Читать книгу Hideous Faces, Beautiful Skulls - Mark McLaughlin - Страница 11

HUNGRY FOR FACES

It was horrible, watching Mr. Linfield move through his life like a maggot through shit. Michael saw him at least twice a week—in the streets, outside the supermarket, even at the mall. Young boys shouted at Mr. Linfield; sometimes they threw rocks or pop bottles at him. Everyone else walked past him, ignoring his outstretched hand.

That was what hurt the most: seeing Mr. Linfield beg. But then, what else could he do? He was a streetperson. A statistic with a ravaged face.

Something was wrong with the old guy’s mind. Whenever Michael handed him a few bucks, Mr. Linfield would nod and mumble incoherently. It was horrible, and it had to end.

* * * *

The potbellied mechanic pointed to a gray, two-story house. On the upper floor, a single window gave forth a faint blue glow. “He lives there. See that light? Now gimme my fifty bucks.”

As Michael handed him the money, he took a good look at the older man’s face: red nose, shiny cheeks, eyes all but buried in flesh. A too-ripe face. The mechanic counted the bills twice, then shoved them in a pocket and ran down the road.

The weedy yard around the house was littered with broken bottles and old boards, so Michael had to watch his step. At the door, he debated whether or not to knock. He turned the knob; it wasn’t even locked. He walked into the house.

The windows were incredibly filthy. Even though it was mid-afternoon, the entry hall was as dark as night. He fumbled a hand along the wall until he felt the plate of the light switch. But only the plate—the switch had been broken off.

Eventually his eyes grew accustomed to the dark. He located a stairway a few feet to his left and began to ascend. What was that sound—that high-pitched hum? He thought for a moment. Telephone wires in the wind? That hardly seemed possible. It was a windy day, but he hadn’t heard the hum outside the house.

On the top floor, he found an empty hallway awash with blue light from an open doorway. The humming sound issued from the room beyond. A floorboard popped as he moved toward the door.

“Who’s there? I have a gun.” A voice from the room—young, male, tremulous.

“Don’t shoot. I need to talk to you.” He paused for a moment, thinking how best to explain his reasons for this intrusion. “Someone we both know said you could help me.”

There was a creak of bedsprings. “Fine. Cover your face and come in.”

Michael dug a handkerchief from his pocket. “My whole face?”

“Do the best you can. You don’t have to cover your eyes. I’m not a Gorgon.”

Michael tied the handkerchief robber-style across his lower face. He wasn’t quite sure what a Gorgon was. One of those batwinged things on old churches? No, those were gargoyles. He walked up to the door and looked inside.

The blue light came from a tinted bulb in a shadeless lamp. Thin copper wires were strung across the room at various levels; every piece of furniture seemed to be caught up in the tangle. The breeze from a fan on high-power made the wires hum. On a brass bed in the center of the room reclined a pale man, bundled in quilts and pillows. His long black hair was thick and coarse, like a horse’s mane. He wore a tattered bathrobe over a gray sweatsuit. Michael decided the pale man was probably twenty-five, just a few years younger than himself.

Michael brushed a hand over the lump in his pants pocket. He had a roll of bills totalling three-hundred dollars, in case the pale man had a price. “I met somebody in a bar—a mechanic. He’d told me you made his wife go away.” It dawned on Michael that the mechanic might have violated a trust. “You can’t really blame him for talking. He’d had a lot to drink and…well, I bought him a few drinks, too. He seemed pretty miserable.”

The pale man shrugged. “No worry. I appreciate references, if discretion is observed. I’m sure Mr. Curtis has selected well. My name is Card.”

“I’m Michael. I guess you don’t really want to know who I am, though, since you told me to cover my face.” He twanged at one of the copper wires. “What’s with the spiderweb?”

“Be careful, will you?” Card nodded as Michael stilled the vibrating wire with a fingertip. “Yes, it is like a spiderweb, isn’t it? Except there’s no pattern. Still, do you see the appeal? Everything connected to everything. Beautiful, like a work of art.”

“Can I get through?”

A brief, worried look crossed Card’s face. “I suppose so.” The pale man watched intently as Michael threaded his way across the room. “Careful there, a wire is snagged on your coat. And your handkerchief is coming loose. Don’t let it fall off. If you should ever show me your face, I would want it to be a conscious choice.”

At last Michael reached the brass bed. He turned away for a moment to pull the handkerchief tighter and retie it. Then he climbed over the pillows and sat cross-legged next to Card.

“I don’t really have a gun,” the pale man said. “I don’t need one.” He shifted on his pillows. “So tell me. How did you know that Mr. Curtis wasn’t lying to you?”

“I remembered reading about his wife’s disappearance in the papers. They found a pile of dust in her bed. Real weird.” Michael studied Card for a moment. The pale man had fine wrinkles around his eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t so young. “This thing you do. With people. What are you?”

Card looked up. “A man in a room.” The look in his eyes was intense. Almost feral. “You are having problems with someone. Someone who should go away. A lover, perhaps? Isn’t it odd about lovers? So beautiful when you meet them, so horrid when the love grows cold?”

* * * *

The next morning, Michael didn’t go to church. After examining the newspaper, he threw it in the trash. What did he expect—a front page headline? HOMELESS MAN DISAPPEARS: DUST HEAP FOUND IN ALLEY. Of course not. He knew that no one would be too concerned about Mr. Linfield’s disappearance. If anything, a few of the shopkeepers downtown would be glad of it.

He flopped down on his sofa, turned on the television and flipped through the channels. Sermons, news shows—at last a cartoon popped up. The show, a teenage space opera, was poorly drawn and woodenly animated.

If only Doc Feisty’s Cartoon Cavalcade was still on the air—a great show with great old cartoons. Each week, fat Doc Feisty would have a different child as his co-host. At the beginning of each show, the lucky boy or girl would pop out of a giant rabbit hole and Doc Feisty would playfully grab the child by the neck. Michael’s mother had sent in his name, but he never got to be on the show.

Too bad the real-life Mrs. Doc Feisty had to spoil everything. She’d killed herself by drinking something awful. Drain-opener or oven-cleaner. Something incredibly caustic. Something that made for an incredibly colorful death.

After that, Doc Feisty was no longer funny.

Michael had been nine when the show was cancelled. It wasn’t until he was seventeen that a friend of his pointed to a confused old man on the streets and informed him that this was old Doc Feisty: real name, Corliss Linfield. His friend went on to tell him that Doc had spent the last few years in an institution.

Mr. Linfield had changed. The fat Doc Feisty belly had swelled into a bag of sickness. The wavy Doc Feisty hair had become a matted rat’s nest. The bright, expressive Doc Feisty eyes had dwindled into twin pits of despair.

The cartoon’s credits rolled, and Michael sighed. Maybe the next one would be better.

Card had asked for a picture. Of course, Michael didn’t have one. The pale man then pulled a sketchpad from under the bed and told him to give a description. In twenty minutes, Card produced a realistic drawing of Mr. Linfield’s face.

“Is this man so beyond hope?” Card had asked. “Are you doing this for him or for yourself? Not that it matters to me.”

The question had momentarily weakened Michael’s resolve. Was his request a mission of pity—or scorn? Maybe both: he often felt obligated to give alms to the homeless; and yet, the sick temptation to kick at them, to laughingly pile them with trash, was also there.

His was a mission of liberation. Time would erase any doubts on the matter.

He had not questioned Card too closely; he hadn’t even asked what void would house the vanished Mr. Linfield. He only knew that the old man’s torment on earth would soon be over. Or possibly, was already over; the pale man had not specified when the disappearance would take place.

The next cartoon was about a little girl whose imaginary playmate, a giant wise-cracking caterpillar, was always getting her into trouble. He had to admit that the animation was of a slightly higher quality than the previous show. Strolling through a park, the girl sat down on a bench next to a tramp sleeping under newspapers.

The caterpillar crawled after the girl and—what was this? The tramp tore away the newspaper and began to cackle insanely; his swollen belly shook with each laugh.

It was not an animated figure. It was Mr. Linfield.

The mad-eyed old man pulled a length of wire out of his pocket and wrapped it around the girl’s neck, tighter, tighter—

Michael grabbed the remote control. On another channel, Mr. Linfield was strangling the Reverend Tillson Parker with a ragged handful of copper wires.

Michael turned off the television. For a moment, he simply sat and stared. Then he went to the door and opened it a crack.

He could hear faint sounds from the other apartments. People talking. Televisions blaring. But no panic. No screams of horror.

* * * *

That afternoon, Michael went to the mall with a group of friends.

Walking from store to store was a nightmare. He never realized how many televisions were on display. Some store windows were completely filled with them. There were cameras and monitors everywhere, to discourage shoplifters. And on each screen loomed Mr. Linfield for only Michael to see. Mr. Linfield, eyes shadowed with hatred, strangling anchormen, sports figures, shoppers.

At one point, Michael saw his own image on a store monitor. He ran out of camera range when he saw an approaching figure on the screen.

Outside of a shoe store, an elderly woman in ragged clothes asked him for spare change. He dug up a few coins from his pockets—eighty-five cents, total. He gave her a dime and hurried on.

* * * *

The next morning, Michael did not watch the news.

Fortunately, there were no TV sets in the office where he worked. Even so, his boss complained that he seemed distracted. So he concentrated—concentrated on the bland invoices and shipping orders with a fervor that made his head pound. He needed this job and could not afford to slip up.

* * * *

Cross moved his pillows to make room. “I didn’t expect you back.”

“You didn’t say that I would keep seeing him.” Michael was about to scratch an itch on his cheek, then stopped when his hand touched the handkerchief. Briefly, he recounted his experiences at home and at the mall. The wires hummed incessantly.

“I don’t understand,” the pale man said. “What you have told me is impossible.”

“Why? Where is Mr. Linfield now?” Michael looked to the dresser, then to the nightstand. There were no photographs of Card in the room. “In Hell?”

Card reached under his mattress and pulled out handful after handful of sketches and photographs. “Fodder,” he said, piling them on the bed and on Michael’s lap. “Mere fodder. He’s within me, forever. They all are. Now tell me who’s in Hell.”

Michael stared at the faces. Thin-skinned old women. Young, hard-looking men. A boy with bad teeth. A deformed infant. A girl with dark, blank eyes. Dozens of faces, many ugly, many mean-spirited. The unloved. The unwanted.

Most of the sketches were discolored and brittle. Some of the photographs were faded with age. Michael swept the faces off his lap. “What are you?”

“You’ve asked me that before,” Card said, “and my answer remains the same. A man in a room.”

Michael pointed to the sketch of Mr. Linfield. “I don’t want to see him again.”

Card sighed wearily. “There’s nothing I can do. It’s just in your mind.”

* * * *

Michael pulled the cord out of his television. He stayed out of the mall. Even so, he could not help but catch glimpses of his friends’ sets, or those in businesses.

In the weeks that followed, Mr. Linfield’s video image grew more violent. After strangling his victims, he would begin to gnaw at their faces.

Once, while walking home from the grocery store, Michael was accosted by a streetperson in a ragged sweater. He cried out—but it wasn’t Mr. Linfield. The old man grabbed his coat sleeve and offered to carry the groceries for a dollar. Michael set down the sacks and shoved him out of his path, into a row of hedges. There was a can of insecticide in one of the sacks. For one frenzied moment he considered spraying the old man’s face. Instead he grabbed his groceries and ran off.

Michael began to wonder. Was Card more or less real than himself? Was this all a game? The pale man was clever, like a demon. He had a pained, kind face, but still, a demon could wear a mask.

* * * *

Soon Michael’s dreams were filled with televisions. Televisions depicting moments from his life, like scenes from home movies, always with Mr. Linfield lurking in the background.

In one dream, Michael watched a huge TV screen floating through space and saw himself as a boy, talking with Mother on the front porch of his parent’s house. Mother was cross with him: he hadn’t finished cutting the lawn. She explained that he had to learn responsibility. Why, if he didn’t, there was no telling what would become of him. Lecture over, Mother gave him a big hug. His face was smothered against her bosom; her lilac perfume made his nose itch. But then the smell of lilacs was overpowered by a hot, meaty smell. He tore free of Mother’s embrace and screamed. Mother’s throat was wrapped in a bloody snarl of wire, and Mr. Linfield was biting into her cheek.

The dream-scenes all ended that way. Mr. Linfield would appear with his wire to devour the face of a parent. A sibling. A coworker. A lover.

Michael stopped seeing his friends. He stopped going to work. He felt sure that Mr. Linfield had been sent by Card. A puzzle filled his mind, and he needed time to work it through. His continued existence depended on the answer.

He sat home alone, frightened, thinking. He didn’t use the phone or answer his mail. He kept his life to a precarious minimum so that the evil threatening him could find no new avenue for intrusion.

* * * *

Card’s brow wrinkled with alarm. “You didn’t cover your face. What are you doing?”

Michael moved in a straight line from the door to the bed. In the yard of the gray house, he had picked up an old board. He used this to pound and snap the wires. His foot caught the cord on the electric fan, pulling it to the floor. The hum of the wires died. “He’s in my dreams now. I haven’t slept for days. You’ve got to call him off.”

“It’s just in your mind,” Card cried. “There’s nothing I can do. Don’t break the wires. Go away or…or…”

The pale man began to—swell. His flesh seemed to be billowing out from the muscle and bone.

Dust sifted before Michael’s eyes, and he put a hand to his face. His skin was softening, turning to dust. Already his nose was half gone. “Stop it, Card,” he whispered. “Stop playing games with me. Don’t you have any feelings? What’s inside of you? What are you?”

Card said nothing. So Michael rushed forward, lifted the board and brought it down on the pale man’s head.

Card’s flesh began to tear from the pressure within. Eyes peered out through the widening fissures. Then the skin split open, spilling a nightmare cloud of faces. Michael sank to his knees. Mr. Linfield’s face emerged from the cloud, confused and pathetic. Completely harmless, even after death. Card had been right.

Michael turned to leave, then stopped. He could not see the door. Or the walls. The man was gone and so was his room. All that remained was an infinity of mad faces and tangled copper wire.