Jacob was the life, soul, and limbs of the party that took up the whole street; a big dark man with an even bigger (and much sunnier) voice. His laugh was the jolliest, his appetites the biggest, his newfound friends the most numerous, and he sang all the songs too sweetly for the volume he was stuck at. Which was pretty good for a man who was asleep in his bed twelve hundred miles away, dreaming about his childhood toast that no one but his mother had ever known how to butter properly. It was a fitful dream, the last twitchings and cartwheels of eyeballs and psyche blending in a confused blur of growing consciousness that would lead to wakefulness within the minute.
There in the party, Jacob felt this coming, the roil and turmoil of his own dreams falling, and he knew he had to go. He said his goodbyes, hugged his friends (everyone within arm’s reach, all at once), and was gone in a twinkling before anyone had missed his face. That was the important bit: no-one must miss his face. Especially Jacob, who had it carefully slipped back on just before his eyelids fluttered open, the face reattaching itself with all the delicate immovability of a limpet to a stone.
The face-thief watched as Jacob blinked and yawned his way out of bed, suffered a moment’s anxiety as he rubbed at his features, then relaxed again as nothing came of it and he wandered towards the bathroom. A thousand thousand thousand times the face-thief had done this, and each time he worried at that moment, though it never went wrong. If someone’s face should come off, why, they might see themselves, and such a thing could be very shocking.
The face-thief did not want to upset anyone, least of all his friends and victims. He knew them all so well.
There was Jacob (always made his folded-neatly sheets messy, snored a lot, wrote novels), who lived in the city with so few lights. The face-thief took him dancing in a hundred towns, and he made them all brighter.
There was Daisy (deep sleeper, short sleeper, had loved all four of her childhood dogs and cried on their birthdays), with her four children that kept her too busy to think all day, let alone rest. The face-thief brought her to fancy dinners with fancier men, who never went home with quite what they’d wanted but somehow were never displeased.
There was Evan (enjoyed sweets, slept with mouth open, had a pet spider he doted on), who lived behind eight sets of locked doors and was guarded by three big, serious men in sleek, serious suits whenever he went outside. The face-thief ran along the back alleys with him and over the rooftops, prancing from building to building armed with cans of spray paint and headfuls of ideas.
And there were hundreds more that he danced to each night on his night that never ended, thousands, millions and millions over the years and the days, all the way back to before the face-thief’s memory could possibly remember, or those of his victims.
For now, though, he was between them, and faceless. Naked like this, he couldn’t walk the wide ways and long avenues of the world, the streets and forest trails. He could only just fit down the Shortcuts, sliding neatly and fusslessly between scenes and ecosystems; sets, stages, and layers of sediment. He bent himself around a beam of light and slipped from Rio to Tokyo on the breath of a whale’s-spout by way of Kamchatka’s mountains; nimbly plucking free the face of Jun (a good boy, always happy and an uncomplaining helper of the home, collected leaves) as he slept in his room while his parents spoke downstairs. His fever was hard and hot but soon to break, they said.
As was his purpose and habit, the face-thief took Jun far away before he put him on, far from anywhere his face might wander in the daylit hours. It stopped confusion, which could make people upset. He squirmed down the Shortcuts for a microsecond longer, taking his time, weighing his options, and at last he set upon a brush thicket in Africa that he hadn’t visited in a while. He refracted off the headlight of an expensive car, caromed through the pupils of a president and a panther, and popped out of the world’s largest termite mound, where he put on Jun.
Jun was short and slight, even for a ten-year-old, but he was agile and monkey-like, even for a ten-year-old. The world around him was a jungle gym, and now he had lifetimes of experience to go climbing and clambering in the treetops. He nearly bowled over the chattering colobus monkeys in the canopy with his speed before they scattered in fright, sending him into fits of giggles as he brachiated that nearly ruined his grip.
“Hello!” he yelled at the distrustful face of a pangolin, as the scaly little anteater blinked at him from its hollowed-tree dwelling. It gave him a surly, smouldering look, then alarm overcame it and it vanished deeper into its lair.
Jun shrugged. “Hello!” he said to the leopard hovering one branch over his head, breath like pine needles smoking.
It shifted without so much a rustle, and he ran laughing on his way, leading it a merry chase through the branches that sent birds squawking for miles. At last it caught him as he tripped on a stone, and just as its fangs were singing towards the nape of his neck the face-thief took off Jun’s face and went laughing away, hopping off its ear and landing on a dumpster in a big city. It was probably someplace in Europe; the face-thief hadn’t checked his descent, too caught up in the moment. He slapped on Jun’s face and chuckled.
“That was peculiar,” said a voice behind Jun’s elbow. He glanced down and saw a face peering at him from under a grate in the alley, all eyebrows and elbows.
“Was it?” asked Jun.
“Yes. Boys appearing out of the air is peculiar, and I’ve seen many peculiar things. Do you have a moment to talk, boy?”
“About what?” asked Jun. “I can talk about lots of things. I’ve been nearly anywhere and done nearly anything. Ask me about it all!”
“Very well,” said the man in the grate. “What are you?”
“I’m a face-thief,” said Jun. “What are you?”
“A thief, eh?” said the man in the grate. “How peculiar. What do you do then?”
“I steal their faces in the night,” said Jun. “I put them on and run all around, everywhere, without a care. I climb the tall places and sink through the low places and I always put them back when I’m through with them, so quick they never miss them.”
“Why ever do you do that? A thief that puts back what he’s stolen is no thief at all.”
“Oh, but that would most shocking,” said Jun. “It doesn’t hurt this way, you see. And what would I do with all the faces?”
“I wouldn’t know, I suppose,” said the man in the grate. “Tell me, in your travels, have you seen the Grand Canyon?”
“All of them,” said Jun proudly.
“But there’s only one.”
“There’s loads of grand canyons, and each grander than the last. I’ve seen them all twice over and twice again.”
“Hmm. Have you glimpsed the Mona Lisa?”
“I drew it!” laughed Jun. “Or at least, I drew a sketch of it once. Maybe. I’ve drawn so many pretty people I can’t keep them straight.”
“Fascinating. Have you ever danced the Tango when the night runs boiling over?”
“Oh yes!”
“With the rose between your teeth?”
“Many times! And once with a sprig of poison ivy.”
“My word,” said the man in the grate. He seemed to mull it over for a minute. “I simply must accompany you,” he said at last.
“If you’d like,” said Jun. “I can’t remember if anyone’s ever followed me before.”
“I’m sure I could, if only you could lend a hand,” said the man. “It’s these bars, these confounded bars. I’ve been stuck down here for four hundred years and four months and forty-four days, with only a crust of bread and a quarter-jug of stale water. It’s monstrous, it’s inhumane, it’s cruel beyond measure. Whatever did I do to deserve this fate?”
“I don’t know,” said Jun, fascinated. “What did you do?”
“Well, I can’t get out,” said the man, filled with misery. “If only you could help me move, I could come with you. I could be a friend for you, if you’d like. It must be hard to have friends with no face of your own, eh?”
“I don’t know…” said the face-thief, thoughts uncurling and rewinding. “I’ve had friends all over the world. I had two hundred not an hour ago.”
“Pshaw! Here one moment and gone the next. No, true friendship is lasting, not any such fairweather cockamamie! I implore you, face-thief, rid me of this imprisonment and I will follow you ‘till the end of your wanderings.”
“Surely!” said Jun. He reached down and grabbed the man’s hand and yanked him up and out of his little cell under the grating; he was whisper-thin and couldn’t have weighed more than his slender, eggshell-frail bones; his skin could have been used to pattern china. As he gasped in the cold night air, the alleyway sighed and heaved under their feet, smashing his little chamber into a grinding shambles of stone.
“Free!” he hollered at the sky. “Free as the deep blue sea and fresh as a lark in the morning breeze! Aha, world, I love thee! Garbage, I would embrace thee! Here, friend, let me kiss your feet and shake your hand.”
“No need,” said Jun. “Was it really so terrible down there?”
“To be imprisoned is the worst of all worlds,” said the man. “You have no agency, no energy, no will of your own! All is inertia, and stillness, and the death of the thoughts. Ah friend, but you know nothing of this. You are quicksilver, lightning unbottled!” He stooped to the dirt and seized up a crumbling speck of mortar and stone. “Here, a piece of my prison. Take this, my friend, and forevermore know what is to be avoided!”
Jun reached out, and then froze. He’d been distracted, he’d been talking, he’d almost missed Jun’s sleepy murmurings getting louder as his fever heightened. In a second and four he’d be wide awake, talking himself out of night-time until his mother came to soothe him to sleep again.
“Come on, away!” he said as he hastily put Jun away, and, grasping the hand of the man, he swept them away through a crack in the wall and over the aurora borealis, pinwheeling them along the edge of Jun’s alarm clock and into his room. A quick slap and smoothing of the face-thief’s small, delicate hands secured it tight, and then they hid behind the wall as the boy awoke.
“Such speed… magnificent,” declared the man. “You really must show me how you do this.”
“You take Shortcuts,” said the face-thief. “It’s easier when you’ve gotten the hang of it.”
“I must insist on lessons,” said the man. “Go on, take me to your next victim! I’ll pay attention most closely.” He peered at the face-thief for a moment. “Strange. Where are you? I can see you most clearly, good friend, but your features elude my grasp.”
“You can’t go stealing faces with a face,” said the face-thief. “It’s bad manners, and it’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“They stick together, you know – you could end up being all those people at once, and they’d never come off, not forever, ever.”
“My word,” said the man. He stared at Jun’s room thoughtfully – inside, his mother had begun singing him back to sleep. “Where to next then, good friend? Come now, set me a course that I might learn.”
“Let’s go to Polynesia,” said the face-thief. “I have friends there.”
The face-thief’s friend was named Ema (she slept with her eyes open, listened carefully to her grandmother, and could out-eat all her brothers), and soon she was off making friends enough islands away that none of them would ever run into her in the day-time and ask awkward questions. The man followed her close all night, but no one ever seemed to notice him, not even when he held her hand (it passed through her arm) and glared righteously at the boys that stared at her so.
“Shamefulness,” he said scornfully. “To be there and not at all. Bah! Are you sure I cannot try on a face? Just a little one, maybe one whose owner wouldn’t miss it.”
Ema drank something interesting from a glass. “No, no, no. It’s dangerous and shocking, and there could be all sorts of problems and no solutions in sight for miles. You’re free now, be happy! They can’t see you, but I can.”
“Ah, well,” said the man. “Turning my words of friendship back upon me, eh? A hard blow, a cruel one, but well dealt and spoken. I shall say no more…” but he hesitated.
“What is it?” asked Ema. It wasn’t her first interesting glass of the evening, and she wasn’t tactful at the best of times.
“I forgot,” said the man most slowly, “to give you my token of thanks. You had to go and put back your face –”
“Not mine,” reminded Ema.
“- your face,” continued the man blithely, “and I completely forgot it. How insensitive of me. Set aside your face for a moment more, friend, so that I can touch you once more, to gift you as you are justly deserved.”
“Thank you very much,” said Ema, who was blushing thoroughly. Compliments and curses alike had been thrown to her times uncounted, but never past her face. It felt tingly. “But give me a moment first, to say goodbye to my friends – my other friends.”
“Friends, friends, friends, and friends,” rattled off the man. “Come now, have I not spoken of the difference between a friend and friends? A friend in need is a friend indeed, but friends are not even accorded the closeness with which enemies are kept.”
“I suppose,” said Ema, and made her farewells a mite quicker than usual, spurred on by excitement and the disapproving frown of the man.
Stepping back to the island where Ema slept soundly was the work of a moment’s beat in a butterfly’s wings. The man barely needed her help at all this time.
“A new thing,” he said, “should be seized immediately and with as much force as possible, lest it glide away and you be left dreary. Tell me, am I not an apt pupil?”
“You are,” said the face-thief, hopping nimbly from Ema’s bedside.
“Thank you,” said the man. “Here then, is a token of my esteem, a favour to be bestowed upon you! Take this fragment of mine prison, oh friend of deliverance, and be reminded of what freedom is!”
With those words he lightly tossed the rude chunk of masonry that he had seized from his grating high, and the face-thief caught it with surety. The moment his fingers touched it, it all went wrong. The bottom and top dropped out of the world and the sides spun, the Shortcuts stretched so far that they bled out of sight, and the face-thief was solid now, solid as a rock, and heavier than sin. He was shocked, and sank to the floor too quickly even to call out.
“I am your friend ‘till the end of your wanderings,” said the man, with the bright and earnest smile that he favoured. “And so I was.”
“Why?” squeaked the face-thief, breath all gone.
“You have taught me all I wish,” said the man. “I have spent many a word on soothing your mind to me, and I have scant patience for motives and morals. Suffice to say it that free is as free does, and I will be freest of all – free with whatever face I choose, as whoever I choose, as all of them if need be! Whom first will it be? Who knows!” He chuckled so hard that his eyebrows burrowed together like a marriage of caterpillars.
“And you, my poor, poor old friend – you may make your way here. Most likely straight downwards; my prison added some manner of weight to the stone that I fancy is most unnatural.” And with a laugh and a jig he was off and away, dancing on the moonlight.
The face-thief didn’t cry. He laughed, and screamed, and yelled, and now and then he yapped, but he didn’t cry. So what he started to do there on the floor must not have been that.
“Who’s there?” said a sleepy voice, and now the face-thief’s little sobs grew that much sadder, because he knew that he’d woken up Ema, poor Ema whose face might even now have been stolen right off her head as she slept. Maybe the man wouldn’t put it back. Maybe he wouldn’t care. Maybe, although the face-thief’s imagination could only begin to hint at such things in the darkest corners of his soul, he wouldn’t even wait ‘till she was asleep. Her or anyone else.
“Oh, a ghost,” Ema said. “What do you want, little ghost? Why are you crying?”
The face-thief tried to say something, tried to explain what he was doing, but he was too out of breath to say anything, and too worried, and a little fearful too. Who knew what she’d do if he told her everything and anything, or what she’d even do to just a ghost. He curled up in a still smaller ball around the cruel weight of the stone, and tried to muffle himself.
“Well, that’s no good at all,” said Ema. She swung herself out of bed and stood over the face-thief, stroked his quivering back and said soothing nonsense-babytalk to him, and bit by bit she got him to uncurl and saw the stone clutched against his chest.
“Bad stone there,” she said, shaking her head. “Really bad. Who did that to you, little ghost? You say the word, and I’ll put out the anger on them, from the whole damned town. We’ll take care of you.”
The face-thief flinched harder. He didn’t want to shock people.
Ema laughed, long and rich, fuller and thicker than the quick chuckle of the man. “You don’t worry, little ghost. You haven’t been a secret here since you dressed up as my grandmother’s mother and got in a fistfight with her cousin-in-law while she was sound asleep in her bed. You’re not as careful as you could be, but you’ve got friends because of it. Nobody’s perfect.” She reached down and plucked out the stone from the little divot that it’d drilled into the face-thief’s chest, then spat on it and hurled it out the window. There was a clack and a click and it burst into a thousand bits of everyday dust, and the face-thief was on its feet again, if it had any, which it now didn’t.
Ema laughed as she felt something clench her waist for a fraction of a second, then vanish. “Take care of it yourself then, will you? Good for you, little ghost.”
The face-thief didn’t hear her, he was halfway to the moon at the moment, running on the moonbeams and dodging orbital debris – bits of old space shuttles and scraps of rock left over from the beginning of the world. He still had time, the man loved to talk, to pontificate, to relish the sound of his voice unconstrained. The face-thief perched on the rim of the Mare Vaporum, and stared down at the planet as hard as he could see, as quick as he could think.
He saw everything. Bees fluttered and he saw the dew flick from their wingtips. Elephants tussled and he saw the dust specks on their eyelashes. Whales warbled and he saw the microbes in their guts vibrate. The continents ground together and he counted their atoms using numbers too quick to be real.
And there, there, there – moving fast as only he could – he saw a treacherous man standing in a bedroom.
The face-thief didn’t dodge, or jump, or dash, or even sprint. He fell, and he fell so fast it was near flying. He landed in the bedroom of Jun, and he landed on Jun’s bed, on his covers, on his chest, right in front of the reaching hand of the man.
“…oh,” said the man, as whatever grand speech that had been brewing in his mouth slid away.
The face-thief leap, speedy with fury, but the man was quick with fear. He dashed down the mousehole, spun down a mineshaft in brazil, and wafted on the smell of broccoli in a Californian kitchen, all in a dead sprint. He was an apt pupil indeed, the most apt of all the face-thief had ever taken, which was one.
But he had no practice. He had no skill. He was flashy, yes, he was dashing, yes, he even had a spark of that rare, rare imagination that was needed, hoarded out oh-so-carefully over his long years alone. But it was nothing but style, and as the man quickly realized as the face-thief tore at his heels, style without substance meant nothing, even when you had no substance.
A final slide along the rim of a French teacup and they were in Polynesia again, on a very small island. Ema had gone back to bed, sound and secure, and there was no pause to savour the moment in the man’s mind this time, only greed born of fear that turned his hands to near-talons as he darted to the bedside. He looked behind him, he looked afore him, he looked at all sides and dimensions, and for that split second he knew he was safe. His hands grasped either side of the face, felt for the hidden hinges he’d oh-so-carefully watched the face-thief grasp and lock earlier. There was something about the open eyes. They were green, with a peculiar glint.
The face-thief popped out of one.
The man’s mouth opened, maybe to say “oh,” again, maybe to scream, to deny, to roar and fight. But none of it mattered, because the face-thief was furious beyond all reasoning, and he had done what the man dared try far more often than he dreamed, often enough to do it without even thinking. His hands darted out, seized on the corners of the man’s jaws and the furrow of his forehead (crushing eyebrows flat under angry palms), and he yanked free the man’s face in one thunder-bolt moment, holding it high between them both.
There was another endless moment, when the man looked at the man and saw just what was there.
There might have been a scream in it, but there was nothing for the man to scream with.
There might have been wide-eyed shock, but there were no eyes for him to widen.
Instead, he shuddered all over at once, shrank in on himself, and vanished inside-out with a strange high cry and the gritty rattle of a crushed chain. The Shortcuts trembled tight, then relaxed once more.
By next morning, things were different.
A publisher woke up to find a copy of Jacob’s latest draft sitting on his desk.
Jun’s fever broke, and the first thing he saw when he woke up was a potted plant in his room. His big book that had belonged to his grandfather said it was from Southeast Asia, and was probably extinct.
Ema’s grandmother had acquired a rocking chair sometime in the night, which was a strange coincidence because the department store that Daisy worked at had one go missing that very night.
Daisy was fired on the spot, and as she trudged up her driveway she found that someone had left a lottery ticket stapled to the front door. One month later, she owned a newer, much nicer door that was attached to an entirely different house. The driveway was a lot longer too.
Evan found a canister of spray paint left under his pillow, along with a small set of lock picks. The rest was up to him, and he was quite eager for it.
Friends in need are friends indeed, and, if circumstances dictate that they be often less close than enemies, they are all the more warming to visit.