Mask of Flies (41 page)

A heavy set woman in a
wrinkled pant suite heaved over the sink. The room had a familiar
putrid smell. She let out a hoarse cough, spewing forth her inner
contents.

“What are you doing
here,” Rick said. His voice abraded his throat like sandpaper.

“I’m—sorry, not
well,” said the roughshod woman. Rick recognized the voice, one of
the other prisoners—inside Angeni. She ran the faucet and spat a
wad of corrupted phlegm towards the drain. “Mel Norton, I was
showing the house across the street.”

“. . . The Wesley
house.”

“Not any more,
Northeastern Mutual’s now. I know your voice, from the…
nightmare.”

“Much more than a
nightmare, but there isn’t time. Listen, Mel, this is my
girlfriend’s house. Have you seen her?”

“Some knocking from
below, in the basement.”

Rick ended turned
towards the basement staircase and noticed several cards from a
Detective Douglas, strewn about the kitchen table. Down the stairs a
reinforced security door stood where there once was a small, wooden
pocket door. Multiple deadbolts latched before him. They disengaged
fluidly.

Inside Allie cried in
the corner on an old coach bed. A woman lay in the middle of the
floor face down in a pool of writhing, black foam: pink maggots, red
flies. Rick tilted the woman's head back and saw it was the Korean
woman—one of the passengers. She didn't survive the trip back from
the nightmare.

“Allie, are you all
right?”

“Leave me alone,”
Allie said sobbing. “I had enough. Just leave me alone!” She
screamed.

“It's me, Rick. I’m
back. The pretender is gone.” Rick began to spout off a slew of
Allie's personal information: birthday, social security number and
bra size. When he tried to approach the bedside, she shrunk back.

“Remember the bat
that got into the house, into my shoe?” Rick asked. “Remember, I
was running full speed towards the door with one of my Nikes, and
threw it into the backyard? When I went to get my shoe back the next
morning, the damn thing was still in there. I thought it might be
dead, but when I shook it out climbed out and went air borne, and
almost dive-bombed my head, could’ve taken my head clean off.”

Allie laughed and cried
at the same time. “Is it you? What is happening?” She jumped off
the bed and hugged him. “You’re so thin.”

“I haven’t quite
figured it all out yet, but I’ll try my best. Just bear with me. I
know it sounds crazy . . . Do you remember the woman I told you about
with the deformed face that was left abandoned at the facility?”

“Yes.”

Rick sat silent for a
moment. “Simply put, the woman was haunted and possessed me, I was
her puppet.”

Allie made a face
rooted in incredulity or perhaps slow acceptance. “I noticed the
change. It was like a light switch being turned off. At first I
thought it was drugs or a mental breakdown. But there was no denying
that you weren’t you.” She shifted on the bed cradling her
stomach. “She wrote me a letter after locking me in here and said
she was using you for important work—signed it with the initials
‘A.K’.”

“Angeni Kingbird is
her name. I do know that the police will be looking for me because of
what she has done. Did you have much interaction with her?”

“No actually. She was
distant and never home. I have no idea what she was doing within …
your body.

“Any idea what were
these women doing here?” Rick asked.

“They watched over
me, fed me, and emptied my bedpan. Never speaking to me. The girl on
the floor was in the middle of taking my dirty laundry when she began
to heave up that black mess on the ground. I think she choked on it.
I tried to knock on the door to get the other lady’s attention, the
big woman, but nobody came.” Allie looked at the dead woman on the
floor. “What do we do with her?”

The doorbell rang,
followed by a knock. “Rick Soblinski, we have a warrant for your
arrest,” a woman’s voice shouted from above.

“Hello Allie, I see
that you made it home from your vacation in one peace,” The dapper
black woman said from the doorway, a soft face with intense eyes.
Next to her a short, pit bull of a man stood. “Where was it that
you went? Your house sitter told me, but I seemed to have forgotten.”

Oh
shit.
Allie thought of the dead woman in the basement.

“I was visiting some
family is all.” Allie tried to reply as quickly as possible, but
knew she sounded plastic.

“That's funny because
everybody at your job seems to be under the impression that you are
sick as a dog with pneumonia. You don't strike me as the type of gal
that plays hooky,” said the woman.

“What are you getting
at?”

“You didn't contact
us after the dozen visits, and dozen cards that I have left. That's
pretty rude. Makes me think you are tryin’ to hide somethin’ from
us.”

“Enough play,”
chimed in the pit bull. He pushed out a packet of papers into Allie.
“It’s a search warrant. I’m glad you answered. I’d hate to
kick in the door of your pretty little home.”

Allie scanned the
warrant. On the first page there was a line titled: Person of
Interest, and next to it
Rick
Soblinski
was written in with a woman’s bubbly
penmanship.

“Can I see some
credentials?”

Both detectives pulled
out their badges that were in matching fold out wallets, both also
containing their Amherst PD id cards.

“Well detective
Douglas, Lewis, before I open my home to you, can you at least let me
in on what this is about?” She knew they weren’t buying her
stall.

“Well, since you are
being so hospitable, the retirement home that your boyfriend Rick
worked at just exploded from a massive gas explosion. We expect foul
play. Your boyfriend is a person of interest, amongst a laundry list
of other heinous acts that I don’t have the time or stomach to get
into,” Douglas said.

Lewis followed suit. He
stopped in front of Allie, “How about that look around,” adding
his at the heels of his mentor.

In the kitchen there
sat one of Allie’s caretakers.

“Hello ma’am, can
you tell me what you are doing here?” Douglas asked the disheveled
woman, her face wrinkling form the sick smell of the woman.

Allie almost chimed in
and answered for her, but Mel Norton introduced herself, and gave her
reason for being there as following up with Allie about the bank
owned listing across the street.

“It would be a great
rental property, so close to the college and business park. You could
have it rented in a week, I bet.”

The two detectives
moved on and began their search of the house. The pit bull, Lewis,
went upstairs, the echo of doors and drawers being open and shut
echoed from above. The detective with the soft brown face went
straight for the basement and examined the heavy security door at the
base. Douglas's expression one of exaltation, the out of place door a
justification of her suspicion. She was good, and for Allie and Rick,
this was not going to be good.

Downstairs Rick and the
dead woman were nowhere to be found. Rick had even wiped up the mess
from the woman, although haphazardly. The narrow basement window
stood opened—how Rick could unjam the reinforced window was an
impressive feat—with hinges bent beyond normal range of travel, now
severely angled upward. The petite woman's corpse would pose no
problem, but the feat of lifting himself through the narrow opening
would have been an impossibility just a few weeks ago, with the
holiday weight he had put on. Now as just a bag of bones, transformed
by the presence of the haunted woman, things were different, terrible
and different.

“Motherfucker.”
Douglas shook her head and looked back at Allie incredulously. “I
suppose you were just airing this place out.”

“It does get a bit
stuffy down here.” Allie’s heartbeat calmed. The detective had
nothing.

“You sleep here?”
The detective pulled the linens off the mattress on the floor,
positioned underneath the window, and then flipped it up against the
wall, checking underneath.

“No, my youngest
daughter was visiting recently, she likes her privacy.”

Douglas eyed the black
smudge where the mess used to be but didn’t say anything. She moved
over to the center of the room. “Interesting reading material,”
She said and picked up one of the mommy magazines off of the coffee
table. Is your daughter expecting? “

“No but I am.” The
first truth Allie told the detective.

Douglas said nothing at that, but
responded a smirk that said it all:
I
don’t care if you’re pregnant, lady, it’s only a matter of time
before your boyfriend slips up
. But for now the
woman-detective and her partner had nothing. Douglas looked around
and made a slow walk towards the stairs, scanning the room once
again. “I’ll leave another card by your collection up there. You
call me if Rick comes back around. It’d be best for everyone.”

The communication
with Rick started a week later with a yellow post it she had found in
her car, attached to the underside of her visor. She found it
checking her makeup before going into work. It simply stated:
glove
box.
Reaching over, she popped the latch to the
compartment; inside she found a packaged prepaid phone. Another post
it on the package stated: “Call you tomorrow, 9PM. —Rick.”

That following night,
Allie got inside her car at 8:45, and watched the tiny LED window for
the incoming call. Almost a half-hour later, it rang—the window
displayed “Unknown”.

“Allie, baby.” Rick
said with a hoarse voice.

“Are you alright?”

“Relatively.”

Allie broke into tears.
“This is a nightmare—the police trail me most of the time when I
leave the house—nobody will talk to me. The only thing I get is
stares and pointed whispers. And you … you are gone.”

Silence on the other
end.

“Do you know about
the handicapped women at a group home? I know this can't be true. I
know that it wasn’t you, but this isn’t just going to disappear.”

“Enough!” Rick
shouted. “I know, and I’m doing the best I can. I just need some
time to figure out what to do, what’s best for you, me and the
baby.”

Allie felt sweat bead
underneath her wool coat. She adjusted the heater down. “How’d
you know that I’m pregnant? I never—”

“That’s not
important now. You know I have to disappear for a while.” Rick
coughed, and continued with his voice breaking, “I want to see you
before I go.”

“Rick?”

“Get rid of the note
and the phone. I will get a time and a location over to you shortly—
I love you.”

The dial tone sounded and Allie was
alone.

It took three days
for Allie to get the next note. Checking under the visor had become a
new ritual every time she went outside, or became a reason to go
outside. If somebody had been watching her closely, they would have
found it to be suspicious behavior, but the patrol car that had been
regularly parked across the street a week ago, now only circled the
cul-de-sac on occasion. It finally fell from her visor during her
routine check when she warmed the car up.

Rick wrote the note on
a weathered piece of loose-leaf pulled from a spiral notebook;
scrawled sloppily it read:
Meet
me at Lossen Park, midnight, at the intersection of Maple View Walk
and Deer Run.

Underneath the note she found a map
of the network of trails within Lossen. The path to the intersection
was outlined with a thick black line that formed a black snake. The
park was only a town over, in a relatively newer area of Cheektowaga,
known for its well-maintained nature paths, frequented by the
suburbanites from the nearby subdivisions by day—their delinquent
children by night.

Allie sat in his
recliner when the clock hit 11:00 pm. She had a flashlight, sitting
on the end table next to her that she found had found in the
basement. Earlier in the evening, after attempting to eat her dinner,
a can of vegetable soup, she had rode to the corner store and bought
new nine-volt batteries. After sunset it would be very dark in the
dense forest.

The drive over was a
blur, a bad dream bordering nightmare, come to life. A gate blocked
her path when she reached the entryway to the park, so she doubled
back about a block, parking in the Lossen Estates apartment complex.
On foot she simply walked around the railed gate, and there was a
clear path from foot traffic, probably the neighborhood kids.

The locations of the
trails were marked by a sign at the end of the entryway.
Deer
Run
was the closer of the two, just a little ways to the
north east corner of the cleared, recreation area. She heard a rumble
of a truck approaching from down the road. Shutting off her flash
light, she ducked behind a bench as it drove by—a service truck. It
continued until it was out of sight around the bend of the perimeter
road, patrolling or whatever park workers did at that time of night.

A graveled walkway led
through the woods, but after about a quarter mile it transitioned
into an elevated boardwalk that followed a small, partially thawed
stream. Tall evergreens loomed over the wooden construct. The winding
walk was unnerving. Allie clutched the flashlight, her only guidance
in the encapsulating darkness. At a clearing, that she thought was
the meeting place intersection, she was greeted by green glowing eyes
refracting the trajectory of her light, and she stopped to consider
running in the opposite direction but then realized it was only an
adult doe and her fawns drinking from the stream. They looked up at
her just as frightened.

“I’m glad you made
it.” A familiar voice said suddenly from behind.