House of Skin

THE GRIM RESURRECTION OF CASSANDRA LOOMIS

The night Cassandra came back from the dead was unexceptional in every way: no moaning wind or blowing leaves, not so much as a stray raindrop or a distant clap of thunder. It was a warm and dry night, moonless, the stars bright, the breeze negligible. It was the sort of night lovers walk hand in hand down shadowy lanes and make love in vacant, grassy lots or beside country streams. The atmosphere was light and in no way ominous or remotely threatening.

This was the night she chose, or was chosen for her.

Her body was found in what was known by some as the House of Mirrors. A derelict looking for a place to sleep had wandered in as they did from time to time. He’d called the police, of course, but not before he’d looted through her pockets and taken everything of any possible value, including her ID.

Then she became Jane Doe. Dead, lost, but not unaware.

The following days were abysmal. The medical examiner and his attendant flunkies were the first to extricate her from the locker she was kept in. Before them, only cops came to visit and a few despondent souls looking for missing loved ones. The former group was insufferable. They’d stand about, gazing down with barren eyes, telling dirty jokes or studying her wounds and usually at the same time. One or two of them made comments about her breasts and legs. The latter group always looked shell-shocked. Their eyes were hollow, their hearts heavy, their voices weak. If they were grateful that the wrecked and flayed face they looked down upon didn’t belong to their lost sheep, you could never tell. They came in numb and were led away in the same state.

Cassandra watched them come, watched them go, her mind racing around in the bleak corridors of her decaying brain. She wasn’t sure why the lights never went out completely, but they didn’t. Awareness still flickered in that skull of hers, relentless and undying, a dim but steadily burning light.

The medical examiner’s name was Dr. Roget. The name reminded her of cheap champagne. So did he: a raw stink of liquor came off his sour breath. He and his flunkies took their time cutting and probing her secrets. Biopsies were taken, fluid samples sucked free, wounds measured for depth and angle of infliction. Her scalp was peeled and her skull was opened like a can of peas, its bounty dropped into a dish and weighed, sliced, and picked at. Her organs and tissues were likewise examined with total indifference. She was no longer a human being in their eyes, just a cadaver, a carcass to be folded, spindled, and mutilated. They did a good job of it. She was disgusted by the process at first, then amused, and finally bored. It only proved that one could get used to just about anything in due time.

When Dr. Roget had finished his little report on the deceased, he sewed her back up again. It was anything but a neat job. Cassandra had known little about autopsies before her own, but she came away with an extensive knowledge. A tailor or a butcher could’ve zipped her back up; it took no anatomical knowledge or specialized skill. Roget hummed a showtune beneath his breath—Hello, Dolly? Oklahoma?—and stuffed her organs back in their slots and if they didn’t fit, he shrugged and packed them in any available recess that would accommodate them. He didn’t even bother trying to fit the brain back in its housing. He dropped it in her body cavity and started stitching, a cigarette dangling from his lips. A bit of ash fell in, but who was complaining? When he was done, she was sewn from crotch to throat in a great Y-pattern, closing out the post.

Roget dropped his rubber gloves in a medical waste vat and said, “Another day, another dollar.”

The flunkies covered her back up and rolled her gurney back into the meat locker. She was slid into her own cubicle.

“Next stop, worm city, baby,” one of them said and closed the hatch.

Cassandra was alone for some time after that. Days? Weeks? Months? It was hard to say. The dead lack any definite sense of time. The next thing she knew, she was sprawled on a slab in a funeral home. Two morticians, both men in their twenties, attended to her final needs. She was embalmed and then meticulously washed before a cheap casket was selected. She was a charity case, so the state wasn’t about to pay for anything regal.

“She looks pretty good,” Fish said. “Considering.”

Mick nodded. “You’re an artist. That’s what you are.”

“I wish I knew her in life. Look at those tits… yummy.”

“You’re sick.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Mick shook his head and went about cleaning the instruments.

Cassandra was appalled by the exchange, but not truly offended. The dead did not offend easily. She was almost flattered by Fish’s comments. If he hadn’t have been such a drooling pervert, she might have loved him. Though her mind was quite active, her body remained numb and frigid like frozen meat. She could feel nothing, only sorrow and despair, the fear of eternity. But she never gave up. She worked at her nerves and stiff muscles, massaging them into compliance. Oh, they’d do her bidding yet, one way or another.

“Any plans tonight?” Fish said.

Cassandra felt herself brighten, thinking she was being addressed… but no, Fish was talking to Mick.

“Not much. Early night. I’ve got class in the a.m.”

“You need to live a little, my friend. I’ve got a couple of Puerto Rican cuties lined-up. Why don’t you come along? They speekee very little English and they’re barely legal, you know what I mean, but they love to fuck.”

Mick sighed. “You’re gonna get your ass in trouble, my friend. Mark my words. You can’t run around poking teenagers without paying the piper sooner or later.”

“Ah, I’m fixed, shooting blanks. I leave no calling cards.”

“You’re still having sex with minors. It’s gonna catch up to you.”

“My ass it will.”

“One of these times, one of your girlies is going to tell her hot-blooded Puerto Rican daddy and your ass’ll be lying on this slab.”

“Shit.”

“Statutory rape, Fish. Courts don’t look kindly on it. You’ll do time.”

Fish laughed. “Not me.”

But Mick was wrong, Cassandra knew. Evil parasites like Fish rarely were punished and they always seemed to get away.

“I wonder who offed this babe,” Fish wondered aloud.

“They don’t know. They don’t even know who she is.”

Fish laughed. “And what the fuck do we care, eh, Mick? We tag ’em and bag ’em and dump ’em in a cheap box and we get paid.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Look at that face,” Fish said. “A butcher couldn’t even love that.”

Cassandra’s face, of course, had been gashed repeatedly by Eddy’s knife. There were cuts and gashes everywhere, but her face was still the worst: it had been carved down to meat, nearly down to the skull. The wounds had been cleaned and somehow they looked more ghoulish without blood to lend them color or character.

“I can’t imagine what kind of sick sonofabitch could do something like that,” Mick said.

“Yeah,” Fish agreed. “A freaking waste. Bet she was a good lay in her time. Nice tits.”

“You sick fuck.”

“Well, shit, look at her. I mean, bag that face, but that body… not bad at all.” Fish stroked the cold mounds of her breasts. “Too bad, sweetheart. You died too soon. We could’ve had fun.”

“That’s enough,” Mick said, getting angry. He was larger than Fish, more muscular. Cassandra was practically in love with him. Here was a man who’d fight for her virtue, dead or alive.

“Lighten up, man.”

“C’mon, let’s get her in the box,” Mick told him. “Time to get home.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“I got things to do.”

“So, get out of here. I’ll take care of her myself. I need the overtime.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, beat it.”

Mick left and Cassandra felt herself cringe. He wasn’t going to leave her alone with this degenerate, was he? Yes, it seemed so. Of all the indignities. After Mick was gone for ten minutes or so, Fish stood there, staring at her for the longest time. He left the room and came back. Cassandra didn’t like the look in his eyes. Nor did she like anything that came next. But she expected it. Even in death, there was no peace for her. Fish climbed up on the slab and unzipped himself. His member was huge and throbbing. This wasn’t the first time for him. That was easy enough to see. He greased himself with petroleum jelly and forced her legs apart. It didn’t take very long. Cassandra couldn’t feel any of it. She was only aware of the motion of her body as he thrust into her. She felt repulsion and hatred, but nothing more. His semen was hot inside her. She could feel it working at her loins, unlocking the ice prison of her dead cells. The warmth spread and her nerve endings began to tingle, her muscles began to ache. He had given her life. Life could only come from life and so it had. Her entire body was pulsing with heat.

Fish hopped off the slab and washed himself thoroughly. He had considered giving her a long and thorough fucking, but he had to think about his dates later that night. He had to have some spunk left for the Rican girls. Besides, it always had to be fast when you knocked off a quickie with a corpse. The thrill of discovery was part of the allure, but you couldn’t push it. He had long experience at deflowering the dead and he wasn’t about to risk any of it coming to an end.

He sat down at the desk and scribbled a few pertinents for his boss, thinking about those Puerto Rican girls and what he was going to make them do. The paperwork took well over thirty minutes to complete. The entire time, Cassandra was knitting up inside, the life given her spreading out, cells renewing and dividing as kinetic organic energy flooded her system, and she was reborn… not the same, she would never be the same… but revitalized and rekindled and remade if only temporarily.

Without further ado, she rose.

Fish’s reaction was kind of a disappointment because he didn’t scream as she’d hoped. He just looked at her with surprise, with awe, with a sort of what-the-fuck? look on his face as if it was a practical joke. And when he saw that it wasn’t, a guilty fear stole over his features that she could now tell the world what sort of monster he indeed was. He sat there like that for a few drawn-out moments, his eyes wide, his lips trembling with questions. Then the color abandoned his face and his composure seemed to go with an almost audible snap.

“MICK! MICK! MICK! HELP ME FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST—”

Mick was long gone, of course.

Fish screamed and babbled out incoherent sentences as cool sweat boiled from his pores and washed down his face. It was the sort of sweat that always beaded the faces of people in situations like this in old horror comics, Cassandra recalled. Paralyzed with fear, the scream winding down into a gobbling/whimpering sort of noise, Fish slid from the chair and fell to his knees. This was his next primitive reaction. Since he couldn’t run and screaming brought no help, he kneeled at the feet of his risen goddess, sobbing and squealing, hoping for mercy.

Cassandra felt only pity for this wreck of humanity before her. She took him in her arms. His eyes bulged in their sockets, his mouth formed airless words. He was trembling like a babe.

“You’ll… be my victim,” she whispered in a dry and gritty voice, a hiss, really.

“Please,” Fish muttered.

She pressed her forearm against his throat and placed her other arm behind his neck. She applied what she thought would be subtle pressure, but it was great and irresistible. Fish’s eyes rolled like marbles, like white yolks, spit foamed from his mouth and his neck went with a sharp, wet snap. He slumped in her arms, the air thick with the reek of his voided bowels. She let him fall.

She found a laundry bag out in the garage. She figured the clothes in it must have belonged to the dead. She dumped them out, selecting a foul-smelling business suit for herself, and brought the sack back into the mortuary. She stuffed Fish into it. Though she was starving, he was far too warm to be palatable. A little ageing would tenderize him.

But there was no need to go hungry because she was standing in the middle of a well-stocked larder.

A prisoner to her own ravenous hunger, Cassandra located the corpse of a woman who had yet to be embalmed. She slid the drawer out, looking down at her and told herself she must be sickened by what she was contemplating. But there was no nausea and precious few pangs of moral guilt. Some things simply did not survive the resurrection process. What societal taboos remained in her brain were like distant memories, dream imagery glimpsed halfway through the day that made precious little sense.

“No,” she said under her breath, sliding the drawer shut. “This is wrong and I know it’s wrong.”

But her hunger remained and it growled and tore at her belly. It had claws and teeth and unless it was satisfied, it would only get worse and somehow she knew this. It was not the appetite of the living, but something far darker, a gnawing agony like needles inserted into her stomach. A hunger born in dark graves and narrow boxes. The starvation of entombment.

She slid the drawer open again… but slowly, very slowly, teasingly and seductively like a man slowly pulling the sheet away from the voluptuous body of his lover. She revealed her food in this way and the hunger inside grew wild, almost violent in its demands.

Letting out a cry, Cassandra seized the woman’s corpse and tore into it with her teeth, shattering the skull against the floor and tearing her scalp free. She snapped away plates of skull until the buttery-soft folds of the brain were exposed. At first, she tore at the gray matter with wolflike bites, then she began to nibble at them, scooping them out with her fingers and savoring each delicate bite. She gnawed the flesh from the left leg and right arm, stripped the throat, and dug deep into the sweetmeats of the cadaver’s distended belly.

When she was finished, she was laying next to the corpse’s grisly remains, her naked body painted with gore. She hummed a song as she licked her fingers. She knew that she could have easily laid there, picking away at it for hours until there was nothing but bones, but that wouldn’t do. Someone might come at any moment and she needed to be practical.

She washed herself up a bit and donned the smelly business suit.

Once she had Fish’s remains safely in the trunk of his car along with a variety of cosmetics to reconstruct her face, she returned to the mortuary. She had definitely made a mess of things. Questions would be asked. She needed to tidy things up. Out in the garage she found a can of gasoline and doused the mortuary. When she left it was blazing.

There was work to do. She would need a place to stay and clothes to wear. She wasted no time; she got busy.

Then she’d seek out Eddy. Who could say what sort of trouble he’d gotten himself into during her absence?

God only knew.

With that in mind, Cassandra drove off into the night. And while the police searched for an embalmer named Fish, the true malefactor went about her business at leisure.