Juggling despair with disbelief, he went to the casualty department to have his face seen to, where he waited patiently for three and a half hours with dozens of similar walking wounded.
The doctor was unsympathetic. There was no use in stitches now, he said, he said, the damage was done: the wound could and would be cleaned and covered, but a bad scar was now unavoidable. Why didn’t you come last night, when it happened? the nurse asked. He shrugged: what the hell did they care? Artificial compassion didn’t help him an iota.
As he turned the corner with his street, he saw the cars outside the house, the blue light, the cluster of neighbors grinning their gossip. Too late to claim anything of his previous life. By now they had possession of his clothes, his combs, his perfumes, his letters—and they’d be searching through them like apes after lice. He’d seen how thorough-going these bastards could be when it suited them, how completely they could seize and parcel up a man’s identity. Eat it up, suck it up: they could erase you as surely as a shot, but leave you a living blank.
There was nothing to be done. His life was theirs now to sneer at and salivate over: even have a nervous moment, one or two of them, when they saw his photographs and wondered if perhaps they’d paid for this boy themselves, some horny night.
Let them have it all. They were welcome. From now on he would be lawless, because laws protect possessions and he had none. They’d wiped him clean, or as good as: he had no place to live, nor anything to call his own. He didn’t even have fear: that was the strangest thing.
He turned his back on the street and the house he’d lived in for four years, and he felt something akin to relief, happy that his life had been stolen from him in its squalid entirety. He was the lighter for it.
Two hours later, and miles away, he took time to check his pockets. He was carrying a banker’s card, almost a hundred pounds in cash, a small collection of photographs, some of his parents and sister, mostly of himself; a watch, a ring, and a gold chain round his neck. Using the card might be dangerous-—they’d surely have warned his bank by now. The best thing might be to pawn the ring and the chain, then hitch North. He had friends in Aberdeen who’d hide him awhile.
But first—Reynolds.
It took Gavin an hour to find the house where Ken Reynolds lived. It was the best part of twenty-four hours since he’d eaten and his belly complained as he stood outside Livingstone Mansions. He told it to keep its peace, and slipped into the building. The interior looked less impressive by daylight. The tread of the stair carpet was worn, and the paint on the balustrade filthied with use.
Taking his time he climbed the three flights to Reynolds’ apartment, and knocked.
Nobody answered, nor was there any sound of movement from inside. Reynolds had told him of course: don’t come back—I won’t be here. Had he somehow guessed the consequences of sicking that thing into the world?
Gavin rapped on the door again, and this time he was certain he heard somebody breathing on the other side of the door.
“Reynolds ...” he said, pressing to the door, “I can hear you.”
Nobody replied, but there was somebody in there, he was sure of it. Gavin slapped his palm on the door.
“Come on, open up. Open up, you bastard.”
A short silence, then a muffled voice. “Go away.”
“I want to speak to you.”
“Go away, I told you, go away. I’ve nothing to say to you.”
“You owe me an explanation, for God’s sake. If you don’t open this fucking door I’ll fetch someone who will.”
An empty threat, but Reynolds responded: “No! Wait. Wait.”
There was the sound of a key in the lock, and the door was opened a few paltry inches. The flat was in darkness beyond the scabby face that peered out at Gavin. It was Reynolds sure enough, but unshaven and wretched. He smelt unwashed, even through the crack in the door, and he was wearing only a stained shirt and a pair of pants, hitched up with a knotted belt.
“I can’t help you. Go away.”
“If you’ll let me explain—” Gavin pressed the door, and Reynolds was either too weak or too befuddled to stop him opening it. He stumbled back into the darkened hallway.
“What the fuck’s going on in here?”
The place stank of rotten food. The air was evil with it. Reynolds let Gavin slam the door behind him before producing a knife from the pocket of his stained trousers.
“You don’t fool me,” Reynolds gleamed, “I know what you’ve done. Very fine. Very clever.”
“You mean the murders? It wasn’t me.”
Reynolds poked the knife towards Gavin.
“How many blood baths did it take?” he asked, tears in his eyes. “Six? Ten?”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
“... monster.”
The knife in Reynolds’ hand was the paper knife Gavin himself had wielded. He approached Gavin with it. There was no doubt: he had every intention of- using it. Gavin flinched, and Reynolds seemed to take hope from his fear.
“Had you forgotten what it was like, being flesh and blood?”
The man had lost his marbles.
“Look ... I just came here to talk.”
“You came here to kill me. I could reveal you ... so you came to kill me.”
“Do you know who I am?” Gavin said.
Reynolds sneered: “You’re not the queer boy. You look like him, but you’re not.”
“For pity’s sake ... I’m Gavin ... Gavin—”
The words to explain, to prevent the knife pressing any closer, wouldn’t come.
“Gavin, you remember?” was all he could say.
Reynolds faltered a moment, staring at Gavin’s face.
“You’re sweating,” he said, the dangerous stare fading in his eyes.
Gavin’s mouth had gone so dry he could only nod.
“I can see,” said Reynolds, “you’re sweating.”
He dropped the point of the knife.
“It could never sweat,” he said, “Never had, never would have, the knack of it. You’re the boy ... not it. The boy.”
His face slackened, its flesh a sack which was almost emptied.
“I need help,” said Gavin, his voice hoarse. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”
“You want an explanation?” Reynolds replied, “you can have whatever you can find.”
He led the way into the main room. The curtains were drawn, but even in the gloom Gavin could see that every antiquity it had contained had been smashed beyond repair. The pottery shards had been reduced to smaller shards, and those shards to dust. The stone reliefs were destroyed, the tombstone of Flavinus the Standard Bearer was rubble.
“Who did this?”
“I did,” said Reynolds.
“Why?”
Reynolds sluggishly picked his way through the destruction to the window, and peered through a slit in the velvet curtains.
“It’ll come back, you see,” he said, ignoring the question.
Gavin insisted: “Why destroy it all?”
“It’s a sickness,” Reynolds replied. “Needing to live in the past.”
He turned from the window.
“I stole most of these pieces,” he said, “over a period of many years. I was put in a position of trust, and I misused it.”
He kicked over a sizeable chunk of rubble: dust rose.
“Flavinus lived and died. That’s all there is to tell. Knowing his name means nothing, or next to nothing. It doesn’t make Flavinus real again: he’s dead and happy.”
“The statue in the bath?”
Reynolds stopped breathing for a moment, his inner eye meeting the painted face.
“You thought I was it, didn’t you? When I came to the door.”
“Yes. I thought it had finished its business.”
“It imitates.”
Reynolds nodded. “As far as I understand its nature,” he said, “yes, it imitates.”
“Where did you find i
t?”
“Near Carlisle. I was in charge of the excavation there. We found it lying in the bathhouse, a statue curled up into a ball beside the remains of an adult male. It was a riddle. A dead man and a statue, lying together in a bathhouse. Don’t ask me what drew me to the thing, I don’t know. Perhaps it works its will through the mind as well as the physique. I stole it, brought it back here.”
“And you fed it?”
Reynolds stiffened.
“Don’t ask.”
“I am asking. You fed it?”
“Yes.”
“You intended to bleed me, didn’t you? That’s why you brought me here: to kill me, and let it wash itself—”
Gavin remembered the noise of the creature’s fists on the sides of the bath, that angry demand for food, like a child beating on its cot. He’d been so close to being taken by it, lamb like.
“Why didn’t it attack me the way it did you? Why didn’t it just jump out of the bath and feed on me?”
Reynolds wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand.
“It saw your face, of course.”
Of course: it saw my face, and wanted it for itself, and it couldn’t steal the face of a dead man, so it let me be. The rationale for its behavior was fascinating, now it was revealed: Gavin felt a taste of Reynolds’ passion, unveiling mysteries.
“The man in the bathhouse. The one you uncovered—”
“Yes...?”
“He stopped it doing the same thing to him, is that right?”
“That’s probably why his body was never moved, just sealed up. No one understood that he’d died fighting a creature that was stealing his life.”
The picture was near as damn it complete; just anger remaining to be answered.
This man had come close to murdering him to feed the effigy. Gavin’s fury broke surface. He took hold of Reynolds by shirt and skin, and shook him. Was it his bones or teeth that rattled?
“It’s almost got my face.” He stared into Reynolds’ bloodshot eyes. “What happens when it finally has the trick off pat?”
“I don’t know.”
“You tell me the worst—Tell me!”
“It’s all guesswork,” Reynolds replied.
“Guess then!”
“When it’s perfected its physical imitation, I think it’ll steal the one thing it can’t imitate: your soul.”
Reynolds was past fearing Gavin. His voice had sweetened, as though he was talking to a condemned man. He even smiled.
“Fucker!”
Gavin hauled Reynolds’ face yet closer to his. White spittle dotted the old man’s cheek.
“You don’t care! You don’t give a shit, do you?”
He hit Reynolds across the face, once, twice, then again and again, until he was breathless.
The old man took the beating in absolute silence, turning his face up from one blow to receive another, brushing the blood out of his swelling eyes only to have them fill again.
Finally, the punches faltered.
Reynolds, on his knees, picked pieces of tooth off his tongue.
“I deserved that,” he murmured.
“How do I stop it?” said Gavin.
Reynolds shook his head.
“Impossible,” he whispered, plucking at Gavin’s hand. “Please,” he said, and taking the fist, opened it and kissed the lines.
Gavin left Reynolds in the ruins of Rome, and went into the street. The interview with Reynolds had told him little he hadn’t guessed. The only thing he could do now was find this beast that had his beauty, and best it. If he failed, he failed attempting to secure his only certain attribute: a face that was wonderful. Talk of souls and humanity was for him so much wasted air. He wanted his face.
There was rare purpose in his step as he crossed Kensington. After years of being the victim of circumstance he saw circumstance embodied at last. He would shake sense from it, or die trying.
In his flat Reynolds drew aside the curtain to watch a picture of evening fall on a picture of a city.
No night he would live through, no city he’d walk in again. Out of sighs, he let the curtain drop, and picked up the short stabbing sword. The point he put to his chest.
“Come on,” he told himself and the sword, and pressed the hilt. But the pain as the blade entered his body a mere half inch was enough to make his head reel: he knew he’d faint before the job was half done. So he crossed to the wall, steadied the hilt against it, and let his own body weight impale him. That did the trick. He wasn’t sure if the sword had skewered him through entirely, but by the amount of blood he’d surely killed himself. Though he tried to arrange to turn, and so drive the blade all the way home as he fell on it, he fluffed the gesture, and instead fell on his side. The impact made him aware of the sword in his body, a stiff, uncharitable presence transfixing him utterly.
It took him well over ten minutes to die, but in that time, pain apart, he was content. Whatever the flaws of his fifty-seven years, and they were many, he felt he was perishing in a way his beloved Flavinus would not have been ashamed of.
Towards the end it began to rain, and the noise on the roof made him believe God was burying the house, sealing him up forever. And as the moment came, so did a splendid delusion: a hand, carrying a light, and escorted by voices, seemed to break through the wall, ghosts of the future come to excavate his history. He smiled to greet them, and was about to ask what year this was when he realized he was dead.
The creature was far better at avoiding Gavin than he’d been at avoiding it. Three days passed without its pursuer snatching sight of hide or hair of it.
But the fact of its presence, close, but never too close, was indisputable. In a bar someone would say: “Saw you last night on the Edgware Road” when he’d not been near the place, or “How’d you make out with that Arab then?” or “Don’t you speak to your friends any longer?”
And God, he soon got to like the feeling. The distress gave way to a pleasure he’d not known since the age of two: ease.
So what if someone else was working his patch, dodging the law and the street wise alike; so what if his friends (what friends? Leeches) were being cut by this supercilious copy; so what if his life had been taken from him and was being worn to its length and its breadth in lieu of him? He could sleep, and know that he, or something so like him it made no difference, was awake in the night and being adored. He began to see the creature not as a monster terrorizing him, but as his tool, his public persona almost. It was substance: he shadow.
He woke, dreaming.
It was four-fifteen in the afternoon, and the whine of traffic was loud from the street below. A twilight room; the air breathed and rebreathed and breathed again so it smelt of his lungs. It was over a week since he’d left Reynolds to the ruins, and in that time he’d only ventured out from his new digs (one tiny bedroom, kitchen, bathroom) three times. Sleep was more important now than food or exercise. He had enough dope to keep him happy when sleep wouldn’t come, which was seldom, and he’d grown to like the staleness of the air, the flux of light through the curtainless window, the sense of a world elsewhere which he had no part of or place in.
Today he’d told himself he ought to go out and get some fresh air, but he hadn’t been able to raise the enthusiasm. Maybe later, much later, when the bars were emptying and he wouldn’t be noticed, then he’d slip out of his cocoon and see what could be seen. For now, there were dreams—
Water.
He’d dreamt water; sitting beside a pool in Fort Lauderdale, a pool full of fish. And the splash of their leaps and dives was continuing, an overflow from sleep. Or was it the other way round? Yes; he had been hearing running water in his sleep and his dreaming mind had made an illustration to accompany the sound. Now awake, the sound continued.
It was coming from the adjacent bathroom, no longer running, but lapping. Somebody had obviously broken in while he was asleep, and was now taking a bath. He ran down the short list of possible intruders: the few who knew he was
here. There was Paul: a nascent hustler who’d bedded down on the floor two nights before; there was Chink, the dope dealer; and a girl from downstairs he thought was called Michelle. Who was he kidding? None of these people would have broken the lock on the door to get in. He knew very well who it must be. He was just playing a game with himself, enjoying the process of elimination, before he narrowed the options to one.
Keen for reunion, he slid out from his skin of sheet and duvet. His body turned to a column of gooseflesh as the cold air encased him, his sleep erection hid its head. As he crossed the room to where his dressing gown hung on the back of the door he caught sight of himself in the mirror, a freeze frame from an atrocity film, a wisp of a man, shrunk by cold, and lit by a rainwater light. His reflection almost flickered, he was so insubstantial.
Wrapping the dressing gown, his only freshly purchased garment, around him, he went to the bathroom door. There was no noise of water now. He pushed the door open.
The warped linoleum was icy beneath his feet; and all he wanted to do was to see his friend, then crawl back into bed. But he owed the tatters of his curiosity more than that: he had questions.
The light through the frosted glass had deteriorated rapidly in the three minutes since he’d woken: the onset of night and a rain storm congealing the gloom. In front of him the bath was almost filled to overflowing, the water was oil-slick calm, and dark. As before, nothing broke surface. It was lying deep, hidden.
How long was it since he’d approached a lime-green bath in a lime-green bathroom, and peered into the water? It could have been yesterday: his life between then and now had become one long night. He looked down. It was there, tucked up, as before, and asleep, still wearing all its clothes as though it had had no time to undress before it hid itself. Where it had been bald it now sprouted a luxuriant head of hair, and its features were quite complete. No trace of a painted face remained: it had a plastic beauty that was his own absolutely, down to the last mole. Its perfectly finished hands were crossed on its chest.