The Lamplighters

by Frazer Lee

  Marla looked at them. Scores of beautiful translucent faces with big doe eyes and skin so unearthly smooth. Each was stark naked, their bodies hairless and sexless somehow, despite bearing the genitalia identifying them as male or female. They eyed her patiently, with soulless tolerance as they might look upon an expensive meal that had taken an age to prepare. She swallowed painfully, her throat craving moisture, but she found only gritty dryness.

  Someone moved through the gathering, carrying a gleaming silver tray laden with tall flute glasses. Marla heard the unmistakable fizz of champagne, felt the tempered excitement of the revelers, as the glasses were passed around. Then, a tall man stepped forward and raised his glass. He looked easily as old as a grandfather but had skin as smooth as a newly born grandchild. His evenly tanned features were topped with a well-groomed mane of white hair. He was like a wave, effulgent. His teeth were brilliantly white as he smiled, wide, and then addressed his fellows.

  “To this wonderful bounty that nature brings.”

  Clink.

  “To hearth and home.”

  Clink.

  “And to our genius benefactor, our very own Skin Mechanic.”

  Clink. Applause. Glug, glug, glug.

  “Now if you’d all like to freshen up before the ceremony, a warming pool awaits.”

  Marla listened to the excited chatter as the people filed out of the white room, distant as a dream. She heard a loud metallic clank and felt the trolley to which she was strapped move slightly beneath her. Then a dark form moved over her and she was being wheeled briskly away by the swarthy Skin Man. A mechanic, the glamorous old guy had called him. A mechanic of what? Unwanted images of Adam’s intestines unpacked themselves in Marla’s mind, spooling into memories of the boy-thing’s charnel attic littered with dead animals. A breeze passed over Marla as she was wheeled into another, larger space and she caught the rank intensity of the man’s fleshy oilskins for the first time. The smell was one of pickled anchovies and syrup and innards, the most complex and overwhelming scent. Her body wanted to gag, but perversely her nostrils wanted to inhale—provoked by this utterly unique olfactory blend. She heard splashing and laughter a little way off. The ceiling above her had given way to a high glass roof, beyond which twinkled a canopy of tiny stars in a dark purple night sky. The trolley came to a halt and Marla watched as the Skin Mechanic moved silently around her, making adjustments to the metal frame. He pulled a lever and Marla felt the gurney tilt forward, her feet swinging down toward the floor. Held fast by her bonds, the gurney continued to tilt until she was almost in a standing position, then it stopped suddenly with a slight rocking motion and she took in her new surroundings.

  She was in a large pool house, constructed almost entirely from glass windows that gave uninhibited views of opulent gardens as far as the eye could see. The floor and columns were made from fine white marble. Flames flickered in stone founts and low-level spotlights illuminated the huge swimming pool that dominated the space. The gossamer-skinned families were at play in and around the pool, some swimming and splashing, others reclining on the pale marble poolside. Marla felt a spasm of revulsion as she saw the dark crimson stains smeared on the white surfaces where the people lay. The pool was a bloodbath—a dark, sticky gumbo of blood and entrails and flesh—and they were all swimming in it, even the children. She looked on in disbelief as she watched two young lovers playfully splashing fluid and guts at each other. The female of the couple pushed herself up in the water before gleefully pushing her beau beneath the surface of butcher’s filth. A child swam past them, swimming back crawl, his little legs kicking through what appeared to be yards of tangled intestine. An eyeball whizzed across the vile scene and dozens of tiny hands reached out to catch it, a tiny volleyball. Marla gagged and vomited the last dregs of stomach bile down her front. Her stomach juices bubbled at her breast, mingling with the corruption of the boy-thing.

  Then, a hush fell across the room. One by one, the swimmers clambered out of the pool, their games over for the moment. Their eyes and teeth were even more dazzling white now they blazed at her from dark bloody faces. She tried to close her eyes as they approached her quietly, but mortal terror conspired to keep her lids open. First in line was a beautiful woman, her blonde hair streaked with grue, her fingernails dripping livid with the stuff of others. Marla gasped at her sudden touch and looked up, confused, to see the woman was wearing the familiar face of the Australian swimmer. Wearing it indeed, for his face was now just a flap of flesh draped across the woman’s features like a mask. The woman tore the mask away, a sick joke. She began to stroke Marla’s skin, leaving blood trails on her breasts and belly. Marla looked up at her assailant’s eyes, expecting to see wickedness there but found only reverence. One after another they approached her with the same respectful eyes and smeared blood and filth all over her skin as casually as though it were sun block or massage oil. The smallest of the children attended to her legs and feet, the tallest adults to her cranium, face and shoulders. Marla licked her lips involuntarily and tasted the salt metal of blood there. Her throat raged acid and she tried to find her voice.

  “Why… Why are you doing this? Plea…”

  No more words would come. And why should they? Mere words could make no sense of the Grand Guignol playing out before Marla’s eyes.

  “Hush.”

  Startled at his voice, Marla then recognized one of the blood-smeared figures standing respectfully in front of her. It was Welland. Call me Bill. He looked so at home there in the pool house, naked and covered in blood, just as he had in his office and sharp suit. His shark white teeth glinted from out his mask of congealing plasma. For a moment, Marla thought he might answer her question, answer her prayers, tell her this was all a joke and she could wake up now because the flight was leaving and the gate was closing, so run. But he told her none of those things, just smiled agreeably to his friends and said quietly, “She’s ready.”

  Stratum basale

  A needle was all it took to subdue Marla, to keep her very much within sight but out for the count so he could do his work. Her eyes had fluttered slightly when he’d inserted the sharp sting, the only movement in her body and a natural reaction to the invasion being visited upon her. The needle was half in her vein, half out in the sterile air of the chamber where he labored beneath the all-revealing white beam of an overhead lamp. A tube ran from the needle, extending up to a drip feed bag filled with clear liquid. The liquid was formed of a chemical compound developed over ages—an alchemical blend of rare medicinal herbs, worth a fortune on the black market, and everyday pharmaceuticals transformed by the arcane processes he’d subjected them to. This was but a small fragment of his art. He took everyday medicine and augmented it with aeons of forbidden knowledge, turning science into magic and magic into medicine. Adjusting the gurney, the Skin Mechanic gazed at Marla’s neckline, her perfection reflected in the domes of his goggles. This really was a fine specimen, perhaps one of the finest he’d ever seen. They were right to send her at this stage of her life, when her derma was just so. And he’d been right to discipline himself, to quell the voices demanding he take her and make good work of her when he’d first laid eyes on her. She’d seen him through the summerhouse window that night; and he’d smelled her blood and panic. He recalled the sanguine odor of the alcohol in her bloodstream, a pollutant his chemicals were even now putting to rights. He’d tolerated the stench—it was, after all, a preservative of sorts for the wondrous specimen of flesh that now lay prone before him. Yes, it had been correct to wait. The others had been fit only for the stock pool, but this girl was worthy of the highest table. He exhaled a slow, long, hot breath and turned to his implements, hoping her innards were as delectable as the skin that sheathed them. The sharp things on the table shimmered beneath the lights. Many of his instruments didn’t even have names. Sometimes the sound of an implement was enough to name it and the act of repetition, slicing through flesh or sawing into bone, enough to learn its name forever.
He selected a cylindrical, claw-like thing and made the first cut into her mysteries.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Hiding beneath their lids, Marla’s eyes made rapid movements. She was dreaming again, of a hot room that smelled of disinfectant and of huge fingers inside of her most secret self. The fingers were scooping into the matter behind her ribcage like hot spoons into ice cream. In her dream she could open her eyes and breathe steadily, looking up into the face of the man above her. He was a sanguine giant, as big as a wrestler with huge hands as steady as a tiller’s working their surgeon’s work. She tried to will her dream-state self to rise up off her back so she could get a better look at him. Her body felt distant and she had to scream at every nerve ending just to raise her head closer to his. He stood over her like a waiting storm, those cold, glass goggle eyes regarding her dispassionately.

  Then his face was gone, dissipating into cloudburst. The man had evaporated into the ether, and so had the clinical white walls of the room, the conditioned air giving way to the fragrant breeze of a forest. Above her, tropical birds flapped and squawked in the tops of great palm trees, all around her a curtain of verdant green rainforest so huge it faded to black at the extremes of her vision. Hearing a wet flapping sound she looked down and was embarrassed to see her guts dangling at her toes. She was indifferent to her nakedness but the exposure of her organs, her secret self, made her face blush. Carefully, so as not to have the whole steaming mess topple out of her, Marla reached down and cradled her innards holding them like she might hold an infant. She teased them back into the warm cave of her abdomen, pulling the soft flesh of her belly around them like a sling. Birds sang and distant waterfalls thundered. This place was primal, ancient and alive, far from men and their constructs, their stucco houses of steel and glass. Still holding herself, she began to walk through the massive trees until she came to a ridge overlooking a primitive village in clearing. A single plume of smoke billowed from the center of the village, a fire around which were dotted about a dozen huts, circular in shape with banana leaf roofs. She recalled the decaying grandeur of the Big House and found herself smiling at the simplicity of these huts—yearning, even, for the basic lives that must be unfolding in and around them. Naked children, their lovely skin the color of coconut shells, were playing in the shade of the huts. She longed to join their games and half-ran, half-stumbled down the ridge to the edge of the village. Before she could reach them, to bask in their laughter, the children were gone. Ashes lay where moments ago there had been a fire. The sky darkened with clouds and a great wind howled, threatening rainstorms. A piercing scream rang out from deep within the trees bordering the village and Marla moved instinctively in the direction the sound was coming from. The scream had been so despairing, so helpless that she felt all the joy had been screamed out of the world. Rain now lashed at her back, freezing her flesh to the bone, and she plummeted through the trees in search of the helpless screamer who must now surely be dead to have uttered such a sound. The foliage was becoming so dense it was almost impassable, and Marla had to fight her way through leaves as big as doors. She crashed through a great spider’s web, disturbing a colony of huge tarantulas, angry black and orange stripes scurrying frighteningly close to her naked body. But Marla was not afraid of them; her only concern was to locate the source of that haunting scream. Then, as she stumbled into another clearing, she found it.

  In the trees all around her were natives from the village through which she’d passed. They were strung up like Adam had been, their brown skins stretched out and attached to tree branches like hammocks. Some of them still breathed, driven insane by the physical inversion they were now experiencing as they watched their hearts beat outside of their bodies and saw their colons expel waste onto the leaves and branches above them, defying gravity. Marla looked for the source of all this pain. She found him standing there, dressed in his great fleshcoat, maniac eyes hidden behind those dark goggles. Another of the villagers screamed and died, answered by the terrified pleas and prayers of those others who still lived but who hoped they might expire next. Marla ignored them all, intent now on knowing what was behind those unblinking eyes. She was just inches from him now. She reached out and touched his face, her fingers skittering across the rough surface like a blind woman’s. He stood, dispassionate, as she went about her probing and did not even flinch when she slipped her fingers beneath the bone frame of his goggles and into the slick goo of his eyes.

  Visions pierced her brain like shrapnel from a roadside bomb. She saw his work, felt his hands as though they were her own. In that moment she knew his life’s labors, felt the long dark decades of his alchemical work stretching out in front of her. She heard the terrified voices of the natives as he hunted them down, mercilessly, and understood their tongue. To them he was a demon, come here from the western world to corrupt them and steal their skins. They had a name for this white demon. Skin Taker. She tasted salt blood as he drank it from the bowl of a skull, helped him distill spinal fluid into a vial, joined him in his reverie upon discovering an albino child naked and cowering in a mud hut, chanting a spell over and over—a spell that would neither protect it from nor deter the intentions of the Skin Taker looming over it. Marla understood the intricate beauty of the Skin Mechanic’s craft, the long dark suffering to which he had willingly subjected himself in return for its secrets. And as night fell in his old Amazonian hunting grounds, she felt the power of the ancient entities to which his workings were offered. Theirs was the lifeblood of youth, every evisceration keeping their dark names alive. Names that whispered through the canopies of this great forest and out across rivers and oceans until they attracted new followers, new disciples of youth and beauty and hot blood. Marla saw them again, pale figures from the West standing naked before the Skin Mechanic. They were begging for his touch. And he blessed them. He was their pastor, their surgeon and their savior.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  This island can change you, Marla.

  The voice was like warm chocolate, simultaneously stirring Marla from her rainforest dreams and soothing her. Half asleep and numb as a dead thing, she mistook the voice for Jessie’s. She opened her eyes without feeling the lids move and looked around without the sensation of having turned her head, expecting to find herself curled up in bed back at the summerhouse after a long dream. But it couldn’t be Jessie—she was dead. And the summerhouse was out of reach now, a construct and a dream forbidden. Marla had opened her eyes to a reality as stark and threatening as a scalpel blade.

  She was in another white chamber, filled with candles and little halogen lamps suspended like eyeballs from snakelike mounts. Tables filled with reflective dishes and tools could be seen lurking in alcoves, threatening little suits of armor and weaponry. And all around her stood the urbane nudists of Meditrine Island, their passive expressions in a limbo land somewhere between boredom and indifference. She tasted the air and found it powdery and clean, without the sense of having opened her mouth or felt the air leave her nostrils. Marla desperately tried to focus. Something stood between the people and the walls of the chamber, like a vast hospital curtain. She unraveled the structure with her eyes, perceiving it to be a network of wire frames woven all around her. Each frame was lined with pale, tautly stretched fabric and decorated with bright ribbons and bows. The white teeth and bright eyes of her strange, smooth audience glimmered in the lights. Marla felt butterflies in her tummy as they each smiled politely at her and turned away to face the curtains. They didn’t want me to make a speech did they, oh no please anything but that, I’d not know what to say, I’d be so embarrassed I’d simply die. But she was safe; she felt no mouth with which to speak even if she had the will. So, her mind raced instead. Oh my God, my Jesus what have they done to me? She saw Welland again, glancing over his shoulder at her and smiling wryly. His voice returned to her, echoing inside her skull. Comfy? Good. I started out just like you; as a Lamplighter. I loved it so much I joined The Consortium full time. I’m sure
once you take the test you’ll work out just fine. Marla could see them all now, in a perfect circle looking in on her like she had dozens of eyes, like a fly. Oh what have they done?

  Marla watched them, each and every one, as they stepped forward into the curtain. Her nerve endings screamed, white raw. She was the curtain—she knew that now. The taut fabric was that of her own skin, cured and treated and stretched out by way of techniques both ancient and forbidden. The ribbons and bows decorating the intricate frames splaying her unraveled self around the room were her organs and veins. Base tissues and cardiovascular conduits had been reworked into the stuff of miracles, pumping blood and moisture around the living canopy of derma into which the naked beauties had stepped. Marla flinched, flinched that’s a good one I don’t even have a face anymore, as each man, woman and child held out their arms and legs in a star formation. Their veins found hers, their hairless bodies fusing with her body until they were one being. The sensation, or rather a million sensations, was mind shattering. Every moment of every life of every person that had joined with her penetrated her consciousness. My brain? Do I even have a brain now? And she slipped out of herself.

  She was standing inside the bright form of the blonde woman she’d seen wearing the swimmer’s stolen face. Still vaguely Marla, she felt herself palpably inside the other woman’s body looking out through her eyes. The sensation made her feel slightly nauseated but it also tickled like feathers and she heard herself laughing. It wasn’t her voice that laughed—it was an older voice, distant somehow, perhaps not surprising seeing how it was coming from another’s throat, across a stranger’s tongue and out through alien lips. Tentatively, she reached up to touch that new mouth with her new fingertips and finding soft moisture there laughed some more via the voice of her host. She closed her host’s eyes and began to look inward, into the body and mind she had infiltrated.