House of Skin

PEARL IN THE ROUGH

Sometimes it surprised Eddy the lengths he was willing to go to for a friend. It wasn’t enough that he’d robbed Spider’s apartment of books and other oddities. It wasn’t enough that he’d stolen his corpse—and no easy task it was. Now he was getting meat for the bastard.

And he’d always thought such devotion was beyond him.

He put a gold loop earring in his right ear and wore a black longshoremen’s chook and pea coat. His long, dark hair was now cut shoulder-length and he’d put on a false mustache and sideburns. He decided no one would recognize him. He wanted to look just like another fag fresh off the boats.

He chose a club named Smiley’s that he knew was frequented by gays and pulled up a stool at the bar. It being just after noon, there were few people in there as yet. Less than a dozen older, unsightly queens dropped him rakish winks, but he ignored them. He found them sickening in their gowns and lace and crudely applied make-up, little of which did anything to hide the mileage under their garish hoods.

Eddy had a special type in mind.

Young, meaty, easy to control. A few swarthy young bucks tight with muscle and smooth asses propositioned him, but he declined. They whispered juvenile obscenities in his ears, trying to lure him into the lavatory for a quick round of buggery. But he didn’t have time for fun and games, he was here on business. Any other time such simple amusement would’ve been acceptable, but not now. After some thirty minutes of laboring over a weak Bacardi and Coke, the right one sat down next to him. Plump with a shaven head and no gaudy attire. He looked rather like a businessman on lunch break with his somber gray suit and tie.

“Could I buy you a drink?” he asked meekly. “Friends call me Pearl.”

Eddy smiled. Yes, this was the one. The subservient air about him was ideal. “Sure,” he replied. “That’ll do for starters.”

Pearl blushed and placed the orders.

Eddy knew this one would do just as he was instructed and that was the way it had to be. Pearl, as he called himself, was a newcomer to the stage of rough trade. And that was something more in his favor. Eddy would play the part of the veteran queer and lead his young and eager quarry into what he thought were the secret realms of his own closet fantasy world. And Eddy himself, the seasoned maritime degenerate, would even indulge in a bit of dirty play with him before the knives came out and the messy work began.

They chatted for a time, Eddy and Pearl, but it was mostly a one-sided conversation in which Pearl spoke of the miseries of heterosexual relationships. And the more he drank, Eddy noted, the worse those miseries became. Soon enough, misery wasn’t adequately descriptive of the hell he’d endured. Words like atrocious, barbarous, and criminal soon came into play. Pearl had suffered at the hands of women. As all men have, Eddy told him, suppressing a smile.

“That’s women for you, mate,” he said. “Every time they spread their legs, their meters are running. Gets so an honest swab like myself can’t break off a piece of fun without paying the tab.”

“Yes!” Pearl said. “Exactly.”

“That’s why a couple of shipmates like you and I can understand each other.”

“And then some.”

“Shall we take a walk?” Eddy offered in a lecherous voice.

“Where?”

“A little place I know. Not far,” he said, then: “As the crow flies, mate.” He was laying the sailor business on a bit thick, but he couldn’t seem to stop. It was all endlessly amusing. It was all he could do to not burst out laughing with his own hammy performance, most of which was borrowed from bad movies, but Pearl didn’t seem to notice.

They walked arm in arm, talking and laughing like two old friends thrown together by chance. They only paused once when Pearl said he could wait no longer. Alcohol had made him quite bold, so Eddy led him into an alley and Pearl unzipped him while he counted the bricks on the opposite wall.

“What do we have here?” Pearl said playfully, pulling Eddy’s pants beyond his knees.

“A little treat,” Eddy assured him.

Pearl went down on him with drunken abandon.

“Was that good?” Pearl inquired, flushed and wiping seed from his lips.

“Lovely.”

“Want to do me?”

“Later.”

Pearl nodded. “But it was good?”

“Yes.”

“You’re so much easier to please than my wife was. I’m glad you liked it.”

Eddy moaned. “Oh, that was wonderful, mate. You’ll have to ship out with me one day. Life on the water suits our kind.”

“Is there many… with our tastes?” Pearl needed to know.

“More than not.”

Eddy took a roundabout route to the house where Spider waited, in case they were being followed. On the way he told of his mythical adventures on the high seas. Of the intimacy men share in close quarters and the carefree days of sodomy and indulgence on a ship of fools. Pearl was beginning to talk as ludicrously as he before they reached their destination, spouting like some swabby from an old Warner Brothers picture.

Finally, the house: old, dark, decaying.

“This it, captain?” Pearl giggled.

“Aye, this be me lodgings,” Eddy told him.

Pearl pushed drunkenly through the door. “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” he shouted in the black interior.

Eddy smiled. “And dead men tell no tales,” he whispered under his breath. It was all so terribly easy, so effortless. Some things were just meant to be.

“Got anything to drink, captain?” Pearl asked when they were together in the living room. “Just one more would suit me fine.”

The living room had no furnishings save for a sofa with a nasty lilt and a set of insect-ravaged curtains. There was a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen and Eddy fetched it, along with some ice and two glasses.

“You definitely need a woman’s touch here,” Pearl laughed.

“I only live here when I’m not on the boats.”

“Still…”

It was a charmless old house and Eddy liked it that way. The Realtor had handed it over, as is, for a song. Given the neighborhood and the bad plumbing and ancient wiring, it was a fair deal. The place hadn’t been lived in for two years. It was dusty, dirty, and decaying, just short of being condemned by the city. But it was home.

Eddy and Pearl sat on the sofa and drank. Pearl was quite intoxicated and whatever inhibitions he’d formerly held had long ago been washed away by the booze. He’d stripped himself down to his pants now and a word from Eddy and they’d go, too.

Pearl leaned against him and brushed his lips with his own. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused. One good blow would put him out for the night and so much the better. His fingers played at Eddy’s crotch.

“Again?” he asked.

“Something better,” Eddy told him and helped him up. “Follow me.”

Pearl did, holding onto Eddy’s hand and nibbling drunkenly at his neck. Eddy brought him across the room to a set of oak sliding doors. They might have been grand things at one time, but now they were defaced with names and initials and crude drawings. A reek of cat piss hung in the air.

“Have you a pussy about?” Pearl asked.

They both laughed.

Eddy opened the doors.

“What’s in here, captain? Is this where you bury your treasure?” Pearl giggled.

“Yes, my treasure, it is.”

They went in and Eddy closed the doors. He turned on the light, a single bare bulb protruding from an ancient fixture on the wall.

“Dim in here, captain.” Pearl looked around. He pointed to a mattress shoved in the corner. “Is that where you sleep?”

“No, not me. Take off your pants.”

“I never disobey an order,” Pearl told him and begin to slip from his pants and underwear. He dropped them to the floor in a heap and fondled his length. He seemed quite impressed with himself.

There was movement behind him, a shuffling of feet. He turned and stared at the shape shambling out to meet him. He didn’t scream or even gasp, he just swayed on his bit of floor and wondered if he was seeing this at all.

“Nice,” Spider said, “very nice. We like it.”

Pearl made a gagging noise and stumbled to one knee. Spider took a step forward and Pearl stared, his erection gone limp. What was it he was even looking at? A man? A man with skin the color of gray ash, his slashed open throat stitched crudely shut like a second disobedient mouth? His hair like a nest of serpents, braided, beaded, hanging in wild filthy strands that crawled with insect life? Was he even seeing this? And despite the intoxication that swam with a low, maddening hum in his brain, he knew he was. This thing was real, it lived… or had at some point. A stink of rot and pungent sweetness enveloped it in an appalling cloud. And its eyes, black, loveless holes drilled into the tombstone face, held no hint of humanity or compassion. They were miasmic alien dreams suffused with a glaring, ugly hunger.

“My God,” Pearl managed.

When the nightmare spoke, its pitted lips cracked open like sores and a vicious tongue tasted the air. “Where did you find this?” it asked in the voice of a woman. And answered itself in the voice of a child: “Somewhere special, I think.”

Eddy grinned like a cat. This was a special moment and he savored its depravity as one must do with all such moments. The fear, the total hopelessness in Pearl’s rolling eyes gave him a lust that was boundless.

“What in the name of Christ is this?” Pearl cried. His voice was kept from total hysteria by the alcohol that deadened his senses.

“It’s a game,” Eddy said.

“Yes, a game,” the ghoul said, gliding forward. “See all the pretty work?” It opened the ragged overcoat it wore. The exposed, graying torso had been slit from belly to ribs and stitched neatly back up. Patches of fungus clung to the chest. “Would you like to see the secrets inside?”

Pearl said nothing. Tears began to run from his eyes. He looked this way and that and saw no escape route.

Eddy slid a knife from his pocket. “You’re meat,” he said.

Pearl screamed and jumped to his feet. Spider put one cold, stiff hand over his mouth and drew a razor over his throat. Pearl went back to his knees, gulping for air and drawing only blood. Eddy came forward and opened his belly with an expert thrust of his knife.

The blood seemed to be everywhere within moments, spreading over the floor in a glistening pool. An electricity crackled in the air.

Eddy watched as Pearl died. There was a beauty in death, an art in gruesome slaughter and, he supposed, he wasn’t the first to know this. The history of mankind was written in red and described in suffering. It was the only absolute of existence, that death would come and often it wasn’t pleasant.

Spider grasped Pearl’s head and ran his fingers over it. He seemed to be checking it over very closely, as he’d done with others they’d made sacrifice of.

“What now?” Eddy asked.

“A little taste,” Spider told him. “And then some more.”

Eddy watched him, watched the Shadows crawl over and through him. Spider was their vessel now. They had a place to call home and he supposed that’s all they ever really wanted. If it hadn’t been for them and the secrets Cassandra had gleaned from the books, Spider wouldn’t be walking at all now. Regardless, he was a horror to behold.

He placed an arrangement of knives around the body and set to work with a scalpel, opening vertical slashes and humming to himself as he did so. He didn’t remove anything, he seemed only concerned with opening up the skin and exposing the bounty which lay beneath.

Eddy grew bored after a time and gathered up Pearl’s clothes and took them into the other room. He put all the dead man’s belongings in the hearth and soaked them with lighter fluid and watched them burn. He fed logs and shredded newspaper to the flames to keep the blaze going. Soon, there was nothing but ash left of the garments. He lit a cigarette and went back to see how Spider was doing.

Spider was slitting his sutures and opening himself like a book. He squatted over the carved body and looked up as Eddy came in.

“What are you doing?”

Spider grinned. “What do you think I’m doing?” he asked. “Did you think I was going to eat him with my mouth? I have no internals.”

Eddy nodded. He’d watched Cassandra remove Spider’s viscera himself and replace it with the things the books had alluded to: salts, spices, powders, and knotted sacs of herb, cat gut, grave dirt. All the things Spider had stored in his refrigerator. He supposed all things living, and even those pretending to live, had to gather sustenance somehow. And ways had to be invented.

It started with a moaning wind and a shriek of discarnate voices that sent eddies of dust swirling around the cadaver. The floor boards began to rattle, the ceiling seemed to bow and groan. Eddy looked on, fascinated. He could feel it in himself, the hungry pull that emanated from Spider’s body cavity. His own flesh trembled on his bones. And if that’s what it was doing to him, what it did to Pearl’s cadaver was something else entirely. His body trembled and thumped on the floor, the skin shuddering madly as if there were rivers of ants moving just beneath it. It came apart with a sodden ripping, atomizing into a viscid mist that was sucked free and absorbed into Spider’s body. A channel was dug in the torso and its matter vacuumed free, muscle and organ and connective tissue disintegrating into a spray. Eddy studied the proceedings with gaping eyes as blood steamed in the air and meat was boiled into gas. Pearl was effortlessly stripped down to hissing bone and even that shattered and came apart as marrow was ingested. The great sucking wind yanked at the boards beneath and withdrew nails and splinters of wood and only then did it stop.

Spider stood and a variety of things spilled from his fluttering, stormy innards: fingernails and crushed bits of bone and then teeth. There was no meat left on the corpse, even the skeleton had been pitted and dehydrated to withered deadwood.

It had all taken only a few moments.

“Incredible,” Eddy found himself saying.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

There were laughter and screams that died out as Spider stitched himself back up with nimble fingers. The Shadows were rejoicing now, carrying on with wild abandon as they fought like mad dogs over Pearl’s soul in the vacuous spaces of Spider’s flesh.

Eddy lit another cigarette. “How soon will you need another?”

“Not for a few days.”

“Good. There’s work to be done tonight.”

Spider smiled and desiccated rents in his lips tore open. “Bring the whores back here, so I can help. It wouldn’t be good for me to go out just yet.”

“Right.”

“Don’t leave me out, Eddy. I want to go too, when the time comes. If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have gotten this close. Remember that.”

“Of course.”

Spider didn’t seem reassured. “And remember I can do to you what I did to that,” he warned, pointing at the husk at his feet.

Eddy laughed. “And if you try, I’ll cut you apart and put you back where I found you.”

Spider took a step back.

Eddy went to the doors. “And don’t come out unless I tell you to. You smell really bad.” He closed the doors and locked them and settled down on the sofa for a drink.

It wouldn’t be long now.

“It was quite a sight,” Eddy told Cassandra when she’d returned from her dinner. “Quite disgusting.”

“All things have to eat, Eddy. It’s a law of nature.”

“Even dead things?” he put to her. “What about you?”

“I have a very healthy appetite.”

“I’d like you to come to the Territories with me,” he told her. “You wouldn’t really be dead there anymore than I’d be alive.”

“Maybe.”

“You and I, Spider, perhaps another.”

“Who?”

He grinned secretly. “You don’t know her. Name’s Lisa Lochmere. A fucking psychiatrist. She played some head games on me once and I’d like to repay the debt. We could have fun with her. She’s in town now, looking for me, so I hear. She’s got a hot, hungry little slit between her legs and all the goodies to go with it.”

Cassandra wasn’t paying any attention. Her hand was busy working him to erection. Her touch still filled him with desire.

“I’ve been thinking about this for some time,” she said. “Let’s go in the bedroom.”

As he sat on the bed, she stood and slipped from her dress. She was beautiful as ever, though somewhat pale. Even the autopsy stitching up her torso was enticing somehow. Eddy buried his face between her breasts. They were cool, but powdered and perfumed just so. Her nipples tasted sweet.

“Death suits you,” he whispered.

She kissed him and freed him from his pants, pushing him back on the bed and mounting him.

“By God,” she said. “You’re warm.”

She rode him fiercely until he came, sucking his warmth and seed up into herself where it lit fireworks inside. It was only then that she rocked and moaned with orgasm.

He closed his eyes and dozed. As he slept, she stroked his hair and cooed a sweet song in his ear. Life was good.

He woke sometime later and she was still there, holding him like a babe.

“I must’ve nodded off,” he said.

“For several hours,” she informed him.

“I have to go out tonight. A few more and off we’ll go into the Territories.”

“Can I help?”

“No, I’d best do this alone. But there is something you can do.”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember who our enemy is? The nosy one always prying intoother’s affairs?”

“Who could forget?”

“Pay him a visit.”

Cassandra decided she would. If a life had to be taken, then it best be someone who had no reason to live.