House of Skin (41 page)

Nothing.

Kids, then. Playing tricks on her.

You’re two months early
, she thought wryly.
The practical jokes aren’t supposed to begin until October
.

Irritated at the way her chest was tightening, she flipped the lock on the door and pushed out into the warm night. Kids would be kids, but they should be smart enough not to play their tricks on an old woman with a heart murmur. She’d have to take an extra water pill before she went down to help Julia carry the boxes up.

Bea stood on the porch steps and scanned the quiet street before her, the houses around the library. Nights like this always made her think back to her younger years. The courting and the secret kisses.

It calmed her heart.

Maybe tonight she’d wake up Bill when she got home. They hadn’t made love in months, seldom did anymore, but they still slept in the same bed. She thought of his warmth, the comforting way he looked at her.

A susurrant breeze had begun; it caressed her skin. Bea sighed. She loved the night air, but there was work to be done.

She grasped the door to go inside but stopped when she discovered what the kids had done to her sign.

Angry now, she turned and scanned the bushes flanking the porch. She descended the steps and moved down the sidewalk, hoping to catch a glimpse of them, the white of an eye, the glint of malicious little teeth.
I’ll teach them to write wicked things on my sign,
she thought
. BURN IN HELL, of all things
.

The words unsettled her, though she couldn’t say why.

The memory came then, and though she tried to hold back the sick fear crashing down on her she could not. Bill and his dalliances. Her years of secret hurt, her pleasure at the whore’s affliction. The spray can her only means of retribution once the hideous woman had died.

But they couldn’t possibly know about that, kids who’d not yet been born.

Fists balled, she stepped off the sidewalk and onto the path that led between the library and the Catholic church. They’d be here, she was sure, hiding in the darkness, hoping she’d go back inside so they could wreak more mischief at her expense. Make her heart stutter the way it was now.

From the corner of the building, where the bushes and dogwood trees nestled right up next to the brick, she noticed something gauzy and white. It fluttered in the breeze, sheer and delicate.

Curious, she approached.

As she neared she saw the patch of white disappear around the corner. She’d not let them get away. Their parents would see what they’d done to her sign, hear about how terribly they’d frightened her.

Bea turned the corner and felt her heart seize.

Her eyes widened in horror.

Then a pale hand lashed out and removed her face.

August, 1996

The girl sat in the grass, reclining on her elbows.

After a time, her grandmother’s window went dark.

Instead of rising right away the girl tilted her head so the moonlight shone full on her face. Her hair swept the moist grass, the little dewdrops there absorbed by her raven tresses. She inhaled the night air, cool and crisp and tinged with the acrid smell of wood smoke. She passed a hand over her abdomen. She could feel herself changing, the pains that meant she was becoming something different. Rolling, she felt the ground massage her growing breasts, the muscles of her stomach. She pushed herself to standing and disappeared into the woods.

Twenty minutes later she emerged from the gloom of the forest and stepped into the lawn. His car was gone, as she knew it would be. She clucked her tongue. A man his age and still visiting the city for its brothels and strip joints. She did not understand such things, but then, she’d never understood Myles Carver.

Julia stared up at the third floor, at the black window near the left corner of the huge house.

Not bothering to conceal herself, she took her time walking through the yard. In five years, she’d return. The house she and her grandmother were staying in would be hers and hers alone. She would escape the old woman and her strictures. Five more years and she could come here whenever she wished.

Getting to Watermere had been difficult. Thirteen years old and no means of transportation meant convincing her grandmother to spend a few weeks in Shadeland. Visiting the place where her only daughter had been murdered had not sounded pleasant to Julia’s grandmother. But Julia was persistent, mentioning the trip more and more often as summer approached. Ultimately, the old woman acquiesced.

She had planned on waiting until Saturday night to complete her mission, but Sheriff Barlow’s dinner invitation changed that. With him around she could not do what she needed to do.

Julia moved up the porch steps.

The front door was unlocked, as she knew it would be. Instead of using the front staircase the girl passed down the hallway into the ballroom. Her bare feet caressed the tiled floor. In the mirror over the bar she saw herself in shafts of moonglow, a tall, thin ghost of a girl.

Without touching the banister she ascended the curved staircase. She focused on the steps ahead of her and listened for sounds in the old house. But she heard nothing save her strained breathing.

She reached the third floor.

Fighting the urge to enter the library, she fixed her gaze on a closed door at the end of the corridor. She moved toward it. When she reached the door she thought of the Poe story they’d read that year in school. The old man in the story had been innocent, the narrator insane.
How different from these circumstances
, she thought.
How very different
.

Turning the knob she let the door swing open.

The smell hit her. Cloying, fecund, it threatened to muddle her thoughts, shake her resolve. Steeling herself with the thought of her mother, of all that had been stolen from her, she strode into the room, careful to avoid the blankets on the floor.

The figure lay on the bed, her wasted body covered by a thin nightgown, her face covered by a washcloth.

Julia inched closer and stood over her.

The sick woman’s body was like some dying insect’s. Segmented and discolored, the creature on the bed was a knobby relic.

Julia took the hatchet from her waistband.

She was about to strike when she thought of her mother. It would not do to slay this monster in her sleep. Julia would not deprive her of the pain she deserved. Reaching out, Julia lifted the washcloth.

The woman’s eyes shuttered open.

Annabel rose, her goblin’s grin even worse than her cadaverous insect body.

Julia retreated, disbelief chilling her blood as the woman climbed out of bed, her insect arms and legs moving effortlessly.

“I’m glad we’re alone, dear,” Annabel said and reached for her.

Julia swung the hatchet.

It tore through Annabel’s cheek. Julia stared in horror at the exposed teeth, the frothing gums.

Annabel’s white jawbone leered at her.

Her teeth clicking like a skeleton’s, the sick woman unbuttoned her nightgown until her shriveled breasts showed, the bones of her sternum and ribs tenting her white skin.

“Here, darling,” Annabel said, offering her naked chest. The skeletal face nodded at the hatchet. “Put that here.”

“Goddamn you!” Julia shouted and brought the hatchet down. It crunched through Annabel’s collarbone and stuck there, the blood spewing out around it a black flood in the moonlight
.

The dying woman chortled at her, followed her into the hallway as though the hatchet weren’t embedded in her chest. Annabel’s hands whispered out of the shadows, fell on Julia’s shoulders.

“Oh God no,” Julia cried.

She thrashed her head from side to side to rid herself of the grinning face hovering toward her, but the mad eyes loomed closer until the stench wafted over Julia, enveloping her.

“First mommy, now daughter,” Annabel croaked.

Julia felt the skeleton fingers dig into the meat of her shoulders. Her knees buckled. She tried to scream but no sound escaped as her back met the floor. The grinning woman landed on her. The blue eyes were avid as Julia reached up, grasped the handle of the hatchet.

The dying woman did not react when the hatchet chunked out of her collarbone but Julia gasped when a long black forked tongue slid out of the bloody mouth and licked at her. Gasping with revulsion, Julia threw Annabel off.

Julia stood and stared at the creature lying on her back.

“Here,” Annabel croaked, touching the waxy skin above her heart. “Put it right here.”

But instead, Julia brought the hatchet down between the woman’s eyes.

The black blood spraying from her forehead, Annabel still laughed.

To silence the woman’s laughter, to end the lunacy once and for all, Julia leaped on her, seized her by the throat. Again the tongue snaked out, licked at her face.

Shoving away, Julia stared aghast at the laughing creature on the floor. She wanted to back away, to flee the house forever, but her determination was gone. In its place descended a suffocating dread. She’d been a fool to believe she could march in here and kill Annabel so easily.

The woman was rising, the hatchet handle pointing insanely out of her forehead. Annabel groped toward her.

The feel of the woman’s fingertips on her throat galvanized Julia.

She fled.

Down the hall to the stairs, which she took three at a time. Once in the ballroom she risked a glance over her shoulder, but the maniacal woman was nowhere in sight.

Crying with relief, she crossed the foyer to the front door.

It was locked.

Muscles locking in atavistic terror, she pulled feebly at the door. It would not give.

“Julia,” said a voice behind her.

She whirled and saw the woman coming toward her. Annabel’s feet did not seem to move. Behind the dying woman Julia could see the slick trail of blood dripping off of her like rancid menstruation.

Instinct propelled her toward the first door she could find. Opening it, she fell into darkness. A shoulder slamming wood, feet somersaulting wildly, Julia tumbled down the basement stairs until she crashed into the concrete wall where the stairs turned. Her head woozy from the knocks it had taken, she glanced up at the open door.

Annabel stepped through it.

Hysterical with fear, Julia tried to stand but found that her ankle would not cooperate. It threw her headlong down the second, shorter flight of stairs. As she struck the floor she felt her hip jostle something heavy. It listed over her and fell, landing beside her on the ground.

Julia stared into her own face.

Forgetting for a moment the woman trying to kill her, Julia reached out, touched the statue.

It was smooth, made of wood.

It was Julia.

“He wants you,” Annabel said.

Julia gasped, pushed away from the woman, who was now standing and watching her at the base of the stairs. She could not read Annabel’s expression in the scant light of the basement, but she could hear from the woman’s voice that all the humor had gone.

With an effort she pushed to her feet, stared at Annabel.

“Look around you, dear,” the bleeding woman said.

She did. Wooden statues of Julia filled the basement. In some she was just a child. In others she was older, more mature.

In all of them she was nude.

“I took his nurse away,” Annabel said, “so now he wants fresh meat.”

As Julia glanced at the wooden images, her vision started to gray. She opened her mouth to speak but Annabel had disappeared. Julia whirled and scanned the basement for the woman, but everywhere she turned she saw herself. It was like being in a hall of mirrors. The pallid light showing through the cobwebbed basement windows made it difficult to tell whether the figures were wood or flesh, lifeless or animate.

“He can’t have you,” a voice at her ear whispered.

Julia gasped and swiped at the voice but her hand slapped cold wood, her middle fingernail snapping off.

“Go to hell!” Julia shouted.

Laughter, a rustling from the shadows.

“Just let me leave,” Julia tried to shout, but her voice dissolved into tears.

A hand fell on her shoulder.

Julia recoiled and crumpled to the floor. She knew she was beaten. She’d been wrong to come here so soon. Had she waited until she was older she might have been strong enough, but a girl her age was no match for the malevolence here. Through her tears she heard Annabel’s voice, wheedling.