Chapter 3: The House of Peeling Skin

The nightmares had become unbearable.

Julian woke each morning to find the burn on his arm throbbing with renewed intensity, as if something were trying to claw its way out from beneath his skin. The mark had spread—five distinct finger impressions now connected by a web of angry red lines that traced up toward his shoulder like the branches of some hellish tree.

For three weeks, he had avoided Alistair's house, telling himself that his friend needed space to work through whatever crisis had overtaken him. But the whispers in the sunlight had grown louder, more insistent, and Julian found himself unable to concentrate on his archival work. His supervisor had begun asking pointed questions about his pallor, his distraction, his habit of flinching whenever direct sunlight touched his desk.

He needs help, Julian told himself as he walked through Bloomsbury on a gray October morning, grateful for the cloud cover that muted the sun's presence. Whatever madness has taken hold of him, I can't abandon him to it. That's what friendship means.

But as he approached the familiar townhouse, Julian realized that something fundamental had changed. The building itself seemed different—shabbier somehow, as if months rather than weeks had passed since his last visit. The windows were filmed with a greasy residue that caught what little light filtered through the clouds and threw it back in sickly rainbows.

The smell hit him before he reached the front door.

It was the scent he remembered from Alistair's "adoration chamber"—that ozone-tinged aroma of purification—but intensified beyond recognition. Now it carried undertones of something else, something organic and unsettling that made Julian's stomach turn. Sweat. Unwashed bodies. And beneath it all, the unmistakable smell of burning flesh.

Julian raised his hand to knock, then hesitated. Through the grimy windows, he could see movement—shapes passing back and forth in what had once been Alistair's sitting room. Too many shapes. His friend lived alone.

The door opened before Julian could complete his knock.

The woman who answered was perhaps thirty, though it was difficult to tell. Her skin had been burned to the deep bronze of old leather, and patches of it hung in ragged flaps where she had clearly been peeling away the damaged layers. She wore only a thin cotton shift that clung to her emaciated frame, and her eyes held the same fevered brightness Julian had seen in Alistair's gaze.

"You're Julian," she said, her voice hoarse and cracked. "He said you would come. He's been waiting."

Before Julian could respond, she had stepped aside, gesturing for him to enter. The interior of the house had been transformed beyond recognition. The furniture was gone, replaced by simple wooden benches arranged in rough circles throughout the rooms. The walls, once decorated with Alistair's collection of academic prints, now bore crude murals painted directly onto the plaster—spiraling suns with dozens of reaching arms, hieroglyphs that hurt to look at directly, and symbols that seemed to writhe when glimpsed from the corner of one's eye.

But it was the people that made Julian's blood run cold.

There were perhaps a dozen of them scattered throughout the ground floor—men and women of various ages, all sharing the same telltale signs of prolonged solar exposure. Their skin ranged from deep red to almost black, hanging in loose folds where repeated burning and peeling had left it permanently damaged. Many were partially clothed or naked entirely, as if fabric had become an unbearable irritation against their ravaged flesh.

They moved with a languid, dreamlike quality that reminded Julian of sleepwalkers. Several sat motionless on the benches, faces turned toward the windows despite the cloudy sky. Others wandered aimlessly through the rooms, occasionally pausing to touch the painted symbols on the walls with reverent fingers.

"Alistair?" Julian called out, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Upstairs," the woman replied. "In the sanctum. He's preparing for the afternoon devotions."

Julian climbed the stairs on unsteady legs, noting how the bannister had been carved with more of those writhing symbols. The smell grew stronger with each step—that nauseating mixture of burned flesh and something else, something that reminded him of heated metal and ozone.

The door to what had been the guest bedroom stood open, and Julian could see that the transformation he had witnessed weeks ago had been completed in ways he couldn't have imagined. The walls between this room and the adjacent bedroom had been torn down, creating a single large space flooded with natural light from multiple windows. But it was no longer just the one window that had been stripped of glass—all of them now stood open to the elements, letting in not only light but wind and rain and the occasional bird that perched fearlessly on the sills.

At the center of the expanded room sat Alistair.

Julian barely recognized his friend. The man who had once been pale and scholarly, who had taken pride in his carefully maintained appearance, had been transformed into something that belonged in an anatomy textbook's section on severe burn victims. His skin was the deep, mottled brown of old leather, hanging in loose folds around his drastically reduced frame. His hair had largely fallen out, leaving only sparse patches of gray stubble across his scarred scalp.

But it was his eyes that were the worst. They burned with an intensity that seemed to have nothing to do with human emotion, fixed on the cloudy sky beyond the windows with the unwavering focus of absolute faith.

"Julian." Alistair's voice was barely recognizable—dried out, cracked, like the whisper of wind through dead leaves. "My dear fellow. I knew you would come."

"Alistair, what have you done?" Julian stepped into the room, fighting the urge to cover his nose against the overwhelming stench. "What have you done to yourself? To these people?"

Alistair turned toward him with movements that seemed to cause him considerable pain. When he smiled, Julian could see that several of his teeth had fallen out, leaving gaps that made his expression even more grotesque.

"I have been purified," Alistair said simply. "We all have. The dross has been burned away, leaving only what is essential. What is worthy of Aten's love."

"This isn't purification, it's self-destruction!" Julian gestured at his friend's ravaged body. "You're dying, Alistair. All of these people are dying."

"Dying?" Alistair laughed—a sound like rustling paper. "Oh, my dear friend, we have never been more alive. We have shed the flesh that bound us to earthly concerns. Look."

He struggled to his feet, his movements accompanied by the sound of skin cracking. With effort that was clearly agonizing, he spread his arms wide, mimicking the pose Julian had seen in the ancient reliefs of Akhenaten.

"Our libidos have been baked out of us," Alistair continued, his voice taking on the rhythm of a prepared sermon. "The animal desires that once drove us have been cauterized away, leaving only pure devotion. We no longer hunger for food, for comfort, for human touch. We hunger only for His light, His warmth, His transforming fire."

Julian stared in horror at the assembled cultists—for that's what they were, he realized, not friends or followers but victims of whatever madness had consumed Alistair. Men and women reduced to living scarecrows, their humanity burned away along with their skin.

"The libidos baked out..." Julian repeated, his voice hollow. He looked at the way the cultists moved—or rather, didn't move. Their strange lethargy, their lack of human interaction, their complete absence of normal social behaviors. "Alistair, you've destroyed them. You've destroyed yourself."

"I have elevated us," Alistair corrected, settling back onto his wooden stool with visible relief. "When Aten comes—and He will come, Julian, He speaks to me in the light—we will be ready. Pure. Worthy vessels for His consciousness."

As if summoned by his words, a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and streamed through one of the open windows. The effect on the assembled cultists was immediate and horrifying. Those who had been sitting motionless suddenly came to life, turning their ruined faces toward the light with expressions of rapture. Several began to moan—low, wordless sounds that might have been pleasure or agony.

Alistair himself was transfigured. The golden light seemed to bring color back to his ravaged features, and for a moment Julian could glimpse the friend he had once known beneath the leather mask of burned flesh.

"Do you see?" Alistair whispered, his voice filled with terrible joy. "Do you feel His presence?"

Julian did feel something—the same oppressive weight he had sensed during his previous visit, but magnified tenfold. The air in the room seemed to thicken, becoming almost liquid, and Julian found it increasingly difficult to breathe. The burn mark on his arm began to throb in rhythm with something vast and alien, something that pressed against the boundaries of the visible world like a tumor pushing through healthy flesh.

And in the golden light streaming through the windows, Julian saw them.

Shapes. Moving. Reaching.

Dozens of slender arms extending from some central source, each ending in a grasping hand that seemed to beckon toward the assembled cultists. For just an instant, Julian could see them clearly—the many-armed solar disk from the Egyptian reliefs, but alive, hungry, pressing against reality with the patience of something that had waited three thousand years for worshippers worthy of its attention.

"No," Julian gasped, stumbling backward toward the door. "No, this isn't religion. This is... this is infection."

Alistair's burned features twisted into an expression of disappointment. "Oh, Julian. I had hoped you would understand. I had hoped you would join us willingly."

"Join you?" Julian's voice cracked. "Alistair, look at yourself! Look at what you've become!"

"I have become what Akhenaten dreamed of," Alistair replied with serene certainty. "A bridge between the human and the divine. And soon, when the purification is complete, I will take the final step. We all will."

The cloud cover shifted, and more sunlight flooded the room. The assembled cultists began to moan louder, their voices joining in a harmony that hurt Julian's ears. The stench of burning flesh intensified, and Julian realized with sick horror that several of them were actively smoking in the direct light, their damaged skin literally smoldering.

He ran.

Julian fled down the stairs, past the woman who had answered the door, out onto the street where the gray London sky felt like salvation after the hellish atmosphere of the house. Behind him, he could hear the cultists' voices rising in what might have been song or might have been screaming—wordless sounds that followed him down the street like accusing fingers.

At the corner, Julian stopped and looked back at Alistair's townhouse. In the upper windows, he could see silhouettes moving in their eternal dance of worship, arms raised toward a sun that was slowly but surely burning them alive from the inside out.

His oldest friend—brilliant, charismatic Alistair Finch—was gone. What remained in that house of peeling skin was something else entirely, something that wore his face but served a hunger that had nothing to do with humanity.

Julian pulled his coat tight and walked away, knowing with sick certainty that he would never see Alistair alive again. But also knowing, with an even sicker certainty, that this wasn't the end.

The burn on his arm pulsed with alien warmth, and somewhere in the distance, carried on the autumn wind, Julian could swear he heard his name being called in a voice like crackling fire.

Whatever had claimed his friend wasn't finished with either of them.