Mask of Flies (28 page)

Tick-Tick-Tick,
Jessica typed away and then stopped, stewing in thought
during the lulls silence. The conversation with Stephanie, the
connotation specifically, invaded her mind like a flesh eating virus,
devouring thoughts detracting from the subject. What if there was
some truth to what she was saying about the man in the window? The
House just had an ordeal with an abusive nurse; allegedly, she’d
locked one of the girls in the bathroom for hours without food,
poured scalding water on another during a bath, and stole an iPad a
resident got for Christmas. The last thing they needed now was
another visible incident.

Some
pervert, preying on mentally disabled woman? It wouldn’t be the
first time somebody has tried to take advantage of the weak
.

If there was a man
prowling around the building, after hours, security would’ve caught
wind of it, but something told Jessica to double check; she had seen
nightshift security asleep at the desk more than once. She dialed
over, and it only rang once before a tired voice answered.

“Mitch, it’s
Jessica over in counseling services. Listen, I just had a female
patient in for a quarterly interview, and she mentioned some pretty
disturbing things. Says a man has been coming up to her window at
night.”

“Ya know how these
girls like to dream,” Mitch said in a croak.

“I know they can be
imaginative, but something about her story bothered me, like it
wasn’t entirely made up. Can you check with your guy on nightshift
to see if he has noticed anybody suspicious?”

“I’m looking at the
log book—it’s empty for the past week on nightshift’s end. If
Ralph saw somebody that wasn’t supposed to be here, he would’ve
took care of ‘em and let me know about it.” He sighed morosely
into the receiver. “I tell you what, we recently installed about
twenty surveillance cameras through the facility; I’m sure you
heard all about the Nurse Ratched situation. I can review the
perimeter footage and give you a call if I find anything.”

She had no choice but
to trust his word and continued her day as planned. Nurses delivered
the patients for their interviews, and the piled up forms began to
lessen. Outside, thick flakes accumulated on the ground and it almost
felt comforting. On days like these she could hunker down in her
office and almost forget she was a cripple. At four o’clock, her
final interview entered.

“Sally,” Jessica
said, waving a big hello. “Have a seat on the couch.”

The girl’s hair
obstructed her face in black tangles; she pushed it back exposing wet
eyes.

“What’s wrong
sweetheart?”

“The man comes to see
all the other girls at night—but I don’t have a window—” And
she cried some more.

“Sally, you know the
rules, those girls aren’t supposed to have boys visiting like that.
Can you tell me which girls told you about having a visitor in their
window? I can make it worth your while.” Determined to find out
more, Jessica reached in her desk pulling out a handful of tokens for
the snack cart.

Sally’s face lit up,
and then she counted them out on her fingers: “Stephanie, Abigail,
and Susan.”

Looking at the room
assignment, Jessica saw the named women all lived in window rooms,
facing the outer perimeter of the facility. The more details
uncovered, the more rooted the actuality became that some sick creep
trolled outside the facility at night, preying on the girls.

Abigail mentioned
nothing about a visitor at her interview. Susan’s interview was
rescheduled because had a stomach bug and was in the clinic. But
Stephanie talked.

“What did Abigail
tell you about this ‘man in the window’?” Jessica abandoned the
normal interview questions completely.

Sally slouched in her
chair, but looked less miserable. “That a handsome man comes to the
window. She lets him inside, and they play no clothes games.”

Jessica managed a smile
and dismissed Sally as politely as possible from her office. When the
nurse escorting Sally shut the door behind her, Jessica indulged in
blurting: “Fuck.” Then the ringing phone jarred her, as if
rebuking her for her outburst.

“You might need to
get down here now,” Mitch said in his frog like voice.

Jessica pushed down the
hallway, never knowing the normal way to walk. Common sense would
indicate that working inside a center for the mentally disabled, the
coworkers would be accustomed to seeing people with disabilities, but
this was not the case. In the administrative section, Jessica felt
their reproach when she rolled down their hallway, their safe haven
of normalcy. When she came to this part of the building, she felt
like a fish on Mars.

Mitch’s cubical was
located next to the men’s room—the echo of flatulence affirmed
this. He just sat there with a blank face, so accustom to the sound
of defecation that he naturally tuned it out. But then he smiled
“Sounds like someone’s lighting off fireworks in there. Come over
here and look at this.” He flicked the screen of his computer
monitor.

Jessica moved over,
next to Mitch. He smelled like chicken wings and had white dandruff
piled on the shoulders of his black polo. It wouldn’t surprise her
if he still lived in his parents basement—forty–something and
alone. She stopped herself, always getting carried away with the
profiling.

“This feed is from
Monday night, outside of the east perimeter,” Mitch said, pointing
to the time stamp in the bottom, right-hand corner. The screen showed
a man in a black tee-shirt and jeans walking around the corner.
Solidly built, a seemingly handsome man, just as the girls described.
He knocked on a window, and it slid open: a woman with Down syndrome
answered. It looked like Abigail.

Mitch hit the pause
button. “I sped up the feed—you can see the time jump in the
corner. He stands there for three hours in the freezing cold in a tee
shirt, talking by the window, and then he finally climbs up into the
room . . . It’s disturbing.” Mitch resumed normal speed as the
man climbed in.

Not believing, Jessica made him show
her again. This was a nightmare come true. What was wrong with this
man? What were they dealing with? “Make sure you save this. I’m
filing a report with the police.”

The detective showed
up around 5:00 pm, a short, stout man with a closely tapered haircut,
and a neatly trimmed goatee. “Detective Lewis, Amherst PD. I was
told to come see Ms. Jessica Stevenson.” He slowed down once he
noticed Jessica’s wheelchair, perhaps he expected a woman of normal
faculty.

“That’s me,”
Jessica said. She told him about the stories of the girls, followed
by the surveillance footage. She opened the video attachment of the
footage from Mitch’s email on her monitor, and tilted it towards
Lewis.

The detective actively
scrawled notes as he watched, and then he asked some basic questions
about the girls that were visited. Jessica answered his questions and
then Mitch showed up—to escort the deputy outside to show him the
locations of the cameras, and the windows where the man had knocked.

It was a sight to see,
the two men, side by side, were polar opposites of each other; the
detective short and neat, Mitch tall and disheveled. They say
everyone has a twin, but it must also be true that everyone has an
exact opposite as well. Jessica thought hers was probably a Russian
ballerina.

About a half an hour
later, the two opposites returned to Jessica’s office with both of
their faces red and swollen from the outdoor frigidity. Cold air
swept off their bodies into the office; winter’s embrace
momentarily surviving the heat blasting from the overhead vents.

The detective took a
seat on Jessica’s couch. “I was able to lift some decent prints,
a man’s prints, off the window and in the room. Hopefully they’ll
match up.”

Mitch leaned awkwardly
in the doorway, then stood with arms akimbo; he kept adjusting.
Jessica thought he would be a horrible poker player, subconsciously
acting out stress. But on the other hand, whether to play pocket
Jacks was different than having your ass in the pan—undoubtedly his
job was on the line as head of security.

“Maybe tomorrow
morning I’ll have something. Thanks for your help, both of you.”
Detective Lewis stood up and went in to shake Jessica’s hand.

Shaking hands was never
Jessica’s thing, particularly not a nice looking man like Detective
Lewis. Her hands were like twisted, dead branches of a gale struck
tree, not hands of a girlfriend or wife. Regardless, she shook and
did her best to smile.

Sleep, inside of
the woman, seemed like something unattainable; a part of her always
slept, yet something always remained turned on, broke open. Rick
lingered in a trance, staring at the wall when he felt something
there, inside the darkness between the sheetrock. At this moment a
vision washed over him, picked up on a wavelength nobody was ever
supposed to receive.

From the viewpoint,
based on the arrangement and decor, the room was inside of Oak Leaf.
A lump lay curled under a floral patterned comforter, and hair
sprouted from the top in threadlike strands. From the nightstand, a
bedside lamp emitted a dim glow; a pair of glasses with thick lenses
sat atop a stack of crossword puzzle and Sudoku booklets. No family
pictures—this room belonged to Will Sammy.

The clock on the wall
read 4 p.m. Rick remembered Will keeping odd hours, but it wasn’t
like him to sleep in this late. The minutes melted away, stuck inside
this excised vignette, Rick watched his old friend toss and turn in a
fitful sleep. After an hour of this, Will pushed himself up, wearily,
to a sitting position; the dull light arced over his face, showcasing
deep pits of age, and now, perhaps disease. The face was Will’s,
but barely, now wasted away and coated in a film of sweat. With each
rattled breath, his chest heaved up and down; he began to cough
uncontrollably. Will reached over for a glass of water on his
nightstand and drank—he choked, coughed and spurted out the
mouthful in a mist. Once the fit subsided, Will gazed down into his
cupped hand, staring at a tooth covered in amalgam. Then he reached
in his mouth, fingering the vacancy, a lower molar, and then pulled
at an incisor; it bent almost 45 degrees forward.

The hours fell away, as
if the skein of time slackened and lapped over itself. Will fell
asleep with his head severely perched against the headboard,
seemingly too exhausted to mull over his failing dental health. He
moaned and fidgeted, eventually turning the comforter over himself
and rolling back into a fetal position. It was 3:00 am, and Rick
wondered where the staff was: the caretakers, the nurses, nobody
checked on the patient the entire time—the man was probably dying.
Rick’s concern was interrupted by the sound of Will
stretching—curiously, the sleeping man’s legs now hung off the
bed with the back of his knees folded over the footboard and his feet
touched the ground. Will grew several feet taller in his sleep?

In a sweeping motion, he slung his
limbs over the bed, and sat up along the side, facing Rick’s vista.
With long boned fingers he rubbed his elongated arms, and peeling
skin flaked off onto the comforter. Will’s face—now something
different, something terrible—looked at Rick and smiled fiendishly.
With some precariousness, he stood towering—head almost grazing the
ceiling. A large peel of skin clung to his wrist, and when he pulled
it, it came off like a glove. The thing Will turned into laughed at
this.

The final note of
laughter rung out when Rick opened the woman’s good eye and saw he
was back in room 137. Shadows accumulated onto the wall—in the
deepest black he had ever seen. It came for him, he knew and tried to
yell for anyone, but only produced a dry rasp. So he pressed a
message into the void, through the same channel he had spoken to
Marco: “W-what do you want from me?”

Eyes opened in the oil
of darkness, and the wall rippled. A face hung there and left his
question unanswered.

Rick wasn’t certain
that the guise was real when everything took on the aspect of a
liquid hallucination through The Jane’s watery eye—the bedside
lamp seemed to dance and bend at all hours—until the face smiled a
smile with huge blocked teeth. “A-anybody tell you it’s impolite
to stare?”

Fingers pried against
the border of darkness; a leg emerged, thin like a stick, followed by
the arm and head. The visitor fully emerged, it smiled again. “Rick
Soblinski—what an awful predicament.” The giant scooped the top
hat from the dresser. “Prisoner in someone else’s body . . . ”

Even through the leaky
bucket of The Jane’s eye, Rick made out that the creature before
him was once Will Sammy, although twisted into something stretched
and terrible. The voice, although changed, was too familiar. “Will,
what happened to you?” He knew he should be frightened but wasn’t.
He just wanted answers.

“Not anymore; Mr.
Samuelson is dead, and his body is now our vessel. Similar to how
your body is being used by her—but you live on.” The stretched
body of Will Sammy pointed a long finger at Rick, inside The Jane.
“We visit as kindred spirits.”

“What use would . . .
my body be to her?”

“We assume the
selection stems from your accessibility—the darkness within you a
manageable asset. You are familiar with Russell, yes? With your
flesh, he opened a doorway into the void; it has already been cracked
open—and foul wind blows from the abyss. Death into life.

Rick at first projected
nothing in response, physically or mentally. He hid behind the
expressionless mask of The Jane’s face. Then:
Allie.
The thought of her spurred emotions of despair, resonating
physical pain through The Jane’s twisted insides.