House of Skin

FLY AND SPIDER

“Spider? You around? I want to talk to you.”

Gulliver listened. Beyond the door there was silence, an awful, heavy silence that got under his skin.

“Spider?”

With a badly shaking hand, Gulliver let himself in. Despite that seedy neighborhood of violent homeless people and drug addicts, Spider never locked the door. He was always open to visitors, regardless of their reasons and inclinations. Gulliver had once asked him if he wasn’t worried about being robbed or killed, and Spider said, quite matter-of-factly, “Let them come; getting out won’t be as easy as getting in.”

He went in and was immediately struck by the stench. It was horrid. He had never smelled anything quite like it before, it was positively vile. Something had been cooked, but what? In his mind he pictured soufflés of blood and human hair, meat pies bubbling with gut cheese and creamy marrow.

He searched about and found no one. This was the point in a movie, he supposed, where a character would begin looting through the occupant’s personal effects. And as he did so, the occupant would return. But Gulliver would have none of that. He was leaving now.

He had come to seek out Eddy, to keep Spider’s filthy fingers off of him… but he knew in his heart and the deep recesses of his poetic soul that he was too late. Much, much too late.

He went back outside and the alley was still deserted. He breathed a welcome sigh of relief, brushing a dew of sweat from his brow. He started walking home, but just a few blocks away he caught sight of a slouched, almost bestial-looking figure. It was Spider. There could be no doubt. Even in that part of the city with its ready compliment of the eccentric, the disenfranchised, and the demented, Spider stuck out like a severed thumb. He was decked out in his leathers—comic book Goth chic—his hair braided and beaded, a leather case in one fist, something like a sheet of folded black vinyl in the other. If ever there had been a man… or something manlike… on a mission, it was certainly Spider.

Gulliver trotted along behind, keeping pace but not getting too close. He caught sight of his face once and was glad of it. Spider was made up like a ghoul. His face was painted bone-white, his eyelids and lips black. There was a reason to this madness and Gulliver planned to find out what.

So he tailed him.

“What the fuck are you up to now, Spider?” he said under his breath.

He kept a good half a block or more between himself and his quarry. If Spider found him following along, who could say what would happen? He was made up for something and Gulliver had a good idea whatever it was wasn’t pleasant.

It took Spider nearly thirty minutes to reach the warehouse district. He was moving slow, his stride confident and sure. He never turned. The idea of being trailed probably never even occurred to him.

He went to the water’s edge and stopped. He checked his watch in the glare of the rising moon. He nodded and looked about. His leather gloves shined like neoprene in the moonlight.

Gulliver hid in the shadows nearby, behind a row of shrubs. In the distance he could hear the throb and bustle of the city proper. Down here, it was quiet. There were warehouses and industrial sites dotting the waterfront, mainly failed and closed-up. It was a bleak and desolate place that would soon be bulldozed for urban renewal.

He heard voices and saw three figures approaching. There was female laughter and a low, even male voice. It was Eddy. He knew that much. He felt a tightness in his stomach, an expectancy.

There was talk and laughter as Eddy and Spider and the two women Eddy’d brought with him got acquainted. They were prostitutes by the looks of them. Was that what this was? Gulliver wondered. Just a little party and nothing more?

They walked off, chatting and giggling, the girls fascinated by Spider’s get up. It was high carnival to them, but that was only because they didn’t know Spider and the deadly machinations of his twisted mind.

Gulliver followed behind, keeping a safe distance.

Why am I even bothering?

He wasn’t sure, but he’d come this far and he wasn’t about to turn back now. If all they were going to do was a little fucking and sucking in the dark, at least he’d get some entertainment for his time.

They slipped through a gap in the gate of a chain-link fence that surrounded a former brewery. The place was empty and had been for… what? Twenty years? At least. Gulliver waited in the shadows until they were around the side of one of the buildings, then followed.

A loading dock had been forced open by vandals and he slipped in, hoping it was the way they’d come. It was huge inside, like being in some vast arena. Moonlight spilled in through the barred windows and he saw nothing but wood and rubble everywhere, the skittering of night creatures.

Then he heard a sound, a wet muffled noise.

He moved in its direction and stopped before a door. He heard voices: Spider, Eddy, but not the whores. Then another noise, like something heavy being dragged off. The voices faded in the distance. Gulliver stepped into the room. It was actually a corridor, he saw. There was no one in it, but he could hear them in the distance, laughing.

The floor was wet.

Moonlight glimmered off a smeared pool of something. A heavy, sharp odor hung in the air. Bile crept up his throat. Blood. A chill passed through him. He steadied himself against the wall. After a moment or two, he stopped shaking. Violent death was nothing new in this city, but he had never been this close to it before. It was garish and ugly and so very, very real. The stink of blood filled his nostrils, his lungs, his reeling head. He did all he could do to keep his stomach down.

He had to get away, to run, to hide. If they were to catch him so close to their crimes, it wouldn’t be a good thing. Yet, like staring at the aftermath of a car accident, he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t pull himself away. He had to see, some graveyard curiosity had taken control and it demanded to be fed. Even at the cost of his own life, his sanity.

He started after them, freeing his shoes from the blood with a sticky sound. His stomach rolled with dry heaves.

Their trail was easy enough to follow, a smear of blood in their wake. He followed along, careful not to tread in it.

The corridor ended at an open door leading outside.

He could smell the fresh November breeze and something else quite horrible. He could hear them out there, talking amongst themselves. He peered out the door. There was a courtyard hemmed in by the buildings. Something was unzipped and there was a rattle of metal instruments. Eddy and Spider were putting on black vinyl raincoats, buttoning them up. A lantern was lit.

Gulliver watched them, stooping down, selecting knives in the brilliant, dirty light, discussing the bodies at their feet. They motioned in the air with the knives, comparing cuts like two butchers and he supposed that’s what they were. What they did next was the thing that made him fall to his knees, the blood abandoning his buzzing head. They worked carefully. First stripping one body, then another, examining their prizes.

Gulliver crawled away down the corridor and threw up, collapsing face first in his own waste. He lay there like that for some time as reality spun out of control around him. In the courtyard, he could hear rippings and wet slashings as the knives did their gruesome work.

When he could finally think straight, he pulled himself up uneasily on all fours and wiped the vomit from his face with his sleeve. His brain was telling him run, but his body admitted it had no strength left.

He listened and it was quiet out in the courtyard.

Had they gone? Had they taken their victims somewhere else to work on?

There was hope. He had that much. If they’d left, then he could count himself lucky that they hadn’t gone back the way they’d come. But if they were still around, this ordeal was far from finished.

He stood and went back to the end of the corridor.

And heard something in the courtyard.

He pressed himself into a corner and the nausea took him again. This time it wasn’t a physical reaction, but one caused from cold, biting fear that swam through him. He covered his mouth with his hands so he wouldn’t make a sound and shook, tears pressing from his bloodshot eyes.

They were still out there, all right. He could hear the sliding sound of vinyl and rip of knives over flesh.

Though he knew it would forever damage him and suck the soul right out of him, he had to see. He had to go look to prove to himself that it was indeed happening. He moved over to the doorway again, the breath in his lungs making a rushing sound in his ears.

They were kneeling next to one of the bodies. The light gleamed off their wet raincoats, the blades in their hands. It looked like they were carefully slitting the corpse’s clothing free, but he could see that she was already naked, her legs long and bare, her breasts heavy, nipples standing stiffly like thimbles. Eddy and Spider whispered as they worked. Whatever it was they were doing, it was meticulous, painstaking work. As Spider carefully slit with what might have been a scalpel, Eddy began pulling a sheet of something free. It looked like a skirt with scarves dangling from it.

Jesus, they’re skinning her.

Yes, very carefully and very slowly, the whore’s hide came off in a gauzy membrane that the moonlight shined through. From what he could see—and surmise—they had slit open the woman’s scalp, slicing down her neck and between her shoulder blades and ass, cutting vertically down each leg and around the bottom of her feet. As Spider surgically slit connective tissue, Eddy peeled her like an orange. It was exacting work, very time-consuming. But they went at it with a sickening finesse, cutting and peeling, the skin coming free in a single silken veil with a sound like stripped packing tape. It took them an hour or more and Gulliver watched them, disgusted, yes, horrified, yes, but oddly fascinated by the process… and too terrified to move. The most delicate work, of course, was at the breasts, fingers and toes. They didn’t bother trying to peel the vulva and anus, they simply cut around them. Finally, they peeled the scalp and had their skin intact. At their feet was a raw, red husk.

As Eddy held the whore’s hide up proudly, Spider examined it closely by the light of the lantern. Gulliver could see the woman’s face, the ovals of her mouth and eyes, the flopping dark hair… like some ghostly hollow-eyed wraith from a horror film.

“Yes, yes,” Spider said. “Not bad, not bad… a bit crude and workmanlike in spots, but not bad at all.”

“It’s right then?” Eddy asked.

“Oh yes.”

Trembling, Gulliver tried to climb to his feet, but the blood drained from his head and his knees went to rubber. He slid down the wall and went out cold.

He woke to the sound of footsteps coming towards the door. His heart thudded weakly in his chest, ready to burst like an over-inflated balloon. His teeth sank into his tongue and drew blood. A whimper clawed up his throat. Again, he tried to get to his feet, but his knees went to butter and deposited him softly onto the floor.

The footsteps stopped and he heard someone sit on the stoop mere feet away from him. A match was struck and he could smell cigarette smoke.

“Messy work,” he heard Eddy say.

“But necessary,” Spider said. “It has to be done in just the proper way.”

Gulliver wanted to scream.

My God, he thought, they’re so damn nonchalant about it all. Like they’re cutting meat for a cookout.

He could hear Eddy drawing off his smoke and exhaling with a satisfied sigh, a laborer on coffee break.

“Why are you opening up her back like that?” Eddy inquired.

Spider was cutting with great effort, grunting and cursing beneath his breath. The wet sawing noise, like someone slicing frozen meat, was almost too much for Gulliver to bear.

“I’m exposing,” Spider panted, “her vertebrae.”

“Why?”

“Trust me,” he said, hacking and cleaving, “there’s method to my madness.”

He heard Eddy crush his smoke out and join Spider with a swish of vinyl. There was a rattle of instruments.

“This membrane’s hellish,” Eddy grunted.

“Try the post mortem knife,” Spider suggested, pulling something free with a wet snap. “There. Got it. Hand me the snips, will you?”

“I think you’ll have to sharpen these knives again for next time.”

And it kept on, this rather bored exchange as they cut and sawed and chopped and swore with exertion. After a time, Gulliver was desensitized to it all and he found his mind wandering. The most horrible part was the allusion to the next time. What sort of psychotic game were they playing here? And did they honestly plan to keep it up night after night?

I better get the police, Gulliver thought.

The butchering stopped and he heard the men wiping their hands and putting their knives away, stepping from raincoats.

“Help me with this,” Spider said.

“Around their feet?”

“Yeah, they’ll be easier to drag around like this.”

Gulliver couldn’t help himself. He peered out the door. They were tying lengths of rope around the cadaver’s respective feet. The lantern was doused now, but the moon was bright. It was terrible. The women were little more than ripped open sacks of meat, internals and musculature trailing wetly.

Ropes were knotted and fastened, instruments gathered up. Spider’s bag zipped shut.

“What are you doing with those?” Eddy asked.

“Just a couple of treats for later.”

“Any good?”

“If they’re seasoned properly.”

“You should try marinating them,” Eddy suggested. “It works wonders.”

Gulliver wanted to vomit again. Murder. Mutilation. Cannibalism. What sort of dark cycle had he put into motion when he’d introduced these two?

Spider and Eddy were talking in low tones, laughing amongst themselves.

They were fiends, ghouls. Deranged beyond imagining. They killed and slaughtered with no remorse. Men like that wouldn’t care to be interfered with. And if they were, murder wouldn’t be beyond them. If Gulliver wanted to get out and alive, now was the time.

More sounds now. They were dragging the bodies to the door.

Run! Gulliver willed his legs, but they wouldn’t move. The best he could do was a slow crawl away from the door. He curled into a ball in a dark corner, prayers falling from his lips. First Eddy emerged, then Spider, stinking of sweat and blood and primal things. They passed right by Gulliver without noticing him, hauling their respective bodies down the corridor and away, blood and bits of flesh raining from them.

When they were out of earshot, Gulliver scrambled to his feet and dashed out into the courtyard. He searched the exteriors of the buildings and found no way out. This theater of suffering had no exits save the one he’d come through.

He had no choice then.

He’d have to follow them back out or hide somewhere until they were gone. It wasn’t much of a choice.

It took him some time to creep back up the corridor into the main chamber of the building. He had to move slowly, quietly, so he wouldn’t be heard. The consequences at hand were great and he’d never been a brave man. But he was cautious and if luck would just hold out…

He made it to the end of the corridor and opened the door. Blinding light exploded in his face.

But that wasn’t all.

The women were hung up before him, one by the feet, the other by the throat, back to back. Gulliver stood there, facing death, filled with it, his head reeling. A stink of blood and raw meat washed over him. The women had been gutted quite thoroughly, opened from crotch to breast. Most of the organs were gone, bone and bleeding muscle protruding at gashed angles. Their genitals had been severed free, replaced by gored holes. Their faces were grinning tissue and ligament.

The lantern was lit nearby, hissing with life, providing unwanted illumination. Their skins were tacked to the wall.

It was madness, yet there was a perfection about it all. These were not maniacal slashings, done out of lust or anger, but carefully plucked and dissected corpses. There was a method here, an insane one, but a method all the same. Both women had been mutilated in the exact, precise way.

Gulliver fell to his knees before their swinging masses, a pagan at the feet of his bleeding, slit gods.

“And what do we have here?” Eddy said, not surprised somehow. “Gulliver of all things.”

He couldn’t look at them.

“The little fuck has been spying on us.”

“Have you?” Eddy asked. “Have you been watching us, Gully?”

Spider unzipped his case of knives. “Shall I carve him?”

Gulliver glared up at them, his eyes swimming in their sockets. He was as near madness as anyone Eddy had ever seen.

“I think you’ve made a grave error here,” Eddy told him. “This isn’t something we want anyone to know about. Not just yet.”

Gulliver stared at him, unblinking. “Butchers,” he managed.

“Let’s kill him,” Spider said.

Eddy shook his head, a man with a problem on his hands. He didn’t look dangerous really, just confused. “What to do,” he mused.

“If we let the little faggot go,” Spider said, “he’ll run to the police like the fairy he is. You know that as well as I do. We have no choice.”

“Would you do that to us?” Eddy asked of him. “Would you betray us like that, Gully?”

“Course he would. Dirty queen would love to ruin everything,” said Spider. “Let’s quarter him.”

Gulliver was waiting to die and under the circumstances, it seemed the best he could aspire to. There was a black voice of madness in his head, buzzing like insects, offering him a solemn and eternal peace. It didn’t seem so bad. If he was crazy, maybe he wouldn’t feel the blades when they spilled his life and peeled back his skin.

And then he heard something. A wet sound like dogs lapping at water bowls, like bones pulled through a meaty matrix of flesh. It had to be in his head… yet, Spider and Eddy seemed distracted, nervous even. They’d heard it, too. Was it the police? A last minute reprieve? Such things only happened in the movies. He was going to die and that was fact. His death would be bloody and painful. He could only hope that Eddy would take his life quickly so Spider wouldn’t prolong the suffering.

But, for now, they weren’t paying any attention to him. They stood fixed, rigid, confused even as he was. The air suddenly seemed different, heavier, busier, thrumming with impurity. It crackled with static electricity. It was cool and thick in his lungs, the air of a meat locker. And still that awful lapping sound, louder, louder, a huge and determined sound, that grisly moist ripping. The building seemed to tremble around them, dust pounding from the beams overhead, the floor uneasy with sluggish waves.

What in the hell is this?

And then he saw, just as Eddy and Spider saw.

She was causing the noises, the disturbances, the woman who wandered out of the darkness, out of a gossamer film of dirty light like some imperfection on the face of a mirror.

Something like a prayer of thanks fell from Gulliver’s trembling lips. Here was help… or maybe something far worse.

The woman stopped just at the perimeter of the light. And what a woman. She was bloated without being actually fat. Her female proportions—hips, legs, breasts, cunt, belly—distended and heaving. She was totally naked and totally beyond shame. She reminded him of a women from museum paintings: heavy, bovine, flesh piled on in abundance. A renaissance women, out of place and time, from a period when large, voluptuous women were highly sought. She licked her lips with an obscene tongue, moonlight shining in her blood-greased tresses.

Gulliver screamed. There was no drama or forethought: the scream came ripping out of his guts and up his throat with a shrilling, broken sound.

It got the attention of the woman immediately. She came in his direction, something like white steam blowing out of the immense, sucking pores set into her pallid, metallic gray flesh. She left a snotty trail of something like afterbirth behind her that crept and rustled like the train of a bridal gown. She expanded like a puffer fish… face, lips, limbs, genitalia swelling grotesquely like someone undergoing anaphylactic shock… then deflated into some gaunt, mechanistic bone sculpture with glittering cherry pits for eyes. Her skin was like an elastic membrane through which dozens of plum-sized doll faces were trying to push.

“Pretty,” she said. “How very, very pretty.”

Gulliver pissed himself, thinking she was talking about him.

But she wasn’t talking about him, but the sacrifices hanging there, the skins affixed to the wall.

“They’ve come,” Spider said in a voice of reverence. He looked to be quite near religious ecstasy. He fell to his knees. “Oh, dear Christ, they’ve come…”

“Jesus,” Eddy said. “The Sisters of Filth.”

They? Gulliver thought. They?

Oh yes, they. He saw it now. She had not come alone but with some freakish thing that was attached to her by a snaking, fleshy umbilical… like some conjoined twin that had never truly separated. A boneless horror steaming with gray gas, swelling and fluttering, pulsing and throbbing.

Gulliver couldn’t help himself: he screamed.

The other was a gas-inflated bladder that drifted three feet off the ground, a raggedy collection of leathery crow skirts formed of multiple blackened hides stitched together, the sutures of which randomly split as it expanded and deflated with its own clotted, phlegmy breathing… if breathing it was. Beneath them, he caught glimpses of a writhing mass of red meat. Tendrils of pulsating, bloody tissue kept trying to escape the confining stitchwork only to be sucked back in like ribbons of snot. It had no legs, only one yellow and scabrous arm dangling from the pelts and a skullish head with a white, seamed face like a puckered, waterlogged corpse. Each time it breathed, the mouth suctioned open and threads of pus trembled in the air with a sewer stink that made him want to throw up. Maybe it knew this, for it fixed him with its one remaining eye… a serous-yellow orb that looked much like a veined, fertilized ovum.

Gulliver felt his mind drawing into some black chasm within his skull. This was a fucking nightmare. He was hallucinating, he was tripping out of his mind. He had to be. And yet, he felt the minds of those things touch him and he knew they had names—the swollen one was Haggis Sardonicus and the conjoined one was Haggis Umbilicus. They were sisters.

“You’ve pleased us,” said Haggis Sardonicus, her voice like the coo of a dove. “You’ve honored us.”

She spoke for both of them, for her sister was incapable of speech as such.

Spider looked helpless, impotent next to them. He asked: “You are the Sisters?” His voice was eager.

“You flatter us, sir.”

“And you’ve come to let us into the Territories?”

Sardonicus giggled like a little girl. “He is wise, sister. He knows.”

Umbilicus rustled her agreement.

Gulliver was shaking so badly he could not string any words together.

“We want to go,” Eddy said. “Into the Territories.”

“In time, little one” Sardonicus said. “In time. We have to be sure. You can understand that, can’t you? Only so many are allowed in every generation. We have to select initiates very carefully.”

Gulliver swallowed down bile. She smelled like rotting orchids and black earth. Which was almost pleasant in comparison to the raw, hot stench of rotting fish that blew off her sister.

Eddy looked uneasy. He took a step back.

“And your names?” the woman asked.

“I’m Spider and this is Eddy Zero.”

“Zero?” she said. “Zero?”

“The Doctor’s son.”

Haggis Sardonicus nodded and seemed pleased by this. She grinned like a wolf with a fresh kill, a foul sweat exuding from her pores. Her sister expanded and deflated rapidly. “Just as lovely as your father, too. What a rare treat.”

“And when can we go? How—”

“In time. When we see more of your artistry. Only then. Our club is quite exclusive.”

Spider seemed happy.

“For now, maybe you’ll leave that one in our care,” she said, licking her stout, swollen lips. “My sister fancies him.”

Gulliver felt a wild, irrational fear slam into him. He’d take the knives first, he’d use them on himself before he let that horror touch him. He began to crawl away even as Eddy and Spider blocked his path. That would have been it and he knew it. It would have ended right there… but there came an interruption.

“Hey!” a voice called out as a flashlight beam panned the room. “What’s going on here? What are you people… oh dear God…”

He was a night watchman of some sort or maybe a member of a neighborhood vigilance committee. No matter, because Sister Haggis Umbilicus went right at him. Her stink washed over Gulliver and it was the reek of split carcasses boiling with fly larva upon a battlefield. The old man screamed once and she had him. Her hair writhed like hookworms, her puckered mouth howled, and she unzipped herself, opening like some monstrous black hood, sucking him into the whirlwind meatstorm of her anatomy where he screamed but once before his brain pulped like a soft pear in his skull and his eyes were plucked from their sockets by slimy optic stems and his bones were literally sucked from his skin. He was pulled apart, slit and smashed and turned inside out. He became part of Haggis Umbilicus. She closed back up like a clamshell and he was gone.

Gulliver seized the only chance given him.

He was on his feet and running before Eddy and Spider could hope to stop him. He was out the door and in the night air, the stench, the sickness behind him. If anyone followed, he never turned to see, he knew only escape and that’s all he needed to know.

He slipped through the gate and pounded up the street, heading away from the brewery and those gruesome hell-witches and their pawns. He was alive, but his mind, he feared, would never be the same again.