It amused her that she should sound like the employer and he the employee. She didn't wait for him to answer before she hung up.
*
They ate in the lounge. Theo had set up the table under the window where the television was usually positioned. He set it pretty with wine glasses and napkins and even pulled out the chair so Alce could sit down. The food was good, simple but tasty. He'd made the dish often enough that even he couldn't screw it up by now. It was nice, it was pleasant, but there was the familiar shadow of something unsaid that fell between them; something which prevented the meal from being quite as warm and comforting as Alce had hoped, something which had not been quite so prominent when she had first arrived.
She'd sensed it before over the past few months. It came and went like a tide. It wasn't a cooling between them so much as a certain prickliness which Theo seemed to be doing his best to hide. Sometimes he was just quiet and brittle. Sometimes he would back away from her, flinching when she touched him as though he was afraid of her. It was only his own discomfort with his behaviour that had postponed her asking him about it. Unchecked, she knew it might grow into something unsolvable, but she also knew from experience it was a manner of confrontation for which she was ill-equipped.
That evening, she assumed it was just her. She knew the situation was as serious as the Padre had said, and when the time came to devote herself to it, she would do so completely, at Theo's expense. He would understand, she knew that, but it bothered her that he should need to, just as it bothered her that she was putting it off at all. She could pretend she was doing it for him, but that wasn't true. She was doing it for her. She just wanted one evening off, one evening away from the rising tide, before it broke and took her over completely.
'What's a Sculptor?' Theo said unprompted after they had cleared the table.
'Were you eavesdropping?'
'Thin walls.'
'You don't want to know.' I don't want to tell you.
His shrug looked a little too affected.
'Just sounded serious, that's all.'
He ran the taps and held his hand under the flow, waiting for hot water to come through.
'We can do that in the morning,' Alce said. She reached out a hand to him.
'I'll get them out the way now.'
He worked silently. He didn't look at her and Alce watched him but didn't offer to help. She checked her phone, then set it on the bookcase next to her her keys.
'A Sculptor is someone who can reshape flesh,' she said eventually. 'They touch living cells and restructure them, reproduce them, and then make something else. They're dangerous, unpredictable. They're whimsical, capricious. They can open people up to put demons inside. They can reach into people's heads and let their memories run out.'
Still he didn't look at her. He concentrated on his work. She tried to remember what she had told him about her mother. She tried to see if he might connect the one thing with the other.
'Are they demons themselves?' Theo said.
Demons. There had been a time when he could only pronounce the word like a sceptic.
'Not really, no,' she said. 'Demons are as frightened of them as we are but sometimes they're used by the higher orders. They don't really have any affiliation. They have their own agendas.'
She sighed.
'They're rare, which is a mercy. But they're difficult. The last one we had in town caused all kinds of chaos. We're barely recovering.'
She reached up and touched his shoulder, feeling him tense. He shot her a quick look over his shoulder, and she saw his cheeks were pink, before he turned away again.
He drained the sink and dried his hands.
'Theo,' she said.
'I know where she is,' he said.
'Who?'
'Your Sculptor. I know where she is.'
Alce dropped her hand and stepped back. Even in the small kitchen, warm from the steam of the washing bowl, a cold current pricked at her. Theo didn't turn around. He stood with his hands on the side of the sink.
'I didn't know what she was,' he said, then his head ducked a little, catching himself. 'Well I suppose I could have guessed. I just didn't know how to tell you.'
Now he looked at her. His face red, his eyes raw.
'Al,' he said, but she had already turned away, fast pacing down the hall to his bedroom where her overnight bag was stored. She could hear him following her.
'I've been wanting to tell you,' he said. 'But I didn't know how. They made it difficult. They want you to— holy shit what is that thing?'
Alce's mother called it a howitzer; she didn't know its proper name. It certainly looked tank-like: it was strange and boxy with a fat barrel. The hand grip looked like an afterthought, but it was worn smooth and comfortable and Alce aimed it directly at Theo's chest.
'It burns through the human epidermis and dissolves the foreign cells living beneath.' She probably didn't need to have said that.
'Jesus, Al—'
'It's a last resort.'
Their directions inverted. Theo backed down the corridor towards the kitchen and Alce stalked after him. She steered him into the lounge and snatched the scrylight from the bookshelf where she had left it.
'Start at the beginning,' she said. 'Don't lie to me. Don't leave anything out.'
Theo set his hand on the back of the chair Alce had been sitting on during dinner. 'Can I sit?'
Alce shook her head.
'Stand,' she said. 'It'll focus you.'
Theo nodded, then shook his head. Then nodded again.
'I don't know her name,' he said. 'She said she was called Diana but I don't believe her anymore. Do you remember when I went for that job interview?'
'What job interview?'
Theo stared at her.
'Four months or so back? It was a publishing job. I was terrified. I could do it, but it wasn't my area, Greek myths or something. Ovid?'
Alce shook her head. 'Remind me.'
'The job isn't important. There was no job. That's what I was trying to say. Jesus, Alce. You don't remember? I was in pieces when I finally got home. I slept on the sofa for a week and you didn't notice?'
She didn't reply. He sighed.
'Look,' he said. 'I met this woman at Barney's leaving do. Remember that? You said you couldn't make it, so I went on my own. Anyway, there she was. Tall. Brunette. We weren't introduced or anything, I just thought she was one of Barney's friends. Anyway I got drunk that night, you weren't about and we ended up talking. I don't remember what about, honestly I don't. Just work stuff mostly. But… don't look at me like that, nothing happened. Really it didn't.
'Then a few days later, I heard I got an interview, so I spend the week swotting up for it. You must remember that? No?
'But it wasn't an interview. It was a set up. I don't know what I told this woman, but I must have said what I did. Maybe talked about the job I'd applied for. Maybe I talked about you.'
He raised his eyes to look at her. The look she returned was steely enough to make him turn away again.
'It was in a building out in the old town, one of those new offices under the railway arches. Half a building site really, I don't know if they'll still be there. They offered me a coffee at reception and I took it and… the next thing I know…'
He blinked.
'It must have been drugged or something. I don't remember passing out but I must have. Because when I woke up, I was tied up and… I was… naked—'
He choked on the word. Embarrassed by it, and embarrassed to be so.
'They'd moved me to the back somewhere. It was like a warehouse and I was tied to this pillar in the middle of the room. Standing up, but really tied, you know? I couldn't move. And there's this woman sitting on a chair in front of me. This little smile on her face. And do you know what she wanted to talk about? You. She asked me all about you. She knew more about you than I ever have. She told me about your mother. She said what she did to her. And she said—'
'What did
she do to you?'
Theo swallowed hard, stalling for time before answering her.
'She changed me.' His voice rose in pitch as though he still struggled to believe what he said. 'When she… touched me, I changed. It was like she was moulding me out of clay. There was nothing I could do. She just… She took hours. Hours.'
'What did she change?'
'Everything.'
'You don't look different.'
'I am.' He looked frustrated. 'I'm getting ahead of myself. There were men there too. I didn't see them at first. Tall, bald, wore suits. Very sharp.'
'Acolytes.'
'Three of them. And before she started, one of them came and took some of my blood. They didn't say much, and they disappeared early on, only coming back in at the end, but the woman told me they were on the black market. They used the DNA to make… to make a skin suit for me.'
He looked at her, pleading, as though desperate that his own jargon might overlap with her own.
'A skin suit?' She didn't hide the contempt in her voice. For a moment, it felt as though the room was lengthening, pushing Theo further away from her. When he laughed, it was a stark, echoey sound. It was out of place, a long way away.
'It's ridiculous isn't it?' he said. 'If anyone had told me a few months back what I'd be saying now, I wouldn't know what to say to them. But now? My god, Al. Before this, I considered myself a scientist. I knew what you did. I knew what you dealt with. But it seemed so far away. I thought I had a good understanding of the world. Now I'm a child again. There are just so many things…'
He looked away. His hand reached up to touch his face, but he hesitated as though he was unwilling to make the contact now he understood what it meant. He blinked and his face turned pink, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry in front of her.
'This,' he said eventually. 'This isn't me. It's something synthetic, I don't really understand it. The me they made is underneath it. It's monstrous and I hate it. I wanted to run away but I didn't know where I'd go. They're making me pay for the suit. A few thousand a month for as long as it takes or they'll strip it off me and leave me as they made me.' He looked up. 'But I don't know if they really care about the money. I think they just want me to be scared of you. They said they'd leave me for you to kill. Because you will, won't you? You didn't even notice when I was crying all night and puking in the bathroom because up here you were just thinking about what monsters you were going to kill next. It's what you do.'
Alce steadied the howitzer.
'Show me,' she said again. She'd always thought she would hate using that voice on Theo. But it occurred to her then that this scene had always been inevitable. He would always have betrayed her. Not consciously. He would most likely have only got in the way through his own naivety; he might have been taken hostage, or someone would have killed him to spite her. Anything would have been a betrayal. It was always the same. In her turbulent world, any island of normality, no matter how small, stood little chance of remaining a sanctuary. She had let Theo in closer than most. She had let her guard down for him. She'd opened herself to him more than she had done to anyone since her mother.
And look what happened to her.
'Al,' he said.
'Alce,' he said.
He'd had the voice. Now he got the look. He blanched; he really didn't know what he was in for. He looked to the floor.
'Okay,' he said. 'But I never wanted to you see this. I thought I could fix it, and…' Maybe he realised how idiotic that sounded. 'I'm sorry,' he said again. 'But it's still me. She just made me look different. But it's still me.'
Alce didn't answer and Theo nodded once, then started unbuttoning his shirt.
'If I show you,' he said, 'will you promise not to kill me?'
It was too preposterous a question to reply to and Theo seemed to understand. Shaking his head helplessly, he continued undressing in the face of Alce's silence.
Shirt, vest, watch. He folded them roughly and hung them over the chair beside him. She watched as he unbuckled his belt and slid his jeans down. She tried to image how such a striptease might have appeared without the shadow of foreknowledge. It all seemed so prosaic. So unerotic. There was no sensuality here, just function, tension, threat.
Theo dropped his boxers and kicked them away. He stood naked and awkward, his cheeks now a different shade of pink. He was a pale, skinny figure. A little paunch on his stomach and some token definition in his musculature that he didn't tend. His penis hung limp and shrivelled as though the temperature had dropped.
Alce gestured with the howitzer.
'Go on,' she said.
Theo sighed. He reached up both hands behind the nape of his neck and ran his finger up the top of his spine. Then he shrugged awkwardly on his left side and using his right arm, gently, uncannily, teased the skin from his left – beginning with the fingertips, moving up to the palm of his hand – and then gently tugging the skin on the forearm down. It rucked and bunched at his touch.
Almost immediately, the artifice of the human arm was obvious to her in a way it hadn't been before. The now-empty fingers were thin like latex, nearly transparent.
Theo twisted his shoulder, extricating the bulk of his left arm by hauling it up and back, leaving the pale skin sleeve hanging like an empty silk stocking.
The arm was huge, impossibly so. It latched onto the side of his slim frame looking as though it should unbalance it. It was as thick as his thigh, maybe thicker, knotted with muscle and sinew. The skin was a rich, unmistakable crimson colour, brushed with coal black hair.
He stopped and looked at her, his unequal arms hanging at his sides, his expression searching hers for a sign of clemency.
She didn't say anything, she offered neither encouragement nor reproof, but her silence was damning enough to make him sigh. He gathered himself and continued.
He used his new arm to aid himself as he unclothed its matching pair, the skin easing off much easier this time like a snake shedding. He was more balanced now, but still preposterous. His arms together seemed bigger than the rest of him, his shoulders like medicine balls. He ducked his head forward and reached behind with both enormous hands then gently unpeeled the skin and scalp from the back of his head.
For a brief moment, she saw his familiar features distort and then collapse, then the head was free, and he rolled the remains of his old familiar face down like a mask. The face stretched grotesquely as he teased it, gathering up his chin and his shoulders and pushing them down over his chest, becoming mercifully unrecognisable once it had distended and folded down to his waist, revealing the new head and the trunk of him.
Now he looked more evenly proportioned. His chest was a piece of brutalist architecture, pectoral muscles like slabs of concrete, shoulders like flyovers, the red skin rough like gravel, sheened with dewy sweat where it had been covered.
When he lifted his head, Alce was surprised by how much of him was still there. His eyes hadn't changed, and while the shape of his face was distorted by the snout and the tusks and all those horns, there was still enough of Theo inside of it for her to recognise him. The mortified embarrassment, the weary acceptance of it all; the expression alone was his.
He reached down and freed the rest of himself from the skin-suit as though they were a pair of increasingly ill-fitting tights. Swollen goat legs, thick with black fur, stepped out of his slim human ones. Gnarled hooves settled on the plush carpet where his feet had stood. He stretched to his full height, near two foot taller than his previous five-foot-nine, ducking only when his horns scored lines in the plaster moulding on the ceiling.
He took the skin-suit delicately in his clawed hands and folded it with a gentle reverence. When he turned to set it safely on the shelf, she saw how he also had a rope of tail, ending in matted brush. It arced out of him and trailed like a pitifully ironic question mark.
He turned back, his hands moving instinctively to cover his phallus, which, to his clear embarrassment, had grown thick and e
rect with its reveal.
Alce aimed the scrylight at him and threw the switch. He winced under the glare but didn't move. The lights flickered precipitously but the shadow he cast was still small, still very human, cowering on the wall behind the enormity of the creature he'd become.
Alce shut off the light and set it and the howitzer aside. She stood up and realised for the first time that evening how tired she was.
'This is ridiculous,' she said. 'Demons don't even look like that. They're tumours. Digestive systems with teeth. They're all spikes and tentacles. Nothing else.'
She approached him, walking around him while he stood stock still.
'She said was doing a course in medieval art,' Theo said. 'She thought it would be funny.'
Funny. Yes, a Sculptor would think that. Alce frowned. Something occurred to her.
'How long have you been like this?'
'Four months. Just over.'
'We've fucked since then,' Alce said. 'You were like that—'
'I was wearing the skin-suit!' Theo said. 'It's… expensive, like I said.'
'Jesus, Theo.'
'Al—' He turned around to face her, too quick; his horns caught on the ceiling again and jerked his head back, making him growl in surprise. The moment was so slapstick, Alce laughed before she could catch herself, and once it was out, the sheer absurdity of the situation coupled with her own exhaustion set her off. She laughed longer and harder than she had for years. Theo had always known how to make her smile after a long day, he'd always been able to raise a laugh with something wilfully ridiculous, but this? This was something else.
Short of breath, she reached out to him to support herself. His skin was unfamiliar and calloused, but warm and oddly reassuring in its weight and mass. He shuddered at her touch and for a moment she thought her laughter had set him off as well. It took a moment for her to appreciate it was something else instead.
The monster, crying.
If anything, he had turned even redder. His eyes were puffy, bloodshot and raw, and tears cut new paths down the reconfigured contours of his face. Snot and mucus ran from his flattened nose as he cried. His mouth, misshapen by the mass of teeth and tusks he had acquired, was ill-designed, and drool spilled down his chin. He wiped his face with the back of his arm, the fur matting.
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