Greetings friends,
It’s spooky season and it would be remiss of me not to include my own tales of horror and woe.
Gigging is back, and I’ve not accomplished much in the way of fiction that I can send out on this blog. But I do have this little tidbit - a somewhat belated Halloween haunting.
I have a few other stories over the next few months, so please keep reading!
And please, Subscribe and comment if you enjoyed it!
Skin
“Excuse me, I think you have something that’s mine.”
I spoke quietly, barely more than a whisper. But even though the bar thrummed with chatter. Eve over the thumps and jitters of house music, and the scattergun shaking of cocktail mixers. Even though she was at the time engaged in flamboyant conversation with some pudgy lumberjack of a man. Even though, despite standing as close as I could I was battered and pressed by bodies jockeying to reach the bar, she still heard me.
“Who are you?” she said.
I breathed out, finally examining my (her’s for now) face in full. It was perfect. Not objectively you must understand. My eyes (hers for now) were wide-set. She had a roundness to her that meant that her face ballooned a little and retained a soft, puttyish childness though, that was, at least, matched by the roundness of her nose, and the way that she framed the face with her rich brown hair. But it was my perfection.
Her expression was even pleased to see me, for half a second at least. I imagined she thought that perhaps the person who had interrupted her so boldly was a man, handsome and swaggering who might entertain her a little; maybe even sweep her away from the raggedy lumberjack and off into the lantern-lit night. Well, I had plans for her, though they were not quite what she was hoping for. And anyway, juts a moment of seeing me as I am now and her face changed quickly. Those lips on her curled with disgust and her nose wrinkled.
Perhaps, I thought, you protest too much. It is your fault after all that I look like this.
“Lucinda, is this man bothering you.” The tubby lumberjack shifted from his bar stool, back slightly arched and voice booming. All primordial anger. A monkey ready to fling shit at its challenger.
I tightened my grip on the knife.
“You have something that’s mine,” I said once again, “And I would like it back.”
God, what must I have looked like? Four days of no food and I was a shambling waste of a man. I must have stunk. Why look after a body you’re not planning on keeping? I was muscled of course, and I had finally eaten a little just before I left. I needed my strength for what I must do. But my face was a patchwork of bruises and scrapes. My fingernails were thick with dirt and my knuckles were tense and white on the knife. The clothes I wore were torn and my lips white and frostbitten.
The lumberjack men stood between us, and he placed a sausage-fingered hand on my chest.
“I think you better step back buddy,” he said. He was all IPA breath and bluster. I stabbed him hard the neck. The blade of my knife slid through him and caught hard on the bone.
She shrieked and stumbled back, but the noise of the bar drowned her out. For a moment, I thought that I might get to her, but the blade was trapped, scraping against the bone. I grunted, twisting it and yanked it from the lumberjack’s neck and he dropped hard to the the floor scrabbling and gasping, pushing fingers against the wound and flopping about like a drowned fish.
That was more than enough to send the place into pandemonium. Yells and shrieks and the pressing of bodies as people sped to the exit. I don’t think many if any spotted that I had been the attacker. In any case in the dim light of the bar and the rushing bodies I wasn’t recognised immediately. However, she was quick enough to slip away.
***
I should tell you how I first saw my body. I had, as chance would have it, taken the afternoon off work. I was relaxing at a riverside café, one of those cheap and cheerful ones set up to deal with the overflow of office drones. Neither plush enough for meetings, nor entirely charmless, but a thoughtless place where one could sit and enjoy the afternoon or smoke. I had a black coffee on the table and a cigarette happily burning down in my left hand. The river lapped at the concrete embankment and under the afternoon sun, students and tourists loafed about with wine and books and all the things that made life good. I was, for once, almost relaxed. Though I never really could inside that old frame.
Even as a baby, from the moment I could touch and explore my mother told me that I would grab at the skin on my arms and pinch at it. I’d fumble with my chubby fingers. I would poke my own eyes and as soon as my nails and teeth grew enough to exert force I would scratch and bite at myself, as if even then, before my mind had fully come online I knew I didn’t belong.
As I got older thing got worse. School was a nightmare. Of course it was. I remember one day our frumpy Headmistress telephoned my mother. All because of the lines I had gashed into my arm after breaking the plastic of the safety scissor. The other children had shrieked and called me a freak (tell me something I don’t know). The teacher had yelled too, but I think mostly from fear because they didn’t really know what to do. And I had sat, calm and happy on the beanbags next to the children’s library where our artwork hung from. Blood dripped down my arms. I explored the cuts I had made with a fingertip, pressing until my nerves flared. That night, trapped in my bedroom with only a few stuffed animals for company and the landing light on I heard my parents rowing. “He needs special help.” “Oh for God’s sake, if you actually spent a bit of time with him he’d have all he needed.” They didn’t last long together. One night my father came home late and found me in my room. He leaned over me and his breath reeked of stale alcohol. “You aren’t my son.” He snarled. “Who the fuck are you? You aren’t him. You aren’t him.” He started swinging his fists at me, and I welcomed the pain though even then I feared death, but that was enough for mother. And soon enough he was gone.
But I digress. My thoughts wander, as they did that afternoon when I, lazing under the sun pondered with my cigarettes. I was not content, but I was as close to it. I was even taking care of myself to some extent. Of course there were tells were you to look closely. I allowed that cigarette to burn down, delighting as it single the hardness of my knuckles. My long sleeved shirt, which I wore all the way down despite the warmth of the summer sun disguised the ridges and fissures of a hundred thousand cuts and scratches, self inflicted through the years. But those that are lost, or sad, are hardly unusual in the city.
She appeared out of the corner of my eye amongst a trail of early commuters, traipsing towards their stations. I didn’t see her face at first, just a flash of white sleeve, a bob of sensible mid-length hair and a small, well manicured hand which was at the time being ran over the leaves of a plant at an outdoor stall. But there was something about her that made me look again. I know what it was now of course. But at that moment, it was just a flash, as if I’d just spotted somebody I knew, and old schoolmate or teacher but years later. And then on the double-take, I saw all of her, or I should say, all of me. Because that was what she was. She was me. From the top of her head, to the small ridge of her brow, to her dull grey eyes and thin ankles and protruding wrist bones.
She was me.
Or at least, the body was mine. I can’t tell you how I knew it, but I suppose you just know do you not? In much the same way as one knows that their thoughts belong to them and black is white. That was my body and she was in control of it, or wearing it. I had not at the time thought of how this was possible by any means. But you must imagine the horror of it. Knowing that all your life you have been unceremoniously deposited into some meatsack that, whilst functional, is not your home. And you know it. Of course you know it! I had always been her. Every morsel of discomfort finally made sense. Every time that I had opened my arm or tried to run myself to exhaustion, or shuffled and winced uncomfortably within my bed, it was because I had deep down always known. I was within another’s body. And she had mine. That wretch! She had stolen it. She had stolen me.
In a daze, I followed her through dirty subway lines and across wide suburban streets. I made a note of where she lived, just a few miles away! The nerve of the thief - to take what was mine and – she smoked too! I caught her stood on the step of her apartment block sneaking a quick drag before she entered. Of course a thief could not be trusted with stolen property. I wondered what other befoulments she’d inflicted on my property? Tattoos most likely, though luckily it seemed none were visible. Was she as uncomfortable in herself as I was in me? Some stole bread because they were hungry. Perhaps she had taken my form before my birth somehow, a lost creature needing a home and given me this suboptimal piece of skin as a sloppy second. But seeing her move about the world, relaxed and easy disabused me of that notion entirely. No, she was a thief. She had done it for her own pleasure and she would pay.
For the weeks after, I followed with a plan. I traced her routes, I worked out where to ensure that the deed was completed. I hired cars. But the more I planned the more frustrated I grew. How could I just take what was mine? I didn’t know how any of it worked. And yet, I knew that I must, and eventually, on that night, I decided to act.
---
She slipped through the crowd like a mouse through a fissure. But I followed. My hand was still slicked with blood and I gripped the blade tight. I glided from the bar as if in a dream, up the cobbled sidestreet and onto the thoroughfare. It was a busy night despite the rain and the gatherings of revellers in the rain masked my approach.
She had kicked off her heels and she even grabbed onto a passing stranger. But all they saw was a drunk woman with running make up. I don’t mean to brag, but getting my property into a vehicle was one of the easiest things I have ever done. I pulled up alongside her – a sympathetic taxi driver with a minor change of clothing. She might have had the smarts to steal my body but she was too hysterical to notice until it was too late. A dash of chloroform and we were away. I don’t mean to speak lightly of this, but it was more than a little funny to me how easy it was to catch such a brazen thief.
We arrived at the place I had scouted. It was a small beach-hut which looked out over the sea. It was wooden and hardly proofed for sound, but I did not think that we would be there long. The waves lapped soothingly against the shingle. I wanted the first smells of my new body to be the salted air. Perhaps I would move here? I certainly deserved a fresh chance. I took the gag from her mouth.
“You have something that is mine.” I said. “Give it back.”
She murmured at first, but I needed to hear it. I needed to hear it from her. Her head bobbed a little but I held her by the chin, my chin, and placed my knife to her throat until she spoke.
“Fuck you,” she spat, “You cunt. Do whatever the fuck you want you little prick.”
“Give it back,” I said again. I was getting tired of this, but I needed it from that mouth that would soon by my own, and besides, I had little idea how to actually complete the transaction. I’d always assumed that the thief would know.
“Give what back,” she snarled.
“Oh you little thief,” I said, “You know what I want. You. Now do it or I cut…”
I took my blade from her throat and placed the tip above the eyelid. Sweat beaded on her neck and I could sense her furiously straining so as not to blink.
“But of course,” I realised, “I cannot.”
I could take an eye, of course, but what if in damaging my prize, I could not repair it. What if I killed the body with whatever inhabited it. I could curse, I could scream, but I could not make it come out. And how had it got there in the first place? Then I realised what I needed to do.
***
They found the body just outside a beach hut, doused in shingle. The victim had no link to the area and he was eventually identified as a Peter Graelish, a twenty-six year old man with a troubled history of suicide attempts and self harm. They spoke to his parents, though they got little from them. They had had him taken into care and after a series of incidents in his early school days. His father wouldn’t speak of him at all. The police found the presence of another on the scene and linked the death to the murder at Strangeways bar, which led them to me. I confirmed what the coroner had said. The man had taken me after murdering my friend, and threatened all sorts before eventually, in a fury he had attempted to slit his own stomach open and, the coroner noted, even as his innards had begun to spill continued to pull the knife as if he had been trying to open as much of himself as possible. The coroner’s confirmed my story and I was offered counselling. My name was on all sorts of lists.
I tried not to think about it too much, but it stayed there, always. The media had interviewed me a little about my altercation with him earlier in the bar, but nothing ever came of any of it. I was never someone people found easy to talk to anyway, I was always so nervous, uncomfortable in my own skin. Occasionally men, insecure in their own way would attempt to take advantage of that, but I rarely let them in.
Then, one day, I saw him. I walked up, bold as brass. He was tall and blonde and chubby, middle aged with a shock of chest hair protruding from above his vest.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I think you have something that is mine.”