The first house on Elm was a little bungalow with a tiny front yard. It had a wooden porch, and on the banister, five terracotta pots of dead flowers. Murdoch stepped up onto the sagging porch and nudged aside a child’s red wagon. He pushed the doorbell and listened as the buzzer rang inside.
Nothing stirred.
He opened the screen and knocked at the door. The sound of his knock seemed to make the silence heavier.
“Hey!” he said. “Hey, anybody in there?”
This was a strange thing to be doing, and he was suddenly aware of himself—a lonely figure, thin in his ragged uniform, his hair grown long and his stubble unshaven. Christ, he thought, I must look like a scarecrow. What if somebody did open the door? One look at me and they’d close it in a hurry.
But no one answered his knock.
He tried the knob. The door was locked.
He looked up and down the street. He’d never broken into a house before. Well, fuck it, he said to himself. I’m coming in there. Heads up, you ghosts.
He put his shoulder against the door and pushed. The door was old, and wood rot had gotten into the framing of it. The latch sheered out of the molding with a creak and a snap. Murdoch peered into the inner darkness.
Who had lived here? Somebody with kids, judging by that wagon. The room inside, now dimly visible in the watery daylight, was dusty but reasonably tidy. A brick-red sofa stood against one wall. Above it hung a framed oil color of a woodland sunset. There was a TV set, a stereo, an empty fish tank. Some kids’ toys were scattered on the floor.
Also on the floor…
Murdoch stared at it a long time before he recognized it for what it was: A human skin.
After he vomited over the porch railing, Murdoch selected a long willow branch from among the windfall on the neighbors’ lawn. He was reassured somewhat by the weight of the stick in his hand. He was otherwise unarmed—but what was there to shoot at?
All up and down this rainy street, nothing moved.
Murdoch clutched the stick and forced himself to climb the three steps up to the porch, to cross the intervening space to the door, open it, step once again into that terrifying dimness.
The skin lay at his feet. It hadn’t moved.
But it was definitely a skin. Fragile, empty—almost transparent. But human, Murdoch thought. Its shape was difficult to discern; it was folded into itself, accordioned together; but one arm projected, a fragile white papyrus, with a hand like an empty glove and five delicate, pale fingers.
It reminded Murdoch of a discarded skin of a spider he had once found in an empty locker—spider-shaped, but so delicate that a breath would carry it away.
He lowered the willow branch until it was almost touching the empty human skin, then pulled it back, revulsion winning out over curiosity.
He stepped over the hideous thing and deeper into the house.
The house was a bungalow with only a few rooms: this living room, the kitchen, two bedrooms, a bath. Murdoch investigated them all, flicking on lights where the daylight didn’t reach.
He found two more skins: one in the kitchen; one—smaller, which made it somehow more horrible—in the child’s bedroom.
Leaving that room, he felt dizzy; and realized he’d been holding his breath as if something in the house might infect him… might suck away his substance, might drain him as thoroughly as these people had been drained of themselves.
He hurried to the door, but stopped there.
He turned back. He took a firm grip on the willow stick and held it with its narrow end pointed at the first of the skins.
The urge to poke at the thing was as strong as the urge to turn and run. There was something childish about this, Murdoch thought. He was like a little child poking at a rattlesnake’s shed skin. He dreaded it… but he couldn’t help wondering about it. Would it crumble or would it fold? If it broke at his touch, would it make a sound? Would it move in leathery fashion, like parchment, or would it rattle like sun-bleached cellophane?
He touched the skin with his stick.
In fact, it made only the faintest noise as he turned it… a whisper of membranous surfaces, like the murmur of leaves in an autumn tree, or the turning of a page in an old dry book.
Murdoch thought he might vomit again. He turned and stumbled to the porch railing.
That was when he saw the girl.
“You don’t look so good,” she said.
Murdoch didn’t think he could stand much more startlement. One more shock and his ventricles might explode. He looked up from the railing with a terrible, emasculating dread.
But it was only a girl, standing on the sidewalk with a frown of concern.
A local girl, judging by her accent. She wore a too-big man’s windbreaker over a yellow T-shirt. Her blue jeans were tight, and she had sneakers on her feet. Murdoch pegged her at about eighteen, but she might have been younger or older. Her head was cocked and she was studying him with patient sympathy.
“You found those skins in the house, huh? First time you seen one?”
She was pretty in a stringy-haired kind of way. Her face was a perfect oval and her eyes were intelligent.
Murdoch tried to reassemble some masculine composure. “First time,” he admitted. “Christ! You’ve seen them before?”
“Yup.”
“Scary as hell.” She shrugged.
The nausea had passed. Murdoch straightened and undamped his hands from the railing. “You, uh, live here?”
“No—not this house. This’s where the Bogens used to live.” She pointed: “I used to live a couple doors down. But I moved out of there. Guess where I live now!”
He felt like saying: Girl, there are three dead people in this building—nothing left but their packaging. Under the circumstances, maybe a guessing game kind of verged on bad taste.
But here was a new face, which was what he’d set out to find, and he didn’t want to chase her away. “I can’t guess.”
“The Roxy,” she said.
The Roxy? A theater? Did this town have a Roxy Theater? Was there an old trestle town like this that didn’t?
“I turned the manager’s office into kind of an apartment,” she said. “And I taught myself how to run the movies.”
He said, “You were running a movie last night? Last night when it was raining?”
She brightened. “How’d you know?”
“Heard the music.”
“It was 42nd Street.There was an old-movie festival playing when Contact came. Those are the only films I can find. I got 42nd Street and Golddiggers of1934 and The Maltese Falcon.I don’t play ’em much. It’s pretty hard work by yourself. And if you see ’em too often, what’s the point? But on a cold night like that…”
“I understand,” Murdoch said.
“Already, I could sing that 42nd Street song in my sleep.”
“Uh-huh. Hey, what’s your name?”
“Soo,” she said. “Two ohs. It’s not short for anything. Soo Constantine.”
“I’m A.W. Murdoch.”
“What’s the A for, A.W.?”
“Abel,” he lied.
“Mmm… I like A.W. better.”
“So do I. Soo, tell me—are there more of those, uh, those—”
“Skins?”
“Are there more of those skins around?”
“Most every house,” she said. “If you look. I hope you’re not planning to look.”
“No, I just… well, Christ, it took me by surprise. I mean, is everybody in town like that?”
“Nearly. ’Cept me.”