Gary McMahon

IN THE SKIN

Dedicated to Dennis Etchison

and Ramsey Campbell,

who led a young reader into

The Dark Country,

and keep him there still,

Needing Ghosts…

ONE

All Alone Together

1

The timing is unfortunate.

Just two weeks after we move into the new house I am called away on business. New York. The Big Apple. Across The Pond. Adi is aghast when I agree to go; she fails to see why a succession of dull business meetings is more urgent than helping to settle my family into the new place. I appreciate her opinion, but the way she goes about communicating it seems pointlessly selfish.

Adi fails to see a lot of things, and can never quite grasp the importance of my job in the grand scheme of life. Sometimes I’m sure she believes I pull money out of the air, like dead leaves falling from an autumn tree.

I watch her as she crosses the small living room and stands by the open window. Pale light scars her face with dull yellow abrasions, making her features look sharper than they actually are. She winces as the sunlight catches her in the eyes, screwing up her face like a child demonstrating distaste. I swallow hard, counting to ten. Adi is… fragile. The pills she’s been prescribed are messing with her head, making her seem vague and disconnected and slightly less than real. I don’t think she has been real for a long time, and my own reality shifts constantly, like a series of slides overlaid on a picture board, each one depicting a slightly different version of the same scene.

“This is an important time in Max’s life,” she tells me, still looking through the glass, her eyes narrow and unfocused, unable to lock onto anything for longer than a few seconds at a time. As if she’s gazing at ghosts. “He’s three-and-a-half, just beginning to form his proper personality. His character is peeking through the tangle of babyish needs.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

This is not a lie: I am almost painfully aware of how, at Max’s age, a few days away from him can feel like a week. A week can feel like a month. The changes a child undergoes in a limited period of time during these early formative years are nothing short of phenomenal, as if they are discarding beta versions of the final product.

“When do you leave?”

I pause before answering; I know how much it will hurt her, how she’ll feel it like a knife between the ribs. “Tomorrow night.”

Adi bows her head, clenches her fists, making the already prominent veins on her skinny forearms bulge. I almost expect her to scream, but she doesn’t. She just cries, silently, and shakes her tousled head as if someone has died and no one told her until now, when it’s far too late to matter.

“I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to Max…and to you.”

At last she turns her head, looks me directly in the eye. Her irises are tiny, like little black dots drawn on the front of a vast white mask: I can see things moving in there but I can’t make out what they are. Black bugs. Insects. Sorrow. Regret. A bunch of stuff like that.

“I know you will.”

I have no response. I can’t even fake one. So I smile, but the expression hangs off my lips like a flap of loose flesh from an open wound. It’s about as convincing as a deal made in a dark room between naked strangers: the promises we make each other when our relationship is new and the whole wide world stretches before us.

But Adi seems calmer here, in the country. The city was bad for her, especially after the attack. She is afraid of empty urban spaces; tube stations bring her out in a cold sweat; underground car parks drive her to distraction. She jumps at the arterial spray of darkness on a concrete wall when night falls, the way city shadows are all spikes and sharp edges. The rigorous regime of exercise she puts her body through at the gym is designed to anneal her to further physical harm: to make her capable of fighting off any assailant. Sometimes she frightens me, but most of the time she simply leaves me cold.

Not long after my wife has gone upstairs, I pour myself a whisky. The room is growing dark; late afternoon is turning into early evening and the nightbirds are waking in the garden, singing their odd discordant songs — or am I the only one who finds no apparent tune in their idle whistling? I close the curtains and sit in an armchair, sipping at my drink and trying not to weep. It’s all becoming too much to bear.

Something brushes against the outside of the main window, perhaps a bird or a bat taking to the air. I think about going to see what might have caused the noise but can’t seem to move my legs. So I sit in the chair and I drink, listening to Adi as she sings softly to Max, bathing him in the undecorated bathroom — another chore I’ll put off for months, making increasingly weak excuses not to finish the job until Adi finally stops reminding me. She sounds like one of those birds: shrill and alien to my ears.

He laughs lightly, my son. His knee or elbow knocks gently against the side of the tub and makes a dull, loud sound which echoes strangely down the stairwell, like a recording turned up too loud. He laughs again, but this time it seems closer to tears.

My heart is a stone lodged inside my chest, pressing against the bones and the gristle, grinding into my ribcage and flaking away little calcium deposits to infect my bloodstream. The pain is beloved to me, like a forced kiss, and I close my eyes to savour it. I am alive and I hurt: the love that I have for my family causes me an exquisite agony.

The sensation subsides; my heartbeat returns to normal. Once again there is a muscle beating in my chest, shifting blood around my system and helping to keep me alive and in full working order, like a busy little machine chugging away towards extinction.

I drink more whisky. I cannot open my eyes, so I stare backwards, into the dark that lives inside me, under the skin, and try to identify patterns in the void.

2

I’m on the plane before I know it, staring out at the runway at JFK. I have no recollection of the flight, nor can I remember saying goodbye to Adi and Max. They are just an absence, an open wound at my centre, sucking away all feeling. But they must have waved me off, like a good little nuclear family. Surely they wouldn’t let me go without wishing me a safe journey.

I check through customs without incident and wait for my luggage to come around on the slow-moving carousel. There are too many bags to count, and as more are added to the shifting procession, I begin to fear I’ll be stuck here forever, watching the conveyor belt go round and round, but never quite able to pick up my belongings.

A huge plaid bag passes me for the second time, split down one side and with its insides bulging out. The entire package is wrapped in strips and bandages of transparent plastic — baggage control must have opened it and then failed to properly seal it up. There is a strong smell of rotten fish in the air, and as the bag draws level with me, I see something with an open mouth and black squinty eyes squirming eagerly through the rent, groping towards me. When I look again the movement has stopped; the creature is no longer there.

I wait for the bag to come around again, intent on solving the mystery, but it doesn’t. Someone must have picked it up, yet I see nobody dragging its awkward bulk away from the carousel. The smell of dead fish hangs in the air like a strange perfume, sticking in the back of my throat.

My bag finally trundles towards me. I grab it and head for Arrivals, relieved that I can escape the oppressive confines of the waiting room.

There’s a well-groomed man in a tight-fitting blue suit waiting for me when I emerge into the terminal. He is holding up a little cardboard placard with INSCENT written on it in lengthy strokes. It is the name of the company I work for; we manufacture body scents and other toiletry products. I am in charge of foreign sales.

I approach the man with my hand held up in the air. He smiles. Nods his head and blinks his large, wet brown eyes. Turns about-face, lickety-split, and leads me outside to a waiting limo. He does not speak to me during the journey, which unnerves me more than it should; even when I attempt to start a conversation, he nods or grunts or simply stares straight ahead through the windscreen. When we reach the hotel I thank him as he hands me my bags, but still he does not speak: he smiles, nods, and climbs back inside the car. Perhaps he is mute; I never find out because I never see him again. His eyes were huge, like fisheye lenses on a camera. Logging every tiny detail; missing nothing.

It is my first time in New York — I usually send a delegate; one of my small Foreign Sales team — and the heady atmosphere disturbs me. Everyone is rushing to be somewhere with no time for pause. Unknown destinations loom on imaginary horizons, forever out of sight.

The plastic young woman who checks me into my room shows me a smile that looks painted onto her ghastly too-smooth face. Her eyes glitter, but not with anything approaching vitality. She hands me a key and I am afraid to touch her perfect fingers. They are too long, too thin, and the nails are utterly transparent, slips of rigid polythene wedged into the fingertips.

My room is on the fifth floor; it is large and there are fresh flowers on the bed, scattered across the clean white bed linen. The pillows are fluffed and I find a packet of condoms tucked discreetly into the top of the sheets, under the immaculate fold. I place them in a bedside drawer and try to forget about them. I haven’t had sex in months, perhaps even as long as a year. Adi’s newly-honed body has become a no-go zone, and whenever I approach her I feel like a trespasser.

I look at the clock and am surprised to find that it is just 10:30am. Adjusting my wristwatch to local time, I wonder what to do with the rest of my day. My first meeting is not until tomorrow. I lied to my wife, just to get away a day early. I could easily have sent one of my able sales staff, but I decided to come here personally. There was no need for this kind of special attention; this is just another business trip, and the meetings involve yet another group of medium-sized U.S. retailers with wet smiles and eager handshakes.

I wince at the pressure of the truth: I wanted to be away from my wife.

Moving to the side of the bed, I pick up the telephone. The receiver is warm in my hands, as if someone has just put it down. Only when I sit do I notice the bedclothes are slightly creased, like a body has just vacated the space. The air smells of jasmine but my nostrils still hold the repugnant tang of fish. I can hear no dial tone, only dead air.

I replace the receiver in its cradle and put my head in my hands, but I do not cry. I cannot summon a single tear. There is no reason to weep, but I feel as if I should, even if it is nothing more than an act, an illusion. It would at least be something to fill the time.

When at last I am able to move again, it is almost noon.

I take a long shower but do not look at my naked body in the bathroom mirror. I examine my testicles for lumps with my eyes closed. They feel too soft, like uncooked dough balls. Resisting the urge to vomit, I put on my casual clothes and then I leave the room.

It is now 1:30pm; time has once more become fluid. I am hungry but unsure whether I can actually stomach solid food.

When I leave the room it feels as if someone is still in there, hiding, waiting until I am gone before emerging from under the bed or behind the curtains.

I eat alone in the hotel restaurant and drink several large whiskies with my club sandwich. The waiters eye me with suspicion, hovering at my side like giant bluebottle flies. The food tastes of nothing in my mouth, like dust. Like plastic. Like the rumour of sustenance. I imagine that I am eating air.

After lunch I drift into the hotel bar. Business is slow this late in the afternoon, catching the lull between the daytime and evening crowds. A couple of men in suits talk animatedly in one corner. An old man in cream slacks and a plain black T-shirt eats stuffed green olives from a white bowl at the end of the long mahogany bar, his hand pulling out two or three at a time. A striking older woman looks dressed for a party — she is wearing the classic little black dress, narrow stilettos, those black stockings with the seam that describes a line along the length of the calf and the back of the thigh. Her sun-kissed blonde hair is long but pulled up into a kind of billowy nest on top of her head. Her lips are painted red and there is a subtle layer of make-up dusted around her pale blue eyes, doing its best to hide the shallow wrinkles carved into her skin.

I move to the bar and order another whisky. My head is spinning; I am drunk already.

The barman smiles at me and I return his gesture. He scratches his head and then turns away, watching me in the shiny glass tiles covering the back wall, creating a mirror-mosaic.

Someone slides onto the stool next to me. It is the woman in the black dress. She crosses her legs and I hear the whisper of silk on silk.

“Buy a lonely girl a drink?” her voice is deep, almost husky, and slightly masculine. She licks her lips after every second word, her pointed tongue poking out at me as if testing the atmosphere in the room, or tasting me.

“What’ll you have?”

“Vodka. Ice.”

I nod at the barman, who has already picked up a glass. He knows the score: the two of them exchange a brief glance and I realise that I am being set up, but I don’t care. I am not concerned. The woman is beautiful. She might help me get rid of the headache that eats my brain from the inside; she might make me forget myself for a while.

“What’s your name?

“Dan. I’m here on business.”

“Aren’t they all?” she asks, and laughs. Her teeth are pointed and very white. I imagine that she is a vampire and I am confused to discover I rather like the idea of being bled dry.

“You?” I point at her with a nod of my head and attempt to take another sip of whisky, but my glass is empty. Another one appears in front of me, courtesy of the friendly barman pimp.

“My name… my name is Destiny.” She laughs again, and I do too, but I’m not quite sure why. Our laughter has the shrill, brittle quality of a scream.

Minutes or hours later, we are upstairs in my room. There is a sheaf of bank notes on the bed and she is taking off her clothes with the bored, practiced air of a stripper. The air is dusty; the lights are turned off. Her chest is blatantly prosthetic; I can see the white surgery scars along the underside of those weirdly rigid breasts. She has a lean, muscular build, as if she works out a lot, and a deep fake tan. I am suddenly ashamed of my small beer belly and my skinny white arms and legs.

“Come on, baby. I’ll get you in the mood.” Her voice has changed, become less sultry, and taken on a higher pitch. I notice for the first time that she has a Brooklyn accent. Everything about this scenario is false, and I wonder if it is just part of a long, weird dream.

In another beat I am lying naked on the bed, staring down between my legs. Her hand works like a piston, pumping the flesh machine. Her head goes down and her lips feel cold against the sides of my slow-rising cock; when she lifts her head again I see that she has rolled on a condom with her teeth. The sheer professionalism of the procedure makes me go soft again, but she teases me back into action with her spiny fingers.

I ride her with all the passion of a man working at a job he doesn’t care for, wishing that I wasn’t here, terrified that if I don’t finish quickly she may stay forever. I fake an orgasm and roll off her, removing the empty condom and sliding it beneath the rumpled sheets.

I lie on my front and stare at the headboard, not wanting to turn and face her. A cold draft of air wafts across my bare buttocks. I can hear her getting dressed; if I pretend to be dozing she might leave in silence

No such luck: she speaks before heading for the door. “Thanks, doll. You were great.” The words hold the same amount of feeling as the fucking. The door eases shut and she is no longer there. Her absence makes more sense than her presence ever did. She was only here so that she might go away.

The thought confuses me.

I crawl into bed and pull the sheets up over my eyes, willing blackness to enter me and take me down, then feel afraid in case it does. When at last it comes for me, I smile. Then I know nothing at all. Darkness crawls through the windows and up onto the bed, but I am too numb to fight it so it gains entry with ease.

* * *

I miss the meeting the following day. A few hasty phone calls sort out the situation and I am soon sitting across a table from a fat man with a tiny pointy beard glued to the tip of his chin. He laughs at everything I say, forcing big bellowing noises up from the bottom of his gargantuan stomach. His shirt buttons are straining at the pressure exerted by his mighty physique and he smells of old bacon fat.

Similar meetings with facsimiles of this man take up most of the rest of the week. In the afternoons these clients, or their bright and pretty female assistants, take me to tourist traps that I recognise from countless movies. This just makes me feel as if I am an extra in a sequel to a film I’ve never even seen.

Grand Central Station. (The Untouchables)

Central Park. (When Harry Met Sally)

The Statue of Liberty. (Planet of the Apes)

The Empire State Building. (King Kong)

The site of the planned memorial, Ground Zero, at the foot of the tragic Twin Towers. (This will undoubtedly feature in a hundred movies not yet made.)

9/11. I remember watching the planes hit on my computer screen at work. The office was hushed, my colleagues awed into an uneasy silence by the drama and sense of occasion. The water cooler bubbled. A pencil rolled off a desk and hit the floor. Someone began to cry, muffling the sobs with their hands. Even the traffic sounds outside the plate glass windows were muted. I fail to connect the solemn construction sight before me with the insane chain of events I witnessed that day. Instead of a sense of loss and futility at the waste of so many lives, I feel the urge for a hot dog from the vendor we passed on the street five minutes ago. I wonder if they taste better than the ones we have England.

I suppose these sights are meant to impress me, to give me wonderful memories I can package up in ribbons and bright coloured paper to take home with me. But all they do is make me feel even more disconnected from the world around me, less substantial than ever.

One of the pretty assistants asks me out to a bar. She makes it clear that more than her company is on offer.  I decline her invitation, and walk quickly away when she asks if I’d like to meet her male friend, Enoch.

* * *

I spend my nights at the hotel bar, drinking alone and wondering if the alcohol is making anything better.

I catch sight of the blonde woman from my first day one more time, but she is with someone else. She doesn’t even acknowledge me; probably fails to recognise me. I sit and watch her through the mirrored tiles, studying her moves, caught up in her display. She is like an actress, and the old man beside her is a captive audience.

A laugh.

A toss of the head.

A hand on his knee.

Sweet and sour suggestions whispered in his ear.

When they leave the bar I follow them to the lift. I stand by a pot plant and wait for the lift doors to close, shutting them both up in a metal casket. Then I head for the stairs, racing the lift to its destination. I check every floor as I reach the separate levels, not even thinking about what I am doing or what it is I expect to achieve.

By the time I reach the fourth floor, my breath a hot jet of air burning my throat, sweat running down the cold skin of my back, I see them disappearing into a room at the end of the corridor. His hand is resting upon her firm arse. Her arm is pressed into his side, kneading flesh. Needing flesh.

I approach the door to the room and wait, listening for the sounds of their transaction: the crisp fluttering of notes, like wings against glass; a low murmuring, breathy gasps that hitch when they reach a certain point; empty laughter.

I press the palm of my hand against the door. The wood is laminated: yet another layer of a manufactured reality. I strain to feel something from inside the room, a stray emotion I can possibly latch onto, a wisp of meaning in the chaos around me. There is nothing. We are all alone together, and this is what we do to break up the tedium, the slow decay that ends in the grave: we reach out to each other but rarely ever touch, missing the connection by inches, miles, light years…

I step away from the door, certain that it moved in its frame: a gentle pulsing sensation against the skin of my palm, a sense of dreamlike motion I cannot explain but which moves me in a way beyond all my powers of description. I think of fake plastic trees and depleted rain forests; of extinct species and genetically enhanced and mechanically recovered meat products.

3

At the airport I toy with the idea of jetting off to somewhere I’ve never even heard of, and even wait in line to buy a ticket. But then I see sense and walk away from the line, looking for my check-in desk. Wherever I go, it will follow me. This sense of dread and despair and…expectation.

I browse magazine racks filled with pictures of faces that seem about to crack. Darkness presses in from the edges of my vision, a stuttering display of shadow.

The flight home is mercifully uneventful. I drink more alcohol and glare at the other passengers, warning them not to disturb me. I make a small girl cry simply by the power of my gaze. Everyone is faded, a copy of a copy of a person; everything is synthetic.

Nothing is real, even

my

self.

TWO

We Are It

1

“So you’re home?” The welcome is hardly inspiring: Adi’s eyes are glazed over, like frosted glass on a winter’s day. She barely even looks at me; she just wobbles her head in my general direction. Her hair is a mess; her face is paler than I have ever seen it.

“Have you been taking your medication?”

She giggles. Then she turns away, dragging her feet as she walks across the room. I put my suitcase down near the TV and follow her into the kitchen, throwing my coat across the back of the sofa and watching it slip away down the back, between cushion and wall. The sound it makes is like a wretched sigh: the slow puling of breath between chapped lips. The room seems to shift like a gauze sheet, giving me a puzzling glimpse of something else beneath.

“How are you feeling?”

She turns on me with her eyes blazing: glaring, burning, stripping me down to the bone.

“Please.”

Her smile is awful, as if a sword is cleaving slowly through the jawbone. “I’m fine. Everything is the same.”

I count to ten.

“Max. Where is he?”

“Upstairs. Playing with his toys. He likes to be left alone sometimes.”

I can’t figure out whether it’s a threat or an indirect instruction so I leave the room and climb the stairs, my fingertips dragging along the rough wallpaper, my feet sounding hollow against the stiff wooden treads.

Max’s room is located at the end of the hall. I lift the latch on the baby-gate and head that way, allowing the ghost of a smile to tickle my lips. I can hear him singing, his voice high and surprisingly tuneful. He is tapping something — a car? a train? — against the wall or the floorboards.

Maybe this is the dose of reality I need to nail me into the moment.

I push open the door and see him sitting there, under the window. He is turned away from me and I can only see him from behind, but he looks bigger, broader, than before I went away. I think again of how quickly kids develop in so small a time, and a sense of pride flushes through me, purging me of everything else — all the bad stuff that has recently been causing a blockage; all the darkness I can barely keep at bay.

“Hey, Max. How’s my best boy?”

Max stops playing with his cars. He lets them fall to the floor. His hands look huge; his fingers are like butcher-shop sausages. He makes podgy fists and climbs wearily to his feet, then turns to look at me.

His face is different, much wider and bonier than before. His eyes seem to have lightened a shade in my absence and his hair has grown alarmingly long. Max’s mouth is set into an unfamiliar smile: a slanted expression, sly and untrustworthy, too old for his face. More like a smirk.

“Max?” It sounds as if I am querying his identity, and this seems to amuse him.

“Hey, boy.”

He lumbers towards me on legs far chunkier than I can recall, dragging his left foot as if he has acquired a slight limp. He is taller than I remember; his clothes no longer quite fit.

“Daddy.” That word is the clincher. Max has never called me daddy in his life — always pa or dad or even da-da, when he was much younger. His voice is deeper, too, and comes from somewhere right inside him — a cold dark spot I’ve never even glimpsed until now.

“Daddy.”

I run from the room, feeling foolish and afraid. The kid closes the door behind me and for a moment I’m sure I hear him chuckle dryly.

I stop at the top of the stairs, caught between separate layers of the same existence. I can hear Adi shuffling about downstairs like a zombie, and the kid in the room has begun once more to clatter a plastic toy against the wall.

I stay where I am for a long time, unsure of what exactly is going on in the strange territory of my life.

2

Later, I’m standing outside wishing that I smoked, just so I might have something to do with my hands. I’m pacing up and down the garden under the nursery window. The light is off; my son is in bed. My son. I must remember that. He is my son, and not some tiny intruder who’s come to stay.

Kicking my heels, I notice something on the ground: a small round bundle. Greasy paper wrapped up in a ball and discarded in the grass. I bend down and pick it up, untying the slippery knot of wrappings. When I’m done I hold a piece of greaseproof burger paper in my hand, the name of the fast food outlet stencilled across it in bold letters.

Panic flares up inside me, then diminishes like a dying firework. I am afraid, yet the fear is almost sexual, like an illicit glance from a stranger in a rough downtown bar.

I walk over to the wheelybin and dispose of the grubby creased paper, slamming down the lid in an effort to dismiss it from my mind. It doesn’t work; the stain of dread is upon me, making my fingertips moist and tacky.

I see several cigarette butts on the paved area near the bins. I have never smoked and Adi gave up months ago, replacing one addiction with another — early morning runs, exhaustive sessions at the gym, rowing miles on machines and lifting pieces of iron in slow repetitive motions.

I scoop up the fag ends with a trowel I keep hidden in a flowerbed for the purpose of removing cat shit and tip them into the bin. Again the lid slams shut, but the unease remains.

Has someone been watching the house while I was away? The thought of alien eyes cataloguing my family’s movements chills me. I think of the prostitute back in New York City and pray this is not part of some elaborate blackmail plot.

When I look up at the nursery window, there is a stocky figure standing behind the glass, hands splayed flat across the pane, head tilted questioningly to one side. Watching me watching him. The figure ducks down behind the sill but a sharp afterimage remains burned in its place, a nuclear silhouette seared onto a bomb-site wall.

I stumble backwards and feel something give under my feet. Stooping down, I pause to examine a dead bird. Its neck is floppy, the head bobbing about when I pick up the tiny cadaver by one ruffled wing. The bird’s beak has been removed; a bloody nub of flesh is all that remains of its face, tiny black eyes stare from the mess, as flat as pinheads. As I look closer I make out a bald spot on the underside of its body, where feathers have been stripped away, perhaps with a blade. There is a mark on the pale pink flesh: a tattoo. It is too small to identify, but I’m sure the blue-black mark is ink.

I dispose of the corpse in the bin, burying it under the rest of the trash. As I approach the rear door on my way back to the house I see something scratched into the UPVC frame: a faint insignia, something resembling a collapsed figure-of-eight lying on its side. Similar to the mark etched onto the bird.

I go back inside and lock all the doors, and then check each window in the house, one by one, rattling the mechanisms to ensure they have not been pried loose. All entrances are sealed but still I feel insecure. Our lives are being invaded, subtly and with great care, but nonetheless we are under scrutiny.

Upstairs, I check on Max. He is asleep in his bed, lying flat on his back with his hands palm-down on the covers. He never used to sleep this way; before I went away, he always lay on his front, like me, with his hands tucked under the pillow. I leave the door ajar and go back outside to confront Adi, who is lingering with obvious intent in the bedroom doorway, her mood having experienced another abrupt shift.

“Are you coming to bed?” her voice is softer than before and she has changed into a nightdress that I swear is new — I’ve certainly never noticed it hanging in the wardrobe or folded neatly in a drawer. Short in the leg, low at the chest. Sexy. But her frame is too skinny for the garment; it hangs on her gym-thin body like rags.

“In a minute.” I turn away, but not in time to miss her sly, calculating grin in the full-length mirror on the wall.

“Don’t belong,” I think she says, before realising that I have joined the last two syllables of her sentence together to create a single word. She walks across the landing to the top of the stairs, taking her time and lifting the hem of the garment as she raises one leg so I catch a glimpse of her waxy buttocks. The expression on her face as she peers over one shoulder is supposed to be sultry, but to me she resembles a snarling beast.

I squeeze past her, slink downstairs, and retreat into the living room, where I sit down and retrieve my laptop from the drawer in the big, low coffee table, an expensive piece of furniture designed to look like a giant book. I switch the machine on and wait for it to boot up. When I try to open my well-organised folders, I discover that all the files have been deleted. All my records have been destroyed; there is nothing that I can possibly do to save them.

There is a new drive installed on the machine, and when I click the cursor to open it, I see it is filled with digital images. Obscene photographs of men and women coupling with dogs, sucking horse’s cocks, pressing the mouths of reluctant farm animals against their grubby private parts. The last file I look at is a sepia image showing a number of deceased children lying in state, dressed in miniature suits. White hands crossed over shallow breasts in a row of tiny coffins.

When I log onto the Internet the homepage I am automatically directed to features downloadable atrocity videos: beheadings in Iraq, massacres in Rwanda, inner-city CCTV murder footage…

I shut down the laptop and stare at the keyboard, aware that I might be losing my mind. The keys possess no recognisable characters; the letters and numbers have become a sequence of gibberish.

I close the lid and stare at the childish stickers Adi and I put there months ago, laughing at the inappropriate nature of small tabs of paper illustrated with skulls and breasts and peace signs. A Yin Yang symbol is a pair of eyes staring up at me. My brain begins to ache and I draw away, heading across the room towards the doorway. My mind is filled with pictures of puckered animal rectums. The bloated teats of milking cows. The thin, wet dicks of domestic dogs…

Adi is lying on her back on top of the bedclothes when I go back upstairs. Her slim legs are open; she is wearing no underwear. I swallow hard, my throat dry, the sensitive tissue inside my mouth throbbing and swelling so much that it constricts my throat.

“Come on, baby,” she says in a faux American drawl. For a moment I think she knows about my New York tryst, but then she flutters her eyelids and I realise it is an act, a tacky seduction technique gleaned from some lowbrow newsstand magazine.

Adi watches as I undress and I wish she would avert her gaze. Her eyes are cold, hard, and she begins to strum the fingers of one hand against the taut mattress. I take off my clothes as slowly as I possibly can but it is not slow enough. She believes I am teasing her and laughs accordingly, licking her pale lips for effect.

“Fuck me now.” Her request is obscene rather than erotic. I swallow down bile. Adi’s mouth is slick with saliva.

(…puckered animal rectums…)

She grabs me as soon as I climb into bed, as if wanting to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. Her moans and groans are carefully orchestrated and as she digs her fingernails into my side I feel only an echo of pain.

“FuckmeIwantyourcockinme.” It’s a nonsense rhyme, a silly singsong verse devoid of all meaning. She slides down my body and eventually teases me erect, her long, dry tongue lapping, coarse hands flapping. When she finally mounts me I feel her hot slime slithering down the shaft of my penis; her vagina convulses, gripping me tight, imprisoning me in a carnal pose.

(…the bloated teats of milking cows…)

Her hands feel different, as if they belong to a stranger, and they seem to multiply so that a crowd is caressing me, coaxing me towards a reluctant climax. Their faces swarm over me, tasting my flesh. All I see when I close my eyes is the erased features of the dead bird. Dry, twisted claws. The absence of its beak. The alien marking on its belly matching the one cut into the doorframe.

It is over in seconds. Despite the dull orgasm, I feel no satisfaction, and Adi must feel even less.

“Mmm…”

These sounds she is making. I feel no connection to them.

“Niiice…”

Lies, all lies. I wish I knew what she was up to.

(…the thin, wet dicks of domestic dogs…)

Adi reaches into a drawer and takes out a jar full of pills, screws off the lid and pops one of the long orange capsules into her mouth. Her teeth look serrated in the darkness and her eyes are vapid, devoid of light and life.

I feel as if I have been raped.

3

Much later — later than I can even imagine — I awake in blackness. Staring into the room, I see phantoms dancing before me, gossamer figures moving with slow precision through thick, dark treacle. I blink my eyes and climb out of bed. My feet feel like dead weights attached to the ends of my legs. The figures are no longer there; despite feeling groggy, the dream has scattered like a swarm of flies.

For some reason I am drawn to the window. I part the curtains and look down into the huge unkempt garden, allowing my gaze to follow the line of the narrow crazy-paved pathway bisecting the shaggy lawn. Soft moonlight illuminates the scene; it looks like a matte painting on a film set.

There is something down there — a twisted shape struggling through the long grass at the side of the path, inching its way towards the sagging wooden fence marking the boundary of my property. At first glance, it looks like a wounded animal — perhaps a cat or a dog — squirming along on its belly, heading for cover. But then I begin to make out further disquieting details. Stubby arms reach forward, short white fingers digging into the dirt to drag the rest of the bulky little form along some predetermined route. Limp legs hang below a squat torso, barely moving other than to trail through the muck after the main body as the thing makes its way towards the fence at the bottom of the garden.

If it were not so small, so pitifully worn and crumpled, I would assume the shape is a man.

I watch in fascination as the thing crawls forward another few feet, stopping to rest after it has reached a large mound of earth rising up from the ground like a hillock. It rolls over onto its side, rudimentary limbs stiff and unmoving, and in the darkness its face — I call it that, but there are no visible features — is jet-black and glistening, like the shell of a beetle.

Soon I begin to feel awkward, like a pervert watching an elderly neighbour undress through an unguarded window. Or a person who studies with interest a cripple who has fallen down on the floor, rather than offering to help.

I close the curtains to block out the view. Open them again. The struggling shape has vanished, but the sense of agonised motion remains in the air, rippling the darkness.

4

Morning can’t come quick enough.

I have trouble sleeping after that weird dream, especially with Adi’s legs wrapped around my thighs. They feel like snakes slithering under the bedclothes, and I imagine them moving of their own volition, not truly part of her body. I shift my weight on the mattress, moving away from Adi, reclaiming my right arm from under her bony elbow. She stirs; mutters; slaps her lips. Her breath smells of old rooms and empty hallways. It tastes of the dark.

“Where are you going?” Her voice is a blade; it cuts deep and true.

“Toilet. I have a bad stomach.”

There is a pause; I do not want to move in case I cause a fuss. She is still taking her pills, but their numbing effect rarely lasts.

“Did you miss me?”

I slide back onto the bed, realising my ablutions must wait. This is more important than my desire to take a shit. “Of course I did. You’re my wife.” The words are hollow; there is nothing inside them but dust.

“You could probably tell I missed you, too. Lots.” She giggles, and the sound sends spiders scuttling across the flesh of my scalp. For a second, I cannot breathe…

“Yes.” I don’t know what else to say.

“Things will be different here. I’m not so afraid anymore. Maybe I can even come off the medication.”

“We’ll see. Let’s just take things slowly, live each day as it comes.” I reach out a hand towards her but she doesn’t notice…or chooses not to. My fingers flail on the bedding like dying worms, but still she does not respond.

“What about Max? Has he changed much while you were gone?”

If the question is loaded, then the ammunition is high calibre, armour-piercing. I pause before answering, keeping my voice controlled, swallowing down the panic that dwells inside me like a squatter in an otherwise vacant property. “He’s changed too much.”

I’m sure I can hear her eyelids scraping together as she blinks: Click-ick. “How do you mean?”

Click-ick.

“He seems…different. Bigger. Broader in the chest. Like a little man instead of a baby boy.”

She lets out a loud bark and at first the sound puzzles me, but then I realise she has simply laughed. Another sound I rarely hear. “Kids change. They grow and become someone else almost daily at his age. He’s still the same Max. Still your boy.”

I listen for a trace of mockery in her voice, but instead locate something far more complex. Is it sarcasm? I get up and pad across the landing, ducking into the bathroom, my bowel heavy with waste and my head light as a balloon. I wash my face in the sink but am unable to meet my eyes in the mirror. Pipes gurgle. Water runs down the plughole. My legs are shaking and my feet are freezing cold, as if the circulation has been cut off.

I cross to the window and peek through the curtains. The morning is dusky; the sky is leaden, but light threatens to break through to the east. I can see a shallow runnel carved through the dewy grass under the window; it traces a straight line away from the back of the house and stops at a pile of mulch left over from the last time someone did any gardening.

I close the curtains. Step away.

Adi stays in bed while I get Max up, shaking him awake with a hand on his shoulder. He never slept through like this before I went to New York; he always woke early, dragging us from sleep with his high-pitched questions and requests for cartoons and breakfast. It takes me five minutes to rouse him, and even then he blinks at me as if he doesn’t know where he is, fails to recognise his father. It’s almost as if he has a hangover.

“Come on, big man. Let’s get you some breakfast.”

Instead of the usual mad rush to the bathroom, he walks slowly and purposefully, pausing to straighten one of his books on the shelf by the door. He turns. Smiles. That same lop-sided grin: the one I don’t know. The one I don’t like.

I chat to him while he brushes his teeth, filling the room with banal information, absurd chit-chat. Max moves his hand in small circular motions, scrubbing his tiny white milk teeth with the utmost care.

“You done?”

“Yes, daddy. I finish.” He places his Thomas the Tank Engine toothbrush in the mug on the sink, twisting it so the head faces the wall. Even that small compulsive act is totally unfamiliar.

He refuses to hold my hand as he leads me down the stairs, but at last he has begun to chatter: “I want toast and pea-butter and a big boy bowl with porridge.”

Max hates peanut butter. He always — always — has a chopped banana covered in a thin layer of maple syrup for breakfast, usually followed by a round of dry white toast.

“You sure? You can have anything you want now that daddy’s home. We won’t tell mummy. It’ll be our special secret.”

He looks at me sideways, his eyes narrowed. “I want pea-butter. Big boy porridge.”

I know without a doubt this is not my son. This large child with the crooked smile and the unfamiliar eating habits. This strange invader.

He takes my hand. His fingers are like ice-lollies.

“Make mine breakfast, daddy. Now.”

5

I sit in front of the television and watch him eat. He has a little orange plastic table and chair he always pulls into the centre of the room, chewing as he watches cartoons. Looney Toons are his favourite; and Tom and Jerry. Today he demands to watch Scooby Doo.

The way he eats is different, too. He never used to push the food into the corner of his mouth, pouching it inside one cheek, like a hamster. But he does so now. My son. My unknown son.

Surely this feeling, this sense of him having changed so fundamentally that he is no longer my progeny, should be gone by now? He should have assumed his normal proportions in my eye; the old, familiar paternal emotions formed over the past three years must come flooding back.

But they haven’t. Nothing has reverted to normal. Everything is relative, and my judgement is impaired. Either that or someone has stolen my son and put something else in his place. A doppelganger. A double…but not quite. An imperfect copy of the original.

(…a copy of a copy…)

I resist the urge to laugh, knowing that to do so would surely signal the end of something I cannot even remember beginning, and if I start I might never, ever stop.

I watch him eat and I feel so alone; alone, even though I am sharing the room with a person formed partly from my own cells, a tiny part of me mixed with a tiny part of Adi to create a perfect whole.

Perfect hole. In my life.

“What you laughing at, daddy?”

I force myself to stop, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “Nothing, fella. Daddy’s just being silly. You eat your breakfast, now. Be a good lad. It’ll make you big and strong.”

But he is already big — so fucking big. And strong, too, with those chunky hands and thick fingers. My own hands are small, like my father’s. Like his father’s before him.

A floorboard creaks above my head and I glance up at the ceiling. Cobwebs in the corners, strung between the old polystyrene coping. Dead insects wrapped up in silk — flies and moths and other, unrecognisable husks. All drained. All dead a long time.

I hear Adi close the bathroom door; the shower comes on with its usual squeal of rusted pipes. If I were to turn on the kitchen taps, she would scald under the sudden jet of red-hot water. I consider it, even going as far as bracing myself to stand. Max stares at me, chewing sideways, like a bovine. His eyes glisten like chipped gemstones. What colour where they before my trip? Blue? Brown? Now they are green.

Upstairs, Adi starts to sing: the happy-happy pills are doing their job, taking off the edges, smoothing out the day into a long flat ribbon leading towards sleep.

I stand and walk to the huge window at the back of the room, the one looking out onto the garden. Sunlight is straining to make its mark on the day, but the low clouds are fighting it, holding it back. They hang onto the darkness as if it were a lover.

There are tiny handprints on the window glass, splayed fuzzy marks that sully the otherwise clean pane. I reach out to wipe one of them away but it remains on the glass. Leaning forward across the cluttered windowsill and upsetting a vase of flowers, I stare hard at the greasy blemish; my breath mists the window, obscuring the mark.

It is on the outside of the glass.

Panic flares within me like a sudden flame, burning at my heart, climbing into my throat and drying it out. I swallow but it hurts. Razor blades slice a hot line down into my gullet.

The smaller section of window at the top of the sealed unit is ajar: I remember opening it early last night, feeling stifled in the room. But didn’t I shut it again before retiring to bed? I cannot be certain.

The handprints seem to climb towards the opening, becoming fainter, the outlines less well defined, as they reach the latch.

I turn away, blanking all thought. Max is smiling at me, one hand resting on the tabletop and the other rubbing his chin in a thoughtful gesture far too old, too mature, for one so young.

He is wearing the lopsided smile that I have come to loathe. Wearing it like a mask.

THREE

The Patter of Tiny Feet

1

I can’t find a decent music station on the radio as I drive through town towards the motorway. The airwaves are filled with plastic pop, monotonous commercial hip-hop, or the empty voices of idiot deejays. All I want is some music — or a proper song to help clear my mind. Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello, John Lennon… Someone who might put a tune to my pain.

But madness is a lone crooner; insanity can only be performed as a solo.

I smile as I turn off the radio, rolling down the window to feel the air on my face. There’s a layer of cling-film between me and the world, and the creases in its surface obscure my view to the point where I recognise nothing. Everything looks the same, but slightly different. Crumpled. Suddenly, I don’t want to go back to work; nor do I feel like going home. I’m stuck somewhere in between — but between what, I do not know. Not a rock and a hard place: more like sludge and a soft place.

I quell the urge to laugh.

Traffic is sluggish; it’s the rush-hour, and time has slowed to a ridiculous pace while my internal clock is speeding up, pushing me forward into some unknown place.

I see him when I stop at a zebra-crossing opposite the Scarbridge Community Centre. His electric wheelchair is perched at the drop-kerb on the bright yellow tactile paving, the front wheels practically resting in the gutter. He is the smallest man I’ve ever seen: tiny, really. Like a doll. A little living doll. But an ugly one. His pinched face is partially obscured by a dirty black beard and his chin is tucked into his neck. He has one of those weird barrel chests a lot of dwarfs seem to develop, something to do with the lack of growth, bones bunching up in the clavicle region.

I am afraid of him but I don’t know why.

He steers his wheelchair onto the crossing, staring resolutely forward as he moves in a straight line towards the opposite kerb. His stubby hand massages the steering-lever; his fingers are wide, almost flat-looking. An attractive middle-aged woman approaches him as she crosses from the other side. Gives him a wide berth and glances back over her shoulder as she passes his chair. She stumbles; her face flushes bright red and she smiles awkwardly at me through the windscreen.

I return my attention to the small man. The dwarf.

He has stopped in the middle of the road, his wheelchair still pointed in the direction he’s travelling. But he has swivelled around to stare at me. Above the ratty beard, his eyes are familiar. They are green.

The beard splits in two, and the smile peeking out of the hair almost makes me scream. It is lopsided, sarcastic.

Then the dwarf continues on his way, and I can almost believe he didn’t even pause in his journey; didn’t focus his attention on my bloodless expression, and on my wide, fearful eyes.

He trundles off on is way to the Community Centre. Someone behind me leans on their horn; the sound tears into me, splitting the paper-like skin of my cheeks, denting the wafery bone of my skull.

My car lurches forward and I turn off at the next back street, guiding the vehicle along narrow alleys until I come out near the newly built Tesco Metro on Farley Street. I park the car and sit behind the wheel, listening to the music in my head. Shoppers dance in and out of the double doors, falling into the rhythm booming like a disco inside my mind. After a few minutes of this, I imagine they can all hear the music too, and are throwing silent shapes to deliberately unnerve me.

I’m glad when the traffic thins and I am able to resume my journey.

I am unaware of my surroundings as I drive into the city, choosing instead to inhabit a cold grey area at the back of my brain. I cannot shake the image of the dwarf. His messy black beard. Terrible green eyes.

As I drive into the underground car park I imagine my entire life has sunk beneath the surface of the earth. Nothing seems the same; everything has submerged.

My workmates act strange when I enter the office, as if I shouldn’t be there. The secretaries talk about me behind cupped hands and whenever someone passes my cubicle they hurry their pace, eager to be gone before I can speak to them. My boss spends the morning locked in his office on the telephone. I send emails to my team — none of whom are office-based — and arrange an impromptu progress meeting for the following Monday morning.

Immediately after lunch, my boss calls me on the phone.

“Have you got a minute? I need to see you, just a general debriefing after your trip. Nothing much to worry about.”

Why did he say that? I wasn’t worried until he told me not to be. Now I am suspicious regarding his motives in summoning me to his office, where the shades are pulled down over the windows, blocking the view of the open-plan workspace.

“I won’t beat about the bush,” says my boss after the opening pleasantries. “I’ve managed to salvage the deal, but none of the clients was impressed with the way you behaved.”

I am utterly confused. As far as I am concerned the trip went well, the meetings were a breeze, a piece of cake…

“Can I just ask you one thing?”

I nod my head, unable to respond until I know what he’s talking about.

“Where were you? You go missing for three days in New York, and then turn up back here as if nothing has happened.” He is sweating; moisture beads his brow. Why is he so nervous?

“I… I have no idea what you mean. I didn’t go anywhere, just the meetings.” I wonder if he knows about the prostitute.

Shaking his head, my boss sits down in his chair. “I know things have been tough for you recently. I know all that. I thought it was a bad idea for you to return to work so soon after… well, after what happened.”

Return to work? I have not been away, apart from the trip to the States, and am about to say so when he holds up a hand to silence me.

“Just take more time off. Don’t worry about your job — that’s not going anywhere. It’s just that, well, you’re no use to me in this condition. We need you well again, Dan, so you can cope with your workload. The company can no longer carry any passengers.”

I leave without shutting down my computer, and when I’m back behind the wheel of the car I feel like punching my fist through the windscreen. What is he saying? What am I missing? It is Adi who needs to recover; she is the one who was attacked.

I take out my mobile phone. Tap in the number of my boss’s direct-dial. He answers after three rings.

“Hello?”

“I have a question.”

“Listen, Dan. No pressure. Just get well… get back to normal.”

“When did I come back to work?”

“Dan, I…”

“Humour me.”

“The New York trip was your first duty back on board.”

“And how long was I off.”

“The doctor signed you off for three months, but you’ve only been off eight weeks. It isn’t enough, mate. You need longer to readjust.”

“What happened to me?”

There is a long pause before he answers, and when he does so his voice is cracked. “I think that’s a question you need to ask your doctor, Dan. Or perhaps your wife.”

I end the call. Squeeze the handset until the plastic begins to creak in my hand.

2

I’m back before I know it, parked outside the Community Centre on the tiny scrap of muddy ground posing as a parking area. It is late in the day; I have no idea where I’ve been since leaving work this morning. All I have is a memory of driving. Along busy motorways. Under concrete flyovers. At one point I parked on the hard shoulder and stared along the slow lane, too afraid to pull out and rejoin the traffic.

How long have I been here, waiting? I’m confused. Time has either speeded up or slowed down, but I can’t say which.

The dwarf comes out of the entrance alone, piloting his little electric chair. His fat hands clutch the single lever, steering the chair around the concrete bollards near the entrance, and he heads for the main road.

He overtakes two disabled men on his way to the main exit, and they flinch away from him, clearly afraid. He turns on them, shouting something. Then he reaches up, stretching his upper body, and slaps one of the men across the face. The man begins to cry; his friend embraces him, whispering soothing words. The dwarf moves away, chuckling.

I lock up the car and follow him, not certain exactly what I will do, or even if I plan to confront him. I’m not even sure if there is any reason to be stalking him this way, but something about the man is not right. I suspect he has been in my home. Messed with the files on my laptop. Done something to — or perhaps with — my son, Max.

I follow him through town until we reach a purpose-built block of flats. The building is single storey, and has disabled access and facilities. It is a council-built-and-owned refuge for people who are not quite able-bodied enough to look after themselves without assistance yet still wish to retain a certain degree of independence.

I follow the dwarf inside. I am so close I can hear the quiet hum of the electric cart, hear his wheezy breaths as he manipulates the joystick to guide the chair into the lobby.

I wait until he unlocks the door to his flat and then walk up behind him, making hardly any noise at all. He doesn’t know I am there until he turns to close the door, and I move in behind him, pushing his chair away from me across the floor before securing the door latch.

The look of surprise that crosses his face is blatently false; as soon as he realises I am on to him, he drops the act and smiles. I see him crawling through my garden at night, out of his chair and rolling in the mud after flopping out of my son’s bedroom window. I imagine him in my rooms, touching my possessions.

“Who are you?” I ask, advancing into the room.

“I’m nobody,” he says. “Just call me Mr. Nobody.” Then he spins the chair around and glides over to the far side of the room, where he parks up against the wall and waits for me to make the next move.

The walls are painted a subtle shade of beige, the furniture is cheap, the television large. There is a desk with a computer crammed into one corner. Lining the walls of the room are pages torn out of newspapers and magazines: sensationalised articles about schizophrenia, madness, murder, missing children. The place is a shrine to insanity, and the sense of everything being off kilter infuses the fabric of the building.

“I need to know what you’ve done. What you’re doing to my boy.”

The little man smiles. His cheeks crinkle, the flesh poking out through his beard. He scratches at his groin. Spits on the floor.

“Tell me what you want.”

The dwarf leans back in his chair, adjusts the seat so make himself more comfortable. “I want it all,” he says, stretching out his arms in a stunted rendition of a Jesus Christ pose. “I want your house. I want your wife. I want your life.”

I back away, stopping when the wall behind me jars my spine. I stare at him.

“I want to give your wife this.” He reaches into his trousers and takes out his long, broad penis. It is huge, much bigger than mine, and I feel a ridiculous pang of envy. The dwarf stuffs it away, laughing. He starts to climb out of his chair, his legs flopping uselessly as he uses his stocky upper body to haul himself across the floor in my direction. His grin is massive and predatory, filling the room, and he moves faster than I ever would have imagined, pulling himself toward me with his meaty arms.

I turn and fumble with the door handle, finally twisting it enough to open the door. I stumble out into the lobby and fall through the doors, charging out into the night. I can hear his laughter; it follows me into the darkness like an ancient curse; magic runes thrown at my back as I walk hurriedly away.

3

It is dark when I get back to the house. Adi has turned out all the lights and gone to bed, hiding from me or from herself. There is little distinction. I creep up the stairs and stand outside Max’s room, wondering who he is, a child or a dwarf. His breathing seems too heavy, laboured; I wonder briefly if he is slightly asthmatic.

“Where have you been?” Her voice cuts me like a fine blade, a scalpel or a craft knife. It doesn’t hurt, but I can feel the blood running down the side of my neck.

“I’m not sure,” I answer, as honestly as I can.

Adi sighs. She thinks I am being evasive when all I am is lost.

“I’m going downstairs for a drink. Coffee. I doubt I’ll be able to sleep.”

“I’ll join you.” She moves out of the darkness of the bedroom, detaching herself like a predator from the edge of some deep primeval forest. I realise that she has not slept. She has been lying awake in the darkness, waiting for me.

Something rears out of the murk inside me, a realisation that I cannot quite put a name to. There is a brief and painless struggle, and all is well. I descend the stairs in silence, glad when she follows me into the kitchen.

When the kettle is boiled I pour the water over instant coffee granules in battered mugs. The smell is sickening, and the taste is bitter. I close my eyes and wait for my body to accommodate the sensation.

“I went to work today.” I sit down at the kitchen table, my eyes averted.

“I know. How did it go?” She sips her drink, her eyes peering at me over the bottom of the mug.

“Weird. I…I’m not really sure what’s been going on.”

She waits. I assume she wants me to continue. The coffee burns my tongue.

“Have I been away? From work, I mean. Not the trip to New York. Have I been absent?”

Tears glaze her eyes. She dips her head, her chest hitching. “In so many ways.”

Now it’s my turn to wait.

“Don’t you remember? The attack in the basement car park? The hospital? The psychiatrist? Have you no memory of any of this?” It all comes out at once, in a surge of emotion, as if she has been waiting for her moment to speak.

There is a loud thumping sound from upstairs, and we both swivel our eyes to look at the same spot on the ceiling. Max’s room. He must be having a bad dream, turning over in his sleep and swinging an arm or a leg against the side of his bed. I cannot allow myself to believe it is deliberate, that he wants to distract me from this important conversation, where the lines of combat have been erased and my wife and I have each dropped our guard.

“I remember… I remember you were attacked. It was nasty. Vicious. You were in hospital for a while, getting fixed up, and when you came out we moved here, to the country, so you’d feel safer. More secure.”

The laugh she emits sounds like the short, blunt barking of an urban dog. An animal used to being beaten if it goes on for too long. Her face is slack; the bones beneath the skin seem to have softened. “You’re fucking unbelievable.”

“Tell me.” I put the cup down on the table, resisting the urge to slam it and shatter the cheap china. “Tell me what I’m missing here?”

Adi flinches, drawing away from me, then manages to rediscover her resolve. “Yes, Dan, I was attacked.” Her features are firmer now, as if she has gained strength enough from somewhere to pull herself together. “In the car park underneath our apartment building, late one night after a business meeting. You’d been with Max, minding him until I got home.”

I search my mind for a reference point, but come up blank. I simply have no recollection of this. What I do recall is being called at work to go to the hospital where Adi had been admitted with serious injuries. I do not remember how I felt about this at the time; my emotions are out of reach.

“You attacked me, Dan. You stepped out of the shadows and punched me to the ground, then began to stamp on my head, accusing me of sleeping with my boss, the husband of a friend, the fucking mail boy at work. Anyone you could think of.”

My mind is reeling. This is wrong. I did not do the things she is accusing me of; I am not capable of harming my wife, the woman I have always loved — sometimes even without having to fake it.

“You had some kind of breakdown, and when we decided to move here you seemed on the way to getting better. I stayed with you when I could easily have left — a lot of my friends said I should, you know. But I stayed and supported you in the hope that things would go back to normal, and we could start all over again in this new place.”

She begins to weep but her tears do not touch me. I am out of reach, like the distant stars and the planets whose orbits contain the slow-moving debris of a thousand failed space missions. I am a satellite circling the planet of my self, and everything is alien to me.

More noises from upstairs: footsteps padding softly across the floor above our heads. Soft laughter. I doubt Adi can even hear it. The sounds are coming from a place she could never even begin to imagine.

“But the pills you take every day…the way you are. It’s you who’s ill.”

She smiles through the tears and it looks as if she is screaming without making a sound. “I’m taking pills because of my nerves — because of what you have done to my nerves. I act the way I do because I am afraid of you.”

Adi’s words sting me, piercing the skin and drawing more blood. At last she has reached me, and her touch is lethal, like a drawn weapon on a dark night, or a fist falling repeatedly against bone.

I leave her there in the kitchen and go up to check on Max. He is sleeping, or pretending to sleep. I reach out to touch his face, the soft warmth of his cheek. My fingers graze against something hard and rough: stubble on his face, on his cheeks, on his chin. His sly green eyes flicker open and I back away from him, bumping into the door as I make my escape.

Sitting on the bottom step and peering up into the darkness of the first floor, I hear the window to Max’s room pop open. There is a scrabbling sound as something lowers itself down, kicking the outside of the wall, and then a dull thud as whatever it is drops loosely to the ground. Undergrowth rustles, a fence post creaks. Then there is only silence, or at least a state as close to it as I can ever hope to find.

When I eventually go outside to investigate I find the twisted corpse of a house cat, a neighbour’s pet. The skin has been peeled carefully from the cat’s skull, and the same strange marking I rubbed off the door frame days ago is stencilled onto the sticky red bone in black marker pen. I dispose of the remains. Go inside and lock the door. Adi is still in the kitchen, sitting at the table. She is no longer crying and her stare is fixed dead ahead, locked onto an arbitrary point on the tiled wall.

4

When your entire life is reduced to fear you have few options. Terror becomes your friend, and everything you do is prompted by it.

Mr. Nobody made the mistake of showing me where he lives. I now know where fear resides, and it is time to force an eviction.

5

Adi is in bed and I’m still downstairs, drinking. I’ve gone through six cans of strong Belgian beer without making as much as a dent in my sobriety. The whisky chasers which follow barely even touch the sides on the way down.

Some time during the early hours — maybe even the Wolf’s Hour — I rise from the kitchen table and walk to the foot of the stairs. I listen to the soft sounds of my family sleeping, and just as I place my foot on the bottom stair a sort of break occurs — my vision fractures, dark cracks erupting before my eyes and making me blink. Seconds pass, then minutes, and I find myself standing by the front door with no idea of how I got there from the stairs.

I leave the house in silence, listening to the sounds of night as I close the door gently behind me. The distant barking of dogs. Dry rustling noises in the garden. A droning TV from an upstairs room in the home of the weird insomniac guy who lives a few doors down from us. It’s like a strange song made up of many singers, too many in fact to count.

I know exactly where I am headed, but pretend I don’t. It’s just another game to play with myself, like the one I’ve been playing for weeks. The forgetting game.

I park the car outside the single-storey block of flats. Most of the lights are off, the windows dark squares in the walls. Mr. Nobody’s window is the only chink of brightness I can see; he is awake, perhaps even waiting for me. He knows things, this man…but is he even a man? Somehow I doubt it. He is both more and less than human: a fiercely intelligent animal, with jungle cunning and deadly guile.

I approach the building with care, keeping an eye out for police cars or peeping toms. No one must see me here.

The lobby door is unlocked. I am not surprised. Pushing it open, I enter the building, and feel the stale draught of deep breaths exhaled, sense the gaze of hidden eyes upon me. Mr. Nobody is expecting me.

I don’t even play out the farce of knocking; he is waiting inside the dimly lit room when I push open the door. His smile is like a premonition of a wound carved into the front of his head, and his beard is wet with saliva where he has been drooling. I close the door and walk into the room, throwing a glance towards the computer screen glowing in the corner. The homepage on display there shows photographs of naked amputees, their pink stumps dripping with semen. I look away, feeling the darkness pressing in and another fracture, much like the one on the stairs at home, threatening to occur. My vision shivers.

“Welcome,” says the dwarf. He looks slightly larger than before, his body wider, heavier. His eyes are black, all colour gone from the irises. The beard growth on his chin and neck bristles, standing on end like a cat’s fur before an alley fight.

I try to speak but words have deserted me. I can only whine, air escaping through my tensed lips like gas from a leaking pipe.

“I knew you’d come back.” I see the image of my son, my Max, superimposed over the dwarf’s ferret-like features. The effect lasts a moment, but it is enough to shatter me, to break me down and tear me apart, then put me back together with pieces missing.

“You see him? He likes it when I climb inside. Says it makes him feel less alone.”

I have no idea where or when I put the knife in my pocket, but suddenly it is in my palm. I fondle the cool blade, blooding myself. Shuffling forward, I pretend I have a plan.

I am aware of him hitting me — that his fists are hammering at my face and neck — but the pain does not reach me. I am miles away, orbiting the scene, watching from above yet still locked firmly into the action. His blows are ineffectual, but I know that I will ache from their contact in the morning.

His beard is sopping wet beneath my fingers, but I manage to get a decent grip with one hand, pulling his oversized head to one side. The other hand brings up the knife, laying the blade against his exposed throat. The blood, when it comes, looks black in the dim light. The two edges of the wound I have made peel apart like the lips of a lover, and I have to force myself not to lean in for a kiss. I slash at him with the knife, not even feeling the spray of blood on my face. I barely even hear as he mutters the word “Daddy…”

Soon his defences have weakened enough that his hands merely twitch in his lap, like ghosts of their former fighting selves. I tip him out of the chair, smiling as he lands on the floor with a heavy thud. His arm catches the table by the window and knocks the lamp off its perch. The light goes out, but the glow of the computer screen allows me to see.

I kneel on his shoulders, my crotch close enough to his pale, spattered face that I could easily thrust it into his mouth. The knife is still in my hand; I put it to one side, its work done for now.

My fingers grip the smooth edges of a deep cut under his chin, slipping into the warm mess and burrowing under his skin. The harder I tug the easier it gets, and soon the mask is peeling away, just as I knew it would. The bone beneath is black and shiny, like the carapace of an insect. There are familiar markings gouged into the bone.

I pause to take off my coat; this is heavy work and sweat runs down the middle of my spine. When I resume, the mask seems to have latched back onto the bone of his weird skull and I have to fight to regain leverage.

The sound it makes as it comes away is rather pleasant, like rubber gloves as they are peeled from the hands of surgeons or kitchen staff. I think I am smiling — it certainly feels as if my face is creating at least some kind of smirk — but I cannot be sure.

Dark blood stains the floor; thick strings of gore attach themselves to the furniture. The mask slips, finally, and begins to come away more easily, showing me what was there, in the skin, all along. Soon I have the mask in my hand, and lying under me is a wet form with hardly any recognisable features beyond the mathematical symbols carved deeply into the black bone of his skull. He seems smaller than before, as if I have deflated him. His body is tiny, childlike.

Struggling to my feet and putting on my coat, I slip the mask into my pocket, patting the material once it is safely hidden away inside. I lurch outside into the disturbing redness of a haunted dawn, feeling peculiarly hungry. If I weren’t so doused in blood, I might consider stopping off at a drive-thru fried chicken place on the way home.

FOUR

Thin as Skin

1

The house has the sense of a battlefield when I return. The doors and windows are all open; and Adi is pacing the kitchen floor like a prisoner of war. When she sees me, I notice a slight glint of relief in her eyes, but immediately it gives way to an expression of almost awestruck horror.

“He’s gone.”

At first I am unable to understand what she is telling me.

“Max. He’s not in his room…”

I walk over to the sink and pour myself a glass of water. The liquid is cool and cleansing and I think it may be the first time in my life I have truly tasted anything.

“Did you hear me, Dan?”

I nod my head, still unable to speak.

“The police have been. They’re out searching, but they told me to wait here in case you came back with him. Do you know where he is? Did you take him somewhere?” Her voice is strained and sounds as if it is rising up through great depths of an emotion I cannot even identify. I realise she is forcing herself not to appear panicked.

I no longer fear for the boy’s safety. He was in great danger, but I have saved him. Me: his father. His rightful protector.

“Well?” Her voice is a decibel away from being a shriek. The illusion of control is slipping.

“Wherever Max is, he’s safe now. I’ve taken care of everything.”

Adi takes a single step away from me, unsure of how to pursue this line of enquiry. She blinks her eyes, licks her lips. Never a conventionally beautiful woman, right now she looks ugly and exposed. “What…what do you mean? What have you taken care of?”

The smile I show her is real, like the prostitute in New York was real, and the mutilated bodies of birds and cats were real, and the…the… My mind goes blank, but I hang onto the grin as I take hold of another similar grin in my hand.

The mask slides easily out of my pocket. I unfold it carefully, delicately, and spread it out on my open palms.

Adi backs away, her face now empty; a tall glass drained of whatever coloured fluid it once contained.

“I’ve taken care of it.” My voice is booming, confident, and I remember the man I used to be before everything started to go wrong. That man remains distant, but he is getting closer, and I am certain a reunion cannot be far away.

Adi begins to make a strange high-pitched whining sound. Her lips have gone white and her eyes are bulging from her head. She is clawing at her face with long nails, drawing blood from the thin lines on her cheeks.

She is staring at my hands.

I look down, raising the mask to eye level.

Then I stare helplessly into the ragged, empty eye sockets of my son.

2

Blood on my clothes. Terror in my heart. Something ancient and unknowable roaring in my blood, under the skin.

Max’s papery face stares up at me, imploring, begging me to explain what has happened and why his daddy can no longer protect him.

Realisation, if not true understanding, flares darkly behind my eyes and reality creases, turning in on itself like an origami figure, a collapsing Möbius strip made out of material thin as skin.

By now Adi is flat-out on the kitchen floor, unmoving, barely even breathing. I kneel down beside her and touch her face, feeling for the familiar lines and contours I once adored. They are no longer there; this is not my wife.

I take off my jacket and lay it down next to Adi, placing the mask on top of the folded garment so my son has a good view as I reveal the true nature of his mother.

This time I have no knife close to hand and I am reluctant to break off and go hunting for one in drawers and cupboards, so instead I use my teeth and my fingernails. It is hard going at first, but I am a patient man. I have to be.

Laughing now at the sheer absurdity of it all, I dig into the deceitful softness in one final attempt to uncover whatever is lurking there, in the skin.

Content

Gary McMahon
IN THE SKIN

ONE All Alone Together

1

2

3

TWO We Are It

1

2

3

4

5

THREE The Patter of Tiny Feet

1

2

3

4

5

FOUR Thin as Skin

1

2