The Face That Must Die (7 page)

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

He stared at the sketched face. The flat eyes were neutral as a corpse’s, but that was only slyness: they were hiding what lurked within them, as well they might. The face looked too small for the head. By holding itself stiff it hoped to conceal its real nature. In the flesh it wouldn’t look exactly like that. That was its trick, to avoid being recognised! The empty eyes stared up at him, daring him to imagine their thoughts.

Shuddering, he turned the page. Its rustling was loud as an insomniac’s blankets. Where the devil was the film? ONE YOUNG MAN’S LIFE ON THE STREETS was spread across page 2 , but he felt queasy enough without reading that — if it was the truth. Who said the young man had been a prostitute? A victim, more likely. Young people weren’t homosexual until they were corrupted — nobody was born that way. Horridge had his own idea about the murders: the man interfered with his helpless victims before he killed them. If he was a homosexual he was perverted enough for anything. Killing on Christmas Eve showed how unnatural he was. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

He started. His neck felt spied upon. As he jerked round, a head dodged back from the projectionist’s window. He’d paid to watch, not to be watched. He flourished the newspaper and read at random.

An old man had been mugged by a gang of girls. That was what came of this Women’s Liberation.

He heard the doors open. Someone was coming to double the audience! But it was an usherette. “Can I see your ticket, please?”

He always kept hold of his ticket; nobody was going to accuse him of not having paid. Did she mean to tell him he was in the wrong seat and herd him into another?

“
Which film did you want to see?”

Good God, didn’t they even know what they were showing? “The horror film,” he said with brittle civility.

“
You’re in the wrong cinema. This is Screen 4.”

If he argued they would start the film without him. He hurried down the passage, feeling hot and prickly. Illuminated numbered arrows pointed the way to each cinema. Well, he couldn’t be expected to notice everything.

They were still showing the adverts. A lit bust, the head and shoulders of an ice-cream girl, hovered above her tray. He muttered his way along a row, touching hair that twitched away, cloth that squirmed; a pool of tobacco smoke drifted sluggishly about his face. A soft-drink carton crunched beneath his heel. At last he reached the unoccupied seat.

He felt hemmed in by shoulders. What was drooping over the seat in front? As the screen flickered, it shifted. It was the empty head of a duffle coat. He settled himself, pressing his knees together so as not to touch anyone. At once the film began — and he found that it wasn’t a horror film at all.

Was it supposed to be a musical? He’d been lured in under false pretences. It began with a wedding, everyone breaking into song and dance. Then an engaged couple’s car broke down: thunder, lightning, lashing rain, glimpses of an old dark house. Perhaps, after all — They were ushered to meet the mad scientist. Horridge gasped, appalled. The scientist’s limp hands waved like snakes, his face moved blatantly. He was a homosexual.

This was a horror film, all right — far too horrible, and in the wrong way. Horridge tutted loudly, but the voice continued shrilling, the hands unfurled like unnatural flowers of flesh. The homosexual had surrounded himself with friends. Horridge could hardly tell them apart, nor did he want to: they were all the same species of filth.

The scientist created a muscle-man. Wouldn’t it tear him apart if he touched it? The film refused to let that happen. Horridge complained, and was told to be quiet. How could anyone be interested in this unless they were homosexuals themselves?

They must have known what the film was. Shoulders pressed against him, soft but muscular. He grew clammily warm all at once; the cinema was stuffed with flesh, the air was clogged with smoke, not all of which smelled like tobacco. Someone was thickly perfumed. Perhaps if he kept quiet they wouldn’t bother him. His wet hands gripped his trembling knees.

What would they dare to show next? The homosexual was seducing the girl. How could she let such uncleanliness near her? Horridge closed his eyes, sickened — but at once he opened them, sure that he’d felt hot flesh edging closer in the dark. The homosexual was in the boy’s room now. His silhouette moved on the curtain of the bed. Good God, they couldn’t be about to —

He sprang to his feet before he knew he meant to. A sound filled his mouth like vomit. Nothing could make him sit through more of this. He forced his way out, struggling past legs, ignoring protests. He was trapped in a cage of flesh. Just let one of them touch him — they wouldn’t touch anything else for a while. When he reached the doors his hands were shaking. He stumbled into the passage, among burly dark red pillars.

His nervousness hurried him to the Gents’. Someone was emerging. As he stood aside fretfully, he glimpsed the figure’s long hair. He retreated, but he hadn’t mistaken the sign: GENTLEMEN. He glared at the other, whose hair cascaded down his back and was spangled with rain.

He limped to the urinal stalls, a row of hollow oval heads, their lower lips protruding. As he stood at one, feeling at the mercy of his bladder, someone padded softly in. Did he hesitate behind Horridge before moving on?

Horridge ought to have used one of the cubicles. He didn’t like the threat of being watched. He tried to hurry himself, but there seemed no end to the nervous flow. Unease gripped him by the back of the neck and forced his head to turn.

Had the man just turned away from watching? Horridge stared at the back of the head. In the clinical light the clipped tufts of black hair looked too vivid, unreal. The large square head was perched on the folds of the hood of the grey duffle coat.

He remembered the coat that had lain over the seat, head gaping. Had the man followed him because he’d protested at the film? He forced himself to finish, and struggled with the zip, which felt as though it meant to gnash its teeth.

He shoved at the door to the corridor while he leaned against the inner door. It cost him a few moments to realise that the outer door opened inwards, and to grab the handle. Behind him the inner door halted half-open. It was being held.

He wrenched at the handle. Between the doors, the vestibule was claustrophobic as an airlock. His nervousness hindered the door. As he dragged it open, a large hand reached over his shoulder and laid itself flat on the wood.

He saw its hairs, black as an ape’s. He saw the penumbra of moisture which outlined it on the door. It was inches from his face. He limped into the dim passage, clenching his eyes to see, and heard the man padding after him. He wouldn’t be intimidated; the man had none of his friends with him now. He turned and stared straight into the man’s eyes.

The face looked absurd on the large head: a small patch crowded with all the features, surrounded by luxuriant flesh. It gazed at Horridge for a moment, then it frowned. But it knew well enough why he was staring. It was the face he’d seen outside the house on Aigburth Drive, and spying from the window.

Was it the dim light that made it look indefinably different — or makeup? There was something about it, something he couldn’t quite determine: something that reached deep into his guts and touched off a slow explosion of fear. As he fled, the threat of a nervous itch swarmed over the whole of his skin. His limp dragged at him.

He’d grasped the chill handle before he realised that his panic had driven him back to Screen 3. The unnatural voice squealed. He let go of the door as though it were the lid of a box of maggots.

Behind him, feet padded stealthily over the carpet. Horridge dodged towards the adjacent pair of doors. But was the man pursuing him? Perhaps he was returning to the cinema in search of victims —

At once Horridge knew. Revulsion surged through him, sweat burst out of his skin, gluing his clothes to him. The dim face that was bearing down on him was the face of the sketch in all the papers.

An expression was emerging onto the face. It seemed slow as corruption. Though he was fascinated, Horridge shuddered himself free. Before the expression could reveal itself, he hurled open the double doors.

Beyond them was another airlock. It was full of people, almost immobile beneath a stagnant spread of tobacco smoke. He struggled towards the far pair of doors. The hot thick cloth that blocked his way hardly yielded; people turned slowly to stare at him. He was panting, and deafened by his heartbeats. When he glanced back, he saw that the man was still following.

Horridge bumped into a stout woman. She raised a hand that could have engulfed his face in fat, and barred his way like a traffic policeman. “You just watch where you’re going. There’s a crippled lady here.”

He had an urge to giggle wildly. He was being pursued by a murderer, as though he’d become trapped in one of the films — and nobody seemed to notice. But the absurdity wasn’t reassuring, for his plight wasn’t at all like a film: his clothes were sticking to him, his coat felt huge and cumbersome; the smell of his sweat suffocated him, he felt desperate for a bath. Even when delirious, he had never been so conscious of his body.

He squeezed past the woman, though she shouted “Look at him, what’s he think he’s doing?” He dragged open one of the pair of doors. He hadn’t reached an exit: he was in another cinema.

The long slope of rows of seats was full of an audience, staring at no film. Beneath red and green lights, the red and green pattern of the carpets jangled. Up the slope illuminated masks came drifting above ice cream trays. At the far end of the rows, he saw a luminous EXIT sign. An usherette touched his arm. “Can I see your ticket, please?”

The lights were dimming. She wouldn’t have the chance to look too closely. He brandished the blurred sodden fragment of paper hastily at her. At once she said “You’re in the wrong cinema. You want — ”

He pushed past her and stumbled towards what looked to be an empty row. Darkness flooded the cinema. The usherette was calling “Wait a minute, please, wait a minute!” The curtains parted, and a picture sprang onto the screen: Peter Sellers’ face towered there, pretending to be a French policeman’s. In the jerky light Horridge saw the man with the cramped face say something to the usherette, and come after him.

Horridge blundered along the row. It wasn’t empty, after all. The children were reluctant to let him through. Fear ached in his stomach like gas, and filled his skull; his head seemed weightless, hardly part of him. The man couldn’t harm him here, surely —
but he could follow him home and find out where he lived.

He fell into the aisle. The wall slapped his palm, bruising it. The audience roared with laughter. He ran to the double doors. Another airlock. He fled through the dim purple box, and out. Beyond the double doors were double doors. He wrested them open. But the street was not beyond them: only laughter.

It was the cinema in which he’d first sat. The tilted screen was full of Peter Sellers’ face, Orientally disguised. Was everything in league with the killer to confuse him? An usherette advanced on him from the dark. The buzz of the indirect lighting seemed to crawl over his skin.

A bright arrow caught his eye: EXIT. He ran, dodging aside from a pillar, and grabbed the door to which he thought the arrow was pointing. Only the stare of the woman who emerged told him how mistaken he was.

As he fell back he heard the rain. Though his skin felt like moist unstable jelly, he forced himself to listen. Yes, it was rain, splashing faintly beyond a pair of doors beside him; it must be rain, it must. He banged the doors wide, glancing fearfully to see that there was nobody in sight behind him. He stumbled down a short stone passage, to a pair of doors locked with metal bars. He wrenched at the bars. He wrenched again, and the doors crashed open, freeing him.

Rain washed his face and stung his blinded eyes. His panic clung to him; he couldn’t tell where he’d emerged. At last he saw how the side street led to the main road. He fled towards the lights. At the corner he blundered against a newspaper-stall — a carton that bore a pile of newspapers scattered with coins. The papers spilled, overlapping: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? MAN? MAN? Everything seemed to be addressing him.

He limped towards Lime Street, past the front of the cinema. There was no sign of the man in the bright foyer. Wind and rain swept across St George’s Plateau, past the stone lions and the diggings for the underground railway. He hurried downhill to the previous bus stop, and stood in shadow to be less conspicuous. The ache in his leg began to count the steps he’d taken today.

His panic was subsiding, or transforming. The nervousness that crept over his skin was more purposeful; it nagged him to act. He wished furiously that he hadn’t fled. He should have called the manager, the police.

He didn’t believe in coincidences. The more unlikely they seemed, the more that convinced him they were meant to happen. Shadows dripped around him; his sweat turned chill. His fingers worked in his pockets, frustrated. He had seen the killer three times now, in as many days. That was no coincidence. But what was he meant to do?

* * *

Chapter IV

“
Edge Hill Public Library,” Cathy said.

The telephone held its breath. For years she’d longed for the chance to say “If this is an obscene phone call I’ll just go and get a chair.” But no doubt it was one of the boys they’d chased out for playing football with a book. “Edge Hill Library,” she announced again.