cannot shake the feeling that she and the thief are not alone in the house. The air continues to move like an invisible beast, sidling past her. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, she holds the smoke in her lungs and then blows a cloud into the hall. Amid the whorls of smoke, she pictures Louis’s face and whispers, “Fuck you,” to the dissipating haze. He had lavished a fortune on his wife, had given her every damn thing she had ever whined about, including this house, and what had Sylvia seen for her time and effort?

  Finishing the cigarette, she drops it on the carpet. She grinds the ember into the carved Berber and hopes an ember will smolder deep in the pile, causing a fire that levels the Towne mansion about five minutes after she and the thief have driven away with the contents of Louis’s safe.

  She leaves the doorway and walks to where Mickey is kneeling. He wears goggles as he guides the barrel of a complicated drill rig. Sparks fly from the safe’s door, showering the carpet. The air around her shifts again and Sylvia spins on her heels to check the room. Nothing. She hugs herself nervously and returns to the window.

  Staring over the dark landscape, she rubs the back of her neck, trying to dislodge the feeling that something rests against it. She tries to convince herself that she’s being paranoid. If anyone else were in the house they’d have shown themselves by now, or the drive would be thick with police cars, but logic does nothing to alleviate her fear. By the time the drill’s shriek dies, Sylvia is near panic with the certainty someone prowls the house.

  “That’s it,” Mickey says, throwing open the safe. He sets his drill rig on Louis’s desk and returns to the open closet door.

  Sylvia races across the room to see the extent of the fortune Louis has locked away from the world and to begin its collection. She presses up against Rossini’s back and peers around him only to find herself confused by the vault’s contents. She had expected to find stacks of hundred dollar bills, stock certificates, a jewelry store’s inventory of gems, and though there is some cash—three small stacks on the third shelf of the safe—the bulk of the space is empty. The money sits on one shelf and another is devoted to a bizarre assortment of baubles.

  The collection is comprised of six metallic statues. Each is no larger than Sylvia’s pinkie finger, and they are ugly like randomly shaped wads of iron with points and blobs.

  “I don’t understand,” Sylvia whispers.

  “Amazing,” Rossini replies.

  “What is this shit?” Sylvia asks. She reaches around Rossini to retrieve one of the unattractive statues.

  His hand shoots out and grabs her wrist painfully. “Don’t touch those,” he says. “You get the cash and the jewelry. That was the deal.”

  “The cash? There’s only about ten grand there and there isn’t any jewelry.”

  Rossini squeezes her wrist until she feels the bones grinding. “That was the deal,” he repeats. “The icons are mine.”

  A hot mask of rage falls over Sylvia’s face. The thief has played her, though she has yet to understand the extent or the intent of his game.

  “Get away from there,” a rasping voice calls from the doorway.

  Sylvia turns to the sound, her heart in her throat. A squat shadow stands at the threshold. The face is very pale, visible but ill-defined. Mickey turns and knocks Sylvia aside. His flashlight falls squarely on the intruder, and he says, “Son of a bitch.” Sylvia only gets a glimpse of the man in the doorway, and to her shock he resembles Louis Towne. She recognizes chipmunk cheeks and small ears, but the view is momentary, and she is stumbling so she doesn’t trust what she has seen.

  Rossini lowers the flashlight so that the beam falls on the intruder’s feet. He then pulls a gun from his coat pocket and levels his left arm to aim the weapon.

  Sylvia remembers the boulevard and the man who killed Louis, remembers his size and his posture and the way he held the gun, and she realizes it was Rossini. All along she has underestimated the thief. His eagerness for the job, his satisfaction with the contents of the safe—this had been his plan all along. He’d only allowed Sylvia to believe it was hers.

  Two muzzle flares light up the room. The reports are deafening. A body falls in the hallway and Rossini hisses, “Shit. Enough of this blackout crap.” He stomps to the door and turns on the light.

  Awash in confusion, Sylvia looks around absently as if waking in a strange place with no understanding of how she’s gotten there. Rossini is in the doorway, kneeling beside a body on the floor. Sylvia approaches him and when she sees the face of the intruder, she gasps. It is Louis Towne.

  His face is longer and misshapen. Tufts of hair stick out around his ears, but he is otherwise bald. Two ragged wounds show above his ear. He still wears the coffee-grounds stubble, but much of it has been torn away on the right side of his face, revealing a patch of darker skin beneath. His nose is longer and his mouth is circled with odd ridges. His eyes are the worst. They stare at Sylvia, but they are the wrong color. Louis’s eyes were blue and these eyes are chocolate brown, and even more unsettling, each eye is framed by two sets of eye lashes. “What happened to him?” she asks.

  “Mumbo Jumbo,” Rossini says in a dry, earnest tone.

  “His face…”

  “Yeah,” the thief says.

  Louis’s legs begin to kick and thrash on the carpet. Sylvia screams and leaps back, covering her mouth with a palm.

  “Settle down,” Rossini says, rising to his feet. “It’s just a death dance. Muscle contractions.”

  “How can you be so calm?” Sylvia wants to know.

  “I got word that Louis’s body went missing from the funeral home. Considering the weird shit he was into, I kept my mind open. Now I think we need to get what we came for and get the hell out of here.”

  “Is he really dead this time?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care. I’ve got a full clip. That’ll keep him down long enough.”

  “Are those little statues doing this?” Sylvia asks.

  “Probably.” Rossini casts another glance at the corpse thrashing on the carpet in the hall.

  “Asshole there got drunk one night and started bragging about these things. He called them the Pellis Icons, and he’d spent about twenty years hunting them down. He said they helped him master the flesh, whatever the hell that means. I know he used them to tear apart Tocci, because I was sitting with him in this room when he did it. They do something, and I figure I’ve got plenty of time to figure out exactly what that is.”

  ‘How much are they worth?”

  Rossini laughs and shakes his head. “By your definition, not a damn thing. There isn’t a fence on the continent who would know what to do with them.”

  He turns away from Sylvia to take another look at the thrashing man. Sylvia pulls her gun and shoots the thief in the shoulder, sending him sprawling against the wall. He drops his gun and slides to his knees and looks at Sylvia, an expression of pained surprise on his face.

  “What the fuck, Syl?” he says. He grasps the wound on his shoulder. Blood spills between his fingers in thick rivulets.

  She doesn’t reply. Instead she keeps the gun aimed on Rossini’s face as she crosses to him and retrieves his weapon from the floor. She slips this into her pocket and walks to the safe. On the floor is Rossini’s canvas bag. Sylvia retrieves it and waves the sack in the air until it’s opened. Without looking at the thief, she pulls the meager amount of cash into the bag and then scoops the Pellis I
cons on top of it. The disappointing void of the safe still feels wrong to her, and she convinces herself that Louis must have kept more. She reaches in and presses against the back wall, expecting a panel to pop free. She does this on every shelf, but the back of the safe is solid and hides no additional treasures. She gives the empty shelves a final look and then turns to leave.

  In the hall, the dead man’s convulsions have stopped, and she is grateful for this, but Rossini has crawled away. He no longer sits by the door. Sylvia approaches the hall cautiously, gun raised, fingers tensed and ready to fire. The weapon trembles in her hand. When she reaches the threshold, she is shocked to see the condition of the body in the hall.

  It isn’t Louis at all. Sylvia recognizes the corpse’s face, and it belongs to a low level bookie who went by the name of Tap. His cheeks are red as if deeply sunburned. The collar of his dress shirt is laid wide and his tie has been torn away and lies across the expensive carpet like a crimson tongue. Blood continues to seep from the two well-placed holes Rossini shot in the man’s chest. Sylvia absorbs this oddity and wonders how she could have mistaken this insignificant creep for Louis Towne.

  A crash in the hallway sends her back into the den. Glass shatters and a great weight hits the floor. Sylvia puts the canvas sack and her purse down and holds the gun in both hands, trying unsuccessfully to steady the weapon, which suddenly feels as heavy as a block of lead. A quieter thump comes from the hallway, and Sylvia swallows a moan.

  Movement in the doorway causes Sylvia to fire two shots in rapid succession but the flashing motion is too brief like a flag whipping in a sudden breeze. Her bullets punch through the wall.

  Then a man steps into view. Sylvia cannot fire her weapon; the abomination in the doorway makes no sense and the sight of it puts a clamp on her mind, rendering her incapable of comprehension or action.

  The body is Rossini’s. He is unstable, rocking from foot to foot. One broad hand clutches the doorframe for support, the other slaps at a sheathed knife hooked to his belt. He wears Louis Towne’s face like a mask. The cheeks are shiny, stretched tightly over the thief’s features with tiny ears jutting from the side of the massive head. The rest of Louis’s skin, a sheet of bloodless flesh the color of bacon fat, hangs from Rossini’s chin like an untied butcher’s apron and swings as the thief rocks from side to side. Bony thorns ring the dangling sheet of skin like teeth. The flesh billows and slaps against the thief’s body, attempting to gain greater purchase but it seems unable to secure itself to the fabric. Sylvia takes in every detail of the unnatural union before her and then repeats the process in a futile attempt to understand it.

  Louis’s lips move and a hoarse mumble escapes Rossini’s throat. The attempt is made again. “Put them back,” come the words, though Sylvia can’t be certain who has made the request.

  The thief finally frees the knife from its sheath at his belt, and Sylvia waits breathlessly for him to carve through Louis’s flapping skin. Instead, the thief cocks back his arm and hurls the blade at Sylvia.

  It strikes her high on the right breast, sending her stumbling back. The air is knocked from her body, and she nearly drops her gun, but the attack brings clarity, supersedes the paralyzing awe. Desperate to keep her footing, Sylvia regains her balance and assumes a firing stance with the gun clamped in her hands, and she squeezes the trigger. A hole punches in the flapping belly of Louis’s skin and passes through to rip its way into Rossini’s gut. She squeezes again and again, every shot hitting home. The thief stumbles back to the corridor wall and slides to the carpet. Sylvia continues firing and her final bullet pierces Louis Towne’s forehead and that of the man who wears him.

  She drops to her knees and sobs. Grasping the hilt of the knife, she pulls it from her chest, and it feels like she’s ripping a bone from her body. She nearly faints from the sight of so much blood following the blade from the wound, and though she manages to remain conscious, her head spins with sickening speed. She collapses to the side and grinds her teeth against the pain, and she closes her eyes and inhales shallowly because she needs oxygen but the jabbing pain cuts off her respiration in mid-breath. Sweat slathers her brow, chilling it. Her body shivers from the cold. She thinks if she can just rest for a few minutes, she will conquer the pain and make her escape. People had survived worse. A moment to recover from the shock and then downstairs and out the door and into Rossini’s car. At the emergency room she will make up a story about muggers, and the doctor will tell her she’s lucky to be alive, and she’ll thank him before painkillers carry her into comfortable sleep.

  But she is not at the hospital yet, and she doesn’t feel safe. Sylvia fights to open her eyes. Louis Towne’s skin slides over the carpet toward her. His head is raised like the hood of a cobra and Sylvia sees Mickey Rossini’s blood stained corpse through the bullet holes and the empty eye sockets of the face.

  Sylvia cries out and a burst of adrenaline provides sufficient fuel for her to rise to her knees. The knife is within her reach and she snatches it up, as the mask of Louis’s face bears down on her. Sylvia strikes out. The blade slices into Louis’s cheek, and she guides the weapon down with all of her force, nailing the flesh to the floor, and refusing to allow Louis to escape again, Sylvia crawls forward and kneels on the spongy sheet. She yanks the blade free, sending bolts of agony across her chest, and begins to slash at the rippling tissues. Chunks of skin come free and wriggle about on the floor like worms dropped on an electrified plate, and Sylvia slices and stabs and tears until Louis Towne’s remains amount to nothing more than a confetti of jittering meat.

  Sylvia drops the knife and looks around the room alert for any new threat that might target her, and her gaze lands on the canvas sack, and she considers what Rossini has told her about the mastery of flesh, and then she looks to the trembling tissue about her for confirmation. She crawls to the bag and empties its contents. In desperation she gathers up the ugly iron icons and holds them tightly in her hands, clutches them to her breast. She lies down on the carpet and lets her eyes close and falls unconscious. She dies twenty minutes later.

  I met Sylvia Newman some hours after her death. Louis had told me about the woman—went on in some detail about their affair—but to the best of my knowledge I’d never set eyes on her before.

  Needled by annoyance, I went to his house that morning to pick up the documents his wife had failed to messenger me before leaving for Miami, and upon finding the alarm system deactivated, decided to search the house for signs of burglary. Upstairs I was met by the sight of Mickey Rossini sitting upright with seven holes in his body. Manny “Tap” Tappert lay on his back with two holes in his chest and a startled expression on his face. But the worst sight awaited me in Louis’s den. In the center of the room was a shifting mass that resembled a loose congregation of mealworms, writhing excitedly, and next to this grotesque display was a skinless corpse.

  Even partially clad in a black jacket and slacks, it seemed too small, too delicate to have been the remains of an adult. Eyes whiter than paper lay nestled in a field of deep red. Here and there ridges of white bone showed through the crimson tissue of muscle and ligament. My stomach clenched, wondering who could perform such an atrocity on another human being and wondering what a victim might do to deserve such a desecration.

  Absorbed by the grotesquerie, what I thought was a hood dropped over my head, startling me back, but my reflexes were no match for Sylvia. She must have been waiting on the ceiling, descending upon me as I stood rapt by the repulsive scene. Her face stretched over mine, and the thorny teeth ringing her skin bit into the back of my head like fingernails working their way into an orange rind. As the skin pulled across my brow and chin and those thorns tore their way in, her memories began flooding me, drowning my own thoughts with scenes from this woman’s life:

  Sylvia Newman strolls along the boulevard.

  Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

  Sylvia is dead but alive in her skin, which she feels rip
ping like fabric, peeling in a single sheet from her muscles and bones.

  A thousand such scenes play simultaneously in my mind. Amid this torrent of information I was lost: I was Sylvia.

  Overwhelmed, I ceased what little struggles I’d engaged in and resolved myself to this mental infestation, viewing the torments and triumphs and carnal excesses that had molded Sylvia Newman. The skin of her neck stretched tightly around my throat restricting my breath, and the tiny bones punctured the nape of my neck and scraped across my spine, and more information flooded in but the information was so dense it cascaded through my head like photographs printed on raindrops.

  When this downpour ceased, I remained standing in Louis Towne’s study but my clothes had been removed and Sylvia busied herself, stretching and wrapping and securing her flesh over mine. Her skin buckled my knees, and we stumbled forward and I grasped the drape for support, but fell nonetheless. The curtain rod snapped under my weight bringing the window treatment down in a wave. We scurried back on my hands and knees and then with great effort, we regained our footing and stood, only to be startled by the sight greeting us.

  With night as a backdrop, the window had become a perfect mirror. Sylvia’s face, still thick with make-up had fused to mine; her full red lips formed a grotesque O around my own mouth. Her breasts sagged emptily against the skin of her stomach, which shined from such tension it looked as though it might rip at any moment, and the tip of my penis showed through the labial lips between her legs. It was this last that so enthralled me. Sylvia must have sensed my fascination because the skin there began to ripple and pull, caressing the head of my cock until it began to grow, and soon a library of erotic images—Towne fucking her and Rossini fucking her and Tocci and a dozen others—crowded my awestruck mind.