House of Skin

ALONE IN THE HOUSE OF MIRRORS (2)

It was the night of nights.

Lisa had spent the previous day visiting the house and now it was time for her all-night vigil. If Eddy had seen her message, then she was sure he would come. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.

There were police everywhere nearby and all it would take was one word from her and they’d come running, yet she was terrified. Her head spun with a raw and ominous sense of dread. She couldn’t stop thinking about the smoldering cigarette butt she’d seen and who had left it. She’d seen or heard nothing at the house after her first visit, although she hadn’t dared go beyond the entry.

She brought a small flashlight, but it probably wouldn’t be necessary to use it. Equal portions of moonlight and streetlight were spilling in through innumerable rents in the walls and the broken windows. She kept one hand in her pocket on the butt of the .38 and she had no intention of letting go of it. The safety was off and her finger sweated on the trigger. One slight tug was all it would take. It gave her a fleeting sense of security.

“I think I’ll take a walk upstairs,” she whispered into the microphone at her lapel. The thought that someone friendly was hearing her words was comforting.

She went directly to the attic door and found it standing open. Had she closed it? Probably not since she’d been in a bit of a hurry and closing doors hadn’t been of primary importance.

There were great gaping holes in the roof, and the attic was positively glowing with light. It almost seemed luminous. She went in and immediately regretted it. There was another dead animal on the floor, possibly a rat, its flesh stripped clean, moonlight gleaming off its vertebrae. She turned on the flashlight and studied its denuded corpse. There was very little but polished bone and scraggly bits of dark fur. Again, she saw the floor was vacuumed clean of dust, meticulously robbed of anything but the wood itself. And again, the motion of the sucking disturbance indicated that it had started with the rat and ended with a vortex near the wall. At the foot of the full-length mirror.

“My God,” she said and then remembered she was being listened to. “Just a dead rat.”

She went over to the mirror and touched its surface.

It was warm. Terribly so.

And what exactly did that mean?

She turned and studied the message she had left. A black insanity itched in the back of her mind. No other message had been left, but hers was smeared as if by a passing hand.

A board creaked somewhere. She spun around, playing the light about.

Nothing. She was quite alone, her eyes told her, yet her other senses disagreed. There was something here out of the ordinary. She just couldn’t put a finger on what it was.

“Is someone here?” she asked in a weak voice. There was no answer to her query and she was glad of it. “Guess not.”

There was a clicking in the wall: slow, insistent. The result of some nocturnal insect worrying at the plaster, she reasoned. A deathwatch beetle, as they were known. As she listened, it stopped. Then stillness: heavy and sullen.

She heard something else suddenly, a dragging sound down in the hallway below. With her heart in her throat, she turned off the flashlight and tightened her sweaty grip on the .38. The sound had died now. She started down the stairs, running her free hand along the wall of the narrow passage. Then she was at the door and there was nothing to do but open it. And she did, knowing a fear that was absolute.

The corridor was empty.

But there was an odor again, of tobacco—strong, pungent, and exotic. It barely masked something worse beneath. She wasn’t alone. Whoever had been here yesterday was back again. Probably the same person who had rubbed out her message.

Much as she wanted to run from the house and never return, she couldn’t allow herself, but her instinct demanded she do just that. It was the safest of possible courses. Flight or fight, it told her. There are no other choices. She chose the latter and stood her ground on uneasy legs.

Another sound now, this one from the attic. If she had imagined the others, there was no possibility her mind had conjured this one up. There was a huge din coming from up there, as if the place was rattling itself apart. Timbers were groaning, floor boards straining against the nails that held them in place.

She threw open the door and it stopped.

She clicked on the flashlight and the passage was filled with swirling dust. There was an odor present as she started up, something like the sharp tang of ozone after lightning has struck. A reek of ammonia followed in its wake. She played the light around, the beam barely penetrating through clouds of dust pounded from the rafters. A frozen wind was blowing, nearly sucking the breath from her lungs and the warmth from her skin. Everything had changed, even the very pressure of the air seemed heavier, thicker, like moving through ocean depths.

She paused at the top of the steps, once again ignoring the voice in her head that told her to run while there was time. Panic was surging in her guts, her skin tight like leather. The flashlight beam cut only a few feet into the dark and died. It wasn’t possible, but then none of this was. There was no moonlight or streetlight coming in now, just an even inky blackness that had swallowed the room in a bleak completeness. She couldn’t see the roof overhead nor the gaping holes that had shown the stars earlier. The light bounced and jigged in her trembling hand.

“Something’s happening here,” she said aloud, hoping they’d hear.

She checked her watch. Was it midnight yet?

Fresh panic assailed her. Her watch was running backwards, counting the seconds in reverse.

She heard the sound of a woman crying and it seemed to come from a great distance. The attic was a polluted abyss. The air seemed inundated with grit, and sandy ash lodged between her teeth as she drew in a gasping breath. The light revealed a form and she started. She wasn’t afraid, really; shocked, if anything.

The form was standing before the full-length mirror… or was it reflected in it?

Thoughts tumbled wildly in her head.

It was a cadaver, her brain told her, standing there on frozen legs. A cadaver dressed in a ragged black overcoat. It could have been one of Eddy’s victims, save that it was male. It appeared to have been carved and divided on an anatomist’s table and hastily reassembled in a gruesome patchwork of humanity. A lurching suture ran from the crown of its bald skull to its disjointed jaw, several others dividing the face into grim quarters of gray, necrotic hide that were held together by black thongs of catgut and what appeared to be metal surgical staples. The result was a visage that was distorted and stretched and horribly scarred, the nose a skullish triangular cavity, a ragged stitching pulling the corner of its mouth up into a sneering grimace. It was a Frankensteinian monstrosity, one eye a juicy gelid green, the other the diseased yellow of leprosy.

But it was no cadaver, for she heard it breathing with a clotted, pulpous hissing and it leered out at her with an intense craving, an appetite for suffering and sadism that made her bowels fill with ice water. Yet, for all its maimed disfigurement, there was something terribly familiar about it.

If there was ever a time to run, it was now. But she didn’t. For some insane, unexplainable reason, her curiosity demanded she stay and see this lunatic episode to a close. A stink of corruption came from the figure, and it was no single odor, but a veritable bouquet of many. Her mind reeled as it tried to attach names to them all. It started with human excrement and ended with old blood and mucid decay.

As she watched, it moved, stepping in her direction with an uneasy, pained gait as if one of its legs was longer than the other. Its leprous, pitted lips formed a grin of something that might have been recognition. It reached out a skeletal claw with abundant stitchwork.

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.