The Faceless One (9 page)

“Fine, tell him I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He saw the look of dismay on her face. “Okay, make it ten.” With that, he breezed into his office.

“Mr. Purcival—” She came in after, following him with all the anxiety of a terrier following a bear.

He was already setting the bag on the conference table when he looked at the desk.

It was gone.

He hurried over to the desk, thinking that perhaps she had moved it to make room for documents requiring his review.

The desk was empty.

He looked up at her, and the paleness of his face told her she had made a very grave error.

“Where is it?” he asked, his voice a stricken whisper.

“I mailed it to California with the other items,” she said miserably.

“I never told you to do that,” he said, his voice rising.

“I know, but I thought … I mean, you said you were coming back at two, and I was going to … I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? You’re sorry, you goddamned bitch? ‘Sorry’ doesn’t mean shit, you stupid cunt!”

Theresa flinched from the explosive violence of his words. Mr. Purcival had never lost patience with her, and now, to be called such names …

As tears filled her eyes, he hurried around the desk. For a moment, she thought he was going to strike her, but he changed direction at the last moment to avoid colliding with her. His right arm connected with the shopping bag and sent it hurtling to the floor. There was a musical crash as all six glass panels of the display case shattered.

Without a glance back, Purcival hurried out.

“Your … your meeting,” she wheezed out, but he was gone.

There was a slight breeze as Purcival exited the building, providing a brief respite from the heat. In spite of this, he was perspiring freely and had developed a slight wheeze from the stress of the last few moments.

Purcival looked up and down the street. There was no sign of a UPS truck, let alone the driver. For one moment, he thought his assistant had kept the mask, telling him it had been shipped to divert suspicion from her. He knew that was crazy. She might have screwed up, but she was honest. Still, mightn’t she want to possess the mask, too? He pushed these thoughts out of his head. Any confusion would hamper him in his quest.

He looked around anxiously. Perhaps it would be better to drive to the UPS office, intercept the package there. He was about to look for a cab when he saw a large brown vehicle
two blocks away.

It was a UPS truck, parked in front of a company specializing in Asian imports.

Purcival hurried across the street, unmindful of a honking cab, and walked as quickly as he could. He was wheezing loudly, now, and kept using his sleeve to wipe the copious amount of sweat from his forehead.

As Purcival reached the corner, the truck suddenly pulled away, belching black smoke as it picked up speed.

“No,” he moaned, his voice like that of something wounded and trapped.

The truck stopped just a block away, and he hurried after it.

As he was crossing the street, his view was momentarily blocked by a large delivery truck. When it had passed, his heart sank as he saw the driver had already gone inside. No matter, he would wait for him.

Purcival approached the truck, its engine idling in a low, throaty purr. He leaned against it to catch his breath, but the summer heat had made the surface too hot to touch. He removed his sodden pocket square and wiped his brow, then crammed it into his back pocket. He peeled off his jacket, and there were dark stains of sweat under his arms, on the small of his back, and at the neck of his shirt.

Where was the driver? He thought these guys made a big deal out of being fast and efficient. Joey, whose physique Purcival had long envied, was probably flirting with a secretary or receptionist.

Looking around furtively, Purcival tried the back of the truck. It was locked, and the handle burned his palm. Cursing and rubbing the sore spot, he circled to the driver’s side. Through the windshield he could see dozen of packages, some wrapped in brown paper, some sealed with tape or string. They all looked so bland, and yet one contained an object that had taken a preeminent place in his heart and mind.

He climbed up onto the truck’s running board. If he found the package, he could remove it, then contact UPS from his office. It wouldn’t be stealing because he was retrieving his own property.

“Hey!”

Purcival looked down, startled.

The UPS driver was glaring up at him.

“Just what the hell are you doing?”

“My secretary sent something by mistake, I need it back, I …”

The driver wasn’t Joey.

This man was older than Joey by at least fifteen years and had graying hair and a handlebar mustache. He softened a little when he saw the distress in Purcival’s eyes.

“You’ll have to take that up with the dispatch office. Once it’s on the truck, we can’t …”

But Purcival was already pushing past him, panicked that he had wasted too much time on the wrong truck.

“Hey!” the driver yelled again, stumbling slightly as Purcival knocked him off-balance. Purcival nearly tumbled into the gutter, regained his balance, and hurried toward Central Park South.

Purcival reached the outskirts of the park. Which way? Praying for some intuitive guidance, he began running up Central Park West, toward Harlem. His sprint began to slow as he passed the Museum of Natural History, and a banner outside proclaimed that there would be “Predators and Prey” on display in September. That was something his son Jeff might like. The thought of his son brought a small ray of reason into his clouded mind. What was he doing? He was acting irrational—crazy, even. The best thing—the most sane thing—he could do would be to hurry back to his office, make the meeting, then try to make things right with Theresa.

He stopped his mad pursuit and leaned against the wall to catch his breath. The mask was gone, but he could get it back. And now that he thought about it, wasn’t he just a little bit glad it was gone? Wasn’t having it like harboring a guilty secret? Wasn’t the feel of it wrong somehow, almost dirty? He realized he was being overly dramatic, but how else to explain his behavior since finding the thing in the safety-deposit box?

Purcival wiped his brow and flung the droplets to the sidewalk. They made small, dark spots that began to fade immediately as they evaporated. Watching that simple event, he felt grounded, in control. The way he had behaved, that wasn’t him. He was a partner in a prestigious New York law firm. He had a loving wife and son, and he donated to charity. By any standard, he was a good man, a sane man. Part of him felt like crying, he was so relieved to be free of that burden, but he could cry later—right now he had to salvage his career. He looked at his watch—3:05. He was inexcusably late, but the meeting would go on for an hour or so. He could hurry back, freshen up, and proffer some reasonable excuse for his tardiness. Perhaps he could allude to Daniel Slater’s murder. It had been in all the papers, so Mel Hoeniger would be familiar with it. Hopefully, the lurid nature of his friend’s death would distract them from his odd, unprofessional behavior.

He took a deep breath, grateful for the return of reason. There was a vendor selling hot dogs and soft drinks on the corner, and Purcival purchased a Coke and drank most of it in one long draft. He belched loudly and glanced at the vendor, who just grinned. Purcival smiled back. He finished the last of the Coke and tossed the can in the trash. If he hurried, he could be back to the office in less than ten minutes.

A motion off to his left caught his eye, and he looked up.

At the entrance to the subway on Eighty-first, Joey the UPS man was waving. In his free
hand was a large, wrapped box.

As Purcival stared, Joey pointed to the box and winked. He then walked jauntily down the stairs to the subway.

“Wait … wait!” Purcival yelled, his obsession born anew. He hurried to the subway entrance, belching in little, explosive grunts as he went.

There was no sign of Joey on the stairway, so Purcival hurried down after him. The station had been recently cleaned, and the white tiles gleamed as he made his way down the steps. A mosaic of a wasp made him pause because, for a moment, he thought it was real—never mind that a wasp of such size could carry away a small dog.

The train was just pulling in, and people moved forward, impatient to be under way. Purcival looked around, and a woman with a child eyed him warily. Two teenage girls made a point of putting some distance between themselves and the large, sweaty man with wild eyes.

Purcival saw Joey past the turnstile, heading down the platform. Purcival would have jumped the turnstile if he had been a smaller man, but his three hundred pounds of girth prevented this sort of gymnastics. He rushed to the ticket dispenser, his shaky fingers tapping through the series of buttons that would get him a MetroCard. He shoved his credit card into the machine several times before it was able to read the magnetic strip, then punched in his zip code.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered as he waited for the machine to spit out his MetroCard.

There was the familiar sound of doors closing and the train’s picking up speed and rushing away. Purcival turned, his card forgotten.

The train was gone. He’d never find the package.

Hot tears streamed down his cheeks and spattered on his lapels. He had lost everything.

He swiped his newly bought MetroCard, figuring he could take the train downtown and try to salvage his job.

“Mr. Purcival!”

Purcival turned and scanned the crowd for whoever had called him.

Joey was on the tracks and waving. Like a kid balancing on a brick wall, he moved slowly along the rail, heading deep into the tunnel. He held the package up over his head like he was fording a river.

Purcival moved after him.

“Wait! That’s mine, wait!”

His phone rang, its pleasant tone suddenly shrill. He tore it off his waistband impatiently and threw it away. It skittered across the platform and into the darkness.

Joey continued down the tracks. Soon he would be out of sight.

Purcival climbed down awkwardly, trying to hurry and be careful at the same time. He smeared his pants and shirt with grease and soot, and managed to scrape his knee, tearing a hole
in his Armani slacks and drawing blood. Several people called to him in alarm, but Purcival ignored them.

Joey was almost out of sight, lost in the Stygian darkness.

“Goddammit, Joey, wait!”

Joey turned and regarded him coolly.

“That’s my package, and I want it back!”

Joey said nothing. He stood there on the rail, tossing the box casually from one hand to the other, an action that made Purcival nauseous. If he should drop the mask, break it … It was too awful to contemplate.

Purcival made his way over the tracks, his expensive loafers too slick to give him much purchase. He avoided the third rail, half expecting current to leap out of it and zap him like an errant bolt of Zeus. As if sensing this, Joey hopped onto the third rail and did a little dance even as Purcival called out a warning.

“You’re just a big pussy, aren’t ya?” Joey sneered.

Purcival felt his face get hot. He had wanted to reason with the young man. Clearly that wasn’t going to happen; he would have to take the package. Jackson Purcival, stripped of any of the civility or reason he prided himself on, charged the grinning UPS driver. As he got within ten feet of his prey, the smiling young man simply evaporated.

Purcival looked around wildly, the bones in his neck cracking as he tried to make sense of the event his eyes had just witnessed.

Joey was nowhere to be seen.

Neither was the package.

The air filled then with a scent that blotted out the considerable odors of the tunnel. It was a smell of pond algae baking in the summer sun. Musky, pungent, a slight odor of decay and something like mildew. It was the smell of wet things, things that hid from the light of the sun.

It occurred to him that the smells weren’t so different from the everyday smells of the subway, its fetid mélange of urine and oil, sweat and garbage. No, these smells were like that but considerably more ancient. There was a pungency to them that alluded to primordial swamps, of things that should have died out long ago, things alien and incomprehensible.

Purcival heard something, and it was a sound that brought goose bumps to his fevered flesh.

It was a moaning, a low wail that sounded like something consigned to the deepest pit in Hell. Surely any creature with its soul in eternal torment would make a sound like that. There was a phlegmy quality to it, like its maker was dying of consumption. In that wail was the utter hopelessness of the human condition.

Purcival looked behind him and saw it.

It rose slowly from the ground not eight feet from him. It was backlit by the lights of the station, but that didn’t disguise its inhuman silhouette. It was big, at least twelve feet long and shaped like a large snake. At the end, though, was what seemed to be a human torso with stubby arms, topped by a large and misshapen head.

It wailed again, but now it seemed to be angry. It began to slither toward him.

Shrieking, Purcival turned and ran toward the darkness, slipping and stumbling in his custom-made shoes. He heard the thing behind him, making a slick, sucking sound as it traveled. A snail that was as large as a house might make a sound like that.

Purcival ran, his wheezing punctuated by little mews of terror. He looked back, and the thing was following him, not swift, but still faster than he would have liked.

His inattention to the route ahead cost him. He stumbled over a beer bottle and went down hard, striking his elbow and ribs against the cold, steel rail.

He scrambled up, covered in oil, muck, and something cold and viscous.

The creature was closer now, and it seemed to be covered with a phosphorescent mold. This cast a pale blue light over the thing, and he could see its tiny arms reaching, its hands, no bigger than a toddler’s, grasping and clutching the air.

Its face was noseless but had a wide mouth and two huge eyes. Its eyes were moist and luminous, glowing a dim and pale yellow. He saw now that its flesh was more like a maggot’s, translucent and covered with an oily sheen.