Under the Skin

5

ISSERLEY, HAVING VOWED to be uncaringly asleep when the ship came in, lay in bed, in the midnight dark, listening for its arrival.

She hadn’t changed her attitude; it was sheer anxiety keeping her awake, anxiety that she’d be roused out of her bed by the men, or, worse, by Amlis Vess.

More than anything she was afraid of not hearing them knocking at the front door, of sleeping right through the noise. They might just let themselves in then, come up to her bedroom, and have a good look at the denuded freak, the gargoyle girl, snoring on the pallet. Ensel was Estate trash, after all; his idea of privacy bore no relation to hers. He’d seemed to have trouble hearing her when she told him she didn’t want to be disturbed; it wouldn’t take much to make him forget. And wouldn’t he just love to see what the surgeons had done to her below the waist! Well, he could go fuck himself.

Hours eroded by. Isserley’s eyes swelled and itched with the imaginary grit of sleeplessness. She squirmed in slow motion on her stained and ancient mattress, listening.

The ship’s berthing, shortly after 2 a.m., was almost noiseless: she could barely distinguish it from the sound of the waves on the Moray Firth. But she knew it had come. It came every month at the same time, and she was intimately acquainted with its smell, its great, secretive groan of docking, and the metallic sigh of its insertion into the steading.

Isserley lay awake longer still, waiting for the clouds to uncover the moon, waiting for the men, for Amlis Vess, to just dare, to have the nerve. ‘Well then, let’s see this Isserley,’ she imagined Amlis Vess saying, and the men scurrying off to fetch her. ‘Fuck off,’ she would call out to them.

She lay for another hour or so, coiled ready with her ‘Fuck off’ sizzling on the tip of her tongue. Nervous moonlight hesitated into her bedroom, drawing a spectral line around the meagre contents, stopping well short of the bed. Outside, a screech owl began its performance of wails and shrieks, one calm and unruffled bird sounding deceptively like a horde of much larger creatures in terror and agony.

Serenaded thus, Isserley fell asleep.

It seemed she had only slept a few minutes when she was shocked awake by urgent hammering at the front door of her cottage.

Frantic, she reared up on her bed, clutching the rumpled sheet to her breasts, pressing her legs together. The knocking continued, echoing around the bare trees like phantom knocks on dozens of phantom houses.

Isserley’s bedroom was still shut tight and snug, but through the window she could see the darkness of the world starting to go a pre-dawn blue. She squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece: it was half past five.

Isserley wound the bedsheet around her body and hurried out to the landing, where there was a tiny four-paned casement. She unlatched it, poked her head out into the night and looked straight down.

Still hammering energetically at her front door was Esswis, all dressed up in his best farmer gear, complete with deerstalker and shotgun. He looked ridiculous and terrifying, lit up luridly by the headlights of his Land-rover parked nearby.

‘Stop banging, Esswis!’ Isserley warned, her voice half hysterical. ‘Can’t anyone understand I’m not interested in Amlis Vess!’

Esswis stepped back from the door and lifted his face to get her in his sights.

‘Fine with me,’ he said brusquely. ‘But you’d better get your clothes on and come out.’ He adjusted the shotgun on its strap, as if he was authorized to shoot her if she refused.

‘I told you—’ she began.

‘Forget Amlis Vess,’ barked Esswis. ‘He’ll keep. There are four vodsels loose.’

Sleep made Isserley stupid. ‘Loose?’ she repeated. ‘What do you mean, loose?’

Esswis waved his arms around irritably, indicating a random sweep of Ablach Farm and everything beyond.

‘What do you think I mean?’

Isserley jerked her head back inside the casement and stumbled back into her bedroom to dress. The full implications of Esswis’s announcement were well on the way to sinking in by the time she was struggling to get her feet into her shoes.

In less than a minute she was outside, accompanying Esswis across the frosty ground to his car. He swung into the driver’s seat; she bounced into the passenger side and slammed the door. The car was cold as a stone, its windscreen an opalescent swirl of mud and frost. Warm and sweaty from the metabolism of sleep, Isserley wound her window down and leaned one arm out onto the car’s freezing flank, ready to scan the dark.

‘How did they get out?’ she demanded as Esswis revved the engine.

‘Our distinguished visitor let them out,’ growled Esswis as the car pulled away with a crunch of ice and gravel.

For Isserley, it feld odd, even frightening, to be in the passenger seat. She was fumbling in the clefts of the upholstery, but if Esswis’s vehicle had seat-belts, they must be well hidden. She didn’t want to reach too far down; there was dirt and grease everywhere.

Esswis made no attempt to swerve when they reached the morass of pot-holes near the old stable. Isserley’s spine was jolted repeatedly, as if furious assailants were kicking her through the seat; she looked aside at Esswis, wondering how he could stand such punishment. Obviously, he hadn’t taught himself to drive the way she had, puttering round and round the farm at ten miles an hour. His teeth were bared as he leaned over the steering wheel, and despite the treacherous surface, the dark, and the semi-opaque windscreen, his speedometer needle reeled between thirty and forty. Twigs and leaves slapped Isserley’s left elbow, and she pulled it in.

‘But why didn’t anyone stop him?’ she called over the engine’s noise. All she could imagine was Amlis Vess ceremonially granting vodsels their freedom while the workers stood by, nervously applauding.

‘Vess got a guided tour of the factory,’ growled Esswis. ‘Seemed impressed. Then he said he was tired, he was going to have a sleep. Next thing anyone knew, the steading door was open and four vodsels were gone.’

The car slewed through the main entrance to the farm and sharp left onto the public road without even slowing down. Indicators and brakes were an alien concept to Esswis, it seemed, and gears were fortunately automatic.

‘Left side of the road, Esswis,’ Isserley reminded him as they hurtled into the darkness.

‘Just look out for the vodsels,’ he said.

Swallowing hard on retaliation, Isserley peered into the fields and scrub, straining for a glimpse of hairless pink animals.

‘What grade am I looking for?’ she asked.

‘Monthlings,’ Esswis replied. ‘Almost ready. Would have gone on this shipload for sure.’

‘Oh no,’ said Isserley. The thought of a shaved, castrated, fattened, intestinally modified, chemically purified vodsel turning up at a police station or a hospital was a nightmare made flesh.

Grim with worry, they drove all around the inland borders of the farm, a massive pie-slice some three miles in perimeter. They saw nothing unusual. The public road and both the roads leading in and out of Ablach were deserted, at least by anything larger than rabbits and feral cats. That meant either the vodsels had already escaped, or they were still on the farm somewhere.

The most likely hiding places were the derelict cattle sheds, the stable, and the old granary. Esswis drove to each of these in turn, shining the Land-rover’s powerful headlights into filthy black cavities and echoing spaces, hoping that four vodsels would stand luridly revealed. But the cattle sheds were eerie with emptiness, their floors moated with a slurry of rainwater and the compost of cows long gone. The stable, too, was the same as usual. Its contents were all inanimate. Cluttering up the rear lay bits and pieces of Isserley’s previous cars (the doors of the Lada, the chassis and wheels of the Nissan). The rest of the space was mainly taken up by Ensel’s attempted hybrid of a Fahr Centipede hay-turner and a Ripovator fork-lift. With its farrago of welded appendages it had looked grotesquely comical when Esswis was towing it out of the steading; in the spotlit gloom of the stable, its rusty claws and gleaming spines seemed more sinister. Isserley peered into the greasy, solder-spattered cabin, to make sure there were no vodsels inside.

The old granary was labyrinthine, full of nooks and compartments to hide in, but access to these crannies was only for creatures that could fly, jump, or climb ladders. Monthling vodsels, with their quarter-tonne of stiff flesh, were not so sprightly. They would either be on the granary floor, or not there at all. They weren’t there at all.

Back at the main steading, Esswis screeched the car to a standstill and elbowed his way out of the door, taking his shotgun with him. He and Isserley didn’t need to confer about what should happen next. They climbed over a stile and began to stump across the frosty stubble of the field leading to Carboll Forest.

Esswis handed Isserley a torch the size of a thermos flask. She shone it back and forth across the fields as they hurried towards the trees.

‘A fall of snow would have helped,’ she panted, detecting no tracks in the dark expanse of muddy earth and prickly harvest debris.

‘Look for blood,’ said Esswis irritably. ‘Red,’ he elaborated, as if she might be at a loss without this extra guidance.

Isserley stumbled along beside him in silence, humiliated. Did he think a big shining trail of crimson was going to blaze out of acres of field? Just because he played at being a farmer and landowner didn’t mean he had any more of a clue than she did. Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.

They reached the forest, and Isserley shone the torch to and fro across the dense jostle of trees. The very idea of the search seemed hopeless: a narrow beam of battery-generated light flickering around an acre of arboreal gloom.

Nevertheless, before very long, she caught a fleeting glimpse of pink amongst the dark boughs.

‘There,’ she said.

‘Where?’ said Esswis, squinting grotesquely.

‘Trust me,’ said Isserley, savouring the delicious realization that he was less sharp-sighted than she.

Together they loped through the thicket, Isserley leading. Within moments they could hear more snapping and rustling of bracken than they themselves were causing; another second, and they had the creature exposed in their sights. Eyes met across the forest floor: four large and human, two small and bestial.

‘Just the one, eh?’ grimaced Esswis, disguising his relief behind a bluff of disappointment.

Isserley was breathing hard, panting embarrassingly, her heart slamming in her chest. She wished there were a big icpathua toggle growing out of the ground that she could flip like a sapling, causing needles to spring up from the earth. She was aware, all of a sudden, that she had no idea what Esswis actually expected her to do.

The vodsel had lumbered to a standstill, and now stood cowering in the torchlight, naked and sluggish. Clouds of bright steam swirled around its head as it wheezed for breath. Removed from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under its dark acorn of a penis. A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground between its legs. Its fists swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue.

‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried.

Esswis shot the creature in the forehead. It flew backwards and bounced off a tree trunk. A cacophonous chuckling erupted nearby, making Esswis and Isserley jump; a pair of pheasants catapulting themselves out of hiding.

‘Well, that’s one down,’ muttered Esswis superfluously, striding forwards.

Isserley helped him lift the carcass off the ground. She grabbed the ankle end, and her hands were instantly slippery with blood and half-frozen shreds of flesh. Amlis Vess had done this poor animal no favours in letting it go.

Even as they prepared to carry the carcass, figuring out how best to tackle its joints to distribute the weight manageably, Esswis and Isserley were coming to the same conclusion. A pale frosting of light was building up on the horizon, diffusing upwards into the cyanose sky. They were running out of time.

Having dumped the vodsel under a bush for collection later, they hurried back across the fields to where they’d left the Land-rover. Barely pausing for Isserley to get in next to him, Esswis started the car up with a hideous cough of ignition and a stink of choked petrol. He drove off at high speed, seemed dissatisfied with the vehicle’s progress, and belatedly released the handbrake.

Once again, they drove all the way around Ablach Farm; once again, the open road and both farm tracks were deserted. The outlines of the mountains beyond Dornoch could be made out plainly now, and something which looked worryingly like another vehicle’s headlights was winking somewhere on the road to Tain. On the way back into the farm, a misty impression of the open sea was starting to luminesce out of the murk.

‘What if they’ve gone to the firth?’ suggested Isserley when the car stood idling in front of the steading again.

‘There’s nowhere to go,’ retorted Esswis dismissively. ‘What are they going to do: swim to Norway?’

‘They wouldn’t know the sea was there until they got to it.’

‘We’ll check there last. The roads are more important.’

‘If one of the vodsels drowns, it could get washed up anywhere.’

‘Yes, but they’ll stay away from the water if they’ve got any brains.’

Isserley clenched her fists in her lap, struggling to keep her temper. Then suddenly she was distracted, frowning, trying to hear something above the puttling of the motor.

‘Switch the engine off for a second,’ she said. Esswis complied, his hand first hesitating around the steering wheel for a while as if he was unfamiliar with its physiognomy. Then the car shuddered into silence.

‘Listen,’ whispered Isserley.

Flurrying through the chill air came the distant but unmistakeable rumble of large beasts, running en masse.

‘The field near Geanies,’ said Esswis.

‘Rabbit Hill,’ confirmed Isserley at the same instant.

They drove there immediately, and found two vodsels trying to climb out of the western field, to get away from a scrum of bullocks snorting and pawing the ground behind them.

The vodsels’ eyes were wild with fear, and the barbed-wire fence was only waist-high, but their frozen and lacerated legs, weighed down by the added fat and muscle of a month’s regime in the pens, refused to be lifted very far off the frigid ground, and the vodsels looked as if they were engaging in desultory callisthenics against the wire, or ballet warm-ups.

When they saw the Land-rover pull up, they stood transfixed. At the sight of Esswis’s unfamiliar whiskery face poking out of the driver window, however, they got very excited, and began waving and ululating loudly. The cattle, startled by the headlights, were already cantering off into the gloom.

Isserley got out of the car first, and the vodsels stopped their noise abruptly. One of them began to stumble away into the field, the other stooped to pick up a clod of soil, which it threw straight at Isserley. There was so much meat and muscle on the vodsel’s arms and chest by now though, that the swing of its arm was comically impeded, and the clod of earth landed with an impotent ploff on the concrete path.

Esswis took aim and shot first one vodsel and then the other. Obviously what he lacked in driving skills he made up for in marksmanship.

Isserley climbed into the field and found the carcasses. She dragged the nearest one back to the fence and lifted its limbs onto the barbed wire so that Esswis could grab hold of something. The creature that had thrown the clod of earth was distinctively tattooed all over its chest and arms; as she heaved the flesh over the wire to Esswis, she remembered something oddly specific about these tattoos – they were done in Seattle, by a ‘fucking genius’, the vodsel had told her. Isserley had been struck by the word ‘Seattle’. A beautiful word, she’d thought then, and she thought so again now.

Despite their best efforts, the flesh of the vodsel’s back became snarled on the barbed wire, and they grunted with effort as they tried to free it with minimum damage. All the while, blood was leaking copiously onto the concrete path from the blasted head, whose shattered jaw dangled loose like a glibbery hinge of gore.

‘They’ ll clean up fine,’ muttered Esswis stoically.

The other vodsel was lighter, and Isserley almost did herself an injury in her effort to lift its torso over the fence without touching the wire.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Esswis. ‘You may regret it.’ But he strained himself too, reluctant to be shown up by a woman.

It was only when both vodsels were safely in the back of the Land-rover that Isserley and Esswis looked at each other and laughed. Retrieving these animals was a spectacularly messier business than either of them had imagined. A glutinous soup of cow shit was dripping down their clothes and arms, mingled with blood and earth. They even had smears of it on their faces, like military camouflage.

‘Three down,’ said Esswis, opening the passenger door for Isserley with a hint of new respect.

They did another circuit of the farm, finding nothing on the roads. Everything looked unrecognizably different from the previous time, because somewhere on the shore-side of Ablach, unseen below the cliffs, the sun was coming up from the sea. Darkness was evaporating minute by minute, revealing a sky promising to be clear and benign, as if to invite other motorists to take to the roads as early as possible. Sheep and cattle which had moved numberless and invisible all night were materializing into view; some beasts could be seen from a quarter of a mile away.

The last vodsel could easily be such a beast, if it only managed to get to the right place at the right time.

Driving back up the Ablach path, Esswis glanced beyond the fields, and noticed a fishing boat on the firth, drifting close to land. His fists tightened in mortification on the steering wheel; Isserley could guess he was imagining exactly the same thing she’d imagined before: a naked two-legged creature standing on the shore, frantically waving.

‘Maybe we should give you your trip to the seaside now,’ quipped Esswis awkwardly, trying to make light of his concession. And of course, his about-face was less humble than it seemed: if there was nothing to be found at the firth, he could act as if he’d merely indulged her in a waste of valuable time.

‘No,’ said Isserley. ‘I’ve got a feeling. Let’s do one more round of the perimeter.’

‘Your choice,’ he grunted, infuriatingly. The fault was already hers, then, for newspaper headlines that might readMONSTER FOUND BY FISHERMEN.

They drove in silence over Rabbit Hill. The passage of the car’s tyres back and forth over the concrete had dispersed the blood somewhat, diluting it with dirt, scuffing it into the cracks. Still it would need a good rinse, later.

If there was a later.

On the public road between the two Ablach tracks, Isserley leaned forward in her seat, her back crawling with sweat and the prickle of instinct.

‘There!’ she cried, as they crested the hill and barrelled down towards the junction.

In truth, no special powers of observation were needed. The junction was an exposed crucifix of roads, and in the very centre of it stood the vodsel. Its meaty body shone golden-blue in the sunrise, like a garish fibreglass tourist attraction, and, on hearing the vehicle’s approach from behind, it turned stiffly and lifted one arm, pointing sideways towards Tain.

Isserley reared up in her seat in a paroxysm of anticipation, but incredibly, when Esswis reached the junction, he didn’t stop. He just drove straight on, following the border of farmland towards the village of Portmahomack.

‘What are you doing?’ shrieked Isserley.

Esswis shied violently, as if she were clawing at him or trying to wrest his hands from the wheel.

‘There were headlights coming up the road from Tain,’ he growled.

Isserley tried to see, but the junction was already past and the Tain road hidden behind trees.

‘I didn’t see any headlights,’ she protested.

‘They were there.’

‘For God’s sake – how far away?’

‘Close! Close!’ shouted Esswis, bashing the steering wheel with one hand, immediately causing a dangerous swerve.

‘Well, don’t just keep driving,’ Isserley hissed. ‘Go back and have a look!’

Esswis pulled the car in beside Petley’s Farm and executed a three-point turn, except in half a dozen points or more. Isserley sat helpless and frantic in the passenger seat, unable to believe what was happening to her.

‘Hurry up!’ she whined, shaking her inward-turned fists under her chin.

But Esswis seemed to have discovered caution all of a sudden, and drove slowly and carefully back to the junction, stopping just short of it, behind the cover of trees. Through the foliage, they could both clearly see the vodsel, still standing upright and expectant on the asphalt. No evidence of any other vehicle was visible anywhere.

‘There was definitely a car coming,’ insisted Esswis, grimly pedantic. ‘As close as Easter Farm.’

‘Maybe it turned in to Easter Farm,’ suggested Isserley, trying not to scream. ‘It is inhabited, you know.’

‘Still, the odds against—’

‘For God’s sake, Esswis,’ squealed Isserley. ‘What’s wrong with you? He’s right there! Let’s get moving!’

‘How are we going to get him in the car?’

‘Just shoot him.’

‘It’s daylight now, on a crossroads. A car could come along any moment.’

‘So shoot him before a car comes.’

‘Anyone sees us shooting him, or chucking him into the car, and we’re finished. Even a pool of blood would do it.’

‘Anyone picks him up, we’re finished, too.’

They were locked in a grotesque impasse for several seconds, as the sun shone in on them through the filthy windscreen and an almost unbearable stink of shit began to steam off both their bodies. Then Esswis revved the car, launched it with a lurch, and drove up to the crossroads.

The vodsel took a couple of shambling steps forward to greet their arrival. It lifted one of its arms and again pointed towards Tain, straining to erect a blueish thumb on its swollen paw. At close range they could see it was nearly dead with cold, swaying on pulpy feet in a vegetative trance of determination.

Still, the sight of a vehicle slowing to a stop brought a glimmer of sentience back to its eyes. Its mouth twitched, too stiff with cold and overfeeding to smile, but still the thought was there.

Esswis reached over to the back seats, groping for the shotgun, which had slipped onto the floor. The vodsel stumbled painfully to the car.

‘Forget the shotgun,’ said Isserley, and she twisted around, opening one of the back doors.

The vodsel bowed its head, heaved its body into the car, and collapsed in exhaustion across the seats. Isserley, grunting with effort, pulled the door shut with one hooked finger.

‘Four,’ she said.

Back at the steading, Esswis barely had time to speak his name into the intercom before the aluminium door rolled open. Four men jostled in the widening gap, their snouts straining out anxiously, their legs pawing the concrete.

‘Did you get them? Did you get them?’ they cried.

‘Yes, yes,’ growled Esswis exhaustedly, and motioned to the Land-rover.

The men piled out into the bright air, breathing a locomotive row of steam on their way to help with the cargo. Esswis and Isserley didn’t go with them, but remained standing in the doorway, as if to block the view of any trespassers who might stray by. There was, after all, a foreign cargo ship nestled inside the building. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be mistaken for a tractor.

Isserley watched the men wrench open a side door of the Land-rover, and saw the swollen, bloody legs of the last vodsel flop out like a pair of giant salmon. She looked away. The barn walls were brilliant white in the sun, making the yellow tungsten light inside look dim and sickly.

Suddenly Esswis slumped slightly where he stood, as if something had come loose inside his shoulders, and he leaned against the steading wall, his hairy hand trembling under the skull-and-crossbones sign.

‘I’m going home,’ he sighed.

Isserley couldn’t tell, from his hunched back, how far-reaching a statement this was supposed to be. But evidently Esswis meant his farmhouse, and he shambled off towards it.

‘What about your vehicle?’ Isserley called after him.

‘I’ll come and fetch it later,’ he groaned without turning.

‘I’ll drive it to your place, if you like,’ she offered.

Still walking, still not turning, he raised one arm and let it drop wearily. Isserley couldn’t tell if this was a gesture of thanks or discouragement.

A shocked expletive in her native language came from near the Land-rover: the men had found the messier specimens jammed into the back. Isserley wasn’t interested in their qualms; she and Esswis had done their best to retrieve the animals in one piece – what did they expect?

To spare herself the men’s complaints, and to avoid offering to help them carry the carcasses in, she slipped inside the steading to search out the true cause of all the trouble: Amlis Vess.

The barn’s echoing ground level was empty of movable things, apart from the great black oblong of the transport ship parked directly under the roof hatch. Even the token farm equipment that was usually littered about in case of government inspection had been removed for unimpeded loading. At this time of the month – all things being well – the men would already be busy packing the goods into the ship, but Isserley could smell that nothing had been done today.

In one corner of the barn stood a massive steel drum, seven feet tall and at least five in diameter, embossed with a rusted and faded image of a cow and a sheep. A brass tap beckoned out of its side; Isserley twisted the handle and the drum opened up for her, a concealed seam parting smoothly like a vertical eyelid.

She stepped inside, the metal enclosed her, and she was on her way underground.

The lift opened its door automatically when it reached the shallowest level, the workers’ kitchen and recreation hall. Low-ceilinged and harshly lit like a motorway service station, it was a utilitarian eyesore that always, always smelled of fried potatoes, unwashed men, and mussanta paste.

Nobody was there, so Isserley let herself be taken down further. She hoped Amlis Vess wasn’t hiding in the deepest levels, where the killing and processing was done; she had never been there and didn’t wish to see it now. It was no place for a claustrophobic.

The lift stopped again, this time at the men’s living quarters – the most likely place (now that she thought about it) for Amlis Vess to be. Isserley had only once visited here, when she’d first arrived at Ablach Farm. She’d never found a reason to revisit its musty warren of clammy maleness: it reminded her of the Estates. She had a reason now, though. As the door parted its metal veils, Isserley braced herself for an angry confrontation.

The first thing she saw was Amlis Vess himself, standing startlingly close to the lift. She hadn’t expected him to be so close; it was as if he was about to step inside with her. But he kept perfectly still. In fact, everything seemed to keep perfectly still: time appeared to have stopped, without a qualm, for Isserley to take Amlis in, her mouth open to spit abuse. Her mouth stayed open.

He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Unsettlingly familiar in the way that famous people are, he was also utterly strange, as if she had never seen him before; the half-remembered images from the media had conveyed nothing of his attraction.

Like all of Isserley’s race (except Isserley and Esswis, of course) he stood naked on all fours, his limbs exactly equal in length, all of them equally nimble. He also had a prehensile tail, which, if he needed his front hands free, he could use as another limb to balance on, tripod-style. His breast tapered seamlessly into a long neck, on which his head was positioned like a trophy. It came to three points: his long spearhead ears and his vulpine snout. His large eyes were perfectly round, positioned on the front of his face, which was covered in soft fur, like the rest of his body.

In all these things he was a normal, standard-issue human being, no different from the workman standing behind him, watching him nervously.

But he was different.

He was almost freakishly tall, for one thing. His head was at the level of her breast; were he to be surgically made vertical, as she had been, he would tower over her. Wealth and privilege must have excused him from the typically stunted growth of Estate males like the one who was guarding him now; he was like a giant, but slender with it, not massive or lumpish. His colouring was unusually varied (gossips sometimes suggested it wasn’t natural): dark brown on his back, shoulders and flanks, pure black on his face and legs, pure white on his breast. The fur was impossibly lustrous, too, especially on his chest, where it was thicker, almost straggly. In musculature he was lean, with just enough bulk to carry his large frame; his shoulder-blades were startlingly prominent under their satiny layer of fur. But it was his face that was most remarkable: of the males Isserley worked with, there was not one who didn’t have coarse hair, bald patches, discolorations and unsightly scarring on the face. Amlis Vess had a soft down of flawless black from the tips of his ears to the curve of his throat, as if lovingly tooled in black suede by an idealistic craftsman. Deeply set in this perfection of blackness, his tawny eyes shone like illuminated amber. He breathed, preparing to speak.

Suddenly, the metal door slid shut between them, as if drawing curtains on the spectacle. Only now did Isserley realize that several seconds had passed, and that she had failed to step out of the lift. The door sealed itself and Amlis was gone; the floor moved gently underneath her.

The lift was descending further, towards the Processing Hall and the vodsel pens – exactly where Isserley didn’t want to go. Peevishly, she banged on the up button with the palm of her hand.

The lift came to a stop, and its doors twitched, as if about to open, but they managed no more than a centimetre or two before the cabin lurched back upwards towards the surface. A whiff of dank animal smell had entered; nothing more.

Back on the men’s level, the lift opened again.

Amlis Vess had moved back a little from the door, closer to the workman guarding him. He was still beautiful, but the few moments’ separation from him had given Isserley a chance to regain her grip on her anger. Good-looking or not, Vess was responsible for a juvenile feat of sabotage which had just put her through hell. His appearance had startled her, that’s all: it meant nothing. She’d expected him to have no presence except as the perpetrator of a wickedly foolish act; he wasn’t quite so anonymous, and she had to adjust.

‘Oh good; I thought you’d decided against us,’ Amlis Vess said. His voice was warm and musical, and terribly terribly upper-class. Isserley seized hold of the frisson of resentment it caused in her, and hung onto it resolutely.

‘Spare me the witty comments, Mr Vess,’ she said, stepping out of the lift. ‘I’m very tired.’

Deliberately, pointedly, she turned her attention to the other man, whom she belatedly recognized as Yns, the engineer.

‘What do you think, Yns?’ she said, happy to have remembered his name in time to use it. ‘Is it safe to take Mr Vess back up to ground level?’

Yns, a swarthy old salt of heroic ugliness, bared his stained teeth awkwardly and made fleeting eye contact with Amlis. Plainly the two men had had ample opportunity to talk during the vodsels’ adventure outside, and had come to appreciate the artificial absurdity of their captor—captive relationship.

‘Um… yeah,’ grimaced Yns. ‘Nothing else he can do now, is there?’

‘I think Mr Vess should come up to ground level,’ Isserley said, ‘and have a look at what the men are carrying in.’

Without taking her eyes off Amlis Vess, she twisted one arm backwards and pressed the button summoning the lift. In doing so, she winced in unexpected pain, and could tell he saw her wince – damn him. So rare were her opportunities to exploit her natural multi-jointedness, so careful was she always to move with the crude hinge-like motions of the vodsels, that she was seizing up. Wouldn’t he just love to know what her body could and couldn’t do!

The lift arrived, and Amlis Vess obediently walked inside. His bones and muscles moved subtly under his soft hide, without swagger, like a dancer. He was probably bisexual, like all rich and famous people.

Noting that the cabin wasn’t big enough for three, Amlis Vess looked to Isserley, but she made it clear that he and Yns should go first, and she would follow. She tried to convey, in her stance, a wary, fastidious disgust, as though Amlis Vess were some huge animal that might soil her, just now when she was too tired to clean herself.

As soon as the lift ascended, she felt sick, as if the earth had closed over her and she was inhaling a miasma of spent breath. It was how she expected to feel, though, and she counselled herself to hang on. Being underground was always a nightmare for her, especially a place like this. You’d almost need to be a lower life form not to go insane.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, longing to be rescued.

When at last they were all standing together in the steading – Isserley, Amlis Vess, and five of the farm workers – a solemn and surreal sight had been arranged before them. The vodsels had been carried into the barn; first the live one, then the three gory carcasses. Actually, the live one wasn’t alive anymore; Ensel had given it a cautionary dose of icpathua on the way in, which seemed unfortunately to have stopped the creature’s overtaxed heart.

The bodies were laid in a row on the concrete in the middle of the barn. The legs of the most complete one were still seeping grume; the heads of the shot ones had more or less stopped bleeding. Pale and glistening with frost, the foursome looked like massive effigies made of candlefat, unevenly melted from their hairy wicks.

Isserley looked at them, then at Amlis Vess, then at the bodies again, as if drawing a direct line for his attention.

‘Well?’ she challenged. ‘Proud of yourself?’

Amlis Vess stared at her, his teeth bared in pity and disgust.

‘You know, it’s very strange,’ he said. ‘I don’t recall shooting these poor animals’ heads off.’

‘You might as well have done,’ snapped Isserley, mortified to hear Yns snorting inappropriately behind her.

‘If you say so,’ Amlis Vess said, in a tone (if not an accent) she herself might have used to humour an alarmingly deranged hitcher.

Isserley was rigid with fury. Fucking elite bastard! He was behaving as if his actions didn’t need defending. Typical rich kid, typical pampered little tycoon. None of their actions ever needed defending, did they?

‘Why did you do it?’ she demanded bluntly.

‘I don’t believe in killing animals,’ he replied without raising his voice. ‘That’s all.’

Isserley gaped at him for a moment in disbelief; then, incensed, she drew his attention to the toes of the dead vodsels, an untidy row of approximately forty swollen digits splayed on the concrete before them.

‘You see these parts here?’ she fumed, singling out the worst affected ones with her pointing finger. ‘See the way the toes are grey and mushy? It’s called frostbite. The cold does it. These bits are dead, Mr Vess. This creature would certainly have died, just from being outside.’

Amlis Vess fidgeted uncomfortably, his first sign of weakness.

‘I find that hard to believe,’ he frowned, ‘It’s their world out there, after all.’

‘Out there?’ Isserley yelled. ‘Are you kidding? Does this’ – she jabbed her finger at the frostbitten toes, unintentionally slashing an additional perforation in one of them – ‘look like they’ve been running around in their natural element to you? Does it look like they’ve been having a little… frolic?’

Amlis Vess opened his mouth to speak, then apparently thought better of it. He sighed. And when he sighed, the white fur on his chest expanded.

‘It looks like I’ve made you angry,’ he said gravely. ‘Very angry. And the strange thing is, I don’t think it’s because I caused these animals to come to harm. I mean, you were just about to kill them yourself, were you not?’

With unconscious cruelty, all the men joined Vess in looking to Isserley for an answer. Isserley went quiet, her fists clenched. She was aware all of a sudden of why she should never clench her fists: the ineradicable pain in each hand where her sixth finger had been removed. And this, in turn, reminded her of all her other differences from the men who stood in a semicircle before her, across a divide of corpses. She cringed instinctively, dropping her posture as if to brace herself for all fours, then folded her arms across her breasts.

‘I suggest you keep Mr Vess out of trouble until he can be shipped back where he came from,’ she said icily, directing the instruction to no-one in particular. Then, one slow and painfully dignified step at a time, she walked out of the steading.

Those left behind stood in silence for a while.

‘She likes you,’ said Yns to Amlis Vess at last. ‘I can tell.’