Woman With No Face by Paul Wilson

Andover sat at his desk, signing the last of his papers, putting away his paperclips, and making sure everything was in its place. But not everything was. A root beer barrel wrapper was under his desk, just out of sight. He did not see it.

He thought everything was perfect, so he prepared to leave. Flowers were on his mind. He had been cross with Betty this morning and needed to apologize. He would stop on the way home. But he didn’t move yet. Down the hall he heard shuffling feet and the whispers of the mad. He didn’t put that description on their forms of course, but some truly were mad in the most romantic sense. Some were lost, others merely confused. Some patients were even treatable. Others would never leave Sunny Brook Asylum. They would never buy flowers for their significant other.

What held him (unaware he had snagged a paperclip) was a feeling of something coming. Something was going to happen. Something was on its way. Andover tossed his paperclip—a straight metal line now—into the trashcan beside his desk. It landed on a bed of tissue. He stared at the door. He waited. He was perfectly still. Seconds later, Mac ran in, catching herself on his desk. The candy wrapper moved in the wind of her rush.

“Sir! Come quick! It’s Bernita Curry! Come, it’s—” Mac ran out the door, her boots thumping the tile hall, assuming he would follow.

Andover stood. He pushed his chair under his desk. He finally noticed the candy wrapper. He picked it up and dropped it in the trashcan. Then he followed Mac.

One of the patients offered to sell him a ’32 Packard on his way down the hall. Andover ignored him.

Mac had created a decent lead. Andover followed her noise but maintained the projection of order that was so important. He was authority and stability for the patients. He couldn’t make a spectacle of himself. Mac was exciting those who were out of rooms. He would have to talk to her about that. Again.

Andover turned a corner and found Mac at the window of 213. She was bent over, gasping for breath.

“Give me the key.” Andover had forgotten his set. He chalked that up to Mac’s unorthodox news delivery, another private mark against her. He didn’t like to forget things. He clenched his jaw and maintained control.

“Here, sir.”

Andover accepted them, inserted them, turned them, and opened the door. He never stepped inside. There was no need. He saw everything from the threshold.

Bernita Curry sat on the floor, back against the wall, staring at some point no one else could see. The horror of what she had done was so grotesque, so startling, that Andover questioned what he was seeing and that was simply not done. He felt himself float away, as if he lost the grip of a balloon. He cocked his head. His eyes grew wide. His bottom lip began to shake. His breath accelerated. All were unprofessional. People were watching him. Mac grabbed his shoulder.

“Boss? BOSS!”

For Bernita, everything beyond her door was a dim outline easily ignored. She delved into the past.

The first realization that Bernita’s ability was something to fear happened with her mother. That day she was bored, watching her mother knit, listening to her mother think. Emma Curry was running through her checklist of fears in a wrote, merciless fashion. She was scared, but more, she was mad. Her anger had grown to hard determination that kept her reviewing suspicious facts.

Her husband was coming home later and later. There was a swagger to his step, like a peacock with his first hard-on. He was nicer to her, even patting Bernita’s head when he finally came through the door. He liked to stroke her hair. “Almost like a white girl,” he often said. It was that very suspicion that had Emma knitting. There were sweaters to be made, sure, but knitting was useful. It kept her hands busy so her mind could work.

Was it another woman? Was that what got his little piggy rooting again? Dale hadn’t touched her since the spring and yet all the tell-tale signs were there that he was getting what a man needs. And he always smelled of perfume when he came home. Emma had smelled the scent before, on that white girl at the groceries.

“It’s her, Momma,” Bernita said. “I see her in Daddy’s mind, too.” Emma didn’t hear her daughter. She was sure she had found the woman her husband was with. In sadistic self-flagellation, Emma’s imagination provided images of her husband pumping away at the dewy-eyed cracker. He wore that gritted look of determination, trying to hold back from finishing, eyebrows knitted, lips curled, eyes squinted.

Bernita laughed. “Daddy looks funny that way.”

Then her mother listened.

“What did you say, little girl?”

“Daddy looks funny. In your mind.” Bernita squelched her own face and laughed some more.

“You can see into my head, child?”

“Uh-hu.” Bernita played with the yarn ball. It wasn’t until her mother uttered a choked sob that she looked up, aware something was wrong.

“Oh my Lord, you got it too.”

“Don’t you Momma?”

Silence, then the click of Emma setting down her needles.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t be so cursed.”

“It’s a curse?” Bernita’s eyes were wide and scared now. Her momma was glad. The girl needed to be scared. She needed to know she shouldn’t look at people’s private thoughts, that people wouldn’t understand, especially if it was a colored girl doing the looking. They would see a demon, a witch, and finally a hanging. She didn’t have to say any of this of course, it came to Bernita in a rapid flood from her mother’s imagination. The little girl saw herself swinging by the neck, the shadows from the branches of the skeletal hanging tree obscuring her face. Mother and daughter stared at each other, sharing the same macabre image, Bernita’s body swinging in and out of shadow, her swollen and beaten face exposed, hidden, exposed, hidden . . .

Then her mother screeched and grabbed her child, knowing Bernita had seen. Emma held her baby, crooned to her, but Bernita’s eyes remained wide against her mother’s breast, the perfect screen to watch her swinging corpse. No face, dead face, no face, dead face, back and forth beneath the pointed branches of an ancient tree.

Where am I? Where’s my face? Why did Momma take it?

Bernita crept through the next three years, wondering if people knew what she could do. When she did read a mind, it was always by accident and compounded with guilt. She would cast down her eyes and retreat, sometimes out and out running away. The thoughts that did get through were a jumbled mess, like air forced out of a pipe, spraying emotions and pictures laced with suspicions, anger, even hate. It seemed everyone knew of her father’ affair with the white-trash down the way. Bernita stayed home as much as she could, going out only to market or deliver some piece of knitting her mother finished. In those years, Bernita blossomed in private.

As the fourth year of isolation began, Bernita’s body hit maturity in a flow of blood—but not tears. She knew about her cycle but the possibilities that came with it were a mystery. The bumps on her chest grew fuller, her hips rounded, and men noticed. When she was forced to leave the house by some necessity, she felt the pricks of their curiosity. Those thoughts were always tinted red. White men especially wondered what she would be like, what she would do, if she would chant in some language that would turn them to slaves. But they wanted her. She was different, exotic, and the strongest pull of all: forbidden. Their intensity frightened Bernita, and her mother was in no position to help.

Emma grew sick in the spring and it worsened through the summer. She lay in bed, wasting away. Her final words to Bernita were a warning.

“It’s not right to see your face through someone else’s eyes. Don’t look, Daughter. You may not like what you find. What’s seen can’t be unseen.”

When Emma passed in the fall, her husband was there to place a final kiss on her cheek and Bernita burned with fierce love for him. He had ruled them with a heavy hand but that one moment of tenderness claimed her heart. She hurt for him and forgot her own pain. Pain returned days later when she re-lived the sound of dirt hitting her mother’s coffin. Bernita woke from the nightmare and wept into her balled blanket. When her father came into her room, she held him in the panicked grip of a survivor.

“Oh, little girl.” He kissed her. It was not unexpected but when he kissed her again, Bernita felt the difference. What happened next was a fall with slippery, sickening ease. Hurt and grief swept her away. She shared it with him. It joined them. He was home (not out with that white bitch) and in the deep reptile part of her brain, Bernita thought He came to me over her. He likes me best!

They needed each other. She had a body not fully understood, an eye in her head she couldn’t close, and the combination made Bernita reckless. She gave in. Daddy was home with her, and she gave in.

During their unspeakable act, a scream rose from the woods that bordered their home. Though she convinced herself it was a loon, in her heart Bernita knew she heard her mother screaming in horror from beyond.

At her climax, Bernita’s body exploded in pleasure-pain prickles. She gasped, bowing her back off the bed. The eye in her mind pulsed wide and showed what her father saw. He had blocked her face. Only a nest of shadow sat below the pool of her hair. Just as she had no face in her mother’s vision of the hanging tree, so her father erased her features as he erased her virginity.

Her father thought Bernita’s final scream was in pleasure, but no.

Gimme back my face!

Bernita ran away to Shy Town. The city offered many faces, none that cared about her, and that was perfect. She became a cleaning woman and practiced being invisible after work.

The night Bernita was attacked was the end for her. All day the mind-eye was wide. Men thought terrible things at her, calling her names that hurt her stomach and closed her throat. It still confused her that men could hate her and want her at the same time. At the end of the night, she only wanted to bundle up in front of her tiny space heater and fall asleep.

The man pulled her into an ally between two deserted buildings. His hands were smooth, and his touch stabbed her brain. Physical contact opened the mind-eye much wider and this man poured vinegar in it. His thoughts were clear and tinted black.

Bad girl black girl badgirlblackgirlbadgirlbadgirlblackgirlblackbadblackgirl

He threw Bernita to the ground, shredding her cheap coat on the concrete, his thoughts more of an assault than his hands. He fell on her. She struck out, getting a lucky shot with the heel of her hand, breaking his nose. He reared back enough for Bernita to find the knife in her purse. She had bought it before her apartment. She stabbed blindly, using both hands, and buried it to the hilt in his throat. Her attacker collapsed and she screamed until people found them.

He was a white police officer with a passion for raping black women. Lately he had taken to strangling them to increase his thrill. And his duty. He was a cop and had to clean up the streets. The bad had to go. The black had to go. It was 1962 and enough was enough with the damned darkies, but the courts and the papers knew none of the sewage in his head, only that he was a decorated officer. With a family. A little girl. And white. Bernita was lucky to live. Death row was very popular during her trial, but she was spared on a decision of insanity. It wasn’t a condition she had to fake.

At his touch, her mind-eye flew open and then exploded. The evil that swirled in Officer Lachette burned away the woman inside Bernita. Through her trial she was a rocking, mumbling mess. She talked to phantom people because they didn’t have minds to read. Her eye was finally closed, gored empty by Lachette’s sickness. The woman under him had been nothing, an un-person. He eliminated her face. Through him Bernita saw a struggling blank oval with only shaded depression features. The third time was enough. Bernita was tired of people taking her face. This time she didn’t want it back.

She was quiet the day they moved her to room 213. She was quiet every day after. She was even quiet the day Mac came running for Andover to see what Bernita had done.

Earlier that day, lunchtime:

“Enjoy your food,” Johns said with open affection. He liked Bernita. She had kind eyes in a hard face. She reminded him of his own mom who worked every day to put him through college. Johns touched Bernita’s shoulder and smiled. He hated locking her in but those were the rules.

The flood coming out of Johns was a black jet of hate for her.

Badblackbadblackbadblack

She never heard his kind words or felt his touches. She never saw Mac bring her extra pudding because she knew Bernita liked it so. All Bernita knew was the mind-eye had opened again and was broadcasting a nonstop spew of hatred from everyone.

Badblackbadblackbadblack

That final day, Bernita knew what to do. She waited to be left alone. Then she acted.

Andover told his wife he loved her. She said she loved him too. Are you okay? You liked Miss Curry so. Yes, yes, I’m fine, lots of forms to keep me busy. I’ll be home soon.

Andover stared at the last form and its last blank line. Everything else was completed, so he told his wife a small lie in a good cause. To type in the last line would bring the image back in gruesome detail. But he had to. It was his job. It was waiting to be finished and put in order.

Describe incident/accident in clear detail__________________________

Andover pecked the keys carefully. He did not want to retype now that he found the courage to begin.

Patient broke window. Judging by cuts on top of head, believed to have rammed window with skull. Patient then used large glass shard to cut off her face. Skin remnants were found on floor. Patient succumbed to injuries at throat. Report ends.

After Andover went home, Mac retreated out back, leaned against the brick wall of the building, and finally let the tears come. She cried for that sweet, tortured woman. She cried for a terrible end. She wondered what happened to Miss Curry to cause her to do such a thing. She would never know. Closure was never promised here. But she could grieve for Bernita Curry.

Bernita never had a visitor, never got a Christmas or birthday card, but they had loved her here, they were her family even if she didn’t know it at the end. Yes, she would cry for Bernita. Someone should. Mac would have to be enough.

“I hope you’re finally at peace, Miss Curry.”

Eventually Mac went back inside. That was also the job, to go back and see who else she could help, to go on.

—

Paul Wilson lives in a suburban neighborhood much like the one he turned into a horror playground in his novel Hostage. He lives with his wife, daughter, son, and three cats, one of which actually likes him. He has worked a spectacular list of jobs including retail district manager, a 911 operator, and the head of a college security department.