I first tried skin soup for lunch at an “American-Style” restaurant in a broken-down strip mall with faded signs and eight empty storefronts. It was a dare, and my friends and I have an understanding that we do not chicken out on dares. Besides, it wasn’t like it was actually skin, I thought. The waiter told me I was the first person to ever order it.

My dread stretched the wait to both sides of an hour. I dabbed sweat from my brow several times, though the day was cool. The waiter brought out hot sauce and a soup spoon. My face grew hotter. 

The soup consisted of a clear broth, a few slices of green onions, and what looked like skin floating in it. I took a spoonful of broth and green onion. My friends chided me for avoiding the skin, so I got a tiny bit of that in my spoon as well.

It. Was. Delicious. 

It tasted like the finest meats had mingled with rare spices with just the right zip and texture from the green onions. I sucked that bowl dry so fast I didn’t notice all my friends staring at me.

“Umm,” I said, and then burped. “It was pretty good.”

“You just ate skin, man,” said Bill.

I looked at the empty bowl in front of me. “Nah, it was just something that looked like skin.”

This seemed to mollify most of my friends, but Bill persisted. “There was hair on some, man. Like, human leg hair.”

With no soup left to prove one way or the other, it was easy to laugh at Bill and write the soup off as a fun theme dish, and not something that was about to change my life. Because that soup was good. I could still taste it on my lips.

That night, a craving started to claw its way into my brain. Even though I had polished off a bowl for lunch, it was all I wanted for dinner. No matter how much I ate, I still hungered for more skin soup. My sleep that night was restless, and every time I feel asleep, I tasted skin soup.

The next day I was back at that restaurant for lunch, and then dinner. Two bowls a day seemed to sate my hunger for skin, and I went there for lunch and dinner every day for three months. Then, one day, the restaurant was gone. They had taken the sign down and boarded up the windows. I pounded on the door until a man answered. He was taller than seemed strictly natural.

“What? We’re closed,” he said.

“Soup?” I probably sounded like a crazy person. “Skin soup? For uh, lunch?”

“Hey, man, this place is closed. There’s no soup back here.” 

I was momentarily distracted by the smell of rotten eggs on him, and he slammed the door shut in my face.

I believed him that they had no soup back there, but not totally. I blew off work the rest of that day and huddled behind a dumpster, watching the rear entrance to the restaurant and waiting for everyone to leave. Finally, when the last person had left the restaurant and driven off, I stood from my hiding place. I tried the door, but it must have locked automatically. Looking around, I saw a pretty big chunk of concrete with rebar in it by the dumpster. I hefted it up and brought it down on the handle, smashing it clean off. The door swung open, and I ducked inside. 

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the shuttered restaurant, and then I began to search the shelves for ingredients, or, more specifically, the one ingredient that I craved beyond all else in the world. The shelves had been mostly emptied. Just a few mostly empty boxes and jars remained. The walk-in refrigerator was completely bare. I shouted in frustration and sat down. With a moment to finally just breathe, I was aware that my hand hurt, and I looked down. I had ripped it open on the rebar, and blood dripped to the floor from my palm, where I had shredded my skin. 

I stared at my shredded skin for a minute as the blood oozed from my hand. Before I was even completely aware of what I was doing, I had taken a tentative nibble, tasted the thing that my body had been craving all day, and ripped bits of skin off with my mouth, barely chewing them before I sucked them down my greedy gullet.

I would have probably eaten the skin off my right hand right then and there if I hadn’t heard shouting from below. My heart sped up a million miles an hour. Someone was in the restaurant with me. Had they heard me? I stayed as still and as silent as I could. 

Then I heard it again. “Help!” It had come from below me. 

I searched the floor of the kitchen until I found a hatch under a rubber mat. I pulled it back, revealing a steep metal staircase into what I can only describe as a cave. It was rough-hewn rock, dark, and about fifteen feet across in any direction. I saw a skeleton hanging by chains from the ceiling. I hoped it was a prop. I crept nearer the skeleton, though each step filled me with raw dread. I raised a hand and placed it upon the shoulder. Its head lolled back and looked at me with piercing blue eyes. What I had thought was a skeleton in the darkness was a man, his skin peeled utterly from his body, every inch of him red except the blue of his eyes. My vision narrowed to a pinpoint and I felt a dull thudding in my ears. 

“Help me,” he moaned.

I was frozen. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t even know where to begin. I cast my gaze around the room for something to get him down, or to wrap his ragged, wet flesh in, and saw something behind him. I took a few steps closer. As my eyes adjusted more to the darkness, I saw a pile of bodies behind him, each corpse wholly peeled. I passed out then, and had a series of strange dreams featuring blue eyes and greasy skin. 

I woke up tied, gagged, and blindfolded, being bounced around the inside of some sort of truck or van. I tried to pay attention to any turns the vehicle took, but I wasn’t sure how long we’d been on the road already, and I soon lost track anyway. I struggled against my bindings, but I was tied securely. Eventually, I fell asleep. I woke up and slept a few more times before I finally woke up without a blindfold, though still gagged and tied and naked, and suspended from a ceiling with chains. Directly underneath me, a hole had been carved in the rock and it disappeared into darkness. 

Despite the warmth of the room, I felt my body go cold and clammy. The walls around me were carved out of rock and skinless bodies had been piled in the corner. One of the bodies stared at me with blue eyes. I thought for a moment that I was still in the same basement, but the stairs were different and the walls were different. 

I waited for hours. When I finally realized I could no longer hold my need to relieve myself, I used the hole under me. As the smell of my excrement faded from the room, I was flooded with the stench of rotten eggs. 

Finally, I heard a hatch above me open. A large man with a coarse black beard and butcher’s apron climbed down the stairs with a pail. He moved up to me without speaking or making eye contact and yanked the gag from my mouth. I tried to talk, but before I could get my mouth working again, the man had pried apart my lips and shoved a funnel between my teeth. He worked it halfway down my throat before he lifted the bucket above my head, and I watched as he began pouring its gray ooze into the funnel. I felt it slide down my throat. It tasted and felt like someone had thrown some fish or frogs or both in a blender. 

He poured until I felt my belly fill with it and he kept going until it was coming back up out of my throat. When he pulled away the funnel, I spasmed, trying to get as much of the vile substance from my body as I could, but he roughly secured the gag back over my mouth. I choked down what was left in my mouth. I regurgitated some and had to choke it back down several times. The  threw the funnel into the bucket, climbed back up the ladder, and slammed the hatch shut. He had done all of this without speaking or looking directly at me.

Some time after he left, an hour or two probably, I started to notice the walls shifting as if they were breathing around me. I’m pretty sure the slop I ate was laced with LSD or mushrooms or something. I hung there in the dark, sulfurous cave, and I laughed. I laughed at the pathetic, hopeless situation I had found myself in and laughed at the way the room matched the pace of my breathing. I laughed as hard as I could laugh through the gag, and I never laughed again. 

At some point in the middle of all this, the man opened the hatch and came down the ladder with a short, curved knife. I watched him approach and kneel before me and stick the knife into my leg by the side of my knee and draw it down slowly to my ankle. My laughs turned into muffled screams, but the man kept a steady, deliberate pace. He drew the blade around my ankle and around my knee, then placed the blade on the ground, put his fingers into the groove he had carved into my leg and firmly pulled. My eyes went wide as I watched him pull the skin in a clean sheet from the lower half of my leg, and then I thankfully lost consciousness.

I only woke up again when he the Butcher was coming down the stairs to force more of the horrible gray substance down my throat. This time, the effect of whatever the slop contained was one of dysphoria and despair. The bodies in the corner rose up to smother me with their putrid masses; the raw flesh of my leg was covered in crawling maggots; the hole below me was filled with heat and fire, and I watched a short and hairy man climb out of the hole and caress my feet and dance around the room playing discordant tones on an ebon flute, his pale pink skin covered in grease and blood and excrement.

I cried and screamed and tried to shut my eyes, but every time I shut my eyes I saw even more horrific and terrible visions: an army of demons raised up from below and enslaving the human race; the oceans boiled, and the land burned, and our sun blocked out by a black star that burned the world with its ghastly light. None of these visions abated in the slightest as the man came down and removed the skin from the rest of my leg.

That hole in the ground became my world, the visions and the nightmares interrupted only by the forced feedings and the flayings. My only rays of hope were that I would die or that I would run out of skin for the Butcher to harvest. But by the time the man had worked the skin off my other leg, my feet, my torso, my arms and neck and shoulders and back, my skin had grown back where he had started. Flayed skin doesn’t usually regrow, so I can only assume something in the ooze was causing it to happen. The skin itched as it grew back

This went on for a long time. I grew a beard partway down my chest. When it got in the way, the Butcher hacked it off with the same knife he used to skin me. Through the endless nightmare, the cutting of my beard because the surest way I could mark the progress of time, but soon I lost count of even that.

One day, the flesh from my left hand came loose and slipped off like a glove, and my hand slipped from its restraints. Had I not been so heavily drugged, I am not sure I could have accomplished what I did next. I reached with what was left of my hand, mostly bone, and forced it into the lock securing my right hand. I fiddled with it until the lock fell to the ground, and I could move freely.

I stumbled up the ladder. I put my shoulder to the hatch above and pushed. I felt my shoulder slide its skinless flesh across the surface and moaned into my gag as I kept pushing. It opened into a an unfamiliar kitchen in a an unfamiliar restaurant. Luckily, it was dark and empty, and I managed to stumble through the front door into a parking lot. 

The stars! How I missed the stars. I wept at the sight and fell to my skinless knees. I was only vaguely aware of the sounds of people from a nearby restaurant rushing over to me, asking if I was alright, calling an ambulance. I spent a long time at the hospital receiving skin grafts and recovering and was released with a bill for more than I would ever make in my life. 

I found a small apartment in the city and got a job pushing files in an office. I never told anyone about my time in the hole. I was too ashamed. Of why I went down in that hole the first time, and my addiction to skin soup, and the fact that as soon as I could, I picked up some green onions and bones for broth, went home, and cut off a small patch of skin from my inner elbow and made myself a home-cooked bowl of skin soup.

I was in that hole for twelve years, but centuries passed for me. I’d say I’ve adjust pretty well considering what happened to me, with two exceptions: I eat skin soup for every meal, and when I sleep, I dream of a blasted land, ruled by demons, bathed in the sick light of a black star.