Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

He dropped it as if stung, took a few steps away from the chair. His first impulse was to flee, but with each step away from the sheath he felt safer, more secure. Somebody’s idea of a joke , he told himself. An odd costume . Nothing to worry about.

He settled into the other chair, still shaken. He would rest for a few minutes, warm up, and then leave.

A moment later, he was sound asleep.

He dreamt that he was in an operating theatre, much like the one his father had performed surgery in back when he was still alive. There was a chair on the upper tier just for him, his name on a brass plate set in the back of the chair. When he entered the theatre, everyone turned and faced him, and stared. It was crowded, every chair taken but his own, and to reach his spot he had to force his way down the aisle and to the centre of the row, stepping with apologies over the legs of the others. Down below, the surgeon stood with his gloved hands held motionless and awkwardly raised, his face mostly hidden by his surgical mask. He seemed to be waiting for Lars to take his seat.

Lars sat and then, when the surgeon still continued to stare at him, motioned for him to proceed. The surgeon nodded sharply and turned toward the only other man on the theatre floor: a tall elderly gentleman, stripped nude and standing just beside the operating table.

The surgeon ran his hand across a tray of instruments and took up a scalpel. He made a continuous incision along the man’s clavicle, from one shoulder to the other. The elderly man didn’t seem to mind or even to feel it. He remained standing, smiling absently. The surgeon set the bloody scalpel down on the edge of the operating table. Carefully, he worked his gloved fingers into the incision he had created and then, once he had a firm grasp on the skin, began very slowly to pull it down, gradually stripping the man’s flesh off his chest in a single slick sheet, from time to time looking back at Lars, as if for approval.

Lars awoke gasping, unsure of where he was. He was sweating, the room warmer than when he’d fallen asleep, the fire glowing a deep red, the heat making the air in front of the fireplace shimmer.

“Bad dream?” asked a voice.

He turned, startled. There in the other armchair was a man. Something was wrong with his skin: it hung strangely on him, too loose in the fingers and elbows, too tight in other places. There was something wrong too with his face, as if the skin didn’t quite align with the bones beneath. One eye was oddly stretched so that it was open too wide, the other bunched and all but shut.

“Bad dream?” asked the malformed man again.

“Yes, it is,” said Lars.

“ Was , you mean,” said the malformed man. But Lars had not meant was but is . I’m dreaming , thought Lars. I’m still asleep and dreaming.

“What are you staring at?” asked the man. “Is it me?” He reached up and touched his face, and then began to tug on it, sliding the skin slightly over with a wet sucking sound. The eye that had been bloated began to shrink back, the other eye opening up. Lars, sickened, had to look away.

“There we are,” said the man. “You see? Nothing to be concerned over.” When Lars still stared into the fire, he added, “Look at me.”

Reluctantly Lars did. It was just, he saw, a normal man now, not malformed at all.

“What was wrong with you?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Wrong?” asked the man. He smoothed back his hair. “Nothing. Why would you think anything is wrong?”

Lars opened his mouth, then closed it again. From the other chair, the man watched him.

“I hadn’t realized someone else was here,” Lars finally managed. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’ll go.”

“Nonsense,” said the man. “It’s a big house. A mansion of sorts. I don’t mind sharing.”

“It’s just—”

“Don’t worry,” said the man. “I’ve already eaten.”

What the hell? wondered Lars. Had the man thought he wasn’t going to stay because he had no food to offer? Was that a custom around these parts? Confused, he started to rise from the chair.

But the other man was already up, patting the air in front of him with his hands. Sit, sit , he was saying. To get past him, Lars would have to touch him, and that was something he felt he did not want to do.

He let himself fall back into the chair. Impossibly, the man was already back in his own chair as well, sitting down. The skin on one side of his face seemed to be growing loose again, or maybe that was just the flickering of the firelight.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” said the man. “Though perhaps it wasn’t I who woke you.”

“I… don’t know,” said Lars.

The man uncrossed his legs and then crossed them in the other direction. “Will you tell it to me?” he asked.

“Tell you what?”

“Your dream? Will you share it with me?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The man smiled, gave a little laugh. “No? Then the least I can do is try to help you fall back to sleep.”

“There was once a man who was not a man,” the man began. He was frowning, or perhaps it was just that his face was slipping. “He acted like a man, but he was not, in fact, a man after all. Then why, you might wonder, did he live with men or among them?

“Why indeed?

“But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It just tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.

“He acted like a man and in many respects he was a man, but he was not a man as well, and sometimes he would forget this and allow himself to relax a little and leak out.”

“What?” said Lars, his voice rising.

“Leak out,” said the man. He had pulled his chair a little closer, or at least it seemed that way to Lars.

“But what,” said Lars. “How—”

“Leak out,” said the man with finality. “I already told you this is not that kind of story, the kind that explains things. Be quiet and listen.

“He would relax a little and leak out, and sometimes it was hard for him to make his way back in again. Sometimes people would come along while he was this way, humans, and he’d have to decide what to do with them. Or perhaps to them. Sometimes if he couldn’t get back in to where he had been, he could at least get into one of them.”

The man suddenly reached out and touched his cheek. Lars felt warmth spreading through his face. Or maybe it was cold, but so cold it felt warm. He found he could not move.

“Sometimes,” said the man, “once he got into one of them, he would stay for a while. But other times, he would just swallow them up and be done with them.”

When he woke up it was late in the day, enough sunlight seeping through the gaps between boards to fill the house with a pale light. He was lying on the floor, on the bearskin, and had slept in such a way that he was stiff all along one side, his shoulder tingling, his jaw tight. The other man was nowhere to be seen.

Had anything really happened? Perhaps he had dreamt it all.

The ashes in the grate were still warm. The room, which had seemed to him so immaculate in his flashlight beam the night before, clearly wasn’t: the floor was dusty. There was litter and garbage as well and a faint sour smell. The bearskin he had slept on was moth-eaten and tattered, as were the two chairs. The only place that was immaculate was the wall above the fireplace: there wasn’t a stain there after all.