Read In This Skin for Free Online Page B

since childhood. He'd worked on every detail, every scent and sound. It was more real than the brutal city that he'd grown up in. For the moment he was happy to walk in the wood with it lying at peace again, without carnivore mammoths. Even the birds that had once glided overhead had vanished. He was content with the serenity of the place, the way the cool breeze whispered through the branches to stir the sticks into a faint hiss. So what he saw next took him by surprise.
        He came upon a sudden clearing in the forest. There stood dozens of pale figures. They were a bluish gray, the same color as corpse skin when the blood has drained from it. He paused for a moment to stare at this weird assembly They did not move, even though, somehow, they all appeared to be staring in his direction.
        Ellery gave an amused laugh and clapped his hands. The sound was startling in the peace of the forest. He'd intended the clap to animate his creations (although he didn't recall intentionally creating them in his imagination, but sometimes it played tricks like that… the beasts he created could appear spontaneously as if formed in his subconscious).
        These figures simply stood and stared. He moved closer for a better look. Hell, his subconscious had worked hard. They were monstrous figures that were vaguely human.
        Deformed? No, that wasn't the right description. It looked as if they'd become soft and pliable and some demon hand had remolded them into bizarre and horrifying forms. Heads were elongated. Eyes had plumped out to bulge from sockets. Mouths were misshapen. Some possessed naked bodies covered with blue-gray skin that puckered into lumpy hides on their chests, while shoulders were smooth with the exception of wartlike lumps from which silver bristling hairs grew. One had a bottom lip that was so grotesquely swollen it hung down as far as its chest. Their arms were apelike, with long powerful arms that terminated either in clawed hands or a single thick tentacle that dripped thick, glistening mucus onto the grass.
        His eyes were drawn back to their eyes again. They burned with an uncanny fire. Indeed, they were brighter now, as if they'd woken to see someone they knew. They were fascinating creatures. Ellery was tempted to stay longer but he knew it was time to quit the daydream and go home.
        Already his mother must be wondering what had happened to him. Even though he was nineteen, he didn't like to cause her worry. Ever since the operation she looked so fragile and vulnerable. Her other sons didn't notice-or care. They still demanded their meals at the same time every day, and their shirts washed and ironed, ready for when they cruised away into the night to chase women in bars, or play pool until dawn.
        This was the neat trick. Ellery didn't like to end a daydream by quitting it as if it was a computer game. He'd evolved a process of exiting the world he imagined just like it was real and he was taking the proper route out of a three-dimensional territory. In his mind's eye he turned his back on the collection of immobile figures and walked swiftly back into the wood. Ahead of him ran a straight path between the trees.
        It led to a pair of towering elms that had been joined at the tips to form an archway. Beyond that, a path ran into a shadowed void. Ellery's imagination conjured an image of him sitting in the armchair in the middle of the Luxor's dance floor. This was the exit from his world.
        He'd walk through the archway and back to his daydreaming self that sat with eyes closed, hands and forearms resting on the two arms of the chair. Ellery had done this so often the transition from one world to another seemed real. He passed from the cool, ozone-rich air of the forest to the hot, dry air of the Luxor. From fresh plant aromas to the smell of dust. From exotic bird song to the sound of trucks and cars rumbling on the freeway in the distance. Beneath his