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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