LIQUID SKIN, by Gareth Owens

Originally published in Quercus One: The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories (2008)

She would be walking down the street, the grey concrete of a normal day. She would look down, the pavement a muted and colourless paste of brick, spotted with bleached chewing gum and seagull droppings. She would be struck by how much the runnels between the square tiles looked like the gaps between the chunks on a bar of chocolate, and then she would hear the crack.

It always sounded like a rifle shot, like ice breaking beneath her feet. She could always feel the surface give a little first, as if it had not quite broken all the way through. Looking down, the pavement would be crazed, like a smashed car window, circular and web-like, and oozing stickily through the cracks, welling up as though from a slow wound, came the dark, deliberate, blood.

Stepping away she would look down, shocked and bewildered, then the crack would happen again under her feet, but this time she could not stop herself, and her foot would always go right through into the blood below, warm and sticky.

Pulling herself free, dripping and nauseous, she takes another step…crack…and another…crack. The concrete world is giving way under her. The breathless terror mounts, and she is overwhelmed with inchoate, primeval panic. Suddenly she is running, the floor under her feet cracking and crunching like the icing on a cake, cracking like ice, and crunching like snow.

In panic she looks over her shoulder as she runs, and she can see her foot prints as dark wounds on the skin of reality, as if the whole world was nothing but a thin crust of insubstantial bone, below which waits a vast and unquiet ocean of blood, heaving beneath the surface.

She tries to scream, but her voice is lost. She can’t seem to make any noise. She can’t remember how to speak. She is too terrified. It feels like a great weight on her chest, and no sound comes. From away in the distance she can hear a pathetic whistling, peeping sound, she can hear it as a panic stricken and breathless whisper; she can hear the tears in it, even though she is not crying.

As she runs, she looks down, and the blood makes pat pat pat noises like the splash of a shallow puddle, like a child in bright red boots, playing in the rain, the rain becomes blood, the sky is bleeding.

She can feel its weak tackiness every time she lifts a foot to take a step, as if the blood is trying to hold on to her, to pull her down.

And then she would wake, tears in her eyes, and anger in her heart. The tears of terror, and the anger of frustration. These dreams had plagued her as long as she could remember. Doctor Eams, the expedition psycher, had told her that they were either a function of stress, or a symptom of demonic possession.

Beale Voynitch lay panting on her camp bed, and wondered how it was that Walput had managed to drag her out to this god forsaken rim-world. She was a cryptographer pressed into the service of paleoxenology. Left to her own devices she would never have left the Earth, but Nageon Walput, the expedition leader, had insisted on her, and her alone, and what Walput wanted, Walput always got.

She swung her legs over the side of her cot and caught a glint as the pale sunlight reflected off the edge of one of her skates.

She had pitched her tent near the shore of Crystal Lake, two days hard travel from the main dig site at Alorep. Walput had been right, the writing of the Fairlight culture was a puzzle that had grabbed her imagination straight away. There was meaning in the strangely swirling figures, but without knowing anything about the species that had made them, or the language that they used, there was no way to derive that meaning.

Her obsessive compulsive nature had ensured that she had been sucked into the puzzle so totally that she barely noticed she was working eighteen hour days, never taking a day off.

Frequency analysis showed that the script was in part a small selection of repeating patterns that resembled letters or perhaps syllables, and other signs that seemed to appear less often, but seemed to have some kind of modification on the following group of signs.

She had been on Fairlight for close to two years now, and Dr. Eams had ordered her to take some time out.

“Why not go out to Crystal Lake, do some skiing, or some sky-boarding? It will be a break for you.”

Beale had just shaken her head; she was too busy to be ill. She could not afford the time off. She had finally made a breakthrough with the written script of the Fairlight culture.

The language had been used to write down thought, directly, and as such was independent of language. If she could find the key, she would be able to read it directly, read the minds of a lost race.

She already had fragments, but they didn’t seem to make much sense. The massive complex at Alorep appeared to be some kind of penal colony, but the vast machine that underpinned the structure was described by an idea that seemed to suggest fantasy engine.

She ate a slow breakfast, alone on a deserted world. Walput had supported the doctor, and practically forced her out of her office. She looked at the large tent behind her, and turned to survey the milky ice of the lake spread out before her. As she sipped her coffee, the silence of a world without birds made the cold seem like the exciting winters of her childhood. Being so alone made her feel, she struggled to find the right word, and then realised it was…naughty.

She picked up her skates and walked down to the edge of the lake. The scenery was spectacular. An open heath in the orange of bracken and the purple of sagebrush, low trees, a light dusting of snow, in patches, and in the distance, gentle hills rising to blend in with a giant golden mountain.

She had called this louring peak, Mount Warder. This place had been a prison, she knew that from the writing that inscribed almost every surface that the Fairlight culture had made, but she could see no bars. And somehow the machine under the surface of the planet was supposed to make fantasy a reality, to make wishes come true.

She found a fallen log and put on her skates. She laced them tightly, watching her breath come out in a plume of vapour as she bent to reach her feet. Gingerly she manoeuvred out onto the ice. Her progress was ungraceful as she held onto the branches of the bushes that grew at the side of the lake.

She was not worried about the thickness of the ice, a planetography crew had been there the previous year. They had taken an ice core that was more than three kilometres deep.

The ice was so smooth, it felt like plastic under the blades of her skates. With an unsteady push she set off from the bank and headed out into the lake. The great tobacco coloured flanks of Mount Warder ahead of her, its snow covered peak gave it the clarity of a child’s drawing of a mountain.

The sound of her skates over the ice cut into her thoughts. She let it become almost mesmeric. The surface was so smooth, it was like shark skin, and her skates left two perfect lines behind her, like razor-blades drawn across the milky flesh of a corpse.

Behind her, underneath and deep, something moved. In the cracks, flowing slowly as if released from slumber, the blood began to rise. As her skates sliced through the skin of the ice, clouds of diluted and watery blood bloomed under the surface. Complex as rose petals.

She skated on, unaware of the twin tracks of red that kept pace with her, marking her progress across the alien lake.

Fantasy was such an odd word, she thought, perhaps wish would be closer to the concept. “For your crimes against us we sentence you to having your wishes come true”. She tried the words out loud, but still could not see that it would be any great threat.

Behind her the blood had spilled out across the surface of the lake, pooling where her skates had liberated it, and where it had not, it boiled below, in angry clouds of crimson. She leaned into a turn, and faced back the way she had come.

Curtains of red moved under the ice, rolling this way and that, like a caged animal looking for escape. She looked down at her feet, the ice was now a thin and clear layer, like a pane of glass, and ravenous beneath her an unfathomable welling of blood. She took a deep shocked breath and turned back. The rest of the lake was suddenly the same. She was surrounded.

Not wishes, she realised with dreadful clarity, not wishes, but dreams. The solitary woman stood, too terrified to move, every limb trembled and she was without strength. She knew that this dream would have no waking end.

The sound was like that of a rifle shot as the ice began to crack.