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Her Skin

By Maegan Langer

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He found her in Hells Canyon. After that, my friend Oss liked to brag about how he’d gone fishing in the Snake River and caught a wife instead, but I knew it was really the other way around.

Recently off our LDS Church missions, Ossman and I were backpacking in Idaho that summer, like we had done so many summers before. The ancient rock walls of the gorge were a convenient buffer against the real world. Neither one of us knew what we wanted to do next with our lives.

That day, we were fishing for trout in one of our favorite spots, where the river cut a small hidden bend into the canyon and we could cast from the boulders right out in the water. We’d stay like that for hours, not talking, just hearing the water and the gulls overhead, waiting for the tug that signaled we’d caught a bite. Having first discovered the place as kids, we liked to think we were the only ones who knew about it. I’d caught the most so far, but Oss was catching up. He stepped away to the shore to take a leak in the trees. I didn’t pay much notice, until I realized he hadn’t come back.

“Oss?” I called. I didn’t see him anywhere, so I sloshed through the ankle-deep water back to the shore. His pack was gone too. A snap of wood behind me made me turn, and there was Oss emerging from the sagebrush with a big, dumb smile on his face. But he wasn’t alone. He was leading a young woman by the hand. Water dripped from her long, black hair, ran down her elongated limbs. She reminded me instantly of a praying mantis. She wore nothing but Oss’s flannel shirt, barely long enough to cover the essentials. She seemed completely unbothered by the rocks and grit beneath her bare feet. And her skin–I don’t know. Is colorless a color?

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“This is, um,” Oss looked at the girl and back to me. “Emily. Her name’s Emily.”

That was weird. Everything about this was weird. Oss seemed. . .changed. He looked so happy. It couldn’t be real. Meanwhile, my lizard brain was telling me to get out, to run. There was something not-right about this girl. Something alien. So much so that it was difficult for me to look at her.

“What are you doing out here, Emily?” She just stared at me, so I tried again. “Are you alone? Do you speak English? Hablas español?” Still nothing.

For Oss’s sake, I stepped forward and held out my hand. This time, the girl looked to Oss. He only smiled bigger and dumber. She reached out her hand and took mine. Maybe it was the gathering storm clouds overhead, or maybe it was just my imagination, but in that moment, I felt a pop of static electricity leap from her clammy palm to mine.

“What’s the story, Oss?” I tried to keep the suspicion out of my voice as I rubbed my tingling palm on my shirt.

“I found her in the trees. She’s lost.” Clearly, he wasn’t about to offer any more than that.

“Then we should take her to the ranger station. Or the police.”

“Sure. But first, I’m taking her home.”

“What?”

“Look at her. She’s got nothing. She needs clothes.”

“They have supplies at the ranger station.”

While we argued, she watched. I mean, really watched. With eyes so dark brown they were almost black. In all the time I would know her, I never once saw her blink. I noticed, though, that her expression changed from wide-eyed innocence to one of knowing whenever Oss wasn’t looking at her. She may not have spoken English, but somehow she understood everything that was happening. In fact, I think she enjoyed it.

“I’m not leaving her with a bunch of strangers,” Oss said.

“We are strangers,” I pointed out. “Do you know how weird you’re being right now?”

“She needs help. We can help her!”

I put my hand on Oss’s shoulder to guide him a few steps away, out of her earshot. “This girl just appeared in the middle of nowhere and you want to take her home like a stray cat or something. That doesn’t seem crazy to you?”

“What are you so afraid of?” Oss laughed. “You think she’s gonna strangle us with my shirt?”

“What if she’s a minor? We could get arrested for kidnapping.”

“She’s not–” Oss looked to the girl, who stood eerily still on the shore staring at us, and back to me. “She’s not a minor.”

“How do you know? She show you her ID?”

“Look. I drove, dude. Remember? I’m taking her home. Come with us, or hitchhike. Your choice.”

He stalked away from me before I could respond, shouldering the pack he’d brought back with him out of the trees. The girl latched onto him. Without looking back, they started up the long trail leading away from the shore to the car. Just like that, this strange girl had made me excess baggage in my best friend’s life.

So we brought her with us on the six-hour drive back to Salt Lake City. I sat in the back seat with the girl riding shotgun. Not only because Oss asked me to, but because it was easier to keep an eye on her that way. On both of them. The thought of her sitting behind me for any length of time was enough to make me nauseated. They held hands the whole way home. Even when Oss had to shift gears, she kept her hand on top of his.

Within a week, they were married. Oss gave his bewildered family barely enough notice to travel in from California for the wedding. I spent that time scouring local police bulletins and news stories for any signs of a missing girl or even an escaped psychiatric patient. Nothing. It was like she appeared straight from the ether. I still tried my best to talk him out of it, to wait a few months at least, but Oss was adamant.

For a while, things seemed to work well enough. She galvanized him to move forward with his life. He got a part-time job, went back to the University of Utah, and they moved into an old house with a porch and a flower bed and Red Butte Creek a stone’s throw away out back. The local congregation accepted Oss’s new wife with almost terminal politeness. Any talk of her getting baptized, however, was oddly shut down by Oss.

It seemed like whenever I went to the house to see Oss, she was upstairs, taking a bath. We could hear her splashing through the ceiling. “I swear, she spends more time in there than she does with me,” he joked.

And then, barely a year after the wedding, the baby was born. I arrived with a bouquet of flowers just as an ashen-faced midwife rushed out the front door to her car. Meanwhile, Oss waited for me on the porch, practically vibrating with happiness.

“It’s a girl,” he announced in a manic stage whisper. “Come and see.” I followed him to the upstairs bedroom, where his wife sat swaddled in the dark in the middle of their bed, gently rocking back and forth.

She shrunk away from the light when Oss switched on a bedside lamp. Her damp hair was plastered against her forehead, snaking down her neck in long black tendrils. She clutched a bundle of gray towels close to her face, oblivious to everything else. An odd humming emanated from her throat. It was the only sound I’d ever heard her make. Oss perched himself on the edge of the mattress and beckoned me to come inside.

Stepping into that room was the last thing I wanted to do. I remembered my sister the day my nephew was born, exhausted but radiant in her hospital bed, surrounded by bright flowers from well-wishers. This was different. The air beyond the threshold was dense and humid, with a stench equal parts rotten and metallic.

Oss was still looking at me. I entered, holding the bouquet up to my face as a shield against more than just the smell. For Oss’s sake, I made myself lean forward to peer at the tiny face peeking out of the soiled towels.

It was clear right away why they’d chosen to have a home birth with only a single unlucky midwife for help. The baby took exclusively after her mother: strange dark eyes, same translucent skin, and a full set of sharp little teeth. I swallowed, unable to speak.

“Do you want to hold her?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him no, I did not want to touch his weird, new baby, but I didn’t have to. The moment Oss reached for her, his wife hissed and twisted away. The humming deepened into a growl. Oss didn’t recoil so much as snap away from the bed. His movements in that moment were weirdly robotic, not his own. It was like he’d been pushed away by some unseen force. The bedside lamp flickered and died. I backed into the dresser against the wall, remembering the spark of electricity that passed between us the first time I met Oss’s wife. The flowers fell onto the carpet as I fled.

After that, the color began to come into Oss’s wife, if you can call it that. It started in her cheeks, and quickly spread; a sort of ash-gray, but still an improvement over the pallid quality of before. On the other hand, Oss seemed to fade a little each time I saw him. I took it upon myself to check on him regularly. I never liked the idea of him living alone with her in that house, sleeping next to her every night. Now there were two of them and Oss was outnumbered. She could do anything to him and no one would know until it was too late.

One day, I was over for dinner. Oss was in the kitchen cooking stir-fry. I passed by their bedroom on my way back from the bathroom, and noticed the door was open a crack. That same unsettling hum was coming from inside. A prickle crept up the back of my neck. I couldn’t help myself. I peeked.

She had the baby on the bed, dripping something dark and thick into its mouth with her hand. I blinked, uncomprehending. What was I looking at? All at once, the grisly panorama crashed over me with merciless clarity.

Oss’s wife held a small, decapitated animal upside down in her hand. A rodent. I recognized it by the thin, limp tail hanging over her thumb. She was feeding her infant its blood, carefully squeezing little drops at a time so as not to choke it.

Then she saw me. The look she gave–not embarrassed or ashamed, but murderous. I had intruded on something I wasn’t supposed to see. The bedside lamp sputtered with an electric hiss. She glanced down at my hand. I felt compelled to pull the door shut, turn around, and march back to the kitchen. I collapsed into a chair, staring at Oss’s stir-fry. He knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t find the words to tell him. She never did join us for dinner that night.

Oss called me one day in the spring, frantic. They’d had a fight. Afterward, she’d taken the baby out for a walk, whatever that meant. I was shocked at his appearance when he opened the door for me. He’d lost more weight. His jeans and flannel shirt hung off his frame. The skin clung to the bones of his face. She’d made him into a little old man, tired and bent. He leaned against the door frame in what was supposed to be a casual stance, but I knew it was because he was out of breath.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw inside the house: kitchen drawers ripped from the wall, utensils scattered across the linoleum with the sharp remnants of broken dishes, cupboards hanging off their hinges. Someone had slashed open the secondhand couch cushions and strewn the stuffing all over the living room floor. The antique upright piano was smashed in, the bench overturned.

“Oss, what happened in here?”

He barely glanced at the chaos around us. “I want to show you something.” He led me to the downstairs cellar. Despite the worn, brick walls and the exposed beams supporting the floor above, Oss had managed to turn this tiny, cold room into a decent man-cave for his projects. It was the only space in the house that belonged to him.

He pulled the string to a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a workbench with a table saw set up along one wall. He went to a giant tool chest in the corner and grasped the edges. I grabbed the other end and together we slid it away from the corner, revealing a hole in the packed dirt floor beneath.

Oss bent down, lifted a wooden box the size of an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel out of the hole and hefted it onto the work bench. He braced his hands against the surface while he caught his breath. For a moment, I thought he might pass out, but then he seemed to recover. He fished a metal key out of his jeans pocket and clicked open the heavy padlock on the front of the box.

Opening the lid, he reached inside. His actions were deliberate, careful, almost ceremonial. He lifted out a soft bundle, cradling it as he set it down next to the box. He beckoned me to come closer. Reluctantly, I stepped to the work bench as he gently un-wrapped the cloth. Inside, was a dark sheet of … something.

“What is that?” I asked.

Oss picked it up, unfolding it accordion-style to its full length. He held it draped across his arms so the ends spilled down his sides, about five feet in all. I could tell it had some weight to it, more substantial than cloth, but less so than leather. He moved it back and forth and it shimmered like a black rainbow even in the anemic light of the bulb, iridescent blues, greens, and purples. He picked up a regular plastic spray bottle and used it to wet the surface. Then he polished the sheet with a cotton rag.

“Can’t let it dry out,” he said.

“Oss,” I persisted. “What is that thing?”

He looked up at me then, his eyes bright and hopeful behind the glasses perched on his skeletal face.

“Her skin,” he told me, as though it were obvious. He held it out to me. “You can touch it if you want.” I shook my head, backing away. He took a step closer. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” I threw up my hands, feeling the dry air between us crackle. Static electricity bit at my fingertips, made my hair stand on end. The same awful power Ossman’s wife held over him also manifested in this thing he kept hidden like some bizarre trophy.

“Get it away from me!”

His expression collapsed, hurt. He laid the sheet onto the workbench. “I found it that day, by the river. I have to keep it safe.”

“Why?”

He blinked. He was having difficulty with an answer, which only worried me more. “Because … if I don’t, she’ll leave. She’ll take my little girl and I’ll never see them again.”

“Was she … looking for it?”

Oss just shrugged, as though the aftermath right above our heads was no more sinister than the mess left by a child’s birthday party.

I tried not to betray my growing desperation. “Hey, Oss. Why don’t you come stay with me for a while?”

He actually laughed. “And leave my family? Come on.”

“Just for a few days. Until this blows over.”

He continued casually as though I hadn’t spoken, brushing the edge of the sheet with his fingers. “You know, I never see her feed the baby. But she must be, right?”

I swallowed the bile rising in my throat.The light bulb began to buzz . Oss’s head snapped up, eyes wide. In an instant, his expression flashed to panic.

“She’s home!” His hands shook as he rushed to wrap up the dark sheet and return it to the box. “You can’t tell her about this.” I heard the front door open and close upstairs. Oss stumbled to the corner, lowering the box back into the earth. Something glinted on the surface of the workbench. The key. While Oss’s back was turned, I stuffed it into my jacket pocket. I followed him to the corner where I helped him shove the tool chest back over the hole.

Oss gripped my arms. “Promise me you won’t say anything,” he whispered. “Please! She can never find out where it is.”

The pleading in his voice scared me. This woman had turned my childhood friend, who’d once hiked through the Andes just to volunteer at a remote orphanage for three months, who never batted an eye at skydiving or free rock climbing, into a paranoid shell. I hated her for it. “Okay, buddy. I promise.”

I watched him relax. He released his death-grip on my arms. “I know. I’m sorry. You’re a good friend.”

“Come home with me, Oss. Just for tonight. You’re not safe here.”

“Nah,” he smiled, all nonchalance again. “We’ll be fine. We’ll work it out.”

She was waiting at the top of the stairs with the child. By that time she was walking, and never left her mother’s side. I paused in the stairwell. They just stared down at me, unblinking. I nodded politely, and continued to the front door, feeling both of them watch me like those creepy hologram Halloween decorations with the eyes that follow you wherever you go. The goosebumps erupted on my skin the moment I stepped onto the porch.

Driving home, I couldn’t help wondering, would it be such a bad thing if she left with her unnatural baby and Oss never had to see them again? If he wasn’t going to leave that house, maybe she should.

My Scottish grandmother told us stories about selkies, seals who turned into beautiful women once they stepped onto land and shed their seal-skins. The best way to catch one was to hide her skin. She couldn’t return to the ocean without it. A selkie could live for years on land, but once she found her skin, she’d run back to the water where she belonged.

Seals were graceful, charming, even cute. Oss’s wife was none of those things. Last I checked, there were no wild seals in the Snake River. No, she was … something else. I thought of the dark, unsettling beauty of the skin Oss had shown me, and realized what each of those different colors represented. Scales.

Oss was still a young guy. He could move on, remarry when the time was right. Most importantly, he would be safe from her.

The next morning, I knocked on Oss’s door. He was at work, as I’d hoped, but she was home. The door cracked open and one of her giant, black eyes peeked out to evaluate me. I held up the key.

“The cellar,” I said. “Under the tool chest.” The eye flicked down to the key. Then a gray hand snaked out, snatched it from my fingers, and slammed the door in my face.

That night, I dreamed about her feeding the baby. But in my dream, the tiny, decapitated animal in her hand was Oss. I bolted awake, cold dread pouring out of me like sweat. I never should have left him there. I should have made him leave with me. It was still dark outside, but I flew out of bed and raced back to Oss’s place.

The house was black when I arrived, immune to the street lamps’ soft bubbles of light. I screeched to a stop at the curb and pounded on the front door for what felt like several minutes, but there was no answer. The only sound was the water flowing over the rocks in the creek behind the house. I backed up onto the grass and shouted Oss’s name at his bedroom window, but still the house stayed dark.

I returned to the front door and kicked at it until I broke through. The inside felt like a tomb. The kitchen had been partially cleaned up, with drawers stacked on the countertop and the spilled utensils tossed inside. A single half-eaten plate of food sat abandoned on the kitchen table. I took the stairs two at a time.

“Oss?” I called.

The bedroom door was ajar. I pushed it open, afraid of what I would find, but there was no one inside. By the light of the bedside lamp, I saw Oss’s wooden box sitting in the middle of the floor, like it was waiting for me. I kneeled down and sucked in a breath.

Fingertips stuck out from under the lid.

I grasped the edge, flipped it back, and stumbled away.

Oss stared back at me from inside the box, motionless, folded in on himself. All contorted limbs and twisted spine, one hand tucked up under his chin, one eye half-open, the pale face stretched across his skull petrified in an expression of shock and pain. Only at the end did he see what she really was.

I began to scream. At first, the only part of me that worked was my voice. Then my arms were dragging me back to the bedroom doorway. Finally, my legs, like jelly, came up beneath me so I could stumble back down the stairs and out the front door just in time to vomit over the porch rail into the dead flower bed. I fumbled in my pocket for my cell phone to dial 911 with shaking fingers.

Halfway to my car, an electric jolt sent my entire body rigid. I crashed onto the front lawn, rolling onto my back. I lay there, paralyzed. Only my eyes would move, but I heard soft footsteps approaching in the grass. She appeared in the corner of my eye, her face moving closer and closer, until she filled the whole scope of my vision.

She kneeled over me. Her dark hair, haloed against the light of the street lamps, dripped water onto my face. She was changing before my eyes, becoming more eel-like with every breath. Her eyes seemed to grow bigger and blacker, moving farther and farther apart. Her nose flattened, disappearing into the gray skin above her lipless mouth.

More movement on my other side.The child lurked a few feet away. She was changing too, just like her mother. She watched me impassively, cocking her head to the side as though she was only mildly curious. I looked back to Oss’s wife. Pins and needles buzzed along my arms and legs. My fingers twitched. Whatever she had done to me, the effect was wearing off, but not quick enough to save me from whatever she planned to do next.

My friend was dead long before she stuffed him into that box. He was dying the moment he met her. Giving her the key had only killed him faster. Now it was my turn

She leaned in, softly touching my cheek. Little crackles of electricity popped along my skin under her damp fingertips. Her breathing had grown ragged, drawing in great gulps of air through her mouth now that her nostrils had ceased to exist. She shuddered, and I watched a trio of pulsing gills slit open down her neck, as though drawn by a scalpel. She held up her fist, clutching the shimmery sheet of her skin. As the wail of a siren approached in the distance, she smiled down at me with a row of piscine teeth: Thank you.

She stepped over me, swept the child into her arms and disappeared toward the creek in a silent flash, leaving me frozen and helpless in the grass, even long after the spell had worn off.

My friend Oss liked to brag about how he’d gone fishing in the Snake River and caught a wife instead, but I knew. It was always the other way around.

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Host Commentary

Electric eel: most remarkable predator in animal kingdom

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I think the rather unpleasant truth we fished up is… be careful what you catch.

Of this story, Meagan says:

“Her Skin” grew out of my desire to write a “sinister selkie” story combined with the very real cultural pressure for LDS (Mormon) young people to marry quickly once they return home from their proselytizing missions. A lot of my work also features platonic love stories, and the changing dynamics of the close friendship between the Narrator and Oss was a tragic love story in itself.

I had a lot of fun researching electric eels once I decided on Emily’s “other side.” Nature’s real-life special effects are indeed stranger than fiction. Electric eels can control their prey’s movements, or even paralyze them, by sending an electric pulse through water,* a skill Emily uses to great effect against the Narrator and Oss.

Do you have thoughts on Her Skin, by Meagan Langer? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, head over to our Discord channel and tell us.

Finally, PseudoPod, and Bertrand Russell, know…

“Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell”

Amazing work, thank you, everyone!