House of Skin

There are places death goes.

A multitude of dead-ends and vacant quarters that it inhabits and calls its own. Abandoned cemeteries and forgotten crossroads where the night winds play and whisper in the tongues of lost souls. Dusty crematoria and dank crypt, prison, madhouse, and morgue. Cancer wards and slaughterhouses where the reek and scream of tortured life cling like grave mold or a child’s echoing cry. Death lives on the razored edges of knives and surgical equipment. On the tips of fingers and tongues, in concentration camps and marriage beds, in cribs and mausoleums alike. Death is everywhere, sewn into the tattered, unwoven fabric of reality.

There is nowhere Death doesn’t go, no hole too deep or altar too sanctified. And it is most at home in the twisted dreams and anguished thoughts of men and women.

It has a special place here.

It moves without check, in places where the living and dead mingle. Where the insane and the sane wear the same brooding faces. It lives in the dreamscapes where men deflower a thousand lovers, their children, and ultimately themselves. Where women mate and kill and destroy everything but their own vanity.

And sometimes death visits the same houses and buildings and thoroughfares that these same men and women call their own. This time it chose an old and crumbling house of filthy brick and here it looked for answers.

The aura of decay and depravity and human suffering was nearly overwhelming. Droplets of rain entered through the sagging, patched roof and fell into the attic. The air was pungent with the stink of rotting plaster and mice-gnawed wallpaper, the windows grimy, the floors uneven, and the walls bowed.

Death had heard things about this place, tales of madness and horror. Stories of unspeakable atrocities and blatant perversities committed behind these graying, powdery walls. So it came, hungry to learn more, looking for something, anything to call its own in this lifeless place that was untenanted by even rats or spiders or termites or silverfish.

Within the walls, reality and unreality were evenly balanced, like light and shadow at twilight or madness and sanity in the mind of a desperate man.

There are places death goes.

I know these places, for they are mine.