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Read the book: «See Through Me»

Name: See Through Me
Author: Kevin Brooks
ISBN: 9781780318257

Kevin Brooks

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First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 9391 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1825 7

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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true adj 1 in accordance with fact or reality; not false, wrong, or made up 2 faithful; constant; agreeing with reality

false adj 1 not based on reality; untrue or incorrect 2 intended to deceive; artificial; illusory

Cover

Title page

Acknowledgement

Back series promotional page

1

My name is Kenzie Clark.

I’m eighteen years old now (it was my birthday last month), and sometimes I forget that my last day of normality – the last day of my life as a relatively ordinary girl – was only two years ago. It doesn’t feel like two years. It feels like a lifetime, like I’ve been like this for ever. And sometimes, when I think back to the days before the horror, I find it almost impossible to remember the ‘me’ I used to be – the child, the teenager, the girl who wasn’t like this. It’s as if she never existed. I’ll be lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, trying to picture her . . . trying to remember how she looked, how she was, how she felt about things . . . and nothing of her will come to me.

All I’ll see is all I am.

A faceless face, eyeless eyes, a skull, bones, blood . . .

All I am.

A lot of my memories of the day it happened are either shattered beyond recognition or buried so deeply that I doubt they’ll ever come back, but I know it was a rain-sodden Sunday – I remember getting soaked when I went to the corner shop to get Dad’s newspaper – and I’m fairly sure that it started out as just another day.

I would have got up at the usual time – around seven o’clock – and before doing anything else I would have checked on Finch, my younger brother, just as I did every morning. We shared a bedroom, so all I had to do to make sure he was okay was get out of bed and shuffle across to his side of the room. If he was still asleep I would have left him, and if he was awake, which he usually was, I would have asked him how he was doing and if there was anything he needed – water, the toilet, any painkillers or anything. I can’t recall how he was that morning, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember if it had been one of his really bad days, because that was the only time he ever showed how much he was suffering. The rest of the time he kept it to himself, and most mornings he’d just give me a tired smile and tell me he was fine.

I can still hear his voice sometimes . . .

Hey, Kez . . .

. . . all weak and croaky.

How’s it going?

And always that smile . . . the one just for us. Like a momentary light in the gloom.

The day would have passed like any other Sunday – looking after Finch, helping Dad with the housework . . . cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing, sorting out my school clothes for tomorrow. I probably had some homework to do – I usually left it till Sunday – and I know for sure that as the day wore on I would have started feeling worse and worse about going to school on Monday. Not because of the homework – I never had any problems with that – but simply because of all the crap I was going through back then. The nastiness, the taunts, the lies . . . the sickening knot that twists in your stomach when you see the faces you don’t want to see . . . and you know you should just ignore it all – it’s nothing, they’re nothing . . . it’s a waste of time even thinking about them . . .

But you can’t help it, can you?

It hurts.

You’d think it wouldn’t bother me so much anymore. Now that I’m like this – and being like this is a thousand times worse than anything I had to put up with before – you’d think all the hurt that I went through back then would have paled into insignificance. But it doesn’t work like that. It’d be nice if it did – it might have given me a small crumb of comfort now and then – but it doesn’t.

I was alone in the house with Finch when it happened.

One of the reasons I know it was a Sunday is that Dad wasn’t home that evening. Sunday nights were his ‘night off’, which meant that as long as Finch was relatively okay Dad would leave the house around seven o’clock and head off to the George and Dragon. It was his local pub, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away, and he’d been a regular there for years. He was in the darts team, the pool team, the quiz team . . . he’d even played in goal for the pub’s football team a couple of times. He didn’t drink very much – I don’t think I ever saw him drunk – he just liked being in the pub, being with his pub-friends, being what he used to be before it all went wrong. He used to go to the pub at least two or three times a week when Mum was still here and Finch wasn’t so bad, but since then he’d gradually cut it down to just the one night. I can’t remember when – or why – the one-night-a-week had become Sunday-night-only, but by the time of that rain-sodden Sunday two years ago, the routine was always the same. At six-thirty Dad would stop whatever he was doing. At six-forty he’d have a shower and change into his going-out clothes – jeans, polo shirt, fleece if it was cold. At six-fifty he’d check on Finch to make sure he was okay, then he’d have a few quick words with me – Call me if you need me, I’ll be back by twelve – and off he’d go.

I can’t really remember what I did between seven and nine o’clock that night. There’s a picture in my mind that shows me sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, but I don’t know if it’s a true memory or just something I’ve imagined so many times that it’s become my truth. Not that it makes any difference. Wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, I know – I know – that at nine o’clock I was sitting on my bed staring stupidly at my phone.

My memory of that moment is seared into my mind.

I was sitting with my back against the wall, my knees drawn up to my chest, and the clock on my phone read 21:02. My thumb was hovering over the yapTee icon (yapTee was the messenger app that we all used back then), and a pulse was throbbing in the back of my head.

They’re nothing, I kept telling myself. They’re not even worth thinking about . . .

But the ever-tightening knot in my stomach told me otherwise.

‘Why don’t you just get rid of it?’ I heard Finch say.

I looked over at him. He was half sitting up in his bed, a paperback book in his hand.

‘Get rid of what?’ I said to him.

He just smiled. He knew that I knew what he meant. He’d been telling me to keep off yapTee ever since all the nasty stuff had started. He couldn’t understand why I kept looking at it when I knew what I’d find, and I knew it would make me feel terrible.

I couldn’t understand it either.

‘You should get rid of all of them,’ Finch said. ‘Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat . . . just shut them all down. You don’t need them, do you?’

‘Well, no . . . but –’

‘Give it to me,’ he said, holding out his hand for my phone. ‘I’ll do it for you.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I’m putting it away now anyway.’ I shut off the phone and put it in the pocket of my hoodie. ‘See? It’s gone . . . easy.’

‘Yeah, but it’s still all there, isn’t it?’ He smiled again. ‘Come on, Kez, just give me the phone . . . it won’t take a minute. You know I’m right, don’t you? I’m always right. That’s why . . .’ His smile suddenly faded and his voice became urgent. ‘What’s the matter, Kenzie? Kenzie? What’s going on?’

I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that everything felt wrong – my skin, my head, my hands, my eyes . . . everything felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. Every cell in my body – inside and out – was shivering, tingling, burning, freezing . . . hot and cold together . . . clammy and sick . . . electric . . .

Indescribable.

Jagged flashes were cracking through my skull – shapes and sounds together – and the room was melting and spinning . . . there but not there, sizeless, whirling . . .

The air was a roar of silence.

Beyond silence.

I could hear a voice – deep and slow, distorted . . . the nightmare voice of a giant – and it was coming to me from nowhere and everywhere, from a million miles away and no distance at all, the sound of it soaking into me through my skin . . .

It was Finch.

I know that now. He told me later that as he’d tried to help me – scrambling out of bed and into his wheelchair, wheeling himself across the room – he’d kept on calling out to me, screaming and yelling at the top of his voice, but no matter how loudly he’d shouted, I’d just sat there on the bed, my head in my hands, oblivious to everything.

‘It was really scary,’ he told me. ‘Your face, your hands . . . there was this weird kind of shimmery paleness to your skin, like a . . . I don’t know . . . like a milkiness. Or a cloudiness or something. Like your skin was floating.’

He also told me that just as he reached me, just as he was manoeuvring his wheelchair alongside the bed, I suddenly groaned, doubling over and clutching my belly, and a moment later I scrabbled off the bed, almost falling over as I got to my feet, and the next thing he knew I was stumbling across the room – stooped over, still clutching my belly – then lurching out through the door and along the landing towards the bathroom.

I don’t remember that.

I remember being in the bathroom though – bent over the sink, retching and heaving, my ice-cold face streaming with hot sweat. My insides were wracked with a strange swell of nausea that kept surging up into my throat then erupting into nothing, so all I kept doing was sicking up gobs of horrible brown phlegmy stuff. And every time the sickness surged, and every time I retched, a wrenching pain ripped through my belly. And all the time my skin was shivering and prickling . . . hot but not hot, cold but not cold . . . and my head was still crashing with electric madness, flashing and cracking with bolts of black lightning . . . and then all at once, just for a moment, everything seemed to stop – no movement, no sound, no pain, no time – and all I can remember is staring down at my hands as they gripped the sides of the sink, wondering distantly why my fingers were as white as the porcelain . . .

Then out of nowhere a sudden massive spasm shot right through me, and as I jerked upright – my back stretched tight – I came face to face with a nightmare vision staring back at me from the mirror above the sink. A skull, skinless . . . white bone, grinning teeth . . .

It wasn’t me.

It was a human skull.

Faceless, stripped . . .

Muscled red . . .

It couldn’t be me.

But it was moving with me . . . turning as I turned, leaning closer to the mirror with me, its lipless mouth dropping open in horror with mine . . .

And it had my hair.

It had my stupid dyed-black hair . . .

It wasn’t real. I knew that. There was something wrong with me, that was all. I was sick, feverish, hallucinating . . . my head was all messed up. All I had to do was close my eyes and take a few deep breaths . . .

I closed my eyes.

Nothing happened.

I could still see.

I opened my eyes and closed them again, squeezing them shut as tightly as possible . . . but it didn’t make any difference. I could still see. And I realised then that I was seeing through my closed eyelids . . .

The skull in the mirror opened its mouth and screamed.

2

As far as I know, the only time I was actually unconscious over the next few days was just after I’d screamed in the bathroom. There wasn’t a lock on the door, and when Finch had heard me screaming he’d rushed in after me and found me lying on the floor with my eyes closed. There was a smear of blood on the wall above me, so I think I must have staggered backwards from the sink and collapsed, cracking my head against the tiled wall as I fell.

When I asked Finch how I looked when he found me, he said I was incredibly pale and drenched in sweat, but apart from that I looked reasonably normal.

‘Normal for you, anyway,’ was how he put it.

I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few minutes though, because when I came round Finch had only just called for an ambulance. He’d called Dad too, but for some reason he hadn’t answered, and Finch had had to leave a message. Not that I was aware of any of this at the time . . . at least, not in the usual sense of ‘being aware’.

It’s very hard to describe my state of awareness when all this was happening. I wasn’t actually unconscious, but I wasn’t fully conscious either. I was aware of things going on – I could see, I could hear, I could feel – but it was as if everything was happening in a different world, a world I didn’t belong to, and there was some kind of invisible and incomprehensible barrier between me and this world that wouldn’t allow me to connect with it. And sometimes it wasn’t just the world that was different. Sometimes it was me. I never stopped being myself, and I never stopped experiencing things as myself, but sometimes that self was a stranger . . . a ‘me’ I didn’t know.

And there were other times . . .

It’s hard.

All I can do is tell you what I remember.

Dad turned up just as I was being stretchered into the ambulance. I remember his face looming over me – panic and fear in his eyes, the smell of beer on his breath – and I remember him reaching out to me, his arm turning elastic, stretching down from the sky, a giant hand with giant fingers reaching down to crush my head . . .

A voice spoke.

The hand went away.

The rain was silver in the night.

I was taken to the local hospital at first – Burgess Park General, or BPG as it’s known – a sprawling maze of ugly grey buildings just off the bypass on the outskirts of town. I’d been there so many times with Finch over the years that when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics transferred me to a trolley bed and started wheeling me inside, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there. I kept asking the medics where he was, telling them that we had to wait for him, that he’d probably just gone to the toilet or something . . .

No one seemed to hear me though.

It wasn’t until later that I realised the reason that no one could hear me was that I wasn’t actually saying anything. Something inside me was speaking out loud, and I could hear my voice coming out of me, but my lips weren’t moving, and wherever the words were coming from, they died when they hit the invisible barrier that separated me from the other world, popping like soap bubbles against a wall of glass.

The barrier affected sounds coming from this other world too, but not in the same way. I could still hear the sounds all around me – voices, footsteps, the soft beeping of monitors – but most of it was distorted. It was as if each different sound had been taken apart and put back together again before reaching my ears, but they hadn’t been put back together properly, so they didn’t sound how they should. I could hear people talking to each other, for example, and I could hear them when they were talking to me – asking me questions, trying to tell me something – but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Their words were so garbled and warped that they barely sounded like words at all.

I remember being wheeled along hospital corridors – lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, watching the lights rushing past – and at one point I was wheeled into a big silver lift, and as the doors closed and the lift lurched upwards, I was vaguely aware of a babble of voices talking urgently about something. The lift stopped, the voices continued – and I think the doors stayed closed – then I felt the lift lurch again and we carried on going up.

Then more corridors.

Fewer people.

Less noise.

And into a white room.

In physical terms, I wasn’t feeling anything now. No sickness, no pain. I wasn’t hot. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t even numb. I wasn’t anything. My entire body, inside and out, had become something beyond description. There but not there. Mine but not mine. Without feeling, but not without sense. It knew when the doctors and nurses were doing things to it – sticking needles into it, attaching sensors, prodding and poking it about – and somehow it passed on something of this awareness to me. But there was no feeling involved. Just a sense of happening.

I knew it wasn’t right.

Nothing about this was right.

And the doctors knew it too. I could tell from their increasingly troubled eyes, and the way they were beginning to behave around me – uncertain, hesitant, almost fearful at times. There was something seriously wrong with me. They knew it. But they had no idea what it was, or what to do about it.

I don’t know what time it was when my skin started shivering and prickling again, but it must have been past midnight, maybe even two or three in the morning. The room was quiet – dead-of-night quiet – and the only thing I could hear was the muted presence of one of the doctors who was standing at my bedside taking readings from the monitors. She was one of the doctors who’d been there since I arrived – a serious-looking middle-aged woman with tired eyes and a downturned mouth.

I could feel everything tightening inside me now, and I knew my body was going to spasm again, just as it had in the bathroom. I tried calling out to the doctor, but it was hopeless. I just couldn’t get any words out. And a moment later it was too late anyway.

The convulsion was more violent this time – the spasm crashing through me like an electric shock, the sudden massive jolt almost lifting me off the bed – but it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, and the next thing I knew I was just lying there on my back, my heart beating hard, and the doctor was staring down at me with a look of sheer horror in her eyes.

I knew what she was staring at.

The horror in her eyes was the same horror I’d felt when I’d seen my skull in the bathroom mirror.

It didn’t take long for one of the other doctors to arrive – I think he was the most senior one, the one in charge – but I could tell from the way the woman was urging him to hurry up that I was already beginning to look normal again. I could feel it too. The prickliness in my skin had faded to a fluctuating tingle. I can’t have changed back completely though, because when the other doctor came over to the bed and looked down at me, it was obvious that he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He wasn’t quite as shocked as the woman had been, and as the tingle in my skin became more and more faint, his stunned expression gradually gave way to a look of utter bewilderment.

He’d seen enough though. Enough to believe the woman when she told him what she’d seen – her sombreness deserting her as she jabbered away at him, frantically waving her hands about and pointing at my head – and enough for him to realise that drastic steps had to be taken.

An hour or so later I was wheeled out of the room, then along the corridors again, into the lift, down to the ground floor, and out into a waiting ambulance.

3

I’m not sure if I was given a sedative of some kind before leaving BPG, or if I was just so tired that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. But whatever the reason, I slept for most of the ambulance journey. It wasn’t a normal sleep. It was that twilight sort of sleep you get when you’re just dozing off – neither fully asleep nor fully awake – and you can’t tell if the things you’re hearing and seeing in your mind are real or not. It doesn’t usually last very long – you either fall asleep completely or wake up – but this time the twilight didn’t go away. I could hear the wail of the siren, and I could see the sound of it too. It was a series of thin flat sheets, all of them electric blue, their flatness gently undulating as they sliced through a pure black emptiness. And I could hear, and sometimes see, the people in the back of the ambulance with me. One of them was the senior doctor, the other one looked just like my mum.

My mum died six years ago. I was twelve at the time, and Finch was eight.

The children we were died with her.

I know now that the ambulance journey didn’t take all that long – with the siren on and the emergency lights flashing it probably only took about half an hour – but my senses were so mixed up that minutes seemed like hours and hours seemed like minutes. For all I knew, I could have been in the ambulance for days.

The place I was taken to seemed like an ordinary hospital at first – a big grey building, long white corridors, people in hospital-type clothing – and it wasn’t until I’d been there for a while, and my strange sleepiness had begun to wear off, that I started to realise there was something different about it. The room I was put in, for example, had all the same stuff as my room at BPG – same hospital bed, same monitors and equipment, same tubes and wires all over the place – but it also had a CCTV camera on the wall, the lens pointing directly at me, and a swipe-card entry system on the door. If you didn’t have a key card, you couldn’t get in or out.

And another thing I realised was that I hadn’t seen any other patients. Or visitors. Just medical staff – doctors, nurses, porters . . .

I tried to think about it, to work out what it meant, but I was starting to feel really strange again, and I kept forgetting what I was thinking about. It was a different kind of strangeness now. Worse, far more intense. My whole body, everything about me, felt alien. Even the pain felt wrong. It was like a living thing growing inside me . . . a clawing spread of living hurt eating its way through my flesh. My skin felt sick – clammy, raw – and I could feel my muscles beginning to twitch. It wasn’t too bad at first – just a faint kind of fluttering beneath the skin, mostly in my arms and legs – but it rapidly got worse, and in no time at all my entire body was shuddering so violently that the bed was rattling beneath me. I tried to grab hold of something, desperately trying to steady myself, but my arms didn’t belong to me any more . . . they were just there, shaking uncontrollably at my sides . . .

Something happened in my head then.

I still can’t remember exactly what it was.

A sound, perhaps . . . but not a sound.

The feeling of a sound.

A flash of black lightning?

No . . .

I don’t know.

All I can really remember is a sense of people hurrying into the room, a blur of voices – urgent but calm – then firm hands taking hold of my convulsing body. I couldn’t see who it was, because for some reason I couldn’t see anything at all. I didn’t understand it, but it was too much to think about. I was still shuddering and twitching, still wracked with pain . . .

I closed my eyes and tried not to feel anything.

After the shaking had eventually stopped, and after I’d opened my eyes and shut them again for at least the fiftieth time, I finally had to accept the truth.

I was blind.

I lost track of time after that.

I lost track of everything.

I remember floating – blind, paralysed, senseless, timeless – and I remember the hurt inside me, its blunt teeth grinding and wrenching . . . and the cold sickness in my bones . . . and the shearing pain of skin being stripped from flesh . . .

And I remember the nothingness too.

The nothingness of not knowing.

I didn’t know who I was or where I was or what was going on . . . I didn’t even know what I was. All I knew was the hurt. But at the same time there was something in an unknown part of me, something I can’t explain, that somehow knew – or at least sensed – what was happening to me. It knew there were at least two doctors working on me all the time – examining every inch of me, taking samples, measuring, scanning, listening, talking. It could sense their hands on my skin, their probing instruments, the stinging stab of their needles . . . and it knew all these things for what they were. But there were other things happening to me, other sensations, that it sensed without understanding. A soft and slightly ticklish feeling on the top of my head and the back of my neck . . . and later, in the same place, the gentle brushing of a hand. Movement . . . quiet and smooth . . . a rubbery hum . . . a machine starting up . . . something spinning around my head . . . the rapid whirr of an electric wheel . . . then silence again, and movement again . . . quiet and smooth . . . a rubbery hum . . . then more silence. A covering . . . a feeling of lightness being laid over my skin . . . arms, legs, body, face . . . a shroud so delicate it’s almost weightless . . . and then the same silky lightness being slipped onto my hands . . .

I slept and dreamed.

My body dreamed.

It was a dream of presence – no sight, no sound – just a knowing. It was in my every element – bone, blood, flesh – the knowing and the presence together. It was one thing and many things.

It was me – and somehow the possibility of something of me . . .

It was Finch – connected and disconnected . . .

And Mum – alone in a sad silence . . .

And her mum, my nan – old and blind, her blindness trailing through Mum’s heart to touch upon my eyes . . .

And there were others too – uncountable others, nameless but not unknown . . . mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters . . . a son, a brother . . .

Mothers and daughters.

They were me.

And I was them.

It was the silent scream that finally woke me.

I was dreaming a dream of spinning and whirling, going faster and faster all the time, and there was something inside me – a feeling in my chest – screaming silently for the spinning to stop. It was a feeling of life, this screaming thing, and the spinning was tearing it apart.

It didn’t want to die.

It screamed, desperate to break the silence.

The spinning roared.

The scream swelled, filling my lungs, my chest, my throat . . .

I couldn’t breathe.

I opened my mouth and screamed.

It wasn’t much of a sound – more like a strangled whimper than a scream – but it was enough to break me out of the dream and jerk me awake. I woke instantly, sitting bolt upright and gasping for breath, and I knew straight away that everything had changed. The different world had gone. There was no invisible barrier, no distortion, no sense of otherness.

I could hear normally again – voices, urgent movement, someone saying my name . . .

And I could see.

The room was dim, the light pale and low, but I could see my immediate surroundings. I could see the grey-haired man standing beside me, his hand reaching gently for my shoulder, and I could see the olive-skinned woman on the other side of the bed, leaning over to straighten out the bed sheet. The sheet wasn’t covering my feet, both of which were covered up by long white socks, and I could see that the sock on my right foot had slipped down and was half hanging off . . .

I could see.

And in the moment before the sheet was pulled down over my feet, the moment before the grey-haired man began easing me back down to the bed, I saw a flash of red . . .

The red of meat.

4

‘Can you hear me, Kenzie? Can you understand what I’m saying?’

I was lying in the bed, staring up at the grey-haired man and the olive-skinned woman as they stood there looking down at me. I felt utterly exhausted. Bone-tired and drained. And my body was aching all over. It was the kind of ache you get when your body’s been through a battering – dull and bruised, wearying . . . but not painful.

I didn’t hurt anymore.

‘Kenzie?’ the woman said. ‘Can you tell us how you’re feeling?’

I had no pain, no sickness, no fever. But I knew I wasn’t right. My skin felt wrong – cold, but not cold . . . clammy, shivery, prickly, raw . . . and the wrongness wasn’t just on my skin, it was in it . . . inside me . . . beneath the skin.

The top of my head felt different too.

And I seemed to be wearing long white gloves that reached up to my elbows . . .

‘If you can hear us, Kenzie,’ the grey-haired man said, ‘just nod your head, okay? We need to know –’

‘What’s the matter with me?’

My voice was a croaky whisper.

The man and the woman glanced at each other for a moment – sharing a look that I didn’t understand – then they both turned back to me.

‘Hi, Kenzie,’ the man said to me, smiling his doctor’s smile. ‘I’m Doctor Reynolds, and this is my colleague –’

‘What’s the matter with me?’ I repeated. ‘What’s going on? Why am I –?’

‘We’ll explain everything soon,’ he said calmly. ‘Your dad’s on his way here now. He won’t be long. We’ll tell you as much as we can when he gets here. In the meantime –’

I sat up suddenly, taking them both by surprise, and before they could do anything to stop me, I threw off the bed sheet, grabbed the hem of my gown, and yanked it up to reveal my feet and legs.

I think something in me knew what I was going to see, but however much I thought I knew, it was never going to make any difference. Nothing on earth could have prepared me for what I saw that day.

My feet and lower legs were covered by the knee-high white socks that I’d seen before, but with the gown pulled up to the tops of my thighs, the upper halves of my legs were visible. But they weren’t my legs anymore. They weren’t real . . . they couldn’t be. They were skinless, stripped . . . a gruesome vision of naked red muscle and sick-yellow globs and pinkish-white gristly things . . . and something of bone . . . two half-hidden white domes, one on each knee . . .

Knee caps.

No . . .

It couldn’t be.

I moved my right leg, cautiously raising my knee . . .

The skinless vision responded.

It was my leg.

That thing of meat and bone was me.

I closed my eyes, unable to look anymore . . . but nothing happened. I could still see. I could see through my closed eyes . . .

See through . . .

It couldn’t be real.

But it was.

I’m not sure what happened then. I vaguely remember a feeling of absolute blankness – no thoughts, no emotions . . . just a stupefied nothingness – but I don’t know if it was a natural reaction to the shock, my mind and body shutting me down, or if one of the doctors had given me something to calm me down. Either way though, the next thing I can remember is sitting up in bed, with the olive-skinned woman standing to my right, Doctor Reynolds perched on a chair to my left, and a woman I’d never seen before sitting in a chair beside him. She had short blonde hair and an eyebrow stud. An open notebook was resting in her lap.

The room was still very dim, and as I gazed slowly around – getting my first proper look at the place – I realised there weren’t any windows. There were lights fitted into the ceiling – four flat squares of whitish glass – but they were all turned off, and apart from the pale glow of the monitor screens, the only source of light I could see was a small LED panel fixed to the far wall. I stared at it for a moment, then closed my eyes . . .

I could still see it.

Nothing had changed.

‘How are you, Kenzie?’ I heard Doctor Reynolds say.

I turned and looked at him. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Your dad’s had to go back home, I’m afraid,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair. ‘There was a problem with your brother –’

‘What kind of problem?’ I said. ‘Is Finch all right? Has something happened to him?’

‘No, he’s fine,’ the doctor assured me. ‘It was just something to do with his carer, apparently . . . some kind of mix-up. Your dad had to go back to sort it all out.’

‘But Finch is definitely okay?’

He nodded. ‘And your dad’s hoping to get out here tomorrow.’

‘Does that mean you’re not going to tell me anything until then?’

Doctor Reynolds glanced at the woman beside him. She’d been watching me closely while I’d been talking, and at one point she’d scribbled something down in her notebook. She was still looking at me now – a serene steadiness showing in her eyes – and after a few moments’ silence, she leaned to one side a little, resting an elbow on the arm of the chair, and spoke to me in a measured tone.

‘Do you want to wait for your dad before we start telling you anything?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on mine.

‘Not if I don’t have to.’

‘Do you mind if I ask why?’

‘I can see inside myself,’ I told her. ‘I can see my own muscles, my bones . . . and when I close my eyes –’ I closed my eyes ‘– I can still see you.’ I opened my eyes and stared at her. ‘If all that was happening to you, would you want to spend another whole day waiting to find out what’s going on?’

The woman didn’t say anything for a while, she just sat there, gazing thoughtfully into my eyes. Eventually, she turned to Doctor Reynolds and gave him the slightest of nods. He nodded back, glanced across at the olive-skinned woman – who was adjusting something on one of the monitors – then he turned his attention back to me.

‘Right then, Kenzie,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with the simple stuff.’

5

The ‘simple stuff’ didn’t take very long. Dr Reynolds introduced himself again – his first name was John – and then he told me who the two women were. The olive-skinned woman was Dr Miriam Kamara, and the other one was Dr Shelley Hahn. Dr Reynolds then went on to explain where I was, and why I’d been brought here.

‘You’re in a specialised medical facility called the RDRT Centre,’ he told me. ‘RDRT stands for Rare Disease Research and Treatment. We’re about twenty miles north of London here, so you’re not too far from home. I’m the Centre’s Clinical Director, and Dr Kamara is Head of Physical Care.’

I looked at Dr Hahn.

‘I’m a clinical psychologist,’ she told me. ‘I work with the Centre’s Recovery and Evaluation team.’

I nodded.

She smiled.

Dr Reynolds went on. ‘We’re not the only Rare Disease Centre in the country,’ he explained, ‘but we’re the only one that undertakes both research and specialised treatment. Our treatment capacity is quite limited – we only have four special care rooms, including this one – but we only take on the very rarest of cases, so we don’t actually need any more beds. At the moment you’re our only patient.’

He paused for a second, sipping water from a plastic cup.

‘Any questions so far?’ he asked me.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘When are you going to tell me what’s wrong with me?’

He started by telling me what wasn’t wrong with me, which as far as I could tell was pretty much everything. I wasn’t suffering from a virus, or any kind of infection. My blood count was fine. Kidney function, liver function, heart . . . all okay. Toxicology test negative. X-rays and scans – CT and MRI – perfectly normal . . .

‘Some of your test results showed slightly abnormal readings,’ Dr Kamara said, taking over from Dr Reynolds, ‘but most of these can be put down to highly elevated levels of stress. In fact, given what you’ve been through, I’d be worried if you didn’t show signs of stress.’ She glanced at Dr Hahn, then turned back to me. ‘There are still a lot of tests that we haven’t done yet,’ she continued, ‘and we’re still waiting for the results of some we’ve already done, but so far it seems as if . . .’

She hesitated, her voice trailing off, and she looked over at Dr Reynolds.

‘How do you feel at the moment, Kenzie?’ he asked me, getting out of the chair and coming over to the bed.

‘Why can’t you just tell me –?’

‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ he said, moving aside to let Dr Hahn stand beside him. ‘But before I start, I need to know how you’re feeling.’

It’s hard to describe something that isn’t like anything else. If there’s nothing to compare it to, and there aren’t any words for it, it’s impossible to say what it’s really like. All you can do is get as close as you can. So that’s what I tried to do. But even after I’d done my best to describe the weird feeling in my skin – the uncold coldness, the clamminess, the tingling rawness of freshly scraped flesh – I knew I’d got nowhere near it.

‘Does it hurt?’ Dr Reynolds asked me.

‘No, not really . . . it just feels kind of . . . I don’t know . . .’

‘Unpleasant?’

‘A little bit, yeah.’

‘But it’s not painful.’

I shook my head. ‘It just feels wrong.’

He was looking closely at me now, his head angled to one side as he gazed intently at the side of my face, and as he leaned in a little closer – a sense of wonder showing in his eyes – I could feel the anger growing inside me. I’d had enough of this now – being gawped at, studied, examined, like I was some kind of experiment or something. I needed the truth . . . I needed to see myself . . . I needed to know . . .

I don’t know what I would have done if Dr Hahn hadn’t realised I was getting upset and given Dr Reynolds a discreet little nudge. Part of me was so desperate to see myself, to see the dreaded truth, that all I wanted to do was push Dr Reynolds away and rip off my gown and the long white gloves . . .

But another part of me was simply too terrified to do anything.

Dr Reynolds had responded to Dr Hahn’s nudge now, realising his mistake and straightening up so he wasn’t staring right into my face anymore.

‘Sorry, Kenzie,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean –’

‘Help me,’ I muttered. ‘Please . . . just help me.’

‘I’m afraid there’s only one way to do this, Kenzie,’ Dr Reynolds said. ‘I could tell you what’s happened to you, and I could try to prepare you for what you’re about to see, but nothing will really mean anything to you until you actually see it. Does that make sense?’

I nodded.

‘And besides,’ he added, ‘you’ve already got at least some idea of what to expect, haven’t you?’

I remembered the flash of red . . . skinless, stripped . . . and the skull in the bathroom mirror . . . faceless bone, grinning teeth . . .

What did I expect?

I don’t know.

I think I was probably hoping rather than expecting . . . hoping that what I was expecting proved to be wrong.

‘Are you okay to go ahead with this, Kenzie?’ Dr Hahn said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘If you want to stop at any point, for any reason, just tell us. All right?’

‘Yeah.’

She smiled at me, then turned to Dr Reynolds and nodded.

‘Could you adjust the lighting, please, Miriam?’ he said to Dr Kamara.

She went over to a control panel by the door and pressed one of the buttons. The LED light on the far wall dimmed, and the already gloomy room grew even darker.

‘Is that enough?’ she asked Dr Reynolds.

He looked at me, studying my face for a moment, then nodded to himself.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just right.’

The light was so dim now that it was hard to see anything clearly, and as Dr Kamara came back over to the bed, and I gazed around at the monitor displays glowing palely in the dimness, I couldn’t make any sense of it.

‘Is that going to make any difference?’ I said to Dr Reynolds.

‘The light?’

‘Yeah. I mean, turning the light down isn’t going to change anything, is it?’

‘Well, actually . . .’ He paused, hesitating. ‘Look, I’m not trying to hide anything from you, Kenzie, it’s just that certain things are going to be a lot easier to explain, and easier to understand, when you know a bit more about your condition. I realise it’s all very confusing, but if I tried telling you now why we’ve dimmed the light, it would confuse things even more. You’ll find out soon enough though, and I give you my word on that. But for now I think it’s probably best if we concentrate on one thing at a time. Is that okay with you?’

I told him it was.

Then he asked me if I was ready.

And I told him I was, even though half of me wasn’t.

‘Miriam?’ he said.

As I turned to Dr Kamara, I saw that she was holding a clean white pillow in her hands.

‘I’m going to put this on your lap, Kenzie,’ she said. ‘Is that all right?’

I nodded.

‘You’ll have to move your hands, please.’

My white-gloved hands were loosely clasped together in front of me. I moved them out of the way, laying my arms at my sides, and Dr Kamara leaned across and carefully placed the pillow on my lap.

‘Is that okay?’ she asked. ‘Comfortable?’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘Good. Now all I want you to do is lay your left hand on top of the pillow. Like this . . .’

She showed me, leaning over and positioning her hand and lower arm along the length of the pillow, her palm face down.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

She removed her hand and straightened up, and I copied what she’d done – left arm bent at the elbow, hand and lower arm resting on the pillow, palm face down. There was an ugliness to the way it looked – shrouded in the alien whiteness of the glove and the sleeve of the gown . . . it looked like something sick and dying.

‘I’m just going to roll up your sleeve now,’ Dr Kamara said, leaning over me again. ‘Could you lift your arm for me, please? Just a little bit . . . that’s it.’

She carefully rolled up the sleeve, stopping a few inches below my elbow – so my lower arm was still covered by the long white glove – then she gently replaced my hand on the pillow, straightened up again, and looked across at Dr Reynolds.

‘I’m going to show you your hand and your arm now, Kenzie,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll do it very slowly, okay? I’m going to lower the sleeve of the glove just a few inches at a time. If at any point you want me to stop, or you want to be covered up again, just tell me. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. Is that all okay with you?’

I nodded.

‘Any questions before we start?’

‘Do you want me to hold out my arm or anything?’

He shook his head. ‘Just keep it on the pillow, right where it is.’

‘Okay.’

My voice sounded strange – weak and shaky, breathless, the words getting caught in my throat . . .

I watched in silence as Dr Reynolds made a few final adjustments to his position beside the bed, making sure he could comfortably reach my arm with both hands, and then – seemingly satisfied – he glanced round at the other two, gave them a nod, and turned back to me.

‘Ready?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah.’

He held my gaze for a moment longer, then reached over, took hold of the top of the glove, and carefully folded it down.

The free sample has ended.