S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 2

Ch. 21 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Paul stumbled away from Victor’s grasp, reaching for the mansion’s back door. Chills rived through his musculature. Blood seeped out of him. What had the Mask cut through with that knife? Paul knew enough about autopsy reports to know he didn’t have long. If he got lucky, hours. If not…

(Where had the Mask gone?)

He turned back, giving dim and blurry reality another scan. He didn’t see the Mask, he only saw Victor, shotgun loosely gripped, facing the entrance to the hedge labyrinth. “Vic,” he managed, not loudly enough to hear. “Vic,” he repeated.

Victor glanced over his shoulder.

Paul dropped his flashlight, pressing his palm to the scalding red oozing out of him. “Come on.”

“It’s out there.”

“Paul!” Deirdre shouted.

Paul turned back, half-balanced, and limped through the last few strides of his journey. Passing the threshold into the mansion proper, he sagged to his knees. He felt true agony strain against adrenaline and shock, gritted his teeth against a groan. Deirdre appeared above him and he realized he’d rolled onto his back.

“I’m fine,” he muttered, iron collecting at the back of his throat. “Give me a minute.”

She peeled his hand away from his wound and replaced it with her own.

Deirdre had a natural talent for healing. For magic in general, of course, but for healing in particular. A wince of exertion parted her lips and warm-kind something spilled into him. He felt her pull his consciousness clear of dizzy death, felt her will stitch softmeat and flesh back together. She couldn’t repair everything, not on her first attempt, but she could patch enough to get him back on his feet again.

As his vision cleared, he saw her wipe sweat from her brow, take a deep breath, and brace to try again.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Paul—”

“It’s not even inside, yet,” he added. “I’m good enough to move. You save your energy.”

She stared down at him, hesitant.

He pushed himself up, her hand falling away with the movement. Though she’d half-healed the wound, he still felt it sear through his torn muscles as he moved. He did his best to hide the pain but couldn’t stop a grimace from rolling through his features. “See? Besides, this time there’s only one bad guy.”

She stood, mirroring him. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

The year before, he’d almost died twice. Once, she’d saved him; the other time, the Speaker and Its coldly uncaring agent had pulled him back. He remembered those moments every time he heard the dead rasp their refrain to him. 

(you, too, soon)

“The real problem is the stuff never seems stupid until I try it.”

Her jaw tensed. She was not amused.

Before she said anything, Paul turned his focus back to the plan. Lurching through the threshold, he found Victor standing in the midst of bright floodlight, shotgun ready, scanning the dim distance. “Vic,” he said, still limping along his approach, “I don’t think you standing in the light with a shotgun is good bait.”

“Call it an invitation.”

Paul winced. He wanted to press his hand against the half-healed wound in his side but didn’t want Deirdre to see it. “If we can’t get this thing inside tonight, It can come back whenever It wants.”

“It’s running out of time, too. After tonight, there’s going to be no end to the money and manpower they’ll put into finding Robert Robertson Junior.”

“That’s not a sure thing,” Paul said. “We need a sure thing.”

Victor took a deep, long breath. Nodded. “Alright, then. Stay close.”

Before they could move, a crash of glass echoed from around the eastern side of the mansion. Caught mid-stride, the two men froze and hesitated before correcting course. Victor broke into a jog as a second hymn of splinters sounded the night. Paul tried to keep up but couldn’t. The wound in his side oozed blood. His limp worsened, his gait listed. “Wait!”

Wood cracked and broke. Victor reached the corner a dozen strides ahead of Paul.

Paul lost pace. Pain scissored through him. Some of the stitching Deirdre had used to weave him back together came unstitched. Teeth gritted, he groaned and grimaced. He moved to his right, getting close to the side of the Blackwood house. He slowed to a walk. With one palm pressed to the antique siding and the other pressed to a half-healed, scabrous incision, he limped ahead.

Victor’s shotgun bellowed. Sounds of clumsy combat followed.

Paul pushed away from the wall and shouted himself into a run. He tried to ignore his body as he threw himself forward, tried not to curl up around his wound and the damage he’d already done to Deirdre’s work of it. Millimeter by millimeter, it reopened.

The scuffle continued.

Stopped.

(you, too—)

Paul turned the corner just as Victor fired his sidearm into the night. A sweeping cut across the man’s sweater revealed a protective vest beneath; his shotgun laid in bright-lit grass three feet away. Victor didn’t seem to be injured.

“Should’ve used goggles instead of the goddamned floodlights,” Victor muttered.

Paul leaned against the side of the mansion, panting, one hand clutching at a growing crimson trickle. “Shit,” he rasped. “I thought…”

Victor lowered his sidearm. Still facing the boundary between floodlight blaze and midnight dark, he stepped sideways toward the discarded shotgun. “You should get inside,” Victor said without looking. “See if Deirdre can finish patching you up.”

“Nobody outside alone,” Paul replied. “That was the plan.”

“Until you got stabbed.”

“That makes it more important,” Paul managed. “Now we know how fast It can do what It wants to do.”

Victor holstered his pistol and bent to pick up the shotgun. Before he did, he briefly touched the wide slice opening his sweater. “Mm.” He rose re-armed and pumped an emptied shell free of the chamber. Staring at whatever swath of night had cloaked the Mask’s retreat, he said, “You know, usually when there’s a gun fight, the guy who shows up with the knife loses.”

Paul didn’t find the aside very funny, considering the circumstances. But he realized that this represented the longest conversation he might have ever had with Victor Monroe, and he wanted not to waste the opportunity. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a pithy retort. “Yeah, well…usually the guy with the knife isn’t…super-human.”

Victor nodded. “Usually not.”

The moment passed.

Something noised.

What?

Paul blinked. “Did you hear something?”

“What?”

The noise repeated: more glass breaking. At a distance.

The other side of the mansion? How?

“Go,” Paul said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

As Victor rushed out farther and farther ahead, racing toward the Mask, all Paul could think as he limped behind was nobody outside alone, nobody outside alone, nobody outside alone.

Victor reached the corner at the opposite side of the building before Paul had even reached the back door at its mid-point.

(you, too, soon)

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Ch. 21 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Twenty One

Booker crept around the exterior of the house, close to the windows. Pressing a hand against a pane of glass, he squinted inside. From what little he saw, all shades and silhouettes draped in dimness and darkness, the place looked inhabited. Furnished, at least. In a semi-circular bulge at the house’s northeastern corner, a series of tall chairs surrounded an antique table—a dining room? Booker pushed away and continued his patrol. He kept his torch-beam pointed low, not wanting to give too much notice of his position.

Something jangled at the rear of the house. Booker paused, hand hesitating over holster. He slowed down, his step-by-step creep decelerating into a quiet inching. Withdrawing his hand away from his sidearm’s grip, he palmed the flashlight bulb, blinding it.

The sound repeated, louder. It jangle-clanked, a noise like something breaking.

Booker approached the northwest corner of the home. Red glow seeped out between his fingers.

Around the corner, a door crashed open. Booker pressed his back against the antique siding. Had the night air suddenly chilled? Everything felt colder. Booker took a breath. He lowered his right hand back to his pistol and gripped it. Slid it slowly out of the holster.

What the hell had just happened? And where the hell was Virgil?

(do you—)

He turned the corner. The house’s back door hung obviously open. Someone had broken off the handle. He angled his flashlight around the gape and into the dark. It revealed an antique mudroom, a wooden bench and plastic-covered mirror. Beyond the narrow entryway, dimness held dominion.

“Virgil?” Booker whispered at the night. “Virgil.”

He heard no response.

He hesitated. After several more seconds, insect chirr mixing with his pulse thumping in his temples, Booker gave one more attempt. “Virgil!” he stage-whispered, throat hoarse with restraint. Heartbeats thumped off time. Again, no reply emerged.

Booker scowled. He peered between the pressing darkness of the night and the pressing dimness of the house’s mudroom. He hoped Virgil LeDuff would turn the corner, the probable cause for entry located, and follow him.

No such luck.

(do you remember me?)

Flashlight-under-pistol, Booker shouldered the door gently aside. He entered the house.

(I remember you)

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Ch. 20 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Paul walked along the side of the house toward the back, flashlight beam swallowed up by the brightness overhead. He held a pistol, safety on, and tried not to remember everything he’d seen and felt and tasted the last time he’d held a gun. His ears ached from noiselessness. Even the ghosts had gone quiet. All of them. Even Cassandra Somers. He still felt faint hints of their existences, vague sixth sense notions, but only from a great distance. Whatever had held the unquiet dead in whispers for the past weeks had finally cowed them into utter silence.

He stepped on a dry twig and froze. Swore at himself. Kept walking.

The hedge maze backing the mansion didn’t have ‘dead ends’ per se. Four ‘rooms’ served as turnabouts where the labyrinth would have otherwise required them. The ‘rooms,’ walled in green leaves and furnished in benches, chairs, and tables of wrought iron, existed primarily to bypass the need for dead ends. The carefully designed hedge labyrinth needed to be unicursal; though nobody had ever explained to Paul the reasons why.

One such room sat a mere ten paces from the southern entrance, a stone-floored space now dominated by a memorial statue to Razz, nee Tyrell Meeks. Two footpaths criss-crossed the distance between the entrance to the maze and the entrance to the memorial chamber. Flashlight under pistol, Paul leaned around one angle and then another, searching for signs of the Mask.

Nothing.

Letting go of a held breath, Paul backtracked.

Something rustled from deeper inside the labyrinth. Paul stopped. Waited.

Leaves murmured in the wind. 

Paul turned back toward the mansion. He peered over at its corner angles, searching for Victor beneath the bright floodlights. He remained alone. Pursing his lips, he wondered if he ought to wait or just continue the patrol. With a glance overshoulder at the labyrinthine green, he decided to continue—

Branches cracked somewhere inside the labyrinth. Something (he knew what) broke through thick foliage, tore through bush-brush walls. The movement crashed on for several seconds before abruptly ceasing.

Void silence fell. Paul’s breath broke it, echoing in his ears.

They’d known the Mask would come that night. The knowledge changed nothing.

be careful, doc, the Speaker hissed, a sizzling whisper crossing his consciousness unbidden. I’d hate to have to watch you bleed out.

Even after a year dealing with the invasive entity on-and-off and on-and-off again, Paul still felt the immediate impulse to respond aloud. He restrained himself. Instead, he crouched low, placed his flashlight gingerly on the ground, and fumbled his cellphone out of his pocket. Eyes flicking between the phone-face and the maze entrance, Paul thumbed through a couple menus and called Victor. As the line trilled, he left the phone on the ground and retrieved the torch.

tngg—a sound echoed, steel against stone.

tng-tng-tng-tng

The floodlight cascade faded into dimness just beyond the labyrinth entryway. Paul ventured forth flashlight-under-pistol, each step a long breath, hot sweat, hairs prickling on the back of his neck. be careful doc, the Speaker repeated, almost mocking. The bare-bright revealed the pedestal of Razz’s monument.

The Mask stood behind it, slapping the flat of Its knife against the side of the stone slab. It stared at him, seeing him long before he saw It.

“Vic!” Paul shouted. And again, longer: “Viiiic!”

The Mask moved. Paul squeezed the trigger. The gun barked. But the Mask hadn’t moved the way Paul had presumed—the bullet whizzed into nowhere, the Mask slinking back into the dark. Before Paul could align another shot, It had melted from form to silhouette to a mere shade within shadows.

More branches and twigs snapped and shattered. Brush ripped. Paul followed the noise with the barrel of his sidearm, the beam of his flashlight. When the sound stopped, Paul stared into the darkness at its source, waiting.

“Paul!” Victor shouted, voice echoing with distance. When he repeated the call a second later, he’d gotten closer—but still ten or twelve seconds away.

Paul stepped back.

too late.

The hand burst through a wall of brush and grabbed Paul’s arm. It pulled him into the thicket and through leaves and prickers and branches. His shirt tore. Red lines tracked his skin. He closed his eyes reflexively, twigs sharping and jabbing his face. He fired a bullet, aiming with hope alone. Of course it hit nothing.

On the other side of bramble chaos, Paul found anguish. As the world spun and twisted in dark and dim, a blade sunk into him. The edge cut muscle fiber, the tip pierced softmeat. Cold pain and hot blood sealed the knife inside the wound. Paul fired his gun again, missing, and crashed into a wall—not a wall—a body, the Mask. 

He lashed out wildly, his existence a confusion of impulse and agony, reflex and adrenaline. His flashlight smashed into whatever skull waited beneath the Mask; Paul felt the reverberation through his every inch. He felt it when the gun made contact, too. The Mask made no noise, no sound to indicate injury. Even as Paul clubbed the monster again, It remained unmoved. 

now, the Speaker whispered. let me in, let me in. give me control and I’ll show you what I can do.

Paul felt the barrel of his pistol press against something hard. At the same time, the Mask wrenched Its knife free of his body. More biological wiring snapped and untethered. A sudden spill of claret stained Paul’s shirt. Shouting unintelligible panic-pain, Paul squeezed the trigger. At point-blank, the Mask’s body muffled some of the gun-cry. It staggered back, a faintly audible grunt escaping It. 

Paul stumbled backward, firing again.

“Over here!” Victor shouted, only feet away.

A shotgun blast burst the night. A sheet of suppressive pellet-fire blew through hedges. Paul felt Victor take him by the arm. Following the other man’s example, Paul fired another couple rounds half-blindly into the dim. The Mask made no noise, no sound to indicate injury. Clumsily, their weights unbalanced against each other, Paul and Victor retreated into the floodlight brightness.

The point had been to get chased by the Mask. But they’d known the greater risks.

“Come on,” Victor muttered, gaze switching between Paul’s face and the maze entrance every second. He carried his shotgun one-handed, his flashlight dropped somewhere unimportant. As they lurched, struggling with weight and balance to retreat, Victor shouted, “Deirdre!” over his shoulder.

The back door slammed open. Paul saw Deirdre as a blur framed by threshold.

“Shit,” Victor muttered. “Shit.”

Midnight quiet had replaced the shriek and cavalcade.

Where had the Mask gone?

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Ch. 20 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

Fog reached in from the west in ragged phalanxes. The radio unit in Virgil’s car crackled and hissed. Occasional voices garbled beneath the static, unintelligible, purposeless. The local meteorological phenomenon subdued all manner of technology, both modern and antique. It misted its way onto the peninsula once or twice a year, swaddled a vast swath of land, and drifted away again after a couple of days.

The first time Booker had experienced the Oceanrest Fog, he’d nearly lost his mind. It had happened between cases, some random week when Booker had had two days off, and the clouds had caught him alone. All the clocks in his condo had started malfunctioning. The streaming services on his television had all stuttered and buffered and disconnected. His phone hadn’t worked and neither had his radio unit. He’d panicked. When he’d finally gone up to a neighbor’s door and knocked on it, the incredulous reception he’d received set the record unforgettably straight in his mind. This shit was, apparently, ‘normal’ here.

Luckily, nobody on the force had found out about his freak-out.

“You sure about this?” Virgil asked.

“You’re gonna have to lie to him,” Castellanos said from the back seat. Virgil didn’t seem to hear her and, in fact, Booker hadn’t noticed her, either, until she spoke. He glanced at her shadow-laden silhouette in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” Booker lied. “I’m sure.”

They drove along a broad, four-lane thoroughfare following the peninsula’s western coast, speeding despite the inclement haze. Despite the distracting radio crackle and the dark, cloud-choked sky. Despite the missing person sitting in the backseat, sometimes there and sometimes gone.

“Walk me through it, again, will ya?” Virgil asked. His visage wrinkled, near-sighted squint and half-confused scowl carving his face into canyons.

“Don’t,” Castellanos advised.

Virgil didn’t hear her. Even staring at the rearview, Booker didn’t think she existed except when she spoke. At least not all the time.

It made him queasy.

He shook his head and took a deep breath. “In the old case files. Nick was one of the only repeat suspects. Now his nephew’s out there killing people by coincidence? Nah. There’s something going on…” he trailed off.

A yellow eye blinked at them through the mists. Virgil sped beneath it and through; it watched them, still, from behind.

“We need more than that,” Virgil said.

“Don’t,” Castellanos repeated. “You know it’s full of holes. How well do you even remember the last few days?”

Booker didn’t peer back at the rearview. He kept his gaze forward. Headlights spotlit fog-drifts; faint moisture speckled the windshield. “You’re driving for a reason, remember?” he asked. “I can’t exactly operate a motor vehicle right now.”

“Huh?”

Booker noised something between a chuckle and a groan. “My head’s a little…off. I remember all the broad strokes, everything I told you at the condo, but the details…” this time the chuckle came more earnestly. “The details are foggy.”

Virgil chuckled, too. “A’yeah. Suppose they would be.”

“They would.”

Sound flooded Virgil’s radio unit. The static reached such a rush of pitch and volume it sounded like a wail. 

“Jesus!” Virgil shouted, taking his eyes off the road, reaching for the power button.

Did some darker thing whisper beneath all that shout? Did a cold, bleak god mutter subliminal backmask at some inscrutable frequency? 

(remember me?)

(because I remember you)

The radio unit went quiet. Virgil withdrew his hand from the power switch and adjusted the steering wheel.

Uncle Nick had lived in Denton in an era when people had considered Denton ‘rural’ instead of ‘suburban.’ Before all the white collars had moved in and put up all their white fences. Back in the early sixties, the property had backed up to the woods. Of course, Denton sported nearly double the population it had in the sixties, even after the peninsula-wide exodus of the eighties and nineties, so now the property backed up to another street that backed up to another street and so on and so on unto the new treeline three-quarters of a mile to the northwest.

The fog let up as they approached the house. The clock stopped spinning digital LEDs and settled on a still-incorrect time.

They parked on the side of the road in front of Uncle Nick’s. Older than anything else on the block, it also stood taller. It had only two stories, but the high ceilings of both and the vaulted roof gave it a few extra feet on its neighbors. Hints of an art deco history, renovated into obscurity by the local HOA, gave the place an antique aura. It looked modern but also didn’t. Staring out at it, Booker wondered if it was this dichotomy that gave it its haunted air. 

“We can’t go in without a reason,” Virgil said. And, as if it needed clarification, “A good one.”

“He’s not renting the place out,” Booker insisted.

“He is on paper.”

“Come on. One mailbox, no unit numbers…” Booker stared. He couldn’t stop staring. “No lights on inside.”

“A’yeah, I see that.”

“He’s not renting it out.”

“But on paper—”

“Who cares, on paper?”

“On paper, he rents it out. We pretend to believe that because if we don’t and we break in there and we’re wrong, any evidence we find becomes inadmissible and we’ll have a lawsuit on our hands from the tenant.”

“I’m telling you—”

“And I believe you,” Virgil interrupted. “Really. But the paperwork matters more.”

“He could be in there.”

Virgil pursed his lips. “We could walk the perimeter, check the windows. Just in case.”

They left the car. As they approached the house, flashlights in hand, a sudden breeze blew in from the southwest, strong enough to brace them. It passed in a second, a momentary gale.

Booker couldn’t help but look over his shoulder.

A momentary gale? Or a sign, an omen?

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Ch. 20 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

The meat moved slowly.

The Mask strode the misted woods. Crackling possibility fogged in from the coast, the mass of cloudy Weird having not yet fully rolled in. Even ten miles south of the fire, Bob’s body still detected distant sirens. Were it not for the frustration inherent in meat-movement and meat-space, the Mask would have vibrated with excitement. Instead, It merely walked, one foot in front of the other, determined to advance Its plan.

With the growing inferno and discord, It felt certain in profiting from Its brief sojourn into the meat and material. Even if the Lock and her mortal coterie managed to dispatch Its host, the psycho-emotional, spiritual, and communal fallout from Its acts all but guaranteed a new glut of resources. Even if It failed, now, It needed only to wait for another opportunity.

The same could not be said for Its prey.

It saw Its destination minutes before reaching it. Bright beams splashed across emerald grass, sourced from roof-mounted (what?—floodlights, Bob knew). The Lock had spent time fortifying. As the necessary reaction to said action, the Mask took time to examine the fortifications.

Its quarry had replaced the structure’s broken windows. Boards and beams reinforced the new glass, implying a lack of strength. Two men patrolled the perimeter, one black with a flashlight and shotgun, the other white with a flashlight and pistol. Their paths didn’t cross frequently. They walked to different angles of the building and squinted from different sightlines into the dark. They spent more time separated than together.

A (hedge maze, Bob knew) filled most of the back yard. The tall vegetation composing the walls threw shadows across the walkways. When either patrolman reached it, they leaned around the corners and ducked inside, checking. In the half hour the Mask spent watching, their hedge maze investigations lasted two minutes on average. Only once did the pair enter the maze together.

Retreating from the treeline, the Mask changed direction and resumed walking.

 

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Ch. 20 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Twenty

Virgil had a podium between him and the gathered journalists. He’d fought and lost. At the end of the day, even the Chief answered to greater powers; and greater powers could start the institution’s engines with or without him. Stepping up the microphone, he felt impossibly small. If he got any smaller, he felt, he might disappear entirely.

He wasn’t even there. He was just the guy (—making the call) delivering the message.

“Due to the growing forest fire, now…now believed to have been started by wanted criminal Robert Robertson, Junior…we will be strictly enforcing a nine o’clock curfew tonight. Police will show zero tolerance for any Oceanrest residents found outside after nine o’clock in any part of the city.” He folded his lips. Cleared his throat. Unfolded them. “All area businesses must close by eight to accommodate employee travel time. Any business not closed at eight o’clock will be issued a citation. I, uh, I repeat,” people had already started asking questions, but he raised his voice into the mic and barreled on, “all businesses in the Oceanrest metro area must be closed by eight o’clock tonight, and all citizens must be inside by nine. There will be no questions. Thank you.”

“How will you handle Squatter City?” someone shouted.

Virgil walked back inside the precinct, uniforms closing ranks between the approaching clamor and the glass doors. He felt the Mayor’s hand on his shoulder and fought off an incredible impulse to shrug it loose and swing.

“Great job out there, Virg’.”

As one of three men responsible for appointing the Oceanrest Chief of Police per term, the Mayor carved out the nickname with a casual surety that disgusted Virgil LeDuff. It disgusted him doubly because, as with so many other things, he allowed it to happen. Though the speech he’d just given served as far more ample evidence of such allowances.

To go along and get along. Bullshit.

“Uh…a’yeah.” Virgil replied.

The hand remained on his shoulder.

It squeezed.

“I wanted to talk to you about something else…”

Thankfully, Virgil’s cellphone interrupted the man. Virgil withdrew it and saw Det. John Bowman Booker stamped across the screen. He shrugged the Mayor’s appendage loose. “Gotta take this,” he explained, turning away. “It’s about Robertson.”

“Talk later, then.”

“Yeah. Later.” Virgil moved toward the back of the precinct. He waited until he’d already managed a dozen paces before answering the call. “Book?” he asked. “John? What’s going on?”

“I need a ride.”

Virgil glanced over his shoulder. Nobody had followed him. “What?”

“Uncle Nick—uh, Nick Robertson. Bob inherited from him just before the lockdown.”

“So?”

“There are answers in that house,” Booker sounded detached. Cool in a way the subject matter didn’t suggest. “I just need someone to drive me over.”

“I—earnest, what kind of lead do you have?” Virgil hushed his voice, dodging between uniforms. A couple people turned as he walked, but none asked him anything.

“Better you didn’t ask.”

“The forest is on fucking fire,” Virgil rage-whispered, quiet and hoarse at once. “I need more than your goddamned word.”

“You took me off the case, anyway,” some of the alien distance faded from Booker’s voice. “But you know that I’m right, right? Bob didn’t just wake up one day and turn into a serial killer.”

“Isn’t it a bit late for a profile?”

“Pick me up when you have time. If you don’t believe me, don’t do it.”

“Listen to me Detective B—”

But Booker had already hung up.

Virgil stood there for a long time, holding the phone. He stood there until he realized he’d been standing there for a long time. A long, uninterrupted time. He turned, half afraid to see what new hell awaited him, but he found himself unneeded. Everyone played their roles. The Mayor did what the Mayor did, and Virgil did what he did, and all the officers and the beat cops and the staff did what they did. No matter how mad, the protocols and procedures rolled out. The goddamned world spun on.

How badly would it really miss one old man?

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Ch. 19 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

Booker drank coffee, trying to sharpen his way through the painkiller-and-clonazepam fog. He squinted at his notebook. Robert Robertson Sr. had had a brother. Uncle Nick. (Why had he written ‘Uncle?’) In their teen years, Uncle Nick had gotten into trouble a few times. The charges and convictions, themselves, were sealed, but the arrest records remained. At some point in his twenties, Uncle Nick cooled off. Or seemed to.

Standing from the cluttered table, he walked into the kitchen and refilled the coffee mug. The floor and walls seemed to change dimension as he moved. Crossing a dizzy span of tile to the fridge, he fetched some creamer. Castellanos’ puzzle orb sat next to the murk-filled carafe. He studied it, its beads in tight orbit tracking narrow alleys carved along its surface.

clack-clack

“Do you think a person can practice something so much they become the thing itself?”

Castellanos racked columns and rows around a six-by-six puzzle cube.

“What are you talking about?” Booker asked, feeling all-at-once less dizzy.

“How many puzzles do you think I’ve solved? Hundreds? Thousands? I’ve put the hours in for sure. So at some point, do I become the Patron Saint of Puzzle Solving? The lwa of Rubick’s Cubes?”

“I don’t think that’s how that works,” he answered.

She put her puzzle cube into an inside jacket pocket and no bulge appeared. “Maybe not. Anyway. What were you talking about?”

Booker crossed the short distance back to the table. “Looking back over all the case files, I was thinking…not long after Nick—”

“Uncle Nick,” Castellanos interrupted.

“Yeah. Not long after Uncle Nick cooled down, Robert Robertson Senior moved back to town and gave him a job. Whatever shit he got into before, he doesn’t seem into it, anymore.”

“Unless Bob-Bob was hiding it.”

Booker sipped from his mug. He didn’t remember pouring the creamer or stirring it, but he had. “Exactly. Oceanrest PD put Uncle Nick on the Slasher suspect list in 1980, not long before the whole series stopped. Aunt Dorothy—”

“Late-Aunt,” Castellanos chirped.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“So the late Aunt, she thought Uncle Nick was having an office affair. Bob Senior confirms this to the police and talks the late Aunt out of doing anything crazy. Then, not long after the killings stop, so does the alleged affair. Uncle Nick’s all very contrite and shit.”

“But Uncle Nick wasn’t having an affair, he was out murdering people,” Castellanos said.

“And I think Bob Senior knew that. Or at least suspected it.”

“But how did our guy get involved?”

“Bob-Bob’s-son?”

“Yeah.”

Booker sat across from Castellanos at the table. His handwriting swam on the opened page of his notebook. He squinted at it. Had more appeared while they’d been talking? He couldn’t tell; he couldn’t quite read it. “I don’t know, yet,” he admitted.

A faint disappointment plucked at the edges of Castellanos’ lips. “He was an object at rest. Something changed that.”

Booker snorted, half-amused. “Yeah. Gave him direction and ferocity.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “Maybe something as stupid as some video Nick showed him, something he saw…like with Richard Ramirez and that shit cousin of his.”

clack-clack. Castellanos twisted the puzzle around in her hands. clack-clack.

Booker leaned over the documents, shuffling papers around. He remembered having read something pertinent at some point but had forgotten what. He sifted through background documents, reports, and scribbled notes. With breath held captured in his chest, he found what he sought. “Uncle Nick died not long before the lockdown. Our guy inherited.”

“Inherited what?” Castellanos asked.

“Everything, pretty much. House included.”

“Did we find anything antique when forensics went through his condo?”

“No.” Booker flipped through the slim report, finding Robert Robertson Junior’s known assets among the data collected. “He hasn’t sold the property, yet, either. He just doesn’t live in it.”

“Does he rent it out?”

“Dunno.” Booker scowled. Why would he keep the house?

“Why would he keep the house?” Castellanos wondered.

Another wave of dizziness crashed over Booker. His senses fogged, dulled by painkillers and anti-anxiety medication. He felt out of sorts. Standing from the table, he reached out for balance. “Al…”

“It’s okay, John,” she whispered in his ear, holding him. “You’re going to be—”

clack-clack. whrrr. clack.

Booker drifted awake, cheek-down on top of a spread of notes and reports. He’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table. Everything around him blurred. A faint but constant soreness roughed through him. Groaning, he reached out and fumbled for his glasses. Found them between empty coffee mugs. Put them on.

Castellanos’ puzzle orb rested between two boxes in front of him. Had it awoken him somehow? Had it made some kind of sound?

He stood with a grunt. Afternoon light hazed the living room behind him. In gym shorts and t-shirt, he stepped down into it. He retrieved his prescription painkillers from the coffee table and turned around to get a drink. Paused when he glanced his reflection in the flat void TV screen.

Did something move beneath that darkness?

He blinked, shivered. Stepped back into the dining room, the kitchen.

After taking the pills, he picked up his phone and called Virgil.

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Ch. 19 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Nobody in the Blackwood Mansion had slept well, or for very long.

They’d stayed up until after four in the morning waiting for the Mask to show up. It never did.

But they knew that Its absence meant nothing. Nothing was over, nothing had ended. The Mask had merely postponed the date of the clash. By how long, they had no way of knowing. Or, at least, they had no way of being certain.

They crawled out of bed in dregs, waking up one or two at a time. 

Clippers in hand, Deirdre stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She stared at her hairline, the point where the tightly wound curls retreated to her scalp. With the door hanging wide, she stood there until she lost track of time, arguing with herself in her head.

“Hey, Grace Jones,” Rehani said, a double-take in the hallway, “what’s up in here?”

Deirdre stared.

Rehani approached slowly. “…you okay?”

Deirdre stared. She’d stared so hard for so long that her ears had started ringing.

“Aight, so how about just give me ‘em clippers, then…” Rehani reached out and put her hand on Deirdre’s hand on the clippers on the edge of the sink. “And let’s let me fix that for you, huh?”

“Something changed,” Deirdre said, still watching her own reflection. “This morning. It woke me up for a while. Paul, too, I think. I’d almost forgotten…the way I felt connected to It after the house, after the visions…”

Rehani coaxed the clippers out of Deirdre’s grip. “Uh-huh?”

“It’s coming. Maybe not tonight, but soon. Within days.”

“So you were gonna shave your head about it?”

“What?” Deirdre blinked. Her shoulders felt stiff, her arms tired. “No. I just. Maybe. Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know what to do with it,” Deirdre admitted. “It makes me feel…” she trailed off, uncomfortable not only in her joints but within the bones that bound them. “When It shows up and I meet It out there, I want to be…”

“Bald?”

“Dangerous?” Deirdre hazarded.

Rehani arched her eyebrows. “You’re dangerous with any kind of hair, sis. Don’t salt the earth just yet.”

When had Deirdre gotten so stiff, so sore? The tendons running down her arms and into her hands ached. She let go of the sides of the sink and flexed her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

“No shit? C’mon. Sit.”

“Where’s Samedi?”

“Who you think woke me up?”

“What?” Deirdre asked.

“Sit,” Rehani gestured to the toilet.

After a second’s hesitation, Deirdre sat.

“Let me see this…” Rehani leaned in, examining. “Oh, this nothing. You just need to re-do some.”

“Feels like more than that.”

“That might have more to do with what’s between your ears than on top your head.” Rehani found a small spray bottle under the sink, dumped its contents out, and refilled it.

Deirdre flinched when she approached.

Rehani raised brows. “It’s hard to let people help you, right?”

“I just—I…” Deirdre trailed off. “I don’t know if we can do this.”

“The hair?"

"You know what I mean."

Rehani took a moment, stepped back. "I do. And we’re prepared as we’re gonna be. The ritual’s ready, it’s strong, and we got a plan to use it.”

“Yeah, but what if we lose?”

“Then none of us will be around to find out.”

Their conversation lulled as footsteps hammered the hallway toward them. Within seconds, a panicked, wide-eyed Paul Somers skidded to a sneaker-squeak halt in the threshold. “The forest, there’s a…” he panted, a man in great shape not too long ago but now much less so, “there’s a fire…forest fire…”

Rehani and Deirdre locked eyes.

“It’s coming tonight,” Deirdre said.

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Ch. 19 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Nineteen

Once Virgil’s day started, it didn’t let up.

In the morning, he, the County Sheriff, and Detective Donaldson fielded a small press meeting. More reporters had arrived, some from out of state. Within an hour of that, the first reports of the clash between police and squatters began to surface. The trickle outlet into an outpour at the speed of internet. Virgil’s desk phone started ringing just after lunch and never seemed to shut up.

In Squatter City, police had uncovered Robert Robertson Jr.’s shelter. The fugitive had left two dead, one man and one woman, their faces carved off and reattached after significant mutilation. It didn’t look like anyone had been in the place for a few days.

Reporters from the Oceanrest Chronicle wanted to know about the veracity of claims that police officers had attacked several homeless people the night before.

“What are you doing about this?” the Mayor asked.

“I’ll say we’re investigating…take the officers off active duty…” Virgil craned over his desk, phone to his ear, older than his age.

“And then what?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

A long pause. 

“Alright. Alright. Yeah. That’ll work.”

“Mm. Talk soon, then.” Virgil hung up. He buried his face in his hands, massaged his eyes. Groaned. Before he drew away, his computer ding’d an e-mail announcement. Another immediately followed. His cellphone buzzed on the desk. The phone rang.

Virgil sat up, suddenly alert. He grabbed the computer mouse and moved it. The cursor dragged and flickered. The speakers froze on the ding, repeating it over and over again. His cellphone buzzed. The desk phone trilled. Virgil pushed his chair away from the desk. He hesitated, hand over phone.

The monitor came to life. The room fell silent.

The door swung open.

“Sir, you—you’ve gotta see this.”

“What is it?” Virgil asked.

“A forest fire.”

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Ch. 18 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

When Bob’s body stood up again, Bob was barely in it. The Mask held dominion over all.

It didn’t particularly enjoy experiencing meatspace this way. Confined to the flesh-blood and bone-buttress of Its host, It engaged fibers and stacked joints and pulled Itself up against gravity. The flesh-bone-blood moved slowly. Compared to the speed-of-nightmare It could attain in Its other forms, everything in the ‘material world’ moved slowly. All of it had the sluggishness of mass and weight, of velocity, acceleration, and deceleration. Still, the Mask stood. It flexed Its newfound hands. Nodded Its newfound head. Exited the farmhouse kitchen.

The hostmeat didn’t fully restrict all of Its senses. It hadn’t wanted to exert the resources necessary for a full possession; It had overpowered Bobbobsson only through sheer will, and so It still existed as a rider on a mount, not as the beast itself. Without the sensory restriction provided by sapient limitations, the ‘material world’ could prove overwhelming. Everything was heavy and loud with everything else. The very air hummed with history and rumor. The dried blood on the floor still carried the shock and panic of Its victims.

It took some time to orient Itself. Moving a vehicle not meant to experience the sea of data bombarding It, It had to practice. It used the emptied farmhouse as an arena. Over the course of a few hours, It learned how to fold some of Its perceptions into Its periphery, how to focus on the input most important to Bob’s body. It flexed the network of Its newfound muscles and joints, practicing their movements, learning their limitations. When the moment came to push the host-form beyond its breaking point, It needed to know where most to spend Its resources.

By early afternoon, It knew.

Drawing Its practice to a close, It slid Its long blade into a deep pants’ pocket and moved on to the next step in Its plan. Leaving the farmhouse, It crossed a gated pasture toward the low, flat building where It had found the milkslaves. One by one, It unlocked the cages. The creatures inside shuffled and hesitated, inky eyes flicking to and fro. They began to leave their cages, but only slowly.

The Mask left the animals pawing the ground and exited the building. Circling east-northeast toward the back of the farmhouse, It sensed/felt a threat approaching. Continuing Its path, It turned Its head to watch the road to the west-northwest. The sensefeel of threat crescendo’d, and soon It saw/knew two ‘police’ vehicles roll into the small asphalt lot fronting the property. (‘Tours!’) (‘Closed.’) The Mask’s path sloped out of sight. As It dipped below the ‘police’ sightline, It adjusted Its heading. Near an old-old silo, a new-old shack contained dozens of tools.

It snapped the rusted padlock off with a supernatural charge and a twist of Bob’s wrist. Stepping inside, It assessed the shack’s inventory.

‘CAREFUL : GASOLINE’ a lidded plastic box shouted. The Mask popped off the lid and found a large red container inside. It reeked of flammability and roar, of screaming and cinders. The Mask poured the potential-energy incineration/obliteration all over the floor. It splashed a trail out of the shack and through grass to the silo. When It had emptied the crimson chalice, It threw the thing away. Returning to the shack, It took a heavy axe and a dusty pack of matches. Standing in the threshold, It turned a match-head into promise and used it to ignite.

As the fire caught and spread, the Mask followed the side of the farmhouse toward the ‘police’ vehicles.

The ‘police,’ it seemed, had mostly entered the building. One remained outside, a young male sapien sitting in the driver’s seat of a car, talking very loudly into a black communicator/radio (radio) clutched in his palm. The Mask could smell the sweat, the fear and sick hormones mixing in it. It approached the car from behind. The male sapien (man) had vomited dread and revulsion only minutes earlier. The digested-undigested still sweetened his breath.

“…at least seven, seven bodies…we’re doing a sweep now. We need backup. We—”

The Mask slammed the head of the axe into the side of the man’s throat. All of his words turned into gurgles. The Mask ripped the weapon loose and drove it home again. The edge chunked through three-quarters of a cervical vertebra before sticking. The ‘cop’ went limp and the Mask used the jammed axe-head to unshell the cop-corpse from the vehicle. Putting a boot on the dead meat’s torso, It freed the axe.

Inside the car, It locked the doors, buckled the safety belt, and turned off the radio, which still carried the crackling voice of a distant sapien (human/person/woman) asking increasingly panicked questions. The engine was already running, cylinders pound-pound-pounding (who had invented that? a male sapien, obviously. haha.) The Mask reversed the vehicle a fair distance and pointed the hood toward the front of the farmhouse.

It turned on the siren.

As smoke-promise-blaze climbed up from the shack behind the house, three ‘police’ (cops/badges/officers) stumbled out of the front. The Mask pressed the vehicle’s accelerator to the floor and shot forward. 

They tried to run, but they ran in ways that presumed a survival instinct on the part of their assailant.

But the Mask didn’t gain strength by surviving. It gained strength by killing.

After noticing one of their ‘own’ vehicles racing toward them, two cops tried to run back inside. The third ran for the far side of the building. With the engine overheating, speedometer a nonsense reading to a creature such as It, It plowed through one of the retreating cops and sent her tumbling broken over the roof of the car and rolling snap-split-shatter across the lot behind. The other reached the farmhouse door, leapt inside, and slammed it shut.

The Mask just didn’t stop.

The front of the house exploded into sharded boards and splinters, sharp rips of glass and needle-thin wood fragmentation. The structure took most of the blow; by the time the hood caught the pelvis of the cop beyond the door, the car only had enough velocity to send him tumbling six or seven feet down the hallway. He landed face-down, right leg knee crooked brokenly.

The Mask expended some energy to recover from the brace, the whiplash, the speed and sudden stop of the crash. Within a second, It felt fine; Its host’s body felt fine. It unbuckled the safety belt, kicked open the jammed door, and exited the car. 

It tingled with excitement as It saw the man struggling to reach for his weapon. This one was still alive. This one would reveal himself to It. Reaching back into the car, It retrieved the bloodslicked axe. The cop had unholstered his sidearm but had lost most use of his right leg. He turned toward the Mask in a sharp lurch, completely off-balance, and took a shot without aiming. The bullet whizzed passed, rage and despair whispering off of its wake, and the Mask continued walking.

The man inhaled, pupils focusing on the approaching Mask. Everything in the ‘material world’ moved so slowly. The Mask swung the axe and the man overestimated the weapon’s reach. He shifted his weight just as his index finger tightened around the trigger. His right knee immediately gave out. The bullet zipped through the air unstopped. A shout echoed the gunshot as the cop collapsed. With a yell, he pulled himself back up to a kneeling position.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, visage a wrack of pain.

The third bullet hit. The Mask felt the hot lead enter the hostmeat and shred a tunnel through. The Mask ignored the damage and swung the axe again. The man turned to avoid the strike but the only result was that the axe-head embedded itself in his hindbrain instead of his forebrain. The edge breached skull and obliterated pieces of both the cerebellum and occipital lobe.

The man sputtered and collapsed.

The Mask left the axe where it stuck, the handle a marker for the man’s corpse. Replacing the weapon, It drew Its long blade from Its pocket. It paused to siphon energy into the hostmeat, repairing the structural damage the cop’s bullet had wrought. It took substantial cost to fix the injury, but the slaughter so far had still produced surplus fuel. Within a second, It felt fine; Its host’s body felt fine.

Outside, the ink-eyed milkslaves bellowed and lowed. Fire gnashed its teeth, eating all in its path. Spreading.

Knife in hand, the Mask turned left, toward the side of the house where the last sapien-cop had sought cover. 

Did the Mask smile?

Of course It did.

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