Mask of Flies (19 page)

The mask’s detail was
much rougher than the polished masks of the present society. Its face
subtly hid in the basswood—the carver only had to chip slightly
away at to bring its features to life. Its alien expression captured
something terrible, something savage. The face only had an eyelet on
the left side; the right was covered in petrified bark. The fangs
were sharpened to a point, jutting outward in innumerable directions.

I took the mask up in
both hands. When I emerged from the tree, I was no longer alone.

A large figure in black
rags stood by the bank, looking into the River. I would never forget
that terrible top hat on its head; its faded black-grey color, and
how the fabric seemed loose and weatherworn around the circumference.
The figure stood taller than any man I have ever seen, thin as a
rail, with limbs radically elongated. How it stood upright at
all—with its emaciated frame—seemed to defy the laws of gravity.

He laughed by the river
with his back turned. “We see you found what you are looking for.”
He turned and showed his awful face. His beak nose akin to his
stretched extremities. He cracked an alien smile showing blocked
teeth intermingled with fangs. Blood red flooded his eyes; I saw no
discernible sclera, iris, or pupil. Eyes that had looked beetle black
from the corner in my bedroom.

I stepped back, my foot
snagged a root. I fell flat on my back. “What do you want with me?”

The giant held up his
enormous palms, indicating violence wasn’t his intention. “We are
merely messengers, messengers of the future paths.”

“What are you?” I
got to my feet.

“Your people refer to
us as High Hat.” He snatched off his top hat and held it to his
breast, a demon and a gentleman. “But mostly, we are cursed old
bones, remnants of the Battle of Blood that took place here many
lifetimes ago. We have been tethered to the hill ever since.”

I stood silent in
disbelief. It took me a moment to come to terms with the unreality of
the conversation. I was looking at the monster of Ga’hai Hill.
Every sound of the forest hung in the air to the point of absurdity.
I felt the eternal darkness from my dream in the clearing. It lay
below the river, like an invisible reflection. Someplace else bled
through. “This is Ga’hai Hill, and the tree is of the legend,
where the woods witch, Lost Moon, was killed.”

“Yes, the legends
hold some weight.” He grinned again, and wreckage of something once
human lingered underneath terrible transformation. “You feel it,
the other side, Abaddon?

I nodded. “Abaddon?”

He flipped a gold coin
and caught it. “Life is but one side of the coin. Death is the
other; the inescapable cost of life. Abaddon is the source of
necessary destruction, the dark impetus that flips the coin and
maintains balance.” He flicked the coin up high; it arced in the
air, and landed at my feet.

It landed face up, gold
embossed with the head of the Statue of Liberty. I took it and turned
it over: the skeletonized reflection of the front, the death side.

“Abaddon flows
through all living,” High Hat said. “Unfortunately, a male dear
to you will die. The path flows through you and forks into three
junctions, one close must perish. I provide you the opportunity to
choose—don the mask and see through the darkness.”

I thought of running but lacked the
energy. Without a choice but to follow his instruction, I held the
mask to my face. Everything seemed normal at first, until I looked
where the coin had sat in my hand. Now a cobra’s head bobbed back
and forth from a hollow hole in my palm. I shook it away, and I felt
something fall. When I looked down, the ground turned into emptiness
below my feet. Dark water leapt out to greet me. On impact, the
current pulled me under.

Underneath, all was
still and silent. Enveloped in darkness, I saw Father picking
strawberries in a field with Mother. Then it cut away.

Father has always been
there and has been the lynchpin of our family’s stability. Even
though he was entering his twilight years and led a fruitful life so
far, I couldn’t beat the thought of losing him.

Then I saw Aart, atop a
girder of the grain elevator, stories above the ground below. Then
the image transitioned into the pub from my dreams. I saw his arm
around another woman, and he took her into a back room with a bed. He
forcibly kissed her and then disrobed her. When he took her, I felt
sick, and attempted to peel the mask from my face, but my hands
grasped aimlessly into the cool emptiness.

I tried to convince
myself that Aart was too young to die, that he worked hard for his
family, and despite his marital indiscretions, he held good will
towards me and our family. But it felt like a lie.

Then I saw Joseph, my baby boy. He
was laughed with Mother, who held him up and blew raspberries on his
stomach. Such a joyful child, yet my motherly connection to him
lacked. I had trouble admitting it to myself, but I had become undone
since giving birth to him. I knew the fault lied within me, not him.
It’s isn’t his fault that his mother has a troubled mind. He
didn’t ask for this burden to be placed upon me, but I can’t help
but to feel overwhelmed by his presence. Others see my feelings are
wooden towards him.

The vision melted
away. I sat on actual ground by the great basswood with the mask in
my lap. I sat there dazed, trying to put together everything I saw in
the black water.

High Hat came to me and
snatched up the gold liberty off the ground in an awkward swoop. He
looked at me with those awful eyes. “Now you must decide, or leave
it to the wind. It is your choice.”

“Aart.” My voice
cracked and tears began to fall uncontrollably.

The stretched giant sniggered,
amused by my decision. He turned and walked towards the hill. He
stopped. “Put on the mask to find me. You will seek answers.” He
continued his walk and disappeared into the horizon.

Despite exhaustion, I
had to escape that energy on the hill. I walked until I could barely
stand, and I set up camp about two miles east of the hill. With
Ga’Hai as a reference point, my sense of direction returned. I kept
the incongruous mask close by and fell asleep into another blasted
dream of the black water. It pulled me underneath, and in the depths
I saw flashes of suffering; an elder woman lay on her death bed; a
young child with dead legs dragged itself across the ground; a man in
straightjacket threw himself around dimly lit room.

I awoke disquieted from
the disturbing images. I took the mask and water skin, full of river
water, and headed towards the reservation. I hiked through most of
the night and only stopped once to take a short rest. I didn’t
return to the Heritage House, but headed straight back to my parent’s
house and slept for 12 hours.

* * *

I thought about
talking to Dancing Meadow about the pilgrimage and the mask, but, at
that moment, I didn’t want anything to do with False Face Society.
I think High Hat used the ceremony as a means to get to me. The
conversation and vision sullied my mind, like a fragmented arrowhead
caught in a vital organ, ripping it to shreds.

I was unsure if there
was credence to his revelation, but regardless, it felt like I was
being used for some other purpose. Since giving birth to Joseph, my
connection with nature had been severed. I no longer had the visions
or the capacity to see through the lens. All I saw was this pulsating
black water in my dreams, and those poisoned by it, connected to the
source that corrupts all. It wormed cracks into reality, wreaking
havoc upon every living thing.

* * *

Elias shut and rubbed
his eyes. He remembered his mother telling him,
High
Hat only eats little boys that talk back to mama and don’t do their
chores
. It must have been during the seventies, when New
York State had built the Kinzua Dam; one of the village elders had
gone into the woods, by the construction site, and came out with
stories of a very tall man, wearing a top hat that stalked him up the
Allegheny River. Everyone thought that it was just another story.

Cody sat by the door
with his tail wagging, slapping against the floor.

“All right, all
right, patience is virtue my friend.” Elias twisted his torso when
he stood, and his spine let out a hollow crunch. He rose slowly and
opened the door to frozen wilderness; the great hills slept like
giants underneath a singular white blanket as far as the eye could
see. He couldn’t help but to wonder if this High Hat really was out
there—or was it truly just some story, brought to life through his
great grandmother’s madness?

A nightmare come to
life. To escape it, Rick plunged his car into the depths of the
Niagara River. Prior to the fall, the legless man, Russell, clamped
down onto the back of Rick’s head with those serrated teeth;
injecting dizzying sickness. The subterfuge, masked as pain,
compelled Rick to take the car off the bridge. He had felt weightless
before the big splash—and found the darkness in the depths.

Then Rick awoke,
walking mid stride down an unknown street. His soaked clothes clung
to his skin, and the freezing temperature stung his body. He coughed
uncontrollably, expelling water from his stomach and lungs. The cold
air stifled his breathing, and he needed to find shelter.

Rick couldn’t stop
walking. Something else moved him. He felt it crawling inside him,
and then somebody-something stalked behind—close—the warped
anticipation of tips of toes scraping his heels, its breath, an
effluvium of sewage and death. Its fingers locked the hinge of his
neck, stopping him from looking behind.

In the cutting wind
Rick focused everything to fight the pushing impulse. He stopped, but
something stirred. The subtle crawling underneath his skin roused
into a frenzy. Faint droning increase into a grating buzz, that
coalesced into a deafening barrage. Rick screamed. The crawlers
twisted, stung, and bit, devouring him from the inside out.

The view of the snow capped slums
shattered into a thousand pieces. An amber light encased in darkness,
the only thing left. Forward, segmented into a thousand pieces, he
saw a giant tree of insurmountable height, the source of the ethereal
glow. A figure ensnared in the branches twitched to life, attempting
to hide its face. The humming cloud that carried Rick ignored this
and made way into the light.

Rick opened an eye,
looking at the ceiling of a familiar room.

With vision blurred, he
sat up in the bed. His face felt shrunken and compressed. The room
lacked the disinfectant smell of a hospital, but had the similar
stench of a long inhabited space—a caged animal smell. His muscles
waivered when he sat up and knees buckled as his feet pushed onto the
ground. The threadbare carpet looked like it would do little to
dampen a fall.

Looking below, he saw
he wore a white bed robe and that his ankles appeared pale, thinner
than remembered. Perhaps, for a while, this room was home; time in
stasis between four walls while the world moved on outside. Rick
almost welcomed the notion that the legless man from his nightmares
was—in fact—just a part of a long nightmare, going on for days,
months. It would be logical. And that horrible, strange dream of the
thousand buzzing eyes—perhaps through the tunnel everyone sees
before dying, but maybe, hopefully a dream as well.

The struggle over to
the bathroom exhausted him. The mirror reflected a face bandaged,
completely. With no recollection of injury or accident, Rick groped
for the endpoint of the wound mask. Straps of blood soaked gauze fell
to the floor when he finished unwinding, only to find another mask
underneath. The reflection stared back with derision—skin turned to
stone and melted wax, teeth pointed like stakes, and that cracked,
red eye.

Room
137 of the Oak Leaf Retirement Community.

Scabbed streaks ran
down the sides of his face. Long black and grey hair fell down past
his shoulders. Rick held onto the sink for stability and stood there,
unbelieving. Too real to be a nightmare, too unbelievable for anybody
to believe him. He didn’t-couldn’t believe this himself. The walk
back into the living quarters felt like wading through hardening
cement. He collapsed in a chair, overlooking a bay window with a
forest view in the corner room and attempted to piece it all
together.

Rick thought of Russell, the dead
woman from the motel, and, most of all, The Jane: why was he within
her body, how did he get there? He remembered the flies that erupted
from the corpse woman before her fall into the Niagara . . . their
sound, the same resounding buzzing mass in the darkness. The horde
that carried him into the light, through the tree, and into The
Jane’s broken body. A transmission flowed through, disturbing Rick
from his thoughts.

A vision through a
man’s eyes, a patient sitting in his room, decorated like the ones
in Summer Hall. He pulled out a 35mm film canister. Dumping its
contents into the hand; he picked out ten light blue pills and
arranged them on the fold of his floral comforter.

Something in Rick
applauded the man, prayed he’d put on a show, hungering for the
grand finale.

The man went down the
line, putting one pill in his mouth at a time, and then masticating
each into a powdered blue pulp. Chomping and swallowing, until there
was no more. After a few minutes he started to shake, gradually
convulsing into the violent overture, cascading mad limbs and
frothing saliva.

This new, sick impulse inside Rick,
had pleaded to be fed, now gushed over the man’s resolute
performance.
What have I become?

The vision cut away,
and Rick felt sick but satisfied by it. Whatever this was—he felt
powerless against its influence. The loss of his body left him
baffled, all he knew was The Jane was the alpha and omega. And
Russell, the intermediary. Rick thought about his conversation with
the broken woman, when he snuck into Oak Leaf for answers.