Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  Having until recently given up on prosperity in this life, these people clung to the promise of reward in the next with a peasant’s simple faith in reward and retribution from a personal God. Not for them was God some abstract Deity Who, if He existed at all, did so as a mass of disincorporated energy. To them, God was an angry old white man with a long beard Who’d never forgiven people for killing His son. They awaited the sound of His massive feet stomping across the land—an all-powerful giant Who’d set things right.

  For the past month their message had been this: The wait was over.

  And sitting in the midst of this poverty, the nucleus around which every one of these families revolved, was the church. We saw its square, whitewashed outline beckoning to us from out of the darkness when we approached.

  We hid our bikes in some kudzu growth a few yards from the front entrance. The entire area was deserted, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that somebody was watching us. I mentioned this to David. He shrugged it off.

  We’d been prepared to break a window and climb in, if need be, but the front door’s knob turned easily. We slipped quietly into the empty church, David carrying our sack of goodies. At first, there seemed nothing unusual. There were the expected polished pews, the imitation stained-glass windows, the podium sitting on a dais in front.

  We were, however, surprised to see a life-size representation of the crucified Christ on the large oak cross behind the podium. Fundamentalist churches tend not to believe in such graphic depictions. They smack of “graven images.”

  It was when we neared the cross that another oddity struck home with me: Unlike most such figures, where Jesus’ head is down and his eyes closed this one’s head remained erect, his eyes open. Even more disconcerting was the unmistakable sneer his lips were set in.

  “How fitting,” David said.

  “Fitting? It’s downright scary!” I said.

  “Well, at least we know for sure what his church is about,” he replied and walked steadily forward. He stopped when he realized I had not followed. “This statue is likely to be heavy. I’ll need your help in taking it down.”

  I couldn’t pull my gaze from Jesus’ eyes. Whoever had painted them had given the sculpting an almost sentient quality. “I’ve really got the creeps from this,” I admitted. “It truly looks like he’s watching us.”

  David frowned. “Sometimes, Mark, you show yourself to be yet a child. Hurry now. It does us no good to waste time chatting. The real danger is that of late-night worshipers dropping by.”

  The idea of fanatics catching us in the act of desecrating their church scared me enough to rush to David’s side and hold the bag open for him. While he busied himself trying to yank out a large nail pounded through the left hand, I stared at the front door, nervously expecting it to fly open any second with a contingent of pitchfork-carrying parishioners intending to skewer us.

  “This might take a bit longer than I’d planned,” David said ruminatively. “The nails are pounded flush with the plaster, so I’ll have to dig into the statue itself to get a grip on the nail head.” I managed a nod. A minute later, when David spoke again, there was something foreign in his voice: uncertainty. “Mark . . . look at this.”

  I looked. Where David had chipped away the plaster, it was not a chalky-white, but blood-red.

  “These people go to some lengths for realism, huh?” He smiled, composure outwardly restored. “Want to bet it bleeds when I pull this nail out?”

  I shook my head. “David, don’t do it!”

  “I was only joking,” David said. Grabbing the thick nail with the hammer’s claws, he pulled. The nail moved perhaps a half inch. He tugged again. This time it slid out nearly all the way.

  And a thin stream of blood followed. It trickled steadily from the wound, onto the dais floor. “Oh, shit,” David said.

  I didn’t say anything because my feet were flying up the carpeted aisle, taking me outside toward the bikes. If David was stupid enough to continue this stunt, I thought, he’d have to do it alone.

  He wasn’t stupid, however. He was never that. His feet pounded close behind me.

  I tried to turn the doorknob, to leave in one smooth motion. But it was locked now, and momentum caused me to smack hard into the heavy wood and bounce off. By the time I’d regained my feet, David was already rattling the door. Frantically. Still, it refused to open.

  The tinkle of metal striking the floor caused both of us to spin around. What I saw literally made me pee my pants.

  The statue’s head twisted back and forth, as if stretching its neck muscles. Its mouth changed from a sneer into a chilling, mean smile. Its arms and legs flexed plaster muscles, causing the nails binding them to pop out.

  I heard myself screaming incoherently. Even though he surely was as frightened as I, David kept his wits enough to speak. “Get away from us! I’ll knock your goddamn head off!” he yelled, still clutching the hammer in his white-knuckled hand.

  Hesitantly, as if not entirely confident of its balance, the statue took one single step forward. When it began to speak, however, its voice seemed to come from the church itself, not the plaster-filled mouth. It was an appropriately deep voice, filled with authority—and menace.

  “By the depth of their hatred did they create me. By their need for revenge against the fortunate, the well-constituted, did my suffering children cause me to be. I was created in their image; their faith sustains me.”

  While he spoke, he moved steadily forward, arms outstretched in a welcoming embrace. When the figure was some ten feet distant, David threw the hammer at it with all his youthful strength. It struck, bounced off, taking a chunk of dark, red plaster with it. The statue paid no heed.

  “I am yet but a weak god. My children are few, and simple of intellect. I need an anger fed by knowledge.” The head veered toward my brother. “I need . . . you,” it said, and stared directly at David.

  My brother scooped me up with a brave vigor born of hysteria and charged toward the nearest window. Numb of mind, I did nothing to resist. An instant later, amid shards of broken glass, I landed on the grass outside. Somehow, I escaped with only a few cuts—

  But I was alone.

  I leapt to my feet, ran to the window, and then discovered why David had not followed.

  The god had him. My brother was locked in his embrace. Before my eyes, I saw the impossible: David, struggling in horror—but then his body began to take on an ethereal quality. Then, quit slowly, gradually—inexorably—it started to merge with this god’s . . .

  Until they were one.

  Since David’s back was to me, thankfully, I did not have to see the incalculable terror that must have been reflected in his young face.

  Then they were gone.

  Shock and adrenaline gave me the energy to pedal madly back home. An hour and a half later, I returned to the church with my disbelieving and disgruntled mother, her newest boyfriend, Max, and a very dubious, irascible policeman in tow.

  We found nothing to corroborate my story. The statue was back in place, head down and eyes closed. The window had been repaired; even the shards of glass on the ground were gone, as were David’s bike and the bag he’d carried inside the church.

  They all thought David had run off, and that I’d used his disappearance to concoct this wild story, trying to explain away the trouble I’d obviously been in.

  What none of them noticed, and I did not point out, however, was this: Embedded in the statue’s face, David’s own features could still be discerned, indelibly frozen in a grimace of awful terror.

  Jeannette M. Hopper

  SUNDAY BREAKFAST

  THE homey things: Hopper is a young wife and mother. Lives in sunny California. End cliches, because Jeannette is tough as nails pulled out one by one. She is one of a growing number of women writing no-holds-barrcd fiction and wishing to God the cliches concerning their gender would end. In How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I edited, she said, “. . .
Certain things will keep you from ever seeing your byline in print—sloppiness, awkward style, trite or boring ideas, and [over-familiar) characters.” Regardless of gender.

  Author of a strong story in the Pulphouse debut issue, another in the Greenbergs’ 14 Vicious Valentines (Avon, ’88), and her own story collection Expiration Dates (’87), J.M. is rarely guilty of the mistakes she cites. “Sunday Breakfast” might be a tale only a woman could write—but a sardonic, hard-bitten, exciting woman. One of considerable talent.

  SUNDAY BREAKFAST

  Jeannette M. Hopper

  HAVING BEEN BEDRIDDEN FOR NEARLY TEN months with an impressive list of real and imagined ailments, Carlotta Pierce was quite a surprise to her daughter-in-law, Maureen, who found Carlotta sitting at the kitchen table, bathed in golden Sunday-morning sunshine. Permed white hair glinted violet against the blue-green backdrop of Monterey Bay visible through the patio doors. Carlotta ignored Maureen’s entrance and continued her concentrated chewing.

  “Mom, what’s that you’re eating?” asked Maureen, steadying herself with one hand on the kitchen counter. The shock of finding the woman suddenly mobile was compounded by the sight of her breakfasting on raw meat—three-dollars-and-eighty-nine-cents-a-poundraw meat, from the looks of it. Maureen had bought it the day before for their Sunday barbecue.

  Carlotta appeared not to have heard the question. She went about the systematic task of ripping chunks of muscle and gristle from the T-bone, mashing it between toothless gums, swallowing through a throat grown accustomed to Cream of Wheat and pureed vegetables.

  Maureen scratched at her scalp, pitching a drapery of auburn curls over her cheek. This she tossed back, making a mental note to allow time for a shampoo before church. She glanced at the clock and calculated the time needed to cook breakfast, take her shower, get Tricia up, bathed, and dressed, feed Carlotta—or would that be necessary after her meal of steak tartare? Looking over her shoulder at the woman by the wide glass doors, Maureen asked, “Will you be wanting any cereal when you’re done, Mother?” Carlotta grunted, shook her head. “Okay. Then you just go on with your breakfast. I don’t suppose Andrew will mind. He doesn’t care about anything else you do.”

  From the back, Carlotta looked like any octogenarian having a go at a tough steak: shoulders hunched, head bobbing with the effort, ears sliding up and down the sides of her oversized scalp. Her jaws emitted dull clicks as the thin muscle bulged and hollowed. Maureen couldn’t tell whether the old lady was enjoying the meat, or simply satisfied to have gotten her way once more.

  Maureen put coffee on to drip, then stood at the sink and gazed out over the sloping backyard, down on the glittering Pacific water. This should be Paradise, she thought, but I’m stuck caring for a senile invalid who takes, takes, takes, and never gives a damned thing back but shit, piss, and vomit. Not that that’s anything new for Carlotta Pierce . . . She looks like she’s ready to croak, but with my luck, she’ll live forever. Maureen let a deep, weary sigh escape, and the silence was broken by Andrew’s arrival in the dining room.

  “God,” he moaned, “didn’t sleep worth shit last night. Damned kids down on the beach till all hours, drinkin’ and carryin’ on. Goddamn access laws and the—Mom, what in holy hell are you eating?” He’d stopped in mid-gripe, crouched halfway to the chair, butt poised a foot from the cushion. Black hair lay glued to his head, but his eyes were a startled electric blue. When he received no answer from either woman, he repeated his question without profanities.

  “An early lunch, I think,” Maureen said.

  Andrew Pierce stared at his wife. “You just gonna let her—eat that?”

  “She’s up, isn’t she? She’s eating the first solid food she’s had in months. Besides, we can’t go calling Dr. Patterson just because Mom’s suddenly taken it into her head to eat raw steak.” Maureen brought two cups of steaming coffee to the dining room table and set one in front of her husband. She kept the other in her hands while she stood behind the chair opposite him. “He’d just tell us what he’s told us the other times: ‘Keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.’ You know she only does these things for attention.”

  “Well, she got it, all right.” Andrew smeared his hair back from his forehead, blew into his coffee. After taking a cautious sip and grimacing at the heat, he asked, “Is Tricia fed and ready for services?”

  “You kidding? I’m letting her sleep in. She was cranky last night, and I don’t want her missing another day of Sunday school.”

  Andrew replaced his cup on the table and blinked. “But I just went in to check on her, and she’s not in her room.”

  “She’s probably in the bathroom. You know six-year-olds—”

  “No, I checked both bathrooms. I thought she’d be in here with you.”

  “Oh, God,” murmured Maureen, splashing the tablecloth as she nearly dropped her cup. She padded down the long hallway, peeking in doors and calling her daughter’s name. Andrew followed close behind.

  “I told you,” he said to her robed back, “I looked in the bathrooms, in Mom’s room, and . . .”

  “Oh, damn, damn, damn,” chanted Maureen as she opened closets and turned back draperies. “Tricia Eileen Pierce, if you’re hiding from me, so help me I’ll blister your little behind, but good!” No reply came, and after a moment, Maureen hurried into her own bedroom.

  She threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, poked her feet into loafers. Forgetting about her mother-in-law in the kitchen, she trotted down the front steps, crushing shade-happy snails beneath her heels, and ran to the front gate. “Tricia!” she yelled. Her voice was all but lost in the thunder of rolling surf. “Tricia!” Pulling tendrils of copper hair from her mouth, she shouted orders to Andrew, who peered inside his tarp-covered sailboat in the driveway. “Go down to the beach. See if there are any signs of her down there. I’ll walk up the road and check the dunes!”

  They met back at the front gate, both without success, and Maureen leaned against the rock wall. “What if she’s drowned? I told you we should have taken her for swimming lessons, but no-o, your mother wouldn’t hear of it. And Tricia, naive child that she is, takes your mother’s word as law!”

  Andrew shuffled in the sandy gravel, gazed off across the dunes. “Don’t make this all my fault. I don’t like having to look after Mother, but she’d raise hell if I tried to put her in a home.” His feet stopped moving and he shoved his hands up into his pockets.

  “Your mother,” sneered Maureen, “would probably eat her roommate.”

  He turned to her, his brows knotted mouth set in a hard line. “That doesn’t happen anymore, and you know it. Mother never actually ate anyone.” He snorted bitterly. “Hell, do you think I’d have let her move in with us if there was any danger whatsoever that she had inherited the curse?”

  “What about your sister? Sammy bit her nipple off when he was two months old!”

  Andrew swallowed looked away. “That could happen to anyone.”

  “But when it happens in your family . . .”

  “Sammy never did anything again.”

  “He’s only two. Give him time.”

  Andrew pushed away from the wall and started for the house. “This is getting us nowhere. I’m going to call the Adamses and the Hendersons. Maybe Tricia walked down to see Judy or Dwayne.”

  Maureen trudged off in the opposite direction, toward the field across the road. Tricia could have fallen into the tall grass, or become lost in the thick stand of trees on the other side. Maureen refused to think of the possibility that her child had been . . . kidnapped.

  Twenty minutes later, after searching the field and coppice and finding only a mangled cat, she returned to the house. As she approached the door, she heard Andrew screaming angrily inside.

  She found him standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring in disbelief at Carlotta. The old woman had finished her steak; she was now working hard on a pile of raw liver.

  “First Tricia disappears and now this,�
� yelled Andrew. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  Maureen, hands held before her, approached her mother-in-law slowly. “Now, Mother,” she said as if to a child her teeth clenched until they ached, “we don’t eat that until it’s cooked. Why don’t you give it to me, and I’ll cook it for you?” Her smile was strained. She knew that if she didn’t get the slimy organ from the old woman, she’d come apart inside and stuff it down that scrawny throat. “Please, Mom . . . just give it to me.”

  Carlotta hugged the wobbling flap of meat to her chest, cuddling it. Streams of liquid like tobacco spit squirted between her bony fingers. She shook her head vehemently, her wet brown eyes locked on Maureen’s. Her mouth worked like some senile monkey’s to gum the glob inside. Then, while Andrew and Maureen looked on in disgust, she tore off another strip and swallowed it without chewing.

  “I can’t take this,” whined Andrew. “A man can handle only so much, even from his own mother!”

  Maureen glared at his back as she stumbled down the hall toward the den. She felt her face grow hot; the itch of anger crawled across her shoulders, building to a scream. After all, the old woman was his mother, not hers.

  She lurched forward and yanked the liver from Carlotta’s grasp. Enraged, the old woman clawed at Maureen’s arms, drawing blood with unified fingernails. Fresh red streaks mixed with the slimy brown juices of the liver, and for a moment the organ was strained between the two women, pulled taut like a wad of taffy.

  Then it broke.

  Carlotta smashed backward into the patio doors, bowing the safety glass. Tiny spider-cracks appeared at the corners near the aluminum casing, but the old woman bounced back, colliding with Maureen where she landed seated on the edge of the dining room carpet. Both halves of the liver had flown through the kitchen to land on the counter; one lay in the sink near the disposal, and the other had slid into the crevice between the microwave oven and the refrigerator.