The Man Without a Face Read Online Free PDF Page A

you been doing?”
    When I didn’t answer he took my arm in a punishing grip and pushed me towards the car. “Get in.”
    Instead of turning around and taking me back to the Island, he drove through the gate and up the path, not stopping to close it again.
    Sure enough, the Hound of the Baskervilles came out to greet us baying as though he could hardly wait for his dinner: me.
    “All right, Mickey. Shut up!”
    Mickey. Like calling a Bengal tiger Cuddles.
    “Get out,” McLeod said, leaning across me and pushing my door open.
    When there is absolutely no alternative. I can be quite brave, and with McLeod blocking one exit and Sudden
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    Death shoving his great jaw through my window, what choice did I have?
    “Go on,” McLeod said. “He won’t hurt you. Not as long as you’re with me.”
    I got out. Mickey reared. His doomsday voice bayed again. I closed my eyes.
    “Sit!” McLeod said.
    I opened my eyes. Mickey was sitting on his haunches, his head on a level with my shoulders, his tongue hanging out like a chopping block.
    “Are you coming?” McLeod said, standing at the open front door.
    A long time afterwards Mother or someone asked me what the house was like inside. No one had ever been there—at least not within memory. All anyone knew was that it had belonged in one family for quite some time. But no one living now in the village had ever been up there. I don’t know what they expected. Dracula’s lair? Cobwebs from the ceiling?
    Anyway, I wasn’t in much of a state to notice anything that night.
    “Go straight ahead through that door at the end of the hall,” he said, when I stumbled over the threshold. “The light’s on. I’ll be there in a minute.”
    The door led into a smaller hall and then into a kitchen. It was a big room with a stone floor and low ceiling. An old-fashioned lamp, giving out a yellow light, hung from a rafter. There was a sink along one side beneath a window, a big table in the middle, and a chair. Along the other side was what Mother would call an old-fashioned iron range and open grate, and from it came a delicious heat. I backed
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    up to it and was all but sliding my buttocks across the warm top when the door burst open and the dog loped in. Seeing me, he stopped. A bass growl started in the huge throat. I stood rigid. McLeod followed, holding a glass with some golden liquid. “Quiet,” he said to Mickey. To me he said, “Drink this,” and handed the glass to me.
    I did, and it burned all the way down.
    “Now go through that door and up the stairs and into the bathroom at the top of the staircase. I’ve drawn some hot water. Get in and stay in long enough to get warm. Then get out, dry off, and put on the clothes you find there. They’ll be big but they’ll have to do. Then come back down again. Now move!”
    I didn’t argue, whether because I had been softened up by the drink or because I was too chilled or because of something in his voice.
    I was down again in about twenty minutes, warm, dry, and rather drowsy. The dark blue sweater I had on was like a tent. The trousers were folded halfway up to the knee and I had to use the belt he’d left out, but he must be leaner than I thought because they weren’t that loose. I was carrying my own sodden garments.
    He was standing staring out the window above the sink to the sea beyond and below when I came back in, his profile to me. In the half light from the lantern and from that side his disfigurement wasn’t that visible. Whatever had happened to him had not touched the bones of his face, which were good, with the nose slightly aquiline, the forehead high and the jaw firm. Then he turned and became Quasimodo again. It wasn’t just the awful red. The scars were here and there gathered or pitted like a relief map.
    “All right?” he said.
    I nodded. “Yes, thanks.”
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    “There’s some tea on the table. Drink it.”
    I never much cared for being ordered around, but somehow I didn’t protest. The tea