A Day Of Faces

by Simon K Jones

  Getting home on time like an obedient little girl wasn’t top of my priority list.

  As Marv walked away, I snuck my key into the lock and turned it as quietly as possible, avoiding the creaky spots on the porch. The music from the club still thrummed in my ears and I could tell that I’d had a bit too much to drink, to the point that I was aware of not being as quiet as I intended but unable to do anything to prevent myself from clattering about. Squamata were thought of as stealthy, or sneaky, but that had never really worked out for me.

  “You’re late.” The voice came from the half—open door to the living room. I could see him sitting in his arm chair, lit only by the side-light and staring through the doorway at me. He’d moved the seat specifically to get that view. Like I said: arsehole.

  I took my bag and coat off, hanging them on the banister and abandoning any pretence at quiet.

  He came closer, stood in the doorway between the hallway and the living room. “Keep it down,” he said, “your mother’s trying to sleep.” His voice was ash crushed into gravel.

  “What do you care?”

  “She’s your mother. Show her some respect.”

  I smiled and curtsied, then draw two fingers across my lips. “Quiet as a mouse,” I mumbled.

  He’d never laid a hand on me. I don’t know why he hadn’t. Maybe he saved it all up for her. It still felt like talking to a coiled spring, one which was aching to leap at my throat. That’s kinda how the tabloids wrote about squamata, but that didn’t even apply to him. He was about as different to me as possible, physically and in all other respects.

  The lock on my bedroom door had been removed years ago. Instead, I just jammed a chair under the handle so nobody could come in. It made him mad, but he didn’t seem to have the energy to complain these days.

  I was tired and it was late (or was that early?), plus I had a seriously great novel I was halfway through reading, so I undressed as fast as I could and brushed my teeth in the tiny corner sink in my room. The walls were lined with movie posters and album cover art. Everything else was book shelves and mix tape holders. It was my little haven.

  Our house backed out onto the town’s huge cemetery, extending off as far as I could see into the night. There were a few lights dotted along paths, revealing headstones and old trees. Our garden wasn’t huge, no more than 10 metres deep, and pretty narrow, leading up to a fence separating it from the graves beyond. I liked it. It meant quiet neighbours.7

  Because there was literally nobody alive out there I rarely bothered closing my curtains. Waking up to the sun was so much more relaxing than an alarm clock. And at night, looking out at the dark trees and gravestones made it easier to forget everything that was behind me, inside the house.

  Tonight, of course, the shed door had come unlocked and was swinging back and forth in the wind, hitting against its frame every few seconds. Having noticed it, I now had to do something about it, if I wanted to get any sleep.

  I dragged my heavy, weary body back downstairs and stumbled blearily through the dark house, glad that my dad had already disappeared upstairs. Their room was at the front of the house, so the banging door wouldn’t have bothered them. With a heavy sigh I unlocked the back door and stepped out into the ragged mess that was our garden, carpeted with mossy, tufting grass and lined on either side with fences that propped up an assortment of unused gardening implements, rusting bikes and unidentifiable machine innards.

  It was a warm night but I tucked my dressing gown around me and shuffled through the garden, barely keeping my eyes open. An owl hooted somewhere in the graveyard beyond the far fence. Something scurried past and disappeared beneath all the accumulated crap. Some of my friends thought it was creepy backing onto a cemetery but I kinda liked it. You knew where you were at with dead people.

  As I approached, the shed door swung open again on its rusty hinges, revealing a black hole of a doorway. Once I’d found a fox sniffling about in there, back when I was a kid. Having heard random tabloid stories of foxes creeping into babies’ rooms and attacking them, I did what any good squamata would do - I bit it. It was dead before it even reached the fence. That was the first and last time I used my venom on anything living. I was pretty annoyed that the memory had resurfaced, in fact.

  Something acrid was in the air. I could taste it. There was something coppery, too, like when you cut your lip and taste blood.

  I reached the door and put a steadying hand on it before it banged shut again. As I was gently closing it I perceived a large shape inside, heaped in a corner, unmoving. Freezing, I willed my eyes to adjust faster to the darkness and wrestled whether to run back to the house or investigate further. Or just close the damn door and bolt it shut.

  Instead, I peeked in closer.

  It was a body, I realised, as I discerned legs. There was something else, though, making the torso hard to figure out. The body still wasn’t showing any signs of movement, so I crept a careful step into the shed, leaning down close and flicking my tongue to try to get a better reading.

  The coppery taste was blood. I should have recognised it earlier. There was a lot of it in here, splashed across the floor and the wall where the body lay slumped.

  Where the shape of the body had been difficult to see I now realised was due to two half-folded, feathered wings, which were probably each five feet across when fully extended. They connected at the shoulder blades, as tended to be the case, with one folded awkwardly across his chest. I traced the blood back up to a gaping hole in the right wing, where the feathers were burnt and caked with dirt. Slowly piecing it together, I figured this guy had been shot while in the air, and had maybe come down in the graveyard.

  Sometimes my brain is a bit slow. Not when it comes to thinking of the name of an actor in a movie, or the exact track listing from an obscure album. I could recall that kind of shit straight off the top of my head. But the important stuff? That was often like wading through mud.

  That’s why it took me far longer than it should have to realise this was who the cops had been after at the club.

  Let’s face it; there was no way I was getting any sleep tonight.

  morphology

  mɔːˈfɒlədʒi/

  noun

  a particular form, shape, or structure.

  It was a habit of mine: not seeing horrible, gory wounds. I’d go as far as saying it was one of my main hobbies. I expended an extraordinary amount of effort into seeing people with whole, unruptured, fully-functioning bodies.

  Call me crazy, I just kinda liked it that way.

  This made two in one evening. Sure, this guy wasn’t inside-out, but the hole in that wing wasn’t doing him any favours and had turned the shed a dark crimson. Every step I could feel the squelch as my bare feet soaked up more of his blood.

  I’m usually pretty decisive. But not this time.

  In version one I tip-toe back out of the shed, scamper back across the garden and pick up the phone in the house. Ten minutes later the police arrive, storm through and take the guy away. They thank me, my dad’s impressed for the first time, and I get a great story to tell at school. I never see the guy again.

  Or maybe I give him the full fox treatment, biting into that bloodied wing and sinking my fangs in deep, poison flowing into his body. He wakes, jumping to his feet, and lashes out, his strong arm smacking into my face and knocking me back. As he rises and leaps towards me I grab a pitchfork from the tool shelf and swing it around in front. He impales himself and staggers back, then I pick up a shovel and being it down on his head. I tie him up before he comes to and drag his sorry ass down to the police station. Kicking open the front door, I slide him across the polished floor, as the cops and other perps turn to look in astonishment. I stand in the doorway, silhouetted against the streetlights. It’s pretty sweet.

  I ignore the blood-washed floor and move quietly closer, aware of my own breathing and my beating heart. I can see his chest rising and falling, his breath sporadic. He might be dying. I pick up
a gardening fork from the workbench, just in case, and lean in close, the fork held up in front of me as I peer at his face. His eyes suddenly snap open and and arm rushes out, seizing my wrist in a firm grip. He looks at the fork, then back at me, and whispers, “you have nothing to fear from me.” I remove his tattered shirt and tend to the wound, delicately removing the remains of the bullet. He grimaces but doesn’t cry out. “I owe you,” he says, voice hoarse but powerful. I close my eyes and lean in.

  Nope. That didn’t happen either. Tempting, though.

  “Hey!” I keep my voice down, not wanting to wake up the neighbourhood. He doesn’t stir. I shrug, then kick his leg, hard. “Hey, dead guy! You’re bleeding on my floor.”

  That got him moving. He groaned, and turned towards me, bleary-eyed. “Fuck,” he said.

  “Are your wings absorbent?” I asked. “Will they mop up all this shit?”

  He tried to sit up, making the mistake of putting weight on his injured wing. He collapsed back to the floor with a thud and a moan. Glancing over at his wound with a wince he asked “Did I get shot?”

  I nodded. “And guess what’s weird, right? I saw it happen. A couple miles away. And now you’re right here in my garden. What the hell?”

  “Weirder things have happened to me lately,” he said, grunting. With my eyes adjusted properly to the dark I could just about make out his face, although the dirt and blood didn’t make that any easier. The wings were clear testament to his birth year, but I didn’t recognise him from any particular phase. January wings tended to be more feathered, while April wings were gliders rather than free-flight. Each day was unique, so it wasn’t like I would know them all, but the annual pattern tended to develop in a predictable manner - much like me and Rachel both being squamata but differing massively in our genotype due to our birth date.

  Not recognising him wasn’t unexpected, given that wings tended to keep to themselves. They made their buildings tall and without ground floor doors for a reason. Nevertheless, there was something a little off about this guy, something just out of reach.

  “I’m thinking you don’t want me to call an ambulance,” I said.

  He snorted. “That’d be a bad idea.” He moved into a seated position, more carefully this time, avoiding the damaged wing. Part of the wing hung loose, the frame shattered and snapped. “You should probably go,” he said, looking me dead in the eyes. “The less you’re involved the better, for you.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just pop back to bed, then.”

  After a moment he smiled, then shrugged, then regretted the shrug. “Alright, then,” he muttered, “your funeral. You got something I can bite?”

  All I could think of was smut.

  “I mean like a small piece of wood. Or the handle from one of those gardening tools. Yeah, pass it over.”

  I picked up a trowel from the workbench and handed it over, reaching out as far as I could and half-flinging it at him. I wasn’t getting too close. The police don’t send ten cops into a packed venue without some kind of good reason.

  Holding the trowel, he looked at the damaged wing, then glanced up at me. “This is going to give you nightmares,” he said, putting the handle width-ways into his mouth and biting down, his jaw clenching hard.

  All his feathers fluttered as if in a breeze and he grimaced in evident pain. His left wing arched upwards, stretching into the perfect double-arc insignia that adorned every building owned by wings. The other wing flexed but didn’t respond, hanging limply and still bleeding. He cried a muffled cry and sweat appeared on his forehead as his face turned red and his breathing intensified. There was an alarming series of cracks and both wings jerked, then shivered uncontrollably for a few moments, followed by another, longer series of rending cracks.

  I was so consumed by the behaviour of his wings that I almost missed the two wounds that had opened up on his temples, large slits that were growing in size, blood pouring from them as something started to protrude out of his head. As in, actually poking through the skin, from the inside. His face was a contorted mask of agony, basted in sweat and saliva.

  Another sharp crack and the wings collapsed to the floor. At first I thought he’d simply relaxed them, then I realised with a jolt that they were no longer attached. Both had fallen away, separated from his body, the bloodied stumps where they had connected to his back clearly visible. Feathers drifted away from the frames like autumn leaves.

  The ordeal seemed to last forever but can only have been seconds. Before me was the same man, but no longer winged. He’d impossibly changed type and was now a bovid, complete with curved horns emerging from his skull. The wooden trowel dropped from his mouth and he sat gasping for breath, before lifting his head up and staring at me from a blood-streaked face.

  “Let me guess. You didn’t see that one coming, right?”

  nature

  ˈneɪtʃə/

  noun

  inborn or hereditary characteristics as an influence on or determinant of personality.

  A month passed.8 In the short time I had with Cal, that first month was the best. Before it all got complicated and crappy and people started dying. I never liked that shed or that garden, but I sometimes want to just be back there, like those early weeks.

  I kept going to school, so that everything seemed normal. After dark I’d wait until my dad was asleep, then sneak out with some food and we’d talk into the night, trying to figure out what to do next. Trusting him didn’t come easy, what with the image of that cop falling off the roof still fresh in my mind.

  “I was born twenty five years ago,” he’d said. “If you want to know whether you can trust me, go to the records office. Look up my genodate.” He’d pleaded for me to allow him to stay in the shed, hidden away, at least until I’d checked out his story.

  Truth is, I didn’t have any real alternatives. Here was a guy, bigger and older than me, who had transformed from wings to horns right in front of me, shrugging off a bullet wound like it was nothing. Some of the feathers still fluttered about the shed when the door was opened, even though we’d disposed of the wing carcass before it started rotting. Having a graveyard out the back turned out to be really, really handy.

  On the way to the records office I’d thought about the rest of his claims: that he’d grown up in an orphanage, having been rejected by his parents. I’d always wondered why my parents hadn’t given me up; they certainly didn’t seem to have ever enjoyed having a child. Cal had gone to an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere nice and quiet. It sounded pretty great - I’d always wanted to be taken away to an orphanage when I was growing up. Better to be among kids close to your age, rather than attempting to forge familial ties with your actual parents, who you had nothing to do with, least of all genotype. My dad was a fluffy little thing, about as far removed from my scaly squamatan nature as was possible.

  The orphanage had treated him well, right up until the point it burned to the ground. That’s when it had all gone wrong. The stress from the fire brought on his change, which attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.

  At the records office I’d found a secluded cubicle at the back of the room, behind filing cabinets and the endless shelves. Thumbing through brown cardboard folders I’d picked out the dozen-or-so babies that had been born on the same date as Cal. Which pretty much assured that they’d have the same abilities.

  There was nothing consistent about the recorded dates of death, other than that they all had them. All at very different times and in different places. Some had died during birth. Others as children, in accidents or domestic abuse incidents. One had died as a teenager, killed by a drunk driver while travelling the world before starting work. There was no consistency or pattern but none of them were still alive. None of the deaths on their own looked particularly suspicious, but Cal assured me that it wasn’t a localised coincidence.

  Cal wasn’t his real name, he’d said. I pulled out the file for Jason Parks. Born locally to rich parents, who had placed him into the
orphanage along with a substantial investment to ensure his and the orphanage’s success. They sounded like nice people. Jason Parks was generally unremarkable, doing okay in his studies without setting the world on fire. Which is a bad turn of phrase, I guess, because he died when the orphanage went up in flames ten years back, along with most of the other kids and half the staff. It had been big news at the time, but I’d only been about eight so didn’t really remember it.

  Although most people are born possessing an obvious genotype, some abilities only became apparent during the change. It was basically a secondary puberty. Because why settle for one when you can have an additional embarrassing physical development? For me that meant that I only started generating my own venom around age twelve. Having that happen right around when I started getting interested in boys was all kinds of trouble. Nobody wants to be a bad kisser, let alone kill your crush with slightly over-enthusiastic smooching. It kinda put a dampener on that whole part of my life.

  It was the fire itself which introduced Cal to his new life. Turns out the shift he’d done that first night wasn’t a one-off. He could do it whenever he liked, aside from the off-putting pain and exhaustion it caused, going from one genotype to another. I’d never heard of anything like it. I was pretty sure it had never been known to happen before.

  “I think I’m the only one left,” he’d said, when I’d returned from the records office. “I’ve moved around a lot. Every town I’ve been, every country, it’s the same. Nobody’s noticed the pattern, or it’s been suppressed, or something. A whole generation has been erased. They do it slowly, carefully, so that nobody picks up on it. They’ve spread it out over two decades. They’re trying to find me.”

  Conspiracy always seemed like bullshit. No government or organisation was that organised. Even if they wanted to be like that, they’d just cock it up through incompetence. It’s better to think of our overlords as being idiots rather than evil, right? Whenever a shitty, stupid law got passed, that’s what I told myself.