Ch. 16 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask
Deirdre figured that if everyone wanted to use her as bait, anyway, they might as well put some real work into arranging the trap. For the mansion’s ‘anti-bullying’ defenses to function, the Mask had to enter the building. Even then, that particular spell would only weaken it, slow it down, knock it around a bit; to finish the fight, they’d need something more specific. To those ends, Deirdre and Rehani began constructing a binding ritual in the entry hall. This one took significantly more work than the one they’d used before Paul’s projection. Two days into the labor, they still had another day of work ahead. And Paul had assured them that the Mask already knew where they were. That It was coming sooner rather than later.
The spellcraft and willpower required to power their ritual drained them and drenched them in sweat. Deirdre’s hair had started to frizz and loosen, disorganizing in ways she didn’t know how to fix. She’d worn the same style for almost her entire adult life and couldn’t remember the things ‘Teesha had taught her about maintaining the new one. Her clothes adhered to her leechlike. Her body ached from funneling so much energy into every sigil, glyph, and incantation tying the magic together.
The work was breaking her down; they had to finish it as quickly as possible.
Around twilight on the third day, nostrils filled with the stench of burnt ozone, hands pressed to the floor, having just charged a section of the layered binding for the sixth or seventh time that day—a ritual obviously requiring ritual to function—Deirdre collapsed. She—
—“Hey, ma,”—
—blinked awake a second later. Rehani, Victor, and Paul all hovered uncomfortably close to her.
“Outta my face,” she muttered, half-reflexively.
“Yeah. You’re done.” Victor said.
“’scuze me?”
“You need rest. Come on. Clock-out time.” Victor held out his hand.
She propped herself up on her elbows. “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a fuckin’ bogeyman on Its way here.”
“Victor’s right,” Paul said. “No offense, but…I mean, you look like you’d lose a fight to Nora, right now.”
Rehani slapped his shoulder but voiced no disagreement.
Victor stared at her, at his hand, at her again.
“I can get up, myself,” she insisted.
Victor withdrew his hand.
It hurt to stand, every muscle in her body wracked and seared and microscopically tore from the days’ labor. She grunted a couple times, rising to her feet. Wanted to say something pithy but couldn’t manage it through her exertion. She frowned. She hadn’t realized she’d worn herself so thin.
“Come on,” Rehani said, taking the back of her arm. “Let’s get you some rest.”
“Dinner’ll be ready in thirty,” Victor added.
Bob had followed the Mask. Was that the best way to describe it? He didn’t know.
He’d followed It the same way he’d followed It to the copycat-wannabe and the way he’d followed It to the squat and the two police officers just days earlier.
It had led him to a perimeter of privacy trees, rows of white-barked Castine elms. There, they hovered in the darkness and surveyed a mansion. Cropped hedges decorated the front yard in staggered arrays. A guest house sat in the dimness, unlit. A private drive curlicued south to the public roads and ended in a driving loop at the mansion’s steps; a fountain centered the asphalt circle. In the back yard, a hedge maze brooded, lit by overhung sodium lamps. For the most part, however, flat grass and open sightlines dominated the topography.
The mansion, itself, stood three floors tall, with various lights on in various rooms on the first and second stories. One of the windows showed them a tableau of dinner-time conversation. A white man with thinning hair said something to a black woman with bundled dreadlocks. The Lock, herself, sat across the table from them, slouched and drained, looking weakened. Two shorter people sat with their backs to Bob and the Mask, providing no details to their identities.
Bob and the Mask set down their backpack. Their hand felt lighter wrapped around the hilt of their knife.
They maneuvered around the treeline for a better view of the surroundings. The extra angling provided them with little new information. A back door in the center-rear of the building let out to the hedge maze. A car sat parked in the loop out front.
Just as they prepared to advance, another figure entered the dining room. Tall and broad-shouldered, the man carried twin serving trays into the room and placed them on the table. He wore a holster at his hip, a baseball cap over close-cropped hair, and a too-big sweater. When he sat, he thankfully sat with his back to Bob and the Mask.
They took a deep breath and began their approach.
“…so what we think, based on the research, is that the Mask, as we’ve apparently decided to call It, can’t have possession as Its primary goal,” Nora said, scooping up a piece of white fish from the plate of fruits, vegetables, and marinade stewing several spiced flanks.
“It wouldn’t be energy-efficient,” Olly added.
“What?” Paul asked.
Nora, mouth already full of food, mm-mm-mm’d at Olly to explain.
They explained. “So the thing gets resources from whatever, killing people or whatever Paul said it does with ghosts, whatever, but It needs resources and has methods of gathering them. But protecting the host takes resources and empowering the host takes resources and guiding the host takes resources…and possessing the host takes significant resources.”
“You don’t think It breaks even with possession.”
“We don’t,” Olly replied. “Or, at least, not by much. It has to have broader goals, otherwise—”
Deirdre jumped at the sudden mrow and abrupt appearance of Samedi. The cat leapt onto the table in a cavalcade, knocking over two drinks within seconds. Still mewling loudly, he dashed around the obstacle course of dishes and glasses as everyone at dinner stood in surprise and momentary indecision.
Victor moved to apprehend Samedi but the feline had already stolen a bite of fish and started his rush out of the room. As Nora and Olly sat back down and Victor moved toward the threshold, Deirdre saw through the window—
YOU.
—she touched Victor’s shoulder. “Vic.”
“I’m getting a rag,” he said.
“Vic,” she repeated, not letting him go.
The Mask and Robert Robertson underneath It appeared from the darkness only ten feet away from the glass. They got closer.
As Victor followed her sightline, the frustration vanished from his features. An expression of flat calm smoothed across his face. Something changed in his eyes that Deirdre couldn’t quite place. She wasn’t sure she liked it.
“Kids, library. Now.”
“But—”
“Now,” Victor repeated, his tone implying that a third request wouldn’t happen.
As Nora and Olly exited the room scowlingly, Victor unholstered his pistol, checked the chamber, and reholstered it. “Rehani, you think you got enough left in you to trigger that ritual?”
“I, uh…well, we’ll find out.”
“See what you can do. Paul, you go with her.”
They left, overshoulder glances slowing them only slightly.
“Deirdre, you got your revolver upstairs?”
As Deirdre opened her mouth to answer, the Mask, Robert Robertson Jr. beneath It, knocked a gloved hand against the window.
They both turned to stare. The Mask, Robert Robertson Jr., both of them, they stared back.
“Get your gun and meet me by the back door,” Victor said.
Deirdre nodded. She turned and ran out of the room. Her thighs immediately stung and tightened against her. All the neuromuscular energy she’d poured into the magic had left her an attenuate mess. Her run faded to a jog faded to a walk within seconds. A stitch caught in her side. It reminded her of—no. She pushed on. In the nearby west wing study, a spiral staircase twisted upwards into the west wing primary suite. Her room was just down the hall and to the right from there.
She was already panting by the time she reached the steps.
Bob and the Mask saw the pistol at the man’s hip. Yet even as they stared at him through the glass, he didn’t draw. Why not? As the Lock rushed out of the room, they lifted their knife-wielding hand and knocked again. They felt the density of the window surface, multi-layered and possibly bullet-proof; but they could break through it if they had to. But that would give the man opportunity to shoot them.
But they’d already given him that opportunity and he hadn’t taken it.
So they moved to find out why.
The glass dented and flaked around their gloved fist. A second blow broadened the divot and fissured a cobweb across the window. Shards and pebbles sloughed away in the aftershock of the punch. Bulletproof, certainly, the Mask and Bob knew. They kept their gaze fixed on the man inside as they pulled back for a third swing. When their gloved knuckles pounded a hole through the first pane, he finally unholstered his pistol. He kept the barrel pointed down and stepped away from them.
Why?
With their off-hand, they reached into the uneven hole in the almost-plastic-glass and wrenched a chunk of it loose.
The man inside took one hand off of his pistol grip and adjusted his baseball hat. He gestured for Bob and the Mask to come on in. He mouthed something to them. ‘Come get some?’ They couldn’t tell. They pried the first pane of bullet-resistant window loose and threw it to the grass.
Something felt wrong about this entire situation.
Having ripped their way halfway into the dining room, Bob and the Mask turned toward the mansion’s backyard and began walking away. As they moved, voices shouted at each other through the building. Their prey had some sort of plan, it seemed. At the very least, they had emergency preparations. Maybe they even believed they had some method of keeping the Lock ‘safe.’ As if safety was a thing that really existed.
They hesitated at the back door. A sense of unseen threat shivered in Bob’s adrenal gland. The Mask and he felt something. Bob wasn’t certain what. The Mask knew better than he did but not with any specificity.
Stepping back, Bob grinned.
(Did the Mask?)
The game had begun. The Lock had made her play. Now they had to make theirs.
Deirdre already felt halfway to keeling over when she got to the back door, revolver handle slippery with sweat. She’d pushed herself too far. Everything ached. She needed rest. But—
“He comes in, we try to lure him up front,” Victor said, stepping out of a shadowed archway. “Hopefully Rehani’s ready.”
“And if she’s not?”
“I think I can get off two or three shots before the anti-violence spell knocks me out.”
“Two or three?”
“Maybe.”
She swallowed. “And what if…?”
“I’m still thinking about that.”
They waited by the back door for something to happen. Seconds yawned widely around them. Deirdre stared at the doorknob, imagining. Her pulse filled the silence. She poised her thumb over the hammer of her .38.
Something crushed and crashed down the hall. They turned toward the noise. The muscles wrapping Deirdre’s torso ached when she moved. As the crack-crash repeated, she took a deep breath and did her best to jog toward the sound. Victor got out ahead of her instantly.
A doorless tea lounge opened on their left. A man in a mask stood on the other side of broad bay windows. He punched the bullet-resistant glass, turning a crater into a hole. As Deirdre and Victor watched, he grasped the uneven edges of the gap and pulled. Chunks of bulletproof semi-glass ripped away from the pane.
“Don’t fire until he gets inside,” Victor whispered.
After the Mask and Bob had torn apart most of the pane, they stepped back and stared.
“It’s not coming in,” Deirdre said.
“Not yet.”
The Mask and Bob turned sharply and continued walking around the house. Not long after, they started working on another window. Deirdre and Victor followed. This time the Mask didn’t bother peeling away the entire pane, It and Bob just punctured a fist-sized hole through it and moved on. Deirdre and Victor followed.
The next threshold opened into a den. Two small tables and a desk played host to five overly-cushioned chairs. Off to one side, two more minimalist, straight-backed seats awaited the resolution to an unfinished chess game. Another half-broken bay window glanced the corner of the hedge labyrinth and a roll of grass. Lights beaming down from the roof (when had someone turned them on?) revealed green blankness all the way to the treeline. Through the web of fissures fragmenting the view, they couldn’t see Bob nor the Mask.
Deirdre wanted to ask a question but found her tongue too heavy.
She focused on moving, on putting one foot in front of the other, on staying close to Victor as they tracked the monster’s progress along the perimeter of their sanctuary. One foot; the other. Deep breath.
“It’s gotta have noticed we haven’t shot It, yet,” Victor said, barely stopping to take in the next dented window. “Goddammit.”
“Huh?” Deirdre grunted, feeling faintly lightheaded.
“It’s testing us.”
The hallway curved around the enormity of the Blackwood library. The next room, a bathroom, had its small bullet-resistant window ripped apart entirely. The one after that, another dining room, this one decorated for a luncheon, had two windows, both partially dented and fractured but neither broken.
“Hold up,” Deirdre muttered, bracing herself with her left hand against the wall.
Victor froze, body torn between two directives. “Don’t take long.”
She panted in response, trying to breathe her way back to Earth.
“Victor!” Paul shouted from the entry hall, voice echoing down to them, the second syllable stretching with urgency. “He’s at the door!”
BANG
(YOU.)
Deirdre pushed herself away from the wall. Still lightheaded, she sagged forward. She managed one foot in front of the other a few times before the stitch in her side caught again. She winced, limped.
Victor reached out reflex-fast and pulled her left arm across his broad shoulders. “Hold on,” he said. “Just try ‘n’ keep pace.” She leaned her weight against him, allowing her legs to move just enough to keep pace.
BANG
(YOU.)
“I don’t think I can hold this by myself!” Paul shouted.
The air bristled with mystic power and supernatural sensation as they neared the grand entry hall. Even having done half the work herself, the sheer magnitude of their ritual caught her by surprise. Her sixth sense jerked, her instincts spasmed. She lost her footing. Victor staggered, catching her weight, and pulled her close. When the overwhelm peeled back, she heaved for breath, moving her feet as quickly as she could just to keep up with Victor’s hampered pace.
Their ritual took up the majority of the space in the broad entry chamber. Paint and chalk, offering bowls and braziers, carved bones and scrolls inked in minuscule handwriting covered the floor. Three expansive protective circles, layered concentrically, stopped just inches from the room’s boundaries.
Rehani knelt on a prayer rug in the center of the geometrically-lined design, spine straight, shoulders back, chin uplifted. Eyes closed, she mouthed a silent series of syllables as sweat rolled down her cheeks and dewed the frays off of her locs.
Paul stood braced against the double doors, an umbrella stuffed between the two door handles as reinforcement. The umbrella had already bent.
BANG
(YOU.)
Paul shuddered. The doors opened-shut. The umbrella bent.
Victor eased Deirdre off of his shoulder. “Catch your breath,” he told her.
“Mm-hm.”
Victor holstered his pistol and jogged across the floor. At the umbrella stand near the entrance, he searched for something Paul apparently hadn’t found. As he searched, Deirdre watched Paul seize again as another crash bucked against their defenses. This blow sent Paul staggering forward, all-but-snapping the twisted, gnarl-bent thing between the handles.
(YOU.)
Victor arrived at the double doors with a slat of dense cold iron. Wrenching the unrecognizable umbrella loose, he replaced it with the broader bar. Paul stepped away, wiping sweat from his brow. Victor pulled his pistol back out.
Together, they waited.
Seconds passed. They stretched on, aching around Deirdre’s unblinking eyes, but they passed. They accrued. They thickened into a minute. Longer. Pins-and-needles pricked her arm. Feeling followed. Enough time passed for her vision to clear. Her hand remembered the revolver still in it. She let go of the gun and flexed her fingers.
“What now?” Paul asked, almost a whisper.
“Give me a second,” Victor replied.
“We don’t know what It’s doing.”
“I know.”
Deirdre felt her pulse slow down. The minute expanded. She swallowed. With a groan, she pushed herself to her feet. Picked up her .38 snubnose. Leaned against the curved railing of the stairwell nearby. “Open the door,” she said.
Victor and Paul looked at her.
“What, you want to wait for him?”
“She’s right.” Victor turned back toward the doors and took hold of the cold iron bar. “The longer we wait to see if the motherfucker’s still out there, the longer we don’t know what he’s doing.”
“He could be standing right outside the door,” Paul argued.
“He could be all the way around the back breaking in,” Victor replied.
Deirdre hobbled forward. “Do it.”
Rehani didn’t seem aware of her surroundings. Her eyes rolled in their lidded sockets, her lips formed silent syllables flicker-fast.
Victor paused before pulling the bar loose. “If things…if things go sideways, get Nora and Olly somewhere safe.”
Nobody knew what to say to that.
“Hold on,” Paul said just as Victor braced himself. “Let me pull the bar.”
“Why?”
“Just—if he’s standing right there, stand somewhere you can shoot him.”
Victor nodded, stepping back.
Paul took three quick breaths, grabbed the cold iron bar, and wrenched it loose.
Nothing happened.
He stepped forward, gripped one of the door handles, and pulled.
(YOU.)
Deirdre saw It/him/them dead on. The roof-mounted floodlights caught It/him/them from the waist down only, the rest of Its/his/their silhouette swimming in midnight obscurity. Their knife gleamed. They moved it, refracting spectra and brightness back at the people inside. They took a step back afterward, as if in invitation.
Her heart throttled her throat. She hurt everywhere. She thumbed back the hammer on her revolver. “Come on,” she said, limping forward. “Come on in.” Her pulse banged against the sides of her skull. The man in(and) the mask(Mask) stepped back again. Only his(their) boots remained visible in the beams of the floodlights.
(YOU.)
She reached the threshold, standing between Paul and Victor. “Come on,” she repeated. “I’m right here.”
The Mask and the man(Mask/Bob) inside(beneath) turned around and walked into the darkness.
“No!” Deirdre screamed. She surged forward but Victor plucked her back like she weighed nothing. “No!” she screamed again. She lifted her revolver and fired blindly into the night. Victor’s other arm wrapped her gun-hand and lowered the barrel.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay.”
“No!” she shouted, not strong enough to fight anymore but wanting to desperately, “No, no, no…”
“Deirdre?” Olly asked, a shadow near the entrance to the library.
“It’s just going to find someone else,” she told Victor, Paul, Rehani, everyone. “It’s just going to find someone else…”
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