House of Skin (8 page)

But it would.

It had to and he knew it.

But there was always the present and it would have to enough. He could be with her now, listen to her voice, pretend that there was more here than there actually was. He told himself that he could merely ask her out to dinner, but he was afraid of the consequences. Her possible refusal was something he didn’t think he could bear. That it would end before it really began.

He almost wished he were still married so there would be a reason he couldn’t pursue her. If it hadn’t been for the mystery surrounding her, surrounding Soames, surrounding
all
of this, he would’ve fallen completely.

“What do you make of all the mirrors?” he asked. There were dozens upon dozens.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Zero had them installed here. We know that much. But not why.”

“Crazy fuck.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything here,” she said.

“No, I guess not. But we had to try.” He popped a couple of aspirins and chewed them vigorously, willing the headache not to start.

“You should do something about those headaches,” she said.

“I’ve tried. The doctors said there was nothing they could do.”

“How often do you get them?”

“Irregularly,” he lied. The truth being that they were starting to be very regular. “I’ve tried to figure out when they happen, like the doc said, so I could figure out if they were caused by some kind of stress. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason. They just happen.”

She touched his hand and it was nearly too much. “I want to thank you for being so helpful, Mr. Fenn,” she said. “This is probably all a wild goose chase. You’ve been very understanding, very cooperative.”

“Just doing my job,” he said and they both knew it was a lie.

They walked back to the car, each secretly relieved to be out of the house.

“What now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll spend a few more weeks at this. I’m not beaten yet. I know he’s here somewhere.”

Fenn started the car. “If there’s anything I can do …”

“I could go for a cup of coffee.”

“You had only to ask.”

He drove them quickly away from that malignant house and its decaying neighborhood. He chose a small diner that wasn’t far from his own apartment. They sat and drank their coffee and he asked her about herself and all the while he thought about other things. How her lips might feel against his. How she might smell if he held her close. How she might look in the morning.

He was more than a little surprised at himself. Although he’d been divorced some six years, he’d had few dates … outside of a few sleazy onenighters. Relationships could be ugly things, he knew, and he had no interest going back into that arena of psychological and emotional barbarity. And now this. He was quite happily falling in love like some giddy teenager. It was totally out of character for him. Yet, he was enjoying it. Enjoying the fact that love had put a new glow in his cheeks, new wind in his lungs, and a new and necessary need to keep living.

Last year, his fortieth birthday had come and gone and he’d consoled himself to the fact that this would never happen again. He was glad to be proven wrong.

His headache vanished as soon as they were free of the house.

* * *

When Lisa got back to her hotel room, she ordered some lunch and sat before the TV staring blindly at it. Things weren’t going well and even she saw this. San Francisco was a huge city and there were hundreds of places someone like Eddy Zero could hide.

She had only enough money to last a month, no more.

Maybe she’d been deluding herself into thinking that four weeks would be enough time to find and contain him. It took Soames three times as long just to locate him in the first place. Eddy could’ve been in another city entirely or out of the country for that matter. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe that. He was here, somewhere. And the murder of that girl in the old house only made her more sure of it.

It was over two years since the last time she’d seen Eddy. And in that time, her desire to work with him again had never dimmed. She supposed she was infatuated with him. Not physically, not emotionally, but professionally. A psychiatrist could spend a lifetime and never hope to meet a patient as interesting or challenging as Eddy Zero. He was the ultimate study. A pure psychopath who broke all of the rules and set new ones.

She pushed away from her lunch and went down to her rented car. She knew where she was going, even if she refused to even think about it. It took her about thirty minutes to reach Zero’s house.

The House of Mirrors.

The atmosphere of gloom and depravity was the same as she pushed through the door. But it meant nothing, she told herself, merely an association the mind made with an old, empty house that had been the scene of several grisly crimes. She went up the stairs and stood for a time in the hallway where the girl had been first stabbed. There was some dried blood spattering the walls. Just a few drops, but enough to kick her heart into her throat.

She went from room to room looking for she knew not what. She was here purely on impulse and nothing more. She felt like a fool for even coming. In such a neighborhood, she’d be lucky if her car was still there when she returned to it. And there were worse possibilities. She was a woman alone in an empty house in a bad neighborhood. If someone had been watching her, they might’ve followed her in. Things like that happened. And if she was raped or murdered, who would hear her screams in this huge, enclosing tomb? And if they did, would they even care? Unlikely. People in this quarter were desensitized to such things long ago. Just another screaming woman.

The police had been all over this place, she knew, as had Fenn and she. Nothing of any possible bearing had been left behind. She passed the door which led to the attic and stopped. Did she really want to go up there? Alone? The attic was where Dr. Blood-and-Bones and his associates had done their bits of work. But that was twenty years past and she didn’t believe in ghosts.

It was a nasty place, brimming with hate and pain. She told herself it was simple association once again, but she couldn’t believe it this time. The beams overhead were festooned with cobwebs, the warped flooring layered in dust and grime. It took great personal strength for her to proceed. In her mind, she saw the crime photos of this place that she knew so well. The blood, the carnage, the skins tacked to the walls. It seemed she could smell them, ripe and sour like hides stacked outside a skinning shack.

“It’s nothing,” she said aloud and continued on. The sound of her voice echoing and dying, being sucked into these rotting timbers that had known so much horror, was disturbing somehow. She rounded a bend and a damp, dirty smell touched her nostrils. The floor here had been vacuumed of dust, even the paint seemed to have been leeched free. There was a dead thing resting in a circle of clean: a twisted clot of bone and fur boiled into a central mass. A cat, maybe. Its blood and meat was gone, blasted from the bone by some impossible, hungry wind. She’d never seen anything like it. Even the bones themselves looked pitted, abraded somehow. There were bits of flesh clinging to the nearest wall like blown insulation. A full-length mirror hung there, its pane caked with twenty years of filth.

What could’ve happened to the poor creature?

None of this had been in evidence before. It had happened since she and Fenn had been here earlier. In those few short hours.

She found her feet and ran downstairs and out to her car. Her breath was coming in raw gasps and her heart thudded like a drum. And it had little to do with exertion.

She drove away, her mind filled with hideous thoughts.

* * *

When Lisa got back to her rooms, the phone rang. It was Fenn.

“There’s been another murder,” he said.

“Where?”

“Near the shore. We think the body was dumped there. It was hacked up pretty good. Not like the girl in the house. More methodical.”

“It’s him,” she said breathlessly.

“Maybe.”

“It
is.”

“You can’t know that, Doc.”

“It’s him. I know it now,” was all she would say.

“Something else, too,” he said with a sigh. “It’s probably unrelated, but it concerns our Jane Doe. She was going to be buried tomorrow, but there was a fire at the mortuary. They’re still sifting through the ashes. So far, they haven’t found her remains.”

Lisa felt something twist in her chest. Somehow, this wasn’t unexpected.

In Fenn’s dream, he was alone.

It was the single constant in these nightmares. Loneliness, solitude, madness. He was cold, freezing. He was naked and his skin was covered with gooseflesh that felt oddly like tiny bubbles ready to pop.

He was in a tiny room by himself, trapped in a square of blackness. He felt someone near … but where? Neither here nor there, but near and far, within and without.

He swept his eyes around in the mulling blackness, but could see no one or nothing. His fingers pulled at the length of rope and the coil of leather that held it to his ankle. As usual, they were immovable. Yet, he pulled, he worked, he strained against his bonds until his fingers ached and his heart pounded with ever-weakening, ever-irregular rhythms.

Beads of sweat stood out on his face and they felt huge and oily rolling down his cheeks. Maybe not sweat but blood. Coagulated blood. He could taste it on his lips—coppery and foul.

I’m bleeding to death, he thought, and there was no fear, only acceptance.

He reached out and the walls were made of glass. Moisture was beaded on them … or was it blood? His blood? That of someone else?

He looked up and there was a tiny slit of light. There were eyes in the slit, flat, emotionless, evil eyes. The eyes of a tormentor. A reptile.

He heard a voice: distant, cool, clinical. Was it asking him questions? The language was garbled like some guttural foreign tongue.

The eyes kept watching, detached, amused.

“Mama, mama, mama,” he heard a voice say and it was his own. “Don’t leave me here … the bad man’s back again … mama? Please … mama …”

The eyes were staring, blatantly amused.

In the distance, a voice began to drone.

A drop of wetness struck his head.

Then another. And another.

A trickle of wetness now.

The eyes were watching.

The wetness was running down his face in warm streams. Water? Blood? Both and neither? The voice droned on. The eyes blinked and kept watching. He heard a broken sobbing coming from his throat and he was not frightened.

He was not afraid.

He was not afraid.

He began to scream.

The voice, the voice …

And then Fenn was awake, pushed up against the wall, his fingers pressed into the cracks of the cool plaster. With a tiny cry he pulled himself away and mopped sweat from his brow and under his eyes.

I’m going crazy, he thought, and the idea was terrifying.

I’m going crazy because only crazy people dream the same thing night after night after night. I’m losing my mind just like Soames.

Yet he knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t going mad and the dream didn’t happen every night. Maybe once or twice a week. But that was up from one or twice a month as it had been in the past. When had he last had it? Two nights ago. It was happening with greater frequency now. There was no denying it. And when things happen with frequency you can believe there is a reason for it.

Take it easy, he told himself. You’re under a lot of stress right now what with Eddy fucking Zero and Lisa Lochmere. You’re okay. Just keep a lid on it.

Keep a lid on it?

Sure, sure. Keep that lid screwed down tight until the pressure gets to be too much and it pops open. That’s why they call it flipping your lid.

He reached over for the glass of water he’d left on the nightstand. He drank down what was left of it. Then he lit a cigarette.

The eyes, he thought, those goddamned eyes. And that voice. What the hell did it all mean?

Dreams were symbolic weren’t they? Some said that. Others said they were just the mind’s way of cleaning out the trash, sweeping the cellar of the subconscious clean for the day. If that was true, then he needed a bigger broom, because something in there wasn’t moving. It was snagged like a nail in a wall.

He thought, for not the first time, of talking to Lisa about it. But he couldn’t and he wouldn’t. He didn’t want her thinking he was some nut.

She wouldn’t think that.

But maybe his greatest fear was that if he talked about it, he’d lose it completely and end up spending his days strapped to a cot like Soames.

He butted his smoke and closed his eyes.

There were no dreams.

It was late and Spider was still in bed.

Like a mountain moonflower, he rarely bloomed before darkness. There was nothing supernatural about this, he simply hated daylight. He hated the noise and the confusion and the crowds and most particularly, the people themselves. Staring at him. Always staring at him.

It was like he was freak or something.

The night was better. There were plenty of shadows to hide in, plenty of dark cubbyholes to lose yourself in. His particular eccentricities were well masked by the gloom. And in the seamy night world of San Francisco, he fit right in.

He pulled himself out of bed and went to the window. The moon was rising in the sky.

Out there, somewhere, he knew, the police were probably scurrying about like worrisome ants, trying to restore law and order. There was a killer in their midst, they probably thought. And they were right, or nearly so. But they didn’t understand anything but the feeble evidence their near-sighted eyes gave them. And it was precious little of the big picture. They knew a murder had been committed, a young woman had been butchered, her life taken. But they didn’t know
why.
They and their attendant psychiatrists probably thought the motive was lust or dementia. But it was neither. The reasons were far beyond what their limited mentalities could grasp.