Bound By No Human Rules
The True Face consumed Theo in its void of limitless desire.
In that moment when he had glimpsed the mirage that broke the shrine, it had burrowed into his brain forever. It had settled there, unobtrusive at first except for the itch of a precious memory tantalisingly out of reach, but then, in the space of an hour, it changed.
Theo couldn’t describe it, but he’d fallen to the floor in a faint with the others, like a nuclear bomb had gone off in his brain. The True Face burst through him, setting every fibre of him on fire, free, wild, unmoored and dangerous, free-falling through his consciousness and dragging everything down with it. Theo had no idea what was waiting at the bottom.
He was not alone.
Numbed to the death of Jem and his brothers, the remnant of the Remnant remained in the warehouse, tending to their shattered shrine. The rest went back to their lives, falling away in misery and complaining of a hole in their heads, an absence in their memories that hadn’t been there before, but had no idea what Theo and the few others were talking about.
People experienced the True Face in different ways, Theo thought, and that made sense. It was indefinable, indescribable. It had to be experienced, but only a few would truly be moved.
As far as he was aware, the unmoved amongst them were trying to live like nothing happened, like they hadn’t failed to bring Grandad through, like they’d never tried. Some continued their rituals of sacrifice to the Death God, who was now protecting the Wend-McVeys.
Theo’s group chats erupted in indignation at this news: who were the Wend-McVeys, but corrupted, weak vessels of glory? They should be ripped out at the root and burned on the welcome pyres as their Grandsire reigned triumphant. Why would the Thirteenth ignore their sacrifices and protect a lesser branch?
She chooses the lesser things of this world to shame the strong, Theo’s uncle posted, and his explanation gained traction. She shows us the Death God is a guardian and protector, a balance between the worlds, and we can entrust our sacrifices to her safekeeping. Death is a blessing, and when the Old Watcher arises, the living will be doubly blessed.
Theo didn’t care for the Old Watcher, their Grandsire, anymore. He had fled the church when the Death God appeared, but now he didn’t even care about her.
He cared about the image burned into his brain, its details slippery and evasive, but its presence gnawing away at him and spreading through his whole being with invisible fire.
Theo wondered if the True Face was more powerful even than Grandad.
They worked tirelessly, sleeping in the warehouse among the bloodstains and broken machines. Theo hadn’t been to work for days and hadn’t bothered to go home yet, either. For the first time in his life, he was single-minded. This was it. The True Face was the One.
Theo was charging his phone in a café near the warehouse when the message came through. The café belonged to another cultist and True Face believer, who lived above it.
:Where are you?: Natalie Shaw texted him, his closest cousin. :I’m already in London, but no one knows where you are?:
:Why are you in London?: Theo messaged back.
“What’s up?” Cousin Tally asked, putting a mug of coffee in front of him. Even she had given up on almost everything but the reconsecration of the shrine; her café was exclusively for cult use, the ‘Closed’ sign turned outwards and front door locked.
Cousin Tally was in her fifties, square face framed with straightened layers that badly needed a stylist, her eyes bearing the same sunken look Theo recognised from his own reflection in the café mirror.
“I don’t know,” Theo admitted.
His phone vibrated as Natalie replied.
:???? The summoning?:
Theo stared at the screen. “Did you feel anything?”
Cousin Tally shook her head.
Theo rang Natalie. “What are you on about?” he asked as soon as she answered.
“The summoning? Can’t you feel it? How is it not ripping your chest out?” Natalie sounded like she was somewhere busy, with automated announcements. Theo guessed a train station.
“I can’t feel anything?” He looked to Tally for corroboration but she shook her head. “Who’s doing it?”
“Can’t feel it? Are you fucking serious?” Natalie sounded breathless. “It’s the Soothsayer. How are you not feeling it? It’s the worst I’ve ever felt.”
“Worse than a family one when Great-Aunt Beverley was alive?” Theo remembered that sharp pain under his breastbone, knives between his ribs, the irresistible forceps pinch around his heart.
“Way worse. How you not getting this?”
Theo didn’t know, but the True Face and its spreading balm was melded to him from the inside. That must be something to do with it, the True Face claiming him as its own, and now he was untouchable. Theo’s breath caught in his throat.
“I’ve seen the True Face,” he managed, welling with evangelistic zeal. “I’ve seen it for myself, when we opened the shrine.”
“What are you talking about? Whose face? Grandad’s?”
“Better.” Theo didn’t know how to make her understand. “I saw the True Face in the Outside, and it was beautiful and now I’m – I’m part of it. I’m part of it, and it’s part of me, and it’s wonderful.”
“Why are you talking like that?” Natalie sounded less than impressed. “What’s the matter with you?”
“No, no, you have to try and understand,” Theo said, accidentally kicking the table and jogging the coffee mug. “Oh my god, we’re immune! We’re immune from the Soothsayer’s summons! We belong to the True Face, it’s blessed us, oh my god, Nats, it’s all real!”
“What’s real? You’re freaking me out.”
“The blessings, the favour, all of it! But it’s not Grandad. The True Face is something else. Something better. Something that will unite us.” Theo was babbling, thoughts racing faster than he could articulate them. He closed his eyes and tried to slow down. “I don’t even know if I’m working this out by myself or if It is telling me somehow.”
“You’re scaring me.” Natalie dropped her voice. “I’m getting the Tube, so I’ll lose you in a sec.”
This may have been just her excuse to hang up; Theo said “Hello?” repeatedly but the call cut off.
He looked at Cousin Tally. “The Soothsayer’s summoning us. And we can’t feel anything.”
Tally frowned, lines deepening around her mouth. “The Soothsayer is powerful, but where’s he been? Why now?”
“Do you think he’s foreseen something?” Theo shivered, a feverish chill vibrating through his marrow. “Do you think one of us should go and see?”
“You should go,” Cousin Allison said from the counter, helping herself to a tea cake. “Tell them the rest of us are dead. We’ll stay and repair the shrine.”
Theo liked this idea. “Like a spy?”
It would be the most exciting thing he’d ever done, and he’d even taken up hang-gliding once to impress Gavin Foreman and make Jem jealous.
“You carry the True Face inside you,” Cousin Allison murmured, her normally rich, lively brown eyes glassy and dull with its blessing. “Bear it to them.”
“Nats wouldn’t listen,” Theo said ruefully, his cousin’s tone paining him. “She didn’t understand.”
Cousin Tally glared at her sister as Allison began picking the raisins out of her teacake, a muscle twitching under her left eye.
“Words aren’t enough. You can’t describe something that must be experienced.”
“The Face will guide you,” Allison said with certainty. “I feel it in me, pressing against the inside of my skin. Don’t you feel it too? Like an emptiness that’s full of something, but every time I try and confront it, there’s nothing there. How do you explain that?”
Theo felt it everywhere. He nodded. “Shouldn’t we run it by the others?”
“Why? There is no authority but the Face.” Cousin Tally smiled, a rapturous stretching of her lips that distorted her square jaw and gave her a ghastly expression. “Do as you feel.”
The freedom in this made Theo giddy. There was no pleasing anybody anymore; the Face didn’t need to be pleased, it offered only a life of reckless abandon. It blessed Theo with its innate hunger for extremes, for sensation, for stimulation, and Theo only resisted a little out of fear of getting it wrong.
“All right,” he said, as the True Face welled up in him like a tide, washing his resistance away. “I’ll go.”
“Enter all our names in the death roll,” Cousin Tally instructed. “We don’t want the unenlightened trying to stop us. There were some who didn’t want Grandad to come through, let alone something they don’t understand at all.”
“We’ll make them see,” Allison said, crumbling the tea cake between her fingers and leaving crumbs on the café counter.
Theo knew how much Cousin Tally hated it when Allison did that.
Cousin Tally’s face didn’t change, but a light went on behind her eyes. Theo felt a tug in his lungs, the True Face thirsting for something original.
Tally’s glory erupted from the sides of her neck, a frill of double-jointed insectoid limbs ending in sharp, toxic points, and attacked her sister in a sudden frenzy.
Theo stood rooted to the spot as blood splattered everywhere, gushing over the till and the glass cabinet of baked goods. The True Face within him filled him with envy at Tally’s blissful smile and tinkling laugh as she ripped her sister’s fingers off her hands, everything blending into a single chiming note in Theo’s ears until he couldn’t tell what was laughter and what was screaming.
Do as you feel, the void that was the True Face demanded, hollowing him out. That is true worship.
“I’ll be off then,” he said over the din, as the sisters tore each other apart, festooned with each other’s flesh like wood sprites adorning themselves with garlands.
Pools of dark blood spread across the linoleum.
He picked his way across to the door and let himself out. It was time to head to London.
russet-brown hair was waiting for Theo in the car park, leaning against a lamp post. At least, it felt that way – there was no one else around, and the man straightened up when Theo crossed the potholed tarmac to his car.
“Theo, is it?” The rich Welsh lilt was unfamiliar.
Theo stopped. He didn’t recognize the man at all. It wasn’t a relative. “Do I know you?”
The man chuckled. “Not at all. And I barely know you, so my advantage is only very slight.”
Theo didn’t know what to say to that. As he floundered for words, the man seemed to shift before his eyes, becoming both ageless and ageing, until Theo doubted his senses.
“How do you know me at all?” he asked, wondering if this was a hook-up he’d forgotten about, or if the True Face had visited him in human form. He was willing to believe anything.
The man chuckled. “Funny story, I was in Newport – the high street’s not what it used to be, these days – and I met someone asking for a cigarette. I looked into the flame of his lighter, and there you were. So, here I am.”
Theo’s mouth went dry. “What do you want?”
The man smiled at him with eyes like pins, piercing and pricking beneath Theo’s skin. He felt the True Face shifting over his bones, its impossible presence squirming under the scrutiny, evading examination.
“I want you to tell the Faceless Man the truth, when you see him,” the man said, and Theo couldn’t focus on anything other than the ocean in the depths of his eyes. He wasn’t even close enough to see them properly, and yet they filled his consciousness and erased any other details. He realised he was seeing the world as the True Face did, feeling the man’s presence within himself, and the man was not human and reeked of danger.
Theo’s nape prickled. “The Faceless Man? Is he—?”
“The origin of what’s inside you? Yes, that’s right.” The stranger straightened, growing taller, filling Theo’s vision with forested hills and rivers running to the sea. “Do not lie to him.”
“Why can’t you tell him?” Theo asked, dizzy.
The True Face told him the answer, bubbling up to his conscious mind from a space within him he couldn’t access anymore.
The man has no real power here. His stories don’t include us.
The knowledge washed through his head riding a cresting wave, something cold and external to him providing it, but the wave itself withdrew before he could examine it or tell where it had come from, leaving only the information behind.
Theo blinked. “Oh – you can’t, can you? You can’t come near the shrine, and you can’t appear where there’s too many of us.”
The man reduced down from a landscape of rugged wildness and into the attractive, middle-aged bear that Theo would fall for in a heartbeat if he wasn’t so damn empty. The True Face was a hungry void in his soul that nothing could fill.
“Just tell him the truth,” the man said. “I promised them I would not return unless they invited me.”
“You need strength from ground we cannot enter,” Theo said, with the vague impression he was reading off a placard placed behind his eyes. “Or else you need us one at a time.” He sniggered, a laugh that wasn’t his and didn’t suit him. “Too bad, old man.”
“I’m speaking to Theo, not you,” the man snapped sternly, and the words dissipated in Theo’s head, leaving it empty.
Theo took a breath that was his own, and noticed the car park looked different – nature was reclaiming the tarmac, seedlings sprouting through the dark, crumbling potholes, ivy climbing over the far wall.
“You’re not yourself,” the man said softly. “Do you even remember who you are?”
Theo wasn’t sure he ever had. He reached inside himself and came up with nothing.
“I’ll say whatever the True Face wants me to say,” Theo said, seeking internal inspiration.
The man gave him a sad smile, stroking his beard. “We’ll see. The way to worship anything properly is in honesty and truth, but the thing that’s inside you only knows how to hide and conceal.”
“That’s not true.” Theo bristled as if at a personal insult. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know how this feels.”
He dared to take a few steps forward, and the car park rippled around him into a flat square of white lines, the saplings melting down to fill the holes and rendering the whole place smooth and man-made. He could make it to his car with no bother, just a few paces beyond the stranger.
“You can’t touch me,” Theo said, but he wasn’t certain of that.
The strange man shrugged. “I won’t stop you. Go. But tell him the truth.”
Theo made it to his car and leapt in, slamming the door. He gripped the wheel for a long moment of uncertainty, trying to convince himself it was real, and focused on the feel of it under his hands. When he looked around for the man, checking the windows and mirrors, there was nobody there.