The Faceless

by Simon Bestwick

  She raised a hand for quiet, not looking at him, not looking at anyone. Stakowski fell silent.

  The pink romper suit lay at the centre of the Black Sun. Empty, of course. Renwick stood over it, looking down, not speaking, not moving, for nearly a minute. Then she crouched to inspect it more closely, reached a gloved hand out to touch it. Martyn found himself stepping backwards. This felt too close, too personal.

  “She’s looking for blood,” Anna whispered.

  Martyn looked back at Renwick. If she’d heard Anna she didn’t react. At last, she stood up and let out a long breath.

  “Roseanne Trevor?” asked Stakowski.

  “No name tag. But she had a pink romper on when she went missing.”

  “Fuckers,” Crosbie said. Even Skelton had his jaw clenched, so tight Martyn could see the muscles jumping in his cheek.

  “Take it easy, folks,” said McAdams. “Alastair. Deep breaths, mate. Mind on the job.” But it still took him two attempts to get his pistol back in its holster.

  Renwick stared down at the suit, not speaking; Stakowski coughed. He stepped in close, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Ma’am? What now?”

  “What now?” Renwick looked up, took a deep breath. “Bag and tag the evidence, Sergeant. Then we finish up and move on. They’re either in E Block or the Warbeck building. So we search those: every room, every corner, every inch.” Her voice was quiet, clipped and level. “And we find these bastards.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  E BLOCK STOOD black against the bleached, washed-out sky. Its doors were battered and dented; old damage, from the night St. John Dace had died. Her great-grandfather’s face, the eyes staring into that terrible distance. Fighting to smile on Nan’s wedding day. He let them out, then locked the doors.

  She’d tried a few drugs at university. Nothing serious, dabbling. A joke she’d heard: there’s a time and place for everything – it’s called college. She’d smoked weed – who hadn’t? – sampled psilocybin, speed and, once, LSD. Lying on a couch in a friend’s rented house, she’d seen a tree outside the window, backlit by pre-dawn light. Just for a second, the branches had shivered and changed, morphed into four cartoon warthogs peering in through the window. Only for a second, and then it was a tree again, but she’d lain there for almost an hour gazing at it, rapt, waiting for it to shift again. Since D Block, this felt more and more like a less benign version of that experience. At any moment the naked rowan trees threatened to shift into the mangled shapes from the D Block corridor.

  We know it. We all know it. Whatever’s waiting isn’t human, or even alive. Bullets will be worse than useless. We can’t harm them, but they can harm us. And yet we go. Like sheep to the slaughter, out of duty, obligation or simple herd instinct.

  Like the Kempforth Pals, again, or Nan’s father at Passchendaele. Anna’s hand slipped into her jacket pocket, found Nan’s cross. It gave her comfort, just for now, it couldn’t hurt. And there was Mary. If any threat to Mary came from here and it took Anna’s life to end it, so be it. The calm with which she accepted that surprised her. And she walked on.

  Just for a second, the bedraggled lawns around the building were populated with thin, dark figures, some shuffling, some gazing, motionless, into some unfathomable distance. For an instant, heads turned towards her. But she blinked, and the grounds were empty.

  Most of the ground floor was the canteen, vast and empty. Anna couldn’t see any sign of life. A faint clatter from upstairs. Stakowski put a hand on his gun.

  “Frank,” Renwick whispered. “Let’s check upstairs.”

  Skelton and Renwick led the way; the rest of the group followed, the civilians within the protective ring of Skelton’s men.

  Upstairs: two floors of dusty, peeling corridors, empty and lightless; doors that gaped open into bare, narrow rooms. Wayland and Crosbie went into one, moving out along opposing walls. Wayland covered the wall opposite him, plus the ceiling; Crosbie covered the other wall and the floor.

  The same exercise was played out in the other rooms, one by one. They were the same, at first glance, as in the other blocks. But then you started noticing things. The restraints hanging from the rusted bedframes. Dark stains on this wall; scratches scored by jagged fingernails on that one. On another wall, words cut out of newsprint: IN HERE THE BLACK SUN SHINES. Below it, a collage of yellowed drawings: jagged black-and-white pencil sketches of screaming faces, jumbled splashes of mud-brown, blood-red, flame-orange, poison-gas-green, battlefield-mist-yellow in wax crayon. Again the feeling something was about to shift: that the chaos of the drawings would shape itself into whatever the artist had been trying to depict. Or the grey air inside that wretched room would form itself into a human shape.

  No. She wouldn’t see.

  But it was too late. As she passed another room, the shadows on the wall above the bed thickened and clotted, solidified and sagged forwards, pouring off the wall onto the bed and floor. The blackness drained out of them to leave the white of a stained, grubby hospital smock and skin denied the light for decades. The man sat on the bed, face prematurely aged, black hair streaked with grey, vast eyes fixed on some distant vanishing point a million miles beyond the wall. Only for a moment, the time it took Anna to take a single step, before he darkened again into shadow and his substance drifted away, dispersing in the light.

  Not real. She shouldn’t have come here. She hadn’t taken drugs in over a decade, but was this some sort of flashback? Or worse: was her sanity going, after all? They could always lock her up in one of these rooms. She almost laughed. Mustn’t. For a moment she was back in Roydtwistle. She’d had a small room there, with a window, a door, off a corridor like this. Oh god, she should not have come; the place was coming alive around her. Her mind was all she had, and it would be so easy to lose it here.

  “Jesus,” said Stakowski. A heavy iron door stood ajar; inside the walls were padded, like mattresses had been stuck to them, the door too except for a little gap for a spyhole. “An honest-to-god padded cell.”

  “Restraint room for violent cases,” she said. “There were four on each level here.”

  “Four?”

  “Some of the patients were seriously disturbed.”

  Like you, Anna? And she felt the shift coming. So easily done, the flick of a finger on Ash Fell’s part. You’re so easy, Anna. I can flip you in a heartbeat, at a whim. You belong to me. The dirt and shadows on the walls shifted from black to red; blood, and a clump of matted hair. Even with the padding, someone had injured himself. There was shit smeared on the floor too and something squatting in the corner in a torn straitjacket, gaunt face bleeding where its own nails had raked it, its lips curled back from brown and yellow teeth, eyes wide and bulbously staring. It was trembling. Fright? No, not fright; fury. The first figure had seen only the past; this one saw the present, but only through the prism of its rage. Suddenly it went still. Blinked once. Its head swivelled, a gun coming to bear, until those pale eyes found her.

  Silence fell. Stillness; a wait that seemed endless. And then it straightened its shit-streaked legs, pushing itself up the wall to stand, eyes never leaving hers. It shuffled across the cell to the doorway – would no-one stop it, no-one help? Its clenched teeth looked like yellowed bone in a bloodless, unhealed wound; it stared at her with killing hatred, trembling as if bitterly cold. Everything else seemed to fall away; there was only this thing and its eyes.

  And then it looked down, at the straitjacket sleeves across its chest, and its arms slowly slid apart, unfurling from its chest, bloodied hands emerging from the unfastened sleeves, the nails sharp. It looked up at her again. The hatred in its glare was undiminished, but the white-lipped snarl gave way to a distorted smile before it lunged for her with a soundless screech–

  She yelped, recoiled, and its substance flew apart, scattering in the dim light that fell through the barred window high above, and the red stains on the padded walls were just the black of old dirt.

  “Ms Mason?” Stakow
ski, frowning.

  “Anna? You OK?” Vera was at her side, a hand on her arm. It felt like a tiny shock, her touch. Forget about that. Now wasn’t the time. Martyn coming over as well; she waved him back. All eyes on her. Her face burned.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. Act normal. Don’t let them know you’re crazy. Maintain control at all costs. “Thought I saw something.” Smile. “This place. Sorry.”

  “I can relate to that,” said Vera.

  “Me too,” said Stakowski. “You need to get out?”

  “No. No. We won’t be here much longer, will we?”

  “Just to search the rest of it. But there’s still the Warbeck.”

  “I can handle that. It’s just this place.” Her face still burned. This place disturbed them all, but she was the one who’d admitted it.

  Mary. Focus. Keep going. Do what has to be done. Whatever it takes.

  “OK, if you’re sure.”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s crack on,” Renwick said.

  Vera squeezed Anna’s hand. Anna squeezed back. A thin smile touched Vera’s mouth.

  “Come on, Vera,” Allen said. “We’ve work to do.”

  Vera rolled her eyes, let Anna go. They moved away. Probably best. Need to focus.

  “Sure you’re alright, lass?” Stakowski had come to her side.

  “Fine.”

  “Alright.”

  Martyn fell into step beside her, not speaking. Cowell had looked almost jealous. Did he know about her and Vera? Stupid. What her and Vera? Nothing had happened. Almost didn’t count. Did it? But what was it to him anyway? Maybe he was used to having all big sis’ attention.

  Or perhaps he just wanted to get this done. Maybe what she’d just seen was a glimpse of the world he saw.

  “No sign of anyone, ma’am,” Skelton said.

  Renwick nodded. “OK. Let’s check out the canteen.”

  Following the others down the staircase, Anna glanced out of the barred window over the lawn. The grass was a tangle of green, with blotches of dead-brown scattered across it, all the way out to the woods. Dead-brown; khaki, almost.

  The blotches shifted and stood up. Some leant on crutches or lolled in wheelchairs. Others had stumps for limbs – some with prostheses strapped to them, some not. Others lacked jaws, noses, ears, eyes. She saw a face where the skin had been drawn over the empty eye sockets and stitched shut. Others had no faces at all, just gaping bloodless half-healed holes. They closed in on E Block – some walked, some limped, and the wheelchairs rolled across the lawn with no-one pushing – as the bare trees at the woods’ edge accomplished the shift they’d been threatening and more figures began crowding the lawn – the crippled and disfigured, the vacantly staring, the murderously raging – until they were crammed shoulder to shoulder, staring up at her. At her.

  “Sis?”

  Her eyes stung, blurring – she blinked.

  “Sis, you OK?”

  The lawns were empty. Tears, warm on her cheeks. She found a tissue, dabbed them.

  “Anna?” Martyn said.

  She managed a smile, even patted his big, decent, concerned face. “I’m OK. Let’s just get out of here.”

  THE TESTAMENT OF LANCE-CORPORAL MELVYN STOKES CONCLUDED but i was one of those who came for st john dace o i was still a fighter a thing of terror i homed in on their screams like a bat hunting echoes and i killed killed until master st john shot me it must have been him who else would have had a gun it was nothing personal against master st john he was a good man once but gone soft weak probably yideon doping his drink with opium god knows what capable of anything the eternal jew and he fired into the hole that had been my face finished the job the german shell began all those years ago and nothing changes this place still our prison and outside is the last of england a swamp of niggers darkies jews filthy disgusting queers the race doomed now lost too late to be saved weakened and miscgenated interbred with lesser races god king and country mocked derided sneered at all that remains is a fat bloated decadent remnant now deserving only a quick death to end its misery its mockery of life

  ONE OF THE canteen windows was smashed, the bars wrenched out; wind and rain blew in, mould and fungus sprouted and instead of dust was a patina of mud, wet dirt that had dried, softened and dried again, layer on layer, one atop the other. In the centre of the canteen, they found what they’d been looking for: the chairs and tables had been pushed aside, and in that empty space someone had drawn the Black Sun.

  “Summat’s different here,” Stakowski said. “Nowt in the middle.”

  Renwick let out a long breath. “So they’re not done yet. They want someone else. Maybe the others are still OK.”

  “Boss–”

  “I said maybe, Mike.”

  “Aye.”

  Cowell crouched by the symbol. “Of course. Five blocks around a central building. Like a five-point star; a pentacle. Or like the Black Sun itself.”

  Stakowski frowned. “Some kind of a ritual?”

  “Oh yes.” Cowell stood up, brushing his trousers and coat. “I’d’ve thought you’d guessed that by now. It’s a ritual, alright. The question is whose.”

  “Sh,” said Skelton, looking up. From above came footsteps, descending the stairs.

  Stakowski, eyes still fixed on the ceiling, put his hand on his pistol.

  “All civilians,” said Skelton, “bunch up. Lads – form up.”

  The armed officers moved to encircle Anna and the others.

  “Shit,” said Renwick.

  Anna turned. Suddenly there were people at the far end of the canteen. They hadn’t been there before. Even in the dim light they were impossible to miss. Some wore stained white smocks; others, army uniform. Some sported missing limbs and faces; some grinned empty grins or stared into other worlds, barely aware. Some stood with bodies bent awry or continually jerking in response to bombardments long ended for everyone but them. And some snarled with perpetual rage, crouching as if to attack.

  And in front of them, like a line of police at a demonstration, were the Spindly Men, with their masked faces and black, tattered capes.

  Footsteps rang out from the far end of the hall. Anna turned; a similar crowd was forming there.

  The devil, and the deep.

  After all these years, her nightmares from the psychiatric ward had come, at last, to find her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “OH GOD,” WHISPERED Vera.

  For an instant the years between her and Shackleton Street vanished and she was huddled weeping on the bed, waiting for the next punter to come up the stairs. A victim again; prey. But then the moment passed; she’d never given anything up without a fight in her whole adult life, and she wasn’t fucking starting now. Allen was white-faced, gawping. Vera grabbed his arm, looked for an exit.

  Renwick drew her Glock. Stay calm. Do your job. Levelled it, two-handed, as the Spindlies closed in. Pick a target. The one in the middle, that one. She steadied the gun on him, right between the black-hole eyes in the mask. Stakowski moved to her side, raising his own weapon. The Spindlies came to a halt and stood regarding her and the other cops.

  “Form a line!” Skelton snapped. His men fanned out and knelt between the Spindlies and the civilians, shouldering their rifles and carbines. Wayland and Crosbie stepped behind them and aimed their pistols over them; Renwick, Stakowski and Ashraf fell back to join them.

  “Mike?”

  “Ma’am?”

  She didn’t look directly at him, didn’t dare take her eyes off the Spindlies and the lost souls behind them. “Get the civvies out.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not planning on croaking here either. Just get them out. That’s an order, Mike.”

  Behind Skelton’s line, Stakowski saw Allen and Vera sidling towards the smashed window. Yes, they could make it that way, if they were fast and if the mob at the other end of the hall didn’t spot them. But the Spindlies seemed to be focused on the coppers. He saw Martyn square his
shoulders, clench his fists. Anna pulled his arm, looking from him to the Spindlies to the window. She was white and breathing fast, almost hyperventilating, eyes so wide the whites encircled the irises completely. Stakowski sidled towards them. Slow, careful; don’t attract attention.

  Vera dragged Allen to the window, knocked the remaining pieces of glass out of the empty frame. “Climb over. Now.”

  He blinked, then nodded and started clambering out.

  “Martyn.” It was like trying to shift a statue. Anna knew he wanted to fight them, get Eva back. But they were already dead, the Spindlies and the horde behind them. “Martyn, come on.”

  “With me.” Stakowski whispered. He had his gun out, pointed at the floor. “That means you, Mr Griffiths. Move.”

  One of the smock-clad patients turned his grinning head, looked past them at the window. Cowell was outside already, his sister crouched on the sill, half-in and half-out of the killing room. The dead started moving, and Stakowski raised the pistol. Renwick had given him a job; he’d bloody do it. “Behind me,” he hissed, “and keep fucking moving. Don’t make a sound.”

  The line of police started backing up. Vera climbed the rest of the way out. Her brother was already legging it across the lawns; she pelted after him. Two down, two to go.

  “Griffiths,” said Stakowski.

  Martyn stood rooted. Anna pulled at his arm. “Martyn.”

  “Armed police officers,” Renwick shouted. “You’re all under arrest on suspicion of kidnapping and murder.”

  Heads turned to study her. Shit. Now what? The other officers were waiting for orders. “Put your hands on your heads, lie down on the floor, you won’t be harmed.” Oh Christ Christ Christ. Dad. Daddy. Christmas with him and Morwenna, was that so bad? She should’ve rung him last night, before the phones went down.

  The Spindlies began moving forward. “Stay where you are.” She shouted it; her finger tightened on the trigger. Careful. You can’t unfire a gun. “Hold still or we will open fire.”