“You, sir, should unmask. Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.”

Masks

by Orrin Grey

“You were his friend, right?”

His granddaughter’s voice on the other end of the phone, her words clear and free from static. I wait to answer, don’t want to, because how do I say, “I don’t know?” For months now, he has been coming over to my house to play xiangqi two or three nights a week while we drink hard cider and talk about bullshit. Does that make us friends, or just two lonely old guys with nobody else to talk to?

Whatever I feel in my heart, what comes out of my mouth is bound to be an affirmative, because what else can I say? And besides, she is so far away—London, of all places, with children of her own that I can hear in the background—while I am so close—his own townhouse just two doors down from mine, only empty spaces between us, because this neighborhood is dying, just as he was dying, just as we all are dying. One uncomfortable phone call at a time.

She hasn’t said the words, but the implication is clear in her voice. If I don’t do it, men will come. Strangers. Impersonal men who will throw it all into boxes and, from there, who knows? The Goodwill? The landfill? No place where it matters. No place where it will be appreciated.

Am I the old man’s friend? I don’t think so. Do I want to do it? No. So why do I say yes into the receiver, my voice bounced across thousands of miles to his granddaughter in London?

The answer is guilt. No more noble a motive than that.

I think that I know what to expect, when I open the door. He came to my house so often, after all. I couldn’t help but smell it on him. Dust, old food smells, stale cigarettes, the scent of clothes left too long in a closet. All the aromas of a college professor gone to pot.

That there are drifts of paper and take-out food containers keeping the door from opening all the way comes as no surprise, either. The old man was a hoarder. No shock there. Piles of things in every corner. A microwave, door hanging partway open. One blender, another. A DVD player still in its original box, the tape unbroken.

The layout of his house is identical to mine, and so stepping inside feels both familiar and strange; a post-apocalyptic movie in which well-known landmarks lie in ruins, or are half-consumed by plant life run riot.

Just as in my place, the living room is the largest one in the house, eating up much of the ground floor. Books lie piled on the carpet, along with cup noodles, coffee filters filled with old grounds, overflowing ash trays. There is almost no furniture in this room. Just an amber floor lamp and a purple recliner that looks to be made of lichen, as if I would sink into it forever were I to sit, sending up a cloud of recliner spores in my wake.

In the fireplace, where my TV sits, he has piled empty bottles, jars, old photographs, hand-written letters. A nonsense shrine, built by a man whose religion was his own and no one else’s. In one bottle, a beetle crawls, too large to ever escape its prison.

My eyes skim it all but they settle, of course, on the masks. I knew, dimly, that the old man had once worked in Poverty Row Hollywood, but I had forgotten what job he did—makeup, set painting, and masks. He said once, “Whenever a detective or a tortured academic stood in front of a wall of masks—masks from Bali, from Africa, from wherever the studio thought conjured the exotic—those might have been mine. I was cheaper than shipping something in. Easier than doing your own homework.”

The masks on the living room wall aren’t those, though. No studio in the 40s would have let even Patric Knowles or Ann Sheridan stand in front of these things. The faces, trapped somewhere between human and monster, between being faces at all and being something else: stars, galaxies, other organs. Melting, running, racing from one to the other and back again, only to become lost somewhere in the middle.

In the dim light struggling in through faded, half-closed blinds they seem damp, alive. Many tongues twitching, many eyes darting. Where did these masks come from? How did the old man come by them? Do they predate the old movie masks, or did they inspire them? Did they come from the old man or did they come to him? Muse or creation?

These are the questions that assail me as I stand in the quiet of the house, dust motes surrounding me as I breathe in the smell of rotting food and spores and who know what else. When my house is quiet, I can hear the traffic on the highway, but in his living room I seem to hear something else. Scuffling. Breathing. Panting. Clawing.

I walk nearer to the masks, and the sound rises. Do they see me, as I see them? They look agonized, starving, desperate. They remind me of the old man. I reach up my hand, let it hover in the air in front of the nearest mask, and I know that its features recede even as they also creep closer, though I could never prove it.

I feel the purple recliner against my thigh, and when I look down it seems so inviting. I could sink into it, I think, chair spores floating up and into my lungs. I could wait there, keeping the masks company until someone else comes to try to take them down. An hour, a minute, a second ago the idea would have appalled me, but now? 

Now it sounds so fine…

The Machete at the End of the World

by Jacob Steven Mohr

It was ten teenagers, forty years ago. I killed them (opened them up, spilling them onto wet sand, hard cracked sidewalk, creaking boardwalk planks) over a neat two-week span. This was 1979, in the summer. I got a name later on, a man’s name, monosyllabic and blunt like a blow from a fist. But first I was just Tall Man, credited at the end of the feature. I don’t remember their faces now. Only the color of their blood. Only the shrieks, like blasts on a whistle, like ten tracks on an era-perfect pop album. 

I remember, too, the Halloween masks of my shark-chewed face. These came later on—and my dockworker duds, my rusted boatman hook, all costumes and plastic props hung from racks in dollar stores across a world that can’t bleed anymore. 

They didn’t forget me, not even at the end. That’s better than love I think. 

It’s twilight now; it’s nearly always twilight these days. Months, years. I’m stalking down some Point Pleasant back alley. I’ve still got that smooth-as-butter SteadiCam glide. I don’t run, but I get where I’m headed. Now, that’s nowhere. Detritus blows by my heavy boots. Tatters of napkins, a surgical mask, a wrapper off a condom, like tumbleweed, end over end over end. A year ago—the world, the living part of it, burned away. But I couldn’t burn. When everything else died, I simply sat up.

The sky overhead is blood; burned, like the earth. Like the corpses I find sometimes even now, here and there. And the days are shorter. Darkness falls fast through smoke and atmosphere dust. My lungs are full of grit. That dark used to be home: I could move so quickly through it, silently, like I could swim in it submerged. Now the shadows expel me, push me out. There’s nobody to see me, or not see. A dead world can’t be killed. 

Maybe sometimes people are born unglued. Empty, sort of. Missing a piece. I think I got the wrong piece put in by mistake. A kind of engine inside that pushed me forward, faster than a beating heart. It made me stalk and kill; it made it pleasurable to stalk and kill. I wonder if those teenagers could hear the engine going… churning behind my ribs, shunting off heat, burning through gallons of black oozing fuel. 

Stalking forward. Coming for them. 

Or maybe it was just my footsteps, heavy in rubber-soled boots. 

I wonder if she heard the same thing. She was the last of them all, and the cleverest.

She got a name too, in the sequels. In the VHS release of the original as well. But I’ll always know her as Final Girl, the name beside this in the credits lost to time’s distortion. The last one on her feet, the last one drawing breath—it fits. The others got names and higher billing at first, but they offered themselves to me. Blood sacrifices on taut young legs. Not her. She was anonymous and deadly. I loved her for that.

It was sewing scissors, the first time. Through my one good eye with a sharp twist of the hand. Then a sparking electrical wire to the heart. Then a pond covered with ice, trapping me beneath. Then a charge of dynamite. A blazing inferno in my childhood home. A medieval sword. Helicopter blades. The jets from a spacecraft. Each time, I remember her relieved sobs or hysterical laughter. Laugh, my darling. It’s over. 

Then I sat up. I came back for her, over and over. That’s better than love too. 

It’s night. The dark is hostile, blinding. I’m at the end of the pier; the water has a single constant metallic gleam all across the surface. It barely seems to move. I’m slower now. Slower moving, slower thinking. The engine in my chest chugs at half power. My fingers are stiff around the rusty hook. I wonder if the water would take me. If I would sit up—not at the silty bottom, but in some new Point Pleasant. A world that wasn’t burned. A breathing world. A world alive, that could scream and bleed. I imagine it, behind suppurating eyelids… 

But I’m not alone. For the first time in days, months, years that old alarm trips. She’s at the other end of the pier. I can’t see a face. I don’t need to see a face. There’s nobody else. The world is dead, save her. Save me. The final girl—and a machete with a chewed face and heavy boots. She approaches, calling out. There’s hope in her voice as sweet as any scream. And I’m approaching her too, my stride lengthening, slipping easily through the dark, SteadiCam smooth. We’ll meet in the middle, closing, closing. 

I don’t know when she sees my face. When the dark is no longer blinding, her eyes are already bugging in terror. But she’s still coming towards me on sheer inertia. Or maybe I’m catching up. Maybe I’m pursuing. Stalking, hunting again. The horror on her face, it shaves the years away. The engine roars hot inside me and the music blares a single terrible pipe-organ chord, and I’m raising the hook over my head—

Scream for me, my darling. Scream like an encore, a bonus track on the record. Don’t call it a sequel. Call it a reunion, and a conclusion. I’ve come back for you. The world couldn’t burn us. Listen to my heart, rumbling and roaring in me. Know that every cut, every drop of blood we spill together—it’s a command, a plea. Under the soundtrack it repeats.

Love me. Love me. Love me.

The Tale of Belette

by Joule K. Zelman

They say that in the village of Provins around the year 1680, a baby was born covered in fur. The mother passed away soon after, and the father and three older sisters took care of the tiny girl. She was baptized Christine, but the sisters called her Belette, “weasel,” for her sleek chestnut coat. 

She grew and her fur became ever softer and shinier. Her sisters spoiled her, running pony-brushes over her back and arms. But all too soon a woman’s body was shaped under the thick pelt. The sisters married and moved to other houses, the home grew sparser and sparser, a widower still in mourning and a strange young girl with a coat that gleamed ever glossier. 

Unfortunately, as ocelots, beavers, and bears the world over know, just because something grows from your skin doesn’t mean others will consider it yours. 

Madame Ferre was a rich merchant’s widow who had an excessive love of fineries. But one day, as her hansom bumped over the track from her manor to the town, she saw the strange girl carrying a basket of eggs. It was raining, but the drops of water tumbled down Belette’s neck and arms, and she seemed to take no notice but for the occasional toss of her furred head. Madame Ferre felt the scratch of her wool wrap on her nape. She bade her carriage stop alongside the surprised girl. 

“Would you like to be employed in a fine house, where you can sleep on fine linens and dine on roast chicken and duck?” asked Madame Ferre, gazing not at Belette’s warm amber eyes but at the triangular white patch upon her breast. One would have called the girl’s garb immodest, save that the fur veiled all. Belette’s mouth hung open, exposing sharp little teeth, as she took in the fine lady’s pink skin and jeweled gloves. 

“Oh…very, very, much, if you please, Madame,” she said.

“Good,” said the elegant woman. “I will expect you tomorrow.” Belette curtsied clumsily as the carriage rattled away. 

Next day, Belette put on her nicest dress and her little straw hat and trudged all the way to the manor. She did not remark that the servants averted their eyes as they showed her into the parlor. But she was astonished when the lady of the house invited her to sit and take tea. Even more shocked was she when Madame Ferre herself went straight to the sideboard and poured the drinks. No doubt Belette should have been watching the porcelain cups instead of gaping at the richly painted ancestral portraits over the fireplace. But she had been raised by loving and gentle people, and she was innocent. 

When her father and sisters heard of her death by a mysterious ailment, they gathered at the house and wept. When they learned that the body had been buried at once for fear of contagion, they lamented loudly. But when the second-youngest sister spied Madame Ferre snuggled in her carriage in a brand-new fur wrap, brown with a triangle of snowy white, they all gnashed their teeth and swore revenge. 

The aged father, the sisters and their husbands waited until nightfall to creep onto the Ferre estate. While searching for an ingress in the garden, they stumbled upon an abandoned well. The eldest woman gestured urgently into its depths. A sound was rising up, a terrible mewl. They stole the bucket from the newer well and lowered it rapidly into the hole. 

“Christine, Belette, is it you?” whispered the father in agony. And then the three men were nearly dragged off their feet, for a weight settled on the line. Immediately they hauled as hard as they could. 

A dark mass emerged and collapsed over the lip of the well. It was a young woman, naked, every inch of her dripping with gore. The only fur left was in a rim around her eyes, which, once so gentle, burned with rage and pain and hunger. 

How Belette had not died, how the family transported her home and nursed her to health, I do not know. My story resumes several weeks later. Madame Ferre’s servants were speaking of a horrible figure, wrapped head to toe in thin bandages, slinking on all fours at the edge of the forest that bounded the estate. When they rushed to the spot, they found nothing but a few drops of blood wetting fallen leaves. 

Madame Ferre feigned to ignore these foolish tales. But she did take care to lock her bedroom door at bedtime, once her maid had undressed her and tucked the fur wrap over the duvet. This is perhaps why, when the lady woke the whole household one night with gurgling screams, no one could get in for a full ten minutes. They had to chop the door down, and by then all was silence. 

The beautiful chestnut fur wrap was ruined forever, so thick and deep was that blood that had soaked in. Madame Ferre’s most devoted servants, knowing how much she loved it, would have buried her in it but for that fact. Instead, they threw it in the woods, hoping whatever foul ghoul had so soiled it would reclaim it and be done with them. The shutters had to be replaced and the walls stank of iron for weeks afterward, no matter how much the maids scrubbed. They did not even think, for some time, to search for signs of robbery, so clearly was the deed a work of maddened, animal fury. But indeed, Madame Ferre’s jewels were missing.

No one in Provins ever admitted to seeing sweet Belette again. The local baron’s men got involved, interrogating her father and sisters, but even after harsh questioning the family admitted nothing. And though they carried out their questioning with commendable enthusiasm, the gendarmes never really believed any Christian could have caused such hideous carnage. So the bereaved family of the missing girl and the household of the murdered lady lived on in the town. And when the dead widow’s servants, who’d been caught in the spray of Belette’s blood as they worked the hide from her flesh, passed a member of the humble family on the street, they buried their chins in their chests and hurried their steps.

But they say that in Paris, a mysterious woman appeared at parties, salons, and operas. Many were enchanted with her sinuous way of moving. They watched the movements of her gloved hands, though envious ladies of good breeding called them stubby, like little rats’ paws. But was she a beauty? Who knows? She never showed her face. It was always concealed behind a mask painted like a haughty aristocrat. If one looked close enough, they say, one could see how it was painstakingly sewn together. Not from one large piece, no. From tiny scraps of delicate leather.