Frazer Lee - The Lamplighters

She ran. Behind her, the shrill laughter and sputum nursery song of the boy as he got to work on his father’s tongue.

The tunnel outside stretched out into black in both directions. Left or right? It was a tough call, Marla had no idea which direction she’d come from when he, when it , had brought her in here. The boy’s shrill laughter urged her on and she banked to the right. Fifty-fifty chance, deeper into this hellhole or out onto the beach. The tunnel snaked, forming a sly corner and Marla was considering doubling back on herself when she saw a distant light up ahead. That was it, must be, the way out. She ran full pelt, her wet footfalls echoing off the bare rock like mechanical applause. Nearing the light, she saw it was coming from a doorway in the side of the tunnel. Slowing down to a trot, Marla approached the lip of the doorway cautiously and stopped. Back pressed against the wall, she took a deep breath and peered around the doorway. Inside was a large chamber, lit with dim sepia lamps that hung from wires bolted to the walls. The room was lined with rows of shelves that formed an avenue to the other side, and there—another door. Marla looked back the way she came. She could no longer hear the maniac boy-thing and no footsteps were coming from the tunnel behind her. Into the room then, oh please let that door be an exit. She stepped inside, struck by the strong smell of mold and dust, and began walking the avenue of shelves to the door. Now she was inside, Marla could see what lined each shelf. The lower ones were stacked to bursting with plain plastic containers, just like the ones filled with cleaning products back at the white stucco house. The containers were neatly grouped according to shape and size and as she walked on, Marla saw further shelves cluttered with the smaller toiletry containers of the type she’d found waiting for her in the summerhouse filled with shampoo, shower gel, toothpaste and the like. Puzzled, Marla paused for a second and took one of the containers from the shelf nearest to her. It was empty. She placed it back on the shelf and saw a stack of screw cap lids waiting next to it—waiting to be twisted on when the container was filled, but with what? Larger shelves up ahead glinted yellow and Marla walked on to better see their wares. These shelves were larger because the vessels that stood upon them were larger and heavier than the plastic containers. Marla was looking at a wall of large glass jars filled with what looked like goose fat. Many of the jars were covered in thick layers of dust, their contents separating like spoiled milk. They must have been here for years, and there were so many of them. Walking further on, Marla was dismayed to see that more of the jars were filled with body parts and tissue specimens, just like the ones she’d seen in the cave before the boy thing had his way with her. She grimaced as her eyes focused on a jar containing the thick tube of a belly button cord, swimming in a dark amber jelly, little flaps of pink flesh surrounding the orifice like a collar. Peering closer, she realized her mistake—this was actually someone’s anus, complete with the fleshy rectal opening she’d mistaken for a navel. Dread connections crept into her mind as she equated the contents of these jars with the expectant spaces within the plastic containers. Shampoo, shower gel, toothpaste. Oh dear God no . Marla felt suddenly sick, desperate to wash herself inside and out. Her flesh squirmed sticky cold where the boy had violated her. She backed away from the jars and their disgusting contents and fled for the door, grabbing at the handle with one frantic sweaty palm.

But the door was locked. It was made of old metal, heavy and immovable.

Tears of despair welled up in Marla’s eyes. She’d have no choice now but to go back the way she came, and to face whatever lurked in the darkness at the other end of the long tunnel. No, she couldn’t do it; she’d be driven mad by fear before a hundred paces, before a dozen even. Nothing else for it, she’d have to break open the door somehow. Studying the door she saw there was no discernable locking mechanism, just the age and rust that made it looked fused into the rock that surrounded it. Maybe if she could break the door handle with something—that might just do it. She began looking around for an object heavy enough to do the job. The jars had been amassed here over months, years or even decades. They had to be important to someone. Surely they’d keep a fire extinguisher down here, in case of fire? Marla darted to the nearest corner, desperate to see red. But she found only more jars, great stacks of them, each filled with fleshy objects she had no desire to look at any longer. She continued her search, aiming for a gap in the shelves that formed a kind of deep avenue within the tall rows a little way from the door.

She froze. Ahead of her was a dark shape, terrifyingly large and horribly familiar. He’d been here all along, watching her. Marla’s head swam, drowning beneath the weight of this new horror. She backed away in slow terror, realizing that she’d run straight into the massive clutches of the giant who’d pursued her through the trees. The candles flickered and she saw him clearly for the first time—a massive Skin Man. His huge physique was clad in black oilskins, but now she saw they were stitched together with a network of leathery off cuts. Horribly, she saw an eyelid forming a buttonhole, the flap of someone’s cheek (still with beard hair) grafted onto a pocket at his hip. His greatcoat was literally held together by human skin and sinew. She looked up and her terrified eyes were reflected back at her from his goggle eyes. They were indeed housed in goggles made of bone, eye sockets expertly extricated from a human skull, filled with obsidian glass, then strapped to his head with sickly yellow surgical tubing. The dark lenses bore into every corpuscle of her being, reflecting her horror like hideous inverted scrying mirrors. Marla choked as his great hand clutched at her throat and she felt herself lifted off the ground onto the very tips of her toes. She looked down in terror at the endgame of those black goggle eyes and felt herself falling into their nauseating curves. Like a terrified, naked child Marla slipped beneath the cold black ripples of her fear and gave herself over to oblivion.

A siren song of waves lulled Marla to and fro like a boat cut adrift from its moorings and set loose upon the ocean. She heard them in the submarine depths of her dreams as she floated above the ground through the trees. The Skin Man was carrying her over his shoulder like a rag doll. Oh but he was a behemoth, barrel-chested and thick, sturdy as a tree trunk. If you’d seen them crashing through the trees together you’d be sure to mistake them for something out of a fairytale. La belle et la bete . The giant bestial fiend in his greatcoat of skin and the girl fragile and pale in her tatters. But his cold glassy eyes were not party to fairytales, they were filled with the thousand flayed edges of nightmares past and yet to come. On through the woods he trudged—each step a commitment to the darker, higher purpose that drove the engine of his being, each breath a hymn to this eviscerated night. Marla stirred slightly in her fitful sleep, murmuring something of the horrors she’d witnessed under her breath as the Skin Man climbed a steep incline, gravel and dirt fleeing from beneath his feet. He turned onto a path, visible only to his owl-like eyes in the vague moonlight, and cut through a network of tall trees and bushes. Breaking cover, he paused for a moment to draw breath and looked up at the huge white edifice in front of him. It gleamed huge and white as an iceberg—the most beautiful house on the island, unknown to any but him and his brethren. He strode on, his path now lit by an avenue of flaming torches. The torchlight danced across Marla’s face, giving her the aspect of a sleeping child curled up in front of a dreamtime fire.