See Through Me Read online

  ‘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 g
oing 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.

  6

  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the way I am, and even now there are still things I shudder to see, but if you live with your inner self for two long years – seeing the life inside you every single day – you can’t help growing to admire it. You might still hate it – or at least what it’s done to you – and you might not find it quite so grotesque anymore (though you know it’s still hideous to others), but at least you can appreciate its wonder. How do all those things inside me know what they’re doing? How do all those mindless lumps and blobs and tubes keep going? And if I have no control over them, which I don’t – I don’t even know what most of them actually do – who or what does control them?

  I’ve also come to realise that no matter how I feel about the things inside me – whether it’s wonder or hatred or anything else – their only purpose is to keep me alive, and they do their job with such tireless devotion that it seems a bit heartless to hold anything against them.

  Unless, of course, you don’t want to be kept alive.

  But I’ll come to that later.

  All I’m trying to say now is that it’s taken me a long time to even begin coming to terms with the way I am, and while that doesn’t really mean much more than being relatively okay with it most of the time, it’s a whole world away from the devastating horror and hopelessness that was all I had in the weeks and months after that day of revelation at the RDRT Centre.

  And as for the revelation itself . . .

  Words aren’t enough.

  It was beyond words.

  Beyond description.

  Beyond all understanding.

  Dr Reynolds was true to his word – he worked very slowly, taking his time, revealing my condition inch by inch, hand by hand, limb by limb . . . all the time checking with me to make sure I was still okay to go on, and pausing at regular intervals to let Dr Hahn look me over and decide whether or not I was too traumatised to continue.

  The initial shock – the revelation of my lower arm, wrist, and eventually my hand – was tempered only slightly, if at all, by the fact that it wasn’t a complete surprise. I’d already seen the meat and muscle of the upper halves of my legs, and the half-hidden bone of my kneecaps . . . and I’d already seen my skull in the mirror too – faceless, skinless, screaming . . .

  But this was different.

  This was right here, right now, right in front of my eyes . . .

  My arm and hand, skinless things of meat and muscle, the living redness framed in the white of the pillow.

  And this time there was no doubting it.

  My mind and my senses were perfectly clear. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t half crazy with pain. And I knew I wasn’t just seeing things, because when I looked up and gazed around at the three doctors, I could see the extraordinary truth in their eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ I managed to mutter, staring down at my hand. ‘What’s happened . . . my skin . . . what’s happened to my skin?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ Dr Reynolds admitted. ‘We’re looking into the possibility that it might be some kind of genetic disorder, but as far as we can tell there are no known records of any condition – genetic or otherwise – that presents with symptoms anything like yours, which basically means we’re looking for answers to questions that have never been asked before. And unfortunately that takes time.’

  He stopped for a moment, watching closely as I tentatively moved my hand, turning it very slowly until the palm was facing up. It looked inhuman – like the inner workings of a demonic claw.

  ‘Try moving your fingers,’ Dr Reynolds said.

  I waggled them a bit, then cautiously closed my hand, forming a loose fist. I held it for a second or two, then opened my hand again.

  ‘Did you see it?’ Dr Reynolds asked.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘If you look very hard you can just about see the outline of your skin. It’s incredibly faint, and it’s only really visible when you move. But it’s definitely there.’

  I tried again, this time moving more freely, and after a few moments I saw what he meant – an almost imperceptible flickering of hand- and finger-shaped outlines, barely more than fleeting shimmers, like the outline of a glass hand in crystal-clear water.

  ‘It’s pure transparency,’ Dr Reynolds said, unable to keep a whisper of awe and admiration from his voice as he gazed at my hand. He carried on staring at it for a few moments, then gave a little shake of his head and turned to me. ‘There’s doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong with your skin, or any other affected tissue. Every test we’ve done shows that the structure and function of the transparent cells is perfectly normal. Of course, I realise that’s of no consolation to you, but –’

  ‘Am I like this all over?’ I said.

  He froze for a second, his eyes blinking and his mouth half open, and that was all the answer I needed.

  I didn’t look at everything that day – there were parts of me that I simply couldn’t bear to see – but I saw more than enough to confirm the unthinkable truth. The skin of my entire body was transparent.

  I knew very little about human anatomy then, so I couldn’t put a name to a lot of the things I saw, but as more and more of my inner self was revealed, the more it seemed that most of it looked much the same.

  Muscle . . .

  Flat bands of fibrous red, the redness blotched with the dull yellow shine of fat.

  The pale gristle of cartilage.

  And in places with little or no covering of muscle – knuckles, knees – the shadowy white presence of bone.

  And I seem to remember that it was this – this basic sameness of my inner body’s landscape – that drifted into my mind as I gazed down numbly at the skinless vision of my belly.

  At least, I remember thinking . . . at least you can’t see any deeper inside yourself.

  Imagine that . . .

  Imagine the horrors lying in wait beneath that canopy of muscle.

  And it was then – just as that very thought came to me – that Dr Reynolds made another revelation.

  7

  Dr Reynolds kept it as simple as possible. Partly, I think, because he assumed – correctly – that I wasn’t in the right state of mind to deal with anything too complicated, but also because – as he freely admitted – he barely understood it himself. All he really knew, and all he could really tell me, was that it wasn’t just my skin that was transparent, but that other soft tissue was affected as well, and that the extent of the transparency – the degree to which it could penetrate my body – was dependent on the level of light I was exposed to.

  ‘So, for example,’ he said. ‘In this kind of light . . .’ he gestured vaguely at the surrounding dimness ‘. . . the transparency doesn’t generally reach beyond the superficial layer of muscles. It seems to penetrate further in some places, but that’
s only because some places are closer to the body’s surface than others, so the light doesn’t have so far to travel. The one exception to all this is your bones. It seems that no matter how close to the surface they are, or how bright the light is, your bones aren’t affected by the transparency.’

  He paused for a second, glancing round at Dr Kamara who I realised had moved across to the control panel by the door again. He gave her a quick nod, then turned back to me.

  ‘When the intensity of the light is lowered . . .’ he said, waiting as the light in the room grew even dimmer, ‘. . . well, you can see for yourself what happens.’

  My belly was still exposed, and as I looked down at it again, it was immediately obvious that something had changed. I could still see inside myself, but not as much – not as deeply – as before. A few strips of muscle were still showing here and there, but the bulk of it – the covering of fibrous red bands that had been so visible before – was itself now covered by the layers of tissue above it. Most of this covering was a thinnish coat of fat – a vile-looking yellow jelly that was simply too sickening to look at.

  I swallowed hard, took a few steadying breaths, then turned back to Dr Reynolds.

  ‘What happens if there’s no light at all?’ I asked him.

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if it’s too dark to see anything at all . . . well, obviously, if we can’t see anything, we can’t see anything. And if we use a torch, or any other kind of light – no matter how faint – you won’t be in total darkness anymore, which defeats the whole point of the exercise.’

  ‘How bad does it get?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I mean, if the light’s really bright . . . it’s going to get worse, isn’t it? That’s why you dimmed the lights before showing me anything, so I wouldn’t see all the really bad stuff straight away.’

  ‘We were just being cautious, Kenzie,’ Dr Hahn said. ‘If we’d shown you too much at first, it might have been too much of a shock.’

  ‘I need to see it,’ I said. ‘I need to know . . .’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I nodded. ‘If I don’t see it, I’ll just keep thinking about it.’