Free House of Skin by Tim Curran Page A

Its blood and meat was gone, blasted from the bone by some impossible, hungry wind. She’d never seen anything like it. Even the bones themselves looked pitted, abraded somehow. There were bits of flesh clinging to the nearest wall like blown insulation. A full-length mirror hung there, its pane caked with twenty years of filth.
    What could’ve happened to the poor creature?
    None of this had been in evidence before. It had happened since she and Fenn had been here earlier. In those few short hours.
    She found her feet and ran downstairs and out to her car. Her breath was coming in raw gasps and her heart thudded like a drum. And it had little to do with exertion.
    She drove away, her mind filled with hideous thoughts.
    * * *
    When Lisa got back to her rooms, the phone rang. It was Fenn.
    “There’s been another murder,” he said.
    “Where?”
    “Near the shore. We think the body was dumped there. It was hacked up pretty good. Not like the girl in the house. More methodical.”
    “It’s him,” she said breathlessly.
    “Maybe.”
    “It is.”
    “You can’t know that, Doc.”
    “It’s him. I know it now,” was all she would say.
    “Something else, too,” he said with a sigh. “It’s probably unrelated, but it concerns our Jane Doe. She was going to be buried tomorrow, but there was a fire at the mortuary. They’re still sifting through the ashes. So far, they haven’t found her remains.”
    Lisa felt something twist in her chest. Somehow, this wasn’t unexpected.

THE NIGHTMARE FACTORY
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    In Fenn’s dream, he was alone.
    It was the single constant in these nightmares. Loneliness, solitude, madness. He was cold, freezing. He was naked and his skin was covered with gooseflesh that felt oddly like tiny bubbles ready to pop.
    He was in a tiny room by himself, trapped in a square of blackness. He felt someone near … but where? Neither here nor there, but near and far, within and without.
    He swept his eyes around in the mulling blackness, but could see no one or nothing. His fingers pulled at the length of rope and the coil of leather that held it to his ankle. As usual, they were immovable. Yet, he pulled, he worked, he strained against his bonds until his fingers ached and his heart pounded with ever-weakening, ever-irregular rhythms.
    Beads of sweat stood out on his face and they felt huge and oily rolling down his cheeks. Maybe not sweat but blood. Coagulated blood. He could taste it on his lips—coppery and foul.
    I’m bleeding to death, he thought, and there was no fear, only acceptance.
    He reached out and the walls were made of glass. Moisture was beaded on them … or was it blood? His blood? That of someone else?
    He looked up and there was a tiny slit of light. There were eyes in the slit, flat, emotionless, evil eyes. The eyes of a tormentor. A reptile.
    He heard a voice: distant, cool, clinical. Was it asking him questions? The language was garbled like some guttural foreign tongue.
    The eyes kept watching, detached, amused.
    “Mama, mama, mama,” he heard a voice say and it was his own. “Don’t leave me here … the bad man’s back again … mama? Please … mama …”
    The eyes were staring, blatantly amused.
    In the distance, a voice began to drone.
    A drop of wetness struck his head.
    Then another. And another.
    A trickle of wetness now.
    The eyes were watching.
    The wetness was running down his face in warm streams. Water? Blood? Both and neither? The voice droned on. The eyes blinked and kept watching. He heard a broken sobbing coming from his throat and he was not frightened.
    He was not afraid.
    He was not afraid.
    He began to scream.
    The voice, the voice …
    And then Fenn was awake, pushed up against the wall, his fingers pressed into the cracks of the cool plaster. With a tiny cry he pulled himself away and mopped sweat from his brow and under his eyes.
    I’m going crazy, he thought, and the idea was terrifying.
    I’m going crazy because only crazy people dream the