Face

by Tim Lebbon

  “It’s not that,” Megan said, but she would not-could not-elaborate. It’s the face at the window, the grin, those scars and their hidden meaning, the very fact that he’s even still here.

  A shadow passed by the next window along. Megan looked up, even though she really did not wish to. There was nothing there but the spider, hanging from the frame on a thread of silk, its legs kicking at the air as if swimming.

  His hand touched me, she thought, remembering the sensation of the spider brushing her leg. Much too hard to be contact from the spider’s legs … much too personal.

  Megan stood, scrambled over three rows of chairs, took off a shoe, waited until the spider had passed the glass and had bare plaster behind it, and then crushed it with one slap. There was a slight sucking noise as she took the shoe away to view the remains. It was little more than a stain.

  Someone shouted outside. Or perhaps it was a crow cawing in the trees beside the church. Either way, she hoped it hurt.

  “I have to go,” she whispered, “I’m due back in work.”

  They tried to stop her, told her she needed

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  cleaning up. Megan wondered whether it was concern for her or the mess that needed mopping. She did not care about that, not now. Maybe later she’d return. Just before opening the outside door she turned to the cross, closed her eyes and muttered one last prayer. He always listened. He always helped. He would see her home safely that night.

  Megan walked back through the village to the office. The scent of vomit accompanied her, diluted by the breeze but still there. She should really go home. She could phone for a taxi, go home, clean up and spend an afternoon reading or cooking a meal, the things that always relaxed her. But behind all these thoughts was the fear of being alone, and her Honest voice reminded her of this. Dan would not arrive home until after six that evening, and Nikki could saunter in at any time between then and midnight.

  She did not want to be alone in the house.

  If they lived back in the city there would be plenty of people around, but not out here. And now that she knew for sure that Brand was still around, her fear was very, very real.

  The road twisted and turned between houses, high stone walls and car hardstandings. Every time she saw someone that was not Brand the relief was intense. She absolutely refused to glance over her shoulder. She tried to tread softly so that she would hear footsteps if they approach from behind. She hugged her coat around her, partly to cover the vomit stains, partly to provide

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  some sense of warm safety that was a hangover from childhood.

  A curtain twitched to her left but when Megan looked it was still, not even the shadow of a watcher behind it. She hurried on. The sun was warm on her neck although the air was cold. Maybe someone was looking at her there, heating her skin with his gaze …

  She looked back at last, unable to help herself. The street was deserted apart from a couple of birds pecking at tiny dead things on the road. One of them looked up and started hopping her way. Megan hurried on.

  The road opened into the village square and there were people there, old and young, wandering from shop to shop, others hurrying back to work. Magenta’s stood in one corner, music and smoke squeezed out by the throng of teenagers. Maybe Nikki would be in there? Megan would like to see her now, but the idea of approaching her daughter and her friends covered in vomit and looking a mess … she’d never be forgiven.

  So she turned right and left the square quickly, passing by the blocks of council houses and heading for the office. The road here was straighter, but there were alleys and driveways and nooks and crannies, a hundred different places from where Brand could be watching, a dozen corners from which he could emerge. She looked down at her feet, counting the steps, each number taking her closer to work.

  “God help me”, she muttered, “Jesus, see me safe.” He heard. He listened. He took her back

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  to the office and into the arms of Charlotte, young vain Charlotte who sat with her for the next three hours. Then, around five o’clock, Megan decided it was time to call a taxi and go home.

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  The Book of Lies

  What you see is what you get.

  Never has a worse lie been uttered, never have words been formed into such a meaningless, vacuous sentence. Seeing is believing, there’s another, but it’s not quite as bad or misleading. You can see and believe, but often the truth will out when more is known, or told, or gleaned from the blackness of lies.

  What you see is what you get…

  You can know someone as well as you know yourself (which, sometimes, is not as well as you think … more of which later), but seeing them is not knowing them, smelling or tasting or touching them does not let you into their soul, their core, that place where they are what they are, no matter how much you, or they, or anyone tries to change them. You are all blueprints,

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  changeable but stolid in their foundations. You are what you are. You certainly are not what you see.

  There are eye complaints that cause hallucinations; drugs that inspire visions; mental states that change what is seen to something different, something not there when you think it is; the poison of a certain frog’s skin can blind; distilled potato spirits can induce sightlessness amongst those who think they are seeing all. States of being which are lies, where sight is being devious and truth is more elusive that a glance here, a nod there. Because truth sometimes wishes to elude. That is its nature. Sometimes, truth itself is a lie.

  You may see a bird in the street and know it’s a bird, but who can tell what it’s thinking, or who is thinking for it? You can see a spider going about its gruesome business-paralysing, injecting, liquefying-but are you sure it’s only a spider? Can you say for sure that it does not have its own arachnid thoughts about you?

  So what are you getting? Not what you’re seeing.

  So often you are getting far, far more.

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  Chapter Six

  Brand had been on his mind all day. That sense of victory he’d had when he left the bar-the bar and that bastard stranger, squirming in his own blood-still existed, but it had slipped sideways into unease. Something was not quite right. Dan sensed people smiling behind his back, and whenever he blinked the darkness behind his eyes was filled with brief images of Brand, Brady and Justin playing pool together, laughing, talking about what a fool Dan was.

  He knew it had not happened. But he also knew that it could have. Who, after all, would ever tell him?

  He’d tried to throw himself into his work, but whenever he used a pen or a keyboard his hand hurt, the bruises flexing and driving memory-spikes into his brain along with the pain.

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  Flashbacks haunted his day, a slide projector’s screen spliced into his head forcing unsought images into his mind’s eye. Some he was pleased, even happy with: Brand kneeling on the floor; blood glistening; Brady’s eyes as he watched Dan leave. Others-darker, hazier, older-he did not welcome so much: Megan covered with her own blood, her eyes white and wide and shocked; Brand in the back of the car with Nikki, his hand creeping slowly across the seat towards his daughter’s thigh.

  Nikki smiling back at the stranger.

  Some were memory, others twisted versions of memory, and although Dan was certain he knew which were which they still disturbed him greatly. He had taken lunch in the pub in the village square with a few colleagues, but there was a pool table there and a chirpy barman, and all it did was to remind him of Bar None.

  It was not until mid-afternoon that Dan began to realize why he could not keep the incident from his mind. Over and above the extraordinariness of what had happened, and the bullish satisfaction at beating someone in a fight, and the sense of achievement he felt about defending his family’s honor, was the overwhelming certainty that there was still some distance to go. Things were incomplete. He may have given Brand a lashing but he was still here. Dan was positive of that. See
you around, the voice had whispered as he left the pub. He knew it had not been Brand uttering those words; it could not have been. Perhaps he’d just been warning himself that things like this rarely ended so suddenly.

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  Bastards like Brand had to be told two or three times until they saw the truth.

  The final hour in work dragged by. He knew what he was doing and where he was going next. Doubt had vanished, replaced by a plot with a grim certainty as its ending. Grim, but satisfying. That comforted him. He liked to have a plan.

  Dan passed through Tall Stennington on his way home. He loved this little place. It was dark now, but that just added a new sheen to the village, the cosy warmth of lit windows spilling into the dark and holding it back. Streetlamps had been installed only recently, though their light was fragmented by waving branches, hitting the pavement like shards from a shattered mirror. Even the industrial units and offices looked appealing at night, adding a shiny modernity to the village that leant more emphasis to its olde worlde charm.

  He passed by the ugly church which Megan attended thrice-weekly. It looked huge and foreboding in the dark, its steeply pitched roof casting a massive silhouette against the sky as if striving for God, even when empty. Dan had never been inside.

  Fifteen minutes later he pulled up in front of their garage. The house was dark and silent. Dan was pleased. Nobody home, no one to ask what he was doing in the woods, in the dark, on his own. Good. He had something to finish in there, someone to look for, and it would not be easily explained. Even if he told Megan that he was feeling pretty good about himself for the first

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  time in years, the reason would not impress her. I beat up someone in a pub, darling, and now I feel great, now I feel as though I could take on the world. And you know what? I did it all for you.

  No, nothing good there. He could disguise it as protecting his family but this was, in reality, all for himself. It was for the little boy who’d been constantly harassed and bullied in school, mentally at first, then physically when the thugs decided that verbal lashings were no longer enough fun. He still had the scar on his knee from when they’d pushed him into a ditch, thrown dog shit at him, kicked him back down when he tried to climb out. A rusty shopping trolley had added insult to injury after they left him to his own devices, slashing at his leg as he scrambled up the slippery slope to the footpath. It was not the only slippery slope he had been on … the bullying had driven him deeper into himself, tying him to his home more and more, afraid to go out but even more afraid to stay hidden. He knew that was the coward’s way, but he’d never been a hero. He knew that to hide himself away would be to let them win, but he still had to go to school. He lost either way.

  He’d been an ugly and awkward kid, so lacking in confidence that he spent hours in front of the mirror trying to see someone else looking back. He thought that by will alone he could change that face, clear up the acne and give the hair some sort of life and style, encourage poise and confidence simply by willing it at his own image. The mirror turns left to right, he used to

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  think, but why not up to down? Then he’d answer himself out loud: It does turn up to down, and back to front as well, because in the mirror I’m someone different. In the mirror, I’m someone who’d fight back.

  That night in Bar None, his mirror-self had manifested at long last. Perhaps it was guilt-more likely desperation, and eternal anger at himself for not being there for Megan-but whatever had finally turned him inside had made him realize that there were victories to be had in this world. They just need taking.

  The house was dark, the woods were darker, but Dan was going in there to make sure that bastard Brand had gone for good. To ensure that he had done the best he could to protect his family. And to grab that victory for himself, one more time. That was all he really wanted.

  Dan took a torch and a baseball bat from the garage, parked the Freelander and set off across the garden. He passed the dead apple tree and climbed the fence just where those damn footprints had seemed to vault it. The field between their garden and the woods was common ground, and so it had never been subjected to any agricultural preening. Clumps of shrubs and trees were dotted here and there, like hairy moles on a giant’s rugged face. The grasses were long and rough. Seed pods hitched a ride on his trousers as he approached the woods. The ground smelled damp and his shoes squished in the grass, a dirty water rising up over the leather if he stood still for too long. He carried the bat in one hand-he’d bought it the month they moved

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  here, with a vague idea that he, Nikki and Megan could do some pitching in the fields, but it had never been used-and the torch in the other. The bat swished through the long grass as he swung it, reminding him of childhood walks in the country when he simply had to have a stick to swat at nettles and brambles, the longer the better, and sometimes it would become his favorite stick and he’d take it home and use it again and-The woods were dark as hell. It was almost five-thirty and the sun had truly left him. He felt his home behind him, watching and wondering just what he thought he was doing. The other house stood dark and lifeless. When he’d come home he’d been pleased at that, because he didn’t want his neighbors to see him plodding across the muddy field like some madman. Now it made him lonely. He was the only one around, no one else within shouting distance, only him, the woods … and Brand? Was he in there? Dan really didn’t have any reason to believe he was anywhere nearby, in fact he began to wish that maybe he had scurried away already.

  Dark, the whisper of water dropping onto its carpet of leaves, breathing out the staleness of damp rot, the woods bade him enter.

  He turned on the torch. The light did not penetrate as far as he’d hoped, even though the trees were leafless, many of the shrubs likewise. He followed its beam between trunks, keeping to the vague path that ran through the woods to the lake on the other side. There were night sounds in here already, secret whispers he never heard

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  during the day because sunlight brought so much more background noise. Now, the calls and cries and rustles were much more individualized, as if presented purely for his benefit. He smiled in the dark and the confidence rose within him. Brand was not in here. No way. He’d be long gone by now, tail between his legs, a split-egg bruise throbbing on the back of his head as a reminder that he couldn’t just intrude into someone’s personal space, talk about their family as if he owned them.

  No. He was gone.

  Dan realized that he’d been stepping quietly. He started stomping louder, brushing against bushes and walking faster. No need not to warn whatever lived in here of his approach. He’d seen foxes, badgers and deer, as well as dozens of species of birds, and he had nothing to fear from any of them. He moved the torch lower to try to see beneath bushes, searching for the animals that would be so scared of him, hiding away, cowering just as Brand should be were he here.

  Dan surprised himself by giggling.

  A shadow moved the wrong way. All noise ceased as Dan froze, one foot raised to step over a small fallen tree. He looked left where he’d seen the strange movement, shone the torch that way, succeeding only in allowing the same thing to happen to his right. He spun around that way as well. Movement. Surely more than shadows dancing with the torch, but while trying to convince himself, doubt took root. The quicker he turned to and fro, the more the shadows slipped behind trees, sunk to the ground, hiding away

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  after allowing him the briefest glimpse of something wrong from the corner of his eye. And was that whispering he could hear? Sibilant plotting or water dripping through the trees? If it was water it fell in startling symphony. It was telling him to be afraid, though its own voice was fearless.

  He backed away from the darkness he would have stepped into next, had he kept going. Black eyes watched him, so many that they formed night. His torch flickered and dimmed. The reduction in intensity allowed him to see further, realising that brash light m
ade his surroundings darker. He switched it off, but only momentarily. Better an oasis of light than a desert of dark. He reversed faster, feeling the path behind him with his heels and only noticing that he’d left it when he backed into a tree. A cool touch between his shoulders, the kiss of a bare branch against his scalp.

  Calm, he thought, calm, there’s no one here, just the torch playing with shadows. Again he turned off the torch briefly, only to see variations of dusk and dark dancing between the trees. The stream gurgled over to his right, a jaunty song, timeless, unafraid of the night. As he should be. As he had never been. The darkness was a source of his own inadequacy, a hiding place for defeats known and yet to be known.

  Not so soon, he thought. Please, not so soon after something so positive, a victory so total. He could stay and delay the inevitable-a panicked exit from the woods, the tang of fear emanating from him, his eyes wide and his clothes torn-or

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  he could go now, still in possession of some of his bluster, keeping one single thing in mind: the impact of the pool cue on the back of Brand’s head. Smashing those foul thoughts. Sending a Shockwave through the bastard’s ideas about his family, and shattering them.

  Gripping the torch until his fingers hurt, Dan hurried back through the woods. He was sure he was going the right way. He had to be going the right way so badly that he convinced himself there was no doubt. Keeping the beam aimed at the ground just before him he refrained from running, breathing loud and deep to try to mask any sounds that may be about to come from behind him, or to the side. He was fleeing, true, but it was an orderly retreat.

  By the time he reached the edge of the woods he was certain that he had been following someone the whole time.