‘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.’
‘You’re going to keep thinking about it anyway, I’m afraid.’
‘Yeah, but at least I’ll know what I’m thinking about.’
She smiled at me, but it was the kind of smile that’s too fragile to hold, and by the time she’d turned to Dr Reynolds it had disappeared without a trace. She didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t speak either. He just nodded, then looked back at me.
‘We’ll do it gradually again,’ he said. ‘Just like before. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll ask Dr Kamara to start turning up the lights. We’ll begin with the small one on the wall, and if you still want to keep going when it reaches full brightness, we can start fading up one of the main ceiling lights. Is that all right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We can slow things down or stop completely whenever you want.’
‘Right.’
‘Are you ready to start?’
‘Yeah.’
He signalled Dr Kamara to go ahead, and the near-darkness of the room slowly began to lift.
It wasn’t anything like I’d imagined . . .
It wasn’t anything like I could have imagined.
It was infinitely worse.
Unimaginable.
The stuff inside your body doesn’t look anything like those see-through illustrations of the human body you see in biology textbooks, or those plastic anatomy models with their nice neat innards, all in exactly the right place. That’s not how it is. In reality, it’s just a jumbled mess of soggy red stuff and thick globs of meat, all shoved together in whatever way they’ll fit. And it’s not inanimate either. It’s a living thing, a mess that moves – pumping, pulsing, throbbing, twitching . . . keeping itself alive.
I know it for what it is now.
But back then . . .
All I could see was a repulsive stew of guts.
Entrails . . .
Sickening coils of intestine, knotted together, fold upon fold, like parasitic worms . . .
Tubes, greyed pink, the colour of rotted meat.
Foul things.
Too much.
‘Stop,’ I said.
I came very close to putting a stop to everything then. I’d had enough. My brain was too scrambled to think anymore, and all I could feel – physically and emotionally – was a numbing cold sickness that felt like the end of the world.
I wanted to be left alone now. I wanted to lie in the darkness and not think or feel anything at all. I wanted to empty myself of everything and float off to a place where things were still all right.
But I knew that I couldn’t.
Not yet anyway.
Not until I’d seen the skull in the mirror.
‘I’d strongly advise against it,’ Dr Hahn told me. ‘You’re already highly distressed – understandably so – and another major shock to your system now could have very serious consequences. On the other hand . . .’ She paused, her eyes fixed on me, her lips pursed in thought. ‘I completely understand why you need to do this – if I was in your position I’d feel the same – and it doesn’t make any difference what I say to you anyway, does it?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve already made up your mind.’
I nodded.
‘And if we don’t do it now, you’ll find a way to do it on your own later on.’
‘It’s my face . . . my head. It’s me. I can’t not know it.’
The only time I cried during the whole revelation was when Dr Kamara told me that I’d lost all my hair. And by lost she meant lost. Not just transparent, but gone . . . every last bit of it. For some reason – which they still didn’t understand – it had all fallen out when I’d been half crazy with sickness and pain.
Dr Kamara told me this before I’d looked in the mirror, and I know it might seem like a strange thing to warn me about – that having no hair should be the least of my worries – and from the look Dr Reynolds gave her when she told me, a puzzled frown, it was perfectly clear that he didn’t get it. But Dr Kamara knew what she was doing. She knew that the shock of losing my hair wouldn’t be the same as the shock of everything else. Everything else was extraordinary, impossible, unbelievable.