The Dark Corner

The sunburn that summer covered his neck and shoulders, face and arms. First the red, then the itch. He scratched at it and scratched at it, and the skin ached and dried up and blew off.

Radiation in the skin. Sunrays—from a dying star. Perhaps then: stellar-rays.

The sea was made of shattered glass and its shards danced seductively and
philosophically under the naked sun. He’d been swimming: the lone swimmer, at the beach during the swan song of the season, with the orange sunset, like squeezed juice, spilling into a napalm explosion.

His glistening skin, his wet skin, his salt-encrusted skin was burning in the sunbeams.

When you’re forty, you no longer expect the summer romances. But you secretly
dream of them. You wake up in the middle of night from the dream, and the dream is explicit, and the dream makes you yearn, your loins burn.

You open your mind to possibilities.

You swim naked in the sea just after the sun dowses. You vacation when the cool
kids have returned home. You catch a glimpse of an athletic young woman in roller
blades.

You forget you’re mortal and ageing.

Of course, you forget the sunscreen.

And for Hillock, you learn that we aren’t alone.

He went back to his seaside hotel, his skin itchy and hot. Aloe-vera cream he
applied in gentle, circular motions with the palm of his hand.

Futile, useless. There were life-forms inside the hypodermis. Skittering and
expanding. He scratched at the lumps and the lumps grew. The doctors were baffled.

Yet the lifeforms kept growing.

Deep inside the radioactive waves, what beings had come riding in? Those, of
course, which could withstand a million years or more of nothing, nothing, nothing.
Until something.

“I can’t abate the itch,” he said, frantically. “I can’t stop the itching. I can feel
something inside. I can hear it, wordlessly speaking.”

His friend was standing there inspecting the glowing rubescent sunburn, his hand
hovering, feeling the radiating heat. And when his friend scratched, a sheaf of skin lifted.

He peeled it some more. And then the hand was pulled in, and was lost entirely.
Pain is expressed in metaphor, but this pain had no comparison, no explanation,
description, or likeness.

Hillock, who now they called Mr. Red, who had splotches so raw they could give
you salmonella, who had torn off his skin layer by layer as the voices crooned beneath the surface, was driving a convertible through a winding canyon, somewhere near a summery, imaginary California. Mr. Red, looking upwards, said to the hitchhiker in the passenger seat, “There’s more coming.” The sun was blazing on the shimmering surface of the sea like melted gold. He could faintly see, in the smoky light as it fell through the trees, the swimming pollen, the twirling pollen, the cosmic pollen of life from a million light years or more away. His scarf billowed, his bonnet billowed, his sunglasses gleamed. His body beneath the layers of clothing was flesh, muscles, ligaments, the occasional paper-thin skein of skin held together like a hundred year-old patchwork, or a scroll in a sacred temple.

Those tiny bumps below his skin now had eyes and the eyes blinked and the
mouths snapped as a fish’s does as it chokes on air. What started as a dozen eyes had now turned into a thousand, and soon a million. Mr. Red’s skin, which he had flayed with his own fingernails, was left abandoned to rot in his apartment—curling, turning green, then black. Now buzzing flies. Later both dust and goo.

There were new deeds, he believed, he thought, he understood, that were pulling
him this way and that. Because whatever had landed within him was now moving
upwards, burrowing through the cranium, into his brain. The life in the light soon in his mind, in his words, in his actions, in the world. Because that which was one was all.

He scratched the bandages on his face, against a lidless eye.

Robert Weaver is the author of several short stories and novels, including the anthology series Occult Britain. When not writing or reading, he enjoys listening to falling rain, drinking coffee, and shaking an angry fist at the sun. He’s an advocate of having a year-round countdown to Halloween.