Ch. 17 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

The world fogged around Bob as he awoke. Twinned stenches of copper and senescence overstuffed his nostrils; a corpse hung from his uvula, tugging. Pushing himself up from a hardwood floor, he braced against a wall for balance. Shadows danced carnally in his periphery, throbbing to the rhythm of his pulse.

A board creaked overhead. Bob stared woozily up at the ceiling. Had somebody up there survived? Had someone knocked him out? Did that explain his unconsciousness? He retrieved his long knife from where it glinted on the blood-streaked floor and peered down the hall toward a stairway landing spotlit by sunset haze. He squinted. Sunset? How long had he…?

He remembered entering the low, flat building and walking along aisles of sheening eyes to find a man working. He remembered the knife sliding into throat, sliding out, sliding in again. After that, he’d circled back around the building and found the other man he’d seen enter the property. And then…

…and then…something…

Wood creaked overhead. Dust stirred. Bob searched for the Mask. Who had taken it off of him? And how? He spun, desperately scanning, but saw no trace of It. It? (Capitalized? When had he started to capitalize It?) Heart rate rising, he walked toward the stairwell landing and scanned for a place to hide. Whoever came down the stairs, he’d ambush them.

(something wrong with the faces)

creak

More blood spattered the hallway beyond the stairwell. Drag marks trailed dark, coagulated streaks through a t-shaped intersection. Bob became aware of a large family room to his left. A heap of broken bodies piled the fly-buzzed center. How many people had he found on the farm? Math tabulated itself in his head. Before he finished the formula, a shock of cold spasmed through him.

Shouldn’t he know the answer to that question off-hand?

Boots clomped down the stairs.

Bob turned into the family room and pressed himself against the wall. The boots paused at the stairway landing back down the hall. Swallowing, ears ringing, Bob turned to look at the ragged gathering of corpses.

Corpses that had not been piled, he realized, but arranged.

Six bodies arrayed the room in various states of dismemberment and evisceration. Their limbs, snapped and broken and sometimes de-boned, connected them all into a strange, kinked symbol. Bob tried to make sense of the six twisted carcasses but… 

No. Not six. Seven. The last body hung from the ceiling. The hanging made it a message. Not hearing any further footfalls, Bob inched away from the wall for a better look. The hanged corpse belonged to a white male, late middle-ages. The farm owner? Family father? Both? Bob and the Mask had knifed his throat open and had bandaged the wound shut again post-mortem, pre-hanging. Bob squinted in the dimness, the windows venetian-blinded. Something was wrong about his face. What was wrong with his…?

Bob stepped closer, ears burning, eyes squinted narrowly.

With a gasp, he inched back.

The face…

Someone had carved it off slowly-and-precisely. They’d run a knife along his jawline with a scalpel’s precision and they’d peeled the epidermis away from the muscle. They’d placed two bright spoons in his eye sockets. They’d broken out all of his teeth and had replaced them with mismatched shards of plastic jammed in the gums. Then they’d sewn the face back on. As best they could, anyway; the nose and lips deflated, the skin sagged at inhuman angles...

But who had done those things?

Because Bob didn’t remember them.

“What the fuck,” he whispered, maneuvering around the splay of human dead. And where had all the furniture gone? And who had moved it? “What the fuck,” he repeated, kneeling next to a woman’s face-down corpse. He touched her blood-stickied shoulder through a dark-stained button-up. His palm suckled to the tackiness. It adhered. Taking a breath to steady himself, Bob turned her over.

He had to get out of there.

He moved back to the room’s threshold and pressed himself against the wall again. He waited for some sound or sign of life. A faint ringing scored his ears. Silence hissed around it. He counted heart beats to measure time. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…

All he heard was his pulse and his breath and the low sibilance of long quiet.

Adjusting the grip of the knife to allow for more agile strikes, he turned the corner.

A fist mashed his nose to splinters. 

He stumbled backward, pain-blind. Lashed out at the air defensively. A boot knocked the crest of his shin. Grunting, he backpedaled from his attacker. His vision started to clear. He swiped the blade through the air, squinting through blear. The edge flickered and his assailant evaded the swipe easily. Bob put a couple more feet of distance between them and re-adjusted his grip. He needed reach, not speed.

He blinked away the last of the blurriness from his sight.

How?

How?

The man stood at exactly his height and bore shoulders exactly the width of his; he wore the same boots, gloves, and pants—though a different shirt—and, worse, he wore the Mask. Bob staggered back. How? It looked exactly like him—

Or did it look exactly like Uncle Nick?

Or did it look like—

The man lunged at Bob and Bob leapt back. Grabbing at nothing, the man regained his balance without pause. Bob sliced the air and skittered backward until he reached the far wall. Behind him, a kitchen. Backing onto the tile, he held the knife out before him. The man in the Mask tilted his head—their head. Bob’s muscles remembered the movement. His mouth dried up.

The man and the Mask led with a fist. Bob ducked the blow and saw an opening. He drove his knife through it. The blade speared the man in/and the Mask and sank into their body, but it didn’t feel like it usually did. It didn’t feel like a knife goring through meat. It felt like sawing through cartilage and tendon, dense and resistant.

They grabbed Bob’s wrist.

Bob swung his other fist and—

They caught that one, too. Their grip crushed his. When they twisted and wrenched on his wrist, he went with them. He didn’t scream but grimaced and whined. His joints strained with pressure, threatening to explode. The whine grew. He let go of the knife and the man in/and the Mask threw him aside. He crashed into the wall and landed on the floor. Rolling face-up, he scrambled away from them.

They peered down at the knife in their body. Nonchalantly, they reached over, gripped it, and pulled it out. Dark grue stained most of the blade’s length. Walking calmly toward Bob, they wiped it off on their same-pants and slipped it tip-first into one of their same-pockets.

Bob heard voices whispering from the other side of reality.

What?

He managed to get his feet under him. He didn’t hear whispers. He heard whispers. He both heard whispers and didn’t. His thoughts swam. He spun away from the man/Mask and went for the farm house’s front door. The man/Mask grabbed his collar, all three layers of clothing at once, and hauled him back. Two layers ripped, cloth tangling around him, and Bob lost balance. A wall slammed into him. The man/Mask grabbed his hair and pulled him away from that wall just to throw him into another.

He panted face-down, crawling. A boot car-crashed into his ribs. A couple of them snapped. Air whuffed out of him. Dizzy and pain-numbed and deaf from the layered, many-voiced whispers he heard and didn’t hear, he barely felt the man/Mask flip him onto his back.

whoareyoutakeoffy—

The man/Mask had their knees on his thighs and their hands around his throat. Bob swung at them. He punched and slapped until his knuckles and palms ached. His vision narrowed. He couldn’t breathe. The man/Mask pulled his skull up by his neck and slammed it down again. Clawing at the Mask, he tried to pull it free from whoever’s face. The vice around his throat tightened. His brain cells started dying. His lungs shrieked for oxygen. His pulse faded. He clawed at the Mask, trying to pull it free…

who—

As the Mask came loose, whose face awaited Bob beneath?

What an unimportant detail.

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