House of Skin by Jonathan Janz

from his shoulders. That sounds cynical, I know, but hell, what kid that age wants to be a dad?
    “But apparently, Myles did. He was incensed. What little time he’d spent at home before was now spent stealing into the forest. He stopped showing up at school altogether.”
    “Then, one night Billy saw him standing in the Hargroves’ back yard, staring up at the house.”
    They moved down a hill, and Paul just avoided tripping on a root that grew like a varicose vein across the trail. Though he’d never seen Myles before, he imagined his uncle as a boy, face livid and watchful in the moonlight.
    “This frightened Billy, as you can imagine. Carver was rotten to the core, so there was that to worry about. But what scared him even more was that Myles wasn’t watching Samantha’s window. He was watching his mother’s, Mrs. Hargrove’s.”
    He could smell the tobacco on Barlow’s breath. It smelled like apple cider. Paul put his hands in his pockets to warm them, listened.
    “Reverend Hargrove and his wife were the kind of couple that had different rooms, for who knows what reasons. That was why one night Reverend Hargrove wasn’t with his wife when he heard a bloodcurdling scream.”  
    Barlow went on, quicker now. “Billy and his father stumbled out of bed, disoriented, scared, and rushed down the hall to Mrs. Hargrove’s room. When they opened the door, the light from within flooded over them, and they discovered Mrs. Hargrove standing there in her nightdress clawing at her throat and shrieking at the top of her lungs. They went to her and fought with her to get her to stop scratching her throat, which was torn to ribbons, but the woman was hysterical. As Reverend Hargrove wrestled with his wife, Billy swiveled his head to see what she was staring at, and he told Trask that he puked before he even realized what it was.”
    Barlow’s voice had softened now to scarcely a whisper. Not for effect, Paul thought, but because the words he was uttering were so terrible.
    “The Reverend got a strong enough grip on his wife to turn and look at what it was that had so shaken her. When he saw it his face went ashen. He stood staring, and let go of his wife, who backed out of the room and bumped into Samantha, who had finally made her way down the hall. Her father was blocking the bed, so Billy said his sister had to push by him to see.
    “The sight of her dead baby, dug up from the cemetery, bloated and purple and muddy, lying there in the middle of those white sheets, was too much for her.
    “Samantha started to laugh, and then she clapped her hands. Then she was moving over and lying on the bed beside the dead baby. She gathered up the corpse, tucked up her knees and laughed.  
    “Billy said it was awhile before his father told him to go find his mom, who’d disappeared down the hallway. The Reverend, sitting quiet as a ghost beside his laughing daughter on the bed, cursed his son and told him to go and, damn it, tend to his mother right now, which Billy did, or tried to do. The last he’d seen of her she was backing out of the room toward the stairs. He had the terrible feeling that she’d fallen, but when he got to the staircase he could see that the landing below was empty.
    “Billy moved down the stairs and through the house trying to find his mother. He even called her by her Christian name—Elizabeth—yet no one answered. She wasn’t in the kitchen, so he searched for her in the living room. She wasn’t there either.
    “Billy could see plainly that unless she’d taken refuge in a linen closet or the pantry, his mother had left the house. He opened the back door and stood on the stoop, listening. What he heard didn’t reassure him.
    “There came a succession of sounds. There weren’t any footsteps or voices, but what he could hear was coming from the direction of the woods. The first thing he recognized were the sounds of a struggle. As he crept toward the trees, he heard the struggling stop, and it