Moonbog (55 page)

The way I saw it, there was no way around it.

G
etting to do it was much easier than I thought it would be.

Derrick and I live—I should say “lived”—about two hours away from each other. I have a place here in Portland, and he lives up past Fryberg. Driving up there was no problem. Last March, I knew his wife, Alice, had taken the kids to Orlando for the week at Disney World. I figured he’d be at the house alone, no doubt working on some paintings for a show or something. I wasn’t expected or anything, but I guess I was lucky that no one saw or recognized my car. Just to be safe, I took back roads. It added a little time to the drive, but then again, what did I care?

Derrick lived in a fairly secluded area—a development on a secluded lake with a lot of fancy-ass houses spaced pretty far apart. He didn’t have any security or anything, no bodyguards or electronic gates, so getting into his house was easy.

Hey! Who would want to kill a famous artist, right?

I was right. When I got there, he was home . . . alone.

Before I got out of the car, I pulled on the two pairs of rubber gloves I’d brought. I’d seen something on a cop show once about how a detective lifted a fingerprint even though the burglar or whatever had been wearing rubber gloves. The rubber, you see, was so thin that it still left a faint impression—at least enough to identify the culprit.

I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Just shooting him wasn’t going to be enough, though. I had to even the score a little bit, too.

B
ut like I said earlier, shooting him didn’t bother me any. I just aimed the gun at him, pulled the trigger, and . . . .

Pop.

Of course, before I got to the house, the whole time I was driving, I couldn’t stop thinking about why I was doing this. I came up with a whole slew of excuses, but I knew they were all bullshit.

The real reason was quite simple.

Even I can see that, now.

He had more talent than I did, and I knew why.

It was all in his hands!

I
already told you how I didn’t feel anything, not even a tremor of elation when the gun went off, and Derrick was blown back off his feet. He landed on the kitchen floor kind of funny, leaning against the wall with his legs splayed out and bent at the knees. One of his shoes had flipped off. He looked a little like a puppet that’s had its strings cut. There was a big splash of blood on the wall behind him, but he was down now, with both hands clamped over the bullet hole in his chest. He was breathing real hard, making this watery, rattling sound in his throat. It sounded something terrible, like he was drowning. After a few seconds, his legs started twitching like he was trying to do a dance or something. It was only when I saw blood leaking out between his fingers that I got a little panicky, thinking that the blood might ruin his hands.

I wasn’t worried about any of the neighbors hearing the shot. I’d been to Derrick’s house plenty of times before, so I knew what to do next, and I took my time doing it right. There was an ax down in the cellar that Derrick used to split firewood. He never heated the house with wood or anything. Like the rest of his life, having a fire blazing away in the fireplace on a winter evening was just a quaint little “artsy” touch.

All image.

I went back up into the kitchen, made sure he was good and dead, and then chopped off both his hands, halfway between the wrist and elbow. It took me a few whacks on both arms, but I think I could have done them each with one hit if I hadn’t been shaking so damned much with excitement.

Yeah, now that I think about it, I guess once he was dead I was pretty excited about it. I’ll tell you one thing—I was glad he was dead by then because when I was trying to cut off his arms, I kept missing, and I think that would have really hurt.

I took his severed hands over to the sink and washed the blood off before drying them and putting them into a little plastic trash bag I’d brought along. On the way out, confident there weren’t any fingerprints on anything to identify me, I dropped the ax beside Derrick’s body. He was staring up at the ceiling with this glassy-eyed stare, looking for all the world like a wax statue.

I wonder what he was looking at. . . .

Anyway, I closed the door behind me, looked around to make sure there wasn’t any activity at any of the neighbors’ houses, then got into my car and drove away.

I only stopped once on the way home, to get rid of the gun and rubber gloves. What I did was tie the gun up inside one of the gloves, tie the other one around it, and then throw it off the bridge into the river. You know where Route 25 crosses the Ossipee River in Limington? The water runs real fast there and hardly ever freezes.

That was pretty much it until I got home.

I was still a little nervous, I guess, kind of jittery when I got back to my apartment. I knew the cops would be coming around sooner or later to tell me what had happened. They might start asking all sorts of questions. I didn’t have a decent alibi, but I figured they weren’t going to suspect me much. Hell, Alice and the kids were going to get whatever inheritance was coming, and I’m sure there was plenty of that. I might get a little something, a token, but certainly not enough to make anyone suspicious.

Besides, who’d even think I’d want to kill my twin brother?

All I had to do was act like I was real broken up about it, and I was sure they’d let it slide. And anyway, I already had everything I wanted from Derrick.

I had his hands.

In case the cops came around, I didn’t do anything with the hands, not right away, anyway. I put the trash bag into the freezer under the frozen peas and carrots, and tried to forget about them. Of course, that didn’t work because I knew they were there, and I knew sooner or later what I was going to do with them.

A
s it turned out, the next night after work, I took the plastic bag out of the freezer and defrosted the frozen hands. The skin was as pale as polished white marble. What I did was throw them into a pot of boiling water. You have to understand, I had no idea if what I was planning to do was really going to work. I mean, I figured it would because skin is so tough, but you never know until you try something.

After boiling the hands for a while, I took them out with some tongs, got the sharpest paring knife I could find, and made a nice, deep incision all the way around each wrist, a few inches above the thumb joint, right about where you wear a wristwatch. It took some doing to hold onto the skin because it was so slippery. Pretty tough, too, but once I got a good grip on it with the tongs, the skin peeled right off, turning inside out like I was removing a glove or a dirty sock Of course, there was no blood involved. I had a little problem with the skin tearing around the fingernails, but nothing serious.

When I was done and turned them back right-side out, I had two pretty close to perfect gloves made out of my brother’s hands. I put them down on the counter, and I swear to God I thought they might start moving around on their own or something.

My biggest concern was that they wouldn’t fit—that Derrick and I weren’t still exactly the same size; but with a little bit of tugging and a few tiny slits here and there to loosen them up, I was able to pull them on over my own hands.

M
an, I’m telling you, I could barely contain my excitement as I raised my new hands up in front of my face and looked at them. I flexed the fingers, thrilled by the taunt pulling of my new skin.

It was exquisite beyond belief!

My hands—Derrick’s hands, really—were trembling as I reached out to touch something . . . for the first time . . . with someone else’s hands.

I picked up the paring knife I had used to cut and peel the skin. Turning it back and forth, I hardly noticed the light reflecting off the blade because I was so entranced by the way the skin on the back of my hands shifted with every subtle movement.

I can’t tell you how excited I was, but I stopped myself because I knew I had other things to take care of, first.

Unrolling my new skin gloves, I carefully laid them aside while I cleaned up. It took a bit of doing, but I scraped most of the flesh off the bone before grinding everything up in the garbage disposal. The bones knocked around some, making quite a racket, but I made sure it all washed down completely. Then I took my new hands—because that’s the only way I could think of them—and went into my work room.

I tell you, I was so excited I was dizzy. I felt like I was drunk or tripping or something as I pulled the skin gloves back on over my own hands and wiggled my fingers to make sure everything fit perfectly.

Custom made!

Once I was ready, I picked up a pencil, tacked a clean sheet of drawing paper to the drawing board, and began to draw.

At first I couldn’t stop staring at the back of my hands.

Just like when I was a kid, I watched the skin shift and slide across my muscles and tendons as I drew. I was amazed how the skin still felt supple and alive. I could almost feel it bonding with the flesh of my own hands—my less talented hands.

This is it!
I told myself—
the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life! I’m going to draw what I see inside my own head with someone else’s hands!

But it didn’t work out quite as I’d planned.

The sketch I started working on that night still seemed flat and uninspired. The spark wasn’t there. I had to remind myself that I was too excited, that I was distracted by watching the way my new hands moved; but deep inside, I started to feel this gnawing worry that I still didn’t have it. The picture still looked like it was being drawn by . . .

Me.

It’ll take time
, I told myself, hoping I could calm down enough to concentrate.

That made sense.

Right off the bat, I couldn’t expect to be able to feel and touch and control things the way Derrick did. I had to adapt to this new way of feeling and manipulating the world. Everyone’s hands are different.

After all, art doesn’t happen overnight.

After trying for an hour or so, I carefully peeled the skin gloves off my hands. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them afterwards. I knew if I left them out, they’d rot. I wondered how to go about drying them out, maybe tanning the skin like leather so they would retain their suppleness.

While I was wondering what to do, the phone rang.

It was Alice, calling from Florida. She had just gotten a call from the Maine State Police, informing her that someone had broken into the house and killed Derrick. The gardener had found him that afternoon. I tried my best to sound upset and supportive when she told me she was flying back in the morning. I even told her I’d pick her and the kids up at the airport.

What a guy, huh?

After I got off the phone, I toyed with the idea of wearing Derrick’s hands when I picked up Alice and the kids at the airport. I was curious to see if she’d recognize her husband’s touch when I hugged her, but I decided that wouldn’t be such a good idea. I had no idea what else to do, so I put Derrick’s hands back into the freezer for the night so they wouldn’t rot.

T
he next few days were tough if only because I had to act a lot more upset about Derrick’s death than I actually was. As expected, the cops came around and asked me all sorts of questions about how Derrick and I got along, about where I was the day he was killed, and was there someone who could corroborate my whereabouts—things like that.

I held up perfectly, I must say.

One time, a couple of days after Derrick died, when I was heading down to the police station to be interviewed, I did wear Derrick’s hands. I was a little self-conscious about them, but no one even noticed.

But every night, when I put them on and sat down at the drawing board, I started to get some pretty unusual sensations. My drawings didn’t appear to be any better than before, at least not to me, but there was a feeling inside the gloves, inside my own hands when I was wearing the skin that was . . . well, strange.

I had finally come up with a method of preserving the skin. Every night, before I began to draw, I would take fifteen or twenty minutes to rub hand cream into the skin. I didn’t scrimp, either. I bought the most expensive kinds of hand cream available, and I spent a lot of time, working it into the thirsty pores. Over the next few days, I learned a lot about emollients and whatever. Night after night, it seemed as though the new skin—my new hands—became increasingly supple and sensitive. Touching things—anything—became a thrill. Vibrant ripples of pure energy tingled from my fingertips, up my arms and neck, all the way to the center of my brain.

Let me tell you, it was exhilarating!

I could barely concentrate on my drawing because I spent so much time simply
touching
things . . .
feeling
them as if for the first time.

And that’s what it was like.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was
really
feeling things. It was just a matter of time before I could translate what I felt onto canvas and paper. Soon, I would have it all—my brother’s talent . . . maybe even the fame and money I deserved even more than he did!