Skin Pop

The deer came out of nowhere. Before either of them could react, it was already over. For a second, Mike remembered the eyes of the creature, how bright and circular they were. Like moons, he’d thought, and then the car had impacted, sending the animal one way and the car the other. Then all had been noise, movement and finally, darkness.

He’d come round and was immediately aware of Craig not being in the driver’s seat. At first, he’d clawed at his seat belt and then stopped, for a crazy second unaware if the car was the right way up or upside down. One long breath and then he opened his eyes as wide as they would go. The car was just off the main road, sunny side up, the stars where they should be, the concrete where it had always sat.
 
Mike Edwards flipped the knotted belt from his ribs and patted himself down for any injuries. Without thinking he wiggled his toes and almost screamed with delight when they shuffled around in his oversized winter socks. As a final touch, he ran his hands over his face, his scalp and checked for any blood, but nothing stuck to his fingertips. Done, he gazed out to the road in-front, mindful that the windows were intact-cracked but intact-and his best friend was out there somewhere, probably searching for the deer. Inside the maze of snow he found his friend, and Mike’s body, for the second time inside a few minutes, locked up all over again.

Craig, the man he’d been best friends with for over twenty years, was standing in the middle of the empty road, with a pipe in his hands. Mike recognised it as the chrome spanner from out of his toolbox in the boot. As it arched into the air, he dumbly thought; hey, that’s my spanner, buddy, don’t mess that thing up, before it swung through the air and down onto where the animal must have been lying. Mike heard himself gasp, but then take a breath; if the poor son of a bitch was in pain, Craig was doing the right thing after all. A surge of relief actually rode through him, grateful he’d not have to be the one to put it out of its misery. That was the thought-rather you than me-that was shaping on his lips as he gripped the door handle. It was only when his friend drew the spanner back into the air and brought it down again, that he froze in his seat.
 
At first, Mike thought he was in shock; shock or still unconscious. This was Craig, the guy who collected butterflies at school and who didn’t swear until he was almost half-way into his teens. He was the guy who finished every sentence with ‘man’ and was teased for talking like a hippie in 2011. Mike had almost bought into this dream, until the first wisp of snow snuck through the cracked glass and brushed against his cheek until it melted. You don’t feel the cold in dreams, he realised and peered a little closer into the windshield, as if watching a movie up close, as the man outside brought the spanner down for a forth and then fifth time.

It was then, between the last two blows, Mike actually thought to look away from the arc of the spanner and actually study his friend’s face. A split second of absolute fear ghosted through him as a nightmare scenario hit him: it was Craig on the floor and a madman was bludgeoning him, while Mike sat, like a dumb-struck baby, in his seat. It was the stuff of bonfire tales and hollow Halloween’s and in no way true. Sure enough, in amongst the spray of snowdrops, the clothes were the same, right down to the woolly hat.

Finally, almost against his own will, Mike made himself squint into the face of the man, as the tool spun back up into the air. It was red and frenzied and the face of his friend, there was no doubt about that. But if not for the scar that ran from the left side of his lip, he would have called the guy out there a mystery and more importantly, a lunatic, but it was Craig alright. What sealed the deal was the way the scar rode up, almost like an exclamation mark, the way it always did when his friend was laughing out loud and uncontrollably excited.

As he walked back to the car, Mike felt an uncontrollable urge to run; it was as desperate as it was fleeting. In the next moment, the car door snapped open and Craig slid into the car, casually tossing the spanner into the back seat. The noise of the night, the gale force winds, the rustle of the trees, all climbed inside with him, as if he was carrying chaos around with him on his shoulders. He slammed the door shut and looked over, his face still flushed red.

“You okay, man?” he asked, his voice still as low and as light as it had always been, but with an undertow of breathlessness factored into it now, giving each word something else, like a dark pulse. What’s on the surface and what’s underneath, a part of Mike’s mind roared.

“Sure, sure,” he said and watched his friend nod.

“You just come round, huh? I had to go out there and put that thing out of its misery, you know?” he said, his voice still quiet but the last heavy breaths subsiding.
 
“Yeah, just now,” Mike heard himself lie and watched his friend nod again. For a second they looked at each other, like a hitchhiker and stranger, until the key turned in the ignition, making him jump. And like that, the lie was established between the two of them and set in place of the truth.

As they drove down the empty roads, the silence enveloped them. It’s because we’re both in shock, Mike told himself, as he looked out of the window to the latest flurry of snow. But he knew that wasn’t true, not really. Once, the two of them had gotten involved in some senseless bar fight, two against eight, and afterwards, in A and E, neither of them could stop laughing and chattering away, amongst themselves, to the doctors and nurses, to anyone and everyone. This, this was different.
 
He remembered that night, how nothing had escalated into something, and how inept he was at throwing punches-much better at receiving them, he’d joked to his girlfriend later-but Craig…he’d just assumed as he was getting his ass kicked that his friend was just getting more of the same, but…but he had no real damage, compared to Mike’s broken nose and black eyes. Plus, a few of the eight had disappeared and he’d just assumed they gotten dragged away, rather than hurt. Craig, who’d he never known to get into a single school yard scrap in his life. The snow grew heavier as Mike began to think about the laptop and what he’d seen.

Everyone had some stuff on their hard drive, right? Mike had some porn on his, sure. Lightweight, but nothing he’d be too keen on his girlfriend seeing. He was sure that Craig was the same, but that one time when he’d used it-his own frozen-he’d noticed some of the names on his email; SKIN POP, and others, he’d assumed were some harmless late night sites, even though he found the titles of them a little troubling. But then, that same site, the one with the name that had always stuck in his head, making his skin crawl a little, SKIN POP, had been closed down, hadn’t it? Rumours of dark things, extreme things which were alluded to in the papers but never actually described. He had meant to try and bring it up over beers, but didn’t have the slyness in him. Instead, he’d tried to forget about it, like the way boys did when they saw their girls looking at other men, knowing the truth but not prepared to acknowledge it as a fact.

Craig, who never seemed to have a girl on the go and who made Mike’s girl friend’s uncomfortable. Hell, let’s be honest, creeped out. The gay thing got bandied about, of course, but there was something else to it, something his only serious girlfriend, the girl he had loved, said one night, as Craig’s footsteps padded by their door on the way to the bathroom. It wasn’t a sex thing, she didn’t think, but something else. It was, as she saw it, as if everyone else was interrupting their friendship. I think he’d be happiest, she’d said, involuntarily drawing the covers over her, as Craig’s feet (tap-tapped) rustled back past the door, if you two were the last people left on earth.
    
Mike shook his head and looked out to the empty road ahead of them. As the wipers went into overdrive, the deer’s blood began to fleck against the screen, making it seem as if it were blood raining down from the sky. You can’t not know someone after twenty years, he thought, and then his mind helplessly raced to the wives of all those killers, who’d claimed not to know a thing; how stunned they’d all sounded and shaken, right down to their core. What if all you’ve ever seen was the surface? His mind (tap-tapped) echoed against his ear. What if that’s all he ever intended for you to see?

Inside the silence they drove and the snow only worsened. They should have turned back by now, but he knew they’d already come this far, too far, to turn tail. In his mind, Mike heard Craig’s voice, teasing him, finishing everything with ‘man,’ and coughing out that old man’s laugh of his. At one point, he hoisted his cell phone out of his pocket and saw, with grim inevitability that the service was shot to hell. He looked over and saw Craig’s eyebrow arched, as if to say- are you crazy? Mike imagined a perfect moment: Craig saying the words out loud and him replying, quite politely, ‘No. Are you?’ He would have laughed at the absurdity of it if his heart hadn’t been beating so fast. As if from out of nowhere, the cabin appeared. Outside, the snow still fell. The car drew to a stop and for a moment, the two of them sat looking at it, like little kids when faced with the possibility of a haunted house.

“Craig…” he heard himself say. He forced himself to look over and saw that Craig was already looking his way. All the other words choked in his throat and he lapsed back into silence, shrugging his shoulders.

“Here we are, man” he heard Craig say, as if keen to fill in the unspoken gaps. “Feels like we’re the last two people on earth or something, you know?” He nodded once to Mike and patted his arm. In the next moment, he turned the handle and stepped out into the howling wind and the snow.

Mike watched as he slipped out of sight and trudged (tap-tapping) down to the boot of the car. His stomach was lurching now, those last words moving through him like a virus. His best friend stood at the back of the car and then disappeared as the boot (skin) popped into life, hiding him from view. Mike swallowed and looked away. His eyes fell on the spanner, so casually discarded onto the back seat. As he reached for it, he saw that the blood had stayed on it and two thin strands of fur still rested on its spine. The blood stuck on his palms as he gripped it firmly in his grip, securing it in place. Outside, footsteps (tap-tapping) came closer to the door and then it opened; the chaos of the wind and the flecks of snow chasing bedlam into the car, as his best friend appeared and seemed to smother the stars above.
 

Image courtesy:Flickr