'I'm sorry,' he said, over and over again. 'I'm so sorry.'
He crouched low, head down like a child who knew they'd done wrong, his body wracking with his tears to the extent that the floor shook beneath him.
Instinctively, Alce reached out to him and held him. He was too big, too ridiculous. But she held him anyway, turning her cheek to rest on his chest. He smelled of leather and iron, but the sweat of him was still familiar, still him.
'Why would she do this?' he said, his voice broken to a leonine gruffness that almost suited his new appearance.
'To hurt me,' Alce said, aware of both the truth of the answer and the selfishness of it. 'Because my job is to kill people like her.'
He choked on that.
'It's okay,' she said, not knowing as she said it how it could be. 'We'll fix this,' she said, not knowing if it was possible.
Reassurance didn't come naturally to her. She knew it sounded forced, but something connected. She felt him shift his arms so they surrounded her, holding her gently and she froze, feeling only the heavy threat of him. When he sensed her discomfort and released her again – holding his hands to his sides slack and impotent – she felt inexplicably awful.
She shook her head.
'Let's get you to bed,' she said.
*
Theo slept on their double bed which now seemed far too small for him alone. He had curled up into a foetal ball, bringing his goat-legs up to his demon chest. His horns had punctured one of the pillows, but he slept anyway, whimpering slightly as he did so as though he was still crying, even if he wasn't awake enough to realise it.
Alce had waited with him until he had fallen asleep, then watched him a little while longer.
Theo was her normal. At least he had been before. He was dull, bland, useless. He was funny, sweet, silly. He was far too sensitive for her world, he was her anchor point to the lightness of the real, while she spent so much of her time in the dark.
Her mother never had any time for a partner. She'd never had any time for anything other than the work. Alce certainly never knew her father and the only time her mother had spoken of him was to firmly dispel the fantasy that Alce had been brewing, the idea he might have been someone special or magical.
'He was a mistake,' her mother said. 'Nothing more. He was weak. I don't drink anymore.'
And that had been that.
Alce had grown up in her mother's rooms in the annex behind the seminary where the word 'father' referred to the Padre, to visiting priests, to churchmen and no one else.
On one of her first trips to the field, she helped her mother exorcise a demon from an elderly man and watched in horror as the man wailed as he reconnected with the cardiovascular pain the demon's presence had muted.
'He's better now,' her mother told her as she steered her out of the room. 'He's human again. You don't know what it's like to have someone else living inside of you. I do.'
The look she had given Alce had been sharp and final.
She had never known about Theo. She hadn't known about any of the people Alce had been with.
'Someone once told me,' she told Alce one evening, 'that everyone needs somewhere to hide, but that's dangerous nonsense. Giving in to the instinct to hide is what makes you vulnerable. You don't need sanctuary, you need strength. Remember that.'
Alce had never believed it. Seeing her mother in the care facility, she wondered if she still believed it either. People just needed the right place to hide, that was all.
Theo whimpered in his sleep again.
She leaned over him, and with a light touch, traced the contour of him from his shoulder to his hip, to his thigh. He didn't wake, but he stilled a little, as though her touch had chased away his nightmare for a spell, and let him sleep in peace.
*
It was late but although she was exhausted, she didn't know if she would sleep. She took a long shower instead, wrapping a towel around her when she was done.
In the kitchen, the dishes were still half-done; in the lounge, Theo's clothes were still laid out over the furniture.
She picked up the skin-suit from where he had left it and examined it with what she hoped was a professional disinterest. Without him, it looked anonymous and grey. She turned it around to try and find the trick of it, but it appeared to be dormant in her hands. She held it up by the shoulders, and it unrolled before her like a plump stick man, its head lolling forward on its chest.
She wished she could see his face in it somewhere. Something of him she could recognise and claim, but the face was a grey blank, an empty hood betraying nothing.
There was an opening at its back. A long line which ran from the nape of the neck to the coccyx.
Curious, she fed her hand inside it, feeling the path of one of the arm holes and running it up her own forearm, so her fingertips found its fingertips. The suit felt slightly elastic, she pulled it taut and snug, it found her shape and used it, the texture of it resettling and taking on the appearance of flesh. Now it was no longer a glove, but a hand. Her hand, his hand. His scuffed knuckles, his dirty fingernails, his life line stretching and splitting across his palm. She turned it back and forth. His light fuzz of red-brown hair thickening across the forearm, the constellation of freckles at the root of the thumb. She put it to her cheek and felt his touch; she put it to her lips, and it was his taste.
She heard him move in the other room, and she stepped into the corridor to see him framed by the bedroom door. He was now on his back splayed across the covers, one giant arm trailing on the floor. She saw the give of the bedsprings under the size of him and heard the catch in his throat as he snored.
She tried to reconcile the touch of the old him with the shape of the new one, but the disconnect was too great, the rift too wide. She went back in the lounge and closed the door gently behind her.
She let the towel loosen and fall to the floor, and guided his hand from the nape of her neck, over her the curve of her breast and down the flat of her stomach. She traced his fingers over the edges of her scars as he sometimes did. He was so much more gentle, so she tried again until it felt more right: the barest touch of his fingertip. It was like tuning a radio. She guided his hand down between her legs. If she closed her eyes, he may as well be there.
Later, she teased open the gap in the back of the skin and stepped inside. She pulled his feet on over hers, his chest, his arms, his face, his head. She reached back over her shoulders and touched the seam on the back, feeling it close up around her, tightening, then relaxing as it settled. It felt comfortable, cool. She looked down at herself, and saw only him. She cupped his penis and balls gently in her hand, but they felt light, illusory. Too much to expect, she supposed, that the suit would make meat of them as well.
The bathroom mirror was still clouded from the shower, so she swept it clear with a towel to see him standing there facing her. His face, his body, his hair mussed from sleep. His lopsided grin smiled back at her and it was such an easy expression, she found herself disappointed. Something she had loved in him was something he had never put any thought into. It was just a part of him, not something he did for her alone, not something either of them had earned.
In the bedroom, she lay on the edge of the bed. She faced Theo and watched him sleep through his own eyes. She lay there for long enough, she wondered if she was daring him to wake and see her. But he didn't, he slept sound and oblivious; his monstrous features softened and strangely childlike.
'This is a job that is never done,' her mother had told her once. 'It's an enemy we can't defeat, we can only keep at bay.'
She remembered seeing a documentary when she was young. Scientists used a microscope to prove just how many things lived on the human body unseen. The eyebrows alone were crawling with tiny bugs and parasites and Alce had spent the next two weeks scrubbing her face so hard her pores glowed, giving her an expression of bruised surprise.
For the past ten years, she felt as though she had been scrubbing the city raw in th
e same way. It only felt more futile as the years had gone by. There was always something there, always something coming.
Why would she do this? Theo had asked her. Because I keep trying. Because I don't know how to stop.
It was nearly dawn when she dressed. Theo was still asleep, still snoring where she had left him in the bedroom. She put on the clothes he had worn the day before: boxer shorts, jeans, t-shirt, boots. She retrieved his coat from the cupboard and found it contained his wallet and his phone. She took his watch from the bedside table and looped it onto her wrist. His mother had given it to him the year his father had died, and although the strap was fraying, he wore it every day.
She kissed him once, gently on the forehead.
At the front door, she hesitated, then took out her own phone and dialled Leon's number. It rang three times before he answered it, his voice hoarse as though he had only just woken up.
She didn't answer him when he asked why she was calling. She listened to him say her name, the syllables escalating in the face of her silence, then she dropped the phone on the doormat and his bass note of worry became tinny and shrill in panic.
She glanced one more time at the shape sleeping in Theo's bedroom, then she let herself out, and let the door shut fast behind her.
Dogsbody
Gil McKenzie didn't get the job in the marketing agency on account of the fact he turned into a werewolf that one time.
The rejection didn't come as a surprise; he'd been through the process often enough in the past five years. It had become almost as routine as the labouring work he took to cover the bills that had continued to stack up no matter who employed him.
The interview had taken place well over a week ago, and the young woman in the grey tweed suit had not taken long to make up her mind. She'd introduced herself as Vicki, and of the three panellists, she'd been both the youngest and the least susceptible to his desperate charm. Unlike her colleagues, she hadn't laughed at any of his self-deprecating jokes about the gaps in his employment history and when she'd turned over the diversity form to examine it in greater depth, he registered how her eyes scanned down it, mechanically switching left and right until she hit the small checkbox on the bottom left of the page. Gil knew the wording by heart. On November 17th 2010, were you affected by Lunar Proximity Syndrome? A little superscript asterisk pointed to a lengthy paragraph of small print at the foot of the page: a promise that an affirmative answer would not invalidate the chances of employment; a warning that a dishonest one would lead to disqualification.
He'd completed the form while waiting in the reception area and his pen had hovered over the checkbox. The weekend tabloids were full of angry stories about once-upright employees having lied about not being LPS, and while the articles focused on how they'd been caught out and punished for their transgressions, to Gil, they demonstrated it was possible to game the system, at least for a spell. But Jackson and Broome was too big a company to be careless. They would have access to the government register and as such, the question seemed cruel. It felt like a dare.
With a flick of his pen, he told the truth, and he remembered how Vicki's eyes had sharpened, and how she'd looked at him anew, staring into him as though she could perceive the monster he'd briefly been, still hiding, uncomfortable under his human skin. Then she'd promised they'd be in touch in such an abrupt tone, it had taken the other two panellists by surprise.
One week later, and he was standing in the narrow hallway at the entrance to the block of flats where he lived, holding the letter he'd been surprised to find waiting for him in his mailbox.
He held it closed. One week was enough time to make him wonder if he'd misjudged them. Maybe they had a quota they needed to fill? Maybe Vicki's expression hadn't been one of horror but one of fascination? Maybe they wanted him because he'd changed?
He tore open the envelope and knew what it said before he read it.
We regret to inform you, etc. etc.
The date on the top of the letter was the same as the day he'd attended the interview, and it was only when he examined the envelope more closely that he realised it was addressed to Flat 12 rather than Flat 12a. They hadn't wasted any time, but Rob next door had.
It didn't matter now. The envelope was open, the letter read, its promise was already spent. Gil tore both into pieces and crumpled the fragments in his fists. He held them over the paper basket on the floor beneath the mailboxes and let them fall, spinning like broken sycamore seeds.
*
He stopped in Sharmin's on Ledgerman Road for a pack of Marlboro Reds, and as Sharmin himself hunted through the back room in search of fresh packs of lighters, Gil caught sight of himself in the reflective glass of the cabinet behind the counter, where the bottles of whisky and rum were kept locked in the mornings like a holding cell.
It alarmed him how quickly he'd become comfortable with his site clothes: his grey tracksuit pants, the khaki zip-up hoodie now forever tangled with the hi-vis vest. It was a brisk November morning and he was dressed warmly with a beanie and an extra layer he'd end up peeling off as the day wore on. His face was lean and ruddy, and the beard he'd grown in a conscious attempt to look less like an office drone suited him now he'd grown into it, even if it was greyer than he'd have preferred. The neatness he'd trimmed into it for the interview was growing out and he didn't look like the experienced and capable marketing executive his curriculum vitae still described him as.
He shuffled idly through the tabloids stacked on the counter. Most had something about the anniversary, but it was the same not-quite-news the media had been peddling since the event five years earlier. Old stories repeated with limited hindsight, the same hypothetical questions asking what was being done to keep everyone safe, and a few inevitable column inches about Chrissy Linderman's upcoming appeal. Some lip service was paid to some unlikely new theories to explain what had happened (A genetic disorder! Blood disease! Aliens!), but none had anything new to say. He leafed through the pages and recognised some of the photographs inside. Familiar stills of sleeping monsters, incongruous in offices, underground platforms, town squares.
Sharmin returned red-faced and panting, and slammed two shrink-wrapped slabs of plastic lighters down on the counter. He was close to retirement, and looked like a man who found the gradient steepening now the summit was in sight.
'We got stars or spots,' he said when he got his breath back.
'What's the difference?' Gil said.
'No difference,' Sharmin said, 'except one's got stars on them, the other lot have spots.'
Gil tapped the top package.
'I'll have a couple of those.'
'Stars it is, then,' Sharmin said. 'I did have some with stripes on them a while back. But they were a bad batch. Tended to flare up and I'd have people in complaining how they took their eyebrows off.'
'Stars is good.'
Sharmin tore open the packaging and rang up the till.
'Stars it is,' he said again.
'What happened to the window?' Gil gestured at the board taped up over a broken pane on the door.
Sharmin shrugged and pushed a few coins in change across the stack of newspapers.
'The usual drunken animals,' he said. 'On this street, a good night is one I don't get woken by the sound of broken glass.'
*
Grisham set Gil to work for the morning, painting the plywood hoardings that masked the site from Mendell Road.
'Doesn't have to look good,' Grisham said. 'Just has to look clean. And mind how you drip on the pavement, the council will have us otherwise.'
Grisham was one of the older supervisors. He had a grey walrus moustache and his hi-vis anorak was zipped up to his chin.
He left Gil with a can of industrial grey-blue, the building company's brand colour, and Gil spent the best part of the morning painting his way from the corner of Bury Street to the remains of the bookies at the top of Mendell Road, which looked like it had been cleaved in half by an enormous blade.
/> At Muirhouse & Partners, where he'd worked for six years, he'd often sat at his desk in the bright, open plan office and pored over brand proposals submitted by agencies. They'd fascinated him with their intricate pedantry. The minutiae of logo placements, the bizarre laws of typefaces, the curated subset of Pantone colours. Now here he was with a bucket of brand to apply in person. No longer a swatch on a page, but a tin of pure corporate pigment that spattered like buckshot across his tracksuit trousers. It was clean theory made grimly practical. He felt like a disgraced officer sent to die on the front line.
Like most of the jobs he was given on the site, it was dull, repetitive work, but anything which put some distance between him and the apprentices was a job worth taking. They were young and rowdy, getting trained up for the beginning of their careers. They knew his story, or some variant of it. To them, he was old, and cast out of his career, forced to start further down the ladder from where they found themselves. In other words, he was fair game for their taunts, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The last site the agency had him working was a series of low-rise office blocks out past the ring road, now he was on a crew building the new multi-storey behind the Kroner Centre. It was a big job – fifteen months or so – and Grisham had assured the labourers there'd be work for them for the best of it. This was good news, but its location in town increased the likelihood Gil might run into people he knew or worse, people he once worked with. He was sure he'd seen Stephanie once. There had been something about the way she walked through a crowd that seemed so familiar to him. He felt like he was seeing her as strangers saw her and the thought made him feel uncomfortably like a voyeur. He'd stepped well out of sight until he was sure she was gone.
But it wasn't so bad on the site now he was used to it. He knew his place as an unskilled labourer and everyone else knew it too. He was expected to do as he was told and do it as efficiently as he could, but no one really expected him to excel and that was liberating. He was mostly there to carry materials and equipment, to screw in fixtures, to clear rubble, to sweep up the detritus at the end of the day. Occasionally, he almost convinced himself that he'd grown comfortable with the work over two years. Even when it rained, he told himself, he liked the fact they just ploughed on regardless.
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