Mask of Flies (25 page)

Morrow placed the mask
to my face, and tightened it with an improved fastener. “The heat
is necessary to recreate your mental state from the pilgrimage: heat
exhaustion and dehydration.” He pulled out a green bottle full of
dark fluid from his jacket. “We will be giving you a dose of
Ayahuasca—a psychoactive substance used by shaman in South America
to induce and sustain spiritual visions. We have been waiting to
tests its application on someone with your talents, and here we are.”

I squirmed and kicked,
but the restraints held.

“There are many
different brews of Ayahuasca.” He shook the bottle and the viscous
fluid clung to the glass each rotation. “We had trouble finding the
recipe for our testing. One brew is used to clean jungle parasites
out the system; others used to talk to the dead; this particular
blend calms the mind, enabling the navigation of visions clearly,
without any interference. Three bouquets of roses are hidden
throughout the facility. I don’t even know where they are. I want
you to find them, remember details of each of the locations, and give
me proper directions on your return.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Oh Angeni, you are
making me be ugly. There’s Roger, your family in Salamanca—your
infant son. For their sake, I advise you cooperate.”

The pulpy fluid poured
in clots, into a measuring cup. Morrow tilted the mask up, and poured
the green mire down my throat. One cup down, then another, the greasy
fluid tasted of wood, mud and grass.

After dosing me, they
left me alone in the sweltering room. The two shrouded men looked on
the room through sliding cuff ports in the door. My vision blurred
and mouth stymied with the lingering taste of the fluid. The heat
from the brazier sweltered, robbing my body of water. Water droplets
fell from the ceiling. I lifted my head in hopes of catching one
through the mask. After an hour the droplets became a steady stream
of water. Then the ceiling cracked, and the water spouted downward,
filling the room quickly.

It was up to my neck
when I screamed for the guard’s help, but they didn’t move, their
eyes just floated in the door’s slit, ever watchful. Underwater, I
pulled and pulled, tearing free a hand and unfastened my restraints.
I tried to swim to the top, for air, but a current pulled me down and
into an opening in the wall.

The water sucked me
through a long narrow tunnel; the gravel walls rubbed my elbows raw.
When I thought I would drown, the tunnel opened up, and I shot out. I
fell for what seemed to be a hundred feet. A large body of black
water swallowed me. Fighting to the surface, my lungs greedily sucked
in air. Ashen clouds obstructed most of the light. Only the temporary
purple fingers of lightning provided occasional glimpses of my
surroundings. I heard cries, the sound of struggling, from a
distance. It filled the watery void as I drifted onward.

Red light painted the
horizon. The current pulled me towards it. Closer, I saw a stone
island cutting out from the water, on top sat a towering tree;
glowing red buds covered the branches. The current beached me on the
isle’s pebbled shore, and I slowly got to my feet.

An elevated path
brought me to the top of the rock, to the tree. It was beautiful
towering upward, and the air seemed alive—some sort of humming
vibration rattled me.

A crone’s voice
boomed from the treetop. “You weren’t supposed to come this deep,
so fast.” Her voice startled the glowing red buds off the branches
into flight—some sort of flying insects. The swarm swelled above
the tree.

I stood silent and
terrified. Around the upper portion of the trunk, I made out a woman
figure imbedded in the bark—an incased prisoner.

The woman-in-the-tree’s
amber eyes glowed in the swarm’s light “Fear not. I saved you
from the others, argued your worth.”

“My worth, what would
I be able to do for you?”

“For us? Everything.”
The flies settled around the base of the tree, amongst the upraised
roots. “Abaddon is a dependent on the living world—its slave
shadow, begging for scraps. The safety of the maturing world has
starved us. A living agent could bridge the gap and help restore
balance.”

“Lost Moon?”

“Yes, that was my
name long ago, but I am something else now. I was not loved, but I am
not the villain the legends would have you believe.”

“How did I get here?”

“This experiment has
pushed your mind too far, into the depths of the void, Abaddon. Any
further and you would have gone to death. By inducing your mind with
their poison, using the mask, they tore open a pathway here. Now your
mind is bound here.”

I felt faint and sat on
the ground. “This is not your will?”

“No, we planned to
slowly develop your perception.” Lost Moon spoke in a kind tone
from above. “I will send you help; he is vile but will serve to
preserve your physical existence, for your mind will demand new
nourishment now. I recommend a taciturn approach to your discourse
with him. But use him to conceal the passageway in your mind and stop
the others from breaking through. These others only thirst for
idiot’s destruction and serve no purpose to me.”

“You want control of
the passageway.”

“Yes girl, but we
cannot control what we have yet to understand . . . Before you leave
me, I have a gift for you: my pets. Learn to use them as your looking
glass, for the old gift is shattered. And your body treads so close
to darkness. Now suffering is inevitable. They will become your
legs.”

The red, glowing
insects burst from the roots, from the base of the trunk, into the
air. The swarm swooped down, enveloping me. My mind scattered across
a thousand eyes. It lifted me upward, inside. I became the swarm.
Into the roots and out the other side, it was that simple. Amongst
the swarm I saw flashes of green and blue: From the darkness into the
light, through the one tree that exists twice.

My senses pulled me to
the sweet stench of death at the base of the hill. The commanded
swarm found a dead turkey lying by the bank. And we pushed out the
common flies that feasted. I felt the swarm’s consensus to
penetrate the bloated thing—to taste its sweetness. We swooped down
and smothered the carcass, entering any opening to taste the
succulent, spoiled meat.

Upon the first taste, I
saw through its dead eyes and felt a network of a hundred flies
within, like attached buzzing strings, and I was their puppet master.
Without a living host to contend with.

I spent an hour in the woods growing
accustom to Lost Moon’s pets. The sky darkened when I exited the
carcass with the swarm of red flies. And we went back towards the
great tree; I hoped to return to my body in one piece.

I opened my eyes
inside the Farseer’s sweltering room, drenched in sweat. The bonds
on my hands and feet were broken. I touched my face and the mask was
gone, but my skin stung. A pile of white ash lay around my feet on
the floor. The room’s atmosphere rippled. Two peculiar shapes moved
shrouded amongst the interference—one man-shaped, the other not.
One trudged, the other slithered to the entryway of the sweat box,
disappearing through the door

These were the
wandering spirits the Lost Moon spoke of; parasites from the black
sea. I functioned as passage into the living world, to fertile
hunting ground. Like ticks and fleas they thirst for lifeblood.
Before they fed from afar, waiting for life to fall between the
cracks of death, but now they can hunt and take.

The locked door flung
open. Rubbing my face, I went through the door into the poorly lit
hallway. The smaller guard stood facing the corner with his hands
upraised inside his hood. An atmospheric glimmer surrounded him. I
pulled on his shoulder, and his hand clawed at his left eye—the
right socket had been plucked clean. He mumbled “Deep dark
,
”
over and over,
in a
strained whisper. The diaphanous tendril slithered past on the floor;
I left the guard to his own mutilation to follow the snake shimmer
through cavernous hallway.

Down a ways, I found
the larger guard on his knees. The tendril forced its way into the
man’s mouth, contorting his jaw beyond its tolerable range. Skin
and tendon stretched until broken—the blood streamed down. His
muffled scream echoed through the hollow earth. When the thing got
inside of him, he fell to the ground lifelessly. I took a wide a
berth around.

The sound of metal
compressing on metal came from the hall’s exit. My exit blocked by
a large cast iron door. Morrow locked us in, to contain what he had
released.

Footsteps approached
from behind, beyond the blackened bend. Elongated silhouettes
stretched in the candle light. I shrank into the wall, doing my best
to hide, but there was no source of concealment. When they appeared,
they passed by as if I wasn’t there.

The possessed men threw themselves
against the heavy door, lacking the understanding that it was much
denser than their flesh. The intensity of their attack slowed, as
their battered bodies ceased to function. Blood painted the kettle
black door, and the ruined bodies lay limp, piled precariously on top
of each other at the foot.

I hid by the sweat
box, as far I could get from the bodies. After a few idle hours, a
woman called from above. The ceiling was three times as tall as the
hallway is wide. The pale face and blonde ringlets of Ms. Roux hung
down from a porthole; her face looked miniature from the distance.
She lowered a basket that contained: canned preserves, a sealed
container of water, candles, matches, some of my clothes, and a few
books—including my journal.

“Let me out of here,”
I shouted up at her.

She hung her head
silent, evading eye contact.

I yanked the rope
attached to the basket to see if I could evoke a response or pull
myself up, but it fell onto the ground. Roux’s head disappeared
above as the aperture slammed shut, and the rumble of something heavy
rolled over the top of it.

At the other end of the
hallway, I heard iron door creak open. I ran down the corridor but
was too late. The door slammed shut as I approached, and the ground
cleared of the bloodied corpses.

Alone I sit, I let the
darkness in.

Undated

From the black
waters, the wanderers breathe madness into this world and sing the
song of all the broken things, of all the breaking things. They
whisper their little game into my ear but are disappointed to see me
here, alone in the dark. Why trade the deep dark for the shallowness
of this little hallway?

The men that put me
here keep their distance, fearing for their minds, for their lives. I
know they know I am poisonous; perhaps they are just biding their
time to kill me.

But I leave here, this
prison, through simple visualization of the great basswood in the
black sea of Abaddon, I’m there, walking out from underneath of its
rooted enclosure. Beneath the witch also imprisoned. This focus has
become reflexive: the great tree that exists twice—now thrice—with
its roots twisting through my mind.

Lost Moon sleeps, as
the flies feast on her petrified flesh. But the creature she sent me
arrived. Legless and wretched, he came with simple instructions to
assist me. I heeded Lost Moon’s words and chose to be taciturn in
my approach to conversation. Shrouding myself in the darkness, he
does not know me. Bending sound, shadow, and shape is simple in the
deep dark. Voice becomes a mere preference when you learn to speak
without your tongue. His name is Russell; I tell him I’m Morrow,
using the voice of the man who damned me.

Elias Kingbird sat
there for a moment, soaking in the fact that the death of everyone he
loved stemmed from this Farseer initiative, carried out over one
hundred years ago. That snake, Roger Graisley, had tricked Angeni
into becoming a science project. And that madman Morrow . . . both of
them probably dead long ago.

Angeni wrote of a
being, Russell, about using him to break out of the cellar prison.
But her transcription ended there, nothing else of the escape. Huge
chunks of information were still missing: What happened after she
made it back to Salamanca, and why did she kill her own blood? When
Elias’s grandfather still lived, he never spoke of his mother’s
return, had said he was too young to remember. Now the secret seemed
buried forever, with Elias and Angeni now being the only remnants of
the Kingbird clan.

But the book
did
uncover how she was changed: Morrow and the Farseers broke Angeni’s
mind— results of unmitigated human experimentation—and opened a
doorway inside of her. Elias wondered if she made them pay for it
with their lives the same way she killed her own family. All of this
playing out beneath some abandoned warehouse out in the forest. And
the compound probably still lay intact; it’s been over 100 years
since the last journal entry, but nothing changed in Lily Dale or the
surrounding land—the township held onto the golden years with a
white knuckled grip. It could still be out there.

Elias climbed the stairs and went
into his great grandmother’s room. The brass skeleton key and the
small book sat on the desk where he left them. He picked up the key
and felt the symbol, remembering mention of it in the journal: the
door to the Farseer’s chambers had been opened with a similar key;
also, their meetings had been written in the cipher, perhaps decoded
by the small leather book. Before him he had tools, the means to dig
deeper.

In the parlor, Elias
sat on the sofa, with Cody curled up next to him, listening to the
wind blast up against the house. The radio said there would be
blizzard-like conditions at nightfall, and the snow flurries already
were intensifying. If he was going to travel to Lily Dale, he would
have to leave soon. And he couldn’t let it be; the guilt crept in,
guilt for failing his responsibility of containing her: the Kingbird
secret, bound to him through blood. It was his time, his watch, and
she broke free, making her way into a retirement home—a place
brimming with worn minds waiting to be picked clean.
He
was the last and now faced with putting his great grandmother to
rest—but how? Three attempts already failed.