Beneath the Skin

Fatal accidents/roadkill

Tess couldn’t sleep. There it was again. Scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch… She pressed her fingers into her ears and dragged the eiderdown over her head, but the sound only sharpened in the dark. Above her, something moved across the ceiling. Slow at first. Then urgent. She knew they were up there. Worse, she could smell them. When the scratching stopped, the silence was enormous. Tess held her breath. ‘What were they up to now?’ Something scraped overhead, heavy, and deliberate, as if something solid was being dragged across the floor. Then came a loud thud. The second was louder. The third seemed to land inside the room. The ceiling seemed to lower. The walls closed in. Her legs and feet felt like lead. Low growls and high-pitched shrieks began to cascade from above. She closed her eyes and shouted. “Enough!”

The alarm split the room open. Tess snatched it silent before it could wake anyone else. For a moment she lay still, listening. No scratching. No thuds. Only her own breath, shallow and uneven. Then she saw her hands. Bloody scratches criss-crossed her fingers, fresh and raw. Deep, but not as deep as the older marks she rarely noticed until mornings like this. Some things had faded. Others had only learned how to hide. Not all of them were visible, but she knew they were there. She could feel them.

Tess never really knew why she bothered to set an alarm. There was no bus to catch, no office to rush to. Her studio was huge and stood at the end of the garden, custom built from timber with huge windows and half hidden by trees. It waited for her like a second skin. She had placed it as far from the house as the boundary allowed so that she could enjoy the view over the open fields. She painted, sculpted, and stitched there, turning the things most people looked away from into something they could not stop staring at. Long ago, Tess had learned the usefulness of looking closely: to name each part, make a map of it, and decide what could be buried. Today, representatives from a new gallery were coming to view her latest pieces. The thought tightened beneath her ribs. Showing people her work felt like baring her soul, and if they failed to understand it, they failed to understand her.

LAtelier de La Lune had recently opened in the large market town near Tess’s home, its empty walls fresh, white, and waiting. They were looking for new talent, and someone had mentioned Tess, then passed on her business card. That was how her clientele usually arrived: a name passed quietly from one collector to another, almost always with a warning attached. Her work was not for the faint-hearted. Tess was in the studio when the gate camera buzzed. A tall woman stood beneath the lens in a white suit and wide-brimmed hat, motionless as a porcelain figurine. Beside her waited a young man in a black cape and bowler hat; he looked nervous. Once they confirmed their names, Tess buzzed them in. She had met plenty of strange, eccentric people in her line of work and was not fazed by their appearance. Not yet.

Tess went out to meet her guests. They followed her to the studio, the woman murmuring how eager she was to see the work she had heard so much about. Inside, six feet by four feet canvases hung from the walls or leaned against them in watchful rows. The visitors moved slowly from painting to painting, speaking in hushed tones, and taking notes. Tess let them look. She was used to the pause that came when people understood what they were seeing. She brought back roadkill and painted what most people never saw: the colour beneath skin, fat, and fur; the secret architecture of small bodies broken too soon by the roadside.

The first time she had buried a bird, she had used a dessert spoon from the kitchen drawer and pressed the earth down with both hands until it stayed flat. Later, she drew it from memory until the shape no longer frightened her. She worked in thick, vivid strokes, then added finer details in pen and ink. Tess called them Postmortem Paintings. Critics had described them as ‘quietly haunting,’ ‘vibrantly Gothic,’ and even ‘disturbing disruptions of violated innocence.’ Tess didn’t care what they thought. She loved what she did. Afterwards, she buried her ‘life models’ in the graveyard behind the studio, then went back inside and painted until the dead were impossible to ignore.

The woman stopped before the largest canvas: a badger opened from throat to pelvis in a burst of crimson, ochre, white and blue-black shadow. She did not flinch. Most people flinched first, then pretended they had not. This woman leaned closer, studying the sweep of exposed ribs as if reading a sentence Tess had hidden there.

“Remarkable,” she said at last. Her voice was soft and dry, the sort of voice that might have belonged to old paper or dead leaves. “You do not simply paint the body. You translate it.”

Tess folded her arms, hiding the scratches on her fingers beneath her sleeves. “That’s one way of putting it.”

The young man had not spoken since he arrived. He stood near the workbench, narrow gloved hands clasped behind his back, gaze fixed on the jars of brushes, the folded cloths, the trays of pen nibs scrubbed clean and laid in rows. His skin had the faint waxen sheen of something kept too long from sunlight.

“And you work only from found specimens?” the woman asked.

“Roadkill, mostly. Birds that hit windows. Things the cats bring in.” Tess tried to make her voice sound ordinary. Professional. “I don’t harm anything.”

“No,” said the woman. “Of course not.”

Something in the way she agreed made Tess look at her. Beneath the brim of the white hat, the woman’s face was almost beautiful, though not in a comfortable way. Her eyes were pale grey and unblinking. A thin crescent scar curved from the corner of her mouth towards her jaw, so precise it might have been drawn there with one of Tess’s finest pens.

The man in black drifted to the far wall, where the smallest paintings hung. These were the ones Tess rarely showed first: sparrows, mice, a shrew no longer than her thumb. Each body had been rendered with the same reverence as a saint in stained glass. He raised one hand, stopping just short of the frame.

“They remember,” he said.

Tess frowned. “Sorry?”

He turned then. His eyes were dark enough to hold no reflection. “Your paintings. They remember what happened to them.”

For the first time that morning, Tess felt cold creep beneath the collar of her shirt. Yet the studio was warm. Sunlight poured through the long windows. Still, every hair along her arms had lifted.

The woman smiled, and the scar beside her mouth deepened. “That is precisely why we are here, Miss Vale. We are preparing a private exhibition. A very particular exhibition.”

Tess went still. Vale was not the name on her studio door, her business card, or her bank account. Not anymore. She had buried it as deep as her life models, under earth and silence and the locked attic above her bedroom. ‘I did not give you that name.’

“No,” said the woman. “You didn’t.”

The man in black crossed the room and stopped too close, studying her face as if searching for a mark only he could see. Tess took two paces back.

“There are things that do not stay buried,” he said, his voice smooth as velvet. His gaze shifted past her, towards the house. “Not when they are still being fed.”

The woman smiled, “We will be in touch regarding the exhibition.”

As her visitors left, Tess looked down at the card clenched in her hand. Its edge had cut into her palm. Two names were printed beneath a silver moon: Angelica White & Nile Black, Purveyors of Antiquities and Oddities, L’ Atelier de La Lune. On the reverse, in blood red ink, someone had written one word: Vale.

She looked around the studio. Her subject matter could be called dark or morbid, but she cared for every creature she recreated. On canvas, they became alive again.

That night, Tess lay in bed listening to the noises in the attic. She thought about Angelica White and Nile Black, about the sudden silence after Nile looked towards the house. Something was definitely off, but she couldn’t quite place what it was.

In the morning, Tess found a note in her mailbox. The gallery wanted a commission, and the sum quoted was obscene: more than she had ever been paid before. The subject matter would arrive after she signed the enclosed contract. Tess read it twice. Three pages, dense and exacting: personal details, credentials, background history, an NDA, and her signature in triplicate. The gallery would have permission to collect the commissioned painting and any works Tess voluntarily released for exhibition. The final line went further. It required unrestricted access to all stored works, living or otherwise.

Tess signed the contract, agreeing to the commission and the selected exhibition pieces, but not the final clause. “This term is unacceptable,” she wrote.

A week after Tess posted the contract, a black van pulled up at the gates and stopped. The buzzer sounded. Tess stood with her hand over the release button; she still had no idea what the gallery had sent. Angelica and Nile had said nothing. She opened the gates and walked down to meet the driver. As she approached, she saw him wrestling a long oblong shape wrapped in plastic onto a trolley. It was rigid and heavy. Her curiosity tightened into something colder.

“Where do you want this?” he spluttered as he caught his breath.

“If you could just follow me, I can show you,” she said, leading him towards her studio.

“He gasped as she opened the double doors and let him push the trolley through. “You’ve been busy here, haven’t you?” He looked around, not quite understanding what he was seeing.

“Er, what exactly are they paintings of?” he asked, still looking around as he lowered the trolley and locked the wheels.

“Dead bodies, roadkill mostly.”

“Oh right!”

“Any idea what’s under the wrapping?”

“I’ve no idea love. I’m just the delivery guy!”

“Well, I suppose I’m about to find out.” Tess moved towards the package, then stopped. An envelope had been stuck to it, her name written across the front in red ink. The strokes looked wet but were dry when she touched them. She opened it carefully. Angelica had written that ‘under no circumstances should the contents be unwrapped in company. It was extremely private and privileged material.’

 “Apparently, I must open my ‘gift’ in private,” she told him.

“Well, I hope it’s nothing that’s gonna leap out and bite you!” he laughed as he left. Tess hoped so too.

There was a lot of wrapping to unravel. The plastic clung to itself. Beneath it came the smell of cold earth, wet fur, and something metallic that caught in the back of her throat. Eventually, she came face to face with her new subject. It was a huge wolf, but not like any wolf she had seen on television or in a zoo. Its limbs were too long, the joints wrong somehow, and a ruffed mane ran from its neck to halfway down its back. It had been brutally attacked by something powerful. Tess wondered what had happened, and how the gallery had got hold of it. The studio seemed quieter with the body inside it. Even the trees outside appeared to have stopped moving. She studied it for hours, making notes and drawing sketches from as many angles as she could.

Three hours later, the gate buzzed. Tess looked up so sharply her pencil snapped. The van driver had returned. She pressed the intercom.

“Can I help you?”

“Well… apparently, I’m to pick it up and take it back to the sender ASAP,” he said. “Something about it only being released for study, not storage.”

She frowned. “Okay. Give me ten minutes to wrap it back up, and then I’ll buzz you through.”

“No rush, I’m due for a tea break,” he said.

Two weeks later another van turned up. This one was white with the gallery logo emblazoned on the sides; it looked surgical against the gravel. Packers came with gloves, tape, labels, and the brisk silence of people who knew what they were doing. They wrapped only the works Tess had agreed to release; some of the larger canvases and a few of the smaller studies. They also took the wolf painting, now dry enough to travel. Tess watched it disappear into the van. She felt sad that it had to go.

The private view was an auspicious occasion. The guests were well-heeled, judging by the cars outside and the glittering jewellery. Champagne and canapés flowed like endless rivers, but the room still felt airless, as if the white walls were holding their breath. Tess had been curious. Private viewings were not her thing, and this one felt more like an invitation she couldn’t refuse.

“So glad that you could come,” Angelica said, almost floating across the room before appearing soundlessly at Tess’s elbow.

“If you wander a little, you will see quite a few red, sold stickers. Tell me, my dear, what did you think of my wolf? Isn’t my boy beautiful?”

“Well, I hope you think my work did him justice?”

“Only time will tell, my dear, only time will tell…” Angelica sighed as she floated off again.

A voice startled Tess, making her flinch. “Tell me, Ms Vale, do they keep you up at night?” Nile Black was almost leaning into her. He was too close again.

“I’ve no idea what you mean.” She did, she just had no idea how he knew.

“Your friends in the attic. Do they scratch and scrape all night long?”

“Excuse me, I have to be somewhere.” She tried to move away from him, but he was like static electricity, clinging to her.

Angelica saved the day. “Nile, someone wants to meet you.”

He looked annoyed, muttering as she whisked him away.

Tess went to leave as quickly as she could, but the wolf painting caught her eye and held her there. In the background, where there had only been shadow, stood the small silhouette of a man in a black cape with a black bowler hat. Her mouth went dry. She knew every line of that canvas, and she had not put him in there. She looked for Angelica, but she was engrossed with a green-haired woman with a lizard on her shoulder. Tess looked around for Nile, but he seemed to have vanished. When she looked back at the painting, the man had disappeared. The wolf stared out from the canvas as if it knew where he’d gone.

Later that night, Tess sat in bed and went through her notes. She kept written diaries as well as visual ones, and there was no figure of a man in any of her preliminary sketches for the wolf painting. But she had seen him. She knew she had. As the scratching began in the attic, she closed her books and picked up the buckets. She unlocked the attic door and climbed the steep, narrow stairs, counting each step because counting lessened the fear. She pulled the light cord; a gentle orange glow warmed the room. The scratching stopped at once. Tess put the buckets down: six large bowls of cat food and six large bowls of seed and nuts. She spread them around the attic and stood back. For a moment, nothing moved.

Then the creatures from her paintings crawled out of the shadows. They stayed close to the darkness, keeping their watchful eyes on Tess, as they did from the paintings in her studio. She had no idea how the subjects of her paintings came back from the dead. Just that after she painted the dead as truthfully as she could, buried their bodies on her land, and kept the paintings close, something of them returned. They carried their scars, as she did, but their bodies had healed. They could not leave the grounds; that was the condition of their renewal. They were bound to her and her home.

Tess had been involved in a fatal car crash as a teenager. The car her family were traveling in exploded after impact. Somehow, she had been thrown clear, but she remembered dying. Her heart had stopped. Women in white suits and white hats, with soft voices, spoke to her. Pulled at her clothing. Then it all went dark, and a man wearing a black jacket and black hat carried her away. She awoke in a hospital bed. They said she was lucky, but she was left with so many scars, inside and out.

When she finally returned to her family home where she still lived now, a parcel was waiting for her. No note. No return address. Inside was a huge painting of her as she had been pulled from the wreckage, with bloody injuries and shredded clothing. She recoiled from the horror, covered it up, and hid it away in the attic. She had never wanted to see it again, until now. As she gently uncovered it, the sheet slid down with a whisper. Tess gasped. Her injuries had healed. Her clothing was repaired, and her scars were almost beautiful. For one impossible moment, she realised that the painted version of herself had been waiting all these years beneath the dust, healing alone, kept close to the house that held her. And just in the background, hardly visible unless you knew where to look, was a small, caped figure in a bowler hat.