Mask of Flies (22 page)

The creature set red
orb eyes onto Tony, baring fangs in an indiscernible expression. But
Tony saw something familiar in its stretched face—the likeness of
the happy matriarch, from the photograph on Marsha Gillium’s door .
. . The lost woman twisted askew.

Tony moved backward,
slow, towards the entrance. The beast of Marsha got on all fours and
crawled towards him like four legged spider. And he froze, his
instincts abandoned him defenseless. Then—a voice beckoned from
above; a rasp of something unintelligible. Marsha turned abruptly and
crawled towards the caller, away from Tony, towards the grill, and up
through the open ceiling vent.

She had kept telling
herself that Rick would return to his normal self—in due time—but
during the week following the bizarre reunion, he had distanced
himself further away. The morning after getting home from Niagara
Falls, he had taken a shower and then insisted on looking for a new
job, right away, leaving the house without saying another word about
it. It was night when he returned and attempted to go to bed
unnoticed, but Allie waited up, wondering the whole time if his
behavior was some sort of nervous breakdown. She remembered what
Marco had said at Glen Falls: he thought Rick felt undeserving of
her. But as Rick stood there in the living room, the only
recognizable emotion she got from him was coldness.

“I got a job at the
youth detention center downtown, as a janitor. I’ll be working the
nightshift,” Rick said in a foreign vocalization, expressionless.
Something was wrong, seriously off.

Allie thought she had
to do something, or was she overacting? Smothering him in inquisition
could make it worse. “But we will be on opposite shifts—we will
never see each other.”

“Something we will learn to deal
with.”

Awkward silence
filled the weekend. When she and Rick had been in the same room—he
sat silent and retreated to the basement after only a short time.
Stirring questions never broke the surface: what of the other woman,
the pregnancy test? It’s as if Rick anticipated these questions and
willfully evaded them.

At dinner, he ate
scarcely, perhaps understandable, considering he had been recently
stuffed into a trunk and faced with the expectation of being
butchered. Broken again after trying so hard at a normal life, she
knew he needed her help. But that underlying sentiment of betrayal
blossomed,
the other woman,
and she wondered what else was omitted from his story and what were
lies.

On Saturday night the
home phone rang; the caller ID stated the number as restricted. Allie
screened it through her home answering machine. The recording clicked
on: Rick and Allie’s voices took turns delivering their little away
message. Now it sounded so fake to her. She went into the kitchen.

A familiar voice talked
from the machine: “Allie, it’s Marco. Listen, I need to talk to
you about Rick. Call me as soon as possible—and be careful.” His
voice wavered at the end.

Be
careful?
What did he know? She did not want to be baited
into another awkward conversation with inquisitive “friends”, but
there was a certain dread in his voice.

The heater rumbled
steadily downstairs, and Allie didn’t think Rick could hear the
message over the noise, but she peeked from the top of the stairway
and saw him rising from the couch. She hurried towards the answering
machine; Marco’s message could worsen her boyfriend’s funk. As
far as she could remember, Rick was a man of privacy when it came to
two things: his past and his love-life. Friend or no friend, if he
found out that Marco was butting into private matters, digging into
both forbidden subjects, she had no doubt that it would infuriate
him—in his current state there was no telling what he might do.

A little red one
blinked on the display of the answering machine, like minutes left on
a time bomb. Immediately, she deleted the message, defusing the
threat. Rick’s shadow was up and over her, to her back.

“Who was that,” he
asked. Pale and swollen with sleep, he looked like hell.

Allie drew blank.
“Ah—just work, we have a new intern helping out on the weekend.
She has trouble staying organized, nothing that can’t wait until
Monday.” She couldn’t stop thinking about Payton and what she
claimed to have seen; now it was leaking out of her subconscious.

He silently turned
away. “I’ll be in the basement, watching television, don’t wait
up for me,” He said with his back to her.

In their cold, king sized bed, Allie
had lain down by herself, longing for the old, unbroken version of
her boyfriend. Before this episode or supposed kidnapping, some
weekends they didn’t leave the bedroom, like teenagers love drunk
and alone. Now sex seemed to be out of Rick’s mind—it was
difficult to get a full sentence out of him at this point, let alone
some pillow talk. Allie wanted to cry, tried to but couldn’t. The
black hole aura of her beloved had sucked the life from her bones, so
much that sleep took her before she could fully disrobe.

Leaving work at 7
p.m. on Monday, Allie drove up Main Street unhindered—missing rush
hour, the consolation prize for being a working stiff. Vehicles
sloshed up and down through the grey dirt slush; she thought the
majority of them, like her, cared a little too much what the others
thought. When she pulled into her empty driveway, she sat in her car
a moment, looking at her Blackberry. She picked it up, found Marco’s
cell number, and hit send.

Marco answered the
phone unfamiliar with the number calling him.

“It’s Allie,
returning your call from Saturday night. You said you had something
to tell me about Rick.”

“Yes . . . there is a
deformed woman we care for here, that was just dumped here. I know
how this must sound, but Rick’s voice came out of the woman. He
talked to me, knew everything about me—”

Allie was puzzled by
this: Marco had always seen like a sane person. “But I picked Rick
up in Niagara Falls this past Thursday. He started a new job already.
Maybe the woman is playing tricks with you Marco.”

“Could be, but I’d
know the difference between an impersonation and the real thing.
Maybe you should come down and see for yourself . . . ” Marco went
silent for a moment. “When we talked, me and Rick, something else
happened in my mind. A flood of old memories stirred in the
background—finding my father dead, this was all I could think about
when I was in that room.”

“I don’t know
Marco—it’s all a little much. Have you told Tiffany about this?”

“No—she wouldn’t
believe me.” Not that he was much luck convincing Allie. “You say
Rick is home with you and landed a new job, but tell me, does he seem
like the same Rick you know?” Marco asked.

“No, not at the
moment—”

On the receiver, somebody in the
background called Marco’s name. “Okay-okay. I have to go, but you
should come to Oak Leaf and see for yourself. I’m not going crazy,
please just do me this one favor.” And he hung up.

Through the kitchen,
Allie’s attention was captured by a bottle of Pinot Noir sitting
solitarily in a small wicker rack. It beckoned her. She felt that
sinking feeling that she felt at the end of her marriage to Kevin,
the feeling that fueled the binge drinking, rooted more in
self-destructive tendency than chemical dependency. It had taken Lulu
finding her mom passed out in the living room, retching out her
insides, for Allie to realize her actions selfish and pointless.

It took years until she
felt comfortable enough to keep small amounts of alcohol in her
house. It started with blush wine given to her, as a gift for
Christmas, from Aunt Bernice. Then Rick moved in, and he had kept a
six pack in the house. Allie started living again and booze
eventually lost its power over her. But after all this time, those
awful, ugly feelings stayed hidden beneath, chained to the ruins of
her past, hopefully never to remerge again.

Despite these thoughts,
she popped the cork off the pinot, poured a healthy glass, and went
into the living room. She turned on the news and looked at the screen
without really watching, lost amongst the unshakeable feeling of
something being out of place. The wine did its job though, and some
of her anxiety was soothed thanks to the gentle rub of draining wine
into a lightly fed stomach. When the glass was empty, she went to the
kitchen for a refill—but hesitated, thinking about that little box,
the pregnancy test, that Rick had given her. She set the glass down
on the countertop.

Outside the motion
sensor flood light popped on; the light snatched Allie’s mind into
the present. She looked through the kitchen window and saw a
bedraggled man limping up her driveway. He was dressed like a Mormon
proselytizer, wearing black slacks, black jacket, and a white shirt.
As he approached, the black of his clothes looked more grayish, and
his shirt was stained intermittently with multicolored splotches.

The unkempt man went to
the front door, wrapped three times, and bellowed, “Hello, I know
you’re in there,” in an uneven tittering voice. Allie heard the
doorknob twist, but she had locked it when coming home, deadbolt and
all. With senses heightened and heart racing, she saw him abandon the
front door and creep further down the driveway. He yanked up on the
garage door, only to be jammed there as well.

Closer in the window,
Allie could see the man’s thinning grey hair and mangy beard—his
face was gaunt and yellowish looking. In the soiled clothes, his gait
seemed as if he was disgusted with himself, in his own skin. When he
made his way around the side of the garage, Allie remembered that
Rick kept the side door on the garage open, so he could take the
trash to the cans on the side without ever having to really go
outside. Then she heard the exterior door into the garage, followed
by the rapid tapping of footsteps inside. She rushed to the interior
and snapped the deadbolt into place entrance just as she saw
disturbance on the door handle. As she stood there silently by the
door, her blackberry rang out from her pocket at full volume. By the
time she fumbled through her pocket to silence it, the man pounded on
the door with his fist.

“I know you are in
there, pretty lady,” the intruder said in his strange, high-pitched
voice, now much closer than the last time she heard it.

“If you don’t leave
right now, I will call the cops.” Allie fastened the door’s chain
lock.

The stranger pounded
both of his fists into the door and grumbled through the wood of the
door.”I just came to check up on you—ta’ see if all is well
with you and Ricky. Ya see, he got away from me last time we
conversed, but I’m not mad at ‘im for his rudeness. I’m willing
to start over with him, clean slate.”

“Who the fuck are
you, and what do you want with Rick?”

“Russell. Ricky had
already showed me what a tasty morsel you are,
Ms.
Gallo
. No need to introduce yourself. Ya see, me and ‘im
are old buddies. We go way back. I even know all of his dark
secrets.”

Russell
.
Where had Allie heard that name before . . . it was the name of
Rick’s kidnapper, who was thought to be lying at the bottom of the
Niagara River. She envisioned a much different kind of person being
sent to take Rick—surely Mr. Moretti could afford to be more
discriminate in his choice of hitman—a more able bodied candidate
than this creature at the door; a vagrant that weighed maybe 110 lbs
and looked emaciated, no way could he had handled Rick’s body
alone. “I’m calling the cops right now.”

“No need for that
sugar, I was just leaving.” Russell spoke as if his words left a
bad taste in his mouth, forcefully spitting them out. “But do tell
Rick I stopped by and will be in touch with him shortly—we have
some serious catching up to do.”

It felt like breathing
through a straw, the exhaustion of the adrenaline dump after he
walked away. Allie slid and sat, her back against the door that just
had something rotten on the other side. Every ounce of his existence
seemed flawed, as if a colony of flesh eating bacteria propagated
into a human figure.

The first thing she wanted to do was
call Rick and tell him his abductor lives, and that he came looking
for him. But, to her knowledge, Rick had never bought a new cell, and
the old one was most likely laid at the bottom of the Niagara River.
She could try him at the detention center downtown, but he didn’t
leave the facilities name or number, and she was too exhausted to
partake in a wild goose chase. She decided to simply wait until he
got home.

That night, all the
locks were engaged on every door. Allie sat on the couch and fought
to keep her eyes open. Trudging upstairs, she flopped onto her bed
and faded into a deep sleep. Suddenly, she sat shotgun in the boxy
interior of a Buick, riding the icy Thruway. The driver was a
skeleton model, the kind in the doctors’ offices, no real driver at
all. When the vehicle hit a major pothole, the driver’s side door
fell off, and the skeleton rolled out at a high speed, smashing into
pieces. And Allie attempted to move into the driver seat, but she
found her seatbelt was actually a chain restraining her. She tried
steering from the passenger side, as the car began to shed all of its
structural parts over a bridge, through a deep fog—that seemingly
led into oblivion. The hood flew off, the remaining doors unhinged,
but the car continued to speed down the bridge. Fifty yards in front,
she saw the road ended; it dropped sharply into the icy water below,
and she had no way of stopping. The vehicle plummeted and smashed
through a thin layer of ice into freezing water. Underneath,
everything was weightless.

Allie awoke gasping for
air, in her big empty bed.