I REMEMBER NOTHING
The light is dim and dirty yellow, but it’s enough to bleach what’s left of my frontal lobe. Feels like I wiped off my mascara with sandpaper. I’m so dehydrated my eyes are going to shrivel up and roll out of their sockets, so I squeeze them shut again and try to sink back into unconsciousness. But too late, because now I’m awake, and shivering because it’s cold and the only thing covering me is a clammy sheet.
Must have been the noise that woke me up. It’s like the constant hum of a distant power tool, the buzzing of a thousand bees, rising and falling, and before I know it my heartbeat has fallen into synch, and my mind is fixating on some tune I once heard, and lo, I’m in the grip of a fucking earworm. That one dirgelike phrase, over and over again until I feel like screaming, except I don’t think my head could take the extra volume. Oh and by the way I’m never going to drink again.
There’s a strange smell in the air too, like yesterday’s Chinese takeaway, making me simultaneously hungry and nauseous. And then someone who isn’t me says, “Jesus fucking Christ my head.” A man’s voice, if you can call it a voice. More of a rasp, really. But at least it stops the earworm in its tracks.
Any sort of movement is torture, but after several abortive attempts I manage to flip myself over and find myself face to face with something small and square. Yellow, even more so than the light. I blink until it comes into focus. A Post-it Note, not really sticking to the pillow but resting there like a dry leaf, ready to blow away.
I adjust the angle of my head a fraction, just enough to read the words.
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF PAIN
YOUR BODY’S MINE SO IS YOUR BRAIN
Wow. What does that even mean? The writing is spindly and careless. Could be mine, but I can’t imagine being in any condition to hold a pen. And why would I have written that anyway?
Beyond the Post-it, something is moving. A mouth, forming words. Someone lying alongside me.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got paracetamol?”
The eyes above the mouth are bloodshot. As they focus on my face, they bulge, as if they’ve spied a gorgon with a mane of snakes. But it’s not the bulging eyes that concern me so much as the red stipple across the nose and one cheek and part of the forehead, as though the face has been spattered with paint, the yellow light making the red even redder. Yellow and red, like someone burst a boil.
As I realise what the stipple is, the air rushes out of my lungs, so I suck it back in, and once again it escapes, and before I know it I’m hyperventilating and I think I’m going to pass out.
“Calm down,” says the man’s voice, sounding anything but calm.
I wrestle with my breathing until I get it under control, more or less, but the humming and the stipple on his face and neck and hands are making me feel sick.
I say, “You’ve got blood on you.”
He brings his hand up and examines it curiously, as though he’s never seen a hand before, then looks back at me, eyes no longer bulging but narrowed into a squint. “So have you.”
I blink through the half-light, peering down at the sheet covering my body, and for the first time notice the faint crimson splotches like faded chrysanthemums. I look at my own hand and make out a dark red crust between the fingers. Surprised I’m not more shocked, but now my reactions are numbed, and it’s as though the hand belongs to someone else.
What the fuck happened? Was there an accident? I can’t remember. I take another, longer look at the man lying next to me. I’ve never seen him before. How much did I drink last night? I struggle to sit up, tugging at the sheet to keep my breasts covered, though clearly it’s too late for modesty. He grips his side of the sheet and pulls it back. For a while the humming is counterpointed by hoarse panting as we engage in a small but what seems like a vitally important tug of war.
I give up, let go of the sheet and reconfigure the pillow to raise my head, just enough to let me look around. I see enough to realise this place means nothing to me. It’s like a waiting room, with a bed. No windows, but on the wall facing us there’s a drab brown door with a small yellow blob in the middle. Another Post-it Note, I’m guessing, but too far away to see what might be written on it. A wooden chair which looks ready to collapse if anyone were to put their weight on it. A chest of drawers, IKEA by the looks of it. On top of that, a putty-coloured candle jammed into a tarnished metal holder. Above the chest, a picture on the wall, something murky, can’t see properly from here. Further along, in the corner, a washbasin the colour of pale urine, or maybe it’s just the yellow light making it look that way. A single tap, a glass tumbler. Above it a mirror, and above that, fixed to the wall, a cheap light fitting, so weak it leaves half the room wreathed in shadow. As I stare at it, I notice an almost imperceptible flicker. Maybe the humming is coming from that.
No clues as to why I’m here, or why I’m hurting. I turn inwards to examine the pain. Each muscle in my body feels as though it’s been extracted and twanged like a guitar string before being twisted back into place. But especially the muscles around my thighs, which are aching as if I . . .
My heart skitters. Muscle ache around my thighs means one thing. Sex. But I don’t remember it. So I must have been raped. Kidnapped, beaten up, and raped. And probably drugged as well, because there’s a black hole where my memory should be. All I know is that I’m here now, lying in bed next to my kidnapper and rapist. I peek sideways at him. He looks almost as dazed as I feel. I need to pull myself together and do something before he recovers his wits and assaults me again.
Think! Think!
I look around the room again, trying to push back the panic, trying not to let him see I’ve figured out his game. I look around for something, anything, to use as a weapon. The candlestick? Too small. Perhaps I could hit him with the chair, but I’d need to knock him out with a single blow, because otherwise it would only enrage him. And then what? Then he’d get violent again, and hurt me some more.
Did he snatch me off the street? From a bar? I should try talking, make him see reason. I read somewhere that if you can get your kidnapper to see you as a person instead of an object they’ll be less likely to hurt you. I could plead with him, promise not to run to the police if he lets me go. But would he believe that? I wouldn’t believe it myself—the second I got out of here I’d be banging on doors and screaming for the emergency services. Any sane person would do the same.
But all this is academic, because I’m not sure I’m even capable of standing up, not right now. Whatever he drugged me with, it sapped not just my willpower but basic muscle coordination and motor function. An acute pain stabs at my stomach and I don’t even have the energy to double up as I identify it as hunger. But I’ll worry about that later. Right now, my priority is protecting myself.
He says, “What did you put in my drink?”
Not what I was expecting. “What?”
“Last thing I remember . . . No, fuck it. Nothing. It’s a blank.”
I lie flat on my back, staring at the ceiling and trying once again to hack some sort of logical path through the infernal humming. Maybe my rapist is playing a sadistic game, pretending he’s the victim here, trying to get me to trust him so I don’t fight back. Well, I’m not going to fall for it.
He struggles into a sitting position, the sheet sliding off his torso, which like the rest of him is streaked with dried blood. As he takes in our surroundings it’s his turn to seem confused. As though he too is seeing this room for the first time.
And I realise with a quiver of dismay that he doesn’t know where he is, any more than I do. Unless he’s bluffing, and I don’t think he is. I’m not sure this makes me feel better. At least the kidnap and rape scenario made a horrible kind of sense. This new scenario doesn’t make any sense at all. He looks frightened of me.
“Where’s it coming from?”
I assume he’s referring to the noise. “The light fitting?”
“No, the blood.”
He’s probing his face now, opening and closing his mouth, pushing fingers into the flesh of his cheeks like someone preparing to shave. I understand what he’s searching for and explore my own face the same way, then lift the sheet and peer down through the ochre shadows at my body. No cuts or scrapes or incisions, nothing that might have bled. I reach between my thighs, but no blood there either, and anyway my periods have never been that heavy, and they’ve certainly never sprayed everyone with blood.
But there is something down there. I feel around in mounting revulsion and bring my fingers up to examine them. They’re smeared with something greasy, like chilblain ointment. I sniff them and wince. Rancid and noxious and green, like no semen I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve encountered quite a lot of it, in my time. Worse, it’s giving off a faint glow, casting a sickly viridian shadow on to the underside of our faces. I shudder and wipe the inside of my thighs with the sheet.
“What did you put inside me, you fucking freak?”
This seems to confuse him even further, so I come out with it.
“I’ve been raped.”
He stares at me, long and hard, before shaking his head.
“Don’t look at me. You’re not my type.”
“You think rapists only rape their type?”
“Who says it was rape?”
“I don’t remember consenting.”
“Babe, I didn’t touch you,” he says. “I’m not that desperate.”
I can’t believe he’s smiling. I feel like smashing his face in.
“Don’t call me babe.”
“OK. Girl. Woman. Whatever.”
He’s a prick, that much is clear, but I force myself to simmer down because we’re in the same boat, unless he really is playing a sadistic game. But I don’t think so. His act is too convincing, and now even the obnoxiousness is leaking out of him, leaving him a punctured balloon of bewilderment.
“Maybe we did have sex,” he says. “I don’t remember.”
“What do you remember?”
We question each other, tentatively, like a couple on a first date. We each remember growing up, going to school. We remember our names. I remember being picture editor on a magazine. He remembers working as a trainee chef. But beyond that, our memories are fogged, as though someone opened the door to the darkroom of our minds before the images could be fixed. All I can summon are vague sensations, but I can’t sort them into any sort of context. We don’t think we’ve ever met before, but we can’t be sure. Maybe we did meet, and that’s just another of the things we’ve forgotten.
One thing I do know. “I drank too much.”
He nods. “Me too. I take it you don’t have paracetamol.”
I tell him there might be some in my bag, but I don’t know where it is. I can’t see a bag here. But at least I’ve remembered something. I do have a bag. Or had one. So where is it now?
I try to lick my lips, but there’s not enough moisture in my mouth to do it efficiently. I would sell my soul for a drink of water. My gaze wanders longingly across the room, towards the basin where the glass is waiting to be filled. . . . But it’s an impossible dream. I’m still not capable of standing up, let alone walking all the way over there.
And then, scattered fragments come back to me. Running down some backstairs, stumbling, laughing. A castle in ruins. Picking my way over rubble towards the gateway to a city. Something on fire. Maybe a car, or a person. Twisting, tearing, screaming . . .
I attempt to put these impressions into words, but they resist so stubbornly I give up. “Probably a dream.”
“Wait,” he says. He screws up his face in concentration. “The sound of breaking glass, right? Running down a long staircase? I remember that too. Dark streets, flashing lights . . .”
“Did we dream the same thing?” I begin to shiver so hard my teeth knock together. Up until now my terror has been blunted by befuddlement, but now it forces its way through the numbness and hits me, hard. The windowless room suddenly feels smaller, the walls closing in on us. I need to get out of here right now. Where are my clothes? They must be here somewhere. I lean over the edge of the bed, and my head swims as the pattern on the carpet comes up to meet me with its interlocking semi-abstract swirls which might be flowers, or birds with sharpened beaks. And I’m struck by the feeling—no, the absolute conviction—that I’ve done all this before. But that’s not possible. How could I not remember a hangover this bad?
For a moment I feel so dizzy I think I’m going to have to lie flat again, but finally my eyes pick out something that isn’t part of the pattern. I reach out and grasp the edge of a limp bundle of fabric, and pull it up on to the bed. A dress? But something’s not right. I try to smooth it out. Was a dress. Now streaked with rust-coloured stains, and in tatters. As though shredded by claws.
“Jesus.” He pokes at the mangled fabric with his finger. “What happened?”
“Hang on. There’s more.” This time I almost tumble on to the floor trying to reach the rest of the clothes, but he holds on to my waist as I pull them up on to the bed. Or what’s left of them. We sift listlessly through the pile, trying in vain to reassemble the stained scraps into viable memories. He finally locates what appears to be a pocket and slides his fingers into it hopefully, but the only thing in there is a blue cigarette lighter.
“Something attacked us,” I say.
There’s an outbreak of growling, so loud I peer around fearfully, thinking whatever shredded our clothes must be right here with us, in the room. Only when he looks embarrassed do I realise the sound is coming from his abdomen.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m starving.”
“Me too,” I say. “And thirsty. Spitting feathers.”
We both look longingly at the basin, so distant it might as well be on Mars. I grit my teeth, ignore the pain, and set my feet on the carpet, but before I can go any further I’m hit by another wave of debilitating nausea. Nausea, and something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Something else I don’t want to put my finger on, as though I’m in the grip of something bigger and more powerful, something which is watching and laughing, having fun at our expense.
I keel sideways, defeated. He sighs as though I’ve let us both down.
“At least I tried,” I say.
He interprets this as a reproach, and laboriously swings his legs over the side of the bed in his turn. I slide over to watch his slow progress. I really want him to stand, so he can fetch me some water, but already he’s in trouble. His mouth contorts, and for a second I think he’s going to throw up, but instead he sinks slowly to his knees and lowers his head till all I can see of him is his back. But I can hear him muttering, “Close to the earth . . .”
His shoulders tense up. Even though I can’t see his face from here, I can tell he’s spotted something.
Then, in a muffled voice, “We have a bag.”
A bag! I feel a flush of triumph. Surely the bag will provide answers. There’ll be clues in it. Maybe even a phone.
He makes a strangled noise in his throat, and when he turns to look up at me, I wish he hadn’t. All the blood has drained out of his face, leaving the skin looking like greaseproof paper.
“Something else . . . I can’t . . . You’d better get down here.”
I’m still feeling optimistic about the bag, so even though I don’t like the look on his face I slither off the bed until I’m kneeling alongside him. So long as I have my head down I can keep the nausea at bay. Now I understand what he meant by close to the earth. Close to the earth is where we need to be.
Down here, on the floor, the sweet and sour smell is stronger, and the humming’s so loud it’s making my eardrums vibrate. The effort of moving has sapped what little energy was available to me, and the yellow light barely penetrates the shadows, so it’s another moment or two before my eyes can make out the object on the floor.
A leather tote bag, tan and weathered, another yellow Post-it stuck to the side. I unpeel the note and bring it up close to squint at the same spindly printing.
IF HUNGER’S MAKING YOU FEEL WEAK UNDER THE BED IS WHAT YOU SEEK
My stomach gurgles in response. I am hungry. Maybe there’s something to eat in the bag, an energy bar, something like that. I grab the worn leather strap and tug at it. The bag is heavier than it looks, but it bumps across the carpet towards me. I prepare to unzip it and look inside.
The man touches my arm.
“Not that,” he whispers. “That.”
He’s shaking his head and pointing at something beyond the bag, so I let go of the strap and peer into the shadows.
What is that? A side of beef, or pork? Raw and bloody. Frills of skin and trailing flaps, not a clean cut at all. Something smooth and white sticking out of the top. What the hell is a big chunk of meat doing here under the bed? It should be in the fridge. In any case it’s uncooked, so we can’t eat it.
Overcome by curiosity, I stretch out an arm, about to prod the joint when my gaze drifts to the other end and I snatch my hand back and, even though it never made contact, wipe it convulsively on the carpet.
The meat tapers off into a plimsoll. A man’s plimsoll, judging by the size of it. A plimsoll and a sticky red sock. No, not red but grey. Grey drenched in red, like the carpet beneath it.
“At least now we know where the blood came from,” I say, trying not to giggle and wondering at the same time why on earth I would find this funny.
“Who put it here?” he asks, as if I’d know any better than him. I ask myself again if he’s feigning ignorance, because there’s something about this situation that feels off.
I shake this nonsense out of my head. Of course it feels off. In what world would a leg under the bed feel normal? Hoping the bag will provide answers, I prepare once again to unzip it, but he frowns and says, “No, don’t open that.”
But this just makes me all the more determined, so I grasp the sides of the leather and feel it throbbing softly, and only now do I realise the humming has been coming from inside the bag all along. Has to be a phone inside, making that sound! So I pull on the zip and look inside, and reality abruptly shifts into another, darker dimension.
He’s watching me apprehensively, so I try to explain. “I thought it was a phone.” Not sure how to put into words what I’m seeing, I push the bag over so he can look for himself. He peers inside, and his eyes widen, but he keeps staring, as though he can’t rip his gaze away.
At last, he says, “Why is it making that noise?”
“Maybe it’s fake.” I’m clutching at straws here.
“Looks real enough to me.” He looks at the leg. “Same person?”
Christ, let’s hope so. One set of body parts is bad enough. He reaches into the bag and for a ghastly moment I think he’s going to pull the severed head out by its hair, but instead he unpeels the yellow Post-it from the forehead and reads the words out loud.
THE GAME’S AFOOT! THE HEAD’S IN PLAY
A LIGHTED FLAME WILL SHOW THE WAY
We stare at each other, searching for some sort of explanation, but all we see are mirror images of our own disbelief. The yellow light flickers. Once, twice.
Our heads swivel towards the light fitting. It flickers again, more rapidly now. Each time it blinks, the light grows dimmer, the shadows longer.
“Oh crap,” I say, because the idea of being trapped in darkness with that thing, these things, this man I don’t know from Adam and who may yet be a psychopath, fills me with a dread more primal than any I’ve been feeling up till now.
He’s still holding the Post-it Note.
A LIGHTED FLAME
“There’s a candle over there,” I say.
“Worth a try,” he says, and in the rapidly dwindling light I sense rather than see him get to his feet with suspicious ease. Not such an invalid now, eh. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t notice, but now he dives towards the chest of drawers and grabs the putty-coloured candle in its holder.
“Lighter!” he barks.
For a second I mistake his meaning and think he’s issuing a godlike command. Then I understand, and grope around on the bed until my fingers close around the blue cigarette lighter, which I scoop up and fling in the direction of his voice, thinking there is no way he’ll see that small object flying through the dying light towards him, and how did I manage to throw it so accurately anyway? But in an impossibly quick movement, he plucks it out of the air, as though some long-forgotten instinct as a cricket fielder has welled up inside him and repossessed his hand. In a smooth, practised movement, he flicks the lighter and holds the flame to the wick of the candle, which flares up and casts an eerie flickering around the room.
The light is no longer yellow but the colour of dry oatmeal infested with weevils. Something else in the room has changed. There’s another presence here.
He turns back to me, looking smug. “We make a good team.”
“Well, that was odd,” I say, as though everything up until now has been normal. I don’t know where we found that energy, but the sudden burst of activity has left us more enervated than ever. He flops back down, so now we’re both kneeling naked in front of the bag, like supplicants at an oracle.
The humming gets louder and the flickering light turns from oatmeal to greenish, but it’s not just the candle lighting the room now. The head in the bag is glowing. I try to put a name to the colour emanating from it, but all I can come up with is bile.
The dead eyes flick open. The dead lips vibrate, and the humming forms itself into words.
“Ask me while I’m still aglow. I’ll tell you all you need to know.”
The man and I look at each other. It’s the closest I’ve felt to him yet and, in a way, I’m relieved he’s there because I’m not sure I could cope with this on my own. And yet, there’s a buried part of me which is finding this new development hilarious. I suspect that part is insanity, and know instinctively that I mustn’t laugh, or I’ll unleash it into the room. Not that there isn’t enough insanity here to begin with.
The head is staring at us, but blankly. It isn’t seeing anything. Or rather, it is seeing something—something that might have once been here, but isn’t any longer.
The man next to me clears his throat and addresses it, as though talking to a severed head is the most natural thing in the world.
“Who did this?”
The lips move. In its humming, vibrating mockery of a voice, it says, “You want to know who made this mess? Your hands are red, so take a guess.”
“No!” says my companion.
“Your memory is just a blur. You don’t remember what you were.”
“My name is Elizabeth,” I tell it. “I’m a picture editor.”
The lips peel back until I see blood on the teeth.
“Once upon a distant past, in bodies never built to last.”
My male companion persists. “We’ve never met before.”
The head rolls its eyes, revealing not whites but yellow jelly.
“Your bond is forged in pain and blood, in fire and water, air and mud.”
“Why should we listen to you?” I have to stifle that hysterical laughter again.
“You knew you’d wander off the track and tasked me to direct you back.”
I’ve had enough of this. I say to my companion, “I vote we close the bag and kick it back under the bed,” hoping he’ll take the hint and zip up the bag for the both of us, because I have no intention of touching that throbbing leather sac again, not now, not ever.
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” he says. “We don’t need this . . . this thing ordering us around.”
The head rolls its eyes again. “Remembering can set you free, but hey, it’s all the same to me.”
The man says, “What if we don’t want to remember?”
The head makes a chuckling noise, and hacks up a small quantity of green fluid which reminds me of the stuff I found between my legs. I find myself wondering how it can cough when its respiratory tract has been shorn off at the neck, and feel sick all over again.
“If you refuse to seek the thread, you’ll end up wishing you were dead.”
“OK then,” I say. “Tell us what we need to know.” I’m just humouring it now, because I have no intention of letting this abomination boss us around.
“To clear your mind and stop the pain . . .” Its voice seems to be fading. “Drink, digest, get dressed again . . .”
I blurt out, “Our clothes are all torn and covered in blood!”
“The clean clothes folded in the drawer . . .”
“How do you know what’s in there?”
It sighs. “You laid out everything beforrrrrr . . .”
It gets stuck on the syllable, like a gramophone needle stuck in the same groove, coughs up blood again and the vibrations we mistook for a voice die away along with the last of the humming. The eyes close. And the bile-coloured glow fades, leaving the face waxy and dead, the only movement now from the flickering beige candlelight playing across its pallid contours.
Without the humming the room seems unnaturally peaceful. I feel like clambering on to the bed and going back to sleep. This is all a dream, and when I wake up it’ll all be back to normal . . . whatever normal is, and I’m not sure any more. But I’m too thirsty. What was it the head said? Drink? Digest?
I look at my companion and he looks back at me. Is it my imagination or does his face seem more familiar now? Have we really met before? Or maybe we only know each other from the past ten minutes, which seem to have stretched into a lifetime of pain, and hunger, and thirst.
“Water,” he says.
I’m filled with foreboding. “No, wait.”
He ignores me, lifts himself on to his hands and knees, and begins to crawl on all fours towards the basin. No, not crawl; more like scuttling, like a misshapen insect. He’s moving unnaturally fast, genitalia swinging from side to side, or maybe it just seems fast to me because I’m still rooted to the spot. The trust I was beginning to place in him has withered. So I follow him, reluctantly. I sense this is a trap, and I’m crawling straight into it, but there’s no going back now.
He reaches the basin and, grunting with the effort, hauls himself up. By the time I join him there, his fingers are already closing around the glass tumbler, as though it was the prize in a contest I’ve just lost. “No, wait,” I say again, but he picks it up and twists the tap. There’s a whine of protest from the ancient plumbing, and water trickles into the glass, with a sound like music.
He waits until it’s filled to the brim before saying, “Here we go,” turning towards me with a half-apologetic smile and tipping back his head and pouring the contents of the glass into his mouth, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows, water running down his chin, dripping on to his chest.
I paw at his arm, but he shrugs me off, drains the tumbler and lowers his head, looking straight at me with a malicious gleam in his eyes as his fingers tighten, knuckles turning white, fist gripping tighter and tighter until there’s a loud crack and the glass disintegrates into a million splinters.
“You bastard,” I say.
He lets the splinters fall, picks slivers out of his palm and drops the biggest shards into the basin. Then holds up his bleeding hand, spreading the fingers so I can see the blood trickling down his arm.
“Looks like I won,” he says.
If I weren’t so dehydrated I’d be weeping with fury. I lean over the basin and poke at the remains of the glass, but not a single piece is big enough to hold even a tiny amount of the water now trickling uselessly down the plughole.
Before I can think about what to do next, there’s an animal screech behind me. I look in the mirror. Beyond the reflection of my face, shiny and alien, I can see him still clutching his bleeding hand. But the image is rippling. His skin is erupting into goose pimples so big they cast shadows like hills on an illustrated map. His fingernails are growing. His face contorts with agony as his eyes sink further and further into his skull until the sockets are dark pools. I sway dangerously, shaking my head, but the image is still there. At last the rippling stops and his mouth spreads into an impossibly wide smile, showing more teeth than a mouth has any right to hold.
“What the hell,” I say, and make the mistake of turning round to face him, assuming the reflection in the mirror is distorted and that when I see him for real he’ll look normal again.
Except he doesn’t.
“Come to daddy,” he says, beckoning with fingernails now like vicious twigs. His voice has changed. Now it sounds as though it’s coming from a deep dark place beneath our feet. His toenails are growing too, each one curved, like a Turkish scimitar.
“Fuck no.” I retreat as far as I can into the corner by the basin, wishing I could disappear. I’m beginning to understand. The other guy, the one I woke up with, didn’t attack me. But this one did. And this one isn’t a man at all. I don’t know what he is.
When he laughs, the sound is like nails rattling in a can.
I brace myself for another onslaught, but instead of attacking me again he tips his head to one side, as if responding to a distant call my ears can’t hear, and turns to move away from me, towards the bed, where he sinks to his knees in a supple movement, not at all like his earlier collapse. He reaches under the bed and draws out the leg, clamps his teeth into the fatty part of the calf, and begins to chew.
My empty stomach heaves at the sight, but at least the meat has bought me time. I stumble to the door and turn the handle. Locked. In frustration I bang my forehead against the wood, dislodging the yellow Post-it clinging there. It floats to the floor before I get a chance to read the words on it.
There’s an explosion of moist laughter at my ear. He’s left the bed and is standing right behind me. It’s the laugh of someone with his mouth full, spitting shreds of meat and saliva. At the same instant I feel a scything pain across my shoulder, as though I’ve caught it in a sliding door, followed by a tightness in my lungs and a shock of freezing air, and wetness spilling out. I fall to my knees, as if someone has snipped the thread that has been holding me upright.
But at least now I’m down here I can read the Post-it.
THE END IS NEARER THAN YOU THINK
THE ONLY THING TO DO IS DRINK
Yes, that’s all very well, and I’m literally dying of thirst, but there’s no fucking glass. Not any more.
Hysterical laughter wells up inside me once again. Who cares if there isn’t a glass, stupid? I can still hear water trickling out of the tap. I begin to crawl back towards the ever more distant basin, and everything is getting darker, and I’m aware it isn’t the light that’s fading this time; it’s my eyesight. Glass splinters embed themselves into my hands and knees, but I try to ignore the stinging pain, and keep moving, head down like a purposeful household pet moving towards its feeding bowl. Can I reach the basin before I bleed to death and the light goes out for ever?
“I know you’re there!” he says.
Of course I’m there. Where else would I be, for fuck’s sake? But he’s moved again, and without me even noticing. Now he’s towering over me. He raises his arm, sending a long dark shadow racing across the ceiling, and I can feel the air being displaced with a whoosh as the fingernails swoop down. I manage to twist sideways so they miss my neck, but instead they sink into the soft flesh of my abdomen. He doesn’t draw them out, but screws them deeper, exploring, until I can feel them grasping something and pulling it out. I look down and see grey coils spilling out of a deep, dark hole hemmed by wayward flaps of shredded skin. As I watch in horrified fascination, the hole wells up with viscous brown liquid which overflows and drips out and is absorbed into the carpet. This is me, or what’s left of me, and soon there will be nothing left.
I resume my epic crawl towards the basin, because the alternative is to curl up and bleed, or be eaten alive or dismembered. Who knows, maybe he’ll decapitate me and put my head in a bag. Maybe I’ll end up glowing bile-green and speaking words I don’t understand to other people who don’t understand them.
I must have blacked out but suddenly I’m there, the washbasin looming over me like a grimy porcelain stump. I wrap my failing arms around the pedestal and pull myself up, slithering in my own blood in a big fat parody of a pole dance. And then I’m slumped over the basin, watching my blood circling the plughole. Thank god he didn’t shut the tap off, because I don’t think I would have had enough strength left to turn it on.
The dripping blood forms fuzzy-edged tributaries which branch out and rejoin each other in a delta of gore. The sight is so mesmerising I almost forget why I’m there. But then it comes back to me. Ah yes. The only thing to do is drink.
More laughter, this time from right behind my ear. I can smell his rank and meaty breath as his teeth snap like scissors close to my neck. Just as his fingers seize my left arm and start to pull it out of its socket, I manage to dip my head beneath the tap so water trickles into my open mouth. At first there seems too much of it, and it makes me cough and splutter. But then some of the wetness leaks into my parched throat, soaking into the cracks until my insides are filling out and swelling up, all pink and plump and juicy again. Then I swallow.
The effect is instantaneous. I feel more like my old self again. The putty-coloured candle flares up one last time and goes out. But it doesn’t matter. Light or dark, it’s all the same to us now.
And now I know everything. I know it will take another few hours for the wounds to heal, but heal they will, and I can already feel my torn flesh knitting itself back together, like a million pins and needles in a sewing factory. One by one, the ruptured veins and arteries are sealing themselves. It’s a good feeling, the strength seeping back, and then even more strength. Inhuman strength. I look down fondly at the grey loops extruding from my torso, feeling an urge to play cat’s cradle with them before they heal. So badly fashioned, these bodies. All those fragile tubes and layers, flapping uselessly around.
And there’s more. I can feel my fingernails growing longer and sharper, like his. I straighten up and stretch like a big cat and turn to greet him with a wide smile, showing off my rows of new teeth.
“I was beginning to think you’d never make it,” he says in his new voice.
“Christ, I’m starving.” My voice sounds like his, deep and dark and guttural. Not my voice at all. Correction, it is mine. This is my real voice. The other one was just a placeholder.
Together, we finish off the leg, which has a gamey taste, but it doesn’t matter because it’s still delicious, and when we’ve eaten that, we start on the head. We reach into the bag and prise off the top of the skull with our fingernails and pull out chunks and stuff them into our mouths. It’s like a panettone full of juicy sultanas and crunchy bits of cranium.
When the bag is empty, our stomachs are still roiling with hunger, but our body clocks inform us it’s after midnight. Feeding time. The leg and head were just an amuse-bouche. Time to go out on the town again, drinking and dancing and crashing cars, setting things on fire and eating people. The usual stuff.
Before we go, we kiss, long and deep. His tongue snakes all the way down my throat and tickles my lungs. Mine worms its way up through the back of his nose into his brain and lingers there, lapping at the lobes from the inside, and I look forward to tasting his greasy green semen again, and laugh with delight, remembering how earlier I found it so repulsive. What a fool I was. It’s not repulsive at all. It’s a delicacy.
For a while, we feel our way around each other’s bodies. Our real bodies, not the stupid ones we were lumbered with. They’ll be back, probably. I certainly hope so. Maybe we’ll regress every now and again and be obliged to grope around blindly, desperately seeking our true selves, but we’ll carry on leaving Post-its and severed body parts to point the way back. And I know the clues will never stop being cryptic, because tormenting those other selves is all part of the fun. So feeble. So useless. So stupid. How could you not want to torture them?
We lick the last of the blood off each other. Then open the drawers and find the clothes where we left them several aeons ago, clean and neatly folded. They’re rough and grey, like army surplus. We put them on, and then the greatcoats, which smell of nutmeg, and inspect each other with mutual admiration.
“Good to have you back,” he says.
“Good to be back,” I say.
On the way to the door, I pause to examine the dark picture on the wall. Up close, I can finally make out an intricate tangle of human figures, some with bird or animal heads, others sinking into black pits or trussed to spiked wheels. Nails hammered into tendons, entrails spilling out in steaming coils, heads roasting like chestnuts, mouths gaping in inaudible screams, and . . . something else.
“Hey!” I say, pointing at two smiling figures holding saws, poised in the act of removing one victim’s legs from the rest of his torso. “They look just like us!”
He grins. “So they do. Shall we go?”
I could stare at that amusement park of pain all night, but he wrenches the locked door open with a flick of the wrist, leaving the jamb in splinters, and extends his arm towards me in invitation. I take it as we step outside.
It feels good to be us.