The Children’s Home (12 page)

“You have some explaining to do,” he said. Morgan shook him off.

“I have nothing to explain to you or anyone else,” he said.

“One of my men has disappeared,” Pate said.

“What has that to do with me?” said Morgan.

“There’s no point in your playing the innocent with me. This has to be accounted for.”

“Give me my child,” said Morgan.

“You have no child,” said Trilby, with an air of triumph. “You made that quite clear earlier. You said”—flipping open his notebook to the page— “and I quote: ‘I have no wife, no family.’ ”

“One of my assistants has disappeared in a highly suspicious manner,” insisted Pate. “On your property. Which makes you responsible.”

“You must be mad,” said Morgan. “People don’t disappear.”

“He was standing beside me one minute,” said one of the other men, “and the next thing he was gone. If that’s not disappearing, I don’t know what is.” He shook his head, bemused. “Like bloody magic, it was. There one minute, gone the next.”

Moira began to chortle. Morgan looked at her. She was staring at him, her little fists opening and closing on the air, as though to show him how the trick had been performed. He looked at her, questioningly, and she nodded, as if to say, Yes, aren’t I clever. I know exactly what I’m doing. He stepped back with a gesture of submission and she laughed again. When the group of men moved back towards their cars, with the baby girl still in the arms of the man, Morgan stood back and watched them go, afraid only in part that he had misunderstood.

in which Morgan loses face and considers the substance of air

D
octor Crane didn’t come that day, nor the next. He wasn’t there when Morgan stood in the hall and called for Engel, and David came down the stairs towards him and said, “Now you must give it back,” and Morgan had shaken his head and moaned. He wasn’t there when the boy stepped forward and Morgan had lifted his hands to his face to protect himself from this and found that the wax was peeling away from his flesh, both wounded and whole, like snakeskin sloughed, soft in his grasp, a sort of muted silk, which David folded into a tiny square, placing it in the pocket of his shirt. “I wanted Doctor Crane to see me,” Morgan said, but David didn’t appear to have heard, or, if he had, to have cared. My power has gone, Morgan thought. His good eye rested on the boy’s breast pocket. He fought back an urge to tear the mask away, if mask was what it was, to tear it back and let it seal once again to his face. He wanted to be whole again. David must have sensed this. He stepped back, just out of Morgan’s reach, shaking his head in a gesture of warning. If only Crane were here, thought Morgan wildly. He’d help me to have what I want. He would understand.

“They’ve gone,” said David.

“They’ve taken Moira with them,” Morgan said, though he recognized as he spoke that there was no need, that David already knew exactly what had happened outside in the garden. Perhaps he had been watching from a window. “One of the men they brought with them disappeared,” Morgan said, and David nodded at this and smiled. Morgan would have asked him what he knew, but, before he had found the words, the boy gave a dismissive shrug with his shoulders. “What can we do about her? How can we get her back? We can’t just let her go like this,” Morgan said. Daisy had told him to ask David before acting and he had been angry. Now, here he was, asking David for counsel.

“You mustn’t worry about Moira,” David said. “She’ll be all right.”

The children swarmed back into the house within half an hour. They ran along the corridors, laughing, throwing themselves into Morgan’s arms. They haven’t seen me as I really am, he thought, with a trace of bitterness, because that was how he had felt with the face on; as though he were himself again. He wanted to ask for the face a second time, just to show them, but he sensed that David would not allow this. If there had been a mirror in the house, perhaps he would have insisted. Not only for Doctor Crane and the children, but also for himself. He wanted to see himself and find out what he was.

If only Crane had been here, Morgan thought later, and not only to have seen the face, although that was part of Morgan’s longing, and regret. With his experience of the world beyond the walls, surely the Doctor would have known what to do. He would have found the words to open the hearts, and arms, of the men and restore Moira to them. But even that wasn’t certain. And Crane was softhearted, Morgan knew this, perhaps too softhearted. He might have lost his temper, or worsened the situation in some other way Morgan could only imagine. They had so much to lose, he thought. Sometimes he found himself breathing in the air through his twisted lips as though there were only a certain amount of it, hungrily almost. Thin air, he thought, into thin air. That’s what people would say, that Moira has disappeared into thin air. They have come from air and they will return into air. But is that true, he wondered, and what would it mean if it was?

That night, Morgan dreamt that he was choking. At first he thought it was the mask itself that had turned against him, that a plug of the fleshlike wax had somehow formed and was forcing itself deep into his throat. He clawed at his face, in his sleep at first and then, to his horror, in a state of semiwakefulness from which he could not emerge. Writhing in his bed, alive to each sensation, he felt the wax dissolve into something else, some bitter, acrid substance, a burning that was acid, and then not acid, but fire. His lungs were filled with smoke. There was smoke all round him, in a physical space so small he couldn’t move, and unbearable, enveloping heat. And he was one of hundreds, thousands, he knew that now. He tried to cry out, but his voice was trapped within his throat as it melted into fat and wax. He lifted his hands to press them against the metal case of his prison, but his hands were dead.

in which Mill is discovered and Morgan is not believed

T
he following day, Engel called Morgan down to say that she had found something in the kitchen. He saw her standing beside the table, with one of the thin metal batons the men had been carrying in her outstretched hand. “I don’t know what it is,” she said, “but I don’t like it. It’s not right for this house. It doesn’t belong here.” He took it from her and weighed it in his palm. He was still shaken from his dream. “It’s made of something I’ve never seen before,” he said. There was a button set into the part shaped for the hand. He touched it and felt a shock shoot up his arm as the baton jumped and sparked. “You see,” said Engel. “What did I tell you?” When one of the little boys ran in with a scrap of cloth in his hand, Morgan asked to see it. It was brown, with buttons along one edge. He recognized it as a piece of the missing man’s shirt. “Where did you find this?” he said. “Outside,” said the boy, whose name was Martin, “in the garden.” “Show me,” said Morgan, and Martin led him out of the house and along the path that ran towards the boathouse. Halfway down the path, he stopped and pointed into a bush. “In there,” he said. Morgan crouched down to see what else there might be, but the inside of the bush was dark and empty of everything but its own thorny tangle of branches. If only Crane were here to help me decide what to do, thought Morgan; something dreadful is happening to us all and I am lost and I have lost my face. “Is this all you found?” he said. “Oh no,” said Martin. “Where is the rest of it?” Morgan asked and Martin ran off once more, with Morgan behind him, back to the house.

Upstairs, in the room where the woman made of wax was closed inside her wooden trunk, he found some of the other children. They were sitting in a circle and in the middle of the circle was a tidy heap of fragments of what looked like cloth and leather, buttons, shards of white, some sort of cushion stuffing. The children were laughing and playing with these fragments; they seemed unaware of his presence. One of the babies lifted a scrap of something soft and pink to suck. Morgan walked over and looked more closely and then stepped back, his hand over his mouth.

•  •  •

“They were pieces of skin, I’m sure of it, pieces of skin and bone. And there was hair as well, hanks of hair with the scalp still attached. It looked as though the poor man had been put through a shredding machine. It was awful, Crane, awful,” Morgan said, his voice breaking, “and the worst thing was the way they were playing with it, as though it had no value.”

“They’re only children,” said the Doctor, though he didn’t mean this. He was as horrified as Morgan. But something had to be said and he didn’t know what else would do. And it was true, at least, that they were children. Surely they couldn’t have known what they were doing.

“It’s not just that they were playing with it, though God knows that was bad enough,” said Morgan, shaking his head with horror. “It’s the
fun
they were having. Because they knew what it was, you see. I could tell they did.” His one good eye stared at Crane, who turned away, abashed, not wanting to be seen as a fool, or naive, but still refusing to accept what Morgan was saying. “They knew what it was, and they were glad. They were having their revenge.”

“And your face?” Crane said, in a low voice.

“My what? Oh, that. It was like being born again,” Morgan said, with a scoffing laugh. So David must have told him, he thought. There would be no secrets. “I wish you could have seen. I was myself with it on, or thought I was. I can’t explain it.” He shook his head again, less with horror now than disbelief. “After David made me take it off, I hated him. I wanted the thing back at once, I felt incomplete. But I was wrong to want it like that, I see that now. Because I wasn’t myself when I was wearing it, not really. I was stronger than I am without it, not just because I was no longer afraid to be seen, but because I felt superior to the others. And that’s not a good strength, is it? I felt like a god.” He shuddered. “It scared me, Crane, that sense that everything I did was justified, not by any external law, but because there was no law. I was the law. I would have killed them myself if I’d had the chance. I wouldn’t have thought twice, I’m sure of it. Killed them and been glad they were dead. But I didn’t have the chance, or I didn’t notice it if I had, because there was something of me there that stopped it, I suppose, something of what I am.” He paused, then touched his face. “Of what this has made me.” He wanted some word of comfort from Crane, but the Doctor didn’t speak.

“Then, when I saw what had really happened, when I went upstairs and saw the children treating a dead man like a broken toy, I knew that I
had
done it after all, though I still don’t know how, I still don’t understand the connection. All I know is that if I hadn’t worn that face nothing would have happened. They would just have gone away, I’m sure of it. And David knows that too. Which makes us both responsible.”

Crane was at a loss. He wasn’t sure he believed Morgan, that was the problem. How could a face made of wax, which must surely have been taken from the head that David had found in the attic, become attached to Morgan’s face, and work, and move? It was natural that Morgan should imagine something like this, the poor man; he had all the reason in the world for allowing such a tragic fantasy to take hold of him, to be whole and proud; to be like a god, as he had just said. To want something that badly; no wonder he had let himself be convinced. Yet he
had
opened the door to the men, he
had
been there when Moira was taken away, in full view of them all; these were things that Morgan would never have done if he had been forced to be seen as he was, disfigured. So what other explanation could there be but Morgan’s? The Doctor had spoken to David about the face, a few brief words in the hall, but David had been evasive and then obstinate, refusing to say whether Morgan’s story was true, although he would surely have known. It was the boy’s doing, after all, if it were true. Crane had gone up to the attic and had found the head as he had last seen it, with the face securely hinged. He touched it, hesitant, feeling idiotic, to see if it was warm; it had the warmth of wax but nothing more than that; it had nothing human. He had looked into its eyes to see what could be seen, but all they did was reflect his own.

Morgan didn’t need to speak to David about what he had seen. It was clear that David knew. Perhaps Engel, who had silently gathered the remains of the man into a sack and carried them into the garden to be burnt, had spoken to him; perhaps she had also known. There was no astonishment in the house, thought Morgan, with a shock of understanding; that was the worst thing. No one but he was startled or disconcerted by anything that happened, the coming and the going, the horror, because that was the only word for it, of the man’s reappearance.

And then there was Moira. What on earth shall we do about Moira? Morgan thought. David had told him not to worry with such a confident air that he had felt himself calmed, as though from now on the boy would always know better than he, or anyone else, would. But the Doctor was less convinced.

“We can’t just let her go like this. I’ll see what can be done,” he insisted. “It’s kidnapping, after all, unless they leave a document of some sort. A receipt, I suppose you’d have to call it.” He gave a humorless laugh. “She might be your daughter for all they know, even if you did say you’d never had children. You could have been lying. That wouldn’t have been so strange after all. People lie under stress. Under torture. You were hardly obliged to tell them the truth, were you?” But Morgan shrugged in a hopeless way, as though his only decision was to wait for David to tell him what next to do.

After the men and dogs had taken Moira away, Morgan, David, and the Doctor began to spend more time together, walking around the garden or sitting in the Doctor’s room, although none of them did more than pretend to work, or read, sometimes with the older ones among the children, more often not. Morgan felt all three of them were waiting for something. Then, late one morning, David said that the car was ready.

“I saw Mr. Green after breakfast,” he said. “He says we shall need some more petrol if we are to go very far, but that everything is in perfect working order.” David grinned. “It’s a beauty, Morgan, it really is,” he said, because he had started to use Morgan’s name like this, as though they were equals, the way the Doctor did. “He took me for a drive in it. Not far, just out of the garage and back in again, really, but it makes no noise at all. Inside, you feel like you’re in a great big boat. He let me drive it a little too. It was easy. I never knew. Mr. Green said I was a natural driver.” David’s cheeks were flushed with pleasure. He looked exactly like a normal boy, thought Morgan, like any other boy of his age who has been behind the wheel of a car and felt its power succumb to his. Perhaps I am wrong to wonder about them; to wonder and to worry. Perhaps I am the strange one after all. He smiled and nodded.