by Melanie Tem
Wind swept along the streets and alleys between the tall flat buildings, faster than he could ride. Stuff blew across his path and under his wheels: newspapers, plastic bags, hats, sections of orange mesh fencing, masks.
Masks. He almost fell, almost rode out into the street against the light. Masks, blowing along the streets and sidewalks like all the other debris, piling up against the curb in complicated little piles of grins, frowns, tongues sticking out, eyes winking and bulging, ears pointed or flapping or no ears at all.
Following what he remembered of Dave’s directions, he turned right onto Blake Street and there, the only big building in the block, was the warehouse, faded red brick with only a few windows. Proud of himself that he’d found it right away, he turned right again into the alley to go into the back door off the parking lot. The alley was so full of masks that he had to dismount and push his bike. Masks bit his ankles, lifted themselves high enough to kiss his hands.
There was only one door in the back of the building, so he didn’t have to figure out which one to use. He couldn’t see anything to lock his bike to so he just left it leaning against the building; already he was worrying that it would get stolen and he wouldn’t have any way to get out of here. Debris, most of it probably masks but he tried not to look, skittered around the parking lot like living creatures. Something hit the back of his leg and fell off; he didn’t turn around to see what it was. Carefully carrying the manila envelope in both hands so as not to drop it or bend whatever was inside, Mark tried the door. It was unlocked and swung inward. He took a deep breath, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
“Quick service,” a quiet voice said. “I like that.”
There were a lot of lights in the building, but they were all dim and uncovered and they were hung up among the rafters of the very high ceiling, so they didn’t cast much light. Mark thrust the parcel in the direction of the voice. “Here’s your package.”
“No,” the voice said softly. “That belongs to you.”
He’d made another stupid mistake. Somehow he’d gotten confused and brought the wrong package. He was going to get fired for sure.
Mark’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light enough now that he could see something of the owner of the quiet voice, could tell at least that the person was about his own height and weight and was dressed in ordinary clothes—jeans and a plain gray sweatshirt. He couldn’t make out the age or sex or race of the person, though, because the whole head was covered by the most elaborate mask Mark had ever seen.
The mask must have been three feet tall and nearly as wide. When the figure turned a little sideways, Mark could see how far the mask extended above the top and beyond the sides of the head. There looked to be dozens of eye sockets, and the opening for the mouth changed form as he stared at it, from grinning to frowning to grimacing to a scream. Protuberances that might have been noses or ears or tongues pushed out all over it, and myriad iridescent colors swirled with black, so vivid that they weren’t confined by the boundaries of the mask but bled into the air itself.
“Open it,” the muffled voice told him.
Mark was already shaking his head. “I’m not supposed to—”
“Open it. It belongs to you.”
Knowing he shouldn’t be doing this, Mark made a deliberate decision to do it anyway, to see what this adventure would be. He loosened the sealed flap of the envelope and straightened its metal prongs. He hesitated, then slid his hand inside.
Something soft and warm was in there. Something moving. Something fleshy.
He gasped and tried to pull his hand out, but whatever was inside the envelope wouldn’t let him go. There was no pain, he didn’t feel teeth, but he had the vivid sensation that the thing had taken him in its mouth.
“Take it out,” commanded the voice from behind the tall mask.
Slowly Mark withdrew his hand from the envelope. With it came a mask. He knew it was a mask before he’d even seen it completely, and his heart raced.
“Put it on.” He would have put it on without being told.
He raised the mask in his hands. Immediately it swelled, sent out feelers, and adhered itself to his face.
It was so pliant and fit his features so perfectly that he could hardly feel it once it was in place.
Now the masked figure was backing into the darkness of the huge warehouse room. First its body disappeared, leaving only its face, which was a mask, looking empty, lifeless, unoccupied. Then the mask disappeared, too, and Mark was staring at a blank warehouse wall, a wide mouth-like loading door, two dingy windows above like cracked eyes.
Mark was afraid he would be left alone here, and he would remain a misfit, an alien for the rest of his life. “Wait!” he shouted, and followed the guide through the murky warehouse.
It seemed to take much longer than it should have, many steps and a great deal of pushing through some sort of viscous material before he reached the wall and the door that he thought the masked creature had gone through. Telling himself that he was a masked creature, too, he kept reaching toward the door. Finally he had it at his fingertips, but he couldn’t seem to force his hand through the last few inches. He was stuck. It seemed to him he’d always been stuck, always heard calls he couldn’t answer, always waited for someone to claim him and feared he wouldn’t be able to follow.
He cried out. No one answered. He tried to break through with fists and feet, but his flailing was pointless. He gathered himself and flung his whole masked body headfirst against the door, but he only bounced back.
Finally he gave up. He sat down on the floor, lay down on the dirty warehouse floor and waited. Maybe he fell asleep. He didn’t think he was asleep, but his mind felt viscous, too, and was full of masks and music.
The floor, the wall, the door began to dissolve around him. Momentarily he was half-in and half-out of the mask they’d put on him, and then it snapped back into place as if elastic, wrapped completely around his head, pulled and pushed at him until it altered his shape.
Then he was through to the other side.
Where half-formed faces floating in midair fought each other with fangs coming out of their nostrils and with swords held in ears that looked like hands. Where distorted humanoid figures frantically traded clothes, appendages, skins. Where heads disintegrated and totally different heads filled in the empty shoulders.
His own face floated. His own head disintegrated, reformed in a new configuration, disintegrated again. His own clothes and skin were sloughed off and replaced by clothes and skin that had belonged to somebody else.
As far as Mark could see were rows and rows of other creatures, not unlike himself, masked and constantly transforming. Some of the masks looked too heavy to bear; others looked lighter than skin. All of them thoroughly covered their wearers; Mark would have thought they were nothing but masks if he hadn’t been so aware of himself under his own mask.
“We have been calling you for a long time,” someone complained.
“I’m here now.” His voice felt different from behind the mask. From all around him rose a murmur of relief.
“You have been a long time coming.”
Mark said, “All my life,” and nodded. His mask moved in ways of its own.
He didn’t need to ask where he was. This was the other world he’d always known existed, intertwined with the world of school and work and girls and loneliness. This was the world he’d glimpsed all his life, between letters and numbers when they skittered around rearranging themselves before he could put them to any use. This was the land he’d begun to perceive among the molecules of objects most people thought were solid: trees, mountains, cars, people. This was the place the masks had been telling him about for years.
“All my life,” he said again. “I’ve heard you, but I didn’t know how to get here.”
“There is not much time. You may have waited too long.” The tall creature wearing the giant mouth mask trembled and swayed, and its voice was weak.
Ma
rk hated having to ask, “Not much time for what?” He should have already known. Maybe he would make stupid mistakes here, too. He might not understand what he was supposed to do. Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to fit in here, either. “What am I supposed to do?” he forced himself to ask, and answers formed everywhere, murmurs and mutterings, sighs and shrieks.
“The enemy.”
“The enemy makes us wear masks that change who we are and make us do her bidding.”
“The enemy grows stronger and we grow weaker. For a long time she has been sending forays into the other world, gauging its strength, changing pieces of it with her masks. Now she is ready to invade the other world completely and claim it for her own. Without you, we cannot stop her.”
“But I’m wearing a mask, too.” Confused, he put his hands to his face and, for a dizzying moment, thought maybe he wasn’t wearing a mask anymore. In only two small places could he distinguish the edge of the mask from his own flesh: under the point of his chin and at the base of his skull.
“You are part of both worlds,” they told him. “You are the only one who can save both worlds from the enemy.”
“Why would I want to?” Suddenly Mark was furious. “Why should I care what happens to this world or that one? I don’t belong in either one.”
The masked creatures swarmed around him. The music hurt his ears. “Because if you do not,” they screeched and sang, “if the enemy wins, nobody will ever be anything but a mask and nothing will ever be what it seems to be.”
Mark was grabbed from behind. The masked creatures moaned and howled, but none of them came to his aid, except that someone thrust into his hand a sword, as pliant and sharp as the edge of his mask. He twisted away from his attacker and swung the sword backwards in a wide swift arc.
The sword connected with something semi-solid that came apart under the blade.
Something was pulled over his head. Another mask, he thought, heavy and with no apertures for seeing or speaking or even breathing. He couldn’t breathe. Desperately he brought the sword upward in both hands, its tip perilously close to his own face, and split the mask apart. Its pieces fell at his feet, piece after piece dividing, until the ground was littered with countless infinitesimal masks.
Mark whirled. A figure in a soldier’s uniform and a featureless khaki mask was lunging the short distance between them with a dagger upraised. Mark kicked at the descending fist. The dagger flew upward and then plummeted, clattering onto a dark hard surface far beneath them. Mark leaped after it, groped through thick sticky layers of some substance he couldn’t name, and brought the dagger back up. He grabbed the front of the uniform and held the point of the dagger to the soldier’s throat. “Take off your mask,” he ordered.
The soldier shook his head violently and struggled in Mark’s hold. “I cannot! The Queen has decreed—”
Mark thrust the dagger into the heavy khaki fabric at the soldier’s throat and ripped the blade upward. A dark blood of dust and shadows spurted and the soldier shrieked but Mark, as if unable to stop, cut and slashed at the skintight mask until it was completely stripped away. But the soldier’s face had been stripped away, too, and all he could see was blood and sinew and gaping moving holes.
Shocked by his own violence, Mark dropped both the dagger and the unmasked body of the soldier. “I’m sorry!” he breathed. “Oh, God, I’m sorry!” He backed away, then blindly turned and fled.
Light fluctuated around him, altering the shapes and textures of things, replacing shadows with reflections. He didn’t know where he was heading and he couldn’t tell where he’d already been. The surface under his feet might have been ground or floor or street; it undulated randomly, shifted wildly under his weight. Sometimes he heard such a cacophony of noises that he couldn’t sort them out; sometimes he heard nothing at all, a huge and almost painful silence; sometimes he heard only the piercing music of the masks. The air was freezing cold and then so hot it nearly burned his skin. It smelled of flowers and then of acrid smoke, of mint and poison.
He had the vivid sensation that he was moving between and through masks. This whole world was masked, designed to confuse and trap him. Or maybe this whole world was nothing but a mask. Maybe it had been forced to wear masks for such a long time that there was no longer anything real underneath.
He walked for a long time. After a while he was not really aware of his legs moving or his feet coming into contact with anything solid, and he thought he might be flying, swimming, crawling.
Mark had felt alien all his life. He was more alien now than he had ever been before.
Something wrapped around him, its long thick body pulsing everywhere as though it had a thousand hearts. Strong muscles coiled tighter and tighter around his chest; fangs—so tiny he could hardly see them and then, suddenly, longer and thicker than his whole body—poised dripping above his head.
Mark dug his fingers into the pulpy skin of the serpent and pulled hard. A layer pulled away, scales the breadth of his finger. The serpent shuddered and contracted; Mark’s shoulders and hips ached from the pressure of the huge coils. He pulled himself inward, made himself small and narrow, and, still clutching the monster’s skin, leaped downward into the inverted cone made by the sinuous body.
He slid and fell, down and down, and the skin came away in his hands. He saw that it was a mask, and under it were revealed more and more masks—smooth, with diamond shapes; rough, with a gelatinous substance in the pits and crevices; iridescent and mottled. He fell and fell, into the dark pulsing pit made by the body of the snake, and the mask he was pulling away grew so large that it folded over him, adhered to him, wrapped him up. He was becoming the snake, or he was becoming the snake’s mask.
But then he had fallen out the bottom of the serpent’s coils. He stopped suddenly, his nerves jangling. The slough of skin covering him dried rapidly, cracked, and split open. Breathless and dizzy, Mark emerged into dazzling saffron light, the sweetest mask-music he’d ever heard, and the presence of the enemy Queen.
“Mark,” said the enemy, and his name bespoke her power. “I am delighted to have you.”
Mark was dazed by his long fall, half-blinded by the brilliant light and nearly deafened by the music of the masks. He tried to say something to her, to tell her that he wasn’t here for her and that he knew her tricks, but he couldn’t find his voice.
The enemy Queen was leaning over him. She was so vast and so near to him that she had no features, but the cold radiating from her was paralyzing and her overwhelming odor entangled his thoughts. “Ah, Mark,” she breathed into his face, into his lungs, “You wear the mask of the hero well, as if you had been born to it. Stay with me and you will continue to be a hero, bold and daring in the hero’s mask I will construct for you. You will make a fine, strong warrior. I will use you well.”
She didn’t grasp him; he doubted she had hands. She enveloped him, her entire body over and inside his entire body, for such a long time he thought he had ceased to exist. When she removed herself, something had been grafted to all his surfaces, so that nothing about him was himself anymore.
One plane of the enemy Queen’s body turned reflective long enough for Mark to see what he had become. A warrior: face transformed by a hideous mask of violence, red and blue slashes seaming his face, long jagged teeth bared and eyes aflame; weapons literally growing from his body, daggers at his waist and guns growing out of the flesh of his hands and iron-like bands of muscle studded with spikes circling his heavy thighs.
The Queen gave a great sigh that made everything in Mark’s consciousness heave and billow. “Perfect. You are perfect for my purposes. We will conquer the worlds.”
“No!” With strength he’d always suspected he possessed but never had had a chance to test, Mark kicked high, so that the many spikes and daggers ripped into the mass of the enemy Queen. She shrieked, a terrible noise like the wind that would end the world, and he recognized her pain as his own, as part of the music of the masks.
He a
imed the pistol of his right hand toward the place where he imagined her heart would be, and pulled the trigger again and again and again. In the tumult raging around and in him, he couldn’t be sure when the gun stopped firing, but finally he flung it as hard as he could upward and outward. A machine gun rested as if glued to his left forearm, and he swung it back and forth and fired it for a long time. The enemy Queen roared and shuddered. Mark found himself sorry for her pain and frightened for his own, but he had no doubt what he had to do.
Suddenly the Queen quieted. Mark held his breath. The mask-music was a very faint keening now; he felt it more than heard it, and its sweet sharp sorrow slid between his flesh and his bones. The enemy Queen was singing now inside his heart, and for the briefest of moments he surrendered to her. In that instant, she melded herself to his mind and body and became part of his flesh. He realized, too late, that she was even stronger and cleverer than he had imagined. She had meant for him to attack her so viciously, to rip into her body. She had known he would be trapped there. She had intended all along to become his new mask, the hero’s mask.
“You are the enemy now.” Her seductive voice moved like fire inside him. “You have become me. You have the power to use other people for anything you like, and none of them will ever know who you really are.”
“No!” Mark screamed, and pulled from his belt a dagger whose blade curved like the curve of the world. He inserted its point into the base of the enemy Queen’s throat, where her pulse was strongest, and ripped the blade downward through the Queen and through himself, through all his different selves, through all the masks he had collected during his lifetime.
All his masks came off. Layer after layer after layer of them, down to the bone. Masks that Mark had never known he wore, some that looked exactly like him and some he never would have recognized as himself. The enemy Queen wailed; Mark wailed; the music of the masks wailed. Mask after mask stripped away, and when it was over Mark was nothing and nobody but who he was. In unmasking himself, he had destroyed all pretending, and destroyed the enemy Queen who had trapped him as well.