Skin

A story should start with a when, a where, a who, a what, and a why.

That, of course, means this isn't a story at all. No-one knows exactly when it happens, where it happens, or why. Our ‘who' is nameless, but legend says it's always a child. As for the what? We have some hints—something about skin. But that's it.

Illusive.

Terrible.

Remarkable.

* * *

The little girl had, all her life, seen and heard things. Terrible things.

Blood.

The screams of the dying.

The fevered twitch of limbs on the almost-dead.

The writhing maggots on rotted corpses.

And a man. Walking through the battlefield, gazing into the frozen eyes of the dead. He took the same path each time, his black cloak whirling, his face hidden behind an ebony mask.

Every night, as the girl saw the man walk towards her, she tried to run, but was frozen, held by the pained stares of the dead. Her tongue wouldn't respond, her throat locked, the chorus of the dead deafening.

And every night, just as the man reached her, she awoke.

After years of the same vision, the same battlefield, the little girl suddenly sees a new sight.

Everywhere she turns: Sterile white. Pristine.

And the man, his cloak whirling in motionless air, his face finally unmasked. The little girl's screams sound tiny in the endless whiteness, but scream she does at the sight of the man's glowing red eyes sunken into fleshless skin, rotted and browned as old leather clinging to ridged bone.

"Hello," he rasps.

The little girl stands silent.

"Hello," he repeats, reaching out a hand to her.

She flinches back. "Who are you?" she whispers.

"Everything," he says. "Everything and nothing, silence and screaming, life and death, forever and never."

"What do you want?"

"Everything and nothing, silence and screaming, life and death, forever and never," the man murmurs. "You."

The little girl begins to cry, terrified. "Why me?"

The man's leather face morphs itself into a grin.

"I must save you from everything and nothing, silence and screaming, life and death, forever and never. You."

The next time the little girl sees the endless white, the man isn't there. Instead, his cloak is nothing more than a black pile on the impossibly white floor. The little girl walks towards it, running both hands over the rough material. It begins to stick, like a vine starts to twine up her arms, carving little patterns in her skin.

The little girl wakes in agony, her old vision coming to life before her.

The blood.

The screams of the dying.

The twitch of limbs on the almost-dead.

The writhing maggots on rotted corpses.

And the man, now uncloaked and unmasked, walks towards her, her screams freezing in her throat.

"Save you from everything and nothing, silence and screaming, life and death, forever and never. You."

The little girl looks down at her arms at the patterns left by his cloak. Whorls of blood, letters, strange symbols on every inch of her skin. Tears course her cheeks as the patterns lift from her arms, her ivory skin peeling from her bones.

The little girl's voice, now freed, melds to the chorus of the dying as the man lifts the skin from the ground.

Her bloodied, skinned body joins the others on the field.

The man strokes the skin as it grows onto his ridged bones, replacing the rotted leather of his emaciated body. A new skin, a new life until it wears away.

And it always wears away.

Every hundred years or so.

Then the Skin Man comes to save another child from her everything and nothing, or his silence and screaming, or her life and death, or his forever and never.

The not-story of a different child.

Ninety-nine years since the last visit.

You know what that means, don't you?

It's close.

You can feel it, can't you?

Your turn.

Back to: Vol 2, Issue 3