House of Skin (43 page)

“Come with me now,” he managed.

She looked from him to the hole in reality that was rapidly expanding.

She was the cause of all of this. In her own way, she had been. Her insistence on finding Eddy and conquering him and her own confused psychology had started this all into motion in the first place. Eddy Zero was dead, but a much more degenerate and vicious version of him lived on in Cherry and this, too, was her doing. Everything begins somewhere, with some random act, and she had set this terrible wheel of fate into motion. She tried to convince herself it wasn’t true, but there was no getting around the cold and cruel facts. Her lust, her desires, her memories of something too horrible to remember, too wonderful to forget, had been her undoing and that of countless innocents. She had unearthed this nightmare, freed it from its noxious grave of aspiration and now she was about to be swallowed alive and screaming by it.

Spider was getting close now.

She opened her mouth to protest, to scream perhaps, and then she saw Eddy bearing down on his dead compatriot. When Spider was a few feet from her, the blade of Eddy’s knife exploded from his throat and sawed his bobbing head nearly free. Spider went down in a heap of dust and fragmented flesh. Eddy began hacking at him, stealing the life he had given, slicing him apart like a moth-eaten rag doll. It was all done quite effortlessly. There was little holding Spider together by that point, save spit and determination. When Eddy was done, all that remained was a filthy pile of something that looked more like parched, slashed rags than a thing that had once boasted flesh and blood.

“I should’ve done that a long time ago,” Eddy told her.

There was a sudden hissing, howling eruption of black steam from Spider’s remains. The Shadows that had hidden in his putrid folds were oozing forth now, looking for a new home. She could see their faces as they departed the shredded cadaver in undulating, twisting balloons of murk. And such faces. They were men, women, and children, these faces, victims all of gruesome deaths and ghastly survival. There were tales to be told in their rolling black eyes, atrocities to be recorded. Bits of pain and madness and sheer horror; fragments of laughter, love, and loneliness. They were a livid, vaporous catalog of humanity and inhumanity, a parade of mankind and its multitude of sufferings.

She watched them light into the air like flies and they watched her.

There was nothing even remotely human left in them now. Those things had long ago been dispersed like ash in the wind and only a reflection of it remained in their hollow, searching eyes. These were beast of hate and lust and depravity, killers and victims all, bound by psychotic aspiration into one loathsome volume of excessive wants.

And what did they want? Why, a place to hide.

But none was offered.

They pressed in around Lisa in a polluted mass, sniffing and tasting and teasing her flesh and thoughts. They quickly abandoned her and sought Eddy like a train seeking a tunnel, punching right into him.

He wasn’t alarmed, only irritated.

“And now for you,” he said.

He seemed to glide in her direction, the knife describing elaborate arcs in the screaming, tattered wind. She had no weapon, no hope of salvation. He was going to cut her wide so the Shadows would have a new home to brood and scheme in and he would have a lover to carry into the chasm.

He brought the knife up to strike, but a voice stayed it.

“She is lovely. So very pretty.”

The voice of a woman, but scratching and dry and inhuman. Lisa smelled a sharp, almost violent odor of skinned minks and rancid pelts.

Dear God,
she thought,
The Sisters.

At least, one of them. It was something from a freak show, a grotesque sculpture of rolling meat scarified by a surgeon’s knife, a grisly anatomy display sewn together from a dozen separate corpses. A woman, yes, but obscenely bloated, discolored oil oozing from her pores with a sweet, revolting stink of musk. Her breasts were immense, perfectly round and hard-nippled, absolutely succulent with life. As Lisa stared at her with barely concealed horror, she saw her body was really a mass of writhing, porcine flesh horribly intersected by dozens of converging sutures that were almost artistically patterned in her skin like intricate tattooing. There was a dark beauty to it
and
her, from the blood-oiled hair to the flawless bubble gum pink of her rounded hips.

Haggis Sardonicus,
a voice like a tolling funeral bell said in the back of Lisa’s brain. Yes, that was her name. And all who looked upon her knew it.

“You didn’t lie, Eddy. She is exquisite,” the Sister said, grinning like a scythe. She studied her prey with glossy purple-red eyes like a dog appraising a shank of bloody meat. They seemed to bulge from their flayed sockets.

Lisa tried crawl away until her back ran into the wall. Oh no, she would not escape this. There was no way this horror would let her slip through its ensanguined fingers. Just no way.

As Sister Sardonicus approached her, Lisa saw that her body was roiling with fleshy pulsations as if there was boiling lava beneath it. It moved and shuddered and shivered and she saw faces, dozens of tiny plum-sized embryonic faces pushing from the mass against the veneer of skin like the faces of dolls pressed against a sheet of Saran Wrap.

Lisa screamed.

And as she did, Haggis Sardonicus seemed to deflate until she was skeletal and machined-looking, her face like some carven fetish mask with ruby eyes set in gouged, upturned slits. The skull beneath had the appearance of something whittled and pared from bone, the skin covering it looking braided and beaded and ritualistically slit with tribal cicatrisation. Her lipless mouth revealed gums like raw meat and yellow tusklike teeth.

“I told you you would like her,” Eddy said. “She likes to squirm, she likes to squeal, and she likes to scream.”

The Sister smiled like death, her sutured face moving uneasily over muscle and sinew, a fluid jigsaw puzzle. “Don’t quiver with fear,” she said to Lisa. “I can smell the heat between your legs. I can taste your need. You’re
our
kind. You’re hungry.”

She turned to Eddy. “Come here, Eddy,” she said.

He dropped the knife and did as he was told, stumbling into her enclosing arms as she bloated to impossible dimensions. His fingers, long denied the mysteries of her flesh, explored freely now, teasing and twisting her pendulant breasts which expunged droplets of milk like shimmering pearls, his fingers disappearing beneath the skin and locating treats that hid below. He was drawn into her, his flesh bisecting her own, drawn in, erection and body alike. For a moment they seemed to be nothing but a tangle of limbs and blubber and then Eddy was cast away, seed running from his cock.

Lisa was whimpering now and not because of what she had seen, but what was seeing her: Haggis Umbilicus. She came out of the darkness, the birth cord connecting her to her sister like a flaccid fireman’s hose. Lisa could barely take in what she was seeing: an immense bag of leathery flyblown skins and stretched hides that flapped like sails caught in a high wind. A semi-human monster composed of living witch skirts stitched together with thongs of gut that burst their seams randomly to reveal ropes of creeping entrails within. Its head was a mop of writhing scarlet ribbon worms that crawled free of a puckered corpse face, the mouth suckering like that of a leech. It had one bleached, yolky eye darting in a shriveled socket.

Haggis Umbilicus,
Lisa heard in the back of her mind.

This was the end. It had to be. Zero had lied to her. He had set her up for this great fall into insanity. Cassandra had betrayed her. There was nothing left now. Nothing at all.

She screamed again as Sister Sardonicus plied her hair with distended, oily fingers, orgasmic moans making her swollen lips tremble.

Lisa pulled away. Sardonicus looked unhappy, as if Lisa really were her only child.

“Where are you, you bastard?” she screeched into the void as her mind began to come apart.
“We had a deal! You wanted your son and he’s here! Take him for God’s sake! Stop this!”

Sardonicus snatched Lisa’s ankle as she tried to crawl away, pulling her back. Her eyes were huge and red like arterial blood, her tongue shuddering in the air in a perverse simulation of cunnilingus.

“Zero!” Lisa cried out, her sanity sinking fast. “If you ever cared for me, if you ever pretended to, stop this! For the love of Christ,
stop this!”

The Sister’s swollen tongue was tasting her calf now, drawing upwards, upwards in a burning wake.

“Edward,” a voice said, almost playfully.

The Sister’s stopped, as did Eddy.

Dr. Blood-and-Bones stepped into this arena of lunacy and his blanched eyes swept the room. His disfigured face literally cracked into a lewd mockery of a smile and his maimed anatomy pulsed through rents in his clothing and the threadbare stitching that held him together.

“Are we playing?” he inquired.

Haggis Sardonicus looked guilty as if she’d been caught at a naughty game.

“Father?”
Eddy said, his features unstable.

Lisa could see bits of Cherry trying to insinuate themselves. Not now, she thought in desperation, for the love of God.

“Yes, my boy,” the good doctor said. “I’ve come to take you home.”

“He’s ours,” Sardonicus purred. “You can’t have him. We’ve worked very hard for this one.”

“There’ll be others,” Zero assured them.

“No …”

He held up his book. They fell silent at the sight of it, knowing what he could do with it. “But you can help,” he promised.

Lisa remembered Fenn and went to him. He was drifting in the air like a man in a hammock. She pulled him to her and they stumbled to the floor. His eyes flickered open.

“What the hell is this?” he asked, looking around.

“And who is this?” Zero asked, stepping in their direction and stroking his withered chin. “Who is this, exactly?” He stepped even closer. “What’s your name, friend. Tell me.”

Fenn’s eyes were staring, confused. Everything Lisa said was true, he now knew, and the revelation of this was staggering. He couldn’t seem to find his voice.

Zero started to laugh. “Your name is Fenn.”

“Yes.”

“And how are the headaches, dear sir? Do they plague you often?”

“How did you …”

“You’re haunted by memories you do not understand, a déjà vu that torments you continually … am I correct?”

Fenn looked shocked. The headache was back and he grimaced in pain. This was the big one he’d been waiting for. The final attack that would destroy him.

Zero was grinning now. “The seeds one plants,” he mused. “You never know what sort of fruit they’ll blossom.”

Fenn looked at Lisa. “What the fuck is he talking about?”

But Lisa didn’t know. The Sister’s didn’t know. And Eddy didn’t know. But they were all waiting to find out.

“The Templar Society,” Zero said. “Do you remember any of it?”

Fenn just stared.

“When things were coming to a close, when our Mr. Soames was beginning to ask too many questions, things had to be done. Grimes committed suicide, weak and soft thing that he was,” Zero told them. “That left only Stadtler and myself. Something had to be done with him. He couldn’t be trusted.”

“You have Eddy,” Lisa said. “Let us go.”

Zero continued undaunted. “Something had to be done. I had mastered a technique of personality transference. After a period of deprivation and harassment and the use of psychotropic drugs and hallucinogenic reinforcement, it was possible to destroy a person’s psyche … wipe it clean. I didn’t want to kill Stadtler, so I decided to give him a new personality. I had already selected individuals of the exact physical make-up as Grimes and Stadtler, in case I wanted to toy with their minds. The rest was simple.”

Fenn was quiet; he had no words to say.

Lisa wasn’t sure what this was about, but the possibility of what he was saying was professionally fascinating.

“It took some months to break down Stadtler, but I did it. After which, I had him listen to recordings of the life of the man he was to become. He listened and listened and listened. Soon, he knew nothing else. With the use of hypnosis and drug therapy, I completed the transference.”

“What’re you talking about?” Eddy asked.

“I’m talking about my friend Stadtler and who he became.”

But Lisa was way ahead of him. She knew. She knew everything now.

Fenn just stared.

“Stadtler became Mr. Fenn. And he’s been hiding in that guise for some years.”

Fenn was on his feet, one hand clutched to his exploding head, the other waving his gun about. “You … lie,” he said between clenched teeth. “You … lying sonofabitch … I know who I am …”

“Jim! Jim, just wait,” Lisa said. “What kind of game is this, Zero? If he’s not Fenn, then where—”

“You’ll find the real James Fenn in a shallow grave at the rear of the house.” He almost seemed pained that it had to come out. “Fenn was selected because of his uncanny resemblance to Stadtler and the fact that he had no family, no friends. He was clay waiting to be formed. A body waiting for a life.”

Fenn screamed something, struggling with the handcuffs that held him. He jerked and twisted, his face contorted with hatred. Zero stepped over to him, then his coat fluttered open and his disfigured anatomy was revealed. As Lisa watched, it opened, it unzipped, and a terrible wind began. Fenn screamed once before the flesh left his bones in a noisome vapor and was sucked into Zero’s body cavity. All that was left were bones.

Lisa started to scream and she might never have stopped, if it weren’t for a voice.

“What a display.” Cassandra’s voice.

They all turned to see her troop in with a collection of women fresh from their graves.

“A party,” one said.

“Such a party,” said another.

They began to clap and shout at Zero’s handiwork, jumping and screeching, losing bits of themselves in the process.

Cassandra went to Lisa and pulled her to her feet. “It’s all right now, dear,” she said. “Eddy wanted some friends to come along and I’ve brought just the ones.”