Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

Or were they hidden?

Approaching the doorway — seeing the light spilling into the corridor, and sensing the warmth and illumination beyond — Holly thought that perhaps she should have fled at the first chance she’d had. They had saved her life after she’d come through the breach, but everything she’d seen and heard since then had made her more and more uncertain.

She nudged the door open enough to see inside, and gasped. The square room was much larger than she had expected. It was well lit with at least six oil lamps fixed to the walls. The half of the room closest to the door was a living area, with several huge floor cushions bearing the impressions of frequent use, a selection of threadbare rugs covering the floor, and a couple of low, wide tables bearing books and candles. The wall to her right was lined with shelves, bearing books and pictures and other objects that she could not quite make out. There was a distinct dividing line across the room marked by waist-high cabinets, and beyond that was a sleeping area and a table and chairs. The bed was wide and round, scattered with crumpled sheets and blankets, and several pillows that were propped against the side wall. The formal seating area comprised a table and six metal chairs. The walls were lined with dozens of movie posters — Psycho, Once Upon A Time In The West, The Graduate, Peeping Tom — with barely a space showing between them. Some of them seemed to have been drawn upon with elaborate markings, others appeared to have been vandalised with a knife. They were all pre-1972.

The room looked very lived-in. Cared for, but well used, and shockingly normal in many ways. There was one door leading from the back left corner of the room and it hung open, light and steam spilling out from behind it. A man was washing there, and singing while he washed.

Drake was keeping this from me , Holly thought, and that was reason enough for her to stay. She entered the room and pushed the door closed behind her. Crossing the room, dodging books on the floor and several empty cloudy glass bottles with chipped necks, she approached the postered wall. The posters were all old, with tears and worn edges, and many of them had yellowed over time. One was smudged beyond recognition, as though it had been soaked and dried again, the names and the shout-line blurred. Another was stained a rusty red. Blood? But she saw names that she recognised, and familiar faces.

‘Hello,’ a voice said.

Holly jumped and took a few steps back. The singing had stopped.

‘I said, hello,’ the short man said.

‘H-hello.’

‘You must be the next one.’ He was standing in the doorway, steam drifting and swirling around him, a heavy towel tied around his waist. In his right hand he held a smaller towel that he was using to rub and dab at his wet hair. His left hand was missing.

‘Next one?’ Holly said. Why call me that? She glanced at him and then looked away again.

‘You can look, you know,’ he said. He walked into the room and sat on the edge of the circular bed, whose base appeared to be made from chairs with their backs removed.

She glanced at his back and saw a constellation of scars.

‘Would you like some soup?’ He pointed towards the table, where several bowls sat stacked beside a steaming container, and wine bottles caught the light. ‘A drink?’

‘Y-yes, please. Thank you.’

‘Pour some for me, too.’ He draped the towel over his head and continued to rub, tilting his head to the left so that he could use his stump as well.

Holly walked to the table and kept her back to the scarred man. She sniffed a bottle and poured, the ruby fluid splashing into the glasses. She heard him humming as he dried himself. God help me look at this man with kind eyes , she thought, turning around with a glass in each hand.

He threw the small towel onto the bed, then unknotted the towel around his waist and dropped it. Unabashed at his nakedness, he walked past Holly and opened one of the low cabinets that divided the room. Trying not to look, but unable not to, she saw more scars on his right leg, and noticed that a chunk of flesh had been taken from his right buttock, his hip, and his lower back. His shoulder blades were slashed with dark red welts, old and rough. He might have been fifty or sixty — she could not be sure.

He turned back to her as he shook out a pair of trousers. His genitals were intact, but his face was not. She looked from one to the other, and then he grinned.

‘It’s good wine,’ he said, nodding at the bottles. ‘They grow vines up in the mountains, use water lenses to concentrate the weak sunlight. A huge amount of effort for such little gain, but that’s what I love about it so much.’ He seemed to drift away for a beat, staring past her with his one good eye, unaware of his nakedness. ‘But then, you probably know that.’

‘Yes,’ she said, unsure why. She watched him slip into his trousers and button them with one hand, an easy fluid movement that he’d obviously performed many times before. And she knew then that all his old wounds were bites. Some were obvious, like the chunks taken from his hip and buttock, and the garish purple wounds on his legs. Others — the torn cheek and eye, the rash of bubbled flesh across his throat — were not so obvious, but she still thought she could see teeth punctures and track marks. Bites. Many terrible, brutal bites.

‘Your name is. .’ she said, trailing off as he stared at her with frank fascination.

‘I’m Mannan,’ he said, a flicker of doubt furrowing his forehead.

‘Yes,’ Holly said, stepping forward and handing him a glass. He nodded, tipped his glass against hers, and took a small sip.

‘Please,’ he said, pointing at her glass with the stump of his left arm. Healed puncture wounds, skilful surgery, skin folded and stitched. ‘Drink.’

She drank, and it was gorgeous, with a rich fruity depth.

‘This time comes around so quickly,’ Mannan said, draining his glass. ‘I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy it, or that I’m sorry they keep trying. Even though it’s hopeless. Never works.’ He held his glass out to her, requesting a refill. ‘I won’t pretend it doesn’t make me happy.’

Holly filled his glass again. Her heart was thumping now, because something was so wrong here. No cure , Drake had told her, and yet here was a man clothed in bites, a man whose naked parading of his scars had seemed without deliberate design.

‘Your scars,’ she said, looking at him more closely now that he was partially covered. She saw now that some wounds were old — scar tissue forming a hard, ridged landscape of pain — and some more pink, recent. He raised his left arm, and at first she thought he was pointing at something away from them, a map or something else on the far wall. But then he performed a slow circle, arms raised so that she could view each terrible, ugly wound.

‘A yearly test,’ he said. ‘I wear them with pride. They’re evidence of my uniqueness.’

‘You’re immune,’ she said. Drake had kept this from her, a hidden man clothed in fury bites and living a pampered life below ground. And as she thought perhaps she could ask why, Mannan’s expression changed.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked. ‘You don’t know of me?’

‘And you haven’t heard everything about me,’ she said, realising that she must be a secret as well. Whatever ‘next one’ meant, it was nothing to do with her.

Mannan threw down his glass. Holly jumped, taking a few steps back until her thighs hit the table. He didn’t take his one-eyed stare from her face, and Holly dared not look away. She could see danger in him as well as pain: her pulse thrummed in her ears, her vision blurred.