Artwork: The Goblin's House by Will Jacques

Shifting Skin
(inspired by the creepypasta “The Bad Dream”)
Zary Fekete

Gone are the times when my wife could share in the evening duties of caring for our daughter, laid up as she is with fever these many weeks, and thus it fell to me to manage the little child with an encouraging word, playfully coaxing our daughter toward her evening ablutions and reading her the evening story, as is our chosen way of easing her toward sleep. I do these items with care and understanding, choosing to remind myself that when I was her age, I, too, looked upon the dark hours between twilight and morning as though I were fitting myself for battle. The night hours are long and are filled with shadowy places. I am not so old to have forgotten childhood nights in dark rooms.

These past weeks have been especially difficult with increased degradation of my wife’s condition. After putting my daughter to sleep I have become accustomed to sitting in my study and staring out the window at the darkened slough behind the property. As I would gaze at the lengthening evening shadows I labored to lift a prayer of healing in my wife’s name, but the past days have begun to wring from me most drops of resilience as her body and mind have slowly broken down. Yet I attempted each night afresh to will myself toward fresh hope. It is during those quiet moments when the house is easing itself toward slumber that a man may feel he is at one with the world in a tender way. And, indeed, sometimes it is, I fancy, the times in my study that prepare me for my own journey into the darkness of sleep, troubled as I have been recently in wondering whether the cure of my wife might be terribly long in coming.

She began to go wrong perhaps two months ago. She returned from a daily journey to the store in the next village over with a hand on her right side and a complaint of short-windedness and a sort of twisting discomfort in her bowels. She passed off the concern as merely a symptom of what both of us have felt more of as our years edged us closer toward the end of a long life’s journey than when we began it as young children over fifty years ago. We had our daughter late in our lives, later certainly than many of our friends, but we treasured the little girl when she finally arrived, as though the empty lives up until then had merely been a preparation ground for the delight we would long last feel when her laughter lay a carpet over every sunny day and every snowy night. It was therefore with a sense of nervous worry that I felt compelled to inquire of my wife whether she might take a visit to Doctor Lira the next county over, a man who had been our family practitioner for the past twenty years. My wife shook her head and waved me off, however, and together we sat down that evening for a regular dinner and a typical night, never suspecting that would be the last night when she would lead our daughter’s nighttime story.

My wife’s pain only increased in the next days and she waked each morning with pressed lips and a nervous twitch in her eye, as she gingerly touched her side and stepped cautiously toward the bath. I quickly took on the majority of the work of day and night care for our daughter. When my wife finally did see the doctor after many days of worry and painful breaths, I hoped for the best, but, alarmingly, Doctor Lira was mystified by what ailment it could be and sent my wife home with a parchment satchel of powders and pills designed to mollify the pain but not empowered to treat the root cause.

It was last week when the illness crested a new hill and my wife could no longer mount over it. She lay with quiet moanings, and a new fear rose in my heart when I chanced to walk near her to tidy her side of the bed. I was caught so off guard by what I saw that I dropped the half glass of water and felt the splash soak my socks quite through. I leaned closer to my wife and saw with utter mortification that what seemed to be a passing play of shadow was instead something real moving beneath her white, thin skin. I reached over to grasp the nightstand lamp and, with shaking hands, held the light closer to see what appeared to be small rises slowly moving to and fro across her skin. It seemed to my untrained eye as though her skin was merely a fragile covering over something lurking below.

I hurried to the telephone and called for the doctor, chancing what would certainly be an expensive home visit, but determined to call whatever aid might be needed. Unfortunately, the distant ring merely sang and sang with no one to answer its plaintive call. I tried calling again repeatedly throughout the day to no avail, and I struggled all the while to contain the mounting fear within me.

I determined my daughter should not see what I saw beneath my wife’s skin, and thus began to lock our bedroom door at daybreak so that the young eyes of the child might not be terrified by the ceaseless movement, which only increased beneath my wife’s skin in the coming days. Indeed, not only movement but, if I held my ear close to the skin, I believed I could hear a tiny chattering which sounded like teeth. I heard it with my own ears, else I might not have believed it. The last few nights the chattering has risen at times and I have begun to place cotton in my ears so as to ward off the chilling noise.

Today is the fifth evening of such movement and sound. I am determined in the morning to move her myself, with the aid of our neighbor, finally, across the county line to the hospital itself, in hopes of finding the doctor in person and placing the writhing skin condition in his care.

It was, therefore, with a determined air of cheerfulness that I read the evening stories to my daughter this evening and put her to her bed with a resolute determination that tomorrow must finally bring with it a cure. While spending my accustomed time in the study I dared to pray the prayer I had yet not ventured toward, calling out to God with the voice of a loving husband but also a caring father.

“Father,” I said, as the evening shadows darkened around me and the slough outside breathed out its misty breath. “If she cannot find herself a cure, please take her. Bring her to your side and allow the pain to cease.”

As I finished my prayer I suddenly started. There was a sound of a deadening thud from the direction of our room. I hurriedly stood and ran to our bed chamber with the light held aloft. The bed came into view and the figure of my wife’s body lay as it usually did beneath the blankets, but there was a change. One arm was extended from her body, off to the side, and held in a rictus of tension toward the side table. My mouth dropped open when I walked to her side. Laying on the floor next to the bed was her Bible, collapsed in a pile of pages where her thrust arm had sent it. Initially I felt a sense of hope. I could see she was breathing, and I saw and heard nothing from below her skin.

I bent and picked up the treasured volume and glanced at the page which lay most open to the floor. When I did my hope vanished, as I read the verse that appeared to be singled out by the crumbled pages. The scripture there said: “ …there, a man with an unclean spirit lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him any more. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones…” I stared with open fear at the words and my eyes drifted from the page to the body of my wife. With trembling hand I reached forward and pulled back the cover. My eyes widened. There was no movement beneath the skin. But the skin was, instead, hot and mottled, red as though it was touched by the summer sun. And directly below her nightshirt there was a protrusion. With a trembling hand I pulled back the shirt and saw what could only be described as a finger below the skin, reaching up, pointed and sharp, as though it meant to break itself free of the clinging sheath of my wife’s body.

I fetched a damp cloth and plied her with it for a spell. She did not move, but I fancied myself hoping perhaps her breathing seemed more tempered and even. I kept my eyes on her face and away from the nightshirt, not believing I could contain a cry if I were to see the rictus of raised horror again. With grim determination I finally lay myself down beside her in my usual place, fortified in thought that tomorrow she would be in the hospital’s hands, and after a steady drumbeat of prayers in the darkness, I finally drifted into sleep.

I woke and the hour must have been close to 3. At first, I could not tell what had wakened me. But then I heard the small movements of my daughter at my side. I pulled the cotton from my ears and turned my head toward her.

“Child, what is it?” I said. “Are you frighted?”

She made no move. Instead, she stood stiffly, with her eyes fixed not on me but on my wife’s side of the bed.

“Come here, child,” I said. She shook her head. “Why will you not?” I said.

She leaned closer to me and whispered. “I dare not, father. For just now I had a dream. And in the dream I came to you just as I have. And when I made to tell you my dream, the thing wearing mother’s skin sat up.”

The room went cold. My daughter’s breath turned frosty. And the blanket beside me shifted as I felt the thing in bed beside me stand.

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