Borderlands 4 Read online

  Terry yawned and rubbed his arms around on the duvet, feeling the coarseness of the hair and picking at the occasional lumps matted within it. He turned to face the window and saw, instead of the paisley curtains, a thin veil, ripped and holey, hanging in front of a large opening.

  In his stomach he felt the first delicate flutterings of anxiety. There was something about the veil, something familiar …

  A sound behind him, out on stairs leading up from the ground floor, disturbed his thought. He did not turn around at first but listened intently.

  It was a dull and rhythmic sloshy clumping, like the sound he would expect a deep-sea diver to make with his weighted boots as he moved through some kind of overgrown swampland.

  Time to wake up. He looked down at Katherine’s shape and saw that the bed was empty at her side.

  The clumping grew louder.

  He stared at the pulled-back hairy skin-duvet and then looked up again at the veil where the windows should be. The orange light showed it all exactly. It was like a patchwork quilt, only it wasn’t made with material.

  The clumping came nearer.

  He recognized the small dark areas as hair. The lumps and holes were eye sockets and ears, boneless nose and empty fingers, limp toes and He shook his head and felt the unmistakable warmth of urine between his legs.

  His heart beating in his chest, he thrust his right hand beneath the covers.

  The clumping was very near now.

  His hand grabbed for his penis and … it wasn’t there!

  He leapt up from the bed into a standing position, ignoring the fact that the bed was surprisingly hard, like rock, and he screamed. Outside the bedroom, on the stairs, the clumping speeded up, louder and louder.

  He kept screaming, relishing the familiarity of his own voice, and turned to face the darkness where the bedroom door used to be. Something was moving towards him out of the gloom, getting nearer.

  And now there was another sound, something calling to him, though not in any language that he knew. Nor was it a voice he recognized, if it was a voice at all.

  He closed his eyes as if in prayer and pressed his hand tightly between his legs, silently mourning the loss of a close friend. There was a blinding light and then darkness.

  Katherine’s face shimmered above him, the familiar patterns of the bedroom wallpaper providing a comforting backdrop behind her head. He grunted and lifted himself up quickly, thrusting his hand down to his crotch to grab hold of his flaccid penis. He sighed and fell back when he felt it, turning the limp appendage around and around in his hand.

  “Terry? Terry, what is wrong with you?”

  “It was the dream again,” he said simply. “But worse this time.

  This time I had no penis.”

  She rose up in front of him. “That’s it,” she said sharply. “That does it, Terry. I’ve had enough. You need help.” Terry shuffled back onto the bed and winced when he sat in a cold wet patch. He clasped his hand to his chest and lifted it away immediately. It was sticky. He sniffed at his hand and almost gagged. It smelt sweet. He returned the hand to his penis and groaned. “The bed’s all wet,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s wet. It’s wet because when I came in from making myself a cup of tea you were standing on the damned thing peeing all over the place.”

  He rolled over onto his side and curled his legs into a fetal position.

  “I’m tired,” he said. And he went to sleep.

  The following day began uneventfully with a silent breakfast, during which the usually attentive Katherine allowed him to see to himself ensuring, with a minimum of fuss, that the two of them spent as little time as possible in the same room. As Katherine got into her car, Terry assured her that he would contact the doctor again. But this time he would insist on speaking to his own doctor. She waved a dismissive acknowledgment and drove off.

  He never saw her again.

  Terry rang the office and explained that he had had another bad night and that he would be in a little later than usual. It was his intention, he said, to try to catch up on a little sleep and come in around lunch time.

  He cleared away the breakfast things and tidied the table. Then he went upstairs and had a long shower. The water felt good, hot and good, swilling away the memories of the previous night. He tousled his penis lovingly, soaping it until it was erect. He considered masturbating there in the shower but the thought of it made his chest hurt.

  Well, not his chest actually, but rather his nipples. He looked down at them under the stream of water. Were they bigger? They felt bigger, both to the touch and also deep within him. When he had got out of his dressing gown to get into the shower, his chest hairs had all been matted and sticky, as if he had spilled something on them. But he had washed his chest well and now everything seemed as it should be.

  Out of the shower, dried and shaved, Terry felt like a new man.

  Almost. He decided against going back to bed and instead put on the kettle for a cup of coffee while he dressed. But then it all caught up with him and he turned off the kettle and went up to bed without taking off his clothes. As he lay down, pulling the duvet around him, he failed to notice the two wet patches on his shirt front.

  Sleep came immediately.

  What awakened him he didn’t know, but awake he was. Wide awake. And the orange light was there again.

  Terry kept perfectly still and waited until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. As he lay there, now very aware of the rough and hard surface beneath him, he could hear the moans again. They were clearer now, more distinct. He was still curled up facing the bedroom door, only the bedroom door was no longer there. Now there was only blackness stretching away from him. Without moving, he lifted his eyes until he could make out the curve of the roof way overhead.

  He moved his hand beneath the hairy skin which covered him and felt his trousers. His chest felt sore and heavy but more than that, it felt wet inside his shirt. He tried to keep his breathing slow and silent but adrenaline was pumping around inside him so fast he fancied he could hear it swirling through his body like a swollen river. Without shifting the skin-cover, he moved his hand to the front of his trousers and felt for his penis. It wasn’t there. “Oh, God,” he whispered. This time was different. He knew that. This time there was nobody else in the house to break the dream. He had to escape. From what, he had no idea. He only knew that he had to escape.

  But if Katherine was not in the house, then the bed should be empty.

  He pushed back with his left leg, feeling with his foot for some sign of another body lying next to him. There was nothing. At last, he turned over.

  The room was misty.

  No clock, no mantelpiece, no curtains, no wardrobe. Nothing that he could recognize as being his. Only strangeness. He looked to his side and saw that the bed was indeed empty. Over by the huge opening to the room the skin-veil shuddered and wafted softly. He sat up.

  The moans seemed louder now, coming from all around him, and there was a smell of something dead or dying, like rancid meat or bad eggs. He looked around.

  Shapes were moving on the floor, writhing and twisting. It was from them, he realized, that the moans emanated.

  Terry pulled back the skin-cover and swung his legs out of the bed until he felt the floor. Then he stood up, maintaining a crouched position both to preserve his anonymity and also to be prepared for flight at the first sign of danger.

  Each of the shapes was covered in its own hairy skin. He moved to the first one and lifted the cover gently. Beneath was what remained of a young man, a faint stubble on his chin and the light of madness shining from his eyes. The man let out a louder moan and, for a second,

  Terry was tempted to let the cover fall back but he just shook his head and hissed “Shhh!” The man’s eyes focused on Terry and he stopped shaking his head. “Help me,” he said.

  Terry pulled the cover fully back and immediately bit hard into his bottom lip. The man’s body was falling in on itself. His skin was intact
but inside it there seemed to be little left of any substance. His head lay on a makeshift pillow constructed of more hairy skins. Below the head the man’s neck traveled to a mound of skin-folds. He was completely naked. His arms lay outstretched beside him like empty arm-length gloves, the fingers curled and twisted and entirely incapable of any movement whatsoever.

  His body, too, was devoid of filling. No ribs, no bones, no meat, no organs. Empty. From his chest extended the remains of two large breasts, spread out across his flattened stomach like cartoon condoms, their teats bitten off and ragged. And below all that carnage the coup de grace was a woolly patch of pubic hair, matted and slimy and smelling like an old runny cheese. There was no sign of a penis.

  “Help me,” the man hissed and, for a second, Terry thought he detected a slight movement in one of those flattened glove fingers. He dropped the skin back over the man, thanking whatever god was watching down on this place that it fell mercifully across his anguished face.

  “Who’s there?” whispered another voice.

  “Help us.” Another.

  Yet another started to weep.

  All around the floor the hairy skins were moving, though each one moved only where it might be covering a head.

  Terry straightened up and stared hard into the blackness where once his landing and the sanctity of his toilet had waited. From way, way off came the sound of a bell.

  At once the shapes beneath the skins began to wail, screaming pleas and curses, begging, screaming. “Quiet!” Terry hissed, but it came out more as a shout.

  Ahead, in the blackness, something was moving towards him.

  Terry spun around and hopped over the figures on the floor, past the foot of the bed he had just left towards the skin-veil. When he got to it, and actually started to reach out a hand, he cringed. The veil was indeed constructed from a series of human skins stitched together. Faces stared sightlessly through empty eyeholes, stitched onto a stomach or buttock. But it wasn’t just the sight of the grisly curtain that made

  Terry’s eyes water and his throat fill with bile. It was the smell. And it wasn’t coming only from the skin quilt. It was coming from a large vat standing just outside the opening. Terry could see it through a ripped nipple that boasted a ragged hole so large you could have thrown a football through it. He pulled back the curtain and faced the brave new world.

  It stretched into infinity, a torn and twisted orange landscape of upside- down trees and smoking mountains. It was a land of nothingness.

  Terry stepped fully outside and moved to the edge of the ledge he was standing upon. The ground was far, far below too far and too steep to consider as a means of escape. He turned around and looked up. No exit there either. He took a step to the vat and peered over the rim.

  Somehow he had known what would be in it. There were hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes and colors. And one of the ones on the top looked very familiar. His scream was louder and more guttural than any sound issuing from a human being had any right to be. And it went on and on and on until he felt that he had completely drained himself of energy and sound and air.

  Then he heard a movement from behind his back.

  He spun around.

  The thing stood its ground.

  At first, Terry thought it was a huge balloon with two heads pasted onto the front. The faces watched him, the eyes burning into him. He broke his eyes from their stare and looked behind the thing, back into the cave. Trailing from where it now stood stretched a thick line of glistening drool. It had no feet and no other apparent means of propulsion.

  He looked back at it, shaking his head, and noticed that it had settled its bulk to the ground. Now it resembled a conical blimp of folds and creases, though the two heads still protruded.

  And as its bulk had settled, the thing’s insides had spread out so that different areas stuck out as whatever was behind pushed against the skin. Terry knew what those things were. They were bones. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else would exert any pressure.

  Again Terry felt the warmth of wetness spreading down from his crotch.

  He lifted his hands to his shirtfront and began to undo the buttons.

  Two huge breasts flopped out from within his shirt.

  The thing lifted its mass to accept his offering.

  He stepped slowly forward, lactating two fine-mist sprays of milk into the orange air.

  Misadventures in the Skin Trade

  By Don D’Ammassa

  Being a voracious reader is one of the pre-requisites for becoming a writer. If total volume of volumes read means anything, then Don D’Ammassa is headed for The List. His book reviews appear in one of the genre newsletters with great frequency and in mass quantities. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island (home of H. P., himself), where he recently lost his 23-year gig as a manufacturing executive. His recent success in short fiction with sales to Hottest Blood, Shock Rock, Deathport, Pulphouse, and The Ultimate Zombie is no doubt highly correlated to his lack of a grown-up peoples’ job. Good for you, Don.

  Someone stole my skin the other day. I know how that must sound, but it’s the simple truth. They were clever though, replacing it with a substitute that was so close it fooled me for a while. But not for long. I mean, how much more intimately can you know anything than your very own skin? It’s not like clothing, for Christ’s sake!

  Sorry. I didn’t mean to lose control there, but you have to admit, it’s an unsettling thing to discover, that your body is covered with something foreign, a synthetic of some kind, perhaps, or in this case a stranger’s skin. How’s that for a disgusting thought? Would you want something like that wrapped tightly around your flesh? No, I didn’t think so. So maybe you can understand how I feel about it.

  I have to concede I was fooled for a while, even though I noticed some inconsistencies first thing that morning. It’s not the kind of conclusion you accept readily, though, and I made excuses. Perhaps I had just never noticed the small blemish on the right thigh, and that fresh scratch on my side…I could have done that with a fingernail in my sleep.

  There were other clues that I chose not to recognize. When Marie walked out, years ago now, she complained that I thought more of my own body than I did of hers. It did no good to point out that unless she began to take adequate care of herself, she would never regain the firm muscle tone, proper ratio of weight to height, or that wonderfully clear complexion which had attracted me to her in the first place. I myself had not varied more than a few pounds from my base weight in over a decade, and I examined my body constantly for signs of imperfection.

  But on that late summer morning following the theft of my skin, there was a thin but unmistakable finger’s width of loose flesh around my waist.

  Still I failed to recognize the implications, assuming instead that I had been lax in my exercises, or perhaps had slipped into unhealthy eating habits. This latter explanation seemed even more credible when I discovered a cluster of small dark spots on my nose, infected pores, and by the time I had thoroughly cleaned them and applied a disinfectant, my nose was as red as a drunkard’s and as painful as a prizefighter’s. Resolving to ruthlessly re-examine both my diet and my training routine that evening, I set off to work mildly concerned but not yet aware of the true nature of my condition.

  The feeling that something was subtly wrong persisted all day. I’ve worked the same position on the assembly line for four years now, and I’ve trained my body to work as a piece of the machinery. The rhythms are a part of me as I am a part of them, and every flexing muscle, every twist of elbow and wrist, each individual stretch of skin over flesh is predictable and familiar. But not that morning.

  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first. I had fallen into the routine as always, three connections on the left, three on the right, rotate the unit, check the solder joint, rotate again, fasten the clip, arms back while the unit shifted to the next station and a new one offered itself. More than a thousand times I had merged with the operation smoothly, without
a moment’s hesitation. But that morning, it felt wrong, the kinesthetics were different, not enough to interfere with my performance of the work required, but enough to put my nerves on edge. I’ve always been proud of my self discipline, the way I’ve trained my body to respond instantly to everything I ask of it. If we aren’t captains of our own bodies, how can we expect to control the world around us?

  I was troubled throughout the day and distracted on the drive home. My work clothes went into the hamper; I never wore the same set more than once without washing them. Then my usual thorough shower, starting with my hair, which had grown to be nearly an inch long. Time for a trim. Three applications of shampoo and a rinse, then a thorough scrubbing with a stiff spined brush, followed by a final shampoo. Then my face, concentrating on my nose this time. I had installed a mirror on the shower wall years before, but it rarely proved effective, the image obscured by rising steam as quickly as I could clear it away. But I used it this time, concentrating to make certain there’d been no recurrence of the invading blackheads I’d discovered that morning.

  Other than that, I kept to my routine, ears, back of the neck, then throat and chin. I scrubbed myself until the flesh was warm and glowing and the sense of wrongness started to recede. Chest and armpits and navel, shoulders and back and waist. The superfluous flesh at my midriff was still there and still worrisome, but I was confident that I could work it off in a few days.

  I was tempted as always to quickly pass over my genitals, the weakest and least perfect part of the male body, but as usual I forced myself to overcompensate and lather them thoroughly, scrubbing vigorously enough that my breath became sharp and ragged. I shaved myself once a week to facilitate this process, but there were so many folds of flesh that might conceal infections or other unpleasantness, I was never completely satisfied that my efforts were complete.