by Rhys Thomas
Closer, he could see that the black skin had thin striations across it. It looked like fibreglass. There were small needles of pink visible where the surface of the skin had split away. Charlie looked at the body impassively. The eyeballs were gone. The clothes had been burned to nothing, the hair on the skull frazzled into the texture of thin fishing line, contracted and shrunken.
He could see that the person had been a woman. Breasts were discernible on the ribcage, though they were distorted and flattened. He could taste the vomit in his mouth again. He went to throw up but there was nothing left in his stomach. His diaphragm folded inside of him. The darkness swelled all around.
A curling stairwell led both up into the lighthouse and down into the ground. On the right was another door leading to an unseen room. The air was cold. A strange sensation came over her. She felt somehow empty, as if her worries were being taken away. Dr Balad seemed to have something that everybody had been in search of for months: answers.
‘We go down,’ he said, closing the door to the stairwell behind him.
He flicked a switch and bright white light flickered to life with a hum. The walls were thick and secure; the painted red steps gleamed in the light. They came to a single wooden door at which Dr Balad stopped.
‘Don’t go too close to him.’
He knocked on the door and announced himself before entering.
Cautiously, Miriam stepped forward.
The room was square. Some chairs were stacked in the left-hand corner. In the near corner, just inside the door, was a neatly made camp bed. A desk was set up on the right-hand side. A man was sitting behind it. His face was deathly white, whiter still in the harsh overhead light. A thick clump of unkempt black hair covered the top of his head. His eyes were sunken and his face drawn as if he hadn’t eaten enough food for a long time. Miriam had seen many of those faces now.
There was something different about this man, though, something altered. Miriam recognized it as soon as she saw him. The same unexplained feeling that allowed people to tell the sick apart from the well. He looked ill. He looked infected.
His eyes turned on her and she caught his gaze. He stared at her for a few seconds and his lips broke into a grin. His skin stretched and wrinkled at the edges of his mouth like taut cellophane.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘Christopher, I’d like you to meet Miriam.’
The man looked at Miriam, maintaining his smile. ‘Miriam,’ he said quietly. ‘The woman from the top of the hill.’
He spoke with a lisp-like speech impediment. He nodded to the empty chair on the other side of the desk.
‘Sit,’ he said.
There was no paper on the desk. The reason for the man being down here in a near empty room, alone, was difficult to guess. The overhead light was so powerful that the shadows were small and crisp. The man behind the desk had a mass about him that sucked her in. He was dense. She sat down in front of him.
‘Christopher came to the camp very recently,’ said Dr Balad. ‘He offers us great hope.’
As the doctor spoke, the man sitting opposite her lowered his head slightly and looked at Miriam from underneath his brow. The faint grin remained all the while, lips slightly parted, pink tongue moving slowly behind them.
‘I am the man who returned,’ he said.
‘He has a certain way with words,’ said Dr Balad with an awkward laugh. He put his hand in his trouser pocket, brushing the hem of his white doctor’s coat to one side. ‘Christopher was ill. But now he is not.’
It was a few moments before Miriam decoded what the doctor had said. She found herself trying to remain calm but was unable to prevent a quickening of her breath. The front of her head, just behind the eyes, felt light.
The man on the other side of the desk widened his grin as he watched her reaction. He parted his lips far enough to allow his tongue to emerge. Slowly, he ran it across the apron of his top lip.
Miriam jolted backwards in shock. The tongue was forked. It had two points where there should have been one. In the harsh light it looked overly fleshy. The scars in the fork were visible as deep shadowless pits. Its underside was whitish and dry.
‘I was ill,’ said the man. When he formed an ‘s’ sound it oozed out as a hiss. ‘I saw it all. I saw where we stand now – at the cusp of entropy.’ He closed his mouth and his grin returned. ‘You want to know how I made my tongue?’ he said. ‘It is a new story. After they cured me, I needed the pain I had been shown.’
Pain. The way in which he said it gave it extra meaning. He punched it out.
‘It is nothing more than that. I did not mutilate myself before I was ill. Only after. And it is as simple as that. It is no . . . great . . . shakes. I cut my own tongue out because I longed for the pain. That is what I was shown. We think,’ he said, ‘that all we want is happiness but that is not true. We are snakes eating our own tails, Miriam.’ He said her name slowly. ‘We want pain just as much as we want pleasure. The pain defines us in the same way. If it was taken away, you see, we would find it in another form.’
He spoke like he was still infected.
‘Is it true that he was ill?’ she asked Dr Balad.
The man opposite tilted his head as he looked at her. He appeared to be interested that she was asking questions about him as if he was not there.
‘We have no medical way of telling, of course. But . . . we think so. Can you not feel it?’
She hesitated, sensing the doctor’s eager anticipation. She could feel it, just as she had felt so many other strange truths through the filter of her new sense.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘I feel it also,’ he said quietly. ‘Take off your shirt, Christopher.’
Slowly, the man rose from his seat. It took several seconds for him to stand fully upright. He was tall and the motion was one akin to unfurling rather than standing. He crossed his arms over each other and grasped the bottom of his shirt. With his eyes trained on Miriam he pulled it up and over his head.
His whole upper torso was covered in surgical stitches. His body had been slashed open and sewn back together. But the dark purple lines were not random. They ran from the area around his kidneys, symmetrically, up his sides to the collarbone, in towards the centre of the chest where they almost joined before snaking back down like train tracks over his heart into his abdomen and then into widening swirls that curled back in towards the middle of the pubic bone, where they finally joined. Instantly, the two swirls at the bottom of his stomach reminded her of inverted devil horns. She knew that her eyes were wide open and her hand had covered her mouth, but her actions were no longer voluntary.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he hissed. ‘Look at me. I am the man who returned. This is my map.’
‘Show her your arms,’ said Dr Balad.
‘Did you do that to yourself ?’ she said.
At the back of her mind was the idea that she should not be here, that what she was seeing was something that did not have anything to do with her, but she could not hold the thought. The pattern of the scars was formed in such a way that it sucked her thoughts towards them.
Christopher smiled. ‘I did not.’
Miriam swallowed. ‘Who?’
He pulled his shirt back over his body and sat down.
‘Your arms,’ said Dr Balad again.
The man behind the desk was now bored of this conversation. He no longer seemed to relish the way he was being treated by the doctor as an exhibit. Miriam picked up on it, saw his frustration and saw him control his feelings. Their eyes caught and they shared a moment. With reluctance, the man rolled his shirt sleeves up.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know I don’t,’ he said, but continued to roll the sleeves. He placed his hands on the desk and turned his arms over so they were palm upwards, revealing the fleshy underside of his forearms.
She saw the holes, three on each arm, and leaned over for closer inspection. Cylinders of sk
in and flesh had been removed from his arm. They looked like miniature version of holes in a golf course. The diameter of each circle was that of a pencil. Miriam wondered with horror just what type of a machine could make such a wound.
‘How did this happen?’
She looked directly into the tiny holes. They seemed to go right into the centre of the arms, right to the bone. They were so deep that even in the harsh light they were clouded in shadow. The incisions were so smooth and clinical. She could feel Dr Balad watching her.
‘The powerful men of the world did it,’ said Christopher. ‘In their desperation for a solution they decided they would do anything.’
The dynamic in the room had shifted. He was talking more normally. The malevolence she had felt from him had not gone, but it had waned.
‘Well, they found their solution,’ he said.
‘Why did they need to do this to you?’
‘It worked, didn’t it?’
He glowered at her and she felt instantly vulnerable again.
Dr Balad spoke. ‘I have never seen such a thing done to a person before.’
Miriam ignored him.
‘Was it the government?’
‘It was done at a . . . facility.’
She remembered the place she had been taken to after Henry’s father was killed. There was the doctor who had freed her. And there was something else: the feeling of unease, of being trapped, of seeing all the ill people there, collected up from the streets by spacemen in suits from the future. They were unknowing and unwilling. She remembered the doctor’s shock when he realized she was not ill, his determination to let her go, to get her away from the place. And then she remembered something that in all the times she had thought back on the moment she had not recollected: the screaming that echoed down the corridors. She looked at the man opposite once more.
‘We are all doomed,’ he said. ‘This camp, it is nothing. You saw what happened the first time the world was decimated. It will happen again. A little push this way, or a little push that way, and this camp will all come tumbling down. Badness is too strong a force. It is too destructive. Goodness is too passive. The time will come.’ He looked at her deeply. ‘You know it will.’
She held his stare.
‘Why do you think you are here?’ he said. ‘Hmm?’ He tilted his head but she was not frightened of him. ‘Why are you the guest of honour?’
‘Christopher, that’s enough,’ said Dr Balad.
‘They want your house,’ he said.
‘Do not listen to him, Miriam, he says these things for effect.’
Christopher smiled. His tongue emerged from his lips again.
Miriam stood slowly and they went to leave.
‘Who are you going to trust?’ said the man, as the door to the room swung shut. ‘Them? Or me?’
When they reached ground level again they stopped.
‘Can we go up there?’ she said.
‘No.’
Above them, up in the upper heights of the lighthouse, she could hear footsteps moving over a wooden floor. A voice called out. It sounded like an order, but the words were muffled.
‘You have to understand,’ said Dr Balad. ‘The people up there are doomed. They will die.’
‘Can you not cure them? Now that you have –’ she failed to find the words – ‘that man?’
‘We do not know how he was cured. We do not know the process, or the drugs. I showed you the man only because of what he means. And that is that the illness does not have to win. We do have a chance, Miriam.’
‘Why do you keep him down there?’
‘We didn’t at first. When he came to the camp he was living with everybody else, but he was . . . a nuisance. He would walk around the camp at night and frighten people. And so we offered him the room in the lighthouse. It is funny because nobody had known about the door that led beneath the lighthouse until he arrived. It seems strange now, does it not? That we had not seen something as clear as a door in the wall?’
She could hear the rumbling of a generator from somewhere outside.
‘You know,’ said Dr Balad, ‘what he just said? About who will you trust? It is always difficult for people to trust us here because it seems so strange, that we exist so peacefully. We know this. But I will tell you that we can be trusted. I hope you will come to realize this, because trust is so important a thing.’
When she got back to the house it did not look the same. She saw just how cold and damp it had become. She went to the back garden and looked over the wall at the grave. It wasn’t even there any more. It was just grass now. Joseph’s animal paddocks were still empty. Placing her hand on her stomach she waited for a kick but nothing came.
As she moved slowly back into the conservatory she heard a knock at the front door. Her mother was standing in the hallway.
‘It’s the Scottish man from the camp,’ she said. ‘He’s back.’
Miriam went towards the door but her mother stopped her.
‘You know you can tell me what happened,’ she said.
Miriam turned away and went down the hall. She thought of the man with the forked tongue, sitting inside the earth, in the little room beneath the lighthouse. Is that what her mother had meant? She opened the door.
‘Can I come in?’ McAvennie said.
They sat down at the kitchen table.
‘We were attacked,’ he said.
Miriam tried not to show emotion. She was not part of the camp; it had nothing to do with her.
‘They . . .’ he paused. ‘They killed everyone – the farmer who owns all the land behind your house, his wife, all of the folk who lived in the wee hamlet there.’
Miriam faltered. ‘There are terrible people out there,’ she muttered.
‘This was different,’ he said. ‘They weren’t killing for protection, or to steal.’ He looked at her, hoping she would understand his meaning. He was sitting with his back to the window, his face in shadow. ‘They just . . . did it.’
‘And so why come to me?’
McAvennie composed himself.
‘You’re not safe up here.’ He knitted his hands together, put them on the table and leaned forward. ‘These . . . men. They’ve been burning farmland, ruining crops. And there’s a lot of them. We’d heard they were out there. There’ve been rumours of them for months: men dressed in black clothes and gas masks.’
He noticed the change in her.
‘It’s their thing. Look.’ He fished something out of his pocket. It was an Ordnance Survey map of the area. McAvennie unfolded it with his large hands, laid it out on the table and spun it round so it was the right way up for her.
‘Here.’ He tapped the map with a chubby forefinger. Black shapes circled fields, hand-drawn in ink, with crosses marked out. The shapes formed a semi-circle. It began ten miles to the west of the lighthouse and swept round to a few miles east of Miriam’s house. ‘They’re closing in on us.’
Miriam shook her head. She thought about the sick feeling she had felt in the supermarket that day, when the aisles had been filled with smoke and the looters had crept through it, moving like insects.
‘They’ll hit you first,’ said McAvennie.
‘They’d be pretty stupid to come round here, with all the people living down on the camp.’
‘They’re not doing this to survive,’ he said. ‘And they’re not scared of us. They’ve burned whole fields. What kind of a person does that, eh?’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘There’s something else I need to tell you, Miriam. You got your two bairns, yes?’
‘What about them?’
McAvennie scratched the back of his head. ‘We know the folks who lived down in the hamlet had children. I’d seen them myself.’
Her body went cold.
‘We couldnae find any kids in the houses. We found their parents, aye, but the kids?’ He shook his head and looked at her. ‘No sign. They must’ve been there – they had their wee bedrooms all made up.’ He tapped the table with a ne
rvous finger. ‘No kids.’
She couldn’t look at him. ‘What do you think happened to them?’
McAvennie shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ He left it at that.
Miriam looked out into the hallway to check the children were not hiding outside. Her brain could not pinpoint any one idea.
‘What do you think we should do?’
McAvennie breathed out heavily through his nose. ‘Come to the camp.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not, Miriam?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘You can trust us.’
She allowed the words to hang in the air. He clearly didn’t understand that she could not risk her family’s safety down at the camp. There were just too many people down there. She didn’t want to be amongst them.
‘Do you have kids?’ she said.
‘I did. I had a son who died,’ he said plainly.
She went to say something, opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
‘He got ill. My wife too.’ His face was impassive. ‘But they both died in the camp, aye? I know what you’re thinking, Miriam. You’re thinking you cannae trust so many people. You came from London? You saw what happened. But I trusted the folk down on the camp. I took my family there.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.
He waved his hand. ‘It’s in the past now.’
She waited.
‘I do think about them but what good does it do? I can think all I want, they ain’t coming back.’
‘George,’ she said. ‘I want you to understand.’ She put her hand on the table. ‘I used to have faith in people, I really did. Joseph, my brother-in-law, used to hate it. He said I was naive and all that stuff, but I always thought it was important to give people the benefit of the doubt.’
‘If you show people kindness, you can gain their trust,’ he said.
‘But I was wrong,’ she said, gaining strength. ‘If there’s one thing I know now, it’s that people are dangerous. I don’t mean people like you, I mean people on the whole. They’re just too . . . selfish, I guess.’
