Second Skin - Chapter 0013

Chapter 13 — Layers

The question remained there, between the two of them, without either of them picking it up.

Sebastian lowered himself to the floor, his face a hand’s breadth from the glass. Inside, the creature lowered itself similarly, and the two stood there, face to face, from below, close together, like someone looking at a piece that had arrived there uninvited. He waited. He waited for a tired yes, like before, a stray word, any remaining voice. Nothing came. What did come was soundless: a sensation that rose somewhere behind his breastbone, that what now shared his body had a soft spot. A weak point. His head touched that spot unintentionally, the way the tongue returns on its own to a tooth that ached in the middle of the night, and Sebastian pressed his forehead against it.

It didn’t match. The night before he had seen the species the right size, up close, still wearing glasses: creatures twice the height of a man, shoulders too broad for a doorway, bodies that looked like paint spilled from a bucket and dried in the air. They were large. There were many of them. One of them came in two colors, red dripping onto black, and none of them stood still for a second. Comparing that to what was in the mirror was so pointless that the comparison fell apart before it was even complete.

This was the opposite of it all. The color didn’t shine. It was matte, a black fabric covering his reflection from within, clinging to every bone. His eyes, the two white ellipses that an hour before seemed cut with a stiletto, had lost their edge: they were heavy, half-closed, the eyes of someone who hadn’t slept in a long time. And he lacked any of that energy that the others expended in the square, jumping from facade to facade as if gravity were an invention of the group ahead. If this was a predator, it was a predator with its claws ripped off. A cat without claws.

The comparison to animals didn’t stop there, and Sebastian let it go all the way, because thinking of animals was easier than thinking of the names the newspapers were using. The ones in the square were lions, tigers, zoo animals with broken fences, and they looked at people like you look at a plate. The one kneeling in front of him, against the glass, looked more like a stray cat cornered at the end of a garage: its teeth bared not from hunger, but from fear; its dry body bristling; ready to bite anyone who came near precisely because it had no hole to escape to.

And while he was watching, the cat walked away.

It began at the edges. The black layer thinned at his collarbones, where it had already been wearing away, and his white skin appeared underneath, first in spots, then in patches that merged. The black didn’t come off his skin. It seeped into it. It seeped into his pores like water on dry sand, and where it receded, the same Sebastian remained: his thin chest, his countable ribs, the freckles on his shoulder. It moved down his arms. It moved up his neck. His wide mouth closed and became his mouth, his lips cracked with cold. His tongue, the last part to go, returned inside the teeth that were his again. Finally, his eyes. The white ellipses faded from the center outwards, and in their place were two gray eyes, red at the edges, wide open.

Sebastian swallowed hard. The click in his throat was the only thing that moved in the room.

In the mirror there was a boy in his underwear, kneeling, his red hair tousled to one side, and behind him the wardrobe, the crooked curtain, the boxes. Nothing else. He brought his hand to his face, and the hand on the glass did the same, white. He ran his fingers over his chest, his stomach, searching for the lines where the black had been a minute before. Skin. Only skin, and cold.

”Wait.”

It came out in a whisper, and he felt ridiculous instantly: a boy asking the mirror to return the monster. Nothing answered. Neither the voice, nor the current of fear that had risen through him when he thought of the glass pipes in the square. He tried again, on purpose. He thought of the cell phone in his coat pocket. The three-digit number. The word Miles Morales had used in the morning interview. His stomach didn’t churn. His chest didn’t tighten. If the thing was listening, it no longer had the strength even to be afraid.

That was what frightened him. Not what he had seen. What he had failed to see.

He stood up slowly, his knees still marked from the floor. The wooden clock on the desk showed twenty minutes to eight. Friday. He’d had a plan for that night since Tuesday: the old notebook, open face up on the edge of the table, the circuit board exposed, and the parts he’d been collecting for weeks laid out on a cloth, under the articulated magnifying glass.

Replace what was burnt out, solder what was loose, close everything up before bed and see if it would light up. A whole night just for him, no delivery, no sister asking for juice, no one knocking on the door. He had waited for her all week.

He looked at the counter as if it were someone else’s desk. The pieces were still there, arranged by size. They made no difference whatsoever.

He got dressed because he was cold, not because he had decided anything: the sweatpants from the floor, the jacket from the bed, the socks. He pushed the pile of clothes off the chair with his forearm, let it fall, and sat down. He pressed the button on the cabinet under the desk—a box that had been three dead computers before becoming a living one—and the fan coughed as usual before kicking in. The screen lit up. He typed the password without looking at the keyboard, quickly, the way his fingers knew how to do it on their own.

I had only one goal now.

He watched the videos using the same diagnostic method he used for a faulty engine: mute, pause, rewind. He observed the way they slid down the facades headfirst, on all fours, clinging to the wet glass like geckos. The way they ran—neither like people nor like dogs, but like something that had studied both and decided to merge them. In a shaky video filmed from a balcony, one of them lifted a policeman off the ground with both hands, by his vest, as if he were made of styrofoam, and threw him over a police car. In another, one that had been knocked down got up without using its arms, its entire body recomposing itself at once, like a spring being released. He reviewed this segment five times. He felt neither fear nor fascination—only the clinical attention of someone analyzing an unknown mechanism.

He migrated from video to text. He opened an article from a major newspaper, then another, then a website that only republished the first two with different photos. The same word in all of them: in the headlines, in the captions, in the statements of the experts contacted by phone. Symbiote. Symbiotes on the run, symbiotes contained, symbiote attack leaves people injured in Manhattan. The journalists used the term as if everyone knew what it meant, and Sebastian did. He remembered his science classes: two organisms living in association, one inside or attached to the other, each benefiting. He knew the definition. What he didn’t understand was why an entire species carried a name that sounded like a housing condition.

And the biggest one, the two-colored one, the one who had licked his face and promised he would be the first, had a proper name in the news reports.
Carnage.
He knew that name. It came from the documentaries his mother turned off when he entered the room, from the list of villains any boy raised on Spider-Man knew by heart. Carnage was on it. But it was at the end, in a poorly explained corner, a name that appeared in old recordings and disappeared without anyone telling the whole story.
He went looking for that story.

He left the official portals and delved into old forums, those with dark backgrounds, with threads opened twenty years ago that still received replies from some insomniac. He typed the name. Opened tabs. Read. Before he knew it, an hour or two had passed, and what he had collected fit in a closed hand: fan theories, debates about dates, discussions held a decade ago about whether a certain video was real or a montage. And photos. Many photos of the same villain in a New York that no longer existed—lower buildings, wrecked cars on the asphalt, headlights on where today only delivery vans and bicycles pass.

In all of them, without exception, Spider-Man wore a different costume.

Black. Complete, without any red anywhere, with a huge white spider on the chest, its legs climbing up the shoulders and down the back. Sebastian had seen that suit before; any fan had seen it. It was the retro model, used for a while decades ago and occasionally resurfacing on t-shirts or commemorative artwork. What he had never noticed was this: in every image with Carnage, without exception, the suit was that one. Never the red-and-blue one. Never the miniature one printed on the face of his watch, with open arms.

At nine o’clock, the living room television went silent.
He listened to the silence before registering the rest: bare feet in the hallway, a light knock on the door, a voice thinner from sleep than from the question.
“Are you going to sleep?”
Sebastian looked at the screen. At the key in the lock. At his own open hands on the table, pale. He got up. He unlocked the door. He took Camila to the bathroom, waited for her to finish brushing her teeth, tucked the blanket over her, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark until her breathing deepened and turned into her usual snoring. He didn’t think about anything during that time. He made sure not to think. Then he went back to the bedroom, turned the key again—and the screen was still there.

He dug deeper into the forums, beyond the pages indexed by search engines, to topics abandoned since before he was born. And there, on page twenty-three of a dead thread, he found a long post from a user named Delancey84.
The profile summed it all up in two lines: last activity more than five years ago. No photo. No reply after that message. Whoever it was had written that and left.
Sebastian read it twice.

Carnage — wrote Delancey84 — had been Spider-Man’s greatest villain in those years. Not just one of the greatest: the greatest. Sebastian stopped at that sentence. He knew the names that occupied that position in cartoons, documentaries, and year-end lists, and Carnage had never been among them. Why then? According to Delancey84, it was clear. But he didn’t stop at the statement; he explained.

The man beneath it all was called Cletus Kasady. The post didn’t waste time on him: psychopath, serial killer, the kind of name that graced magazine covers, condemned to death and awaiting his date in the corridor, and this before anything dark had even come close. Kasady had had contact with the symbiote, the text said, but it didn’t say how, where, or who had left it. Sebastian thought Delancey84 didn’t know, and thought nobody on the forums knew. But the user spoke calmly about what came after. The merging of the two. And a New York that, for two years, ran through his blood. A fear of another scale, he wrote. A fear that Spider-Man couldn’t solve either. Two years.

Until one rainy night, Spider-Man, in black and white, managed to surround Carnage. The post said surround, not defeat, and Sebastian noticed the word. After that night, Carnage never appeared again. The man did appear: Kasady went to a maximum-security prison and, two years later, was sentenced to death again, this time for what he had done to the creature inside him.
There were images. Scanned newspaper covers, yellowed at the edges. Photos of the fight, grenades, with the rain scratching the lens: a red stain on top of a taxi, a black figure with the white spider on its chest hanging from a lamppost. And a photo of the prison where Sebastian stayed longer than he would have liked.

A red-haired man in orange overalls, handcuffed with his hands in front of his body, kneeling on the wet asphalt between two policemen. Smiling. Not like someone who had been caught. Like someone who had won. He looked at the camera as if the condemned were the others, the men standing around him with their guns pointed, and he was just waiting for them to take care of it. His hair was a darker red than Sebastian’s, plastered to his forehead by the rain. His light eyes didn’t match his mouth. Sebastian felt a shiver run from his tailbone to the nape of his neck and couldn’t tell if it was his own or coming from deeper within.

The post ended there. No closing, no source, not another line.

Sebastian leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Now he knew who Carnage was, better than he had when he woke up. And what he had learned didn’t fill any gaps; it opened others. Why had he attacked the plaza yesterday, after decades without a sign? How had he escaped from wherever Spider-Man had hidden him? How had he joined Cletus Kasady, a man locked on death row? Why was a piece of it—of its offspring—inside him now, bending his fingers, reading his thoughts? And the question from before, the one the mirror had refused to answer, remained above all others:

What was that?
The forums weren’t going to answer. He went another way.

The internet Sebastian knew had levels. At the top was what everyone could see: the portals, the videos, the official pages with their watermarks at the bottom, the answers the search engine delivered ready-made even before the question was finished. It was a clean, well-lit, and short level; it always ended at the same wall on the third page of results, where the same ten websites began to repeat themselves in different guises. From what he read in older forums, it hadn’t been like this thirty years ago. He didn’t know why it had become like this, nor who decided what went up and what went down; he only knew that below there was another level without light: pages that search engines had stopped accessing, forgotten servers that no one had shut down, copies kept by archives that photographed the entire network from time to time, like someone taking a picture of the street before demolition.

He knew how to get down there. He had learned out of necessity, scouring manual battery-powered motor diagrams erased by manufacturers when the model was discontinued, patents canceled with the design still visible. The tricks were the same as always: words no one used anymore, addresses copied from old quotes, broken links until another broken link was still standing due to carelessness.

He typed the word. Symbiont. Then symbiont and sample. Symbiont and species. Symbiont and host. The bottom of the internet returned biology: lichens, corals, bacteria in the intestines of termites, entire theses on fungi and on creatures that live inside other creatures and pay rent in sugar. He went through it all without stopping, with a haste that came almost from his stomach. Those things had something in common with what was inside him, something that the word announced and that he had no desire to understand that night. Nothing there had teeth.

It was in that leap, from one citation to another, that he arrived at a university website.
It was dead. You could tell from the first screen: the logo was missing, the menus led to pages that no longer existed, the footer was from a year before the year he was born. But the framework was still standing, and inside it were pieces: lists of departments, names of laboratories, research summaries with half the links broken. Sebastian ran his hand over it all like someone rummaging through a scrap metal box on the sidewalk, not yet knowing what he was looking for, only knowing that he had arrived at the right place.

He looked at the clock. Three in the morning.

The hours hadn’t made a sound. It was his stomach that spoke: a long, rumbling sound from deep within, the same empty warning that had hit him at six in the afternoon after a whole bucket of chicken nuggets. He stood up. His legs were numb from the chair.

The hallway was dark and cold. He passed his sister’s door, which was closed, and on the other side, the usual snoring, at the same rhythm, filled the entire room. He passed his mother’s door, and it was open: the bed made just as she had left it that morning, the streetlight streaming through the window, the smell of hand sanitizer that never left that room. Until eleven, the note on the refrigerator said. São Lucas never let anyone out at eleven.

She opened the refrigerator, took an apple, and closed it. She didn’t turn on the light. She went back to the room biting into it, turned the key, sat down again, and the screen was exactly where it had been.

It was there, in a list of summaries without any order, that the word appeared along with something else that wasn’t fungus.

The article’s title was a question: “A new species beyond the stars?”

With the question mark. Sebastian opened it.

It was a text from the beginning of research; he could see that in the first few lines: it explained more than it stated, surrounded each sentence with “maybe,” said “seems” where it meant “is.” It said that a new species had been found. It didn’t say where. And right below there was a photo, and in the photo there was a glass tube the length of an arm, with a black substance at the bottom, climbing up the walls.
He knew that tube. He had seen his older brothers in the square, taller than him, carried two by two by people in white overalls, with the dark liquid swirling inside.

He bit into the apple and continued.

The article described the studied goo, a separate part of the main mass. They tried to discover its composition and failed. They then injected a fragment into a selected rat – the text specified, with clinical care, that it was sick: multiple tumors, an infection, two problems whose names Sebastian couldn’t pronounce. When the substance penetrated the animal, everything disappeared. Quickly. The word echoed on the screen and Sebastian retraced it with his left index finger, pressing the smooth spot where the soldering iron scar had once been.

The transformation continued. The rat became stronger than its littermates, faster, with muscles that the researchers’ measurements couldn’t explain. Its appetite, the text recorded, increased exponentially. It devoured everything in the cage: biomass, plant matter, meat. When the food ran out and other rats remained nearby, it hunted them. It reached the point where it couldn’t share space with any other rodent.

Sebastian stopped chewing. He remembered the McDonald’s cashier raising an eyebrow. He remembered devouring everything and still feeling hungry. That part seemed the most sinister to him, and the article continued.

Over time, he reported, the animal became aggressive. Difficult to handle, then difficult to restrain, capable of bending the bars. But it didn’t last long. A month after the exhibition, the rat died.

And then the substance emerged.

The text described, without embellishment, what was worse: the black mass rose from the corpse through the nostrils, eyes, mouth, ears, coalesced over the body and consumed the rat’s own flesh. The researchers, without understanding what they were witnessing, collected the sample and reintegrated it into the main container. It merged back as if it had never left. As if it had always belonged there.

One month. Sebastian calculated before it could be avoided.

From that point on, however, the article became strange, and that strangeness held him to the chair.

They repeated the experiment on other animals. Amphibians first. Then cats. They all died – the text stated with the same coldness as before. Except they didn’t die after a month. They didn’t die from the substance. They started dying when the researchers began extracting it from their bodies.

They developed a technique for this. The text didn’t detail it, but it described the result: a painful process where both sides suffered – the animal and the inner creature. The animal emerged weakened and died easily in the following days. The extracted part appeared visibly weaker, smaller, and slower. But it recovered simply by returning to the main mass.

Sebastian reread that paragraph three times, and on the third time he understood that he was reading a translation.

Danger Separation Death

Three loose words on the mirror, without a verb, an invisible thread connecting them. He had thought of the cell phone and the thing had been afraid. He had thought of the word coalition and it had been even more afraid. He had thought of the tubes and his stomach churned. Now it was all there, written with the coldness of a report on a dead page, by someone who had seen it happen to cats. To separate was to kill. The animal died. And the part that came out weaker, slower, only survived if it had somewhere to return to.

He waited for the current. The fear that wasn’t his rose up the thread. It didn’t come. Whatever it was, the thing remained extinguished, and Sebastian found himself with a astonishment he didn’t know where to put, hoping it was merely asleep.

And that’s where things got stuck.
The article had no end. It did have an end, yes, but in the middle, like a sentence someone left unfinished. The next page wouldn’t come. No conclusion, no date, no name. He went to the footer, came back, looked in the corners of the page, at the dead links, at the code behind the text. Nothing from the author. Nothing from the lab. Whoever had written that, whoever had stuffed the black goo inside a rat and watched the rat emerge from the corpse through its own eyes, hadn’t signed it.

With a furrowed brow, he climbed up to the top, where the logo wasn’t loading. Next to the white space, in the remaining letters, was the name of the institution: Dunmore University.
He took a piece of paper from the table, the back of a delivery note, and wrote the name down with the pen attached to the arm of the magnifying glass. Then he went upstairs and typed it into Google.

The university existed. Or had existed. The map marked the spot where it should have been, in the north of the state, far from everything, a small campus that satellite photos showed with weeds growing in the parking lots. And the first line of information, before any other, said: closed. For more than twenty years.

Sebastian searched for the reason. He found little, and the little that was always the same thing: lack of funding. Cuts. End of activities. A local newspaper article with four paragraphs lamenting the lost jobs, without a word about any laboratory.
Lack of funding.

He looked at the paper with the name written on it and then at the screen, and the numbers didn’t add up. A university with something like that in its hands, a kind of other place, that cured tumors and came out of the mouths of corpses, wouldn’t close for lack of money. Research like that must have required a lot of funding. Someone would have financed it. Someone always finances it.

It was almost four in the morning. The computer case fan was humming. On the table, the red and blue Spider-Man still stood with his arms outstretched in front of the clock, and the old laptop remained on its back, waiting for parts that no one was going to replace.

Sebastian pulled the paper close and, under the university’s name, began writing questions. He wrote until the paper ran out. He turned it over. He continued. Each answer he found that night came with two questions stuck to it, like the pieces he brought from the street that never came loose on their own from the scrap metal where they were fitted. He had a villain’s name, a man’s name, a black costume on a rainy night, a dead rat, a glass tube, a closed university, three words on the mirror.

What he still lacked was the answer to the only question that mattered. And it remained there, in the dark glass next to the wardrobe, reflecting behind it a boy in front of a computer who no longer knew if he was alone.