"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 I 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 it?"
"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 behaviour 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 realised 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 terrorising 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. The night deepened. There was nothing to do but watch it sleep, and he became bored with that. It had traced him here, it wasn't likely to run away again, he could go back to bed. Outside the rain had slowed the commuters' homeward journey to a crawl, there were accidents, some fatal; engines overheated, hearts too. He listened to the chase; sleep came and went. It was the middle of the evening when thirst woke him again: he was dreaming water, and there was the sound as it had been before. The creature was hauling itself out of the bath, was putting its hand to the door, opening it.
There it stood. The only light in the bedroom was coming from the street below; it barely began to illuminate the visitor.
"Gavin? Are you awake?"
"Yes," he said.
"Will you help me?" it asked. There was no trace of threat in its voice, it asked as a man might ask his brother, for kinship's sake.
"What do you want?"
"Time to heal."
"Heal?"
"Put on the light."
Gavin switched on the lamp beside the bed and looked at the figure at the door. It no longer had its arms crossed on its chest, and Gavin saw that the position had been covering an appalling shotgun wound. The flesh of its chest had been blown open, exposing its colourless innards. There was, of course, no blood: that it would never have. Nor, from this distance, could Gavin see anything in its interior that faintly resembled human anatomy.
"God Almighty," he said.
"Preetorius had friends," said the other, and its ringers touched the edge of the wound. The gesture recalled a-picture of the wall of his mother's house. Christ in Glory – the Sacred Heart floating inside the Saviour – while his fingers, pointing to the agony he'd suffered, said: This was for you."
"Why aren't you dead?"
"Because I'm not yet alive," it said.
Not yet: remember that, Gavin thought. It has intimations of mortality.
"Are you in pain?"
"No," it said sadly, as though it craved the experience, "I feel nothing. All the signs of life are cosmetic. But I'm learning." It smiled. "I've got the knack of the yawn, and the fart." The idea was both absurd and touching; that it would aspire to farting, that a farcical failure in the digestive system was for it a precious sign of humanity.
"And the wound?"
" – is healing. Will heal completely in time."
Gavin said nothing.
"Do I disgust you?" it asked, without inflection.
"No."
It was staring at Gavin with perfect eyes, his perfect eyes.
"What did Reynolds tell you?" it asked.
Gavin shrugged.
"Very little."
That I'm a monster? That I suck out the human spirit?"
"Not exactly."
"More or less."
"More or less," Gavin conceded.
It nodded. "He's right," it said. "In his way, he's right. I need blood: that makes me monstrous. In my youth, a month ago, I bathed in it. Its touch gave wood the appearance of flesh. But I don't need it now: the process is almost finished. All I need now…
It faltered; not, Gavin thought, because it intended to lie, but because the words to describe its condition wouldn't come.
"What do you need?" Gavin pressed it.
It shook its head, looking down at the carpet. "I've lived several times, you know. Sometimes I've stolen lives and got away with it. Lived a natural span, then shrugged off that face and found another. Sometimes, like the l
ast time, I've been challenged, and lost -”
"Are you some kind of machine?"
"No."
"What then?"
"I am what I am. I know of no others like me; though why should I be the only one? Perhaps there are others, many others: I simply don't know of them yet. So I live and die and live again, and learn nothing -” the word was bitterly pronounced," – of myself. Understand? You know what you are because you see others like you. If you were alone on earth, what would you know? What the mirror told you, that's all. The rest would be myth and conjecture. "The summary was made without sentiment.
"May I lie down?" it asked.
It began to walk towards him, and Gavin could see more clearly the fluttering in its chest-cavity, the restless, incoherent forms that were mushrooming there in place of the heart. Signing, it sank face-down on the bed, its clothes sodden, and closed its eyes.
"We'll heal," it said. "Just give us time."
Gavin went to the door of the flat and bolted it. Then he dragged a table over and wedged it under the handle. Nobody could get in and attack it in sleep: they would stay here together in safety, he and it, he and himself. The fortress secured, he brewed some coffee and sat in the chair across the room from the bed and watched the creature sleep.
The rain rushed against the window heavily one hour, lightly the next. Wind threw sodden leaves against the glass and they clung there like inquisitive moths; he watched them sometimes, when he tired of watching himself, but before long he'd want to look again, and he'd be back staring at the casual beauty of his outstretched arm, the light flicking the wrist-bone, the lashes. He fell asleep in the chair about midnight, with an ambulance complaining in the street outside, and the rain coming again.
It wasn't comfortable in the chair, and he'd surface from sleep every few minutes, his eyes opening a fraction. The creature was up: it was standing by the window, now in front of the mirror, now in the kitchen. Water ran: he dreamt water. The creature undressed: he dreamt sex. It stood over him, its chest whole, and he was reassured by its presence: he dreamt, it was for a moment only, himself lifted out of a street through a window into Heaven. It dressed in his clothes: he murmured his assent to the theft in his sleep. It was whistling: and there was a threat of day through the window, but he was too dozy to stir just yet, and quite content to have the whistling young man in his clothes live for him.