Under the Skin (9 page)

‘Wha-wha-where?’ he waffled.

‘Edderton,’ she said. ‘Where you wanted to be.’

He blinked several times, struggling to believe her, then squinted through the windscreen and the passenger window.

‘Zaddafact?’ he marvelled, orienting himself in the oasis of familiar aridity outside. Clearly, he was having to concede that nowhere else could look quite like this.

‘Gee, this is … I dunno …’ he wheezed, grinning with embarrassment and anxiety and self-satisfaction. ‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’

‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley.

The woodcutter blinked again, then tensed up, peering nervously through the windscreen at the deserted street.

‘I hope my girlfriend’s not out,’ he grimaced. ‘I hope she don’t see you.’ He looked at Isserley, his brow wrinkling as he considered the possibility that this might offend her. ‘What I mean to say is,’ he added, even as he was fumbling to unclasp his seatbelt, ‘she’s got a temper. She’s what-would-you-say … jealous. Aye: jealous.’

Already out of the car, he hesitated to slam the door before he had found the right words to leave her with.

‘And you’re’ – he drew a deep, rasping breath – ‘
beau
tiful,’ he beamed.

Isserley smiled back, bone-weary all of a sudden.

‘Bye for now,’ she said.

*
*
*

Isserley sat in her car for a long time, engine off, in the pool of light near the thatched bus stop in Edderton village. Whatever was needed to enable her to leave, she lacked it just now.

While waiting for whatever it was to be granted her, she rested her arms on the steering wheel, and her chin on her arms. She didn’t have much of a chin, and what little she did have was the result of much suffering and surgical ingenuity. Being able to rest it on her arms was a small triumph, or maybe a humiliation, she could never decide which.

Eventually, she removed her glasses. A stupid risk to take, even in this somnolent village, but the sensation of tears collecting inside the plastic rims and leaking through onto her cheeks was unbearable in the end. She wept and wept, keening softly in her own language, watching the street carefully in case any vodsels strayed out. Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

She looked up into the rear-view mirror, adjusting the angle of her head until what she saw reflected was just her moss-green eyes and the fringe of her hair. This little sliver of face, poorly illumined, was the only bit she could look at nowadays without self-loathing, the only bit which had been left alone. This little sliver was a window into her sanity. She had sat in her car like this many times over the years, staring through that window.

A pair of headlights glimmered on the horizon, and Isserley put her glasses back on. By the time the vehicle arrived in Edderton, quite some time later, she had pulled herself together.

The vehicle was a plum-coloured Mercedes with tinted windows, and it winked its lights at Isserley as it passed through the village. It was a friendly gesture, nothing to do with warning or the codes of traffic. Just one vehicle saluting another of a vaguely similar shape and colour, in ignorance of the contents inside.

Isserley started her own car and turned it round, following her unknown well-wisher out of Edderton and into the forest.

All the way back to Ablach, she thought about Amlis Vess and what he might think when he learned she had come back empty-handed. Would he assume that the reason why she was hidden away in her cottage was embarrassment at her lack of success? Well, let him. Perhaps her failure, if that’s how he chose to see it, would make clear to him that her job was not an easy one. Pampered dilettante that he was, he probably imagined it was like picking wildflowers from the side of the road, or … or whelks from the sea-shore, if he had the faintest notion what whelks were, or what a sea-shore looked like. Esswis was right: fuck him!

Maybe she should have taken the woodcutter after all. How massive his arms had been! – such massive chumps, bigger than any she’d ever encountered. He would have been good for something, surely. Ah, but the cancer … She really would have to find out whether cancer made any difference, for future reference. It was no use asking the men on the farm, though. They were thick; typical Estates types.

Ablach Farm was snowy pale and as quiet as ever when she drove up its overgrown private road. There were actually two roads leading into the farm, one nominally for heavy machinery, but both were cracked and bumpy and wild with weeds, and Isserley used either depending on her mood. Tonight she turned into the one supposedly for cars, though no cars except hers ever drove on it. Already at the mouth of Ablach, a cluster of signs warned of death, poison, and the full penalty of law. Just passing these signs, Isserley knew, triggered alarms in the farm buildings a quarter of a mile ahead.

She liked this road, especially one gorse-infested stretch of it which she called Rabbit Hill, where colonies of rabbits lived and could be depended on to hop across at any time of day or night. Isserley always drove very slowly here, taking great care not to run over these winsome little creatures.

Through the camouflage of trees at the top of the road she glimpsed the lights of Esswis’s farmhouse, remembered their awkward conversation that morning. Hazily though she knew him, she could well imagine his back would be torturing him by now, and she felt pity, contempt (he could have said no, couldn’t he?), and a queasy pang of kinship.

She drove past the stable, illuminating its blistered door in a flash of orange and black. There were no horses in there, only a pet project of Ensel’s.

‘It’ll work, I know it will,’ he’d told her, just days before abandoning it and letting Esswis tow it away. She’d shown no interest, of course. Men of his sort could bore you to death if you encouraged them.

The main steading, when she pulled up to it, was ridiculously white, its fresh paint glowing in the moonshine. As soon as she’d switched off her engine, the great metal door rolled open and several men hurried out. Ensel, first as always, peered into the passenger window.

‘I couldn’t get anything,’ said Isserley.

Ensel poked his snout inside the cabin, much as the woodcutter had done, and sniffed the alcoholic upholstery. ‘I can smell it wasn’t for want of trying,’ he said.

‘Yes, well,’ responded Isserley, hating herself for what she was about to say, but saying it anyway, ‘Amlis Vess will just have to appreciate it isn’t as easy as all that.’

Ensel noted her discomposure, smiled. His teeth weren’t so good, and he knew it; for her sake, he lowered his head.

‘You got a big one yesterday, anyway,’ he said. ‘One of the best ever.’

Isserley stared into his eyes, yearning to be sure whether, just for once, the compliment was sincere. As soon as she caught herself yearning, she yanked this contemptible little shoot of sentimentality out by the root. Estate trash, she thought, looking away, determined to get herself locked up safely in her cottage as soon as possible. She’d had far too long a day.

‘You look exhausted,’ said Ensel. The other men had already gone back inside; he was attempting a private moment with her, the way he sometimes did, always at lamentably inopportune times.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘It would be fair to say that.’

She recalled another occasion, a year or two ago, when he’d had her trapped like this – him leaning into the car, her foolish enough to have turned off the motor. He’d told her conspiratorially, almost tenderly, that he’d got her a present. ‘Thanks,’ she’d said, taking the mysterious little parcel from him and tossing it onto the seat beside her. Unwrapping it later, she’d found an almost transparently thin fillet of braised voddissin – a delicacy which Ensel must surely have stolen. Nestled in greaseproof paper, it winked at her, still moist and warm, irresistible and disgusting at the same time. She’d eaten it, even licked the juices from the creases in the paper, but she never mentioned it to Ensel afterwards, and that was the end of that. Still he tried, in other ways, to impress her.

‘Amlis Vess will probably arrive in the early hours,’ he was saying now, leaning further into the car. His hands were dirty and gnarled with scabs. ‘Tonight,’ he added, in case there was some misunderstanding.

‘I’ll be asleep,’ said Isserley.

‘Nobody knows how long he’s coming for. He might leave again, on the same ship, as soon as the cargo is loaded.’ Ensel used one hand to mime a ship departing, a precious opportunity swallowed up into the void.

‘Well, I guess all will be revealed when the time comes,’ said Isserley brightly, wishing she hadn’t switched off the ignition.

‘So … shall I let you know?’ suggested Ensel.

‘No,’ said Isserley, striving to keep her voice level. ‘No, I don’t think so. You can say Isserley says hello and goodbye, how’s that? Now, I really must get to my bed.’

‘Of course,’ said Ensel, bowing out of the window-frame.

Bastard, thought Isserley as she drove off. Tired and vulnerable, she’d lost concentration and let slip that little detail about going to her bed. No doubt Ensel would relish that, share it with the other men, this titillating proof of her subhumanity. Had she shaken him off sooner, he would never have been any the wiser; he and the other men would have carried on assuming that when Isserley slept, in that secretive cottage of hers, she slept like a human being, on the ground.

Instead, in one humiliating instant, she’d thoughtlessly given him the gift of the tawdry truth, a vision of an ugly freak sleeping on a strange oblong structure of iron and cloth-wrapped kapok, her body wreathed in sheets of old linen, just like a vodsel.

ISSERLEY, HAVING VOWED
to be uncaringly asleep when the ship came in, lay in bed, in the midnight dark, listening for its arrival.

She hadn’t changed her attitude; it was sheer anxiety keeping her awake, anxiety that she’d be roused out of her bed by the men, or, worse, by Amlis Vess.

More than anything she was afraid of not hearing them knocking at the front door, of sleeping right through the noise. They might just let themselves in then, come up to her bedroom, and have a good look at the denuded freak, the gargoyle girl, snoring on the pallet. Ensel was Estate trash, after all; his idea of privacy bore no relation to hers. He’d seemed to have trouble hearing her when she told him she didn’t want to be disturbed; it wouldn’t take much to make him forget. And wouldn’t he just love to see what the surgeons had done to her below the waist! Well, he could go fuck himself.

Hours eroded by. Isserley’s eyes swelled and itched with the imaginary grit of sleeplessness. She squirmed in slow motion on her stained and ancient mattress, listening.

The ship’s berthing, shortly after 2 a.m., was almost noiseless: she could barely distinguish it from the sound of the waves on the Moray Firth. But she knew it had come. It came every month at the same time, and she was intimately acquainted with its smell, its great, secretive groan of docking, and the metallic sigh of its insertion into the steading.

Isserley lay awake longer still, waiting for the clouds to uncover the moon, waiting for the men, for Amlis Vess, to just
dare
, to have the
nerve
. ‘Well then, let’s see this Isserley,’ she imagined Amlis Vess saying, and the men scurrying off to fetch her. ‘Fuck off,’ she would call out to them.

She lay for another hour or so, coiled ready with her ‘Fuck off’ sizzling on the tip of her tongue. Nervous moonlight hesitated into her bedroom, drawing a spectral line around the meagre contents, stopping well short of the bed. Outside, a screech owl began its performance of wails and shrieks, one calm and unruffled bird sounding deceptively like a horde of much larger creatures in terror and agony.

Serenaded thus, Isserley fell asleep.

It seemed she had only slept a few minutes when she was shocked awake by urgent hammering at the front door of her cottage.

Frantic, she reared up on her bed, clutching the rumpled sheet to her breasts, pressing her legs together. The knocking continued, echoing around the bare trees like phantom knocks on dozens of phantom houses.

Isserley’s bedroom was still shut tight and snug, but through the window she could see the darkness of the world starting to go a pre-dawn blue. She squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece: it was half past five.

Isserley wound the bedsheet around her body and hurried out to the landing, where there was a tiny four-paned casement. She unlatched it, poked her head out into the night and looked straight down.

Still hammering energetically at her front door was Esswis, all dressed up in his best farmer gear, complete with deerstalker and shotgun. He looked ridiculous and terrifying, lit up luridly by the headlights of his Land-rover parked nearby.

‘Stop banging, Esswis!’ Isserley warned, her voice half hysterical. ‘Can’t anyone understand I’m not interested in Amlis Vess!’

Esswis stepped back from the door and lifted his face to get her in his sights.

‘Fine with me,’ he said brusquely. ‘But you’d better get your clothes on and come out.’ He adjusted the shotgun on its strap, as if he was authorized to shoot her if she refused.

‘I told you—’ she began.

‘Forget Amlis Vess,’ barked Esswis. ‘He’ll keep. There are four vodsels loose.’

Sleep made Isserley stupid. ‘Loose?’ she repeated. ‘What do you mean, loose?’

Esswis waved his arms around irritably, indicating a random sweep of Ablach Farm and everything beyond.

‘What do you
think
I mean?’

Isserley jerked her head back inside the casement and stumbled back into her bedroom to dress. The full implications of Esswis’s announcement were well on the way to sinking in by the time she was struggling to get her feet into her shoes.

In less than a minute she was outside, accompanying Esswis across the frosty ground to his car. He swung into the driver’s seat; she bounced into the passenger side and slammed the door. The car was cold as a stone, its windscreen an opalescent swirl of mud and frost. Warm and sweaty from the metabolism of sleep, Isserley wound her window down and leaned one arm out onto the car’s freezing flank, ready to scan the dark.

‘How did they get out?’ she demanded as Esswis revved the engine.

‘Our distinguished visitor
let
them out,’ growled Esswis as the car pulled away with a crunch of ice and gravel.

For Isserley, it feld odd, even frightening, to be in the passenger seat. She was fumbling in the clefts of the upholstery, but if Esswis’s vehicle had seat-belts, they must be well hidden. She didn’t want to reach too far down; there was dirt and grease everywhere.

Esswis made no attempt to swerve when they reached the morass of pot-holes near the old stable. Isserley’s spine was jolted repeatedly, as if furious assailants were kicking her through the seat; she looked aside at Esswis, wondering how he could stand such punishment. Obviously, he hadn’t taught himself to drive the way she had, puttering round and round the farm at ten miles an hour. His teeth were bared as he leaned over the steering wheel, and despite the treacherous surface, the dark, and the semi-opaque windscreen, his speedometer needle reeled between thirty and forty. Twigs and leaves slapped Isserley’s left elbow, and she pulled it in.

‘But why didn’t anyone
stop
him?’ she called over the engine’s noise. All she could imagine was Amlis Vess ceremonially granting vodsels their freedom while the workers stood by, nervously applauding.

‘Vess got a guided tour of the factory,’ growled Esswis. ‘Seemed impressed. Then he said he was tired, he was going to have a sleep. Next thing anyone knew, the steading door was open and four vodsels were gone.’

The car slewed through the main entrance to the farm and sharp left onto the public road without even slowing down. Indicators and brakes were an alien concept to Esswis, it seemed, and gears were fortunately automatic.

‘Left side of the road, Esswis,’ Isserley reminded him as they hurtled into the darkness.

‘Just look out for the vodsels,’ he said.

Swallowing hard on retaliation, Isserley peered into the fields and scrub, straining for a glimpse of hairless pink animals.

‘What grade am I looking for?’ she asked.

‘Monthlings,’ Esswis replied. ‘Almost ready. Would have gone on this shipload for sure.’

‘Oh
no
,’ said Isserley. The thought of a shaved, castrated, fattened, intestinally modified, chemically purified vodsel turning up at a police station or a hospital was a nightmare made flesh.

Grim with worry, they drove all around the inland borders of the farm, a massive pie-slice some three miles in perimeter. They saw nothing unusual. The public road and both the roads leading in and out of Ablach were deserted, at least by anything larger than rabbits and feral cats. That meant either the vodsels had already escaped, or they were still on the farm somewhere.

The most likely hiding places were the derelict cattle sheds, the stable, and the old granary. Esswis drove to each of these in turn, shining the Land-rover’s powerful headlights into filthy black cavities and echoing spaces, hoping that four vodsels would stand luridly revealed. But the cattle sheds were eerie with emptiness, their floors moated with a slurry of rainwater and the compost of cows long gone. The stable, too, was the same as usual. Its contents were all inanimate. Cluttering up the rear lay bits and pieces of Isserley’s previous cars (the doors of the Lada, the chassis and wheels of the Nissan). The rest of the space was mainly taken up by Ensel’s attempted hybrid of a Fahr Centipede hay-turner and a Ripovator fork-lift. With its farrago of welded appendages it had looked grotesquely comical when Esswis was towing it out of the steading; in the spotlit gloom of the stable, its rusty claws and gleaming spines seemed more sinister. Isserley peered into the greasy, solder-spattered cabin, to make sure there were no vodsels inside.

The old granary was labyrinthine, full of nooks and compartments to hide in, but access to these crannies was only for creatures that could fly, jump, or climb ladders. Monthling vodsels, with their quarter-tonne of stiff flesh, were not so sprightly. They would either be on the granary floor, or not there at all. They weren’t there at all.

Back at the main steading, Esswis screeched the car to a standstill and elbowed his way out of the door, taking his shotgun with him. He and Isserley didn’t need to confer about what should happen next. They climbed over a stile and began to stump across the frosty stubble of the field leading to Carboll Forest.

Esswis handed Isserley a torch the size of a thermos flask. She shone it back and forth across the fields as they hurried towards the trees.

‘A fall of snow would have helped,’ she panted, detecting no tracks in the dark expanse of muddy earth and prickly harvest debris.

‘Look for blood,’ said Esswis irritably. ‘Red,’ he elaborated, as if she might be at a loss without this extra guidance.

Isserley stumbled along beside him in silence, humiliated. Did he think a big shining trail of crimson was going to blaze out of acres of field? Just because he played at being a farmer and landowner didn’t mean he had any more of a clue than she did. Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.

They reached the forest, and Isserley shone the torch to and fro across the dense jostle of trees. The very idea of the search seemed hopeless: a narrow beam of battery-generated light flickering around an acre of arboreal gloom.

Nevertheless, before very long, she caught a fleeting glimpse of pink amongst the dark boughs.

‘There,’ she said.

‘Where?’ said Esswis, squinting grotesquely.

‘Trust me,’ said Isserley, savouring the delicious realization that he was less sharp-sighted than she.

Together they loped through the thicket, Isserley leading. Within moments they could hear more snapping and rustling of bracken than they themselves were causing; another second, and they had the creature exposed in their sights. Eyes met across the forest floor: four large and human, two small and bestial.

‘Just the one, eh?’ grimaced Esswis, disguising his relief behind a bluff of disappointment.

Isserley was breathing hard, panting embarrassingly, her heart slamming in her chest. She wished there were a big icpathua toggle growing out of the ground that she could flip like a sapling, causing needles to spring up from the earth. She was aware, all of a sudden, that she had no idea what Esswis actually expected her to do.

The vodsel had lumbered to a standstill, and now stood cowering in the torchlight, naked and sluggish. Clouds of bright steam swirled around its head as it wheezed for breath. Removed from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under its dark acorn of a penis. A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground between its legs. Its fists swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue.

‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried.

Esswis shot the creature in the forehead. It flew backwards and bounced off a tree trunk. A cacophonous chuckling erupted nearby, making Esswis and Isserley jump; a pair of pheasants catapulting themselves out of hiding.

‘Well, that’s
one
down,’ muttered Esswis superfluously, striding forwards.

Isserley helped him lift the carcass off the ground. She grabbed the ankle end, and her hands were instantly slippery with blood and half-frozen shreds of flesh. Amlis Vess had done this poor animal no favours in letting it go.

Even as they prepared to carry the carcass, figuring out how best to tackle its joints to distribute the weight manageably, Esswis and Isserley were coming to the same conclusion. A pale frosting of light was building up on the horizon, diffusing upwards into the cyanose sky. They were running out of time.

Having dumped the vodsel under a bush for collection later, they hurried back across the fields to where they’d left the Land-rover. Barely pausing for Isserley to get in next to him, Esswis started the car up with a hideous cough of ignition and a stink of choked petrol. He drove off at high speed, seemed dissatisfied with the vehicle’s progress, and belatedly released the handbrake.

Once again, they drove all the way around Ablach Farm; once again, the open road and both farm tracks were deserted. The outlines of the mountains beyond Dornoch could be made out plainly now, and something which looked worryingly like another vehicle’s headlights was winking somewhere on the road to Tain. On the way back into the farm, a misty impression of the open sea was starting to luminesce out of the murk.

‘What if they’ve gone to the firth?’ suggested Isserley when the car stood idling in front of the steading again.

‘There’s nowhere to go,’ retorted Esswis dismissively. ‘What are they going to do: swim to Norway?’

‘They wouldn’t know the sea was there until they got to it.’

‘We’ll check there last. The roads are more important.’

‘If one of the vodsels drowns, it could get washed up anywhere.’

‘Yes, but they’ll stay away from the water if they’ve got any brains.’

Isserley clenched her fists in her lap, struggling to keep her temper. Then suddenly she was distracted, frowning, trying to hear something above the puttling of the motor.

‘Switch the engine off for a second,’ she said. Esswis complied, his hand first hesitating around the steering wheel for a while as if he was unfamiliar with its physiognomy. Then the car shuddered into silence.