Masked (2010) (31 page)

He was lurking in an alleyway, his gray boilersuit and black gloves and boots rendering him almost invisible in the shadows, but the stark white skull sewn onto his mask shone in the dim light like the full moon.

Perhaps it was my mounting frustration over my inability to locate the cold demon, or perhaps I was simply annoyed to be reminded that a copycat was skulking around the streets of
my
city, but as soon as I saw Sepultura in the alley I shadowed through the side of the hearse and dove for him, hands out and grasping. Did I
intend to throttle him? To knock some sense into his masked head and drive him out of Recondito? I’m not sure, in retrospect, and now I’ll never know.

I regained solidity as soon as I passed through the closed door of the hearse, and was less than an eyeblink away from tackling Sepultura to the ground. But to my astonishment he reacted immediately to my sudden appearance before him, diving to one side as I approached. I sailed past, only narrowly avoiding crashing to the rough pavement of the alleyway, and tucked and rolled my way into a crouch. When I spun around, I saw that Sepultura had dropped into a defensive posture, shoulder to me and hands held loosely before him like a wrestler waiting for his opponent to make the next move.

“You’ve trained,” I said in faint admiration. “Not bad.” Then I added an undertone of Sent thought to my spoken words,
“But you’re no match for the
Wraith
.”

I surged forward, my greatcoat swirling around me to conceal my arm motions, and my right fist lashed out like a striking cobra at his head.

Sepultura managed to duck to the side and block the blow with his forearm, but just barely, and the force of the impact sent him sidestepping to retain his balance.

“Órale!”
he said, and I could almost hear him grinning behind his mask. “You’re fast.” Lightning quick, he jabbed straight at my neck with his left. “Always talk about yourself in the third person, though?”

I snapped back in time to avoid the jab, and then swept a leg out in a sidekick, catching him with a glancing blow to the hip. “I’ve heard you do the same, ‘Sepultura.’”

He staggered back, gripping his hip and hissing in pain through the mouth-slit of his mask. But he kept on his feet, and after a split second was back in a defensive posture. “Touché.”

He’d managed to shrug off the disorienting effects of my Sending, and was holding his own in hand-to-hand. It was clear that my copycat was not to be dismissed lightly.

“Why did you come to my city?” I demanded.

“
Come
here?” Sepultura snarled. “
Pendejo
, I was
born
here.”

I was wearying of this game, and eager to get back to the hunt. Bracing myself, I readied to leap forward and shadow straight through Sepultura, intending to solidify as soon as I was past him and then strike a blow from behind before he knew what had happened. But before I could move he suddenly straightened, his gaze trained past my shoulder at something farther up the alleyway.

“Sarah?” he said, arms falling to his sides and shoulders slumping.

I turned, and there before me hovered the demon of cold.

Only it wasn’t any demon, whether of cold or any other sort. It was a girl, or rather the ethereal and not-entirely-present specter of a girl. I recognized the murder victim from the front pages of the
Clarion
—Sarah Pennington.

I could feel the waves of cold radiating from her, and my breath fogged in the frigid air as it passed through my skull-mask.

“F-Felix. . . ?” the specter said, in a voice that reverberated strangely with distant echoes.

“No,” Sepultura said, and stepped past me, tugging the leather mask from his head. He turned his bare face to the specter above. “It’s Beto.” He paused, and then said, “Roberto. Roberto Aguilar.”

The specter wailed in dismay, and seemed to flicker from view for the briefest of instants.

“Where. . . where is Felix. . . ?” her echoing voice called out.

The unmasked Sepultura was revealed to be a young Mexican man, no more than twenty years old. He was looking right at the apparition of the girl, though mundane vision would see only an empty alley in front of him. That meant that he had the Sight, though he might never have realized it until now.

But though we live in a demon-haunted world, the spirits of the dead never return to visit the living. There is only one way I know for a live person to become a specter such as floated before us.

The echoing voice of Sarah Pennington howled in sorrow and fear once more, and, muttering beneath my breath, I named her. “
La Llorona
.” Wailing Woman.

I stepped forward and placed my hand on Sepultura’s shoulder. “You know this girl?”

He turned to me with wide eyes, looking as though he’d forgotten I was ever standing there. “I didn’t think. . . Felix
couldn’t
have hurt her. . . killed her. . .”

“Felix!” the specter of Sarah Pennington wailed.

“No one hurt her, son,” I said. “And she isn’t dead. She is simply. . . lost.”

It was likely the girl hadn’t ever imagined that she could shift away from reality. Not until she did it for the first time, and found she couldn’t get back.

“She’s been seeing my friend Felix,” Sepultura finally said. “Felix Uresti. But her dad, he wasn’t happy about her dating a Mexican. Said he was going to put an end to it. Joe Dominguez went with Felix to her house, to help her get away from the old man, but Pennington came out with a shotgun. Started shooting in the air like it was the Fourth of July. The way Felix tells it, things went crazy, Sarah came running toward him, then she just. . . vanished.”

Typically the untrained shift instinctively in states of agitation and trauma, often fleeing some perceived danger. The poor girl running away from a shotgun-wielding parent would definitely qualify.

“Felix and Joe took off running,” Sepultura continued, “and the next day the police came and carted them away, charged with kidnapping and murder.”

“Felix!” the specter wailed, perhaps in response. “Where are you?”

The specter drifted a few feet nearer, and waves of freezing cold lapped over us. I thought back to the Rattling House, and the brief moment I’d spent in the Unreal, that unending realm of darkness and cold. I knew now how the victims had come to be frozen; she’d been searching for a way back, and grabbed hold of anyone she could. How was she to know that her very touch would bring cold death?

Was she too far gone now to attempt to grab onto either of
us? Or was the reminder of her lost Felix enough to stop her in her tracks, ignoring us because neither of us were the one she sought? I couldn’t say, but knew that we would have to put an end to the danger she presented, and soon.

“But you knew your friends were innocent,” I said, looking from the specter to the young man beside me. I recognized him now as the young man from the argument I’d overheard in the cemetery.

He nodded. “That’s why. . . well. . .” He paused, and gestured with the skull-faced mask in his hand. “Sepultura.”

“You were trying to clear your friends’ names.”

The young man drew himself up straighter, lifting his chin. “I’d read all about you in the magazines. I figured, if
he
can do it, then why can’t I?” He looked back to the specter. “I never believed that Felix killed the girl, but she
couldn’t
have just vanished. I figured that she had slipped away in the confusion, and that someone
else
had nabbed her before she could rejoin Felix. So I put on the mask and started searching the streets, looking for the kind of
cabrόn
who would snatch pretty girls. But now that we’ve found her, we can
prove
Felix and Joe didn’t kill her.” He glanced over to me, his expression hopeful. “Right?”

I tightened my hand on his shoulder, sympathetically. “I’m afraid it won’t be so simple.”

I released my hold on his shoulder, and pulled pouches of salt out of my greatcoat’s pockets in either hand. I passed one of them to the young man, who accepted it with a questioning look.

“We’ll do what we can about your friends,” I told him, tugging open the drawstring on the pouch. “But there’s something we must do, first.”

Though one is a lost human being and the other is a fiend of the Otherworld, there was much in common between the specter before us and the shade that I had banished on the dock earlier tonight. Neither of them can conscience crystalline structures of any kind, and the perfectly cubed molecules of everyday salt are particularly anathema. And running water and flames are capable of discomfiting both, and of driving them away from reality.

I motioned the young man to mirror my actions, and began laying down a wide ring of salt on the ground beneath the specter’s hovering form.

“I will explain later,” I said, not unkindly, when I saw his confused expression.

There is simply no way to end Sarah Pennington’s suffering, at least no way that Xibalba ever knew. But it
is
possible to drive her away from reality, pushing her further into the Unreal where she will pose no further risk to the world she’s left behind. And God forgive me, I had to do it.

“
Don Mateo
,” I Sent to the old daykeeper in the hearse idling a short distance away.
“I’m afraid we will need the acetylene torch.”

Already the sky outside has begun to lighten, and dawn is not far off. I’m reluctant to sleep, worried that the image of that poor girl will revisit me in my dreams, but I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.

The city was safe. . . for now. It was only a matter of time before evil once more imperiled her innocent citizens. But whatever the threat, whether man or monster, from earth or beyond, they would have to contend with the city’s ever-vigilant silver-skulled sentinel—THE WRAITH.

T
UESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
3, 1942

The papers this morning carried the story of how Joe Dominguez and Felix Uresti escaped from jail in the night. The
Clarion
quoted the Recondito chief of police as insisting that the two young men could not have broken out of their cells on their own, and must have had outside assistance. The
Telegraph
, never shrinking from sensationalism, quoted an unnamed jailer as saying that “only a
ghost
could get through those walls.”

Or a Wraith, I’m tempted to point out.

Without a body to produce, living or dead, there was simply no way of proving the innocence of the two men. Even if I
had
been willing to step forward, reveal myself, and testify in court, the account would simply be too fantastic for a jury to accept. But I could not allow two innocent men to go to the gas chamber, not if I had the power to see justice done.

The two were startled when I shadowed through the wall of their cell, to say the least. But when I explained why I had come, and what awaited them if they remained, they were all too eager to leave with me. Shadowing with even one full-grown man taxes my abilities to their limits, so Uresti had to hide in the darkened alley behind police headquarters while I shadowed back through the brick wall for Dominguez, but by the time I had both of them free Aguilar had arrived with changes of clothes and busfare for his friends.

They are already on their way south to Mexico, where new lives and new names wait for them. Like my new associate in the boilersuit and wrestling mask, Dominguez and Uresti were both born in California, and neither have left the country before. But I know they will adapt. They are hardly the first to have to leave the land of their birth and adopt new names in order to survive.

A dozen years behind the mask of the Wraith, and I’ve become too quick to make assumptions. Have I learned so much since the day Don Javier found me in the jungle that there is nothing left for me to be taught? Not hardly.

I had assumed the deaths by freezing to be the work of a demon of cold, though neither Don Mateo nor I had ever heard of any such creature before. Had I stopped and thought a bit more, might I have recognized the telltale signs of an untrained shifter-turned-specter, one whose touch bled heat away into the Unreal? And if I
had
recognized the signs, might some of those who died at the specter’s touch still be alive today? Perhaps.

Too, I was all too quick to assume that a pachuco in a zoot suit was naturally guilty of any accusation. Like the “cold demon” I sought, the young delinquents were an invasion from without, a
threat to the security of my city. But like poor Sarah Pennington, boys like Dominguez and Uresti were no invasion, but had been here all along.

I won’t be around forever. And one day my patience may wear thin enough for me to storm the gates of the Guildhall and bring that monstrous building crashing down on the fat-cats’ heads. When I am gone, there needs to be someone who can pick up where I left off. There must be a successor with the Sight capable of protecting this city against all threats, from without
and
from within.

Last night, Sepultura tangled with the Wraith. (Damn, I
do
refer to myself in third person, don’t I?)

Today, assuming he makes our scheduled meeting at the cemetery, Roberto Aguilar will be properly introduced to Alistair Freeman.

And tonight, my successor’s training will begin.

I may not be the daykeeper that Don Javier was, but with Don Mateo’s help—and assuming that Aguilar is an apt pupil—I will make sure that the legacy of Xibalba does not end with me.

Charlotte will be here soon. I’ve not seen her since yesterday afternoon, and all she knows about the events of the night is what she might have gleaned from the morning papers. I will have to tell her that I banished an innocent girl to endless exile in unreality, all to safeguard a thankless city—but perhaps not right away. Let me pretend for a moment to be a simple writer of cheap fiction, an old man in fact as well as name, who can turn away from the night’s horrors as simply as lifting his hands from his typewriter’s keys. I know night will fall, and with it the need to take up the silver mask once more, but give me this one bright moment of sunshine for my own.