Different Skins

by Gary McMahon

  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 whe
n 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.