Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Skinned Angels KATHRYN PTACEK

Jim didn’t want to go into the shop, but his wife insisted. ‘We’re tourists, and we should be doing touristy things,’ she said.

He relented. After all, it was his vacation — their vacation — and they were out to have fun, or at least that was the theory. Poking around in old shops was his wife’s idea of amusement; it wasn’t his, but he wanted to please her. They’d had some problems recently, and this trip to Santa Fe was one of the things they’d thought might start to help.

The bell clanged over the door as Jim pushed the glass door open. Immediately he wrinkled his nose. Old dust, dried herbs, perfumes and spicy incense assaulted his senses, and beneath it was the smell of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He wanted to sneeze, but managed to control it.

Bev was already across the room, examining some rugs heaped into mounds along one side of the store. They had a handful of Indian rugs in their house and he hoped she wouldn’t insist that they buy some more. He didn’t know why he resisted everything; it wasn’t as if buying one more rug would break them financially, and he actually liked Indian rugs quite a lot. ‘You’re so negative,’ Bev accused him, and she was right. He was negative, but he couldn’t seem to help it.

No, he amended with a faint smile, he was positive he was negative.

He ambled over to the ramshackle bookcase that all these stores along this little Santa Fe street — hardly more than a burro lane, really — seemed to have and scanned the titles. Most were in Spanish, which he didn’t know despite having lived in New Mexico for over thirty years. He had avoided learning the language, although he didn’t know why because he spoke German and French, and could make himself pretty well understood in Italian. Spanish should have come to him so easily. But he hadn’t wanted to learn it, hadn’t seen the need, despite working with Spanish-speaking men and women ever since he got out of college.

You’re just being stubborn, his mother used to say. And she was right.

Stubborn and negative, he thought, and wondered how anyone stood him.

He took a look around the store and saw some leather goods — boots and saddles mostly — in one section, some bright clothing hanging from a few racks, a chest that looked like it had numerous little perfume bottles on it, and all around the room stood case after case of jewellery.

If they ever outlawed jewellery in Santa Fe, the city would go belly-up, he thought. That’s fairly uncharitable, he realized. He could add that to his long list of growing sins.

The autumn light filtered in through the dirty window and he felt warm standing in front of the bookcase. It was a comfortable feeling, and for a moment he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to do anything, and it was as if he’d gone into another dimension because he couldn’t hear anyone, couldn’t smell anything, not even the too-sweet perfumes and incense. It was just him and the bright sunshine, and—

‘Jimmy, come look at this!’

The sound of his wife’s voice was like the ripping of a membrane, and he shook himself, almost more a shudder. He left the mildewing tomes and headed across the room. At first he couldn’t locate her, then he saw her standing at a counter. She was being waited on by an old man.

He became aware then that there were two girls — excuse me, he chided himself, that was young women these days — standing not far from Bev, pointing at something in the glass case; one was talking while the other giggled. He came up alongside his wife and smiled automatically. If he did anything else, she’d want to know what was wrong, and he would say nothing was wrong, but she wouldn’t believe him, and they’d go back and forth like that until something was the matter.

‘Look, Jimmy, aren’t they great?’ She dangled a pair of silver earrings from her fingers, while the clerk smiled expectantly at him. She was waiting, he knew, for his response. His positive response.

‘They’re nice, honey. Really nice.’ Actually he thought they looked like a dozen or more other pairs of earrings she had pawed through in the dozen or more other shops they’d stopped in today.

There you go exaggerating, his teachers said, that’s very unprofessional and unnecessary.

These earrings, though, had inlaid turquoise in the silver triangles, and were pretty in an unflashy way. But still.

She was watching him, waiting for him to speak the magic words, although she hardly needed permission.

‘Well, Bev, if you want them, go ahead and buy them.’ His smile widened, and it seemed like his face was about to crack open. There, he’d said them. She had dozens of earrings in her jewellery cases, maybe more, and she had her own income and didn’t need his permission to buy anything, but she always waited for him to say that.

She looked at the old man and shook her head. ‘Not quite right. What else do you have?’

Jim never understood that, either. He said the so-called magic words, thinking she wanted to hear him say it was all right to buy whatever, and then she always put the item back. As if she no longer wanted it. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t say go ahead and buy it/them/whatever. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to find out, at least not now. This was, after all, their reconciliation trip.

For the next half hour Bev examined all the silver earrings in the three trays the old guy put up on the counter. She held one from each pair up to an ear and asked Jim for his opinion, and he smiled, his face now feeling frozen into that expression, and she’d sigh and put the earring down and pick up the next one. She went through a fourth tray, then decided to look at rings, trying each one on. The minutes ticked by, and Jim shifted from one foot to another. Behind him the warm sunshine tugged, and he wanted to stand there in the golden light and pretend to read the titles of the books even though he wasn’t cold or anything, but he knew the minute he did, Bev would call to him.

And he would go to her, like an obedient dog.

He sighed.

The girls were still there, and now they were talking louder, or maybe he was listening more carefully, and the brunette was examining a strand of pale coral called angel skin. It was more white than pink, and he’d never seen coral that colour. She was talking about how it was formed from the bodies of dead sea creatures. The other girl interrupted.

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Trisha. Actually, you see, angels die, and their skins just sort of slough off and drift down from Heaven into the seas, and the coral forms from the skins.’

Next to him he sensed Bev crossing herself, and he felt a surge of annoyance at the gesture. She didn’t go to church, hadn’t been in one since before they got married — at least she couldn’t blame him for that — but she still crossed herself. She still had her rosary, and he always wondered why, when she’d turned her back on the church when her faith seemed so strong. His faith had left him years ago; one day he had it, the next it was gone, and he hadn’t stepped inside a church since, hadn’t felt the need, didn’t know why anyone did.

You just don’t understand. That was Bev’s voice, and his mother’s, and maybe that girl back in high school, the one he had dated in junior year.

It occurred to him that all the little things that annoyed him about his wife were probably what bothered her about him. Only more so, since he’d been told enough by her and his parents and everyone else that he had numerous faults. Sometimes at night as he lay next to Bev and listened to her wheezy breaths he wondered why she had married him if he possessed all these character flaws. It wasn’t like he’d changed radically after marriage. He was basically the same as when he got out of college. Marriage hadn’t made him any better or any worse. He thought. He was sure there were others who could tell him different.

Maybe Bev was one of those women who see a flawed man as a challenge and think that once they’ve married him they can change him, as if he were so much clay to be moulded by her perfecting hands.

Or perhaps she liked the thrill of marrying a man so far from perfection.

Or maybe she married him, despite what everyone counselled her, because she was the type to defy everyone’s good intentions.

Or maybe she just hadn’t seen any of these flaws.

‘Let me look at some coral,’ Bev was saying now.

Well, there was white coral and red coral and blue coral, and God knows what other colours waiting in other velvet trays. Out of the corner of his eye Jim could see dust motes swirling in the rays still streaming through the window. They drifted downwards, and he remembered what the girl had said. Skins drifted downwards. He felt the pull of the light, and yawned lazily.

Of course, there were single strand necklaces, and double strands, as well as triple. There were smooth beads, hardly larger than the thread used to string them; there were chunks of coral, and there was the branch coral that looked like so many fingers and toes hardened into bizarre angles.

Bizarre angels, he thought, and chuckled aloud, then looked away as he saw the old man and Bev staring at him.

You always laugh at your own jokes, she had once accused him after they’d argued about God knows what, and he always wondered what kind of vice that was. If that was the worst he’d ever done. laugh at his own jokes…then…But unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst of his sins. His sins were many. Sometimes they seemed to go on and on, page after page.

Sins of stubbornness, and negativity, and insensitivity, and pride. Could one be proud of the number of sins one carried around?

Probably.

Mea culpa.

‘What do you think, Jimmy?’

‘It’s nice, hon,’ he replied and realized he hadn’t even looked. He stared down at the necklace she’d clasped around her neck, and he imagined his hands around her neck, and how it would feel. Her skin so warm beneath his, and he shifted from one foot to another, feeling the response in his body.

Swell. Add another sin to the list.

He moved closer and dropped a kiss on top of her head. Okay, that took care of the sin. She looked up at him, her thin lips pressed together, as if he’d goosed her or something.

‘My hair. it’ll get mussed,’ she said.

Good God. He’d just kissed her; he hadn’t vacuumed her damned scalp, and if you asked him, her hair always looked the same, no matter what she did to it, no matter what colour she dyed it, and why she always asked him—

No, he thought and blinked hard and turned around to look at the light. It was fading now, the sun having shifted since he’d last looked, and sadness enveloped him. He wanted to go stand there, and let the dust drift around him, like little skins, drifting downward ever so slowly, drifting, drifting. drifting.

‘What do you think, senor?’ the old man asked.

‘What?’Jim turned around.

‘The necklace,’ Bev said, impatient that he hadn’t been attending every nuance of the deal going on, and she thrust a strand at him.

He took the necklace, and it was as if something at once both hot and cold touched him; he stared down at the white coral and thought of skinned angels. He felt the warmth of their skins seeping out, the coldness of the water creeping in, saw the agonized looks, saw—

He shook his head.

‘No?’ Bev said. ‘What about this?’

The next necklace thrust into his hands was a double strand of reddish coral, and he saw the blood swirling through the water, felt the coldness of the skins, and yet they were so soft, so pliant beneath his fingers, and he caressed the coral, and heard the screams, and he looked up to see the old man watching him intently.

‘This is nice,’ he said hoarsely, and the old man nodded as if he’d expected all along Jim to say that.

‘I don’t know,’ Bev said. She grabbed another strand and put that into his hands, and now he had another soft buttery skin beneath his fingertips, and as he stroked the supple skins, he groaned inwardly.

‘Well, Jimmy?’

‘Well?’ He stared at her, feeling befuddled. His senses had dulled, and he couldn’t smell the intense perfumes and spices as he had before, couldn’t hear much of anything as well, as if even the girls standing so close to him had stopped talking loudly and were now whispering.

He closed his eyes and thought about Bev and how their marriage was falling apart and how they didn’t have the good sense to admit it, and how he wanted nothing more than to make the marriage… to make something in his life work, how he wanted to make everyone realize they were wrong when they said he was stubborn and negative and callous, and all he wanted, really, was to stand in the sunlight and be left alone and not be told that he was this or that, all of it bad.

When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in the warm sunlight, looking out the window. Outside he could see Bev crossing the street at the corner, and at her side, but one step behind, was a man that he dimly recognized, and it hit him after a vague minute that the man with Bev was him.

Jim tried to move, but couldn’t. All he could do was stare out the window and feel the dust motes settling on him, like little dried-out angel skins, like the dried-out husk that he’d become, that Bev had turned him into.

He would have laughed, but he couldn’t. Nor could he weep. All he could do was feel the sunlight, and realize that the underlying smell of the place hadn’t been perfume or incense at all; it had been that of dusty dying souls.