Coldbrook(76)

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.

‘Last year,’ he said, touching the indentation in his left hip. ‘The year before.’ He held up his stump. ‘They lost control of the fury then, and by the time they smashed its skull it had chewed so hard that my bones fractured and crumbled.’ He touched the stump to the ruined cheek and eye socket. ‘Five years ago. Casey was holding the collar rod, she tripped, it took off part of my face and then turned on her. Drake was holding a dressing to my face, but I had one good eye left. I saw her fall, saw the life go from her eyes. And she stood again, and they fired an arrow through her head. Casey.’ He touched other scars one by one, but no longer relayed their history. Perhaps he was paying homage to Casey as the most important.

They bite him every year, Holly thought, trying to discern his intent. But his ruined face was unreadable, scar tissue having hardened it against the subtleties of expression. He’s immune, and they test him every year.

‘I’m not from your world,’ she said. ‘I came through a breach from somewhere else. A parallel Earth. Another universe.’

‘Whatever,’ he said, his one eye glittering. He grinned again, started singing once more, a wordless tune. Then he cut off his song. ‘One thing I ask, and I ask it of everyone, only when they get down here, though, not so Drake could hear, if Drake knew he wouldn’t approve, so don’t—’