Unbelievable, Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen – Steps too far

I shivered as I made my lonely way along the tow path, heading for the bend in the river that would hide us from all possible prying eyes. The trees were thick there; we would be sheltered too, for the wind was rising. She whistled along the river, making waves beat upriver, against the current. The world was back to front.

I stumbled in the pitch black as the trees enveloped me. The clouds were obscuring both the moon and the stars, and the streetlight glow couldn’t reach down here. Elyssa and Arun were waiting, perched on the fence like a pair of crows, head to foot in black. Lithely, Arun slid off the fence to greet me.

‘Good evening!’ he caroused, sounding joyful. A cold hand gripped the back of my neck and drew me into an embrace.

This was new. It felt hard and cold and strange. My head vanished back a few hours to Mika’s house; his warm, cosy bedroom and his warm, cosy hugs. At the cinema, he had pushed the arm of the chair that separated us up, so that I could nestle beside him, especially useful, since he had chosen a horror film. Watching it, I had felt insulated from feeling, my every sense filled with Mika; his body heat, his scent, his personality that seemed to ebb around him like an aura. Arun couldn’t have been more of a contrast. He smelt good, too, but that was as far as the similarity went.

‘Ready to be mutilated?’ he grinned, a touch lasciviously, drawing back and waggling a large kitchen knife at me. I choked a little, not sure whether this really was going far too far.

‘Wait!’ Elyssa joined us on the path, leaping off the fence like a cat after a mouse. ‘We need to do this methodically, if it’s going to be a proper experiment. Start small, and then work up.’

‘Where do you want me?’ I joked, as if I were a patient in a surgeon’s waiting room.

‘Lie down,’ she instructed. ‘That way, the blood will run to the ground, rather than down your jeans. We’ll do stomach, I think. Soft tissues and organs before we start trying to saw through bones.’

I really did gag as she said that, hoping that Arun wouldn’t start brandishing a saw in my face. If he did, I might be sick, all over his pristine clothes.

I dragged my hoodie off over my head and pulled my t-shirt up to my bra, exposing my pale, thin stomach and ribs.

‘Can you see what you’re doing?’ I hissed, as Arun eased my frame to the floor. Elyssa sat down, cross legged, and drew my head into her lap, balling my hoodie for me to rest on, so that I would be comfortable. In the face of what Arun was about to do to me, the gesture seemed ludicrous, and rather sweet.

‘We see very well in the dark,’ Arun whispered, kneeling beside me. The knife glinted dully, catching an errant ray of moonlight as the clouds cleared, momentarily, far above the bare trees. ‘Are you ready?’

I glanced down at my sunken belly, flattened as I was, on my back. It seemed so smooth and clean and…undamaged. No scars, of course.

‘Go for it!’ I blew air out through pursed lips, trying to relax and not tense against the knife as he laid the cold blade against my skin.

The moon beamed brighter as he drew the knife cleanly across the middle of my stomach, just above my belly button, a straight line across under the ribs. Not deep, just a skin-cut to begin with, a small incision. I winced at the expectation of pain, but found the experience easier than the thought of the experience; the wound merely prickled softly, the sudden surge of heat spreading and then receding. Odd. Three pairs of eyes watched the skin reseal almost instantly, faster than ever before. I cast my mind back to the science accident; the palm of my hand had healed extraordinarily quickly, also. Had I felt pain then? I couldn’t recall; perhaps I had been too absorbed with catching fire! The carousel was spinning. Where was the pole? I reached upwards to grasp both Elyssa’s hands in my own. They were freezing and thin, and hard, rather like grasping metal. I held on, nonetheless, and they became rods of steel.

‘Grip as hard as you like,’ she encouraged. ‘You won’t hurt me!’

Arun raised the knife for another pass. Same place, same movement, same depth. The cut clicked back together this time almost as soon as the blade parted the skin. By the time he had lifted the knife at the end of the long, sleek cut, the wound was already invisible, the heat a flash, there then gone.

‘Incredible!’ he hissed, frowning. ‘Your ability is evolving as we watch.’

Then, without warning, he slashed the knife once more across my body, deeper, harder, faster. I cried out, instinctively reacting, shocked, but the cry died in my throat as I realised I hadn’t felt a thing. Arun had frozen, knife raised, for the cut and the healing warmth were already vanishing.

‘Again!’ I urged. ‘Something’s happening!’ the carousel was spinning, the horses galloping, the wind roaring in my ears, the moon dazzling through the stark branches above, flickering, flickering.

Arun slashed, then slashed again, but as fast as he could make the cuts, they vanished, as if they had never existed. He stopped after the sixth pass, dropping the knife and shaking his head.

‘Bizarre!’ he uttered, looking dumbfounded. ‘It’s as if your skin is rising to meet my challenge, as if it’s speeding up under the threat of attack. Quickly! The bridge. Throw yourself off, let’s see if you still break!’

Elyssa lifted me to my feet in one, smooth movement, as if I weighed nothing. Then we ran, the three of us, upriver to the bridge by the silent pub. The watch on my wrist was ticking towards midnight, and the First of March haunted our steps. Kalends. The word whispered through me…Then, I was on the parapet, staring down at their upraised, pale faces. The moon was waiting, waiting, poised to re-enter the cloud bank. The wind lifted my hair and blew it back from my face. I could feel it whipping my jeans, pushing against my chest. I leaned forward into her strength, and leapt, high, for once graceful, out into her current.

Landing like a cat, crouched low on my haunches, I felt my bones complain, but hold strong. Lithely, I raised myself to my full height, staring the pair of shocked faces in the eyes. Eyes that seemed dark and full of secrets and a hint of something I hadn’t seen before, something I hadn’t expected to see in those particular four eyes, something…alien.

Fear.

‘It can’t be!’ exclaimed Elyssa, backing slightly away from me, her fists balling protectively.

‘The third.’ Arun stepped closer, bearing down on me, eyes burning into mine.

‘But why? Why her? Why now?’ Elyssa looked panicked, scared, uncertain. Words I’d never thought I’d use to describe her. To me, Elyssa was rocklike in her certainty; nothing could touch her, literally and metaphorically…but something had shaken those foundations.

‘Funny, to long for something for so long, and then, when the gift is given, to be shocked and unready.’ Arun had turned to address Elyssa, and was now circling her slowly. ‘She’s in a process…a process of evolution. I imagine that soon, she will be the same. She’s Becoming.’

I felt like a camera operator in Big Brother. They knew I was there, listening to every strangely delivered word, and yet I was still an intruder on a moment that should, perhaps, have been private. It was time to reassert myself.

‘You know something about me that I don’t, and that isn’t fair. You need to tell me what is happening to me. What does it mean, to be ‘Becoming’? How am I ‘evolving’? And, finally, what are you?’

I stepped towards them. Arun instinctively placed himself between me and Elyssa, and I had the strangest feeling that he was protecting her from me. Me, the breakable one, a threat to the marble girl.

‘You ask, as if the questions are simple ones, the information mine to give freely. You ask if I know all the answers. You assume too much.’

His face was a mask, cold and flat and empty of… what was missing? I tried to pinpoint exactly what was absent. More than expression, more than emotion, more than animation.

‘But how far do we trust you? You attracted my attention in the first place because you were different. Your name had meaning, the article…marked you apart. At first, I thought it was a human fluke, that you had simply been lucky, escaped from the car, saved by a bystander, thrown clear from the crash. Your reaction put me off the scent. It was so…human. I dismissed you.’ He paused, still and flat once more, then resumed. I felt that secrets were being shared, that trust was in question.

‘And then when we talked, you showed your intelligence, your own guarded nature. Yes, I had dismissed you too soon. And then, of course, the game was up at the paper cut. No human heals that fast.’

‘So we decided you were worth exploring,’ Elyssa slid out from behind Arun, cautiously, sylph-like. ‘The experiments have all been to establish your nature. You were different, as we were, but our differences were different. The healing…the fragility…your humanness.’

‘And now all that has been overthrown once more,’ Arun took over. ‘You are Becoming one of us. It is clear now. Elyssa is frightened because we cannot remember ever being like you.’

‘Like me?’ I demanded. ‘You mean human.’

‘We mean breakable.’ Elyssa pointed out. ‘Yes, a human quality.’

‘But you must be human too, in part, if I am, and I’m becoming like you!’ I was getting frustrated with the circumlocution.

‘Yes, and that is a terrifying prospect to us, for we have never considered ourselves human.’ Arun raised his hands simply in a sort of shrug. ‘We are all adjusting, all three of us.’

‘But why don’t you know?’ I demanded. ‘You must have begun like me, if I’m turning out like you. You must remember. After all, you must be my age, or no more than seventeen, if you’re in the lower sixth…right?’

Arun’s face. Inhuman. Yes, humanity was missing. And yet, he looked human. Thin and beautiful, but human nonetheless. Expression, emotion, animation…missing. As if his face was frozen.

‘We’re older than that.’ Elyssa said simply. The words hung in the air.

‘Much older.’ Arun clarified.

‘The ageing process freezes. You become…’ Elyssa was braver now, edging forward towards me. Slowly, she reached out a hand to touch my face. ‘More beautiful, stronger, lither, colder, less…emotional.’

‘So what are we?’ I demanded, grabbing her marble wrist in my own, cold, toughening hand.

‘That’s just it,’ Arun half-laughed, half-sighed.

A silence. The three of us, locked.

‘I am the first. Elyssa is the second. I found her; we found each other. Years ago. And now, you are the third.’

‘The third WHAT?’ I shouted, tired of the word-games.

But they just stared blankly at me, and I noticed a note of sadness in them, then. Just in their eyes, lurking fragilely.

And then Arun confessed the greatest secret. The one I had been waiting for. My identity, my truth. The thing my mother refused to tell me, to talk about. The thing that Maggie hinted at, our family secret, all of them hiding, locked up, lost… but what he said was completely unexpected. Simply:

‘We do not know.’