Mysterious Skin

  The world sped past. Out there, the moon hovered above the flat horizon like a jewel surfacing in a black lake. Below it, shadowy farmhouses, silos, and haystacks scattered the fields. A German shepherd chased a rabbit through weeds. Fog began its nightly slide over Kansas, as thick as peaks of meringue.

  My father coasted the truck toward the Haunted Mansion. The headlights shone off the house’s murky windows. “I won’t be home until four in the morning,” my mother said. “They make me spend the entire night in that lookout tower as if I’m Rapunzel or something. Thank God I’ve got only one more month of this shift.” She looked at her watch. “Your father has accounts to balance tomorrow. He’ll be falling asleep early, so you need to ask someone’s mom or dad or, better yet, Pastor Black to drive you home.”

  My mother kissed two fingers. She touched Deborah’s forehead, then mine. “Don’t be too loud when you come home,” my father said. I hopped from the truck and walked toward the house, Deborah following.

  The Haunted Mansion stood in a collar of trees. Rumors claimed a man had slaughtered his family there, years earlier. Little River high schoolers tried to prove bravery by parking in its driveway, most zooming away when no indoor light switched on or no forlorn ghost stared from a window. The house, two stories of gray wood, displayed a surface of loose boards and nails, a roof with shingles bleached to a light tan. Its windows had been cracked or shattered by falling limbs or vandals’ rocks. It looked as flimsy as a matchstick cabin.

  A sign on the porch read ARE YOU BRAVE ENOUGH? ADMISSION: $1.00. The letters were written in a “blood” our group had concocted with Karo syrup and food coloring. I sidestepped a welcome mat stained with a splash of the fake blood.

  The front room had once been a kitchen. Two jack-o’-lanterns sat in the sink, faces grimacing as if they’d felt every jab and slice of the knives that had carved them. Rubber bats and tarantulas bounced from strings Deborah had tied to ceiling hooks. She hadn’t bothered to sweep away the spider webs in the ceiling’s corners. “Leave them. They add atmosphere,” she had said, even though Breeze Campbell had stepped face first into one.

  Leaf, Breeze’s older brother, lurched through the rooms, spilling the counterfeit blood from a plastic milk jug on the floors and walls. He was fat and always wore a black stocking cap. His costume consisted of a bloodstained sheet, the stocking cap, and a knife unconvincingly wedged in his armpit. “All the adults took off,” Leaf told Deborah, “except for my dad, and he’s out back drinking.” Mansion tours were scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes.

  Pastor Black had advised us to keep the scares to a minimum. We hadn’t obeyed his rule. Upstairs, in one bedroom, Leaf and his friends had decorated the floor with knives, saws, drills, and hammers. They’d cut a hole into a rectangular table, draped it with a sheet, and lined it with candles. One of them planned to sit beneath the table and poke his head through the hole. A saw’s blade would rest against the neck he’d stained with syrup and food coloring. When the tours began, the boy’s “dead” eyes would open, and his mouth would spew blood.

  Deborah pulled a compact from her purse. She touched her earrings, gigantic lightning bolts she’d cut from foiled cardboard. She checked her warts and teeth in the mirror. Her face looked sculptured from pea soup. “The man who lived in this house got up from dinner one evening and went to the toolshed.” She was practicing for her job as tour guide. “When he came back, he led his wife and each of his eight children one by one to the nine rooms of this house, and then….”

  She looked through the door of the next room, where Lucas Black was rearranging weapons. Lucas was acting the role of the father-murderer. The Campbells and the other older kids got the jobs of the slaughtered family. I was the youngest in the group. “You can wander from room to room,” Lucas told me, pointing a screwdriver. “Try to scare any kids who think they’re brave.”

  That night, my shyness had smothered, and I was eager to do the scaring. Two Halloweens ago, my father and I had driven to Topeka; we had passed a roadside Haunted House similar to our Youth Ministry’s. My father stopped the truck. “Let’s try it.” A bloody-mouthed polar bear and a mummy had stood at the front door, beckoning people in. But I chickened at the last minute, crying when the mummy’s clammy finger slimed across my face. “You’ll never go anywhere with guts like that,” my father had said. “This world’s not all peaches and cream, son.”

  Deborah and I stomped upstairs. The red syrup lent the whole house a breakfasty smell. Someone had tied a plastic doll to the banister, her eyes driven through with the spears of scissors. Her dress was lifted to reveal her naked, dimpled butt. I covered it as I passed.

  Light striped the master bedroom wall. Breeze’s face lit up, her mascara and lipstick suddenly as obvious and as crude as smears of jam on a pancake. “A car’s pulling in the driveway,” she yelled. She ran to her hiding place.

  Downstairs, a tape player clicked on. Horror movie soundtrack music lifted through the air, a droning bass punctuated by a high, screechy violin’s staccato. I took my place in the smallest bedroom, grabbed a broom, and crouched in a musty corner. On the room’s opposite side, in front of the window, Breeze hung from a noose. She looked dead, in spite of the hidden sling around her shoulders and the foot she propped against the window. I waved the broom at her, and she winked back. She adjusted the rope. The candlelight glowed a pair of pink Vs against her face.

  Lucas Black whistled from downstairs. Three seconds of silence. Outside, car doors slammed.

  I listened as Deborah assembled some kids. “We’ll have tours every ten minutes,” she said in her regular voice. Pause. Then, gravelly, “Greetings to all. I hope you’re feeling brave. This house is haunted. The man who lived here was a cold-blooded murderer. One night he left the dinner table….” I closed my eyes and imagined a bundled-up, chickenhearted row of kids, their gazes fixed on the witch tour guide.

  The rubber mask made my ears feel as if tiny hands were squeezing them. Slowly, the assembly began climbing the stairs. “The youngest daughter was the first to go,” Deborah hissed at the kids. “He brought her into this room, where he told her to open her mouth and close her eyes. She thought she was getting a nice mouthful of candy corn or cinnamon bears for dessert, but boy, was she wrong.”

  Downstairs, the horror film music crescendoed. Upstairs, a series of wails. The kids had stepped into the room where Marcy Hathaway lay sprawled across the floor, her face drenched with a caul of blood, a raw veal cutlet poised on her chest to simulate a sliced-off tongue.

  The tour group returned to the hallway. As I squatted there, my heart drummed in my chest. My throat trapped each thin breath. At any second, tonight’s kids would burst into the bedroom.

  The door creaked open. Breeze rolled her eyes into her head and lolled her tongue. “Go on inside,” Deborah told the kids, and they filed in. “He hung this daughter. Open your mouth and close your eyes. That’s what he said to all of them. He listened to the snap of this girl’s fifteen-year-old neck.” The kids surrounded the body, fascinated. A little boy with plastic fangs began to cry.

  I waited. They spun around, ready to explore the next roomful of carnage. Then I sprang from the corner. They screamed as I swung the broom at them, careful not to touch their heads. They sprinted through the door. I laughed, and Deborah gave me the thumbs-up.

  The tours sped by, one every fifteen minutes. After a while, Deborah lost her interest. I selected one member from each group to pick on, usually a girl or boy in a topnotch costume. It disappointed me that none were Martians or robotic aliens, so I wound up picking a favorite in the kid dressed as the Shroud of Turin. He or she wore a black body suit and headpiece, gilded head to toe to resemble the pre-Resurrection Jesus. I gave the “Shroud” a jab of my broom and soft pinches from my glued-on devil’s claws.

  With the final tours, the crowd began to change. I had recognized most kids from Sundays at Little River Lutheran, but now more unfamiliar faces drifted through the rooms. Most
unrecognizables seemed older. “I think they’re from Hutchinson,” Breeze whispered. The door reopened, and her irises rolled back into her head.

  A group of boys looked familiar to me. Six of them filed into the syrupy-smelling bedroom. They had ditched their tour guide. I watched them through the slits in my mask. One belched, his breath visible in the chilly air. He had a blond crew cut and a choker necklace made of minuscule white shells. Another wore overalls and a Reds baseball cap, his teeth gleaming with a row of braces. None of the boys had dressed in a costume.

  I emerged from the shadow. Metal-mouth spun and started laughing. “Hey, it’s Lucifer.” The others turned and stared.

  The boys surrounded me. I opened my mouth and choked out the word “boo.” All six laughed. Even Breeze Campbell laughed. Her body shook from its noose.

  Then the crew cut boy with the shell necklace leaned forward. His green eyes stared into mine.

  In that moment, I remembered. I’d known these boys a couple of years previous, during the summer of the missing time and the UFO, the summer I’d started Little League in Hutchinson. I had practiced with them; had listened to them yelling things like “four eyes” and “pansy” and “the only place for you is the bench.” Now, years later, this boy reached toward me, and the memories flooded back—how I hated baseball, how I never returned, even though my father had urged me on, had bragged of the game’s benefits.

  Crew cut pushed me against the wall. “Really, unbelievably, incredibly frightening,” he said. His hand shot toward my Satan mask. He tore it from my head, tossing it to the floor.

  I felt hairs rip from my scalp. I opened my eyes, and the world had slipped out of focus. My glasses had come off with my mask.

  They were laughing, all of them. Breeze’s giggle blistered the air, shrill and pestering, like a blue jay’s screech above their tenors. She was showing off for them. I stepped toward their circle.

  My right boot landed on the glasses. I heard the crack, felt them snap like potato chips. I bent to pick them up. Nothing but shards, as thin and sharp as the teeth in a monster’s mouth. I swept the pieces aside and grabbed my mask.

  The boys watched me run from the room. I had made a fool of myself, just as I’d done again and again, summers ago. I remembered standing in right field, dropping a pop fly, the older boys taunting me. I staggered downstairs, and my foot slipped on a bloody stair, my arm knocking over the doll and her scissor-gouged face. I passed the hallway, where Deborah and the others stood talking. Without glasses, I could hardly see them. Deborah’s warty face was pressed against Lucas Black’s chest, smudging it with green makeup. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. I still heard them upstairs, my old teammates. Their voices echoed bits of sentences: “the decapitated guy in the next room,” “one lousy dollar,” “waiting for us outside in the station wagon.”

  Deborah held out her hand. “What’s the matter?”

  I sped through the kitchen. It seemed as though the entire town were laughing now, and the noise echoed through the house. I slammed the screen door and ran across the porch, past the row of cars, into the trees.

  Thirty minutes later, I sat with Deborah and Breeze in the Campbells’ car, riding back into Little River. I stared out the window, the black night rushing past, my eyes glazing over. Something had happened to me when I left the Mansion, something I couldn’t quite remember.

  I recall bits and pieces. When I sprinted from the house, I saw the moon, orange, almost electric, stalled between feathery clouds like a helium balloon, ready to burst into a million splinters. Without glasses, the world melted from focus. The house and trees seemed under water. I leaned against a tree and felt its knobby trunk pressing into my skin like a column of bones.

  I put the mask back on. Behind me, the pipe organ music swelled, softened, swelled again. Most of the kids had gone home. “Let’s call it a night,” an adult said. I kept walking, trying not to cry. My scalp tingled from where the hair had ripped out, and my face pounded from the kid’s hand.

  I remember passing the parked cars. Ahead, nothing but air so cold it snapped, and an arena of trees, the bordering saplings leading into towering, ancient cottonwoods and oaks. I wandered through them, their arms whispering and creaking in the wind. I looked up to their blurry branches, as lacy and fragile as spiderwebs.

  Back at the house, Leaf roared, no doubt grabbing some kid’s shoulder. A chorus of wails. “Hey, Brian,” Deborah yelled. I was no longer part of that scene. I didn’t stop walking. The Little League boys are in the past, I told myself. Forget them.

  In the distance I heard a creek’s murmur. I moved toward the sound, deeper into the trees. Thorns from bushes snagged my cape, oak leaves fell around me, and my galoshes oozed through mud puddles.

  A stick cracked behind me. I remember it making that exact sound—crack.

  Then I noticed how everything had altered to an unbelievable silence. The crickets, the creek, even the wind had ceased. The quiet made me think of that night on the side of our hill; how I had stood staring up at the sky, a little scared but curiously peaceful, even happy, as the spacecraft hovered its carousel of blue lights above us.

  The final thing I remember: In the center of the quiet, another branch snapped. And I turned.

  Blur.

  four

  WENDY PETERSON

  Neil McCormick was a scruffy, moody stick of a boy. I developed a crush the same day I set eyes on him. It didn’t take long to discover my crush was doomed: he was one of those queers.

  The kids at Sherman Middle School realized this fact during an afternoon recess séance. It was September 1983; at twelve, I’d begun to slip into the antisocial skin I’ve never slipped out of. The trends my Hutchinson classmates followed seemed foolish: neon rubber bracelets, nicknames in iron-on lettering on T-shirt backs, or illegal lollipops made with tequila and an authentic, crystallized dead worm. But when some other sixth graders became interested in the occult, I joined them. “Finally,” I told Mom, “they’re into something cool.” Groups of us traipsed through graveyards on dares. We bought Tarot decks; magazines devoted to telekinesis or out-of-body experiences. We gathered at recess, waiting for some small miracle to happen.

  My mom claimed she was observing a change in me. For my upcoming birthday, I’d requested albums by bands whose names sounded especially disturbing or violent: The Dead Boys, Suicide, Throbbing Gristle. I longed for the world that existed beyond Hutchinson, Kansas. “You, Wendy Peterson, are looking for trouble with a capital T,” Mom had started to warn.

  In my eyes, that trouble equalled Neil. I’d noticed him, but I doubted anyone else had. He always seemed to be alone. He was in fifth grade, not sixth, and he didn’t participate in the daily half-hour soccer games—two disqualifications from what most everyone considered cool.

  That afternoon, though, he fearlessly broke the séance circle. Two popular girls, Vicky and Rochelle, were attempting to summon a blond TV star from the dead. Sebastian So-and-so’s BMW had recently crashed into a Hollywood brick wall, and my classmates were determined to disclose whatever heaven he now hovered through. “Aaahhhmmm,” the girls moaned. Hands levitated in midair, attempting to catch this or that spiritual vibration.

  When Neil interrupted, his sneakered foot stomped squarely on a Ouija board someone had brought. “Watch it, fucker,” a séance attendee said.

  “You shitheads know nothing about contacting ghosts,” Neil said. “What you need is a professional.” His voice sounded vaguely grandfatherlike, as if his brain were crowded with knowledge. Eyes opened, concentrations broke. Someone gasped.

  A few tall boys’ heads blocked my view. I tried to peek above their shoulders; saw a mop of thick black hair. A breeze blew it. To touch it would be like touching corduroy.

  Neil picked up the valentine-shaped beige plastic disk from the Ouija board. It looked like a tiny, three-legged table, a gold pin poking through its center. Sun glinted off the pinpoint. Only moments bef
ore, Vicky and Rochelle had placed their polished fingernails on the disk to ask about the coming apocalypse.

  “My father’s a hypnotist,” Neil said. He waved the disk in front of his face like a Smith & Wesson. “He’s taught me all the tricks. I could show you shitheads a fucking thing or two.” From Neil, all those fucks and shits were more than just throwaway cuss words. They adopted some special meaning.

  Neil slipped off his shoes, sat on them, and pretzeled his legs into a configuration only someone that skinny could have managed. The crowd blocked the sun and shadowed Neil. The air felt chilly, and I wished I’d worn a jacket. From somewhere behind us, a teacher’s whistle shrieked. Some classmates chanted a brainless song, its words confused by the wind.

  “Who wants to be first?” Neil asked. He excited me to no end. Maybe he’d expose their infinite foolishness.

  Vicky volunteered. “No way,” Neil said. “Only a boy will work for the kind of hypnotizing I’m going to do.” Vicky pouted, planted her tequila pop back on her tongue, and stood aside.

  Neil pointed toward Robert P., a kid whose last initial stuck because two other sixth graders shared the same first name. Robert P. could speak Spanish and sometimes wore an eye patch. I’d heard him bragging about his first wet dream. Some girls thought him “debonair.” Like most everyone else in school, he seemed stupid to me.

  People made room, and my view improved. Under Neil’s direction, Robert lay on his back. Random hands smoothed the grass, sweeping aside pebbles and sandburs, and someone’s wadded-up windbreaker served as a pillow. Roly-poly bugs coiled into themselves. The more nervous kids stayed on the circle’s outer edge, watching for teachers, unsure of what would happen.

  Neil sat beside his volunteer. He said, “Everyone, to their knees.” We obeyed. From where I knelt, I could see into Robert P.’s nostrils. His eyes were shut. His mouth had opened slightly, flaunting teeth that needed braces. I wished for a spot at the opposite side of the circle. Being near Neil McCormick would have satisfied me.