Being (8 page)

I positioned the mirror on the flat of my belly, just below the wound.

And now I was ready.

Holding the scalpel firmly, I took a tentative pick at the hook of a stitch. The thread snipped. There was a little pain, but not much. The alcohol had numbed me. I picked again. The scalpel blade sliced through another stitch – easy – then another, and another, and another. I kept going until all the stitches were cut.

I wanted to rest now, but I knew that I had to keep going. If I stopped now, I’d never do it.

I put the scalpel down, gripped the cut end of one of the stitches and pulled. It was stuck. I pulled a little harder, feeling the pain now, and out it came. Pop. A reddened stitch-hole remained. Quickly, but carefully, I pulled out the rest of the stitches. One, two, three, four, five, six…

When I was done, the wound was loose, but still fixed. Held together by a wafer-thin ridge of flesh.

Or something like flesh.

I lay my hands flat on either side of the wound and gently pulled at the skin. Gently, slowly, firmly… my hands
moved… the wound stretched… and stretched… until the join began to give. A crack appeared, and a dribble of thin brown liquid oozed out. I pulled harder, wincing at the pain. The ridge of flesh was splitting open, but it was still joined to something below. I pulled harder. It hurt. I was sweating, hot and cold, groaning, gritting my teeth. God, it
hurt.
The pain was dull and distant, but deep. I kept pulling, flat hands tugging the skin, and the mouth of the wound began to open. Not much, about half a centimetre. Like a tiny pink abyss. I looked in the mirror, angling it, trying to see what the flesh was joined to. After searching for a few moments, I saw something. Just below the skin… some kind of seal. A flexible hinge.

I picked up the scalpel again.

Emptied my head.

And then I was plunging the scalpel into the wound and slicing down into the hinge. Oh God, it hurts so much so much so much… keep going, keep cutting, keep slicing… nice and clean and quick and strong… and the blade keeps cutting through the pain… and the liquids stream, red and black and white… and I can hear that stone-cold whistle in my head saying stop stop stop stop stop STOP.

I stopped cutting.

The wound lay open.

My stomach was red. My skin, my fingers, my hand. A red skeleton hand.

I breathed.

Listened.

Breathed.

My hand was shaking.

The wound lay open and bleeding.

I could feel something, but I didn’t know what it was. A numb, dull, black feeling. A reaction to the pain, perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t think I cared. I wasn’t there any more.

There was blood on the sheets. Blood on the towels.

It didn’t matter.

I had to do this now. I had to finish it.

I picked up the mirror and held it over the gash in my belly. What did I see? I saw a darkness… like oil and water on a hard surface. Movement. It was unclear. I took a quick breath, placed a hand on the edge of the wound and pulled it to one side. A sudden jagged pain ripped through me like a knife, and just for a moment I was gone – shut down in nothingness – and then suddenly I was back again. The wound was gaping open now, like a black and bloody teardrop. Red-rimmed like a lipsticked mouth. And I could see right down inside myself. I could see blood and an oily brown blackness. A thick and inky liquid that moved as if magnetized. I reached in and touched it. The liquid shimmered like mercury. I felt inside the lips of the wound. It stung. But I was a long way beyond the pain now. I felt around some more, and I felt something hard. Rigid. Thick-skinned. Hollow. It moved stiffly to the touch, as if heavily sprung. I remembered Casing’s voice:
This
… I
can’t get through it. It has – look – patterning. Like bone structure. Outlines. It could be some kind of shield. That might explain the X-rays.

I positioned the mirror to get a better look. I saw something brown… brown and hard, like plastic. But it was the brown of something alive. Something internal. An inner shell. Bone, shell, metal, fibre. Patterned, etched, embossed, formed, engineered, designed, evolved…

Christ…

A silver shred flickered through an unseen pore, then dissolved and lost itself in a trail of black.

Something quite perfect.

I looked inside myself.

For a long long time.

What can I say?

It was all there, inside me.

It
is
there.

It is.

I am.

It.

Eventually, with drunken fingers and a shattered mind, I took the needle and surgical thread and started sewing myself back together again. Flesh slipped in the sweat of my fingers. The needle trembled as I guided it through the bleeding holes and knotted the thread. The pain of it was pure and sharp.

When I’d finished, my stomach was butchered and ugly. Badly stitched, swollen and bruised, stained with nightmarish colours – yellowy-black, brown, red, inky-blue, puckered pink. But at least the wound was closed. Whatever was inside me was back inside me.

Hidden away.

Finally, while my mind was still reeling, there was just one more thing to do. Just to make sure. I took the bloodstained scalpel in my right hand, clenched the fist of my
left hand, held the arm out in front of me, then pressed the blade into the fleshy part and slowly drew it down. A thick red slice opened up and my heart screamed dully. I lifted my arm to my face and studied the cut. Beneath the flow of blood, a luminous shiver of pale white liquid was enmeshed with a shine of black, like milk and oil. I wiped away the blood with a towel and looked closer. I saw something metallic pulsing in the liquid. I saw red things, silver things, a flash of tiny stars. I saw the shadows of silver bones.

I kept looking. Mesmerized.

After a while – ten, fifteen minutes – the blood darkened and began to solidify. Visibly, the flesh was starting to dry. A scab was already forming.

Twenty minutes.

The wound was closed.

With a sense of some futility, I ripped the sleeve off Ryan’s shirt and wrapped it tightly round my arm.

It was nearly two thirty in the morning. I was lying on a bloodstained bed on the sixth floor of the Paradise Hotel, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was bleeding. I was drunk. I was exhausted.

I wanted to go to sleep, but I knew that I couldn’t.

I was too scared.

Scared of what was inside me.

Scared of myself.

The rest of that night is a timeless blur. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know if I slept or not. I can’t remember. I don’t think I did. I think I might have dozed off once or twice, but all I can really remember is sitting on the bed all night, thinking myself into a sleepless void.

Nothing made sense.

I kept going over and over everything that had happened – trying to understand it, trying to make sense of it, trying to make it into something real – but no matter how much I thought about it, no matter how many questions I asked myself, I couldn’t find any answers.

How did it happen?

How
could
it happen?

How could I be something else?

Why
should I be something else?

What else
is
there?

Who’s Ryan?

What
is he?

What does he want?

Where did he come from?

What does it all mean?

The questions didn’t get me anywhere. All they did was
swirl around inside my head like shapeless things in a whirlwind, roaring and spinning, twisting and turning, until eventually I didn’t even know what I was thinking about.

Everything was too much, too vague, too impossible.

I couldn’t do it any more.

I had to think about something else, something that meant something.

I had to think about what I was going to
do.

It was six thirty in the morning now. I rubbed the tiredness from my eyes and gazed around the hotel room. A slow grey light was seeping in through the curtains, giving everything a flat and empty look, like a picture in an old magazine. The room was a mess. There was blood and stuff all over the place – on the bed, on the towels, on the floor. There were piles of papers and photographs, empty food wrappers, clothes, wallets, syringes, scalpels. The air smelled bad – a stale mixture of alcohol, blood, weariness and fear.

What are you going to do?

I knew I couldn’t stay here, not with all this mess I’d made. The room looked like a slaughterhouse. As soon as the cleaners saw it, there’d be questions, and I didn’t want questions. So I knew I had to move on. But where? Where could I go? The only place I wanted to go was back home to Bridget and Pete, but that was out of the question. Ryan would be watching them. He’d have people watching the house, watching Pete’s office. He’d have taps on Bridget’s and Pete’s phones. Wherever they went, whatever they did, whoever they spoke to – Ryan would know.

So… where could I go?

I didn’t have any family.

I didn’t have any friends.

I had no sanctuaries.

There was nowhere to go.

As I sat there, trying to think about it, I could feel the sounds of the hotel getting inside my head. The silence of the room, the random noises from the corridor outside… empty and unknown, belonging to no one, echoing dully with unwanted noise.

I couldn’t think.

My head was throbbing.

My legs were heavy.

My throat was dry.

I went into the bathroom, drank from the tap, then opened my shirt and examined my belly in the mirror. The stitches were crusty and black, the stitch-holes ringed with a strange coppery colour. The wound was closed, almost healed, and the bruising had faded to a faint yellowy-blue. I ran my hand over the wound.

There was no pain. None at all.

I untied the bandage on my arm. All that remained of the cut was a knobbly ridge of hardened skin. I flexed my wrist. The ridge cracked open a little and a drop of clear liquid oozed out. I wiped it clean and retied the bandage.

This wasn’t just fast healing. I knew that now. This wasn’t just cuts and bruises… this was something else.

This was something that simply shouldn’t be.

∗

I looked in the mirror again. Look, I told myself, it’s just a body. A face. Nothing untoward. A thing of skin and bone. Lips, teeth, eyes, a soft scrape of beard. And beneath the skin…?

My reflection shimmered, and just for a moment I saw what I could be. I saw struts and cages and bowls of bone, or something like bone. I saw red-and-white strips of ribbony bands, sockets, holes, hinges. I saw levers and wires and multi-coloured canals, bellows and pumps, tubes and pipes, weird white sacs, veined vessels, jellies and liquids, metallic cords…

Christ.

I saw the spine of a giant snake, the dead-domed visage of a titanium-white skull.

Look at yourself.

The mirror shimmered again and the images died. I got undressed, turned on the shower and tried to wash the memories away.

Half an hour later I was back on the bed again, back to thinking about what I was going to do, when suddenly I heard a thump outside the door. It wasn’t much, just a faint little
thump,
but it was enough to set my shredded nerves jangling. I reached for the pistol and pointed it at the door. I could hear muffled footsteps, moving quietly along the corridor. I thumbed the safety catch on the pistol. I listened hard. The footsteps were still there, but they were moving away from my door now, and when I heard another faint thump, and then another, I put down the pistol and relaxed.

Newspaper in the morning, Mr Ryan?

Yes, please.

Nothing to worry about, it was just the newspaper.

Why had I asked for a newspaper in the morning? Because that’s what an ordinary young man would have done, and that’s all I was – an ordinary young man.

Ordinary jacket, ordinary shirt, ordinary newspaper in the morning.

The first thing I saw when I opened the door and picked up the paper was a photograph of someone who looked like me. Similar face, similar eyes, similar mouth. Then I looked closer… and I realized it
was
me. I couldn’t believe it. But I had to. It was right there – front page of the
Daily Express,
bottom left-hand corner. A photograph of me. It was a school photograph. I’d only had it taken about six months ago. In the original photograph I didn’t look too bad, but the graininess of the picture in the newspaper made me look shadowy and gaunt, like something from the underworld.

‘Shit,’ I whispered, folding the newspaper and going back into my room. I shut the door and locked it behind me, then opened the paper again.

The photograph was still there.

The caption beneath it said:

I stared at the words for a while –
ROBERT SMITH: FRENZIED ATTACK
– then, with a terrible sinking feeling inside me, I forced myself to read the story.

I sat down on the bed and read through the story again, just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken, but I knew I was wasting my time. The words were still there –
Professor Ian Casing
…
multiple stab wounds
…
Robert Smith
…
horrendous killing
…