by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter Nine
Uniformed and non-uniformed police officers and Sheriff’s deputies arrived via the back door and stairs. It was too crowded, so they singled out some masqueraders and escorted them upstairs to begin their inquisition. I remained downstairs, with my Jonathan. I had gotten him to lay down beside me on the bed. We embraced, face to face. There were many individual conversations going on at once, all somewhat quiet, and were between cops and masqueraders. It would be our turn soon enough, I figured. A girl in a black dress went inside the bathroom holding her stomach, closed the door behind her. A second later I heard her vomiting. Maybe from the alcohol, but probably from the assertions a cop made to her just moments prior.
“I should be losing my virginity right now,” I said to Jonathan.
It filled me with appreciation when he smiled at that. His smile was a pillar of strength in which I sought purchase. He apologized to me, said the night’s young, though we knew damn well that sex wasn’t something that we’d be enjoying this night.
After having been questioned, Frog stepped away from a uniformed cop and looked around, contemplating where he wanted to take a seat, and decided he’d take one on the bed. He sat a foot or so behind me, back to back. I rolled over and tapped his shoulder. He glanced back apathetically, but that indifferent expression changed at my sight. His brow lowered a little, features softened, a kind of sadness pervaded him merely at my sight. More than sadness, it was a disapproving expression.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but what questions did the policeman ask you?”
He looked at Jonathan with that same disapproving expression before returning his gaze at me. “Where we’ve been over the last week.”
“Why do people keep saying that? Why does it matter where we’ve been?”
“Do you have a cellphone?” he asked me.
“Yes, why?”
“Take a look at it, at the date. I bet it’s different than what you expect.”
I couldn’t remember where my purse was, then remembered I left it in Lion’s Civic. I said I didn’t have it on me. Jonathan fished his phone from his pocket and pressed a button, triggering a glow on the screen. “What the fuck…” he whispered, and turned the phone around, showed me. 9:16 P.M., and under that, February 21.
“It’s just broken is all,” I said.
“No it isn’t,” Frog argued. “Everyone’s phone will read the same date. We’ve been here for a week.”
I felt like I was going insane. I knew we hadn’t been here for a week, yet people adamantly insisted we had. It was maddening.
“Why aren’t you scared or confused then?” I said pointedly to Frog. I think my question caught him off guard. He had been looking a little too confident, a little haughty before I sprang that question on him. “You seem to be the only masquerader here who has a grasp on things.”
I reached down and hiked my dress up to the knee, grazed my calf: smooth freshly-shaven skin. Wasn’t that proof if nothing else that we hadn’t been here a week?
“Here, touch my leg,” I said to Frog. “Feel it. It’s smooth. No stubble at all.”
“I’m not touching you,” Frog said with marked disdain.
“If you believe we’ve been here for a week, why are my legs smooth? And why don’t you have a beard?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“And why aren’t you acting as shocked and perplexed as the rest of us?”
“I am,” he said, but it was bullshit. He was lying.
“You’re lying. You’re a liar.”
Frog lowered his voice and said with equal parts fervor and contempt, “You should consider yourself blessed, young lady. Blessed! Blessed that you lived to see this day. Because if you had died, your Lion friend here would have an eternity to finger you before an audience in hell.”
I was stunned. And utterly ashamed. I think Jonathan was ashamed as well; he didn’t appear to be angry.
“I… I didn’t know anyone saw that,” I said in a tiny voice.
“You didn’t know or you didn’t care? People did see it. Your parents should be proud of you,” he said sarcastically.
I covered my face and wept, feeling ashamed and despising my selfishness.
Frog touched my shoulder: it startled me. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “That was wrong of me to say.”
“I’m such a sh-shit,” I stammered, and sobbed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Jonathan said soothingly.
Frog ran his hand through my hair. I uncovered my face and met eyes with him. His eyes were glassy. I looked away from him in my shame.
“Be remorseful,” Frog said, “be contrite, ask God for forgiveness, but don’t hate yourself. You’re a beautiful girl. I can see that in you. Look at me. You made a mistake, that’s all. God loves you.”
“He does not,” I said and sobbed. “Why should He?”
“He does. That’s why you’re weeping here right now, and not... gone.”
“Is everything all right here?” a cop said from the foot of the bed.
“Yes, sir,” Frog said.
“Would you give us a moment alone?” the cop asked Frog.
Frog caressed my cheek with a sympathetic smile, apologized again before getting up and relocating to the other side of the room. The cop took his place on the bed, turned the scrawled-on yellow page of his little notepad over to a fresh sheet. He asked if we preferred to be questioned together, Jonathan and I, sensing that we were a couple. I said yes please, and thanked him. I had stopped sobbing, but the tears were running unchecked.
“State your first and last names.” We gave our names: he jotted them down. “Give me the details of the seven days prior to today,” the cop directed at Jonathan.
“It was an ordinary week. Classes, went to a party on Friday night. Watched college basketball most of the day yesterday, and went to this party tonight.”
The cop jotted a short note before saying, “I should be more specific. Could you give me the details of the week spanning from February fourteenth till today?”
“Is it really the twenty-first?” I asked him.
He nodded once, wrote another short note. He already knew we wouldn’t have answers for him. The last person or two questioned had already cemented that expectation. But he had a job to do, and executed it professionally.
“Then we have nothing to tell you,” Jonathan said. “We got here Valentine’s Day evening, and as far as we know, it’s still that day.”
“Is it possible that someone slipped something inside your drinks?” the cop theorized. “Drugged you all?”
Lion and I exchanged doubtful stares, shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible,” Jonathan said, “though highly unlikely. Everyone here is cool. And there are no lapses in my memory.”
“Mine either.”
The cop scrawled a few words on his pad while saying, “Nor is there a lapse in anyone’s memory here, it seems. Do either of you have any enemies?”
We said no.
“What’s your relationship like with Norrah Petersen and Paul Klein?”
Neither of us knew Norrah, and I had only just met Paul on Friday; Jonathan said he was acquaintances with Paul.
The cop jotted on his pad. “In your opinion, would Paul have any reason to abduct anyone? Or have the disposition of someone who might?”
“No way,” Jonathan said.
The cop turned the page over and stood up. “You have my deepest sympathies for enduring this. I know I don’t look it, but I’m thrilled that you’re alive and well. If there’s anything you remember about this past week, or think of something you’d like to share with me, here’s my card.” He handed them over. “Soon you’ll be free to go. Since most of you live on campus in Redlands, we’re going to have a bus come and transport you all there—if you wish to accept that service, that is.”
“My car is on the street,” Jonathan said.
“I’m afraid they impounded the cars on the street severa
l days ago. They were considered possible evidence in your disappearances. I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t much longer that we were detained there. When a bus pulled up out front, we exited through the front door in a single and double ranked file toward it. A police barricade separated the journalists from us. It was daylight out front, though the clock would have you believe it was dead-night. A hundred feet away camera crews had their big ass lights on stands and they cut through the darkness like the sun. That and the swirling blue and red cop lights and blindingly bright headlights. I squinted as I walked.
None of us spoke a word as we situated ourselves on the bus. We were collectively despondent and introspective. Our minds were anchored down to the sobering reality that we were part of a dark mystery that might forever remain unsolved. Nothing good would ever come of it, but there might be some bad.
Together we lost a week of our lives, somehow, and that knowledge was likely to plague our speculative minds for the remainder of our years. These people who were mostly strangers to me and strangers to each other, would now recommence our lives as twenty-three individual fragments of a larger picture all our own. We were bonded by a profound commonality that would never change, never diminish.
Twenty-three people who went missing we were. But not a one of us on that bus was smiling a toothy grin with wide unsmiling eyes, wearing a mask of a man. Paul Klein wasn’t the only one who escaped that night.
In the coming days I’d be all-consumed by the need for answers. Who could I talk to? The lady from upstairs and her friend the cop stood out as likely candidates. When I wasn’t awake to ruminate over the mystery, I was sleeping and suffering the worst nightmares of my life. I’d wake my roommate Claire with my screaming. After the second night of that she began sleeping at her boyfriend’s, assured me that it wasn’t personal and that she’d come back once I settled down.
I don’t feel it is important to elaborate on the content of my recurring nightmares, as dreams are just dreams. They don’t pertain to these pages. And if they do, I don’t want to know about it. What I will tell you is that it is the same dream every night, and features the masquerade party. Something inhuman gets to work slaying us all, one at a time, and with great pleasure, a pleasure with an almost erotic quality. The door is unlocked but won’t open for us as we try to escape. The hatch won’t budge either. One by one we are murdered, not methodically but in a kind of homicidal improvisation.
I awaken each time upon my death. Clawed hands ripping through my neck.
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