He was expressionless. Blank. In a way the inability to read him had grown more chilling than the horror of his absent face. A flat plane of creamy white ceramic, or marble maybe, appended the sinewed red trunk of his neck. It was like staring into a void. Nothing reflected my gaze; my eyes found only an absence and slipped off. But it was undoubtedly my captor's head. It was that pristine diamond which craned over me whenever his irregular rounds returned him for the next apportionment. The weaving motions it led the neck in were unmistakeable. It was observation. I can only assume that it had sense organs of some kind within, for the head seemed quite clearly to guide the arms in their work.
Of course I did not observe all of this straight away. It was only after several apportionments that I remained remotely lucid during the procedure. (You will forgive me if I cannot relate these intervals to any useful measurement. At their shortest it seemed the bite of the cold steel had scarcely departed my skin before my keeper's head swum into sight again. At longest, it may have been weeks that I lay in the darkness. That I do not remember sleeping only confuses matters further.) Over time - many tens of procedures - the horror subsided. Necessarily, perhaps. Whether it is some part of his procedure to forge a new consciousness in the crucible of the specimen's pain and fear, or whether it is some trivial emergent property, I have no inclination; but that, I believe, is what happened.
Thereafter I was possessed of a peculiar clarity (and am still). I suffered no less pain nor any more diminished terror, but those experiences seemed no longer to trouble my objective thought. They were still present, as sustained staccato notes in my perception, but my perception and my sapience had become discrete entities, as if they too had been apportioned. During this time, in spite of the repulsion it instilled in me, I was compelled to begin observing more closely the work of my captor.
Endlessly terrible and fascinating did I find his methodical working. He operated to some esoteric internal rhythm, such that the irregular size and timings of his actions cohered as a whole. Each seemingly abstract motion was yet executed with precision and purpose. The extractions, though they varied from infinitesimal slivers to elaborate topiaries, each bespoke a silent intent. I had no doubt each was tailored to exactly fill a need.
Some time later, perhaps between ten and twenty procedures, I began to slip into a kind of malaise. As perverse as it may sound, I had grown bored with my existence. The striking rhythm of my captor's undertaking had become tiresome repetition. In weariness, my mind began to wander, and it was around this point I first truly considered his oblique face. Thus far I had been otherwise distracted and had not given time to really question the strange alabaster tablet that confronted me at each apportionment. Once I had, however, it consumed me.
At first I questioned if it were truly the head of my captor. But as I have already described, the motions were unmistakeable. Then, I began to scour the oblate plane for any hint of something behind or within. I do not know what I expected to see – nothing so simple as motion or transparency. I looked instead for a... sense of something radiating from the slab. I did not find it. It was not long before a stimulating dilemma was transfigured into a deeply troubling impossibility. My thoughts could gain no traction, find no ingress to possibilities. The face presented a problem as void and featureless as its physical exterior. I could not comprehend it. And I could not forget it.
It seems to me that I spent an immensely long time obsessing in the dark, circling that vortex. Long enough that by the time the icon of my torment rose over me again like a new lunar dawn I was no longer feeling the wraith-pain of my shoulders. In the stretches since, I have postulated that perhaps my captor needed time to prepare for the next apportionment; that perhaps he had reached the most complex or delicate part of his operation.
On this occasion the head leaned in close to my own face, maddeningly inches before my eyes. I stared back at a pallid question, and could think nothing more coherent than an inward scream. He craned it this way and that, sinking down either side of me, to my ears. Then he cradled my head in one spidery, fleshy arm, and conducted his procedure. Even the old diversion of watching him work was denied to me this time, as he operated beyond my periphery, and I could see only the darkness, and a few taut red tendons of his arm. My inner vision was still emblazoned with the barren plate that had filled my sight however many moments before. I finally knew that I was going mad.
I will never know if my mind could have survived it. If I had returned to the blackness in that state perhaps I could have wrestled myself free of the obsession in one of those long meditative stretches that had forged my new consciousness in the first place. It was not to be. My captor finished his work for the time and lay me back down upon the table. He retracted from my view, and lingered a moment on the edge of my vision, as always. Replacing, I assume, his tools and extractions. And then he began to leave. I had never seen my captor go, in all the time I had been here. But on this occasion, the apportionment had left the remains of my head asymmetrical. As his silhouette slipped into the corner of my vision, my head, no longer balanced, rolled over on the table. For the first time I stared not up into the darkness but out across the chamber of my occupation. There was no room to see, the darkness was absolute, but my eyes fell straight upon the retreating form of my captor, not yet beyond the light. From that moment, any chance of holding onto my sanity was gone. For in the edge of the light I comprehended the monstrous form of my captor. The long trunk of neck and those two, branchlike arms that had attended me so diligently arced back into a torso essentially human. Dragged behind it, however, was a monumental amalgamation of human organs. Now I saw the purpose of the apportionments. Each neatly cut parcel of meat was incorporated into the structure for a purpose esoteric beyond understanding. Recognisable amid the ivory infrastructure were livers, kidneys, hearts, veins and cords and bowels webbed together. Walls and globules of cubed flesh neatly grafted. Arms and legs formed into mechanical armatures cranking between it all. Bloated ganglions of brain and nervous tissue swung like grotesque lanterns from a raised spinal cord which ran the length of the carnal topology. As I stared I knew I was seeing every component neatly parcelled off from a myriad of victims and incorporated into a visceral construct of purpose arcane beyond mortal understanding.
This was not what broke me.
As I stared, as I saw each constituent part in the awesome whole, the question destroyed me.
Why didn't it take the faces?
