Very well, the surgeon agreed readily. It is not important that we do
it now. You could come back at any time in the future. He walked to
the door of the ward. Come on. Let's go find a mirror. There was one
in the nurses room beyond the double doors at the end of the passage.
The room itself was empty and the mirror was set into the wall above the
wash basin.
The surgeon stood in the doorway and leaned against the jamb. He lit a
cigarette and watched as David crossed towards the mirror and then
halted abruptly as he saw his own image.
He wore the blue hospital dressing-gown over his pyjamas. He was tall
and finely proportioned. His shoulders were wide, his hips narrow, and
he had the same lithe and beautiful man's body.
However, the head that topped it was something from a nightmare.
Involuntarily he gasped out aloud and the gash of a mouth parted in
sympathy. It was a tight lipless mouth, like that of a cobra,
white-rimmed and harsh.
Drawn by the awful fascination of the horror, David drew closer to the
mirror. The thick mane of his dark hair had concealed the peculiar
elongation of his skull.
He had never realized that it jutted out behind like that, for now the
hair was gone and the bald curve was covered with meshed skin, thickened
and raised.
The skin and flesh of his face was a patchwork, joined by seams of scar
tissue drawn tightly over his cheekbones, giving him a vaguely Asiatic
appearance, but the eyes were round and startled, with clumsy lids and
puffed dead-looking flesh beneath.
His nose was a shapeless blob, out of balance with his other coarsened
features and his ears were gnarled excrescences, seemingly fastened
haphazardly to the sides of his head. The whole of it was bland and
bald and boiled-looking.
The gash of a mouth twisted briefly in a horrid rictus, and then
regained its frozen shape. I can't smile, said David.
No, agreed the surgeon. You will have no control of your expressions.
That was the truly horrifying aspect of it. It was not the twisted and
tortured flesh, with the scarring and stitch marks still so evident, it
was the expressionlessness of this mask. The frozen features seemed
long dead, incapable of human warmth or feeling.
Yeah! But you should have seen the other guy! David said softly, and
the surgeon chuckled without mirth.
We'll have those last few stitches behind your ears out tomorrow, I
shall remove what remains of the pedicel from your arm, and then you can
be discharged.
Come back to us when you are ready. David ran his hand gingerly over
the bald patterned skull.
I'm going to save a fortune in haircuts and razor blades, he said, and
the surgeon turned quickly away and walked down the passage, leaving
David to get to know his new head.
The clothes that they had found for him were cheap and ill-fitting,
slacks and open-neck shirt, a light jacket and sandals, and he asked for
