فصل بیست و چهارم

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Rough Edges

The Walker was pacing around George’s room, looking at all the toys and models and clay animals. He pushed back his hood as he paced, and grimaced.

His mouth was the kind that settles in a permanent scowl, the sides pulled back to expose teeth and gums, as if the very air were distasteful to him. His eyes were a dark violet, sunk deep in their sockets. He had a small beard around his mouth, although his cheeks were, in a grizzled fashion, clean-shaven. The beard hooked into a goatish tuft on the end of his chin. There was a single pearl dangling from a gold hoop looped through one ear, and he wore a black rimless cap on the back of his head.

He looked like a magician turned pirate.

But not a kind magician or a good pirate.

He suddenly reached up and took a small clay model of George as a baby and stuck it in his pocket. Then he pulled a long dagger, with a surprisingly ornate jeweled handle, from a scabbard hung at the back of his belt, under his coat, and pulled open a drawer.

He removed a T-shirt, smelled it, and discarded it.

He crossed to a laundry bin and pulled out a dirty T-shirt.

He smelled it and smiled.

He took the dagger and ripped out a section of it in three jagged slices.

Then he pocketed the scrap of material and left the room.

As he walked across the living room he paused in front of the bust of George’s mother. Her head was thrown back in a laugh, hair caught in a permanent swirl of joy. His hand stroked the naked shoulders and the exposed curve of her neck and traveled on to the edge of the piece, where the smooth sensual curves suddenly ended in a sharp jagged edge, as if someone had taken a hacksaw and angrily removed something from a sculpture that was—when you looked closely at it—a little lopsided. His fingers enjoyed the rough edges a second time, and then he suddenly turned and left the room to itself and the night.