Hey, everyone! I want to thank Alan Spencer for allowing me to hijack his
blog for a day. He’s one of the newest and most exciting talents at Samhain
Horror (which is one of the newest and most exciting places in the world for
horror), so appearing on his blog is a real treat.
You ever drive while tired?
Me too. I’m not proud of that, and I’ve never been quite as
tired as Paul, the protagonist of HOUSE OF SKIN is in this scene, but I’ve been
close enough to feel his pain. Here’s a moment from early on in the novel. Paul
is driving toward his newly inherited home and his new life. But something is
about to delay him…
Paul’s head jerked up, his lungs
sucking in frightened breath. He gripped the steering wheel, shook the sleep
out of his head. Stifling a yawn, he checked the digital clock.
2:14.
He’d
sue the pill makers. Who the hell heard of a guy falling asleep after a handful
of caffeine pills?
He
thought of checking the map, though he knew he was nowhere near his
destination. He’d be lucky to make Shadeland by dawn. What had possessed him to
drive at night? In retrospect, didn’t it make far more sense to leave early in
the morning and arrive in the afternoon?
Too
late now. He was already most of the way there and he wasn’t about to turn
around. It occurred to him to pull over and catch some shut-eye, but that would
be conceding defeat. He’d finish what he’d started if that meant driving all
night.
He
jolted. He’d been dreaming again. Good lord, what was the matter with him? How
long had he been out? Ten seconds? Thirty? He imagined himself cruising along
at sixty-five miles per hour with his mouth open and his hands dozing on the
wheel, a rolling missile careening toward whatever poor son of a bitch happened
to be in the other lane.
He
had to keep awake. If stimulants couldn’t do it, maybe music would. He opened
up the storage box under his armrest and plucked out his CD case. Most of what
he had was either country or classical, and Paul trusted neither to keep him
alert. Finally, he flipped to Metallica’s Ride
the Lightning. If that wouldn’t do it, nothing would. He thumbed in the
disc and fast-forwarded to “Creeping Death.”
Paul’s
chin bobbed. The situation was growing dire. He checked the clock.
2:26.
He’d
never make it there alive. Desperate, he rolled down the window and let the
wind blast his greasy hair. It didn’t help. The fragrance of the pines bordering
the road lulled him deeper into that soft, tranquil place. Paul whipped his
head to stay awake. He’d never been this tired before. His fatigue was an
undertow sucking him toward the comforting blue depths of sleep. His blood was
suffused with caffeine, his ears assaulted by heavy metal, his skin pelted with
frigid air; yet the combination of these things only underscored the futility
of his resistance. Sleep, an inexorable crawling glacier, plowed through every
barrier, freezing his blood and flattening his defenses. The road seemed a
million miles wide. For as far as his dimming eyes could see there were no
cars, no houses, nothing but a measureless wasteland spreading out in the
darkness.
A
jarring thud and a high-pitched scream. Shocked into wakefulness, he threw a
puzzled glance at the road, then at the clock.
2:31.
Had
he been out the entire time? Surely the car couldn’t have steered itself for
five minutes. For some reason, the sight of the overhead mirror made his
stomach feel loose and quivery. He spotted nothing in the road behind him to
confirm the sick fear backstroking in his belly, yet he wondered what he’d have
seen had he checked the mirror immediately after the thud, the scream.
The
bile in his throat demanded he slow the car and turn around. Paul made a u-turn
with hands he couldn’t feel.
His
racing thoughts conjured a hitchhiker’s limp body, bloodied and broken, balled
into a lump in the middle of the highway. The Civic would arrive there just as
another car pulled up and discovered what he’d done. The police report would
show that Paul had veered onto the shoulder and clipped the man, sent his
shattered body skittering end over end. His dream of beginning a new life as a
writer with money in the bank and a large estate would be replaced by a decade
in prison for manslaughter.
His
headlights splashed over a dark shape in the opposite lane. He glimpsed
something large and motionless surrounded by two or three smaller moving
shapes.
Then he was
closing his eyes and whispering thanks, for the large shape was a mother possum
and the moving objects around her were her surviving children. Under normal
circumstances he’d have felt terrible for orphaning these baby possums, but the
sight of them now made him feel like opening a bottle of champagne.
Delirious
with adrenaline and relief, he pushed open the car door and moved toward the
carcass. Swollen from her recent pregnancy, the mother’s stomach loomed white
and large in the headlights’ glare. Scattered about her broken body lay four of
her dead children. Three looked peaceful and intact, as though they’d lain down
in the road for a moonlit nap. The fourth was torn in half, the two sections of
its body connected only by a shiny string of intestine. The eye-watering scent
of fecal matter enshrouded him. He shielded his nose with the side of his hand.
Three
more babies were crawling about in a daze. All three were slathered in a patina
of blood, yet Paul couldn’t tell whether it belonged to them or their mother.
The giant possum lay unmoving inside a spreading pool of blood. Sickened and
fascinated by the mother’s enormous body, Paul sidled around to get a better
look. He felt his gorge leap.
Two
little legs, besotted with blood, kicked and strained, flicking little droplets
on the highway. A surviving baby possum was digging into its mother’s stomach.
Transfixed, Paul watched the little blood-covered baby worm its way through
cartilage and sinew as it tried to burrow inside the corpse.
At
first he didn’t want to credit the smacking sounds for what they were, yet the
sounds and the frenetic twisting of the baby possum’s body could only be the
little devil feasting on its dead mother. Buried as it was from the shoulders
up, it was inching its way to the heart.
Appalled
by the burrowing cannibal and forgetting his revulsion, Paul endeavored to yank
the baby out of its mother’s corpse. Try as he might to get a finger hold on
the kicking feet or the twitching tail, the baby eluded him. He didn’t want to
get too close, lest its crimson head appear and bite his finger. At this
thought, he felt the mother’s body shift.
Paul
cried out and stumbled away as the mother’s face rose and snapped at his arm.
He landed on his rump and stared at her in shock. She bared her teeth at him
and hissed. Then, instead of batting away her feasting child, she lay back and
appeared to rest. Soon, two more surviving babies were swarming over the dying
mother and digging out scraps of flesh on which to feed. The smallest possum
chewed on one of the mother’s teats and drank the blood that sluiced forth
instead of milk.
Paul
looked down and found that his heels were resting in the pool of blood. He
shivered and scrambled away. Then, hearing the sounds of lips smacking and
voices chittering, he drew himself to his feet and scuttled back inside his
car. As he drove away from the scene of the accident, he found that he was
fully awake.
And…cut!
I hope you check out HOUSE OF SKIN,
and I hope you enjoy it. I hope you hate the detestable characters, and I hope
you care about the good-hearted characters ones. Most of all, I hope you have
fun.
Thank you very much for your time, and thank you, Alan, for having me on your
blog.
Jonathan Janz
