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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