Face

by Tim Lebbon

  “Do you mind taking this elsewhere?” the librarian said.

  “She’s not fucking him anymore!” one of the watchers said.

  Nikki walked away. She had to because she didn’t want a scene, even though there’d already been one she didn’t want it made worse, and there was something very wrong in that room now, something warm and clammy that had nothing to do with central heating and nerves and the red-hot vibes of hate and embarrassment, and hatred for being embarrassed, rising up from Jazz. Everyone stood still and watched her go, but she knew she was being followed.

  “Nikki!” Jazz hissed.

  She opened the door and heard him scrabbling to his feet to chase her. There were amused giggles from the pupils, a whispered reprimand from the librarian. Those flies, she thought, but already she’d rationalized it away. They were there before, just disturbed from behind the blinds by all the commotion. Lazy with the cold draft from the window, sluggish in the air, crawling on the sill was all they could do, avoiding their dead dried cousins. …

  Jazz shouted something else-something nasty and sick and imbued with threat, trying to save face in front of those amused observers-but Nikki let the door swing shut and she made no effort to hear anymore. She hurried downstairs and wandered the corridors for a few minutes, passing but not seeing other pupils and teachers.

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  She felt someone following her, keeping out of sight, matching her footsteps in an effort to avoid detection. Whoever it was kept quiet. Jazz would have been shouting.

  Lunch was ended by the bell and Nikki made her way to the theatre for her afternoon English lecture. The school was buzzing now as pupils and teachers went to their next lessons, and she risked a few glances behind her along corridors and through glass doors. Amongst so many people, she saw no one.

  The teacher talked them through the play and they discussed honest Puck, and Nikki would never see Jazz again.

  That evening, Jazz rides home from school.

  He’s a seething jumble of emotions; an embarrassed lovelorn teenager with a hard-on, shameful plans for revenge clouding his vision as the motorbike rumbles through the lanes. He sees Nikki’s face as she turned and elbowed him in the head, and his heart drops and his limbs loosen at his feelings for her, her beauty. He blinks and sees her face again, grits his teeth, wants to punch it, needing to hit his anger into her because she embarrassed him so badly. But of course he never will, even if he does find the chance. Jazz has never been violent or abusive, but perhaps because of his inadequacy he is more aware than most of those who are. People will hear about today. They’ll laugh behind his back, smirk because he’d been decked by a girl, call him a pussy … and he will mist away in their estimations like breath on a windowpane. He can

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  feel himself changing now, as if the speed of his angry ride is tearing bits of him away, flipping them to the wind to let the air eat them up.

  He is not concentrating enough on the road. It’s not a particularly fast bike, but he can wind it up to sixty along these country lanes if he tries, and today he really tries. It’s fast enough. He’s usually such a careful driver, but some things need more than care to avoid them. Some things need an incredible stroke of luck, or reactions faster than light, or God on your side. And sometimes even that is not enough.

  He rounds a bend and sees something standing in the road. For an instant it’s just a shadow thrown down by a tree, but as Jazz approaches the shape solidifies, coalesces out of nothing into something … into a man. A tall man with long dark hair and a smile that should look pleasant on his face, should look welcoming. Perhaps it’s the speed of his approach, or Jazz’s confused state of mind … or the ugly, bleeding wounds that hide the man’s expression along with the truth.

  That smile just looks rotten.

  Jazz shouts. The noise explodes in his helmet but barely leaks out. He squeezes the brakes and knocks down two gears, the motor screams, Jazz screams again, the man opens his mouth as if parodying Jazz’s shock …

  The bike swerves and leaves the road with Jazz still astride it. They leap the ditch and the bike forces its way straight through the hedge, motor still whining, startled birds and last year’s dead leaves exploding into the air on either side.

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  Jazz is left in the undergrowth like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  Shock steals his breath, his comprehension, and for a few seconds he can only remember the guy’s face as he skidded by at almost forty miles per hour. His face, and how much he looked like someone Jazz had never known and could never know. How much he looked like no one.

  Then the pain kicks in.

  Decelerating from forty to nil in the space of a hedge has virtually merged him with the shrubs and bushes, making a mockery of his protective leathers and driving leafless twigs and shards of split wood through into his flesh, knocking bones aside like so much play-dough and embedding themselves in organs, stomach, skull, bowels.

  He’s no one, Jazz thinks, because it is all he can think. It’s all the pain allows. He tries to breathe but it does not work. He opens his eyes but he can see nothing because there are twigs piercing both eyeballs.

  He’s no one, he thinks again.

  Hands touch his shoulders, reach up to his neck, down his back to his legs. A fist closes tenderly over his crotch.

  “A waste of space,” a voice says from out of nowhere.

  Help, Jazz thinks, and it is neither a request, nor a statement. He thinks of Nikki but all he sees is the laughing, bleeding face of the shadow that should have never become a man.

  And then he knows that there can be no help because hands start pounding at him, pushing

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  him deeper into the hedge, twisting him further onto the branches. He opens his mouth but a hand covers it, holding in the scream. Making him die in silence.

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  The Book of Lies

  Chance does not kill, otherwise what chance would anyone have? Chancers would be killers, media games of chance gladiatorial bloodlettings of epic proportions instead of the mindless exercises in mass-control they really are. The horses? While they’re running the minds of the gamblers are not … their imaginations, their views of the worlds are dead, but they are not dead themselves. No, chance is a duller, not a killer. Believe in chance … rely on it … and you remove yourself from the world stage. No need to kill you. You’re nothing. Ironic, then, that chance’s very arbitrariness makes life one long game of chance, and a game that kills is meaningless and … unfair. And saying that life is unfair is no defence, because life is impartial. What can be fairer than that?

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  Luck does not kill. Where chance is sought, luck is possessed. Good luck and bad luck may well be inherited, genetically or created by circumstance, but they merely form opportunities for chance to kick in and change lives, for good or bad. Good luck is a blessing, bad luck a curse, but only in the perspective of a human. Again, nature is impartial. Luck is luck is luck. It doesn’t end lives. It doesn’t need to. Lives do that.

  But fate, now … fate kills. Fate knows all about you, it knows your fears and your weaknesses and your confidences and strengths, and it can be ready for all of them when it decides that the time is right. It can move you like a pawn in a terrible game of chess, sacrifice you for the good of others, drop you from a building you should never have been inside, give you a disease that no one has ever heard of. Luck and chance are impartial. Fate is active. It picks on people. Almost as if it thinks about things too much …

  Fate can be standing in a road where nothing or no one could or should be standing. It can put a cat in a trap, but how do you know it’s there without looking? And without looking, how can you tell whether the cat is alive or dead?

  And fate always gets an invite to parties.

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  Chapter Eight

  Megan remained home that day. Dan rang the office for her and spoke to Charlotte, told her that Megan was still feeling sick,
and Charlotte sent get-well wishes for him to pass on. His wife merely nodded and smiled because she knew she should. It felt forced. Her mouth was a lump of metal she was trying to bend into an impossible shape.

  Dan fussed and made her breakfast and they both kissed Nikki as she left for school. When they were alone he sat quietly and looked into the half-empty cup he held in his hands. There was no truth in there, Megan knew, just cold coffee. But still he stared, his forehead lined with thought, eyes half closed. His knuckles were white. He didn’t know how to say whatever it is he needed to say.

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  “I’m going to the loo,” Megan said, rising from the table and groaning at the pain in her stomach. She must have pulled a muscle yesterday while she was being sick.

  “What were you dreaming about last night?” Dan asked. Megan was almost relieved. If that was all he’d been struggling with she needn’t be worried, needn’t concern herself about Brand and whether Dan suspected. Not that there was anything to suspect. Or feel guilty about, other than lies.

  “I don’t really recall,” she lied again. “Animals, I think.”

  “You were batting your hands around and hitting me.”

  “I’ve already said sorry.”

  Dan looked up at her and smiled. “I’m not after an apology, honey. I’m just worried about

  you.”

  “Dan, I feel rough. Must have been something I ate, or something. Haven’t you ever had bad dreams when you’re ill?” She leaned against the wall and shifted until the pain in her stomach lessened. She had to get to the bathroom, just to check one more time.

  “Yes, I have,” he said. “It’s just … since you said you wanted to go back to the city, it’s all been a bit weird.”

  Megan looked at Dan, her husband, her love, and she suddenly wanted to tell him everything. Not only the stuff about Brand and yesterday and how it had messed her up, but the idea that he was around all the time, watching her vicariously … that bird, that spider … mad but true, it had

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  to be true. And she wanted to hug Dan and ask him not to be so worried for her because God was on her side. He had kept Brand from the church yesterday when he could so easily have come inside and hurt her-

  (the cat, what about the cat, crucified on the floor of the church, legs snapped back?)

  -and there was nothing to fear when God was on your side. He had been looking over her shoulder as Brand reached out and grabbed her and touched her breast. He had seen him, and He had marked him. Megan was good. She had nothing to fear.

  She wanted to hug her husband and tell him not to be so scared and guilty and not to torture himself about that terrible attack that had drawn them out of the city and into the wilds, the wilderness, this place where she knew no one and where no one knew, or wanted to know her. Because Dan thought about it every minute of the day. It was plain in his eyes, obvious in his voice when he spoke to her, evident in his tensed body as they made love. He hated himself for not being there to help her. Ironically, she loved him more for that.

  But she could not tell him any of this. He may ask, but she could not say. Because she had to protect herself and her family. And silence, as her mother had always taught her, was the best protection.

  “Honey, I feel rough,” she said. “I need the loo. Hey, don’t worry.” She turned and left him staring after her, feeling his gaze on her back and all those unsaid things hanging like a barrier

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  between them, stretching now as she widened the space, more impenetrable for that.

  She went to the loo, sat down, then had to stand and lean over the pan as she was sick. When she saw movement in there, something as big as her thumbnail with clawed legs and a curved stinger, she closed her eyes and flushed the mess away.

  Dan thumped on the door. “You okay, Megan?”

  She mumbled a yes. Then she stripped her bathrobe and nightdress and ran her hands across her body. She was looking for her dreamwounds, knowing that they could not possibly be there but desperate to check again, for the third time that morning. She touched her ears and nose and mouth, looked at her fingers, no blood. She squeezed her nipples and ran her hands down between her legs, from the front and behind, checking her palms and fingers for blood, seeing none. She twisted as far around as she could to look at her back, just to make sure they weren’t hiding their entry and exit holes there. Nothing. As she knew there would be … nothing.

  Nothing but the thing she had vomited up.

  Megan closed her eyes and muttered a frantic prayer, covering as many of her orifices as she could with two hands, keeping things out or holding them in.

  God would look after her.

  After Dan had left for work-again kissing Megan and mentioning his concerns, again turning

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  away with a frown when she told him that everything was all right-she walked from room to room without really knowing what she was looking for. She checked the front door to make sure it was bolted from the inside, then the windows in the living room, dining room, study, kitchen and utility room. Then the back door in the kitchen-opening and closing the bolts several time just to feel the metallic certainty of them-until she started on the front door again. She looked out of every window at the day outside, the morning chill held at bay by the central heating and double glazing. No sounds, no breezes, no smells wafted in. She may as well have been in another world. And that alien world outside was as still and peaceful-looking as ever, with the neighboring houses shut up and silent, the woods drawn back further from the house than they had seemed whilst snow-laden, the surrounding scrub-land offering few hiding places for anyone wishing to approach the house unseen. There was the main lane, and that was it. No opportunities for creeping up on her. No ditches, no hedges or secret tunnels …

  He was not out there, because if he had been she would have known about it already. She wondered whether he really needed to be out there to see her, to hear her or taste her. She ran her hands through her hair, sure that she would shake woodlice and fleas onto the laminate floor in the hallway, but apart from the night-time knots it was clean and clear.

  Megan thought briefly about the thing in her vomit, but it had been a piece of food from last

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  night, given life by a hangover from her nightmare. Things don’t live inside you, not things like that. Her stomach twinged at the thought. She could not decide whether the pain was real or imaginary.

  In each room she searched for something as she checked the locks. She was not sure what, only that she would know it when she saw it. For now she did not see it, did not know it. In a way that made her more nervous. Confronting dangers she could see or sense would be preferable to living in fear of something she could not. God was with her but sometimes, she knew, pain and fear were His way.

  She spent the first hour after Dan had left patrolling the house, walking from room to room downstairs and up, locking, unlocking, relocking doors and windows, staring at the still scene outside, wondering all the while just what Brand had wanted yesterday. The more she thought about it the more sour the taste in her mouth. He had scared her very badly and she resented that. It made her angry that he could come between Dan and her, because that’s exactly what the stranger had done. She had dreamed badly last night and lied this morning. Now she was acting like some paranoid, disturbed idiot, reading more into things than she possibly could or should.

  Megan went back downstairs to the kitchen, made a cup of tea and continued lying to herself. Talking out loud helped perpetuate the idea that she had been talking and thinking herself into a panic, rather than reacting to simple fact and

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  actions. Brand had threatened her, but with effort she did not see it that way. He had scared her, but with a little bit of thought and some creative screening in her mind, all his frightening aspects were hidden behind his superficial appearance: that blank, strangely unattractive visage he presented; those gruesome scars. By the time she
’d finished her second cup of tea she was almost feeling better. She was aware that she was constructing lie upon lie to protect herself, just as she had to hide herself from Dan, but she was so desperate for comfort that lies seemed better than the truth. However elusive she was making it.

  And as she finished pouring her third cup of tea she heard the footsteps upstairs.

  A daddy long-legs fluttered down from the ceiling and alighted on the back of her hand. Megan jerked in surprise, knocking the cup to the floor. It shattered and spilled tea like brown blood. The long-legs remained where it was, its touch barely felt but its weight more than she could bear.

  He was watching. Seeing her with whatever multi-faceted eyes this thing had. Viewing a dozen images of her, each one of them changing as he did more to haunt and hunt.

  The footsteps again, across the landing, nudging one of the wardrobe doors in her bedroom.

  “Oh God,” she whispered, bringing her right hand down to enclose her left, feeling the flighty tickle of the insect’s wings for the split second before she exerted enough pressure to kill it. She ground her palm against her knuckles, wishing

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  she could crush it so much that it would not be there when she looked.

  “Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone …” Here, on her own, she found that the make-believe no longer worked. She could only lie to herself so much before the truth began laughing in her face.

  The thing was a smudge on her skin. Banging from upstairs again, random and seemingly without design. She felt the insect’s insides as a breeze kissed them cool on her hand. Her heart thudded, breath came in short painful gasps, tears blurred her vision. It’s not like him, she thought. Running around, banging, not like him. He’d be more … composed.