Mask of Flies (29 page)

The giant noticed,
perhaps felt the tumult. He flashed his gaping smile that looked like
an earthquake ripping through the fault line of his jagged mouth. “We
loved the woman once.”

“What?”

“Angeni, or as you
call her: ‘The Jane’, was once a beautiful girl with a talented
mind. She saw beyond the veil of mortality and death, aware of its
necessity. We were sent from the darkness to guide her, to build her
as a living agent on our behalf: those that live inside death. We
loved the possibility of her; the hanging question of her potential.
But her mind unraveled with the burden of knowing.”

“You did this to
her?”

The giant’s smile
vanished. “No. We simply advised her to seek aid for her malady.
She would be no use broken . . . Power hungry men posing as healers
experimented on her—and cracked open passage to Abaddon, the void,
through her. Intense exposure transformed her, and the responsibility
for her undoing was placed on us. Our stake replaced by Russell; the
fiend prolonged her natural existence by showing her how to feed—the
way of the parasite.”

Rick didn’t know what
to make of all this. “You’re telling me this because—”

“—Because they’re
intent on creating more passageways, which will inevitably fracture
the cycle of life and death, intermingling the two. Your body, a tool
utilized to initiate the great cataclysm.”

“I’m just an
ordinary man. I don’t possess any power. You’re insinuating that
I’m somehow responsible for all this, but here I sit, a prisoner
here in this body.” Rick flung the woman’s hands up, unable to
contain his anger.

“Truth, you are but a
man, but you inhabit the gateway, the opening we traveled through,
into this facility. Inside her, you have aptitude beyond
comprehension; surely you already felt the urge to feed, pulling
blackness from the mind of the living.”

Rick remembered how
Marco fell to the floor with tears streaming from his eyes, as some
memory, from deep down, was broke loose. “Yes, it was automatic. I
had no control of it.”

“Like a newborn drawn
to breast—an ingrained survival mechanism. You were simply placed
to act on these urges to sustain this gateway, while your original
body is used for the undoing.” The giant looked back at the wall of
darkness behind him—it seemed to waver. “The others here watch
me, make sure I keep an arm’s length, intent on protecting you. The
overseers in Abaddon have become jaded and look forward to the great
ending. Unfortunate for them, I traverse odd roads.”

Something rattling
outside the door grabbed Rick’s attention; when he turned back
towards the wall, the giant had vanished, and the darkness returned
to the shades of ordinary night. The door opened, and Marco pushed a
rollway cart through the door. His face was sullen and drooped. He
didn’t take his eyes off of the ground. Rick needed to reach out to
him, to get him to find out if Allie is okay, without conjuring up
the pain inside him. But it was all too automatic, and the visions of
the little boy with the knapsack crying over the corpse of his father
returned. The exhaustion that Rick felt was washed away with a
feeling of raw energy: the pulled memory part food, part drug.

Marco’s thoughts
resounded:
she’s fucking with
me—make this a quick visit, in and out.

Apart of Rick was glad
Marco fought the intrusion, so he could feed on his thoughts longer.
But he fought this urge when he saw how Marco’s hand shook when he
picked up the feeding tube and inserted it. The sensation caused by
the tube was discomforting to say the least. It was like a worm
slowly crawling from nose to stomach, and the sound of the machine
pumped nutrient slime down. “You need to leave now Marco.”

Marco said nothing and
eyed the big syringe that pushed the slime up the tube.
Just
a little more, she’s just fuckin’ with me.

“I’m not fucking
with you.”

Marco pulled the tube
out, packed everything up in a clamor of sound, and exited mutely.

A black Dodge
Charger, that had all the identifiers of belonging to the Amherst
police department, pulled up to the front of the facility around
eight o’clock in the morning. A short, thickset man got out of the
car and plodded through the snow to the main entrance of Oak Leaf.
Tony walked hurriedly towards the door to greet him. He must have
looked a mess, wearing the same clothes as the day prior: the same
black polo with day old sweat stains underneath the armpits, and the
wrinkled khaki pants that he had attempted to sleep in. All he could
do was
attempt
to
sleep, after seeing Marsha Gillium—transformed and stretched beyond
normal length. He felt like he was in a tough position, burdened with
the task of disclosing the details of what he witnessed, while trying
to maintain the appearance of a sane person. In light of what he saw,
or thought he saw, it was no small order. He knew he had to approach
his disclosure with the detective subtly.

“Detective Lewis,”
the short man extended a meaty hand to Tony in the foyer. He smelled
like fabric softener and cinnamon chewing gum.

“I’m Tony Delgado,
the facility manager. I filed the report last night,” Tony said,
shaking Lewis’s hand. He tried his damndest to match the stout
man’s grip.

Then an attractive
black woman walked in the door behind Lewis. She had at least 6
inches on her partner, wearing flats. Stomping the snow off her feet,
she acknowledged Tony with a nod of her head in his direction.

“This is my partner,
Detective Douglas.”

Tony felt loathsome in
the presence of the female detective; he felt sweaty and realized he
hadn’t applied any deodorant since the morning prior.“I normally
don’t look like I woke up in the laundry hamper. Got snowed in here
last night”

Douglas offered a
pleasant smile, albeit mildly artificial.

“I’ve got files put
together of the missing people in my office.” Tony knew he smelled
ripe and, in the confines of the office, his stench would violate the
nostrils of his guests. Embarrassed wasn’t the word.

In anticipation, he had
cleaned his desk and hid the improvised bed inside his gym bag. The
files of the missing lined up neatly for the presentation. The heat
blew from the vent, introducing a faint metallic tang to the air—it
over warmed the cramped office. Lewis wriggled his nose: it met
something it didn’t agree with. A blown up photo of each of the
missing sat inside each folder: the ones Kaja pulled from the rec
room collage. Tony told the detectives how he found their rooms,
being particularly descriptive with Will’s. Douglas listened
attentively, while Lewis took notes.

The short detective
stood when Tony finished. “We’re gonna talk to some other staff
members. Need a little more perspective on this.” He looked at his
watch. “Give us half an hour.”

Douglas remained seated; it took
Lewis tapping her on the shoulder to break her from thought. She
looked at Tony “Maybe there is something you forgot to tell us.
Think on it before we get back.”

When the detectives
were gone, Tony thought of running over to the convenient store for
some Speed Stick but decided against it, not wanting to leave his
post unmanned. They returned an hour later—Lewis mentioned that
they needed to see the rooms but also wanted to see another room:
Angeni Kingbird’s.

“Why you want to see
her room?” Tony asked.

Douglas chimed in,
“This new patient shows up, causes a bunch of ruckus, and then
people start missing—sounds like a good place to start to me.”

“Most of your staff
gets anxious just talking about her. The worst off fella’ claimed
that she did a convincing impersonation of her former caretaker,”
Lewis looked at his notepad. “A Rick Soblinski?”

Tony knew they talked
to Marco and now wished he had convinced the man to take some
vacation after the meeting outside of Angeni’s room when he started
with the nonsense about Soblinski.“Yeah . . . Rick quit earlier
this week. You don’t think he’s a suspect?”

“Can’t call it at
this point, can’t rule anything out, though, either. We’ll just
have to dig in and see what we can find.” Lewis said, standing up
from the chair. “Can you show us now?”

Jim’s order said to
leave the rooms alone until the police came, and Tony was fairly
certain that they would be undisturbed. Shit, he had a hard enough
time covering the occupied rooms, let alone have the manpower
available to clean out an empty one, missing persons or not. Tony
opened the Marsha’s room, and Lewis walked inside, scribbling notes
on his pad.

“Anything of note?”
Tony asked.

“No sign of a
struggle. It’s like they just walked off and didn’t come back.
Not normal for two patients suffering from advanced terminal
diseases.” Douglas said while looking under the bed; during the
bend, her blouse receded from the small of her back and exposed
yellow panties.

“We’ll see what you
can make of the next room,” Tony said. “I never seen anything
like it.”

Out in the hallway, he
unlocked the door to Will Samuelson’s room, and a pungent stench of
decay emanated from the inside. Lewis gagged; his olfactory system
shocked. The stench was beyond bad, but Tony thought the detective
acted a bit overdramatic. Douglas looked at her partner in an
exasperated glance, perhaps thinking the same thing.

Both detectives donned
face masks and rubber gloves and went into the room, while Tony stood
in the doorway. Douglas took pictures of the teeth on the ground and
collected them. Lewis tentatively pulled the soiled sheets off the
bed. His disgust was evident even underneath the surgical mask as he
collected the bedding and the snake skin hand in evidence bags. They
looked through Will’s things a bit but found nothing of further
interest outside of the odd bodily markings. When they finished their
cataloguing, Douglas pulled off her mask and gloves and threw them
into the trash can by the door. Lewis knelt down in the hallway with
the two bags of evidence at his feet. His skin was the hue of ocher.

“You all right
Lewis?” Douglas’s eyes didn’t leave the paper as she continued
to write.

“I think so . . . ”

She looked over towards
Tony and nodded towards Lewis, “You’ll have to excuse my partner.
His stomach doesn’t agree with this line of work.” Her eyes
smiled at him. “Could you show us Ms. Kingbird’s room next?”

“Of course . . . ”
Tony stepped closer to the pretty detective. “I don’t think your
partner will hold up. The patient in this room has some pretty
extreme—”

“I can hear you. I’ll
be fine.” Lewis picked himself off of the floor, his skin still
held the sick color, and beads of sweat formed around his forehead.
In the act of embarrassing one’s self in front of a pretty lady,
Lewis was stealing the show, and this was all right by Tony.

They walked down the
hallway, towards the end, and room 137 waited like a hole in the
world. Tony turned the door handle; the room was dark. Flushed light
from the grey sky crept through the window, providing the only
illumination. Angeni sat by the window; luckily for Lewis, she had
their back to them.

“Hello Angeni,”
Tony said softly. “I have a few people here that want to look
around your room.”

She turned in the
chair, displaying the side of her malformed face and then made a
gasping sound. Tony heard plastic bags rustle on the ground behind
him, followed the sound of door shut—from the bathroom. It was
Lewis; the sound of him retching could be heard through the
walls—undigested breakfast
ker-plunked
into the toliet’s water.

“I apologize for my
partner, Ms. Kingbird, he has come down with a bug.” Douglas said
awkwardly. If the patient’s deformity bothered her, she didn’t
show any sign of it.

Angeni said nothing for
a moment, but then struggled, rising from the chair, and then turning
to face them. She stood there, horridly, hunched over—it looked
painful for her. The dim lighting obscured the full detail of her
face, although it loomed like a nightmare storm cloud, waiting
closely in the murk of the room.

Something spun to life
in Tony’s head, a sharp ringing noise, and then his ears popped. A
familiar voice spoke to him:
Tony
. . . help me.
The woman raised her arm and reached out to
him.

“R-Rick? This can’t
be . . . how did you?” Tony walked backwards until the door handle
met his spine.”

I’m
trapped,
Rick’s voice said.

“I-I can’t.” A
sudden wave of anxiety filled Tony like some sort of instantaneous
nerve gas, shutting his sense of reality down. All he could do was
turn around and go out of the door, away from this.

“What happened in
there?” Douglas approached from behind.

Tony jumped when the
detective grabbed his shoulder. He stopped, turned around, and backed
up with his hands outstretched behind him, searching for the wall to
anchor himself. “Her voice . . . was Rick’s voice. Marco told the
truth.”

Douglas looked at Tony
through a perplexed glance. “Didn’t hear anything; didn’t look
like she could even talk through her mouth. She can’t even talk,
can she?”

Tony leaned his back
against the wall, taking in deep breaths in attempt to calm himself,
but his heart continued hammering; his limbs felt like wooden
appendages. “I don’t know, but I can’t deny what I heard.”

Lewis emerged in the
doorway and wiped his mouth with a brown paper towel. “Everything
all right out here?” His normal color returned to his face.

“We’re fine, Tony
just thought he heard the caretaker, Rick Soblinski, and startled is
all.” Douglas looked away shaking her head. “Are you feeling
better Tommy?”