House of Skin by Tim Curran

swore with exertion. After a time, Gulliver was desensitized to it all and he found his mind wandering. The most horrible part was the allusion to the next time. What sort of psychotic game were they playing here? And did they honestly plan to keep it up night after night?
    I better get the police, Gulliver thought.
    The butchering stopped and he heard the men wiping their hands and putting their knives away, stepping from raincoats.
    “Help me with this,” Spider said.
    “Around their feet?”
    “Yeah, they’ll be easier to drag around like this.”
    Gulliver couldn’t help himself. He peered out the door. They were tying lengths of rope around the cadaver’s respective feet. The lantern was doused now, but the moon was bright. It was terrible. The women were little more than ripped open sacks of meat, internals and musculature trailing wetly.
    Ropes were knotted and fastened, instruments gathered up. Spider’s bag zipped shut.
    “What are you doing with those?” Eddy asked.
    “Just a couple of treats for later.”
    “Any good?”
    “If they’re seasoned properly.”
    “You should try marinating them,” Eddy suggested. “It works wonders.”
    Gulliver wanted to vomit again. Murder. Mutilation. Cannibalism. What sort of dark cycle had he put into motion when he’d introduced these two?
    Spider and Eddy were talking in low tones, laughing amongst themselves.
    They were fiends, ghouls. Deranged beyond imagining. They killed and slaughtered with no remorse. Men like that wouldn’t care to be interfered with. And if they were, murder wouldn’t be beyond them. If Gulliver wanted to get out and alive, now was the time.
    More sounds now. They were dragging the bodies to the door.
    Run! Gulliver willed his legs, but they wouldn’t move. The best he could do was a slow crawl away from the door. He curled into a ball in a dark corner, prayers falling from his lips. First Eddy emerged, then Spider, stinking of sweat and blood and primal things. They passed right by Gulliver without noticing him, hauling their respective bodies down the corridor and away, blood and bits of flesh raining from them.
    When they were out of earshot, Gulliver scrambled to his feet and dashed out into the courtyard. He searched the exteriors of the buildings and found no way out. This theater of suffering had no exits save the one he’d come through.
    He had no choice then.
    He’d have to follow them back out or hide somewhere until they were gone. It wasn’t much of a choice.
    It took him some time to creep back up the corridor into the main chamber of the building. He had to move slowly, quietly, so he wouldn’t be heard. The consequences at hand were great and he’d never been a brave man. But he was cautious and if luck would just hold out …
    He made it to the end of the corridor and opened the door. Blinding light exploded in his face.
    But that wasn’t all.
    The women were hung up before him, one by the feet, the other by the throat, back to back. Gulliver stood there, facing death, filled with it, his head reeling. A stink of blood and raw meat washed over him. The women had been gutted quite thoroughly, opened from crotch to breast. Most of the organs were gone, bone and bleeding muscle protruding at gashed angles. Their genitals had been severed free, replaced by gored holes. Their faces were grinning tissue and ligament.
    The lantern was lit nearby, hissing with life, providing unwanted illumination. Their skins were tacked to the wall.
    It was madness, yet there was a perfection about it all. These were not maniacal slashings, done out of lust or anger, but carefully plucked and dissected corpses. There was a method here, an insane one, but a method all the same. Both women had been mutilated in the exact, precise way.
    Gulliver fell to his knees before their swinging masses, a pagan at the feet of his bleeding, slit gods.
    “And what do we have here?” Eddy said, not surprised somehow. “Gulliver of all things.”
    He