Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Lady Leatherface Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

LADY LEATHERFACE

He was so cold. Cold enough that it hurt all over.

It was early spring, snow still on the ground. But that was outside. Inside was cold, but not that cold. On a cement tile floor, the cold was different.

A swatch by the back of his ribs seemed colder than everywhere else, and it stung as if burning around the edges. That swatch felt as big as a shoebox, the sting felt big as the universe.

Teary eyes opened and spied the bright light reflecting off the floor drain next to his face. The white tile wall before him was wet and shining. He tried to scream but the homemade leather ball gag choked his words. Panic set in and he writhed, shooting pain tendrils along his veins and arteries.

“You’re still alive?” a voice said from behind.

It was that woman, the one with the promises, she’d brought him home and she… Suddenly, he wanted his mother so badly. Silly, given the circumstances.

“I certainly didn’t mean for you to suffer.”

His chest and shoulders bounced as he sobbed. There was a pinch in his throat and then a quick, warm spillage.

Earlier, she’d nicked a master vein, but it had clotted, distancing the devil. “Shh, it’s all better. Now you’re part of something special. A Halloween tradition.”

He heard no more as the warm pool spilling from his throat left him swimming before drowning in the endless depths of forever.

—

The clock above the diplomas ticked with the kind of motion that seemed knowing and aggressive. As if the hands bore malice against Susan Edison. Most days she was so busy that clock was an enemy in the exact opposite way. It’s not that she didn’t have the same caseload on Halloween. It was that her priorities changed.

The papers stood on her desk in towers, filling the stackable plastic trays. Hidden away in manila file folders were the histories and fact sheets about countless people who needed her for one thing or another or another or another. Piled in a half-dozen stressful mountains, most days she never had enough time to get things done. Maybe if the cases stopped coming, but that would never happen.

Susan’s career was not an easy one. Often heartbreaking and nerve-racking.

Not today. Not Halloween. Not when her head was elsewhere.

As a kid, she was a freak for rubber masks and Snickers bars. She was a coatroom and recess storyteller; used to make up tales, owning urban legends. She was the one who found the razors in caramel apples. Her cousins had gone to the emergency room with sliced guts, or worse, torn throats from needles in Mars bars. Nobody believed her, but everybody listened because that’s part of the fun. Monsters and ghouls and specters are nothing if they don’t touch humanity.

Now, as an adult, Susan Edison sat quietly in that chair behind her desk and paid more than a deserving sum of her time and attention to her career. One night a year with the career on the backburner seemed earned.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

4:15 PM. She closed her eyes and imagined the night ahead. The freeing of her inner beast. That was love.

Things had changed since she was a girl, though those around her still wore masks on Halloween, the night didn’t end snuggled up next to a pillowcase full of candy, it ended snuggled up next to a stranger. The olfactory network produced an imprinted memory and she smelled those sweaty, flesh-rubber, primordial splashes as if in real-time.

Halloween was beautiful.

4:22 PM.

“Come on.”

She opened the bottom left drawer of her clunky steel desk and looked at more folders. They were in order. No time-killer there. She opened the next drawer and it was more of the same. She opened the skinny middle drawer and looked at the odds and ends that summed up the everything in a drawer like that.

Elastic bands and staples and paperclips…

4:29 PM.

She groaned, and picked up a scalpel she’d brought in from home. It was crafting quality, you wouldn’t want to perform open heart surgery with it, why she’d brought it in at all was beyond recall. That wasn’t where her mind was anyway. She popped the cap from the blade and stared at the fine ridge, imagining…

The blade slid into the flesh of her forearm. It burned in a way that was neither good nor bad, but simply was. Blood bloomed as she lifted the blade away from the inch-long cut. Sweat bubbled on her forehead as she parted the edges in an attempt to look inside.

Silly. The cut was too shallow and too skinny.

In the drawer, she moved around items in search of a bandage. Found one. A deft two-fingered procedure took the wrapper and the tabs off before smoothing it over the cut.

Susan looked up.

4:48 PM.

“Close enough.”

She gathered her phone into her purse, tossed the scalpel into the middle drawer, closed and locked her desk, grabbed her dirty porcelain mug, hit the lights, and left the office.

A year in waiting; she could be her true self for the night.

It was five minutes to 5:00 PM when she rinsed her coffee mug in the lunchroom sink, and the first children of the evening—the smallest babes in their superhero and cartoon character outfits—hustled the block of businesses surrounding the community services building, parents in tow. Susan was in the lunchroom, looking out the window. These children belonged to parents in workplaces nearby, little monstrous showpieces for mommy or daddy to parade before coworkers.

When Susan was a kid, she told everyone at school that while out trick or treating, a man revealed his penis to her. It didn’t happen to Susan, but it had happened to other girls. Susan’s father had read it in the paper the morning after Halloween. Her mother, in awed disgust, drank in the tale just as Susan had.

“Are you little liars, too?”

If they were, if their mouths oozed fantasy and their faces bore mimicry, if they donned rubber masks as a part of a welcome ruse, then that was okay. Halloween was a time of permissible lies for children, and for adults, it was the time of freak flags, excusable higher than high skirt hems, socially forgivable dancing with intent, and shame-free morning walks, hidden behind guises or face paint or hangovers.

Halloween meant no judgement.

Halloween was Susan’s Christmas, New Year, and birthday rolled into one. October 31st gave her the power to unshackle wings and sore.

A year of secret toil mounted atop the belabored efforts from the years prior. The hours lost, head down, back bent, fingers busy had proved worth their expenditure in outcome.

Five o’clock finally struck. Susan stepped out of the breakroom and the buzzing in her belly thrummed, speeding up. Too early for adults. Only children wore costumes on her subway car. Adults had to wait for the cloak of darkness to unveil dreams on costumed sleeves. Oh god, she was excited.

So many children, dressed up, smiling, screeching, a few scaring one another… The image of the kiddies had her pulse on fire and brought forth more memories of her own childhood: vampire, hobo, princess, wolfgirl, Ninja Turtle, witch, skeleton, and so on.

That was before, when Halloween was about edibles and trickery.

It wasn’t until her sixteenth birthday that she cut her first swatch of flesh, unaware that her subconscious had decided her future. Unaware that the smoothness of new leather would take her mind and body and soul.

That fresh-cut skin, that fantastically soft material, was magic to her fingertips. And once she’d begun, and gotten away with it time and time again, what was to stop her from feeding what she loved? What is addiction but a love letter penned in blood?

Trip concluded, she stripped as she walked through her small bungalow. Shoes kicked off at the door, blouse on the kitchen floor, pencil skirt draped over a recliner in the living room, bra hung from the basement doorknob, and underwear flung toward the wash machine at the foot of the steps. The basement was a space with the illusion of a bunker—spread oddly, as if an afterthought rather than the opening of a complete foundation.

There was reason to this ruse.

Into the fruit cellar access, followed by the hidden door next to the jars of jam and jars of pickles, Susan entered her atelier. She flicked the switch and bright halogen bulbs exposed her favorite place in the world—favorite place every day but for Halloween. Halloween demanded freedom for secrets.

The space was equal parts fashion studio and meat abattoir. One-half had the sewing machine, bins of specialty tools and threads, as well as the stretchers that held the skin swatches drum-tight until cured. The second half resembled a locker room shower: floor drain, pale tile walls and base, showerhead above the thin leather choke noose dangling in wait.

In the corner next to a full-body mirror was the standing dressmaker’s dummy, an ancient thing with mysterious stains from the decades of yore and extra padding around the butt and breasts to match Susan’s natural padding around the butt and breasts. The skin suit, twelve swatches of human flash sewn together, fat threads attaching seams in a moderately sexy and annually updated piece of fashion. The beginnings appeared in a mock-cavewoman style.

It was beautiful. It rode the dummy almost as well as it rode Susan.

The first time she wore the suit, it was barely a bikini, six pieces sewn together. Befitting, in her early twenties when it was appropriate to wear less and she’d had the perfect figure for it. As she aged and gathered more of herself, the suit grew to cover lumps, lines, and veins.

Imperfections were inconveniences, nothing more. She did not pine for perfection, but she needed to be attractive.

Halloween was the time to share and mate.

Imperfections tabulated: Susan remained sexy. The skirt stopped four inches above her knees. The top revealed her midriff—meaning she’d spend the entire night on her feet—and exposed a goodly sum of cleavage from the center of a built-in bra. The latest design change put a single sleeve that snugged tight to her left arm, stopping at her elbow. It no longer passed for anything cavewoman-ish, it was now more a sexy Mrs. Leatherface, perhaps, Lady Leatherface.

“Lady Leatherface.” The alliteration made her grin.

The mask exhibited her honed skills like no other part of the outfit. Eight skinny digits stretched out from her temples. The edges followed her hairline, a carnation of dark and heavily stretched flesh bloomed at the forehead. Two clear and wide openings to reveal her mascaraed eyes below. Beneath, the second flesh dipped to touch her cheekbones. A leather strap held the mask in place above her ears.

Antsy to get out, eager to mingle in the skin suit, rub flesh to flesh, Susan ate a lonely chicken salad in front of the TV and dressed in all but the mask. Back-to-back crime dramas where police always get the bad guys and bad girls, eventually. Laughably unrealistic. Most police work seemed to be cops having the recorder ready when a criminal’s conscience kicked in.

Susan had no qualms about what she did, about what made her feel good. There was a time when guilt touched her the wrong way, but the thrill overtook all else. It pointed to something in her genetic makeup. People can’t choose what they love.

After Ice-T busted a hebephile—though all the characters referred to him as a pedophile—she flipped through the thirty-nine channels of her basic cable package. The clock was against her once again and she opened her laptop to scroll through titles on Netflix. Bored and impatient as she was, it felt good to be upstairs in her suit. The suit imparted a sense of beauty and wholeness not offered by any other facet of her existence. Her hands ran almost constantly over the seams and swatches.

Through the typical lists, she began searching and scrolling based on single letter queries. Her eyes bounced constantly to the little numbers in the corner of her screen.

Finally.

Nine o’clock.

Late enough, she took a bus, gathered curious and appreciative glances from the costumed men and women: Super-men, Bat-men, sexy nurses, sexy tennis pros. Flags out and soaring, she smiled, holding a post tight to her chest.

Onto the subway followed by another bus, she rode toward her predetermined choice. Every year she danced at a different club, it kept the experience from feeling wasteful or monotonous. Revisiting clubs meant at any moment someone might figure her out, might catch her wearing something recognizable as human. Not that the fear of potential capture and punishment did not thrill her. It did.

Club Lullaby had a line.

This was fine. This was good.

The rules were different on Halloween. Sexy took a secondary burner in the bouncer’s eye, if only slightly. Originality first, followed closely by sexy. This allowed Susan to sidestep most of the waiting faces. A man whistled at her.

—

Jason Graham fought a dreary, hopeless inner battle for too long.

Time had come to live anew. Halloween was something he did in his college years, before the marriage, before the joint funeral. He’d had fun back then and he wanted that part of life again, finally.

Three years, two months, and nine days earlier, he was at his station at the battery plant, watching the men and women solder beads, sort imperfect from perfect, pile double As, and load clear hardened plastic wrappers into the enormous packaging machine.

A telephone rang in an office behind the assembly line. The manager fetched Jason. He picked up the receiver from the cluttered desk. The boss sat across the desk with wide doe eyes, all earnest and worried.

“Jason Graham here.”

The voice on the other end was stern, female, all business. “Sir, there’s been an accident.”

Shopping. His wife and the twins were on their first outing since coming home from the hospital.

“How bad?”

“Sir, please come down to—”

“Dammit, how bad!”

“I’m sorry.” The tone changed and Jason heard tears in her words. When a nurse cried on duty, while speaking to a stranger about strangers, there’s nothing good coming.

“Is it the twins?”

“University Hospital, please, the doctor—”

“My wife?”

“Sir.”

“The twins and my wife?”

“I’m sorry.”

That was it. His life ended as he knew it. There was enough life insurance that he could take some time. Some time stretched into three years, alone, brooding in the house that had lost its chance to be a home.

Halloween. The notion of it was silly, but he’d felt good a week ago and every day since. One day he went to the movies, another day he went fishing, another day he went ice skating, bowling, clothes shopping, ate at a four-star joint with names on the menu that read like hieroglyphics. Life was suddenly an option. It was as if a switch flipped and gave him permission to exist outside the melancholy of grief.

The plant had closed down, but his former boss had a new job at Dick’s Sporting Goods—a regional manager. The man explained that the location twenty-one minutes down the highway from Jason’s home had an opening for assistant manager and it sure would be nice to see Jason again, give him the rundown of this cool job and cool work environment, not to mention competitive wages, good benefits, and two weeks of paid vacation per year for the managerial level employees.

Jason said he’d like that. He was on a zephyr of good, pulling away from grey thunderheads.

The second interview, the important one with two of the higher-ups, went well enough that they offered him the job, starting November third. That was it, if he wanted to do something unusual, he had to do it right away.

On the morning of Halloween, Jason awoke and spoke to his ceiling. He didn’t believe or disbelieve in a god, not really, not since that horrible day, but it felt good to tell the Man Upstairs, if he did exist, that things were going to be all right. After that, Jason got dressed, hopped in his car, drove nine minutes, stopped at the wrought iron gates of the Lion Rest Cemetery, walked through, and then talked to the dirt, saying much the same he had to his ceiling. Adding, “It hurt so bad, but I’m going to live my life. I’m finally going to live again. I love you, but it’s time.”

No tears fell and a smile stretched his face.

Halloween, why not?

The life insurance was nine hundred grand. He had six hundred remaining and a paid off split-level and a paid off Toyota. He had plenty of extra cash to blow on a $700 Goblin King outfit. Another forty for the artist in the back of the store to do his eye makeup.

7:15 PM.

Jason wheeled around the city, bending slightly to keep his high wig from flattening against the car’s ceiling. Club Lullaby was far enough out of the way that he thought he might be able to sneak in despite his rustiness and his being on the wrong side of thirty.

The club remained closed until 9:00 PM, so Jason went to a Tim Hortons, ordered forty Timbits and a large coffee from the drive thru. He sat and ate, drinking and waving at everyone who gave him a thumbs-up or a raised fist for what they saw of his outfit through the windshield. Small children walked by in numerous shades of imagination. He saw the twins in them. Three was old enough, well maybe not quite. In the past, thoughts of where they’d be now had crippled him. He’d eyed the box-cutting knife with the razor’s edge. Belts and ropes became considerations. There was a container of sleeping pills under the bathroom sink. Trains rolled on the tracks behind his home every few hours, it would be so easy to time the step.

Nothing like that came up and he waved to parents who waved at him, ‘seventies and ‘eighties babies who loved to Magic Dance. Halloween was good. Life was good.

“I wanna live!” He laughed and laughed until it was time to go.

—

The music thumped pop and hip-hop all night. The majority of the patrons were people a bit older than the usual dancehall scene. It was the kind of club that had Prince and Vanilla Ice tracks on the ready. Younger people were there, all mingling with folks older than they were. Twenty-something men seeking cougars. Twenty-something women seeking a Daddy Warbucks.

Susan loved it. She ignored the young men as they were hardly ever worth the trouble. They wanted ten minutes of your time and a story to tell and high fives to slap around later. Easy enough, she found others like her in age and mind, releasing their inner selves. Hips and breasts pressed, she pulsated with them, against them. Hours passed, drinks drained, the secondary urge of the celebration began to bubble.

Halloween was a night to take someone home and use them up.

Through the darkness, beams of light flashed over the other sweaty bodies rubbing together. Men and women grinded against Susan as she bounced back onto the floor after downing a sixth whiskey sour. She danced against everyone willing.

One man kissed her neck.

A woman caressed her hip and thigh.

Compliments all, but not what she wanted, not what she needed. She was particular about who came into her home. She had to be, she only needed one all year.

She danced and seeped sweat into that second skin. These drips transferred to so many unsuspecting patrons. God, it felt good to spread the beautiful truth unbeknownst, unacknowledged, unnoticed. People rubbed and touched, told her how fantastic the leather was and asked her questions unfit to ask anywhere but on the dancefloor:

“Are you into BDSM?”

“Do you need a slave?”

“I want to taste your skin under that skin, will you let me?”

Halloween, a time for coming together, for being part of the crowd. These people, open and lurid and loud, she had to pick someone and soon. Last call was an hour gone.

A special set of eyes had followed her. Unnatural, sure, but it had her attention nonetheless. As if proving destiny’s call, David Bowie’s Underground came through the speakers as the lights began glowing brighter, telling those still kicking around it was time to pair up and head for home, or to another party.

That man stared and she stared back. He was unmoving. The initiative was hers. His makeup made those blue eyes pop. She crossed the floor, feeling heavyweight nostalgia. Damned if she hadn’t grown up with a thing for Jareth and Bowie alike. Susan recognized this man not for who he was or who he’d come dressed as, but for what he offered, what he could do for her.

His flesh, she wanted it on her, in her.

She draped her body over his and they danced at half the speed of the track. Pelvis grinding pelvis. She licked his neck and ear. He licked her neck, tongue running over the leather at her shoulders. His tongue on her true skin made her shudder.

“My house or yours?” he whispered.

In a cab, his hand roved between her thighs while his tongue filled her mouth. Her right hand held balance while her left hand stroked a slow-boiling rocket beneath the stretchy waistline of his pants and underwear. His flesh was smooth. His flesh was perfect.

The cabbie shook his head, he moved often, as if uncomfortable in his jeans while he awaited payment. Certainly he’d had many shows in the backs of his cabs over the years, but the body reacts as it does when excitement presents itself.

Susan paid for the ride despite her date’s protestations.

Susan laughed at how he squirmed against the codpiece built into his spandex pants as he walked toward her home. The neighborhood was dead, all the Halloween lights and lantern flames had gone dark.

Inside. He asked for a drink and Susan said, “How about you take off the boots, pants, and blouse, but keep the wig on.”

The man seemed nervous, even sad or trepidatious. Perhaps coming home with a woman was new. She didn’t need a story, she needed a lover, someone’s skin to rake over and pair with. So Susan knelt and put him at ease and full attention simultaneously as she lowered his pants and ran her tongue over him. Within a minute, they were in her bedroom. Anything he felt, those unspoken stories that had weighed upon him, were no longer a concern.

The sex was superb. It usually was on Halloween. It paid to be picky.

Susan wore her skin suit during the act and the man accepted this. He freed her breasts, his sloppy tongue worked over her skin and the patchwork of flesh she’d farmed as he pumped and she pawed, legs spread.

This man, his skin was fantastic and burning. His skin was what she needed.

He came and she soared, riding the throbbing wave to her own completion. Chests rose and fell from the panting efforts. Susan ran fingers over the man’s abdomen. His name was Jason and he spoke little, mostly smiled. This man was a manager but couldn’t really explain his job. He tried to clarify more, get personal, and Susan pretended to listen, already thinking of the next step, onto the next swatch of skin.

She didn’t need to know anything about him. She didn’t care. It was best if she knew little to nothing. But it never hurt to be polite.

—

Before work the following morning, Susan fingered the note left by the supposed assistant manager of a Dick’s Sporting Goods, balled it, and tossed it away. A future date, a real date, was the suggestion. That romp was a Halloween thing and she had to get ready for next year.

Life was back to the grinding schedule. The folders were where she left them, on her desk with the 364-day life she led. Tired, yawning, stressing again over those cases, over the horrible actions of others. The abuse and neglect within those pages was enough to bring tears to surface and send them spilling.

A knock landed on her office door. It was Tracey. Tracey worked on the floor below at intake and addictions. She wore a sad, exhausted expression.

“Hey, Susan, I’ve got a girl out here. Eleven. Her parents died last night in a house fire, and she has no other relatives. Guess she came over from Iran two years ago. No paperwork done on her yet, but I’m—”

“I get ya.” Susan frowned as she pulled a fresh folder from a cabinet behind her. She turned her head up to see a tiny girl with beautiful smoky brown flesh step through the door.

“We good?” Tracey owed Susan about a million drinks or slices of pie or whatever the hell you did when a co-worker picked up the slack.

Then again, Susan owed Tracey more than Tracey would ever know.

“I’ve got it from here,” Susan said.

Tracey left and Susan looked at the girl. She was pretty, had huge brown eyes.

“What’s your name?”

The child remained silent. Her clothes were aged and faded. Thrift store fashion. But the girl had some flair, there was a pin on her shirt, a little green lizard, and then a barrette on her head.

“Come on, I won’t bite.”

“Reza,” the girl mumbled.

Susan reached excited fingers to touch flesh.

“Reza, that’s a pretty name.” Susan grinned. “You’re just a babe in the woods, huh? I’m a social worker. Do you know what that means?

The girl shook her head.

“I’m here to help. It means I’m a friend.”

The girl kept her eyes down, hands clenched. A broken child.

“Hey, have you ever seen a real fashion studio?”

At this, the tiny figure lifted her gaze, hopeful. A smile fought to play on her lips.

“I have a secret fashion studio that I’d love to show you. Do you want to see it?”

The girl nodded and bit her lower lip with oversized front teeth.

Susan rose from her desk and kneeled to look the girl in the eyes, ran hands over arms—so smooth, so impossibly fine, so undeniably fitting for the next swatch. She said, “You’re perfect,” and led the girl out of the office and to her car. They stopped at McDonald’s for Reza’s last meal.

XX