Free House of Skin by Tim Curran

would never happen again. He was glad to be proven wrong.
    His headache vanished as soon as they were free of the house.
    * * *
    When Lisa got back to her hotel room, she ordered some lunch and sat before the TV staring blindly at it. Things weren’t going well and even she saw this. San Francisco was a huge city and there were hundreds of places someone like Eddy Zero could hide.
    She had only enough money to last a month, no more.
    Maybe she’d been deluding herself into thinking that four weeks would be enough time to find and contain him. It took Soames three times as long just to locate him in the first place. Eddy could’ve been in another city entirely or out of the country for that matter. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe that. He was here, somewhere. And the murder of that girl in the old house only made her more sure of it.
    It was over two years since the last time she’d seen Eddy. And in that time, her desire to work with him again had never dimmed. She supposed she was infatuated with him. Not physically, not emotionally, but professionally. A psychiatrist could spend a lifetime and never hope to meet a patient as interesting or challenging as Eddy Zero. He was the ultimate study. A pure psychopath who broke all of the rules and set new ones.
    She pushed away from her lunch and went down to her rented car. She knew where she was going, even if she refused to even think about it. It took her about thirty minutes to reach Zero’s house.
    The House of Mirrors.
    The atmosphere of gloom and depravity was the same as she pushed through the door. But it meant nothing, she told herself, merely an association the mind made with an old, empty house that had been the scene of several grisly crimes. She went up the stairs and stood for a time in the hallway where the girl had been first stabbed. There was some dried blood spattering the walls. Just a few drops, but enough to kick her heart into her throat.
    She went from room to room looking for she knew not what. She was here purely on impulse and nothing more. She felt like a fool for even coming. In such a neighborhood, she’d be lucky if her car was still there when she returned to it. And there were worse possibilities. She was a woman alone in an empty house in a bad neighborhood. If someone had been watching her, they might’ve followed her in. Things like that happened. And if she was raped or murdered, who would hear her screams in this huge, enclosing tomb? And if they did, would they even care? Unlikely. People in this quarter were desensitized to such things long ago. Just another screaming woman.
    The police had been all over this place, she knew, as had Fenn and she. Nothing of any possible bearing had been left behind. She passed the door which led to the attic and stopped. Did she really want to go up there? Alone? The attic was where Dr. Blood-and-Bones and his associates had done their bits of work. But that was twenty years past and she didn’t believe in ghosts.
    It was a nasty place, brimming with hate and pain. She told herself it was simple association once again, but she couldn’t believe it this time. The beams overhead were festooned with cobwebs, the warped flooring layered in dust and grime. It took great personal strength for her to proceed. In her mind, she saw the crime photos of this place that she knew so well. The blood, the carnage, the skins tacked to the walls. It seemed she could smell them, ripe and sour like hides stacked outside a skinning shack.
    “It’s nothing,” she said aloud and continued on. The sound of her voice echoing and dying, being sucked into these rotting timbers that had known so much horror, was disturbing somehow. She rounded a bend and a damp, dirty smell touched her nostrils. The floor here had been vacuumed of dust, even the paint seemed to have been leeched free. There was a dead thing resting in a circle of clean: a twisted clot of bone and fur boiled into a central mass. A cat, maybe.