House of Skin (25 page)

The road was practically deserted. There were a few trucks, but not much else. The rain and the wind had scared all the lambs back into their holes. But that was okay. We owned the road that night of nights and what else really mattered? Just the two of us and miles and miles of emptiness.

It wasn’t too long after we’d passed that turn off for Petaluma that you saw the lights behind us. Those flashing red lights. What a thrill that gave me. We had already discussed what to do in such a situation. You thought of everything, didn’t you?

“You know what to do,” you said.

And I did.

There was a rest stop ahead and you turned off into it. We were in luck: it was deserted. Not a soul in sight and given the conditions, it was unlikely anyone would show up. We pulled into the empty lot and you shut the engine off. The cop—a CHP trooper—slid in behind us, his lights flashing. He sat there for the longest time before coming over. Why do they always do that? Just sit and sit before coming over?

Finally, he approached us. He was a short man, solidly built. Gray hair. Tired-looking, though, as if he hadn’t slept in some time.

He played a flashlight in through your window.

“In a hurry?” he asked.

“Yeah
…
my wife’s hurt. There was an accident.”

I moaned and acted woozy. He put the light on me and I made sure he saw the blood all over me.

“Christ, what happened?” He came around to my side of the car and opened the door. He checked me over real quick, looking for wounds.

“I better call a—”

His words died on his tongue. He must’ve seen a glint of steel as my razor opened his throat. Then he stumbled back, gagging on his own blood. His fingers were trying to find his gun, but they weren’t fast enough.

Not as fast as the razor
.
By the time he gave his last breath, the rain was hammering down again
.
“We better make tracks,” you said
.
I knew you were right and we did. No doubt he’d already called in ou
r
plate number.

We ran.

Yours,

Cherry

Gulliver was learning to hate his life. Not what it was, as such, but what it had become: a joyless celebration of paranoia. There was nothing left in it that brought him even a moment’s pleasure. Every act, every movement, every thoughtless mundane activity which he’d once went about with a self-hypnotic banality now had to be thought out carefully. The world, his world, was now fraught with dangers. Simple things that one rarely gives a moment of thought to like taking a walk or going into the bathroom, now had to be plotted carefully.

Eddy Zero was to blame.

Gulliver saw him in every dark alleyway, every shadowy alcove. And each time he did, which was painfully often, he drew in a sharp intake of trembling breath and waited for the knife to fall. He was no longer living, he was only existing in a world in which the rules were dictated by a homicidal maniac, ever changing.

He’d liked his life, such as it was. Barren of love and family, it was still good. It was still something he clung to with repetitious ferocity. He liked the normal, dull channels of his existence, each day resembling the one it replaced. It was boring. It was predictable. But he’d never been one to seek excitement, never one to live on the edge. He liked the monotonous grind of things. No surprises, just quiet living.

Gulliver had few close friends and dozens upon dozens of acquaintances. He’d never had a steady lover since he’d abandoned the ministry and his wife had left him. There was only a weekly fling that had lately become monthly with some stranger, sometimes male, sometimes female, occasionally both. It was enough to satisfy the animal urges.

Now even that had been shattered.

He didn’t dare frequent the bars and clubs he’d once visited nightly. If Eddy was out hunting him, it would be the first place he’d look. He hadn’t even gone to work since Eddy had stabbed him. His supervisor understood, thinking the reason was because of physical duress from the knifing. But that wasn’t it at all. Gulliver was afraid to go anywhere or see anyone. His personal bogeyman was always near, he felt, waiting to strike and butcher. He missed his job. It was tedious, but he’d liked it. Work gave a man a sense of worth to himself and his fellow creatures. He was part of the art department of Macy’s in Union Square, handling window displays. It gave him a chance to express his creativity and the pay wasn’t bad.

Eddy Zero had taken that away from him, too.

He had learned, since the assault, to hate Eddy like he’d never thought he’d be able to hate another living soul. To injure someone was one thing, but to steal their life was quite another. He saw only one way of bringing things to an end and that was to find Eddy himself. He trusted Fenn, but he knew how the police worked. He’d always likened their methods of justice to that of a man circling a house and hoping he’d fall through the front door by accident, rather than just proceeding up the steps and letting himself in. It wasn’t entirely their fault. Their hands were duly tied by laws that were set to protect the individual. Laws the criminal could work to his own advantage.

If Eddy was to be stopped, then Gulliver decided he would have to do it. He had no set procedures to follow. He could walk right into the front door, as it were. He wanted only to locate Eddy and he’d let the police handle the rest.

Fenn had come a long way in a matter of days, as far as Gulliver was concerned. He’d transformed from a cynical, bigoted cop into a real human being with an open and thinking mind. Yet, Fenn was still a cop and bound by rules. And he was also hopelessly distracted by his worship of Lisa Lochmere’s face. And under the might of such infatuation, he saw only her.

His head wasn’t clear enough to deal with the task at hand.

No, Gulliver would have to do it himself.

With this in mind, he took to the streets and took his chances. If he was going to put an end to this madness, he had to start somewhere. But first, he was going to buy a gun. The sort of weapon that could send Eddy spinning into hell to join his father.

The idea of this brought a smile to Gulliver’s lips.

It was the night of nights.

Lisa had spent the previous day visiting the house and now it was time for her all-night vigil. If Eddy had seen her message, then she was sure he would come. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.

There were police everywhere nearby and all it would take was one word from her and they’d come running, yet she was terrified. Her head spun with a raw and ominous sense of dread. She couldn’t stop thinking about the smoldering cigarette butt she’d seen and who had left it. She’d seen or heard nothing at the house after her first visit, although she hadn’t dared go beyond the entry.

She brought a small flashlight, but it probably wouldn’t be necessary to use it. Equal portions of moonlight and streetlight were spilling in through innumerable rents in the walls and the broken windows. She kept one hand in her pocket on the butt of the .38 and she had no intention of letting go of it. The safety was off and her finger sweated on the trigger. One slight tug was all it would take. It gave her a fleeting sense of security.

“I think I’ll take a walk upstairs,” she whispered into the microphone at her lapel. The thought that someone friendly was hearing her words was comforting.

She went directly to the attic door and found it standing open. Had she closed it? Probably not since she’d been in a bit of a hurry and closing doors hadn’t been of primary importance.

There were great gaping holes in the roof, and the attic was positively glowing with light. It almost seemed luminous. She went in and immediately regretted it. There was another dead animal on the floor, possibly a rat, its flesh stripped clean, moonlight gleaming off its vertebrae. She turned on the flashlight and studied its denuded corpse. There was very little but polished bone and scraggly bits of dark fur. Again, she saw the floor was vacuumed clean of dust, meticulously robbed of anything but the wood itself. And again, the motion of the sucking disturbance indicated that it had started with the rat and ended with a vortex near the wall. At the foot of the full-length mirror.

“My God,” she said and then remembered she was being listened to. “Just a dead rat.”

She went over to the mirror and touched its surface.

It was warm. Terribly so.

And what exactly did that mean?

She turned and studied the message she had left. A black insanity itched in the back of her mind. No other message had been left, but hers was smeared as if by a passing hand.

A board creaked somewhere. She spun around, playing the light about.

Nothing. She was quite alone, her eyes told her, yet her other senses disagreed. There was something here out of the ordinary. She just couldn’t put a finger on what it was.

“Is someone here?” she asked in a weak voice. There was no answer to her query and she was glad of it. “Guess not.”

There was a clicking in the wall: slow, insistent. The result of some nocturnal insect worrying at the plaster, she reasoned. A deathwatch beetle, as they were known. As she listened, it stopped. Then stillness: heavy and sullen.

She heard something else suddenly, a dragging sound down in the hallway below. With her heart in her throat, she turned off the flashlight and tightened her sweaty grip on the .38. The sound had died now. She started down the stairs, running her free hand along the wall of the narrow passage. Then she was at the door and there was nothing to do but open it. And she did, knowing a fear that was absolute.

The corridor was empty.

But there was an odor again, of tobacco—strong, pungent, and exotic. It barely masked something worse beneath. She wasn’t alone. Whoever had been here yesterday was back again. Probably the same person who had rubbed out her message.

Much as she wanted to run from the house and never return, she couldn’t allow herself, but her instinct demanded she do just that. It was the safest of possible courses. Flight or fight, it told her. There are no other choices. She chose the latter and stood her ground on uneasy legs.

Another sound now, this one from the attic. If she had imagined the others, there was no possibility her mind had conjured this one up. There was a huge din coming from up there, as if the place was rattling itself apart. Timbers were groaning, floor boards straining against the nails that held them in place.

She threw open the door and it stopped.

She clicked on the flashlight and the passage was filled with swirling dust. There was an odor present as she started up, something like the sharp tang of ozone after lightning has struck. A reek of ammonia followed in its wake. She played the light around, the beam barely penetrating through clouds of dust pounded from the rafters. A frozen wind was blowing, nearly sucking the breath from her lungs and the warmth from her skin. Everything had changed, even the very pressure of the air seemed heavier, thicker, like moving through ocean depths.

She paused at the top of the steps, once again ignoring the voice in her head that told her to run while there was time. Panic was surging in her guts, her skin tight like leather. The flashlight beam cut only a few feet into the dark and died. It wasn’t possible, but then none of this was. There was no moonlight or streetlight coming in now, just an even inky blackness that had swallowed the room in a bleak completeness. She couldn’t see the roof overhead nor the gaping holes that had shown the stars earlier. The light bounced and jigged in her trembling hand.

“Something’s happening here,” she said aloud, hoping they’d hear.

She checked her watch. Was it midnight yet?

Fresh panic assailed her. Her watch was running backwards, counting the seconds in reverse.

She heard the sound of a woman crying and it seemed to come from a great distance. The attic was a polluted abyss. The air seemed inundated with grit, and sandy ash lodged between her teeth as she drew in a gasping breath. The light revealed a form and she started. She wasn’t afraid, really; shocked, if anything.

The form was standing before the full-length mirror … or was it reflected in it?

Thoughts tumbled wildly in her head.

It was a cadaver, her brain told her, standing there on frozen legs. A cadaver dressed in a ragged black overcoat. It could have been one of Eddy’s victims, save that it was male. It appeared to have been carved and divided on an anatomist’s table and hastily reassembled in a gruesome patchwork of humanity. A lurching suture ran from the crown of its bald skull to its disjointed jaw, several others dividing the face into grim quarters of gray, necrotic hide that were held together by black thongs of catgut and what appeared to be metal surgical staples. The result was a visage that was distorted and stretched and horribly scarred, the nose a skullish triangular cavity, a ragged stitching pulling the corner of its mouth up into a sneering grimace. It was a Frankensteinian monstrosity, one eye a juicy gelid green, the other the diseased yellow of leprosy.

But it was no cadaver, for she heard it breathing with a clotted, pulpous hissing and it leered out at her with an intense craving, an appetite for suffering and sadism that made her bowels fill with ice water. Yet, for all its maimed disfigurement, there was something terribly familiar about it.

If there was ever a time to run, it was now. But she didn’t. For some insane, unexplainable reason, her curiosity demanded she stay and see this lunatic episode to a close. A stink of corruption came from the figure, and it was no single odor, but a veritable bouquet of many. Her mind reeled as it tried to attach names to them all. It started with human excrement and ended with old blood and mucid decay.

As she watched, it moved, stepping in her direction with an uneasy, pained gait as if one of its legs was longer than the other. Its leprous, pitted lips formed a grin of something that might have been recognition. It reached out a skeletal claw with abundant stitchwork.