House of Skin (26 page)

In a scraping voice, it said, “I knew you’d come eventually, Lisa. I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away …”

* * *

Fenn was in the police van down the street. He was trembling inside with nervous agitation. This was all a bad idea, a reckless and stupid idea and he couldn’t believe he’d gone along with it. He should have known better.

“I don’t like this at all,” he said to Gaines. “She hasn’t said a thing in twenty minutes.”

“Give her time, just give her time. If she walks around in there talking to herself, it’ll tip Zero off. If he’s even around.”

Both of them, along with a technician who monitored the equipment, were wearing headsets. They heard nothing but silence.

“We should’ve put a man in there with her,” Fenn said for not the first time that night. He was worried and rightfully so, but he had to remain impartial. Anything less and he would lose his professional edge.

“She’s probably bored,” Gaines told him.

“Or scared to death.”

Fenn took his headset off and poured a cup of coffee from his Thermos. Lisa had been in the house since before ten, which was over two hours now. If Eddy got her message and didn’t scent a trap, he’d be showing up anytime, if he hadn’t already. And that’s what was really eating at Fenn. That Eddy had already gutted her and slipped away. But he couldn’t let himself think that. If he did, he’d go running over there right now and ruin everything. Besides, she was wearing a wire and the transmitter was a very sensitive piece of equipment. If there’d been a struggle or even if she’d been struck or fallen, they would’ve heard it.

“I don’t know,” the technician said. His name was Avery and he was a thin, sensitive black youth. He had intense, intelligent eyes that seemed to look right inside you, as if he was trying to see what sort of mechanism made you tick. Fenn had already decided he was probably the sort of guy who spent his free time taking electronic components apart and then reassembling them.

“What do you mean?” Gaines asked.

Avery shook his head. “We should be picking up something. Her footsteps, her breathing—something. I think … I think we’re getting dead air.”

Fenn dropped his coffee cup. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, something’s not right here.”

“Move ’em in,” he told Gaines and leapt out the door.

He was the first one in the house, but he could hear the sound of approaching feet. Lisa was sitting on the bottom step, her head in her hands.

“Lisa?” he said, his voice high with panic. “Are you all right?” He went to her side and she was still warm, still breathing. He thanked God for this.

“I’m okay,” she said in a low tone. “You don’t have to call in the Calvary.”

But it was too late. Five or six heavily armed cops in ballistic vests kicked through the door, scanning the dimness with automatic weapons.

“Search the place,” Fenn told them and they scattered in all directions.

“He never showed,” she told him. Her voice had a strange lilt to it and he didn’t care for it in the least.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.” She studied the floor. “Nothing at all. I think this place is getting to me. It makes you imagine things.”

“What sort of things?”

But she just shook her head and he wasn’t about to push matters. He helped her out to the van and they drove back to her hotel. He came up and she sat in a chair, falling asleep almost immediately. He lifted her into bed and covered her.

He kissed her cheek. “Sleep tight,” he said and let himself out.

When the door closed, she opened her eyes.

* * *

She was awake most of the night. Sleep was something for people with peaceful minds and easy hearts, not for those who feared they couldn’t distinguish between reality and nightmare.

What happened in the attic was a mindless plunge into blackness. It couldn’t have happened, not in any sane world, yet she knew it had. She knew all the symptoms of obsessive mania and hallucinatory delusion and suffered from not a one. Although she was feeling what Kierkegaard had deemed angst, an undefined anxiety, she was very much in command of her faculties.

As much as she’d suspected an underlying truth in what Spider had said, the confirmation of such was maddening. Some things were best left in a theoretical phase. But she had seen it. She had seen William Zero … or the hideous monster he’d become. He’d come back now, ripped asunder in some alien chasm and pieced back together to come calling. But it
was
him. There was no getting around that. He’d slipped away from the police some twenty years before and plunged head first into a private hell she knew only as the Territories.

And now he was back.

I knew you’d come eventually, Lisa.

He hadn’t threatened her, nor even attempted to reach out to her with his cancerous fingers. He smiled and asked only one thing: “Where is my son?” And that was enough of a question to rob the air from her lungs and drop her to her knees.

There’d been no other intercourse between them and if there had been, she feared her mind would’ve snapped like a stick of dry kindling and left her there, babbling and sobbing. He had departed the real then in a screaming rush of vacuum wind that shook the attic and nearly pounded the fillings from her teeth. He’d stepped
into
the mirror. Dust and dirt and splintered wood had rained down on her and then the attic was just the attic again, save for a sharp reek of ozone and death. The Territories had closed their loathsome gates with a huge, ripping sound and a reverberation of human screams. She’d found her way downstairs then. She couldn’t even remember exactly how, only a vague half-memory of crawling like a baby and weeping. The next thing she remembered was the door opening and Fenn coming to her rescue. The only evidence that it had happened at all was that her watch had stopped at exactly midnight.

She’d told Fenn nothing. She couldn’t bring herself to. Maybe later she would.

No, never,
she told herself.
I saw a man step through a mirror. I must be crazy
…
I have to be crazy
…

Yet, she knew she would have to tell Fenn. Eventually.

And even then, what would she tell him? That reality had gashed open, its very unstable material had ruptured and no blood had seeped from the wound, only a black portion of some impossible, grotesque world between worlds? Some quasi-dimension of insanity had poked out and Dr. Blood-and-Bones had paid his respects? What would he say to that? And if she had the mettle to bring that to her lips, shouldn’t she tell the rest, too? That William Zero, the very demented father of the very man they sought, had preyed upon her when she was an insecure, naïve teenager? That she had loved him even as he used her? Had harbored romantic visions of him even as he beat and sodomized her? That even if she had known, she might not have cared that he was off cutting up women when he wasn’t abusing her? What would he say then?
I understand why you chose psychiatry, Lisa, because you’re one screwed-up bitch.
And he wouldn’t have been far from the truth. Because she had chose it for that very reason. She’d hoped that understanding the human mind in general would help her understand her own tormented psyche in particular. Understand why she did what she did, why she chose the men she chose, why her desires were a direct contradiction to all she held sacred. And most importantly, once she’d discovered her old lover’s true identity, why she still held him in awe, still missed his perversions. And why she’d had something quite close to a sexual infatuation for his equally unstable son.

No, she could never tell him. He’d hate her if he knew what she was, who she was. Because no normal woman you could love felt the things she did, wanted the things she did. William Zero might have corrupted her impressionable mind at a very painful period in her life, but he’d eventually gone his own way and she’d been lost without him. And could she really point the finger at him for her inability to enjoy a healthy romantic or sexual relationship?

Her training told her no, not entirely. Every person is still their own master, still able to make their own decisions and choices.

It wasn’t a puzzle she could hope to solve. Her own mind was every bit as complex as any other. And she lacked the needed objectivity to approach it as a therapist.

And what about Cherry Hill?

What would Fenn say when she unloaded that little gem on him?

You let a psychopath free into the world and you never reported it?

Oh, Christ.

Yeah, Cherry was here, too, now. If things hadn’t been complicated or terrible enough before, now they were definitely worse. Lisa’s past mistakes were about to gang up on her. Fenn already had suspicions about Cherry and eventually she’d have to tell him about that, if nothing else. Which brought up an interesting point. When Soames was working for her, he never once mentioned anything about Cherry Hill. But now he had, to Fenn. What did that mean? Was that mysterious lead he was working on something about Cherry?

If Fenn or anyone else ever find out about the illegal drug trials on Cherry, you’ll not only lose your license but be charged with criminal negligence.

It was getting so complicated.

For now, certain questions remained. Mainly, why had Zero returned for his son? What was the purpose? Had he learned of Eddy’s desire to enter the darker realms of the Territories and was he now ready to unzip the bowels of the chasm, walking hand in hand into a living nightmare with his son? Was that it? It couldn’t be sheer coincidence that he’d chosen this particular time to reappear.

Before dawn she collapsed back in bed, exhausted from self-analysis and too many questions without sane answers. She closed her eyes and began to dream that Fenn was making love to her, sketching out his emotions and desires to her in a flurry of infantile kisses. There was no arousal for her, not until his face melted away and was replaced by that of William Zero.

Then there was no limit.

In the house he was renting, Eddy Zero was drinking and plotting out his next move. Spider was dead now, but his body was in the next room. Eddy had all the necessary materials to resurrect him now that he’d looted his flat, but actually going about it was another matter entirely. Spider’s notebooks spelled out in detail how it had to be done. But, of course, it was madness.

And Eddy wasn’t mad.

Just as corpses never live again.

The Shadows were mulling around him, excited at the prospect of a dead body rising up.

(bring him back eddy then we’ll have a place to call our own)

“It’s rubbish.”

(try it try it anyway)

“Not bloody likely. I’ve better things to do.”

(you promised him we heard you promise him you’d do it if he died)

“Leave me alone.”

(you promised)

“Fuck off.”

He started to pour himself another drink when he heard the front door open and close. He set his bottle down and sat silently. A thief? A looter? His fingers closed on the knife in his pocket and he turned off the lights. No one knew about this place but Spider and he. No one alive, that was.

The door to the living room swung open.

He saw a shape in the doorway.

“What do you want here?” he asked calmly.

There was no answer. The shape stood its ground.

“Well?”

There was a whisper of motion as the shape stepped into the room. “Turn on the light,” it said. “I’m a friend.”

That voice, that voice—

He turned on the light.

Cassandra stood there dressed in a skirt and blazer. His heart skipped a beat and for a moment he wasn’t sure whether he’d laugh or scream. He did neither. He just stared. She’d come back to him … not in cerements stained with grave dirt, but in skirt and blazer. Like a woman on her way to the office. There was something damnably funny about that—walking dead, business elite class.

“Don’t ogle me, Eddy. I’m not here to haunt you.”

“Then why … how?” He could barely speak. The words seem to rattle on his tongue.

“Unfinished business,” she said, sitting on the sofa and crossing her legs. “It’s rather irresponsible to die before your affairs are put in order.”

“I murdered you.”

“You did.”

“But you were dead, I saw—”

“Yes, yes, I’m dead, all right. Quit making a scene about it for God’s sake, will you?”

“I’m must be going crazy.” Feeling light-headed, he sank into a ratty chair. “Yes, that’s it. I’m a fucking lunatic.”

Cassandra laughed. “Of course you are. Like father, like son.”

“Maybe it’s really taking hold now.”

She laughed with a throaty croaking sort of sound. “Oh, I’m real enough, Eddy. Dead as a bag of drowned kittens, but real enough.”

His face was hanging, slack and sallow. “But how … how did you do it?”

“It’s a long and dreary story. Suffice to say I’m here and I forgive you for killing me.”

“It wasn’t my fault, the Shadows made me kill you.”

(you killed her because you wanted to we only unlocked your desires)

“You made me do it! You didn’t give me a choice!”

(don’t be such a baby be man enough to take responsibility for your actions your father ALWAYS took responsibility for his actions)

“I’m not my father!”

(pale imitation)

“Shut up!”

(The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree but this one has a worm in it)

Eddy clutched his hands to the side of his head. “Sometimes they won’t fucking shut up.”

“That’s some baggage you carry, darling,” Cassandra said. “Daddy’s pets, are they?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. They won’t leave.”

(give us spider’s body and we’ll leave you alone)

“It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?” Cassandra said. “Give them the carcass and they’ll be happy.”

Eddy looked up at her. “You … you can hear them?”

She nodded. “Of course. The dead can hear the dead just fine. Now tell me about Spider’s cabalism and alchemy. There’s nothing like a good resurrection for laughs.”

Eddy outlined the plan to her and showed her Spider’s books and notes. It was very detailed stuff. She studied them over for a time as she pulled off a cigarette and he wondered how it was she looked so good. Why, he could barely see a hack mark on her anywhere. Amazing, is what it was.