Eli was silent a long while. Derek said nothing. He set the recorder on pause, thinking to get up and brew a fresh pot of coffee, then either embark on a new subject or say his farewells.
As he was rising, Eli said, “I’ll need your help.”
“Certainly.” Derek was already up. “What can I do?”
“In the hall closet, on the top shelf. I had one of my nurses put it there after Evangeline’s death, so I wouldn’t be able to reach it, wouldn’t be tempted.”
Derek located the closet in the small hall adjacent to the living room.
“There’s a box,” came Eli’s voice. “You’ll see it. Be careful, though, it’s heavy with books. Bring it down.”
Derek opened the closet, which he had eyed curiously on numerous occasions, expecting it to be full of magical talismans and ritual costumes, carved staves and shamanic animal masks. Instead he found several overcoats and a vacuum cleaner. Above, on a shelf, was a stack of shoe boxes labeled “Snapshots,” “Cards,” “Grandchildren.” Next to these was a larger cardboard box, unmarked, which proved to be not quite as heavy as Eli had led him to believe. He got it down without much trouble. When he set it at the old man’s feet, Eli stared at it without blinking, his lips and jaws trembling.
“Shall I make more coffee?” Derek said.
Eli made no reply.
Derek busied himself in the kitchen. By the time he returned with two full cups, Eli was leaning over, trying to fumble at the folded flaps without much success.
Derek squatted down and quickly threw the flaps open, hearing a sharp gasp from Eli as he did so.
At first Derek wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The box was packed with some loose, soft material—a pliant foam padding, but strangely patterned and colored, like handmade paper. He dug under this stuff, exposing the covers of some old ledger books with red binding and black spines. Thinking these the main object of Eli’s fear, he pulled out the packing material and flung it aside with a swift motion that caused it to unravel.
Eli cried out, rolling backward nearly to the kitchen. Derek stared in horror at what he had so casually drawn from the box. It was as if a third presence had joined them, invited but unwelcome all the same.
A complete human skin, rumpled from long confinement, lay spread out on the carpet.
Had it been an ordinary human skin, repulsion might have been all Derek felt. But this sallow hide was riddled with bright lichenous tattoos in dark blues, brownish reds, and dirty greens. The patterns were circular, wheels of all sizes, and none was identical. They speckled the shoulders, the back, and the winglike shreds that fanned out to either side… wings with nipples centered high on each of them. The circles covered buttocks, thighs, calves, and arms, running right to the ragged hems of ankle, wrist, and neck. Derek found himself counting the blotches, as if the mundane task would restore his sense of proportion.
“There are thirty-seven in all,” Eli said, having seen his lips moving. The old man wheeled forward, his expression grim and resolute. “Put it back now—roll it up again. It’s not a good idea to stare at the damn thing.”
Derek could feel the seeds of a nightmare being planted in his soul, pushed down deeper than the reach of his nerves. It was almost impossible to touch the skin again: cool as a snake, but clammy. He started to furl it up, but the underside was worse than the outside, for he could see and feel traces of tissue where fat and flesh had been flensed away. Finally he merely wadded the thing in a crumpled ball, shoving it back into the box atop the stacked red and black ledgers.
“Wait,” Eli said. “Those I want. Bring them out.”
Dropping the hide, Derek lifted the ledgers and heaped them on the floor. Then it was easy to stuff the skin into the empty box; he wove the flaps together so the carton wouldn’t open on its own.
Feeling nauseated, and somewhat wary of Eli now, Derek sank cross-legged onto the floor next to the box and the ledgers. The old man’s dark eyes were full of fear and anxiety. The sight of such trepidation was slightly comforting, though he wasn’t sure how to interpret it. If Eli were responsible for this skin, then perhaps he only feared prosecution; but Derek didn’t think that was the source of his worry. There was something about the skin itself that unnerved him, as it would anyone. He had never expected to see anything so ghastly in this little suburban house.
Now he thought he had finally begun to glimpse the reason for Elias Mooney’s paranoia, a tangible focus for what had previously been a vague sense of dread….
Again he wondered if any possible book was worth exposure to Eli. He’d felt so much safer sitting alone with his research materials, inventing fantasies. There was no sign here of the book he’d intended to write.
“I am responsible for Evangeline’s death,” Eli said solemnly.
Derek nearly bolted for the door, fearing that Eli was about to throw off his disguise of frail convalescent and leap at him, flaying knife flashing. Mooney the butcher, the suburban cannibal….
But Eli didn’t move, and gradually Derek’s panic subsided. The skin in the box was not a woman’s skin anyway.
“If she’d never come near me, she never would have come to their attention. But she was so pure, so loving, and they
knew how much I trusted her. They knew they could use her as a gate because she never feared the evil in this world. She never had reason to fear a thing until she met me.”
In the box, as he spoke, the human parchment rustled, expanding slightly, finding a new position. Like Derek, it might have been settling down to listen as Eli embarked on his story.
19
(ELIAS’S STORY: A TRANSCRIPT)
“Evangeline had no interest in magic when I met her. She was a cook at a handicapped center where I used to spend time after my second wife’s death. While she and I had very little in common, in our hearts we were close from the first. Brother and sister, that sort of warmth.
“We were married twice. Once by a Christian priest we both knew and respected, but first in a much older ceremony. Married in sight of the earth and the stars, our wrists bound with a red silk cord anointed with mistletoe juice and some of my semen and a little of Evangeline’s blood. She wasn’t a squeamish girl; she understood instantly how these things worked, though no one ever told her a thing about them, and she had never in her whole life cared to peek into the sort of books you and I take for granted.
“She had to put up with all sorts of strange things, marrying me. My children from my first marriages had suffered the loss of their mothers, but they took to Evangeline like blood kin, and she to them. The youngest were grown and on their way soon after we married, and then we had only the years ahead of us, and grandchildren, and life here in San Diablo, listening to the bulldozers coming up through the hills where before we had heard only birds.
“She was so patient. She put up with me and never once called me crazy, which should tell you something right there. When I spoke about where I’d been and what I’d seen in the astral, out traveling, she’d just nod and sometimes ask a question that made me wonder if she hadn’t seen the places for herself. We traveled together at night sometimes, though she couldn’t remember our trips in the morning. Wherever we went, everyone—every being we met in the universe—loved her instantly. She was so full of compassion, strong and pure as sunlight; you could live on her light without needing anything else.
“Evangeline….
“Pointless to say I miss her. That only tells them they triumphed, the sadistic… what? I can’t call them bastards; I’m not sure of their parentage. And sadism surely isn’t the right word. No human terms apply. Misbegotten, yes; despicable; but maybe necessary, in their way. That’s the worst of it. Like blowflies laying eggs in corpses, like maggots and bacteria causing rot and corruption and decay. All these things, so horrible to the humans whose flesh they will someday claim, are indispensable. Without the mandalas we’d drown in our own psychic waste; the fragments of ego and consciousness we leave in our wake as we pass between incarnations would be eternal, like the debris of old rockets and satellites that orbit the earth until they crash down upon it…. No god designed them, you see—they evolved. But the evolutionary forces at work in the astral realms are not so well understood as those in the physical world. I have conducted my own investigations, but my abilities are limited. We have not yet had our occult Newton or Einstein, a genius who can illuminate the basic principles of the realm. Swedenborg came close, perhaps, but his influence on following generations has been slight, and Blavatsky and her brood corrupted it so. Our sick modern culture knows less than many more so-called primitive societies that haven’t invested so much into promoting spiritual blindness. Unfortunately, those societies today are all but extinct, their knowledge as lost as the genotypes once hidden in the rain forests….