A Mote of Dust in the Air

            Lydia Lisenrush awoke at five. She sat up out of bed, did a set of push-ups, and went to the shower. The water was very hot. She got dressed, tied her hair back, and went on her way to the office.

            It was well into spring now, with summer just around the corner. The snow should have melted by now, but it was still there, black and dirty from the mud it had soaked up over the months.

            The faceless man was walking behind her, and part of her knew that he was there. The part of her that understood made her walk faster. Yet there was a disconnect – some gulf between the part of her mind that saw the faceless men and the part of her brain that saw nothing out of the ordinary other than a discouragingly shrunken ranger corps.
            Actually, it had been a long time since they had lost a ranger. Lisenrush suspected that they were not trekking quite so far into the woods. Yet the rangers who had returned from their journeys seemed very hesitant to set out again. After Vymer came back as a draugr, Lisenrush had become conservative with the rangers' assignments. She's gotten word - top secret information - from the forensics team back in town - Vymer was not a typical draugr. His flesh had not rotted or mortified, rather it had somehow fused together, such that each muscle transitioned smoothly into other parts of his anatomy, and the internal organs had become so undifferentiated that it was almost as if he'd been replaced with a man made of plastic. He was hardly "undead," as much as he had been turned into something quite unlike a human being.
            He was on his way to becoming like the faceless men.

            There was dissonance, and both halves of her thoughts recognized this. She blamed the numbness on it, even if she had still not come up with a satisfying theory to explain how they could be connected.

            It would be troubling enough to feel that she was losing her mind, but she noticed it in the men as well. Perkins had even come to her, volunteering that he may not be fit for service, given his current mental distress. She admired that he had the courage to speak up about it. So many of the men were in denial, even when they were clearly just as affected. Still, there weren’t enough men to rotate people in and out. She had sent Perkins back to his post.

            There was only one person in all of Far Watch Outpost who seemed normal – one person who seemed to have a cohesive mind, who was not distracted or spacey. It was Ana Sweeney.

            Lisenrush had begun to entertain a very dangerous notion. Part of her, the rational part that knew that there were no invisible men stalking her, considered that Sweeney could even be the cause of this strange malaise, and that it was foolish for them to keep her here. Yet even that side had been forced to consider that Sweeney could be telling the truth.

            Once or twice, a thought from her mind connected with her brain, like sparks jumping between two wires held just close enough together. Sweeney had been going on about some sort of hidden presence at the Outpost, a man that was everywhere.

            You can see them. There is one next to you right now.

            Lisenrush felt her heart begin to race. Only now, after walking across the entire compound, did she realize she had walked to Sweeney’s cell. She looked to the man guarding the door, whose name was Andersen. He seemed hardly there, as if he were catatonic.

            The door opened, and she went inside.

            “Ranger-Captain. What answers would you like to ignore today?”

            Lisenrush crossed the cell and sat down on the bed. Ana backed away, eyeing her as if a lion had just wandered into the room.

            You’re not the thing she’s looking at. Her eyes are not watching you, they are focused on the air in front of you – as if there were a mote of dust floating there.

            “Ana,” said Lisenrush – that was unusual, she usually stuck with “Sweeney,” or “draugr.” “Tell me about the faceless men.”

            Ana swallowed. She looked up at the faceless man, standing mere feet from her. The thing seemed to be focused on Lisenrush, rather than her, but it was still deeply unsettling to be in such close proximity. There was a strange kind of pull in the air, like from a vacuum, toward it.

            “You won’t believe me,” said Ana. “You haven’t yet.”

            “I want to know everything you can tell me about them. I’ll decide if I believe you.”

            Ana was very still. “I started seeing them in my dreams. I don’t know when it started. In my dreams, they weren’t as dangerous. I started seeing them for real after I was shot.”

            “What do they do?”

            Ana was now against the wall entirely. Lisenrush was better at hiding her fear, but she had the same instinct – to straighten and stiffen, to remain motionless until the danger had passed. “They stand there. Sometimes they touch someone. It’s… it’s like they are sucking the feeling out of the air. I don’t… Captain Lisenrush, I… I don’t know much else.”

            Lisenrush looked up at her. “Something horrible is happening here, right now, all over the compound. But I cannot say what it is. I think you can.”

            Ana took another step back. “Captain Lisenrush, there’s a faceless man standing right in front of you, right now.”

            Lisenrush looked up, and for a split second, she saw it. Right there, less than a foot away, staring without eyes right down at her.

            For the first time since she was a child, she screamed in terror. She climbed backward, scrambling over the cot and to the floor. She could not see the faceless man anymore, but she knew that it was there.

            And it was now that she realized she had been seeing them for months. At Far Watch, in town, even on a trip to Port Sang. She had been seeing them everywhere. Why had she never noticed?

            “Sweeney, we’re both leaving here right now.”

            Ana did not need to be told again. The two of them ran out of the room, down the corridor and out into the open.

           

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)