Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (37 page)

After trying for an hour or so, I carefully peeled the skin gloves off my hands. I wasn't quite sure what to do with them afterwards. I knew if I left them out, they'd rot. I wondered how to go about drying them out, maybe tanning the skin—like leather—so they would retain their suppleness.

While I was wondering what to do, the phone rang.

It was Alice, calling from Florida. She had just gotten a call from the Maine State Police, informing her that someone had broken into the house and killed Derrick. She was in hysterics. The gardener had found him that afternoon. I tried my best to sound upset and supportive when she told me she was flying back first thing in the morning. I even told her I'd pick her and the kids up at the airport.

What a guy, huh?

I wondered if maybe I should wear Derrick’s hands. Would she even recognize them?

I decided that wouldn't be a good idea. Having no idea what else to do, I put Derrick's hands back into the freezer for the night so they wouldn't rot.

* * *

The next few days were tough if only because I had to act a lot more upset about Derrick's death than I actually was. As expected, the cops came around and asked me all sorts of questions about how Derrick and I got along, about where I was the day he was killed, and was there someone who could corroborate my whereabouts—things like that.

I held up perfectly, I must say.

One time, a couple of days after Derrick died, when I was heading down to the police station to be interviewed, I did wear Derrick's hands. I was a little self-conscious about them, but no one even noticed.

But every night, when I put them on and sat down at the drawing board, I started to get some unusual sensations. My drawings didn't appear to be any better than before, at least not to me, but there was a feeling inside the gloves, inside my own hands when I was wearing the skin that was ... well, strange. You might say “alien.”

I had finally come up with a method of preserving the skin. Every night, before I began to draw, I would take fifteen or twenty minutes to rub hand cream into the hands, inside and out. I didn't scrimp on quality, either. I bought the most expensive kinds of hand creams and moisturizers available, and I spent a lot of time, working them into the thirsty pores. Over the next few days, I learned a lot about emollients and whatever. Night after night, it seemed as though the new skin—my new hands—became increasingly supple and sensitive. Touching things—anything—became a thrill. Vibrant ripples of pure energy tingled from my fingertips, up my arms and neck, all the way to the center of my brain.

Let me tell you, it was exhilarating!

I could barely concentrate on my drawing because I spent so much time simply
touching
things ...
feeling
everything as if for the first time.

That's what it was like.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was
really
feeling things. I told myself it was only a matter of time before I could translate what I felt onto canvas and paper. Soon, I would have it all—my brother's talent and maybe even the fame and money I deserved even more than he had!

But gradually—and I'm not sure when, maybe a month or so after Derrick died—something upsetting happened. It was as if my own hands inside the skin of Derrick's hands were changing. At first, all of the sensations were pleasant—warm and moist, comforting as if this new layer was my real skin; but after a couple of nights, the feelings got more intense. The gentle warmth got steadily hotter until it began to feel like there was a slow-burning fire smoldering deep beneath my skin. Every time I flexed my hands, watching the veins wiggle beneath the extra layer of skin, I gloried in the way the outermost skin—and I no longer thought of it as Derrick's skin— stretched and pulled.

One night I had been drawing, lost—as always—in watching the way the skin on the back of my hands moved when my hands felt like they had suddenly burst into flames. I yelped in surprised and pain, but then tried to ignore it and keep drawing.

It didn’t stop, and I had to try to
endure
it.

After a while, though, I couldn't stand it any longer. I put my drawing pencils away and started to roll one of the gloves off, the one on my right hand. Over the past few weeks, the skin had been treated so well that it usually rolled off smoothly. This time, though, when I lifted the top edge, the skin caught. When I tried to pull it down, the skin on my own wrist started to rip.

Let me tell you, I sure panicked.

It took a great deal of effort to sit back, take a few deep breaths, and then try once again to remove the hands. I sure as hell didn't want to damage them. Where was I going to get another pair like this? I thought maybe it was just a matter of decay, but when I took the edge of the skin on the other hand and lifted it up, once again my own flesh lifted with it.

This isn't happening
, I told myself.

Someone—I think it was that lady shrink I talked to a while ago—told me that I was imagining all of this. That Derrick's skin had rotted away by then, and I was pulling at my own flesh. I listened to her, but like all that transference stuff she'd been talking about, I think she was dead wrong. I should have killed her and tried using
her
hands.

I lowered my drawing light and shined it straight down onto my hands, looking closely as I tried several times to peel back the skin. Each time I got the same result. The skin wouldn't roll down. It was fused to my own skin. Hell, I can't deny it; it looked like it had
become
my own skin.

I'm telling you, I was some scared at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to accept it.

This ain't so bad
, I told myself.
In fact, isn't this exactly what I'd wanted all along?

Why have hands that I have to put on and off like gloves?

Why not have them be permanent?

Didn't I want to feel the way Derrick had felt, and be able to control my pencils and brushes the way Derrick had controlled his?

I had wanted Derrick's hands, had coveted them so much that I was willing to kill him to get them. So what was so wrong if his skin was permanently attached to mine?

We'd been twins in the womb! We shared everything else right down to our chromosomes. Other than the women in our lives, there wasn't anything we
hadn't
shared, and sometimes I wondered about Emily, the woman I dated several years ago.

The only problem was, no matter what I did—whether I massaged hand cream into them or held them under a steady flow of cool water or held them inside the freezer— I couldn't make that burning sensation go away. It penetrated all the way to my bones, bringing tears to my eyes. I told myself that I'd eventually get used to it, that this was just a stage as Derrick's skin and mine fused, but I didn't sleep much that night.

The pain—oh, the pain!

It was a pure, silver singing inside my hands, and it never let up.

* * *

That next morning, a couple of weeks after Derrick's death, I was supposed to attend a memorial service being held in my brother's honor at one of the art galleries in
Portland. I forget the name of the gallery, but I'm sure the invitation is still on my desk, back at my place. Everyone was going to be there—a lot of important people in the art community as well as Alice and Derrick's kids. I've been trying to feel bad for them, losing their father like that, but pity just doesn't seem to be inside me.

When I got out of bed that morning, hardly having slept a wink all night, I considered calling the gallery and canceling. I was supposed to say a few words about my brother, but I hoped Hugh Andrews—the gallery director—would understand that I was still too shattered and couldn't cope with facing the public like this.

Before I dialed the gallery, I started thinking about how suspicious canceling out might look. Sure, the cops had stopped coming around and asking me questions, apparently satisfied that I'd had nothing to do with my brother's murder, but I couldn't be sure. They might still
think
I
had
done it, and they might be waiting for me to slip up so they could pounce.

Maybe they even recognized Derrick's hands. I panicked, trying to remember if I’d been wearing them when they fingerprinted me.

So I determined, no matter how bad the pain in my hands got, I'd go through with this farce of a memorial service.

The problem was, I had no idea how bad it could get.

Even before I walked into the gallery that morning and saw how many people had gathered to honor my brother, my hands were clammy with sweat and trembling deep inside. I was self-conscious when I shook hands with anyone and made it a point to touch as few people as possible. I couldn't help but notice the startled reactions most of the people there gave me when we clasped hands. Maybe it was my imagination.

Being one of the guests of honor, as it were, I had to sit in the front row along with Alice and the kids. Every wall in the room was adorned with Derrick's paintings. None of them were really very good, I thought. I could do—and had done—much better.

Andrews spoke first—a bit too long, I thought—about how he had been one of the first people in the "Art world" to recognize Derrick's extraordinary talent, and how we and all of humanity have suffered a great loss in such a senseless, brutal act of butchery. I could hear people sniffing back their tears, but I hardly paid any attention to them. I couldn't stop looking down at my hands. They felt like they were on fire.

I tried rubbing them, scratching them, folding my arms across my chest and pressing them tightly against my sides—
anything
, but nothing relieved the pain and burning. It got so intense I thought I was going to jump to my feet and scream.

I didn't notice when Andrews stopped speaking, but after a moment or two, I noticed that the room had fallen silent with a hushed expectancy. I glanced around and realized that everyone was looking at me.

A boiling blush raced up my arms and across my face. My heart was slamming hard inside my chest when I realized that Andrews must have introduced me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, preparing to stand, but I wasn't even sure my legs would support me, much less carry me all the way to the podium.

The crowd was perfectly silent.

A steady, low, throbbing sound filled my ears as I inhaled and held my breath. I took a single step forward. My shoes, scraping across the carpet, made a sound like the rough scratching of sandpaper. Cold sweat broke out on my brow and trickled down the sides of my face.

I wanted to scream, I tell you, but as I made my way to the podium, I noticed a glass pitcher and several clean glasses on the small table beside the podium. The pitcher was filled with ice water.

That gave me an idea.

With each halting step forward, the agonizing sensation in my hands grew steadily worse until it became intolerable.

I had no idea what to do with my hands, whether to shove them deep into my jacket pockets so no one could see them, clasp them behind my back, shake them wildly above my head, or claw at them and start screaming.

That's what I
wanted
to do—

Scream.

The thought crossed my mind that if I fell completely apart, everyone in the room would think it was simply an outpouring of my overwhelming grief over the loss of my dear brother. They would all react respectfully, with sympathy and understanding.

But my throat was constricted. My chest and lungs were so tight I could hardly breathe, much less scream. I was suddenly afraid that, if I opened my mouth and tried to say even a few words—something about my dear, departed brother—deathly cold hands would clasp around my throat and begin to choke me.

I had jotted down a few notes of what I wanted to say, only because I was afraid of what I might reveal if I started rambling. The problem was, the sheet of paper with my notes on it was in the breast pocket of my jacket, and I didn't dare reach for it. I was suddenly fearful that I would no longer be able to control my own hands. The skin— Derrick's skin—had long since dissolved into my hands, fusing with them.

His flesh had become mine.

I glanced down at my hands and was suddenly convinced that I didn't even recognize them.

They were someone else's hands!

They really were Derrick's hands!

I know it isn't possible. You're not the first person to tell me it was all in my mind; but even if it was, it was nonetheless true!

The silence in the room continued to pulsate. When someone toward the back of the room cleared his throat, it sounded like a distant cannon shot. Somehow, though, I made it to the podium. Leaning forward and gripping the edge of the podium with both hands, I forced a smile, but I could tell by the way the skin stretched around my mouth that it was more of a grimace. As if moving by its own volition, my right hand reached up and inside my jacket and clasped the sheet of paper in my pocket. The heat inside my jacket was intolerable. It was as if I was reaching into a blazing furnace. I almost cried out. Bone-deep tremors shook my body as I unfolded my notes and, without looking at them, spread the page on the podium.