Lester's Keeper

9) The Wolf Wore Sheep's Clothing

They moved clumsily as if weighted by sodden garments, but their flesh was bare. He saw the obese one who had been with Maggie minutes earlier, gut bulging and hanging over elephantine legs. Three others approached, each slimmer than the first, yet their skin appeared loose and stretched. They seemed to ooze toward him. A fear ballooned in him.

The men won't help. They're going to rape me!

Except they were not men, were they? As they grew close, the fear of sodomy was replaced with something new, for he saw that their bodies were beyond wrinkled or obese. Their ill-fitting skin hung and trembled, deformed and lax like flesh that had been boiled from the body.

The skin shone, waxen in the occasional light that struck it, and above it stood their body hair, dry and depleted and wild. Their genitals were barely recognizable, shrunken and withered like stale old fruit. And there was something more. Something in the expressionless features and the lips frozen still, and the eyes that somehow did not seem part of the faces.

He hung, surrounded by the ghoulish man-things and women, every private piece of them revealed. Even above the pain in his legs and the panic in his heart, something about the things around him set his skin on edge. The mute women stared in relaxed silence. Perhaps they would stop after all. Perhaps they had scared him enough. They would release him. Make him promise secrecy. And he would agree. Of course he would!

The hostess reappeared with a roll of what appeared to be canvas in one hand. She knelt and regarded him intently. "You would have been quite content to ruin dear Maggie's life just like you ruined the lives of those other two girls Mr. Latroy." She stood before him, handed off her package to one of the onlookers and began to pace a small circuit before him. "The two sluts you drugged and videoed. One is dead you know? Driven to overdose by a shame that you created Mr. Latroy. It took a week before someone finally broke into her apartment and found her, purple and swollen and bleeding from her eyes and mouth."

That wasn't my fault! She was always a mess!

"Your other victim fortunately is still with us, for it was she was able to warn Maggie to exercise caution around you. It was this caution was what enabled her to intercept your sordid little wager. It was her interception that led her to us."

That interfering bitch!

He groaned desperately and tears streamed from his eyes. "You should be very proud of your girlfriend Mr. Latroy. For such a demure individual, she proved incredibly devious. To think that all this time you thought you were setting her up for humiliation, she remained ahead of you."

Mrs. Knight stepped backward, placed a hand on the shoulder of one of the men. "I did say you would likely meet my husband, didn't I, Mr. Latroy?" She stepped forward with the misshapen creature at her side. "Do say hello." He looked at the thing in confused horror. Mrs. Knight absorbed his confusion and then, grinning widely, her hand went to the back of the ghoul's neck where she took hold of the flesh of the neck and tore it upward and forwards with a series of jerking motions in an act of near effortless flaying.

He could feel his heart palpitate in his chest as he stared upwards with mounting incertitude. The loose flesh of the face and scalp hung everted and shining upon the thing's chest, hair protruding from within it.

Atop the shoulders now rested the face of a young woman that stared back at him from within the misshapen body. The woman began to pull the rubbery flesh from about her. It stretched and peeled and fell limp about her on the floor just as Maggie's clothes had fallen. The woman stood in its place, naked and normal, the discarded suit a wrinkled pile before her. His mind swirled in a mire of pained confusion. What did any of this have to do with her husband?