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