A hallway. White walls line each side. Move forward, a woman in powder blue pulls the bed. She watches, encourages, “You’re gonna be okay,” but her voice is not sincere. Two metal doors fly open and she pulls me through. A man looks over the top of me from behind the gurney. “The surgeon is waiting in the OR,” he tells the woman. “It appears that there are no head injuries.”
The gurney is wheeled through another doorway. Two men standing in the middle of the room, gloves on and masks in place, rush to each side of the gurney and look down. They reach into the abdominal wounds, and one shakes his head. He looks at the other, turns and studies my eyes.
“He’s in shock,” the man says. He glances at the nurse and orderly who just wheeled me in and says, “That will be all.” They nod and exit the room.
The other surgeon leans in close to my face, near enough to me that when he speaks, I can feel his breath on my cheeks. I wonder, in this trauma, how a sense so subtle remains possible.
“Well, it will all be for the best. The bleeding is terminal, the kidneys ruptured and his spine severed.”
“He’s got a donor card,” the other says.
“Good, because we should certainly have use for the eyes. Let’s see what else we can save.”
…I come to and the man in the silver suit has one knee on the deck in front of the jar. He is now unscrewing the cap.
With the lid removed, he sets the jar down on the deck, reaches in with one hand and pulls the brain through the large mouth. As it glistens in the flashes of green, there is not enough muscle to support the weight of the eyes, so they dangle, staring down at the man’s foot. He stands and walks over to the other man, who is waiting in his swivel chair, and stops at the rod. While still holding the brain in one hand he gathers a clear line attached to a hook in the other. It is an enormous treble hook, larger than his gloved fist.
He turns the brain over and digs the hook into the stem. The eyeballs shudder, from shock or incredulous pain. The man then takes the bait and turns it up as the seated man reels in the line, leaves approximately two feet between the tip of the fishing pole and the bait. The man who set the bait steps away as the fisherman cranks the pole back and with a powerful jerk swings everything forward, sending the brain hurtling, its eyeballs gyrating like protons around an unstable atom. The bait disappears over the stern with a splash. Instantly, the water around it churns, and within seconds the man jerks. The hook is set into something powerful, and the rod rattles as the fight begins. The chair swings left, then right, and he reels hard. He lets up as his quarry turns and runs with the line. The drag on the reel whirs.
The electric storm lights the stage for some time until the man who is standing waddles over to the stern. He picks up a pole and turns it over the side. It’s got a pointed aluminum gaff on the end, and he leans over the edge, in a prepared stance, holding it so that the hook faces out.
Green light illuminates something large as it rises up from the water, and the man with the hook lunges out at it. The man from the chair stands up, grabs a second gaff, stabs it into the fish from another angle. Both squat and strain to draw it in. The catch smacks the sidewall, its fierce fin or tail thumps three or four times, and a moment later a giant, fleshy creature slides over the rail and plunks onto the deck. It flops and squirms, and in the next flash of blue light, I see that it is not a fish. Nor is it an octopus or a sea lion. I’ve never seen such a beast. Ten feet long, this creature has smooth skin and blubbery flesh. It wriggles on the floor between two pairs of metallic boots. No fins, no features in the tail, and no face or eyes, it resembles a slug without antennae.
The man who reeled in the creature grabs another tool, a device that looks much like a pitchfork, only without the middle teeth, and he pins the monster, keeping its torso tight against the deck. The other man digs his boot sole flat against its squirming head, while the fisherman holds the midsection firm. He then pulls a two-foot-long pair of pliers from his belt pack. He leans toward the creature’s snakelike head, turning about to get a look into the gaping mouth. With no further hesitation, he plunges the pliers deep inside the fleshy creature, past several rows of serrated teeth and wriggling gums. He digs around, causing the gums to flare and the long throat to swell and throb. Its six-foot length of tail recoils, unfurls, slaps the deck violently in an attempt to free its upper end, but the tool seemingly designed specifically to restrict this breed of monster does its job.
Seconds later, and the pliers are retracted. Out pops the brain and treble hook. He flips the bait onto the deck and the hook falls off to its side, a serrated chunk of cerebrum still attached.
He picks up his gaff from the deck and plunges it deep into the blubbery hide. Together, the two men drag the beast back toward the stern. One of them pulls open a hatch and they sling the giant thing so that it slides off into the compartment. The boat rattles again as the creature thumps the floor of the holding tank.
I turn my attention back to the sea-bleached brain as orange flashes from around the boat highlight its frayed and softened features. One milky eyeball lies next to it, a barely visible pupil gazing lifelessly into space. Again, a surge of blue energy engulfs the boat, and the eye twitches, turns up to look at me a final time. Then it goes blank in an eternal stare.
One of the men produces a push broom and uses it to brush the remains in short, choppy sweeps toward the stern. He shoves them through the scupper into the sea, while the other man washes the debris away with a bucket of seawater.
He hangs the bucket on a rail and ambles over to my crate. The skies rumble and beams of neon green creep in from above, as my roof is lifted. I turn my eyes up, and for the first time I can see the lid of my own jar and the metallic fingers finding their grip around it.
Skin
by Kim Despins
This thing wearing his sister’s skin stands at the foot of Jeremy’s bed, just as she has every night since he moved back into his father’s house. When Jeremy asked Lisa to help care for their father in his last days, she hung up on him. Instead, this thing visits in her place. She whips the covers from his bed, and Jeremy’s skin puckers in the cool rush of air.
He thinks she’s changed her mind about helping with their father, but when he touches her, the skin slides over the thing underneath and he knows this can’t be his sister. He tries to scream but nothing emerges except a soft moan. He pushes her away, but his hands caress that pale skin while something else pulsates just beneath its surface. His body refuses every command his mind issues. He’s come to accept these visits, even enjoys them in some unnatural way. There’s always penance.
His entire adult life has been penance. In the Peace Corps he taught English in a tiny cinderblock room to children who asked only the English words for food. After failing to feed anything more than their minds, Jeremy joined the seminary. His room there had a wood floor, plaster walls, and no starving children. As a priest, he enjoyed the overgrown garden behind the rectory. The trees hung low, denying the herbs sun and stunting their growth, but the air tasted fresh.
The priesthood had been his escape. The children, their minds hungrier than their bellies, arrived at Sunday school eager to learn. His parishioners responded to his counseling with appreciation. After almost thirty years of searching, Jeremy finally found a community, a family.
His father’s illness has ripped him away from that family, and he aches to return. Jeremy waits for his father to die so he can return to his life in the church. His life with no starving children. His life without this thing wearing his sister’s skin, and its unnatural hunger.
Lying rigid on his mattress, Jeremy promises when he returns to the church, he’ll trim the trees and feed the herbs with sunlight. He can’t confess something this unsavory, but he vows to pray every prayer he knows a dozen times. Anything, he pleads with God, just make this thing go away.
Every door is bolted, every window shut tight. Yet here she stands wearing the skin of someone he loves. This caricature of a woman i
s not his sister. Lisa lives thirty minutes away in Boston. Her partner and his religion are two of the many things they never speak about on the rare occasions they talk at all. During those conversations, Jeremy does the talking, and Lisa provides vague answers to his questions. Calling her his sister seems wrong, invasive. He barely knows her.
Would she notice, he wonders, that he replaced the Farrah Fawcett poster from his boyhood with a framed photograph of a pale yellow crocus, opening among the crystals of melting snow? The photo was a gift from a parishioner. Jeremy tried to tell Lisa that he’d burned the cache of dirty magazines he’d found piled in his dresser drawers, forgotten since high school. Her response had been a dial tone.
Jeremy called her three times the first week he spent in his father’s house. Twice she hung up on him, and the third time her partner claimed Lisa was out even though he heard her voice in the background.
“Wait,” Jeremy said, struggling to remember this woman’s name.
“What?”
“Does she still like to catch lightning bugs?”
Lisa’s voice came through the background. Jeremy pictured her standing next to her partner, one hand on her shoulder. “Tell him not now. I can’t talk to him now.”
“Don’t call back.” The partner hung up the phone.
The thing that looks like his sister unties her robe and lets it fall to the floor. Her skin glows in the moonlight. He wishes for the false safety of blankets, to curl up under the covers and pretend there’s not a monster in the room. But his body disagrees. She climbs atop him, pausing to kiss his erection much the way Jeremy hopes to kiss the rings of the pope. Every night is the same, down to the hopes, regrets, and memories as she takes his willing body, and his mind pretends to fight from its cage.
* * *
At thirteen, Jeremy developed a painful crush on Missy Salinger when she pushed her bathing suit bottoms to her knees and showed him hers behind the boathouse. Jeremy put his family jewels on display for her, but she gasped and ran away, leaving him alone with his swim trunks around his ankles.
Thinking about the freckles on Missy’s pale thighs and where they led, Jeremy hiked through the woods between his family’s vacation house and the Salingers’ cottage. Her voice reached his ears before he got to the edge of the woods. Crouched behind a lilac bush, he listened to Missy and Toni Wilson chatter about girl stuff while baking their skin in the sun. He ignored their words and drank Missy in with his eyes.
Her red hair, barely contained in a ponytail, shone in the sun. Jeremy imagined weaving his fingers through those curls. He untied his swim trunks and slipped his hand inside. Jeremy massaged his erection until Toni’s words stopped him cold. The flesh in his right hand softened.
“You saw it?” Toni asked. “You really saw it?”
“Yeah, it was all shriveled and gross.”
“So it was small? Where did he show you?”
Jeremy’s skin burned to the tips of his ears.
“Behind the boathouse. I can’t believe he really did it.”
“Did you—”
“Ew! Of course not.”
Jeremy sucked in deep breaths, but it didn’t calm the anger flooding him. The word liar rested on the tip of his tongue. He breathed in a mosquito buzzing among the lilacs and coughed it out of his throat.
Both girls sat up on their towels.
“Who’s there?” Toni called.
Crouched low, Jeremy ran back into the woods. Behind him, the girls giggled.
Missy’s words followed him through the trees. “What a creep.”
* * *
He’s finally dying. A down comforter pins the old man to the bed, his outline faint. The rise and fall of his chest doesn’t move the blanket, but the thick gasps tell Jeremy it’s not quite over. Jeremy waits in a kitchen chair next to the drug-littered night table. Half-empty beer bottles stand among the prescription containers like trees. Jeremy gave up on taking away his father’s vice when he found the Styrofoam cooler lodged between the bed and the wall. Instead he picked a handful of daisies and plunked them into a bottle. Now the flowers bend toward the floor, their white petals ringed in brown. His bags are packed and waiting in the car.
Dressed in his vestments, Jeremy reads his Bible. Matthew chapter five, verse thirty catches his eye. “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.” His father tried that. The cancer started in his testicles. Doctors took those almost a year ago, but surgery came too late. The disease marched through his body to the lymph nodes, the bones, and finally to the major organs. Doctors removed every offending organ they could, but it was never enough.
His father struggles under the covers. Jeremy pulls the blankets off his chest and dabs at his sweaty forehead with a cool cloth while muttering meaningless words, telling his father it’ll be all right. The old man grips Jeremy’s wrist with the strength of a child.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” He gasps for breath, his toothless mouth a dark window into his diseased body.
Jeremy picks his father’s fingers from his arm and looks away. “There’s no need.” Some things even a priest can’t bear to witness.
The old man collapses onto the mattress, his uneven breath hitching into something that resembles a sob. He looks up at Jeremy, his eyes alert for the first time in days.
“Son?”
“I’m here, Dad.”
“Remember when we went to Virginia Beach?”
Jeremy had been nine, Lisa six, Mom healthy. What Jeremy remembered best was that the cooler had been filled with soda instead of beer, and they’d built a sandcastle as a family. Dad drove them home before the tide washed it out to sea.
“I do, but then Mom died.”
Jeremy checks his watch. It’s just after eleven. The thing wearing his sister’s skin usually visits around midnight. Part of him would like to be gone by then. Part of him will miss her when he returns to his life of penance. It’s the most contact he’s had with his little sister in years, even if it is with just her skin.
His father shivers under the sheet. Jeremy gets up to open the window and let in the cool air. When he turns back to his seat, she’s at the end of the bed, robe pooled at her feet. Her toenails are painted glitter pink.
She raises one finger in the air and looks at Jeremy. Wait. He wraps his hand around the crucifix dangling from his neck. The cross is big enough to be hung on the wall, but he’s always preferred the weight of it around his neck.
The thing that’s not his sister pulls the sheet from his father’s withered body. Somehow the old man has the strength for an erection. Jeremy tries to close his eyes, but they disobey. Heat gathers in his groin.
His father cracks open his eyes as she takes him in her.
“No more,” he wheezes. “I’m sorry.”
Jeremy’s stomach churns. This thing has taken his father every night just before coming to his own bed. Jeremy tries to turn his head, but it remains fixed, his gaze on the two bodies.
She thrusts against the old man, making his body flop against the dirty sheet. The pungent smell of sex mingles with the odor of medicine and beer. His father coughs, gasps for breath, finds none. Jeremy sees himself shove the thing off his father, but his body makes no move other than to slip one hand into his trousers.
His sister—no, the thing wearing his sister’s skin—makes no sound, she bounces against his father’s hips, her gaze trained on the water-stained wall above the headboard. Jeremy watches with one hand clasping his crucifix and the other caressing his erection, as his father expels a breath and falls limp. The woman runs her knuckle along the old man’s cheek, then slaps him before slipping off of his cooling body. His head rocks to the side, his empty eyes fixed on Jeremy, whose hand is still in his pants.
She kneels in front of Jeremy, looks up at him with his sister’s green eyes, and speaks with his sister’s voice.
“It never bothered you before.”
Jeremy extracts his hand from his trouser
s. She unzips them and takes him into her mouth.
Not my sister, Jeremy thinks. His mind chants the reminder, trying to take control of his body. Not my sister.
Jeremy focuses on his father’s corpse, one age-spotted arm flung off the side of the bed. The yellowed nails are long because Jeremy forgot to trim them. He finds control of his own arms, they still have life. Jeremy grips the long end of the crucifix in both hands, rips it from the chain. He turns it upside down and thrusts it into the thing knelt before him. It slams into the base of his sister’s skull.
Not my sister.
She gasps, choking on his member. Jeremy pulls himself from her mouth and brings the up-ended crucifix down again and again. In his hands, the metal cross pulverizes her spine. The sound of it reminds him of the crunch of gravel under his shoes on the rectory garden path. It reminds him of freedom. She falls forward, pushing Jeremy against the window. She curls into the fetal position, the blood darkening the wood floor around her head and matting her blonde hair. Not my sister.
Jeremy buttons his pants and starts to clean the mess. His erection refuses to fade until he has the thing wearing his sister’s skin hidden away in the parlor closet.
* * *
Jeremy trudged through the house toward his bedroom where there waited a copy of a Victoria’s Secret catalog he’d swiped from a neighbor’s recycle bin. His father thumped down the stairs as Jeremy waited to go up.
“You been to see that Salinger girl,” his father said.
“How do you know?” Jeremy braced himself against the wall as his father grabbed his shoulder to steady his balance.
“You been sniffing around that girl since we got here.” He limped to his easy chair, collapsed into the flattened cushions, and exhaled. His father had installed carpet before arthritis settled into his knee, twisting it into a gnarled formation that looked more tree than human and bent about as well as wood. “That girl’s nothing but a tease. She has no intention of putting out for you.”
“But I don’t—”
The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 Page 22