THE SKIN

The first inkling of the anomaly came to William Howard on a damp Tuesday night. The London rainy season had the walls of his flat weeping moisture, and mildew crept across the corners. He’d just finished a fourteen-hour surgical rotation at the hospital, and the antiseptic-smelling gloves had been tossed in the bin. As he pulled off his shirt, a sharp sting flared on the inside of his right arm—like a needle prick, or an insect bite.

“Bloody rats,” William muttered, examining his arm. The skin was unbroken, save for a few faint scratches he was sure he’d made himself, clawing unconsciously in his sleep. The flat’s rat problem had worsened over the past three weeks. He could hear their scuttling inside the walls and would occasionally find their black droppings in a corner of the kitchen.

William dabbed the spot with an alcohol swab, the familiar sting a confirmation of disinfection. He collapsed onto his bed, succumbing to an exhausted sleep.

The next morning, shaving in the bathroom, his own reflection in the mirror gave him pause. Deep, violet shadows hung beneath his eyes, and his cheekbones seemed sharper, more prominent than he remembered. Amid the sound of running water, his sharp ears caught a faint squeaking.

William snapped the tap shut and looked around. He was alone in the bathroom. When he looked back at the mirror, he watched in horror as his right eye began to twitch uncontrollably, while the left remained perfectly still. It lasted for about three seconds before subsiding.

“Lack of sleep,” he told himself, his voice sounding unnaturally hollow in the white-tiled space.

In the days that followed, William began to log the anomalies. Each morning, he’d note a new symptom in his journal. Wednesday: a cramping, sore muscle in his left calf. Thursday: a metallic, fishy taste in his mouth. Friday: waking at 3 a.m. with a fit of dry heaves.

On Saturday afternoon, William finally made an appointment with his colleague, Dr. Grayson. In the exam room, he described his symptoms in detail, but he deliberately omitted the part about feeling something moving under his skin. It sounded too much like the onset of psychosis.

Grayson listened, then smiled. “William, how many tests have you run on yourself?”

“Dozens. More than enough,” William replied, his fingers unconsciously tracing the inside of his right arm. “Blood work, MRI, ultrasound, even a urinalysis. All normal.”

“And aside from stress-induced insomnia, mild gastritis, and muscle aches, you're perfectly healthy,” Grayson said, scribbling on a chart. “Look, you’ve just finished your residency and you’re prepping for your specialty boards. I’m prescribing you a two-week holiday and some mild sedatives. Stop reading those journals. Your paper is brilliant enough as it is.”

As William took the prescription, he caught Grayson’s gaze lingering for a second on his right arm. On the way home, he replayed that look over and over. Was it pity? Or had Grayson actually seen something?

That night, William decided to conduct one last self-examination. He locked the bathroom door and sterilized a scalpel blade over an alcohol lamp. As the tip of the blade touched the itchiest spot on the inside of his right arm, his hand was rock-steady—a gift from six years of surgical training.

When the first bead of blood welled up, William felt a profound, almost blissful, sense of relief. He carefully made a two-centimetre incision, preparing to inspect the subcutaneous tissue. Just then, a small lump bulged beneath the skin, darting rapidly towards the incision. His eyes widened in a moment of pure, animal terror.

William’s breath caught in his throat. A grey-black, skeletal, nauseatingly real rat’s head poked out of the cut, its wet nose twitching, its long whiskers brushing against his fingers. Its eyes, black and glossy as two nails hammered into his brain, stared directly into his consciousness, his soul.

A scream died in William’s throat. Instinctively, he grabbed the rat's head with a pair of tweezers and pulled. The creature let out a piercing shriek, its body stretching like an elastic band, but part of it remained fused to his flesh. When William released the tweezers, the rat zipped back into his arm as if it had never been there. The skin didn't heal; blood continued to well from the open wound.

William slumped to the floor, his back cold against the tiles. He glanced in the mirror and saw a man with a face ashen as a corpse, his lips trembling, forming a silent whisper. “No… it’s not possible… I…”

He frantically checked his body and found at least twenty similar marks—on the inside of his thighs, across his abdomen, even near his carotid artery. Each one had pulsed with that same phantom squirming. Each one could be hiding another one of the vile rodents. The damned things.

By 3 a.m., William had made a decision. He sterilized the scalpel again and prepared a glass jar filled with saline solution. If a rat could hide inside a human body, a full exploration was the only logical solution. He had to get them out before he went completely mad.

The first cut was on his right arm. Biting down on a towel, he made a precise incision, separating dermis from epidermis. Pain, white-hot, seared through his nerves, but his fingers remained steady as stone. The skin peeled back like parchment, revealing the pink muscle tissue beneath. It was empty. No rat, no anomaly, just normal human anatomy.

“I must be mad,” William gasped, but he moved on to his left arm. Sweat soaked his hair, pooling on the tiled floor in a reflective puddle. As he peeled away strip after strip of skin, his breathing grew ragged, his reflection in the mirror beginning to warp. Was that really him? That blood-soaked figure, flaying himself alive?

When most of the skin from his torso was gone, he staggered to his feet and looked in the mirror. The reflection that stared back made him scream. Beneath the peeled-away skin, there was nothing. No muscle, no bone. Only a single, enormous rat, staring back at its own reflection.

The rat broke into a cackling laugh, the sound echoing in the bathroom like a grotesque chorus. It raised the scalpel to its face, the blade moving with precision along the hairline. When the last piece of human skin was peeled away from its face, the truth was finally laid bare.

Standing in the mirror was a giant rat, easily six feet tall. Its grey-black fur was matted with blood, its long tail sweeping the floor. It still clutched the scalpel in one of its front paws, its black, glossy eyes glittering with the madness of a shattered reality.

“So that’s how it was,” the rat said, its voice a high-pitched squeak. The human skin lay at its feet like a cheap, discarded suit. It crouched and began to gnaw on the skin that had once been William Howard, its sharp teeth tearing easily through the tissue that had once protected it. When the entire skin was devoured, it opened its mouth to speak again, but all that came out was a single, long, repellent "squeak."

From outside the bathroom door, the landlady was banging furiously. “Dr. Howard! Are you conducting animal experiments in there again? I can smell blood! One more time, and I'll have to ask you to leave!”

The rat stopped chewing, its ears twitching. It scrambled nimbly onto the sink and squeezed into a ventilation duct in the wall. In the dark labyrinth of the ducts, it could hear the calls of its own kind. They had been waiting for him, for their family member to finally shed his disguise and be reborn in the embrace of the dark.