Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala Page 26

  I used to wonder about it, mostly late at night as I lay in bed, staring up at the bottom of Derrick's upper bunk. I still lie awake at nights, wondering. Now I have plenty of time to think about things. Back when we were kids, I could hear my brother's deep, rhythmic breathing coming from the top bunk, as if even sleeping was something he did better than I ever could.

  * * *

  It didn't surprise anyone that Derrick and I both ended up being artists. Ever since we were kids, we'd both shown unusual talent for the visual arts although—as usual—Derrick's paintings and drawings … hell, even his throw-away sketches were always several notches … several quantum leaps better than anything I ever produced.

  Not that my stuff was bad, mind you. I do have some talent.

  Now that I think about it, when I first started drawing was probably when I first really noticed the back of my hands. I remember how I'd spend a lot of the time not even paying attention to whatever it was I was drawing because I was so fascinated by the interplay of muscle and tendons and bone beneath my skin as I held the pencil or brush in my hand and rolled it back and forth or whatever. Probably the one thing I ever did better than Derrick was anatomy drawing. Especially hands. I have quite a knack for drawing hands.

  So like I said, it didn't surprise anyone when we both went off to art school—the same school, of course. Mass. Art. We both worked hard—I worked even harder than he did, but my grades never quite measured up to Derrick's ... and neither did my work. He graduated summa cum laude while I was simply lucky to graduate cum laude. I never heard it, but I have no doubt my professors wondered and commented on how Derrick was the superior artist.

  Following graduation, we both landed jobs within our chosen field. Derrick started right out as a painter—an "artist" with a capital A. Within a year or so, he was having one-man shows of his work at galleries in Boston and New York. The "art scene" had apparently already taken notice of him, and his paintings were selling for astronomical sums. Personally, I thought his paintings weren't worth the price of the canvas they were painted on, but there's no accounting for taste, now, is there?

  And what about me?

  I went to work doing some illustration and pasting up ads for the local newspaper, all the while trying to convince myself of the worth of a steady paycheck while I concentrated on my own art during evenings and weekends.

  I think—hell, no! I don't have to lie about it anymore, right? I know that's when the full measure of the resentment I felt toward my twin brother began to blossom.

  Until then, the resentment had always been there, bubbling up inside me and festering, maybe even when we were in utero; but it had always been—you know, buried deep, like a seed in the soil that’s struggling to push its way up through the hard-packed soil and into the sunlight. It was only after college, once we were out in the real world, settling into our respective careers and trying to make a living that I finally allowed the seed to break through the surface. Over the next several years, as I watched my brother accumulate success and wealth and fame—everything I wanted and felt I deserved—I watered and nourished that seed of envy and hatred....

  Yes, hatred!

  I cursed the fate that I had been born to, wondering why?—what cruel, uncaring God could do this to me, could torment me like this?

  Why couldn't I have been given at least something—just one single fucking thing that I could do better than my brother?

  But Derrick had it all, and I had ... well … much less.

  That's when I started planning to change it all by killing him.

  You know, one person I talked to a few days ago, maybe a few weeks ago, now, it’s hard to keep track of time, but she said that she thought I didn't really want to kill Derrick. That what I really wanted to do was kill myself, that he was a surrogate. She said that by identifying so closely with my twin brother and his success, and by envying him so much, I was turning all my pent-up anger against myself. She used all sorts of fancy psycho-babble terms like "transference" and "guilt projection" and "personality displacement"—stuff like that, but I'm pretty sure she was wrong.

  I really did want to kill Derrick … not myself.

  You see, I had to kill him.

  The way I see it, there was no way around it.

  * * *

  Getting to do it was much easier than I thought it would be.

  Derrick and I live—I should say "lived"—about two hours away from each other. I have a place in Portland, and he lived up past Fryberg, on a lake. Driving up there was no problem. Last March, I knew his wife, Alice, were still down in Fort Myers. I figured he'd be at the house alone, no doubt working on some genius paintings for a show or something. I wasn't expected or anything, but I guess I was lucky that no one saw or recognized my car. Just to be safe, I took back roads. It added a little more time to the drive, but then again, what did I care? You can’t be too careful.

  Derrick lived in a fairly secluded area—an upscale development on a secluded lake with a lot of fancy-ass houses spaced pretty far apart … for privacy. He didn't have any security or anything, no bodyguards or electronic gates, so getting up to and into his house was easy.

  Hey! Who would want to kill a famous artist, right? I mean, other than Andy Warhol.

  Turn out, I was right. When I got there, he was home ... alone.

  Before I got out of the car, I pulled on the two pairs of latex gloves I'd brought. I’m glad I’m not allergic to latex. I'd seen something on a cop show once about how a detective lifted a fingerprint even though the burglar or whatever had been wearing latex gloves. The latex, you see, was so thin that it still left a faint impression—at least enough to identify the culprit.

  I wasn't going to take any chances. That’s why I wore two on each hand.

  Just shooting him wasn't going to be enough, though. I had to even the score a bit more than that.

  But like I said earlier, shooting him didn't bother me any. I just aimed the gun at him, pulled the trigger, and …

  Pop.

  Of course, before I got to the house, the whole time I was driving, I couldn't stop thinking about why I was doing this. I came up with a whole slew of excuses, but I knew they were all bullshit.

  The real reason was quite simple.

  Even I can see that, now.

  He had more talent than I did, and I knew why.

  It was all in his hands!

  I already told you how I didn't feel anything, not even a tremor of elation when the gun went off, and Derrick was blown back off his feet. The impact knocked him out of his slippers, and he landed on the kitchen floor, leaning against the wall with one leg splayed out and the other bent at the knee. He looked like a puppet that's had its strings cut. A big splash of blood decorated the wall behind him, but he was down with both hands hanging limply at his sides, his fingers twitching. The bullet had hit him square in the chest. He was breathing real hard, making funny watery, rattling sounds in his throat. It sounded terrible, like he was drowning. He stared at the hole in his chest with a look of absolute amazement … like he couldn’t believe this was really happening. After a few seconds, his legs started twitching like he was trying to do a dance or something … maybe stand up. It was only when I saw blood flowing down and over his hands and fingers that I got a little panicky, thinking the blood might ruin his hands.

  I wasn't worried about any of the neighbors hearing the gunshot. I'd been to Derrick's house plenty of times before, so I knew what to do next, and I took my time doing it right. There was an ax down in the cellar that Derrick used to split firewood. He never heated the house with wood or anything. Like the rest of his life, having a fire blazing away in the fireplace on a winter evening was just a quaint little "artsy" touch.

  All image.

  I went back up into the kitchen, made sure he was good and dead, and then chopped off both his hands, halfway between the wrist and elbow. It took me a few whacks on both arms. Bone’s tougher than you might realize. But I think I could hav
e done them each with one hit if I hadn't been shaking so damned much.

  You know, now that I think about it, I guess once he was dead I was pretty excited about it. I'll tell you one thing—I was glad he was dead by then because when I was trying to cut off his hands, I kept missing, and I think that would have really hurt if he’d still been alive.

  I took his severed hands over to the sink and washed the blood off before drying them carefully and putting them into a little plastic trash bag I'd brought along. On the way out of the house, confident there weren't any fingerprints on anything to identify me, I dropped the ax beside Derrick's body. He was staring up at the ceiling with a glassy-eyed stare, looking for all the world like a wax statue.

  I wonder what he was looking at …

  Anyway, I closed the door behind me, looked around to make sure there wasn't any activity at any of the neighbors' houses, then got into my car and drove away.

  I only stopped once on the way home, to get rid of the gun and rubber gloves. What I did was tie the gun up inside one of the gloves, tie the other one around it, and then throw it off the bridge into the river. You know where Route 25 crosses the Ossipee River in Limington? The water runs real fast there and hardly ever freezes. I doubted anyone would ever find it, and if they did, they’d never connect it to me.

  That was pretty much it until I got home.

  I was still a bit nervous, I guess, kind of jittery when I got back to my place. I knew the cops would be coming around eventually to tell me what had happened. They might start asking all sorts of questions, too. I didn't have a decent alibi, but I figured they weren't going to suspect me all that much. Hell, Alice and the kids were going to get whatever inheritance was coming, and I'm sure there was plenty of that. I might get a little something, too—a token, but certainly not enough to make anyone suspicious.

  Besides, who'd even think I'd want to kill my twin brother?

  All I had to do was act like I was real broken up about it, and I was sure they'd let it slide. And anyway, I already had everything I wanted.

  I had Derrick’s hands.

  In case the cops came around, I didn't do anything with the hands … not right away. I put the trash bag into the freezer under the frozen peas and carrots, and tried to forget about them. Of course, that didn't work because I knew they were in there, and I knew, sooner or later, what I was going to do with them.

  * * *

  As it turned out, the next night after work, I took the plastic bag out of the freezer and defrosted the frozen hands in the microwave. The skin was as pale as polished white marble, and kind of squishy. What I did next was throw them into a pot of boiling water. You have to understand, I had no idea if what I was planning to do would actually work. I mean, I figured it would because skin is so tough, but you never know how something will turn out until you try it.

  After boiling the hands for a while, watching them carefully so the skin didn’t pucker up and peel off, I took them out with some tongs, got the sharpest paring knife I could find, and made a nice, deep incision all the way around each wrist, a few inches above the thumb joint, right about where you wear a wristwatch. It took some doing to hold onto the skin because it was still quite hot and very slippery. Pretty tough, too, but once I got a good grip on it with the tongs, the skin peeled right off, turning inside out like I was removing a glove or a dirty sock. Of course, there was no blood. I had a little problem with the skin tearing around the fingernails, but other than that, nothing serious.

  When I was done and I had turned them back right-side out, I had two pretty close to perfect gloves made out of my brother's hands. Neat, huh? I put them down on the counter to dry, and—I swear to God—I thought they might start crawling around on their own like they had on the kitchen floor while Derrick was dying.

  My biggest concern was that they wouldn't fit. Derrick and I were still roughly the same size, but what if the skin had shrunk? With a bit of tugging and a few tiny slits here and there to loosen them up, though, I was able to pull them on over my own hands.

  Man, I'm telling you, I could barely contain my excitement when I raised my new hands up in front of my face and looked at them. I flexed the fingers, thrilled by the taunt pulling of my new skin beneath Derrick’s.

  It was exquisite beyond belief!

  My hands—Derrick's hands, actually—were trembling as I reached out to touch something ... for the first time ... with someone else's hands.

  I picked up the paring knife I had used to cut and peel the skin. Turning it back and forth, I hardly noticed the light reflecting off the blade because I was so entranced by the way the skin on the back of my hands shifted with every subtle movement.

  I can't tell you how excited I was, but I stopped myself because I knew I had other things to take care of, first.

  Unrolling my new skin gloves, I carefully laid them aside while I cleaned up. It took a bit of doing, but I scraped most of the flesh off the bone before grinding everything up in the garbage disposal. The bones knocked around some, making quite a racket, but I made sure it all washed down completely. Then I took my new hands—because that's the only way I could think of them—and went into my workroom.

  I tell you, I was so excited I almost passed out. It was like I was drunk or tripping or something as I pulled the skin gloves back on over my own hands and wiggled my fingers to make sure they fit perfectly.

  Custom made!

  Once I was ready, I picked up a pencil, tacked a clean sheet of drawing paper to the drawing board, leaned forward, and began to draw.

  At first, it didn’t matter what I drew. I couldn't stop staring at the back of my hands.

  Just like when I was a kid, I watched the skin shift and slide across my muscles and tendons as I drew. I was amazed how the skin felt supple and alive. It was like it was bonding with the flesh of my own hands—my less talented hands.

  This is it! I told myself—the moment I've been waiting for my whole life! I'm going to draw what I see inside my own head with someone else's hands!

  But it didn't work out quite as I'd planned.

  The sketch I started working on that night still seemed flat and uninspired. The spark simply wasn't there. I had to remind myself that I was too excited, that I was distracted by watching the way my new hands moved to draw well. But in my heart of hearts, I began to feel a gnawing worry that I still didn't have it. The picture still looked like it was being drawn by ...

  Me.

  It'll take time, I told myself, hoping I could calm down enough to concentrate on my drawing.

  That made sense.

  Right off the bat, I couldn't expect to be able to feel and touch and control things the way Derrick did. I had to adapt to this new way of feeling and manipulating the external world. Everyone's hands are different.

  And remember, art doesn't happen overnight.

  After trying for an hour or so, I carefully peeled the skin gloves off my hands. I wasn't quite sure what to do with them afterwards. I knew if I left them out, they'd rot. I wondered how to go about drying them out, maybe tanning the skin—like leather—so they would retain their suppleness.

  While I was wondering what to do, the phone rang.

  It was Alice, calling from Florida. She had just gotten a call from the Maine State Police, informing her that someone had broken into the house and killed Derrick. She was in hysterics. The gardener had found him that afternoon. I tried my best to sound upset and supportive when she told me she was flying back first thing in the morning. I even told her I'd pick her and the kids up at the airport.

  What a guy, huh?

  I wondered if maybe I should wear Derrick’s hands. Would she even recognize them?

  I decided that wouldn't be a good idea. Having no idea what else to do, I put Derrick's hands back into the freezer for the night so they wouldn't rot.

  * * *

  The next few days were tough if only because I had to act a lot more upset about Derrick's death than I actually was. As expected,
the cops came around and asked me all sorts of questions about how Derrick and I got along, about where I was the day he was killed, and was there someone who could corroborate my whereabouts—things like that.

  I held up perfectly, I must say.

  One time, a couple of days after Derrick died, when I was heading down to the police station to be interviewed, I did wear Derrick's hands. I was a little self-conscious about them, but no one even noticed.

  But every night, when I put them on and sat down at the drawing board, I started to get some unusual sensations. My drawings didn't appear to be any better than before, at least not to me, but there was a feeling inside the gloves, inside my own hands when I was wearing the skin that was ... well, strange. You might say “alien.”

  I had finally come up with a method of preserving the skin. Every night, before I began to draw, I would take fifteen or twenty minutes to rub hand cream into the hands, inside and out. I didn't scrimp on quality, either. I bought the most expensive kinds of hand creams and moisturizers available, and I spent a lot of time, working them into the thirsty pores. Over the next few days, I learned a lot about emollients and whatever. Night after night, it seemed as though the new skin—my new hands—became increasingly supple and sensitive. Touching things—anything—became a thrill. Vibrant ripples of pure energy tingled from my fingertips, up my arms and neck, all the way to the center of my brain.

  Let me tell you, it was exhilarating!

  I could barely concentrate on my drawing because I spent so much time simply touching things ... feeling everything as if for the first time.

  That's what it was like.

  For the first time in my life, I felt like I was really feeling things. I told myself it was only a matter of time before I could translate what I felt onto canvas and paper. Soon, I would have it all—my brother's talent and maybe even the fame and money I deserved even more than he had!

  But gradually—and I'm not sure when, maybe a month or so after Derrick died—something upsetting happened. It was as if my own hands inside the skin of Derrick's hands were changing. At first, all of the sensations were pleasant—warm and moist, comforting as if this new layer was my real skin; but after a couple of nights, the feelings got more intense. The gentle warmth got steadily hotter until it began to feel like there was a slow-burning fire smoldering deep beneath my skin. Every time I flexed my hands, watching the veins wiggle beneath the extra layer of skin, I gloried in the way the outermost skin—and I no longer thought of it as Derrick's skin— stretched and pulled.