New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

I

It was abandoned, the clapboard peeling and splintered, but practically a mansion. And surely, thought Lars, warmer than the outside. No wind anyway. The front door was padlocked and the windows boarded, but it didn’t take long to find the place where the boards only looked nailed down and the shards of glass had been picked out of a window frame. The place where, with a minimum of effort, he could wriggle his way through and inside.

But of course that place meant that someone had arrived before him, and might still be inside. He didn’t mind sharing—it was a big enough house that there was plenty of it to go around—but would they?

“Hello?” he called softly into the darkened building. When there was no answer, he pushed his duffle bag through the gap and wormed his way in after it.

He waited for his eyes to adjust, but even after a few minutes had passed all he saw were odd thin grey stripes, floating in the air around him. Eventually, he divined these to be the joins between the boards nailed over the windows, letting the slightest hint of light in.

He felt around with one gloved hand, but the floor seemed bare. No rubbish, no sign of habitation—which meant that whoever had been here hadn’t stayed long or perhaps, like him, had just arrived.

“Hello?” he called again, louder this time, then listened. No answer.

Just me, then, he told himself. Though he wasn’t entirely sure it was just him. He groped for the top of his duffle bag and unzipped it, then took his glove off with his teeth so he could root around by touch inside. Lumps of cloth that were wadded dirty clothing, the squat cylinders of batteries, the thin length of a knife, a dented tin plate, a can of food. There it was, deep in the bag: a hard, long cylinder with a pebbled grip. He took it out, fiddled with it until he found the switch.

The flashlight beam came on, the glow low, battery nearly dead or the contacts corroded. He shook the flashlight a little and it brightened enough to cut through the dark.

He shined it about him, walking around. Ordinary room, it seemed. The only odd thing was how clean it was: no debris, no dust. The pine floors shone as if they had just been waxed. Immaculate. Had he been wrong in thinking the house deserted? But no, it had appeared ruined from the outside, and the windows were boarded.

Strange, he thought. And then the flashlight flickered and went out.

He shook it, slapped it with the heel of his hand, but it didn’t come on again. He cursed himself for having left his duffle bag near the window. He returned slowly backward in what he hoped was the direction he had come from, but darkness was making the space change, becoming uncertain, vast. He kept backing up anyway.

The back of his heel struck something. Feeling behind him he found a wall. Where was the window he had entered through? He couldn’t find it, there was just solid wall.

It’s just a house, he told himself. No need to worry. Just a house.

But he’d never been able to bear the dark. He hadn’t liked it when he was a boy and he didn’t like it now. He felt along the wall again. Still no window. He was hyperventilating, he realized. Take a breath, he told himself. Calm down.

He passed out.

When he woke up he was calm somehow, almost as if he were another person. He had none of the disorientation that comes with waking in a strange place. It was almost as if the place wasn’t strange after all—as if he’d been there a very long time, perhaps forever.

The stripes, he thought. And immediately he began to see them, the lines of grey that marked the windows. There were none near him—the wall he had been touching must have been an interior wall, he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. How had he gotten so turned around?

He stood and made his way to them. Halfway there, he stumbled over something and went down in a heap. His duffle bag, he thought at first, but when he groped around on the floor for it, he found nothing at all. What had he tripped on?

He climbed to his feet. Once he’d touched the wall with the window in it, he swept his foot over the floor looking for his duffle bag, still not finding it. He tugged on the slats of wood over the window, but none were loose.

Wrong window, he thought. Wrong wall. He did his best not to panic.

Turning away from it, he peered into the darkness. He could just make out, at what seemed a great distance, another set of lines defining another set of windows. He made his way toward it.

The duffle bag was there this time—he stumbled on it, and when he felt around for it, it had the decency not to vanish. It felt just slightly wrong beneath his fingers, but that no doubt had come when he had forced it through the gap in the boards and let it drop. He shouldn’t worry, it was his duffle bag: what else could it possibly be?

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he searched through it for the spare batteries and in a moment had them. He unscrewed the cap at the end of the flashlight. Shaking out the old batteries, he dropped them onto the floor with a clunk, then pushed the new ones in, screwing the cap back into place.

Carefully he pressed the switch, and this time the beam came on bright and strong. The room became a room again, boundaries clean and distinct. Nothing to be afraid of, just an ordinary room, empty except for him and his duffle bag.

He slung the bag over his shoulder and started toward the door that led deeper into the house. Halfway there, he stopped and, turning, swept the light across the floor behind him. The dead batteries, he wondered, where could they possibly have gone? They simply weren’t there.

The adjoining room offered a stairway and then narrowed into a passageway that led to the remainder of the ground floor. Here too everything appeared immaculate, the floor and stairs dustless, as if they had just been cleaned.

He shined the light up the stairway but didn’t climb it, instead following the passage back. After openings leading to a dining room, a kitchen, and a storeroom, the passage terminated in a series of three doors, one directly before him and one to either side. He tried the door to his right and found it locked. The one on the left was locked as well. But the door in front of him opened smoothly. He went through.

A fireplace dominated the room, a large ornate affair faced in porcelain tile. The grate and firebox were as clean as the rest of the house: spotless, as if a fire had never been made. There was a perfectly symmetrical stack of wood to one side, a box of kindling in front of it. On the other side was a poker in its stand, also seemingly unused. The porcelain of the tiles had been painted with what at first struck him as birds but which, as he drew closer, he realized were not birds at all but a series of gesticulating disembodied hands.

And there, on the wall above the mantel, what he took at first for a curious work of art: something seemingly scribbled directly on the plaster. Upon closer inspection, it proved to be a stain—the only blemish he had seen in the whole house. And then he came closer, and closer still, and recoiled: it was not just any stain, he realized, but the remnants of a great cloud of blood.

There were two armchairs here and a bearskin on the floor. He could light a fire and get warm. Did he dare start one? What if someone saw smoke coming up from the chimney? Would they cause trouble for him?

But his batteries wouldn’t last forever and the last thing he wanted was to be left in the dark again. No, he needed a fire. If he was caught, so what: it would mean a night in jail and then they’d let him go. And the jail would be warm.

He balanced the flashlight on its end so that the light fountained up toward the ceiling, then rummaged through his bag until he found his book of matches.

It was bent and crumpled, the striking pad worn along the middle of the strip through to the paper backing. Most of the matches were torn out and gone.

Carefully he arranged the split logs in a crosshatched stack, and then on top of this built a little mound of tinder. The mound looked, he realized, like a star, and once he’d noticed this he found his fingers working to make it even more of one.

The first match he struck fizzled out. The second did a little better, but the tinder didn’t catch. With the third, once the match was alight he lit the matchbook as well, pushing both into the tinder.

He blew on the flame until the tinder caught, watched it blacken and curl, charring its mark onto the pale wood below, and then that catching too. He stared into the flames. Soon he felt the warmth radiating from the fire. Soon after that, it was too hot to be so near.

He made his way back to one of the armchairs, but before he could sit in it realized there was something already there. A rubberized blanket perhaps, strangely shaped and nearly see-through. An odd colour, a dirty pink—pigskin maybe, cured in a way that gave it a translucency or stretched thin. It was soft to the touch, and warm—no doubt from the fire. He grasped it in both hands and lifted it, found it to be more a sheath than a blanket, something you could crawl into, as large as a man, roughly the shape of a man as well.

He dropped it as if stung, took a few steps away from the chair. His first impulse was to flee, but with each step away from the sheath he felt safer, more secure. Somebody’s idea of a joke, he told himself. An odd costume. Nothing to worry about.

He settled into the other chair, still shaken. He would rest for a few minutes, warm up, and then leave.

A moment later, he was sound asleep.

He dreamt that he was in an operating theatre, much like the one his father had performed surgery in back when he was still alive. There was a chair on the upper tier just for him, his name on a brass plate set in the back of the chair. When he entered the theatre, everyone turned and faced him, and stared. It was crowded, every chair taken but his own, and to reach his spot he had to force his way down the aisle and to the centre of the row, stepping with apologies over the legs of the others. Down below, the surgeon stood with his gloved hands held motionless and awkwardly raised, his face mostly hidden by his surgical mask. He seemed to be waiting for Lars to take his seat.

Lars sat and then, when the surgeon still continued to stare at him, motioned for him to proceed. The surgeon nodded sharply and turned toward the only other man on the theatre floor: a tall elderly gentleman, stripped nude and standing just beside the operating table.

The surgeon ran his hand across a tray of instruments and took up a scalpel. He made a continuous incision along the man’s clavicle, from one shoulder to the other. The elderly man didn’t seem to mind or even to feel it. He remained standing, smiling absently. The surgeon set the bloody scalpel down on the edge of the operating table. Carefully, he worked his gloved fingers into the incision he had created and then, once he had a firm grasp on the skin, began very slowly to pull it down, gradually stripping the man’s flesh off his chest in a single slick sheet, from time to time looking back at Lars, as if for approval.

Lars awoke gasping, unsure of where he was. He was sweating, the room warmer than when he’d fallen asleep, the fire glowing a deep red, the heat making the air in front of the fireplace shimmer.

“Bad dream?” asked a voice.

He turned, startled. There in the other armchair was a man. Something was wrong with his skin: it hung strangely on him, too loose in the fingers and elbows, too tight in other places. There was something wrong too with his face, as if the skin didn’t quite align with the bones beneath. One eye was oddly stretched so that it was open too wide, the other bunched and all but shut.

“Bad dream?” asked the malformed man again.

“Yes, it is,” said Lars.

“Was, you mean,” said the malformed man. But Lars had not meant was but is. I’m dreaming, thought Lars. I’m still asleep and dreaming.

“What are you staring at?” asked the man. “Is it me?” He reached up and touched his face, and then began to tug on it, sliding the skin slightly over with a wet sucking sound. The eye that had been bloated began to shrink back, the other eye opening up. Lars, sickened, had to look away.

“There we are,” said the man. “You see? Nothing to be concerned over.” When Lars still stared into the fire, he added, “Look at me.”

Reluctantly Lars did. It was just, he saw, a normal man now, not malformed at all.

“What was wrong with you?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Wrong?” asked the man. He smoothed back his hair. “Nothing. Why would you think anything is wrong?”

Lars opened his mouth, then closed it again. From the other chair, the man watched him.

“I hadn’t realized someone else was here,” Lars finally managed. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’ll go.”

“Nonsense,” said the man. “It’s a big house. A mansion of sorts. I don’t mind sharing.”

“It’s just—”

“Don’t worry,” said the man. “I’ve already eaten.”

What the hell? wondered Lars. Had the man thought he wasn’t going to stay because he had no food to offer? Was that a custom around these parts? Confused, he started to rise from the chair.

But the other man was already up, patting the air in front of him with his hands. Sit, sit, he was saying. To get past him, Lars would have to touch him, and that was something he felt he did not want to do.

He let himself fall back into the chair. Impossibly, the man was already back in his own chair as well, sitting down. The skin on one side of his face seemed to be growing loose again, or maybe that was just the flickering of the firelight.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” said the man. “Though perhaps it wasn’t I who woke you.”

“I… don’t know,” said Lars.

The man uncrossed his legs and then crossed them in the other direction. “Will you tell it to me?” he asked.

“Tell you what?”

“Your dream? Will you share it with me?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The man smiled, gave a little laugh. “No? Then the least I can do is try to help you fall back to sleep.”

“There was once a man who was not a man,” the man began. He was frowning, or perhaps it was just that his face was slipping. “He acted like a man, but he was not, in fact, a man after all. Then why, you might wonder, did he live with men or among them?

“Why indeed?

“But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It just tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.

“He acted like a man and in many respects he was a man, but he was not a man as well, and sometimes he would forget this and allow himself to relax a little and leak out.”

“What?” said Lars, his voice rising.

“Leak out,” said the man. He had pulled his chair a little closer, or at least it seemed that way to Lars.

“But what,” said Lars. “How—”

“Leak out,” said the man with finality. “I already told you this is not that kind of story, the kind that explains things. Be quiet and listen.

“He would relax a little and leak out, and sometimes it was hard for him to make his way back in again. Sometimes people would come along while he was this way, humans, and he’d have to decide what to do with them. Or perhaps to them. Sometimes if he couldn’t get back in to where he had been, he could at least get into one of them.”

The man suddenly reached out and touched his cheek. Lars felt warmth spreading through his face. Or maybe it was cold, but so cold it felt warm. He found he could not move.

“Sometimes,” said the man, “once he got into one of them, he would stay for a while. But other times, he would just swallow them up and be done with them.”

II

When he woke up it was late in the day, enough sunlight seeping through the gaps between boards to fill the house with a pale light. He was lying on the floor, on the bearskin, and had slept in such a way that he was stiff all along one side, his shoulder tingling, his jaw tight. The other man was nowhere to be seen.

Had anything really happened? Perhaps he had dreamt it all.

The ashes in the grate were still warm. The room, which had seemed to him so immaculate in his flashlight beam the night before, clearly wasn’t: the floor was dusty. There was litter and garbage as well and a faint sour smell. The bearskin he had slept on was moth-eaten and tattered, as were the two chairs. The only place that was immaculate was the wall above the fireplace: there wasn’t a stain there after all.

He quickly packed his duffle bag and made for the door. He wouldn’t come back, he told himself. He was, after all, just passing through. He’d never stayed in the same place more than a day or two, not since his father’s death.

He searched the house, found nothing of value. The dead batteries still weren’t anywhere.

It was late afternoon by the time he walked the half-mile into town. The town was smaller than he’d hoped, the business district little more than one main street, with a diner, a general store with a lunch counter in back, a drugstore, a feed and grain supply and a hardware store. He spent some time in the hardware store, but there weren’t enough other customers and the clerk was paying too much attention to him for him to lift anything. So he left and went down to the general store.

He walked down the aisles, considering. One clerk here too, seemingly the identical twin of the fellow in the hardware store, but less attentive. In the candy aisle he slipped a pair of energy bars into his coat pocket as he bent down to pretend to examine something on the bottom shelf. Batteries were on an endcap and a little trickier to pocket unobserved, but when he stood just right he got his body between the display and the clerk and managed to slip a set down his pants.

He wandered a little more, just to throw off the scent. By the time he was turning again toward the front of the store, prepared to leave without buying anything, it was beginning to grow dark outside, snow just beginning to fall. The clerk seemed to have doubled, having been joined by his brother or cousin or whatever the fuck he was from the hardware store next door. Unless there was a third one floating around. They were whispering back and forth, watching him.

He considered briefly putting everything back. But he needed the food—it had been well over a day since he had had anything to eat—and he needed the batteries too, particularly if he was going to spend the night outdoors. He needed to be certain his flashlight wouldn’t go out. Matches, too, he thought, otherwise no fire. He found a box of them, slipped them into his duffle bag.

The clerk from the hardware store was heading toward him, his lips in a tight line. The other clerk, the one who actually worked there, had moved to block the front door.

Lars headed quickly up the aisle and toward the back of the store. Behind him, the man closest to him gave a shout, and Lars burst into a run, darting through the door marked Employees Only. He swerved around boxes and metal shelves until he reached the back wall. He chose a direction and ran along it until he hit the door, a metal bar slung about waist-level. He pushed on the bar and the door opened to a blast of cold and an alarm went off. And then he was out in an alley, the light fading, snow drifting slowly down. He ran, his feet slipping on the ice, hearing the sounds of the two clerks in pursuit behind him.

He ran until he no longer heard them, then stopped, listened. It was all but dark out now. He walked for a while, catching his breath. Where was he? He wasn’t sure exactly—one of the roads leading out of town, fields on all sides. And then he heard something, a cry from behind him. He began to run again.

And then in the darkness he heard voices even closer, as if he had not run away from the two men but toward them. He cut quickly off the road and into the field beside it—only it wasn’t a field but a house and its grounds. Almost a mansion from what he could see of it, he found himself idly thinking. And then he realized exactly what house it was.

But he hadn’t been anywhere near it. How could that house be here?

The voices drew closer. Would they see him if he just stood still in the yard? It was already dark, but was it dark enough? Would they see his face shining like a buoy in the darkness?

It’s just a house, he tried to tell himself. Just an ordinary house. Nothing to worry about. Before the voices came any closer, he forced himself to walk toward it, find the loose boards over the window, and squirm in.

Later he wondered if he’d heard voices after all. Or, rather, wondered if the voices he’d heard had been connected to the two clerks, if they were still chasing him. That was, he told himself as he waited in the house, the heart of the matter. Either the voices were the clerks’ or they weren’t. But if they weren’t, what were they?

I’ll just wait a little, he told himself once inside, just until I’m sure they’re gone. But each time he thought he was safe and made for the window, he’d hear them again. Or hear something like them anyway.

How much time passed? He wasn’t sure. Had he slept? He didn’t think so, but it was much darker in the house now, so dark he couldn’t see at all save for the pale lines of light marking the joins between the window boards.

He got out his flashlight. It wasn’t wise, not if the two men were still outside looking for him, but he couldn’t help himself—he couldn’t stand the dark, not in here. He turned it on, pointed it at the ground.

The room, he saw, looked just as it had the night before: clean, immaculately so, the floor itself freshly polished. As if it were not a deserted house after all. Having the flashlight on made him feel better, but seeing this made him feel worse.

He listened. The voices came and went for a while and then dissolved into wind, a lonely sound with nothing human to it at all. He pulled on the boards to look out and see if they were still there—or tried to anyway: the boards wouldn’t give. It was as if they had been nailed back in place since he had entered. He pulled at them, hammered on them with his flashlight. Disoriented, he looked around, tried the boards on the other windows, but they were all tightly nailed in place.

He went to the front door, unlocked it, rattled the handle, but something held the door shut from the other side. He hit it with his shoulder, then stopped. It had been padlocked, he remembered. Of course it wouldn’t open.

All he needed was something to pry the boards away from the window. It didn’t matter how they had gotten stuck—it was not worth thinking about. All that mattered was to get them off and get out.

But there was nothing in the room—the room was empty: he knew that already. He hit one of the boards with the butt of his flashlight, but when its beam began to flicker, he stopped. He couldn’t bear to be without a light. Not here. He needed to find something he could pry with. He would have to find something else.

He found himself going back and forth between the entrance hall and the hallway, but stopping shy of opening the door at the end of the hallway. He looked in the kitchen, found nothing but empty cabinets. The dining room was empty too. He tried the doors to either side at the end of the passage, discovered them both still locked. He kept searching the same empty rooms and finding nothing. I won’t go, he was telling himself, not in there.

But in the end he did go. He could see the poker in his mind, leaning in its stand just beside the fireplace. He would, he told himself, rush in, take the poker, leave. He would look at nothing, no one. He would think about nothing, no one. He would just come and go. He wouldn’t stay.

But when he finally opened the door, a fire was already lit, roaring in the fireplace. He couldn’t help but see that. And he couldn’t help but see that the spray of blood was there again on the wall above the mantel, looking even larger than before. Just as he couldn’t help but see the creature in the chair, struggling into, or perhaps out of, its skin. The skin was still on the bottom half of its body, but not the top half.

It looked at him and perhaps smiled. Moved its face anyway in a way that frightened him.

“Back for more?” it said.

“I was just leaving,” said Lars.

The creature ignored him. “You wanted another story?” it said. “Is that what you came for?” And it reached out toward his face.

It didn’t touch him, but his face still felt warm. He could not, he suddenly found, move.

It reached down and wormed further into the sheath. What had not been a hand became a hand. It flexed the fingers experimentally, settling the skin deeper around them.

“No story,” it said. “I haven’t eaten.”

Lars felt the flashlight slip from his fingers. It struck the floor with a clunk, then began to roll away, the sound abruptly cut off as if, suddenly, it was no longer there.

“Well,” it said. “What am I to do with you?”

The fire roared and then suddenly fell silent, the rest of the room too. In the silence, the creature came closer. First it touched Lars with its hand, then with the thing that was not a hand, and finally it wrapped what remained of the loose, empty skin around him and drew him in.