And yet – Larry was gone, and old two-skins was haunting her.
Finally, worn out by the useless excavations of her memory, Nora turned off the television and went to sleep.
She woke feeling sick. She didn’t need to turn her head or open her eyes to know, but she did. And, of course, he was in the room. He would come to her wherever she fled. The stench came from the rotting skin he wore, not from a neighbour’s garbage or something dead between the walls. He didn’t look like something hallucinated – he seemed perfectly substantial standing there beside the television set and in front of the draperies.
Staring at him, Nora willed herself to wake up. She willed him to melt and vanish. Nothing happened. She saw the dark gleam of his eyes through ragged eye holes, and she was suddenly more frightened than she had ever been in her life.
She closed her eyes. The blood pounding in her ears was the sound of fear. She would not be able to hear him if he moved closer. Unable to bear the thought of what he might be doing, unseen by her, Nora opened her eyes. He was still there. He did not seem to have moved.
She had to get out. She had to give him the chance to vanish – he always had, before. But she was naked – she couldn’t go out as she was, and all her clothes were on the chair beside the window, much too close to him. In a moment, Nora knew, she might start screaming. Already she was shaking – she had to do something.
On fear-weakened legs, Nora climbed out of bed and stumbled towards the bathroom. She slammed the door shut behind her, hearing the comforting snick of the lock as she pressed the button in.
Then she stood with palms pressed on the Formica surface surrounding the basin, head hanging down, breathing shallowly in and out, waiting for the fear to leave her. When she had calmed herself, she raised her head and looked in the mirror.
There she was, the same old Nora. Lost her husband, driven out of her apartment by nerves, surrounded by the grey and white sterility of a hotel bathroom. There was no reason for her to be here – not in this building, not in El Paso, not in Texas, not in this life. But here she was, going on as if it all had some purpose. And for no better reason than that she didn’t know what else to do – she had no notion of how to start all over again.
Nora caught a glimpse of motion in the mirror, and then the clear reflection of the one who had come for her: the lumpish head with the mask of another’s face stretched crudely over his own. She looked calmly into the mirror, right into the reflections of his eyes. They were brown, she realised, very much like a pair of eyes she remembered from Mexico.
Feeling a kind of relief because there was no longer anywhere else to run, Nora turned away from the mirror to face him, to see this man in his dead skin for the first time in a fully lighted room. ‘She sent you to me,’ Nora said, and realised she was no longer afraid.
The skin was horrible – a streaky grey with ragged, black edges. But what of the man underneath? She had seen his eyes. Suddenly, as she gazed steadily at the figure, his name came into her mind, as clearly as if he had written it on the mirror for her: Xipe, the Flayed One. She had been right in thinking him some ancient Mexican god, Nora thought. But she knew nothing else about him, nor did she need to know. He was not a dream to be interpreted – he was here, now.
She saw that he carried a curved knife; watched without fear as he tore seams in the skin he wore, and it fell away, a discarded husk.
Revealed without the disfiguring, concealing outer skin, Xipe was a dark young man with a pure, handsome face. Not a Mexican, Nora thought, but an Indian, of noble and ancient blood. He smiled at her. Nora smiled back, realising now that there had never been any reason to fear him.
He offered her the knife. So easy, his dark eyes promised her. No fear, no question in their brown depths. Shed the old skin, the old life, as I have done, and be reborn.
When she hesitated, he reached out with his empty hand and traced a line along her skin. The touch of his hand seared like ice. Her skin was too tight. Xipe, smooth, clean and new, watched her, offering the ritual blade.
At last she took the knife and made the first incision.
THE NEST
We found the house on the third day of hunting. It was in the country outside Cheltenham, half-a-mile from a small village: a tall, solid house standing on its own in an expanse of flat, weedy lawn surrounded by hedge.
I switched off the engine and we went on sitting in the car, staring up at the house, caught. The roof looked dilapidated, and the house had obviously stood empty for some time, but the yellow stone it was built of seemed to glow softly in the sunlight.
‘Imagine living here,’ Sylvia said softly.
‘We could,’ I said.
‘Remember how we used to play we were the Brontë sisters? In a lonely old house on the moor.’
‘You could go for long walks,’ I said. ‘I’d have tea waiting for you by the fire when you came in.’
She laughed, a brief, rich sound of uncomplicated pleasure.
‘Let’s go in,’ I said, and we got out and followed the broken paving stones to the door.
‘How old do you suppose it is?’ Sylvia asked.
I shrugged. It was a simple, solid, stone box with a tile roof. For all I knew of architecture, it could have been twenty years old, or two hundred.
‘I hope it’s really old,’ Sylvia said. ‘There’s something about an old house . . .’
The key turned stiffly in the lock, and we stepped into a narrow, rather dark entrance hall. Rooms opened to the left and right and a steep staircase rose directly ahead. My skin prickled. Sylvia touched my hand. ‘It feels . . .’ she said, very softly.
I nodded, knowing what she meant. It felt inhabited, or only very recently vacated – not like a house which had long stood empty. That made me cautious, and I left the door open behind us as we entered on our tour.
It was shockingly dirty. The two front rooms, large kitchen and tiny lavatory at the back; three bedrooms, and a bathroom upstairs were all filthy with litter. There were newspapers, empty cans, bottles, cigarette butts, contraceptives, food wrappers, indistinguishable scraps of clothing, dead leaves and twigs, and chunks of charred wood lying everywhere. But none of the windows were open or broken, there was no graffiti scrawled on the dirty walls, and no signs of a squatter’s rough habitation. It was all just rubbish dumped or abandoned there for some unknown reason. And yet I couldn’t lose the feeling that someone was living – or had been, until our arrival – amid all the mess.
We were together at first, touring the house, but somewhere along the way I lost Sylvia. I retraced my steps but could not find her. Outside, clouds had moved across the sun and the rooms were full of shadows. Once I froze at the sound of paper rustling in a corner. My skin crawled at the idea of the vermin that might be lurking there. I called Sylvia’s name but there was no reply.
I went outside, but she wasn’t waiting for me there; the garden was empty. A loud cawing drew my attention to the tall beech trees which stood close beside the house. Half a dozen rooks were perched low in one tree, but at my look they all flapped heavily away.
‘We’d have to get the roof fixed,’ Sylvia said from behind me.
I started and turned and saw her standing in the doorway. ‘Where were you?’
‘There’s a big hole in it. Somebody covered it with plastic, but it’s all shredded now – from the wind, I guess. Rain or anything could get in. The attic floor is all covered with – ’
‘I didn’t know there was an attic.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘I didn’t see any stairs.’
She walked down the path to join me. ‘There aren’t any stairs. The loft door is in the ceiling of my bedroom.’ She giggled shyly. ‘Well, what could be my bedroom. There was a box there, so I used that to climb up on, and then hauled myself up. Old monkey Sylvia.’ She flexed her arms.