Peeling It Off

By Darrell Schweitzer

I was wide awake, not dreaming. Grandpa put down the suitcase, then reached up behind his head with both hands as if he were fumbling for the string to take a Halloween mask off—that was the image that came to me, even then—and he peeled his face away. It just came off. But he had his back to me and I didn't see—I mean, I only saw when he held up the mask of flesh to the window. It was translucent in the pale light for just an instant before it vanished with a hiss, the way a thin slice of bacon will fizzle away into nothing on a hot grill. When he turned back toward the living room, he was someone else, an older man I didn't know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667601595

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Table of Contents

PEELING IT OFF, by Darrell Schweitzer

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

PEELING IT OFF,

by Darrell Schweitzer

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1990 by Darrell Schweitzer.

Originally published in Borderlands, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

CHAPTER I

It’s a matter of life land death, Sam Gilmore said, and I believed him.

I had to. It was something about his intensity, the way he said it, the way he leaned over the table and stared right through me, the way he had begged me to meet him now, tonight, here in a ridiculous East Village bar called the Yuppie Upper—despite the lateness of the hour and the foul February weather.

But I was his friend, so there I was. We went back a long ways together, to childhood, and in a city as huge as New York you cling to anyone who isn’t a stranger.

I glanced around at the decor—everything that the name of the place implied, a hideous caricature of the young-and-loaded image, clashing Neo-Fifties chrome, Neo-Thirties Art Tacko, a whole wall dominated by a Warholesque portrait of Marilyn Monroe in pale green—and reflected that in other circumstances this would be one of Sam’s little jokes. We would both be laughing now.

But even before I’d sat down, when I found him in a back booth nursing the remains of some tall drink that came with a pair of cheap sunglasses wrapped around the stem of the glass—even then I could sense that something was terribly wrong. Sam could try to be silly to stave off the most wrenching despair, but it never worked and it wasn’t working now.