Free The Faceless by Simon Bestwick

town.
    A half-smile dies on his lips. It isn’t funny. It’s never funny. Mark and Sam and Johnny aren’t funny. None of it is. None of it was.
    Nothing dies. Nothing. And sometimes that’s no comfort to anybody.
    They’re waiting, patiently, as they always do, for him to look; for him to see.
    This is the price; this is the toll. The Sight’s lifted him out of poverty, given him wealth and comfort. But this is the price.
    Allen rolls onto his back, closes his eyes. The covers make no sound. He releases a deep breath that no-one hears. Then he sits up and opens his eyes.
    They stand at the foot of the bed, red tear-marks on their pale cheeks. They cried a lot, before they died. All of them.
    Sam speaks first. Sam was nine. Wiry and brown-haired, jug-eared, but with that cocky, cheeky look to him. Some of Walsh’s punters had liked that. Sam had been the cunning one; he knew how to please the punters, make them happy. He’d shielded the other kids sometimes, but at others he’d let them get the worst of it, to save himself pain. They didn’t judge him for that. And it hadn’t saved him, anyway, in the end.
    Sam’s lips move. There’s no sound, but Allen hears, feels it; the words seem to print themselves, in dully burning red, on the fuzzy darkness of the small-hours room: You abandoned us. You left us to die .
    Allen shakes his head. He’d been a child. A child.
    Johnny speaks next. Johnny was the posh lad – a little bookworm in his glasses – and the eldest after Allen, ten years old at his death. He still wears his glasses. The lenses are cracked. He was the quiet one. Tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Part of the fun for Walsh and his friends was proving to him it was.
    Johnny’s lips move. So were we. And you left us to the Shrike.
    Hours seem to pass as he sits there without any answer. In the morning, in the light, he’ll tell himself over and over how he lives to put what happened right, to atone for his failure, until he believes it. But no donations to the NSPCC, to Save The Children will save him from the times like this, when the years fall away and he’s one of them again; four boys, naked, bound and gagged in a cold, reeking cellar while the Shrike circles round them in the darkness, whispering.
    This is how they were, before. There’s that much mercy, at least. He’s seen them as they looked after death – hours, weeks or months later. But tonight, he knows, looking from face to bleak, solemn face, there are worse things than them to see.
    Mark speaks last of all. Mark was the littlest, at eight years old. Fair hair, large blue eyes. They’d all tried to shield him, when they could. Of all of them, he’d been most like Allen himself – no defences, none of Sam’s cunning or Johnny’s ability to wish himself away; everything exposed, an open wound walking, but younger. A delight to the likes of Fitton. Walsh. The masked copper. Father Joe. Always popular, Mark; always in demand.
    Mark’s lips move. We have something to show you , he says, and turns his back. They all do. Facing the far wall, where the shadows have thickened and Allen sees only formless black.
    As one, the boys swivel back to face him. Allen saw a picture once: ice mummies, dead Inuit whose bodies had freeze-dried in the Arctic cold. A child, face framed in a fur-lined hood, a fringe of inky hair. Lips shrunk back from the teeth. Skin the colour and texture of wood. And no eyes; just holes. Their shape remained – the eyelids hadn’t decayed – but the eyes themselves were just apertures of black.
    The boys’ faces are like that now. Ancient, dried, eyeless. The black holes pin him, hold him. The shrunken lips move, and Allen knows what they’ll say. His bowels and bladder feel ready to fail, because he knows. He’s always known they’d say it one day; now it’s here he’s almost relieved.
    It’s time, Alan , says Mark. Not Allen, Alan. The name he was given; the one they all knew him by.
    The reckoning