House of Skin

I knew about Hell.

Because Hell was my city.

I knew every stinking, squalid corner of it in detail. And like it, I knew about pain and death and blackness. Just as the city turned a great blind eye towards the daily atrocities that were committed in its twisted streets, so had I back in the world. I remember the young women pleading for their lives. Asking me for mercy and getting only misery. The city had no name in the Territories. It was just one of many spat out of my world or some alien plane. A place too wicked to exist in its original surroundings, so it was swallowed up and brought here. I heard it called the Nameless City or the Forbidden City, but it had no true name. Its history was extant. Even in the world its memory had been blotted out, I supposed, by those who preferred to pretend it never existed. Judging by the architecture, it was my guess that the city had existed somewhere in central Europe four or five centuries ago. But what horrid cataclysm had thrown it into this awful place, I never learned.

Not that it mattered.

The city was here and it was my home. We understood each other. We both suffered from black, loveless souls and morals adulterated well beyond mere corruption. We were intertwined, threads of a common cloth, in our peculiar dance of darkness, parasite and host, lovers of agony and inhumanity. I slaughtered innocents for amusement, to wile away the endless periods of boredom, and the city welcomed my actions. I never learned where the innocents came from exactly. Only that from time to time, numbers of them were sucked from the world to keep the fires of the Territories burning. I supposed it would explain the rash of missing persons back home or the entire populations that vanished from time to time.

I was known as Dr. Razor in the Territories. Perhaps my other titles weren’t adequately descriptive. Who can say? I picked up the name mainly because of my weapon of choice: a straight razor drawn expertly over the throat. The designation of doctor stuck for unknown reasons. I liked that. When asked, I said I was a doctor of anatomy. And that wasn’t too far from the truth.

I spent my time in the city pouring over the equations and symbols I had copied down. It took a great deal of time to work out the muddled logic behind them. It seemed to take months in the Territories, but in reality, years were passing in the world like sand trickling through a child’s fingers. But I was very close, yet my equations and formulas lacked an underlying logic. My fascination with mathematical analysis and differential calculus was finally becoming useful. Each day brought me closer to escape from the chasm.

When I was but one variable away from my heart’s desire, my reputation had spread. Many wanted out and finally, here among them, was a man very close to solving the riddle of the ages. I was long gone when they closed in, eager to steal my work. It was my own fault. I had shown my equations to many and asked for their help. I got it, but I also got to be known as a man with a key. I suppose it was that and too many casual, incriminating boasts to the wrong people. But they would never know what I had spent years in formulating. I wouldn’t let them. While they brooded and tried to destroy themselves and each other, I worked towards my goal.

I left my rooms at a decaying building called the Pretorious and was swallowed up by the city long before they moved in. I disappeared into the reeking bowels of the metropolis in search of a certain brothel where it was rumored that the prostitutes derived sensual pleasure from certain calculations of fourth dimensional physics. The brothel was located in a dark section of the city called the Zone. A place where few dared go. It was rumored by some that the physical realities of the place were demented and constantly in flux due to the prostitutes’ experiments with alien geometries. One might go in and never find their way out again due to the bending and corruption of time and space the whores had set into motion.

I walked for hours and hours, darting into mulling shadow each time I heard the sound of approaching feet. Soon I was quite alone and I knew I had arrived. A cloak of damp fog had fallen over the city and a chill mist was raining from the starless sky. I was in a foreboding alien landscape, one equally as unnerving as my first night in the chasm. I wandered the streets in a hypnotic stupor, confused, and hopeless. The fog, a rich and enveloping blanket of dreams, had consumed everything and what it had discharged was an exotic, foreign place, more lunatic than the chasm itself. I heard voices in that fog, but saw no faces; I saw faces, but heard no voices; there was insane laughter and piteous sobbing. A pale, cloistral haze hung over streets and buildings alike, painting all in a dreary neutrality. I was avoiding the shadows now and their razored heaps. Spreading pools of them seemed to seek me out. The buildings towering above the deep cut street were ancient, shuddered mausoleums of drab gray stone crumbling into rubble. They were huge sleeping cyclopean monoliths with no use for light or cheer reaching high into the mist at impossible angles. Their uniform repetition left my nerves jangled.

I was lost, I thought, in this land of gloom and whispered dread.

Empty, plotting desolation greeted me from every sullen quarter.

I remember thinking: Dr. Razor, I fear you’ve made a grievous error. You’ve gotten yourself into something no man can ever free himself from.

Panic hit me then. I could suppress it no longer. I thought I was beyond fear, beyond the reach of any decent emotion. I was wrong. I broke into a stumbling run, sprinting wildly down the most promising avenues and avoiding those which courted feelings of solitary abandonment. But nothing changed. The thoroughfares and twisting lanes were bland replicas of each other—heavy with mist and melancholy—and the buildings were gray, charmless slabs of repeating stone.

Even as terrible as the other sections of the city were, there were always hiding places. But here, sanctuary was just a word, a thought lacking substance.

I tried re-tracing my steps, but the place was a maze and I was the performing rat for the evening, if not for eternity.

Then I saw a doorway.

Why I chose this one out of countless others, I can’t say. I was drawn to it, a fly to decayed meat. I went in.

I didn’t know what I was expecting. Perhaps an interior as wanting as the exterior, but that wasn’t what I got. It was lavish inside. Great violet and vermilion tapestries adorned the walls. Brass candelabra dripped with coagulated wax and cast dancing, hazy shadows over everything. Underfed women lounged in shapeless chairs that were upholstered in hide the color of rubies. The women were dressed in moth-eaten leathers and zippered bondage masks or they wore nothing at all. This was the brothel, I knew then, for what else could it be?

A naked woman with white skin like flaking pastry emerged from a low doorway and approached me. She was wearing an oiled leather skirt and a leather bondage mask, but nothing else. Her breasts were small, boyish, her ribs rising in angry contrast from the emaciated flesh that housed them. Her hair, a dusky blond, was greased with what looked to be petroleum jelly. Someone had painted arcane symbols and inverted crosses over her chest and belly with red lipstick. Her mouth was invisible behind the slash in the mask, but her eyes peered, unblinking, through slits in the material. They were cold, dark things, lusterless stones at the bottom of an icy creek.

“Excuse me,” I said to her. “I think I’m lost, I need direct—”

“You’re not lost. We both know that,” she said to me in a dry, deathly voice lacking inflection. “You came in out of the fog, looking for sanctuary, and you’ve found it.”

“Yes.”

“Not many come here. Only the desperate. This is the last court of appeals for the damned.”

I liked her. She was mad. “I’m new to this part of the city,” I explained. “I’ve heard there’s knowledge to be had here.”

She nodded as if it were a pack of lies twice told. “Why don’t you look around and see if anything amuses you? Then we can get down to business.”

I did as I was told. It was all very intriguing somehow. I decided to play along if that was her pleasure. I’d take a whore and use her and be done with it. But none of them interested me. They were all starved and wasted. They reminded me of pictures of Dachau survivors. Not that this disturbed me; I’ d seen far worse things in the Territories. But the pickings were better out there than in here.

“How about you?” I suggested.

She shrugged. “So be it.”

Her apparent boredom brought a smile to my lips and inwardly disturbed me beyond description.

“Let’s be done with it then,” she announced and led me away by the hand, the flesh of which was cool and moist like fungi.

I followed obediently, vaguely wondering if I cared to commit an act with her. It was of no consequence. We went down a series of corridors that were more a maze than the streets outside. We walked in silence. The floors were thick with settled dust. A well-worn path ran through it. Finally, she stopped before a drab and colorless door. A length of rusted chain hung from the hook above it. She took it down and pressed it between her breasts.

“We heard you would be coming,” she said, working her nipples to erection with the rusted coils. “You would’ve ended up here regardless.” Ocher dust stood out like fire against the white, pathetic mounds of her breasts. “Men like you who leave the world of their own choice, often want to go back. Very few make it.”

I smiled and nodded.

“Let me see your calculations before we go any further.”

I handed my little book to her.

“Nice,” she said, looking them over. “You’ve done well. A few variables and you’ll be through.”

She pushed the door open.

I hesitated.

“Is something wrong?” she asked with concern. “It’s too late to turn back, you know.”

I hesitated. Questions were assailing my brain, but I didn’t voice them. I found I couldn’t. All of this was so very familiar, as if I’d been to this place before. All my life, like anyone else, I’d experienced déjà vu, tiny half-memories that burst into my brain at any given time, then disappeared before my mind had time to process and identify them. And there’d been dreams, too, mostly from when I was a child. Dreams so vivid that I never remembered and only caught glimpses of at odd times. Scenes that made no sense, yet were so familiar they were maddening. And now, it was all clear in my mind: This was the place I’d dreamed of, had visited before, a place so familiar it was alien.

“Yes,” the girl said. “We’ve all been here before.”

I went in and I heard the door close behind us. The room was immense, beyond belief. I could see no walls, no ceiling, just darkness everywhere, rolling thundering silent darkness. There was a counter of sorts ahead. A counter of arid, warped wood, ancient and huge. I’d seen it so many times in dreams, in misty half-recollections.

“What does all this mean?” I asked her.

“The soul travels while we sleep, before we’re born,” was all she would say.

I turned and she was gone.

I took out my razor and opened the door.

Cautiously, atavistic animal sense guiding me, I moved down the corridor. I didn’t see the girl anywhere. I moved quickly down the connecting passages and found the door we’ d originally come through. I opened it carefully, almost hoping someone would try and stop me so I could intersect flesh with steel. There was no one. In fact, the room was gone. In its place, a set of steps leading down, down. How clever she was, trapping me in this place. It was her intention, I supposed.

On the top step, there was a cigarette smoldering. I didn’t have to look too close to see that it was my brand, the kind I’d smoked back in the world. The filter was even slightly bent. It was a trademark of mine. But who had smoked it?

I heard a sudden, slow rustling of cloth coming up behind me. I turned and saw nothing but a glimmer of steel winking in the distance. I rushed down the steps. This room was huge, too. A spidery maze of shadows.

“All right,” I said aloud. “I’m here to learn. So teach.”

I waited. The person who’ d been following me came down the steps, slowly, slowly, their footfalls almost inaudible. I found myself backing away, terror in my veins instead of blood. I bumped into something and turned around.

It was a table and on it was the girl. Her throat had been slit, bright scarlet rivers bathing her chest. She looked to be dead, but I wasn’t sure. Death wasn’t an absolute in the Territories. Her face was tight, stretched painfully over the architecture of her jutting skull. Her skin, no longer pale, was the livid color of a bruise. A fly lit on her nose, then buzzed away. A discolored tear slid from one staring eye. Between her lips, a cigarette with a bent filter smoldered.

“So, you’ve arrived, have you?” a voice asked.

I turned. A man stood there… or a caricature of one. He seemed to be two-dimensional, cut from black vellum. He had height, length, but no width. When he turned sideways, he no longer existed. Where his face should’ve been, there was an X for each eye and a slash of a mouth drawn in white chalk. He carried a straight razor in his papery fist.

“Who are you?” I inquired.

The man giggled. “The one who will instruct you. Look there.” He motioned to the wall. All my calculations were scrawled on the wall in chalk. The missing ones had been added. I took out my little book and copied it all down.

“You should be proud,” he said, his voice not seeming to come from that chalked-in mouth of his, but from above and behind me. “You’re only one of few who’ve ever made it this far.”

“What is this place called?”

“I call it home, nothing more. My own little subcellar of creation.”

“I can leave now? Whenever I please?”

“Yes, if I let you.” He brandished the razor.

I had my own out by then. He closed in and I lashed out, slitting a gaping hole in him. He was indeed made of something like paper. I could see through the wound, yet blood, red and real, flowed from it.

The man laughed. “Very good, Doctor. Very, very good.”

He swung out with his own razor, but I side stepped his lunge. I opened his throat, then his belly. It was like slicing cardboard. He slumped to the floor, something which might have been his anatomy bulging from the openings I’d made.

“Nasty,” he said. “I guess you can go now. No more time to play.” He struggled vainly with his papery limbs and pulled himself into a corner. He stuffed his internals back in the wounds.

The wall was opening now, the one with the equations scribbled on it. It started as a thin aperture of light and soon yawned wide to admit me. An endless corridor revealed itself. I started in and the wall sealed behind me. It took me what seemed hours to reach its twisted end.

And then, before me, the world.