The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell

his old home. The sounds had been familiar and comforting. He still didn’t know where half the sounds here came from. It would take a damn sight more than that to scare him. As soon as he’d slipped the razor beneath his pillow he felt less vulnerable.
    He lay in the dark, which robbed him of all sense of the size of his bedroom. He wished he could afford a new clock; the dark allowed the ticking to grow louder, louder. The sound was a four-beat rocking, too quick and harsh to be a lullaby. Roy Craig, kill-er. Roy Craig, kill-er. Couldn’t it stop, just for a moment? Couldn’t it at least slow down? Wouldn’t it give him even a second of silence during which he might fall asleep?
    He had no idea when it stopped: perhaps hours later. He was in the alley, among the stuffed dustbins. The girls surrounded him. As he backed against the wall, the rough stone plucked at his clothes. The bricks were hard and harsh; they felt like his fever dream, when his brain had seemed composed of chunks of rubble that ground together.
    “ Make it stand up,” the girls were saying. The icy wall pressed against him. He was shivering; they must think he was afraid — and he was, for once his father had beaten him for handling himself. His body shook and throbbed, at the mercy of his panic. He stood helpless as he was seized by a painful orgasm.
    He woke terrified, and pressed himself against the wall through the blankets, recoiling from the stain in the bed. For the love of God, why had that happened? It hadn’t happened in the alley; he had been far too scared to achieve an erection. “Don’t you be going with those girls,” his father had used to say ominously, and Horridge hadn’t wanted to; they had tricked and trapped him. Beyond the alley walls, frost had grown like lichen on the roofs of the outside toilets. “He can’t make it stand up. He must be queer,” the girls had said, and he’d listened appalled while they explained what that meant.
    He felt as though he had been possessed in his sleep. He couldn’t be blamed for that — but his bed felt invaded. Only once in his life had he masturbated, alone in his old home after his parents had died, his willpower enfeebled by dozing. The experience had been wholly unpleasant, pumping away as though to make a reluctant toilet work, to achieve the sudden uncontrollable flushing. How could people waste their time wallowing in sex? It wasn’t as though it took much self-control to refrain. After all, one seldom had erections, and then only while asleep.
    He was growing calmer, the side of the bed on which he’d taken refuge was beginning to feel safe, sleep was slowing down his thoughts — when, amid the ticking of the clock, he heard another sound.
    Though his head was loud with blood, he raised it gently from the pillow. His hand slid directly and silently to grasp the handle of the razor. He managed to hold his body still as he listened.
    There was no sound. Nor could he recall exactly what he had heard before. Perhaps it hadn’t been a sound that he had sensed — but something had warned him that an intruder was creeping about nearby. Perhaps that had made him dream that he was helpless.
    But he was not, even if Craig had come to silence him. He inched himself free of the blankets. Though his heel touched the stain, chill and slimy in the dark, he succeeded in setting his feet down noiselessly on the carpet. As he stood up, he felt for the blade. It emerged from the handle with a slight click.
    He paced stealthily to the door. His fingerprints roamed its cold surface, and found the colder handle, which he turned minutely. It would be just like this place to betray him with an unexpected creak — but the door edged wide silently. He reached into the darkness, holding the blade in his other hand before his face, and twitched the light on.
    The light surprised only the empty room. There was nowhere an intruder could hide; his furniture was sparse. He switched off the light