City of Masks

by Daniel Hecht

  'Course," Jack mumbled.

  "Promise me you won't tell Momma? You won't tell Ron? No matter what? Both of you! I can't live with what they'd say, I already know what they think of me. You have to promise."

  Cree promised. Jack nodded and moved as if to put his arm around her, but then, confused, seemed to think better of it.

  Once she'd gotten their assurances, Lila seemed determined to plunge on, straight into it. She turned and stumped ahead of them down the remainder of the hall, a woman running on utter desperation and not much else.

  The hall ended in a large kitchen that had obviously been remodeled not long ago, with white-marble counters, cheerful yellow walls, tile floors, and brushed chrome appliances. The pleasant breakfast nook was surrounded on three sides by windows framed by bright, flowery curtains. Where Temp Chase had blown his brains out. Yes, Ron had gone to considerable lengths to get rid of that unmarketable "ambience." Cree could feel it, just barely - the dark paroxysm, the convulsive pain and confusion that had been lived here. But she pushed it away, held it down: Not yet.

  "This is the kitchen," Lila said. "Isn't it the prettiest kitchen you ever saw."

  On her pad, Cree made a note of Lila's flattened affect. The recording unit in her fanny pack vibrated faintly, reminding her that the scroll would tell it definitively later. But watching Lila now she knew what it would probably show: ragged, generally rising indicators on all of Lila's signs since they'd come into the house, but not the telltale spikes and deep valleys that revealed a remembered or unconscious crisis. Not yet.

  "Wasn't the original kitchen," Jack said. "Old days, they always kept the kitchen pretty separate - wood-fired stoves, too hot, and there was always the fire risk, so - "

  Cree gave Jack a look and tossed her gaze to Lila. To his credit, he got the message.

  "Down here is the library," Lila said. "Jack, remember I told you about that noise, I thought it might be termites . . ."

  "You said you never heard it again. I sure never heard it."

  "I did hear it. I heard it every day." Walking quickly, Lila led them down a side hall from the kitchen, into one of the wings. They passed a modern bathroom and a couple of closed doors Cree assumed to be storage rooms or closets, and then came to a large, dark room lined with bookshelves.

  In the gloom, Cree could make out the glisten of dark, oiled furniture and the straight white teeth of a piano keyboard. She picked up a faint sense of presence here, but not the sense of nightmare Lila apparently felt. This felt keening . . . a piercing sweetness. Whatever it was, it wras subtle, impossible to probe with the distractions of Jack and Lila present.

  "Let's get some damn lights on in here," Jack said. He fumbled for the switch and bulbs came on in a smaller version of the chandeliers in the front rooms.

  "Jackie, that table . . . that table was making the noise." Lila was unwilling to go farther than the doorway.

  "What the hell - ?"

  "It . . . it came alive. The claws."

  Jack looked as if someone had hit him in the gut. He looked quickly to Cree, something like panic in his eyes. For a long moment, he didn't have a reply. Then he crossed the room to the table and bent to look at the wooden talons. The dark mahogany legs, Cree could see, were elaborately carved with scales or feathers, each one ending up in a gryphon's head just below the top.

  Jack shoved at the table and turned back to his wife. "We'll get rid of the thing. We'll sell it. Hell, we'll toss it out on the trash today!"

  Lila just shook her head. She was biting her lips, fighting to stay functional. "I can't. That was one of Daddy's favorites, Momma would never forgive me. Anyway, it wouldn't help. That . . . isn't all. There's more. A whole lot more."

  8

  LATER, CREE WOULD REMEMBER Lila's quavering narrative as one of the most remarkable and terrifying tales she'd ever heard. This was true partly because of what she said, but mostly the way she said it: that tortured mix of self-doubt and utter conviction. And all told against the backdrop of the old house, the dim rooms full of unrelenting whispers. Maybe most poignant of all was the emotion between man and wife, the ebb and flow of terror, concern, distrust, love, doubt, resolve, desolation, loyalty, guilt. Cree did her best to disappear, speaking only to murmur something sympathetic when Lila seemed about to fall apart.

  They continued to walk slowly through the house. Lila took small, broken steps, as if she were a woman thirty years older, or as if she'd injured herself. Indecisively, Jack did his best to help her. Sometimes she stood for long moments staring into some extraspatial distance as she struggled to put words to what she had seen.

  The day after the first incident of the claw feet was one of the most horrible she could remember. She was afraid to tell anyone what had happened, because she knew what they'd think. So what she did instead was dream up excuses to be away from the house. When Jack left to go to his office the next morning, she left, too, taking the other car to go shopping for a couple of lamps she'd decided they needed. She called some friends and tried to get lunch dates, but no one could make it on such short notice. She ate lunch at a restaurant and drove around town, even swung by the empty lakeshore house as if seeing its familiar, safe facade could offer some comfort.

  What was going on? she asked herself. She'd lived at Beauforte House for the first fifteen years of her life and couldn't recall feeling this way. Sure, a few childhood scares - bad dreams, Daddy or Uncle Brad or the nanny telling a scary story that kept her awake for a while, that kind of thing. And yes, she could remember the family talking about there being ghosts at the place, but everyone who lived in an old house, which was most of her friends, did; it was casual and taken for granted you were mostly kidding. Everybody had a housemaid or cook or gardener who supposedly practiced voodoo, too, and nobody took that seriously except as a potential personnel problem.

  And then Momma had lived there for all those years, hadn't she? Lila had visited regularly over the course of two decades and had never felt any greater stress than missing Daddy, or being ticked off at Momma for one thing or another, or the general nostalgia for childhood. And Momma had never acted as if there was anything terrible there. Momma had a few secrets, maybe, but it couldn't have been anything too troubling or she wouldn't have stuck it out. Not if it felt like this.

  Which, it seemed to Lila, suggested two possibilities. One, this was about something that had happened after Momma had moved out —Temp Chase's murder. Or, two, maybe she was just going plain crazy.

  She couldn't decide which was scarier.

  But eventually there was nothing left to do but go home. She felt a little better - walking around downtown had refreshed her. She convinced herself that she'd just been feeling uncomfortable, knowing about the Chase murder, and it was making her edgy. Anyone would feel the same. With time, it would no doubt pass.

  Back at the house, that idea lasted about one second. The flutter, the jitter, was there as soon as she walked inside. From the kitchen, she could hear the table claws clenching.

  She unpacked the things she'd bought, determined to ignore it. Then she went to do something in the upstairs bedroom. She turned into the big room at the top of the stairs, and when she glanced down the hallway she saw something at the edge of one of the doorways, maybe thirty feet away. The shoe tip! And something else, too, along the edge of the door at chest height. She stopped, feeling nauseous, and made herself look at it. Fabric — some kind of coarse brown weave, sort of raggedy. And it was moving, a slight, regular rise and fall. Breathing! She realized she was staring at part of the lapel and shoulder of a jacket. Worn by someone standing in one of the doorways. Someone who thought he was out of view.

  It took a moment to shake off the shock. She wanted to run and call the police but was afraid to turn away from the intruder. Instead, she shouted out, "I see you! I see you there! You come out of there right now!"

  Whoever it was didn't move. Just continued to hold there, breathing.

  "I have a gun!" she l
ied. "You come out or I'll shoot you, so help me God!"

  Standing in the big room at the top of the stairs now, Lila pulled out of the narrative to look wide-eyed from Cree's face to Jack's and back.

  "And I would have!"

  "Why didn't you? Couldn't you have gotten Jack's shotgun?" Cree asked. She sighted down the hallway, lined by many doorways.

  Lila shook her head. "Oh, I did. But not at that point. It's so hard to explain what goes through your head at a time like that! See, I . . . I saw somebody standing there. But then part of me was looking for a, I don't know, a normal explanation? I'm sorry, Jackie, for a minute I thought maybe it was you, home early and pulling some stupid prank. Or Ron. Or somebody else who maybe had some reason for being there, I don't know, a, a handyman Jack had asked to come in. Or then I thought, No, Lila, it'syour nerves again, just like the first time. The security system was working when I came home - how could anyone have gotten in? I just didn't want to do anything stupid! I didn't want to call attention. You see?"

  So she began to walk toward the doorway. When she was fifteen feet away, the lapel disappeared, slipping backward into the room. What she thought she was going to do, where she got the courage, Lila didn't know, but she kept on going until she stood in that doorway and looked inside. It was the room that had been her bedroom when she was a child, now set up as a guest bedroom.

  There was nobody in there. The windows were closed and locked, and there was no other way out. She could see the empty floor under the bed. The only place someone could hide was the huge armoire that served as the room's closet. The doors were shut, but there was a key in the lock and she quickly turned it and yanked it out. Good, solid, old-time craftsmanship, heavy doors with strong lock and hinges. If someone was in there, he was stuck now.

  She debated calling the police but then got afraid of making a fuss, of what people would think if they came with flashing lights and sirens and found nothing. Jackie would for sure hear about it, he'd tell Ron and Momma. So instead she went quickly across the hall, got the shotgun, and came back.

  Jack had taught her how to load it, she'd even shot clay pigeons with him once in a while, she knew how to operate the gun. She jacked a shell into the chamber. Holding the stock tucked tight under her right arm, barrel straight ahead, finger on the trigger, she used her left hand to turn the key. She yanked open the doors and jumped back.

  No one was there.

  She felt only the briefest sense of relief. The absence of an intruder left vastly more frightening possibilities.

  Lila made it through that day and the next. She heard the table clenching. She saw the shoe and the jacket again, a little more showing each time, but when she'd go to investigate, it would disappear. And now she'd begun to hear things - movement in the other room, the scrape of a chair, the brush of cloth. Sometimes she thought she heard a pattering, like a four-legged thing running, the clack of claws on the floorboards. It never happened when Jack was in a room with her, only when he was at work or in another part of the house. She began making it through her days and nights hour by hour. Any distraction helped; it was a relief when the new cleaning woman started coming twice a week, because for the first couple of times Lila had to show her around - that killed off part of a day.

  Thanksgiving came, and Janine and David, the two youngest Warren kids, returned home for the holiday; Ron and his girlfriend and Momma and Jack's parents all came over for the feast. Everyone commented on Lila's condition — "Oh, honey, you've lost some weight! You takin'proper care of yourself?" "Mom, you haven't been sick, have you?" but having people in the house seemed to banish much of the tension.

  Once the holiday ended, things got rapidly worse. Lila saw her watcher several times - the shoe tips and the lapel of the jacket. She began to sense flutterings at the corner of her eye all the time. She heard the relentless screech of the table's claws, and a couple of times she saw other things quickly resume their former shapes as if trying to conceal dire transformations from her: the faces in the family portraits leaving a faint afterimage of snarling, ogling monstrosities, a throw rug that had been a gnarled, waited, lizardlike thing. She became afraid to leave the TV on because the sound might camouflage the subtle noise of something sneaking up on her. Mirrors became particularly intolerable, because whenever she saw herself in them she always got the sense that another image, something terrifying, had just vacated the glass. And then there was her own face.

  When she asked Jack how he liked the place — was he comfortable here - he said a guy could sure get used to it. People came up to him at the office and complimented him on his new digs, he told her cheerfully. That was pretty fine.

  So far, Lila told herself, nothing she'd experienced was all that bad, she was a Beauforte, she should show a little spine. But it was wearing on her - the constant tension, the sleepless nights. Plus she was living a double life, trying to lie to Jack and Ron and Momma and everybody about how great she was doing and all the while being gnawed hollow on the inside.

  They decided to hold a big Christmas party, with all the kids, some of Jack's family, some friends. Seemed like a good idea: She'd keep busy with planning, sending invitations, making calls for catering and decorations, and so on. But it didn't help. By the first week of December she didn't think she could survive until Christmas, let alone be able to play hostess. Things came to a head the second week of December.

  Middle of the night. Jack asleep in bed. Propped up on the pillows next to him, unable to find sleep, Lila had been reading until her eyes burned. Just after she turned out the light, she heard a brushing or slithering sound. She lifted her head to stare at the fireplace, its little black coal grate just a square of shadow in the semidark. As had become their habit, they'd left the lights on in the hall, so there was enough light to see what was happening.

  A shadow began oozing out of the stove - many slender tendrils of shadow, actually, worming out through the holes in the grate, groping in the air and then braiding together into a thick snake of darkness. It came out like smoke but seemed to collect weight, growing as a long tube of shadow along the floor, writhing, arching, swelling thicker until it was as big around as a horse's belly. It looked like a water moccasin. Lila could hear the friction of its body on the floor, the rasp of scales. She couldn't breathe, couldn't even scream until its knotting coils had filled half the room.

  Jack woke up groggy, groping for the bedside light. "Lila? Peaches? What's goin' on?" he mumbled. Lila managed to find her lamp and snapped it on. When light filled the room, the snake didn't disappear instantly but rather took a second or two to fray into separate tentacles and suck back into the stove.

  Lila was pointing at the fireplace, but there was nothing for Jack to see. Shaking with her own pulse, she could only tell him it was a bad dream. She'd had a bad dream. She was sorry she'd wakened him. Bad dream.

  She had always hated snakes. The visitation had given her a shock, and the next day she felt sick, almost too weak to get out of bed. The housekeeper came for half the day, so that one wasn't so bad. But the next day Jack had to leave on a business trip, a realty seminar put on by the national affiliate company in Dallas. Jack couldn't skip it - he was supposed to make a presentation.

  Lila was left alone at the house for two days and nights.

  "Do I really have to do this?" Lila moaned.

  "Only if you want to," Cree said. "It will certainly help me, and I think it would help you, too. But it's up to you. Always."

  They had come to the bedroom she and Jack shared, a big room that was now about half furnished. A huge antique canopy bed dominated the wall opposite the fireplace, and two large mirrored armoires stood against the other walls. A pair of French doors opened onto a small balcony that hung among the branches of a magnolia tree. Through the dark green, waxy foliage, Cree could make out the backyard, bounded on the far side by a hedgelike thicket, the iron fence, and then the wall of the next house. Cree noticed that the mirrors on both armoires' doors were broke
n, big spiderweb cracks from some heavy impact, and in combination with the broken mirror downstairs it struck her as a significant detail. But it wasn't the right moment to ask Lila about it.

  Lila was shivering. She reached shakily for one bedpost and sat down on the edge of the mattress.

  Jack moved to her side, looking chastened. "I didn't know," he mumbled miserably. "I didn't really . . . get it. How bad it was. Or I wouldn't have gone."

  Lila stared at the coal stove as if she could still see the shadow snake emerging. The separate muscles of her face ticced, one above her eyebrow, another that tugged the corner of her lip.

  "I don't have what it takes for the blow-by-blow. I can't give you all the buildup. I can't tell every detail. I can't." Looking up at Jack, Lila took his hand and massaged it lovingly as if, Cree was surprised to see, she were suddenly worried about him. But when she went on, it was in that flat, almost mechanical voice, reciting it to get it over with: "That night I saw a wolf in the house. A black wolf. Yellow-green eyes. He just rounded the corner at a run and came bounding down the hallway. I barely had time to jump back in here and slam the door. I could hear him snuffling all along the crack and at the keyhole. I could see the shadows of his paws and muzzle under the door. And then I could hear him saying my name, this raspy, whispery voice, God help me I could hear the sound of those . . . long wolf lips kind of fluttering as he called my name over and over, and I thought, Oh, God, just let me be dead!Don't make me listen to this!" Lila's desperation had crescendoed again, and she struggled to find the impassivity that would let her go on. "And of course I knew there aren't wolves in New Orleans, and wolves can't talk. Which meant I was crazy. So I stood in here for a long time. After a while I didn't hear him. So when I got my courage up, I went out again. I was going to leave the house, go sleep at a hotel. But down at the corner, where I'd seen the shoe, there was the edge of someone's clothes again! That awful raggedy jacket. I'd been seeing a little more of him each time, and this time I could see part of his face above the clothes, the side of his cheek, with hair, a beard or something. And I was going to come back in here and get the gun and shoot him, I didn't care if it was a hallucination or whatever, I didn't care if I was going to wreck up the house. But then the face turned, and I realized that what I could see wasn't right, it was sort of . . . square, shiny but hairy. Not human. More like a bristly snout. And that's what it was. He stepped out, and he had a pig's head. It was a boar-headed man. I peed myself. He had a wet snout and bristles going down into his shirt and these little tiny bright eyes. And he came straight for me. And I ran down the hall, I was going to go for the back stairs. But he came after me so fast, I knew he was going to catch me. So I turned into my old bedroom. I tried to shut the door on him, but he pushed it aside so hard it knocked me down. And — "