Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  -12-

  For a long time after leaving Kitchissippi, I had a recurring dream. I was in the dark and somebody, a kid perhaps, whispered, “I always liked you the best.” I would reach out and turn on my bedside lamp and realize I was still in total darkness. Blind. And then someone would set the limp, furry body of a dead cat in my hands. Sometimes I woke up screaming.

  Now I heard that same whisper, only it was not a boy’s voice but a man’s. It was Aubrey. He was on the other side of the door he had closed and he was whispering, “I always liked you the best.”

  I went to the door and opened it, hearing the thump of Aubrey’s feet as he ran up another flight of stairs. Kent’s body was lying dead inside, his ravaged throat and empty eye sockets dripping blood.

  Aubrey was at the top of the stairs, a decrepit, deranged version of the boy I had known so long ago. He stood with arms outstretched, a beatific smile on his face, watching me through the dead pig’s eyes.

  “Now I can see you. Again,” he said with a grotesque wink before stepping through another door and slamming it shut.

  I went up the stairs slowly, listening for recognizable sounds. The theater was silent. I opened the door and stepped onto old wooden flooring that creaked underfoot. Above me was a vast expanse of white cut by red slashes. I was on the theater’s stage, behind the screen.

  I stepped out in front of the screen into a blinding glare that came from a small aperture in the wall at the back of the theater. Aubrey had put a light in the projection booth bright enough to illuminate the screen.

  From one end of the screen to the other were words slashed in red.

  As I read the words, my mind made connections between disparate elements far too late.

  When I was young I enjoyed reading from Greek mythology because those stories were the most graphic tales kids could get their hands on. Bloodcurdling violence, incest, matricide, patricide, castration, torture, bestiality—the Greek myths offered up all of that and more, and librarians shared those stories with a smile.

  As I read the message towering over me now I remembered that Perseus had stolen a single shared eye from the Graeae, sisters to the Gorgons, as the first part of his great adventure. Without that eye there would be no slaying Medusa, no saving Andromeda.

  It all began with stolen sight.

  Long slashes of red on the tall white screen formed a message.

  When my grim task is complete, I will pluck these eyes from my own head, for I shall never see a thing more beauteous than what I hath wrought instead.

  It did not take me long to realize who the passage was intended for, but the knowledge came too late.

  Aubrey’s hands were already encircling my head from behind, his eager fingers digging at my face with a maniac’s relentless strength, tearing away my eyelids and uprooting my eyeballs as I shrieked into the approaching darkness.

  As I touched my eye sockets and felt my own hot blood wash over my trembling fingers, I heard the sounds of Aubrey eating my eyes and saying, "Let's play hide and seek, you and me. If you stay hidden you get to live. If I catch you I will eat the rest of your soft parts."

  I ran, my hands held out before me, my palms slapping against old wood, my fingers grazing crumbling plaster. I could hear Aubrey following, hooting with pleasure like a demented child.

  At some point I turned a corner and could no longer hear him at all.

  Ultimately, I made my way out of the theater and through the streets of downtown Kitchissippi, falling and crawling and pushing myself back to my feet again and again.

  I stumbled sightless through the cold and dark until I reached the highway where a tow truck driver nearly ran me down. He brought me to the emergency room at Miramichi Regional Hospital but not before calling the police.

  Aubrey was never found, but the bodies of my friends were quickly discovered.

  Smeared, bloody hand prints on walls and doors throughout the theater made it appear that the murders had been committed by a man who blinded himself afterward and found his way out of the building by touch, leaving behind his confession writ large on the theater screen.

  It was the perfect setup.

  -13-

  I have a very comfortable room in this facility. The Laurentian Park Institution is a minimum security prison, but I like to think of it as a secure infirmary. LPI is on a beautiful tract of land, or so the guards and attendants tell me. From the barred window of my third-story room, across a wide expanse of fields and fences, one can see the deep green shadows that mark the border of Algonquin Provincial Park and, as I've been told, the abandoned remains of the old Renfrew County mental hospital.

  Everyone I talk to doubts my story, attendants, doctors, police and prosecutors. They all seem to be patronizing me. I’ve been told it’s a curious coincidence that two kids were killed in Kitchissippi back in the seventies, and that those killings stopped when my family moved away. It’s been suggested that of the five men who went back to Kitchissippi that August night, I was the most unstable. I had no family, I worked alone and I never stayed in one place very long.

  The police told me the RCMP were now investigating the incident at the Maitland Playhouse because they had unsolved murder cases going back forty years in which victims across Canada had been killed in many different ways, but the dead all had one thing in common: their eyes had been gouged out.

  I’m beginning to realize I’m the only one who believes Aubrey was ever in Kitchissippi the night my friends died.

  When I stand at my window with summer’s warmth or winter’s chill on my face, I can almost feel the weight and the hardness of the distant stone walls and steel doors that once incarcerated Aubrey.

  I know Aubrey is mocking me, capering with glee in the still silence. I can hear him in the distance, as clearly as I can hear the pigeons cooing on the sill of my window as they strut and swagger outside the bars just beyond my reach.

  Someday soon I will lay my hands on one of the pigeons and take the pompous little thing's eyes.

  Then I will leave this place, crossing fields and fences and entering the ruins of the Leander Meade Convalescent Home and Sanatorium, where Aubrey and I will meet again.

  John McCallum Swain wrote his first story in the sixth grade. While other children were writing about kittens and summer vacations, he wrote of the annihilation of humanity by invading aliens.

  Since then, Swain has progressed from longhand to typewriters to laptops, and he continues to write tales ranging from graphic horror to alternate history while exploring new territory creating original screenplays for the transatlantic partnership Grab a Half Productions.

  He has previously published novels and short stories under the name Jack X McCallum.

  The radio trembled with the sounds of simulated peril: maniacal laughter, a terrifying mechanical whine and the panicked yelps of a trapped animal.

  A young boy’s voice—a hero’s voice—rose above the cacophony. “Keep fighting, Paddy. No compromise!”

  “This fight was over before it started,” a man snarled in reply. His accent marked him as foreign and, therefore, nefarious. “You’re going to watch the buzz saw claim your little trained bear. Then, child, it will be your turn!”

  Organ music swelled to signal the episode’s end, and the announcer breathlessly advised the audience to tune in tomorrow to find out if Andy and his pet bear Paddy would escape the sawmill and smash the fiendish Red plot that had turned it into a house of horrors. While the radicals and anarchists targeted by the Feds in the wake of the Great War were now, seven years later, far less of a pressing concern than the mobsters turning the Volstead Act to their brutal gain, they remained a reliable and popular avatar of menace with the public. The writers for All-American Andy had cast them as villains almost exclusively in the four months the show had been on the air.

  “Remember,” the announcer said, “true Americans like Andy are easy to spot. And here is today’s Eagle Agent message, intended only for members in good sta
nding of All-American Andy’s Eagle Squadron. Ready?”

  In a modest home in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, a ten-year-old girl dutifully wrote down the string of numbers that followed, then started to translate them using the decoder for which she’d saved a month’s worth of Liberty Bar wrappers. Like many of the thousands of children planted in front of their radios all across the Midwest, Cindy Reisbig could guess what the communication would be even before she deciphered the final word. “R-I-G-H-T. The message is ‘Right is right,’” she said aloud, as if she were reciting a lesson in class. “Just like Andy tells us all the time in the comic strip!”

  The station had segued into a late-afternoon broadcast from the Aragon Ballroom, but Cindy hardly heard the Jean Goldkette Orchestra and their new horn player Bix Beiderbecke burning through “Riverboat Shuffle.” Nor did she notice the thin, greenish mist bleeding from the horn speaker of the family’s new Atwater Kent radio. She was too focused on sketching Paddy. The plucky little bear was her favorite All-American Andy character. She’d even convinced her adoptive father to take her to Wrigley Field for Paddy Day. Sitting through the Cubs game had been a bit of a chore—she’d always been more of a White Sox fan—but it had been worth it for the Paddy pin-back button they gave away that afternoon.

  A voice growled from over the little girl’s shoulder. The words were hard to make out; the thing’s mouth and throat were not particularly amenable to human speech, and the thick brogue only made matters worse. “A passable likeness yer scratchin’ there,” was what the intruder had tried to say. The utterance came out instead as something threatening and horrific—and far more appropriate to its intentions.

  The living room of the modest Woodlawn home trembled with the sounds of genuine peril: inhuman laughter, a terrifying mechanical whine and the panicked screams of a doomed little girl.

  * * *

  Tristram Holt stood next to the stone angel crouched at the head of the open grave. The marker had been at its vigil for less than a week, so it still shone white in the light of the full moon, the marble pristine, unmarred by soot or storm. Its purity made the man at its side appear all the more ragged. Old blood spattered his coat and bullet-torn shirt. His cloak was tattered and grimy. The brim of his battered fedora cast a shadow over his face, which resembled a dead man’s in every way, save for his eyes. They burned with a strange fire as he watched the two men uncovering the murdered girl’s coffin.

  “I don’t like him looming over us like that, Mister Branch,” noted the shorter of the two grave robbers, the one deepest in the hole. He was a squat, muscular figure, built, quite literally, for digging in tight spaces. “We’re doing him a favor and he stands there waiting, like undelivered bad news.”

  “Eyes on the prize, Mister Crump,” his partner chided. Branch sat at the foot of the grave, his long legs dangling into the hole, his arms cradling a shovel that resembled a surplus and equally spindle-like limb. He tilted his head on its bony neck and smiled a smile that revealed too many teeth, all of them overly large and wickedly pointed. “My partner is on to something, though. You’re even making me nervous. Why don’t you go visit yourself. You’re still buried not far from here, as I recall.”

  Despite himself, Holt found his gaze moving across the Resurrection Cemetery, in the direction of the headstone his fiancée and Cook County had placed to mark what should have been the final resting place of his former self. They’d buried an empty coffin after giving up on finding what the doctors in “Schemer” Drucci’s lab had left. The butchers had tried to transform the young assistant district attorney into a human bomb. Instead, they left him all but broken, with the face of a living dead man and a thirst for vengeance that drove him to recast himself in the forge of the notorious Levee district as the Corpse. The Scourge of Evil was one of several new identities Holt had created for himself in the months since Drucci and his thugs targeted him; he was still uncertain if any of them, even the Corpse, could truly be called his own.

  A sharp thump brought his attention back to the open grave. “I’m down to the box,” Crump announced.

  Mister Branch tossed a large burlap sack to his partner. “Use this. We’re not taking her far.” He gestured to a nearby tomb. “I set up everything for the ceremony in there so we won’t be disturbed. Corpse can have his chat with her and then we can get the child back in the ground.”

  “Put her back? I’m not promising nothing of the sort,” Crump growled. “There might be some parts of her the doctor can use.”

  “You’re putting her back,” Holt said. “We’re only disturbing her rest now because it will save other children from the thing that took her life. I won’t allow you to give her to Doctor Grimm.”

  “Yes,” Branch said. “The poor child has already been through enough strife without Doctor Grimm’s tender ministrations.”

  Crump heaved the sack holding the body out of the grave, then clambered up himself with the deftness of a badger exiting a burrow. He tipped his flat cap to the dead girl before hoisting her over his shoulder.

  “I say she was lucky, learning so young that there are awful things in the dark. I wish someone woulda taught me that hard truth back when I was a tyke.”

  “When you were a tyke, Crump, you were the awful thing in the dark,” Holt said without a hint of jest about it as he followed the resurrection men into the tomb. Mister Branch’s laughter echoed in the stone hall. The short, hissing barks were indistinguishable from the sound his partner’s shovel made when biting into graveyard earth.

  The arcane patterns on the floor and sarcophagi had been drawn in witches’ blood, and the animal fat for the candles lighting the proceedings had been rendered from beasts that went extinct long before Chicago was set down on any map. As Crump freed the dead girl’s body from the sack, Branch produced a rope he’d recovered from the Tyburn gallows in London, but only after it had been thoroughly broken in on Oliver Cromwell. With the rope, he secured the child to a simple wooden chair positioned at the tomb’s center. The chair had been pilfered from the groundskeeper’s house just an hour earlier.

  “Whatever this murderous thing is, it’s only killing orphans?” Branch said. “I do hope the blackguard is no one we know.”

  “Doctor Grimm used to build me lovely things out of orphans,” said Crump, a wistful look on his face. The candlelight revealed the winding lines of suture marks crisscrossing his flesh and the mismatched quality of the parts for which the scars marked the ragged borders. Holt opened his mouth to reply to the comment, but the grave robber added quickly, “But he ain’t the one behind this. He’s pickier about his materials than he used to be.”

  Holt scowled and moved closer to the girl. Her head was flopped forward, face hidden, chin to her chest. “How do we get started?”

  “Like this,” Branch said. He leaned in. Brushing aside a pigtail, he whispered something softly into the dead girl’s ear.

  Her head flew up, a pair of glass eyes dropped to the floor and smashed, and a scream tore from her throat. Her mouth gaped black and round, like her two empty eye sockets. Dark lines slashed out from the voids toward her ears and across the bridge of her nose, where the mortician had closed up more brutal gashes.

  “My eyes!” she howled. “Please! I need them back. Not glass ones—my eyes. God won’t let me into Heaven without them!” Then she shrieked again, a long, agonized cry that filled the tomb with the stink of grave rot.

  “You said the rite wouldn’t hurt her.” Anger twisted Holt’s pallid features. “You said she’d be calm, able to answer questions.”

  Branch rubbed his pointed chin. “This is all wrong.” He waited for a pause in the girl’s screaming, but when it didn’t come he simply spoke louder. “Perhaps it’s the chair. Too mundane.”

  “Forget the chair,” Holt snapped. “Is she serious? She can’t get into Heaven without her eyes?”

  “Possibly,” Branch replied. “God can be a merciless rotter when He sets His mind to it. I would
n’t put it past Him to conduct a parts check at the pearly gates, right after the cherubim pat down the hopeful applicants for contraband.”

  Crump clamped a dirty hand over their captive’s mouth. “You’re talking through your hat, Branch. You don’t know nothing about what happens when you snuff it. You ain’t been dead. Not even once in a thousand years.” He nodded at the struggling girl. “I say this is a death-dream.”

  “What the hell is that?” Holt asked.

  “Something close enough to Hell, Corpse,” Crump replied. “See, sometimes souls get confused when death takes ’em. They can’t make sense of what’s happening, so they conjure up their own idea of what’s going on based on where they think they should’ve ended up. This one probably had too many Sunday school lessons about keeping her body pure for the Rapture. If nothing comes along to shake her out of the death-dream, she’ll be trapped in it, maybe forever.”

  “Then we probably need to get her some flesh-and-blood eyes. Anyone’s will do.” There was no disgust on Branch’s face as he said this, only a slight puzzlement over the challenge. “Where do you think—”

  His question was silenced by the thunder of a single gunshot. An instant before Holt’s gun went off, the brutish Crump managed to throw up a hand in defense, its five digits uniform only in their stubbiness. The blast tore the hand from its wrist, then opened up the grave robber’s throat from ear to Adam’s apple. He died with a curse on his twitching, lopsided lips.

  “It’s easy enough to shoot a man when you know he can be cobbled back together,” Branch observed wryly.

  “He had that coming all night. Besides, he wasn’t going to give up his eyes without a fight, and we don’t have time for that. We need to get this over with.”

  Cindy Reisbig was screaming again, but she calmed down at last when Holt took the pair of eyes—one green, one startlingly blue—that he’d stolen from Mister Crump and worked them into the empty sockets.