Silver Skin

by Joan Lennon

  Cait glowered and glared, but gradually the red anger died down. Gradually doubt crept in.

  How does she know? thought Cait, struggling to keep meeting the Old Woman’s eyes. How does she know I wouldn’t be able to keep the anger clear in my mind? How does she always know?

  The Old Woman turned to leave.

  ‘Clean it up,’ she said over her shoulder.

  And then she was gone again.

  Cait stared at the empty doorway. Is that it? Is that all you’re going to say? She was starting to ache where Voy had hit her, and somehow that made it even harder to stay safe inside the fury. She tried to, anyway.

  ‘If you’ve hurt her,’ she whispered at Rab. ‘If you’ve done anything to her, I’ll kill you.’ Her words sounded thin and unconvincing, even to herself. It was as if Voy had taken all the energy out of the room with her.

  ‘Done anything to who?’ He must have sensed she wasn’t going to hit him again. He sat up straighter and started to dab at his face gingerly with his sleeve. He winced. ‘What the scut are you talking about? Why did you attack me? And why did you lie – my suit’s not there – what’s she done with it? I need my suit – don’t you understand? Without the suit I’ll be stuck here forever – I’ll be stuck here till I die – unless—’ A look of horror crossed his face. ‘Unless I’m dead already and … The accident – was that when I died – and none of this is real – it’s just a nightmare – it’s some sort of primitive afterlife?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Cait snapped. ‘Look at the way you’re bleeding. The Dead don’t bleed.’ Ghouls don’t either, a voice in her head reminded her, and the last shreds of her fury dwindled away.

  Rab let out a breath that bubbled blood. ‘Yeah. Right. I’m stupid. And it’s just normal, is it, to go crazy and beat me up for no reason at all?’

  ‘No reason at all? What were you doing?’

  ‘Looking for my skin. Where you told me to look. What did you think I was doing?’

  ‘You were … what?’

  ‘You told me – last night, with that look, don’t you remember? I asked you where my skin was and you looked. Over there. At her bed. I thought you were saying my suit, I mean, skin, was in her bed – so I went looking for it.’

  ‘No. No! I meant she had it – Voy has it – she carries it with her. All the time. Did you think she was going to leave it lying about for you to find? Do you think she doesn’t know anything?’

  ‘Then what did you think I was doing? What made you go crazy like that?’ Before she could answer, he whispered, ‘Oh, scut, Cait, I must be losing my mind. Do you know what I thought I saw in there? In a hole, under the bed?’

  She looked him straight in the eyes.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what you saw. You saw my mother.’

  Voy: Skara Brae

  Voy paused in the passageway. That – in there – that had felt good! She’d been so successful at cowing everyone years ago, she rarely got the chance to flex the muscles of her will any more. She’d almost forgotten how much she enjoyed that sense of … what? … inflating.

  Swelling up like a big old frog in spring. She grinned at herself and then shrugged.

  Well, it wasn’t spring now, and hadn’t been for a long time. She’d stopped them from killing each other, though it hadn’t looked as if the selkie had been doing much except bleating. Now by rights she should stay and listen, see what she could learn. The reconciliation might be … enlightening, and an Old Woman could never know too much. The selkie certainly looked like a functioning male, though to match up to what the stories promised he’d have to do a lot more than just look the part.

  But the aching was back in her bones and she suddenly couldn’t remember when she’d eaten last – and there was a delectable smell coming down the long passageway.

  Turning awkwardly, she shuffled off to see what Sidne had in her pot today.

  Rab: Skara Brae

  ‘You’re telling me there’s a corpse under the bed. You’re telling me you’ve got your mother buried right where you’ve been living – where I’ve been living. What is the matter with you – that’s – that’s—’ He felt his voice getting high and squeaky. ‘You knew it – you knew she was there – all this time – and then you let me put my hand in there …’

  ‘I didn’t let you – it was your idea – I thought you must be some kind of ghoul—’

  ‘You think I’m – you thought I was what?!’

  And then, with a gesture that reminded him suddenly, heartbreakingly, of his own mother, she shuffled over and pushed his head back.

  ‘Hold still. I can’t do anything with you until your nose stops bleeding.’

  And then she began to talk.

  She told him about the First People and the lost souls and the ways of ghouls. And why her mother was buried under the floor with the fifth spirit stone binding her in place. And how she couldn’t leave to go looking for her proper people until Voy taught her some magic words to set her mother free. And as she talked, she wiped the blood from his face.

  He tried to imagine what it would be like to actually believe this stuff. To feel invisible danger all around. To not know if the next person you met was human or something else entirely that was out to get you, one way or another. When they’d studied the superstitions of early cultures it had never occurred to him just how stressful it would be, just how paranoid it must make you feel. The care and worry that went into all the strange things they did to protect themselves. Against … nothing. It’s all fairy tales. Including me …

  She told him how the spirits of the dead had to be held in the carved stones, sometimes for years, before they could be sent back to the sun at some place, a ring of stones somewhere inland. And how their presence in a village, waiting, drew the attention of the ghouls.

  She didn’t meet his eyes.

  She thought I was one of those. He rolled the thought around his mind for a moment like an unfamiliar taste. Me, the terrifying bad guy. Creature from the dark. Powerful … scary … There was no getting around it – it felt ever so slightly good.

  He suddenly realised she’d stopped talking. She must have guessed he’d stopped listening.

  Then, ‘Well? What do you think you are?’ she said, her voice husky.

  ‘I can’t say.’

  She sighed and shrugged. ‘That fits with the stories. In the stories about the selkies they say that, in human form, you have no memory of your other life.’

  She thinks I mean ‘can’t say’ like ‘I can’t remember’ – not like ‘I’m not allowed.’ Well, he wasn’t going to clear it up for her. Besides, she’d never believe the truth, even if he did break the Non-Intervention Contract. Break it? I’ve shattered it a thousand times –

  ‘Ow!’

  She gave his face a final wipe, none too gently. ‘But if you can’t remember what you are, how do you know you’re not what I thought you are?’

  ‘You want to believe I’m a soul-sucking ghoul?’

  ‘I want to believe you’re a selkie.’ She flung the bloodstained bog cotton across the room and suddenly she was shouting again. ‘I want to believe you come from under the sea and maybe you saw what happened to my mother and you can tell me – did she fall? Was she pushed? – and did my father drown? Did the ship founder and no one knew? I want to believe you can take me on your back and swim to the land of my people or if you can fly – if I did hear you drop out of the sky – I want you to go and find them for me and say, ‘Come and take Cait home!’ And while you’re at it, make the Sun strong again and the crops grow and make Voy teach me the words so I can release my mother. But you can’t do any of that, can you? Can you?’

  Rab didn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything except the blood pounding in his ears. She was so magnificent, with her pale hair thrown back like that and her eyes blazing and the shape of her body under her clothes and –

  Scut! What’s the matter with me – going all cave-man – maybe it’s somethi
ng in the water …

  He choked, as if the sudden realisation was trying to climb out his throat. It wasn’t the water. Not this water …

  All citizens were taught about the Alexander Decision and the famous speech that swayed the last dissenters in the World Parliament – ‘Never again! Never again!’ Nothing had ever worked before – imposed quotas, economic pressures like famine and drought, the decimation of warfare and local violence, pleas to self-control. Humanity in its raw form was a breeding disaster that could not be stopped.

  So it was decided to change the raw material. A gentle nudge, no more, in the direction of lowering libido and freeing up all that energy for other things. It didn’t stop people fancying each other, and sex was still the best way to make babies, but it was no longer an all-consuming obsession. And all it took was the merest addition to the drinking water – unnoticeable.

  Only, Rab wasn’t drinking that water any more.

  He looked down at his hands with a kind of horror, as if they belonged to someone else. Someone he didn’t know. If he stayed here any longer, what could he become? What was he becoming already?

  ‘Rab?’

  Cait was standing in front of him, too close, making him too aware of her body and her smell. She tried to take his hands, but he pulled away and staggered back.

  ‘No!’

  She kept coming nearer. ‘I’m sorry I tried to kill you.’ He grabbed her shoulders, holding her off. ‘You don’t understand – I’ve got to get away,’ he hissed urgently to her. ‘I’ve got to get away – before it’s too late – before I’m not me any more. Don’t you see? But how could you? You can’t understand – no one can—’

  Her nearness was overwhelming – he couldn’t bear to be by her another moment. He pushed her away, harder than he meant, so that she fell onto the ground.

  ‘See?’ he shouted at her. ‘See – it’s started already!’

  He couldn’t catch his breath. He stared at her, sprawled out like that. He was alone and she was different – other – practically an animal – and that was what he was going to turn into too –

  He covered his mouth with his hand and staggered for the door.

  Cait: Skara Brae

  He’d looked at her as if she disgusted him, like something that had crawled out from under a rock. As if she were a ghoul.

  Everything was a mess. The house. Rab. Her. Everything.

  She couldn’t bear to think what would have happened if the Old Woman hadn’t appeared when she did. Would she really have killed him? But she’d thought that he was … that he had …

  And now he was off, who knew where, and in a terrible state and it was all her fault.

  Again.

  She scrambled to her feet and followed.

  Rab: East of Skara Brae

  Outside the door there was a low stone passageway, like a tunnel. Rab stumbled, bent double, along it and then turned to the left, towards the light, erupting from the end of the tunnel into a paved area. The brightness of the sun dazzled him. Through squinting eyes he saw faces, too many faces – horrible and dirty and scarred – they were staring at him – he was assaulted by a whole new barrage of smells – there were animal skins lying about and piles of dead bushes and half-disembowelled fish –

  He turned abruptly and saw the village for the first time – weird half-buried lumps covered in scrubby thatch with blue-grey smoke sieving up from each one, twining together and drifting away. Just at that moment, someone propped open a roof window and more smoke belched out.

  ‘Selkie? Can we help you, selkie?’

  He spun round. A stunted woman reached out for him and he realised she had only one eye and nothing but a ghastly puckered red pit where the other eye should be.

  He flinched away from her in horror but there were more of them, moving towards him.

  ‘Selkie?’ It was like a hiss.

  Fending them off, whimpering in fear, he staggered away, tripping over stone containers, toppling heaps of vegetation. Past a stone-lined pool of water, his feet found a track that led away from the village. He started to run. He wasn’t running towards anything because the only thing he wanted wasn’t within reach of his feet. He was running away. He had no sense of anything else, just stumbling forward, just putting one foot in front of the other as fast as he could manage. He didn’t notice Cait, loping easily behind him, keeping him in view.

  He came to the top of a rise and stopped short, unable to understand what he saw. There was nothing there. Nothing at all. No houses, no buildings, no tower stacks, no figures in the landscape, nothing but dead-looking bushes and patches of black mud and scattered pools of water reflecting the sky.

  Empty. Utterly, impossibly empty.

  He had never seen emptiness before. In his time, there was no such thing. Every centimetre of the world was filled to overflowing. He knew it wasn’t like that here, now – he knew it with his mind, from his studies, but his eyes were struggling and his imagination denied their evidence.

  ‘Where are they?’ he panted. ‘Where are the people?’

  Nothing but space – space without anyone to live in it – wasted space – wasted land – wasteland – There was a roaring in his ears and he felt as if he were about to fall – it was as if the ground were juddering –

  His knees crumpled. Cait ran up behind him, trying to catch him, but she wasn’t quick enough, and instead she only succeeded in tripping herself and knocking him over the edge of the hillock. They landed in a tangle on the springy heather. Rab held onto her as if she were the only thing left in the world, as if he would become nothing himself if he let her go. He buried his face in her shoulder and wept bitter tears.

  Cait: East of Skara Brae

  She let him be. She didn’t understand what he’d been saying or why the view upset him so much. But that didn’t matter. He was out of place, that was all. Out of his place. She knew how that felt.

  They had landed in a hollow below the crest of the hill. It was warm there, lying on the supporting heather, out of the wind, with the sun beating down. She slitted her eyes against the brightness and looked up into the distant blue. A bumble bee burbled drunkenly past between her and the sky, confused, tricked into waking early. It was out of place too, yet the sound was soothing nevertheless. The weight of Rab, quiet now in her arms, was also comforting.

  He sighed deeply. She could tell he had fallen asleep, utterly worn out. She tightened her arms a little and sighed too, as a wave of contentment washed over her. Her eyes fell shut and the light of the sun made red shapes on the inside of her lids until she, too, had drifted off.

  She slept so deeply that she didn’t feel Rab stir, untangle himself from her and stumble away. Only the dropping temperature as the short day neared its end dragged her, shivering, back into consciousness. The contentment was gone, along with the warmth.

  Along with the selkie. What did the stories all say? Sooner or later the selkie always finds his skin. Always leaves. Don’t give your heart to a selkie if you don’t want it broken.

  Well, she was safe from that, anyway. Her heart was whole and set on leaving Skara Brae behind, the very first moment she had her mother safe out of the hands of Voy.

  The Old Woman stood in her way and his, equally.

  She was heart whole. She was certain.

  She made her way back to the village with its familiar smoke and smells. When she ducked under the low lintel and into the Old Woman’s house she almost tripped over Rab. He was in a huddled heap just inside the doorway.

  He didn’t look up. He’d made no attempt to feed the fire or tidy the mess of heather bedding and blood-stained scraps of bog cotton strewn about on the ground.

  She got on with sweeping up the debris, remaking Voy’s bed, putting everything back in order.

  He didn’t move, until they heard the sound of the Old Woman’s wheezing breath as she crabbed her way along the passageway. Then he scrambled into the other bed box and dropped the hide canopy down.

&n
bsp; A moment later, Voy came in, a cooking pot in the crook of her arm.

  ‘Here,’ she grunted. ‘Sidne sent this for you and the selkie.’

  As if nothing had happened.

  ‘He’s tired,’ Cait said. ‘He’s gone to bed.’

  As if nothing had happened.

  Rab: Skara Brae

  The next morning he woke with a headache, a face ache, an aching throat – and a determination hard and clear in his mind like a shiny stone. He was going to confront Voy. He was going to demand his Skin. He was going to make her give it to him and he was going to get away from here before …

  He suddenly realised that he was alone. He’d already missed her – but it couldn’t be by much. The door to the passageway was open and he could almost sense the displacement of air of someone passing out of the house. He scrambled out of the box bed, down the stone tunnel and out into the paved place, looking wildly round, just in time to see Voy disappear behind the swell of land behind the village.

  He ran after her.

  The landscape was as barren and empty as before, and he had to fight the panic that rose in his throat like sick. But ahead of him, Voy’s twisted figure hirpled over the rough ground with remarkable speed. He would lose her if he didn’t move.

  Ignoring the erratic beating of his heart, Rab pushed forward. By the time he caught up with her they were surrounded by the greying heather and the great empty bowl of sky, and there was a metallic taste in his mouth no matter how often he tried to swallow it away. ‘Stop! You’ve got my Skin. I want it back.’

  Voy paused and turned round to look at him, her lips pulled back in that grin of hers that hadn’t anything to do with smiling. He hated that grin.

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve got no right to it. It’s not yours. You stole it from me when I was too sick to stop you. Give it back to me. Give it back to me now!’ He could hear his voice rising in pitch. It made him sound weak. He deliberately spoke lower, squaring his shoulders, trying to look threatening. ‘I’m warning you.’