The Lamplighters

Chapter Thirty-Three

Hiding beneath their lids, Marla’s eyes made rapid movements. She was dreaming again, of a hot room that smelled of disinfectant and of huge fingers inside of her most secret self. The fingers were scooping into the matter behind her ribcage like hot spoons into ice cream. In her dream she could open her eyes and breathe steadily, looking up into the face of the man above her. He was a sanguine giant, as big as a wrestler with huge hands as steady as a tiller’s working their surgeon’s work. She tried to will her dream-state self to rise up off her back so she could get a better look at him. Her body felt distant and she had to scream at every nerve ending just to raise her head closer to his. He stood over her like a waiting storm, those cold, glass goggle eyes regarding her dispassionately.

Then his face was gone, dissipating into cloudburst. The man had evaporated into the ether, and so had the clinical white walls of the room, the conditioned air giving way to the fragrant breeze of a forest. Above her, tropical birds flapped and squawked in the tops of great palm trees, all around her a curtain of verdant green rainforest so huge it faded to black at the extremes of her vision. Hearing a wet flapping sound she looked down and was embarrassed to see her guts dangling at her toes. She was indifferent to her nakedness but the exposure of her organs, her secret self, made her face blush. Carefully, so as not to have the whole steaming mess topple out of her, Marla reached down and cradled her innards holding them like she might hold an infant. She teased them back into the warm cave of her abdomen, pulling the soft flesh of her belly around them like a sling. Birds sang and distant waterfalls thundered. This place was primal, ancient and alive, far from men and their constructs, their stucco houses of steel and glass. Still holding herself, she began to walk through the massive trees until she came to a ridge overlooking a primitive village in clearing. A single plume of smoke billowed from the center of the village, a fire around which were dotted about a dozen huts, circular in shape with banana leaf roofs. She recalled the decaying grandeur of the Big House and found herself smiling at the simplicity of these huts—yearning, even, for the basic lives that must be unfolding in and around them. Naked children, their lovely skin the color of coconut shells, were playing in the shade of the huts. She longed to join their games and half-ran, half-stumbled down the ridge to the edge of the village. Before she could reach them, to bask in their laughter, the children were gone. Ashes lay where moments ago there had been a fire. The sky darkened with clouds and a great wind howled, threatening rainstorms. A piercing scream rang out from deep within the trees bordering the village and Marla moved instinctively in the direction the sound was coming from. The scream had been so despairing, so helpless that she felt all the joy had been screamed out of the world. Rain now lashed at her back, freezing her flesh to the bone, and she plummeted through the trees in search of the helpless screamer who must now surely be dead to have uttered such a sound. The foliage was becoming so dense it was almost impassable, and Marla had to fight her way through leaves as big as doors. She crashed through a great spider’s web, disturbing a colony of huge tarantulas, angry black and orange stripes scurrying frighteningly close to her naked body. But Marla was not afraid of them; her only concern was to locate the source of that haunting scream. Then, as she stumbled into another clearing, she found it.

In the trees all around her were natives from the village through which she’d passed. They were strung up like Adam had been, their brown skins stretched out and attached to tree branches like hammocks. Some of them still breathed, driven insane by the physical inversion they were now experiencing as they watched their hearts beat outside of their bodies and saw their colons expel waste onto the leaves and branches above them, defying gravity. Marla looked for the source of all this pain. She found him standing there, dressed in his great fleshcoat, maniac eyes hidden behind those dark goggles. Another of the villagers screamed and died, answered by the terrified pleas and prayers of those others who still lived but who hoped they might expire next. Marla ignored them all, intent now on knowing what was behind those unblinking eyes. She was just inches from him now. She reached out and touched his face, her fingers skittering across the rough surface like a blind woman’s. He stood, dispassionate, as she went about her probing and did not even flinch when she slipped her fingers beneath the bone frame of his goggles and into the slick goo of his eyes.

Visions pierced her brain like shrapnel from a roadside bomb. She saw his work, felt his hands as though they were her own. In that moment she knew his life’s labors, felt the long dark decades of his alchemical work stretching out in front of her. She heard the terrified voices of the natives as he hunted them down, mercilessly, and understood their tongue. To them he was a demon, come here from the western world to corrupt them and steal their skins. They had a name for this white demon. Skin Taker. She tasted salt blood as he drank it from the bowl of a skull, helped him distill spinal fluid into a vial, joined him in his reverie upon discovering an albino child naked and cowering in a mud hut, chanting a spell over and over—a spell that would neither protect it from nor deter the intentions of the Skin Taker looming over it. Marla understood the intricate beauty of the Skin Mechanic’s craft, the long dark suffering to which he had willingly subjected himself in return for its secrets. And as night fell in his old Amazonian hunting grounds, she felt the power of the ancient entities to which his workings were offered. Theirs was the lifeblood of youth, every evisceration keeping their dark names alive. Names that whispered through the canopies of this great forest and out across rivers and oceans until they attracted new followers, new disciples of youth and beauty and hot blood. Marla saw them again, pale figures from the West standing naked before the Skin Mechanic. They were begging for his touch. And he blessed them. He was their pastor, their surgeon and their savior.