Mask of Flies (40 page)

He stood completely
still, not breathing, not sure what to do, unable to determine his
mode of survival: fight or flight? He reached down slowly from his
pocket to his beltline and found his holster and gun missing, lost
somewhere in the kitchen during his scuffle with the woman stretched.
He braced his left hand onto the wall, and the other held the hunting
knife out in front of him.

The red eyes seemed to
move closer. The exact aspect blurred in the darkness. The figure
stalked and measured him, measuring his wounded prey, and then moved
in and pawed at him. Elias slashed out into the air but caught
nothing.

The shadow moved in
again.

Elias swung the knife
as hard as he could. It connected with something fortified and
unforgiving, and his weapon was knocked from his hand. The shadow
moved forward unfazed and pulled Elias away from the wall and slammed
him into the ground in one violent, jerking movement.

His bad knee twisted,
his head bounced off the ground, and the air was pushed out his
lungs. Elias managed to push out, catching the thing under its neck.
Its jaws snapped in contention. Shadow writhed.

A voice inside Elias
urged him to let go.

And he did, but only
long enough push off to jam his thumb into the things eye. It busted
like a cherry tomato.

* * *

“Tony, where the
hell are you?” Jim squawked over the radio.

Tony turned the
handheld off and set it down on the receptionists counter. Jim would
have to wait for now. Autumn Hall was black. The strobe from the fire
alarm at the base of the hallway provided a severe and disorienting
effect.

Steve kept a flashlight
in the desk next to his Maxims. Tony made a quick detour into their
office to grab it. Finding what he needed, he made his way towards
the noise. As to why the lights to Autumn Hall were shut off, he
didn't know. Maybe to signify that the hallway had been
evacuated—except for Angeni.

His pants made a
whooshing sound as he walked. Whatever was down there would hear him
coming. Making his way past the first set of Autumn Hall rooms, the
smell of gas stifled him and continued to grow in potency. Sounds of
growling, sounds of a struggle came from around the corner.

Autumn Hall, being the
longest of hallways and L-shaped, would be Tony’s last choice to
traverse in darkness towards the sound of a struggle, but here he
was. The gas made his head swim. From an email, he remembered the
kitchen reporting a problem with one of the stoves. He thought for a
moment to go back and alert the fire department of the leak but kept
moving down the hallway.

Around the corner, it
was stronger. The supply line in the kitchen must be opened. The
noises of the struggle increased.

Shining his light down
the hall, Tony caught an aberration: a figure resembling one of the
missing patients, Joshua Reynolds, mounted on top of a man that Tony
recognized immediately as Elias Kingbird. Reynolds cast in the same
horrible, stretched aspect as the transformed Marsha Gillium.

Reynolds thrashed
manically, clutching his face—a fluid wept down his gaunt face.
Elias twisted the ground, struggling to break free.

Tony whooshed forward,
but something whizzed past him, producing a warm mist. It flew out of
the kitchen's spaghetti doors and thudded wetly on the wall across.
He shown the light down and saw the severed head of one of the
kitchen workers, eyes and mouth open, looking at nothing in
particular through death glazed eyes.

A buzzard like roar
came from the kitchen, and the doors birthed a skeletal creature,
whose head touched the ceiling. It was Marsha Gillium, tremendous and
terrible. She grew considerably since Tony saw her skirting up the
vent in the kitchen, only a few days earlier. One of her arms dangled
lifelessly at the elbow, on a string of flesh and tendon.

She saw Tony and showed
him her black blood incisors.

Tony backed into a
door. He didn't know what room, touching the cold door handle, static
snapped from it, roaring to a life of its own.

* * *

Blood, slaver, and
visceral fluid covered Elias, as he pushed and pulled onto the beasts
face and neck. It bit through his hand, taking a chunk out of the
meat between thumb and pointer, but as it chomped down, Elias buried
his other thumb, knuckle deep, into the things eye for the second
time.

A blinding light shined
on him for a second. The once little voice of weakness inside Elias's
head let out a sigh of relief, thinking it was the fire department
coming to save him. He tried to scream for help, but the shadow
beast's oversized mitt completely covered his nose and mouth. All he
was able to let out were a few muffled blasts of air.

He heard the scream of
the monstress from the cooler in the direction of the light. A
mixture of his own blood and the beast’s partially blinded him,
dripping down from his gnarled hands, now his only line of defense
against the shadow.

In the direction of the
shriek, he heard a concussive boom, deafening.

A tremendous force
swept Elias off the ground in an unstoppable gust. The weight of his
attacker instantaneously removed. Spiraling flames engulfed the
hallway that looked like a den of serpents racing on the face of the
sun. The air around Elias ignited—pain beyond comprehension, a
moment lasting much longer than expected. And then it ceased cutting
away from existence.

The blast ripped
through the room in Autumn Hall. The breaching inferno propelled
Angeni’s body into the air, through the obliterated structure of
Oak Leaf. Rick's mind was split into a thousand buzzing pieces. The
darkness of a black sea was illuminated by the burning great tree. It
crackled and hissed as if it was dead tinder all along. The light
thrown from the fire showcased strange creatures in the water, giant
spine like serpents circled around the shore in a mad search for
flesh to feast upon.

Thought was limited. He
felt Beavertail and the others close, within the cloud of red flies
humming in unison above the black sea. They carried him,
deconstructed in piecemeal, towards some unknown trajectory, the
instincts of the swarm a secret. A heavy cloud flickered; threads of
purple and blue rolled through the darkness. The hive split
directions entering the murk, through clouds into brilliant purple.

Rick looked down to his
hands. His feet were planted on concrete, looking around he saw that
he stood in a familiar parking lot. The chalet styled building of his
favorite bar, Slow n' Steady's, stood before him. Above the doorway
hung the putrid sign from his nightmare—the jester with
disorienting, spinning swirls in the background, but it was difficult
to tell if it was really moving or just a sick joke carried out by
the contrast of colors.

Through the door, the
silver man or the flamenco songstress were nowhere in sight. The only
patron sat at a corner table, donning a black dress and jet veil,
barely visible in the scarce light, seemingly an optical illusion
from flickering candlelight.

She gestured to Rick
with a gloved hand, beckoning him to have a seat across from her. “We
don't have long, and I have something of the utmost importance to
speak to you about.” The woman's voice seemed as if she was
standing directly in front of him, not on the other side of the
sparsely lit room where she sat.

Rick tentatively walked
over and sat in front of her.

“I know you must have
many questions, but I’m afraid there is no time to answer. All I
can do is provide guidance forward.” The veil wrapped tightly
around her face but did not make the slightest movement when she
talked.

“What did you do to
Allie?”

“You should be asking
yourself what you did to Allie,” the veiled woman said.

Rick attempted to lunge
forward, but all his muscles were slack. He felt like an anchor in
his chair.

“I am sure this is
frustrating,” she let out a little laugh, elegant but menacing. “It
is not my intention to be overly cryptic, so let's cut to the heart
of the matter. Your woman friend, Allie, is pregnant—she was before
we took you.”

Rick said nothing.

“You will wake up in
your body and have the chance to resume your life and be a father. Do
not squander the opportunity . . . You have lived my prison and are
now free.”

Rick tried to form
words but his thoughts were jumbled. He let out a rough croak. “Why
me,” was the only thing that he was able to piece together.

“Oh Rick, I'm afraid
there is no way around it: You were simply the most corrupted person
that my associate and I had contact with.” The black veil around
the woman's face stood completely static as she talked. Her voice was
no longer old and broken, but rich, almost pretty. “The remnants of
your past ill-fated circumstance allowed us to connect to you. For
you, it was simply a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong
time. If we had come across anybody else with more open
vulnerabilities, we would have taken them, but you have a strong
will. You gave my associate such a difficult time, and left me no
choice to take you myself.”

Something crunched
overhead, plaster and dirt sprinkled onto the wooden table.

“Our time is running
out.” A large chunk fell from above, knocking the red votive style
candle from the table onto the floor. She continued unflinchingly. “I
have used you for terrible things.”

Whatever pressed from
above, the ceiling couldn’t take much more. Rick tried to latch
onto what the woman said but couldn’t help to focus upward. He
didn't know what this place was; the only thing he knew was that it
lacked the critical fabric to last much longer.

“The law is actively
looking for you. They visit your home in search for both you and
Allison.” Angeni reached out and grabbed Rick’s hand with a
gloved hand. “Stay with me—I have tucked away Allie in a safe
place and have diverted those pursuing you.”

A sharp contraction in
Rick’s lungs and stomach stopped him from talking. He began to gasp
for air and gag.

“They seek you for
the death of the girl in the hotel room, also for deeds that you will
have no recollection of committing. It is your choice on how you deal
with it. My only concern is Allie and the baby. I know that you will
act in their best interest and protect them at all costs. If I felt
otherwise, I would have left you to burn inside my body.”

The ceiling collapsed and dirt and
poured into the deserted bar room. Angeni spoke over the sound of the
foundation being crushed. “Your body will not be the same, the
flies are always hungry.”

Rick opened his own
eyes, looking up at snow dusted evergreens. Layers of winter garb,
encased in a snow suit constricted his movement, and when he tried to
sit up he suddenly felt flush with heat and an intense bout of
nausea. He heaved, convulsed, and then sat up to cough and gag, a
fight for every breath of air.

An oily fluid spewed
from his mouth, which reeked like death, followed by another violent
convulsion. He vomited more, this time solid, globular lumps; within
the black refuse something began to move spastically—the red metal
backs of the flies.

After the purge, the
deep feeling of sickness subsided enough for him to gather the
strength in his frozen-numb body. He stood.

A large red fly—the
size of a carpenter bee—fought for its life out of the sick pile.
Gross fascination on how something so strange and disgusting came
from his body provided a momentary distraction. After the fly quit
its death throes, he decided to move on.

The woods led out into
a backyard of a forest-green home, the snow stacked high all around,
leaning on the house like a drunken friend. A yellow foreclosure was
posted on the window of the entry door—an abandoned house and an
abandoned body. He had no idea why Angeni would presumably leave him
in the woods to freeze to death.

He remembered her
words: “Your Body may not be how you remember it
.
”
Ungloving his hands, he found his skin a hue of blue.
Flexing his fingers, he knew there was no telling how long he had
been in the snow. But there was something else, a lack of pain, like
a blank numbness throughout his body, more to the equation of his
ailments than exposure.

In the rear sliding
glass door the reflection in revealed in hazy detail, heavy clouds
muddied the sparse sunlight. Rick noticed two things immediately: how
much thinner he looked in the face and the black circles etched
around his eyes. These factors gave him the aspect of the puppet like
apparitions that haunted the lower east side’s dope houses.

Something felt very
familiar about the house and the backyard. When he trudged through
the snow, towards the front, he realized where he was; on Forrest
Lane, home was just across the street. A funny notion how something
so close could seem so foreign.

It used to be the
Wesley house before they were foreclosed on. Whenever Rick left for
Oak Leaf in the morning, he would wave to the husband, Jon, the
realtor. The wife, Wendy, was a trophy with pretentious taste and
undoubtedly an attributing factor to the posting of the yellow
notices in the doorways.

Across the street, in
the white house that he called home, a figure, much too broad to be
Allie, could be seen in the bay window. The silhouette appeared to be
hunched over the sink. The side door, through the garage would be
best to take whoever is inside off guard, and, if it came down to it,
force them out of the house.

He circled to the right
of the house, in attempt to stay out of view from the vista of the
window and made his way into the garage. On top of the door frame,
Allie kept a spare key. She had left it there. He opened the door
slowly and peered around down the hall.