House of Skin by Jonathan Janz

under. It was hell getting the hypo in again, but once she did, he went down fast.
    His face had been covered in bites, so much so that she hardly knew where to start when cleaning him up. She’d never noticed the ants before. If she had she certainly never would have put him on the basement floor. There never would have been so many had she not added so much sugar to his drink, which she’d only done because he’d asked her to. My God, she’d been trying to be nice to him.
    But he didn’t believe that, and if she tried to convince him of it he’d only shout cruel things at her.
    She thought of how he’d feel when he awoke, his murderous eyes as he glared through the angry red bites at her. To get her mind off it, she set about getting ready for work.
    After she’d driven Ted’s car over to Watermere, sleep hadn’t come at all. Neither had a solution to her problem. By tying Ted down, she’d bought herself a day or two at most, and that was only if Sheriff Barlow didn’t come knocking. If he did she’d just have to tell him the truth, about Brand and the way he’d treated her. She’d go to jail then, she knew, but perhaps the jury or the judge would go easy on her.
    No they wouldn’t.
    They’d bury her in a maximum-security ward, throw away the key. Ted would laugh at her as they took her from the courtroom in handcuffs, her face lowered in shame and the knowledge that she’d wasted her life, thrown away her freedom with one flurry of terrible decisions. There was no avoiding it. As long as Ted Brand was alive.
    Julia started at her reflection. Seeing herself in the mirror, she couldn’t believe it. It was like another woman had taken her place, another woman thinking like a criminal. She took deep breaths, waited for her fear to bleed away, for rational thought to return.
    When she looked at herself again, she was glad to see that nothing had changed. No, she wasn’t a psycho. She still had options, ways out of this mess.
    Killing him was out of the question. For now.
    Unaccountably, she found herself back in Watermere last night, and though Brand had been right beside her at the time, the sound of his voice was now a muffled echo, his figure a faded shadow.
    What wasn’t vague—what came to her now more clearly than her mirrored face, the sound of the dripping faucet—was the way the floor had creaked under her tennis shoes in Watermere. She remembered the clammy sheen of sweat coating the back of her neck, the exaggerated smells of the old house, moldering drapes and stale air. She reached the basement door before she realized it was the source of her sudden dread, and without thinking she drew closer to Brand, his tall, athletic frame reassuring at the time.
    She heard his words through a muffling wad of gauze, the words she somehow knew he’d say, on some level recognizing even then what a vacuous schemer the man was. His arm around her, his face almost kind: “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”  
    That’s when she’d pushed away from him, her extended hands seeking support on the first thing they touched, the old rose-patterned wallpaper, the steadying wall beneath.
    “ Hey ,” he said, going to her. A hand on her shoulder, his voice a distorted baritone. “ Hey, are you okay? ”  
    She couldn’t even pretend, could only wait for equilibrium to scatter the malignant stare of the basement door.
    “Julia?” he asked.
    “Give me a second,” she said, and as she leaned against the wall some of her composure had begun to return.  
    And then it had happened, the sensation that had to have been spawned by her fear, her irrational terror, a cruel trick of her imagination that got her moving, compelled her into the ballroom where a new set of associations took hold of her.
    Beneath her right hand…the wallpaper under the pads of her middle and index fingers…
    No , she thought, and stared fiercely into her bathroom mirror. A thousand times no. You go down that road and you’re done