The Faceless One (10 page)

It wailed again, its keening echoing throughout the depths of the subway.

How could such a thing be? How could it exist and not be found, not be the topic of every newscast across the country?

Maybe this is why people disappear in New York
, he thought.

He ran, his breath hitching and the pain in his arm and ribs making him nauseous with pain.

He had just started to outdistance the thing when he ran full tilt into its nest, which is what it had wanted all along.

A dozen of its offspring swarmed over Purcival, their mewling cries giving way to snarls as they began to feed on him. They mouthed him with their horrible, toothless maws, and he felt the sting of acid on his skin as it ate through his clothes.

He managed to get his small knife from his pocket, but by then the tendons and nerves of his hands were being eaten away. The knife dropped into the darkness.

Purcival wept then, tears streaming down his grime-caked face as he wished for one moment with his family as the mother-worm came to feed with her brood.

A light hit him, and for one glorious nanosecond he thought he was saved.

The B train never saw the things feeding on Purcival, but it ran him down just the same.

Jimmy awoke with a start, his heart racing. The nightmare had been a bad one, filled with violence and darkness, but it faded rapidly like wisps of smoke from a drowned campfire. He had one fleeting glimpse of something like a large eel in a deep cavern, then this too evaporated in the light of day.

He was on the balcony again, sprawled in a plastic deck chair. His body was cramped and aching, and there was a wicked crick in his neck. He rotated his head gently, trying to work the kink out.

The balcony was a small area, just large enough for the chair, a small plastic table, and a plastic palm that wouldn’t have fooled a child. Instead of a railing, there was a concrete wall, three and half feet high and topped with a balustrade of hollow metal pipe painted a pastel blue. Golden Summer was filled with these Easter-egg colors, and Jimmy despised them.

A raven, its black feathers as shiny as ink, stared at him from its perch on the blue balustrade.

“Hello,
Naas shagee Yéil
,” Jimmy said respectfully. He had no doubt this was the same raven that had visited him earlier.

The raven turned its head to peer at him, its left eye glittering in the bright sunlight. The raven walked sideways along the rail, then back. Three steps to the left, four to the right. It peered again at Jimmy, then repeated its steps.

Three and four. A phone number?

“I’m sorry; I don’t understand your message.”

The raven ruffled its neck feathers again until it looked like it was wearing a thick fur collar. It opened its beak and cawed, one sharp, harsh note.

Jimmy didn’t know what to do. Had his uncle been there, he could have conversed with the bird in its own language. The raven might know Tlingit or English, but it was rude to ask it to speak in a foreign tongue. This was something it must opt to do on its own.

The raven regarded him silently. Jimmy stared back.

The raven walked sideways again. Six steps to the left, eight to the right.

Now Jimmy was completely lost. He saw no pattern to the numbers outside of the second set being the double of the first.

The bird looked at him, as if expecting an epiphany. Jimmy shook his head, ashamed at his lack of understanding.

The raven pecked at the metal railing, producing a resonant ping every time he struck it. Seven pecks, pause, seven pecks, pause.

Jimmy concentrated, but nothing would come. He sat there, not wanting to offend Raven but suddenly filled with dread.

The bird began striking harder, like a woodpecker. Its blows were making a clanging sound, like a beater striking a triangle. Faster and faster it struck the railing, all patterns lost in the rapidity of its assault.

Paint chips began to fly from the railing, and the floor of the balcony as well as Jimmy’s shoes and jeans were soon covered with falling flakes of blue enamel snow.

Still, the raven continued, its blows like a hammer to an anvil. It was a sound Vulcan might have made at his forge, crafting lightning bolts for Zeus.

Faster, faster, the railing was actually bending under the repeated blows. Jimmy covered his ears, afraid that the din would make him deaf. He could feel the vibration of each strike through his clamped hands. Why wasn’t anyone running in to see what was making this horrible sound?

Suddenly, the raven’s beak broke off and landed at Jimmy’s feet, a small husk of ebony keratin. Jimmy looked at it in horror. The raven exhibited no concern or pain, just kept striking its ruined face against the railing, and the sound grew louder.

It was the sound of church bells, but churches from some lower region, where the bells were made of a foul-smelling metal, and the offerings were consecrated in blood. Jimmy cried out because the sound was jarring his bones, making his teeth rattle. Much more of this, and he would fly apart, an exploding ruin of leathered flesh and brittle bones.

One last cataclysmic blow, and two objects flew from the raven’s head, landing at Jimmy’s feet like two bright stones.

Its eyes.

The raven stopped then although the railing continued to vibrate like a tuning fork. It seemed to look at him although it was surely blind. Deep within each empty eye socket he saw a miniature aurora borealis, the bright blues, pinks, and greens shimmering within small caves of infinite darkness.

And Jimmy suddenly remembered.

The Faceless One.

For a moment, he thought
Yéil
was going to become The Faceless One, and he staggered back, falling down as the chair skittered away from under him. He cowered on the ground, praying that his death might be swift.

There was no sound. The humming of the railing faded into silence.

Jimmy looked up.

The raven regarded him with its mutilated face.

The Faceless One, myth behind all myths, truth behind all tales.

The sky grew dark, and trees beyond his balcony grew brown and cracked under the weight of ice that suddenly encased them. The railing glittered with frost, and Jimmy’s ragged breath formed thick plumes of vapor.

He could not face such a being, no one could. Raven might, but he would need his eyes and beak. Gingerly, Jimmy gathered them up and offered them to the bird.

The bird flew away in a shower of ice crystals, their falling prisms casting jewel-like brilliance in its wake.

Jimmy stood there, clutching the beak and eyes of the bird.

He heard the sliding door open and knew what had opened it.

An icy hand fell on his shoulder, and he heard a sound like the howling of the wind through caves of ice.

It was saying his name.

Jimmy awoke sprawled on top of his bed, his legs bathed in sunlight. He looked around in a panic, disoriented and frightened.

The railing of the balcony was undamaged. There was no sign of Raven, nor that the Final Winter had descended on the world.

With a pounding heart, Jimmy slowly turned, thinking he might leap off the balcony if the thing was still behind him.

His dull little room was undisturbed.

It had been a dream.

He sat up, wincing from a sharp pain in his neck. It was as sore as it had been in his nightmare, and there was a sharp pain in his right hand. He held it up and could see blood dripping from the underside, splattering his jeans with drops of bright crimson. Slowly, Jimmy opened his hand.

In his palm were two marbles, made of polished jet.

Raven’s eyes.

These lay next to a small knife, which had cut into his palm. The knife was no more than four inches long and exquisitely crafted, with a hilt of ivory and a blade of polished obsidian.

Raven’s beak.

Jimmy looked at them for a long while, his mind full of confusion and wonder. He felt great shame, for he did not deserve such gifts. Hell, he didn’t even understand their purpose.

He got up, old bones creaking, and went to the bathroom. He cupped his left hand under
his injured one to keep blood from staining his carpet. It wasn’t that he wanted to save the carpet; indeed, to him it was the color of shit from a sick dog. But blood would bring questions from the staff, especially Nurse Belva.

He ran the water until it was cold, then cleaned the obsidian orbs and the knife. He set them gently on a folded hand towel on top of the toilet tank and tended to his cut hand. He washed it under warm water with soap, the sudsy water pink for a long while. When at last it ran clear, he replaced the soap and dried his hands. He considered treating the wound with Bactine or iodine but was afraid that might offend Raven. He decided to leave it unbandaged and let it heal on its own.

He lay down for a while, puzzling over what he had dreamed. While he had looked with wonder at the talismans left by Raven, he hadn’t been shocked or filled with disbelief at what he had seen. He was old enough to remember a time when miracles had not come from movies or television, when life was far more dangerous than the computer games that passed for today’s entertainment.

Damn, he needed a drink.

Alcohol, of course, was frowned on at Golden Summer. There was apple cider at Halloween and the occasional dose of cough syrup, but that was it. He needed something stronger than holiday cider.

Jimmy checked the lock on the door and dragged a wooden chair from the corner over to the closet. He opened the closet and put the chair partway in. He climbed up, the old chair creaking a bit, and rummaged around on the top shelf.

Here were two shoe boxes containing photos and documents, out-of-date fishing licenses and expired coupons for everything from a bamboo fishing pole to a Venus flytrap. There was a box with his cowboy hat, a genuine Stetson with a beaded band. One small beige box lay atop the hatbox. Although it wasn’t what he was after, he brought it down anyway.

The box was splitting along one seam, and the logo across the top was for a store in Juneau long gone.

Inside, wrapped in white tissue paper, was a single wool mitten, red with a stripe containing a blue-and-white snowflake design. Of the many things he owned that had belonged to Rose, this is what he had elected to take with him to Golden Summer. It made him think of the first time he had seen her. He was twenty and had returned with the other men from fishing, and she was there visiting from a neighboring village for a dance his village was hosting. She had caught his eye immediately, but he had pretended not to notice. He had wanted to see if she was promised to anyone. She wasn’t, and they watched each other shyly as the flames rose high from the bonfire. His friends had nudged him and made jokes, but he had ignored them. When he went over to talk to her, he noticed Uncle Will smiling and nodding as he smoked his pipe. Uncle Will
had been dead seven years by then, swept off a fishing boat as he exhorted halibut to the hooks. The village had mourned him three days, and when they returned to the sea, their nets were overflowing. Uncle Will’s last act as shaman had brought them great bounty. Now he smiled at his nephew, then vanished when the fire roared up, its sparks spiraling into the sky like incandescent emissaries.

Jimmy went to Rose and introduced himself. By then he was a shaman’s nephew but no longer officially a shaman. Times had changed in Yanut; television and radio had convinced many that Science and Technology were the new gods to embrace. Some of the elders still sought him out when they were ill, and he still blessed the one or two boats they asked him to, but mostly he pumped gas at the Esso station two miles out of town. It was steady work and paid enough for him to support a family. Rose shyly held out her hand, clad in one of the mittens. He took it, feeling a charge run through him. She had looked down, blushing, but a smile had crossed her face. Jimmy thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

After the dance, they had walked together down to the inlet, where trees and waves whispered secrets. He had taken her hand to help her over a large log even though she was as sure-footed as he was. He felt the strength in her hands, the warmth, and wondered what her skin felt like.

They had married that spring, and the mittens still made him think of her dark, shining hair and laughing eyes. Sometimes, he missed her so much he just lay in the dark and cried.

He stroked the mitten gently, then wrapped it again in the tissue and put it away.

Behind all these other treasures was a box roughly a foot square and three inches deep. The art and text on the lid proclaimed that it contained a truss by Halbert and Sons Medical Supply of Whitney, Illinois. It was good for both hernia sufferers and those wishing not to become hernia sufferers, was washable, and guaranteed for five years. The illustration showed a smiling man who seemed to be on his way to win the decathlon although he was only wearing his truss.

Jimmy had found the box in the Dumpster behind the rest home. He had no need for a truss but thought the box might deter any spies. He climbed down from the chair, placed the box on the bed, and sat down next to it. After glancing guiltily at the door, he opened it.

Inside the box, cushioned by paper towels, were five bottles of liquor, the small kind you got on airplanes. Three Johnny Walker Red, one Smirnoff, one Bacardi.

George had snatched these when he had flown to Portland for his brother’s funeral. The flight attendant had been so taken with George that she had left the drink cart unattended to fetch him an extra pillow. George had hurriedly taken fourteen bottles in all. He had wanted to leave money for them, but the flight to Oregon had taken most of his cash. He had stuffed the bottles into his carry-on just before she returned. The only one who had noticed had been a small child
of three, who had just goggled at George, then smiled when George had waved at him. The child’s mother had smiled at George, too. George had that effect on people.

Being a generous man, George had given Jimmy almost half his haul. Jimmy hadn’t begrudged his keeping the two bottles of Chivas and the Tanqueray; hell, most people wouldn’t have even told him about the liquor, let alone shared it.