S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 8

Ch. 4 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

Detective John Bowman Booker stared up at the empty air long after the techs had cut down the hanging body and loaded it into the coroner’s van. Judge Howard Lesser had died during a violent confrontation the night before. His downstairs neighbor had gone on a date that evening and hadn’t returned. Otherwise, she’d have heard something. Instead, another condo owner in the complex had discovered the body while walking his dog into the park across the street just before dawn.

Someone had stabbed Howard Lesser multiple times, caused some amount of blunt force and lacerative damage to his torso, sliced and carved his face, and hanged him with a length of extension cord from his balcony. By the time of discovery, the birds had already seen to his eyes. The birds or something else…

Reaching a brown hand up to adjust a white medical mask, his glasses fogged by his own breath, Booker turned his gaze away from the nothing where the corpse had hung and peered down the street. A familiar, boxy old sedan rolled its way toward him. Chief of Oceanrest Metro PD Virgil LeDuff sat in the driver’s seat, hair graying to white, his pale, wrinkled hands on the wheel, slowing as he approached. Virgil LeDuff had a longstanding habit of getting over-involved with murder investigations. A longstanding habit of playing the role of a third detective.

For better and for worse, Virgil LeDuff meant well.

Booker waved his memo-pad at the car as it rolled to a stop. Virgil climbed out wearing a faded blue police parka, fumbling a white medical mask over his face. Adjusting the mask as he moved, Virgil crossed the sidewalk toward Booker, barely acknowledging the crime scene techs still working the area inside the yellow tape.

“As if there wasn’t enough wrong in this son-of-a-bitch world already,” Virgil said. Considering his sixty-year lifetime in Oceanrest, he didn’t have much of a down-east accent. But Booker didn’t sound much like a Bostonian, either.

“This was a deeply personal killing,” Booker replied.

“Is Castellanos even here, yet?”

“Nope. I mean, no, sir, she isn’t.”

“Nope’s good enough.” Virgil sighed. “That woman, earnest…I know she tries, but…” Detective Alejandra Castellanos carried two of the profession’s stereotypical crosses: a cunning mind and rampant alcoholism. Unfortunately for Booker, the latter usually overcame the former. Or, rather, fortunately for Virgil, since this allowed him the tacit permission to barge into the case. Shaking his head, Virgil switched topics. “Anyone knocking on doors, yet? Making calls?”

Two squad cars rolled up, preparations for the inevitable and imminent press.

“His fiancee’s at a conference halfway across the country,” Booker replied. “She was supposed to come back tonight.”

“Have any theories?” Virgil asked.

Judge Howard Lesser had been left out hanging as a portent, a sign. The corpse became a symbol, a method of communication. The murderer hadn’t just killed the man, they’d done it brutally, up close and personal, with the intent of making it hurt. They hadn’t needed to hang him. He would’ve bled out from the stabbing, anyway. From the stabbing or whatever they’d done to his face. If they’d wanted to stop his screams, they could’ve just cut his throat. The hanging made it a message. An omen.

(a lock and a)

“Who do you think most hates a judge?” he asked.

“I’d imagine the judged,” Virgil answered.

“Think we can get a hold of his case history?”

“A’yeah. I imagine we could.”

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Ch. 4 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Nobody knew how dreamer worked. Nobody.

Not even Deirdre, who may not have known much about spellcraft for a witch but who knew a great deal about a great many other things. Even she had no idea how the process functioned.

But she knew it did.

They’d skipped the usual dreamer ritual. Normally, a person who intended to take dreamfruit (or ‘dreamer’) took a pinch of Orpheus dust under their tongue, held the taut, pepper-shaped fruit to their lips, and provided some kind of direction for the upcoming visions. But they’d turned to the dreamfruit in search of direction, themselves, so they’d lacked such a thing to provide. They’d placed the Orpheus dust under their tongues, eaten the dreamer leadlessly, and taken Paul’s amphetamines. Rehani had triggered the true beginning of the spell while their handrolled joints still smoldered and things had…

Things had since developed.

Deirdre’s television sat silent, tuned to a channel she didn’t receive, its face bright blue. Occasionally flickers of gray-black static flashed across it, but mostly it remained an uninterrupted cerulean. Her nineties-era alarm clock radio fuzzed between stations. The speakers crackled. Beneath the noise, Deirdre thought she heard voices. What did they say? She couldn’t tell. Not yet.

Dreamfruit, golden-amber in color, pulsed with a faint internal glow when ripe. When she’d bitten down on hers, it had burst into a thick, agave-like sweetness. Combined with the campfire savor of the Orpheus dust, it tasted like timelessness. After they all swallowed, it honeyed the folds of their brains and bee-buzzed between their neurons. It weighed down their eyelids—her eyelids. Her eyelids sank, sleep beckoning.

Nobody knew how dreamer worked.

Deirdre blinked awake. For Rehani’s plan to work, they had to stay awake until after the visions started. Without pharmaceutical aid, such a feat would seem nearly impossible. Luckily, they had pharmaceutical aid.

Sitting on the couch’s central cushion, Rehani shuffled and dealt out cards on a tray. Whispering to herself, she jotted notes into a notebook; she knew she would not remember the readings in the morning. She rattled bones in her hands and threw them down. Whispering, she jotted notes. For a moment Deirdre thought she saw intestines coiled on the tray, Rehani’s fingers picking through them. When she blinked, the viscera vanished. Only cards, dice, and bones littered the tray, Rehani’s notes beside.

Paul stood rigid and wide-eyed in southeast corner of the room. His lips moved but no audible sound emerged. He wasn’t there, not really. The spell had used his connection to the world of the dead to project his consciousness outside of the house and, within a limited distance, into the ill-defined and immaterial realm of ghosts, geists, and lost souls. Sweat sheeted his face and slicked his thinning hair. He whispered, words too quiet for Deirdre to hear.

He’d asked Rehani what would happen if the dreamer put him under while the spell still had him projected ‘out there.’ Wherever, whenever, and whatever ‘there’ really was. Rehani had shrugged. She’d only done this once before and that hadn’t happened, so how would she know? Paul had argued for a few seconds before agreeing anyway. Deirdre respected that. His inaction had cost lives, before. Now he acted. Herself a gardener, Deirdre knew well the difficulty of growth.

He twitched, whimpering. Rehani had promised him that if he died ‘out there,’ he’d wake up back in his body. Assuming it was even possible to die in the realm of the dead. Assuming, well, assuming a lot of things.

Only Rehani had any extensive training or practice, and all of that handed down from generation to generation, an education informal. Most of what any of them knew they’d learned or taught themselves. Almost twenty-two years had passed since her gift first revealed itself and Deirdre still had more questions than answers. And though she knew little of spellcraft, she knew a great deal about a great many other things.

But nobody knew how dreamer worked.

Nobody.

They just knew that it did. And that was enough.

(Wasn’t it?)

Deirdre hadn’t noticed the man enter. Maybe he hadn’t. He stood in front of the coffee table, unnoticed by Rehani as she shuffled and dealt cards, rattled dice, scattered bones. He faced Deirdre, staring. He wore a Mask. What did it look like? What an unimportant detail.

The man and the Mask held a knife. They shared a body that had two arms but whose shadow had six. With one of their real-not-real hands, they brought a finger to the Mask’s lips. With the other, with the knife, they gestured Deirdre to follow them. They approached her, came within sixteen inches, and stepped out of the room into the foyer.

Had anyone ever died during a dreamer vision?

Deirdre hadn’t heard of such a thing but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

She took a deep breath and walked through the threshold.

She sat in a dead man’s basement. But the man wasn’t dead yet. He sat at the corner of a homemade basement bar, fiddling with something in his hands. Deirdre tried to see it but couldn’t focus. “You gotta be careful what kinda masks you wear, Mikey,” the man said. “’cause we all gotta wear ‘em. We all gotta wear ‘em.” Uncle Nick’s words stank of rye. “Sure. But then sometimes they end up wearing us.”

“Uncle Nick?” Deirdre asked, not in her voice. “What are you talking about?”

The man stared at him—at her—at Deirdre-not-in-Deirdre’s-body-somehow. His irises swam for something to catch onto, drowning. Late Uncle Nick, not yet late, cleared his throat. “You just be careful out there, Mikey. You know, once you open Pandora’s box, you can’t just close it again. Certain things, you start doing them…they get harder and harder to stop.”

“Is this about Jimmy?”

“Is this about…” Nick trailed off. “Yeah. Poor Jimmy. Poor Jimmy and the fucking dope. Yeah.”

Not-yet-late Uncle Nick disintegrated. Time fast-forwarded through the basement, ravaging all. Deirdre’s head spun, having just been someone she’d never been, the memory pushing all her other memories momentary out of place. When anything made sense again, cobwebs clung to the corners. Dust held dominion over all.

She heard long, deep breaths echo down to her from above. The man and the Mask stood at the top of the basement steps. Did they grin at her? In the dim haze of the unlit stairwell, she couldn’t tell. It gestured for her to follow again.

She stood up, her scenery changing before she moved. She stood in a condo, streaks and spatters of blood everywhere. Barefoot for seemingly no reason, she surveyed the scene and focused on keeping her breath under control. Behind her, one body slumped in a slick mess, tangled in boots and a foyer coat rack. Ahead of her, she knew without knowing, another body waited in the bedroom, visage ripped and misshapen into some inscrutable message.

The same deep, calm, rhythmic breathing whispered from farther ahead.

Stepping over tacky gore, wet and semi-wet, slick and sticky, she approached a hallway intersection. A bedroom and a bathroom. She reached instinctively for her gun but of course she didn’t have it. She wasn’t really there, except insofar that she was.

She approached the bedroom. The door hung an inch ajar. She pushed it open.

Crickets choired the night. Booted, she took the steps between the front door and the ground in a single bound. The man and the Mask faced away from her, walking devil-may-care for the edge of the light. She stumbled, caught herself, and chased after them. Only when they stopped and turned around did she realize her mistake—

The wards didn’t protect her outside.

The man and the Mask lashed out with their knife and—

Deirdre jerked awake, tumbling books from the wall’s inbuilt shelves. She’d fallen asleep just barely leaned over.

Bird’s sang morning outside. Early hour light filtered into the room.

“What the fuck is that?” Paul whispered, still standing stock still and wide-eyed across the room from her. “What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?” every repetition grew slightly louder. The whisper rose to a murmur to a normal volume to…

“What the fuck is that!?” Paul shouted, jerking awake. Without saying anything else he ran for the restroom. Deirdre didn’t have time to ask anything before he’d rushed passed her. Woozy, she braced herself against the threshold. What had he seen? Down the hall, a door slammed open and closed again. A toilet lid flapped open hard enough to echo. Paul retched and gagged.

She pushed herself back upright to follow.

“Now!” Rehani screamed, shooting up from the couch. When Deirdre spun to look at the woman, she seemed surprised, herself. Rehani stood with one hand over her chest, panting. “Something about…something about a lock and a key?”

“What?” Deirdre asked.

“I don’t remember. I just know that the spell’s going to give us something right—”

The blue screen flickered gray-black and resolved into the local news, another channel Deirdre didn’t receive. Deirdre got all of her television-viewing from app and internet sources. What she and Rehani watched, then, hadn’t come from the internet.

“A judge was found hanged from his balcony this morning just before five A.M.,” the news anchor said. “Due to the violence involved, police are releasing no further details at this time. Chief of the Oceanrest Metro-Area Police Department Virgil LeDuff will be holding a press conference at ten o’clock. In the meantime, his official comment is…”

“Is this it?” Deirdre asked.

Rehani nodded, looking almost as nauseous as Paul had.

Deirdre remembered the man and the Mask. Stepping toward the screen, she saw police push back against a small posse of press at a taped-off crime scene. ‘Judge Found Murdered’ the scrawl read.

“Yeah,” she said. “This is it.”

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Ch. 4 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Four

…also the present… (mantles itself over bone, power and patience but not yet not yet not—)

Judge Howard Lesser’s fiancée had flown out of Ellsworth International Airport, ‘International’ in that it had flights to Canada, the previous night. She had a business conference in Philadelphia. Their conglomerated social media posts and messages remained vague, but Bob-Bob’s-son, who’s-a-disappointment-now, had figured out that she’d attend the conference for at least two days. That left a minimum of one night when Howard Lesser would sleep alone.

But one night was all that they needed—that he needed.

Although, resting his hand on the Mask’s strangely-smooth second-skin, he had to admit he’d started to think of the thing as a partner in crime. He’d found it in his beloved late Uncle’s basement among a scattering of other trinkets, what some might have called ‘evidence,’ and it had made everything make sense again.

He pulled on the Mask. Together, they walked over to the knife block and withdrew the longest, sharpest blade available. They gripped it in a gloved hand and Bob grinned. He imagined the Mask grinned with him.

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

…the present… (as it sinews itself, muscles itself, gowns itself in skin)

They’d agreed to meet back at Deirdre’s because, frankly, Deirdre had a cat to take care of and nobody else bore responsibility for another living thing. Additionally, over the archaeological age that felt like it had passed since Razz’s death, Paul Somers and Shoshanna Winters had invested considerable labor and money into turning her little homestead into a fortress. Situated on a rubbled stripe of street rotting off the edge of Squatter City, her house marked the farthest reach the Oceanrest metro area had ever achieved. Technically not a squat, owned by David Winters and tenanted by Deidre (whose legal name, Imani Greene, appeared nowhere on the contract), it received water/sewer, heat, electricity, and every other amenity afforded to people who didn’t have to live in collapsing foreclosures and condemned deathtraps. Its front and rear doors were steel-reinforced and could be locked with frame bolts. The first floor windows were, allegedly, bullet-resistant. She’d left most of them boarded up just in case. The ingress to the basement bristled with locks, two key and two combination, as well as frame bolts and steel reinforcement—but that one had been done Before.

Deirdre vacuumed for the first time in months, mostly because Paul had an allergy to cats.

The feline himself, wearing one milky-blind eye and half a tail as testament to his history, scowled at the handheld device roaring through his kingdom. A half-mask of white fur fuzzed around his good eye. Thus the name: Samedi.

Rehani had told her, once, that blinded cats gazed into spirit realms through their sightless orbs.

Paul had told her that cats knew when people were allergic and liked to victimize them.

Half a dozen of one…

Deirdre, local witch and apothecary, kept a personal stash of esoteric and supernatural substances tucked in a kitchen cupboard. She figured they’d need sixth sense stimulant for whatever ‘receiving’ Rehani planned on doing. With dashes of black pepper and dried, ground-up Bee’s bread for courage, and a pinch of hybrid sirenstouch-cannabis for a shield of a giddy detachment, Deirdre rolled three thick joints, one for each of the ritual’s participants. She tossed a sprinkling of catnip at the stairway landing between the first and second floors for Samedi. Samedi gave the pile a couple hesitant licks before digging in. After the brief, feline bacchanal, he sprawled the landing wide-iris’d, stretched out as much as his small, furry body allowed.

Rehani arrived first, predictably, with a massive bag of portable esoterica and mystic paraphernalia slung over her back. After simple greetings and no chit-chat, Rehani crossed the foyer of the house and entered the den.

“You mind?” she asked.

“Go ahead,” Deirdre replied.

Rehani unpacked quickly. Conquering the center third of the oversized coffee table in the middle of the room, Rehani sat on the broad, antique sofa and started unloading cards, bones, and charms onto a velvet cloth. Deirdre left her to work, wandering down the main thoroughfare of the house back to the kitchen, where she filled a tea kettle and set it on a heater. She stared at the back door, frame bolts plunged six inches into the foundation, and tried not to think about Before.

Razz had lived with her for years. They’d fought. She’d wanted him to get into college and go to work for Winters-Armitage or Malleus or, better yet, some company that took him far, far away from Oceanrest altogether. He’d wanted to know what secrets she kept from him in the basement, what endeavors she went on while wandering through the always-eerie woods. Tensions mounted. She’d kicked him out. Not technically, not by the letter-of-the-law and not by making the decision, herself, but…

For months afterward, she and Razz maintained a familial, if sometimes strained, relationship. And then…

The kettle howled her attentions back to the present. She poured three mugs to steep, carrying them back to her den on a small oak serving tray. Rehani had set up three braziers, always sparking and crackling with herb and ash, and had started pushing furniture around. “Is there space for some tea?” Deirdre asked, slightly miffed that she felt awkward in her own home.

“We can use the coffee table for now. One of the end tables later.”

“Great.” Deirdre crossed the center of the room. It took less time than usual, two armchairs missing from the route. Rehani had pushed them up against the farthest wall already. “Is there anything I can do?”

“I’ll need another half hour set up before we’re ready to do any real work,” by which Rehani meant ritual work, the labor of spellcraft. Magic demanded fuel. A person could use all kinds of fuel: blood, sacrifice, ascetic suffering, the right volumes of the right alchemical materials, et cetera, but the most common choice was to power as much of a spell as possible with physiological and neuromuscular stress.

As Deirdre had won the random cosmic lottery of having been born with natural magical aptitude, she could rely on her own physical endurance and spiritual fortitude more than most.

As Rehani had won a different cosmic lottery, a psychic born into a family of actual mystical practitioners, she had learned to rely more on performing the appropriate rituals, using the appropriate ingredients, at the appropriate times, to arrive at the appropriate results.

Deirdre, a born witch, knew a handful of tricks spectacularly well, but little of overall magic. She preferred plants both normal and mystical, esoteric and outright supernatural.

Rehani, born a psychic, knew little of how to be a psychic, but a hell of a lot about spellcraft.

“Hey, you got an old radio around here somewhere?” Rehani asked.

“Uh…I have an alarm clock radio upstairs.”

Rehani considered this for a moment. Bobbing her head with a shrug, she said, “Yeah, old enough.”

Deirdre stepped over Samedi, who made a low trilling noise but otherwise didn’t react, and headed to the second floor. After Razz had left her squat, she’d transformed his room into Samedi’s. It stood open at the top of the stairs. Not much to look at, a couple cat castles and litter boxes made up its furnishings. All the stuff Razz had left behind still waited for his return in the closet.

Still, even now…

She pretended not to feel the half-second loss of her breath and kept walking.

In her own bedroom, with her Singer sewing machine repaired and her new bed frame still foreign to her, she found the square box of nineties tech wrapped up in its own tangled cord. She’d bought it and never used it, her phone performing the same service, and now couldn’t recall why.

Samedi rolled around in catnip dust as Deirdre passed him on her way back down.

Rehani stared at her television, a forty-two-inch high-definition gift from Shoshanna Winters that Paul had frame-bolted above the topmost bookshelf built into the room’s western wall. Its unlit screen bore Rehani’s reflection back at her. “This TV has to stay on this wall?”

Deirdre nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Well. We can work around that.”

Before Deirdre could ask her immediate question, someone else knocked on her front door.

“Deirdre?” Paul asked, knocking again as Deirdre started working the locks.

Paul arrived late, predictably. He’d showered and shaved but still wore a cologne of whiskey and weed. Deirdre didn’t blame Paul for his tardiness. Paul’s car had died during the events of the summer before. Paul had moved the thing into storage for the winter, planning to have it repaired in the spring, but then…

Paul removed his facemask. “Hey.”

So he’d taken the bus everywhere, Since. The bus that serviced its final stop almost two miles south of Squatter City.

So he also walked.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Are you?” he replied.

She shook her head. Sometimes her scalp hurt. Sometimes even getting out of bed felt like a Herculean fucking feat.

“Do you want to talk?” he whispered.

“No. I…no.”

“Yeah. Me neither. So…I guess let’s get this thing started.”

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

Magic didn’t just require fuel. It needed molding, sculpting, direction. A spell provided a blueprint but the practitioners still had to do the actual creating. They pulled supernatural energies from their bodies by way of extreme involuntary neuromuscular stress; they shaped it with their willpower, their intent and desire. Magic did nothing that someone or something didn’t tell it to do; but telling it to do anything proved prohibitively difficult. It took focus and sweat, pointed faith, weaponized stubbornness, and imagination.

Hands pressed to a vèvè chalked onto the den’s hardwood floors, Rehani muttered a ceaseless stream of multi-lingual sentences, dreadlocks draped over one shoulder. The room stank of singed ozone, heat energy. The white chalk of the vèvè lit briefly, barely, and Deirdre felt the spell take from the other side of the room.

Before everything had happened, Deirdre had only known a couple cantrips—small spells built entirely out of neuromuscular energy and sheer willpower—and only one particularly powerful piece of healing magic. After, she’d started learning wards and defensive spells.

Born with natural aptitude and raw power, Deirdre put up the wards around the ritual. It took hours; chalking sigils and glyphs on hardwood and chalkboard, smearing blood over the room’s threshold, sweating through her clothes as she emptied herself into the spells. She smudged with sage and left sachets of yarrow at every entryway.

The house hummed. Deirdre felt the building energy thicken the air. It static’d the hairs on her arms. Everything felt heavy.

Something big was coming.

It took five hours and fifty-five minutes for Deirdre to build and reinforce the wards. First she touched up the ones she and Shoshanna Winters had erected the autumn before, basic spells meant to protect her from harm and attention. Since Rehani’s ritual called for several more powerful and more temporary additions, she took a brief rest and a snack before continuing. 

Pulling latent energy from the earth and the air and the things unknown or indescribable to humankind, pulling it from her own muscle and sinew and cell, she funneled it through her body into an array of hand-painted sigils. Every part of her seized, shuddered, and released. A long, strenuous groan rattled up from her innards. The sigils briefly lit, then faded just as quickly, no more magical than chalk. Except for the buzz in Deirdre’s sixth sense, the hum of something expectant for release.

The wards attended to, a panting, sweatslick Deirdre slouched back to her den.

Rehani sat on the couch, also sweating but less profusely, fanning herself.

Paul sat on the floor in the center of the room, already keying into his sixth sense. Deirdre could tell because the effort made him look physically uncomfortable, almost constipated. It warped all charm and attraction away from his features.

“My part’s ready if yours is,” Rehani said.

“Yeah.”

“So next we smoke these joints, we take the dreamer, and—”

“And then we take Paul’s pills to fight off the dreamer,” Deirdre finished. Paul took prescription amphetamines. A long time ago, he’d formed a habit. Between a growing addiction to stimulants and his issues with alcohol, he’d lost everything. A marriage. A daughter. But he still had a prescription and Deirdre couldn’t think of anything else that might keep their eyelids open after taking dreamer.

“And then I key us into whatever’s calling your name.”

Deirdre sat on a wall-abutting armchair. “And you’re sure this’ll work?”

“Nothing ever works one hundred percent. But this? Ninety-nine.”

Deirdre nodded.

Paul’s face fell slack. He shook himself off. “They’re quiet,” he said. “The dead. Quieter than usual. But not like…I don’t know how to describe it. It’s quiet with a purpose. It’s quiet like they’re waiting for something.”

“Any chance it’s something good?” Deirdre joked.

Paul, apparently not in the mood to joke, wiped sweat from his forehead. “What do you think?”

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Ch. 3 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

…three weeks earlier… (as it gains strength)

Recently divorced and more recently unemployed, Robert Robertson, Jr., Bob-Bob’s-son, disappointment infinite, had more than sufficient time to develop a real obsession.

When the divorce had gotten to its knock-down-drag-out ugliest, Judge Howard Lesser had presided over the dispute. Howard Lesser had gaveled many of the final decisions that had put Bob in his new, undecorated condo, including alimony and child support. He’d gaveled Bob’s isolation, too, with his ruling on custody.

But while Bob’s ex-wife Veronica and daughter Sadie had left Oceanrest for some distant part of the country, Judge Howard Lesser still lived there.

And in those unprecedented times, someone could discover an unimaginable amount about someone else’s life through the systematic and occasionally clever use of the internet. With the Mask laid out on the left side of his desk and his mouse on the right, he found his research oracular. Somehow, he already knew which digital paths to follow. He followed them almost on auto-pilot.

The judge that had presided over his divorce case had cooked a homemade dinner with his new, much-younger fiancee and had taken a photo of the two of them eating it in on their balcony. Beyond the railing, Bob-Bob’s-Son, not-so-fucking-disappointing-after-all, recognized a statue. The statue belonged to a suburban park not terribly far from the denser city center. Not terribly far from him.

On one side of the park, a row of small condo buildings contained young couples and professionals. On the other side of the park, houses. But the judge lived in a condo, probably on the third-and-topmost floor, with a clear view of the monument and the walking path that circled it. Trees obscured a small picnic area, another property feature he recognized. Having spent almost two days poring through the other man’s photos and social media profiles, Bob felt he had a pretty accurate idea of what building and unit the judge occupied.

He’d seen the inside of the man’s home. Photographs taken at a housewarming party two years prior showed a broad living room, a kitchen with marbled countertops, and recent-renovation appliances. They also showed hallways, angles of bedroom and bathroom, and the threshold opening from lounge to balcony. An impressive place, a new construction. A monument to the slow but slowly-accelerating recovery of Oceanrest’s previously crippled economy.

Judge Howard Lesser, fifty-four, had recently become engaged to a twenty-eight year old paralegal.

Bob jerked back from the screen with a gasp.

Had the Mask moved?

No. Of course not.

Had its expression changed? Did it smile, now?

Did it matter?

Another day burnt into night. Rob-Bob-Mikey stroked the Mask with one hand while he scrolled the internet with the other. His breath deepened, husky. Judge Howard Lesser ate dinner with a smiling woman so far away from a divorce they hadn’t even thought of it, yet. Them with their jobs and their balcony and their bright white teeth. Did they want to rub it in? All their joy, bright eyes character-lined from laughter—they did. They had to.

Bob lost his breath, pulling away from the monitor. Sweat flopped his brow.

He wouldn’t really do it, right?

He hesitated before closing the windows and shutting down the VPN and turning off the computer. 

Would he?

In his dreams, people whispered his name. No matter how small he got, the whispers stopped him from disappearing.

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Ch. 3 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Three

…the present… (as the echo joints a skeleton together)

…Pauly…

The voice cooed sweetly from a deep and hungry darkness.

Paullyyyy…

A little over a year earlier, Paul Somers had cut a deal with something called The Speaker. A powerful entity, not a god but perhaps mistakable for one, It existed in some fractal para-universe butting up against his own. Their worlds interacted in usually-invisible and always-ethereal ways, through psychic and supernatural influences Paul still couldn’t understand.

It spoke like a used car salesman.

there’s something sharp pushing into your world, doc.

Paul floated in a sloshing black sea, paralyzed. He stared at a starless void above, unable to blink.

it’s smaller than me or daddy Devourer but it’s just as mean.

Paul heard something else in the inky water. His ears pricked at the barely-there sound of liquid parting around a body. His eyes strained to his periphery but he couldn’t turn his head. He tried to scream. His lips didn’t move.

don’t try to wake yourself up, Pauly. this is important stuff I have to tell you.

The thing in the waves approached him.

He tried to scream. His lips didn’t move.

this thing isn’t a city-ender like some of my kind, but it’ll still kill a lot of you apes if it makes landfall. it’ll kill a few of you before then, too, given a hand, but…the intensity isn’t really comparable if you get what I’m trying to say.

Something like a hand, but with tentacles instead of fingers, found the back of Paul’s head. Its tendrils suckered and released, playing through his thinning hair. Aching his retina to get a glimpse, Paul saw a slender nub wriggling toward the edge of his eye socket. He tried to scream, but…

I have something important to show you, doc. something you’re gonna want to know about later, like when I taught you how to make some use out of that ‘curse’ you never stop bitching about. just try to stay very, very still…

He didn’t need to strain to see anymore.

Paul Somers woke with a sharp gasp, hands reflexively groping at his face. He spilled off of his mattress and onto the houseboat floor. Finding no squidlike grope attached to his visage, he rose with a groan and tried to reorient himself.

Someone knocked on the houseboat door. Had that awoken him?

Rubbing the rest of the nightmare from his skin, he shuffled over to the coffee table centering his ‘living room,’ a mere three feet from his bed, and picked up his pipe. With a plastic lighter, he ignited the half-charred bowl and took a hit of cannabis mixed with sixth-sense downers. A vapor-thin swaddle wrapped him, cushion against the world.

The knock came again.

“Paul?” Deirdre asked from outside.

Something heavy plunged through Paul’s innards.

He set the dirty glass pipe back down and walked through the living room and kitchen to the door. In pajama pants and a tanktop, he opened up. “Hey…”

Deirdre’s descent into depression seemed to have accelerated in the two weeks since Paul had last seen her. A faint scent hung over her, the vague odor of someone who had recently bathed but who hadn’t done laundry in a long, long time. Her eyes, the color of vast tracts of void pockmarked by stars, hid in cavernous pits. Her hair, unmaintained for months, had started coagulating.

“Hey,” he repeated, more quietly.

He knew he didn’t look much better. Unshowered, booze- and weed-stench clinging to him, thinning brown hair growing into an embarrassing spray of mullet, sleepless bags bloating his sockets—he didn’t look better at all.

“Hey,” she replied, acknowledging the same thing. She slipped a slender black finger behind the ear-loop of a black, medical-grade mask and pulled it off. “You have a minute?”

A little over a year earlier, Deirdre had had a ward named Razz. A little over a year earlier, Paul had put off doing something he’d known better than to put off doing. Now, Paul heard a voice living in his dreams and Deirdre would never hear her ward’s voice again.

A ‘what if’ could weigh a hell of a lot.

“He open the door or what?”

A few yards up the pier, Deirdre’s friend Rehani shaded her eyes against the sun.

Paul sighed but nodded. “I have a minute.”

He’d wanted to ask why Deirdre had brought Rehani but didn’t. Though Paul had only met Rehani once before, he’d felt her presence in his sixth sense. Later, he’d learned she was a psychic, a thing that sounded more impressive than it was. So Deirdre had brought a psychic to a medium’s houseboat. The ‘why’ seemed obvious.

Something was happening.

Again.

“Pardon the mess or whatever,” he said, waving a hand behind him.

A kingdom of clutter had conquered his home. He hadn’t taken out garbage for a week, recycling for two; he’d let his sink fill and over-fill with dirty dishes and bowls. A mound of unwashed clothing bristled from his hamper like a mushroom cap. Sleek bags from dispensaries and wrinkled bags from street dealers filled a candy dish on his coffee table. Empty liquor bottles cluttered his bedside. He pushed a heap of junkmail off the top of his laptop to open it.

“Ancestors,” Rehani muttered, barely missing the right volume for a whisper.

Paul didn’t respond. He opened a music streaming app and found a playlist.

“The wards holding up?” Deirdre asked, picking a fingernail along the depth of a sigil she’d carved in his doorframe.

“So far so good,” he answered.

Paul Somers heard dead people. Worse, he saw and felt them. So after everything that had happened the summer before, Deirdre had warded his houseboat against supernatural intruders. It had taken weeks, in part due to Deirdre’s unfamiliarity with the spells and spellcraft required, but it had worked. Except, of course, for the Speaker. Because Paul Somers had technically invited the Speaker inside already.

But he hadn’t told any of that to her.

“Thanks again, by the way,” he added. “For that.”

“Yeah. Anytime.”

He started some music and sat in the office chair situated between the coffee table and a desk he kept facing the Atlantic-panoramic windows. He didn’t recognize the music. He’d been making an effort to find new stuff. Mostly, though, at forty four, the new stuff made him feel old. He cleared his throat. “So,” he said. “What’s up?”

Deirdre sat on a small, upholstered chair across the table from him. “Rehani had a vision.”

“She is an alleged psychic.”

“Boy,” Rehani warned.

“It called us by name…at least, as close as these things come.”

Paul frowned. He didn’t like the idea of supernatural forces calling his name.

“Something dangerous is coming,” Deirdre continued. “And the two of us can do something about it.”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea to get involved with something just because a supernatural force or universal hiccup or unknown, mystical power invited us to get involved.”

“What I tell you?” Rehani asked Deirdre, still standing in the kitchen with her facemask bundled in her hands.

“Paul,” Deirdre kept her eyes on his. “Please. You promised.”

He dropped his gaze. Just around a year earlier, he’d made a promise. Some deep, profound part of him suspected that if he broke it, he would disappear. Worse, he would deserve to disappear. “Okay,” he said. “What do you need me to do?”

“We’re running a ritual at my house tonight. Rehani knows it. If there’s really something here…” she trailed off. Shrugged. “I need you to…to do what you do.”

“I have a feeling you’re not talking about my professorship.”

“Different resumé,” she admitted.

His mouth felt rough-sand dry. “When should I show up?”

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

…three months earlier… (and did hearing it make it real?)

Bob-Bob’s-son, recently divorced and more recently unemployed, had moved into a new condo mere months before the lockdown. There, all white-walled and half-unpacked, the days melted viscously into each other. Bob woke up, applied for as many jobs as the job sites showed him, and did housework. Sometimes he put something on the television, sometimes he didn’t. The thing on the television didn’t matter. Increasingly, Bob knew, he didn’t matter.

He woke up. He clicked around the job sites. He paced. He cleaned up the small messes he’d made the day before. Half the boxes sat unpacked. Once in a while he’d call someone, but few people answered. A dozen years earlier he’d played video games as a hobby but everything he found online now seemed alien to him. And who would he play with? Most of his friends had drifted apart into family.

Sometimes he put something on the television, sometimes he didn’t. He never knew what to watch. He never cared. Before the divorce, he’d let Veronica choose all the shows. On Saturday mornings, Sadie chose. He thumbed the remote control through an endless library. None of it struck him but sometimes he put something on.

Eventually, he went to sleep. Later, he woke up. He clicked around on job sites. He paced.

they will whisper your name—

He stopped pacing. Had he heard something from his bedroom?

Standing on the tile where the condo kitchen became the condo dining room, Bob stared through an open threshold at his bed. Faint light leaked in through slanted blinds. He squinted at the dimness, trying to make out the shape of his bedside lamp.

they will whi s p e r…

The next thing Bob remembered, he stood in front of his bureau, his mattress at his back. He opened the top drawer—as he’d planned to, he thought—and found Uncle Nick’s mask inside. Bob had found the mask with a handful of other objects, miscellaneous trinkets, but he couldn’t recall them anymore. He’d taken the mask. On his first trip back to the condo that day, he’d taken only the mask.

Breathing hard, Bob picked it up out of the drawer. It held his gaze with vacant holes.

Bob had had a lot of time to think…

Just as the scarlet fantasy tendriled up from the back of his mind, Bob pushed it down again. Clearing his throat, he settled the mask back in his bureau. He paced. He cleaned up the small messes he’d made the day before. From the piled, half-unpacked boxes strewing the condo, he procured a box he and Veronica had never gotten around to opening. Inside, he found a knife block. He put it on the kitchen countertop.

Eventually, he went to bed.

That night, the dreams started.

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Ch. 2 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Two
…the present… (who heard the echo first?)

With a jacketed shoulder leaned against a tiled hallway wall, Deirdre reached out and knocked on Rehani’s door. Four teenagers, unmasked, joked their way upstairs from below. Deirdre, nee Imani Greene, reached out to repeat the knock when—

“’bout time,” Rehani greeted, flapping a hand that told Deirdre to enter.

Deirdre pulled down her own mask as she passed the threshold. A perimeter of Kosher salt lined Rehani’s apartment; the woman had nailed together a small step at the entrance so that guests wouldn’t break the seal on ingress. Deirdre stepped down. “None of the kids on the court had masks on.”

Rehani shrugged. “It’s an outdoors space.”

“COVID doesn’t care.”

Rehani wore bundled dreadlocks down to her waist, black sweatpants, and wraps of colorful sashes across her torso. In sandals, she flopped out of the foyer and into the main of the apartment. Despite having arrived from the Congo over twenty years earlier, she carried a slight accent. “You want something to drink?”

Passing under a dozen hanging devil’s traps and dream-catchers, Deirdre followed Rehani into the apartment’s kitchen. Deirdre also wore black sweat pants, with a camo tanktop and leather jacket above. A malignant growth of months-condensed and unmaintained hair snarled from her scalp where a clean-cut high-top once stood. It ached her scalp but she’d learned to live with it.

She’d learned to live with a lot of things.

Or without them.

“It’s noon,” she answered.

“So? You got anywhere to be?”

“I…no.”

“Well, not yet.” Rehani chortled. “Anyway, sanitizer’s next to the Tarot table. I’ll fix us up some, hmmmm…Cuba Libres?”

“You mean a ‘rum and coke?’”

“Sounds boring.”

Deirdre turned right, leaving the kitchen for Rehani’s living room—if ‘living room’ could adequately describe it. Rehani did relatively little living in the room, having converted it into an unofficial psychic business. While claiming not to use her actual psychic abilities with her clients—in fact, while claiming to have little control over them at all—Rehani felt confident enough in her theatrical skills to charge people for readings, advice, and fortune-telling. Deirdre found the industrial-sized jug of hand sanitizer and squirted some into her gardener’s palms. She rubbed her hands together and whuffed down on the over-cushioned couch that usually served as Rehani’s ‘waiting room.’

Rehani joined her shortly afterward, carrying a tray. Two coffee mug Cubra Libres and an enormous bowl of stew occupied most of the space. Next to the stew, twin plates carried pale balls of thick dough and twin bowls waited for filling. “Fufu.” Rehani set the tray down on the reading table proper. “And two Barista Communistas. Sit over here, come on.”

Deirdre sighed up from the couch and walked to the faux-velvet armchair opposite Rehani. She slumped down and sank into cushion. “You said you had something important to talk about.”

Rehani pointed a finger between the smaller bowls. “Serve yourself some stew. Or don’t and just drink.”

“I ate before I left,” Deirdre said. “I didn’t know you’d cook.”

“You didn’t?”

“I…no, I didn’t. Why would I know that?”

“Sometimes people just know things.”

“Sometimes psychics just know things,” Deirdre corrected.

“And I wish it was more useful than it was,” Rehani replied, half a joke.

“So, free drinks, hot food…do you need an advance or something?” Deirdre worked as an apothecary, trading in supernatural prescriptions and supernaturally-modified recreationals as her major form of income. “’cause you can just ask and I’ll give it to you.”

“Rude,” Rehani accused. “So rude.”

Deirdre opened her mouth.

“No,” Rehani pre-empted, “I don’t need some ‘advance.’ And it’s impolite not to talk to a friend after such a long absence.”

“Sorry.”

“Whatever,” Rehani flapped a hand, “we’re all learning how to be with people again.”

Which was truer for Deirdre than for most. For five years she’d taken care of a boy who went by ‘Razz.’ The summer before, he’d been murdered. The people who’d done it had all ‘gotten theirs’ to various extremes and the bloodfire from that had kept her moving for a few weeks afterward. But eventually… 

The official COVID lockdown had only extended a solitude she’d already long held.

She cleared her throat. “But you did say you had something important.”

“Rude.”

“Sorry. So. What’s up, then?”

Rehani leaned back in her fortune-teller’s chair, high-backed and tapestry-draped. “You know that Vietnamese woman down the hall?”

“I don’t.”

“She’s the one who walked out naked in front of all those cops at downtown precinct.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

Deirdre nodded. “Wow.”

“Chh. Right?”

“You get her autograph?”

Rehani chortled. “Maybe when she gets out of jail.”

“They arrested her?”

“Oh, she’s out from behind bars, Oceanrest PD can’t fuck up those kinda optics after last summer’s shit show. But they charged her. She’s got a court date.”

Deirdre shook her head. “Goddamn.”

Rehani shrugged. “Dark days.”

“It doesn’t take a psychic to see that.”

Rehani pulled a piece of fufu away from the larger whole and dipped it into the stew. She put it in her mouth before the soup had all dripped off and used her index finger to stop a stray drop’s descent. She wiped it on her clothes. “I had a vision.”

Deirdre pried off a knot of fufu. “What kind?”

“What kind you think?”

“I meant what did you See?”

Rehani reached into a hidden pocket folded somewhere among her fabrics and procured a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper. Handing it across the table to Deirdre, she said, “I was off on dreamer and sixth sense stims. Was meditating, focusing my Sight, and this shit hit me out of nowhere. Wrote down everything I could remember, after.”

Deirdre hesitated. “Do I want to read this?”

Rehani scoffed. “Did I wanna write it?”

Deirdre read:

it moves unharassed peels souls over itself

it’s happening again

oh spirits what if it’s happening always

there: a knight, her armor rusted, hair a crumbling stormcloud

the key

a hanging man / blood pouring down / change

they scream in the streets

there: a seer who plucks out his eyes not to see,

pours poison in his ear not to hear

all the things wanting into this place

it’s pushing thr / who are you?

who are you? who are you?

take off your mmmmm

aaaaaa

sssssss

CALL HER NOW

“Goddammit,” Deirdre muttered.

“And that’s when I called you.”

“God-damn-it.”

“I thought: ‘who do I know who sounds like a knight in rusted armor with real fucked-up hair?’”

“You know what?”

“What?” Rehani asked, palm uplifted to indicate Deirdre’s head.

Deirdre didn’t really have a response.

Rehani waved an apology. “But, anyway, maybe it is time you took on another… ‘case.’”

destitute, the squatters and indigent of Oceanrest’s most scarified reaches. Once, people had conjured the unofficial burden of ‘Sheriff’ for her. They’d called her ‘the Sheriff of Squatter City.’ But she hadn’t taken a case since…well, as with so many things, Since.

She folded the page in her hands.

“It pretty much calls you by name,” Rehani added. “As close as it calls anyone, at least.”

“Yeah. I think it calls someone else out, too,” Deirdre grumbled.

“Where’s that boy live, anyway?”

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Ch. 1 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

…when it fist took root // before its fruit… (where the story starts but not the start of the story)

Robert Robertson, Jr., recently divorced and more recently unemployed, sifted through his late Uncle’s estate mostly on autopilot. Bob had loved Uncle Nick more than any other member of his family, mother and father included, and the vice versa seemed equally true. Nick had always called him “Mikey,” which Bob preferred to his own name despite the cereal connotations. It beat out “Have you met Bob, y’know, Bob’s son?”

Ha ha.

He’d always hated his father for that. The name. Who lived their lives with such an embarrassing name and then handed it down to their children? But to Uncle Nick he’d always been “Mikey,” never Bob-Bob’s-son, many-faceted disappointment.

Few other people had harbored such affection for Uncle Nick. Bob’s late Aunt attested to that.

In the basement of a dead man’s house, recently divorced and more recently unemployed, Bob-Bob’s-son, multi-faceted disappointment, discovered a box, lock-garlanded and patina’d in a layer of white-out painted sigils and glyphs beyond his recognition. Breaking it open without quite knowing why (had he heard something whispering inside?), Bob found a mask.

What did it look like?

What an unimportant detail.

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

Chapter One

…three years before the echo became the thing itself…

Matthew leaned into the mic, continuing the afternoon’s recording. “Sidetalk aside,” he said, “a lot of which we’ll have to cut, by the way…today we’re going to cover our first unsolved case since we did Jack the Ripper.”

“Don’t make this Michael Myers wannabe sound fuckin’ cool,” Harry spat.

“The Oceanrest Slasher killed eight people between 1979 and 1993.”

“While wearing a mask,” Harry added. “Like, was it actually a Michael Myers mask?”

“While Halloween debuted only a scant thirteen months before the killings began, both the Oceanrest Metro Police Department and the general true crime community tend not to call it a direct inspiration.”

“Oh, so it wasn’t actually a Michael Myers mask,” Harry pouted, faux-disappointment.

“I’m glad the guy respected copyright law, at least,” Bushel chimed in.

“Jesus, Ken,” Harry replied. “He killed eight people.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“He killed eight and grievously injured three more,” Matthew continued. “All in the small city of Oceanrest, Maine.”

“I’ve never even heard of the place,” Bushel said. “Uh…but I’m sure it’s great.”

“It’s not,” Matthew admitted.

“Don’t—people could be listening!”

“Like he cares,” Harry over-acted for his mic. “Like he even knows! Bushel, where is Oceanrest?”

“It’s, uh…” Bushel flipped some papers around for foley. “In Maine?”

“That’s my fault. I set the bar too low.”

“The case interested us not only because of its unsolved status,” Matthew maintained control of the narrative. Of the trio, his job was to remain focused, to stabilize the core of the how. “But because of the huge gap between the Slasher’s first series and his second. The Slasher claimed his fifth victim in 1981 and his sixth in 1993.”

“Oh, he did a Grim Sleeper thing,” Bushel said.

“Oh, look, he got one right!” Harry laughed.

“He did do a Grim Sleeper thing,” Matthew confirmed, grinning. “After the first Oceanrest Slasher book came out in 1992, both the writer and publisher received threats from someone who may have been the Slasher, himself. In 1993, another publisher released a second book. Two weeks after the second book’s release, the Oceanrest Slasher claimed a sixth victim.”

“Wait…are these the books we used for sources?” Bushel asked.

“Um…yes?”

“But—okay, you see how maybe someone a little more superstitious might think that’s a bad idea?”

The studio door banged open. Trent, their sound engineer and producer, stepped in with an uneasy glance, cheeks scarleted. “Uh, guys? There’s a phone call we just got that is, uh…that I think you should listen to.”

“Really? We’re already running late with the—”

“I really, really think you should hear this guy.”

Matthew stood up but didn’t start walking. “Uh…okay. Sure.”

A confused, hesitant moment passed before they all followed Trent into the offices on the other side of the soundproofing. Everybody felt it but none of them recognized it. It stimulated a sense they didn’t know they possessed.

Trent handed over the studio phone, a decade-old landline handset.

“Hello?” Matthew asked the receiver.

“Are you people stupid!?” an older man snarled on the other end of the line. Matthew imagined spittle spraying from his lips. “If you talk about It, It’ll hear you.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Did I fucking stutter!? Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up!”

“Can I ask what you’re calling about?”

“Don’t play dumb with me you geeky little shit. Just don’t talk about it anymore or I’ll—I’ll—” the man started coughing and hacking. Interference shrilled over the line. As Matthew pulled the handset from his ear, the pitch crescendo’d and crescendo’d until the phone itself seemed to shriek. Abruptly, the call disconnected.

Silence enveloped them.

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