Cold Skin

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  Confusion was followed by a wave of panic. I shouted in terror and jumped out of the chair at the same time. A multitude of voices answered my cry. They were everywhere. The house was surrounded by unearthly screams, something between a hippopotamus’s moan and a hyena’s shriek. I was so terrified that my own fear felt unreal. I looked out another window, my mind a blank.

  I could sense them out there more than I could see them. They ran around the house as agile as gazelles. The full moon cut out their silhouettes. As soon as I could make one out, it fled from view. It stopped, twisting its head with the vivacity of a snake, whistling, running, going back, joining a few others, who knows why, and all at lightning speed. I heard something smash; they had broken the windowpane behind me. Only their unbridled appetite saved me. The window was a small rectangle, but it was big enough for a lithe body to get through. All the same, their eagerness drove them to try and jump inside at once, making it impossible to get through. The scene was lit up by the lighthouse’s beam. That brief flash illuminated absolute horror. Six or seven tentacle-like arms waved in front of their faces that came screaming out of some amphibious underworld: eyes like eggs, pupils like needles, holes instead of noses, no eyebrows, no lips, a huge mouth.

  I acted more on instinct than common sense. I grabbed a thick log from the fireplace and, with a cry, shoved it against those marauding arms. Sparks, blue blood, whimpers of pain and fragments of charred wood flew. When the last arm pulled away, I threw the log outside. The windows had storm shutters on the inside. I wanted to shut out and bar them, but the last claw seized the moment to slash at my neck. I’m still amazed that I managed to keep my wits about me. Instead of grabbing for the monster’s wrists, I snatched its finger. I doubled it over until the bone snapped. I took a step back. I gathered the coals from the fire into an empty sack and threw them out the window. That deluge triggered a round of invisible moans. In the momentary calm that followed, I closed the wooden shutters as fast as I could.

  There were still three windows with all their shutters hanging wide open. I flew from one window to the next, closing the wooden panels and drawing the bars across them. Somehow, the creatures understood the situation and circled the house, trying to reach into each window as it slammed shut. I could follow them by their ever more anxious howls. It was just good luck that I got to the shutters first. Their frustration when the last one closed was expressed as a long and bone-chilling scream. Ten, eleven, twelve voices were howling in unison.

  They were still out there. Desperate, trying to work out what to do, I searched for some kind of weapon. The axe, I chanted to myself. But I couldn’t see it and had no time to look for it so I settled for a stick. Now a mass of monsters were pounding against a window. The wood trembled but the bar was strong. And they weren’t following any kind of plan; the banging went on, without order or purpose. Under those conditions, I couldn’t even defend myself, only wait for who knew what. I thought again of that arm in the hatch: it was still there. That sight almost pushed me over the edge. The accumulated tension made me go straight for that horrible limb with a rage I would never have thought myself capable of. I pummeled it, using the stick like a truncheon. Then I twisted it, trying to rip the arm off, but even then the creature still fought back. Finally, a major vein must have been hit. Blood shot out and the arm pulled away with the rustle of a lizard.

  I could hear the mutilated monster groaning. His companions joined the lament. The pounding on the window died down. Silence. The worst sort of silence I had ever heard. I knew, I was sure, that they were out there. Suddenly, they started to whimper in unison. They meowed just like kittens calling for their mother. The meow, meow, meows were short and sweet, sad and abandoned. It was as though they were saying, Come out, come out, it’s all been a misunderstanding; we didn’t mean any harm. They weren’t trying to be convincing, they just wanted to calm my fears. Their lethargic mews were accompanied by an occasional punch on the door or on the barred windows. Don’t listen to them, for the love of God, don’t listen to them, I told myself. I barricaded the door with sea chests. I put more logs on the fire in case they thought of coming down the chimney. Looking up at the ceiling made me uneasy. It was covered with slate shingles. With a bit of effort, they could break through and get in. But they didn’t. During the small hours, light filtered through the cracks in the shutters with each monotonous swing of the lighthouse beam. Long, thin rays came and went like clockwork. They kept up the attack all through the night, first a window, then a door, and with each assault I was convinced that my barricades would give way. Afterwards, a deep quiet.

  The lighthouse lantern had been extinguished. I opened a window, taking every precaution. They weren’t there. A delicate margin of violet and pumpkin tones extended across the horizon. I let myself fall to the ground like a sack of potatoes, still clutching the stick. Two or three new and unfamiliar sensations battled inside me. After a while, the meagre sun rose over the water. A candle in the dark would have given off more heat than that star shrouded by a veil of clouds. But it was the sun. The summer nights were extraordinarily brief at those southern latitudes. It had been, without a doubt, the shortest night of my life. It had felt like the longest to me.

  4

  I had mastered a technique during my rebellious youth: the best way to fight sentimentalism and despair is, undoubtedly, to approach the problem in a clinical way. I devised the following hypothesis: you’re dead. You find yourself on a cold and lonely island far from salvation. “You’re dead, you’re dead,” I repeated out loud to myself as I waved a cigarette. “This is how things stand: you’re dead. That means that if you don’t make it, you won’t have lost anything. But if you manage to survive you will have gained everything: life.”

  We should never underestimate the power of solitary thoughts. That cigarette magically transformed into the world’s best tobacco. And the smoke coming out of my lungs was the symbol of someone who has resigned himself to fight another Thermopolis. Yes, I was worn out, but the fatigue soon dissipated. As long as I was still tired with my eyelids drooping like lead weights, I was alive. What had led me to that isolated spot didn’t matter anymore. I had no past, no future. I was at the end of the world, in the middle of nowhere and far from everything. After smoking that cigarette, I felt infinitely distant from myself.

  I had no illusions about my prospects. To begin with, I didn’t know anything about the monsters. So, as the military manuals say, it was a worst-case scenario. Would they attack by day or night? All the time? In packs? With chaotic perseverance? How long, with my limited resources, could I hold out alone against a horde? Obviously, not very long. It was true that Gruner had managed to survive. The lighthouse was as solid as a fortress: the little house got more flimsy each time I looked at it. One thing was certain: I didn’t need to ask what had happened to my predecessor.

  As things stood, I had to plot some line of defence. If Gruner’s fort was up in the sky, I would dig a trench in the ground. The plan was to surround the house with a moat filled with wooden spikes. That would keep the creatures at a safe distance. But the problem was time and energy: a lone man would need the strength of a mule to hollow out that much terrain. On the other hand, I had seen the monsters’ pantherlike movements firsthand – the trench would have to be deep and wide. And I was exhausted, not having had an hour’s sleep since my arrival. To make matters worse, I wouldn’t get any rest if I was constantly working and defending myself. There were two options: be killed by the monsters, or die mad from the physical and psychological strain. It didn’t take a genius to see that the two fates converged. I decided to simplify the task as much as possible. For the time being, I would concentrate on digging big holes beneath the doors and windows. I hoped it would be enough. I excavated some semicircles and filled them with sticks. After carving the wood into points with a knife, I drove the stakes down deep, spikes facing the sky. Most of the sticks were dragged off the beach. While I was by the water collecting wood, it o
ccurred to me that the monsters’ shape and webbed hands gave every indication that they came from the sea. In that case, I said to myself, fire would be a primitive but very effective weapon. It would put the theory of opposing elements into practice. And since everybody knows that all beasts have an innate fear of fire, I could only imagine the scale of its effect on amphibious creatures.

  I built up my defences with stacks of wood, throwing all the books on top. A paper fire isn’t as steady but it burns more intensely. Maybe that would give them a nasty jolt. Farewell, Chateaubriand! Farewell, Goethe! Farewell, Aristotle, Rilke and Stevenson. Farewell, Marx, Laforgue and Saint-Simon! Farewell, Milton, Voltaire, Rousseau, Góngora and Cervantes. How I revere you, dear friends, but art can’t go before necessity; you’re words. I smiled for the first time since the whole nightmare began as I stacked the piles, doused them with petrol and made bundles to add on to the future bonfire. I smiled because I had discovered while doing all this that one life, specifically my own, was worth more than the complete works of all the great thinkers, philosophers and writers of humankind.

  Finally, the door. Trenching and staking out the entrance presented the clear disadvantage of blocking my own exit. So, before doing anything else, I constructed a wooden plank to bridge the gap. But I couldn’t go any further, I was at my limit. I had hollowed out the earth below the windows, collected sticks, made them into lances and driven them into the ground. I had made mounds of wood and books, melding them with a stream of oil. The sun was going down. You could find fault with my reasoning, but not my instinct. Night was coming, and some gut instinct told me that darkness is ruled by butchers. Wake up, wake up, I said out loud to myself, don’t fall asleep. There wasn’t much water, so I splashed my face with gin. Afterwards, a void. Nothing was happening; I treated the blisters I had got on my hands from the burning log and the scratches on my neck, a souvenir of those killer claws. The pit beneath the door wasn’t finished. It was the least of my worries. I had a solid barricade thanks to the heavy chests in my baggage.

  I said before that the letter almost got me killed. It’s one way of looking at it. That letter was the reason I had left two crates untouched. I opened them in that moment, mostly because I was afraid of falling apart if I relaxed. And I’m convinced that no one has ever, anywhere, felt such happiness as when I opened that rectangle of wood. I lifted off the cover, ripped the cardboard and found two Remington rifles wrapped in straw. The second crate contained two thousand bullets. I got down on my knees and cried like a child. It goes without saying that it was a gift from the captain. We had shared our ideas about the world on the voyage out and he knew how much I hated soldiers and anything military.

  “They are a necessary evil,” he would tell me.

  “The worst thing about the military is that they are infantile,” I answered. “The supposed honour of war boils down to being able to tell everyone about it.”

  We had lots of late night conversations and he knew that if he offered me a gun I would refuse it. So the captain discreetly added those crates to my luggage at the last minute. With fifty men like the captain I could found a new country, a free nation, and call it Hope.

  Darkness fell. The lighthouse beam was lit. I cursed Gruner, Gruner. That name would be forever linked to dishonour. I didn’t care if he was crazy, all that mattered was that he had known about the monsters and didn’t tell me. I hated him with the fervour of the powerless. There was still enough time to cut a few small loopholes in the shutters; rounded incisions big enough for the barrel of a gun to stick through. And above them, some long thin slits for peepholes. But nothing happened. No movement, nor any suspicious sounds. From the window that faced the ocean you could see the coast. The water was calm and the waves, instead of pounding the sand, caressed it. I was seized by a strange feeling of impatience. If they were going to come, then let them come now. I yearned to see hundreds of monsters attacking that house. I wanted to gun them down, kill them one by one. Anything but that exasperating wait. Every one of my coat pockets was stuffed with fistfuls of bullets. The added weight felt comforting and invigorated me. Copper-coloured bullets on the left, bullets on the right, bullets in my chest pockets. I even gnawed on bullets. I clutched the rifle so tightly that the veins in my hands stood out like blue rivers. A knife and a hatchet hung off the belt strapped over my jacket. Eventually, they came.

  The heads emerged first, heading toward the coast. They were like little moving buoys or advancing shark fins. There must have been ten, twenty, I don’t know, schools of them. As soon as they hit the sand, the creatures turned into reptiles. Their wet skin resembled burnished steel that had been coated with oil. They dragged themselves about ten feet before standing up as perfect bipeds. But they walked slightly hunched over, like someone battling against a harsh wind. I thought of the sound of rain from the night before. Those duck feet couldn’t but feel out of their element. They crushed the sand and beach stones as though treading on freshly fallen snow. A low conspiratorial hum came from their throats. That was enough for me. I opened the shutter, flinging a burning log that ignited the oil, wood, and mountains of books. I closed the shutter. My shots flew wildly from the loophole. The creatures leaped away, shrieking ferociously, like a plague of locusts. I couldn’t make anything out. Just the flames that, at first, roared high. Behind the blaze were the silhouettes of bodies that jumped or danced with the fever of a witch’s mass. My cries joined theirs. They bounded and squatted, came together and split apart, recoiling as they tried to reach the windows. Monsters, monsters and more monsters. Here, over there, there and here. I went from one window to another. I fired blind, one, two, three, and four shots, swearing like a Berber against Rome as I reloaded. Shooting and reloading for hours on end, or maybe it was just a few minutes, I don’t know.

  The bonfires began to die down. I saw that the fire protected my morale more than anything else. But they had vanished. I didn’t realise it at first. I kept on shooting until the rifle jammed. I fumbled the catch frenetically. It wouldn’t release – where was the other Remington? The cylindrical cartridges scattered under my feet made me slip and stumble. The bullets rolled around in my pockets. I wanted to pick them up, but the good bullets and the spent cartridges were all jumbled together. I dragged myself over to the ammunition box, put my hand in and grabbed a handful of icy lead, taking my time. I sensed, to my surprise, that the monsters had stopped wailing. Panting like a beaten dog, I peered out of the loopholes. There was no enemy to be seen from my angle of vision. The flames had faded from red to blue and barely flickered a foot high. They crackled. The lighthouse beam swept the landscape with an even cadence. What horrors were they devising? Nothing was to be trusted. Darkness continued to erode the landscape.

  A distant explosion pierced through the layers of mist. What was it? Gruner and his rifle. They were attacking the lighthouse. I stopped and listened. The frenzied sounds of combat were carried over by gusts of wind. On the other side of the island, the monsters roared with the force of a hurricane. Gruner spaced out his gunshots as if he were only aiming at sure targets. The inhuman screams rose in volume with each blast. But the way Gruner wielded his rifle revealed a quiet assurance. He acted more with the ease of a lion tamer than someone teetering on the brink. I’d almost say that I heard him laugh, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

  Dawn: light filtered through floury gauze. The blisters on my hands had swollen up, despite all the bandages and ointments. I supposed it was from gripping the gun so tightly all night. My breath stank like stale tobacco. Bile that tasted like burnt sugar welled up in my mouth. My overall condition was deplorable. Weakness in the knees. Loosely strung muscles. Blurry vision with yellow sparks. The piles of logs and books were still smoking. I set to work excavating a pit at the foot of the door. However, at midmorning I was interrupted by a completely unexpected visit.

  Gruner was the perfect image of a Siberian hunter, fat and surly. He wore a felt cap with big earflaps and a coat sewn up with th
ick thread; lots of buckles. His chest was crisscrossed with lacing. He was carrying a rifle and a sort of harpoon strapped on his back. The lighthouse keeper moved slowly but assuredly, swaying like an elephant bowed down by his weight. My body was half in, half out of the pit. I stopped shovelling.

  “Nice fellows, aren’t they? Those toads I mean,” he said in an almost friendly way, and then added, coldly, “I thought you would be dead by now. Here,” he said, passing me a bucket with a sack of beans inside, “you can use the fountain too.”

  His words were in the same tone that is used with the dying: give them anything but the truth.

  “I need something more than beans and a water fountain, Gruner,” I said while still in the ditch. “The lighthouse, Gruner, the lighthouse. Without the lighthouse I’m a dead man.”

  “It’s going to rain tonight,” he commented, looking up at the sky. “That drives them away.”

  “Be reasonable,” I protested with trembling lips. “What’s the sense of struggling alone? Humans need to unite when they’re surrounded by predators.”

  “Take all the water you want; it’s yours, honestly. And the beans. I also have coffee. Want coffee? You’ll need coffee.”

  “Why are you pushing me away? You should judge me by my intentions, not my presence.”

  “Your very presence shows your intentions. You can’t understand. You’d never be able to understand.”

  “The problem,” I said, “is whether we can come to an understanding.”

  “The problem,” he said, “is that I’m stronger.”

  It was unbelievable. I screamed, “Allowing a man to die is the same as killing him! You’re an assassin! An assassin! Any court in the world would condemn you! By action or omission you’re throwing me into the lion’s pit. You hole up in your lighthouse and contemplate the spectacle like a patrician at the Colosseum. Are you happy, Gruner?” I fumed with growing indignation.