Peeler

When the rain woke her again, it was too early in the morning for the sun to have risen. Though it was still dark, Ari felt she’d had a decent few hours rest.

She felt the sleeping bag beside her and opened her eyes. ‘Paul?’

She sat up just in time to see his naked foot slide out of the unzipped tent flap.

‘Paul…’ she mumbled, her heart already starting to race. ‘Please, no, Paul…’

There was no response from outside the tent, only the rain hitting the canvas.

She sniffed, already feeling her tears returning with terror.

It couldn’t be. It had been Paul. Paul had come back to her, had told her it had been her who’d been crazy. She’d believed it. She had to.

She wanted to.

She crawled across the tent to the opening and, holding her breath, lifted an arm to push one half aside. She stopped there, frozen in time, knowing to look outside could potentially destroy Paul’s return, his explanation, their love; everything. She could simply return to sleep, wake up from this nightmare and return to her loving partner in the morning who’d promised to take her home, to help her.

‘Paul?’ she said once more before moving the flap aside.

Her heart stopped, air caught in her lungs, stomach dropping.

In the darkness through the rain she could see Paul… So many of him. His skin. Patches – arms or legs or sections of the torso – and entire sleeves of his body from head to toe, hanging from the trees at varying heights, rain soaking them. Skins scattered about the ground outside the tent, pooling in puddles of mud and rain. All of them empty, shells of her partner, devoid of anything inside.

No matter how intact the skins were, how they were displayed, how muddy and wet they were, they all shared one characteristic: the ones with faces – empty, lifeless masks – looked at her, staring right at the tent and her inside it.

She froze, unable to react, unable to process what she was witnessing; only seizing terror.

Something grabbed her hand holding the flap and she screamed. Paul – the one who’d left the tent – looked up at her from the ground. He still had eyes, unlike the other skins, but they were as lifeless as all the others staring straight through her. Naked, wet, covered in mud, his hand squeezed her wrist hard enough to contract her fingers.

‘Sweeeeeetheeeeeart,’ it groaned in the sickening sound it made.

She screamed again, trying to pull away, and managed to spin around and kick the thing in the face as hard as she could with both feet. The pain it caused her feet only covered in socks did nothing to the thing holding her, except cause the skin around its eyes, its mouth, everywhere, to droop grotesquely from the muscle.

In one quick movement, before she knew what was happening, it pulled her arm and threw her out of the tent to land face first in the mud. She coughed, the wind forced from her lungs, but scrambled through the grass and mud to get away from him, it, only to crawl closer towards the empty skins scattered about the forest floor, their empty eye sockets always watching her.

Shock still pumped through her, not letting her stop to think, only to turn and see that the thing that had thrown her was now on its feet, its limbs twitching and contorting as it had when she’d watched it from afar, but even more violent and grotesque. Its arms, legs, back, and neck snapped and twisted and bent in movements that would permanently damage any regular person.

While its body shook and writhed uncontrollably, its head aimed straight at her, unflinching. ‘Cooooooome heeeeeeeeere,’ it groaned.

It didn’t approach her, however, only stood and watched her on her back in the mud. She found no ability to move. Her legs didn’t work, her hands didn’t work, but… her shock had worn off. She wasn’t unable to move because of the primal terror coursing through her. This was something else.

Something was stopping her from moving.

It seemed to slowly take over her entire body; after her legs and arms, she collapsed in the mud and lost all control of her back and abdomen, her neck, her face. She couldn’t move at all, yet her body writhed and her muscles contracted against her will. She could still feel everything.

Even when Paul, the thing that had been Paul, stood over her, the rain cold and wet on her face.

Even when he crouched and clasped onto her cheeks, fingernails digging into her skin and gripping like clamps.

Even when it pulled, harder than anything within normal strength, yanking with such ferocity she wanted to pass out.

Even when the skin split down her face and peeled from the muscle beneath, burning infinitely more intense than the whitest, hottest flame engulfing everything she was.

Ari lived through every moment, unable to pass out, unable to move, unable to scream, feeling every fibre of her skin as it separated from her flesh. All she could do was watch the thing tear every bit of her skin from her body in patches, throwing them aside to add to the piles of Paul’s.

And, beneath it all, she felt what had once been her lips stretching, twisting and splitting, bleeding onto her teeth… smiling.

In the immense burning agony of being skinned alive, unable to control her body in any way, she noticed the Paul thing step over her, its neck craning to one side unnaturally to directly face her, mere inches from her eyes.

In its grating, groaning voice, it said, ‘You go as fast… as you’re comfortable. I can catch up.’

Then, against all her will and pointless effort, she felt a rising in her throat, a painful scratching as if a fire was being lit in her neck, and through no control of her own, her lips and tongue began to move in her own mouth, and though feeling everything, she had no ability to stop or alter the movements. Her neck snapped to directly face Paul, and from within her own body, from her own unnatural grin, something else said, ‘Can you, though?’