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  All stories contained in this anthology remain the copyright © of their respective authors. Additional credit and copyright information is located in the Declarations of Copyright section.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This collection is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors' imaginations, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PEEL BACK THE SKIN

  ISBN 978-1-940658-70-4

  First Grey Matter Press Electronic Edition

  June 2016

  Anthology Copyright © 2016 Grey Matter Press

  Design Copyright ©2016 Grey Matter Press

  Cover Artwork Copyright ©2016 Victor Slepushkin

  Stories Copyright ©2016 their individual authors

  All rights reserved.

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  To all the many monsters out there—the readers.

  If you don’t know who you are, take a look in the mirror.

  MYSTIC

  Jonathan Maberry

  THE PROTECTOR

  Tim Lebbon

  MOTH FRENZY

  Lucy Taylor

  FAMILY BIBLE

  Ed Kurtz

  LIFE, OR WHATEVER PASSES FOR IT

  Durand Sheng Welsh

  THE SHED

  Joe McKinney

  THE GREATEST GIFT

  Graham Masterton

  THE LADY OF THE MINCH

  William Meikle

  BEHOLDER

  John McCallum Swain

  ORPHANS OF THE AIR

  James Lowder

  PARTY MONSTER

  Charles Austin Muir

  GATOR LAKE

  Nancy A. Collins

  SUPERHEATED

  Yvonne Navarro

  BURNING LEAVES ON AN AUTUMN DAY

  Ray Garton

  THE LONG BRIGHT DESCENT

  Erik Williams

  Declarations of Copyright

  More from Grey Matter Press

  -1-

  I see dead people.

  Make a joke. Go ahead, people do.

  Fuck ‘em.

  I see dead people.

  Not all of them. My life would be too crowded. Just some. The ones who need to be seen.

  The ones who need me to see them.

  -2-

  The diner’s name is Delta of Venus.

  Most people think that’s a pun of some kind, or a reference to Mississippi. It’s not. The owner’s name’s not Venus. One of her girlfriend’s was. It’s like that.

  I had my spot. Corner of the counter, close to the coffee. Out of the line of foot traffic to the john. Quiet most of the time. I dig the quiet. Kind of need it. My head is noisy enough.

  It was a Thursday night, deep into a slow week. The kind of week Friday won’t make better and Saturday won’t salvage. Me on my stool, last sip of my fourth or fifth cup of coffee, half a plate of meatloaf going cold. Reading The Waste Land and wondering what kind of hell Eliot was in when he wrote it. World War I was over and he wrote poetry like the world was all for shit. Like he’d peeled back the curtain and the great and powerful Oz was a sorry little pedophile and Dorothy was going to have a bad night. Depressing as fuck.

  The coffee was good. The day blew.

  Eve, the evening waitress, was topping off ketchup bottles and not wasting either of our time on small talk. Not on a Thursday like this. These kinds of days don’t bring out the chattiness in anyone who’s paying attention. Outside, there was a sad, slow rain and most of the people who came in smelled like wet dogs.

  Then she came in.

  I saw the door open. Saw it in the shiny metal of the big coffee urn. Saw her come in. Watched her stand there for a moment, not sure of what she was doing. Saw her look around. Saw nobody else look back.

  Saw her spot me. And know me. And chew her lip for a moment before coming my way.

  Little thing, no bigger than half a minute. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Slim as a promise. Pretty as a daffodil.

  Lost and scared.

  Looking for me.

  People like her find me. I never ask how they heard of me. In my line of work, the referral process is complicated. I get most of my standard clients from asshole law firms like Scarebaby and Twitch. Yeah, J. Heron Scarebaby and Iver Twitch. Real names. Some people are that fucking unlucky, and that dim that they won’t use a different name for business. Or, maybe it’s a matter of rats finding the right sewer. Not sure, don’t care. They hire me for scut-work. Skip traces, missing persons. Stuff like that. Pays the light bill, buys me coffee.

  They hadn’t sent her, though. She found me a whole other way.

  I signaled Eve and tapped the rim of my coffee cup with the band of my wedding ring. Still wore the ring after all this time. Married to the memory, I suppose. Eve topped me off.

  “Gimme a sec,” I said.

  She looked around to see what was what. Looked scared when she did it, which is fair enough. People are like that around me. Then she found something intensely interesting to do at the far end of the counter. Didn’t look my way again.

  There were five other people in the Delta. Two were regulars: a night watchman on the way to his midnight shift, and Lefty Wright, who was always topping off his Diet Coke with liberal shots of Early Times. Neither of them would give a cold, wet shit if a velociraptor walked in and ordered the blue-plate special.

  The other three were a gaggle of hipsters who must have gone looking for one of those no-name clubs, or the kind of dance party that’s only ever advertised by obscure Internet posts. Probably got bad directions and brought iffy decision making capabilities with them because they lingered here in this part of town long enough to order pancakes at a place like this. That, or they were hipster wannabes who thought the Delta was retro cool. It’s not. And pretty soon they were going to let common sense trump their peer pressure and then they’d fade away.

  That left me and the girl.

  I didn’t turn, but I patted the red Naugahyde stool next to me. Maybe it was the color that drew her eye. I’m pretty sure it’s the only color people like her can see. That’s what one of them told me. Just red, white, black and a lot of shades of gray.

  That’s fucked up.

  The girl hesitated a moment longer, then she seemed to come to a decision and came over. Didn’t make a sound.

  She stopped and stood there, watching me as I watched her in the steel mirror of the coffee maker.

  “It’s your dime, sweetheart,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I picked up the Tabasco sauce and shook it over the meatloaf. Used enough of it to kill the taste. The specials sign over the kitchen window doesn’t say what kind of meat is in it, and I’m not brave enough to ask. I’m reasonably sure that whatever it was ran on four legs. Beyond that, I wouldn’t give Vegas odds on it being a cow or a pig.

  “You want to sit down?” I asked.

  Still nothing, so I turned and saw why.

  Her face was as pale as milk. She wore too much makeup and clearly didn’t know how to put it on. Little girl style—too much of everything, none of the subtlety that comes with experience. Glitter tube top and spandex micro mini. Expensive shoes. Cl
othes couldn’t have been hers. Maybe an older sister, maybe a friend who was more of a party girl. They looked embarrassing on her. Sad.

  She had one hoop earring in her right ear. The left earlobe was torn. No earring. No other jewelry that I could see. No purse, no phone, no rings. That one earring damn near broke my heart.

  “You know how this works?” I asked.

  Nothing. Or, maybe a little bit of a nod.

  “It’s a one way ticket, so you’d better be sure, kid.”

  She lifted her hand to touch her throat. Long, pale throat. Like a ballet dancer. She was a pretty kid, but she would have been beautiful as a woman.

  Would have been.

  Her fingers brushed at a dark line that ran from just under her left ear and went all the way around to her right. She tried to say something. Couldn’t. The line opened like a mouth and it said something obscene. Not in words. What flowed from between the lips of that mouth was wet and in the only color she could see.

  She wanted to show me. She wanted me to see. She needed me to understand.

  I saw. And I understood.

  -3-

  Later, after she faded away and left me to my coffee and mystery meat, I stared at the floor where she stood. There was no mark, no drops of blood. Nothing. Eve came back and gave me my check. I tossed a ten down on a six-dollar tab and shambled out into the night. Behind me I heard Eve call goodbye.

  “Night, Monk.”

  I blew her a kiss like I always do. Eve’s a good gal. Nice. Minds her own business. Keeps counsel with her own shit. Two kids at home and she works double shifts most nights. One of those quiet heroes who do their best to not let their kids be like them. I liked her.

  It was fifteen minutes past being able to go home and get a quiet night’s sleep. The rain had stopped, so I walked for a while, letting the night show me where to go. The girl hadn’t been able to tell me, but that doesn’t matter. I’d seen her, smelled the blood. Knew the scent.

  Walked.

  And walked.

  Found myself midway up a back street, halfway between I Don’t Know and Nobody Cares. Only a few cars by the curbs, but they were stripped hulks. Dead as the girl. Most of the houses were boarded up. Most of the boards had been pried loose by junkies or thieves looking to strip out anything they could. Copper pipes, wires, whatever. Couple of the houses had been torn down, but the rubble hadn’t been hauled off.

  What the hell had that little girl been doing on a street like this?

  Fuck me.

  I had a pocket flashlight on my key chain and used it to help me find the spot.

  It was there. A dark smudge on the sidewalk. Even from ten feet away I knew it was what I was looking for. There were footprints all over the place, pressed into the dirt, overlapping. Car tire tracks, too. The rain had wiped most of it away, smeared a lot of the rest, but it was there to be read. If I looked hard enough I’d probably find the flapping ends of yellow crime scene tape, ‘cause they never clean that stuff up. Not completely, and not in a neighborhood like this. Whole fucking area’s a crime scene. Still in progress, too, for the most part.

  Doesn’t matter. That’s me bitching.

  I knelt by the smudge. That was what mattered.

  It was dried. Red turns to brown as the cells thicken and die. Smell goes away, too. At first, it’s the stink of freshly sheared copper, then it’s sweet, then it’s gone. Mostly gone. I can always find a trace. A whiff.

  And it was hers. Same scent. If I was a poet like Eliot maybe I’d call it the perfume of innocence. Something corny like that. I’m not, so I don’t. It’s just blood. Even the rain couldn’t wash it away.

  I squatted there for a few minutes, listening to water drip from the old buildings. Letting the smells sink in deep enough so I could pin them to the walls of my head.

  Back in the day, before I went off to play soldier, before I ditched that shit and went bumming along the pilgrim road trying to rewire my brain, smells never used to mean much. That changed. First time I didn’t die when an IED blew my friends to rags, I began to pay attention. Death smells different than life. Pain has its own smell.

  So does murder.

  I stopped being able to not pay attention, if you can dig that. I lost the knack for turning away and not seeing.

  There was a monk in Nepal who told me I had a gift. A crazy lady down in a shack near a fish camp in bayou country told me I had a curse. They were talking about the same thing. They’re both right, I suppose.

  A priest in a shitty church in Nicaragua told me I had a calling. I told him that maybe it was more like a mission. He thought about it and told me I was probably right. We were drinking in the chapel. That’s all that was left of the church. They don’t call them Hellfire missiles for nothing.

  The girl had come to me. Couldn’t say what she wanted because of what they’d done to her. Didn’t matter. She said enough.

  I dug my kit out of my jacket pocket, unzipped it. Uncapped a little glass vial, took the cork off the scalpel and spent two minutes scraping as much of the blood as I could get into the vial. Then I removed the bottle of holy water, filled the dropper and added seven drops. Always seven, no more, no less. That’s the way it works, and I don’t need to fuck with it. Then I put everything away, zipped up the case and stood. My knees creaked. I’m looking at forty close enough to read the fine print. My knees are older than that.

  Spent another forty minutes poking around, but I knew I wasn’t going to find anything the cops hadn’t. They’re pretty good. Lots of experience with crime scenes around here. They even catch the bad guys sometimes.

  Not this time, though, or the girl wouldn’t have come to me.

  It’s all about the justice.

  The vial was the only thing that didn’t go back into the case. That was in my pants pocket. It weighed nothing, but it was fifty fucking pounds heavy. It made me drag my feet all the way to the tattoo parlor.

  -4-

  Patty Cakes has a little skin art place just south of Boundary Street, right between a glam bar called Pornstash and a deli called Open All Night, which, to my knowledge, has never been open. Someone nailed a Bible to the front door, so take that any way you want.

  The tattoo joint was open all night. Never during the day, as far as I know. It wasn’t that kind of place. I saw Patty in there, stick thin with a purple Mohawk and granny glasses, hunched over the arm of a biker who looked like Jerry Garcia. Yeah, I know, Jerry’s been dead for years. This guy looked like Jerry would look now. His name was Elmo something. I didn’t care enough to remember the rest.

  “Hey, Monk,” Patty said when she heard the little bell over the door.

  “Hey, Mr. Addison,” Elmo said. He was always a polite s.o.b.

  “Hey,” I said and hooked a stool with my foot, dragged it over so I could watch Patty work. She was half-Filipino Chinese, with interesting scars on her face. Lot of backstory to her. I know most of it, but almost nobody else does. She knows a lot about me, too. We don’t sleep together, but we’ve stayed up drinking more nights than I can count. She’s one of my people, the little circle of folks I actually trust. We met the year I came back, and she spotted something in me from the jump. Bought me my first meal at the Delta.

  She was working on green tints for a tat of climbing roses that ran from right thumb to left. Dozens of roses, hundreds of leaves.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Elmo grinned like a kid on Christmas. “She’s nearly done.”

  I nodded. Elmo was an ink junkie. He’d be back. Not just to elaborate on the tattoo, but because it was Patty sinking the ink. People come from all over just for her. I do. Like me, she has her gifts. Or maybe it’s that she has her mission, too. But that’s her story, and this isn’t that.

  Patty sat back and studied her work. “Okay, Elmo, that’s it for now. Let it set. Go home and take care of it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Give Steve a kiss for me.”

  “Sure.” He got up, stood in f
ront of the floor-length mirror for a minute, grinning at the work. His eyes were a little glazed. He walked out wearing only a beater and jeans, his leather jacket forgotten on a chair. I knew he’d be back for it tomorrow. They always come back to Patty Cakes.

  She got up and locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED and turned out the front lights. I stripped off my coat and shirt, caught sight of myself in the mirror. An unenamored lady once told me I look like a shaved ape. Fair enough. I’m bigger than most people, wider than most, deeper than most. A lot of me is covered in ink. None of it’s really pretty. Not like those roses. It’s all faces. Dozens of them. Small, about the size of a half-dollar. Very detailed. Photo real, almost. Men and women. Kids. All ages and races. Faces.

  “Let me have it,” she said, holding out a hand. I hadn’t even told her why I was there. She knew me, though. Knew my moods. So I dug the vial out of my pocket and handed it to her. She took it, held it up to the light, sighed, nodded. “Gimme a sec. Have a beer.”

  I found two bottles of Fat Pauly’s, a craft lager from Iligan City in the Philippines, cracked them open, set one down on her work table, lowered myself into her chair and sipped the other. Good beer. Ice cold. I watched her work.

  She removed the rubber stopper from the vial and used a sterile syringe to suck up every last drop, then she injected the mixture into a jar of ink. It didn’t matter that the ink was black. All of my tats are black. The white is my skin. Any color that shows up is from scars that still had some pink in them, but that would fade away after a while.

  I drank my beer as Patty worked. Her eyes were open, but I knew that she wasn’t seeing anything in that room. Her pupils were pinpoints and there was sweat on her forehead and upper lip. She began chanting something in Tagalog that I couldn’t follow. Not one of my languages. When she was done mixing, she stopped chanting and cut me a look.

  “You want the strap?”

  “No,” I said.

  She held out a thick piece of leather. “Take the strap.”

  “No.”