Mask of Flies (7 page)

The blood spatter on
Rick’s arms began to dry and tighten, a reminder that he had killed
again. He drove his rust riddled Toyota down Main Street with
caution, occasionally glancing down at the speedometer. Half naked
and varnished with a dead woman’s vital fluid, the last thing he
needed was getting pulled over for speeding.

He tried to recount exactly what
happened and remembered agreeing to meet Russell, the auditor, for a
few drinks after work. After more than a few, at The Milkbar of all
places, the rest of the night turned a complete blur.

He woke up to a
crash. The furniture, the smell, a dingy motel room. He had looked
towards the noise and saw a vague figure in the corner, watching him,
perched on a chair. Pure hatred coursed through him. It emblazoned
him. He flung out of the bed towards it, grasped its slick skin, and
took it to the ground. He saw black eyes and a lack of legs in a
tumbling glimpse. The legless man slid free upon impact and seemingly
vanished into the wall.
It was
the man in the bathroom from that strange nightmare, but that was
just a dream—and this blood is very real.

A silhouette had sat
upright on the bed and belted out a shrill scream. This exasperated
Rick’s rage to another level. He yanked the telephone off the
nightstand by its base and slammed it into the scream. He brought it
down again and again, washed over in blind fury, hellbent on smashing
the perpetrator. Each blow produced an emission of warm spray, and
the scream transfigured into a damp whimper, then an empty moan
before conceding to silence. He pushed himself off of the body below,
and his hand slipped blood, grazing what felt like a breast. In
haste, he turned on the bedside lamp, and it illuminated a dead
woman, naked and brutalized. His insides had ballooned, and he
vomited onto the floor.

He had run outside, hoping it was
all a bad dream, but the snap of the cold morning was proof enough
that it wasn’t.

Blacking out from
drink was not something that Rick had ever experienced. He came to
the conclusion that he must have been drugged and kidnapped: what
somebody would want with an ex-con that made fifteen dollars and hour
was beyond his scope of comprehension. None of it made sense.
Why
would the woman scream if she was in on his kidnapping?
The more Rick thought about it, he knew the woman was probably just
as frightened as he was of the legless man. There was no denying the
truth; he had killed another innocent person.

He glanced in his
rearview, and there were no cars. Scrubs in a crumpled pile in the
backseat, strewn about when he had changed to go out with the auditor
for the evening. And paperwork of the Jane Doe that he forgot to
return to the nurses’ station.

The
Jane—she talked to me.
Her warning: “He knows what you
did, he knows what you are.” Yesterday, discounted as mere noise,
but now her words made perfect sense. Someone or something was
bringing out the worst in him. Could it be that the legless man from
the nightmare burrowed some sort of passageway into reality?

If it was her intention to warn him,
then she would have to understand it to some level. Going to her for
answers could prove to be dangerous, but he saw no other options.
Everyone else would think he was crazy. He drove towards the
retirement home, the guilt of killing continued to fill his insides.
It stuck to his ribs like a home cooked meal, albeit an undercooked
one, riddled with maggots.

When he arrived at
Oak Leaf, he immediately killed his headlights upon pulling into the
rear parking lot. The night manager, Steve, would likely take notice
of any movement at the front of the dead silent facility. He would be
sitting at the front receptionist’s desk, with his feet kicked up,
watching a reruns of old cop shows on his handheld television.
Regardless of his penchant for bad TV, Steve remained tuned into his
surroundings, so Rick opted to be cautious.

Rick parked his car by
a barren willow caked in snow and thought of his best course of
entry. This end of Oak Leaf was windowless and poorly lit, offering
concealment to enter the facility unseen. There were two ways in: the
main-rear entrance—opening to the annex housing the main
administrative offices, and there was the loading dock door. The
problem with the main-rear was that it led into the same foyer that
Steve was probably sitting in; Rick would have to sneak around the
back of him without making a sound, or being caught in his line of
sight. The loading dock doorway was a better choice; it accessed the
facility’s cavernous storage area and was interconnected to each of
the hallways. And Rick had navigated the storage area on numerous
occasions when restocking incidentals to the rooms in Summer hall.

The
garage door would cause too much noise to use, but the lock on the
old white door could be picked
. Rick could use a credit
card from his wallet, but he remembered he had something better. He
reached in his backseat and pulled forward a bag from the hardware
store, and pulled out: sandpaper, a facemask, and finally a flat,
metal paint scraper that would easily slip into the jam of a door.
Holding the scraper, he gently shut the car door and then traversed
the darkness towards the loading dock.

He jimmied the paint
scrapper into the jam of the door, and the first few tries to
discretely break the lock of the door were unsuccessful. Rick simply
overestimated the weakness of the lock. He put some muscle into the
next attempt that resulted in a loud crack-pop of the lock braking.
The door opened, and inside were various paper supplies and some bed
robes. He grabbed a large robe and put it on—it served to conceal
the spatter on his arms. The outlets to each hallway were marked by
signs; he found Summer Hall and emerged undetected. He opened the
door to room 137. He found Jane sitting up in her bed, as if she had
been waiting for him.

“I knew you would
come back. To ask about the legless wretch, yes?” The Jane spoke to
Rick without moving her mouth again, but the words seemed much
clearer than before. She seemed livelier than ever.

“What is happening to
me? Who are you?” Rick asked, as he approached the bedside.

“Who I am is not
important. He is into you, pulling you in whatever direction they
please. He will inevitably destroy who you are, if you let him, and
there are outcomes much worse than death, as you can see.” She
waved her hand down her face, brandishing diseased flesh. “You
don’t want to end up like me now do you?” The Jane asked.

“What does he want?”

“He is one of many,
of those that do the breaking. In the end we all break, one way or
the other, thus, they always win. They are from the outside of what
we know in life, and hide in the deep dark, feeding off our natural
demise. They know no name, but nonetheless, we are dealing with an
apt force that is attempting to break through the barriers between
worlds to feed on their own accord,” The Jane said.

“So, you’re saying
some sort of ghost or demon is trying to possess me? What would he
want with me? Rick leaned on the wall and crossed his arms.

“Ha, such simple
blanket terms; may be neither, or both.” The Jane sat motionless,
with her red eye fixated on Rick. “I have seen all kinds of them.
Some could be deemed ghosts—entities that could have once been
human. And there’re others beyond corporeal description, other than
the fact that they are malice incarnated. All I know is one of them
found a way into our world: through me, into you.”

“Through you, into me
. . . the legless man . . . ”

“I have dealt with
them for a long time. My mind operates on different channels than
most people.” The Jane’s voice cracked. “The legless one you
speak of is clever, has many disguise
s
,
many tricks up his sleeve. He fancies himself Russell.”

“Russell . . . ”
Rick realized why the auditor’s face looked so familiar; because it
was the face of the imp from the nightmare, just smoothed out to pass
as human, a clever disguise indeed.

“He cozened you to
believing him friend, and you dropped your guard, drunk and
vulnerable. He lived again through you for a night, and what a night
it was. But he is not with you now, no, he is with the girl from the
motel. She doesn’t have long.”

“The woman is already
dead.”

“So you think. I told
you he has tricks—”

“Then explain this.”
Rick took off the robe, exposing caked blood on his arms.

The Jane laughed again.
“Look in your shorts.”

Rick hesitated.

“Go on. Inside, all
the way.”

He pulled the elastic
band of his briefs forward and saw his genitals similarly caked in
blood. He said nothing and looked at the Jane with wide eyes.

“Nothing to worry
about Rick, your man-parts are still in working order. The woman in
the motel was simply on her monthly misery when, well you know . . .
” Her voice sounded ancient now. “He implanted the experience of
killing the girl within you, so you would storm off, as you did, and
he could take her. You see, the woman is imbalanced, her mind turns
against her; easy work for Russell. He plans to manipulate the woman
into throwing herself over the Canadian side of Niagara Fall, at the
crest, ‘tis a special place.

This
is all too much.
Rick rubbed his temples.

“I can see the woman,
through the woods. He leads her across the shallows of the Niagara
River, towards the falls. If you don’t stop him, he will gain
strength. And the next time he gets inside of you, you won’t break
away so easily.” The Jane’s head began to slouch and her eye
began to close, as if fighting off sleep.

A part of Rick was
incredulous of The Jane’s prophecy, but how she did know he would
have blood in his shorts? “How do you see all of this?”

“Think of the radio
in your automobile; with the twist of the knob you can listen to
whatever you want. In my case, the channels of my mind are only set
to the parasites that travel through me.”

So many questions raced
through his head: what was so special about the Canadian side of the
falls? What happened to the Jane, and why did things like Russell
travel through her? But there wasn’t time, so he decided to ask
something pertinent. “How can I stop something like this?” Rick
asked.

“Wake her up,” The
Jane paused and held a clenched fist to her chest, like she had a
case of indigestion. She rocked back and forth, her good eye closed,
and she began to audibly choke. The Jane’s featureless face
writhed, then transmuting to a painfully stretched countenance—long
and horse-like. She got to her feet, stood up on top of the bed, and
both of her hands clawed her face. Blood snaked between her
fingertips. The haunted woman screamed.

Rick knew he had about
fifteen seconds to exit before Steve would come hurdling down Summer
Hall to reach the scream.

He felt the cold handle
of The Jane’s door and then the knob of the storage closet. In what
seemed to be an instant, he made it outside. The escape seemed
surreal, as if floating through time, unhinged from reality. He had
to go to the woman from the motel room—across the border, to
Canada—but could not fathom what would be waiting for him there.

When Tony came to a
small shanty sided with dark brown shingles, he had been driving down
an unmarked road for seven miles. Luckily the area had a thaw that
melted the underlying snow, which if covered, would make traversing
the sparsely traveled road impossible. The cottage bellowed out smoke
from a blackened chimney top, and a weather vane shaped as a rooster
wobbled precariously during abrupt gusts of wind.

* * *

Tony didn’t think
he would ever find the house of Elias Kingbird upon his arrival in
Salamanca earlier in the afternoon; he hadn’t received much help
from the locals. A man looking at hunting knives said Elias died
years ago. Others said he fled the country. An elderly Seneca man
said he had him in his pants pocket and doddered of to commence what
the senile do. A shop clerk confirmed that Elias drove an ‘86, or
‘87 Cutlass, but he had no idea where he stayed, and said he hadn’t
seen him in a few years.

The pursuit to find
Kingbird had gone absolutely nowhere. As he walked outside on to the
store’s deck a very pregnant woman approached Tony as he exited
through the door.

“Excuse me sir, but I
heard you were looking for Elias. Why?” asked the young woman with
big brown eyes.

“I’m Tony Delgado;
I work for a nursing home in Williamsville. We recently have taken in
a patient who has serious health issues.” He sheltered his hands in
his pockets from the frozen air. “I’m here to get background on
her—perhaps the name of a former doctor who can supply us with a
comprehensive history. The Sheriff’s office has found some
surveillance tape that implicates Kingbird as a person of interest
for her abandonment. I want to try and smooth the situation over
before the patient’s health further deteriorates.”

“I see—my name is
Jennifer,” She put out her hand and shook Tony’s softly. “The
Kingbirds were friends with my family before Elias’s wife, Meni,
died. I remember her saying that they cared for Elias’s grandmother
at the house—perhaps she is your mystery patient?”

“So are you still in
contact with Elias? Is there any way you can point me in his
direction?” He zipped his winter coat up to the top of his neck.

“The Kingbirds lived
out on the edge of the reservation. Their house is on land adjoining
Allegheny State Park. It borders three sides of their property,
running for roughly twenty miles on each way. Needless to say,
secluded,” Jennifer smiled, touching the bottom of her swollen
stomach. “But I haven’t talked to Elias in years . . . nobody has
since Meni died, and I don’t know much about Elias’s
grandmother’s condition either. Meni had mentioned the woman was
mentally ill, and that they struggled to care for her.” She sat in
a wicker chair on display and squinted at Tony. “You do seem like
you are truly here to help—I’ll give you the benefit of the
doubt. I can draw you a map to their land. But it’s kinda tricky to
get to.”