The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [101]
The scene switched to a filmed ad for a marital aid and abruptly ended.
The poodle squinted her eyes two seconds before Mr. Gumb hugged her tight.
“Oh, Precious. Come here to Mommy. Mommy's gonna be so beautiful.”
Much to do, much to do, much to do to get ready for tomorrow.
He could never hear it from the kitchen even at the top of its voice, thank goodness, but he could hear it on the stairs as he went down to the basement. He had hoped it would be quiet and asleep. The poodle, riding beneath his arm, growled back at the sounds from the pit.
“You've been raised better than that,” he said into the fur on the back of her head.
The oubliette room is through a door to the left at the bottom of the stairs. He didn't spare it a glance, nor did he listen to the words from the pit--- as far as he was concerned, they bore not the slightest resemblance to English.
Mr. Gumb turned right into the workroom, put the poodle down and turned on the lights. A few moths fluttered and lit harmlessly on the wire mesh covering the ceiling lights.
Mr. Gumb was meticulous in the workroom. He al?ways mixed his fresh solutions in stainless steel, never in aluminum.
He had learned to do everything well ahead of time. As he worked he admonished himself:
You have to be orderly, you have to be precise, you have to be expeditious, because the problems are for?midable.
The human skin is heavy--- sixteen to eighteen per?cent of body weight--- and slippery. An entire hide is hard to handle and easy to drop when it's still wet. Time is important too; skin begins to shrink immedi?ately after it has been harvested, most notably from young adults, whose skin is tightest to begin with.
Add to that the fact that the skin is not perfectly elastic, even in the young. If you stretch it, it never regains its original proportions. Stitch something per?fectly smooth, then pull it too hard over a tailor's ham, and it bulges and puckers. Sitting at the machine and crying your eyes out won't remove one pucker. Then there are the cleavage lines, and you'd better know where they are, Skin doesn't stretch the same amount in all directions before the collagen bundles deform and the fibers tear; pull the wrong way, and you get a stretch mark.
Green material is simply impossible to work with. Much experimentation went into this, along with much heartbreak, before Mr. Gumb got it right.
In the end he found the old ways were best. His procedures were these: First he soaked his items in the aquariums, in vegetable extracts developed by the Na?tive Americans--- allnatural substances that contain no mineral salts whatsoever. Then he used the method that produced the matchless buttersoft buckskin of the New World--- classic brain tanning. The Native Americans believed that each animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. Mr. Gumb knew that this was not true and long ago had quit trying it, even with the largestbrained primate. He had a freezer full of beef brains now, so he never ran short.
The problems of processing the material he could manage; practice had made him near perfect.
Difficult structural problems remained, but he was especially well qualified to solve them, too.
The workroom opened into a basement corridor leading to a disused bath where Mr. Gumb stored his hoisting tackle and his timepiece, and on to the studio and the vast black warren beyond.
He opened his studio door to brilliant light--- flood?lights and incandescent tubes, colorcorrected to day?light, were fastened to ceiling beams. Mannequins posed on a raised floor of pickled oak. All were partly clad, some in leather and some in muslin patterns for leather garments. Eight mannequins were doubled in the two mirrored walls--- good plate mirror too, not tiles. A makeup table held