S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 4

Ch. 15 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

Memory was a curse. Of this, Paul Somers felt certain.

He sat on one of the two curving stairways descending from the second floor landing to the mansion’s entry hall. He didn’t know what else to do or where else to do it. The projecting had left him utterly spent, mentally burnt and physically exhausted. He felt incapable of anything besides sitting and, unfortunately, thinking.

To his right, to the right of his particular stairway, a broad corridor outlet into a slender sitting room and, beyond that, the kitchen and dining areas. Dining areas, plural. To his left, the entry hall narrowed into a doorless threshold, beyond which a small, circular tea room—really an antechamber—awaited. The southern entrance to the Blackwood Library stood in the antechamber’s northern wall. 

To the left of that hallway, another set of stairs curved elegantly upward. To the left of those…

Paul tried to map the mansion in his head as a way of distracting himself from his thoughts, but his thoughts clawed and rattled and snarled with unrelenting endurance. It didn’t take long for him to start thinking them again.

The Mask hadn’t needed to drill into his mind to give him nightmares. The flashes and glimpses, the seconds-long scents and sensations that had whirled through him during their brief interaction had done enough. 

Before crash-landing his life in Oceanrest, Paul had worked as a consultant to the NYPD, as well as police in Nassau and even Suffolk counties. Before that, post-Quantico, he’d worked at the BAU. People had once considered him an extremely promising mind, maybe among the top fifty in his field. Slowly, all of that potential had become…something else.

He and Anjuli, his ex-wife, had had fertility problems. And while this originally bothered them, the growing stress of their Masters and Doctoral studies and, subsequently, their careers, had turned the seeming curse into an unmentioned blessing. Until somehow the miracle occurred. They hadn’t had Cassandra Somers by accident, of course, but the pregnancy had come as a surprise. In the overwhelm of responsibility that followed, Paul’s career suffered. After a few years of sinking deeper into obscurity in an already-obscure field, he over-corrected. Maybe he’d done it out of spite. In retrospect, he’d probably done it out of spite. Spite and resent.

But he hadn’t seen it that way, back then.

And, of course, he hadn’t seen the way Anjuli’s career had suffered, either.

Paul Somers blinked. To the right of his staircase, a broad corridor outlet into a slender sitting room and, beyond that, the kitchen and dining areas. Dining areas, plural. He’d hurt so many people with his myopia. Sometimes, he wanted to forget it all. Sometimes, he wanted to disappear.

The worst thing about seeing the dead, and hearing them, and feeling them, was the same as the worst thing about everything else: he had to remember all of it.

His daughter, Cassandra Somers, had died at sixteen-almost-seventeen years old, the drunk driver in a drunk driving accident that had left four bodies behind, including hers. The booze in her system had come from their apartment liquor cabinet. The amphetamines had come from his stash—bottles both legally prescribed and illicitly attained—and the painkillers had come from Anjuli’s prescription. Cassandra Somers had had so many drugs in her system at her time of death that the M.E. had been shocked that she hadn’t just overdosed.

To the left of the stairs, the entry hall narrowed into a doorless threshold, beyond which a small, circular tea room—really an antechamber—awaited. The southern entrance to the Blackwood Library stood in the antechamber’s northern wall. 

“Hey,” Rehani said, snapping him back to reality. She leaned against the railing in a multi-hue wrap of dress. Holding a densely-rolled joint toward him, she added, “Look like you could use a hit.”

Shifting to face her, he hesitated as his mind caught up to reality. Awkwardly chuckling, he accepted the gift. “Sorry. Thanks. Yeah.” He maneuvered, searching himself for a lighter. “Any chance you—”

With half a smirk, Rehani held out a flame.

“Thanks,” Paul repeated.

“Nothin’,” Rehani answered. As Paul inhaled his first drag, she killed her match with a snap of her wrist. While Paul understood that she’d lit the match to spark the joint, he couldn’t recall watching her strike it. He didn’t remember seeing a matchbook, either. Pocketing the burnt matchstick, Rehani continued, “You see something in that place you can’t shake off?”

“No,” he answered, maybe too-suddenly. “No, it’s not that. Not exactly.”

“Just thinking?”

“Yeah.” He took a second puff, this one seething in his lungs. He coughed, tucked his face into his elbow, and coughed again.

“Mm. Been having problems with that, myself.”

Paul nodded, still choked on heat. After another couple coughs and a sandpaper-raw clearing of the throat, he said, “I’m sorry about…I meant to ask, after…”

“Better you didn’t,” she replied. “With the shit this close to the fan, we need to stay focused.”

He held the joint back toward her. “But on the right things.”

“Exactly.” She puffed the cherry back to life. Flicked the butt gently enough to brush off the barest layer of ash. “Or at least…the pressing things.”

He nodded, not knowing what else to say. They passed the joint back and forth a few times. To his left, the entry hall narrowed into a doorless threshold, beyond which a small, circular tea room—really an antechamber—awaited.

Staring at nothing, mellow and detached, Paul broke the silence. “My daughter, you know, she was the first one I saw. The first ghost, I mean.”

Rehani, disappearing the remnant roach, peered down at him. “Like, what did we just talk about?”

Paul frowned. Remembered. Chuckled. “Right.”

A muffled mrow reached them through the double front doors. The two of them, both weed-buzzed, merely watched as the doors bucked, opened, and shut again. By the time Paul and Rehani both moved to help, Deirdre had already managed to shove her way into the entry hall, cat-carrier first. Usually a very quiet cat, Samedi yowled and whimpered in the cage, pacing in small circles. Barely inside, Deirdre set the cat carrier down and opened the gate.

Samedi shot out, faster than Paul had ever seen him move before, and sprinted away.

A couple seconds later, Victor entered, a weekender bag hanging from one hand. “I could’ve gotten that,” he said.

Deirdre didn’t reply. Instead, she pivoted her stance to face Victor, Rehani, and Paul all at once. “I think I have a plan.”

Before anyone could ask for details, a delighted squeal echoed out from the library.

“Nora!” Olly shouted. “Come meet this gorgeous fuckin’ slonk!”

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Ch. 15 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Water dripped; it echoed. Booker ascended the stairs with his pistol held low. He stopped when he reached a dim, cold landing. His breath turned to steam in the chill. From the lightlessness ahead, he heard a weak whimper. The slap of skin against skin replied. Hands tight around the grip of his gun, Booker approached.

Slap, whimper, slap, whimper.

YOUR DUTY—

Booker spun around, one shoe-sole scraping the concrete, but found nothing behind him. The corridor’s frost slithered into his bones. Had the perp heard the sound of his movement? Slowly, he turned…

Whimper, slap, whimper, slap.

Pressed close to the wall, he crept toward the dark, door-less threshold ahead. The sounds clarified, becoming more distinctly recognizable. He heard the groans and the choked sobs. He closed his eyes—

—loud noise surrounded him. Bright lights. The world blurred in commotion. Strangers shouted things he couldn’t understand. His eyelids—

—and took a deep breath. Opened them.

In the cavern of the room, Booker saw two figures shift against each other. The larger one thrusted and bucked, the smaller whimpered and cried. Did the man wear a mask? As Booker brought the barrel of his gun to bear, he thought he saw a mask.

Gunfire shattered reality.

The masked man had six arms. Two flew wide in shock, two threw the weeping child into a wall, and two grabbed Booker’s wrists. Before the masked man-monster thing twisted his joints and disarmed him, Booker put three more rounds into his/its/their center mass. Having shot the man six times, his seventh went wide. His wrists seared, bulging, their small bones threatening to fissure…

The man stumbled backward, no shadows coursing through his veins at all, just red, red blood. He clutched the wreck of his bullet-shredded midsection and sagged against the far wall. Booker bent to retrieve his pistol from the floor—(how had he dropped it? the shadows arms. what shadow arms? there’d never been any shadow arms)—and walked over to the barely-living man. He emptied the remainder of the magazine, reloaded the gun, and emptied the next one, too.

The boy, eleven years old, had stopped crying by then.

After reloading for the second time, a detail that came up during every hour of the hearings that would follow, Booker holstered his gun, took off his coat, and wrapped it around the child. “You’re going to be okay,” he’d whispered, not even hearing his own voice through the ear buds and minor tinnitus, “you’re going to be okay.”

Who was he trying to convince?

(Nobody was ever really okay.)

He held the boy for a couple seconds, not knowing what else to do. He closed his eyes against a ridge of tears—

“You’re going to be okay,” the voice behind the white mask told him. Crimson flecked her glasses. She wore a bright halo, blinding. Booker felt dizzy. He floated. Everything below his neck pinched but only distantly. He tried to focus on the woman’s face. He—

—stood up, unblinking, and searched the room. He found a keyring on top of a nearby packing crate. It jingled when he picked it up and the boy winced at the noise. Holding the keys in his palm to stop them from clinking against each other, Booker returned to the child. “Hey,” he said, as quietly as he could through the ringing in his ears. “Do you know where the others are?”

The boy nodded.

Booker’s back-up arrived as he left the room. His partner, O’Sullivan, approached him slackjawed.

“What—what happened?” O’Sullivan asked.

“There’s a boy,” Booker said. Not able to string the rest of the words together, he pointed back to the room. “There’s a boy,” he repeated.

“Oh, fuck…” O’Sullivan muttered, shining a flashlight into the darkness.

Booker (every) ascended to the (descent) third floor. The keys on the keyrings belonged to cages. Inside them, he found another five of the eight missing children. The last two remained unfound, now presumed dead. But in the now that was still then in Booker’s fractured perception, he unlocked the cages, walked back out of the room, and sat down. He waited for someone to arrest him. He stared at the floor and tried not to remember.

And the strangest thing happened: he almost entirely forgot.

Booker awoke from the dream-memory to a hospital room. Tape held IV needles in place on his arms. He felt the scar where they’d cut into him to undo whatever damage Robert Robertson had done while cutting into him. He felt the stitches where they’d sewn him back together again. The pain happened distantly, subdued by Oceanrest fog. No. By painkillers. He chuckled at the thought. They hadn’t intubated him, he noticed. Good.

Castellanos sat at the bedside, working the beads on her orb, tracking their orbits and velocities against each other. She’d had a shower since the fight. He noticed it in the sheen of her hair. How did his hair look? He rolled his eyes but couldn’t see. Of course he couldn’t see. But medical-grade drugs did that to a person.

“John?” Castellanos said, peering up at him from her puzzle.

“A-Al?” he rasped, suddenly aware of a gulch of aching throat.

“Here, I brought you some water.” She set the orb on the vacant chair next to her and reached into her bag for a bottle of water. She uncapped it and started moving it toward his face.

“No, no,” he lifted an arm against her approach. “No.”

“They said you should try not to move too much.”

“We are not doing that.”

She put the cap back on and offered him the other side. “Alright. Fair enough.”

He took the bottle. It hurt to sit up. He felt the motion through his whole abdomen. Grunting, he uncapped the water, drank what little he could through the pain, and capped it again. “What happened?”

“You won’t remember if I tell you.”

“Huh?”

“Drugs.” She indicated the IV bags. “And hydration, I think.”

He squinted at her. “You think?”

“I’m not a doctor.”

It hurt to laugh. The earlier chuckle hadn’t, but real laughter did. It hurt like hell. As soon as the first peal escaped his lips, his core muscles seized. He craned forward, choked with pain. When the tension left his body, sweat dribbled down his forehead. “Goddamn.”

“You know what’s funny?” Castellanos asked.

“Not anymore.” He winced, leaning back into pillow cushions.

“You never remember the beginnings of your dreams. Only the endings.”

“What the hell?”

“You only remember the dreams you have right before you wake up. It has to do with the way dreams and memory work together—or don’t. Brain chemistry stuff. Neuroscience. You following, or are the drugs too good?”

Booker chuckled. Now that hurt, too. “Oh, I follow,” he lied.

“So the way dreams and memory don’t work together, it sort of implies that you can’t remember the beginnings of any dream. Unless that dream is very short.”

“Okay?”

“So imagine picking up the second half of a book, or watching the second half of a movie. Imagine knowing the ending but not the beginning, imagine seeing the outcome but never its context. Wouldn’t that frustrate you?” Castellanos leaned forward, her hands on the bedframe rails. “Wouldn’t that make you crazy?”

“The hell you talking about?”

She blinked. Her gaze softened. Easing back from his bed, she chuckled. “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

“Well…at least you’re not drinking.” He leaned his head back and saw ceiling.

“I guess I’m not.”

He blinked. The blink stretched on. It didn’t end for hours.

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Ch. 15 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Fifteen

Eating breakfast mid-morning, almost brunch, Deirdre watched Paul with concern. She’d spent most of the night supervising his post-projection aftershocks, his shivers and starts and fits of semi-conscious whispering. After his initial collapse, she and Victor had carried him back to his bedroom to rest. She’d sat in, sleeping in an armchair by the bed, and his restlessness had left her restless. Hours of sleepwalking and sleep-talking and tossing-turning nightmares passed before Paul fell into peaceful slumber. That peace had allowed her, too, to sleep.

At dawn, Paul had jerked awake violently, awakening her in kind. He’d thrown himself from the bed and scrambled on all fours out of the room and down the hallway. When she’d caught up to him seconds later, she’d found him sobbing and vomiting, body arched around ceramic. She’d tried to soothe him as he shook and puked but he hadn’t seemed aware of her presence. His eyes had searched but found nothing. Eventually, he eased himself against the wall and passed out again. Not strong enough to move him on her own, and unable to otherwise rouse him, Deirdre had climbed into the bathtub and slept uncomfortably there.

Victor had found them just after nine o’clock.

Nobody had spoken much, since. After the initial chatter of every-morning catch-up, the table had fallen to silverware scrape and chewing. Curled in his seat, Paul’s pink-white skin sallowed sickly, paler than pale. His eyes hid in cavernous sockets. He looked apocalyptically hungover, older than his years, frail in a way Deirdre never thought of him as being. And so, barely tasting her food and only half-remembering to thank Gaea for her gracious bounty, Deirdre watched him, across the table, with concern.

Paul, perhaps feeling the tension in the air, cleared his throat. At once, everyone else at the table joined Deirdre in her watching.

“So, uh…” Paul trailed off, coughed. “Uh…” he faltered again. Peering at the faces turned toward him, he shifted in his chair and managed a third attempt. “So, uh, this—this artifact thing, this mask, it’s not the only conduit or whatever our bad guy has moving around in the world. There are others in other cities…maybe other countries…”

“That makes sense,” Nora chimed in, freshly showered, frizzy hair balled in a knot atop her scalp. “Like we said, this thing is probably just a fractal of a fractal, an offshoot or byproduct of some other entity or thoughtform with more power or magnitude, which may, itself, be an offshoot or byproduct of some other other entity, and so on…”

“Monsters all the way down,” Olly added.

“Right,” Paul said, unamused. “Anyway. It’s also figured out how to…I don’t know how to describe it…It can kind of ‘skin’ ghosts, and It’s using their skins to armor Itself. At least in the spirit realm.”

“Did you find out what the thing wants?” Rehani interjected.

“Uh…no,” Paul admitted. “Not really. I know It’s gathering power through the killings and the way It ‘skins’ ghosts, and I know It uses a lot of that power to help Its, uh—Its servant perform the murders, but as far as a motive…”

Rehani scrunched her face, incredulous.

“These things don’t profile easily,” Olly leaned forward, their elbows and half their torso on the table as they stretched between Rehani and Paul. “They don’t think like people do. They aren’t people.”

“You said ‘servant,’” Nora piped up, leaving barely a breath at the end of Olly’s sentence before speaking. “What do you mean by that?”

“The people It possesses or—I guess I don’t know if it possesses them, but—the people It uses, they usually buy into the deal because they want to do evil things, or they want to reap the rewards of evil deeds, and It uses those desires to manipulate them until It controls them. Maybe entirely.”

Nora and Olly exchanged another secret-language look. Victor seemed to understand it. A faintly-proud smile perked up beneath his scruff.

“What?” Deirdre asked.

“Well…that’s a lot of human sacrifices just to power up a mortal body and possess it,” Nora said. “So whatever ‘It’ gets out of this cycle, I don’t think it’s as simple as just, like, driving sadistic psychos into committing increasingly sadistic crimes. Dumb inertia can do that by itself.”

“And what’s the end-point, anyway?” Olly wondered. “I mean, the thing collects human sacrifices and—and spirit essences or whatever…It can’t be aiming for something as basic-bitch as possession.”

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “I don’t know what It wants.”

“But It wants to kill me?” Deirdre asked.

“It—It does,” Paul admitted. “And there was some other place I caught a glimpse of, It had someone It specifically thought of as an enemy…so there must be some inherent need for a conflict or a specific sacrificial target in Its plan.”

“Whatever Its plan is,” Rehani said.

Deirdre clutched her silverware in taught hands. “Do you have any leads on how to stop it?”

“A couple. In the projections, in the visions I had when I touched It with my sixth sense, I watched one of Its servants die. It tried to protect the vessel at first but then decided, essentially, to cut Its losses. So if we can find this Robert Robertson guy before the Mask fully possesses him, we might be able to convince the thing to bail altogether.”

“Is there a better plan than ‘hunt down a wanted fugitive and shoot him?’” Deirdre pressed.

“Most supernatural things still die if you put enough bullets in them.” Victor leaned back in his seat, the table’s attention swiveled his way. He pointed at the ceiling and twirled a finger. “This place is virtually impenetrable. If you all—uh, if we all want to bunker down here, we know It has to show up. That gives us tactical advantage.”

Rehani’s mouth gaped. “And how many folk die in the meantime?”

“Vic—er, Victor—has a point,” Paul said. “We don’t know where the guy is, we don’t know how powerful the Mask is…and the last time we launched a response team, it didn’t exactly end well.”

Rehani huffed, waving him off.

Paul continued, “For better or worse, sooner or later, this thing needs Deirdre. It has to come here.”

“I’m not bait.”

“No,” Nora jumped in, “but this place is a trap. Vic, when you and Ambrose first took me in, when we were walking around and you were explaining all the wards to me, I mean—this place is the mystical equivalent of, like, every casino and museum in every heist movie.”

Victor nodded. “We have wards against non-biological entities, uninvited intruders, and general malevolence. From what it sounds like, this thing’s strong enough to get inside, anyway, but acting against those defenses will take a toll. It’ll slow the thing down, tire it out.”

“And once indoors, we’ve got the anti-bullying system,” Olly added.

“The what?” Deirdre asked.

Victor chuckled. “It was originally a spell intended to stop a few children from hurting each other. The Blackwoods were deep enough into magic to use it as a shortcut for everything, babysitting included. When Ambrose’s daddy inherited the house, he expanded that defense into a general anti-violence response. Anyone who commits any act of violence in the house, well…usually, it’ll knock someone out. In this case, it’ll at least hit this ‘Mask’ with a few hard jabs.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. We find a way to pull the Mask off of Robert Robertson’s head. Tie him up tight enough that he can’t break free. If all else fails…” Victor trailed off, shrugging.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “If all else fails.”

The table returned to breakfast-chew and silverware scrape.

After a few minutes, Victor stood up. “Well, Deirdre, I promised I’d go fetch your cat. Want to help me corral the thing?”

“Right,” she said, snapping out of a trance of thought. “Right, yeah. Sure.”

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Ch. 14 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Leading with barrel and flashlight, Booker stepped over shards and splintered boards of wood and entered the dark squat. A memory squirmed in the back of his mind. (Pistol in hand he ascended a staircase.) (every ascent) He entered a small mudroom that opened into a nameless space. A living room? Maybe once. But neither furniture nor appliances remained to explain its long-ago purpose. All it was now was four walls, a partially collapsed ceiling, and busted-open plaster where scavengers had rooted around for wire and scrap.

Castellanos followed.

He took deep breaths against a weight growing on his sternum. Fear hung from his neck like a pendant. The night felt heavy with meaning. Signs and portents. Omens. (He followed a water-drip corridor toward the sound of wrestling.) He scanned the room and moved for a doorless threshold. Pipes and wiring and tool-scrapes against every surface suggested the next room had served as a kitchen, before. Breathing deeply against a growing weight, Booker checked corners and searched for entry/exit points.

(a whimper)

The ceiling of another room had collapsed entirely. A waist-high barricade of broken chairs, stools, and shelving blockaded the plywood front entrance. To their left, a candlelit room, tiled and wired like a once-when kitchen, awaited entry. Also on their left, but closer, a rotten, mouldering staircase led up to the second floor. Booker hesitated. His heart pounded despite his slow pace and deep, even breathing. It thrummed in his head like a snarling eight-cylinder engine.

“Kitchen,” Castellanos decided, moving ahead.

Booker shifted stance to follow, but heard something—

(slap/whimper)

—upstairs.

“Al,” he whisper-shouted. But she’d already turned the corner.

Someone sobbed on the second floor.

Booker scowled, wanting to follow Castellanos but starting up the creaking, half-rotten stairs instead. He kept his flashlight and barrel low, not wanting to give away his position. He eased his way along, slow and easy, holding his breath when an errant groan stretched along a floorboard ahead of him. He ascended. The second floor landing opened into a wide hallway.

Sweat trickled down his neck. It crept through his hair. His glasses remained mostly clear, making him realize he’d lost his mask.

When?

It didn’t matter.

He turned right and hugged the wall. A toothy hole in the floor gapped a span of a couple feet; Booker leapt over it and landed loudly. His dull, initial impact resounded back in muffled echoes. The hardwood moaned under his feet. He paused, lifting his barrel and flashlight to check his surroundings.

Four doors, two pairs mirroring each other across the scraped and dusty corridor, yawned for entry. Another jagged pit barred one threshold; the other three remained traversable. With a long, shaking breath, Booker crept forward.

Another sob jerked out of the first door on his right. Booker paused outside, barrel and flashlight pointed down, and waited for another sign of life. A moment passed. Someone sniffled. A hoarse and reedy voice whispered something. Another voice replied, equally inaudible.

Booker turned the corner.

An old bathroom. Chipped ceramic. Two boys, late teens or early twenties, one white, one—Hispanic, maybe?—held onto each other in the bathtub. Both slender in a way that concerned Booker, they each wore defensive wounds on their forearms, bruises on their faces. When Booker entered, flashlight and pistol drawn, they recoiled from him, sliced hands lifted up, tear-lines glistening.

“Please don’t!”

Booker stepped into the room. “Where is he?”

It took them a moment to understand that they were safe. From him, at least.

“Oh my god,” one of them said. “He’s—”

Booker didn’t know which one spoke, which one unfolded his skinny legs from the tub, because he’d already figured it out. He spun, elbow-first, leading with a strike. Too slow. A spasm of heat lightning screamed through his back. His whole body hitched and twisted around the blade. He dropped the flashlight, grimacing. The kids—boys?—wailed. Everything blurred.

A hand grabbed the front of his shirt. Robert Robertson ripped the knife loose from his body.

Booker’s knife-resistant vest hadn’t done anything.

Shouts filled the air. Booker tried to twist toward his attacker, tried to get his barrel to point the right way. Bob-Bob’s-son hauled him backward. Booker lost footing. He fired a bullet through the hardwood floor and tripped with the force of Bob’s pull. As he stumbled, Bob yanked harder, dragging him out of the derelict bathroom.

The knife came in again. It pierced the vest and slipped through Booker’s skin with a sickening pop. Fire-ice and shiver-burn spiked along the lengths of his muscle fibers, twisted tight around his bones. He shouted, trying to expel the freefall numb-pain-shock through his throat. Another bullet blew through floorboards.

For a moment, Booker thought the Mask (capitalized?) came into focus before him. As it stared at him with sunken void sockets, Booker thought he heard a cold, dark god call his name. remember me? It asked, Its language an arrangement of signs and portents and omens.

because I remember you.

“John!” Castellanos shouted.

Robert Robertson let go of Booker’s shirt and whirled around.

Gunfire roared. Ancient plaster and rotten wood pulped and exploded. Booker fired one more time, missing, and fell to his knees. Robert Robertson jumped through the hole in the floor as Castellanos let loose another volley. Booker gasped for breath, wheezing. The kids in the bathroom screamed and cried. Booker fell to his side, one arm bracing him up, the other clutching his chest.

Castellanos jumped the gap in the floor with ease. She threw her sidearm aside as she reached Booker, kneeling to scoop him up. “Back-up’s almost here. There’s an ambulance on its way.”

“We gotta—we have to catch him…”

(a slap and a whimper)

“I’m staying right here.” Castellanos pressed her hand against the wound on his back.

(in the darkness, a mask)

(“I’m right here with you,” he told the child, afterward, his face flecked in blood. “Okay? I’m right here.”)

“Keep your eyes open, Book,” Castellanos barked. “You hear me? Stay with me.”

“I’m right here,” he tried to tell her. But the darkness reached down and Booker felt so tired. His eyes ached. His head hurt. He’d seen too much and couldn’t forget it. He didn’t want to remember anymore. Castellanos muttered something in Spanish and Booker knew enough to wheeze a chuckle at it even though none of it filtered through to his conscious mind. His eyelids fluttered. The darkness reached down.

“John!” someone screamed. “John!”

YOUR DUTY IS TO—

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Ch. 14 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

Paul felt the ritual activate, felt the magic take hold of him; felt the connection between his sixth sense and his physical body snap like dry kindling.

Paul stood in a grayscale world. Or, really, he didn’t stand; he had no legs. His form, so much as it ‘existed’ at all, did so as a blurry vagary, a gaseous silhouette made manifest merely through his idea of having a physical body.

All around him, a constant dimness pervaded—not a literal dimness of light and shadow, but metaphorical, his psychic awareness processed through the visual centers of his brain. As no sunlight gleamed the edges of this realm, what Paul saw—or experienced as ‘seeing’—had no true visual limit. The deep darknesses represented things so far uninterpretable by his sixth sense, the shallow dimnesses represented things already partially inferred.

As with his perceptions, his movement functioned differently in that grayscale place. Physical movement felt slow and syrupy, yet also unanchored and free-falling. Instead, Paul reached out with his sixth sense toward some known thing and hauled himself onward.

The world spun beneath him, a blur. When it stopped, he ‘stood’ at the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Black Watch Hill—or that realm’s equivalent. As Paul ‘watched,’ the street faded away from view, replaced by shadowy suggestions of trees and wilderness. Those shades fragmented and disappeared, dying into blurry silhouettes of houses and side-roads, fences and cars. The buildings bloated, bulged, and blet; they burst, overripe, and melted down. They rotted to their very bones. Squatters nailed more skin over them. Even as new walls went up, the forest ate its way through them. In a skip it took a couple seconds for Paul to notice, the ancient wilderness re-emerged.

you, too, soon…

They clamored, the spirits. Even with so many in hiding, whispering and rasping with a quiet Paul had never heard from them, before, their chorus remained unavoidable, constant. As soon as he’d pushed his sixth sense out beyond the estate’s wards, he’d left himself open to them.

And not only them.

out here all by your lonesome, doc?

The Speaker’s chemical-sweet tones played through Paul’s consciousness.

Paul didn’t reply. He tried to ignore the Speaker, but the entity had a multitude more experience with the immaterial planes—Paul didn’t have nearly the strength or expertise required to block such a powerful and insistent voice.

be careful, Pauly, the Speaker continued, soothing-yet-smarmy, our new friend has grown up a little bit. one wrong move and you might have to call for back-up…

Paul felt It close by—not the Speaker, but the Other Thing. An icy aura crisped the area, settling in, the monster waiting at its center. The Speaker faded into Paul’s psychic background, remaining present only as the faint impression of a smirk in the back of his mind. All the whispering ghosts fell silent. The sudden quiet unnerved Paul. He’d never heard such vacancy, before.

Paul floated his consciousness down the street/through the wilds toward Deirdre’s squat. The invasive chill grew colder. Pressed against his brainstem, the Speaker’s smirk curled into an infinite grin. If Paul’s avatar had had lungs, Paul would have lost his breath with prickling anxiety; but in that gray dreadscape, Paul neither had lungs nor needed breath. The dread had no way to express itself. It lingered, growling along the edges of Paul’s sixth sense.

The molting, mutating scenery stabilized when he reached Deirdre’s. The grayscale world stilled into a smudged, eternally-blurry painting of Squatter City.

Paul felt Deirdre’s wards against unwanted intruders repelling him with a pulsing, invisible force. It didn’t recognize him without his human body. He knew fighting it wouldn’t work, either. Everyone who’d met Deirdre had recognized her as a powerful witch. Everyone who’d met him recognized him as barely-held-together. Trying to get closer, to get inside its defenses, would only exhaust him—it wouldn’t actually get him anywhere.

The temperature—or what Paul experienced as temperature—continued to drop.

need a little help, doc? the Speaker purred, voice prickling through him.

Shut up, Paul thought.

The psychic influence Paul experienced as temperature plunged sharply. If Paul’s manifestation had had organs, or a necessary temperature at which to sustain homeostasis, he would have shivered. Instead, he merely shrank back, searching his surroundings for the approaching—

He noticed it, at first, as a sliver in his periphery; but once he caught a glance, he couldn’t look at anything else.

Somehow, It had harvested the materia vitae of restless souls and lacquered it over Itself in an armor-like coating. Its once-spindly center mass bulged and bulbed with the skeins of spirits. Scores of slender legs held Its overgrown heft aloft and a dozen multi-jointed arms unfolded sharply from all angles of Its manifestation. Three prehensile necks, each the circumference of Paul’s leg, rose from a nest of nodules topping the monster’s ‘torso.’ The three corresponding heads wore two faces each—all masks. Paul couldn’t make them out save for the eyes and mouths, eyes and mouths…

…he didn’t want to do what he had to do next…

what’s the matter, Pauly? the Speaker chided, this mid-level wannabe give you the heebie-jeebies? say the magic words, doc, I’ll lend you the kind of muscle that’ll give you a fighting chance.

The doubly-masked heads swung on their serpentine necks, the seething dark behind their sockets seeming to see. Paul tried to swallow but had no throat. He stared. The monster searched. For what? For spirits? For ghosts?

For Deirdre?

Its countless sinew-skinny legs scissored the shared psychic phenomenon that created the ‘ground’ in that place. It loped forward in sharp, jagged intervals, and came to a sudden halt just yards from where Paul hid. Up close, It towered, a hundred feet tall at least, Its legs so narrow they blended into the trees.

A new voice slipped into his consciousness.

Dad?… it whispered.

Paul froze, ice to his core.

Cassandra?

what is that?

Barely audible, her words curled as a hiss in his ear—but the entity seemed to sense her reaching out. It felt the psychic strands that linked them together. Its heads swiveled and dove, searching.

Dad? something’s wrong—

Paul reached out with his sixth sense and touched, no, grabbed the monst—

(a slap and a whimper)

Paul seeped coldly into the unexamined cracks splintering the world. He melted into the thing, congealed with It. For however long his consciousness brushed against Its, he stared in contest at an unblinking, icy abyss.

And, oh, It had such things to show him—

(a slap and a)

The puppet thrusted, slapping meat. The puppet had wanted to do this. At least at first. Wasn’t that how every devil’s deal began? Serve me and you shall have what you desire? Ah, but how many of them ever ended that way?

The puppet thrusted.

(a whimper)

Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. The Mask could shield Its servant/vessel/conduit/toy from a certain degree of physical damage, one bullet, two bullets, three, but as a fourth shard of lead blew stuffing out of Its plaything, the act felt increasingly futile. The puppet fell, string-cut. Paul and the Mask abandoned it to the void. As they tendriled their will away from their marionette, they caught a glimpse of their enemy’s face. Paul recognized it from somewhere but couldn’t remember. The Mask never f—

Uncle Nick, not yet an uncle, buried tear-slick sockets into his knees. In a tree house decades earlier, Uncle Nick curled up in one corner, blood drying across his shirt and chin, legs hugged close, and wept. “I can’t keep doing this. You can’t make me do this no more.”

The Mask made no reply. It rarely did. Over the span of Its long, short life, It had barely ever needed to whisper to get what It wanted. There were always Uncle Nicks in the world, average or above-average people quietly furious at the mediocrity of their lives…It merely made the offer.

they will whisper your name…

And every Uncle Nick wanted what every Uncle Nick wanted.

At least until it was too late.

“I’m no killer,” Uncle Nick whispered, having killed only hours earlier. “And you can’t make me one,” he added, having become one months before. “I know what you are, now,” he continued, knowing perhaps a sliver, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, “and I’m gonna get you off’a me.”

Did Paul smile?

The Mask did.

Uncle Nick—

Dad!

The Mask held Paul in a tornado of claws. Even as a projection, essentially gaseous, Paul couldn’t escape It. The grayscale world seized and shuddered around him. Worms ate their way through his skull.

you will never sleep again, the Mask promised, many-voiced, hollow-eyed, drilling into his mind.

“Deirdre!” Paul screamed. “Rehani! Someone! Fuck, help! Help!”

An array of half-visible needles sliced through his scalp, their tips digging for purchase in the cracks between skull bones. The worms slithered deeper inside of him. The Mask had a library of memories, victims and perpetrators both. They threatened to spill into Paul’s consciousness.

you will never sleep—

what do you say, doc? the Speaker interrupted, syrupy-sweet. All of time seemed to slow around Its intrusion. In the stretched seconds that followed, Paul felt the Mask begin to unstitch his skin, drawing impossibly-possibly thin blades along his body to make him peelable. I can snap you out of here faster than a nightmare. all you have to do is spit and shake. we can figure out the favors you owe TBD. sound good?

“Rehani!” he screamed. “Deirdre!”

you — will — never — sleep —

believe me, Pauly, the things It wants to show you? you don’t want to see ‘em. let’s make another deal.

The needles pierced, the worms bore down, the Mask began pulling flesh away from bone, starting at Paul’s forehead and unraveling downward. (what’s underneath your m—) Paul opened his mouth but only raw sound ripped its way out of his throat. He howled even as the Mask split his lips and—

—and jerked sideways in the ritual space, barely-there scratches over-bleeding from his face, bruises all over, vocal chords flared and dry. People clamored around him but he couldn’t tell them apart. All shadows. He vomited ghost-pale sick on the floor and pawed four-limbed across the hardwood like a feeble mutt. Someone wrapped his shoulders with an arm and he knew without knowing that it was Deirdre. Another spout of filmy white ejecta burst from his lips. He collapsed face-down into his own gross.

Everything went away.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 14 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Booker and Castellanos barreled through the forest after Robert Robertson, Jr. Their flashlights flared over foliage and brush, catching glimpses of Bob’s back or his pants. In flashes they saw him wrestle with something in a bag. Bob swerved and they swerved with him. Only after nearly a minute of chase did Booker finally think to reach for his radio. Panting, he holstered his sidearm and grabbed the device. “The suspect is on foot, heading west from…” he glanced back behind him and Castellanos shouted something.

What had the street been called?

“We’re heading northwest toward the highway,” he said, instead. “In the woods.”

Castellanos had pulled ahead by a few yards.

Booker had lost track of Bob. He rushed to catch up to his partner.

“What—where are you guys?” the walkie crackled back.

“East of Lafayette, then north into…into the trees.” He kept his flashlight trained on Castellanos; Castellanos chased hers after Bob.

“We’ll try to find you.”

Booker slowed down, trying to reattach the walkie to his belt.

“Leave it!” Castellanos shouted.

He dropped the handset and brought both hands back to his sidearm. He gained on Castellanos by a few inches per second, now only feet behind her. Looking out ahead, he could see a maybe-Bob silhouette crashing through foliage, twigs and brush quaking in his wake. Booker reached Castellanos’ side as they breached the last few feet of wilderness slicing down through Squatter City. Within a few panting seconds, trees shrank to saplings, and wild bush dwindled to overgrowth.

Across the barely-there street ahead of them, Bob shouldered open the side-door of a squat. Booker’s beam caught the man square on the back. Instinctively, he lifted his firearm. Squinted.

YOUR DUTY IS TO APPREHEND

Hesitated.

Castellanos pulled back out ahead, shouting for Bob to freeze even as their perp vanished inside. She fired twice, scoring the structure’s age-cracked siding with both bullets. She cursed but Booker couldn’t hear it over the waves of lapping memories sloshing through his head. (a whimper, a slap) His vision blurred.

“John?” Castellanos asked.

“I’m okay.” He winced, betraying his lie, but stepped forward.

“Come on.”

He took a couple deep, chest-broadening breaths. His eyes refocused. “Back door.”

They jogged, following Bob’s path across the crumbled sidewalk and shin-high lawn. Their flashlights found the side door battered in, the force so severe it bent the doorframe and burst the locking apparatus. Roving their beams ahead of them, they moved for the back of the structure.

“Must be heaven for ticks,” Castellanos whispered.

Booker saw the back door—or what passed for one. A few heavy two-by-fours criss-crossed a sheet of plywood in the threshold. As their twinned beams flashed across its graffiti-scrawled surface, neither Booker nor Castellanos needed to speak to understand their next moves. They rustled the overgrowth along the rear of the building and circled around toward the front. As they tracked the perimeter, they occasionally sent a flashlight-led glance upward, checking the glassless windows. Boards blinded all of them.

They found cinder blocks piled chest-high barrier-ing the front entrance.

Castellanos holstered her sidearm and replaced it with her radio. “This is Castellanos. Me and Book have the perp pinned down in one of the—”

“Help!” a male voice screamed inside the house. “Fuck! Please! Help!”

Castellanos dropped her radio, unclipped it from her belt, and pulled her satchel up over her head, discarding it. Booker advanced on the shattered side door, flashlight-under-barrel. Castellanos caught up within seconds, rustling the tall grass and brush just a couple feet behind him, to his right.

“Help!” a second man shrieked.

Booker fought to keep his breathing even. Sweat and breath steamed his glasses, all the exertion and anxiety finally overwhelming his new medical mask. Leaning against the house, he took his flashlight away from his sidearm and yanked the thing off of his face. Tossed it aside. He shoved the torch into a pocket, holstered his pistol, and removed his glasses.

“John,” Castellanos said.

He untucked his shirt, wiped the lenses clear.

“God, please, help!” the first man screamed.

“John,” she repeated, harder.

He shoved his glasses back onto his face, grabbed his flashlight and gun, and rushed inside.

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Ch. 14 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Fourteen

Paul spent the day attuning his sixth sense. In a second-floor lounge near a broad, multi-paned window, where the mansion’s many wards and defenses thinned, he meditated for hours. Surface thoughts skittered roach-legs across his mind. He wanted a drink. He wanted a joint. He wanted to sleep. The impulses to turn back rived through him like steel slivers. At the bottom of the journey, an endless mausoleum of whispers awaited him. It counted among its numberless voices his own daughter, Cassandra.

It took hours not because the practice of attuning his sixth sense took hours, but because paying attention to it at all exhausted him.

He wanted a drink, a joint, some sleep.

In an antique armchair feet from the glass, his eyes closed, Paul took a long, broad breath and tried to focus beyond the distractions. A half-smoked joint of psychic stimulants sat in an ashtray on a bar cart next to him. Its everything-at-once scent languished in the air, rancid rot and blossoming flowers, steak-char and compost, summer breeze and crypt dust stirrings.

Nora had explained to him, once, that everyone had a sixth sense, that a ‘sixth sense’ only represented a person’s connection to the supernatural and immaterial. Most people had sixth senses so weak that their minds rejected supernatural stimuli, replacing experiences with false, mundane memories later on or even blanking out or rewriting events as they unfolded. This population, the vast majority of all human beings, felt these immaterial energies and stimulations as hunches and instincts, vague senses of deja vu or precognition; a sudden decision not to walk down a particular street on the way home, one night. Those like Rehani and himself had more discrete awareness. Their sixth senses had strengthened and adapted into outright abilities. Hers, a connection to myriad probable futures. His…

His, a seat in the theatre of the dead.

He wanted a drink. A smoke. Some sleep.

He wanted to disappear.

Opening his eyes, he stood from the antique chair and approached the window. There, where the mansion’s wards and defenses wore thinnest, he rested his palms and forehead against the glass. He stared down at a flank of grass rolling eastward into brush and forestation. Taking slow breaths, he focused on the quiet. On the near-sibilant silence surrounding him in the cozily muffled lounge. On the hiss crackling underneath…

He pressed his eyelids shut. Pressed hands and head against the window.

Focused.

you, too, soon…

He fought back the impulse to pull away.

you, too, soon…

When the numberless souls ceased reliving and raging at their deaths; when they ceased crying and wailing for release; when they ceased begging to be seen or heard or felt or merely noticed, they always returned to that refrain. The dead choir whispered the words with such crypt-like rasps that they combined into a hiss. A gas leak momento mori.

He dug deeper.

don’t look at it

don’t speak

shh shhh

Finding the frequencies for individual ghosts, he began to fuzz through the channels. He no longer felt the glass against his forehead or palms, no longer remembered the cool shade playing across his face. He existed in a liminal space, its edges painted in grayshade and echolocation, gaps filled in by his sixth sense. He saw no detail.

Dad? his daughter’s voice cut into his head, razorsharp. what is that thing? do you know? Dad?

Paul lost his breath. He clenched his jaw. Feeling his body dimmed his awareness of the other-place.

He searched for a different ghost, some other echo or signal—

you should hurry back home, doc, the Speaker sweet-sizzled. it’s dangerous out here.

He couldn’t tell if the Speaker whispered in from the realm of the dead or from inside his own skull…

you’ve got yourself ‘in tune’ enough. trust me.

He pushed deep—

“Hey,” Olly called out from the threshold.

Paul blinked, backing away from the window. Afternoon had sunset into early evening. He cleared his throat. “Huh?”

“Rehani and Deirdre are ready,” they said.

“Oh.”

“Uh…” they stepped inside, Doc Martens under a floral dress, a wrinkled lilac hoodie thrown over, unzipped. “Are you?”

“I, uh…” he coughed, still finding gunk in his throat. “I’m ready enough.”

They ran their eyes over him head-to-toe. “You sure?”

He laughed it off. “I’m not sure of anything. But, yeah. Let’s go.”

“Alright…” they hesitated, dubious. “Sure. Follow me.”

He glanced overshoulder at the window as he left the room. Frost hazed the glass where a sharp plunge in temperature had frozen the sweat from his forehead and palms. Beyond that, the sky darkened to night.

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Ch. 13 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

After the gruesome murder of a wanted murderer, Oceanrest’s Mayor had called Virgil LeDuff at four in the morning to review what to say at the press conference. At six in the morning, Virgil LeDuff had called John Bowman Booker to get his input. Booker had blearily provided some limited notes before hanging up and returning to sleep.

At nine o’clock, Booker barely made it to the precinct in time to sprint to the front steps and stand behind Virgil LeDuff for the conference. Virgil LeDuff assured the Oceanrest citizenry that none of the crimes committed seemed to have political motivations or angles. He assured the Oceanrest citizenry that the heightened curfew had nothing to do with political motivations, either, but a legitimate concern for safety while Robert Robertson, Jr., remained uncaught. He took no questions. Clapping Booker on the shoulder, Virgil requested the man wait outside his office while he handled a few conversations. Booker had agreed.

Alejandra Castellanos joined Booker at his desk at ten fifteen Sunday morning. She brought a new puzzle with her. This one looked like a silver, elliptical orb dotted by multi-colored, crystalline beads. As Castellanos’ steel toed boots tapped the hallway toward him, he watched her move one of the dozen-or-so beads along a narrow track carved in the orb’s surface. As one bead moved, all the others did, too, in different directions and at different velocities.

“How you feeling?” he’d asked.

“Sober.” She’d shrugged. “Day two, take twenty.”

He hadn’t known how to respond.

Luckily, at ten thirty, Virgil LeDuff called them into his office to deliver the latest in the never-ending stream of bad news.

“I need you and your guys to turn something up in Squatter City,” Virgil had said, making eye contact but never holding it. “Today. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Otherwise…otherwise, I’ll have to send everyone.”

“You know what’ll happen if you send that many cops up there, right?” Castellanos had asked.

“I do,” Virgil had replied, voice low and solemn. “I do. So, please…don’t let me down.”

And by eleven, John Bowman Booker and Alejandra Castellanos had found their way back up to Squatter City. Them and four cops hand-picked by Castellanos, the last line of defense between the disenfranchised of Squatter City and the brutal batons of the law. They split up, the four uniforms taking the tent city while Booker and Castellanos checked the condemned and foreclosed houses along the southern and eastern swathes of the region.

They knocked for hours. Few faces met them; fewer answers.

Time marched cruelly forward.

As afternoon melted toward evening, Booker found himself and Castellanos crossing Lafayette and Old Main for the third time that day. Passing one of the few still-operable payphone banks in the Oceanrest metro area, he stopped walking.

“What’s up?” Castellanos asked, turning back toward him.

“That’s not the pay phone he used to call in the wellness check, is it?”

“No. That one’s in Baldwin.”

Still, something about the thing seemed off to him.

He sighed through it.

Even as Castellanos spoke, she watched the beads move around her puzzle orb. “I’ll stay out here all night. I don’t have any plans.” She glanced between the different crystals, measuring how they interacted.

“The two of us against a serial killer? In the dark?”

Still staring at her puzzle, she shrugged. “You’d rather Virgil send in the real bulls?”

Booker pursed his lips. Kicked a piece of loose rubble down the sidewalk. “Shit,” he muttered.

Castellanos brought her gaze to his. “All we need is the right person saying the right thing.”

“You think there’s someone we missed on the last three loops?”

“Maybe there’s something we missed.”

Booker rubbed his forehead. Somewhere in Squatter City’s indigent population of just over three hundred people, a serial killer had buried himself tick-deep. How had none of the other squatters seen him? Or why would they hide a known murderer from the police? Or…

“I think there’s another street down there,” Castellanos said. She gestured with her puzzle orb toward a flattened disruption of overgrowth at the far end of Lafayette, barely visible.

Booker’s new medical mask allegedly changed the airflow around his nose and mouth to avoid fogging his glasses. As another sigh singed its way out of him without blurring his vision, he had to admit it worked well enough. “Guess we don’t have anything better to do.”

Hoofing the suburban distance to the corner, they discovered a curl of ratty, cracked asphalt rolling northward. A torn-down street sign read ‘Bl__k W_t__ H___’ between finger-thick ropes of brush and vine. Most of the houses looked uninhabitable, half-collapsed or listing over, representing some of the longest derelictions in the area.

“Deja vu,” Castellanos muttered.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I think maybe I dreamed about this place, before…”

Booker peered along the crumbling span. “Must have been a bad dream.”

Castellanos reached down and slipped her orb into her hip-slung satchel. “You can live in this place your whole life and never get used to it.”

Booker’s brow trenched. He’d gotten used to Alejandra Castellanos’ sudden tonal shifts over their years as partners, but not so used to them as to have a prepared response. “Get used to what?”

Though her facemask covered her mouth, Castellanos grinned with her eyes. “I don’t know if you figured this out yet, John, but Oceanrest is weird.”

“Oh. That.” He chuckled. “Yeah. Everyone’s noticed that.”

No answer came from knocking on the first house’s door. The second house had no door. Letting themselves in, they navigated what small square footage of the building remained navigable. They called out and received only echoes in answer. They couldn’t find a way to enter the third house, the various sagging and collapsed architectures leaving no visible ingress. Stepping into the absolute ruin of the fourth house, they smelled rancid rot. In an unzipped tent in the building’s basement, Booker and Castellanos found a man’s corpse.

He hadn’t died long ago, some time in the past few days judging from the reek and bloat of him, but enough time had passed for the flies to find him and seed the meat with maggots.

Booker and Castellanos called in the corpse for disposal.

Clutching a handkerchief over his mask, Booker swallowed against an aftertaste of decay that wouldn’t leave his throat. 

As sunset darkened to purple twilight, they considered calling it a day. Few streetlights operated in Squatter City; the darkness glowered more intensely there than in Oceanrest proper. And something about finding a man dead, caused by pandemic or overdose or injury or exposure, felt heavier than attending a crime scene. In a murder investigation, a perpetrator awaited apprehension. When a squatter died in a squat amid a plague for which he could afford no treatment, there was nobody to catch.

Was that, itself, a sign? A portent?

Of what?

“Hey, hold up,” he said, reaching for Castellanos as she turned back the way they’d come. “Look up there.”

At the end of the street, a house stood in full repair. Someone had rebuild and reshingled part of the roof. No sign of collapse or structural decay presented itself—at least not on the exterior.

“Someone definitely lives there,” Castellanos confirmed.

Booker noticed the figure, first. Small and perched on the steps leading up to the front porch, it switched a short, ragged tail from one side of its body to the other. Not just an animal, a pet; not just sitting, waiting. He pointed it out to Castellanos and they crouched as they approached it. A sable coat cloaked the feline; a white half-mask swirled up one side of its face. Of its two eyes, only one functioned. A milky cataract scarred the other.

“Hey, buddy,” Booker cooed, creeping close. “Who you waiting for out here?”

The cat regarded him coolly. A sound rattled in its throat.

“You got a friend who lives in that house?” he asked.

The cat made no reply except to stop twitching its tail.

“I don’t think it’s rabid,” Castellanos said, behind him. 

“Seems fine to me,” Booker confirmed.

The feline strangled a snarl. It narrowed its gaze at them.

“She doesn’t like you,” Castellanos said.

“Looks neutered,” Booker replied, kneeling only feet away from the cat, hand extended.

Castellanos stood from her crouch, joining him at the steps. “Someone out here takes their stray to the vet.”

Booker stood, too, and the two detectives climbed up to the porch proper. The cat swatted at his pantleg and hissed as he passed but he ignored it. After a few more warning swipes and snarls, the animal chose retreat instead of attack. It leapt between the wooden dowels of the railed porch fence and rushed into the overgrown yard. Chuckling, Booker walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. He blinked. The doorbell worked.

“We’ve got to tell Virgil about this,” he muttered.

“How didn’t we know about this house?” Castellanos asked nobody, echoing his thoughts.

Nobody responded to the bell. He knocked.

He stepped back.

The door was dense. Even rapping his knuckles against it, he’d felt heft behind it. Weight. Gripping the knob, he slowly eased his shoulder against it. Bracing, he pressed his bodyweight into the wood. His muscles strained before the door did. It didn’t feel wise to put any velocity behind the attempt.

“There’s definitely something going on in there,” Booker observed.

Castellanos had her right hand inside her hip-slung satchel. Booker could see the bulge where she held the puzzle orb in her palm. She’d backed up off the porch to stare at the face of the house, scanning. “Something strange…”

“You okay, Al?” he asked. “You’re acting…weird. Even for you.”

As twilight painted the sky in purple and navy, insects began their nightsongs.

“Yeah,” she answered, seconds later. “I’m fine, I just didn’t expect it to…” she trailed off. “I think I need something to eat.”

“Yeah. It’s about that time.”

He joined her back in the yard and the two of them started the walk back to the car.

Between the corpse and the strange house, Booker felt a sense of ominous meaning about the day. Signs and portents, maybe. Omens. The gravity of the feeling simultaneously filled and emptied his mind.

It shocked him when Castellanos froze mid-stride, spun toward the treeline following the rubbled western half of the street, and yanked free her sidearm and flashlight. “Who the fuck is there!?” she yelled, flashlight under barrel, beam lighting up against a rustling curtain of forested dark. Booker jerked around to follow, just a second out of sync. He noticed the silhouette only after Castellanos had already identified it. “Freeze!” she yelled. “Robert Robertson, you are under arrest.”

Robert Robertson, Jr., looked like a ghost in the brightness of her flashlight. He took a wide-eyed breath, only seeming to notice her at the same time Booker noticed him, and dove into the woods.

Despite the evening dim’s descent to night-time dark, despite the bodies indifferently piled up in Robertson’s wake, and despite the strict set of procedures Virgil had set out for everyone in the department—Booker and Castellanos immediately pursued.

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Ch. 13 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

It took hours to prepare the ritual. 

Victor, who had studied some degree of magic alongside his late husband Ambrose, offered what little help he could. He knew the wards and defenses of the mansion inside and out; his aid in reinforcing and charging them saved Deirdre a significant degree of exertion and a significant volume of sweat. Buttressing the long-disused wards ate an hour and a half in and of itself. By the time they’d finished, Rehani had prepared the ritual space for the next step.

Most magic didn’t require much in the way of preliminary summonings and banishings, but since this matryoshka of spells involved projecting Paul’s consciousness beyond his body, it seemed wise to play it safe.

Victor bowed out before the summoning. “Not really my area of expertise,” he said, padding sweat from his brow with an ancient handkerchief. “’sides, someone’s gotta start cooking dinner.”

After he left, Deirdre entered the room.

Tobacco smoke and spiced rum scented the air. Blackout curtains blinded west-facing windows. Candles and braziers glowed the room. Dreadlocks bound back away from her head, a sweat-slick Rehani murmured in the shadows, standing upright, eyes closed, face uplifted. Deirdre watched her rock slightly, her weight shifting from heels to toes to heels again.

White-chalked sigils, runes, and vèvès decorated the walls. In the far southeast corner of the room, a summoning circle waited, its boundaries crackling with readied energy. A black hen and an old dog watched it, backed themselves into the very fringes of all available lambency. The animals didn’t seem quite real to Deirdre, as if their bodies disintegrated into the darkness where the light stopped touching them.

Rehani finished her multi-lingual muttering abruptly.

Deirdre hadn’t noticed all the background sound of the world until it suddenly cut away. All the sunset insects and distant, muffled conversation, the music playing from some other floor of the house, the always-there hum of electricity, the myriad omni-noises the brain usually tuned out anyway; when everything silenced at once, Deirdre felt it sharply.

Rehani took a few chest-heaving pants and wiped at her brow backhandedly. So much sweat dripped down her face she slicked an audible slap of it across the floor. She laughed. “And we ain’t even done the hard part, yet.”

“You know I’ve never…” Deirdre trailed off. “I mean, not really.”

The year before, Deirdre had discovered a newfound talent: the ability to shove interloping entities out of her own psychic space. In the grand scheme of bindings and banishings, the feat amounted to small potatoes, but the fact that she’d done it reflexively, without study, proved a tremendous degree of potential. And while Deirdre had studied the arcanum in more depth, she’d only practiced it four times, under controlled circumstances, and alongside the guiding presences of either Shoshanna Winters or Rehani.

“Sure you have,” Rehani answered.

“Not in the wild.”

Rehani made a half-chuckle half-snort sound. “Didn’t I ever tell you? With these things, it’s always the wild.”

“So we summon it…whatever it is…I bind it, you banish it?”

“That’s the plan.”

Deirdre swallowed. “Okay. Where do you want me to stand?”

 Rehani wiped at the sheen of exertion glistening her face. Passing in front of Deirdre, she explained, “I’ll sit here, lead the ceremony. You stand directly behind me. Dead straight behind me, okay? And don’t move.”

“And then I use…”

“You do what you do. Freeze the thing up, give it an ice cream headache, whatever-it-is, maybe-we’ll-know-one-day, and I banish it right back to wherever and lock it out.” She folded herself down to the floor, just inches away from an arc of the enchanted Kosher salt enclosing the diameter of the summoning circle. 

“This isn’t usually how we do it.”

“True,” Rehani noted. She took a deep breath and fanned at herself. “Usually we summon something specific and toss it back out specifically. But that shit takes time, so we’re doing a more general broadcast.”

“What kind of broadcast?”

“I’m using a weak replica of a projection spell as a lure to trap anything out there looking to take advantage of such a thing. So the motherfuckers hoping to intrude, they try and snatch the lure, they just get jerked into the summoning circle. Then we banish ‘em back out one at a time.”

(in the deep, dark ocean, anglers used light to lure in their prey.)

Deirdre cleared her throat. “Sounds simple enough.”

The hen and the dog angled toward the summoning circle, triangulating with Rehani.

“Ready?” Rehani asked.

Deirdre stepped into place behind the other woman. “As I’m gonna be.”

Rehani pressed her palms to the floor and bent forward straight-backed. She whispered.

Tension built up on the air. The atmosphere grew dense, almost humid. An almost-electrical energy bristled up the short hairs on Deirdre’s body. A faint under-scent of burning ozone tinged the aromas of rum and tobacco. Thin static fuzzed the borders of reality, audible only due to the unnatural silence prevailing over so much else. Whispers stretching into pants and hoarse half-words, Rehani funneled energy into the spell. Nordic bindrunes, Icelandic staves, and Vodou vèvès lit and dimmed, pulsing. Objects piled into offering bowls crumbled apart molecule-by-molecule as they lost material integrity.

Deirdre tried to keep her breath even. She took long, calming inhalations.

The first series of spells triggered.

Rehani swallowed and panted, sitting up. She drew in a big breath, hitched, and doubled over in a dry heave. When Deirdre bent to touch her, she threw a hand back and muffled “Mmm!” in a way that told Deirdre not to move. Rehani spat a hock of something on the floor. Short, phlegmatic gasps lifted her back. She spat more, bracing herself on her palms.

Deirdre almost bent to touch Rehani again when—

All-at-once, all-of-a-sudden, it was there.

Though composed of human-like bones, the creature in no other way resembled a human. Four legs jagged out from its base, its femurs unnaturally thick, its tibiae and fibulae not splitting slenderly but fused into sharp-tipped scythes. From the center of this platform, a column of three twisted spines ascended, topped by two angled skulls, themselves mantled over sharded layers of other skulls. Its four, three-jointed arms ended in phalanges calcified and edged into claws. A tar-like ooze tendoned and ligamented the thing; garbed and cloaked it. Where candlelight touched the grime, its surface glittered like oil-slick rainbows.

Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat. Her eyes widened; her breath stopped.

The monster clattered forward and hit an invisible wall. Crystals of Kosher salt shivered; a couple tumbled down their respective ridges. The creature whistled like a cockroach, recoiling. Its four arms twitched and shivered. It raised two of them defensively in front of itself, the other two broadly, claws prepared to carve and cut. 

A woman’s arm emerged from the darkness where the black rooster had waited. A purple-black snake coiled around her arm; a curved, wickedly sharp knife waited in her palm. The serpent flicked its tongue. The arm, hinting only barely at any other form or silhouette in the darkness behind it, held the blade low.

From the shadows where the dog had once resided, an unseen figure tapped the foot of a cane against a floorboard three times.

“Dee,” someone said. “Deirdre!”

The monster seemed to understand the meaning of the arm, the snake, the cane, the salt. It seemed to notice the trap it had fallen into. It prepared to throw itself back into the wherever it had come from; it moved to plunge, rattling its cavalcade of bones and—

—and froze.

Deirdre stood, shaking, with one hand outstretched.  

Strictly speaking, she knew, she didn’t need her hand outstretched. She’d flung out her hand as a reflexive gesture, an expression of intent and will. But there laid the crux: in magic, especially in the sort of magic natural adepts could throw out using willpower alone, expressions of intent meant a lot. If she lowered her hand, the cantrip might need to draw power from somewhere else. Maybe a lot of power. So she left her arm lifted even as the effort of holding the monster still ached through her muscle-by-muscle, burning up her lower back, her middle back, her shoulder…

“A little bit faster,” she whispered, purposely keeping her gaze on the creature even as Rehani worked in front of her.

Rehani didn’t take the time to reply.

Just over a minute later, Rehani finished the last of the banishing spell. With a series of cockroach screams and teeth-chatter snarls, the monster unraveled. Neither it nor any of its representatives could return to the area until after the projection ritual ended.

With a groan, Deirdre dropped her arm back to her side. Pins and needles crept through her. Wincing, she snapped and shook her arm around. “Shit,” she muttered. “Damn that hurts. Shit.”

Dabbing more sweat from her brow with a cloth, Rehani grinned. “You know, if you wanted to learn more spellcraft…you could become a very powerful person.”

Still shaking feeling back into her arm, Deirdre snorted. “I don’t want to be a powerful person. I just want…” she snapped her arm again, sighed, and trailed off.

“Yeah,” Rehani replied, after it became clear Deirdre had no intention of speaking the rest of her words. “Don’t we all?”

Deirdre flexed her hand. She nodded but made no other response.

They waited for another monster or entity to fall for their bait spell. None did.

Rehani stood with a soft hmph and rolled her neck. Massaging the muscles connecting spine and shoulder, she walked back toward the center of the room. “So when you had your hand out like that…”

“Nope.”

“Was that like, what’s his name, was that like that Luke Skywalker Jedi shit?”

“It was not.”

“’cause it looked like it.”

Deirdre felt heat under her cheeks. It vanished when she laughed. “Whatever—you see that thing? If I’d’a had a toy lightsaber, I’d’a pulled it.”

“It was one ugly motherfucker,” Rehani allowed. “Now, let’s finish the rest of this set-up and get your boy in here to look around.”

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Ch. 13 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Birds sang Bob to wakefulness. Sunlight blurred down upon him. 

He heard someone else breathing next to him. Their inhalations and exhalations echoed his by fractional seconds. Squinting his eyes open, Bob found himself lying on his side on a series of ancient wooden boards. The floor of a tree-house. Decades earlier, someone had put real work into the place; Bob saw a window in front of him, and two corners where three walls met. In his hand, he held his knife.

He took a breath. It echoed after him.

He tightened his grip around the hilt of his blade. He slowed his breathing, quiet and calm. Listening more closely, he found the other breath long and steady, the inhalations and exhalations of someone sleeping.

He jerked himself around and plunged the knife into—

A wooden plank shattered, taking a chunk of its neighbor with it. The brittle shards tumbled twelve feet to the forest floor below.

The breath resounded again and Bob realized he’d slept in the Mask. He hadn’t heard another person breathing, only his own coming back to him. Chuckling awkwardly, he stood and surveyed his surroundings.

(Their surroundings?)

Three walls, two windowed, perimetered most of the tree-house. Whoever had built the place had only finished half of the fourth wall; but an empty set of hinges on one end implied a once-upon-a-time door. A half-rotted rope ladder tangled down from the unfinished threshold.

Mold and rotted leaves and dead bugs and spiderwebs covered most everything inside. An old fabric couch twitched with insects. Seeing the alien-weird creatures spasming and roaming across it made Bob happy to have slept on the floor. Glass bottles from an earlier era grew fungus and algae in their clusters, tucked into webbed corners.

People had carved initials and names and numbers and phrases into the creaking-croaking wood with knives, sometime forever ago. Bob didn’t have context for any of it and so none of it mattered to him. A few of the more modern additions, maybe made in the late nineties or early aughts, blurred and bled with faded marker.

Bob tested the rope ladder, found it stable enough, and started down. Only the last scrap disintegrated as he stepped on it, plummeting him all of six feet. He landed on the soles of his boots, steadied himself, and chuckled again.

(Did the Mask chuckle with him? Did It laugh just a fraction of a second after he did?)

Bob started northeast through the broad forestation separating Denton from Squatter City. He needed to change his clothes, eat breakfast, and prepare for the night. Both of them did. After all, the police already knew their names. His name. And he knew enough about true crime to know that any killer, no matter how good, never made it far after the police knew their names. At this point, their only choice was to bring about the climax of their story before the cuffs caught up to them.

(To him?)

As the high noon sun melted into mid-afternoon, Bob saw his newfound squat again. He only remembered to remove the Mask as he exited the treeline and started across the knee-high overgrowth lawning his new domicile. He stopped walking mid-stride, removed it, and looked down at it. Somehow, no blood had stained its features—Its features?—which struck him as funny. Maneuvering his way toward the back-door basement entrance to his stolen home, the Mask dangling from his left hand, Bob laughed and snorted and laughed.

(Had he really gotten the joke?)

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