Being, Page 6

  Words don’t mean anything. These things were beyond description. They moved without movement. They were solid liquids and liquid solids. They were with and without form and colour. They were unknowable.

  PAUSE.

  With the picture paused, the after-images danced around inside my mind. Particles, spheres, discs, rods, cones, cylinders, strings, stars. Crystalline compounds with radiating shards. Elements in a structure. A structure of elements. A sub-atomic dome, a dark cathedral, a perfect abomination.

  Inside me.

  In me.

  It was me.

  I rewound the tape and played it back.

  I rewound it again and played it back again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And again.

  How could it be?

  There was no conceivable explanation.

  It had to be a mistake. A joke. A hoax. A trick. An absurd misunderstanding.

  It had to be.

  Because if it wasn’t… if it wasn’t…

  I had to face it. If it wasn’t a mistake, if those things I’d seen… those alien things inside me… if those things were real…

  What did that mean?

  What did that make me?

  It made me sick.

  I drank more vodka and forced myself to consider the only question: if I’m not normal, if I’m not human… then what am I? What? What else is there? Robot? Cyborg? Alien? Android? No. Impossible. No. No. NO. I couldn’t even believe the sound of those words. This was the real world. This was reality. This was Essex, England. This wasn’t a story. It wasn’t a fantasy, for God’s sake.

  I couldn’t be a machine.

  That was impossible.

  Absolutely impossible.

  And even if it wasn’t impossible… even if there were such things – machines of unimaginable complexity, humanoid machines, machines that looked and functioned exactly the same as a human being – well, even then… it still wasn’t possible for me to be something like that, was it?

  I’d know, wouldn’t I?

  I’d know…

  Wouldn’t I?

  Would I?

  How would I know?

  If I was some kind of a machine, a machine that looked and functioned exactly the same as a human being, then how was I to know that I wasn’t a human being? If I looked the same as everyone else, walked the same as everyone else, talked the same as everyone else… how was I to know that I wasn’t the same as everyone else?

  What would tell me?

  What did I have to tell me?

  How would I know?

  How can you wonder what you are?

  Twinkle twinkle, little star…

  I was drunk now. Drunk enough to do what I had to do.

  The floor tilted slightly as I got off the bed, but I was steady enough to function. I went into the bathroom, fetched some towels and a handheld mirror, then went back and sat down on the bed. I placed the towels beside me. I took two more painkillers, another long drink… waited for the sickness to pass. Then I unbuttoned my shirt and gazed down at my stitched-up belly.

  It looked like a sunset, an ugly sunset – a bruised yellow sun on a white-skinned sky. My skin. A map of sick colours – puce, black, dull red-brown. There were faded stains around the stitches, the remains of leaked fluids. Like blood, but darker. Like dried runnels of blackberry juice.

  I wet my finger and cautiously rubbed at the stains. My fingertip reddened. I looked at it. Sniffed it. Licked it. It didn’t taste like blackberry juice. It tasted sour and metallic, like something alien.

  It could have been anything.

  I looked down at the fresh scar on my belly. It was slightly raised, like a wormy ridge, criss-crossed with dried dark stitches. I touched it. It was tender, sore, but not particularly painful. It was already healing.

  The tip of my finger tingled.

  I turned my attention to the pile of surgical paraphernalia laid out on the bed – syringes, needles, scalpels.

  I picked up a scalpel.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I leaned back slightly and spread the towels around my body.

  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 positio
ned 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.

  7

  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:

  ROBERT SMITH: FRENZIED ATTACK

  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…

  I stared at nothing, trying to think…

  How?

  Why?

  But I knew I didn’t have time to think. I wasn’t an ordinary young man any more, I was a murderer. I was on the front page of the Daily Express. People had seen me – the hotel receptionist, people in the street, people on the train – they’d call the police. The police would call Ryan… he might be here any minute.

  I emptied my head and got moving.

  Shoes on, jacket on, pistol in pocket. I ran round the room, grabbing a few clothes and throwing them in the rucksack, then I stopped for a moment and took a quick look round at the rest of the stuff – the papers, the photographs, the video, the scalpels – wondering if I should take any of it or not.