Face

by Tim Lebbon

  “Hello?” Megan.

  “You okay?”

  “Dan? Yes, I told you, I’m just cleaning up, it’s such-“

  “Not that,” he said, but then he thought what? What do I tell her? Can I really say that Brand is still around, that he phoned and threatened? Can I really ask her to lock the door again without scaring her? In her present curious condition it

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  may affect her hugely, drive her desire to leave this place into a need, and urgent insistence to quit now, go back to the city and sort out all the house-selling details, the jobs, Nikki’s schooling once they were there. Megan had been attacked before and Dan had not been there to help her. He would not have her live in fear for her safety again, not while he was around. Being scared was his job now.

  “What?” Megan said.

  “Don’t worry.” He glanced up as a car flashed by. A child waved from the back window but he was too distracted to respond. “Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon.”

  “Say hello to Brady,” she said, but her tone was loaded: suspicion; guilt. Fear?

  “Sure.” But Megan had already cancelled the call. Again, he should have turned around and gone straight back to her. They could talk through their concerns, sort things out … and if it meant mentioning Brand, so be it.

  Dan eased back out into the road and drove to the village. Brady’s antique shop sat in one of the little side-streets leading off the village square, so Dan parked in front of the library and climbed slowly from the Freelander, slamming the door, looking around, checking in the mirror, watching out for Brand all the time.

  He took out his mobile and dialled home again.

  It rang … and rang … and rang. No answer.

  He hurried past the front of the library and along the street to Brady’s shop, starting to breathe heavily now, wondering just what the

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  fuck he was doing, why wasn’t he at home with Megan when she needed him, and Nikki, her boyfriend was missing and she’d likely be interviewed by the police today, why wasn’t he at home?

  Dan stood outside the shop and stared in. Brady was sitting in an old rocking chair reading a crumpled paperback. He wondered why the hell he’d come here instead of the police station, but he couldn’t find an answer. Why not? didn’t seem sufficient.

  His phone rang in his hand and startled him, and his sudden movement caught Brady’s attention. Dan waved to him and tried to force a smile as he pressed the answer button. “Hello?”

  “Dad?” Nikki sounded sleepy. “Did a callback…”

  “You okay, Nikki?” He tried not to sound too desperate but his voice twitched at the last syllable.

  She didn’t seem to notice. “Fine. Tired. Too much cider.”

  “Nobody’s phoned?”

  Brady had opened the door and was looking out at Dan. It wasn’t often Dan visited him in the shop.

  “Dad, I honestly don’t know where he is.”

  For a few seconds Dan’s insides turned cold and his brain blanked. How does she know I’m talking about Brand? A terrible sense of not belonging overwhelmed him, an enveloping feeling of blackness and emptiness, and the certainty that he was insignificant to all but himself, and even then only as an idea of someone he had once

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  been. All his contacts were gone, all his ties to other people, his histories and ambitions and yearnings … and in that nothingness, fear had drained him completely and left him on his own.

  Then he realized that she was talking about Jeremy.

  “Police not been round yet?”

  “No, Dad. I’m tired.”

  “Don’t tell your mother I rang.”

  “Okay.” She disconnected without saying goodbye.

  “Dan,” Brady said. “You called the police then?”

  Dan could only stare at his friend, marshalling his thoughts and trying to make sense out of what Nikki had said, what Megan was doing, how he felt right now. Perhaps there was no sense, no rhyme or reason. Maybe it was all about being a family.

  “Dan?” Brady asked again.

  “Yeah. Sorry. No, haven’t called the police. Er … Nikki’s boyfriend has run away from home. His parents have called the old Bill, and they’ll probably be chatting to Nikki later. Perhaps I can mention something to them then.”

  “Your daughter been doing any unexpected gardening recently?” Brady raised his eyebrows, his normal reaction when his own coffin-cold humor offended even himself.

  Dan shrugged, couldn’t help smiling. “Well they did have a row, apparently. Little runt’s not good enough for her anyway.”

  “And who would be good enough for her? A

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  tall, dark, mysterious prince won’t be good enough in your books.”

  Dan waited to see if Brady was joking. He wasn’t; but then why should he? The only time he’d seen Brand was when he’d seen Dan almost brained him in the pub.

  “You’re not a dad,” Dan said. “She’s my little girl.” He shoved past Brady and into the shop, looking around at the confusion of furniture arranged into carefully orchestrated chaos. “I’ve got to look after her.”

  “So you haven’t called the police about this Brand character, so you’ve come into town to see them, but you couldn’t do it because you felt vaguely stupid going to the station and telling them you’d had a nasty phone call.”

  Dan shrugged. “It’s not really that. I just don’t see what they can do. They can’t arrest him for anything, even if they could find him.”

  Brady sat back down in his chair, groaning as his football-damaged knees clicked in sympathy with the aged timbers. “And if they could maybe you’re a bit worried about a GBH charge for your unorthodox pool strokes.”

  Dan ran his finger along the surface of an old pine table and inspected it for dust. Clean as an operating theatre. Brady was meticulous, that was for sure. “I don’t really know, mate. I need to sort it out on my own. I need to … protect my family.” It didn’t sound as melodramatic as he’d feared.

  Dan checked the surface of a magazine rack and found a fine sheen of dust, lying there like the myriad memories of its many owners. That’s

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  what Brady always said he sold: memories. Wrapped in the confines of old furniture, time passed through his shop and was sold for money, memories of the countless people who had sat in the chairs, walked with the sticks, kept their own little mementoes on shelves, hung clothes in wardrobes, made love in beds. If ever a place was going to be haunted, this shop was it. Full of lost times.

  “So what are you doing here while they’re still at home?”

  Dan wondered why so many of his memories had to be bad. He took out his phone and pressed recall. “I think I came here so you’d convince me to go to the police.”

  Brady went to say something, but Dan’s call was answered and he turned away.

  There was silence along the line. An occupied silence, expectant rather than empty. “Hello?” Dan whispered, and the tone of his voice startled Brady into standing. Dan looked at his friend and shook his head. Something’s wrong. “Megan? Nikki?”

  Brady caught his attention and raised his hands, palms up. What?

  “Anyone there?” Dan shook his head again.

  “They’re everywhere,” a voice said. It was low, husky, bled androgynous by static.

  “Megan?”

  “They’re everywhere, Dan. His spies are everywhere. I found one on my Bible, trying to sully it, dirtying it with its horrid legs. Looking at me. Seeing what I was reading.”

  “Megan, what’s wrong honey?”

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  “He there?” Brady asked, frozen into a statue by the fear in Dan’s voice.

  Dan shook his head, shrugged, covered the mouthpiece. “I don’t know.” He’d never heard himself sounding so desperate. Brady grabbed his coat and motioned Dan to leave the shop with him. “Megan!”

  “Dan, I’ve cleaned up as best I can but there are ways in. There are
always ways in. You can’t hide forever, can’t cover up all the gaps and spaces. If something wants in, it’s in. And I’ve tried shutting all the curtains but I can hear them out there in the garden-“

  “Who’s in the garden, Megan? Where’s Nikki?”

  “The birds. Singing and flitting around, eating the nuts and seed I put out for them. They spy and tell him what they see.

  “Tell who?”

  “Tell Brand. He’s still here. Dan, he’s watching me.”

  “Lock the doors,” Dan said, a fear realized actually seeming to inject some sort of calm. It was panic, he thought, but if this is how it manifested then he was glad of it. “Go upstairs with Nikki. Don’t open the door to anyone.”

  “Dan? You’ve seen him too, haven’t you?”

  “I’m coming home. Ten minutes.” He cancelled the call, feeling terrible as he did so. She sounded terrified. She sounded … mad.

  I’m going to make the next few days very, very long for you Brand had told him. Dan glanced at the clock and saw that it was still only eleven o’clock. It felt like lunchtime already.

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  “Oh shit, Brady, he’s been at Megan. She’s seen him and she thinks … those footsteps. Damn it!”

  “She thinks what?”

  “You know what she’s like. She thinks Brand’s the fucking devil and he’s spying on her. I’m going home. Call the police for me, mate, tell them there’s a stalker … a prowler, whatever, someone at my house. I want them there before me or with me.” He left the shop in a hurry, clapping Brady on the arm and giving him a strained smile. “I should never have left them alone.”

  “Give me a call when you get home,” his friend said, then Dan was out of the shop and running back to the Freelander. The phone banged his hip, tempting contact, but he knew that to stop and call home again would be to lose vital seconds.

  He hadn’t been there for her in the city.

  He would not let that happen again.

  My God, Dan thought, what the hell is she doing? Those spiders in the bag, the birds in the garden. The way she’d been bashing about in the cupboards, as if she was after not only the crawlies she could see, but those too small to be seen.

  Not for the first time, he realized that he was slightly afraid of his wife.

  Dan started the car and circled the village square, pushing his foot down and banging his head on the ceiling as he drove over the little stone bridge. As he left Tall Stennington and motored towards home, it began to snow.

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  Brady turns back to his antiques and breaths in deeply. He likes to be alone. He hates stress, and other people give him stress. Dan is one of his very best friends, but for the three minutes he was in the shop Brady was on edge, and driven very close to going over by Dan’s strange phone call. He is a good friend, yes, but Brady can do without other people’s problems.

  He rescues the phone from behind a pile of books he has yet to stock on his bookshelves. It’s an old manual dialler, something that came into the shop a year ago and which he just couldn’t find it in his heart to sell. A few modifications and it was his to use and enjoy. He likes old things. They are less confusing. His trade in old memories is most pleasing of all, because old memories can do no harm. What’s past is past.

  Brady dials the local police station, reading the number from a tatty phone book he keeps in a drawer. He wonders just what he’ll say when someone answers. How will he explain a threatening phone call to a friend, and his friend’s odd wife who seems to have developed a profound case of paranoia? And the pool cue incident … well, that could do without mentioning.

  The door opens and somebody rushes in behind him. It’s Dan; Brady can sense the panic in the air. The edgy tension of the room washes over him like a breath of heat from a sauna, his skin prickles and he turns to see what is troubling his friend now, his friend who has already resigned himself to going back to the city because his wife hates it so much out here …

  “What now … ?” Brady says, but the shadow

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  moves quickly. He does not see the face of the person who hits him.

  He falls, catching a table with his shoulder and bringing a stack of books down on top of him. Dust coats his throat with its dry grit, old memories drowning him. He hears a metallic ring as the phone is picked up from the table, and then there is a terrible, shocking impact as it connects with the back of his skull. His face is driven into the floor and pressed sideways, and he notices an old brass bookmark he lost years ago, little more than a vague hump in the dust beneath a writing desk he’s never managed to sell and which now-Another crash on his head, cheekbone now, something gives and his mouth is full of wet warmth, and some fucker is battering him, he hasn’t even heard the till being opened yet, it’s a manual one, won’t cause any trouble, they can even take the whole thing with them if they want-Thunk, again, old memories abandoning him now to sudden truths, it’s the moment that matters, not some unknown past and unknowable future, now, the here—

  Crash, onto his skull again.

  The here and now, and now, and now.

  The phone rings one more time, and then there is silence.

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  Chapter Twelve

  Megan stared at the phone in her hand as it emitted its dead monotone. Dan has seen him too. She could not understand that, could not comprehend how or why Brand had been at Dan as well … and even less, why her husband had never told her.

  “Everywhere, they’re everywhere,” she muttered. She thought of Dan staring at her as she cleansed the house of Brand’s minions, crushing them sightless, denying him access to her family.

  But the birds were singing this morning, and she’d seen a couple of squirrels on the old apple tree before she closed the curtains. Now she knew that the curtains would never be enough. Apples were supposed to contain some sort of power-they had magical connotations-but those were pagan thoughts and Megan lifted her

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  face and closed her eyes and prayed to God for the millionth time that day. She asked for lots of things, all of them special. No simple smile upon me, Jesus today. Now was a time for desperate pleas for help, calls for His merciful intervention to protect them from whatever devil had been let loose in their midst.

  Until now, she had never seen anyone but her husband in her husband’s eyes.

  Putting the phone down on its cradle shut off the tone and gave her back the quiet. But only partial quiet; there were still sounds from outside as the world stared in, relaying its message back to him, telling him what she was doing and listening in for him, wherever he was. …

  He … him … that devil.

  Megan snatched at the corner of the curtain covering the front door and glazed side-screen. She lifted it slightly, hoping to surprise whatever foulness existed in the garden into revealing itself. But she saw only the garden, flower borders and bare rose bushes already perking up as spring hinted at itself, the lawns dark green and unkempt and glistening with dew, the apple tree standing silent sentinel at the fence, branches alive with birds as they fed and fluttered to and fro.

  And some of them watched the house. She could see a blue tit sitting on a thin branch near the top of the tree, ignoring the profusion of nuthangers to stare at the house. Its little head jerked slightly left, slightly right as it took everything in.

  Megan felt the bird’s eyes upon her, even from

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  that distance. She went cold, her skin stretched and tingled, as if Brand had walked over her grave seconds after burying her there himself. She dropped the curtain and backed into the hall, half-expecting the doorway to darken with his presence.

  She couldn’t understand why Dan had left her alone, not if he had seen Brand. Surely he knew what Brand was? Surely he knew how dangerous he could be? And yet he’d left the house, allowing the monster access any time he wanted. He’d left his family alone.

  Megan was good at guilt but it was mostly her own, propagated and nourished b
y her devotion to God, the certainty that she was far from perfect acting as the driving force behind her worship. Her own sense of imperfection, the acknowledgment of her own sins, the sullied soul she called home, all contributed toward the way she was and how she looked at others. Sometimes she despised the fact that her daughter had not accepted Jesus. The girl shunned this chance at light to live a grey life, renouncing God through apathy. Sometimes, the worst of times, she hated Nikki for this.

  But she hated herself most of all. She should have raised Nikki with God in her heart, but she had failed. Therein lay her worst guilt, a sense that she had failed her daughter and, more dreadfully, God. Failure was a theme with her family, it seemed. Dan had failed her. Ironically she loved him for it more because it had effectively destroyed the man she had married, leaving a redemptive, silent, melancholic person in his place.

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  A love born of pity, but love nonetheless.

  If he failed them again, however, she thought that pitying love could easily turn to a heartfelt hate. And he was her husband. She did not want to hate him.

  “Where are you Dan?” she whined, sinking slowly to her knees in the hallway. “Don’t leave me like this again.” Already she could feel her fears beginning their own ethereal assault.

  She stood quickly. God urged her to her feet and into the living room, told her to check the locks on the windows and doors. Protect yourself, don’t submit… God helps those who help themselves. She crossed the room and pulled the curtains aside, noticing that it had started snowing in the seconds it had taken her to come from the hallway. It hadn’t been forecast, it had been a cool, clear day, but here it was. A few errant flakes at first, but they were fat and fluffy, settling on a fence post, the crazy-paving around the edge of the garden, the lawn, then closer still to the house. Megan actually watched the snow thicken and advance across the garden until it struck the house itself. Several flakes landed on the timber sill outside the window, but did not melt: