S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 3

Ch. 18 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Booker spiraled through disorientation, trapped in some inscrutable centrifuge of data and dream. 

(“…Besides, 1979, 1993, 2020? If this is one killer escalating, he’d—or she’d or they’d—have to be, what? Sixty? Seventy?”

“What if it isn’t one killer?”)

When the Oceanrest Slasher had first struck in 1979, Bob would have been a mere child. Three years old? Four? Booker couldn’t remember Robert Robertson Jr.’s exact birth year. Too young to wield a knife in any case.

Witnesses had seen a tall man, athletic, wearing a mask. What kind of m-M-mask? What an unimportant detail.

In 1979, the Oceanrest Slasher (maskmaskmask) destroyed the faces of his victims, leaving behind crime scenes painted in carnage. With the exception of the first and fourth victims, however, virtually all the actual violence happened post-mortem. The majority of the murders, themselves, happened within seconds, often amounting to a mere two or three deep stab or slash wounds. After the victim had vacated the body, the Slasher went to work. In a book, later on, an author writing about the crimes described what the Slasher did as a ‘brutal erasure of a human’s personhood.’ All that remained was a scatter teeth and an unrecognizable pulp of bone and meat.

In 1993, the Oceanrest Slashmaskmask cut the faces off of his victims.

In 2020…

(“If this is one killer escalating—”)

(ascend/descending)

The list of suspects in the 1979 sequence indexed sixteen entries. Cross-referenced with the list of suspects from the 1993 sequence, seven names repeated. Neither line-up contained Robert Robertson, Jr. or his father. Robert Robertson, Sr., had moved the family back to Oceanrest in 1972 after a twelve year enterprise in Boston and New York City. Robert Robertson, Sr., had grown up in Oceanrest, Maine, and wanted his children to do the same.

Booker’s eyelids fluttered. He blinked awake at his eat-in table, his glasses folded in one hand, a small sputter of drool on the pages beneath his face. He sat up, donned his glasses, wiped his lips. and took a breath. An array of documentation spread before him. Why the hell had he done this? He peered down at his notebook and tried to interpret his own handwriting.

(signs and portents)

Robert Robertson, Jr., had gone through a messy divorce, the battle culminating in a court dispute the lasted six months. The final ruling fell in April, 2019. The fallout affected the man. He made several errors at work, mistakes that slipped through various cracks unnoticed until they compromised his clients’ assets. Though earnestly accidental, the actions proved both costly and legally unethical. Bob-Bob’s-son lost his license and job. At the bottom of the spiral, he hanged the judge who’d gavel’d his divorce. 

Why?

Booker fought through a muted mental detachment. He felt distant from his body, his arms moving at a significant delay from his commands to move them. He tried to push his chair away from the table and time seemed to twist around him. Everything stretched out.

Had he taken too many painkillers? He must have. He’d taken too many painkillers.

Nausea wound its grip through his guts.

Chair legs scraped the floor. He stumbled back from the table, from the splay of information bulbing as bubbles grew beneath the skin of reality. Something crawled around in his stomach. Sweat poured from his face. Fumbling through the tight intersection between dining room, bedroom, and restroom, he threw himself into the last. He flung open the toilet lid and knelt in front of the bowl, heaving with breath.

Everything surged out of him all-at-once. He saw bile spill out of him, pale yellow and viscous, but also sea water, salt-briney and foaming, and tangles of white and gray and black sludge knotted and tied together. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. Had he? Another gut-churn-flexion arched his back. Another burst of nonsense matter grossed into his mouth and tumbled out.

A hand caressed the space between his shoulder blades. “You’re okay,” Castellanos said, lips suddenly inches from his ear. “You’re going to be okay. Okay?”

“Wh-what the fuck?” he panted.

(Nobody was ever really okay.)

She reached an arm across his back and flushed. Hugged him by the shoulder, after. “It’s a lot to take in all at once.”

“What is?”

“I thought I’d have more time…”

He wanted to look away from the white ceramic but worried he might collapse if he did. “What are you talking about?”

“Just take a few deep breaths and let your senses settle.”

“My senses?”

“John, please.”

He took a deep breath. Another.

Castellanos leaned her forehead against his temple. “Just like that. Deep breaths. You’re going to be okay, okay?”

“Mm-hmm,” he muttered, focused on filling his lungs and emptying them again.

“Your sixth sense is stronger than most people’s,” she whispered. “But that doesn’t mean much in the face of what we’re doing.”

His heart rate slowed. Her fingernails traced circles along his back.

“Wait…” he chuckled, feeling better already. “Did you just say I had a ‘sixth sense?’”

“There’s the John I know,” she said. Standing, she turned back toward the door. “Now come on. I think we’re getting close.”

“Close to what?” he asked, following.

“The beginning,” she answered.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 18 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Eighteen

Virgil slammed a palm on his alarm clock radio. He’d hit the snooze button too many times to stop for breakfast at the diner, that morning. Groaning himself off the mattress, he rubbed his sockets in an effort to stir life into them. He met limited success. Shuffling into the restroom of his ranch-style home, four bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths, he turned on the lights and squinted at the mirror. Shaving could wait another day, he decided. The salt-pepper scruff, more salt than pepper every year, had grown out into whiskers.

He brushed his teeth semi-consciously. The water ran hot. Steam vapored up against the mirror.

He felt wrecked. Putting the toothbrush on the sinkside, he leaned into the mirror. Tired bags bloated his lids. His ex-wife had given him the name of an under-eye cream a dozen times but he always forgot it. The brush rinsed, he turned the faucet knob to ‘cold.’ He splashed his cheeks and eyes, the chill quenching some of the burning-throbbing ache pitting his sockets. Wiping the water away, he walked to the kitchen pajama-clad to make breakfast.

Coffee percolated. Eggs sizzled in a pan. Virgil stared out of an over-sink window at a green back yard that rolled into undeveloped land. Though invisible from his vantage, the undeveloped span stretched only a mile or so until it rubbled into rocky beach and descended to Atlantic tides.

When the old phone rang, he didn’t jump. It speared the near-silence that had settled around him once his brain had backgrounded the frying eggs and trilled its pitch high and sharply, but he didn’t jump. Setting the spatula down, he sighed. Picking up the handset from its base, he didn’t bother squinting at the tiny-fonted caller ID in any attempt to discern who might have called him so early, either. Instead, he merely answered, “A’yeah?”

“Chief,” Detective Donaldson gruffed on the other end. “We’ve got bad news.”

“When don’t we,” Virgil said, not as a question. “So what’s it this time?”

“There was a, uh…a clash between some of our boys and some squatters.”

“Jesus Christ. How bad?”

“Six hospitalized, two of ours, but luckily nobody got killed.”

“‘Luckily?’”

“Yeah,” Donaldson grunted. “Luckily.”

“Anyone critical?”

“What?”

“Is anyone in critical condition?” Virgil’s heart pounded in his temples, his voice raised without him telling it to.

“No,” Donaldson answered. Then, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I wasn’t there, alright? I’m just the guy making the call.”

Virgil turned off the stovetop, the eggs crackling and sputtering in the pan, and carried the handset over to the eat-in table. “Tell me someone at least found something, something substantial.”

“I wish I could,” Donaldson said.

“Goddammit…”

“We’re expanding the search today, checking some of the abandoned buildings and smaller farms north of the highway. Maybe we’ll find something there.”

“And what about Squatter City?” Virgil asked.

“What about it?”

“When the story gets out—”

“So don’t let it get out.”

“Say that to me again,” Virgil snarled, making a threat on instinct alone.

“Sorry, sir,” Donaldson replied a moment later. He cleared his throat. “I think we should just pull some guys up for OT and have them, uh, peace-keep on Lafayette and Grant. Problem solved.”

Virgil’s scalp boiled. His face tightened into a sneer.

“Suppose it might come to that,” he said.

“Yeah. It might,” Donaldson agreed.

Virgil hung up, expression still lined, lips still curled.

To hell with all of it.

He put the handset in its cradle, fetched a plate from a cupboard, and plated his lukewarm eggs. He took five deep breaths, replaced the pan on the heater, and carried his breakfast to the eat-in table. He smoothed his face out and worked his jaw. Sighing heavily, he carved open a yolk with the side of a fork.

He needed a plan.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 17 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

The world fogged around Bob as he awoke. Twinned stenches of copper and senescence overstuffed his nostrils; a corpse hung from his uvula, tugging. Pushing himself up from a hardwood floor, he braced against a wall for balance. Shadows danced carnally in his periphery, throbbing to the rhythm of his pulse.

A board creaked overhead. Bob stared woozily up at the ceiling. Had somebody up there survived? Had someone knocked him out? Did that explain his unconsciousness? He retrieved his long knife from where it glinted on the blood-streaked floor and peered down the hall toward a stairway landing spotlit by sunset haze. He squinted. Sunset? How long had he…?

He remembered entering the low, flat building and walking along aisles of sheening eyes to find a man working. He remembered the knife sliding into throat, sliding out, sliding in again. After that, he’d circled back around the building and found the other man he’d seen enter the property. And then…

…and then…something…

Wood creaked overhead. Dust stirred. Bob searched for the Mask. Who had taken it off of him? And how? He spun, desperately scanning, but saw no trace of It. It? (Capitalized? When had he started to capitalize It?) Heart rate rising, he walked toward the stairwell landing and scanned for a place to hide. Whoever came down the stairs, he’d ambush them.

(something wrong with the faces)

creak

More blood spattered the hallway beyond the stairwell. Drag marks trailed dark, coagulated streaks through a t-shaped intersection. Bob became aware of a large family room to his left. A heap of broken bodies piled the fly-buzzed center. How many people had he found on the farm? Math tabulated itself in his head. Before he finished the formula, a shock of cold spasmed through him.

Shouldn’t he know the answer to that question off-hand?

Boots clomped down the stairs.

Bob turned into the family room and pressed himself against the wall. The boots paused at the stairway landing back down the hall. Swallowing, ears ringing, Bob turned to look at the ragged gathering of corpses.

Corpses that had not been piled, he realized, but arranged.

Six bodies arrayed the room in various states of dismemberment and evisceration. Their limbs, snapped and broken and sometimes de-boned, connected them all into a strange, kinked symbol. Bob tried to make sense of the six twisted carcasses but… 

No. Not six. Seven. The last body hung from the ceiling. The hanging made it a message. Not hearing any further footfalls, Bob inched away from the wall for a better look. The hanged corpse belonged to a white male, late middle-ages. The farm owner? Family father? Both? Bob and the Mask had knifed his throat open and had bandaged the wound shut again post-mortem, pre-hanging. Bob squinted in the dimness, the windows venetian-blinded. Something was wrong about his face. What was wrong with his…?

Bob stepped closer, ears burning, eyes squinted narrowly.

With a gasp, he inched back.

The face…

Someone had carved it off slowly-and-precisely. They’d run a knife along his jawline with a scalpel’s precision and they’d peeled the epidermis away from the muscle. They’d placed two bright spoons in his eye sockets. They’d broken out all of his teeth and had replaced them with mismatched shards of plastic jammed in the gums. Then they’d sewn the face back on. As best they could, anyway; the nose and lips deflated, the skin sagged at inhuman angles...

But who had done those things?

Because Bob didn’t remember them.

“What the fuck,” he whispered, maneuvering around the splay of human dead. And where had all the furniture gone? And who had moved it? “What the fuck,” he repeated, kneeling next to a woman’s face-down corpse. He touched her blood-stickied shoulder through a dark-stained button-up. His palm suckled to the tackiness. It adhered. Taking a breath to steady himself, Bob turned her over.

He had to get out of there.

He moved back to the room’s threshold and pressed himself against the wall again. He waited for some sound or sign of life. A faint ringing scored his ears. Silence hissed around it. He counted heart beats to measure time. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…

All he heard was his pulse and his breath and the low sibilance of long quiet.

Adjusting the grip of the knife to allow for more agile strikes, he turned the corner.

A fist mashed his nose to splinters. 

He stumbled backward, pain-blind. Lashed out at the air defensively. A boot knocked the crest of his shin. Grunting, he backpedaled from his attacker. His vision started to clear. He swiped the blade through the air, squinting through blear. The edge flickered and his assailant evaded the swipe easily. Bob put a couple more feet of distance between them and re-adjusted his grip. He needed reach, not speed.

He blinked away the last of the blurriness from his sight.

How?

How?

The man stood at exactly his height and bore shoulders exactly the width of his; he wore the same boots, gloves, and pants—though a different shirt—and, worse, he wore the Mask. Bob staggered back. How? It looked exactly like him—

Or did it look exactly like Uncle Nick?

Or did it look like—

The man lunged at Bob and Bob leapt back. Grabbing at nothing, the man regained his balance without pause. Bob sliced the air and skittered backward until he reached the far wall. Behind him, a kitchen. Backing onto the tile, he held the knife out before him. The man in the Mask tilted his head—their head. Bob’s muscles remembered the movement. His mouth dried up.

The man and the Mask led with a fist. Bob ducked the blow and saw an opening. He drove his knife through it. The blade speared the man in/and the Mask and sank into their body, but it didn’t feel like it usually did. It didn’t feel like a knife goring through meat. It felt like sawing through cartilage and tendon, dense and resistant.

They grabbed Bob’s wrist.

Bob swung his other fist and—

They caught that one, too. Their grip crushed his. When they twisted and wrenched on his wrist, he went with them. He didn’t scream but grimaced and whined. His joints strained with pressure, threatening to explode. The whine grew. He let go of the knife and the man in/and the Mask threw him aside. He crashed into the wall and landed on the floor. Rolling face-up, he scrambled away from them.

They peered down at the knife in their body. Nonchalantly, they reached over, gripped it, and pulled it out. Dark grue stained most of the blade’s length. Walking calmly toward Bob, they wiped it off on their same-pants and slipped it tip-first into one of their same-pockets.

Bob heard voices whispering from the other side of reality.

What?

He managed to get his feet under him. He didn’t hear whispers. He heard whispers. He both heard whispers and didn’t. His thoughts swam. He spun away from the man/Mask and went for the farm house’s front door. The man/Mask grabbed his collar, all three layers of clothing at once, and hauled him back. Two layers ripped, cloth tangling around him, and Bob lost balance. A wall slammed into him. The man/Mask grabbed his hair and pulled him away from that wall just to throw him into another.

He panted face-down, crawling. A boot car-crashed into his ribs. A couple of them snapped. Air whuffed out of him. Dizzy and pain-numbed and deaf from the layered, many-voiced whispers he heard and didn’t hear, he barely felt the man/Mask flip him onto his back.

whoareyoutakeoffy—

The man/Mask had their knees on his thighs and their hands around his throat. Bob swung at them. He punched and slapped until his knuckles and palms ached. His vision narrowed. He couldn’t breathe. The man/Mask pulled his skull up by his neck and slammed it down again. Clawing at the Mask, he tried to pull it free from whoever’s face. The vice around his throat tightened. His brain cells started dying. His lungs shrieked for oxygen. His pulse faded. He clawed at the Mask, trying to pull it free…

who—

As the Mask came loose, whose face awaited Bob beneath?

What an unimportant detail.

Turn Back

Ch. 17 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Deirdre tossed and turned through fitful sleep. In her dreams, Razz drowned in a stormy sea of glue and cottage cheese; a teenage neo-Nazi’s head unraveled around a bullet from her gun and a voice beneath the paper-thin skin of reality spoke to her through the meat-thresher vortex. you certainly don’t pull punches, the sweet-and-oily thing sizzled. you went for the upper chest, neck, and head at the speed of muscle and lead. when your back’s against the wall, dear Dee-dee, you’re a predator, too. and, hey, don’t be so ashamed about it. Shreds of brain and skin flapped around skull shards and bloodspray like lips over teeth. when the chips are down, you do what you have to do. we’re all just animals trying to survive, right? all that ‘thou shalt not kill’ mainstream morality is just a bunch of window dressing to distract from the skinned corpses on sale. 

The gore grinned.

just be sure you don’t hesitate next time. the Mask sure won’t.

She woke up with a wail in her throat and strangled it there. Samedi slept curled against her left side and when she sat bolt upright he scrambled away from her armpit to stand wide-eyed at her blanketed feet. Sweat soaked her shirt. Her body ached, residual muscular soreness and burnt-out emptied everything providing her a constant lowkey pain. Pushing herself to the edge of the bed, she wiped nightmares away from her face. She couldn’t quite remember them, anymore, but she remembered hearing a voice that didn’t belong in the mansion. Though the details faded too quickly to spark alarm, the unsettling suspicion remained pitted in her gut.

She stood, felt her legs shake, and sat back down. Samedi paced the edge of the bed, watching her. On the bedside table, someone had left a small pile of books, mostly Donald E. Westlake and Walter Moseley novels. She considered picking one up but felt too drained. Sinking back into the sheets, she groaned. Samedi pawed his way back up toward her. Feeling frail and brittle, Deirdre closed her eyes and tried to sooth herself to sleep. Samedi curled his back against hers.

Eventually, rest came.

Deirdre next awoke to a series of knocks on the door. “Huh?” she grunted.

“It’s, uh, it’s me,” Olly said from the other side.

“’s unlocked.”

 “Yeah, I know, I just…” they sighed, opened the door, and stepped inside. “I just wanted to check on you.”

Deirdre rolled in the comforter, disturbing Samedi again. This time the cat jumped from the bed and crossed the room to an armchair. “I feel like shit,” Deirdre said. Then, to soften the blow, she added, “Just need some rest.”

Olly bobbed their head, touched one arm with the other hand. “Yeah. There’s lunch, too, if you want something to eat. I could go grab something for you or…”

“Actually, yeah. That would be nice.”

“Last night, you know, it was scary.”

“I’m sorry you two had to deal with that.”

“No. Not the part where some psycho broke in all our windows like a fucked up crackhead. The part where you were falling down from being so exhausted and you were still throwing yourself at him.”

Deirdre opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say.

“Your plan, the way you explained it, there’ll be times when it’s just you and Paul and the Mask. There’ll be a time when it’s just you and Rehani and the Mask. If things go sideways, it might just be you and…if you’re so tired you can barely stand up, that fight can only go one way.” Olly didn’t quite make eye contact when they spoke, dodging it just-barely. “Dee, I know you—I know you feel like you have to go for him, It, whatever, but…but me and Nor’ can’t just keep losing people, you know?”

“I know,” Deirdre whispered. “And I…I’m sorry.”

She hadn’t known, of course, not really, but this only made her sorrier.

“Anyway. I’ll get you some lunch.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Rest well, okay?”

###############

After lunch, Deirdre spent most of the day in bed. By dinner, right at sunset, she felt more or less fine. She still felt drained but no longer so sore. She left bed, showered, and examined her hair in the mirror. She had no idea how to deal with the mess she’d already made of it. She sighed and muttered through her frustration, got dressed, and met everyone else in the dining room. Someone, she noticed, had repaired the windows.

Everyone looked tired and worn.

“Good to see you up,” Victor offered.

“Oh. Thanks.” She took the sole empty seat at the table. In the brief silence that stretched around her, she felt intensely stared-at. 

“Are you okay?” Paul asked.

“Yeah,” she lied. “I mean. Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

She could tell nobody bought it.

“Could we—could we just eat?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

Even Rehani wore an expression of loud, brazen concern.

“Nora,” Deirdre tried, “you and Olly were saying something about the Mask, what It might be after…?”

“Oh, uh…” Nora slid a questioning glance at Olly, who shrugged. “Sure. Yeah. So. Uh. As a warning, some of this is pretty theoretical, Big-Scary-Picture stuff, y’know, the kinds of conclusions Ambrose was trying to reach in his late life.”

“Such as?” Deirdre asked, happy to have someone willing to free her from the obviousness of everything else.

“Ambrose had started to think that evidence pointed toward the existence of true thoughtforms, sort-of Jungian metaphorical or super-supernatural entities, to put, like, a simpler descriptor to it. These things could become entities of any magnitude, magnitude referring to an analogous ‘weight’ or ‘size’ for supernatural entities performing inter-planar or inter-reality travel, like we talked about before, but had origins related to the specific psychic and physical behaviors of, well, humankind.”

“You need to talk slower,” Rehani adeptly noted.

“I mean, I don’t need…” Nora trailed off. “Anyway. Where was I? So, right, these thoughtforms, they could be of any magnitude, ‘size,’ if you will, but they only ‘emerged,’ or came into existence, through humankind’s psychic and physical influence, mostly accidental.”

“I’d also prefer it if you talked slower,” Paul said.

“I—Olly?”

Olly took over. “We started looking more into this theory after we did the math on ritual killings and supernatural possessions. See, we figure if this Mask thing uses ghosts as an immaterial resource and ritual killing as a magical resource, It has to kill a lot of people to trigger a full possession. On top of that, It only has some amount of immaterial and magic resources—let’s just call it ‘gas’—to do things like make Its host super-strong or heal Its host from gunshot wounds or anything like that. So any time the host fucks up, It loses gas. Plus, It has to build up the gas to empower and possess the patsy to start with.”

“So if It’s not aiming at possession, then what? It tryna summon Itself?”

“We don’t think so,” they replied. “Because the gas cost on that would be a whole different ballpark, and then It might end up just cashing out Its host for a manifestation, which might not be much stronger.”

“So what’s It doing?” Rehani asked.

“Well…” Olly glanced over at Nora, who shrugged a response. “It’s possible that the possession is part of something. It takes gas to keep It in our plane, even if It’s got a body, but then the Mask would have more direct control, plus the gas has faster access to the, uh…the engine, I guess.”

“So…It does want possession?”

“That’s where the math gets weird,” Olly said. 

Paul laughed.

“Yeah, I know,” they replied. “Believe me, I know. But it’s true. If this thing is a true, uh, thoughtform,” they hesitated around the word, still stumbling over its first-glance insanity, “then It might not be looking to use Its resources for anything as dramatic or short-term as manifestation. If It feeds on behaviors, rituals, beliefs, fears, emotions…then It might get the biggest boost not from completing Its supernatural task but from making the largest psychic splash possible.”

“See?” Nora chimed in. “It’s not the ‘fast’ part that makes it confusing.”

“So what does all this mean in plain English?” Deirdre asked.

“In, uh, plain English, it means that if we make finding and attacking you too difficult, the Mask might still benefit from sending Its host on a suicide rampage and waiting to take another shot the next time It gets Its hooks in someone. Whenever that is.”

“So we have to go outside,” Deirdre said.

For a moment, everyone fell silent again.

“We have to go outside,” Victor confirmed.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 17 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Seventeen

Skirting the western edge of the peninsula, Bob and the Mask walked north until dawn. In the hours and miles they traveled, they passed little. Northwest of the mansion, they came upon the border of the old Asher farmstead. Every nine yards, a crucified scarecrow held sentry at the perimeter. Bob and the Mask didn’t like the feel of them. When a strange wind whistled around them and bristled through some of the husks staring down from above, they left.

North of the farm, an ancient slaughterhouse, more than twenty years shuttered, rusted and rotted as treetrunks speared it apart. Bones and rubble littered the overgrowth. Bob and the Mask passed the dead place and continued on.

Across US Highway-1, they found more wilderness. They decided to walk east along the highway. A green sign pointed them in the direction of a local dairy. As the sun burst its yolk over the horizon, oozing light, they followed the highway exit down to a beaten, laneless roadway.

A chest-high wooden fence barricaded the pastures. At the edge of the broadest emerald field, a stout, roofed structure groaned at the coming day. As they followed the property’s boundary, Bob and the Mask watched two men enter the building. One drove up in a pickup truck, the other came from a small house abutting a silo. Once they’d vanished inside, Bob and the Mask climbed over the fence. Besides the house, silo, and stalls, another building invited attention near the front of the property. ‘Tours!’ one sign announced. ‘Closed,’ another said.

Knife in hand, Bob and the Mask moved into the building of stalls. Black, glassy eyes followed them along an aisle of cells. They heard liquid splashing into a pail nearby. Slipping through an open gate, they found one of the men at work. By the time he’d looked up and noticed them, it was far too late to scream.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 16 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Deirdre figured that if everyone wanted to use her as bait, anyway, they might as well put some real work into arranging the trap. For the mansion’s ‘anti-bullying’ defenses to function, the Mask had to enter the building. Even then, that particular spell would only weaken it, slow it down, knock it around a bit; to finish the fight, they’d need something more specific. To those ends, Deirdre and Rehani began constructing a binding ritual in the entry hall. This one took significantly more work than the one they’d used before Paul’s projection. Two days into the labor, they still had another day of work ahead. And Paul had assured them that the Mask already knew where they were. That It was coming sooner rather than later.

The spellcraft and willpower required to power their ritual drained them and drenched them in sweat. Deirdre’s hair had started to frizz and loosen, disorganizing in ways she didn’t know how to fix. She’d worn the same style for almost her entire adult life and couldn’t remember the things ‘Teesha had taught her about maintaining the new one. Her clothes adhered to her leechlike. Her body ached from funneling so much energy into every sigil, glyph, and incantation tying the magic together.

The work was breaking her down; they had to finish it as quickly as possible.

Around twilight on the third day, nostrils filled with the stench of burnt ozone, hands pressed to the floor, having just charged a section of the layered binding for the sixth or seventh time that day—a ritual obviously requiring ritual to function—Deirdre collapsed. She—

—“Hey, ma,”—

—blinked awake a second later. Rehani, Victor, and Paul all hovered uncomfortably close to her.

“Outta my face,” she muttered, half-reflexively.

“Yeah. You’re done.” Victor said.

“’scuze me?”

“You need rest. Come on. Clock-out time.” Victor held out his hand.

She propped herself up on her elbows. “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a fuckin’ bogeyman on Its way here.”

“Victor’s right,” Paul said. “No offense, but…I mean, you look like you’d lose a fight to Nora, right now.”

Rehani slapped his shoulder but voiced no disagreement.

Victor stared at her, at his hand, at her again.

“I can get up, myself,” she insisted.

Victor withdrew his hand.

It hurt to stand, every muscle in her body wracked and seared and microscopically tore from the days’ labor. She grunted a couple times, rising to her feet. Wanted to say something pithy but couldn’t manage it through her exertion. She frowned. She hadn’t realized she’d worn herself so thin.

“Come on,” Rehani said, taking the back of her arm. “Let’s get you some rest.”

“Dinner’ll be ready in thirty,” Victor added.

###############

Bob had followed the Mask. Was that the best way to describe it? He didn’t know.

He’d followed It the same way he’d followed It to the copycat-wannabe and the way he’d followed It to the squat and the two police officers just days earlier.

It had led him to a perimeter of privacy trees, rows of white-barked Castine elms. There, they hovered in the darkness and surveyed a mansion. Cropped hedges decorated the front yard in staggered arrays. A guest house sat in the dimness, unlit. A private drive curlicued south to the public roads and ended in a driving loop at the mansion’s steps; a fountain centered the asphalt circle. In the back yard, a hedge maze brooded, lit by overhung sodium lamps. For the most part, however, flat grass and open sightlines dominated the topography.

The mansion, itself, stood three floors tall, with various lights on in various rooms on the first and second stories. One of the windows showed them a tableau of dinner-time conversation. A white man with thinning hair said something to a black woman with bundled dreadlocks. The Lock, herself, sat across the table from them, slouched and drained, looking weakened. Two shorter people sat with their backs to Bob and the Mask, providing no details to their identities.

Bob and the Mask set down their backpack. Their hand felt lighter wrapped around the hilt of their knife.

They maneuvered around the treeline for a better view of the surroundings. The extra angling provided them with little new information. A back door in the center-rear of the building let out to the hedge maze. A car sat parked in the loop out front.

Just as they prepared to advance, another figure entered the dining room. Tall and broad-shouldered, the man carried twin serving trays into the room and placed them on the table. He wore a holster at his hip, a baseball cap over close-cropped hair, and a too-big sweater. When he sat, he thankfully sat with his back to Bob and the Mask.

They took a deep breath and began their approach.

###############

“…so what we think, based on the research, is that the Mask, as we’ve apparently decided to call It, can’t have possession as Its primary goal,” Nora said, scooping up a piece of white fish from the plate of fruits, vegetables, and marinade stewing several spiced flanks.

“It wouldn’t be energy-efficient,” Olly added.

“What?” Paul asked.

Nora, mouth already full of food, mm-mm-mm’d at Olly to explain.

They explained. “So the thing gets resources from whatever, killing people or whatever Paul said it does with ghosts, whatever, but It needs resources and has methods of gathering them. But protecting the host takes resources and empowering the host takes resources and guiding the host takes resources…and possessing the host takes significant resources.”

“You don’t think It breaks even with possession.”

“We don’t,” Olly replied. “Or, at least, not by much. It has to have broader goals, otherwise—”

Deirdre jumped at the sudden mrow and abrupt appearance of Samedi. The cat leapt onto the table in a cavalcade, knocking over two drinks within seconds. Still mewling loudly, he dashed around the obstacle course of dishes and glasses as everyone at dinner stood in surprise and momentary indecision.

Victor moved to apprehend Samedi but the feline had already stolen a bite of fish and started his rush out of the room. As Nora and Olly sat back down and Victor moved toward the threshold, Deirdre saw through the window—

YOU.

—she touched Victor’s shoulder. “Vic.”

“I’m getting a rag,” he said.

“Vic,” she repeated, not letting him go.

The Mask and Robert Robertson underneath It appeared from the darkness only ten feet away from the glass. They got closer.

As Victor followed her sightline, the frustration vanished from his features. An expression of flat calm smoothed across his face. Something changed in his eyes that Deirdre couldn’t quite place. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

“Kids, library. Now.”

“But—”

“Now,” Victor repeated, his tone implying that a third request wouldn’t happen.

As Nora and Olly exited the room scowlingly, Victor unholstered his pistol, checked the chamber, and reholstered it. “Rehani, you think you got enough left in you to trigger that ritual?”

“I, uh…well, we’ll find out.”

“See what you can do. Paul, you go with her.”

They left, overshoulder glances slowing them only slightly. 

“Deirdre, you got your revolver upstairs?”

As Deirdre opened her mouth to answer, the Mask, Robert Robertson Jr. beneath It, knocked a gloved hand against the window.

They both turned to stare. The Mask, Robert Robertson Jr., both of them, they stared back.

“Get your gun and meet me by the back door,” Victor said.

Deirdre nodded. She turned and ran out of the room. Her thighs immediately stung and tightened against her. All the neuromuscular energy she’d poured into the magic had left her an attenuate mess. Her run faded to a jog faded to a walk within seconds. A stitch caught in her side. It reminded her of—no. She pushed on. In the nearby west wing study, a spiral staircase twisted upwards into the west wing primary suite. Her room was just down the hall and to the right from there.

She was already panting by the time she reached the steps.

###############

Bob and the Mask saw the pistol at the man’s hip. Yet even as they stared at him through the glass, he didn’t draw. Why not? As the Lock rushed out of the room, they lifted their knife-wielding hand and knocked again. They felt the density of the window surface, multi-layered and possibly bullet-proof; but they could break through it if they had to. But that would give the man opportunity to shoot them.

But they’d already given him that opportunity and he hadn’t taken it.

So they moved to find out why.

The glass dented and flaked around their gloved fist. A second blow broadened the divot and fissured a cobweb across the window. Shards and pebbles sloughed away in the aftershock of the punch. Bulletproof, certainly, the Mask and Bob knew. They kept their gaze fixed on the man inside as they pulled back for a third swing. When their gloved knuckles pounded a hole through the first pane, he finally unholstered his pistol. He kept the barrel pointed down and stepped away from them.

Why?

With their off-hand, they reached into the uneven hole in the almost-plastic-glass and wrenched a chunk of it loose.

The man inside took one hand off of his pistol grip and adjusted his baseball hat. He gestured for Bob and the Mask to come on in. He mouthed something to them. ‘Come get some?’ They couldn’t tell. They pried the first pane of bullet-resistant window loose and threw it to the grass.

Something felt wrong about this entire situation.

Having ripped their way halfway into the dining room, Bob and the Mask turned toward the mansion’s backyard and began walking away. As they moved, voices shouted at each other through the building. Their prey had some sort of plan, it seemed. At the very least, they had emergency preparations. Maybe they even believed they had some method of keeping the Lock ‘safe.’ As if safety was a thing that really existed.

They hesitated at the back door. A sense of unseen threat shivered in Bob’s adrenal gland. The Mask and he felt something. Bob wasn’t certain what. The Mask knew better than he did but not with any specificity.

Stepping back, Bob grinned.

(Did the Mask?)

The game had begun. The Lock had made her play. Now they had to make theirs.

###############

Deirdre already felt halfway to keeling over when she got to the back door, revolver handle slippery with sweat. She’d pushed herself too far. Everything ached. She needed rest. But—

“He comes in, we try to lure him up front,” Victor said, stepping out of a shadowed archway. “Hopefully Rehani’s ready.”

“And if she’s not?”

“I think I can get off two or three shots before the anti-violence spell knocks me out.”

“Two or three?”

“Maybe.”

She swallowed. “And what if…?”

“I’m still thinking about that.”

They waited by the back door for something to happen. Seconds yawned widely around them. Deirdre stared at the doorknob, imagining. Her pulse filled the silence. She poised her thumb over the hammer of her .38.

Something crushed and crashed down the hall. They turned toward the noise. The muscles wrapping Deirdre’s torso ached when she moved. As the crack-crash repeated, she took a deep breath and did her best to jog toward the sound. Victor got out ahead of her instantly.

A doorless tea lounge opened on their left. A man in a mask stood on the other side of broad bay windows. He punched the bullet-resistant glass, turning a crater into a hole. As Deirdre and Victor watched, he grasped the uneven edges of the gap and pulled. Chunks of bulletproof semi-glass ripped away from the pane.

“Don’t fire until he gets inside,” Victor whispered.

After the Mask and Bob had torn apart most of the pane, they stepped back and stared.

“It’s not coming in,” Deirdre said.

“Not yet.”

The Mask and Bob turned sharply and continued walking around the house. Not long after, they started working on another window. Deirdre and Victor followed. This time the Mask didn’t bother peeling away the entire pane, It and Bob just punctured a fist-sized hole through it and moved on. Deirdre and Victor followed.

The next threshold opened into a den. Two small tables and a desk played host to five overly-cushioned chairs. Off to one side, two more minimalist, straight-backed seats awaited the resolution to an unfinished chess game. Another half-broken bay window glanced the corner of the hedge labyrinth and a roll of grass. Lights beaming down from the roof (when had someone turned them on?) revealed green blankness all the way to the treeline. Through the web of fissures fragmenting the view, they couldn’t see Bob nor the Mask.

Deirdre wanted to ask a question but found her tongue too heavy.

She focused on moving, on putting one foot in front of the other, on staying close to Victor as they tracked the monster’s progress along the perimeter of their sanctuary. One foot; the other. Deep breath.

“It’s gotta have noticed we haven’t shot It, yet,” Victor said, barely stopping to take in the next dented window. “Goddammit.”

“Huh?” Deirdre grunted, feeling faintly lightheaded.

“It’s testing us.”

The hallway curved around the enormity of the Blackwood library. The next room, a bathroom, had its small bullet-resistant window ripped apart entirely. The one after that, another dining room, this one decorated for a luncheon, had two windows, both partially dented and fractured but neither broken.

“Hold up,” Deirdre muttered, bracing herself with her left hand against the wall.

Victor froze, body torn between two directives. “Don’t take long.”

She panted in response, trying to breathe her way back to Earth.

“Victor!” Paul shouted from the entry hall, voice echoing down to them, the second syllable stretching with urgency. “He’s at the door!”

BANG

(YOU.)

Deirdre pushed herself away from the wall. Still lightheaded, she sagged forward. She managed one foot in front of the other a few times before the stitch in her side caught again. She winced, limped. 

Victor reached out reflex-fast and pulled her left arm across his broad shoulders. “Hold on,” he said. “Just try ‘n’ keep pace.” She leaned her weight against him, allowing her legs to move just enough to keep pace.

BANG

(YOU.)

“I don’t think I can hold this by myself!” Paul shouted.

The air bristled with mystic power and supernatural sensation as they neared the grand entry hall. Even having done half the work herself, the sheer magnitude of their ritual caught her by surprise. Her sixth sense jerked, her instincts spasmed. She lost her footing. Victor staggered, catching her weight, and pulled her close. When the overwhelm peeled back, she heaved for breath, moving her feet as quickly as she could just to keep up with Victor’s hampered pace.

Their ritual took up the majority of the space in the broad entry chamber. Paint and chalk, offering bowls and braziers, carved bones and scrolls inked in minuscule handwriting covered the floor. Three expansive protective circles, layered concentrically, stopped just inches from the room’s boundaries.

Rehani knelt on a prayer rug in the center of the geometrically-lined design, spine straight, shoulders back, chin uplifted. Eyes closed, she mouthed a silent series of syllables as sweat rolled down her cheeks and dewed the frays off of her locs.

Paul stood braced against the double doors, an umbrella stuffed between the two door handles as reinforcement. The umbrella had already bent.

BANG

(YOU.)

Paul shuddered. The doors opened-shut. The umbrella bent.

Victor eased Deirdre off of his shoulder. “Catch your breath,” he told her.

“Mm-hm.”

Victor holstered his pistol and jogged across the floor. At the umbrella stand near the entrance, he searched for something Paul apparently hadn’t found. As he searched, Deirdre watched Paul seize again as another crash bucked against their defenses. This blow sent Paul staggering forward, all-but-snapping the twisted, gnarl-bent thing between the handles.

(YOU.)

Victor arrived at the double doors with a slat of dense cold iron. Wrenching the unrecognizable umbrella loose, he replaced it with the broader bar. Paul stepped away, wiping sweat from his brow. Victor pulled his pistol back out.

Together, they waited.

Seconds passed. They stretched on, aching around Deirdre’s unblinking eyes, but they passed. They accrued. They thickened into a minute. Longer. Pins-and-needles pricked her arm. Feeling followed. Enough time passed for her vision to clear. Her hand remembered the revolver still in it. She let go of the gun and flexed her fingers.

“What now?” Paul asked, almost a whisper.

“Give me a second,” Victor replied.

“We don’t know what It’s doing.”

“I know.”

Deirdre felt her pulse slow down. The minute expanded. She swallowed. With a groan, she pushed herself to her feet. Picked up her .38 snubnose. Leaned against the curved railing of the stairwell nearby. “Open the door,” she said.

Victor and Paul looked at her.

“What, you want to wait for him?”

“She’s right.” Victor turned back toward the doors and took hold of the cold iron bar. “The longer we wait to see if the motherfucker’s still out there, the longer we don’t know what he’s doing.”

“He could be standing right outside the door,” Paul argued.

“He could be all the way around the back breaking in,” Victor replied.

Deirdre hobbled forward. “Do it.”

Rehani didn’t seem aware of her surroundings. Her eyes rolled in their lidded sockets, her lips formed silent syllables flicker-fast.

Victor paused before pulling the bar loose. “If things…if things go sideways, get Nora and Olly somewhere safe.”

Nobody knew what to say to that.

“Hold on,” Paul said just as Victor braced himself. “Let me pull the bar.”

“Why?”

“Just—if he’s standing right there, stand somewhere you can shoot him.”

Victor nodded, stepping back.

Paul took three quick breaths, grabbed the cold iron bar, and wrenched it loose.

Nothing happened.

He stepped forward, gripped one of the door handles, and pulled.

(YOU.)

Deirdre saw It/him/them dead on. The roof-mounted floodlights caught It/him/them from the waist down only, the rest of Its/his/their silhouette swimming in midnight obscurity. Their knife gleamed. They moved it, refracting spectra and brightness back at the people inside. They took a step back afterward, as if in invitation.

Her heart throttled her throat. She hurt everywhere. She thumbed back the hammer on her revolver. “Come on,” she said, limping forward. “Come on in.” Her pulse banged against the sides of her skull. The man in(and) the mask(Mask) stepped back again. Only his(their) boots remained visible in the beams of the floodlights. 

(YOU.)

She reached the threshold, standing between Paul and Victor. “Come on,” she repeated. “I’m right here.”

The Mask and the man(Mask/Bob) inside(beneath) turned around and walked into the darkness.

“No!” Deirdre screamed. She surged forward but Victor plucked her back like she weighed nothing. “No!” she screamed again. She lifted her revolver and fired blindly into the night. Victor’s other arm wrapped her gun-hand and lowered the barrel.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay.”

“No!” she shouted, not strong enough to fight anymore but wanting to desperately, “No, no, no…”

“Deirdre?” Olly asked, a shadow near the entrance to the library.

“It’s just going to find someone else,” she told Victor, Paul, Rehani, everyone. “It’s just going to find someone else…”

Turn Back Table of Contents

Ch. 16 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

“Wake up,” a voice urged him from the dark. “Come on, partner, job’s not done, yet. It’s time to wake up.”

Booker, laid out on the couch opposite his living room flatscreen, groaned and grunted.

“John.”

“What?”

“We fell asleep.”

Booker’s eyes slivered open. Castellanos paced between the coffee table and the two-stair entry to the dining room. Seeing her jerked him awake. Soreness ached through his musculature as he sat up. “Al?”

She stopped pacing. “Did anyone ever tell you, you mumble in your sleep?”

“They think you’re missing, Al.”

“Do I look missing to you?”

“So why do they think so? And—and how the hell did you get in here?” He stood, but the shakiness in his legs and the intense fatigue of his torso drained all drama from the motion.

Castellanos laughed. Booker wasn’t sure what she found so funny. As if explaining a joke, Castellanos said, “And then I say ‘it’s better you don’t ask.’ Get it?”

Booker braced himself on one end of the couch. “What?”

“Nothing, John. Forget about it. It’s just…” she hesitated, took a breath. “I need you to trust me. Okay? Can you do that? ‘cause we have bigger problems than which type of B-and/or-E I might be guilty of.”

“Bigger problems? I can barely stand up.”

“It’s Bob-Bob’s-son. And you don’t need to.”

“We’re not on that case, anymore, Al, because everyone at the precinct thinks—”

Castellanos scoffed, the snarled sound of half-amusement sucking away his anger even as it built. Booker sighed, letting the rest of his sentence trail off. Castellanos resumed movement, almost swaying herself up the small steps and into the dining room. “Don’t tell me you’ve got cold feet now.”

Booker followed. It took some time, enough time that he lost track of Castellanos. He didn’t see her in the dining room or attached kitchen—had she wandered into the bathroom, the bedroom?—but as he surveyed the area, he noticed something obviously urgent. All the notes, recordings, reports, and photographs from their investigation splayed the dining table. He moved numbly, without thinking, picking up scattered reports as if expecting them to vanish. They didn’t. Indeed, as Booker shuffled through the nightmare-miracle documentation, he noticed cold case boxes piled around the table’s legs. All the gathered intel on the cases from the 70’s and 90’s…

“I chose you, John.”

He jumped when she spoke, her face inches from his without warning.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

She opened the first cold-case box and started pulling out bags of zipped-up evidence and folders full of reports. Piling everything on top of everything else, she gestured for Booker to join her. “I promised I’d tell you how it ended,” she said, dumping another harvest of decades-old notes onto the table, “but I can’t do that until you help me figure out how it began.”

“How did you get all of this?” he asked.

“Trust me, you wouldn’t understand it if I told you. Especially not with the painkillers you’re on.”

“Well, what—what do you want me to do with all this shit?”

“Sit down, first of all. We have a puzzle to solve.”

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 16 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Whiteheads rolled into themselves and died and crashed against the rocks dead. Bob splashed cold Atlantic over his body, his grizzled face. When had his beard gotten so thick? When had his hair grown so disordered? The salt textured everything. The whiteheads rolled into themselves and died. The ocean breeze shivered gooseflesh across Bob’s arms and back, the temperature at dark dawn shaking him to his bones. A few yards away, his last set of stolen clothes, a couple cans of beans and tuna, the Mask, and their knife waited stashed in an oversized backpack, hidden under stones. Bob splashed freezing water against himself. The whiteheads rolled and died.

Bob coughed his throat clear. He hadn’t spoken in—(we don’t talk until the—)—how long? Hours? Days? He shook the sea out of his coarsened hair and shook his way along the rocks. Behind him, the Atlantic chewed the coast, eating its way inland. The whiteheads rolled…

Still shuddering from cold, Bob stood next to the backpack and used his palms to slick wetness from his skin. The cool breeze sliced through him. As the sun rose, Bob used a pair of stolen boxers to dry off his genitals before pulling them on. The dampness made the fabric stick to him. He pulled the rest of the clothes from the pack in a tangle and dressed in snarling frustration. Beads of moisture sucked at random patches of fabric, sticking them to him.

He growled at the sea and the sea growled back, eating its way inland. Whiteheads crashed against the rocks, dead.

Backpack slung over one shoulder, flannel overshirt half-unbuttoned, Bob backed away from the water. Dawn glittered across the waves like light refracting over a cracked mirror. Or a window. 

Bob had always felt some great unnameable presence beneath the seas surrounding his hometown. When the Oceanrest Fog started brewing in the western bay, or in the broad harbor along the peninsula’s southern swath, the feeling intensified; and that morning, far off to Bob’s right, thin mists rose from the coast like an omen. 

Pulling on the backpack’s other strap, Bob stepped cautiously backward, ascending (descent) the beach back toward the treeline. Several yards uphill, he halfway tripped on a loose foothold. Stumbling, he yelped. In the nothing that followed, a rush of embarrassment went warm-hot-cold through him. He searched for witnesses but saw none. Still somehow embarrassed, he turned his back on the nonsense meteorology and finished the climb as quickly as he could.

It took nearly two hours to hike back to the fringes of Squatter City, but Bob made the trek even knowing what he’d find on the other side. As expected, packs of uniformed police roamed the rubbled streets, homeless eyes tracking them with prey-animal wariness. Soon, some badge or another would break their way into his stolen sanctum—their stolen sanctum—and he and the Mask still had too much to do to go down now.

Nearly five miles separated their treehouse northeast of Denton from the borders of Squatter City, most of it up- and downhill through the woods. Still, the treehouse provided them with shelter until they could acquire more suitable accommodations. As soon as Bob confirmed the growing police presence infesting Squatter City, he and the Mask began the trek.

Dawn had warmed into full afternoon by the time they reached their destination.

Under the shade of the structure’s half-roof, Bob curled up on the floor with the backpack serving as a pillow. He clutched the Mask and the knife to his chest and slept fetal around them.

He awoke as twilight darkened to night, his body electric with purpose.

Somehow, he’d already donned the Mask.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 16 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Sixteen

The last forty-eight hours in the hospital had passed in a haze. Booker had gone through basic physical therapy, received a referral to a local physical therapist, and left with a collection of prescriptions. The other homicide detectives, Donaldson and Waithe, had interviewed him for hours that had groaned on for him into stretched days.

The morning they released him, Virgil LeDuff picked him up in a boxy, decades-old sedan. The drugs still lingering in John Bowman Booker’s veins proved a contraindication to driving and the older man had volunteered the service. The two barely spoke on the ride.

Somewhere in the traffic between Oceanrest Memorial and his apartment, Booker broke the silence. “Find the guy yet?” he woozily asked.

Virgil answered with a noise between grunt and snort.

“How bad’s it going?”

“Bad. But not so bad it can’t get worse.”

“You can’t send just anyone into Squatter City.”

Virgil turned down a side-street away from the main thoroughfare. “I don’t have much of a choice,” he said. “We all knew what sort’a shit could happen, sending badges up to Squatter City, but we can’t just let this psycho slip through our fingers.”

Booker leaned his head against the passenger seat window and chuckled. “He ain’t even up there anymore, man. All the farms and forest in this county? He’s out there, somewhere. Living in a cave for all we know.”

Virgil didn’t reply at first. He sighed, a sound so practiced by the man that it perfectly expressed the tight commingling of frustration and disappointment within him. After the sigh, he reached for the radio knob, decided against it, and returned his hand to the wheel. For a while, Booker didn’t think Virgil would respond at all. Had he somehow gone too far?

But Virgil cleared his throat as they approached their destination. “Sooner or later, you know, someone else is gonna sit in my office.” He sounded older than his years, saying that. His posture wilted. “Someone else is gonna carry the responsibility and wield all the goddamn power. It…it scares me, John. Scares the shit out of me.”

“Huh?” Booker muttered, only half-listening through the medicinal fog. “What?”

Virgil signaled his entrance into the condo complex. “Not too long from now, might be I step down and retire. Might be they make me. Or might be someone else just gets the seat…but sooner or later, there’ll be another Chief. And I don’t have any idea what kind of person he—or she—is going to be. A man…a person in my position, they could do a lot of harm.”

Booker nodded. He didn’t voice his immediate response: that any person, any person, could do a lot of harm if they just chose to. The world had made doing harm exceedingly easy. It was doing good that took work.

“So, uh…a’yeah.” Virgil parked the car in front of Booker’s building. “You need help getting up the stairs?”

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 15 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

“Indefinite suspension—with pay, pending review.”

In the nightmare that was also halfway a memory, the Captain stood behind a tombstone slab of desk, his body a hazy stormcloud. Booker sat across from him, jaw tight, heart thrumming, and clasped the arms of his chair.

“I’m sorry, John…” the Captain didn’t look at him. “But your duty is to apprehend.”

Bullshit.

Bullshit.

A cop killed somebody every day in the United States. Every single day. Police killed people at traffic stops, during drug arrests, and just walking down the street. John Bowman Booker had killed a man he’d caught raping a young boy. Surely the circumstances meant something…

But he didn’t say that.

In the nightmare that was also halfway a memory, John Bowman Booker just stood up and left the office.

The doorway opened into fog. Booker stood at the helm of a ship floating through mist and darkness. He sat in the cockpit of a ship rocketing through blur and darkness. He stood at the helm, the Atlantic sloshing bleakly beneath. Did the cold, lightless depths of the salty sea mirror the cold, lightless heights of the cosmic dark above? 

(was every ascent also a descent?)

The ship drifted (spun/orbited) aimlessly. Booker felt lost. The waves bore him onward. Fog surrounded him. He’d always felt ironically grounded by the ocean, but now it sloshed him unanchored from parts unknown toward parts unknown.

Part Irish, part Haitian, and partially lost to stolen history, John Bowman Booker had spent his early youth in Canarsie before his family had moved to South Boston. He’d lived in South Boston from the age of nine until the age of twenty-nine. 

A rocky coast breached the mists. A woman stood on the shores, familiar and unfamiliar. 

She asked him a question but he forgot it as she burned into light.

Night had fallen when Booker awoke, and the overhead fluorescent lights reflected themselves against the darkened windows. Virgil stood at his bedside, facing the glass, hands folded behind him. The older man looked harried, usually-neat hair rumpled and tossed, his visage scruffed by more than a single day’s five-o’clock shadow, and a slouch that aged him into antiquity.

“Chief?” Booker croaked, dry-throated again despite the alleged hydration.

Virgil turned toward him. “Book. It’s good to see you awake.”

Booker picked up the water bottle Castellanos had left him and uncapped it. He sipped, sitting up as little as possible. Replacing the cap, he set it down again. “The guy stabbed me. I turned my back for half a second and the guy fucking stabbed me.”

“A’yeah. You were in bad shape for a little while there.”

“Mm.”

“But they stabilized you pretty fast.”

“Mm.”

“A’yeah.”

Booker chuckled. Was it the drugs? He couldn’t be sure.

“So…how do you feel?” Virgil asked.

“I hurt. Kinda. And I’m high. Kinda.”

Virgil bobbed his head. “Suppose so, a’yeah.”

“A’yeah,” Booker parroted.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Virgil sighed. “Look, Book…John…”

Booker’s brow trenched. Virgil virtually never used his first name.

Virgil sighed again. “There’s no easy way to tell you this. The doctors say you’ll have to be here another twenty-four hours at least, probably forty-eight. They say you’ll need two, three weeks physical therapy before you get back to work.”

“Uh-huhh?”

“I have to put someone else on the case.”

“You talk to Alejandra about that?”

“Castellanos? She’s—has nobody else told you?”

“Told me what?”

“She’s—John, she’s been missing since our guys found you at the house.”

Booker glanced down at his water bottle. “No. She was just here.”

“She’s not on the sign-in sheet.”

“But she was…” he trailed off.

“We’re looking for her. We are. But we can’t afford to miss time on this. I hate to ask, but…do you have all your files at the office? Your case notes? We think Castellanos kept hers on her and she’s, well...you know.”

“I…” what the hell was happening? Booker swallowed, already thirsty again. “I think, yeah. Most of ‘em.”

“Thanks. And thanks for all your work. You’re one of the best Detectives this city’s seen.”

Booker squinted at Virgil. Why had the older man suddenly started calling him ‘John?’ He didn’t ask. He nodded. “Thanks,” he said. Virgil returned the nod. Booker rested back in bed and picked up the water bottle. He stared at it until he forgot why he’d starting staring to begin with. After Virgil left, he took a few more sips, replaced the cap, and fell asleep.

He did not remember his dreams. Or, at least, he did not remember how they began.

Turn Back Table of Contents