The Fleshless Man - Norman Prentiss Read online

  She waved a hand near her throat, pointed to her lips.

  “Sure,” he said. He tilted the pitcher to pour fresh water into her cup—a small plastic cup, so it’d be light enough for her to hold. The flexi-straw swayed like it had a mind of its own, deliberately trying to avoid her mouth. Glen reached over and held it steady, and she finally managed a few slow sips.

  The glucose solution in the I-V drip beside her bed was sufficient to keep her hydrated, but Mom always wanted some water so her throat and lips wouldn’t get too dry. Glen knew this, so she barely had to ask. They practically had their own sign language. For example, when she pointed at the television, Glen knew hour-to-hour which channel she’d prefer to watch. A hand raised to her ear meant she wanted the telephone—a drug-store generic with huge buttons, easy for her to operate.

  His mother gave back the cup, and he returned it to the bedside table.

  “Let me know if you want more.”

  She nodded. Her hand retained the shape of the cup, then she brought her forefinger close to her thumb and made a faint motion of writing in the air.

  “Oh, the crossword,” Glen said. “I almost finished it. One corner has me stumped.” He picked up the folded-over newspaper and found two clues that he’d circled. He read them aloud.

  After her answers, he said “Let me try.” He inked her answers over the correct letters he’d filled in previously. “Those fit, Mom. You finished it for me. Thanks.”

  She smiled. A calm acceptance washed over her at times like this, softening the harsh transformations brought on by the disease. Even in sickness, his mother could still look beautiful.

  Her eyelids flickered a bit, and he wondered if she would fall back asleep. Of all her symptoms, sleep patterns were hardest to predict. Sometimes she’d wake for only a few minutes then would drift soundly back to sleep; other times, she’d sit up for hours watching her shows or allowing Glen or Nurse Lillian to read to her. The disease drained her energy, but he knew the medications did, too. For a while, he had a theory that Tuesdays and Wednesdays were her worst days, but this latest Tuesday afternoon she’d watched two movies in a row; then on Wednesday he’d read aloud the final ten chapters of an Agatha Christie novel, and she kept pace with Poirot in solving the mystery.

  “It would be a shame,” his mother said.

  She wasn’t falling back asleep, after all. He had to lean close to hear.

  “The worst,” she said. “The worst that can happen.”

  “What, Mom? What do you mean?”

  Her eyes went wide. She hadn’t pointed at them yet—the signal that she wanted her glasses—yet it seemed to Glen that she saw him clearly. “It’s terrible for a mother to outlive her children,” she said. “That’s the worst.”

  Glen heard a faint clicking sound as his mother blinked, the lids scraping over dry eyes. He knew she was trying to hold back tears.

  Should he offer her a cold reassurance? You definitely won’t outlive me and Curtis, Mom. You know that already. Instead, he said “Don’t worry. Don’t be upset.”

  Her eyelids clicked again. “I’m going to bury you,” she said.

  “No, Mom. Don’t think like that.”

  Click. She saw through him, he was certain. She saw everything.

  “You need to lose some weight, Glen.”

  Who did his mother see, really? Not who Glen was now, but the child who took second and third helpings at every meal; the heavy teenager who read on the couch all day while his brother shot hoops outside with friends; the bachelor adult who lived with his mother and used to cook a frozen pizza for his after-dinner snack.

  “Try to be healthy, Glen. For my sake.”

  Click. Click.

  Her eyesight was terrible. Thankfully, she wasn’t responding to anything current. She glimpsed only a memory.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom. Don’t worry.”

  He pressed his forearm against the edge of the mattress, as if trying to rock her back to sleep. After a few minutes her eyelids grew heavy, and her chin drooped toward her chest.

  He reached for the end table and lifted the speaker to the baby monitor they’d purchased after she’d come home from the hospital. “I’m going to the garage to use the exercise machine,” he whispered. She probably didn’t hear, but she’d likely guess that’s where he’d gone. Glen tapped her portion of the monitor. “Call out if you need anything. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  -3-

  Curtis dreamed that he was sleepwalking. He stumbled through the California apartment he shared with Lauren, and the layout shifted into the house he remembered from his childhood, hazed over with modern-day alterations he’d half-registered during the evening. Though it was an average two-story suburban house, the family home had always seemed large—they’d grown up without a father, which gave the kids separate bedrooms and let them claim the den for themselves. The dream version of the house loomed larger: it became every house Curtis had lived in, every dorm room and apartment, every hotel he stayed in for a business trip or weekend vacation. And he was every version of himself, too: a child adjusting to the loss of his father; an angry teenager helpless to change his life; an adult with more freedom to act yet with a constricting sense of morality and consequences, holding him back even as the anger lingered.

  His right hand steadied against the wall for balance, and his fingertips brushed the frame of a Degas reproduction that hung there during the seventies. They passed over the ballerina’s torso and pressed down through the image itself—a ghost painting—to scratch against felt-textured wallpaper beneath.

  A dead weight pulled his other arm toward the ground. It brushed against his left leg with each step.

  A pillow. Perfect for smothering.

  He headed towards his mother’s room. Curtis at sixteen, still stinging from Mom’s recent lecture—

  “You will listen to me, Curtis. My house. My rules.”

  —and he held the fabric of the pillow’s open end, gathered it tight like holding the scruff of a cat’s neck while the animal wriggled beneath.

  The pillow was anxious to do its work.

  Then Curtis was in his California apartment again, after he’d fought with Lauren about money, about dinner, about which goddamned movie to watch on the DVR, and he’d won but had gone to sleep enraged. He turned around in the apartment hallway, back toward their bedroom, and the pillow jumped so excitedly in his hand that Curtis needed to press it against his stomach to keep from dropping it. He imagined his stomach was Lauren’s sleeping face, and he jammed the pillow tighter, a hand scruffed on either side, pressing down.

  Lauren tried to speak, her words muffled by the pillow.

  She was probably trying to apologize. Curtis couldn’t hear her, because he was asleep.

  As he smothered her, he practiced how he should behave when he woke.

  Oh, God, what have I done? Lauren, honey, talk to me.

  Breathe, my love. Breathe.

  He should try to shake her awake. Grab her shoulders.

  Her shoulders will be as soft as down feathers sewn into a pillow.

  The pillow would have grown warm. It absorbed all her hot breath, every gasp and rasp and death rattle.

  I didn’t mean it. I wish I could take it back.

  The dream grants his wish, and Curtis is grateful. His subconscious sometimes lapses into cruelty, but he knows he is a good person. He’d never hurt anyone he loved, and there’s no reason such awful thoughts should follow him into waking hours, haunting his relationship with Lauren. He should put the dream back on track. Forget the cruelty and vengeful spite. Do a good deed instead.

  His mother is dying. She’s suffering. Smothering her would be a mercy.

  He heads back toward her bedroom. His dream steps are slow and cautious. He approaches his mother’s room, but pauses to listen before peering around the open
doorway. Glen might be at her bedside, extending his nighttime vigil; if so, Curtis would retreat in silence, wait for the next opportunity.

  A faint hiss scratches through the air, the flutter of dust in the heating duct. It is his mother’s sickly whisper, which settles into a regular pattern like the drone of someone telling a story.

  Then she laughs. It’s a healthy, hearty laugh, strong enough to rattle her frail frame into pieces. From the sound of it, Curtis decides his mother has made a full recovery. There’s no longer a reason to suffocate her.

  Then he realizes it’s the nurse’s laugh. Why is the nurse here tonight? She only works during the day.

  He wonders what his mother has said to provoke such a raucous laugh. She has shared a story about him, Curtis decides. Somehow, she’s ridiculed him.

  His grip tightens on the bunched fabric of the pillowcase. He waits outside the room.

  The nurse says, “Now it’s my turn,” and she begins a story of her own.

  -4-

  I can’t usually speak about all my patients at Evergreen (the nurse says). There’s a secret there that goes beyond the usual bonds of confidentiality between patient and caregiver.

  A horrible secret.

  And yet, for me, it’s become almost commonplace.

  I’ll tell you about it because I think I can trust you. And, forgive my candor, because you won’t have to live with the secret for very long.

  It’s pretty disturbing. Are you sure you can handle it?

  Okay. Here goes.

  I have to start back a long way. Back to the late seventeenth-, early eighteenth-century, when America was still new—a haven for victims of religious persecution, as the textbooks say, but sometimes a dumping ground for the dregs of humanity.

  That is, if you can call them human.

  Imagine a ship from one of the older countries. England, let’s say. And a captain we’ll call Captain Montgomery, who’s used to transporting unusual cargo. Living cargo typically brings the highest premium, with additional reward upon successful delivery—the feathers all in place for your exotic birds, their mimic tongues well-sheltered from the sailor’s crass vocabulary. On this particular ocean voyage, he’s agreed to transport a cargo so unspeakable that the crew would mutiny if they found out about it.

  And that’s where my story begins: a crew member named Redding foolishly brings a wretched thing above deck, exposing its withered features and shattered string-muscled limbs to the superstitious eyes of all the crew.

  “Look at it,” he says. “It shouldn’t be alive.”

  And as much as Captain Montgomery might agree, he has to tell Redding that they can’t kill it.

  Redding has dragged the creature behind him on the flat lid of a crate. He’s draped a square of burlap over it, then tied both cloth and body to the boards with several hatches of rope. But a sailor should fashion better knots: the burlap cover slips through the ropes at the top, and the creature’s uncovered head bobs side to side with the motion of the ship. A naked, withered limb dangles off the side of the planks.

  He sets the platform atop the low table the Captain uses for his meals. Imagine his horror to see, in the oil-lighted safety of his cabin, this hellish monstrosity freed from its cage in the ship’s hold. Although Montgomery is somewhat aware what cargo he transports, he has taken great pains to protect himself and his crew from any direct contact. The cage was constructed of solid steel bars, each bar covered in thick cloth held in place with twists of barbed wire. The cloth obstructs an outsider’s view between the bars, while the barbed wire deters the captive from tampering with his prison walls. Bowls for gruel and water are attached to a feeding tray that enters through a slot at the bottom of the cage. This tray is retracted and replenished once a day, by crew members Montgomery carefully chose based on their trustworthiness. In Redding’s case, he’d apparently chosen wrong.

  A pungent odor rises from the strange carcass. The abomination’s head continues to roll aimlessly from side to side. It looks like a decapitated head that savages would post on a stick to frighten enemies: skin hangs loose from the skull, a tan, bristled texture barely distinguishable from the burlap that covers the rest of the creature’s body; hair sprouts in soiled gray-white wisps among numerous bare patches in the withered scalp. The eyes, clouded over with cataracts, seldom blink. Redding has tied a handkerchief over the creature’s mouth, which at least spares them sight of the pruned lips and rotted gums.

  The exposed arm dangles like a snapped branch hanging lifeless from a tree. Its hand is a strange club of gnarled fingers, and a tangle of overlong fingernails that scrape at the deck of the stateroom. Beneath some of the hideous calcified curves Captain Montgomery can distinguish dried clumps of the gruel they serve the captive each evening. The gruel is laced with powerful sedatives.

  Redding’s curiosity had gotten the best of him. To enter the cage, he would have had to open two latches and lift aside a steel and barbed door. He must have stretched his arms across a stinking floor of straw and waste to close around a huddled travesty of the human form, frail and naked and, thankfully, dulled into insensibility. Redding had served with Montgomery on missions that transported slaves, so he was familiar with human bodies jammed tight into the ship’s hold, existing in their own filth, humiliated and starved into weak compliance. But he’d never seen anything like this. What great rewards did curiosity extend to his senses, as he grasped an arm as thin as a child’s, pulled a body that unfurled like some strange animal, and then shriveled upon closer inspection into an adult that seemed the deadest thing to draw breath. It looked like a Fleshless Man!

  Curiosity was one thing, but what foolish impulse possessed Redding to parade the creature past the crew? “How many others have seen this?” Montgomery demands.

  “A handful, sir. Maybe fewer. I’m not sure when the cloth fell away.” As he speaks, the repellent head lolls back and forth in the purposeless movements of an imbecile child. “I thought it was dead when I looked in on it,” Redding continues. “Then I put my hand above its belly, and the leathery skin swelled up to meet my palm.”

  “You need not have known.” The Captain’s words convey regret, coupled with stern judgment.

  Redding protests: “Surely it would be better to put it out of its misery, then throw it overboard. The damn thing can’t live much longer, from the looks of it.”

  Later, Montgomery will correct Redding’s false assumption—because , I can reveal to you now, this creature can not be killed. It is an undying, hideous thing, banished to America so residents of its home country will be spared its awful presence.

  And well you might be skeptical (the nurse says to his mother). Later, I’ll explain why this story rings true for me—so much so, that I’ve taken the time to commit these words to memory, even though I rarely have occasion to repeat it.

  Getting back to the story: The Captain’s immediate solution is to appeal to a sailor’s tendency toward superstition. “It’s terrible luck to destroy such a creature,” he says in the most somber tone he can muster. “It’s perilous even to consider such a rash action. If we killed this creature now, I assure you our ship would never make it to land.”

  He worries that he might have overstated his case, but a steady resolve soon replaces Redding’s aversion to the creature. He will do whatever his Captain asks.

  At that moment, however, Montgomery realizes the lolling of the thing’s head does not exactly match the motion of the ship, and is not the senseless reflex he had previously assumed. All the while, it has been twisting to shift the gag out of its mouth, its lower jaw clenching and unclenching, its vile tongue pressing the cloth from beneath. The kerchief falls to its chin, followed by a thick gurgle of drool and the immediate exhale of warm, putrid breath.

  A low hiss follows, and such words as Montgomery has never heard, although he recognizes some syllables of Latin and Greek, a
nd a few guttural Anglo-Saxon phrasings. None of the sounds together form an intelligible sentence, and yet the cataract eyes now flash with cruel intent. The hissed voice grows in volume, and the Captain fears these sounds will be heard outside the stateroom.

  The Captain is momentarily stunned by fresh revulsion at the creature’s appalling appearance, odor, and voice. Luckily, Redding now acts decisively to re-secure the handkerchief. That he’s able to bring himself to touch that spittle-soaked rag, and press his hand against the warm assault of that fetid mouth, is something Montgomery could never recall without a shudder.

  “You are right that I shouldn’t suggest harm to the creature,” Redding says. “I fear it has just cursed us in all the languages of the world.”

  “Quite possible.” Montgomery lifts the burlap over the creature’s struggling head and helps Redding secure the ropes. He permits Redding to push the arm and its frightful coiling fingernails beneath the covering, assisting only when the time comes to lash this limb to the planks.

  “I will accompany you below deck. The men will be less inclined to question you with their commanding officer present.” The Captain lifts one end of the wooden stretcher—the head, since he stands closest to that part of the abomination—and Redding takes the other. The load is surprisingly light, though the shiftings of the fleshless occupant necessitate a firm grip. “If anyone who saw it asks you to explain, tell them it’s an exotic primate of some kind. The lie will be easier for all concerned.” He leans over the lashed body to repeat his command in a firm whisper: “Tell them it’s not human.”

  Montgomery backs to the stateroom door and moves one hand from the planks so he can flip the latch. The boards wobble, but he quickly returns his hand to steady them. Outside, only a small gathering of men stands at a respectful distance from the Captain’s stateroom: thankfully, they would not have overheard his conversation with Redding.

  In the lingering twilight, he recognizes another of the men he’d entrusted to feed the cargo. “Bruggard, clear a path ahead, and open the hold for us when we get there.”