Skin Of Death

Maxine looked at Minah and wondered what on earth was going on? Had the natural order of the world just gone slightly wrong? She looked at the beautifully wrapped up present that Minah held in her hands and then looked at Minah, thinking that something had to be wrong. This would not be right if nothing was wrong. She even narrowed her eyes at here, despite the fact that that was such a rude thing to do. Minah just laughed at the look on her face and smiled a big toothy smile. She gestured for Maxine to take the present with a little pleading look on her face and started to say something. Before she could get the words out of her mouth, Maxine opened her mouth and spoke first.

'Okay, Minah. Why are you doing this? And don't tell me it's my birthday.' She insisted on being very forward. If there was anything besides good gesture behind this, she wanted to know. Minah sighed and shook her head. She kept the toothy smile on her face and put a hand on Maxine's shoulder. Maxine had to make an effort not to recoil. It's not that Maxine was a particularly horrible person. It's just that she had apt reason to be wary of Minah. She had been deceived by that congenial smile one too many times in her life. 'Don't worry Maxine, there is no bomb in there. It's just that, I am not sure how to say this. It' just that I miss you and I am sorry about all the things I did. I missed the times when we were friends and I would like to have that back.' Maxine's jaw dropped at the humble statement that humbled her along with it. She immediately felt guilty for all the possible reasons she had just been concocting in her head to explain the sudden friendliness in this girl who had caused her so much pain.

Maxine smiled and took the wrapped gift. She took it and then, still holding it, embraced Minah warmly. They then looked at each other for awhile as Maxine smiled and felt the package. 'Still like guessing before you open it?' Maxine nodded and asked whether she could open it there and then and Minah laughed and asked what she waiting for. Maxine undid the scotch tape as carefully as she could and took out the piece of cloth from within. She opened it up and looked at it with sparkling eyes. It was a long, tie-dyed dress in deep yellow and black. It had straps for sleeves and was made of the softest material anyone could imagine. She did not think that Minah could have possibly bought this from anywhere; she must have bought the dress and dyed it herself. When Maxine asked her, Minah just shook her head mysteriously and said that she had bought it but she was not going to tell her where from. Maxine absolutely loved it and promised she was going to wear it as soon as she had a chance. 'You have no idea how happy that would make me,' said Minah, smiling her usual toothy smile.

Maxine woke up two days later past noon and got ready to meet her boyfriend in town. She opened her closet and took out the dress. She smiled to herself and held it in front of her, looking at it for a while before starting to put it on. She put on the dress, which fit her perfectly and flattered her figure. She closed the closet that held her full length mirror and went outside to put on her shoes. She had finished getting ready and walked to the lift. Just as she went in she felt a sudden sharp pain in her left foot. She cringed and held the door open with her right hand as she looked down at her sandal-clad foot. It looked perfectly normal to her as far as she could tell. She limped into the lift and cringed again as she press the button. She bent down and examined her left foot but found nothing wrong with it. She sighed and concluded that it was just one of those things that involved muscles which sprained without their owners knowing why. She walked toward the bus stop and then decided to take a taxi. There was no way she was going to take the bus to the station; she would have to do a considerable amount of walking. She limped towards the taxi stand and got into a taxi. She then directed him to where she wanted to go.

When she reached her destination and as she was about to alight from the taxi, she braced herself for the pain she thought was going to shoot up her leg when she got out. But when she did get out, her foot was perfectly fine. She was pleasantly surprised. She got out of the taxi and walked to the bus stop where her boyfriend would be waiting for her. When she did meet him, she was still shocked at the fact that her ankle did not hurt. The pain had been so intense that she could barely walk into the lift when it struck. She asked him what it could have been, it disappearing so fast and all. 'Pain gone; why you worry?' He laughed as she hit him at the back of the head and pouted. 'Do you have any idea, how painful it was? I was actually considering not coming and paging you to call off the date, you know?' She narrowed her eyes, exaggerating anger as he put his hand to his heart and put on his best hurt look. She was about to open her mouth to speak when she gasped instead, her right hand moving towards her stomach and clutching it.

'Jordan?' she said, softly, obviously taking a lot of effort to do so. 'My stomach, something is wrong.' For some reason, guys always decide make practical comments when it counts the least. He supported her with his own body and tried to hold her. 'I thought you said it was your foot that hurt.' She shot a glance at him that would have made him take a step back, if he was not supporting her. 'It did,' she growled emphatically. She moaned a little as they made their way to the nearest outdoor seat and sat down together. Maxine could not explain the sudden decision her body had made that day to keep causing her pain. She looked up at the trees, suddenly afraid that a trouble making bird would decide to use her head for target practice. She was thinking this exact thought when the pain subsided. She suddenly got up and looked at Jordan, who was looking at her with that bewildered look on his face. 'It's gone!' She exclaimed, snapping her fingers. 'Just like that! Like my foot. I mean, my foot is still there, but the pain just disappeared. It's miraculous. Annoying in some sense, but miraculous. There is definitely something wrong with me, Jordan.'

They looked at each other for awhile and then at their watches. They had been sitting there for about half an hour. They decided to continue to walk around for a couple of hours before Jordan eventually sent her home. When she had got home, she was so exhausted that she just sat down to dinner without taking a shower or changing her clothes. She felt a dim pain in her stomach and decided not to eat. It went away, like her other pains when she got ready to go to sleep. She sleep peacefully that night, not being able to remember her dreams when she got up. She told her mother the next day about what had happened and her mother was suitably concerned. They knew a modern healer. He was a personal friend and she said that if it happened again, to tell her about it so she could call him and have him give them both a diagnosis. The next time it happened, Maxine was out with her brother, Carl, getting a present for their father's birthday. Looking for something to accommodate the hot weather but was not too scruffy, she slipped into the yellow and black dress.

Maxine almost collapsed all of a sudden from the sudden pain in her stomach. She swore and told him what was happening. Like anyone else, he did not know what to do and did nothing more than attempting to comfort her. She tried to regulate her breathing to ease her pain but gasped as she felt something icy sharp shooting up both her legs. She fell to the ground. Carl, four years older then her and fairly well built, tried to pick her up but he could only carry her to the nearest bench. When she was well enough to move, he supported her into the lift and to the taxi stand. She told him to call Uncle Chan. At home, she changed and the pain subsided. They waited for Uncle Chan to come over. She hung the dress she had worn over the dining room chair inside out so as to air it out. There was no point in washing it yet since she had only been in it for an hour. Uncle Chan came over, hugging each of them in turn and stopped short at the sight of the dress that hung on the chair.

'Who gave you that?' he asked Maxine. She looked at him, rather puzzled, responding that a friend had given it to her. She did not like the way he was looking at it. He looked at it the way someone would investigate a mysterious bloodstain on the dining room carpet. He picked it up and looked at it. He then held it up and then let the family see it. 'Can you see it?' 'See what?' they all asked in unison. Maxine's jaw was the first to drop. She grabbed the dress and stared at it. She then turned it inside out and looked at it, realisation sweeping over her. She turned it back out and held it out to her family. The dress's patterns were made up of two main splotches of black and yellow. They were huge and created patterns throughout it, the black dye sometimes fading into grey or turning the yellow into a sort of muddy colour. What she had not seen was something on the top splotch that spread over her chest. Amidst all the black dye, there was a very specific pattern. She had noticed the outlined of a circle first. There was a perfect circle within the splotch, made up of two wavy lines that kept intersecting each other, making it look like a braided stream which ran in a circle.

This had caught her vision and led her eye to the centre of the circle where in faint lines of grey slightly different from the rest. There was the out line of a man in a moustache. He wore a turban and sat cross legged, his hands together as if in a gesture of prayer. The sight was extremely unnerving. It could have been an accidental design and it not been do perfectly symmetrical. Her mother placed her hand on her mouth and Carl actually took a step back when he made out the design. 'Your mother told me about your problem; I think this may be your cause. Did your friend get this from another country? They do this thing in some places where they work their religious designs into their products. They use the cloth to cover corpses. It is called the skin of death.' He looked at her for awhile and then suggested she throw it away. He then went on to add that it could have also been an act of malice by the person who made it. They might just have another copy of the picture in their home over which they cast spells.

That thought was just too much for her and she almost ran to the chute to throw it down. She apologised under her breath to Minah and then let it fall to the bottom. Whoever had made this dress would have no more power over her. Three days later in schol, Maxine sat down next to Minah, slumping onto the table. Minah smiled and said that she needed to go to the toilet and that she would be back. Maxine simply smiled and then pick up Jasmine's file to move it so she could put her head on the table. She smiled as she looked at the pictures of her favourite actors on the side that faced up. She turned it over to look at who was in store on the other side. Her heart stopped. On white typing paper, drawn in black marker was a man that sat within a circle. He sat cross legged, wore a turban and had his hands together in a position of prayer. He seemed to look up at her as she looked down on him. In his ankles and his stomach, there was thumbtacks inserted into the cardboard of the file. They glimmered in the light of the classroom made her shiver.

Minah came in and looked at Maxine, smiling her toothy smile the way she always did, her friendliness seeming more fake than it ever had. 'Why are you looking so tense?' Maxine stood up and pushed her chair back, looking at Minah straight in the eye. 'Don't you ever talk to me again.'

Heavy Metal

Matt popped the tape into his Walkman and listened to it, rather impressed at what he heard. He heard a set of bridge chords running at a speed he had never thought possible. He grabbed his Walkman and rewound the tape so he that he could hear it again. He would have rewound it the entire thing and listened to it from the start, but he wanted to listen to the whole thing before he reached school and rewinding would take time; a problem the compact disc player would make easy once it started becoming popular and cheaper. But till then, it was the good old fashioned tape.

He kept on listening until the rain stopped at the station he was supposed to get off at. He picked up his bag, careful no to get entangled in the wire that came out of it, and walked out of the door still listening. Enchanting maybe the wrong word to use to describe rock music but Matt was really enchanted. even when he was through the college gates where at times the discipline master stood, he was reluctant to take off his headphones. But as he approached the assembly area, he took off the metal band that connected the two little woolly muffs and placed them in his bag. He was not only amazed at the music but also at the fact that the band's lead singer had given him the tape in the first place. It was a demo tape that contained five songs, one of which they had not even played for anyone else yet. He was amazed that Gavin had even thought about him when he was giving out the tape. Considering they had quite a negative and short-lived history, Matt had even been suspicious when the tape was handed to him. Matt had dated Gavin's sister for awhile and she had been unusually upset about their breakup. The story was long and tedious and he did not want to go through it in his mind. Gavin was two years older than his sister and the same age as Matt was. Matt and Gavin had known each other through basketball and were closer than acquaintances but not close enough to be called friends. The day after the breakup, Gavin had cornered Matt before school started. Being considerably larger than he was, Gavin took him by the collar to pin him against the wall.

Well, the story went as one would think the story would go. Gavin shouted a number of not so empty threats and Matt nodded a lot, wanting to be out of the bathroom and in the safe company of people. The rest of the day had gone by as usual and so had the rest of the days till then. They no longer talked. The tape occurrence was indeed a very strange thing. Maybe it was his way of saying that things were okay between them. Of course he had only thought that in the morning. He saw Gavin three times that day and was totally ignored by him. The song was all he could think about so it did not matter. He knew Gavin's band had been good but he had had no idea that they were super good. He supposed that Matt would have just been giving it out to everybody and that he just happened to see him first. Either way, good music did not need a reason and he was happy with the tape.

He found himself listening to that particular song once again during his lecture while trying to concentrate on indices. He happened to look down at the rows in front of him and found Gavin staring up at him. When their eyes made contact, Gavin's lips curled up into smile. Matt would have smiled back if he had not thought that Gavin's smile was more for himself than for Matt. It was three days late when Matt found himself listening to the same song on the train to school. He had come to not simply be amazed by the music but had almost come to fall in love with the song. He had kept rewinding it and playing it over and over. Each time he listened to it, he would discover something new about the song, the way the last chord of the second verse would reverberate, the way it almost sounded as if there were two sets of drums. Gavin must have used some electronics device on his voice for the last part.

He had developed a headache on the second night when he was trying to sleep. Music had always helped him to sleep and when he played the song, not only did it help him sleep, it almost seemed to cure him of his headache. He had slept like a baby and had woken up to the sound of the tape jamming itself on the stereo system. It was one of those systems you had to switch off when the tape was done so that it would stop being pulled along. He took out the tape and placed it in his Walkman while getting ready for school so that he would not forget to bring it. Four days after he had been given the tape, he found himself very restless in class. He was unable to concentrate on anything and began to think about the song, playing it in the Walkman of his mind. He had listened to it so often that he could hear every specific sound in his mind; though of course nothing was good as listening to the real thing. Finally, he got the Walkman out of his bag and placed the headphones over his head, sliding it down to the back of his neck where it could not be seen. He lay down on his desk where he hoped he would be inconspicuous and listened to the music that he actually might have believed was made by the angels in Heaven.

The relief he had got when he popped the headphones over his ears unnerved him for awhile. It was like how some brands of food were sprinkled with nicotine so the people would crave for them. The music was like a drug... A week after he had been given the tape, he had suffered three headaches which he promptly soothed with the song he had taped multiple times onto one tape. he almost had his Walkman confiscated during one of his lectures. It took him ten minutes of pleading and numerous vows of how it was never going to happen again before he could get it back. Promptly, he stashed in his bag till the next lecture where he took it out again. A fortnight after he had been given the tape, the same teacher caught him listening with his headphones, during her tutorial. She had literally held him back after class and demanded that he give her his Walkman. He refused and the argument eventually evolved into him walking off only to be pulled by the sleeve.

In a reflex action, he had used his free hand to take the nearest plastic chair and hurl it at her, more to get her off him than to hurt her. He was violent. In a state of shock, she had just watched as he ran out of class, looking as if he was trying to escape from an ugly monster. There was definitely something wrong with him and it definitely had something to do with the music. he had slept listening to it every night since he had got it and he needed to hear it in order to do anything. Something was wrong with it and he knew it. maybe it was something scientific, like the way certain sights and sounds could cause your brain to send strange signals to your body. There was something wrong with it and he would have to tell Gavin about it. He would have to ask him if anything had happened to any of his band members when they listened to it. He would have find out who else he had given the tape to. It was then that it finally hit upon him. 

Gavin might have been the one behind the whole thing in the first place. He could not believe he had not realised this in the first place. It was completely unnatural that he could not function without the song. Lunchtime was approaching and he would confront him. But in the meantime, he needed to listen to that song so he locked himself up in a cubicle and put on his headphones... 'What the hell in on this tape Gavin? Tell me!' 'Tape? Music! What else?' Gavin looked at him with exaggerated perplexity. 'Gavin! Please stop this. I can't even get through a normal day...' Matt was speechless when Gavin cut him off. 'Oh! Oh you can't, is it?' His voice was sarcastic. 'Well, now you know what my sister went through. You think i don't know what you did to her?' 'I did not do anything! Our relationship just did not work out,' Matt tried to explain. 'Please, just take the tape back. Can you? It's not worth doing this for your sister. We were friends before.' 'You are not my friend! And don't you dare insult my sister! Good luck to you. You are never going to be able to throw that thing away. You can listen to it for the rest of your life. In fact... you have to!'

The sun was such that the light fell perfectly through the small windows of coloured glass that ran along the church wall. The multi-coloured light fell onto the carpets as the sun sank along the horizon, painting a distorted copy of the window's picture onto the floor. Matt ran in and looked into the confessional booth in a panic, seeing if anyone was in there. Finding no one, he ran to the church office to find the priest he had been looking for doing some paperwork. 'Father!' he burst out as he almost fell through the door. 'I need your help, please.' Telling him the entire story, Matt was almost in tears in his desperation. The priest took the tape and played it in the ancient looking machine that he kept in his office. He listened to the song and told him that he could not hear anything wrong with it. But he knew some people who knew some back masking techniques. They had worked on a teen and parent retreat he had held; one of the topics had been the peril of rock and roll decadence.

Meanwhile, he placed his hand on Matt's forehead. 'I want you to give me this tape willingly. I want you to say it out loud and to renounce its power over you.' The entire process was difficult be he had managed to. He did just like the priest had said and he felt something lift from his shoulders. It was three days later that he received a call from the priest saying that the tape had been back masked and that there had been words recorded on the other side. They were in Latin and were hard to interpret. The words were probably from a curse or had been said in accordance with a ritual that had been performed while the song was being recorded.

Pulling the tape from it's casing and cutting it with his scissors, Matt dumped the musical carcass on the canteen table where Gavin sat with his band. 'I don't need your stupid tape anymore.' Gavin looked at the tape and raised an eyebrow at Matt. 'The poison is in your blood. It might not strike now, but sooner or later, it will cause your death. I bet it is sooner.' Matt broke down and cried.