by Gemma Files
The streetlamp’s glare leaks in over her apartment’s windowsill, unchecked by blinds, to touch what little furniture remains with a bleak light. Before her, a table—actually, three upturned boxes topped with a plank stolen from the construction site just north of the railway tracks. On the table, a tape recorder. Next to it, an empty cassette case.
Her suit waits, thrown over the end of the bed, for her to make up her mind.
Adage Beck swallows. The bright eye of her cigarette blinks, as ash dots the rug beneath her feet.
Useless even to try and tell you what she looks like. She’s naked now, though not as we know the term—naked and red and wet. And it’s so comfortable, to be hidden away here in the dark, she almost wishes her cigarette would last forever.
But that’s impossible.
Soon the clock will strike, and she’ll get up. She’ll dress herself, as carefully as she can. And then, when she’s presentable, she’ll go out. To meet somebody.
Anybody.
Adage takes one last drag. She drops the butt on the rug and lets it lie, smouldering.
She leans forward into the dark, feeling for the “record” button.
A month later. Mike Grell sits by the window nearest the front door, looking out. In one hand he holds a postcard, in the other his Walkman. Outside the bus, Chinatown blurs by, trailing pennants of red lacquer and neon.
The postcard is custom-made. One side’s a holiday snapshot: thirteen-year-old Adage tilts her head back, laughing, as the sun bleaches away her face. Mike touches his wallet, where the original lies folded between bank card and expired driver’s license.
The other side is a scribble. Deciphered, it reads: It’s happening again. In Toronto. At the Meat Market, there’s a girl named Sherri. Ask her where I am. Find me. Please. Adage.
Below that:
P.S.: If you got the tape, listen to it.
Ahead, a couple with matching Mohawks argues with the cab driver over what currently constitutes exact change. An elderly woman squeezes past, cradling an overweight pug on one hip and a bag of groceries on the other. Somebody drops a dime. Dust motes tremble, caught in mid-flight, as the doors slam shut.
Mike sighs.
He flips the cassette case open and lets the tape fall into place.
A low hiss.
“Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Hello?”
Click.
Rewind, and press play.
“Testing, one, two—”
Click.
Softly: “All right, then.”
“July twenty-third, nineteen-ninety. About . . . quarter to twelve.”
Silence. In the background, a distant sitcom’s laugh track seeps up through the floor of Adage’s apartment like a forming blister.
“Okay,” she says, at last. “I’m gonna tell you a story.
“It’s a red one, through and through. The words I’ll use are stained so deep nothing could wash them clean. They reek and shine. Red the same way the moon would be red tonight, if you could see it. Red the same way the river is red. A red moon, a red rising tide, a red river breaking its banks, and a deep red tale somebody beside me has to hear before the world ends or I do, whichever comes first. And Larry’s dead, so it might as well be you.
“Here’s how it goes.”
Mike hops the curb and stumbles, nearly sprawling waist deep in a puddle. He scans for the Meat Market sign—a steak on a phallic neon stick—as his mind races backwards.
Larry.
Last name—Gurley? Garvey? A skinny kid, bigger even than Adage, who’d spurted to full height that year, the way girls tend to. They spent their summers at the cottage—Mike with his parents, Adage her grandparents—and played in the woods, down by the lake. Always together, but always alone. And not minding, right up until Larry’s Winnebago pulled into the vacant lot across the road.
Mike shuts his eyes. Beneath his coat, against his side, he feels the cold iron weight of his father’s gun.
“Late July, nineteen eighty. You, and me, and Larry. Out in your Dad’s truck, in the woods, before it got light. You wanted to go spot birds, and I wanted to go home. But Larry said no, let’s do something different. And he took out the cards. So okay, you said, you want to play gin rummy? And Larry laughed. It’s not like that, he said. Now draw.
“So we all took one card.
“And then Larry made us stop the truck, right near the shore. Just before the sun comes up, when all the stars are dead. And the lake was still.
“Now look at your card, Larry said, and I looked down. And my card was just a picture of four sticks, lashed together and hung with some kind of fur, standing in front of a river. Like a door. And underneath it was written the word: Skin.”
Inside the Meat Market, girls jiggle and sway like parade balloons—white, swollen, shiny as plastic wrap. Strobe lights pulse. Squinting, Mike spots the bartender: a tall skinhead, deep in conversation with an even taller transvestite wearing a lime-green minidress. Next stool over, a yuppie with his shirt open to his waist howls with laughter. Up and down the bar, tattoos bloom, bright as mold.
Mike elbows his way in. “’Scuse me—”
Bottles click together. No reply.
“I said, ’scuse me?”
The bartender turns, slipping his customary scowl back into place. “Can I help you, buddy?”
Oh, Christ.
“Well, yes,” Mike replies brightly. “Actually, you can. I’m looking for a girl—”
Deadpan: “What a shock.”
“—named Sherri.”
No immediate reaction. The light turns orange. Cheers greet the next number.
“Sherri?” Mike repeats.
The transvestite blows a smoke ring. The bartender jerks his scalp toward the front.
“Back there,” he tells him. “In the pink.”
Mike turns. One door’s propped open, spilling noise. Beyond, shadows move and posture. A faint gleam of rose-colored plastic shimmers, becomes an arm clutching a battered leather bag whose long white fringes seem chewed. Now a profile, once pretty, but equally worn. Between them, couples thrash.
“Thanks,” Mike says, pushing off.
“There’s nothing on my card, you said. And Larry smiled, like he expected it or something. Nothing on mine either, he said. Then he looked at me.
“Later, you told me Larry said I should stare at the card and try to make the door open. To want it to. So I did . . . think I must have, anyhow. And then you started feeling like there was somebody watching us. Let’s go, you said. But Larry, he just said no, wait, something’s gonna happen. Like he already knew it would.
“And when he said that, I started to make this noise, deep in my throat.
“So then you got mad, and you said you were going to start the truck, and Larry could go to hell if he wanted but we were going back. But as you reached past me, I grabbed your arm. Hard. And you said it was like my nails were longer or something, because I was hurting you. So you said hey, Adage, let go, hey, what’s wrong with you? And then I looked up, I grinned. And you screamed.
“You told me my mouth was full of blood.”
“Sherri?”
The girl—fifteen? Thirty?—jumps up, catching Mike’s sleeve with her cigarette. A tiny circle of pain stamps itself inside his wrist; she draws back, grimacing. Blurts out: “Oh, man . . . man, I’m sorry. I—you okay?”
“Fine,” he lies, while she beats ineffectually at the damage, making it worse. Adding, through gritted teeth: “Please. No problem.”
A shrug. “If you say so.” Sherri drops the cigarette, face falling into what seem like far more familiar lines. “Looking for me, huh?” she says, turning it on, dim and flickering though “it” might be. “What for?”
Instinctively Mike reaches inside his coat—whether for his gun or his wallet, he couldn’t say. “I—I’m a friend of a friend.”
Sherri smirks. “Got a lot of friends, baby. Refresh my memory.”
Mike swallows, hard; something seems to be caught in his throat, suddenly. It knocks against his tongue when he tries to speak, deforming the words. “A—dagebeck,” he manages, at last.
“Come again?”
Much slower, this time: “Adage. Beck.”
Sherri recoils, slipping on some stray garbage. When he tries to help her, she avoids his touch. “Get off me,” she snarls.
“You knew her, right?”
“Damn straight I knew her. That chick was stone crazy. Nuts. And you’re her friend?”
“Look, it’s important. You know where she is?”
Sherri wrenches away, flattening herself against the inside of the door.
“One time,” she says, suddenly clear and calm. “Only one time, and then I don’t ever wanna see your face again. Me and Susan, we had a room down in Chinatown. And one night she brings back another chick she found on the street. Your friend.”
Adage, Mike breathes.
“So we’re doing pretty well here, right? Except our johns start disappearing. And they turn up dead, all over the Strip. It’s in the papers. Cops’re finding them in pieces. And none of them got any skin, right? Like somebody tore it off.”
And—here Mike sees a flash of early morning. 1980, peering through the windshield of his Dad’s truck at something. Something small, and nude, and black with flies. Something without a face. As the smell rises and settles, rises and settles, like a tide.
Back to the bar, then. To Sherri, mid-story. Who hasn’t even noticed where he went.
“So I start noticing stuff, after that. Like how she smells weird, your friend, like meat that’s gone off. And she sleeps all day, and she’s always wearing the same clothes. Whatever. And then Susan’s gone, and they find another body, out back of Ryerson. And that night I come home early, and your girlfriend’s standing there . . .”
Sherri stops, chokes. I don’t want to hear this, Mike thinks. I really don’t.
“She was wearing Susan’s—Susan’s—”
A nearby streetlamp goes out.
“Sherri?”
Sherri looks up, mascara dripping. “I’m going now,” she tells him, and does.
“I was three months in the hospital, but I don’t remember any of it. Just a long, red blank, and—the silence. When I resurfaced, they told me Larry was dead. They said it was suicide.
“. . . likely.
“So I got better, and my parents moved us moved away. You wrote for awhile, and I appreciated it. Then, eventually, you stopped. I wasn’t too surprised.
“I went to Toronto, to school, and I was fine for a long, long time. I lived in the waking world, and brushed my teeth twice a day. I thought bright little thoughts which flashed once and were gone, just like everybody else. I did my work. I even had friends. Years slipped by. Until—it happened.
“Again.”
Across the street from the Meat Market, Adage leans against a lamp-post, waiting for her evening’s prey to reveal itself. It’s finally stopped raining. The gutters overflow with light.
At 12:22, a girl in a tight pink plastic slicker finally breaks rank—struggling, briefly, with some unseen partner—and jumps the last two steps, falling into her customary strut as she clicks away.
Sherri, Adage thinks with a little stab. She didn’t expect it to be her tonight. Other—worthier—candidates still linger outside the Market’s doors: that older woman, whose smile seems penciled on over a lipless slash of a mouth; the boy in the leather jacket, whose ears are fringed with tiny silver rings. The girl with a freshly bloodied nose, whose pendant proclaims her to be a HOT CHICK. But take what you can get, babe, she thinks, and count yourself lucky.
Adage lets Sherri’s footsteps die away before rising to follow.
The moon sees her coming, and narrows, appraisingly.
“Graduation night, I let a boy I barely knew drive me up the hill to that spot we’d all heard so much about. And we sat there, side by side in the car, staring at the city below. He shuffled his feet, and coughed, and finally he put his arms around me. And there in the dark, between the bars of a Depeche Mode song, I felt something change. A key in a lock, turning. A red river rising, a hot red tide finally coming in, high enough to drown us both.
“And when he turned to kiss me, he sniffed the air, and gagged.
“And I just smiled.”
Then, in a whisper: “And it was so sweet, Mike. Like sex, only so much better. Like Larry must have been.
“And I remember it all.”
Pushing her way past the Totally Concerned With Sex Shop, Sherri hangs a right in front of Girls! Live! Girls! Nude!, and disappears. Her scent remains, though, fading fast. Adage swallows, tasting dust.
It’ll be over soon enough, she thinks. Walking even faster.
Mike rounds the corner and sees her, up ahead: a slight woman in a long, cloth coat, fashionably cut, with a toque pulled down over her ears. Shabby. Anonymous. Totally unseasonal.
Adage?
She pauses at the crosswalk. Her face is very pale against the dark. White and flat, and oddly limp. Motionless, except for a pair of searching eyes. As she bends to press the signal change button, a lock of hair spills from her hat—
Ad—
Blonde.
Mike feels his heart deflate.
You stupid sucker, he thinks. She’s dead in a ditch somewhere. You blew your education money to get here, and she’s dead. Probably died while you were still on the bus.
The woman reaches up to scratch behind her ear. Maybe to tuck back the lock . . .
(Stupid, stupid, stupid.)
But instead, instead, she . . . digs her nails into the side of her neck, and rips. The skin flaps slightly as she shifts weight; the freed lock blows across it and sticks, blonde turning red.
Oh, God.
Delicately, with one too-long nail, Adage reaches further in, to scratch the raw flesh underneath.
The signal changes. Adage spots Sherri on the opposite side—twenty feet ahead and gaining speed. Behind her, a movement; Adage pays no attention, instincts well and truly kicked in. Nothing could deflect her now, short of a bullet. Sherri pauses mid-step, however, nose wrinkling.
The wind has changed.
And the reek of her boils up from Adage like a miasma, so bad even she can smell it—an invisible glove of uncured hide, reaching in every direction at once. Prodded by the stench, Sherri turns, just in time to meet Adage’s eyes. Her true eyes, staring through the slightly ripped lid-holes of her false face—old now, almost done with. Yet still recognizable.
“Uh,” Sherri says. Then asks, timidly: “. . . Susan?”
Hardly.
And Mike freezes, as Sherri starts to run.
“So why am I telling you all this?”
“Larry was dumb. He wanted power, but he was too lazy to take his own risks. So he tricked me into opening the door, because he thought he could control me, afterward. When what was always inside me finally came ripping up to meet the waking world, all raw and naked and hungry. And . . .
“. . . he was wrong, obviously. So wrong, it’s kind of funny.
“I live my life the way I was meant to, now. I get up, and I get dressed, and I go out and meet someone new. And then we dance. And then I take what’s left of them home and sew it back together, and the whole thing starts over again.
“Winter’s better. They can’t smell you coming, at least not as well. But summer’s okay too, because by the time the cops find them there’s very little to even identify, and I’m gone long before they can. I keep my nose clean. I don’t get caught.
“I’m lonely, though, and I don’t know how long I want to go on like this. But I don’t know how to stop, either. Or even if I can. So—
“—find me, Mike.
“And do whatever suits you, when you do.”
The parking lot, behind King Fook’s. This is it, Adage thinks, through her haze. At last.
She takes a last step, mainly for effect. Sherri moans, runs straight into the back gate, scrabbles at it for a moment, then bounces back. It holds, locked tight for the night. “God!” she screams.
Adage pauses to remove her coat, which is far, far too expensive to dry clean.
Sherri falls to her knees, sobbing, as much with anger as with fear. And Adage . . .
. . . starts to shake.
Sherri looks up, her cupped hands full of snot.
Adage throws her head back. The naked moon, visible at last, ripples in time to her shivering. A red joy cracks her ribs. And Sherri just watches as Adage rears up, full size, the corners of her mouth breaking open. Rips inch towards either ear until, impatient, she thrusts her hands inside, and pulls.
“Adage!”
To her right. From the elevators. Sherri stumbles vertical, using the fence for support. Adage turns, drooling blood. Thinking, in surprise: Mike?
(He came.)
The fence’s lock explodes.
Sherri shrieks, realizing the possibility of escape; Adage matches her, high and harsh, like a carrion bird sighting a hearse. She lunges.
“Adage—no!”
As she turns again, Sherri slips under her arms, disappearing around the corner. Mike and Adage are left, face to face, with only a gun and ten feet left between them. Hesitant, he repeats the name, suddenly less sure.
“. . . Adage?”
Slouched like a praying mantis, the thing wearing Susan’s skin gives a too-dry laugh, coughs a fine pink spray. “See—for—your—self,” she says, wetly . . . indistinctly . . . as she steps into the light.
Mike’s hand—wavers.
Partially stripped, her bloodied skull nods moronically, face a crossfire of nerves. Her nose hangs flat, the torn half-mouth slack. She jerks her head aside and both wounds flap open at once, revealing the craters at their roots. A lipless grin chatters from chin to ear. The nude moon of her left eye bulges and slits, blankly, as its lid smears itself shut.
“I—guess—this—means—you—heard—the—tape.”
Mike gulps.
Adage seems to smile. Then the change grips her again. Mike staggers back, gun at knee-level, as blood sprays again, fiercer now: bright red, a slaughterhouse sneeze. Adage’s borrowed skin snaps at its seams, rucking up like a pair of old tights. She peels herself free. Beneath, the bulge of raw, red flesh; muscles and mucous, thrust center-stage, spurt and writhe and glisten. Gristle follows, flashing taunting little hints of bone; a spine peeps out, vertebrae cracking like a whip as she moves closer. Hands rise, busy with tendons, their nails still growing—slick, and pale, and sharp.
“Oh, Adage,” Mike whispers.
An amused croon: “Miiiike. What’s the matter, baby?”
Almost near enough to touch, now. As she so clearly wants to.
“You’re like this too, underneath,” she says. “Know that? You all are.”
Half-blind with tears, Mike brings the gun up. “Stay away, Adage.”
“Oh, but I can’t. Don’t you see I’m naked?”
Her hand, reaching. Claws ruffle his hair.
“Adage, please.”
“You who have so much,” says Adage Beck, no longer even faintly human. “Old pal, old buddy, old friend of mine. You who have so much, I pray . . . be lenient, be nice. Be generous enough to lend just me a yard or two of hide, to clothe my awful shame.”
And Mike—fires.
Gemma Files was born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, and has been a journalist, teacher, film critic and an award-winning horror author for almost thirty years. She has published four novels, a story-cycle, three collections of short fiction, and three collections of speculative poetry; her most recent novel, Experimental Film, won both the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel (Adult Category). She is currently working on her next book.