Chapter 177: The Face

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 177: The Face

He was not what Cole had expected.

Three weeks of fifties, coat, ordinary — of a face that slid out of his head every time he reached for it, on a bench, on a doorstep, in a street he'd lost four times — had built something in Cole's mind that was mostly shadow. What stood three feet away in the grey light of Kaelmoor's main street was a man.

Grey at the temples. A small, pale scar through the left eyebrow, like somebody had caught it with a ring. Brown eyes, one very slightly lighter than the other. A good coat, badly looked after. A tired face. A face you'd pass in a post office queue and never think about again.

Which was, Cole understood — in the half-second he had — the whole point.

Bell's hand was coming down toward Reeve's head.

Cole caught it.

He caught it at the wrist, with his free hand, the way he'd caught Marguerite's on Fen's street. Not hard. The way you'd stop somebody touching a hot pan.

And Bell stopped.

Not because he couldn't move. Cole could feel how much he could move — there was a strength in that wrist that had nothing to do with its size, like holding a cable that was holding up a bridge. He stopped because he was looking at Cole.

And Cole was looking back.

"Oh," Bell said.

It was the same sound Cole had heard him make once before, on a doorstep outside a laundrette, when a boy in socks with a frying pan had described his face out loud. Surprise, very quiet. The expression of a man finding a chair where he hadn't expected one.

"You can see me."

"Yeah."

"That's not possible. You're not—" Bell's eyes went to Cole's other hand, clamped round Reeve's wrist, and something in his face went very sharp. "Oh. Oh. He's giving it to you. Through his hand."

"Looks like it."

"Forty-one years," Bell said softly, "nobody in this town has looked at me. And the first person who does is you."

He tried.

Cole felt him do it — felt the thing Bell did to everybody else come up through the wrist he was holding like a tide. Forget. It's nothing. There's nobody here. You're holding the air.

It reached Cole, and pushed, and for a moment the edges of Bell's face started to go soft the way they always had—

And then stopped.

Because Cole's other hand was round Reeve's wrist, and through it, running up his arm like warmth into cold fingers, was a seventeen-year-old's absolute refusal to let anything, ever, disappear.

Bell's face came back into focus. Every line of it. The scar. The mismatched eyes. And it stayed.

"No," Cole said.

That was when the gold came.

It came the way it always came now — up out of him without asking, out of the corners of his eyes and down his throat and along his jaw — and the dead street went a shade brighter, and the geraniums in the window box turned toward it, all of them at once, the way plants turn toward a window.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And the word came with it.

Cole felt it rising the way he'd felt it in a lit street with forty shapes closing on him, and at the open doors of a white van, and in Ivor's kitchen with his fingers on a woman's collarbone. The word that closed things. It came up into his throat, calm and certain and already shaped, the other one's voice underneath his own—

"Set—"

He stopped.

He stopped with it half in his mouth.

He stood in the middle of a dead town's main street with a man's wrist in one hand and his best friend's wrist in the other and gold running out of his eyes, and he did not say the name of the town he was standing in.

Bell was watching his face.

For the first time, there was no smile anywhere on Bell at all.

"You nearly did," Bell said. His voice had gone very quiet. "Here. Of all the places on earth. Do you have any idea what you nearly did?"

"No."

"No. You don't." Bell looked round — at the street, at the chapel, at the forty-yard stretch of black rubble where the north end had been. "In a laundrette, it's a word. On a street in the city, it's a word. You can say it in a Ministry basement and all it does is move a number on a screen." He looked back at Cole. "Say it here, and it isn't a word. It's an address."

The gold wavered.

It was only for a second. Cole held on to it, and to Bell, and to Reeve — but that second was what Bell had been waiting for, and he turned his wrist in Cole's grip in a way that should not have been possible for a human wrist to turn, and he was free.

He stepped back.

He did not run. He did not vanish. He walked, unhurried, backwards for three steps, and then turned and walked away down the middle of Kaelmoor's main street toward the south end of town, in his good coat, with his hands in his pockets.

And Cole watched him the whole way.

Every step. The coat. The grey at the temples. The back of a tired man walking away down a dead street. Cole held it — held all of it — and it did not slide.

At the corner by the chapel, Bell stopped.

He turned round and looked back up the street, and Cole saw his face at forty yards — clearly, perfectly — and saw Bell realise, standing there, that he was still being seen.

Bell stood there with his hands in his pockets, being seen, and did not seem to know what to do with it.

Then he went round the corner.

Cole let go of Reeve's wrist.

The gold went out of him. He stood in the middle of the road and waited for it to happen — for the face to start going soft, the way it always had, the way everything about Bell always went the second you stopped trying to hold it.

It didn't.

The scar. The eyes. The coat. Every line of it was still there when he closed his eyes, as sharp as a photograph.

"Reeve," he said.

"Yeah."

"I can still see him."

Reeve looked at him. His nose was bleeding. His hand, the one that had been holding Ansel's, was still in Ansel's.

"Yeah," Reeve said. "I know. I don't think you're going to be able to stop, now." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Sorry."

Behind them, somebody laughed.

It was Cordelia.

She was standing at the window box with a green watering can in both hands, looking down at it, and the laugh came out of her like something that had been stuck in a drawer since 1985. It wasn't happy. It wasn't unhappy. It was the sound of somebody who has just woken up and does not yet know where they are.

"It's new," she said. "The can. It's got a sticker."

"I know," Ansel said. "I'm sorry. I didn't think to take it off."

"You were always like that." She was looking at him now, properly, the way you'd look at somebody across a platform. "You never took the stickers off anything. Your mother used to—" She stopped. Her face went strange. "Where's your mother? She was at the chapel. She was — it was a Tuesday—"

Ansel had not let go of her hand.

"It's been a long time, Cordelia," he said, very gently. "I'll tell you. I'll tell you all of it. But it's been a very long time."

Thessaly came down the street at a run.

She stopped beside Cole, breathing hard, and looked at the woman with the watering can, and at Ansel, and at the empty road where Bell had walked away, and then she said, very quietly:

"Cole. Look at the street."

He looked.

The man on the lawn had stopped raking. He was standing with the rake in his hands, looking down at the six feet of grass he'd been raking since 1985, as though he'd just noticed it was there.

In the doorway down the road, the dog lifted its head. Then it stood up — stiffly, like a very old dog — and stretched, and walked out onto the pavement, and sat down in the sun.

And on the porch across the road, the boy on the swing had stopped swinging.

He was nine. He had been nine since before any of them were born. He sat on the swing with his feet on the ground and his hands on the chains, and he looked round at a street he had been looking at for forty-one years without seeing it, and then he looked at the strangers standing in the middle of the road.

"Where's my mum?" he said.

[End of Chapter 177]