Gary McMahon - In the Skin

“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.

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.

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.