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By Root 2137 0

his face and hair. The creature, so much larger than Stephen, fell to its knees at the roadside as if baffled, uncomprehending; perhaps it felt no pain, but only this profound incomprehension, as of a being who’d imagined itself invulnerable to physical harm, immortal somehow, the delusion now shattered, spiraling away in dark ribbons of blood that could not be stopped. Making a choked, guttural sound, the creature staggered to its feet, hands pressed against the streaming blood, turning away dazed, having forgotten Stephen entirely; at last staggering away, like a drunken man, into the underbrush beside the road. Stephen himself dazed, bleeding, trying to catch his breath, stared after the thing in amazement and elation. He had saved himself! He had cast the thing-without-a-fàce from him and mortally wounded it, and he had saved himself!

At the ruin of Cross Hill, where stealthily he climbed the stairs to the second floor where Mother and Father slept; at Cross Hill, his heart pounding violently in his chest not in warning, not in caution but urging him on!—on!—for this must be done, this must be accomplished, he dare not turn back, he must push to the very end. And so opening the door of the master bedroom, and so stepping breathless inside that room it was forbidden to him to enter; the sticky, still-warm blood of the thing-without-a-face smeared on his own face, and in his hair, soaked into his clothes and mixed with his own so Stephen knew he must look savage, a terrifying sight. Yet he dared to switch on a light; a dim, yellowed bulb in a dusty bedside lamp; he stood beside his parents’ enormous canopied bed; yet only Mother lay there, on her back, unnaturally still and her eyes open; in a satin nightgown so faded it had lost all color; Father’s side of the bed was empty, though the bedsheets were rumpled and not very clean. On his pillow was the heavy imprint of his head, a concave shadow. Stephen stared, not certain what he saw. He whispered, “Mother—?” His hand reached out, groping; he dared to touch her—it; pushing gently at the smooth, naked shoulder that, with the attached torso, fell away from the shadowed lower body, and from the neck and head; the head, a mannequin’s bald, blank head, rolled to one side on the pillow; one of the limbs, the shapely left leg, had fallen away from the body, as if its joints had become brittle with time, and lay at a grotesque angle perpendicular to the thigh. Again Stephen whispered “Mother …” even as he saw clearly that the thing wasn’t human and wasn’t alive: an elegant department store mannequin, sleekly constructed, rather flat-bodied, with a porcelain-smooth face, beautiful wide-open eyes with absurdly thick lashes. The mannequin’s wig—Mother’s ashy-blond, now graying and disheveled hair—had been placed, with apparent care, on the bedside table.

Father’s handsome face, a molded mask of some exquisitely thin, rubbery material, an ingenious simulation of human skin, had been placed, with equal care, on the other bedside table; it was a mask so lifelike that Stephen winced to see it. It appeared to have been washed, and oiled with a colorless, subtly fragrant cream, fitted to a plaster-of-paris mold of a man’s face; these eyes too were starkly open, but more liquidy, human-appearing, than the mannequin’s. In horror, and fascination, with the curiosity of a very young child, Stephen reached out to touch the face with his forefinger. How lifelike it felt! How warm!

In great urgency then waking Rosalind and the twins, who now slept in her bedroom; though Rosalind, moaning in a nightmare, hardly needed to be wakened, only her name gently spoken—“Rosalind;” and hurrying them out of the ruin of Cross Hill and, on foot, along the road to Contracoeur, only five miles away; there was no time for Stephen to explain to his frightened sisters and brother, and, at this moment, there would have been no words. Rosalind asked in a whisper what had happened to Stephen, had he injured himself, had someone hurt him, where were they going, and what of Father, and what of Mother, but the twins,