The Faceless One Read Online Free PDF Page A

safe and uniform light—a perpetual 3:15 P.M., mid-April. Only the floor remained gray, which was fortunate; otherwise, it might have seemed as if he were floating in some ivory-colored void. As things were, the walls seemed to recede, moving away and out of sight. He reached out, and his fingers relayed the comfort of the wall’s surface, but his eyes still believed they were gone. This was some sort ofphantom wall, a grieving echo of a structure long gone.
    At first, he thought he could hear drums near the ocean, then realized he was hearing the beat of his own heart, the roaring inside his ears. He felt sad, his newfound energy aching for a celebration by the water, a welcome to the Chief of the Salmon, perhaps, gratitude for the bounty he brought to the village. Such welcomes were filled with dancing and an abundance of food and drink.
    As always, thoughts of the old times made him think of Rose, and he felt that sharp pang in his heart. Pain had become his companion over the last ten years, replacing her laughter and feather touch with a piercing jab at his core. The pain had not diminished but had become a sort of obstinate friend, one who knows you and is never afraid to hurt you. There had been times at Golden Summer when his pain over Rose had been his only clue that he was still alive.
    He heard a small tapping, like a bird pecking at the linoleum. Remembering the raven from earlier, he turned back to see if it had come to guide him on some adventure. His welcoming smile faded as he looked down the corridor.
    The Stick Man was coming.
    Jimmy felt light-headed, terror seizing his throat in a tight and merciless grip. His fear was so immense that it made him ache, as if his bones no longer fit together properly. Every motion, even breathing, was fraught with agonizing friction and a pain that almost rendered him unconscious.
    His great-grandmother had scared him with tales of the Stick Man when he was a small boy. When he misbehaved, shouting or pulling at the strands of her weaving, drool running from his mouth in bright and shimmering strings, she would point to a bundle of sticks near the cookfire and tell him the Stick Man was going to rise and catch him; that the Stick Man loved the taste of disobedient, fat little boys. The Stick Man would pull out some of its own ribs for the cookfire, then roast him on a spit made from one clutching, spindly limb. Then little Jimmy would look at the bundle of sticks, the shifting light lending them animation. He would think that the sticks were indeed gathering into some demonic entity and run behind his great-grandmother for protection. Then she would pinch him and hug him fiercely, and his terror would be forgotten.
    What was coming down the corridor was no illusion of firelight and childish terror.
    The sticks had gathered into the crude semblance of a man, long and spindly, full of creaking and splintering. It had donned the cloak like a skin, and the garment had stretched taut over the skeleton of kindling. He could see the makeshift bones moving under this false flesh with ever-finer precision, its tap-tapping along the floor the song of insect mandibles tearing and feeding.
    Its face was the waterskin, two holes serving as its vacant eyes. There was no sign of lifein them, just an awful blackness. Long, dried grass hung from the top of its head, undulating with its puppet movements as it clicked and cracked toward him. A crooked horizontal fissure had opened in the waterskin, providing the Stick Man with a wide and serviceable mouth. Over the tapping of its progress he could hear the grinding of strange and powerful teeth, millstones set within ragged jaws. He couldn’t see the teeth but knew they would knife into him with cold, obsidian precision, tearing his flesh into warm, wet strips. This was a creature with no soul, and it hungered to feed on one. Its face billowed and collapsed rhythmically, a parody of breathing caused by the vagaries of air currents in the