A Nest of Nightmares

SUN CITY

It was 3.00 a.m., the dead, silent middle of the night. Except for the humming of the soft-drink machine in one corner, and the irregular, rumbling cough of the ice machine hidden in an alcove just beyond it, the lobby was quiet. There weren’t likely to be any more check-ins until after dawn – all the weary cross-country drivers would be settled elsewhere by now, or grimly determined to push on without a rest.

Working the 11.00 p.m. to 7.00 a.m. shift was a dull, lonely job, but usually Nora Theale didn’t mind it. She preferred working at night, and the solitude didn’t bother her. But tonight, for the third night in a row, she was jumpy. It was an irrational nervousness, and it annoyed Nora that she couldn’t pin it down. There was always the possibility of robbery, of course, but the Posada del Norte hadn’t been hit in the year she had worked there, and Nora didn’t think the motel made a very enticing target.

Seeking a cause for her unease, Nora often glanced around the empty lobby and through the glass doors at the parking lot and the highway beyond. She never saw anything out of place – except a shadow which might have been cast by someone moving swiftly through the bluish light of the parking lot. But it was gone in an instant, and she couldn’t be sure she had seen it.

Nora picked up the evening paper and tried to concentrate. She read about plans to build a huge fence along the border, to keep illegal aliens out. It was an idea she liked – the constant flow back and forth between Mexico and the United States was one of the things she hated most about El Paso – but she didn’t imagine it would work. After a few more minutes of scanning state and national news, Nora tossed the paper into the garbage can. She didn’t want to read about El Paso; El Paso bored and depressed and disturbed her. She couldn’t wait to leave it.

Casting another uneasy glance around the unchanged lobby, Nora leaned over to the filing cabinet and pulled open the drawer where she kept her books. She picked out a mystery by Josephine Tey and settled down to it, determined to win over her nerves.

She read, undisturbed except for a few twinges of unease, until 6.00 a.m. when she had to let the man with the newspapers in and make the first wake-up call. The day clerk arrived a few minutes after seven, and that meant it was time for Nora to leave. She gathered her things together into a shoulder bag. She had a lot with her because she had spent the past two days in one of the motel’s free rooms rather than go home. But the rooms were all booked up for that night, so she had to clear out. Since her husband had moved out, Nora hadn’t felt like spending much time in the apartment that was now hers alone. She meant to move, but since she didn’t want to stay in El Paso, it seemed more sensible simply to let the lease run out rather than go to the expense and trouble of finding another temporary home. She meant to leave El Paso just as soon as she got a little money together and decided on a place to go.

She didn’t like the apartment, but it was large and cheap. Larry had chosen it because it was close to his office, and he liked to ride his bicycle to work. It wasn’t anywhere near the motel where Nora worked, but Nora didn’t care. She had her car.

She parked it now in the space behind the small, one-storey apartment complex. It was a hideous place; Nora winced every time she came home to it. It was made of an ugly pink fake adobe, and had a red-tiled roof. There were some diseased-looking cactuses planted along the concrete walkway, but no grass or trees: water was scarce.

The stench of something long dead and richly rotting struck Nora as she opened the door of her apartment. She stepped back immediately, gagging. Her heart raced; she felt, oddly, afraid. But she recovered in a moment – it was just a smell, after all, and in her apartment. She had to do something about it. Breathing through her mouth, she stepped forward again.

The kitchen was clean, the garbage pail empty, and the refrigerator nearly bare. She found nothing there, or in the bedroom or bathroom, that seemed to be the cause of the odour. In the bedroom, she cautiously breathed in through her nose to test the air. It was clean. She walked slowly back to the living room, but there was nothing there, either. The whiff of foulness had gone as if it had never been.

Nora shrugged, and locked the door. It might have been something outside. If she smelled it again, she’d talk to the landlord about it.

There was nothing in the kitchen she could bear the thought of eating, so, after she had showered and changed, Nora walked down to the Seven-Eleven, three blocks away, and bought a few essentials: milk, eggs, bread, Dr Pepper, and a package of sugared doughnuts.

The sun was already blazing and the dry wind abraded her skin. It would be another hot, dry, windy day – a day like every other day in El Paso. Nora was glad she slept through most of them. She thought about North Carolina, where she had gone to college, reflecting wistfully that up there the leaves would be starting to turn now. As she walked back to her apartment with the bag of groceries in her arms, Nora thought about moving east to North Carolina.

The telephone was ringing as Nora walked in.

‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for the past three days!’

It was her husband, Larry.

‘I’ve been out a lot.’ She began to peel the cellophane wrapping off the doughnuts.

‘Do tell. Look, Nora, I’ve got some papers for you to sign.’

‘Aw, and I thought maybe you’d called to say “Happy anniversary”.’

He was silent. One side of Nora’s mouth twitched upwards: she’d scored.

Then he sighed. ‘What do you want, Nora? Am I supposed to think that today means something to you? That you still care? That you want me back?’

‘God forbid.’

‘Then cut the crap, all right? So we didn’t make it to our wedding anniversary – all right, so legally we’re still married – but what’s the big deal?’

‘I was joking, Larry. You never could recognise a joke.’

‘I didn’t call to fight with you, Nora. Or to joke. I’d just like you to sign these papers so we can get this whole thing over with. You won’t even have to show up in court.’

Nora bit into a doughnut and brushed off the spray of sugar that powdered her shirt.

‘Nora? When should I bring the papers by?’

She set the half-eaten doughnut down on the counter and reflected. ‘Um, come this evening, if you want. Not too early, or I’ll still be asleep. Say . . . seven-thirty?’

‘Seven-thirty.’

‘That won’t cut into your dinner plans with what’s-her-name?’

‘Seven-thirty will be fine, Nora. I’ll see you then. Just be there.’ And he hung up before she could get in another dig.

Nora grimaced, then shrugged as she hung up. She finished the doughnut, feeling depressed. Despite herself, she’d started thinking about Larry again, and their marriage which had seemed to go bad before it had properly started. She thought about their brief honeymoon. She remembered Mexico.

It had been Larry’s idea to drive down to Mexico – Nora had always thought of Mexico as a poor and dirty place filled with undesirables who were always sneaking into the United States. But Larry had wanted to go, and Nora had wanted to make Larry happy.

It was their luna de miel, moon of honey, Larry said, and the Spanish words sounded almost sweet to her, coming from his mouth. Even Mexico, in his company, had seemed freshly promising, especially after they escaped the dusty borderlands and reached the ocean.

One afternoon they had parked on an empty beach and made love. Larry had fallen asleep, and Nora had left him to walk up the beach and explore.

She walked along in a daze of happiness, her body tingling, climbing over rocks and searching for shells to bring back to her husband. She didn’t realise how far she had travelled until she was shocked out of her pleasant haze by a sharp cry, whether human or animal she could not be certain. She heard some indistinct words, then, tossed to her by the wind.

Nora was frightened. She didn’t want to know what the sounds meant or where they came from. She turned around immediately, and began to weave her way back among the white boulders. But she must have mistaken her way, for as she clambered back over a rock she was certain she had just climbed, she saw them below her, posed like some sacrificial tableau.

At the centre was a girl, spread out on a low, flat rock. The victim. Crouching over her, doing something, was a young man. Another young man stared at them greedily. Nora gazed at the girl’s face, which was contorted in pain. She heard her whimper. It was only then that she realised, with a cold flash of dread, what she was seeing. The girl was being raped.

Nora was frozen with fear and indecision, and then the girl opened her eyes, and gazed straight up at Nora. Her brown eyes were eloquent with agony. Was there a glimmer of hope there at the sight of Nora? Nora couldn’t be sure. She stared into those eyes for what seemed like a very long time, trying desperately to think of what to do. She wanted to help this girl, to chase away the men. But there were two men, and she, Nora, had no particular strengths. They would probably be pleased to have two victims. And at any time one of them might look up and see her watching.

Trying to make no noise, Nora slipped backwards off the rock. The scene vanished from her sight; the pleading brown eyes could no longer accuse her. Nora began to run as best she could over the uneven ground. She hoped she was running in the right direction, and that she would soon come upon Larry. Larry would help her – she would tell him what she had seen, and he would know what to do. He might be able to frighten away the men, or, speaking Spanish, he could at least tell the police what she had seen. She would be safe with Larry.

The minutes passed and Nora still, blindly, ran. She couldn’t see their car, and knew the horrifying possibility that she was running in the wrong direction – but she didn’t dare go back. A cramp in her side and ragged pains when she drew breath forced her to walk: she felt the moment when she might have been of some help, when she could have reached Larry in time, drain inexorably away. She never knew how long she had walked and run before she finally caught sight of their car, but, even allowing for her panic, Nora judged it had been at the very least a half an hour. She felt as if she had been running desperately all day. And she was too late. Much too late. By now, they would have finished with the girl. They might have killed her, they might have let her go. In either case, Nora and Larry would be too late to help her.

‘There you are! Where’d you go! I was worried,’ Larry said, slipping off the bonnet of the car and coming to embrace her. He sounded not worried but lazily contented.

It was too late. She did not tell him, after all, what she had witnessed. She never told him.

Nora became deathly ill that night in a clean, American-­style hotel near Acapulco. Two days later, still shaking and unable to keep anything in her stomach, Nora flew back to her mother and the family doctor in Dallas, leaving Larry to drive back by himself.

It was the stench that woke her. Nora lurched out of her sleep, sitting up on the bed, gagging and clutching the sheet to her mouth, trying not to breathe in the smell. It was the smell of something dead.

Groggy with sleep, she needed another moment to realise something much more frightening than the smell: there was someone else in the room.

A tall figure stood, motionless, not far from the foot of her bed. The immediate fear Nora felt at the sight was quickly pushed out of the way by a coldly rational, self-preserving consciousness. In the dim light Nora could not tell much about the intruder except that he was oddly dressed in some sort of cloak, and that his features were masked by some sort of head mask. The most important thing she noticed was that he did not block her path to the door, and if she moved quickly . . .

Nora bolted, running through the apartment like a rabbit, and bursting out through the front door into the courtyard.

It was late afternoon, the sun low in the sky but not yet gone. One of her neighbours, a Mexican, was grilling hamburgers on a little hibachi. He stared at her sudden appearance, then grinned. Nora realised she was wearing only an old T-shirt of Larry’s and a pair of brightly coloured bikini pants, and she scowled at the man.

‘Somebody broke into my apartment,’ she said sharply, cutting into his grin.

‘Want to use our phone? Call the police?’

Nora thought of Larry and felt a sudden fierce hatred of him: he had left her to this, abandoned her to the mercy of burglars, potential rapists, and the leers of this Mexican.

‘No, thanks,’ she said, her tone still harsh. ‘But I think he’s still inside. Do you think you could . . .’

‘You want me to see if he’s still there? Sure, sure, I’ll check. You don’t have to worry.’ He sprang forward. Nora hated his eagerness to help, but she needed him right now.

There was no one in her apartment. The back door was still locked, and the screens on all the windows were undisturbed.

Nora didn’t ask her neighbour to check behind every piece of furniture after he had looked into the cupboards: she was feeling the loathing she always felt for hysterical, overemotional reactions. Only this time the loathing was directed at herself.

Although one part of her persisted in believing she had seen an intruder, reason told her she had been mistaken. She had been tricked by a nightmare into running for help like a terrified child.

She was rude to the man who had helped her, dismissing him as sharply as if he were an erring servant. She didn’t want to see the smug, masculine concern on his face; didn’t want him around knowing he must be chuckling inwardly at a typical hysterical female.

Nora intended to forget about it, as she had forgotten other embarrassing incidents, other disturbing dreams, but she was not allowed.

She had a hard time falling asleep the next day. Children were playing in the parking lot, and her doze was broken time and again by their shouts, meaningless fragments of talk, and the clamour of a bicycle bell.

When, at last, she did sleep in the afternoon, it was to dream that she and Larry were having one of their interminable, pointless, low-voiced arguments. She woke from the frustrating dream with the impression that someone had come into the room and, certain it was Larry and ready to resume the argument in real life, she opened her eyes.

Before she could speak his name, the stench struck her like a blow – that too familiar, dead smell – and she saw the tall, weirdly draped figure again.

Nora sat up quickly, trying not to breathe in, and the effort made her dizzy. The figure did not move. There was more light in the room this time, and she could see him clearly.

The strange cloak ended in blackened tatters that hung over his hands and feet, and the hood had ragged holes torn for eyes and mouth – with a rush of horror, Nora realised what she was seeing. The figure was dressed in a human skin. The gutted shell of some other human being flapped grotesquely against his own.

Nora’s mouth dropped open, and she breathed in the smell of the rotting skin, and, for one horrible moment, she feared she was about to vomit, that she would be immobilised, sick and at the monster’s mercy.

Fear tightened her throat and gut, and she managed to stumble out of the room and down the passage.

She didn’t go outside. She remembered, as she reached the front door, that she had seen that figure before. That it was only a nightmarish hallucination. Only a dream. She could scarcely accept it, but she knew it was true. Only a dream. Her fingers clutched the cool metal doorknob, but she did not turn it. She leaned against the door, feeling her stomach muscles contract spasmodically, aware of the weakness in her legs and the bitter taste in her mouth.

She tried to think of something calming, but could not chase the visions from her mind: knives, blood, putrefaction. What someone who had been skinned must look like. And what was he, beneath that rotten skin? What could that ghastly disguise hide?

When at last she bullied and cajoled herself into returning to the bedroom, the thing, of course, was gone. Not even the cadaverine smell remained.

Nightmare or hallucination, whatever it was, it came again on the third day. She was ready for it – had lain rigidly awake for hours in the sunlit room knowing he would come – but the stench and the sight was scarcely any easier to endure the third time. No matter how much she told herself she was dreaming, no matter how hard she tried to believe that what she saw (and smelled?) was mere hallucination, Nora had not the cold-bloodedness to remain on her bed until it vanished.

Once again she ran from the room in fear, hating herself for such irrational behaviour. And, again, the thing had gone when she calmed herself and returned to look.

On the fourth day Nora stayed at the motel.

If someone else had suggested escaping a nightmare by sleeping somewhere else, Nora would have been scornful. But she justified her action to herself: this dream was different. There was the smell, for one thing. Perhaps there was some real source to the smell, and it was triggering the nightmare. In that case, a change of air should cure her.

The room she moved into when she got off work that morning was like all the other rooms in the Posada del Norte. It was clean and uninspired, the decor hovering between the merely bland and the aggressively ugly. The carpet was a stubby, mottled gold; the bedspread and chair cushions were dark orange. The walls were covered in white, textured vinyl with a mural painted above the bed. The murals differed from room to room – in this room, it was a picture of a stepped Aztec pyramid, rendered in shades of orange and brown.

Nora turned on the air conditioning, and a blast of air came out in a frozen rush. She took a few toilet articles into the bathroom, but left everything else packed in the overnight bag which she had dropped on to a chair. She had no desire to ‘settle in’ or to intrude herself on the bland anonymity of the room.

She turned on the television and lay back on the bed to observe the meaningless interactions of the guests on a morning talk show. She had nothing better to do. After the network show was a talk show of the local variety, with a plain, overly made-up hostess who smiled, blinked, and nodded a lot. Her guests were a red-faced, middle-aged man who talked about the problems caused by illegal aliens, and a woman who discussed the ancient beauties of Mexico. Nora turned off the set halfway through her slide show featuring pyramids and other monuments in Mexico.

The television silent, she heard the sound of people moving in next door. There seemed to be a lot of them, and they were noisy. A radio clicked on, bringing in music and commercials from Mexico. There was a lot of laughter from the room, and Nora caught an occasional Spanish-sounding word.

Nora swore, not softly. Why couldn’t they party on their own side of the border? And who ever carried on in such a way at ten o’clock in the morning? But she hesitated to pound on the wall: that would only draw attention to herself, and she didn’t imagine it would deter them.

Instead, to shield herself, she turned on the television set again. It was game-show time, and the sounds of hysteria, clanging bells, and idiotic laughter filled the room. Nora sighed, turned the volume down a bit, and pulled off her clothes. Then she climbed under the blankets and gazed blankly at the flickering images.

She was tired, but too keyed up to sleep. Her mind kept circling until she deliberately thought about what was bothering her: the man in the skin. What did it mean? Why was it haunting her?

It seemed more a hallucination than an ordinary dream, and that made Nora doubly uneasy. It was too real. When she saw, and smelled, the nightmarish figure, she could never quite convince herself she was only dreaming.

And what did the hideous figure itself mean? It must have come crawling out of her subconscious for some reason, thought Nora. But she didn’t really think she had just made it up herself – the idea of a man draped in another’s skin stirred some deep memory. Somewhere, long before, she had read about, or seen a picture of a figure who wore the stripped-off skin of another. Was it something from Mexico? Some ancient, pre-Columbian god?

Yet whenever she strained to recall it, the memory moved perversely away.

And why did the dream figure haunt her now? Because she was alone? But that was absurd. Nora shifted uncomfortably in bed. She had no regrets about the separation or the impending divorce; she was glad Larry was gone. They should have had the sense to call it quits years before. She didn’t want him back under any circumstances.

And yet – Larry was gone, and old two-skins was haunting her.

Finally, worn out by the useless excavations of her memory, Nora turned off the television and went to sleep.

She woke feeling sick. She didn’t need to turn her head or open her eyes to know, but she did. And, of course, he was in the room. He would come to her wherever she fled. The stench came from the rotting skin he wore, not from a neighbour’s garbage or something dead between the walls. He didn’t look like something hallucinated – he seemed perfectly substantial standing there beside the television set and in front of the draperies.

Staring at him, Nora willed herself to wake up. She willed him to melt and vanish. Nothing happened. She saw the dark gleam of his eyes through ragged eye holes, and she was suddenly more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

She closed her eyes. The blood pounding in her ears was the sound of fear. She would not be able to hear him if he moved closer. Unable to bear the thought of what he might be doing, unseen by her, Nora opened her eyes. He was still there. He did not seem to have moved.

She had to get out. She had to give him the chance to vanish – he always had, before. But she was naked – she couldn’t go out as she was, and all her clothes were on the chair beside the window, much too close to him. In a moment, Nora knew, she might start screaming. Already she was shaking – she had to do something.

On fear-weakened legs, Nora climbed out of bed and stumbled towards the bathroom. She slammed the door shut behind her, hearing the comforting snick of the lock as she pressed the button in.

Then she stood with palms pressed on the Formica surface surrounding the basin, head hanging down, breathing shallowly in and out, waiting for the fear to leave her. When she had calmed herself, she raised her head and looked in the mirror.

There she was, the same old Nora. Lost her husband, driven out of her apartment by nerves, surrounded by the grey and white sterility of a hotel bathroom. There was no reason for her to be here – not in this building, not in El Paso, not in Texas, not in this life. But here she was, going on as if it all had some purpose. And for no better reason than that she didn’t know what else to do – she had no notion of how to start all over again.

Nora caught a glimpse of motion in the mirror, and then the clear reflection of the one who had come for her: the lumpish head with the mask of another’s face stretched crudely over his own. She looked calmly into the mirror, right into the reflections of his eyes. They were brown, she realised, very much like a pair of eyes she remembered from Mexico.

Feeling a kind of relief because there was no longer anywhere else to run, Nora turned away from the mirror to face him, to see this man in his dead skin for the first time in a fully lighted room. ‘She sent you to me,’ Nora said, and realised she was no longer afraid.

The skin was horrible – a streaky grey with ragged, black edges. But what of the man underneath? She had seen his eyes. Suddenly, as she gazed steadily at the figure, his name came into her mind, as clearly as if he had written it on the mirror for her: Xipe, the Flayed One. She had been right in thinking him some ancient Mexican god, Nora thought. But she knew nothing else about him, nor did she need to know. He was not a dream to be interpreted – he was here, now.

She saw that he carried a curved knife; watched without fear as he tore seams in the skin he wore, and it fell away, a discarded husk.

Revealed without the disfiguring, concealing outer skin, Xipe was a dark young man with a pure, handsome face. Not a Mexican, Nora thought, but an Indian, of noble and ancient blood. He smiled at her. Nora smiled back, realising now that there had never been any reason to fear him.

He offered her the knife. So easy, his dark eyes promised her. No fear, no question in their brown depths. Shed the old skin, the old life, as I have done, and be reborn.

When she hesitated, he reached out with his empty hand and traced a line along her skin. The touch of his hand seared like ice. Her skin was too tight. Xipe, smooth, clean and new, watched her, offering the ritual blade.

At last she took the knife and made the first incision.