House of Skin by Tim Curran Page B

Her skin was like an elastic membrane through which dozens of plum-sized doll faces were trying to push.
    “Pretty,” she said. “How very, very pretty.”
    Gulliver pissed himself, thinking she was talking about him.
    But she wasn’t talking about him, but the sacrifices hanging there, the skins affixed to the wall.
    “They’ve come,” Spider said in a voice of reverence. He looked to be quite near religious ecstasy. He fell to his knees. “Oh, dear Christ, they’ve come … ”
    “Jesus,” Eddy said. “The Sisters of Filth.”
    They? Gulliver thought. They?
    Oh yes, they. He saw it now. She had not come alone but with some freakish thing that was attached to her by a snaking, fleshy umbilical … like some conjoined twin that had never truly separated. A boneless horror steaming with gray gas, swelling and fluttering, pulsing and throbbing.
    Gulliver couldn’t help himself: he screamed.
    The other was a gas-inflated bladder that drifted three feet off the ground, a raggedy collection of leathery crow skirts formed of multiple blackened hides stitched together, the sutures of which randomly split as it expanded and deflated with its own clotted, phlegmy breathing … if breathing it was. Beneath them, he caught glimpses of a writhing mass of red meat. Tendrils of pulsating, bloody tissue kept trying to escape the confining stitchwork only to be sucked back in like ribbons of snot. It had no legs, only one yellow and scabrous arm dangling from the pelts and a skullish head with a white, seamed face like a puckered, waterlogged corpse. Each time it breathed, the mouth suctioned open and threads of pus trembled in the air with a sewer stink that made him want to throw up. Maybe it knew this, for it fixed him with its one remaining eye … a serous-yellow orb that looked much like a veined, fertilized ovum.
    Gulliver felt his mind drawing into some black chasm within his skull. This was a fucking nightmare. He was hallucinating, he was tripping out of his mind. He had to be. And yet, he felt the minds of those things touch him and he knew they had names—the swollen one was Haggis Sardonicus and the conjoined one was Haggis Umbilicus. They were sisters.
    “You’ve pleased us,” said Haggis Sardonicus, her voice like the coo of a dove. “You’ve honored us.”
    She spoke for both of them, for her sister was incapable of speech as such.
    Spider looked helpless, impotent next to them. He asked: “You are the Sisters?” His voice was eager.
    “You flatter us, sir.”
    “And you’ve come to let us into the Territories?”
    Sardonicus giggled like a little girl. “He is wise, sister. He knows.”
    Umbilicus rustled her agreement.
    Gulliver was shaking so badly he could not string any words together.
    “We want to go,” Eddy said. “Into the Territories.”
    “In time, little one” Sardonicus said. “In time. We have to be sure. You can understand that, can’t you? Only so many are allowed in every generation. We have to select initiates very carefully.”
    Gulliver swallowed down bile. She smelled like rotting orchids and black earth. Which was almost pleasant in comparison to the raw, hot stench of rotting fish that blew off her sister.
    Eddy looked uneasy. He took a step back.
    “And your names?” the woman asked.
    “I’m Spider and this is Eddy Zero.”
    “Zero?” she said. “Zero?”
    “The Doctor’s son.”
    Haggis Sardonicus nodded and seemed pleased by this. She grinned like a wolf with a fresh kill, a foul sweat exuding from her pores. Her sister expanded and deflated rapidly. “Just as lovely as your father, too. What a rare treat.”
    “And when can we go? How—”
    “In time. When we see more of your artistry. Only then. Our club is quite exclusive.”
    Spider seemed happy.
    “For now, maybe you’ll leave that one in our care,” she said, licking her stout, swollen lips. “My sister fancies him.”
    Gulliver felt a wild, irrational fear slam into him. He’d take the knives