Trapped Within

by Bradshaw, Duncan P.

  It would be Saturday tomorrow. Nigel would head out early for a day at the bookies, followed by a heavy night at the pub.

  He’d come home wasted.

  He’d be slow, weak, and even dumber than usual.

  James decided that if nothing convinced him differently, he would take this as an opportunity to deal with his awful steptwat.

  James awoke to the hiss of a woman’s voice: “You shouldn’t.”

  He sat up, twisting his head to the right so fast that the joints clicked.

  No one.

  He peered over the edge of the bed. Still nothing; just his glass of Pepsi on the carpet—never booze—and a bed so close to the floor that not even a kitten could squeeze beneath it.

  The clipped, female voice came again, inches from his ear: “Apologies for waking you like that, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer.”

  James lowered his eyes to his right shoulder and the short, loose sleeve of his “Scum” t-shirt.

  “Yes, that’s right,” the voice said.

  Frowning, still half-asleep, James lifted the black material.

  His shoulder grinned.

  James stared, struggling to process the sight.

  Overnight, a pair of plump, pink lips had risen from the ridge of his collarbone, breaking through the skin between his neck and the curve of his hairy shoulder.

  The mouth beamed, its teeth immaculate.

  “Hello,” it said, primly. The voice almost reminded him of his mother.

  James squawked. He leapt out of bed, despite the fact that the thing he wanted to escape was attached to him.

  “What the hell?” he demanded, standing in his pants and t-shirt.

  “Come on now, James,” the mouth told him. “Calm down.”

  “You aren’t real. You can’t be.”

  “Stop talking then,” the mouth replied. “You do look rather silly, arguing with your own shoulder.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  “I’m not talking though, am I, James? As you said, I’m not real. I… ”

  “I said shut up!”

  James slammed a hand over his shoulder. The mouth nipped him, and he yelped.

  “Don’t do that,” the mouth snapped, no longer playful.

  James sat down on his bed and stared at the wall, counting to 10. If he reached 10 and the mouth had vanished, he would put the sight down to tiredness, or a dream. But if it was still there when he reached 10…

  He reached 10.

  When he looked down, the lips were pursed cockily.

  “Well?” the mouth asked. “Real enough?”

  James looked at the palm of his left hand. There were two rows of angry teeth marks. He felt like running from the room to either dial 999 or tell his mum, but something stopped him. His legs and arms felt unsteady.

  If Nigel had spiked last night’s omelette, James would murder him.

  “You won’t be murdering anyone,” the mouth said, as if in reply. “And this, young man, is exactly why I’m here.”

  James focused on his drawn curtains. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, I have permission to speak now, do I?”

  James neither replied nor argued.

  “Well then. Lately, James, you’ve been having some rather dark thoughts, haven’t you? ‘Shoot this bastard’. ‘Hang that bitch’. And, more significantly, ‘Let’s deal with my step-daddy’.”

  “How do you… ”

  “Because I’m part of you, silly.” The mouth clacked its teeth. “I know it all. I… ” The voice became muffled: his sleeve had dropped down again. “Do you mind?”

  James lifted the fabric.

  “Thank you. As I was saying, I know everything about you. I know about the time that you pushed little Kenny Thistlethwaite out of his wheelchair, and said that if he told anyone, you would get your dad to beat him up.”

  “I was nine!” James said.

  The lips smiled again. “I know about that time when you were left alone in class, and decided to sniff your French teacher Mrs Clacton’s seat.”

  Ashamed, James had no response. The morning felt dreamlike but the pain in his hand told him that he was awake, and he still could not bring himself to leave the room.

  The steptwat had probably left the house by now, but James’s mum would be downstairs, probably watching Jeremy Kyle on catch-up. James had planned to make the most of his Saturday morning, either by working out what to do about the steptwat, or sending pictures of his knob to girls online. But now he found himself locked in debate with…

  With?

  “You’ve been a naughty boy,” the mouth continued. “Shoplifting to impress the other students. MDMA and amphetamines. Fighting the other lads. But so far you’ve done nothing compared to what you’re considering now.”

  “Nigel’s a prick, though.”

  “Stepfathers are always… difficult.”

  “Oh, so it’s okay to threaten me, like last night?” James said, antagonised. “You heard what he said? About kicking me out?”

  “I did,” the mouth said. “But do you really want to sink to his level—or lower?”

  James didn’t generally think in ‘levels’. In Social Health at school, Mr Hopkins often talked about morals and stuff. While James understood that most people believed in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, he struggled with the finer details. ‘When is abortion acceptable?’ Mr Hopkins had once asked. ‘Is it right to murder one human in order to save a hundred?’

  And James had thought, ‘Depends if you get away with it.’

  “But there is more to life than ‘getting away with it’, young man,” the mouth told him.

  “Will you please get the hell out of my head?”

  The mouth ignored him. “There are certain things that you simply shouldn’t do. Rape, for example. Torture. And, in your case, cold-blooded murder.”

  “But he’s a prick!” James repeated. “He deserves whatever he gets! He comes into my house, sits in my dad’s chair, keeps me awake at night when he and mum are… eurgh… and he’s gonna chuck me out! So don’t you think that—?”

  The mouth yawned loudly. James closed his left eye and used his right eye to look down between the mouth’s dazzling white teeth. Inside, he couldn’t see any of the muscles or bones that helped him move his arm. But there also seemed to be no tongue, or gullet, or any of the pink that you would expect to see inside a mouth. Between those perfect white teeth James saw nothing but black. It was like looking into a deep well, and it made him dizzy.

  Everything felt so wrong.

  “This isn’t wrong,” the mouth countered. “Killing someone is wrong. And, more simply, you’ll get caught.”

  A harsh male voice said: “Oh, blah, blah, fuckin’ blah.”

  James jumped, but in a weird way wasn’t even surprised. As he reached up to his left shoulder, he braced himself. He lifted the t-shirt’s other sleeve and before he even saw what was underneath he was hit by a waft of gingivitis.

  A second mouth had appeared overnight. This one was cracked and split, the lower lip coated with froth. Its teeth were a brown junkyard, and something grey oozed from the sides of its lips.

  How had he not noticed that sooner?

  “I might not be pretty,” it told him, “but at least I’m honest.”

  “Don’t listen to that troublemaker, James,” said the right-hand mouth. “He’ll just confuse you.”

  “How can I confuse him any more than you already have?” the left-hand mouth—Lefty?—demanded. “This poor bastard is being threatened with death, and you’re telling him to hold back? If anything, he’d be showing restraint by killing his steptwat. That arsehole needs torturing!”

  James’s head swam. “I… I never said… ”

  “Oh come off it, Shitpool,” Lefty said. “We all know what you was thinking.”

  James almost punched the rotten mouth at the sound of his nickname, but somehow he knew that he’d only bring himself pain. Again he wanted to jump fr
om the bed and hurry downstairs to his mother, but when he tried his limbs disagreed. He was trapped by his own body.

  Lefty said, “If you ask me, the question isn’t whether you should do it—it’s just how.”

  “Well… well no one’s asking you,” the right-hand mouth, or Righty, said. She sounded flustered. “James—you love your mother, yes? Then just think how she would feel, if—”

  “Ah, quit your preachin’,” Lefty said. “The longer you leave it, James, the more likely it is you’ll just stand there and let that bastard chuck you onto the streets.”

  “James,” Righty said. “Take a moment, and just think-”

  “If you don’t stop your yammering,” Lefty warned, “I’ll come over there, and—”

  “Stop,” James said.

  Both Lefty and Righty clamped shut. James glanced at each in turn, waiting to see if they were going to start again.

  As bizarre as his morning had become, James knew that the mouths were right about one thing: he had a decision to make. Everything had come to a head in a short time, and although he wasn’t sure if he was going mad, hallucinating, or still dreaming, he planned to face things head-on. That’s what the man of the house would do.

  “Okay. This is what’s going to happen,” James said. “Both of you can tell me what I should do. State your case, like. You can each have a couple of minutes to speak, and then I’ll weigh everything up and decide.”

  The mouths puffed irritably. “Fine,” they said, almost together. Minty breath rose from James’s right and a cloud of rotten gas filled the space to his left.

  James stood up and went to the crack between his wardrobe and the corner of his room. The mirror, which he rarely used, was about half his height. He dragged it out, propped it onto the bed and leaned it against the wall. Then he tugged off his t-shirt and sat cross-legged before the glass on his mattress. He stared at his sleepy self: the birthmark on the side of his face, his pot-belly, his yellow boxers, and the new mouths that had grown from the skin of his shoulders.

  “I’ll go first,” said Righty.

  Lefty didn’t object.

  “You’ve had it tough, James,” Righty began. “When your dad lost his job, he picked up an old bad habit again, and after a while, that brown filth took him away from you. Afterwards, your mother seemed to give up, didn’t she? She sank down into herself and then fell into Nigel’s arms—conniving, controlling, boozing, bullying Nigel. It’s no surprise that you’re angry.”

  James was. He felt madder than he could ever remember being before.

  “But,” Righty went on. “You’ve survived this long without doing anything dreadful, so why put your future at risk? If you do something silly, you’ll let that monster win, and what would your father think of that? You can become a better man than the both of them—a real man, who takes responsibility and learns from his hardships, rather than letting them consume him. Take up a job now, while you still have time to save, and then rent your own place. Grow. Face the challenge. Become responsible, take ownership of what’s happened to you, and break the cycle.” Righty bit her lower lip. “I, um, rest my case.”

  James was silent for several moments. Then he said to Lefty, “Okay. Your turn.”

  He watched the other mouth in the mirror. Its discoloured teeth were clenched. “Alright then,” Lefty said at last. “Here’s my argument.”

  James felt his left shoulder joints shudder.

  “James… ” Righty said.

  In the mirror, Lefty drew its lower lip up and over its horrid dentures, opened wide, and gnashed. Pain erupted in James’s shoulder, but somehow he managed to avoid crying out.

  “Get off,” he gasped, instinctively snatching at the furled strip of muscle which Lefty had clamped between its teeth. Instead of simply releasing its lip, Lefty opened and chomped down again—this time into the palm of James’s hand. The pain sharpened to a point. James breathed in with a whistle. Lefty bit down for several more seconds and then released him, hissing. The foul teeth, now tipped red, had left blood-welled ditches in James’s hand, deeper and more painful than Righty’s warning nip earlier.

  James cringed when the mouth expelled a sticky, hateful snarl, exposing the hollow blackness inside.

  “Stop,” James pleaded, panicking. “This isn’t an argument!”

  Lefty, foamy with blood, clamped its jaws down over its own lip once again, apparently impervious to the pain it was causing, and then roared, “Of course it’s an argument, Shitpool! So argue back!”

  James shrank from the stench of its breath, wishing he could tear his eyes away from the mirror.

  “Fight me, you fucking coward!” Lefty demanded, biting the sore skin once again. “Or aren’t you man enough?!”

  Rage bubbled up inside James and he finally retaliated: he ploughed his right fist into Lefty’s teeth. There was an explosion of pain and the blow sheared skin from his knuckles. One of the mouth’s filthy incisors broke and became a jagged fang. Blood rose from the back of James’s hand, but even more rushed from Lefty’s burst lip, down over James’s collarbone.

  Lefty spat. “That’s what you have to do,” it said. “When something threatens you, you don’t just take it, and you don’t just turn the fucking cheek. You fight.”

  Catching his breath, James watched Righty’s reflection. The neater mouth was silent.

  Lefty breathed a disgusting, satisfied breath. In the mirror, James saw another rivulet of blood emerge from its maw, catching speed as it joined the rest and ran down into his armpit hairs.

  He knew what had to be done.

  While James believed that his plan would benefit his mum in the long term, he felt as if something cruel and cancerous was squirming in his belly whenever he imagined how she would first react. Instead of eating lunch with her as he usually did, he munched a sandwich in town before visiting the hardware store. He needed to buy one item for his main plan, and another for his backup plan.

  Although James could tell that Righty was irritated by his decision, at least it had stopped protesting. The pair of mouths could still not agree, but James was thankful when they hushed their bickering whenever they were near other customers.

  After hiding a bottle in his pocket, James stood before a display of DIY tools.

  “If you have to go through with this ghastliness,” Righty said from beneath James’s sweater, “then it is better to be quiet and underhanded than vicious and blatant.”

  “Such a coward,” Lefty muttered. “If you’re gonna do something, do it right. Imagine the satisfaction of smashing that fucker to pieces!”

  “You said that this was about fighting back, not about sadism,” Righty said. “James, think of your mother, please.”

  James thought of his mother. Then he thought about Nigel calling him Shitpool, and the sounds of the pair of them fucking in the next room.

  So James slipped a second item under his top and hurried from the store.

  When James returned home to prepare his backup plan, his mum was slouched asleep in his dad’s armchair, the shrubbery of her hair hiding her eyes. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She snuffled when his lips brushed her skin and he froze, hit by a gust of her alcoholic breath.

  Relieved that she hadn’t woken up, James surveyed the room. The TV blathered in the corner. James could smell the remnants of another morning’s baking, perhaps to make up for yesterday’s singed biscuits. He tidied up a couple of plates and a few empty cans and left his mum snoozing in his father’s once-smart leather chair.

  I could get used to this, he thought, smiling at his steptwat’s absence. First things first, though.

  Sometimes, James felt nervous passing beneath the underpass alone. It was only a short walk from his home, and while overhead lights coloured the tunnel interior a bright yellow, both entrances led onto sections of road unlit by streetlamps. One dark verge led down towards another road, while the other side sloped towards a section of river.

  On the river side, at the en
trance to the underpass, James waited in the darkness. He crouched and pressed himself against the wall, knowing that his steptwat was more likely to spend his last scraps of change on another drink than on a taxi ride home. Cars purred and belched by, headlights sweeping the shadows but never quite revealing James.

  He itched all over but resisted raking the skin. Instead, he fingered the stolen claw hammer through one of his puffer jacket pockets. It had a satisfying weight and a sharp, curved hook made for prying nails. Back home he had made his backup preparations, just in case Nigel passed by with someone else in tow, or didn’t show up, or, worse, James was too squeamish to go through with it.

  “You can still change your mind,” Righty said, muffled beneath the layers of his jumper and coat. “Just throw the hammer away, go home, and… ”

  “Oh shut your fucking hole,” Lefty replied. “Stop sulking, just because you lost.”

  “I’m not sulking at all,” Righty said.

  “You’re always sulking.”

  “Oh, for goodness’—”

  “Hush, you two,” James said.

  A figure had entered the opposite end of the tunnel. James felt ill, but reminded himself that this was all for the best, and that it was for his mum as much as for him. Two wrongs probably made a right, and all that mattered was that he got away with his crime.

  His steptwat Nigel was not quite staggering, but his feet threatened to tangle over every second step. His upper half leaned towards the road, as if magnetised by the tarmac. A lorry blustered by. James considered pushing Nigel beneath a vehicle instead.

  “Fuck that,” Lefty sneered. “Witnesses mean either getting caught or having to shut more people up.”

  “I hate to say it, but he’s not wrong,” Righty said.

  James didn’t want to kill anyone else, and he definitely didn’t want to be caught. He peered around the corner again.

  Nigel wore the thin brown trench-coat that James always thought made him look homeless. It was unbuttoned and James could see a pale football shirt half-shimmering in the rancid light of the underpass. Nigel’s eyes were half-closed, like he was sleepwalking, and he carried a near-empty glass of what James assumed had once been a full pint of beer.