David scrambled onto all fours and backed away until the quilt slipped off his body, but then he had to reach out to part the curtains at arms’ length. He might have screamed if a taste hadn’t choked him. Two eyes as dead as pebbles were level with his. They didn’t blink, but sputtered as if they were trying to come to a kind of life, as did the rest of the swollen face. Worse still, the nose and mouth surrounded by a dirty whitish fungus of beard were above the eyes. The inversion lent the unnecessarily crimson lips a clown’s ambiguous grimace.
The mask dealt the window another blundering thump before a savage gust of wind seized the puffed-up figure. As the face sailed away from the glass, it was extinguished as though the wind had blown it out. David heard wires rip loose and saw the shape fly like a greyish vaguely human balloon over the garden wall to land on its back in the road.
It sounded as if someone had thrown away a used plastic bottle or an empty hamburger carton. Was the noise enough to bring his grandmother to her window? He wasn’t sure if he would prefer not to be alone to see the grinning object flounder and begin to edge towards the house. As it twitched several inches he regretted ever having tipped an insect over to watch it struggle on its back. Then another squall of wind took possession of the dim figure, sweeping it leftwards out of sight along the middle of the road. David heard a car speed across an intersection, its progress hardly interrupted by a hollow thump and a crunch that made him think of a beetle crushed underfoot.
Once the engine dwindled into silence, nothing moved on the roads except the wind. David let the curtains fall together and slipped under the quilt. The drama had ended, even if some of its lighting effects were still operating outside the window. He didn’t dream, and wakened late, remembering at once that there was nothing on the roof to worry his grandmother. Only how would she react to the absence?
He stole to the bathroom and then retreated to his bedroom. The muffled conversations downstairs felt like a pretence that all was well until his grandmother called “What are you doing up there?”
She meant David. He knew that when she warned him that his breakfast would go cold. She sounded untroubled, but for how long? “Eat up all the lovely food your mother’s made,” she cried, and he complied for fear of letting her suspect he was nervous, even when his stomach threatened to throw his efforts back at him. As he downed the last mouthful she said “I do believe that’s the biggest breakfast I’ve ever had in my life. I think we all need a walk.”
David swallowed too soon in order to blurt “I’ve got to wash up.”
“What a good boy he is to his poor old granny. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you. We won’t run away and leave you,” she said and stared at her husband for sighing.
David took all the time he could over each plate and utensil. He was considering feigning illness if that would keep his grandmother inside the house when he saw the door at the end of the back garden start to shake as if someone was fumbling at it. The grass shivered too, and he would have except for seeing why it did. “It’ll be too windy to go for a walk,” he told his grandmother. “It’s like Grandad said, you’ll catch cold.”
His mouth stayed open as he realised his mistake, but that wasn’t the connection she made. “How windy is it?” she said, standing up with a groan to tramp along the hall. “What’s it going to do to that empty old thing?”
David couldn’t look away from the quivering expanse of grass while he heard her open the front door and step onto the path. His shoulders rose as if he fancied they could block his ears, but even sticking his fingers in mightn’t have deafened him to her cry. “He’s got down. Where’s he hidden himself?”
David turned to find his mother rubbing her forehead as though to erase her thoughts. His grandfather had lifted his hands towards his wife, but they drooped beneath an invisible weight. David’s grandmother was pivoting around and around on the path, and David was reminded of ballet classes until he saw her dismayed face. He felt that all the adults were performing, as adults so often seemed compelled to do, and that he ought to stop them if he could. “It fell down,” he called. “It blew away.”
His grandmother pirouetted to a clumsy halt and peered along the hall at him. “Why didn’t you say? What are you trying to do?”
“Don’t stand out there, Dora,” his grandfather protested. “You can see he only wants—”
“Never mind what Davy wants. It can be what I want for a change. It’s meant to be my Christmas too. Where is he, Davy? Show me if you think you know so much.”
Her voice was growing louder and more petulant. David felt as if he’d been given the job of rescuing his mother and his grandfather from further embarrassment or argument. He dodged past them and the stranded sleigh to run to the end of the path. “It went along there,” he said, pointing. “A car ran it over.”
“You didn’t say that before. Are you just saying so I won’t be frightened?”
Until that moment he hadn’t grasped how much she was. He strained his gaze at the intersection, but it looked as deserted as the rest of the street. “Show me where,” she urged.
Might there be some trace? David was beginning to wish he hadn’t spoken. He couldn’t use her pace as an excuse for delay; she was waddling so fast to the intersection that her entire body wobbled. He ran into the middle of the crossroads, but there was no sign of last night’s accident. He was even more disconcerted to realise that she was so frightened she hadn’t even warned him to be careful on the road. He straightened up and swung around to look for fragments, and saw the remains heaped at the foot of a garden wall.
Someone must have tidied them into the side road. Most of the body was a shattered pile of red and white, but the head and half the left shoulder formed a single item propped on top. David was about to point around the corner when the object shifted. Still grinning, it toppled sideways as if the vanished neck had snapped. The wind was moving it, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure that his grandmother ought to see. Before he could think how to prevent her, she followed his gaze. “It is him,” she cried. “Someone else mustn’t have liked him.”
David was reaching to grab her hand and lead her away when the head shifted again. It tilted awry with a slowness that made its grin appear increasingly mocking, and slithered off the rest of the debris to inch along the pavement, scraping like a skull. “He’s coming for me,” David’s grandmother babbled. “There’s something inside him. It’s the worm.”
David’s mother was hurrying along the street ahead of his grandfather. Before they could join his grandmother, the grinning object skittered at her. She recoiled a step, and then she lurched to trample her tormentor to bits. “That’ll stop you laughing,” she cried as the eyes shattered. “It’s all right now, Davy. He’s gone.”
Was the pretence of acting on his behalf aimed at him or at the others? They seemed to accept it when at last she finished stamping and let them usher her back to the house, unless they were pretending as well. Though the adults had reverted to behaving as they were supposed to, it was too sudden. It felt like a performance they were staging to reassure him.