She heard a crash in her bedroom. She ran in and found the masks of her mother and sister broken on the floor. Damn it. The cat. Tears came into her eyes. But there was no time to clean it up.
(Tombi? Look, look!)
“Yeah, yeah, I see it,” she muttered, rubbing at pressure between her mismatched eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll make new ones for you.”
She came back out into the living room just as George was unloading the last of her supplies.
“Going somewhere? Could I drive you?” George offered.
“I’ve got to take this to Esmeralda Drive. I sure could use a lift. Thanks.”
She was relieved more than she could say.
He drove her to the address and said, “I have a delivery a few blocks over. I’ll swing back by in about twenty minutes and take you back home, if you like.”
She nodded. “I’d be really grateful.”
“No problem. See you in a few.”
Tombi withdrew the box and went up the walk to the porch. She knocked on the door and waited. Several minutes passed and she grew flustered, afraid the client hadn’t remembered the time scheduled for her to come by. Was he not home? She’d made it plain on her website that it was very inconvenient for her to have to personally deliver, preferring to work through UPS. But he’d begged for the meeting, including extra payment to wear down her reservations, even paying the full sum in advance, product sight unseen.
There was no way she would leave the box on the porch and simply go when George came back for her. She tugged at the hood, bowing her head, sure that people in the other houses were craning at their windows to stare at the freak. But the yard was full of large oak trees, sturdy branches snaking out in all directions which would make it difficult for spying eyes to get much of a glimpse of anything. It had even been hard for Tombi to watch George drive away.
Tombi decided to just try the door. And it turned out to be unlocked. Well, she could leave it on the table with a note. Going in, she set down the box and then heard a light step behind her. There was a sharp crack to the back of her skull and she lost consciousness.
When she opened her eyes, a man stood over her, his face a mass of peculiar knots and whorls.
“I’m sorry I had to hit you,” he whispered. “But I wanted you to stay awhile.”
Her vision swam. The house was darker than when she’d entered. How long had she been out? God, how close to sunset was it? There was pattering against the windows. It was raining.
She studied the face above her. Flaccid gray-green rubber. Heavy brooding forehead. Wide, fanged mouth. Ears that swept back like bat’s wings.
It was an old mask. Created back when the molding techniques and materials made them look cheesy.
He helped her to stand. She noticed his hands, right knuckles tattooed with G-A-R-G-O, the left with U-I-L-L-E. Gargouille, a French word. And on the back of the a hand was another tattoo, a red gargoyle.
Tombi stared hard through the eyeholes of the mask at her attacker.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked.
“Do you remember Dr. Wymath?” he answered with another question. “Not really a cruel bitch, not heartless in the traditional sense. Merely sans coer. Without a heart.”
“You knew Phyllis Wymath?” But Tombi had already guessed that he had. Because of the tattoo on his hand. Twenty years, but she recalled the description of the man in the elevator, taking down the oversized trash bag. The man seen fleeing the spot where her family had been butchered.
“She was my doctor, too. Wouldn’t let me wear my mask into our sessions. She was the goddess of the skinless psyche.”
Wymath had apparently shared that theory liberally.
“Did you kill her?” Tombi wanted to know, feeling a brick in her gut grow into a cinder block.
“Vedette was the goddess of flesh.”
(Tombi had once called her sister this. How had he known that? Well, she said that to Wymath, and he might have snooped the files. Before or after he cut off the doctor’s face.)
“They turned out to be false deities, useless, offering no protection or salvation to their faithful,” he continued.
He gazed at her through those long-lidded eyeholes, saying with emotion, “But, you! You are the goddess of guises! You live it every day, dawn to dusk. I thought their masks would save me. But yours truly will.”
He pointed to the mask she’d made for him.
Tombi felt her heart in her chest, skipping beats as it considered what Vedette and Reine must have suffered. All the guilt she’d experienced twenty years ago for how she’d resented them came back. She thought of the masks, made lovingly in their images, which she’d kept on her dressing table. How often she’d wanted to wear those, on days she was at her most deformed. But she never had, feeling unworthy.
And now they were broken.
The cat.
(Or had it been Karloff who knocked them off?)
So urgently whispered, Tombi! Look, look!
Were they trying to warn her of something?
“You already have a mask,” she pointed out. “What do you need the new one for?”
“This one reflects what I was,” he began to explain. “I was born in Louisiana, in bayou country. To a tribe of people who believed they were descended from gargoyles bred with humans. They mostly looked like this mask does. But I didn’t look like them; I was a throwback to purely human. They said it was all right that I was ugly, because the gargoyle was under my skin.
“The tribe raided farms. And cars driving on the roads alone at midnight. Eventually the authorities found us. They called my people inbreds, mutants. I was taken away, put in foster care. They gave me a name based on the word on my knuckles. See?”
Tombi stared at it, trying make a name from it.
He took off the mask. And she was sick.
GARGOUILLE. George Wheel.
Tombi’s legs buckled and she grabbed the table to steady herself. Had he parked the delivery truck around the corner and walked back through the alley?
“I was hurt at first, that you didn’t really see me. When we made love and I so cherished you new beauty, happy for you. But I know what it is to be so self-absorbed that you don’t really see anyone else. If the vision isn’t a reflection, then it becomes almost invisible. I was afraid you would recognize me when I came to put those two rooms together for you. Remember? About ten years ago? And then I made sure that delivery guy for HUGO’S needed to be replaced. I got this job so I could be close to you again.”
“Have you stalked me all this time?” How could she not have realized? Because—as he said—she never really looked, only ever thinking of how she looked. When they’d been lovers, he hadn’t worn gloves…yet she hadn’t seen the word on his knuckles or the gargoyle on his wrist. How blind. How selfish.
“No,” he admitted. “I haven’t been in town that much. Oh, Tombi! I’ve been everywhere! Searching for beauty and ugliness, trying to understand. I’ve been to India, seeking the faithful of Sitala, goddess of smallpox. There’s a disguise for you…cruel yet sumptuous in suffering. I visited a leper colony in the Amazon, where modern medicine hasn’t conquered the worst of the symptoms. You can’t believe how graceful and good the most afflicted can be. They have god at their cores. I know. I found it there. I worked as an orderly, emptying bedpans mostly, in a remote African outpost hospital where a peculiar venereal strain of flesh-eating bacteria ran rampant through the village one summer. What was left of them was pure. I combed the mountains in northern China, looking for the corpses of deformed children who had been abandoned by their parents. I sold them to a doctor who dissected them for a study on birth defects. But I wept for each, plucking out the cruel maggots, anointing the faces with my tears. In those really decomposed, I could peel their faces away, finding such beauty underneath. And even when the seller of rare herbs and charms wanted parts of them—and therefore needed them to be fresher, I was gentle when I killed them. I never frightened them
. And I waited until they were dead before I cut them open. In Mexico, I joined a cult who thought themselves to be the new followers of Xipe Totec, the flayed god. But there was no satisfaction to be found in the skins of our victims. The flesh was always someone else’s. I should have known from Dr. Phyllis, and from Vedette and your mother that this was not the way.
“But I always returned, to see how you were getting along. Waiting for you to come into your complete power. And you have! Now you are going to redeem me!”
Tombi didn’t have to see the sun set to feel it go. Her features sagged as toward a horizon, wetness at every edge and every facial orifice. Her eyes blinked too fast—like manic wings coming loose from an injured hummingbird, and her lips pursed…trying to form syllables in silence. Her saliva tasted of iodine.
She’d never before done this with someone watching her. She wept, feeling more vulnerable she’d ever been. The salt in the tears might just as well have been sulfuric acid.
“This face will not redeem you,” she said, embarrassed by her crying. “What’s wrong with you not even a new visage every morning would heal.”
He put his hands up in surprise. “No, I don’t mean with your face,” he told her. “I only kept you here so I could see you do this. I knew you did, for I’ve sometimes watched you through your window. But I couldn’t get a good look. Please forgive this violation of your privacy. Don’t be…no…don’t be ashamed! That is the greatest symbol of your power, this metamorphosis.”
He stepped forward and peeled off her face, holding it dripping in his hands, as if it were an ecumenical vestment dipped in holy water.
“I must keep this one. You have all those others. I ask only this single relic,” he said, putting his lips to the bloody flesh.
She watched, nauseated. Was he somehow like her, blood of her blood? No, she’d been bitter but never a psychopath.
What had her grandfather meant when he’d said that? She’d always believed he’d cursed her. But he was really just trying to bless her, hoping she’d rise above the useless vanity of flesh—like he had—to be happy.
This curse had never been Grandfather’s. It was Tombi’s alone.
George Wheel gazed at the cast-off skin for another moment, staring as if it were a reflection in a wine-washed mirror. Did he expect it to say something? It only rustled in damp Latin as if restless for this masquerade to be ended, not caring what prize or blasphemy took its place tomorrow.
He sighed and set it on the table, slipped on the work gloves she’d seen him wear as the deliveryman, as the contractor, the gloves which had hidden his tattoos. He slipped the mask of the screaming man over his head, careful not to disarrange the wire. He adjusted it, closing the zippers to make it snug around his neck.
She looked around, hoping for some kind of weapon. He was a killer, surely he had sharp knives. How else had he killed Dr. Wymath, Vedette, Reine? She tried surreptitiously to check her pockets, in case she’d absent-mindedly slipped in one of her X-acto’s. She badly wanted to avenge her family, herself. But there was nothing.
He faced her. That is, the screaming man in the barbed wire nebula faced her.
“Now what?” she asked.
He pulled a switchblade from a back pants pocket and thumbed it open.
“Now you run,” he replied, gesturing toward the door.
She didn’t need to be told twice.
Tombi lunged for the door, turning the knob, feeling it slip in her bloody hands. Somehow she got it to open, surprised he wasn’t right on top of her already. What? Was he granting her a sporting chance? She ran out onto the porch, hearing thunder roll overhead, seeing a bright flash of lightning which illuminated the oaks in the yard like a small forest of gallows trees.
She could hear him now, behind her. She fled toward the street, trying to find her scream. But when a scream did come, it was not her own.
Tombi stopped and looked behind her.
He’d run out into the yard, too, but had not come after her. He had veered, and then leapt as high as he could into one of the oaks. Well, he must have been quite an athlete to jump so unnaturally high. The barbed wire was snarled in the branches and his twisting wrapped it tightly around the mask and his head inside. He jerked like Absalom hung in the boughs, blood streaming from the iron barbs gouging him through the latex.
Tombi realized it was not a scream she’d heard. It was laughter. He was laughing as he struggled, a high chittering squeal like a monkey and a howl like a jackal. It might have been the sound a gargoyle might make.
His hands reached up in the instinctive need to claw at the object which trapped him. She saw his fingers, talons springing from where there had only been plain nails before. Long, curved like scimitars. The gargoyle inside him coming out a little bit?
When she heard his neck snap and saw his body go limp, she stared for a while. Seconds. Minutes. A half hour? She got very wet in the rain coming down. He didn’t seem to undergo any further transformation. Unless it was under the mask. She had no intention of looking. Perhaps that was a private matter.
Tombi began to walk away. Toward home.
A few streets later and there were people about, hurrying out of their cars into restaurants, opening umbrellas outside book stores and boutiques, staring at her in horror and fascinated shock as she passed them, wondering if what they were seeing was real. She tried to pull the parka hood low over her face. (What face?) The rain burned as it spattered her.
She pulled the head back, shaking the water in her hair. She was through hiding. She held her head up, mindless of the pain. If not proud, she was at least unwavering.
Tombi told herself, this is what I am.
Let them look.
— | — | —
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlee Jacob (born 1952) is an American author specializing in horror fiction, dark fantasy, and poetry. Her writing career began in 1981 with the publication of several poems under the name Charlee Carter Broach. She began writing as Charlee Jacob in 1986.
This native Texan is best known for her graphic explorations of the themes of human degradation, sexual extremism, and supernatural evil. Her first novel This Symbiotic Fascination (Necro Publications, 1997) was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award. Her novel Dread in the Beast tied David Morrell's Creepers for first place for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2005, and her poetry collection Sineater won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Poetry Collection in 2005 as well.
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