Borderlands Read online

  I pulled off the sack.

  On top of the large brawny shoulders sat a tiny shriveled-apple head onto which was stamped an expression of wide-eyed youthful terror. The small mouth opened and closed spasmodically, gasping like a fish drowning in air, and then the eyes closed, the head drooped onto the left shoulder. The pounding arm slowed, then stopped, the stone failing from the unclenching fingers.

  The pace of the other men’s pounding increased, as if to make up for this loss, but they did not turn to look at me, did not deviate in any way from their ritual. The sack moved neither one way nor the other; the bodies remained in place, unmoving save for the piston-like arms.

  I touched the body of the de-sacked man. Had I killed him? Was he dead? The sweaty skin was warm and spongy to the touch. I looked closely at the tiny head. Although it was wrinkled and shriveled, its features were vaguely familiar, as if this were someone I should know but could not quite place. I stared at the face for a long time.

  Then it came to me.

  Franklin Roosevelt. The face looked like that of Franklin Roosevelt.

  I quickly pulled off the sack over the head of the adjacent man’s head. The shriveled visage of Albert Einstein gasped bug-eyed for air, then expired.

  The tempo of the pounding increased as I pulled off other sacks.

  Winston Churchill.

  W.C. Fields.

  They were all famous men, many of them powerful world leaders. Finally, there was one man left, at the head of the table. His arm was pumping fast and furious, at an inhuman rate, the sound of the single stone striking the table at this speed sounding like a flat drumroll. I walked toward the man, ready to pull off the sack, but something held me back. I was filled with a fear more profound than I had ever experienced before or have experienced since. I stared at the sack and thought I saw, pressing lightly against the coarse brown paper, the outline of a ridged head.

  From underneath the front of the sack protruded a single fern frond.

  I left without looking back. I knew I would wonder afterward what had been under that sack, but I knew also it was not something that would keep me up at night. Some things it was better not to know.

  I walked up the stairs, down the hall, and out of the building.

  I never went back. I never even drove down that street again, and a few months later I moved out of the city.

  In the years since, I have often wondered what it all meant, or if indeed it meant anything. If I had read of such an occurrence in a novel, short story, or other work of literature, I could have analyzed it in terms of symbol or metaphor, I could have placed meaning on the individual elements of the room and on the events which occurred there. But this was no work of fiction, there was no correspondence between what I experienced and some higher meaning.

  Yet…

  Yet I wonder what did happen. Were those robots or genetically engineered creatures? Had the corporation somehow cloned or resurrected famous people? Were those men going to be used for something? As part of a publicity campaign or a plot to take over the world? I didn’t know then, and I still don’t now, but somehow none of those explanations seem adequate. I can’t help feeling that those…things…were in some way an integral part of the company, as necessary to its function and operation as labor or management. I do not think they were human, but I do not think they were man-made either. I wouldn’t call them supernatural, but that description is closer than any other.

  I still think about my one day and one hour on the job, and I can see the nightmare contours of the room as if it were before me now. I can hear the rhythmic pounding, pounding, pounding. Sometimes the noise intrudes upon my life, coming up from the depths, growing louder, superimposing upon the here and now, and I wonder if I simply dreamed it all and am going crazy. Or, far more frighteningly, whether I am still in that room and have never left, whether I have been lulled into slumber and have dreamed everything that subsequently happened, whether I have been hypnotized by the pounding and can never leave the room.

  Thumpthump…thumpthump…thumpthump.

  PEELING IT OFF

  Darrell Schweitzer

  When I created the concept for Borderlands, I worried about getting enough stories I could honestly proclaim unique or bizarre or thoroughly strange. This fear became exacerbated as I waded knee-deep through submissions that ran through the same tired HDF shticks. Gradually, the really odd pieces began to surface, and I felt better. One of the first stories to give me such reassurance was Darrell Schweitzer's "Peeling It Off," and even though I asked him for several sets of revisions, I always knew I was going to buy it.

  In his late thirties, Schweitzer's been a professional writer since he was twenty-one. He's worked as an editor of both magazine fiction and books of criticism; had stories in most of the genre magazines and anthologies; has had several story collections published, in addition to a handful of novels. He lives in Philadelphia, where he continues to write and work as coeditor and co-publisher of the latest incarnation of Weird Tales.

  "I've done something to Joanne."

  "It's worse than life and death," Sam Gilmore said, and I believed him.

  I had to. It was something about his intensity, the way he said it, the way he leaned over the table and stared right through me, the way he had begged me to meet him now, tonight, here in a ridiculous East Village bar called the Yuppie Upper despite the lateness of the hour and the foul February weather.

  But I was his friend, so there I was. We went back a long way together, to childhood, and in a city as huge as New York you cling to anyone who isn't a stranger.

  I glanced around at the décor–everything that the name of the place implied, a hideous caricature of the young-and-loaded image, clashing neo-fifties chrome, neo-thirties Art Tacko, a whole wall dominated by a Warholesque portrait of Marilyn Monroe in pale green–and reflected that in other circumstances this would be one of Sam's little jokes. We would both be laughing now.

  But even before I'd sat down, when I found him in a back booth nursing the remains of some tall drink that came with a pair of cheap sunglasses wrapped around the stem of the glass–even then I could sense that something was terribly wrong. Sam could try to be silly to stave off the most wrenching despair, but it never worked and it wasn't working now.

  I stood there in front of him, shaking the water off my coat.

  "Sam, goddamnit, this had better be good."

  And then he went very pale, and his lower lip was trembling. I thought he was going to break down then and there. "It's about Joanne."

  I sat down. A waiter came over. I ordered a whiskey sour just to get rid of him. "Sam," I said, "you'll have to get over her. You're divorced now, like God knows how many other people. Something a lot of people have learned to live with."

  "It's not just that. I've discovered I–"

  I tried to be as firm as I could without upsetting him. "I hope you aren't going to say you still love her. It's a bit late for that."

  He sipped his drink. The straw made a gurgling sound. "No, Frank," he said. "Quite the opposite. I have discovered that I truly hate her."

  "Put that out of your mind," I said. "Just forget it. That kind of thing can eat you, like a cancer."

  He toyed with his glass, twirling it in his hands.

  "You haven't been there, Frank. You don't know. It was actually a comfort to realize, at last, that I hated her. It wasn't "Joanne opened the door a few inches and peered out. She was in a bathrobe and slippers, her hair up in a towel.

  'Sam!' she all but hissed. 'I told you never to come here again! Do you need a fucking court order?'

  'But I wanted to see you, dearest,' I said. I rammed my shoe in between the door and the jamb, then put my shoulder to the door and shoved my way inside.

  "That was more than she had been expecting, even after everything that had happened between us. She just stood there, her hand to her mouth in amazement. I closed the door behind me and turned toward her in the narrow hallway. 'What the hell
do you think you're doing?' She was furious, but whispering. There has never been anyone else who could put such venom into a whisper. 'Get out of here before I–'

  'Before you scream?' I grabbed her by the shoulders and slammed her against the wall, holding her there. The towel started to come loose. She jerked her head to get it out of her eyes. 'No one will come,' I whispered back at her, 'even if they can hear you. This is New York, home of the late Kitty Genovese, remember?'

  "She was getting scared by then, I could tell. But she controlled herself. Her voice was icy calm.

  " 'So now you're here. Now what?'

  'I just wanted to talk to you again, Jo—'

  She was almost crying then. 'There's nothing left to say. Just leave me alone and get the fuck out.'

  'Profanity, my dear, is the last recourse of the fucking inarticulate, and you were never inarticulate, so why talk to me like that?'

  "I reached up to gently caress her cheek, and she slapped my hand away with real repugnance, as if I were covered with lice or something. That hurt. That, more than anything else, strengthened my resolve.

  'My God,' she said, in tears now, shaking all over. 'Your barging in here like this only makes me sure I did the right thing getting rid of you. If I ever had any doubts about you being a creep and an asshole, I don't now.'

  'I don't either,' I said. I grabbed her by the throat with my left hand and lifted her till she stood on tiptoes against the wall. She tried to kick me in the balls then, but I just stepped aside. I held her dangling there, but just for a second–"

  "Jesus Christ–Sam! You didn't–?"

  I felt sick then. I held on to the edge of the table hard. All I could do was think to myself, Oh shit, Oh shit–

  But Sam held up his hand.

  "Frank, please. It's not what you think. You promised you'd hear me out."

  "Okay. Yeah. I did."

  "She barely managed to gasp, 'Sam, don't–do–anything stupid…'

  "I couldn't wait any longer. It was time to let her in on my secret.

  "I sank my fingers into the side of her face, slipping under the skin by her left ear. The underside of her face felt like putty, and it was wet in there, and almost scalding hot.

  "I don't think Joanne was quite conscious then. She seemed stunned, somehow paralyzed, and she didn't make the slightest sound or motion as I slowly pulled outward and her face came away in my hand. For a few seconds I held it drooping over my fingers like half-melted cheese. Then it was no heavier than a cobweb, and a few seconds after that, my hand was empty.

  "I let go of her then, and when I saw the raw, red place where her face had been, I was violently sick. I ran into the bathroom and puked my guts out. Then I came out and walked slowly into the living room. I sat down on the sofa and just stared at everything, taking inventory, looking for nothing in particular but looking for it with desperate urgency. Nothing. That was the key. For all Joanne and I had lived here for twelve years, there was nothing left. The prints on the walls, the stereo, the furniture were all different. Even the tennis trophy we'd won together in college–I'd left her that when she'd asked for it–was gone from the shelf. The room told the story of a stranger's life.

  "Then I heard her sobbing softly out in the hail. I stood up: It was time for me to go.

  The woman sitting in the hall, the one wearing Joanne's bathrobe and slippers, was no one I had ever seen before. I stopped and studied her face for a minute. The cheekbones were higher, the nose longer, the eyes brown instead of hazel, the eyebrows thicker and more arced. Her expression was that of someone who has suddenly stepped into life without any bearings, unsure of who she is or how she got there.

  "The very unfamiliarity was comforting. I left the apartment without a word. Downstairs, I scraped my ex-wife's name off the other woman's mailbox."

  The truly terrifying part was that Sam Gilmore clearly believed every word he said. I was trapped then, completely unprepared, and yet I had to do something, as surely as I would if I had come across a man bleeding to death in a back alley.

  "Sam," I said, very deliberately. "Listen to what you're saying. This is…crazy. I mean, you know, you really know, that people's faces don't come off like Silly Putty."

  He folded his hands on the table.

  "But they do, my friend. They do. You have been my best friend all these years, but there's one secret I've been keeping from you all this time. They do. I know it."

  I was only stalling for time then, desperately, until I could come up with some sort of plan.

  "Okay. They do."

  "I learned that when I was six years old, Frank. It was one morning a couple days after Christmas. I was hunting Injuns in the living room, crawling around under the furniture with my coonskin cap and Frontiersman cork rifle. You remember, Frank? You had one too."

  "I remember," I said.

  "Well, it was barely dawn, much too early for me to be allowed up, and there I was. Suddenly the door to the guest bedroom opened, and my grandfather stepped out. I froze where I was, afraid he'd see me and tell my parents. But he just stood there in the doorway, fully dressed, with a suitcase in hand, staring into space as if he were trying to remember something.

  "Then he crossed the living room and went into the kitchen. I put my gun down gingerly and crept out a way to see what was he was doing.

  "It was real, Frank. I was wide awake, not dreaming. Grandpa put down the suitcase, then reached up behind his head with both hands as if he were fumbling for the string to take a Halloween mask off–that was the image that came to me, even then–and he peeled his face away. It just came off. But he had his back to me and I didn't see–I mean, I only saw when he held up the mask of flesh to the window. It was translucent in the pale light for just an instant before it vanished with a hiss, the way a thin slice of bacon will fizzle away into nothing on a hot grill.

  "When he turned back toward the living room, he was someone else, an older man I didn't know.

  "I wanted to scream, Frank. I bit my fist hard to keep myself from screaming. At the same time, I think I was more consciously afraid of being caught up too early than anything else. My mind rejected what I saw. It was impossible, I told myself. Just what you'd say. A little kid doesn't have a real good grasp of what's possible and what isn't, but there are limits, and that, even for a six-year-old, was too much.

  "I must have let out a little moan, because then he saw me.

  "'No,' I whimpered softly.'Go away.'

  "Our eyes met, and for just an instant it was still Grandpa there, gazing at me out of that stranger's face–angrily, sadly, I couldn't tell–and then he did indeed go away. Whatever there was, in the eyes, in the face, that remained of Grandpa was gone, and the stranger shrugged, picked up his suitcase, and left the house.

  "I lay there for a long time. Mother found me eventually. She thought I was sick. I'd wet my pajamas. I got a scolding and was put to bed, and she never understood, never suspected, and for years afterwards that scene came back to me in nightmares or just popped up in the middle of a train of thought, and I tried to figure it out. I was much, much too young. Kids can't understand that adults are real people too, with their own feelings and vulnerabilities. He was just Grandpa. He visited. He brought me presents. I couldn't imagine what frustrations, what little agonies he must have gone through before taking that final escape route.

  "And sometimes I wondered: was it because of me? What if, instead of 'Go away,' I'd said, 'Please stay. We love you'? But I didn't. I didn't say anything at all.

  "And that's how I found out my little secret."

  We sat there quietly for what might have been five minutes. The last customers and even the waiters were gone, so we were alone but for the bartender in the corner by the television.

  There were lots of times I thought I would just get up and bolt, but I was afraid to. And Sam Gilmore was my friend, and friendship is a little like marriage–in sickness and in health–so I had to stay.

  "Sam, what did you do to
Joanne?"

  He swirled the ice in his glass, gazing into it, seemingly oblivious of me.

  "I didn't want to hurt her. I just wanted her gone, out of my life. Then it would be over."

  "It isn't that simple, Sam, and you damn well know it. People are going to wonder what happened to her. The police are going to start asking questions–"

  I stopped then, waiting for his reaction. Perhaps I had gone too far by mentioning the police.

  There were tears on his cheeks now. He put his elbows on the tabletop, covered his eyes with his hands, and sobbed.

  "It's not like you think, Frank. No cops ever came looking after my grandfather. He was gone, like a stone thrown into a lake, and after a while the ripples just smoothed out. Grandma and my parents never mentioned him. He made a graceful exit. But, Frank, you're right. It's not that simple for me. That's why you're here tonight. I called you not merely to tell you about what I did, but because I need your help with something that is still going on. There has been, you might say, an unforeseen complication."

  "I don't understand," I said.

  "It's Joanne. It's different with her. She keeps coming back."

  II.

  That was when the plan occurred to me. I grasped at it with quiet, desperate deliberation, because I had to do something, and this, at least, was something.

  I stood up and put my coat on.

  "Come on, Sam. We gotta get out of here."

  He put on his coat.

  "Okay…"

  I took him by the arm and maneuvered him past the cash register. He was too befuddled then. I led him like a child or a very, very old man. I had to leave a twenty of my own to pay for the drinks.

  Outside the wind howled, and the stinging sleet was turning into stinging snow.

  "Where are we going?" my friend shouted.

  I just dragged him along. There were no taxis in sight so we made for the subway entrance.