both eyes, her cheeks and forehead, bisecting her mouth and nose. Her ears had been removed and she’d been scalped. Her throat had been cut so deeply that she’d been nearly decapitated. Dale’s father had begun skinning her legs when the police had apparently burst in and shot him. His body was crumpled up on the side of the bed.
Dale crawled up onto the bed, slogging through his mother’s blood, his chest hitching with emotion, and placed his lips to his mother’s lips, trying to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He blew into her lungs, then inhaled deeply and blew again. He was about to give her another breath when he felt her blow back into his mouth. She was breathing.
Her breaths came slowly at first and then began to speed up, coming faster and faster as if she was hyperventilating. As Dale watched, her flesh began to knit back together. A fury of movement exploded beneath the thin sheet of skin that remained on her body. It looked as if her muscles had been filled with tiny insects that were all moving at once, warring within her flesh.
Severed veins, arteries, tendons, and sinews crawled like vines over exposed bone, slithering like a nest of worms within the lacerated meat, reattaching muscle to skeleton. Skin cells regenerated, reproducing at an astonishing rate as the skin grew back to cover her skeletal muscular system where the skin had been shorn away.
Her breaths came in quick, short bursts as her body remade itself, chest rising and falling rapidly. Long minutes went by before her breathing began to slow, relaxing into its normal rhythm. Slowly, her eyes opened and she sat up.
Dale’s mother looked around at all the blood and skin and bits of flesh, then down at her husband’s body. She screamed and immediately the room filled with police officers with guns drawn, shouting at her and ordering her to lie down on the floor.
“Get down! Get the fuck on the floor! Put your hands where I can see them!”
One of the police officers tackled Dale’s mother and soon three cops were pinning her down and wrestling her arms behind her back. Once they had her in handcuffs they lifted her back to her feet.
“Now, who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”
Blood obscured her features in a mask of red.
“I live here. What are you doing in my house?”
“Where’s the body? What did you do with the body?”
“What body? I don’t know what you’re talking about! What happened to my husband?”
She was in a panic. Dale clung to her legs, hugging her tight.
“There was a woman’s body lying in this bed with her head almost cut off and half her skin removed. You’ve got her blood all over you. Now what did you do with the body?”
Police officers surrounded Dale’s mother, staring at her in horror and disgust. His mother’s nightgown had been cut to ribbons. Her breasts and the triangular patch of brown hair between her thighs were visible through the rents in the fabric. Blood covered nearly every inch of her body.
“Who let her in here? Who was supposed to be watching this kid?”
“It’s my mommy. She’s okay. I made her better.”
The officer who’d tackled her pointed at her shredded gown.
“Isn’t that the same nightgown the dead woman was wearing? What the fuck is going on here?”
Two of the officers who’d handcuffed Dale’s mother were now standing beside her, backing slowly away, looking at her as if she were a ghost. The fear in their eyes was like a light growing brighter until it radiated from them and filled the entire room.
The policewoman walked over to Dale and his mother. His mother was holding him tight, smearing blood onto his pajamas.
“What happened to my husband?”
“We had to shoot him. He was killing someone. We thought it was you. Do you know where the girl went? The woman whose body was here in this bed?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There wasn’t anybody else in here. It was just my mommy. My dad hurt her real bad and then I gave her mouth-to-mouth like they do on TV and she was all better!”
The police officers all looked at one another, not knowing what to make of it. The officer who’d shot Dale’s father, a fat Italian cop in his forties, was shifting nervously from one foot to the other, wringing his hands. He looked around at his colleagues for support.
“I’m Lisa…L-Lisa McCarthy. This is my house. What are you all doing here?”
“How are we going to explain why we shot this woman’s husband without a body?”
Another officer with gold bars on the sleeve of his uniform looked down at the body on the floor.
“Well, he had a knife. And with all that blood it looked like he’d killed her.”
The policewoman who’d taken Dale out to the police car was standing in the room, looking around at all the blood and then at the blood-soaked woman with the torn nightgown.
“No! This wasn’t some kind of hallucination! We all saw what he’d done to her. He almost cut her head off! Her skin was removed. Look! It’s still there. Her skin is still there! There has to be a body.”
The officers dashed frantically around the house, trying to find the missing corpse. The policewoman continued to stare at Dale’s mom, noting the blood matted in her hair, already coagulating, the slashes in her nightgown. The policewoman began to visibly shake. She looked from the bloodied woman to Dale and back.
Dale’s eyes connected with the policewoman’s and the officer clamped a hand over her mouth as she stared back at him.
“Oh my God. It can’t be,” she whispered.
The policewoman sniffled a couple of times, wiped the vomit from her lips with the back of her hand, then wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her uniform. Dale watched as she nodded to the other officers, gave them a weak smile, and then knelt down, taking Dale’s hand. The policewoman looked up at Dale’s mom and then over at the other officers.
“Can I take your son outside so the officers can ask you a few questions?”
“Uh, sure, but I don’t know what happened. I just woke up on this bed in all this blood. And…and then I saw Mikey dead.”
“He killed you, Mom. You were dead and then I brought you back.”
The policewoman looked at Dale for a long moment. Dale could feel her trembling as she held his hand. Her hand flew up to her mouth again and tears welled up in her eyes. Dale knew right then that she believed him.
“Let’s get you out of here.”
The policewoman took Dale outside, casting one last glance over her shoulder at the blood-soaked woman, the woman she’d seen just minutes ago with stab wounds in her face and half the skin stripped from her body.
Outside, Dale and the policewoman sat in the back of the police cruiser. The sky had gone from black to gray as the sun began to rise somewhere beyond the big houses and trees. Dale stared out the window of the police cruiser, watching the sunrise. When he turned back toward the officer, she was smiling.
“You…you healed her, didn’t you?”
Dale nodded.
“How?”
“Like they do in the movies. Mouth-to-mouth resussisation.”
“You mean ‘resuscitation’?”
“Yeah, I breathed into her and she healed all up.”
“But she was dead. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, just like on TV. She was dead and I saved her.”
“But-but how did her wounds heal?”
Dale shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know.”
“And you’re sure that’s your mom in there? It’s not some other woman that got in the house somehow?”
“No, that’s my mom.”
“And the woman who was on the bed when we got here, the woman who was all cut up, that was your mom too?”
