Cold Skin

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  “Gruner!”

  He was on the balcony, dirty and unharmed. The haze of a London-like fog lent him a ghostly air. A good part of his hair had been singed and was still smouldering. He waved the Remington about with one hand as if it were a pistol. His other fist was raised against the enemy. Incredibly, a monster managed to slither up in between the stakes to the ravaged railing. Gruner broke the beast’s skull with his rifle butt, opening it like a melon in a brutal surfeit of blows. Then he shifted his attention over to the last detonator.

  “Gruner, don’t do it, don’t do it, whatever you do, don’t!” I screamed, down on my knees and grasping him about the waist. “We shall be blown to bits!”

  He looked at me for a moment with the indulgence of a feudal lord and said, “Move aside!”

  He shoved me down against the fallen barricade.

  Below, the monsters roasted in a burning trap. They searched for the ocean and found only curtains of fire. Many of the living fled, enveloped in flames. The blaze had consumed over half of the island. The terrified monsters, scorched red against the inky night, created the eerie effect of a Chinese shadow puppet theatre. Demented wails rose up to the balcony. Gruner bore down on the plunger.

  It seemed the island would be torn asunder like a cannoned ship. An incandescent dome rose from north to south. Our lighthouse took on a ridiculous insignificance, the fragility of a lily in a rainstorm. A tide of debris and mud had covered everything in sight. Suddenly the monsters’ howls, Gruner’s, even mine became as one. I had gone deaf, capable only of watching Gruner’s lips move in the midst of that artificial silence. I saw mutilated bodies soar to astonishing heights. The explosion appeared to be a living thing, a genie conjured up by Gruner. Oblivious to the surrounding havoc, Gruner clapped, danced and swore as though he were under the influence of a witch’s potion. One last avalanche rushed through the balcony door and a torrent of detritus bathed us in frigid magma. All together, it was a scene out of Revelations.

  The following events are of little importance. Gruner and I sat far apart. We shunned each other, trapped in our own ignominy. If that was victory, nobody cared to mention, let alone celebrate, such butchery. Two hours later I began to hear the distant whistle of a locomotive. My ears began to slowly open again to the world of sounds. By daybreak, they were almost completely recovered.

  We readied ourselves for a most macabre task. Scarves and handkerchiefs swathed our noses. We ventured out at first light. A dim glow of candlelight illuminated the landscape. It was horrible. Flames had stained the lighthouse black. Encrusted shrapnel gave it the look of a face horribly rutted by pox. The gunnysacks on the balcony, riddled with holes, leaked their contents like hourglasses.

  A gigantic crater marked the sight of the last explosion. As for the monsters, they were strewn about as though cut down by an avenging angel. The number of casualties was incalculable. They were on all sides. Many were floating on the water’s surface. Mutilated, blackened, their limbs were mummified by fire. Doubled over like rag dolls, their claws rigid and their mouths open. I shall never forget the stench of burnt flesh, a smell horribly similar to boiled vinegar. Some bodies were so consumed that their charred ribs emerged like curved black bars. Others were still moving. Putting them out of their misery was, above all, an act of compassion. We walked among the dead and, at the merest movement, stabbed the creatures in the neck. Gruner wielded his harpoon, and I a long knife. But the spectacle brought out Gruner’s most sadistic nature.

  One of them had been left with half a leg on one side; the other limb had been blown clean off. The monster was nothing more than a carcass, trailing white smoke behind as it dragged itself along by the elbows. Instead of killing the creature, Gruner stepped in front of it. The monster saw a pair of boots impeding its progress and changed direction in fits and starts. Gruner blockaded the beast’s path to the coast at every turn. But the monster, stubborn as an ox, did not give in, searching for the ocean with snail-like movements.

  “Sacrifice it, for God’s sake!” I yelled, ripping the handkerchief from my mouth. He continued to amuse himself for a while longer. Then he drove the harpoon through the creature’s neck.

  We spent an untold length of time dumping bodies into the ocean. We had not even come close to completing the task when I spotted the mascot on the balcony. She was sitting cross-legged and held the bars as if in a cage.

  “My God,” I exclaimed, “look at her!”

  “Who is wailing now?” asked Gruner.

  “My God, she is crying.”

  11

  Disaster struck with the cruelty of surprise. Not forty-eight hours had passed since the infamous butchery. Two days, two fleeting days of peace. I found myself wandering somewhere in the forest, armed with a pencil and notebook in an attempt to reconstruct the calendar. I had long since lost track of the exact date. Gruner never bothered with such matters, and I had kept records only sporadically. During the most perilous spells, I neglected to cross off the days simply because I had little hope of seeing the morrow. Pages of the calendar had been marked twice over. There was an entire month of miscalculation. One could trace the confusion of shaky lines, which shifted between black and red. The black ink crossed out each day. But the red tint did not pay the black any attention. It started all over again on the same month; doodles filled each square to baroque excess. Every date took on a fanciful form. The first of February was a monster lying in wait, the second was a crouching beast about to pounce, the eighth was a heap of bodies climbing up the lighthouse’s side, the eleventh was a tower of amphibians. I no longer recalled having engendered such madness and was unable to recognise it as my own. Naturally, I was at first filled with delight by the discovery. If time had been artificially held back, it could only mean my ship would arrive sooner than expected. But a closer inspection of my miscalculations, the days twice crossed out, showed I had nothing to celebrate. According to the calendar, my ship should have come two weeks ago.

  What had gone wrong? Had yet another world war brought all naval traffic to a standstill until the hostilities were over? Perhaps. Humanity has a tendency to blame our sufferings on the great hecatombs in order to bestow more importance on our individual lives. But truth is almost always written in lowercase letters. I was the last grain of sand on this infinite beach called Europe; a solitary soldier in the trenches; a subject without a king. Most likely some inept bureaucrat had banished the meteorological expedition to the wrong filing cabinet. The chain of command had broken at some point; that was all. One could be quite certain that my plight would never be discussed at a meeting of the board of directors.

  I remember riffling through the calendar pages nervously, trying in vain to disprove my own fatal calculations. I recall the black nail of my index finger counting the paper squares like some dismal accountant. It was no use. Desperation began to take hold, a castle crumbling in my gut. That calendar scheduled my doom, condemned me to a life sentence. I longed for death. And yet, the best way to forget bad news is to be told something worse. Could such a thing exist? Yes.

  I simply could not credit Gruner’s warning voice calling out “Zum Leuchtturm!” from the balcony. Something very fragile broke within my soul on hearing those bullets rip through the cold air. I was not aware of it at first. I dropped pencil and paper and ran for dear life.

  They did not wait for the cover of darkness. Slithering forms emerged at the first sign of dusk, circling the scorched and shrapnel-pitted lighthouse. “Friend, friend,” Gruner cautioned as his rifle spat in all directions. The explosions had reduced the stone steps to rubble. I clambered my way up to the door. Gruner covered my back. He took aim at the monsters as they drew perilously close. They appeared and disappeared with each shot. My fear turned to rage just as I was about to reach safety. Why had they returned? We had slaughtered hundreds. And here they were once more. Instead of seeking refuge, I began to stone the beast closest by. I hurled rocks at his face; one, two, three. I can still hear myself
cursing. The monster threw its arms over its head and stepped back. And then a most extraordinary thing occurred; the beast threw a stone at me! It was at once horrid and grotesquely ridiculous. Gruner exterminated it with one well-placed shot.

  “Friend, come inside. What are you waiting for?”

  I took up my position on the balcony, firing one or two shots. The monsters were few in number, but they were there.

  I lowered my weapon. Their very presence proved the futility of it all. No matter what, they would always come back, and in greater numbers. A bullet or an explosion was as much a natural catastrophe as a rainstorm was to an ant. Our efforts might lower their numbers, but never their perseverance. I raised the white flag of surrender.

  “Where the devil are you going now?” Gruner challenged.

  Lacking the will to reply, I sat in a chair, my head in my hands and a rifle across my knees. I began to sob like a child. The mascot was before me. Oddly enough, she too was seated in a chair, leaning indolently against the table. But, as usual, she contemplated Gruner on the balcony, the gunfire, my tears and the attacks on the lighthouse with the indifference of a museumgoer gazing at a painted battle scene.

  My courage, forbearance and wits had been stretched to untold limits. I had fought the monsters with weapons and without, on land and sea, under cover and out in the open. And every night, if it suited their fancy, they returned in ever greater numbers. The beasts seemed impervious to destruction. Gruner kept up the assault. But that battle no longer belonged to me. “Oh dear God,” I sputtered, and rubbed my tear-stained cheeks, what more could a reasonable man do in my position? What should the most resolute, the wisest man have done that I had not yet tried?

  My gaze shifted back and forth between my moist palms and the mascot. She had been crying not two days before. Now it was I who wept. Those tears had undone something more than my body. A rampant tide of memories swept over me. One thinks most freely after weeping.

  The mascot and I held each other’s gaze the whole night through. Gruner fought while we stared across the table at each other until I could no longer tell who I was looking at nor who was looking at me.

  Afterwards, Gruner disdained me as if I were a deserter. In the morning, he left to go for a walk, or something of that sort. I went into his quarters immediately afterwards. The mascot slept huddled up in a corner of the bed, naked save for a pair of socks. I seized her by the scruff of the neck and sat her down at the table.

  Gruner was met with a delirious man at midday.

  “Gruner,” I said, brimming with enthusiasm, “guess what I have done today?”

  “Waste time. I had to buttress up the door all by myself.”

  “Come with me.”

  I led the mascot along by the elbow and Gruner followed a step behind. I forced her to sit down once we were outside the lighthouse. Unfazed, he remained standing next to me.

  “Observe.”

  I piled one, two, three, four blocks of firewood under my arm. The fourth however, I purposely let fall. I was clowning about, of course. As I collected a trunk, another would slip from the bundle. I repeated the sequence again and again. As usual, Gruner watched me with his puzzled look, but did not interrupt. Oh, come on, come on, I thought. I had carried out the experiment that morning, while Gruner was away. But I failed to get any results now. As Gruner glared at me, I kept my eyes on the mascot and she watched the logs.

  At last, she laughed. The truth is, it required a bit of imagination to recognise it as a laugh as such. But that is exactly what it was. The sound resonated up from the mascot’s chest. Strident tones could be heard through her mouth, clamped shut. The inner workings of some unseen muscle reached our ears. Then her lips parted. There could be no doubt, it was laughter.

  “You see?” I said with triumphal satisfaction. “You see? What do you think now?”

  “I think that my good fellow friend is incapable of carrying four logs at the same time.”

  “Gruner, she is laughing!” I paused, waiting for a reaction that never presented itself. I added, “She cries, she laughs. What is your conclusion?”

  “Conclusion?” he bellowed. “I shall tell you what my conclusion is! They breed like rabbits. The beasts will charge to battle once again, and not as they have the last few nights, but in the thousands. It shall be our last evening on earth. And in the meantime, you entertain yourself by fiddling with four sticks like a fairground clown.”

  But all I could think of was her. What was she doing at the lighthouse, with such a brute as her sole companion? I knew very little about her. Gruner once told me how he found her splayed out on the sand, like one of the jellyfish that washed up on our beaches.

  “She has never attempted escape or tried to leave the island?” I enquired. Gruner paid me no mind. I persisted, “You often beat her. She ought to abhor your presence. But she does not run away. It is not as though there has been any want of opportunity.”

  “Sir, you have had odd ideas of late.”

  “Yes, and I cannot help entertaining a reckless idea,” I announced. “What if they are something more than just monstrous amphibians?”

  “Something more than just monstrous amphibians …” he repeated unhearing while counting our ever-dwindling supply of ammunition.

  “Why not? Perhaps there is something besides instinct lurking beneath those bald skulls. If that is the case,” I continued, “it might be possible to negotiate.”

  “And I think you ought to rein in your imagination,” he interjected, loading his shotgun with exaggerated gusto.

  Nothing was to be gained from arguing, and I preferred to save myself for other battles.

  Undoubtedly, the attacks were few and far between. The mascot had ceased her song, which gave us a small measure of security. But we could not deceive ourselves. Constant combat had lent us an imperceptible but palpable awareness. The sea was rough, the waves stained eggplant. The air was so saturated with damp one could envisage a school of whales sporting about the sky. Small signs which normally should have been meaningless took on an irrational importance. Without our being able to explain quite why, it seemed that doomsday was upon us. Forces were gathering beneath the waves, and this time our diminished arsenal would be unable to stop them.

  Every omen foretold our death. Perhaps that was why I took up with the mascot again, because nothing mattered. Not many precautions were needed to conceal ourselves from Gruner. Death was about to disembark on the island, our death, and that was enough for Gruner to take shelter in his interior world. He escaped from reality by repairing a door or counting our few remaining cartridges. Gruner could tell each one apart just as a farmer knows his cows; he even named them. He set the prettiest bullets aside – I know not what criteria he used to differentiate them – and wrapped them in a silk handkerchief. Then Gruner would untie the knot and count them all over again. He gently fingered each slug with eyes half shut as if he were never quite sure of the exact number. Gruner well knew how much this meticulousness annoyed me. Therefore it was natural, if only to avoid unwanted tensions, for me to leave the lighthouse. I spent those long interludes having my way with the mascot. Our trysts usually took place in the forest. I seldom ventured to the weather official’s house, for fear of Gruner’s unexpected appearance.

  As a result, my interactions with Gruner became quite sporadic during those days of lingering agony. Worse yet, the mood within the lighthouse had grown obscurely tainted. It was not so much what we said as what we had ceased to say. We had not yet determined to commit suicide and I needed something to entertain my thoughts. I recalled The Golden Bough.

  “Do you know where that book by Frazer has gone? I have been looking around these last few days and haven’t been able to find it.”

  “Book? What book? I do not read books. What do you think I am, a monk?”

  I did not believe a word he said. Why was he lying? Did he abhor me so much as to deny me the consolations of reading? In his own way, Gruner could be quite diplo
matic.

  The fellow kicked me from the chair where he was seated. “You want books, some sort of a distraction? You are a young fellow. Perhaps we should capture a lady toad for your amusement.” Then he sneered at me in a profoundly disagreeable and ironic manner. Did he suspect anything? No. He was just being provocative. Gruner wanted me to leave the room so he could fornicate with the mascot at his ease. I had no wish to smooth his way.

  “The last thing one may say about this island,” I replied, “is that it lacks distractions. The solution to our troubles may very well be right in front of our noses.”

  He attempted to disguise his sarcasm. “Oh really?” He crossed his arms in sudden interest. “Tell me then. Is your pupil making any progress? Exactly what skills is she being taught? French cuisine? Chinese calligraphy? Or are you perfecting the four-log juggling act?”