Ironskin

Surely he could hear her heart racing. But he didn’t turn, didn’t look up.

 

Edward ran his scalpel around the woman’s face, as close to the hairline as possible. Just before the ears and just under the jawline. Then he worked underneath the flap of skin with a spatulate tool until he could peel the face up and away. It hung up around the nostrils and eyelids and he had to fiddle with it until it lifted away completely.

 

The woman’s face—Jane could hardly think Nina in connection with it—was horrifying underneath. All red like a war victim—Jane shut her eyes. When she forced herself to reopen them, Edward was settling Nina’s skin back into place.

 

But no, not skin.

 

A mask.

 

A clay mask, matte white and opaque and sculpted by a master craftsman.

 

From Jane’s angle, the clay mask did not blend with the rest of the woman at all. It was rigid, dead white. Unthinkably unlike human skin. Edward picked up a delicate brush, thick with glue, and began to attach the mask to the red scalp line, the red neck. He pulled the woman’s skin, the skin of the mask, as he bound the two together. Despite his orders to the contrary, the window was open to the night, and the sheet draped across the wooden table fluttered in the breeze.

 

His hands—no, that wasn’t just the blue-lit room—his hands were faintly blue. Jane made some sound, too tiny to be a gasp.

 

Slowly he turned and looked through her. She backed up one step. His eyes—she had never seen them like this. They were glassy, filmed over as if she were seeing them through stagnant lake water, through layers of mold and algae.

 

The blue in his hands died, till Jane could almost doubt that she’d seen it. A small zip, a pop. And then he was looking at her, and the glass in his gaze was gone, and he was not smiling, but he was there.

 

“How long have you been standing there?” he said.

 

“Long enough,” Jane said in a low voice. “Long enough to see you peel a woman’s face back like the skin off a rabbit. You’re no artist. Nor a surgeon. Surgeons can’t do what you just did.” Her hands clenched, went instinctively to where she’d once kept a feyjabber at her side. “You’ve got fey technology.”

 

This wasn’t like Dorie, who couldn’t help it.

 

He was in league with them.

 

Edward turned back to his work, running his fingers along Nina’s cheek. He seemed to be searching for what to say.

 

Dazed, she thought: This must be what it means, his hints, his allusions. The presence of bluepacks in this household, to run our lamps and motorcars and machines, long after everyone else’s have died.

 

He is working with the fey.

 

From the table he picked up a fine sandcloth, began brushing away pilled glue and blood. “You will leave me now,” he said. “You will exit my life. You will denounce me to the world.”

 

Her breath caught, hearing not command in his tone but sharp regret, an envisioned future. “Not that,” she said. “Never that.”

 

“You will make your excuses then, and leave us.”

 

“An invented dying aunt,” said Jane, and she seemed hardly to have the breath for the words. Her feet took her two steps closer, one step back—she froze there, watching as he gently teased the mask’s eyelids in place with a long tool like an ice pick. One word, that she hoped would bring her closer and not farther away.

 

“Why?”

 

Why do you have this skill, why are you using it, why. Tell me, tell me why, and in that telling let there be some measure of explanation that will make it okay, will make it so I don’t have to hate you, don’t have to pick up my stone-still feet and run to my sister in the city.

 

Why.

 

In that silence she seemed to hear him swallow his fear. Then the words rolled out, deep and velvet, above the woman in black with the frozen white face.

 

“Once upon a time, a long time ago,” he said, “back when the waters were low and calm and the stars were hardly hung in the sky, there was a young boy who wanted to be an artist. The fey were different in those days, back when the air was clean and the sky blue. More substantial. They had bodies, especially when they were in the forests, and they did not need to steal forms from mankind. They were as dangerous then as they are now … but they were reclusive. They rarely attacked unless provoked, and so they were like recluse spiders, or copperhead hydras—you hardly heard of them unless you happened to live right at the edges of the forests where they walked. And then you knew how not to provoke.”

 

And you provoked them, thought Jane, for around the flowery description of a long time ago she heard this fey tale like heartbeats in her throat. My father was cold and I was lonely. I went into the forest with my sketchpad. I sketched beauty.

 

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