The Faceless One (3 page)

His neighbor’s kid, Mitchell Price, rode up to the effigy on his new bicycle, one he had largely paid for himself after emptying Daniel’s trash for six months.

He looked at the fetish intently, then looked up at Daniel.

Daniel calmed himself and gestured that the boy should bring the idol up to him.

Smiling up at him innocently, Mitchell Price slowly rolled the front wheel of his bike over the effigy, crushing it.

Daniel watched in horror as an ochre stain began to spread from the fetish.

Mitchell looked down and made a disgusted face but rolled the front tire of his new bike over the protective effigy again and again. Its obsidian eyes fell away, and its fierce teeth cracked under the weight of the bike. With each pass, Mitchell would look up at Daniel to see his reaction.

Daniel stood there, paralyzed, as a line of his defense was demolished by a child.

The boy continued until the effigy was no more than a collection of rags and thread, gristle and pine needles. The ochre fluid was absorbed into the dirt surrounding the maple tree, which would be dead within a week.

Then Mitchell looked up at him, smiled sweetly, and rode away.

Daniel stepped back from the window, as if he expected something large and dark to crash through the glass. He stumbled against his chair and fell down hard, his teeth coming together with a loud crack.

Nothing came through the window. Outside, the leaves of the maple tree nodded lazily in a summer breeze. The air conditioner and the computer continued their low purring.

Daniel flopped down on the floor, his eyes filling with tears. Six months of this had worn him to a frazzle. All for nothing, it seemed. A protective device had been destroyed, and both he and his home were intact.

Perhaps they couldn’t travel this far. Perhaps Duvall had been right. It wouldn’t do to be overconfident, though. Perhaps he would take an exploratory walk out onto the landing. He could always run back in at the slightest sign of trouble.

The thought of breathing air that wasn’t recirculated was a heady one, indeed. He wanted great drafts of it, air chilled and filled with pine, or hot and redolent of sage and mesquite. Perhaps his days of captivity, of exile, were over.

The archaeologist leaves his tomb at last.

In answer to this small note of hope, he heard a slight scratching and the barest suggestion of a whisper.

He got up, his heart hammering in his chest.

The scratching became louder, as if his thundering heart had been construed as a welcome.

Daniel crossed the living room toward the front door, that genial distance seeming to stretch out miles before him.

There were small bits of mortar on the floor before the large oak door. As he watched, several more grains fell away from the strip sealing the door.

Something was trying to dig its way in, using claws or teeth to reach him.

I only touched it once
, he thought.
Just the tip of my finger. It was so beautiful, so terrible. I had to touch it just once before it was crated and shipped. Just once
.

Daniel hurried to the computer and brought up his e-mail page. He had drafted a letter to Steven long ago, in case something like this ever happened. He tried to bring up the draft, but he was nervous, hitting icons for mail already sent and files on correspondence from his colleagues at the university.

In his panic, he brought up the letter and promptly deleted it. Quickly, he composed a new letter, trying in a few sentences to explain what had happened and what Steven must do.

A scent of cloves reached him, overlaid with smells of iron, copper, and pine.

He looked behind him.

From his vantage point, he could see the wall near his chair before the television but not the chair itself.

There was a shadow on the wall.

Something was sitting in his chair.

With great effort, he turned to the computer and sent the message to Steven. The note winked out, and a smiling icon of an anthropomorphic envelope informed him his message had been sent.

He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the clock mounted in his work space. He looked insane.

Something hit the front door with an angry thud.

Daniel stood slowly. He tried not to make a sound though any squeaking the chair might have made was masked by the scrabbling of something on the other side of the front door. Daniel moved quietly and peered around the corner at his chair.

It was empty.

He looked at the wall. The shadow was still there.

The shadow stood then and stretched, a gesture that was all the more horrible for its banality. It was roughly humanoid in shape, with long claws that seem to emerge and retract from the tips of its fingers, like a cat’s.

He found himself praying, which was ironic. He had published an article on the
superstition of prayer just two years ago.

There was no place to run.

He ran anyway, trying to reach the bathroom.

That was when the shadow stepped off the wall and caught him, enveloping him in its embrace of cobwebs and rotting meat.

And when the door crashed inward, the things that had tracked him across so many miles covered him with their glittering eyes and snapping teeth.

So many teeth
.

Jimmy Kalmaku sat on the balcony and listened to the wind in the pines.

He had long ago given up hearing any messages in the susurration; these trees were overpowered by the proximity of buildings and automobiles, arc lamps and neon. Now he merely enjoyed the tranquillity the gentle murmur brought with it.

He wore his usual outfit of jeans, boots, and a colored tee shirt, his long gray hair pulled into a ponytail and secured with a leather thong. It was mild on the balcony, the temperature down in the low seventies, yet he was sure Miss Belva, the night nurse, would demand he come inside. Inside would mean either his room or the rec room, where the others were watching
Wheel of Fortune
.

Jimmy didn’t mind television though he preferred cop shows, but lately he had been impatient to be out in the wilderness again. Ironic that, in his great-grandfather’s time, a man of his age (Jimmy would be seventy-two in October) would be left behind if he couldn’t keep up, left to perish in the snow or be devoured by wild animals. He was still fairly strong for his age, but arthritis made it painful for him to walk, forcing him to resort to a cane when the weather became too cold. Out on the Alaskan ice, he would surely perish, but at least the air would be fresh and chilled, not the tepid, recirculated breeze that issued from vents throughout the Golden Summer Rest Home.

Jimmy hated his room at the home. It was relentlessly cheery and soulless. When he had been a boy, he had lived in Yanut, near the cold Pacific. Life was hard, but so much more rewarding than this pink, beige, and green cracker box. His son, Thomas, had offered to bring some of Jimmy’s ceremonial trappings, but Jimmy couldn’t bear to see his masks or knives displayed among the potted ferns and drab seascapes that made up his room. And the thought of sacred objects being displayed here was unthinkable. Where would he display his Chilkat coat, next to the television? Would he put his soul-catcher next to the atrocious seascape over his bed? God, he hated that fucking painting. After Thomas had left him that first night seven years ago, Jimmy had tried to pull down the seascape and throw it out the window. It must have been a common problem because the painting was bolted to the wall.

Thinking of his son, Jimmy sighed, the sound echoing that of the trees. His wife had been so happy when their only son had been accepted to Stanford, and Jimmy must admit he had also
felt a fierce pride in his son’s accomplishment. And, unlike some of his fellow Tlingit, he did not shun all of the white man’s ways. He had lived long enough to realize that there were many things in the world he did not know. Thomas had wanted to become a doctor, and Jimmy relished the idea of his son’s being a healer in their village.

He had never suspected that Thomas would so abandon his heritage.

His son had met a girl at Stanford, married her, and moved to Seattle. Jimmy’s wife, Rose, had not minded that Thomas had married a white woman, but the move to Washington had hurt her. She had never been the same, and he blamed Thomas for that. Even the cancer that claimed her had seemed secondary to her broken heart.

When Jimmy had been struck by a drunk driver—the arthritis in his hip slowing him just enough to prevent him from getting out of the way of the battered Ford pickup—Thomas came out and supervised his care. Once Jimmy’s broken ankle and ribs had healed, Thomas had brought him to Golden Summer. Not long after, Thomas had taken a position in Boston and left his father in this pastel prison.

He was sitting on a stucco balcony, listening to the stifled trees and wishing he were out in a boat, chugging through frigid waters in search of fish.

Jimmy checked his watch. Two hours until dinner. One of the worst things about being at Golden Summer was the regimentation of meals. In better times, he had eaten when hungry, slept when tired. The sleeping he could still control although he needed far less these days. But mealtimes were strictly scheduled: You either ate with the rest of them or went hungry later. Jimmy had convinced his friend George to smuggle out a roll or a pork chop from time to time, but Miss Belva had finally caught them and issued a severe reprimand. From her tone, you would have thought that Jimmy and George were tunneling out of a prisoner-of-war camp.

Jimmy eased up out of his folding chair, his joints popping and cracking in protest. Thinking of George had reminded him that they had a date to play some poker with Fred Deutschendorf. Fred was a loudmouth, continually crowing about his son, who was a hotshot director in Hollywood. Jimmy was tired of Fred’s bragging, but he and George had won a fair number of nickel poker games against the old fart. Fred groused about losing but always came back for more.

As Jimmy came in off the balcony, he heard a familiar hoarse cry.

A raven.

Jimmy turned, but there was nothing there. It must have been a jay; several nested in the trees near his balcony. It would have been nice to see a raven when he was so far from home.

He decided to see what George was up to, maybe take a stroll around the grounds before dinner. There wasn’t a lot to see, but it beat the peach-colored hallways and gray linoleum floors.

Joints still stiff from sitting in the cheap, plastic, deck chair, Jimmy grabbed his cane near
the front door. His uncle Will had carried a handsome hand-carved staff, but Jimmy had left it in storage with his other keepsakes. Besides, the nurses here would never let him use anything but an approved walking cane with a rubber safety tip.

Sometimes, getting old was really a load of crap.

As he entered the corridor off his room, he noticed that it was deserted. This was not unusual, as the other residents either stayed in their rooms or were off in one of the recreation areas.

He made his way down the corridor, the rubber tip of the cane giving him a silence his legs had not earned. Had it not been for that and his sneakers, he would have been clomping through the halls like a seal in tap shoes. Loud and graceless.

The air whirred softly from ducts, occasionally teasing at tendrils of his silver hair. The air was always on, keeping Golden Summer safely in the bland zone, neither too hot nor too cold. If you never looked out the windows, you might imagine that the world had become a vast, temperature-controlled womb, safe and featureless, cushioned and well insulated from excitement.

He heard no music as he padded along the corridor, and this
did
strike him as odd. Rooms 105 and 110 had residents he had rarely seen—one a bedridden veteran of Korea, the other a woman in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s—but both usually had music playing in their rooms. The vet liked Mel Torme and Frank Sinatra, while the woman’s family had supplied numerous CDs of Vivaldi, Bach, and Stravinsky. He’d have to ask George if either of these residents had passed on. George had an uncanny knack for knowing every bit of gossip and news at Golden Summer. Jimmy told him he should get a job on CNN, which had cracked George up. Jimmy had ordered a little lapel pin for the network off the Internet and given it to him for his birthday. George wore it almost every day with one of his dapper suits.

The nurse’s station at the end of the corridor, really just a desk, chair, and phone, was unoccupied. Jimmy turned the corner and stopped.

From here, he should have seen the lounge, front entrance, admitting office, and doors to the various common areas. Golden Summer was shaped like the letter “H,” the uprights rows of forty rooms to a side, the crossbar thick with administration, common rooms, infirmary, kitchen, and dining room.

All he could see was a featureless corridor, stretching out before him for about five hundred feet, then gently curving out of sight to the right.

Confused, Jimmy leaned on his cane.

Had he gotten lost? He had been here seven years and explored nearly every inch of the place in that time. As far as he knew, there was no place in the building constructed like this.

He turned around and received a second shock.

The corridor behind him was also featureless, curving away to the left. There was no sign of any of the doors he had just passed.

Dreaming then
, he thought. He had either dozed off in the TV room or on his own bed. Perhaps he was still on the balcony.

Since he was dreaming, he decided to see where the new corridor might take him. He faced forward again and began to shuffle along the tile, his feet whispering over the spotless floor.

He walked that way for what seemed like an hour, the corridor featureless but clean, its expanse always curving just out of sight. He thought he might get tired, but he actually began to feel stronger. The pain in his hip and feet, constant for nearly three years, began to ease. He found himself drawing in deeper breaths. He felt strong. He felt good.

Then the air began to grow chill, but it was invigorating. Since it was a dream, he didn’t worry that his breath began to plume before him, like smoke from the stack of a ship headed for exotic ports. He drew in great drafts of the air, feeling the cold course through him, his heart beating strong and fine.